Category: Marketing Technology

Marketing in the Metaverse

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When internet and computing technologies first emerged, all interactions were mainly text-based (usernames, messages, email addresses, etc.). Then they became more media-based (livestreams, photos, videos, etc.). The next elevation of user experience and the user interface is 3D. Typically, a 3D version of the Internet and computing is known as the metaverse.

Why should businesses evolve their marketing strategy for a new B2A (business-to-avatar) world?

Avatars exist because customers like having a digital representation of themselves. As a result, they are drawn to customizable content. Therefore, brands have a fantastic opportunity to help customers personalize their avatars through branded content. This type of customizable content has been utilized by brands successfully for several years. Nike and Louis Vuitton are excellent examples of how customers are drawn to personalized products, and this model’s growth is continuing to elevate into the digital age through avatars. 

Furthermore, marketers must try to live where the potential audience is spending more time, and when it comes to generation-Z, that includes gaming and virtual worlds. Therefore, for brands and marketers, hyper-realistic avatars are everything. The future avatars will enable businesses to empower customers to make better purchasing decisions by being able to review their avatars trying on products. This transition will essentially be a ‘try before you buy’ business model – ultimately adopting a less ‘forced sales’ approach.

How should brands prepare to market in the metaverse?

To stay ahead of the competition, it’s crucial to know what your potential audience is doing in the metaverse. This means studying the type of experiences other businesses are offering and how they’re interacting with customers. Would something similar work for you?

There are several ways for brands to utilize the metaverse to interact with customers. A few of the easiest ways to start getting involved includes:

  • Building virtual offices for employees
  • Sponsoring events within the metaverse like music festivals or gaming tournaments 
  • Creating virtual stores for shopping experiences
  • Creating NFTs that represent the brand

Additionally, with the metaverse being the latest evolution in marketing, brands should take an experimental, test and learn approach. Be flexible, nimble, and willing to fail to gain the data you need to succeed.

Top advertising opportunities for brands using metaverse

One excellent place to look is the video gaming industry, where marketers are already exploring different social aspects of virtual realities to enhance brand engagement and build fresh avenues of data collection. Obviously, not all video games fall into the metaverse category; however, some of the most prominent ones showcase core metaverse attributes like multi-player modes, personalized avatars, and the ability to interact with fellow gamers in real-time.

Besides that, opening virtual hubs is becoming a huge business in certain metaverse realms. For instance, platforms like Somnium Space, The Sandbox, Cryptovoxels, and Decentraland are all virtual worlds, offering users opportunities to rent or buy digital real estate with cryptocurrency. As a result, companies, celebrities, art galleries, media agencies, and numerous others are rushing to snap up parcels of land, and some of the numbers involved are mind-boggling.  Opportunities can also include creating a storefront for your brand, display, sponsorship, and lead generation.

What these pricey endeavors represent is a strong commitment to an enduring virtual presence. It is evidence that some businesses don’t see the metaverse as some passing craze but as something that’s here to stay and worth investing in. Consequently, while it’s early on, consider ways your brand can become a leader in this new metaverse world.

Rolanda Gregory ©2022
All Rights Reserved.

Cookies, Privacy & User Data

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Businesses understand the value of the data they collect about customers. Firms can predict sales trends, send out targeted advertising, and improve their products through this data. However, for consumers, data collection is a privacy invasion and a practice that can be abused easily, leading to the suspicion of many businesses. Furthermore, for data collection, web developers now use cookies to offer convenient website visits, but it’s a vulnerability to your privacy.

What are cookies?
Cookies are small files that are sent to your devices to monitor and remember specific information about you, such as your login information, details about your shopping cart, etc.

Why do companies use cookies?
Cookies let a business owner recognize users and recall their individual preferences, such as politics versus sports news. They’re also used to customize advertising to personalize user sessions. Moreover, e-commerce businesses use cookies to track items customers previously viewed to suggest other relevant goods.

How the EU has set the stage with its groundbreaking GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) requirements
GDPR regulates the way businesses manage and process personal data. After 25 May 2018, GDPR constituted the greatest change to the EU’s data protection rules in over two decades. The GDPR rules apply to the companies if they use personal data and are based in the EU. Personal data includes name, numbers, health records, location, banking, income information, cultural preferences, etc. GDPR allows firms to use personal data under certain conditions and forces them to implement additional security measures like strong encryption.

