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5 Influencer Marketing Trends That Your Business Should Use in 2020

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The social media marketing game is huge and has grown to the level where brands engage social media influencers to help their brands gain awareness and attract new customers. This is why it is important to be aware of the influencer marketing trends.

Influencers’ have reach and yields that are not to be underestimated. With social media playing a pivotal role in many people’s lives, it is no surprise that influencer marketing – a once supplementary marketing strategy, has grown to become a primary strategy employed by the biggest companies in the world.

What is Influencer Marketing?

You’ve probably heard of the term “influencers” on social media before. Influencer marketing is a collaboration between a brand and one of these influencers to market the brand’s product or service. The purpose of course is to tap on the influencers’ popularity to gain brand recognition and win customers from the influencers fanbase.

The question that you’ll probably then ask is “What difference is influencer marketing compared to using a celebrity?”. Influencers are different from celebrities in the sense that they can be anyone found on anywhere. They don’t have to be popular movie stars or A-list personalities. It could be a reputable journalist, a respected designer in the fashion industry or anyone in any industry really. What makes them an influencer is the following and reputation that they have because this is what gives them influence. They are known people or experts in their own domain and hence, this makes the content that they share the most engaging and noteworthy. Thus, businesses in their domains will look to reach out to use their influence on the particular demographic that they are targeting.

The Influencer Marketing Industry

Influencer marketing has grown into a $15 billion industry. Despite the problems faced by this industry, such as influencers with fake followers, it is still an industry that continues to grow rapidly. This can be attributed to consumer trends and behavior such as, 74% of consumers trusting social networks when making a purchase decision. Influencer marketing also has shown significantly high returns on investment for businesses with the average influencer marketing campaign earning $6.50 for every dollar spent.

While it is important to grow your business through digital channels like SEO, the influencer marketing industry is definitely a good alternative mean. The figures mentioned above should allow you to grasp how this industry is able to grow into an industry with the magnitude it has today. It should also very likely kindle your interest in trying to grow your business through such a channel. To help you in your influencer marketing journey, here are some trends that your business should look out for in influencer marketing for 2020.

Trend #1: Use of Micro-Influencers

When engaging in influencer marketing, typically businesses would want to be as cost-effective as possible. This means getting the most value out of the money spent on engaging these influencers. At the same time, businesses would require the meeting of certain KPIs like engagement, conversions and leads generated when utilizing influencer marketing.

This brings about the struggle of what is the appropriate kind of influencer to pick. Influencers can be categorized into three different categories: nano, micro, and macro-influencers. Nano and micro refer to the influencers with smaller reach – in the range of 1,000 to 100,000 followers.

Now, your first reaction is probably that nano and micro-influencers probably won’t get you enough traffic and awareness that your business is looking for as they could only get you 100,000 followers, at best. But, do bear in mind that costs for engaging in influencers are not cheap. Engaging influencers usually cost in the range of $10 – $25 per thousand followers for a post. Below is an influencer engagement pricing chart did up by Influence.co. You can see that the rates scale exponentially when it goes into the macro/mega-influencer range.

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Average Sponsored Instagram Post Rates by Influencer.co

 If your business operates in a niche field that the micro-influencer is actively involved in or has a follower base that may have interest in, it may be more cost-effective for you to use these smaller influencers. This is because consumers these days desire engagement with the brand and it has been proven that engagement rates are higher with micro-influencers who have an engagement rate of 3.6% compared to macro-influencers’ 1.5%. Higher and more genuine engagement is also more likely to help translate the extra reach you’re getting into sales.

Engagement Rates Among the Different Influencer Categories (Source; Later.com)

Trend #2: Emerging Alternative Influencer Marketing Platforms

Typically when engaging in influencer marketing, you would think of Instagram as the undisputed king of influencer marketing and that is probably still true today. However, there are other platforms that are starting to emerge as major channels in influencer marketing.

Tik Tok, a short-form video social platform has seen a sudden growth over the past year, amassing 2 billion total app downloads. Its young user base – 66% of them under 30 years old, has allowed it to be a platform that is suitable for businesses targeting the younger age demographics. Major brands like RedBull have also engaged in smaller Tik Tok influencers. RedBull hired KeeOh, a Tik Tok content creator with 5,000 followers to create a funny short video involving their product, using humor to make the followers interested in its product. It is a perfect example of using smaller-scale influencers to gain cost-effective yields on TikTok by utilizing memorable content.

