Category: Marketing

The Biggest Challenges Facing Marketers in 2024

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Marketers in 2024 are navigating a landscape filled with unique challenges. Some of the most prominent ones include:

  1. Adapting to Evolving Social Media Platforms: Marketers are facing a shift in the effectiveness of established social media platforms, with some platforms losing popularity among younger users. This necessitates an audit of social media channels and possibly reallocating budgets to other marketing efforts showing more promise.
  2. Transition to Google Analytics 4 (GA4): The switch from Universal Analytics to GA4 by Google has introduced new challenges in terms of data storage, reporting, and overall usage effectiveness. Marketers need to ensure they configure GA4 correctly and have a plan for old UA data.
  3. Creating Quality Content: The challenge lies in producing content that is not only high quality but also unique and well-researched. This requires significant time investment or potentially outsourcing to content marketing agencies.
  4. Capturing Attention in the Age of Short Attention Spans: Crafting concise and compelling messages paired with eye-catching visuals is crucial to engage audiences in the digital era of short attention spans.
  5. Meeting Demand for Diversity and Inclusion: Marketers are expected to create authentic, inclusive campaigns reflecting diverse perspectives. This begins with fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace.
  6. Transparency in Data Use: As AI tools become more prevalent in marketing, there’s a growing need for transparency in how customer data is used to inform these tools.
  7. Generating Leads and Retaining Customers: Generating new leads and retaining existing customers remain key challenges, with strategies like loyalty programs and personalized marketing efforts being crucial.
  8. Budgeting for Marketing Campaigns: Marketers are tasked with creating effective campaigns in a budget-constrained environment, requiring more creativity and efficient use of existing resources.
  9. Refining Messaging for Differentiation: It’s essential to find the right words and tone to communicate brand values authentically and differentiate from competitors.
  10. Navigating Multiple Marketing Channels: Utilizing multiple marketing channels effectively is vital, as relying on a limited number of channels can hinder competitiveness.
  11. Changing Consumer Behavior and Expectations: Keeping up with evolving customer expectations and behaviors is critical, especially in terms of personalization and social and environmental responsibility.
  12. Integrating AI without Losing the Human Touch: While AI is a significant trend in marketing, it’s important not to neglect the human aspect of marketing. AI should be used to support and enhance human-led strategies.

These challenges require marketers to be adaptable, strategic, and continuously innovative to stay ahead in a rapidly evolving field.

Rolanda Gregory ©2024
All Rights Reserved.

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.

Channel Planning

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Effective marketing considers both channels and communication techniques needed to enable customer acquisition for particular service or product categories. Each channel has its weaknesses and strengths, costs and benefits, limits and freedoms, and must be scrutinized carefully to understand how it will or won’t improve the campaign strategy. Therefore, let’s discuss how to determine which digital and traditional channels to use for your campaign.

Target audience measurement

First, measure where the potential audience is spending their time. Determine who you want to target; for instance, are you targeting an older demographic that primarily uses TV, email, Facebook, and radio – or are you targeting Gen Z, who are heavy users of TikTok, CTV and new digital media platforms. Use top content creators and brands in your vertical and analyze their audience engagement across several channels. Meaningful metrics to use include content engagement, audience size, video views, and mobile app usage.

Allocate marketing budget across multiple channels

Establish an overall budget for the campaign and then divide the budget amongst targeted channels. Understand that doubling the campaign budget of a high-performing channel may not proportionally increase performance. Therefore, never rapidly invest a massive amount of money in campaigns. Instead, consider running more ads, targeting new markets, or more keywords to determine which channels are getting more results in terms of reach, impressions, views, and conversions.

Determine how to schedule the campaigns across multiple channels

A campaign schedule will help keep you organized; however, there’s no one-size-fits-all perfect schedule. The ideal timing and frequency of the campaign across multiple channels will depend on your targeted industry and audience, among other things. Moreover, some channels can be active during the campaign’s life, while others will provide a better lift by overlapping during specific moments in the campaign. For longer campaigns, this is more difficult as you must adequately plan the budget for the campaign’s duration. For example, a campaign that will be active for 3 months may not necessarily have all paid channels running during the entire duration to be cost-effective. Therefore, campaign scheduling is essential to enhance your chances of achieving goals. 

Track campaign channel utilization

If you’re not using a campaign management platform, create a spreadsheet to document which channels have been utilized for campaigns. Use spreadsheets for items like content and financials. For example, you can track ad spend, budgets and ROAS (return on ad spend). Spreadsheets can also be used to manage campaigns, ad effectiveness, social media posts, blog calendars, web traffic, SEO, and many other metrics.

