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Why data-inspired creativity is the future of effective marketing

doxigo — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 16:46:42 +0000

Friday, August 30, 2019 - 12:46

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There’s never been a better time to be a creative. In an increasingly cluttered world, there’s more need for big thinking and enormous power in great ideas. Research backs up what we intuitively know to be true: Creative assets are still the most important element in driving sales, according to Nielsen Catalina Solutions.

At the same time, new data, technology, and possibilities with machine learning are emerging every day. There are more platforms, more signals, and more data sources to inform the creative process than ever before. In my work with the best creative agencies in the world, I’ve seen time and time again that those who draw on this data and technology are able to take more creative risks, make better choices, and prove the value of their ideas. Here are three creative challenges they’ve been able to overcome for their clients with the power of data and technology that others can learn from.

1. How well do I know my audience?

Most marketers think they know their customers. But do we know them as well as we could? Maybe not. Recent research has found that 61% of people feel that the brands that should know them simply don’t.

But with the myriad data and tools available to strategists and creatives, it’s never been easier to get a deeper understanding of your audience’s needs and passions — and ensure your marketing aligns with them.

That’s exactly what Olay Skin Care did for a recent campaign. By digging into Google and YouTube data, the team discovered that their audience (perhaps unexpectedly) loves football and horror movies. So its creative agency came up with a YouTube-led #KillerSkin campaign that centered around the Super Bowl and told a unique and gripping story that led to tens of millions of views and a huge uptick in search interest.

2. Am I offering personalization at scale?

New technology and tools can also help you reach the audiences you care about and serve them relevant, compelling stories — which is important, because research tells us that relevant video ads get 3X the attention compared to the average video ad ¹.

A recent campaign for Abreva did just that. Using Director Mix, the brand created 119 versions of one base ad, customizing the copy to match what a YouTube viewer was watching.

Someone knee-deep in celebrity gossip videos might have seen this version of the ad:

Whereas someone about to watch a beauty tutorial might instead have seen this:

All in, the campaign drove a 41% lift in overall ad recall and a 342% lift in search interest among its target audience across Google and YouTube.

3. What does my experiments road map look like?

If I’ve learned one rule from working in the creative space, it’s this: There are no rules. But smart, strategic experimentation can help us get closer to understanding what resonates and what doesn’t.

A great example comes from brands who partnered with our Unskippable Labs team to explore the question: What is the optimal amount of customization in a campaign? The results were varied and fascinating. In a quick summary, Coty’s CoverGirl saw that six-second ads with copy-only customization outperformed or performed on par with the ad that had customized copy and visuals. And Czech auto manufacturer Škoda experimented with long-form ads specifically and saw higher ad recall the more it customized.

You can learn from the experiments of others and also use platforms like YouTube to test and iterate on the go, watch how everything performs, see how engaged viewers respond, and refine your approach based on that immediate feedback.

Using creative intelligence to fuel your work

A lot of people wonder whether technology is coming to take creative jobs. Whenever I get asked this question, I say that there is no machine that can replace a creative thinker with big ideas.

Technology and data are tools that can be used to amplify and fuel your work, but never supplant it.

Explore creative inspiration, tools, and best practices on Google’s creative hubcreate.withgoogle.com.

Source: Think with Google

Digital Marketing

Google

Marketing

Think beyond the buy: Shopping is an omnichannel journey

doxigo — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 16:25:38 +0000

Friday, August 30, 2019 - 12:25

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Marketers understandably tend to obsess over purchases. Even if they know that there is an entire journey leading up to a purchase, the actual sale is the tangible result of all their efforts and the thing that puts money in the coffers. That means many end up focusing on where that purchase gets made, online or in-store.

It’s an important data point. And people historically have preferred to buy certain things online and other things at brick-and-mortar locations. But the truth is, today’s shoppers like to browse and research online even in cases where they intend to buy in-store. In fact, 82% of Canadian shoppers who visited a store in the last week said they used online search prior to going in-store¹. Factor in things like video and apps and 89% of Canadian shoppers say they’ve used online resources to help with their shopping in the past week².

Growth across categories

Not so long ago, buying clothing or shoes online seemed like an odd thing to do. How could you buy something without trying it on? Today, apparel is a truly omnichannel retail category. In fact, 56% of Canadian shoppers say they buy clothing both in-store and online³.

Of course, there are still a wide range of categories that are mostly purchased in-store -- think household items like cleaning supplies or toiletries, cosmetics, or home appliances. When it comes to groceries, 83% of Canadians say they buy them in-store only⁴. But it’s telling that even in these traditionally offline categories, online shopping is on the rise.

Consider this: The percentage of shoppers who have bought personal care and cosmetics online grew to 46%, which was significant growth when comparing Q1 to Q3 2018⁵. Even household items saw online category growth of 17%⁶.

A better experience

Overall, 68% of people say they’re looking to do more of their shopping online in the next year⁷.

