Which Pokemon Go Team is Most Popular? YouTube has the Answer!

Pokemon Go, launched July 6, 2016, is arguably the fastest growing game ever. In that spirit YouTube Trends wondered just how big is it? "We asked the YouTube data, and can confirm that “Pokemon Go” is a unique video game phenomenon like no other," commented YouTube Lead Gaming Curator Jeff Rubin in a blog post for Yahoo Trends. "After just a few weeks, it’s clear “Pokemon Go” is big."

That's Jeff Rubin in the lead pic above.

Overall Pokemon Go Stats

Craig Smith over at DMR scoured the web for Pokemon Go stats seen in his blog post. Here are a few of the most illustrative stats on the popularity of Pokemon Go:

From a peak of over 25 million US active users, there are now just over 20 million.

Pokémon Go is at 75 million downloads.

Users are spending 43 minutes a day playing, more than any other social app.

YouTube Pokemon Go Stats

"We compared the launch week of Pokemon Go’s with the launch week of other blockbusters from 2016," he said. "We found that the launch of “Pokemon Go” received twice as much watchtime as “Overwatch,” and three times as much as “Tom Clancy’s The Division.” Overall, since launch, “Pokemon Go” has racked up millions of hours of watchtime and consistently been one of the top 3 games on YouTube (trailing only “Minecraft” and “Grand Theft Auto V”)."

Rubin noted that one video related to Pokemon Go on YouTube is the "2014 Google Maps April Fools’ Day prank", which has seen its views and watchtime pop up since the game was launched.

He says that other hit videos include "PewDiePie’s “Is Pokemon Go Going Too Far” with nearly 10 million views, Feranfloo’s Spanish “Capturando Pokemons En La Vida Real” with 9.2 million views, and a whole slew of musical tributes."

Which Pokemon Go Team is Most Popular?

All Pokemon Go players must swear allegiance to one of three teams - Team Mystic, Team Valor, or Team Instinct. Using YouTube search and watch data they were able to determine which team is the most popular. "We found that, in terms of search queries, Valor jumped out to an early lead but was soon overtaken by Mystic," Rubin said. "They’re currently running neck-and-neck, both ahead of Team Instinct."

He says the best part of Pokemon Go's popularity is that the Pokemon theme song is back! "And that’s the way we like it," Rubin says!

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4 Ways All Marketers Can Use Facebook’s Offline Conversions API to Optimize Campaigns

Author: Mike Stocker

Facebook’s recent announcement of their new Offline Conversions API generated a lot of buzz and excitement among marketers and for good reason. The new API provides stores and retailers with a way to see how many people made offline purchases after seeing a Facebook campaign—connecting offline conversions to digital campaigns. They can then use these offline activities to optimize their ad campaigns and ad spend.

As a Facebook marketing partner, Marketo was excited to be a part of their launch announcement. Even more exciting is that our integration enables an expansion of this offline conversion concept to a much broader set of use cases that apply to all marketers, B2B marketers included. Before I get into the details of how you can use the new Offline Conversions API with Marketo, let’s start with some basics.

What is an offline conversion event?

In this case, an “offline” conversion event happens when a contact in your database performs a desired action on a channel not measured by Facebook.

When Facebook made their announcement, most business publications (Forbes, AdWeek, etc.) focused on the retail use case. While that is certainly a huge use case for an offline conversion event, I’d argue there are a lot more potential “offline” conversion events that impact marketers. In fact, offline conversion events can give marketers a complete omni-channel view of all the sales and conversions attributable to Facebook, regardless of location, channel, or campaign.

Here are a few examples of offline conversion events that come to mind:

• MQL (marketing qualified lead)
• SQL (sales qualified lead)
• Event attendance
• Target account
• Onsite sales consultation
• Automotive test drive
• Sports game attendance
• Demo given
• Content downloaded
• Score threshold met
• Call occurred
• Call duration
• Postal mail/package received

More specifically, here are four unique ways to use offline conversion events to improve your marketing campaigns:

1. Increase MQLs

Let’s say that you’re a B2B marketer on the demand generation team for a SaaS company. If your team buys Facebook Lead Ads to drive top-of-funnel growth, you shouldn’t just optimize your campaign based on form submissions. Instead, tie it to a metric that’s measured internally: the number of MQLs (marketing qualified leads) it drives.

