You can hardly avoid facts that make you feel your age these days – I realized the other day there are people that are legal adults who have no idea that Netflix used to send you DVDs in the mail. Before becoming the most popular over-the-top (OTT) streaming service on earth, with almost 150 million global subscribers, it helped bridge the gap between the days of heading down to the local video store, and the way we consume media today. Many have tried to follow in Netflix’s footsteps and with so much choice, audiences have become ever more fickle and impatient. They want the best possible content at the lowest cost, and they want it available 24/7.

This year is set to be particularly crowded in the OTT subscription market, with Disney+, Apple TV+ and Britbox all launching to join Netflix, Amazon Prime, Now TV, Roku, Hulu, HBO Go…the list goes on. So, when launching a product like this, how can brands ensure they stand out from the (jam-packed) crowd?

Today I’ll be reviewing some of the key learnings we’ve acquired at my employer, Merkle, when marketing these kinds of services, many of which can be applied across a range of other verticals.

Exploring niche audiences

Unlike your internet or gas provider, streaming services have the unusual quality that users or households may choose more than one. In fact, a compelling argument for many of these big brands setting up new services is that almost half of UK households have more than one streaming video-on-demand (SVOD) subscription, and that number of multi-subscription households is growing each year. So knowing this, you might assume a prime audience for your new service is people that are already subscribed to another.

But let’s think about that compelling argument for a second. Netflix is king, so that’s likely streaming service number one in a lot of those cases. And number two? Amazon Prime. With 75 million global subscribers it’s a not-very-close second. But arguing that so many households have more than one streaming service means they clearly don’t mind paying twice, is ignoring Amazon Prime’s other purpose. Prime Video comes with an Amazon Prime subscription. The incredibly popular membership which means next-day delivery on millions of Amazon’s products. Speaking purely for myself, I’ve been a Prime member for almost a year (people finally got sick of me asking to use theirs for deliveries) and have never once logged into Video. While I’m just a focus group of one and I’m sure many Prime users do choose to take advantage of the added bonus of instant video alongside speedy delivery, it’s difficult to know how many “double streamers” would have chosen that second service for the video content alone.

That’s not to say people aren’t willing to pay for more than one service or that you should exclude current SVOD subscribers from your targeting, but you cannot rely on them alone. Instead, it’s important to identify other relevant, niche audiences that will respond to specific USPs. The best way to do this is by analyzing your first-party data, but short of having any (what with being a brand new service), there are a host of audience insight tools available such as Hitwise or Mintel that help you dive a bit deeper.

Each of the SVOD services available today and being released this year have something unique to offer users, and they need to make sure that they’re promoting that message to the right audience. Simply saying “here’s another streaming service to add to your list” will not be good enough.

App-install formats

While it might seem obvious that to get people using a streaming app, you should be putting some budget behind app install formats, what we’ve learned at Merkle is that particularly for a launch, that’s where the vast majority of budget needs to go.

Last year when launching a new sports streaming app, we’d originally planned for most of the budget to go behind ads leading to the website. Our thinking is that as this is a new product, users would want an opportunity to find out more about the brand before signing up to a free trial, and of course, eventually downloading the app. But we very quickly had to pivot our strategy as we found this was falling short of our free-trial targets. Instead, we started to plow around 80% of budget behind the variety of app-install formats available across our digital channels such as:

• Google app campaigns: Single campaigns that run across search, Google Play, YouTube and the Google Display Network. They’re easy to set up as they use text and assets from your app store listing to compose ads and run with automatic bidding and targeting. The disadvantage is you have limited control over where your ads appear so negative keyword and placement lists are vital.
• Facebook app install ads: Ads that can run across Facebook, Instagram and the Facebook Audience Network, linking directly to your app listing. With 70% of traffic on Facebook is mobile, it’s a fantastic way to reach users when they’re in “app download mode.” However, it’s a good idea to complement these ads with some targeting desktop and leading to your website, so that the remaining 30% of users aren’t excluded.
• DV360 mobile campaigns: More recently, the ability to promote apps through DV360 has been released. Simply create a new line item and select “Mobile app install,” and you can choose the same kinds of targeting you would for any of your other campaigns in the platform.

When running any of these formats, it’s vital to have pixels in place to track who has downloaded the app. Not only to be able to report on performance, but also to build an audience of app downloaders that you can then exclude from these campaigns. Otherwise, you risk wasting money on users that have already taken your desired action.

Automation and personalization

One thing all SVOD services have in common is a lot of content. Some more than others, but we’re talking thousands of combinations of shows, actors and genres per platform. Even for the likes of Apple and Disney, their brand name alone is not going to be enough to convince people to take out a new or second subscription. Instead, they need to effectively promote their content at scale, and to the right audiences. Automation and personalization are vital for this.

There have been huge developments in automation across digital platforms in the last few years, which has eased the burden of manual labor when marketing extensive inventory like this. A handful of successful tactics tried and tested at Merkle are:

1. Inventory management

Available in Search Ads 360, inventory management uses a product feed, ad templates and rules to automatically build out hundreds, if not thousands of keywords, ad variants and extensions for search campaigns. In a fraction of the time that a manual build would take, you can have full coverage for every show and actor featured in your inventory, meaning you can serve highly relevant ads for even the most granular, niche searches. After building inventory management campaigns for an SVOD client last year, we saw a 59% reduction in CPA within three months.