 Twitch, which is a video game streaming site, home to the best gamers and internet personalities, is also utilized by non-gaming related brands to advertise their products. For example, KFC has used one popular Twitch PUBG streamer’s (Dr. Lupo) channel to advertise their marketing campaign. This helps their brand be noticed by the viewers and create demand amongst them. Twitch’s platform, while primarily gaming related, also has streaming categories such as “Just Chatting” and “IRL”, allowing these streaming personalities to just stream live feeds of themselves hanging out and talking to viewers instead of playing games. The interactivity for influencers on these platforms with their audience is high because of the live chat in each streamer’s channel, which allows advertisers to also engage almost directly with the influencers’ audience.

These alternative platforms are definitely worth checking out as they may help businesses to be more specific in targeting and could prove to be more cost-effective in terms of gaining engagement and brand awareness.

Trend #3: Long Term Partnerships with Influencers

Another trend that will prove to be effective in 2020 for influencer marketing is long term partnerships with influencers. Brands are going to become more invested in influencer marketing and as such, they start to seek long-term partnerships with influencers instead of a one-time advertisement or endorsement.

Brands will start forming partnerships with influencers and engage them in the long run. This is useful as it creates more touchpoints for the brand with the influencers’ followers, allowing for more content to be produced. The result is a more cohesive campaign with a better brand recall among the influencer’s followers.

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GymShark’s long-term collaboration with Fitness Influencers helped them grew exponentially (Source)

One trend that will be useful to marketers in 2020 is to go beyond the series of influencers endorsed posts and have the influencers be involved in the products. Brands like GymShark were first to hop onto this strategy early on in their business. GymShark started off its marketing by sending out free samples of their workout clothing to influencers and eventually ended up collaborating with some of these influencers to create the influencers’ own line of products. The partnerships and collaboration with these influencers will help businesses to build a greater sense of trust and commitment toward the brand with their followers, resulting in long term benefits.

Trend #4: Using a Storytelling Approach

Generally in sales advertisements, companies tend to come up with catchy, memorable and short captions in order to ensure that its target audience is kept interested and that their attention is captured. In influencer marketing, however, it has become a trend for companies to do the opposite of the traditional advertising methods.

The use of an influencer would mean that businesses want to create a message that will resonate well with their followers. As such, the best way is to craft a story that details the influencer’s personal experience with their use of your products or services.

Instagram’s caption limit of 2,200 words has allowed influencers to write in detail their story and experience with using the endorsed product or service. Functions like Instagram Stories can also be utilized to craft a cohesive story regarding your brand.

Since followers of these influencers get a glimpse into their daily personal lives, they would be able to understand and see some of the struggles faced by these influencers. By showing how your company’s product or service helps these influencers solve some of the issues that they face or their personal experience with your product, their followers would be more sold and feel more involved with the product.

Trend #5: Utilizing Video Content

Video content in marketing is definitely hot with online marketers now with 87% of them using it. This is probably due to how video content gains on average, 135% more organic reach as compared to other forms of content.

This explains why it is essential to incorporate video content marketing into your influencer marketing campaign. Influencers are able to help you create an array of different video content, from product reviews to short-form stories, unboxing videos and even live streams

By creating content based around your product will allow these influencers to better promote your product and in the case of live streams, they can engage your target audience better as it allows for direct chatting with their followers. The result of these efforts is a greater appeal visually for your target audience.

Conclusion

Influencer marketing is a channel of marketing that should be tapped on due to the number of engagements and brand recognition you can create. These 5 trends on Influencer Marketing in 2020 should be able to help guide and give you an idea of how your influencer marketing campaign should be like.

You may wish to consult a digital marketing agency with these tips in mind to help you run your next influencer marketing campaign!

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4 Reasons Why Line Ad Platform is HUGE for your Online Marketing

Online marketing is an important aspect for capturing your target audience’s attention. In our blog posts, we usually cover things like Facebook ads, Google ads and Search Engine Optimization tips and tricks. Today we will be shifting our attention to one of the most effective ways to market your products online. If you intend to expand and penetrate the Thailand market with your company, Line Ad is definitely worth using to help boost your brand’s awareness and reach.

What is LINE?