All leads are scored within Marketo based on pre-defined criteria to determine if they are ready to be passed to the sales team, and they are considered MQLs only if they meet the right qualifications. This is an important metric to track, since MQLs that are further qualified by sales become SQLS (sales qualified leads), which can ultimately translate into new opportunities and revenue.

In the image below, an example revenue model, you can see how leads come in at the top-of-the-funnel as names, then progress further into the funnel as they continue to engage with your company. By optimizing your Facebook campaign for MQLs and not form submissions, you can increase the number of conversions that drive more qualified leads down the funnel.

2. Optimize Your Scoring Model

For B2B marketers, and even some consumer marketers, it’s likely that you have (or would) set up a scoring model within Marketo to qualify incoming leads or contacts. Scoring models attach values to various online and offline engagement events between your brand and the buyer.

With the integration of Facebook’s Offline Conversions API and Marketo, you can optimize your scoring model so that when a lead has reached a specific lead score as the result of a combination of different interactions, it’s defined as a conversion event. This way, a lead doesn’t need to, for example, download content or attend an event for it to be considered a conversion.

The example below shows how a revenue cycle might be modeled within your marketing automation platform, governed by how each buyer interacts with your brand—their behavior across channels, their engagement with your campaigns, their lead score, and even data changes in your CRM system.

By tracking when a lead hits a specific score that signals a conversion event, you can optimize your campaigns to tailor your ads to them appropriately. For example, for existing customers who have a score much higher than a MQL, you’re still able to identify scoring thresholds that signals they’re ready for cross-sell.

3. Boost In-Home Appointments

If your company sells products that require in-home consultations, such as window treatments, you may want to optimize your Facebook Ads towards the number of in-home appointments it generates, rather than the number of online appointment requests.

It’s likely that there’s a discrepancy between the number of online appointments booked and the physical appointments completed, but previously, this type of data was hard to track and made it hard to follow up on. Now, because of this integration, your sales consultant can log physical in-home appointments into Marketo and that data will be sent as an offline conversion event to Facebook. Then, your paid media team can re-evaluate their campaigns to understand how to optimize their ad spend to drive more completed in-home appointments.

4. Track Follow-Throughs

For a digital marketer at a car dealership, one of your initiatives probably include increasing the number of visits to your show room and test drives by prospective customers. Previously, you might’ve used Facebook Ads to encourage prospective customers to fill out their info in forms online, but it was tough to tie those initial interest requests to actual test drives. Now, with Facebook’s Offline Conversion tied to Marketo, you can capture how Facebook Ads results in in-person interest and test drives—connecting your Facebook ad spend directly to a test drive of a car so you can better optimize to ultimately improve sales.

As you can see, Facebook’s new Offline Conversion API can be used for a whole variety of broader use cases for ALL marketers, not just retail and physical purchases. In conjunction with Marketo, you can drive alignment between your paid media campaigns and other campaigns to improve results and ROI and offer a better customer experience.

Have you set up Facebook Lead Ads within Marketo yet? I’d love to hear your use cases in the comments below!

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4 Ways All Marketers Can Use Facebook’s Offline Conversions API to Optimize Campaigns was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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Facebook's Future: Video, Search, Messaging and VR

Facebook's goal is to connect with everyone, yes every single person in the world. Not just that, but Facebook wants to connect to everyone at all times, in every waking moment. Facebook envisions a future where you will always be engaging with some part of the Facebook ecosystem, whether it's on its mega social platform at Facebook, using it's search engine, messaging a business associate or communicating on video or via a virtual reality environment.

But first lets talk business.

"I often talk about how when we develop new products we think about it in three phases, said Zuckerberg. "First, building a consumer use case. Then, second, making it so that people can organically interact with businesses. And then third, on top of that, once there's a large volume of people interacting with businesses, give businesses tools to reach more people and pay. And that's ultimately the business opportunity."