The reason why is pretty simple. Many say the online shopping experience is better than in-store when it comes to specific aspects of shopping:

Navigation: 60% of shoppers say they prefer online shopping to find items they’re looking for, compared to 32% who say they prefer offline.
Suggestions & tips: 51% say they prefer to go online to get helpful recommendations or suggestions on what to buy, compared to 34% for offline.
Pricing: 55% say they prefer to shop online to get the best deal possible, which is also the number one thing that people say they enjoy about shopping⁸.

In other words, people feel that online shopping makes it easier for them to find the right item at the right price.

Be omnichannel to win

While it’s true that online shopping continues to grow across categories, it’s also true that people are actively doing both. When it comes to categories such as movies, books, and video games, 66% of Canadian shoppers say they purchase these items both in-store and online. For toys, it’s 65%, and for home electronics, it’s 60%⁹.

Ultimately, people are looking to meet their needs in the most efficient way possible, whether that means shopping online only or researching online before heading to the store. Regardless of category, make sure your in-store and online experiences are

Integrated: Share local store inventory where possible on your site and through search.
Speedy: Desktop and mobile speed are just as important, or maybe more so, than speed at the store.
Helpful: Optimize your search functions so people can find exactly what they’re looking for, and make it easy for returning customers to pick up where they left off.

If you can follow these steps to be truly omnichannel, you’ll be poised to win.

Source: Think with Google

Digital Marketer

Google

Marketing

How to measure what matters most: A measurement model for success

doxigo — Fri, 16 Aug 2019 07:54:42 +0000

Friday, August 16, 2019 - 03:54

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With today’s complex consumer journey, it’s more important to know your customer than ever before. But knowing your customer has never been more difficult — partly due to the fact the customer journey has become fragmented, but also because most marketers organize their data around legacy systems, rather than the customer. It’s time to change that, and embrace the fact that measurement is now as much an art as it is a science.

If you don’t take action on better measurement, your brand could be at a huge disadvantage. Based on a study by Bain & Co, we found that brands with the highest measurement maturity are 4x more likely to exceed business goals, increase market share, and increase revenue when compared to those with the lowest¹.

Measurement should be your top strategic priority

Better measurement is achievable. We created a new framework to help marketers “evolve” their measurement plans, better identify business needs, and create change in their own organizations.

With all of this research around the importance of a strong measurement strategy, it’s time to think about how to ensure that you are effectively supporting business goals and delivering the right insights.

Measurement is now as much an art as it is a science.

To start, ask yourself the following questions about your measurement strategy:

Are you measuring what matters most to your organization?
Are you challenging data systems that don’t allow a whole view of your customer, or for you to act on those insights?
Are you supporting the projects that will drive business for your organization?

Once you’ve asked yourself these important business questions, the below framework will help you evaluate your level of measurement across 3 key domains, and provide key ways to improve it.

The Measurement Maturity Framework

It’s easy to say “we need to make measurement our strategic priority.” It’s harder to actually make that happen. To help teach marketers how to achieve this, Google worked with Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Bain Consulting to develop a roadmap to better measurement. The result is a new maturity framework: a set of structured stages to help marketers understand what continuous improvement can look like in digital marketing broadly.

First, we created a digital maturity scale to help you identify which stage your organization is at.

Nascent businesses work on a campaign-by-campaign basis, using external data and direct buys with limited link to sales.
Emerging businesses are using some owned data in automated buying, with single-channel optimisation and testing.
Connected businesses have integrated and activated data across channels with a demonstrated link to ROI or sales proxies.
Multi-Moment businesses have dynamic execution optimised towards a single-customer view across channels.

Evaluating measurement maturity

Then, we organized these stages across three domains: Media measurement, Client value measurement and Brand measurement. We use this guide as a way to evaluate your organization, determine where the organization sits, and what steps you need to take to move it forward.

Media measurement

Within media measurement, we look at how you measure and optimize your media across the customer journey and how you attribute media and the impact it has on your business.

Begin to improve your media measurement maturity by:

Connecting digital media to in-store purchases with measurement tools
Adopting and/or developing data-driven attribution models
Building data pipelines to optimize media towards business objectives

Client value measurement

To evaluate your client value measurement maturity, we look at how you are measuring your media against the value of the client you bring in. This may be based on how much or how often they buy from you or how long you think they will stay a customer.

Gain client value measurement maturity by:

Building propensity/LTV models to evaluate the value of each client
Connecting 1st and 3rd Party databases for a richer database for prediction.
Connecting data points across the customer journey

If you don’t take action on better measurement, your brand could be at a huge disadvantage.

Brand measurement

Lastly, our brand measurement evaluation considers how you measure the impact TV and video has on your brand metrics.

