Digital Marketing - Braveheart Digital Marketing

Four Digital Marketing Predictions The Experts Got Wrong In 2019

2019 Digital Marketing Predictions That Were Wrong

Four 2019 Digital Marketing Predictions The Experts Got Wrong

As I was starting to work on my 2020 digital marketing predictions, I decided to take a look see how accurate the 2019 prediction were from industry leaders. The results were frankly disappointing.

Predictions from Google

● Multi-channel will grow into omni-channel
● The importance of the mobile experience
● Voice services will boom
● Breakthrough chatbots
● Personalization through data-driven marketing
● The value of custom content will increase

Lenovo offered up:

● AI Starts to Transform Marketing
● Privacy Laws Disrupt Ad Sales
● Voice-Based Marketing Enters Mainstream
● Digital Communication Becomes Personal

Jeff Bulas said:

● Omnichannel Marketing
● Artificial Intelligence
● Chatbots
● Personalization
● Video Marketing

Convince and Convert has similar views saying:

● Omnichannel Marketing
● Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
● Voice Search
● Personalized Marketing
● Video Marketing and Influencer Marketing
● Visual Search

It was clear in the minds of the experts that 2019 would be the year of: ● Omnichannel marketing ● AI/ML ● Voice Search ● Chatbots

As we look back at these predictions with the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that not only did many of these channels and tactics fail to live up to the hype but, for the Small- and Medium-Sized businesses, they had little or no impact on their 2019 digital marketing efforts.

Omnichannel Marketing

Convince and Convert defines Omnichannel marketing as “a type of marketing that connects the dots between multiple channels, ensuring a consistent user experience and encouraging the consumer to engage with your brand at every touchpoint across multiple channels.”

The ideas behind this prediction made sense a year ago. In B2B, it takes 8 touches to make an appointment today, with many of those touches taking place across multiple platforms.

Business owners and CMO’s understand the importance of omnichannel marketing. The challenge is attribution. How do you track these multiple touchpoints–which is an issue at the Fortune 100 level, never mind the world of Small and Medium Sized businesses? The recent CMO survey showed that CMO’s expect to double their analytics budget in 2020 from 7.2% of marketing budgets in 2019 to 11.6% of budget by 2022.

This growth in analytics is fueled by marketers trying to understand the performance of Omnichannel Marketing. But marketers also struggle with measuring the impact of Omnichannel Marketing–only 40% of marketers report having the right quantitative tools to demonstrate the impact of marketing spend on company performance. The silver lining is that this is the highest reported level of use of quantitative tools in the history of The CMO Survey.

Omnichannel Marketing will continue to be important to marketers, regardless of the size of the company. But attribution tracking is a big hurdle to overcome, and that will impact how diversified a company’s digital marketing strategy will be in 2020 and beyond.

AI/ML

Using the definitions from Convince and Convert, once again: Artificial intelligence (AI) is the branch of computer science that is all about teaching the machine to think and act like a human being.

Machine learning is usually what runs behind AI algorithms. While AI is basically all about teaching the machine to replace human beings, machine learning is about teaching the machine what a human brain cannot grasp, e.g. complex data mining and future predictions based on current patterns.

Two of the best examples of AI-empowered marketing are: ● Amazon: Using AI to analyze each particular buyer’s decisions and suggest products to them they didn’t even know they want or need. ● Netflix: Using AI for content recommendations and beyond. Netflix successfully applies AI for product development too. They have analyzed years of viewer data to create successful products of their own, including the hit “House of Cards.” Put simply: thanks to AI, Netflix knows what people want before they do.

A post from Quora Creative said that 85% of consumers end up selecting the products that Amazon suggests, which creates a huge advantage that the retail giant has over it competitors. Most SMB’s don’t have the ability to provide that kind of AI-driven personalized marketing. But they can take advantage of AI/ML when running paid ads within the Google platform. ML/AI allows Google to optimize your ads and bidding strategies in real-time to make the campaign more effective–something you cannot manually do today.

But for the majority of SMB’s, ML and AI is still several years away from having an impact on their digital marketing efforts

Voice Search

We have all seen the stats about how strong the growth is in voice search: ● 55% of households are expected to own smart speaker devices by 2022. That’s a 42% jump from today’s household ownership numbers (Source: OC&C Strategy Consultants). ● Voice commerce sales reached $1.8 billion last year, per OC&C Strategy Consultants. They’re predicted to reach $40 billion by 2022.