During the earnings call yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg opened the curtain into Facebook's plans, strategies and dreams for the future. He first provided the latest metrics illustrating Facebook's continued success, 1.7 billion people now use Facebook every month, and 1.1 billion people use it every day. He said that Facebook revenue grew by 59% year-over year to $6.4 billion, and advertising revenue was up 63% to $6.2 billion.

Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook said that Q2 ad revenue grew 63% and mobile ad revenue hit $5.2 billion, up 81% year-over-year, and was approximately 84% of total ad revenue. Facebook is now truly a mobile app rather than a desktop experience for the vast majority of its users.

Zuckerberg said that they continue to see excellent growth and over the past year Facebook has added over 200 million people using Facebook on a monthly basis. Time spent per person increased double digit percentages year-over-year across Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. And that doesn't even include WhatsApp yet.

Facebook is still growing rapidly and that's because it has continued to evolve. It's evolution has happened because of increased bandwidth, technological advancements, acquisitions of new platforms like WhatsApp and Instagram and most importantly continuing to be on the cutting edge of what people want in a social network. All of this while simultaneously building a successful business model that pays for this evolution.

What's really interesting however, is how Zuckerberg sees Facebook transforming in the future. "Our results show our progress as we work to make the world more open and connected across our three-, five- and ten-year horizons," he said. "Over the next three years we are focused on continuing to build our community and help people share more of what matters to them. The next five years are about building our newer products into full ecosystems with developers and businesses. And over the next ten years we are working to build new technologies to help everyone connect in new ways."

Facebook is seeking to be the world's business platform, not just the peoples. More on this below in the Search section on a Facebook future where it is competing with LinkedIn.

"We're excited to announce that we now have 60 million monthly active business Pages on Facebook," said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. "We also continue to grow the number of active advertisers on our platform. This shows that both our free and paid products are providing value to marketers of all sizes around the world. We continue to focus on our three priorities — capitalizing on the shift to mobile, growing the number of marketers using our ad products, and making our ads more relevant and effective."

Trust me, this is just the beginning of Facebook's morphing into both a personal and business platform in the future.

The Future of Facebook is Video

Facebook used to be mostly text and over the years they changed to be photo centric, with many people using Facebook as their family photo album. People still do that but Zuckerberg envisions a huge change coming. "We see a world that is video first, with video at the heart of all of our apps and services."

"Over the past six months we have been particularly focused on Live video. Live represents a new way to share what's happening in more immediate and creative ways," Zuckerberg said. "This quarter Candace Payne's Chewbacca mask video was viewed almost 160 million times. Live is also changing the way we see politics, as news organizations and delegates go Live from the Republican and Democratic conventions. And we have seen in Minnesota and Dallas how Live can shine a light on important moments as they happen."

At Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women International Summit in London, Nicola Mendelsohn, VP EMEA at Facebook, predicted that the Facebook newsfeed will be all video in 5 years. "It will definitely be mobile. It will probably be all video," Mendelsohn said. "I just think if we look, we already are seeing a year on year decline in text. We're seeing a massive increase as I've said on both pictures and video. So yeah, if I was having a bet, I would say video, video, video."

"When you think about what's happening on video on our platform we're really excited by the production and consumption of video and we're seeing the full range from people posting the things in their personal lives; the power of what a mobile phone can produce and distribute now is pretty incredible when you compare it to just a few years ago to some of the most sophisticated content producers in the world producing for us," added Sandberg.

Facebook Focuses on Search

Facebook is moving into the search space aggressively, definitely to help it compete with Twitter and perhaps even Google in the future. Facebook launched true keyword search in late 2014 that allows users to search not just profile names or just your friends posts, but also everyone's public posts. And, if you didn't know, all postings default at public, which means that anyone can search for your posts.

The first goal for Facebook with search is to become more like Twitter, where people post their thoughts, feelings and most importantly news reports, especially the on-the-scene kind. When the next plane lands in the Hudson, Facebook wants the survivor standing on the wing to use their platform to post about this breaking news, not Twitter. More precisely, Facebook wants you to use Facebook Live to stream your personalized live news coverage.