2. Dynamic creative

Dynamic creative is something retailers, in particular, familiar with when retargeting users with specific products that have been viewed on site. But it can also be utilized for prospecting. Templates built in Google Studio can pull different ad components such as logos, show names, etc., from a feed to create multiple ad variants. These different variants can be run in rotation and optimized towards best performers over time. Or, you can layer over targeting to serve relevant ads to certain users with no manual build work. For a sports streaming service, we used geotargeting and audience segmentation to identify fans of particular football clubs and served them ads showing their team logo and upcoming fixtures. This achieved a 22% reduction in cost-per-free-trial compared to non-dynamic creative

3. Optimization rules on social

Facebook was a little behind the other half of the duopoly in terms of automation, but last year, they released automated rules within Ads Manager. These rules can monitor the performance of campaigns and ad sets and make automatic changes based on parameters that you set. For instance, we’ve created rules to increase bids on any ad sets that have led to more than X number of conversions below our target CPA. This means we’re able to react in real time to changes in performance without constant manual monitoring, driving the best possible performance from campaigns. This was particularly useful over weekends when launching new content, as naturally fewer people are in the office, and overall we saw a 60% reduction in cost-per-free-trial through social utilizing these rules.

Retention strategies

So your acquisition campaigns have been a huge success. You’ve met your app download and free trial targets – what’s next? Well, you’re not even close to the finish line. It’s important to have retention strategies in place from day one to make sure that acquisition translates into lifetime value.

Ninety percent of apps downloaded today are never opened again. To avoid ending up in the “scrAppheap,” create remarketing lists of users that have downloaded the app but not started their free trial and target them with app engagement campaigns. They aren’t going to remember it’s there by themselves; you need to provide that reminder.

As for users that have started their free trial, don’t let them slip away at 29 days. Make sure that when their free trial is about to end, they are reminded of some great content they haven’t explored yet, or maybe the option to refer a friend for a reduced price for a month. All too easily people jump from one free trial to another, so don’t assume that you’ll keep them as a customer without some investment.

Final thoughts

Streaming has revolutionized our media consumption, and the market is likely to get even more cluttered over the next few years. Users will not be willing to pay for a never-ending list of subscriptions, but there can be room in the market for a new service that taps into the right audience with relevant USPs, and strong marketing tactics.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

As of January 2019, there are more than 1.94 billion websites. That’s a lot of competition. What’s one great way to stand out? Great images. In fact, vision dominates all other senses when it comes to interacting with and absorbing information.

Here are three quick facts to help you understand how critical images are for people (and for SEO):

• 90% of all the data the brain transmits is visual.
• The human brain processes one image in the same amount of time it would take to read 1000 words. (Yes, turns out the old adage is indeed rooted in scientific fact.)
• The recall value of visual content even after three days is 65%, whereas the recall value for written text is merely 10%.

With the majority of search volume coming from phones — and coupled with the fact that people’s attention spans have reduced to eight seconds — it’s essential for websites to be able to deliver a quick, frictionless, and delightful user experience.

Image optimization serves as a major part of this puzzle.

What can image optimization do for my users (and for SEO)?

1. By shaving seconds off your site speed, it can reduce bounce rate and improve site retention.
2. It helps improve page loading speed, which is a major Google ranking factor.
3. It can help improve your keyword prominence. Read more on that here.
4. It helps in reverse image search, which can be a big value add especially if you’re a product-based business.
5. Many devices and desktops use high-resolution screens, which increase the need for good quality images.

Basic image optimization tips

These are some tips that anyone can apply for any type of site (even WordPress), so you’re not solely at the mercy of your developers and designers.

1. Choosing the right type of image: Vector or raster?

• Vector images are simple, created by using lines, points, and polygons. Vector images are best applicable for shapes, logos, icons, and flat images. They have as good as no pixelation when you zoom in, making them apt for high-resolution devices. Additionally, you can use the same image file on multiple platforms (as well as for responsive website design) without having to use multiple variations.
• Raster images, on the other hand, are images that are made of rectangular grids, each packed with multiple color values (pixels). Raster images provide depth to the imagery you would want to convey, giving it an emotional and psychological appeal as these images look real. However, if not handled well, these can heavily hamper your site’s loading speed! Plus, you might have to save multiple file variations to ensure they’re compatible on different platforms and fit for responsive designs.

Here’s a table that Google shared to help understand the pixel-to-byte relation. In short, you’ll get an idea of how heavy one image can get based on its dimensions.

Source: Google

Google also mentioned that it takes four bytes of memory to deliver one pixel. Imagine if you had several images on a site with 800 X 800 pixels. our site would take at least something around 625 kBps. Or in simpler terms, imagine an elephant participating in a rabbit race.

Bottom line

I would suggest wisely using a mix of both. An ideal ratio could be 40% vector images and 60% raster images.

2. Picking the best image format – SVG, JPG, PNG, or GIF?

Best format for vector images:

SVG is the only, and the best, option for vector images. Due to its flat imagery, you also benefit from high quality that is easily scalable.

Best formats for raster images:

• PNG: Produces high-quality images with heavy file sizes. It can be suggested only for times when you want to save every detail of the image.
• JPG: Produces good quality images which aren’t heavy in terms of file size. However, these are lossy images, which means you’ll lose some minor image details permanently. JPG is undoubtedly the preferred image format, which gives you the convenience of hassle-free downloading and uploading of images. Because of this, they’re the most widely used — around 72.3% of websites use JPG image formats and most of the phones save images as “.JPG” files. They are especially suggested for ecommerce sites and social media.
• Gif: If you’re looking for animation, GIF is an ideal choice as it supports 256 different colors chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space. As of now, just 26.6% of websites use GIF formats.

Here’s a chart that could help you take a call on which image format is best to use.

