Advertiser Platforms
Article | March 12, 2024
The difference between advertising and marketing is clear as day. Advertising is a specific subset of marketing that focuses on promoting products or services. On the other hand, marketing is a business practice that aims to identify, interact, and engage with customers.
While it is easy to distinguish marketing from advertising and vice versa, new concepts have risen to confuse marketers and advertisers alike. AdTech and MarTech are two relatively new terms that some people use interchangeably. In reality, AdTech and MarTech are different, even if the differences are slightly noticeable.
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Ad Tech and Martech
Article | May 14, 2024
Stay ahead with insights into alignment of sales and marketing for unprecedented business growth. Discover how the latest trends in sales intelligence are shaping the future of business strategies. Contents 1. Introduction 2. Top Sales Intelligence Trends to Watch in 2024 2.1. Hyper-Personalization 2.2. Customer Data Platforms 2.3. Multi-touch Approach 2.4. Shorter Sales Cycle 2.5. Cross-Selling and UpSelling 2.6. Calling Cognitive Conversational AI 2.7. Voice of Customer (VoC) Analytics 2.8. Automation of Routine Tasks 2.9. Real-time Analytics: 2.10. Predictive Analytics 2.11. Alignment of Sales and Marketing 2.12. Enhanced Customer Profiling 2.13. Blockchain for Sales Data Security and Transparency 2.14. Quantum Computing in Data Analysis 2.15. IoT-enabled Sales Intelligence 3. Final Thoughts 1. Introduction The ever-growing advertising market in sales and sales intelligence demands for aligning business strategies with sales trends. The impact of modern sales intelligence on businesses and their ROI is profound. It drives significant enhancements in lead generation, customer engagement, and conversion rates. Companies can optimize sales strategies by using sales intelligence trends like intelligent data to gather and apply insights from customer data. This targeted approach reduces the sales cycle and increases the efficiency of sales teams. Eventually, it leads to a higher conversion rate and customer lifetime value. Sales intelligence and its role in business evolution is crucial owing to its predictive capabilities. This allows businesses to anticipate market trends and customer needs. Doing so will enable them to make proactive adjustments to offerings and strategies. As a result, organizations experience a marked improvement in revenue growth, cost reduction, and competitive advantage. They demonstrate a substantial return on investment (ROI) from their sales intelligence initiatives. 2. Top Sales Intelligence Trends to Watch in 2024 2.1. Hyper-Personalization The implementation of hyper-personalization is crucial as it increases customer engagement, conversion rates, and, ultimately, revenue growth. This methodology enables sales and marketing leaders to craft highly individualized customer interactions. Such a tailored approach aligns with the escalating consumer demands for personalized experiences. The fact that 71% of consumers demand customization and 76% are dissatisfied with generic interactions contributes to competitive differentiation and a high ROI. McKinsey reports highlight that entities mastering personalization can surpass their peers by 40% in revenue generation, with a notable 8x return on marketing spend. 79% of organizations that exceeded revenue goals have a documented personalization strategy. Hyper-personalization enables the delivery of nuanced, context-sensitive sales pitches and marketing messages. It optimizes customer acquisition costs and fosters deep, meaningful connections that enhance customer lifetime value. 2.2. Customer Data Platforms Customer data platforms, one of the sales intelligence trends, are integral to businesses, especially Marketing Cloud. In 2022, a Genie was introduced, built upon the capabilities of the Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform. CDP extends the functionalities across the businesses' entire product portfolio, facilitating data unification, identity resolution, and activation. Despite this expansion, the Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform remains robust and relevant, offering distinct advantages. As organizations increasingly rely on diverse and aggregated data sources for personalized customer experiences, the significance of CDPs in conversations continues to grow. 2.3. Multi-touch Approach Multi-touch attribution represents a nuanced approach to measuring marketing effectiveness. It acknowledges the complexity of the customer journey by attributing value across multiple touchpoints, leading to a conversion. Unlike traditional, rule-based attribution methods such as first- and last-touch, multi-touch attribution offers a more equitable and comprehensive analysis. It leverages advanced analytics and allows integrating AI in sales strategies to accurately measure the impact of each touchpoint. It, thus, eliminates biases and lets marketers make data-driven business decisions. According to HubSpot's 2022 sales strategy & trends report, a third of sales reps say they average 2-4interactions with prospects in the sales process. 26% of reps report 5-7 interactions. Multi-touch attribution models provide distinct perspectives on the customer journey, including first-touch, last-touch, linear, time decay, u-shaped, w-shaped, and custom attribution. They emphasize the significance of the initial engagement and acknowledge the importance of interactions closer to the conversion. Adopting multi-touch attribution allows companies to gain deeper insights into campaign performance. It enables them to optimize their future marketing strategies and budget allocation. Future-proofing business strategies in sales ensure an eminent fair distribution of credit across marketing channels and partners. It enhances understanding of the paths that drive conversions. Ultimately, it guides more effective marketing strategies and investments in the complex digital advertising environment. 