"We're making good progress on core services within the Facebook app, like Search," Zuckerberg stated. "A growing way people use search is to find what people are saying about a topic across the more than 2.5 trillion posts in our network. Now, people are doing more than 2 billion searches a day, between looking up people, businesses and other things that they care about. Continuous, steady improvement to services like search are an important part of helping people connect and realizing our mission."

He also said this in minimizing their true plans, in my opinion.

So I'd say we're around the second phase of that in search now. We have a pretty big navigational use case where people look up people and pages and groups that they want to get to and look at and search. One of the big growing use cases that we're investing a lot in is looking up the content in the ecosystem and that is an area that we're very excited about which helps people find more content.

But certainly there's a reasonable amount of behavior in there which is looking for things that over time could be monetizeable or commercial intense and at some point we will probably want to work on that but we're still in the phase of just making it easier for people to find all the content they want and connect with businesses organically.

But what's their next goal? Facebook has certainly focused on the business use of their platform as they continue to look for monetization opportunities. My guess is that Facebook will seek to compete with LinkedIn as the business platform of record.

Over the last few years LinkedIn has certainly moved from a glorified directory of business professionals to a platform for business related news, conversation and connection. Facebook has the platform but would need to figure out how to easily separate family life from business life, which could be done rather easily. With Microsoft buying LinkedIn, Facebook will be highly motivated to compete.

Next up for Facebook Search would be to compete with Google. Why... you ask? Because Google has a market cap of $520 billion, with the majority of that credited to its search business, while Facebook has a market cap of $362 billion. More importantly, it's about revenue and profit. In 2015, Google had $75 billion in revenue and $16 billion in net income while Facebook had $17 billion in revenue and $3.6 billion in net income.

Google tried to compete with Facebook with Google+ and it failed miserably, but that's because it's harder to get people to change their social habits than it is their search habits. You don't need your friends to use Facebook Search in order for you to find it useful, but you definitely need your friends to move to a new social platform to make it work for you. That was Google's dilemma, but it won't be Facebook's.

"Since it refocused on keywords, Facebook is now seeing 2 billion searches per day of its 2.5 trillion posts," stated TechCrunch writer Josh Constine. "That’s compared to 1.5 billion searches per day in July 2015, and 1 billion in September 2012. That’s a 33% climb in just 9 months."

That's lets than half a reported 3.5 billion searches per day on Google. The difference is that Google's searches are monitizable, while Facebook searches, not so much. However, this must scare the heck out of Google because it shows how ingrained people are to use Facebook for search. Therefore, over time I predict that Facebook will add web indexing to it's search engine. They already have 3.5 billion searches, why not open up search to everything and in the process open up a huge monetization opportunity.

One other prediction, Facebook will disconnect its search app from just Facebook.com, just like they did Messenger. Then, voilà, Facebook is competing with Google.

Making Instagram Stronger

Instagram was purchased by Facebook for $1 billion while it was just getting off the ground. It is now center to its plans on connecting with everyone in the world on a constant always on basis. That's why Instagram is so important to Facebook, it has a foothold with younger people and its active user base is not a clone of Facebook's, so it expands the corporate Facebook's universe of connectivity and engagement.

"Over the next five years we are working hard to build ecosystems around some of our newer products," said Zuckerberg. "Instagram now has more than 500 million monthly actives, with more than 300 million daily. Now we’re working to make the experience more engaging."

He said that when Instagram, despite user pushback, began to rank its feed in order to improve the experience, that they are already seeing a "positive impact" with people spending more time and share more content within the platform.

As always, business is important to Zuckerberg as well. "We’ve also introduced our advertising tools on Instagram and we’re seeing marketers engage with people in creative and innovative ways."

Messaging with Messenger & WhatsApp

"In the two years since we separated Messenger from the main Facebook app -- which was a controversial decision at the time -- we've improved performance and given people new ways to express themselves," commented Zuckerberg. "Now, for the first time, more than 1 billion people are using Messenger every month."