Source: W3Techs

Note: The data in the above chart is of May 15, 2019

3. Resizing images

With a cloud full of devices it’s obvious why people get confused about ideal image sizes.

Note that image size and image file size are two different things. Here we’ll explain how you can get ideal image size (also called image dimensions).

As part of image dimensions, we’ll also discuss aspect ratios.

What’s an aspect ratio?

Aspect ratios tell the width and height of an image and are written in an “x:y” format.

Why is it important?

Remember the time when you tried scaling an image and literally blew it out of proportion? This is exactly what it saves you from. Referring to an image aspect ratio while cropping or resizing images helps you maintain the viability and beauty of the image’s dimensions.

You could refer to this image Shutterstock created to enlist some commonly used aspect ratios.

Source for the image and the table data: Shutterstock

With reference to the table above, it’s best to focus on the 1:1 and 4:3 image ratio that are apt for social media, mobile screens, photography, and print.

You might have your own dimension templates based on the content management system (CMS) you’re using.

According to Squarespace, the most ideal size for image optimization on a CMS is 1500 and 2500 pixels.

Here’s a quick and simple answer to spot the most common image sizes for the web.

Source: Shutterstock

Bottom line

From personal observation, I can suggest using 1080 X 1080 pixels and 1500 X 2500 pixels.

If you’re feeling too lazy to go through all these details, you could also try scaling the image from the corner arrow while you’ve pressed the “Shift” key. Works for some platforms.

4. Naming images – Best practices

Search engines have brains without eyes, so unless you name your images right, they won’t be able to  “read” your images nor rank you accordingly. This is where your keywords come into play. As I’ve mentioned above, if you name your images well, you can improve your keyword density and chances of ranking.

Let’s explain this with an example:

• How people commonly save images – “Haphazard/random numbers and alphabets”, “Flowers can dance”, and “What was I thinking”
• How  people should save images  – “five-tips-for-image-optimization” and “the-ideal-method-for-naming-images-in-2019”

Name your images in all small letters with hyphens in between and leave no spaces. As you’ve seen, I’ve used the keyword “image optimization” in the “five-tips-for-image-optimization” example. You’ll be surprised with how much that helps in ranking.

Bonus

You could also use the following to improve keyword usage in your site content:

• Alt text (If your image is loading slowly, this text appears in place of the image so users can get an idea of what should be there.)
• Captions (Text that gives a short description, helping users know more about the image.)

Plus, if you have an ecommerce site, you could even make good use of structured data to give the search engine more specific details about your products’ color, type, size, and a lot more.

5. Compressing the byte size of the image files

Compressing a file is possibly the simplest yet the most crucial part of image optimization as it directly relates to the website’s loading time. Points one to four prepare you for this final stage of image optimization.

Two live examples of how much load time can cost your bottom line:

• Amazon.com observed a one percent decrease in sales for every 100-ms increase in the page load time.
• Google experienced a 20 percent drop in revenue for every 500-ms increase in the search results’ display time.

What’s the ideal image file size?

A file size below 70 kb is what you should be targeting. In case of heavy files closer to 300 kb, the best you can achieve is a 100 kb file size. Doing so saves your images from taking extra milliseconds to load while it gives you lossy, compressed images that do not compromise the visual quality.

How can you decrease an image’s file size?

All you need to do is drop these files on a file compression site and you’re all set. These are some good, free image file compression online tools:

• TinyPNG/TinyJPG – (Compresses .png and .jpg files – 135 kb reduced to 43.9 kb – Does up to 20 images at a time – Supports dropbox)
• Image optimizer – (Compresses .png and .jpg files – 135 kb reduced to 49 kb – Only does 1 file at a time)
• WeCompress – (Compresses .png, .jpg, and other files – 135 kb reduced to 48 kb – Only does 1 file at a time)
• EzGif – (Compresses .gif and other files – 2MiB reduced to 1.77MiB – Only does 1 file at a time. It also lets you edit the gif before compressing it.)

Bonus tips

• Use web fonts in place of images with text on them as they look better, do not need to be scaled with the image, take less space, and save loading time.
• Use 72dpi resolution for your images.

Closing notes

You could be using all these image optimization tips and still get stuck with a site that loads in 13 seconds or even worse. This is when you might want to ask yourself:

• Do I need all these images?
• Which images are redundant?
• What’s the best place to put images on the site?

Website content, both visual and written, has an intertwined relationship that stimulates emotions and inspires people to further engage with your product or service. People (or at least I) judge a business through its website so feel free to tell us, which was the last impressive website you visited? Or what have you done for image optimization?

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A widely accepted idea among retail technology providers is: consumers crave personalization. However, in a new study, Deloitte finds that personalization is last on a relatively long list of factors that consumers consider when choosing a retailer.

The report, entitled “The consumer is changing, but not how you think,” is based on a survey of over 4,000 U.S. adults. It explores nuanced demographic variables and shifts among consumers of various generational, ethnic and income categories.

More diverse shopping population. Deloitte explains, “The population has become increasingly heterogeneous: Millennials, now representing 30 percent of the population, are the most diverse generational cohort in US history, with roughly 44 percent consisting of ethnic and racial minorities. In comparison, only 25 percent of baby boomers belong to ethnic and racial minorities.”

These demographic changes are playing out in specific ways and in specific industries, which facile and widely repeated generalizations — such as e-commerce and mobile commerce are killing traditional retail — fail to adequately capture.

Price, product availability, convenience trump personalization. Deloitte says, “Consumers still look to value, product, and convenience as the overwhelmingly important attributes while making decisions.” This is consistent with historical findings. The firm adds, “often-noted attributes of the modern consumer like core values and personalized experiences ranked lowest among their priorities.” The company does say that these considerations have grown in importance over time but they’re not critical or fundamental to purchase decision-making.