Gather learnings for creating your next channel plan

Do some in-depth market research to find which platforms your audience is using more in that timespan and mold your campaigns and content to their expectations. Then, you need to constantly track the results to determine how well the campaigns and channels are performing and what tweaks should be done. Essentially, channel planning is all about delivering what the customers need and where and when they need it – vital knowledge that’s driven by data.

Conclusion

By integrating digital and traditional marketing channels, you can attract a potential audience in their preferred way; furnish and motivate sales and marketing teams, and maximize your chances of achieving your desired business goals. 

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.

This website uses cookies

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.

Performance Marketing: Optimizing ad spend to achieve campaign goals

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A digital marketing strategy that is driven by results is termed performance marketing. It is ideal for businesses looking to reach audiences at scale since results are based on how end-users interact with campaigns and content.

Moreover, performance marketing works when advertisers pay either publishers or agencies to design and place advertisements for the organization on several performance marketing channels — search engines, social media, embedded web content, CTV, videos, and more. Rather than paying for an ad in a conventional way, advertisers pay based on how well the ad performs by measuring the number of impressions, clicks, shares, or sales.

An important factor of performance marketing is determining how to optimize ad spend to achieve campaign goals. Let’s take a deep dive into some tried-and-tested tips I have discovered to do this the right way.

  • Determine your KPIs (key performance indicators) and ROAS (return on ad spend) goal

A KPI is an effective metric used to measure performance. There’re 3 main groups of KPIs.

Social engagement – Defines how content performs on social media.

On-site metrics – Defines how content influences website visitor’s behavior, for instance, bounce rate and time spent on site.

Conversion metrics – Defines how content turns potential leads and campaigns to sales.

First, determine what you need to measure and ask yourself these questions.

  1. What timespan will you measure the metrics across?
  2. What’s a realistic growth rate?
  3. How will you achieve the desired results?


After setting your KPIs goals, set a realistic goal for the average ROAS you would like to achieve. It’s essential to determine ROAS goals to evaluate the ad campaign’s performance quantitatively. Then, a mix of insights, a dash of data crunching, and research will put you on the right track.

  • Set a realistic budget

Setting a realistic budget, whether it’s based on the percentage of revenue or fixed income, makes it simpler to allocate resources effectively and measure the campaign’s results. Ask yourself these questions:

  1. What percent of the budget can be spent on marketing?
  2. What’s your CLV or LTV (customer lifetime value)?
  3. What’s your funnel/conversion process?
  4. What’s the conversion rate?


To set a realistic budget, you should know what a lead or a visitor is worth and what the customer lifetime value for the business is.

  • Target your campaign to the optimal audiences

Successful advertising is the ability to reach an audience who’ll be most interested in the offered service or product. If you need to get the right eyes on your ad campaign, you must target the optimal audiences. To do this, gather information about who your potential audience is.  What are their demographics? Consider things like hobbies/interests, age, gender, location, salary, discretionary income, and education. The more information you have about the ideal audience, the better you can target them. Knowing your audience also enables finding look-alikes of your highest performing audience segments.

  • Monitor campaign progress for effectiveness, paying close attention to burn rate of budget, CTR (click-through rate), conversions, and revenue

Monitoring campaign progress for effectiveness allows determining if the campaign is working correctly and how the marketing tactics are performing. Therefore, use elements that can be assessed and quantified easily, such as clicks, actual sales, and profit. 

Furthermore, the burn rate describes how fast a campaign is spending its allocated budget. Keep a watchful eye on the levels of spend to ensure there’s a direct correlation in conversions. Burning through your campaign budget too swiftly without results leads to an underperforming scenario in which you may not be able to recoup. Besides that, it’s also vital to monitor impressions, CTR, conversions, and revenue to determine how many users are visiting the website and performing the desired actions such as filling out a contact form, making a purchase, downloading a spec sheet, etc.

  • Gather learnings and optimize elements such as creative, copy, CTA (call-to-action)

The content builds excitement and interest, and the promo, CTA, and creative encourage the visitor to dig deeper and become a paying customer. An appealing ad with a persuasive call to action is the fastest way to generate leads and double the conversion rates. However, since every business is different, continually analyzing and testing helps determine what works best for your potential customers, resulting in a campaign that converts to leads and purchases.

Wrapping Up

Performance marketing is an effective and creative way to diversify your audience and expand reach, all while obtaining valuable data and insights. Find out the approaches that optimize your ad spend and work best for your brand and customers. It doesn’t matter where you stand in the performance marketing space; there is always room to grow!