LINE is a leading social media platform in Thailand, with 84% of internet users in Thailand reporting that they’ve used the social messaging platform. In 2019, it is reported that Line has a total of 44 million users in their country whose population is 69.2 million. This is as good as having two thirds of the country actively using the platform! When it comes to the power of Line ad in the Thai market, the numbers don’t lie.

LINE’s Presence in Thailand is massive, giving you more reasons to advertise on it.

However, wanting to advertise on Line is different from Facebook or Google Ads. For Facebook and Google, you can just create an account for yourself and set up the advertisements on your own after putting in your ad budget. Line requires you to look for a company that provides Line Ad services in order to put your advertisements on LINE Ads Platform. Which is why it is important for you to first look for an agency that provides Line Ad service. Our company, MarketingGuru, are happy to help you with that! We have staff that participated in Line Ads Platform training and are well equipped with skills imparted from LINE’s training to help your company succeed in advertising on the Line Ad platform.

In this article, we will be covering what exactly Line Ad platform is, 4 of its interesting features and how it will be able to help raise your business’s status in Thailand.

Introduction to the LINE Ads Platform

LINE Ad Platform is an advertising platform that allows businesses to advertise on the social messaging platform LINE. Advertising on the platform requires for companies to do it through a marketing agency that is a partner of Line only. This means if the company doesn’t engage in marketing services as its core service, they wouldn’t be able to become a Line partner.

In the Line Ad platform, there are multiple types of advertisements that can be done. Advertisement styles include static image advertisements and videos. These advertisements can be displayed on different places in LINE including LINE timeline and LINE Today. It works similarly to Facebook in which companies would set the desired budget and use only that amount. However, in Line Ad the user gets to choose which campaign objective they want. LINE will through the use of its SMART Channel algorithm, help you optimize your budget and display the ads at appropriate places across their platforms for your target demographic.

Additionally, the algorithm will measure the users’ behavior on websites that they’ve been on and will analyze this accumulated data. After which, LINE will help you to place your ads at appropriate places for the target audiences you have in mind based on their behavior.

Feature 1: Campaign Objectives

As mentioned earlier, LINE ad requires you to pick a campaign objective and use its machine learning to help with your advertising. Listed below are the 4 campaign objectives that users can choose from in LINE ad.

Brand Awareness

This objective is particularly good if you’re a new brand looking to penetrate the Thai market. By choosing this objective, LINE’s algorithm will help you to position the ad banners at the right places sch that you can gain the most clicks and be the most visible to your target audience.

Increase Customer Base

Businesses looking to gain registrations, installations, or lowering down their cost per customer acquisition can look to use this objective in their Line Ad campaign. This is because Line will help to promote links that lead to their app download page. Another method is to use the company’s LINE official account to gain friends on LINE to send out future promotions, helping them to gain more customers.

Increase Sales

Brands can use LINE ad to collect information on interested audiences who clicked or purchased their products. LINE can help increase sales by helping them to retarget these audience in the future, that way increasing sales.

Maintain Existing Customer Base

With Line’s dynamic product placement, maintenance of a business’s existing customer base can be done by personalizing ads shown to the LINE users. LINE’s algorithm learns what the user is interested in and can help businesses to more effectively target the correct audience with interests relevant to their products.

The existence of such a feature on LINE makes it superior to other ad platforms’ advertising since LINE is able to help you decide on the most effective places to put your ads based on your budget

Feature 2: Cost Per Friend

Line Ad platform has a unique feature cost per friend. This feature allows for advertisers to let their audience click on the Follow (or add friend) button for their page while watching the video or display advertisement that is being shown. This makes the experience more seamless for users as they wouldn’t have to leave the page in order to follow the advertiser.

The cost per friend feature most importantly is a feature that is effective in helping companies that want to engage better with their target customer base since cost per friend is essentially trying to get the audience to follow the company’s official Line account. Therefore this is certainly a feature of Line Ad that will help businesses who want to have better engagement and increase their sales through promotion of their products on their Line page.

Feature 3: Target Lookalike Audience

Line Ad platform also allows for a similar function to Facebook in which businesses can target a customer group that is similar to existing customers of either their own company or another company similar to theirs. This customer base to be targeted is known as lookalike audience. Being able to successfully target audience similar to your existing customer base on a larger platform like Line Ad will help your business increase sales since it is one of the widest reaching platforms in Thailand with users averaging 63 minutes per day on the app.