It’s unclear how consumers understood the idea of “personalized experience” on a multiple choice survey. But it’s fair to infer that they had some idea of what that phrase meant. It may be the case that if you demonstrated or framed personalization more concretely you’d get a different response. Nonetheless, this finding seems to fly in the face of numerous other surveys and articles in technology and retail publications over the past few years.

Store visits up. Finally, the study discovered that offline store visits were up overall. “In 2018, consumers traveled to more stores, more often.” Although, when explored in more detail, visits vary by category. “Trips to hospitality, travel, and entertainment destinations rose by 8 percent in 2018. Trips to convenience, quick service restaurants and fuel stations jumped 16 percent. Even brick-and-mortar retail saw a 2 percent increase in traffic. The biggest gains were seen in grocery-related trips, which grew 7.7 percent in 2018, with a notable decrease in visits to traditional retail locations such as apparel stores (1.7 percent) and department stores (10.3 percent).”

Why you should care. These findings affirm the need to concretely understand your target audience and their attitudes and behaviors. With greater diversity than ever — as well as a significant urban-rural divide — it’s critical to not rely on assumptions but on data and experience. There’s a kind of herd mentality that one sees in technology, when it comes to “shiny new objects” or trends (e.g., voice search). But it’s important to question that conventional wisdom and not simply go along with “what the experts are saying.”

Google is always looking for the best ways to provide the most useful results to users. It’s what has allowed Google to dominate the search engine market for so long and, it has kept the SEO industry evolving.

In the beginning, there were quick answer boxes (remember those?) and, most recently, the introduction of “How-to” snippets.

“How-to” snippets aim to provide step-by-step instructions directly in the SERPs for instruction-based queries. There are two types of “How-to” snippets that you can find in the wild.

• A standard, accordion list view of instructions.
• A carousel of images showing each individual step.

This type of schema is mobile specific. And that’s important because it means absorbing huge amounts of SERP real estate. It has also been confirmed by Glenn Gabe, that you can capture both a featured snippet and the “How-to” carousel/list view.

This left very little space for your competitors but also, forced websites to now think more logically about how they structure their content.

Accordion vs carousel

The immediate question is “which type of How-to snippet is best for my audience?” You guessed right, it depends.

Take, for example, a crafting site audience. Visual and creative people. In this instance, you may consider using image rich snippets.

It’s like anything else in SEO, test it and tweak based on your results.

Here’s how it looks

Source: Google Search developer tools

Pretty eye-catching, isn’t it?

And then the accordion view (the standard “How-to” rich result).

Source: Google Search developer tools

My immediate preferred option is the accordion. For a number of reasons:

• It’s easier to markup.
• Each list item can have a few lines of text to explain the step.
• It’s familiar. People recognize featured snippets and the standard “How-to” result, isn’t disruptive to that experience.

The only major difference which may influence user behavior after the click is the ability to anchor link to each step. The standard markup doesn’t allow for this to happen, however, the image carousel does.

Interesting to see how that changes user engagement in the future.

Understanding “How-to” schema objects

Your best source of information is Google’s search developer tools.

However, we often find that it can become complicated for those less-techy SEOs, which could dissuade implementation and testing.

We don’t want that. Which is why we’ve broken down each element of the schema and explained what it means.

Type

This solely defines which type of schema you’re using on the page. In this instance, we’re going to use the type “HowTo”.

Name

You can think of this as the title of your snippet. In basic SEO terms, it’s the equivalent to the page title attribute of a normal webpage.

Description

Here is your chance to describe what you’re breaking down into steps. Keep this short, precise, and interesting enough to still encourage the click.

HowToStep

The “HowToStep” is where we tell Google we’re about to outline a numbered step to appear in the SERPs. Google counts the instances of the “HowToStep” to understand how many steps are there in total.

Text

This sits underneath the “HowToStep”, “HowToDirection”, or “HowToTip”. This is your basic explanation of one of the three aforementioned “HowTo” elements.

HowToDirection

This is where it can get tricky. Using the “HowToDirection” allows you to bullet point your text, rather than use a single paragraph. In our view, “HowToStep” is the easiest element to implement.

URL

The best approach here is to add anchored links to each step of your “How-to” snippets. It’s only used for image-rich results. So, if you’re using the accordion, just add the main page URL to this element.

Image Object

This can be used to define the main image of your snippet. It can also be used to populate the carousel steps found in image-rich “How-to” schema.

Total Time (ISO 8601 format)

This is a critical element. The time defines, to your user in the SERPs, how long something will take to complete. If you’re not familiar with the ISO 8601 format, it’s worth visiting this Wiki page.

Creating your own “How-to” schema

We, as SEOs, are always looking for simple ways to complete complex tasks. Adding this markup to your pages should be no different.

We recommend letting Google do the hard work for you. You shouldn’t have to be a full-fledged web developer to start working with Schema markup.

Use the code generated in Google’s example to then tweak as you see fit.

Example image used for educational purposes, Ryan Roberts, Zazzle Media

You can easily change all elements of valid How-to Schema, generated by Google itself.

Some of the HowTo markups may not be relevant for what you’re trying to do, so, just begin removing sections which are relevant.

“How-to” schema example

Let’s say I own athomefitness.com and I have an article about how to do crunches.

I’d take the code generated above, and tweak where I see necessary. Here’s how that might look:

Example image used for educational purposes, Ryan Roberts, Zazzle Media

And, to preview how this looks in the SERPs, you just select ‘preview search result’ in your code generator and it’ll give you two options to choose from.