Start maturing your brand measurement strategy by:

Using incrementality testing methods such as Geo-Experiments or Conversion Lift
Measuring how viewability affects your media spend

The above measurement maturity model offers key lessons and actionable steps that you can take now to improve your measurement capability. With this strategy, you, too, can help your business take steps toward maturity

Here are two takeaways to help you with your marketing measurement journey:	Determine if your brand is asking the right questions around measurement: Ask if you are measuring what matters most, if you are you challenging systems that don’t allow a holistic response, and if you are supporting projects that grow your business.
	Identify which stage your organization is at across the 3 domains: It is key to understand which stage your organization is at in its measurement maturity across media, client value and brand measurement so your brand can begin to make the necessary improvements.

Source: Think with Google

How Rihanna’s Fenty Beauty delivered ‘Beauty for All’ — and a wake-up call to the industry

doxigo — Sat, 10 Aug 2019 09:55:58 +0000

Saturday, August 10, 2019 - 05:55

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The launch of Fenty Beauty highlighted the importance of inclusive marketing, which jolted the industry and shifted the beauty landscape. Sandy Saputo, chief marketing officer at Kendo Brands, which includes Fenty Beauty, shares the inside story.

The first time we showed the Fenty Beauty campaign trailer internally, a room full of business leaders, including myself, got very emotional. It was the first time underrepresented, underserved women and cultures were featured in a global prestige beauty campaign.

We knew the brand would touch women’s hearts around the world, but we had no idea of the greater impact our work would ultimately have. There was no precedent to our radical approach to inclusivity. We had to break and disrupt all the traditional marketing rules and carve a new path.

The results exceeded all of our expectations.

In our first year of business, Fenty Beauty became the biggest beauty brand launch in YouTube history, drove huge success commercially, and was named one of Time Magazine’s best inventions of 2017.

Here’s how we did it — and three lessons we learned along the way.

Exclude no one

From the beginning, our founder Rihanna was very clear that absolutely no one was to be excluded. Her vision of “Beauty for All” became our marketing mission.

Fenty Beauty first launched with 40 beautiful shades of foundation and today we have 50. At the time, there wasn’t a brand that truly reached everyone from the lightest skin to the darkest. Many undertones, such as olive ones like mine, were also underserved in beauty. Inclusion was more than the number of shades; it was the well-crafted nuance of each shade in the range that also served as a proof point. This allowed so many women to find themselves in the brand and feel included.

Let values inform process

Rihanna wanted her brand available to women everywhere around the world at the same time. This was insanely difficult from an operational perspective.

The brand went live in 17 countries on the same day at the same hour (regardless of time zones) with a completely omnichannel marketing strategy. We were also ready to ship directly to 137 countries.

Distributing content around the world in real time required surgical precision. One mistake could derail the entire marketing plan. Press and consumers ultimately saw a fun and flawless execution, but what they didn’t see were the efforts of more than 500 global leaders across brand and merchandising, supply chain, marketing, social, and retailer teams doing synchronized swimming to pull it off.

The consumer and market reactions were phenomenal. We received photos of lines forming outside of our retailers’ stores around the world. Hundreds of people started posting selfies of themselves wearing Fenty Beauty on social media; our first repost was of a beautiful woman wearing a hijab. And direct sales surpassed all of our estimations, crashing our website.

We were so proud to be able to authentically market a beauty brand envisioned by Rihanna to serve all women of all cultures. Our marketing mission was underway to build a beauty brand for the next generation.

Show, don’t tell

Our dream was to create the biggest brand launch in beauty history. What resulted is a movement that shifted the beauty industry. You really don’t know it’s happening until it’s happened.

Our approach to inclusion marketing has always been about “showing, not telling.” Never once did we use the word “inclusive” in our messaging.

After Fenty Beauty launched, we began to see headlines that coined the term “The Fenty Effect.” It was a call to action for all industries to do more and challenge the status quo. In beauty, it caused a chain reaction of brands that responded positively by expanding their makeup lines to be more inclusive.

Our approach to inclusion marketing has always been about “showing, not telling.” In fact, we never once used the word “inclusive” in our messaging. “Inclusive” is how we were defined by the press and consumers. The marketing, social, and creative team prioritizes and engages in this conversation on a daily basis with the Fenty Beauty community.

The best way to break through with inclusive marketing is to share authentic stories that are rooted in culture and are emotionally meaningful to the consumers you serve.

If you haven’t thought about inclusivity in your advertising, I’d encourage you to make the case for it. The best way to break through with inclusive marketing is to share authentic stories that are rooted in culture and are emotionally meaningful to the consumers you serve.

By having Rihanna and her vision as our north star, we were able to nail the execution of the Fenty Beauty launch with integrity. Success also wouldn’t have been possible without my diverse, insanely creative and brave marketing team — each with their unique background and voice. I consider them like spices on a marketing spice rack — cooking up well-seasoned stories that are good for the world and good for business.

Source: Think with Google

Rest is best: How IKEA harnessed the appeal of a good night’s sleep to drive customers to store

doxigo — Thu, 08 Aug 2019 17:38:11 +0000

Thursday, August 8, 2019 - 13:38

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when it comes to digital, advertisers have long aimed to reach audiences with a relevant message at exactly the right moment. However, few advertisers have taken this phrase as literally as IKEA Canada, with their Complete Sleep campaign.