Feature 4: Precise Targeting

The Line Ad platform also allows your business to be very precise in choosing your target audience, granting you the ability to choose the reach and frequency that your business wants out of the campaign. LINE’s ad platform also allows for very accurate Geo targeting, letting businesses choose the exact coordinates and specific provinces that they want their ads to be shown to.

The ability to have these customized targeting features makes Line Ad a very attractive platform for businesses to be marketing their products on as it will help them to be effective with their campaigns.

Ready to Get on the LINE Ad Platform?

With the massive reach that LINE Ad Platform is able to help your business achieve in the Thailand market, this is an opportunity that should not be missed if you are looking to grow. Whether is it to get more awareness in the Thai market or to create more conversion, LINE ad’s different features have got you covered. This of course, can only be done through a marketing agency.

If you’re ready to get on LINE Ad Platform, why not contact us. We will be able to help you customize your marketing campaign based on your marketing needs. Whether you are in need of graphic designing, video advertising, or targeting the appropriate audience, we’ve got you covered!

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The Top 5 Digital Marketing Trends in 2020 You MUST Know to Stay Competitive

The digital marketing landscape is one that is ever changing and constantly evolving. As the new decade starts, digital marketers must learn how to adapt and stay ahead of the curve in order to thrive in the competitive digital marketing landscape. We enter this new decade a smartphone obsessed society, with people spending an average of over 3 hours a day on their smartphones. This reliance on smartphone brings about opportunities and new ways digital marketers can explore to better reach their customers. In this article, we will discuss the quintessential trends for digital marketers to understand to succeed in the upcoming year.

1. Voice Search

“Alexa, where can I find the nearest Thai restaurant?”. Questions like these will become more common with people demanding more convenience from their smart devices. These voice enabled devices act as an assistant to help people in searching for products online.

Voice technology has already been a significant force in the search engine domain. Google announced in 2016 that 20% of the searches it has received have voice intent. This figure has grown to a predicted staggering 50% of searches in 2020.  Furthermore, it is predicted that by 2022, 40% of a surveyed population by Capgemini would prefer using a voice assistant as opposed to manual search.

There are actionable steps that us digital marketers can take to capitalize on the trend of voice assistants. Digital marketers can shift their focus of targeting shorter keywords to targeting long-tail keywords instead. This is important for targeting users of voice search because of the way they are likely to search for the things. For instance, users will search with full sentences when speaking. Like: “Can I find out what’s the best digital marketing agency in my area?” instead of typing “Best Digital Marketing Agency near me”. This would change up the game for digital marketers as they have to now look at more long tail keywords to target.

Additionally, there are companies like Jetson.ai that help businesses craft and transform their online marketplace into a fully voice search integrated one. Allowing consumers to buy from your site using only their voice. Below is a video of Jetson in action.

With these statistics showing the move of consumers to voice search and purchasing, capitalizing on voice technology with these tools and tips is paramount to a digital marketer’s success in 2020.

2. Diversifying Marketing on Social Platforms

Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter. These are the most renowned social media platforms that come to mind when people talk about social media marketing. However, what they fail to notice is the trend of companies seeking to do their marketing on other platforms and increasing their engagement by doing so.

Take for example: TikTok. TikTok is a social short-form mobile video platform where users can share their self-produced entertainment content. TikTok is a rising star in social media marketing, with an impressive download volume of 614 million in a single year, outmuscling established competitors like Instagram. TikTok’s growth can also be seen in its sudden growth in ad spending, growing 75 times from May 2019 to November 2019 in the span of only half a year.

Pinterest is also another emerging platform for companies to marketing their products, especially for companies that have females as their target demographic. Presently, Pinterest have a monthly active user base of over 300 million users, with 70% of these users being female. Pinterest is great for digital marketers to share their visual content, ideas and style inspiration.

In 2020, with these emerging alternative social media platforms, it is important for you as a digital marketer to keep up with the trends and appropriately use the different varieties of social media platform to effectively capture your target audience’s attention. Choose wisely and market smartly!

3. Personalized Marketing

Let’s face it, if you’re an online retailing site, you would be more than glad to have 15% of your visitors converting into customers. But the fact of the matter is that it is highly likely that you’re only going to see about 1 – 5% of your site’s traffic convert into customers. This most likely has got nothing to do with your marketing efforts being low quality or that your products are uninteresting.

The likely reason for why your visitors leave your site is probably because the messages they see on your website don’t resonate with them. To curb this issue and possibly boost conversions, you would have to make use of personalized marketing tools to ensure that your visitors needs are satisfied.