Did voice search live up to the hype in 2019?

That depends on which industry you are in. According to seoClarity, nearly 20% of all voice search queries are triggered by a set of only 25 keywords. These consist mainly of question words like “how” or “what” and adjectives like “best” or “easy.” These are informational searches, not the type of search that drives revenue.

Some of the most speculative statistics around are about the ecommerce (or v-commerce) impact of voice search. The most quoted study on it was produced by OC&C Strategy Consultants, which predicted that voice channel will grow from a $2 billion channel in 2018 to a $40 billion channel by 2022. That is a huge jump, and before that can happen, the payment issue needs to be fixed.

The challenge here lies in voice payment authentication, where currently the prevalent modes consist of either a biometric authentication (e.g. fingerprint of Apple’s TouchID) or a four-digit PIN code to be read out loud.

The data does not show that revenue from voice search, or voice search itself, is growing as fast as predicted 12 months ago.

Chatbots

Definition from Wikipedia: A chatbot is a piece of software that conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. Such programs are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner, although as of 2019, they are far short of being able to pass the Turing test

According to Gartner, by 2020 85% of such interactions between consumers and brands will take place via chatbots, without human participation. In order for Gartner’s prediction to come true, consumers have to be willing to engage with a bot, and the data suggests that they don’t want to.

According to Statista polls, only 34% of respondents prefer chatbots to traditional channels of communication with online retailers.

One reason for the reluctance of consumers to fully embrace chatbots is that bots are only as good as the playbooks that they are built on. Most chatbots that answers questions have been programmed to provide an answer to a specific question. Which means they are only as good as the database of questions and answers they have. When a consumer asks a question whose answer is not in the database, the bot stops working.

Which is the second reason why consumers prefer chatting with real people. We don’t think linearly like a machine. Instead we jump from one topic to another, which is difficult to program a chatbot to handle.

Also, we like personalized attention from our favorite brands, and the chatbot experience is the opposite of that. For a lot of companies that had chat on their site in 2019, the chat feature was simply a fill in a form where someone would get back to you, or it redirected you to the right department like an auto attendant on a phone system. It has not AI or ML, which is why is impact has been less that predicted, especially amongst SMB’s.

Conclusion

Predicting trends, even for the next 12 months, can be a daunting task. However, it is clear that the enthusiasm in 2019 for Omnichannel marketing, AI/ML, Voice Search, Chatbots was a little early. Will these channels and tactics be influential in 2020? Stay tuned for my 2020 digital marketing predictions.

How Is Advertising Different From Marketing?

I had an interesting conversation with a business owner the other day and he made the point that business owners in his market often did not distinguish between advertising and marketing.

This is not a new topic. I found a Businessweek article from 2003 titled Marketing vs Advertising asking the same question.

So what is the difference between marketing vs advertising? There are a lot of different definitions of advertising and marketing, and many of them are almost interchangeable with each other.

But the best one I found was on marketingprofs.com where they used this definition from Kathleen Micken, assistant professor of marketing for the Gabelli School of Business at Roger Williams University.

“Marketing might be defined as everything an organization does to facilitate an exchange between itself and its customers/clients. Advertising is just one of many marketing activities.”

Kathleen Micken

Assistant Professor of Marketing for the Gabelli School of Business at Roger Williams University,

Steven R. Jolly, owner of SRJ Marketing Communications, a marketing and design firm in Dallas adds,

“Marketing is the sum total of all impressions and advertising is part of the impressions that must be managed. And, of course, advertising has a hard dollar cost associated.”

To put it another way, advertising is a single component in the overall marketing process, it’s a tactic. It’s part of an overall strategic marketing plan. Advertising is an ad, a commercial, a billboard. Think Mad Men. Advertising is typically a brand message delivered in a passive way to consumers, with the goal of raising their overall awareness of a brand, product or service. If you are trying to educate a mass audience about your brand, that is advertising.

Marketing on the other hand is delivering a targeted offer to a differentiated audience for a specific result. So if you are trying to generate actual leads, for a specific offer, from a defined audience, that is marketing. And I would argue that MOST small and mid-sized business owners do not know the difference. So why does that matter?

The most compelling argument for using marketing vs advertising is because marketing has a better track record of consistently producing results. Several times I have met with business owners who think that by buying an ad in the local newspaper, industry magazine or billboard in town that they have a marketing plan. They do not. They are just advertising.