IKEA Canada recently partnered with YouTube and agencies Jungle Media and Rethink to create their first digital-led video campaign, “Complete Sleep.” Together, they created a personalized video campaign rooted in deep consumer insights to influence sleep-deprived Canadians to visit IKEA stores to buy new bedroom products.

Instead of simply putting TV assets on YouTube, the brand decided to take a different approach to promoting mattresses: leveraging custom YouTube video creative to influence online and offline shopping behaviour.

IKEA’s customized YouTube campaign drove outstanding results

Finding a purpose-driven message that resonates

With a strategic focus on the bedroom, IKEA wanted to use online video in an innovative way to highlight the mattress as a key protagonist of the complete sleep offer.

They learned that one third of Canadians do not sleep the 7-hours per night that they should, and are often exhausted. IKEA decided to use this insight as inspiration for a campaign message around sleep that anchored the creative and resonated with many — but still left room for customization.

Taking a customized creative approach

The campaign creative consisted of a 15-second spot that ran on YouTube late at night, between 10:45 p.m. and 3:30 a.m., encouraging viewers to stop watching and get some rest. But to both bolster and personalize their core message, IKEA made over 20 different versions of the ad using YouTube’s Director Mix tool.

Director’s Mix allows advertisers to create videos featuring highly targeted messages at scale, providing cost efficiencies back to creative agencies and clients. IKEA used the tool to connect with their customers at a precise moment in time by altering messaging based on time-of-day signals. Each version of IKEA’s customized spots featured a superimposed clock with the viewer’s precise time, a countdown to when their nearest IKEA store would open, and a call-to-action to visit their mattress event.

Overall, IKEA converted over 50,000 viewers from online viewing to offline shopping at a cost per store visit of under $1.20 in the first 8 weeks of the campaign. They saw a 22% lift in ad recall from this campaign, a 108% lift in Search interest for the IKEA brand, and a 673% increase in searches for IKEA Bedroom products. IKEA’s Head of Digital Marketing, Santiago Arbelaez, says, “The great results from this campaign highlight the impact we can create with online video. Director’s Mix is a tool that we will definitely use again in the future.” IKEA intends to continue to rely on compelling creative to win over their customers and bridge the gap between the offline and online world.

Here are three takeaways to help you bring your own digital-first campaign to life:	A universal message helps digital marketing find its audience: By launching a campaign around something all Canadians need more of — sleep — IKEA’s messaging reached far and wide.
	Personalization of digital ads provides a more dynamic interaction than television: Custom creative and targeted advertising allowed IKEA to send the right message to the right person at the right time.
	With automated creative development, marketers can save money and make a greater impact with digital-first campaigns: Director Mix allowed IKEA to create a highly customized campaign for only $1.20 per store visit.

Source: Think with Google

Digital Marketing

Google

social media

Everything a marketer needs to know about machine learning

doxigo — Fri, 19 Jul 2019 17:06:41 +0000

Friday, July 19, 2019 - 13:06

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As consumer expectations grow for more personalized, relevant, and assistive experiences, machine learning is becoming an invaluable tool to help meet those demands. It’s helping marketers create smarter customer segmentations, deliver more relevant creative campaigns, and measure performance more effectively. In fact, 85% of executives believe AI will allow their companies to obtain or sustain a competitive advantage.¹

We created this guide to help you optimize your machine learning marketing efforts — whether you’re just starting out or you want to discover more benefits of machine learning.

A quick machine learning guide for marketers

At its core, machine learning is a way to quickly label and analyze huge data sets. People can do this on their own, but a machine helps do it faster and on an infinitely larger scale. In fact, 66% of marketing leaders agree automation and machine learning will enable their team to focus more on strategic marketing activities.²

But machines can’t learn on their own — they need the help of a human. Dive in to the interactive machine learning quiz below for a machine learning 101.

Getting started: It’s easier than you think

Why the first step is taking a step back

Now that you know what machine learning is, you might be asking yourself how to get started using it. We’ve seen many marketers dive head-first into building a machine learning program from the ground up. But that’s a tricky business. It requires a lot of upfront investment. And can take years to perfect.

Instead of jumping in too quickly, take a step back. Companies, including Google, are already doing the heavy lifting by integrating machine learning into existing and new marketing products, helping you gain deeper insights from your data without additional effort from your team. All you need to do is make sure your organization is set up to get the most value out of these products.

We’ve outlined three key considerations every marketer should make to prepare their organization for machine learning.

Define your machine learning marketing goal upfront.

Much like us, machines work best when they are given clearly defined goals. Your goal, or output, works as a framework. It helps a data scientist build your machine learning models and identify the right data to use when training your model. Make sure your goal is quantifiable, and measurable. Doing this upfront will help you define and measure the success of your model.

An algorithm is only as good as its data.