What upcoming changes we can expect in the US
The CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) passed on 1 January 2020, and industry experts considered it a landmark piece of user privacy rights legislation, as it needed specific businesses to disclose all personal data they have about a user whenever that user requests. Now, California, Colorado, and Virginia are only the tip of the iceberg. Given that multiple states have some kind of consumer privacy legislation at some stage of proposal or consideration, enterprises can expect several other states to enact new privacy legislation. This will, however, become a nightmare for marketers if we have to deal with a patchwork of laws from state to state; what, in essence, will be needed is a national consumer privacy act to make it easier for marketers to operate.

Marketers should focus on cookieless targeting
As more tech companies start to eliminate 3rd party cookie tracking, advertisers must be prepared to rely more on cookieless tactics to segment and target potential audiences to provide them a personalized experience and leverage data for informed future decision-making.

Is it possible to do cookieless targeting?
The online advertising landscape has been focusing its attention mainly on cookie-based targeting. However, advances in AI and machine learning have opened up numerous opportunities for intelligent targeting, which doesn’t require user-profiling and is privacy-friendly. One way to do this is contextual targeting, which provides marketers the opportunity to view and react in real-time to insights acquired from live content consumption. This dynamic data will help target and scale campaigns just as efficiently as a cookie-based targeting method.

What are Consumer Responsibilities?
Cybercrime is a huge business; therefore, as a consumer, it’s essential to learn about the data organizations collect about you and how they use the data to earn revenue (in many cases, they sell and share your data with 3rd party companies which you may be unaware of the relationship and scope of the data-sharing agreements).

Moreover, to limit tracking – clear your cookies regularly, minimize the use of browser extensions and ad-ons, turn off cross-site tracking in your browser, and use privacy-oriented browsers and search engines such as DuckDuckGo and Brave. And when you navigate to a site and see this type of message, don’t be afraid to click ‘Manage Cookies / Do Not Sell My Personal Information to gain slight control of the amount of data being tracked about your browsing habits.

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Key Takeaways
• Consumers are wising up to the dangers of data misuse – companies can lose their audience if they fail to protect user data.
• Specific data privacy regulations differ from state to state; however, core principles include transparency, accountability, and confidentiality.
• Consumers are not off the hook and are indeed accountable for their data protection.

Rolanda Gregory ©2022
All Rights Reserved.

How NBA Team Memphis Grizzlies Uses Walls.io

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“We Wanted a More Aesthetic View of Our Social Media Posts Across Our Brands”

A photo shot from the view of a Grizzlies player who is sitting on the floor. Four of his teammates are standing around him helping him up.

by Andie Katschthaler April 18, 2019 4 min read

Many of our customers are loyally returning to Walls.io for all of their events, setting up social walls on big screens for their audience. Others have an ongoing social wall for their brand and embed it on the brand website.

But once in a while, we have one of those customers who really make full use of their Walls.io accounts, running multiple walls, embedding them, showing them off at events and generally putting lots of work into the presentation.

We’re very happy to count the NBA team Memphis Grizzlies among that type of customer. The Grizzlies switched to Walls.io from a competitor and have since set up multiple social media walls, all to an impeccable standard. They’ve fully integrated social walls with their online marketing strategy.

Use case: Multiple social walls across various properties to enhance brand experience
Website: Grizzlies.com, GrizzGaming, Memphis Hustle, FedExForum
Campaign duration: ongoing
Channels connected: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest


Social wall design follows website design

The walls are being used to showcase social content on various websites the Grizzlies are running. The content of each wall is adapted to the website it’s embedded on, and all social walls are styled to fit the look of the site as well.

Here we have two different social walls; one is embedded on Grizzlies.com, the other one on FedExForum.com. The two walls are styled completely differently, each one adapted to fit the website it’s embedded on.

Screenshot of Grizzlies.com website with the social wall embedded. The wall is styled to blend in with the website’s design and colours.
The social wall on Grizzlies.com.
Screenshot of FedExForum.com website with the social wall embedded. The wall is styled in to blend in with the website’s design and colours, for example by using tile colours in the three FedExForum colours blue, orange and purple.
The social wall on FedExForum.com.

We’ve been told that, In due time, a social wall will likely also be shown on a big screen at the Grizzlies arena. That is one way to use Walls.io that obviously excites us a lot and we hope to soon be able to tell you more about this project.

We wanted to know what drew the Grizzlies to Walls.io and how social walls are working out for them. Rolanda Gregory, Vice President of Marketing, told us about how her department is using social walls and shared some plans for the future.

Why did you start using a social wall and what do you hope to achieve with it?

We started using a social wall because we wanted a more aesthetic view of our social media posts across all of our brand website properties. We wanted the social walls to have a natural flow with our other website content instead of having it feel like an afterthought.

We’ve found that it’s a great way to pull in content from our various social media platforms. For our websites, the walls provide fresh, timely and relevant information that our fans find important. We are also able to post promotions and ads within the social wall content.