2.4. Shorter Sales Cycle Optimizing the sales process is as essential as accelerating revenue growth. Here, a pivotal aspect lies in shortening the sales cycle. Sales intelligence offers deep insights into prospect behaviors and preferences. This information facilitates quicker identification, qualification, and conversion of leads. "Prospects are less interested in 'seeing how it works' and more interested in making sure you understand their needs, have a comprehensive idea of their requirements, and that the product will work." -Dan Tyre, Inbound Fellow at HubSpot It empowers representatives to pinpoint and engage with key decision-makers efficiently, ensuring personalized outreach that resonates with an account's specific needs. This justifies its ability to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities within an existing customer base. It eventually leads to streamlined revenue growth from current relationships. While these real-time lead enrichment and targeted outbound prospecting efforts hone in on high-quality leads, ideal customer profiles significantly reduce time to conversion. 2.5. Cross-Selling and UpSelling Understanding and implementing cross-selling and upselling strategies are pivotal in today's competitive market. A 2022 HubSpot Blog survey found that most sales professionals use cross-selling and upselling strategies to drive up to 30% of their revenue. This demonstrates their critical role in sales intelligence and customer lifecycle management. Cross-selling encourages customers to purchase complementary or related products alongside their primary purchase. The process enhances customer experience and satisfaction by offering more value. According to a HubSpot Blog survey of more than 500 sales professionals, 72% of salespeople who upsell and 74% who cross-sell say that it drives up to 30% of their revenue. Upselling involves encouraging customers to purchase a premium or upgraded version of the product they are buying, thereby increasing the transaction's value. This business intelligence strategy relies on understanding the customer's needs and goals and offering solutions that align with their growth trajectory. Both strategies necessitate a deep understanding of the customer journey, trust-building, and personalized engagement to be successful. Encouraging sales teams to leverage these strategies involves: Regular customer check-ins Comprehensive product knowledge A focus on adding value to every customer interaction 2.6. Calling Cognitive Conversational AI Cognitive conversational AI is transforming customer service operations by delivering personalized, efficient, and dynamic interactions based on cognitive science principles. This advanced technology surpasses traditional chatbots and generative language models by understanding, remembering, and responding to inquiries in a human-like manner, tailoring responses to each user's unique history and needs. It can handle a wide range of customer service tasks well. Its ability to recall past conversations, analyze sentiment, and provide contextually relevant responses allows it to address a broad spectrum of customer service tasks effectively. Companies like Walmart have significantly improved customer satisfaction scores by implementing AI-driven chatbots, with a reported 38% increase in CSAT in certain regions. These systems can reduce average call handling times by efficiently directing calls. They assist agents with real-time information to expedite resolutions. Their ability to continuously learn from interactions helps them improve performance over time. Sean Downey, Google's President, Americas and Global Partners, believes that growing in importance in AI will be the single biggest trend in 2024. 2.7. Voice of Customer (VoC) Analytics Voice of Customer (VoC) analytics has emerged as a critical tool for sales leaders. They use VoC analytics to align their sales strategies with buyers' evolving needs and expectations. This analytical approach provides invaluable insights into customer preferences, pain points, and behaviors. Additionally, it enables organizations to optimize their sales motions, messaging, and overall customer experience. VoC needs to be implemented as backed by a research that 61% of consumers switch brands due to poor customer service. Implementing VoC analytics across the sales process empowers teams to identify opportunities based on customer needs. It enables teams to refine messaging to address specific buyer concerns. It also streamlines sales processes to enhance customer experiences and gather competitive intelligence. Furthermore, it pinpoints areas for retention and expansion efforts. This data-driven approach ensures that sales strategies are responsive to current market dynamics. It also proactively addresses potential challenges and opportunities. Additionally, closing the feedback loop by communicating to customers how their input has influenced business decisions is crucial for reinforcing the value placed on customer insights. 