Here’s a golden rule to remember: a machine learning algorithm is only as good as the data it’s fed. So, to use machine learning effectively, you must have the right data for the problem you’re trying to solve. And not just a few data points. Machines need a lot of data to learn — think hundreds of thousands of data points. Your data will need to be formatted, cleaned, and organized for your algorithm, and you will need two datasets: one to train the model and one to evaluate its performance.

Assemble a diverse team with the right mindset.

Marketing teams can identify the best use cases for machine learning, but data scientists and analysts are critical when it comes to implementation. That’s why assembling a cross-functional team is essential to the success of any machine learning program. But to get the most out of machine learning at your organization, you need the right team and the right mindset. The latter requires a cultural shift that prioritizes and rewards experimentation, measurement, and testing throughout your organization.

How machine learning powers better marketing

A deep dive into key benefits and opportunities

There are countless ways that machine learning can help your business. Explore the marketing applications below to learn what products can help you optimize campaigns, and see how brands are already using machine learning to boost their marketing efforts.

Source: Think with Google

Digital Marketer

Google

Lessons from top companies on building a better data-first strategy

doxigo — Fri, 19 Jul 2019 16:41:57 +0000

Friday, July 19, 2019 - 12:41

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Data empowers marketers to make better decisions and take smarter risks, but sometimes the best intentions lead to the wrong solutions. Interpreting data isn’t always easy, and I’ve seen marketers come up short by not allowing themselves the space to learn, grow, fail, and improve from their collective experiences.

A campaign that falls short of its goal can teach just as much as one that succeeds. And marketers that wish to do the right thing, well, can learn from how they do the right thing, poorly.

Through leading Customer Analytics at Google, I’ve spent years not only studying the technical aspects of measurement and the relationships that users form through digital media, but also understanding how to strengthen the analytical cultures of world-leading organizations themselves. Time and again, I see companies make crushingly common mistakes with data, and refusing to give themselves the room to experiment and to fail.

What I’ve noticed is that marketers have become experts at doing the wrong thing, because they’re grounded by the past and the “way we’ve always done it”. Their organizations expect them to succeed, even if that success is dependent on the wrong technique or marketing channel, or in pursuing customers who are detrimental to the company's long-term growth.

One of the biggest mistakes that a marketer can make is to look at their data in isolation.

But I’ve also seen what companies can do when they allow themselves to take steps in the right direction, even if they fall flat at first.

Here are a few examples of how successful organizations think, and how you can apply them to your business.

1. They look at their metrics as part of a story, not the whole picture

One of the biggest mistakes that a marketer can make is to look at their data in isolation. If you oversimplify your data, you’ll lose out on the magic that’s happening around you.

One thing that I’ve observed from successful companies is that they don’t capture metrics for the sake of it. For every metric they set and optimize toward, they go a level deeper by asking themselves some key questions:

Do I know what this metric truly means? Let’s look at conversions, for example. They are central to everyone’s business, but not all conversions are created equal. When considering for cross-device users, online-to-offline users, and view-through conversions, we start to see real differences emerge between platforms. And they could determine how you interpret their performance and future spend. It’s important to understand the specifics and the distinction when calculating for each metric.
What could influence that metric, and how? The late Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel, said “For every metric, there should be another ‘paired’ metric that addresses the adverse consequences of the first.” I suggest taking his advice to heart. If you are optimizing toward using deals or coupons that are driving a ton of customers to your store, are you doing so to the detriment of profit margins and customer retention?
Am I limiting what I can learn from my metrics? Don’t focus your attention solely on what’s underperforming. Think about what you can learn from what you’re doing well, but could do even better. If you’re a shoe company and you’ve successfully incentivized customers to buy multiple pairs of your shoes online, that’s a great win! But why did that happen? Do you even know? Can you replicate the findings to other marketing activities?

I’ve seen that top companies don’t just look at their metrics as numbers. They look at their metrics as opportunities to ask more questions: where is the market headed? What should we be aware of? That way, a single metric becomes part of a larger story, not the whole picture.

2. They expect human behaviour

Machine learning is growing fast and teaching us a lot. But people are not machines, and as such, they’re not always rational, efficient bidding and buying engines. They don’t necessarily respond in the way you’d think they might. As a marketer you have to plan for that by gaining a better understanding of the human story behind your data—because it’s those behaviors that may drive your business forward.

Here are some examples of what I mean from recent research on behavioural economics:

Slow doesn’t always mean no: It’s hard to deny that when it comes to site speed, faster is far better—the longer people wait for your site to load, the more you’ll lose. But a study by Harvard Business School found that, due to what it called the ‘operational transparency’, people can tolerate—and in some cases, prefer—websites with longer waits as long as there is an understanding of the work being performed. If you demonstrate that your site is exerting effort on a customer’s behalf (consider theDomino’s Pizza tracker, which keeps you updated every step of the way in your journey to getting your pizza), it can contribute to have a stronger sense of loyalty and reciprocity towards your company.
The perils of proactivity: Facing the challenge of increased customer attrition, many service companies will start to recommend lower-cost pricing plans to their customers in an effort to demonstrate care for their customers, and the greater benefits they can provide. Researchers from Columbia, Wharton and IAE Business Schools found this tactic had the opposite effect: encouraging customers to switch to cost-minimizing plans can actually increase churn. In some cases, it inspires customers to be less inert about making a change, and they start to look at other service providers.