• Result type one (image carousel)
• Result type two (standard list application)

In this instance, I’ve marked up my page to display a standard list.

Example image used for educational purposes, Ryan Roberts, Zazzle Media

Common markup errors

Unfortunately, Schema is a fickle character and will very quickly point out mistakes that you’ve made.

The most common errors normally come from missing required properties (known as class type) or syntax errors (uncategorized errors).

1. Parsing error: Missing “,” or “]” in an array declaration

Source: Schemaapp.com

This usually means you haven’t closed an open bracket somewhere in your code. Unfortunately, you have to dig into the code itself to find it. Thankfully, Google highlights the line in which the error appears on the Schema generator.

2. Parsing error: Missing “,” or “}”

Source: Schemaapp.com

Very similar to the syntax error above, this error means you have not successfully closed your {, or you have forgotten to add a comma before the start of your next opening {.

3. Incorrect value type

Source: Schemaapp.com

This type of error means you’ve omitted or mistyped the value of your “How-to” step. In this scenario, it could be:

• HowToStep
• HowToDirection
• HowToTip

Note: A simple spelling mistake could throw your whole script out of sync.

Make Google crawl your URL

You can jump the queue and request that Google crawls your URL sooner to make sure it gets around to your content and (hopefully) finds your new “How-to” markup.

An easy way to do this is with the URL Inspection Tool (similar to “Fetch as Google”).

Source: Google Search Console for zazzlemedia.co.uk

From our initial testing, we’ve found that indexing happens pretty much immediately; irrelevant of the size of your site.

So, if you’re impatient and eager to see if your hard work has paid off, this is a great way to validate that Google has identified the changes to your URL.

Track your performance in the Google Search Console

After successfully implementing your Howto markup, it’s important that you track content performance.

Are clicks increasing/decreasing? Are impressions going up/down?

You can assess this within the Search Console’s performance report

Source: Google Search Console for papanicksdriving.co.uk

The likelihood is you’ll be a very early adopter of this markup, which will make it a quick way to eat up large amounts of SERP real estate.

However, it’s always important to monitor whether or not this markup is a real benefit to your site. This markup aims to enhance your content, not pay detriment to it.

In conclusion

“How-to” schema should begin making its way onto sites much more in the near future as clients (and SEOs) start to see the immense benefit of absorbing as much SERP real estate as possible. Despite the negative connotation of a zero-click search.

We’d love to hear about any tests and progress you’ve made, please feel free to leave any comments below to let us know!

Ryan Roberts is an SEO Lead at Zazzle Media.

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For the past decade, most enterprises have focused on scaling and modernizing their martech and digital experience (DX) stacks, pushing ever-richer content and experiences through web content management (WCM) systems, marketing automation/ESP platforms, and CRM environments, among others. This made sense for improving digital customer engagement in those platforms, but also led to serious challenges that now need attention.

When you apply personalization to your website, and customize media assets for social networks, and then deliver special offers via email, you’re effectively customizing experiences within each channel, but potentially confusing your customers. On the surface, it appears like you’re engaging smarter, but in practice, your just creating isolated silos of customer engagement.

The result is that customers engage with you differently across channels, at a time when brands like Netflix and Amazon have trained them to expect a more coherent, omnichannel experience.

What’s a martech leader to do? Clearly it starts by taking a more customer-centric approach, perhaps involving voice-of-the-customer initiatives and more attention paid to true customer analytics. But you need to evolve your tech stack as well. Here is how stack owners can adjust.

From top-heavy to bottom-heavy

Your investments in WCM, marketing automation and social engagement technologies were not made in vain. But now it’s time to take a more enterprise-wide approach that will redirect investments lower in your stack. Going forward it will matter less what you do within channels and more what you do across channels.

To do that, you’re going to need to rethink your stack and move from martech to enterprise-wide CX.

Real Story Group’s Omnichannel Stack Reference Model.  Note especially the critical services in the lower “Enterprise Foundation” layer.

In particular, you’ll want to explore four key solutions for supporting the enterprise-wide customer experience. Critically, each of these platforms lives underneath your existing customer engagement solutions and ideally will serve them all independently.

1. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), a single, unified datamart of extended attributes and segments that marketing and engagement platforms need to engage intelligently with individual prospects and customers
2. Journey Orchestration Engines (JOEs), to serve as a kind of traffic management system, gathering information on real customer journeys across enterprise touchpoints, and directing how and where they should be treated going forward – regardless of channel
3. Omnichannel Content Platforms, to support a single source of the truth for re-usable content that you can confidently and consistently syndicate across all your customer and prospect touchpoints
4. Omnichannel Operations Hubs, to support internal collaboration across business units, creating the right assets, coordinating the right campaigns, and measuring outcomes across channels

Key technology buyer considerations

Based on my company’s experience working with large enterprises using these platforms, we can generalize about three key considerations for technology customers.

1. These are highly fragmented marketplaces

If your enterprise is exploring omnichannel tools to deploy enterprise-wide, the good news is that you’ll encounter almost an embarrassment of supplier choices. The bad news is that your team may struggle to differentiate among them — though once you get beneath the covers, you’ll see stark contrasts in terms of architectures, performance levels, use-case emphasis, pricing models and geographic footprint.

The Customer Data Platform Market is highly fragmented…and still growing.

How’s a customer to choose? We always recommend taking a business-focused, use case-based approach. Across nine archetypal CDP use cases, the typical vendor only excels at three or four, so prioritization becomes extremely important here.