2.8. Automation of Routine Tasks A significant portion of a salesperson's time can be consumed by manual data entry and report generation. Automating data entry and reporting frees up reps to focus on more strategic initiatives that drive growth. Robotic process automation (RPA) tools seamlessly capture data from multiple systems, populate CRM and sales databases, generating regular performance reports. While lead qualification is essential for identifying and prioritizing promising opportunities, automated lead scoring uses demographics, behavior, and history to gauge lead quality. Bots can further enrich profiles with firmographic data and intent signals. Forrester also predicts that the market for AI-powered platforms will grow to $37 billion by 2025. Intelligent scheduling automation enables reps to automatically sync calendars, rapidly find mutual availability, and instantly book meetings. The automated collection and analysis of buyer and account data to uncover sales opportunities scrape data sources to update key prospect details like technology stacks, initiatives, and structures. 2.9. Real-time Analytics: The ability to access and analyze data in real-time is becoming crucial. This immediacy allows for quicker adjustments to sales strategies and more timely responses to customer needs. Traditional lead scoring models, based on past behavior analysis, are giving way to real-time analytics. These models assess prospect engagement as it happens. This method provides instant insights into buyer signals across multiple channels, revealing key changes in stakeholder influence and priority requirements. Such timely intelligence allows sales professionals to adjust their approaches and negotiations more effectively. Real-time analytics also monitors competitors’ online activities. They alert sales teams about the new product launches and marketing efforts. This enables quick strategic adjustments to maintain a competitive advantage. Additionally, it tracks evolving buying behaviors and preferences and offers a transparent view of the true ROI from campaigns and marketing assets. This way, they let the sales teams customize business strategies with sales intelligence for improved outcomes. 2.10. Predictive Analytics Using the power of AI analytics in sales, firms are dissecting vast data to forecast trends and shape strategic actions, enhancing agility in market responses. Voice of the Customer (VoC) analysis is crucial for gauging consumer insights from diverse data points like reviews and social media. It enables rapid sentiment analysis and product adaptation. Additionally, adapting to sales changes allows real-time analytics to revolutionize advanced business strategies like customer engagement. This enables on-the-spot adjustments to sales approaches. Predictive analytics further extend to refining pricing, inventory, and supply chain management, showcasing its broad utility in business optimization. 2.11. Alignment of Sales and Marketing Integration of sales and marketing, also known as "Smarketing," is becoming increasingly important. Integrating sales and marketing procedures and goals lets them work together throughout the consumer journey. Contemporary sales methodologies also encompass the application of digital tools to generate streamlined and customized product demonstrations tailored to the clientele's specific requirements and inclinations. Businesses with sales marketing alignment say that goal attainment is 107% more likely than companies with misalignment. With the assistance of sales intelligence tools, sales and marketing function integration is becoming increasingly prevalent. This alignment guarantees uniformity in customer correspondence and enhances the effectiveness of lead management. 2.12. Enhanced Customer Profiling Enhanced customer profiling is still a trend among top sales technologies to boost buyer engagement. This is because customers tend to prioritize personalization and data-driven insights over the traditional ways of knowing the product. Advanced business intelligence in profiling techniques for customer profiling includes demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data, allowing for more targeted sales approaches. This gives rise to better ads, that suit the right target audience and appeal businesses to buy the product or service. Customer profiling thus helps increase profits, engage more customers, make marketing easier, and help understand the customers better. 86% of customers say that they are ready to pay more if it means getting a better customer experience 2.13. Blockchain for Sales Data Security and Transparency Most companies store sales data in centralized databases and data lakes. While convenient, these repositories have single points of failure that make data vulnerable to cyber-attacks and insider threats. Blockchain is a distributed digital ledger that establishes trust, accountability, and transparency without a central authority. In blockchain, data is distributed across many nodes in peer-to-peer networks, eliminating single points of failure. In addition, transactions are secured with cryptographic hashing and digital signatures to prevent tampering. For any business that values sales data security and transparency, blockchain is the future. This is because it enables encrypted storage, granular access controls, irrefutable audit trails, and supply chain traceability for sales records. 2.14. Quantum Computing in Data Analysis Although still in its infancy, quantum computing presents a potential for handling extraordinarily complex data analysis much faster than current technologies. It provides unprecedented insights into business intelligence trends, including customer behavior and market trends. Quantum computing can process data exponentially faster than classical computers. Certain types of data analysis tasks like pattern recognition, clustering, and regression analysis can be accelerated massively using quantum algorithms. This aspect lets the sales teams crunch large datasets in seconds as opposed to hours or days. Quantum machine learning algorithms are extremely adept at detecting hidden patterns and insights in complex, noisy datasets. Quantum machine learning models like quantum neural networks can deliver far more accurate predictions than the classical techniques. This increased predictive precision allows sales teams to forecast sales more reliably. 