I’m not suggesting you throw your conventional wisdom out the window with these varied examples of counterintuitive consumer behaviour. But I think it’s important to know that successful companies know that you can’t predict every single element of the customer journey—no matter how much you measure, you’re not going to capture everything. If there are no perfect humans, there’s no perfect data.

3. They’ve fallen in love with failing

When we work with smaller businesses or startups, we tend to see some incredibly miserable attempts at marketing. That’s all part of growing, right? But we can learn so much from how these companies tend to respond to those failures: they look inward. They consider that perhaps their brand isn’t strong enough yet, or that they haven’t properly optimized their campaigns in these early stages. What they don’t do is look for something or somewhere else to place blame.

There are multiple components to performance, and failure is one of them.

Here’s what I see over and over in larger organizations: They’ll test something, and if it fails, they’ll pivot immediately to a strategy with which they can win, arguing the customers simply aren’t there or that the channel doesn’t work for their business.

This is where doing the right thing, poorly, needs to become your new manifesto, no matter what size your organization is. There are multiple components to performance, and failure is one of them. Give yourself and your teams the ability to fail, with the understanding that it’s the first step to growth.

With these best practices in mind, ask yourself: What is the right thing for me to be doing? Even if you can’t immediately take action on the answer, acknowledging it to yourself is the first step. I hope you’ll consider these best-in-class approaches to data and measurement as a step toward doing the right thing, well.

Key takeaways for doing more with your data	Look at your metrics as a whole picture: Question every metric you set, and don’t oversimplify; ensure you’re learning from the wins as well as the losses.
	Anticipate human behaviour: Humans aren’t perfect, rational beings. Your data won’t be perfect, either. Accept that you can’t measure everything.

Fall in love with failing: Embracing failure is the only way to grow, and find the right thing for your company to be doing.

Source: Think with Google

Digital Marketer

Digital Strategy

Google

IPG Mediabrands’ Leith Mellors on fostering the next generation of digital marketers

doxigo — Fri, 19 Jul 2019 13:08:00 +0000

Friday, July 19, 2019 - 09:08

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This is the second in a regular series on Think with Google Canada, in which thought leaders share their insights and guidance on topics that are top of mind for marketers. In this installment, Leith Mellors, Senior Vice President of Talent, Canada at IPG Mediabrands, talks about how agencies can play a key role in fostering the next generation of digital marketers, and how to nurture and retain the best talent in a time of industry upheaval.

With growing competition, increased number of opportunities, and a new generation of digital marketers eager for mentorship, agencies need to make hiring, nurturing, and retaining the best digital marketing talent a top priority.

It’s not easy. The landscape is constantly evolving, opening up more opportunities by the day. How can a digital marketing organization keep its people happy, growing—and not looking elsewhere?

At IPG Mediabrands we’ve been focusing on this question, and six years ago, the company dedicated a team to invest in talent. We’ve created a best-in-class internship program and an evolving training and certification system, but above all we are working to ensure there’s an environment for growth and development.

To me, nurturing talent is one of the key elements of a healthy business. That’s why my job is to make sure that our organization is one where talent can thrive, and that we're giving back to our people. We ask a lot of employees in this industry, and it should be our top priority to invest that back into our people.

Here’s a look at some of the key things I’ve learned about how to become an employer of choice in a competitive industry.

1. Show you care about people as people

The beauty of our industry is that it’s constantly evolving, but it’s also a struggle at times for us to keep up and to establish teams that can evolve, be nimble, and hone their skills as they go.

First and foremost, we want our employees to know that we care about them as people. One of the ways we do that is to make sure they’re aware that we are constantly working to create and foster a culture of change and growth.

People perform their best when they know that we care about them and we’re invested in them as individuals.

If an employee isn’t being supported, trained, and given the chance to expand their skills, they’re going to get restless. We regularly communicate job opportunities to our employees across our network. We also encourage managers to have regular career-pathing conversations with their teams. This continuous feedback mechanism and focus on career sends the message to their employees that they have a solid road ahead of them within this organization.

Ultimately, as employers, we have to show our teams that they’re valued. People perform their best when they know that we care about them and we're invested in them as individuals.

2. Educate your teams, at all levels

Our retention and development programs are constantly evolving to reflect the needs and standards of the industry. We ask employees every year what skills and learning investments they’re most in need of for today and for the future, and we build our learning strategies around that feedback.