One very good example of a company that does personalization well are companies like Asos, End Clothing and Amazon. These companies make it a point to track your buying patterns and show things that you are likely to buy based on your cached buying and product viewing history. Additionally, they notify customers through e-mail on deals that they think are of interest to them. 

To make the best of this trend as a digital marketer, tools such as OptinMonster and Barilliance could help your company to create personalized exit intent pop-ups and even personalized floating headers to promote relevant deals and sales to customers that are deemed interested. By tapping on this trend of personalized marketing, you could bring your digital marketing game to the next level as well as see your conversion rates soar. With companies seeing a sales increase of over 50% after utilizing such personalized marketing tools.

Personalized marketing is the future and will become commonplace in the future of e-commerce and digital marketing. Mark our words.

4. Augmented Reality Content

The future of ecommerce is in augmented reality. Shoppers want to be able to experience and feel what an object looks like in their space or on them without even having to leave the house. The amount of convenience this could bring to them as well as enhance their shopping experience is insurmountable. 

AR being an upcoming trend is also backed by consumers’ sentiments as surveys have shown that 70% of consumers believing that AR could bring them benefits and 67% of media planners wanting AR in their digital marketing campaigns.

Presently, we are seeing furniture companies like IKEA implementing AR successfully into their online stores. Customers can use the AR function to see how a piece of furniture would look like in their living space! This helps to bring more trust and satisfaction in the consumer shopping experience. The level of immersion brought by AR can help to create a shopping experience that is hard for competitors not using it to replicate, helping your business appeal better to potential customers.

5. Automated Advertising Campaigns Optimization

AI and machine-learning are powerful tools that we as digital marketers should make full use of. There are algorithms designed to help ease our digital marketing journey by optimizing our online advertising campaign.

There are software out there like SmartyAds and SalesForce Marketing Cloud, that are able to help you with your online advertising. Automating tasks and processes such as the keyword bidding process to even helping with personalizing your emails to each client.

By acquiring the service of such software, you’ll free up valuable time as a digital marketer to do tasks that robots and algorithms can’t perform. Automation is the way to go in terms of making your digital marketing campaigns more effective in the future.

Still Can’t Figure Out How To Strategize in 2020?

Fret not! Our gurus at MarketingGuru are here to help your company with campaigns and digital marketing strategies. We have a team of creative and trendy gurus who are consistently in the know with regards to marketing trends. To find out more about our services you can head over to our site! As a full service digital marketing agency we are experts in not just SEO, but also in Social Media and Pay Per Click marketing as well.

You can get a FREE SEO AUDIT from our expert gurus by dropping in an email to us. We wish you all the very best in your 2020 marketing endeavours!

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12 Holiday Marketing Trends You Should Know as a Marketer

Tis’ the season to be selling! The holiday season is here again and companies are looking for opportunities to market their products to consumers who are more willing to spend because of the festive mood. 

To prepare you for the festive season, our gurus at MarketingGuru will be sharing with you 12 Christmas Marketing Trends and Campaigns that you need to know to greatly boost your holiday season business

1. 80% of Shoppers Stated Internet as the Greatest Influence for Purchase

Digital Marketing Influence for Consumer Purchase

Based on a survey conducted by WordStream, it was found that 8 in 10 shoppers in the holiday season cited the internet as their greatest influence for making a purchase.

If anything, this statistic proves how pivotal the use of online marketing is for the festive season. If you own a business, it is of paramount importance to optimize your website to gain exposure to the aforementioned 8 in 10 customers.

Find out more about how you can optimize your website to capture their attention from this article or get a FREE SEO audit courtesy of the gurus at MarketingGuru (Yes, we are playing Santa Claus right now!).

2. The Usage of Facebook/Instagram Stories for Holiday Marketing

Instagram Stories Usage for Holiday Marketing

Another important trend that should be remembered by marketers for holiday season marketing is the use of Facebook or Instagram stories as a tool for marketing their products.

Facebook’s 2019 Holiday Marketing Guide, highlighted how window shopping for products has seen  a shift to shopping through stories. Based on Facebook’s survey on consumers, 69% of people surveyed expressed that stories are a favorable way of helping them become familiar with new brands or services and 62% become more interested in brands or products after seeing them in stories. With these statistics, it has become very evident that the importance of marketing through Facebook or Instagram stories is high and that if your brand hasn’t already started utilizing these means of marketing, you’re missing out.