2.15. IoT-enabled Sales Intelligence The Internet of Things offers new streams of real-time data. Executives can leverage this for live insights into how products are used, enabling more next-level sales strategies for precise targeting and product development. IoT creates intelligent systems that sense, analyze, and integrate data from across the. It then translates it to new streams of information on prospective buyers, their behaviors, and their interactions with the company. It identifies promising new prospects by tracking digital signals like web traffic, content downloads, and social media engagement. Smart sensors enable the tracking of prospects through the sales funnel by monitoring online and offline interactions. To leverage IoT for next-level sales, organizations need capabilities to ingest, process, analyze, and interpret the influx of data. These include prescriptive analytics, augmented intelligence, smart data visualization, contextual guidance, among others. 3. Final Thoughts As we look towards the future, sales intelligence in advertising is set to become more sophisticated and integral to business success. The continuous refinement of technologies and strategies will enable organizations to meet and even exceed the consumers’ ever-increasing expectations for personalized and engaging experiences. The integration of quantum computing and IoT will further amplify the ability to process and analyze data. It will open new avenues for customer engagement and strategic decision-making in sales. This intelligence in sales promises an era where advanced analytics, deep customer insights, and strategic alignment between sales and marketing converge to boost customer happiness and business growth. This foreseen evolution will empower businesses to manage the intricacies of digital advertising and forge stronger connections with their customers. Eventually, the process sets the stage for sustained competitive advantage and revenue growth.
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Advertiser Platforms
Article | March 18, 2024
Just like with any small business, advertising an Etsy shop can seem like an overwhelming task. There are so many options, learning marketing strategies on your own is time-consuming, and many advertising methods can get expensive fast. But don’t worry! This article is a complete guide that will break down all of the different ways you can start advertising or promoting your Etsy Shop cheaply or for free. How Does Etsy Marketing Work? Advertising an Etsy shop can be very different from advertising other online businesses. For example, you don’t need to have your own website to run an Etsy shop. This is convenient in many ways, but it also limits your ability to use traditional advertising methods. Ad platforms like Facebook Ads Manager are a great way to get exposure, but without a custom domain, you’re advertising Etsy instead of your shop.
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Display Advertising
Article | May 21, 2021
The world is changing every minute and so is the structure of business and marketing tactics. Digital advertising has changed drastically over a period and is growing at a break neck speed. Although native advertising is at a nascent stage, it is a popular, creative, authentic, interactive, and engaging form of advertising.
Native advertising is also called paid content or sponsored content. Gone are the days when native advertising was just a buzz word. Today it is the new marketing reality. Native content marketing has winged its way into emails, e-commerce platforms, social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram), video sites. Social media ads, recommended ads, and promoted search results are a few examples of well-known native ads. Native ads are cohesive with the content on the page and ingest themselves very well with the design and look of the page.
Many online marketers are turning to native advertising that eases the opportunity of connecting to their users in the format they are comfortable with, such as articles, videos, and infographics. Native ads normally do not look like ads. They look like a part of the content in a user’s viewable area.
Media companies like The New York Times, BuzzFeed, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal are few examples that invest in native content advertising.
Native advertising is the driving force leveraging advertising strategy. As per the Native Advertising Institute, by 2021, the revenue from native advertising is expected to increase by 46%.
Types of Native Advertising
There are various types of native advertising that publishers may offer on their sites. They may offer a few or all of these:
In-stream
In stream ads are the ads put in before, during or after the streaming of any video, music, and animation that the consumer has requested. In-stream ads termed as pre-roll, mid-roll, and post roll. In-stream ads are most commonly visible on YouTube.
In-article
In-article are the ad formats that helps you to put native ads between the paragraphs of the pages. These articles are optimized by google for better performance. They blend well and provide a better experience of the readers.
Content recommendation
Content or product recommendation provide you with personalized content or product recommendation based on data collected about user’s online behavior. Offering better effortless customer journey.
Commerce
Native video
Native videos are the in-feed videos that are created and uploaded on various social networks. Facebook, , YouTube, and Twitter are most widely used platforms for native video.
Custom formats
Custom native ads are developed by brand itself. Custom ads are user-defined allowing you to define your variable.