Rolanda Gregory ©2022
All Rights Reserved.

Grizzlies See Growth Opportunities Via In-House Media, Three-Mode App

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February 11th, 2020

By Pat Evans

 

  • Team’s Grind City Media offers local sports, a betting podcast, and more to engage fans.
  • Wizards, Warriors among teams going in-house in search of content and revenue.

The Memphis Grizzlies switch to mobile tickets last season has given birth to a three-headed app that the team sees as the future of its fan engagement.

The current iteration of the official Grizzlies mobile app has three modes: one for the team, one for the FedExForum and its events, and a third for the team’s content production arm, Grind City Media. Grizzlies vice president of marketing Rolanda Gregory said Grind City Media is the one with the most growth potential.

“No one knows the team better than we do,” Gregory said. “When we look at the local outlets, it surpasses what they do. If anyone should be talking about the team and impacting that daily knowledge, we should have a shot at doing that, so we’re expanding coverage and bringing on talent.”

Grind City Media provides more than just Grizzlies content; it extends across Memphis-area sports with a daily sports podcast, a podcast series on sports betting, video features, and staff reports covering the team and other sports in the market. The Grind City Media site currently features a variety of “presented by” sponsors, like Mountain Dew and Direct Auto Insurance.

“There’s so much opportunity out there, it will eventually become something that takes on a life of its own as it grows and expands,” Gregory said.

Teams growing their internally-produced content is key to moving forward and driving revenue, Daniel Cohen, Octagon senior vice president of media rights consulting, said. The sports industry has transformed over the past several decades from ticket-sales driven in the 1980s and 90s to sponsorship-powered at the turn of the millennium, Cohen said.

But now, it’s imperative there’s a robust media offering beyond regional sports network deals, Cohen said.

“It’s an absolute necessity; almost an arms race as teams are essentially media companies,” Cohen said. “They’re staffing up tremendously when it comes to online media offerings, and the good ones are becoming content creators.”

The prime example Cohen gives is the Washington Wizards, whose ownership group Monumental Sports & Entertainment has heavily invested into a 24-7 OTT network called Monumental Network, acquiring local rights and “created a destination for DMV basketball fans.

While the Grizzlies content is primarily contained to the team’s regional footprint, Cohen said the league is working closely with organizations to build content opportunities internationally. He pointed to the Golden State Warriors deal with e-commerce retailer Rakuten and the Wizards internal content strategy with Japanese-born rookie Rui Hachimura.

Cohen said the on-the-court rights would likely continue to be owned by major rights holders, like Turner and ESPN, but NBA fans are increasingly more interested in what happens off it, which is where the opportunities lie.

“The teams can’t touch the live rights, but they can get creative with the cultural elements, the fashion, art, food,” he said. “The NBA popularity on the court is being overtaken by athlete-driven content.”

“It’s a wide-open space for brands that are endemic to the sport or team, or a new brand wanting to get in,” Cohen said.

Integrating Grind City Media into the team’s mobile app rather than building a new one made sense for Memphis, which wanted to limit costs and spur adoption by fans, Albert Hughes, Grizzlies senior manager of marketing technology, said.

The app allows fans to access their tickets, interact with fan services at FedExForum, play games, and consume the content produced by the organization. Hughes said the team would continue to add more functionality as fans continue to adopt the current uses.

Next year, the team plans on rolling out a mobile-only loyalty program based on engagement with different brands, attendance, and shopping behaviors. The Grizzlies are also working on mobile food and beverage ordering for in-seat delivery and more games.

Hughes said there’s so much opportunity for the app to provide untapped fan data to help drive business initiatives and marketing campaigns, including Grind City Media.

“The big initial use was moving to digital tickets,” Hughes said. “Knowing they had to come to that experience, we decided it’d be smart, adding new brands to give it another level of engagement.

“We want the app to be a 365-day-a-year experience,” he said.

 

Article credit: Front Office Sports

The Memphis Grizzlies Select Venuetize to Launch a 365-Day, Multi-Experience App for Fans

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MGrizzlies_Global_with_white-768x919

Memphis, TN and Tampa, FL (October 1, 2019) – Today, the Memphis Grizzlies announced its new mobile app in partnership with Venuetize, the leading technology platform for smart space solutions. The Grizzlies’ reconstructed app is designed to focus on three distinct brands – Memphis Grizzlies, FedExForum and Grind City Media. While the app’s main infrastructure is shared, each brand will have its own section within the app for an enhanced personalized look and feel, plus a unique user experience.