Walls.io TIP: With Walls.io, you can create custom content like ads, for example, and upload it directly to your social wall as sponsored posts.

 

How did you find the process of setting up the social walls and integrating them on the websites?

It was actually quite simple. Our Marketing Technology team, led by Albert Hughes, was able to transition from our previous solution to Walls.io very quickly. The social walls also allowed for better branding and configuration of the layouts. The ability to be able to use an embed or iFrame provided greater flexibility for our websites.

How are people reacting to the use of the social walls?

The feedback has been great as the layout of the content looks much better and is easier to read.

Walls.io TIP: Like the Grizzlies, you can use Walls.io’s extensive customisation features to make your social wall look just the way you need it, whether you’re embedding it on a website or showing it off on a big screen.

 

What other plans do you have for your social walls in the future?

We are currently working on plans to use social walls in-arena for events and campaigns. Meaning that for a specific game or event, we will display a large social wall in-arena and run a hashtag campaign to engage with event attendees.

Due to our satisfaction, we are also looking to extend social walls for our GrindCityMedia.com personalities, as well as integration into our mobile app.

Use social walls to keep innovating

How one NBA team uses social walls shows us how important it is for brands to keep innovating and how social tools like Walls.io can help with that. Social walls are a creative and dynamic tool, so keep changing it up and finding new ways to use them to implement your marketing strategy.

The Grizzlies’ plans to show a social wall in their arena is a fantastic example of that. A big wall where matches take place will let fans engage with the Grizzlies and each other at the most important point of contact. Similarly, the plans to integrate a wall into the mobile app will create another point of interaction between brand and fans, deepening the connection and brand loyalty.

A diverse group of Grizzlies fans are posing for a picture. They are dressed in t-shirts that feature the team mascot Grizz (a blue bear) and say “Memphis Grizzlies”.
Fans love finding new ways to engage with the Memphis Grizzlies, whether it’s online or offline.

Don’t be afraid to experiment

Brands with a diverse portfolio can use social walls for different websites, purposes, etc. It’s fairly easy to design and adapt each wall for its use. And you remain flexible — show a social wall on a big screen or embed it on your website. With Walls.io, you have many options.

Don’t be afraid to use social walls in many different ways. Sometimes you’ll want the social wall embedded in full width on your website, other times a sidebar widget is all you need.

Screenshot of the MemphisHustle.com website. The left two thirds of the page are covered with news articles, the right hand third is taken up by the social media wall in a sidebar. The width allows for posts to show underneath each other in a scrollable column.
Here we see the social wall on the Grizzlies’ MemphisHustle website incorporated prominently in a sidebar on the right. Social walls in sidebars are fully functional, of course, they’re just narrower.

Time to set up an awesome social wall for your own brand

Play around with the customisation options to see what you can do

Create a free social wall now!

Remember, if something doesn’t work for you, you can always change it back or try something different. Adapting your social walls is easy and fast with Walls.io.

Not In My House

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With the Internet of Things quickly taking over, the concerns of privacy advocates are stronger and more relevant than ever.  Many tech companies and startups are developing new products that skirt the gray line between convenience and privacy violations.  With the government slow to catch up on these matters it’ll be left to consumers to dictate how much listening, watching and out-and-out spying they want in their lives – especially at home.  If you haven’t stumbled upon Presence Detection technology, read more here on soon to be innovations.

Yahoo! Account Breach!

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It’s just been announced that Yahoo! experienced a data breach that caused more than 1 billion accounts to be compromised.  Hopefully everyone knows not to store or transmit sensitive information on ‘public’ email systems, meaning email providers that give you a ‘free’ account as they’re often the target of hackers.  Also your emails are searched for marketing and sales opportunities.  In any regards, if you have a Yahoo! account, keep a lookout for suspicious activity – and consider moving on to a different platform.

Acquiring a New Testing Platform

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Website Optimization

If your Marketing department is not taking advantage of using an optimization testing platform to conduct A/B and multivariate tests, or if you’re using a proprietary system, here are a few reasons to consider utilizing one of the many platforms now available to marketers.

2 Main Reasons for Implementing an Optimization Testing Platform:

  1. Allows you to easily run marketing A/B and multivariate tests so you can optimize your website content thereby increasing conversion rates and engagement at a faster pace.
  2. We’ve all experienced prioritization issues when it comes to competing for technical resources, now there’s a work-around.  If your test is restricted to front-end/graphical user interface changes (such as testing call-to-actions, page layouts, text or imagery), there’s no need to involve IT and wait for development resources until you have a sure winner.