Rarely do those tactics lead to first three stages of a successful inbound marketing campaign; Traffic Generating, Lead Generation and Customer Acquisition. Instead we have found that clients have a much better ROI when they use email marketing to present a specific offer to a segment of their customer base, or they offer a webinar that solves a problem that many customers are facing.

Is your currently marketing plan generating all the leads that you want? If the answer is no, check out our free marketing assessment offer.

The BEST Way To Generate Leads In 90% Of Industries

A new report from Bizible analyzed more than 480,000 leads through its Salesforce marketing analytics platform and the data showed that Search does a better job of generating leads than any other marketing channel.

A Hubspot report last season showed that SEO provides the best ROI of any inbound marketing channel, and the Bizible study reinforced that data. There is a subtle difference between the two reports as the Hubspot report was able to track both SEO and PPC separately. In the Bizible study they combined both organic and PPC under the single search umbrella.

The Bizible data showed that when looking at first touch, Search drove 56% of leads generated. When looking just at last touch, Search accounted for 41% of the leads generated.

Not a surprise then that the combination of Search first touch and Search last touch was the most productive channel for lead generation, accounting for 37% of all leads from first/last touch combinations.

For those marketers who believe that search will not work in their market, Bizible refuted that. The data showed that Search was the leading channel for 9 out of 10 of the industries measured for generating leads by first touch. The software/SaaS sector was the only sector in which search did not drive the majority of first touch leads.

Don’t Overlook Social In Lead Generation Process

Social is a market that has really matured into a valuable inbound marketing channel in the last year of so. When Bizible looked at the percentage of closed deals that were won by first touch in each channel, social impressively came in third with a 30% win rate, despite driving just 5% of leads. Social impact on lead generation is a not widespread yet because the social leads were concentrated among two industries; Education and Finance.

Note that Direct and Search had the two highest closed rates at 56% and 40% respectively with Display having the worst at only 12%.

Social shortens the length of the marketing cycle. When Social was the first touch, the marketing cycle was 30% shorter than average.

Takeaways

Search is the most popular first touch channel for lead generation accounting for 56% of all leads acquired. Search, especially organic SEO, has to be a part of your company’s inbound marketing strategy. Whether your market is B2B or B2C, Search generates more leads, more cost-effectively. The Bizible report shows that the last touch severely undervalues the top of the marketing funnel and does not account for the buyer’s decision journey. Companies need an inbound marketing analytics program that allows for Multitouch attribution. You can’t ignore Social in B2B marketing; it has a 30% shorter marketing cycle than the average inbound channel. Social is not just for posting statuses anymore. It is also a valuable lead generation channel. The full paper “Multi-touch Attribution for Companies with Sales Teams” is available for download here.

Study Suggests Marketers Rely on Instinct Over ROI

I was surprised by an article on eMarketer recently titled “Do Marketers Rely on Instinct Over ROI?” According to a study by Webmarketing123, marketers are still struggling to measure return on investment (ROI).

The report found that 33% of US business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing professionals still don’t know which channels make the biggest impacts on revenues.

As the below graph illustrates, the percentages of B2B and B2C Marketers who can determine the ROI of the most popular marketing channels are relatively low.

Those who cannot determine the ROI of their marketing efforts are often left to rely on “gut instinct” to determine which channels are most remunerative. Although relying on gut may work for some, it does not provide clear insight as to which channels are most time-worthy and cost-effective.

Marketers, ROI, and Social Media:

One of the biggest areas where marketers are not tracking the results of their campaigns is social media. While 87% of B2B marketers use social media, just 17% were able to prove its ROI.

Similarly, 87% of B2Cs use social media, but only 27% are able to measure the financial effect of their social media marketing efforts.

Marketers, ROI, and Email:

Marketers are even struggling to track the ROI of email, which has been around for almost two decades now.

As the most-used channel among B2Bs, email is also the most-measured. However, with 93% of B2B markers using email, only 66% report being able to prove its ROI.

Email is the second most popular channel among B2Cs, as well as No. 2 in terms of its ability for its ROI to be proven. The percentage of B2C’s who can actually measure email efforts is just 44% vs. 80% who use the channel.

Are you measuring the ROI of your current marketing efforts?

To learn the true costs and benefits of your investments, contact us for a free consultation!

CMO’s Unhappy With Content Marketing Efforts

With seventy percent of B2B marketers creating more content than they did last year, you would think that their bosses would be happy with their content marketing results.