“We wanted to reimagine the app so on a single platform, fans can stay up-to-date on all things Grizzlies, get the latest content from Grind City Media and keep track of all the happenings at FedExForum,” said Jason Wexler, Memphis Grizzlies Team President. “The Grizzlies Mobile App will now not only give fans easier access to their event tickets, but it also includes interactive features that allow users to chat directly with Account Executives, preview FedExForum seats before purchasing, play mobile games and more. We are pleased to bring Grizz Nation a more seamless, convenient and interactive platform that allows us to better connect with our fans.”

On event and game days, the Venuetize-powered mobile app will provide a personalized experience for fans who are at the arena, showing users the most relevant information for their event. By including app integrations with vendors such as NBA.com, Ticketmaster, Experience, Arrive, Fanatics, GameChanger MVP, Zappar, Handbid, Olark, Waze, Uber and Radius Networks, event goers will be able to access features such as live game stats, tickets, parking, merchandise, augmented reality experiences, bidding on auctions, and the ability to chat with an account representative. Additional user engagement includes navigating the arena, RSVPing for events, listening to player’s Spotify playlists, sharing player cards and much more.

“The Grizzlies wanted to develop a truly unique mobile experience for their fans,” said Karri Zaremba, Venuetize founder and COO. “By leveraging the Venuetize platform, they are able to bring to life their vision of a personalized mobile experience that spans across all of their brands and properties. In addition, the data and analytics our platform captures will continuously improve the fan experience and drive greater insights for the entire organization.”

“This is only the beginning,” said Rolanda Gregory, Memphis Grizzlies Vice President of Marketing. “We’re taking an iterative approach to rolling out new features and enhancements. In 2020, we’ll launch a new mobile-only loyalty program where fans will be rewarded for engaging with our respective brands. We are also completing the discovery process for mobile ordering of food and beverages. Our goal is to listen to our fans and incorporate the features that will benefit them most.”

By leveraging the powerful mobile-commerce engine that Venuetize has developed, fans will soon be able to seamlessly make mobile payments, resulting in a better overall fan experience and providing valuable data back to the organization. Additionally, for Season Ticket Members, the Grizzlies will provide better efficiencies in managing their accounts by allowing payment arrangements and renewal of accounts via the app. Upcoming versions of the app will continue to improve the mobile experience for Grizzlies’ fans adding even more features and further integrating the user experience.

For more information and to download the Memphis Grizzlies app, visit grizzlies.com/app.

About Memphis Grizzlies

Founded in 1995, the Grizzlies spent six seasons in Vancouver before relocating to Memphis in 2001. As one of the youngest franchises in the league, the Memphis Grizzlies have seen their share of success, making the NBA playoffs seven out of the past nine years in Memphis. Fans who want to support the Grizzlies and purchase 2019-20 Season Tickets can do so now by calling (901) 888-HOOP or going online to grizzlies.com/tickets. For more information on the Grizzlies, visit grizzlies.com, ‘like’ Memphis Grizzlies on Facebook or follow on Twitter and Instagram (@memgrizz).

About Venuetize

Venuetize makes the way people experience spaces easier, more personal, and enjoyable. The company’s mobile platform integrates with existing venue infrastructure to deliver mobile wallets, contextual advertising and information, and other applications that improve and innovate the guest experience. Founded in 2014, Venuetize works with professional sports teams, stadiums and arenas, casinos, entertainment districts, and shopping destinations throughout North America. For more information, visit http://www.venuetize.com.

Super Women in Business

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VIEW SLIDESHOW
26 photos

By  – Associate Editor, Memphis Business Journal
Updated

They are leaders in their careers and in their communities. They find solutions before anyone sees a problem. They don’t wait for an opportunity to present itself; they create it.


They are super women.

Each year, the Memphis Business Journal honors 25 standout female business leaders for positive contributions to both their professions and their communities at its annual Super Women in Business event. In industries such as banking, government, nonprofits, and logistics, the 2019 honorees span all sectors.

To see the 2019 Super Women in Business honorees, click the slideshow.

Following a public call for nominations, this year’s honorees were selected from a large pool of candidates by MBJ’s editorial staff. Selections were based not only on career achievements and impact, but how they go above and beyond outside of work.

https://www.bizjournals.com/memphis/news/2019/08/08/meet-them-now-mbjs-super-women-in-business-2019.html

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.

Blackberry Opts Out

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blackberry

The leadership at Blackberry continues to amaze me with its inability to turn the company around.  They’ve been at the very least risk adverse at a time when they should have been making brazen moves in order to regain even a slimmer of market share.  Now it seems that they’ve completely thrown in the towel when it comes to the mobile hardware market as they’ve sold global rights to the Blackberry brand to Chinese manufacturer TCL.