Important Features to Consider:

  • Easy to use drag and drop interface that includes in-page and in-line editing via a WYSIWYG editor.
  • A side-by-side view of what the changes are in a test (current vs proposed view of the page or elements) will become important as you start using the testing platform.  Believe it or not, some major platforms do not have this capability making it cumbersome to understand and see the changes without going through unnecessary steps.
  • Ability to stop a test upon reaching a customizable threshold.  While most platforms will automatically stop a test after a certain date has been realized, not all platforms will allow you to customize a threshold.  For instance, once a test hits 1MM page views, or exceeds a 5% CTR.
  • While permissions should be a standard include, a customizable workflow is a must-have option.  This will allow your organization to route new test changes to different departments and team members (such as to Copy, Graphic Design, and Compliance) as necessary for edits, review and approvals before new tests are published.

When conducting an RFP for a new optimization testing platform, be sure to keep the above points in mind.

Rolanda Gregory ©2016
All Rights Reserved.

Marketing Technology Landscape 2016

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Marketing_Technology_Landscape_2016

Chiefmartec.com has updated their annual Marketing Technology Landscape.  The new design makes it easier to find companies.  It’s broken down into the categories of Advertising & Promotion, Content & Experience, Social & Relationships, Commerce & Sales, Data, and Management.  If you plan to implement a new marketing platform, be sure to review the updated landscape for potential vendors to include in your RFP process.

Omni-Channel Campaigns…Connecting the Dots

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Intersecting circles

When launching a new service, product or startup, it’s important to do so from an integrated and connected perspective. Marketing campaigns should be planned strategically across all available marketing channels. If a particular channel isn’t utilized it’s important to understand and notate why.

Creating awareness and buzz is best done in concerted partnership across multiple marketing channels, leveraging the audience and strengths available in each channel.  Omni-channel marketing ensures that you’ve covered all the bases.

Once the purpose, theme, budget and schedule are determined, drilling down to analyze each marketing channel is necessary.  Campaigns aren’t one size fits all, so a strategic play on how to utilize digital, traditional and out-of-home, as well how as how key tools such as targeting and segmentation impacts your messaging are important. How you communicate on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, can be decidedly different from Email Marketing, Radio, Banner Ads, Direct Mail, PPC or DRTV so it’s necessary to create customized copy for each channel that ladders up to your overall campaign theme and message.

Measurement is crucial in understanding what roles marketing channels play in the performance of your campaign.  Implementing multi-channel attribution tools can assist in this area.  While you may not see a direct conversion from some channels, knowing which channels are introducers and influencers are just as critical as knowing which ones are closers.

When launching marketing campaigns, do not do so in separation.  Leveraging at least multi if not omni channels will yield better performance.  I have witnessed organizations that launch campaigns in isolation – with different teams being responsible.  The email team is launching a totally different campaign and message than the social team, etc. with no integration or coordination from the top.  Creating an editorial and acquisition marketing calendar will help coordinate the efforts of multiple teams, and ensure everyone is on-message.

On your next campaign, utilize omni-channel marketing to engage consumers on their turf and to see a lift in performance.

Rolanda Gregory ©2016
All Rights Reserved.

Invest/Maintain/Kill

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Yahoo!

Invest/Maintain/Kill:  These are words to live by for any organization.

Today, we’re starting to learn about the impact of Yahoo’s Invest/Maintain/Kill List.  While it may initially sound threatening, cold or insensitive, it is a strategy that all organizations should utilize.  And use often.

As an organization, it’s important to constantly evaluate, measure and plan for the future as it relates to your core competencies, technological advantages, people, strategic partnerships, and any other competitive advantages.  Having a strong indication of which of these items should be further invested into, maintained as the status quo, or subtly decommissioned or killed is key.  It helps to keep your organization nimble and focused on its most critical objectives and goals, while keeping aboard the talent and people who will best contribute to reaching those objectives.

I applaud Yahoo! for taking these necessary and crucial steps.

Learn more about the changes at Yahoo! on re/code.

Rolanda Gregory ©2016
All Rights Reserved.

No More IE

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MS Edge

It feels like only yesterday that we were hard-coding web dev fixes for older Internet Explorer browsers.  You know for the users that simply wouldn’t upgrade from IE 7, 8 or 9.  For some Marketers it was just a tad bit too much traffic to shut off altogether so we continued to Band-Aid fixes.  Well at least now we finally have support from Microsoft.  As of today, Microsoft will only support IE 10 and Edge for its consumer-base.  It’s about time.

Hmm, I wonder if Edge will topple Chrome from the throne.

Learn more about the transition at Microsoft

Rolanda Gregory ©2016
All Rights Reserved.