Companies need to invest the money into learning and development, and protect that budget. At Mediabrands, we are strongly invested in Google’s training and education programs, one of which being Digital U, a program that leverages an innovative format to educate our teams on the changing media landscape, focusing on areas like performance marketing, digital video and measurement. We enroll our assistants through to manager level in the program each year ensuring our employees are well-versed and able to apply these learnings to their clients’ business right away.

Our employees also tell us they’re eager for mentorship in all forms, and we’ve responded with several different avenues for it. One example is our female-focused mentorship program that pairs emerging female leaders with senior female leaders, to drive shared learning and create a circle of support and internal advocacy. Our clients are also participants in this program, which deepens our partnerships with them and provides an opportunity for shared learning.

Finally, I’d highly recommend putting focus on a strong internship program. Most agencies have some form of this, but we believe that ours excels because of its depth and experiential approach.

Here’s how we do it: Our program is designed around the key pillars of learning - a combination of hands-on experience; mentorship and coaching; and formalized, foundational learning. Our Residents, as we refer to them, join us for 16-week paid positions, and move through a number of targeted learning experiences to grasp the fundamentals of media and performance. We hire more than 85% of our residents full-time following their internships - the main objective of the program is to hire and develop future talent for Mediabrands and our agencies.

3. Make mobility possible

We have an industry of emerging talent that still has a perception that you have to move to grow. It’s incumbent on us as leaders to help employees create a real sense of career within an agency, network, or organization.

Turnover, as we all know, is expensive, disruptive, and it puts a lot of pressure on our teams. Ensuring your employees know they have a path at your company is critical, so they don’t feel that they have to jump in order to broaden their portfolios or deepen their knowledge.

The way we foster that at Mediabrands is by encouraging mobility. For every job that's posted, we search within our network for candidates first before extending the search more broadly. We also feature hot jobs every week within the company so we're ensuring visibility for open roles.

We have to raise the bar as an industry, and think about how we can continue to be an attractive path for bright new talent.

If you’re leading a smaller organization with fewer resources, you can still make mobility a priority for your teams. Focus on how you help people broaden their skills — that could mean moving them between clients after a certain amount of time. It could also mean pulling people onto integrated projects, and bringing together a diverse group of people from different places to give them an opportunity to hone and broaden their skills, without actually having to move them around.

Regardless of your size or scope, I think it’s very important to talk to your people about career pathing. Too few people leaders are having those conversations with their teams.

There are a lot of competitors right now in the digital talent space, more so than there ever have been. We have to raise the bar as an industry, and think about how we can continue to be an attractive path for bright new talent, and how we can be truly world-class employers.

Source: Think with Google

Digital Marketer

Google

5 questions to ask yourself about your mobile strategy

doxigo — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 13:01:38 +0000

Thursday, March 21, 2019 - 09:01

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We know that more than half of web traffic comes from mobile.¹ Despite these numbers, mobile conversion rates are lower than desktop.²

The reason? Research suggests many CEOs have failed to prioritize mobile properly because they’re unaware that their current mobile strategy isn’t working — and it’s likely costing them customers. People who have a negative experience on a mobile website are 62% less likely to purchase from that brand in the future than if they have a positive experience³ — no matter how beautiful or data-driven its marketing campaigns are.

Five years ago, I talked endlessly to companies about how having a mobile website was the new table stakes. Now, a mobile site isn’t enough — it has to be fast and provide a simple yet compelling user experience. Here are five questions to guide you through putting mobile at the center of your company’s digital transformation.

Is a mobile strategy a company-wide priority?

It’s not enough to assign one team to manage your mobile strategy. Enhancing the customer experience has to be everyone’s responsibility.

Executive leadership needs to invest in the right technologies and get buy-in across the organization. Marketing and analytics teams should be continually measuring and optimizing for new revenue opportunities. Developers need to be up to speed on the latest mobile development tools and techniques. Designers should be intimately familiar with mobile UX best practices and work closely with developers to create the best possible experience.

But you can’t improve your company’s mobile site performance until you’ve established specific KPIs. For example, is your mobile conversion rate getting better over time, and is it in line with your mobile traffic? If 70% of your customers hit your mobile website each month but only 35% complete the purchase on their phones, you’ve got a problem.

Is your site performance up to speed?

The average mobile web page takes 15.3 seconds to fully load, and more than half of visits are abandoned if a mobile website takes more than three seconds to load.⁴ In retail, we see that a one-second delay in mobile load times can impact conversions by up to 20%.⁵ If you don’t have a team dedicated to optimizing your customers’ experience, you could be driving users to faster competitors.

Fast pages start to load in under one second. Test My Site, our mobile speed testing tool, can help benchmark your mobile site performance and let you know where you’re lagging.

Are you using the right solutions?

Optimizing aging legacy systems may hold back your team over the long haul. Modern web technologies like Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and Progressive Web Apps (PWA) allow you to create engaging sites that look beautiful and load instantly on every platform. Both technologies help enhance the user experience and neither requires special skills to implement.