In case you’ve missed it, we have an article that helps guide you if you’re unaware of the potential mistakes that you may make when using Facebook for advertising. Hopefully this helps as you venture into Facebook and Instagram stories marketing.

3. Effectiveness of Email Marketing

Email Marketing Effectiveness for Holiday Season

As old-school as the notion of using emails to get to your customer may sound, the figures have shown that email marketing is still king during the holiday sales period. Klayvio’s research has shown that 27% of holiday spending during promotions like Black Friday and Cyber Monday comes as a result of email marketing. This is also further backed by how email has seen a higher conversion rate as opposed to organic searches and social media marketing. This just goes to show that as a smart marketer, you MUST capitalize on email marketing now to capture more of your audience. Time to start sending out these promotional emails to your customers!

4. Mobile: The go-to consumer purchase channel

Picture for Mobile Platform being the preferred holiday season channel

The smart phone is a very convenient way for consumers to access and shop on the internet. The World Advertising and Research Centre (WARC) has predicted that 72% of internet users will access the web solely via their smartphones by 2025. Hence, it is no surprise that mobile shopping dominates the holiday season as the preferred consumer purchase channel for online shopping.

Mobile purchases accounted for 54.3% of all visits to retail stores for Cyber Monday in 2018 and this amounted to $2.2 billion in sales. 66% of consumers also used their mobile devices to make purchase decisions during the holiday season.

What this means for marketers is that they must be able to ensure that their websites are mobile device friendly. This could be achieved by ensuring that your website has a responsive web design, which allows your website to fit a variety of screens of different sizes. It is important to invest in making your website mobile friendly, not just for the holiday seasons, as Google’s mobile-first index allows websites with a mobile version to be shown first. By making your site mobile friendly would help to optimize it for Google’s search engine.

5. Mobile Page Load Speed KILLS Conversion

Google Pagespeed

Statistics have shown that during the holiday season, a slow mobile page load speed could cause a drop of up to 20% conversion for every second of delay. Losing sales of such volume due to an unoptimized mobile site is costly to businesses looking to thrive in the holiday season. As such, marketers cannot just solely focus on promotions and forget about the basics of site performance!

Google Pagespeed Analytics Opportunities for SEO
Google PageSpeed Insights’ Analysis

One tip we could give for marketers looking to optimize their website for the holiday season is to run their domain URL through Google’s PageSpeed insights. This allows for them to receive a rating on a scale of 1 to 100 from Google of their website’s performance. An analysis of the causes and opportunities for increasing load speed of the mobile page will also be given when the website’s URL is tested. This should help in solving load speed issues and help to reduce such unnecessary losses.

6. Cyber Monday II: The Hidden Gem

Cyber Monday 2: Sales Opportunity Online Marketing

If you somehow have not prepared your business for Christmas season, fret not because there is a great opportunity that can still be tapped on for increased online sales. Introducing, Cyber Week II, the week where consumers flock online to treat themselves after the tens to hundreds of gift cards they received as Christmas gifts.

Cyber Week II starts on Christmas Day, with Cyber Monday being the Monday that follows it. During the 2017 holiday season, it was discovered that in the week after Christmas, consumers have an Average Order Value increase of 28% from Christmas week and the weeks before that.

With this, we hope that you are able to use this information to sustain and planning out your marketing campaigns for the holiday season, making it stretch past Christmas or if you have missed out on it, take advantage of the post holiday period!

7. The Impact of Personalization

Picture of Personalized Letter

In an Evergage report on personalization, 70% of surveyed marketers have said that personalization has a “strong” or “very strong” impact on their company advancing customer relationships. This trend is especially important in the holiday season when there will be a barrage of email or mobile marketing deals coming from different companies

To stand out from this barrage of holiday deals bombarded at consumers, marketers need to know how to personalize. An example of this could be to use the information on your customer’s browsing history on your site to send them appropriate deals regarding the products they have been looking for. This helps to capture their attention as your company provides them with what they need conveniently, making you stand out from the pack.

8. Retarget Your Customers

Customer Retargeting Online Marketing

Retargeting of customers is to target your customers who might have products from your site on your cart or browsed your website for a significant amount of time only to have bounced in the end. It is especially important to retarget your customers during the holiday seasons as certain products that may be of interest to these customers may be on sales during the holiday period.