Like most marketplaces, you have a choice between large CX and marketing cloud suppliers, and a number of (typically newer, more focused, but smaller) pure-play vendors. Which brings me to…

2. You shouldn’t default to old-line suite vendors

Chances are, your enterprise already licenses some technology from at least one of the big martech “suite” vendors: Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, IBM (albeit selling these tools to HCL and Centerbridge).

These vendors focus very much on customer-facing engagement systems and have invested heavily in ramping up those toolsets. Unfortunately, they have arrived somewhat late to the party in terms of providing lower-level omnichannel capabilities, which arguably would erode the value of some of their beefy (but silo-bound) engagement platforms. So my advice to you: don’t default to martech suite vendors as you look to develop enterprise-wide services. In fact, consider this an opportunity to reduce your level of investment in these platforms as you build services lower in your stack.

3. Carefully create boundaries and test before you buy

Vendors always push boundaries with their tools – e.g., building a CDP into a JOE, or saying that their WCM platform is really an omnichannel content platform (hint: it’s not). To some extent vendors are following desires among customers for more bundled services. But I think you should resist that temptation.

The smart omnichannel stack owner will carefully create service boundaries to avoid unnecessary overlaps and attendant employee and customer confusion. Focus on what a vendor does really well, not what they say they can do in aggregate. The best way to discover the truth is to test thoroughly before you buy any technology.

From here to there

I don’t know any firm that has yet built a true omnichannel stack….yet. The key thing is to make a plan and start transitioning. Hopefully you find the reference model diagram useful to your enterprise, but of course, the transition from martech to CX is more than just a technical challenge. RSG’s Stack Leadership Council is evolving some approaches to governance and operations in this new world. I look forward to sharing those lessons.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.

Having data is no longer a problem these days. There are myriad tools that measure countless metrics out there.

According to Copyblogger, Google Analytics alone has over 150 default metrics, which can be explored with over 100 dimensions. And that’s excluding advanced functions. If we are being honest, that’s overkill for most people.

What on earth can you do with all those stats? Truth be told, all they give you is a migraine because they’re complicated to track, let alone analyze.

Here’s the thing. Marketers are choking under an avalanche of data. The real challenge today is sifting through the bazillion metrics and boiling them down to essential ROI-based numbers. What if I told you there’s a tool that cuts through all the data noise, ignores vanity metrics, and focuses on numbers that matter?

Enter Finteza, an exciting new tool in the martech space.

Finteza is an advanced comprehensive analytics tool that tracks and analyzes traffic, funnels, conversions, landing pages, and advertising campaigns.

This post is sponsored by Finteza.

Here are five things you can do with this agile tool

1. Analyze incoming traffic in real-time

Data sampling can mislead you.

It skews results especially if your traffic is dynamic. Distorted data inevitably leads to wrong conclusions and a wayward strategy.

What you need is real-time data, not sampling.

With this software, you get real-time data and adjust your strategy on the fly in response to what your users are doing. You get massively detailed statistics on every traffic source so you take the guesswork out of your strategy.

One unique feature is the program’s ability to measure traffic quality and present the info in an easy-to-understand, color-coded way.

Green represents quality traffic that includes live users while yellow is poor traffic from proxy servers, VPNs and so on, red is useless spam traffic.

2. Create and manage targeted advertising campaigns

Let me guess. You often struggle to create targeted marketing campaigns.

Not anymore.

This tool makes hyper-targeting a breeze. You get plenty of options to help you configure and target campaigns depending on your goals.

For starters, you can run banner ads or landing pages in several languages, and the system will automatically determine the user’s language and show the relevant message.

You can create and manage multiple campaigns for any website or mobile app and quickly pull out in-depth reports and stats. With Finteza, you can also set various conversion goals and launch marketing campaigns targeting users who have or have not performed a certain action.

The system supports GIF, PNG, JPG, HTML5, and responsive ad blocks.

3. Optimize your funnel from top to bottom

Who needs an elaborate 12-step guide on how to set up a funnel when you can do it automatically without breaking a sweat?

Besides, who does manual configuration in a tech world? Even online soccer match commentaries have got heat maps nowadays.

Imagine seeing a detailed breakdown of your conversion funnel from sign-up to the sale.

• UTM-marked traffic: Shows numbers for different sources like banner ads or purchased traffic.
• Traffic sources: Instantly tell what’s converting best, search, social, direct or referral traffic?
• Referrers: Conversions from domains with links to your site.
• Registrations: See how many prospects are signing up for your incentive at the top of your funnel.

You can create a funnel from scratch and have all the crucial stats at your fingertips.

With all these numbers, you’ll easily identify conversion loss points in your conversion funnel, plug the gaps, and increase profits.

4. Optimize landing pages for maximum conversions

If you are a marketer, you know landing pages are a crucial part of your inbound strategy.

Getting traffic to those pages is expensive. So make sure you fine-tune them so you can maximize returns on the money spent on buying traffic.

That’s easy with a platform that:

• Displays devices, operating systems, and user agents’ numbers.
• Channels, referrers, and UTM-based traffic.
• Shows you how visitors from different countries are converting.
• Reveals any bot traffic that’s converting.

That’s exactly what Finteza gives you.

Landing page optimization improves efficiency and stretches your advertising budget.

5. Track users across devices

Users switch devices many times on any day.

One moment they’re working on their desktop, the next moment they’re chatting on their smartphone. Then they jump to a laptop or personal digital assistant (PDA).

According to Statista, by 2020, the average person will own almost seven devices.

What does this mean? Follow prospects everywhere and see what they’re up to so you market better to them.