The mobile pickings in the US are very slim – iOS or Android; just like our 2-party political system.  We really need a third option.  Hopefully, there’ll be new competition that will totally disrupt the mobile market.

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.

The Ever So Dependable Facebook Metrics

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fb

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that Facebook is still discovering and fixing issues with its metrics algorithm.  When the majority of your revenue is comprised of selling advertising, it’s key that your customers trust the product in which they’re investing.  We all understand that Facebook has worked hard to monetize a difficult product, especially as we move towards a true mobile first world.  As Marketers mull over options for social spend, Facebook will need to reassure the market that their platform is effective in reach, engagement and especially conversion.  And they’ll need to work even harder to regain trust.

 

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.

Building Your Social Media Strategy

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Social media buttons on on the modern keyboard

As an organization focused on either B2C or B2B, it’s important to determine what your Social Media strategy should be.

While we all know it’s important for businesses to be on social media, it’s equally vital to first understand what you’re trying to solve for.  Do you have a need to respond to customer issues and complaints, promote new product or service offerings, conduct polls and surveys to obtain data, build a community, etc?

Once it’s determined what you’re trying to solve for.  It becomes easier to build the strategy and tactics to execute on each objective.

While social media marketing might mean something different to you, here are some of the tasks and goals that may be beneficial.

  • Determine which social media sites/apps are best suited for your business.
  • While paid social can help spread the news of your brand and/or promotion, count on organic as your long-term approach.
  • Define your communications calendar and determine your communications cadence.
  • Post consistently.
  • Listen across all social media and communications platforms to understand impacts to your brand and business.
  • Respond rapidly, but diplomatically to any negative content and posts. Remember the spotlight is on you.
  • Sometimes intervention is needed.  Ensure you have a mechanism for determining when a post/comment deserves a more ‘intimate’ response away from all the public eyes on social media.
  • Engage consumers when they post positive feedback about your product or service.  This allows you to build a relationship with them.
  • Review your performance and optimize your creative, messaging, campaigns, etc.
  • Use targeting to ensure your message meets the appropriate audience.
  • Evaluate the numerous social technology tools that are available so that you can adequately build your social infrastructure.

Building a social media strategy takes a lot of reflection and knowledge.  Managing the day-to-day communications and engagement takes a lot of proactive work.  Ensure that you understand your organization’s limitations and strengths when it comes to planning and executing on social.  During the initial stages, it may be wise to enlist the expertise of a social media agency to steer you in the right direction.

Social media marketing can work for any organization if the right strategy is in place.

Rolanda Gregory ©2016
All Rights Reserved.

Better Than Google Glass?

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Contact lens

The move by Samsung to create a ‘smart’ contact lens could make the likes of Google Glass obsolete.

A smart contact lens has far reaching possibilities.  The virtual augmented reality potential is limitless.  Even erasing the need for those pesky 3-D glasses needed for movie watching.

And of course the amount of data available to marketers would be remarkable.

What I’m not so certain of are the privacy implications.

In any regard, the patent that Samsung has for this Blink technology moves us a step closer from wearables to embedded human technology.

Learn more at Digital Trends.

Role of the Business Card in the Digital Age

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image

I’ve often wondered about the seldom used box of business cards that sit in one of my desk drawers, as well as the stack that occupies a small place atop my desk.  While they contain useful information, they’re often left behind.

I’ve forgotten to carry them when attending important vendor meetings, or when interviewing a potential new hire.  I realize at those moments that I’ve just made a business faux pas. Although one that’s glanced over by almost everyone as I’m also seldom alone in forgetting to carry them.

Once upon a time, business cards were critical in making first impressions, establishing methods of communication, and demonstrating that you are a professional.

Today, they have been somewhat displaced by smartphones that allow us to enter our contact information directly, and sites such as LinkedIn.

In today’s world, I do believe that business cards can continue to be an effective marketing tool for entrepreneurs and executives as it’s a piece of yourself and your brand that can be left behind as a reminder.  This is amplified when time is of the essence, phone batteries are low, or you want to be sure your email address doesn’t get misspelled.

For me, this serves as a reminder to keep them at the ready.

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.

Twitter Departures

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Twitter

Major changes in leadership at Twitter indicates that the company has major challenges with its business model.  Trying to stay relevant to its target demographic and competitive with other Social Media platforms is a huge undertaking. Let’s just hope for Twitter’s sake that its users don’t depart as quickly as its top brass.

Read more at re/code.