SoftwareAdvice’s statistics on retargeting has shown that customers are 70% more likely to convert when retargeted with display ads. This statistic is further backed by how click-through rates of retargeted ads are 10x higher than the click-through rate of the initial display ad.

With so many customers being more receptive and impulsive to buying products during the holiday season, retargeting them would be appropriate, especially since there is a chance that the products they were interested in previously may be on sales.

9. Guide Your Consumers

Consumer Guide Online Marketing

Research from SearchEngineLand has shown that consumers want direction when shopping for gifts in the holiday season. Shoppers were 1.98 times more likely to be browsing a gift guide to find compelling ideas for gifts to their loved ones. This should not come as a surprise to anyone as it is a very common scenario to be out of ideas for gifting!

Marketers should come up with content like gift catalogues or ideas for their business’s products in the holiday season in order to give guidance and direction for these lost consumers, in turn creating higher conversion for their companies.

10. Secret Santa!

secret santa picture for online holiday marketing article
Secret Santa surprises. Christmas celebration in the office

Christmas season means a whole lot of Secret Santa and Gift Exchanges from consumers, be it within their family or the companies they work at. Usually these events have a specified budget such that the participants would know how much they would have to spend minimally.

What this means for marketers is that when optimizing your companies website to prepare for Christmas sales, you should focus on using meta tags, descriptions and alternate image texts that involve price points. Content like Secret Santa gift ideas and catalogues could also be created in order to drive higher traffic to your website during the period. This is affirmed by SearchEngineLand’s keyword research on Secret Santa during the holiday period, which shows that multiple of the top searched queries involved a price point.

11. Free over Fast

free shipping vector for online holiday marketing article
free shipping boy. vector illustration

While there may be an urgency for getting gifts in this holiday season, consumers still have a preference for free shipping over fast shipping during this period. In a survey by Etsy conducted for consumers for 6 major countries (China, France, Germany, Japan, UK and USA), at least 52% of the surveyed from each of these countries have expressed that they’d prefer free over fast shipping. This is further backed by how Comscore found that about 80% of the transactions made on desktop during the holiday season, included free shipping.

The implication of this for marketers in the holiday season is that they have to be able to set a threshold price for free shipping that is reasonable enough for consumers to want to spend that amount and for their company to not be losing money from providing the free shipping. Free shipping seems to be a qualifying factor for consumers to consider shopping from a company nowadays during the holiday season.

12. Local Search Presence

google my business banner for holiday online marketing article

Having your business listed in the Google local listing directory by using Google My Business is critical in the holiday period. Statistics have shown that 50% of users on mobile platforms have visited a store within one day of doing the local search during the holiday period.

Marketers must know to take advantage of this statistic by optimizing their websites such that shoppers looking for a local store via Google can easily find their website. This in turn will help in boosting the website’s SEO performance as well as increase traffic from people around the shops area.

Conclusion

And on the 12th day of Christmas, MarketingGuru gave to you, 12 top trends that you should know as a marketer. Now that you are equipped with this information, go out there and get those customers for your company this festive season!

7 Halloween Marketing Campaigns That Spook Engagement

It’s the trick or treat season again. Similar to other celebrations throughout the year, brands both big and small take the opportunity to induce celebratory themes into their halloween marketing campaigns. With spine-chilling themes and spooky graphics, the best marketers utilize the halloween season to indulge in creating spooktacularly bad wordplay for their fang-tastic campaigns.

Some would probably feel that occasion-based marketing is not appropriate for their products or services or too fluffy. While it’s may be true but that’s where the understanding of your audience come in to help adjust the tone of your occasion-based marketing campaigns.

Let’s not forget the fact that during such occasion, your audience are more receptive since they are ready and in the mood for fun. A cleverly thought out halloween marketing campaign can inject occasion-relevant excitement in the form of wordplay, puns, visual graphics and audio effects.

Over the years, many brands have crafted spooktacularly good campaigns that still unsettled the world. We share 7 of our favorites, in no particular order.

1. Guinness Shadow Coaster

Spook engagement during halloween with halloween marketing campaigns and take advantage of occasion-based marketing benefits.

Probably the most simple and easiest to be implemented. Guinness’s shadow coaster demonstrates that sometimes, getting people engaged just required a small effort. Drink coaster are frequently been used by beer lovers to avoid condensation marks on the table and prevent the glass from slipping on smooth surfaces. With little cost, Guinness’s ingenious idea add a ghostly festive touch to the beer table. Not to mention that their signature stout is already a ghastly black.