Without a cross-device channel analytics solution, you won’t win. Finteza gives your brand agile, cross-device, end-to-end analytics so you know exactly what your customers are doing regardless of the device they’re using. This data empowers you to provide a seamless and unified experience.

On top of it all, the platform has a user-friendly interface that’s easy to navigate. Every item is clickable.

Plus, the set-up is quick and easy. Once you’ve registered, all it takes is one click from your CMS control panel and you’re good to go.

How about integrations?

Are you concerned if the tool is compatible with your favorite tools?

Relax. You don’t have to forgo your darling tools because you’ve opted for Finteza.

The software integrates with all of the most popular content management systems and ecommerce platforms like:

• WordPress
• Drupal
• Joomla
• OpenCart
• And more

Happy now?

Want to give it a spin?

Leonardo da Vinci was right, simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

What I like about Finteza is that it zeroes in on a few essential metrics. But it delves deep into them and generates fresh numbers from multiple angles so you can calculate your ROI accurately.

Plus, it’s easy to use.

Curious to see it in action? You can register for free now and track all your traffic and campaigns straight away.

Qhubekani Nyathi is a long-form content strategist. He is also a contributor to top blogs like Business 2 Community, Get Response, Crazy Egg, Conversion Sciences, and more.

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LinkedIn announced on Tuesday it has entered a deal to acquire Drawbridge, an identity resolution platform that uses AI and machine learning technology to provide marketing, customer experience and security solutions.

Why we should care

With the addition of Drawbridge’s technology, LinkedIn is aiming to boost ad engagement and ROI for marketers.

A LinkedIn spokesperson told Marketing Land that, when integrated into the LinkedIn Marketing Solutions portfolio of products, Drawbridge’s technology will benefit advertisers in two specific ways:

• Improved reach via LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences and Audience Network campaigns.
• Better attribution, allowing advertisers to measure the results they’re generating from LinkedIn campaigns across channels and devices.

“Our data shows that mobile accounts for the majority of ad engagement yet most of our conversions happen on desktop. Drawbridge’s technology will help us better connect our mobile and desktop experiences,” said a LinkedIn spokesperson.

LinkedIn has been steadily building out its advertising offerings. Last July, it overhauled its Campaign Manager platform to deliver an objective-based workflow designed for high-volume campaign management. More recently, LinkedIn introduced lookalike targeting and enhanced its interest targeting advertising features .

More on the news

• LinkedIn said 78% of B2B marketers rate its platform as “the most effective” social network for achieving specific goals.
• The company is not releasing any financial details on the deal, and but a LinkedIn spokesperson said the specific integration plans will be more clearly defined once the deal closes.
• LinkedIn reports its Marketing Solutions platform has, “accelerated growth to 46% year-over-year in revenue.”

As digital advertisers, driving strong performance is at the heart of what we do. But, what is the true goal of paid search ad copy? If clicks, conversions, and demand generation are what is most imperative to client success and satisfaction, do you really need fresh ad copy to accomplish these goals?

At first glance, you might think, yes.

Forbes estimated that in 2017, Americans were exposed to 4,000 different forms of ads and brand messaging each day. With ads packed on top of each other, it can sometimes be difficult to fully capture user attention and interest. This idea leads some people to believe that they have to consistently develop and redevelop novel ad copy that breaks through the clutter. While it isn’t wrong to try and separate yourself from competitors within the marketplace, you don’t have to spend too much time creating niche variances in your copy.

Do users actually care about ad copy?

In this highly saturated ecommerce landscape, people aren’t going to spend time reading all of the specifics of your ad copy, regardless of how fascinating it might be. The average user only spends a couple of seconds navigating the SERP after typing in their query, meaning that they’re not going to actively take the time to read all three headlines as well as both description lines. In my experience as a consumer, when I type in a query, I scan the ad’s first two headlines, display URL, and site links before deciding whether or not to click.

To prove this theory of whether users truly care about the wording and actual detail within the ad copy, we ran an A/B test for one of our clients during a promotional period. From a high-level perspective, the test involved running evergreen ad copy versus promotion-driven ad copy across all of our branded trademark campaigns.

The results: Evergreen copy drove a 30% higher click-through rate

The outcomes we found were captivating. Our evergreen copy drove a 30% higher click-through rate over the course of the promo period, as well as a 19% lower cost per click. Ultimately, this decrease in CPC helped facilitate increased efficiency, saving us thousands of dollars. Evergreen copy also drove stronger back-end metrics, showing +2800bps in conversion rate versus our promotion copy.

With this being said, I’m not trying to say that it’s acceptable to get complacent with your copy development. I do believe that there are things you can apply to your ad copy that will help your ad stand out, drive relevance, increase quality score in the auction process, and ultimately drive increased traffic to the site.

Typically, strong PPC ads commonly contain features, benefits, and a strong call to action. The purpose of including these elements isn’t because they’re going to necessarily be heavily read or sifted through. It is merely to increase visibility, user experience, and ultimately get higher conversions for your clients.

The fight for SERP real estate isn’t won through compelling ad copy, but through relevance, quality score, and keyword inclusion. These elements convince the user that your ad will provide the solution to their query.

The answer isn’t easy

Incorporating this practice can hold many challenges, especially within an advertiser to client relationship. There are many times where a client pushes us to use copy that is either developed in-house, has a specific promotional message, or is nearly identical to the wording on their website. Sometimes these ad copy suggestions can be successful in increasing the quality score and relevance. But being an agency, it is our job to suggest running tests on different variations of ad copy that can potentially drive higher performance, especially since the window of time when users assess PPC ads is extremely small. At the end of the day, many brands will want to utilize whatever will drive the highest traffic, conversions, and demand across their accounts.