But more is not always better and that appears to be the case according to a recent survey by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and NetLine Corporation. The survey found that 90 percent of CMOs said they have a content strategy, but only 2 percent consider their existing approach to demand generation highly effective

The challenge for many CMOs, and marketers in general, is producing content that translates into business results. How can they do that? By following these three strategies.

Content Amplification

Only 12 percent of marketers believe they have a content marketing strategy and amplification to target the right audiences with relevant and persuasive content. They are also not using multiple distribution and syndication channels for maximum reach, impact and return.

“Generating demand and ensuring the consistent flow of high-quality, actionable leads is paramount to the success of today’s business-to-business marketer." “Sales enablement and pipeline performance remain key mandates as organizations look to fine-tune their content marketing practices to be high-performance growth engines.”

Donovan Neale-May

Executive Director of the CMO Council.

Customized Content

Seventy five percent of marketers measure the success of their content marketing efforts by the number of downloads or registrations they get.

But often those goals are not met due to:

Not developing customized content for target audiences (48 percent of respondents)
Not allocating sufficient budget to create engaging and authoritative content (48 percent)
Not producing content that is relevant or meaningful to different audiences (44 percent)
Not reaching the right decision makers across the organization (43 percent)
List ItemNot leveraging the right distribution channels and syndication opportunities to maximize reach (39 percent)

As Robert Alvin, CEO and Founder of NetLine Corporation put it:

“The quantity and quality of audience-appropriate content directly correlates to the number of leads that will end up in the sales pipeline. “Content demand generation programs start with the asset but must ensure proper consumption. Syndication and distribution to target audience groups with measurable results is indispensable for a successful content strategy.”

Robert Alvin

CEO and Founder of NetLine Corporation

If you’re looking for a content marketing agency that can help you achieve your business goals, contact Braveheart Digital Marketing today. We’ll be happy to discuss your content needs and provide a content strategy that aligns with your overall business goals.

What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

This month has been the month of audits as almost every project I have worked on this month seems to involve some sort of audit (content audits, page audits, landing page audits, etc.).

My auditing procedure begins with gathering the data I need—analytics, keywords, conversion rates, etc. Additionally, I ask clients for four pieces of information on their target audience:

I am amazed at the number of times I hear that this information is not available. Without these four pieces of information, the content recommendations switch from being highly customized to more general in nature. Instead of highly targeted content that speaks directly to the user and explains why product X meets their needs, the content focuses more on features and benefits. Although that kind of content offers useful information, it lacks the hook—the story that draws users in and makes them take the next step. The most common reason I hear why companies have not developed buyer personas is because developing them is time-consuming. While it is true that generating really good buyer personas does take time and effort, the benefit is that content that is developed with specific users in mind will result in higher engagement and conversions than content that is not. Without buyer personas, companies are losing the opportunity for more business. Do you have your buyer personas? Contact us today, so we can help you discover your audience and pitch to them directly!

Braveheart Digital Moves To Manchester NH

We are happy to announce that Braveheart Digital has a new home. We have moved our offices from the Alpha Loft incubation and acceleration space in Downtown Manchester NH to the Red Oaks Offices on 66 Hanover Street, still in downtown Manchester.

Our NEW address is:

Red Oaks Offices

66 Hanover St

Suite 200

Manchester · NH · 03101

Being located in the heart of downtown Manchester will allow us to attract the SEO content writers and email marketers we need to help our clients grow their traffic, increase leads and drive new revenue.

Braveheart Digital is an SEO Company bringing together cutting edge, organic search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, marketing savvy and a solid methodology to help businesses achieve their growth objectives.

Four 2019 Digital Marketing Predictions The Experts Got Wrong

Predictions from Google

Lenovo offered up:

Jeff Bulas said:

Convince and Convert has similar views saying:

Omnichannel Marketing

AI/ML

Voice Search

Chatbots

Conclusion

Recent Posts

How Is Advertising Different From Marketing?

Recent Posts

The BEST Way To Generate Leads In 90% Of Industries

Don’t Overlook Social In Lead Generation Process

Takeaways

Recent Posts

Study Suggests Marketers Rely on Instinct Over ROI

Marketers, ROI, and Social Media:

Marketers, ROI, and Email:

Are you measuring the ROI of your current marketing efforts?

Recent Posts

CMO’s Unhappy With Content Marketing Efforts

Content Amplification

Customized Content

Recent Posts

What You Don’t Know Can Hurt You

Recent Posts

Braveheart Digital Moves To Manchester NH

Recent Posts

What we do

Email us