2. Oreo Lab

Oreo is a no stranger to creative marketing campaign. The Oreo Laboratorium is probably the campaign that generate the highest ROI for Oreo since their cookies are easily associated with being inside the trick or treating bag.

Spook engagement during halloween with halloween marketing campaigns and take advantage of occasion-based marketing benefits.

The Oreo Laboratorium consisted of short viral video about how a lab would transform oreos into monsters. Oreo proceeded on to utilize user generated content by encouraging their fans to submit ideas for the names of the monsters, and they rewarded those with the best suggested names.

3. SVEDKA Vodka Curse Video

This halloween marketing campaign could possibly be one that all marketers would appreciate. Svedka attracted consumers with online advertisements featuring cocktail recipes. Once these individuals click on the advertisements, they were shown a video declaring that they have been “cursed with hellish ads”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoXzLhBRwh0
SVEDKA Vodka Halloween Curse Video

What happens is what marketing professional will appreciate. Svedka used re-targeting to deliver those “hellish ads”, ads after ads to the so-called victims and terrify them.

4. Burger King #ScaryClownNight

Very often, we see brands taking a jab at their competitor. Burger King’s attempt at doing so make it among the most iconic halloween marketing campaigns by using it’s competitor mascot in the campaign. Just take a look at the campaign video and see if you can identify the competitor.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ni3jN_DH20
Burger King #ScaryClownNight Video

The campaign begins with a 90-second video showing a young man attempting to flee a gang of clowns with one that resembles Ronald McDonalds. The video concludes with the real-life Burger King meetup of scary clowns.

5. Koala Mattress Spot The Spooky

Koala Mattress made it to our iconic list because of their approach to generate halloween engagement. While most brands try to engage you through telling, Koala Mattress’s engagement approach is in getting their audience to play a game, that’s what we think it is.

Spook engagement during halloween with halloween marketing campaigns and take advantage of occasion-based marketing benefits.

Koala Mattress ask their audience to find the spooky elements in an image. Try finding out how many you can spot before scrolling to the end of the article for the answers.

6. Coke vs Pepsi

Coke and Pepsi are well known to be rivals and you must be wondering which made it to the iconic list. Some may say both, but we think Coke made it.

We mentioned earlier that brands often take a jab at their competitor and that’s what Pepsi’s Belgian ad agency tried with a daring creation. Note the “L” instead of “C” in coca-cola.

Spook engagement during halloween with halloween marketing campaigns and take advantage of occasion-based marketing benefits.

While it may not be a official response from Coke but from their fans, the Coke camp’s response was even more iconic based on their response to Pepsi.

What is unique in this advertisement is that there are many interpretations on Pepsi’s original ad. One of them is by wearing a Coke coat, Pepsi is trying to imply that it want to be like Coke. The debate is endless, but that might be Pepsi’s attempt to engage both camp of the cola wars.

7. Chipotle Booritos

The last brand that made it to the iconic list is a famous brand in the United States. Chipotle campaigns varies each year. However, they use the same approach of giving discounts to encourage customers to purchase a burrito and drive social media engagement. On some occasion, they may even turn stores into a halloween party.

Spook engagement during halloween with halloween marketing campaigns and take advantage of occasion-based marketing benefits.

You may be wondering why did Chipotle made the list since most other food and beverage chains are doing similar things. Chipotle difference is in their subtle approach to take a jab at their competitors. They do so by highlighting the additives their competitors use that consumers won’t find in Chipotle’s burritos. Chipotle goes another step further with a video encouraging their customers to dress in a costume with an ingredient that they thing is unnecessary.

Spot The Spooky Answers

Have you manage to find the spooky elements in the Koala Mattresses’ image? Find the answers below:

Spook engagement during halloween with halloween marketing campaigns and take advantage of occasion-based marketing benefits.

A final Note

It’s time to wrap things up and have a wild and crazy halloween! halloween could be a good time to engage in some “fun” or rather ghoulish advertising campaigns. A good digital marketing agency would be able to provide creative suggestions and integrate your campaign across all channels. In fact, MarketingGuru does not play tricks to generate results for our clients campaigns. Feel free to open the door to us and we may in turn give you a treat. Witch-ing you a spook-tacular Halloween!