Modern mobile technology can also alleviate another obstacle — the checkout process. Often mobile shopping carts require too much text input. Simplifying the checkout process by using platforms like Google Pay can help streamline the process and boost conversions. The closer you are to a one-click purchase experience, the better.

Are you continually testing?

The only way to know what your customers really want is to give them multiple options and see what performs better over time. Continuous A/B testing is a hallmark of nearly every successful internet company. For example, every day Booking.com runs a thousand A/B tests, and Amazon changes its prices more than 2.5 million times a day.

Are you thinking like a customer?

There’s no substitute for hands-on testing under real-world conditions. Not everyone has access to a fast 4G LTE connection, and speeds vary depending on location and other factors. Your team should be stress-testing your mobile website frequently and recording the results.

Experiencing the site the way your customers do will reveal their pain points far more effectively than simply poring over data. Then ask your team: Is this what customers really want? If not, it’s time for a change.

With more options than ever, people demand a mobile experience that’s fast and friction-free. Ensure you’re meeting customer expectations — and your mobile growth goals — by leaning into these principles and investing where it counts.

Source: Think with Google

Digital Strategy

Google

Milliseconds earn millions: Why mobile speed can slow or grow your business

doxigo — Thu, 21 Mar 2019 12:47:07 +0000

Thursday, March 21, 2019 - 08:47

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Mary Ellen Coe is the president of Google Customer Solutions. Here she explains why more businesses, even beyond e-commerce, should look to mobile site speed as a growth driver.

I meet with hundreds of business owners and executives a year, from Merz Apothecary, a local pharmacy in Chicago to major international brands. And what they all have in common is that they want to grow. While there are as many growth strategies as there are types of businesses, there’s one area where nearly every business has room to improve: the mobile web.

The mobile web remains the most widely used platform in a world where people have more ways than ever before to search, browse, and shop. But it’s no longer enough to have just a mobile presence. Business growth requires the speedy mobile experience that people expect and demand today.

Fifty-four percent of people say that as the load time for a brand’s mobile site increases, so does their frustration.¹ And that affects the bottom line. In retail, we’ve seen that a one-second delay in mobile load times can impact conversion rates by up to 20%.²

This presents any business that has a mobile presence with a simple choice: either provide customers the kind of mobile experience they expect, or be prepared to watch those customers go elsewhere — and fast.

If a slow mobile experience drives customers away, a fast mobile experience can help attract and keep them.

Here’s the good news. If a slow mobile experience drives customers away, a fast mobile experience can help attract and keep them — and those milliseconds can earn millions.

But far too often, I see businesses underinvest in the kind of fast mobile experience that can unlock revenue and brand loyalty. It’s not that businesses don’t understand that a fast mobile experience matters, but it’s easy to treat it as a one-and-done goal to accomplish. The reality is that no matter how fast your site is today, if it’s not an ongoing priority, over time that speed will degrade.

Market leaders lead with mobile speed

The ranks of successful brands include a wide range of companies that have benefitted from making fast mobile experience a priority.

Outdoor clothing company Dakine was using large images and slideshows on its German mobile site to show the active, outdoorsy lifestyle its customers love. But when a mobile site speed audit showed that slow-loading pages were affecting the quality of its customer experience, Dakine moved quickly.

Through a combination of browser caching, image optimization, and prioritizing content on the visible part of its mobile pages, Dakine cut the load time of its start page by 55%, of category pages by 48%, and of product pages by 65%. The impact on performance? Over the next year, Dakine saw mobile traffic increase by 31%, mobile revenue by 45%, and tablet sales by 4%.

Mobile site speed also helped unlock growth for Telefónica, one of the world’s largest private telecom companies. More than 70% of web trafficcomes from mobile devices, so when Telefónica wanted to increase sales, reduce transformation costs, and increase self-management, the team decided to conduct a trial of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), an open source standard that can enable near-instant load times on mobile web pages.

With AMP, Telefónica improved load times for its mobile site by 70% — from six seconds to only two seconds in 3G connections. These improvements helped the company increase click-through rate by 31%.

Even if you’re not in the e-commerce business, mobile speed can still affect your bottom line. BMW proved this when it revamped its mobile site in an effort to invoke the same feelings of speed, performance, and reliability as its cars. BMW supercharged its website using AMP and Progressive Web Apps (PWA) — state-of-the-art technology for reliable, smooth, and secure web experiences that responds quickly to user interactions, even under poor network conditions. And what happened next? The proportion of people clicking from BMW.com to a BMW sales site soared from 8% to 30%, nearly 4X higher than before.

Start by diving into your brand’s mobile site speed

Choosing where and how to invest is one of the most important decisions a business can make, and at Google, we want to make it easy for businesses to invest wisely in mobile speed improvements. That’s why we’re rolling out a new Test My Site tool to help businesses understand, measure, and benchmark their mobile site speed.

With these tools, businesses of any size and type can set the stage for growth by better understanding how to deliver the fast mobile experiences that today’s consumers demand.

Source: Think with Google

Google

Mobile & Local