Focus not on wording, but on results

To summarize, ad copy is absolutely imperative for PPC success. But remember, users, are unlikely to take the time to read all of the intricacies included within each headline and description. Instead of spending time focusing solely on eloquent wording, it is important to suggest tests with your clients and ensure that you are having conversations about continuously optimizing your copy from a performance-based mindset. With this clutter-filled ecommerce marketplace, the essential benefits of ad copy lay in creating copy that will have a high-quality score and drive heavy clicks.

Nicolas Ross is an SEM Coordinator at PMG.

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One of my key takeaways from attending Martech West was that change management is no longer a dirty word. In addition, I see marketing operations in the unique position to lead explosive change that affects the fundamental role of marketing and the perception of marketing’s value to the firm. Key to this type of change is for marketing operations leadership to step up as the agent of change.

There are many characteristics of a change agent.  I’d like to highlight three that best describe successful marketing operations leadership. They include:

• Communicating compelling reasons for change
• Diversified knowledge
• Ownership and accountability

Communicating compelling reasons for change

Change-oriented marketing ops leaders are excellent communicators. The mere presence of a marketing operations team represents a change in how marketing functions. Leveraging this as a platform, effective change agents hone compelling reasons for change within marketing and with outside key stakeholders. The reasons for change are tailored to each audience and succinctly present why and how the change benefits each stakeholder.

For the marketing ops change agent, their compelling reasons for change are especially powerful as they are backed up and further influenced by data and on-going data analysis. This is a big change from the more traditional marketing decision-making processes based largely on gut instinct. It is very difficult to argue with data-informed changes.

An example of using data to inform and communicate change recently occurred with one of my customers. Before the arrival of a marketing ops leader, sales and marketing had constructed a lead scoring model based on gut feeling and intuition. You’ve seen this before. Sales and marketing get together and guess how many points to assign to certain kinds of digital behavior.

With the arrival of a new ops leader, one of her first goals was to make data-driven decisions, including lead scoring. After deep data analysis, she re-worked lead scoring and presented the new model at the next sales meeting. Disagreement quickly broke out but she was able to win them over once she showed data supporting the new model.

Diversified knowledge

Successful change agents bring and are continually exploring knowledge, best practices and new ideas from other areas. This certainly describes an effective marketing ops change agent who needs to have expertise in technology, data, marketing, operations, business, consulting, process mapping and the list goes on. This requirement of diversified knowledge is why we frequently refer to unicorns in describing what we need in marketing.

However, for the change-oriented marketing ops leader, having diversified knowledge is not enough. They must know how to weave together their diversified experience to create an outcome that is greater than the sum of the parts. After working with, talking to and interviewing hundreds of marketing ops leaders, it is their consulting skill that is essential to effectively using their diversified knowledge to effect change.

A few years ago I was working with an organization with a fairly new marketing ops function and leader. This marketing ops leader had a diverse background, including a stint in consulting. While having experience in tech, marketing and operations was important, he claimed his expertise in consulting affected the most change.

Why? Let’s look at the key characteristics of an effective consultant and see how that maps to being a change agent. First, this ops leader asked lots of questions and then shut up and listened to what people had to say. This behavior achieved two important elements of change. First, asking questions helped him gather critical information that informed what needed to change. Second, listening and interacting with all key stakeholders helped build relationships and advocacy for change.

Another key characteristic of an effective consultant is using diversified knowledge to create innovative solutions. One marketing ops manager I worked with used her diversified knowledge to create best practice services function for program and campaign managers and field managers. First, she baked into email and campaign templates best practices. As a marketer completed the template, they were driven to incorporate best practices. In addition, her team consulted with marketing peers on campaign performance improvement. In both cases, the diversified knowledge of marketing ops was a key input to changing campaign processes.

Ownership and accountability

A huge element of change management success is taking ownership and being accountable for change in the most transparent way possible. In other words, change agents are highly visible in what they are doing, how they are doing it and the results they are achieving. Being in this position can be scary and lonesome and may invite extra scrutiny and conflict. In situations with conflict, the ops leader must be able to demonstrate what they are doing is in the best interest of the business.

Change-oriented marketing ops leaders will look at all the changes that need to be made and then prioritize which changes will have the biggest impact on the business (this behavior represents change as well). Quite often, that change will be in the lead management process. Lead management is where the rubber meets the road for marketing. After all, the increasing martech investments are geared to create more qualified leads, that convert at a higher rate and that visibly demonstrate marketing’s contribution in financial terms. Taking visible ownership of this process and assuming accountability for an improved outcome is the hallmark of a change agent.

I was recently working with a global marketing team limping along in their MQL production and revenue results. They had a turn-over in marketing ops leadership and the new leader had both a tech and sales background. The first area she wanted to address was the very sticky issue of MQLs. Sales and marketing members were at odds with one another and her first approach to re-engineering the current lead management process soundly rebuffed. This marketing ops leader engaged sales leadership in a dialog around what she would do differently and how it would help sales. She also agreed to take ownership and accountability on her proposed process including having part of her variable compensation tied to the success of the new process. It was this attitude and action to accountability that won over the VP of sales so that the new process could be implemented.

Conclusion

Today’s marketing ops leadership has a choice. They can be reactive leaders that respond to business requests or they can be change agents that lead with new ideas, new innovations and new business models. We live in a digital world and digital transformation is all around us. This is why today’s marketing ops leaders have such an opportunity to lead and inform change, not just in marketing, but also in other parts of the organization.

Opinions expressed in this article are those of the guest author and not necessarily Marketing Land. Staff authors are listed here.