In-mail
There are two ways of In-mail native advertisements, they are one-off long-form and programmatic. Native email marketing will boost KPIs.
Sponsored content
Sponsored content naturally blends in with content on the webpage but is marked as “sponsored” within the ad.
What Does Native Advertising Look Like?
In Feed Ads
In Feed native ads are slipped between the content allowing the readers to view them easily and with less effort. Example of in-feed ads are the ads that appear in your newsfeed on social media and news sites (Facebook, Buzzfeed)
Search & Promoted Listings
Search and promoted listings appear at the top of your Google search results or in the side bar increasing the product visibility and sales. Search and promoted listings are fee-based advertising services.
Content Recommendations
These are the articles that appear at the bottom of the webpage. This is a great way to increase the audience and attract new leads. Content recommendations are the personalized articles keeping the target audience in mind.
Best Practices of Native Advertising
Content is King
Content plays a key role in native ads for engaging the audience and comes in different shapes and sizes. Developing an innovative format for delivering quality content such as short snappy text, animations, infographics, videos, carousels of images, will earn you higher ROI. Customers are likely to return to your site without any native medium advertising. Successful native ads are colorful, easy to read, and stand out among other content around the same page.
Keep Native Advertising Programmatic
Partner with a top-notch premier content house to stand out. Keep native advertisements programmatic. Programmatic help brands make the most of micro-moments. In Programmatic advertising, automated technology is used for buying advertising space allowing advertisers to make native ads more relevant to potential customers. In the traditional buying media process, advertisers have less control over buying the placement. Native advertising can achieve higher engagement and conversion with the programmatic platform.
Native Ads Placement Smarter
Native ads are embedded onto the webpage much like the publisher's editorial. It is best practice to let the ad be on the same page for several days so that the potential customers come back to the website to have a look at it.
Keep it Personal
Keep your ad copy simple, interactive, and direct to connect with the audience. Try to call out the problem-solving content to make people feel identified and easily relatable with the solution. Keep content personal and relevant to increase engagement. The copy that is simple is more persuasive. Write ad copy as though you are speaking to your audience.
The Rise in Video Popularity Trend
Generating high-quality content that educates and entertains at the same time is far more effective in building long-term customer relationships. Video happens to be one of the successful formats of native content marketing. Video content accelerates the engagement of customers and the revenue earned from native video advertising. One of the successful ad trends is interactivity. Video content being interactive creates a sense of personal touch and leads to word-of--mouth marketing.
Targeting the Right Way
The success of any campaign largely depends on sites, audiences, and gadgets. Gather your user’s information through tools and analytics to decide your audience. Emphasizing the need of the audience is important to maintain the foundation of native advertising. Knowledge about the audience will ensure you target the right audience on the right native advertising platform. According to a recent study, click-through rates on native ads are higher on mobile devices.
How Does Native Advertising Work?
The most inevitable question arising to any advertiser’s mind is whether there is sustainable growth for native content marketing? Well the answer to this is very positive. Native advertising works in terms of demand and supply. Publishers fall under the supply category looking out for ads to monetize their site and advertisers fall under the demand category reaching an audience to generate promotion, sales, and lastly leads. The brand pays on a native advertising platform of their choice for the placement of their content. Selecting the right platform is an essential step of native ads. Once the content is created and approved, it will be tagged by saying something like, “Advertisements”, “Paid advertisement”, “Sponsored”, or “Recommended” to create transparency within native advertising platforms.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is native advertising?
Native advertising is a paid content that mimics the design of the platform upon which it is published. Native ads are commonly visible on most of the social media platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn) but are also seen on websites. They function differently from advertorials. Native advertisements blend perfectly with web page organic content therefore are not jarring.
Why native advertising is important?
Native advertisements bring brands and customers together on a single page by better targeting and using personalization technology, making it more engaging. Native advertising content has a longer shelf life and reaches the target audience through trusted channels. It generates higher CTR, boosts conversions, and creates higher sales for your website and company.
What is an example of native advertising?
Media companies like BuzzFeed, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Instagram filter, Nickelodeon, and social media ads are a few popular examples of native advertising that have invested in the creation and distribution of native advertisements on their respective platforms on behalf of the brands.
Why is native advertising so successful?
The success of native advertising heavily depends on the relevant and engaging content, better received by target customers. Native ads are viewed 53% more than other banner ads. Native content is cohesive, blends smoothly with the organic content so they do not appear as ads, making people inclined to view them more and consume them. Native ads are worth the hype provided used correctly and created and promoted the right way.
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