Facebook sees a huge opportunity with messaging because it moves them closer to their goal of connecting everyone on a constant always on basis. That's why they paid $22 billion for WhatsApp, which is a service that barely had a business model.

"I’m also happy with the updates we're making to WhatsApp -- which also has a community of more than 1 billion people," said Zuckerberg. "This quarter we launched new desktop apps and end-to-end encryption, and millions of people are using WhatsApp's voice calling features."

Facebook has big plans for messaging because not only does it help them bring even more people into Facebook's universe, but it moves them into the business space, where Facebook desperately wants to be, because that's where the money is.

"The scale we’ve achieved with our messaging services makes it clear that they are more than just a way to chat with friends," Zuckerberg noted. "That’s why we’re also making it easier for people to connect with groups and businesses as well. We are going to keep focusing on this over the next several years."

Facebook owned messaging has now taken over standard text messaging according to Zuckerberg.

"Between Messenger and WhatsApp I think we're around 60 billion messages a day which is something like three times more than the peak of global SMS traffic."

It's incredible to think that Facebook now owns the messaging space. Who would have thought that 3 years ago?

New Technologies

"I’m also excited about the early progress we’re making on our 10-year initiatives. We are investing in new technologies to give more people a voice -- including the 4 billion people around the world who aren’t yet online -- and helping more people take advantage of the opportunities that come with the internet."

Facebook is seeking to connect everyone in the world, regardless of any obstacle. It's a long term plan, but Facebook is on it.

"One of the biggest opportunities to grow our community is in developing countries where connectivity is less advanced than what we take for granted here at home," Zuckerberg said. "So over the past couple of years, we’ve began making steady improvements to our apps to make them work regardless of the device or connection people are using. We also built a light-weight version of our Android app, called Facebook Lite, that is tuned to work on 2G networks and is now used by more than 100 million people."

Virtual reality is another huge area of investment for Facebook, especially with their $2 billion purchase of Oculus. They see VR as an extension of connecting and sharing. Know one really knows the future of VR, but it will be deeply engrained in advertising in the future and since all of Facebook's revenue comes from advertising, they need to be in this space.

"We believe that virtual reality can help people share richer experiences and help everyone understand what’s going on around the world," said Zuckerberg. "It’s really early for us in VR but we’re hitting some important milestones. As of the second quarter more than 1 million people a month are using Oculus on mobile phones through our Gear VR 4partnership with Samsung."

Zuckerberg also commented on the potential revenue importance of their investment in VR:

"More than 300 apps are already available at the Oculus store for Gear VR, we’ve filled all of our pre-orders for Oculus Rift and we are seeing increasing demand from retail as stores plan for the holidays. While it’s still early for augmented reality, we're doing AR research and are seeing lightweight versions of AR technology today in mobile apps like MSQRD."

Facebook is Just Getting Started

"So that’s a recap of the progress we’re making in our 10 year plan," said Zuckerberg. "We have a saying at Facebook that our journey is only 1% done -- and while I'm happy with our progress, we have a lot more work to do to grow our community and connect the whole world. That means making big investments and taking risks -- focusing not just on what Facebook is, but on what it can be."

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Cracking the Glass Ceiling: How to Thrive as a Female in a Male-Dominated Industry

Author: Janet Dulsky

Regardless of your politics, Hillary Clinton has become the first woman to capture a major-party nomination for President. In a big first for American politics, 96 years after women won the right to vote, a woman is in the running to become president. CRACK!!!

This first is just one of many firsts for women recently:

• Janet L. Yellen became the first female Chair of the Federal Reserve Board
• Becky Hammon became an assistant coach for the San Antonio Spurs—the NBA’s first full-time female coach and the first full-time female coach in any of the four major professional sports in America
• Admiral Michelle Howard became the Navy’s first female and first female African-American four-star officer
• Mary Barra is the first female CEO of General Motors and the first female CEO of a major automaker
• Racer Danica Patrick became the first woman to lead a lap in the Daytona 500, leading for five laps and finishing eighth overall

As women in the tech industry, we may not be first, but we’re making cracks in the glass ceiling every day working in what is still a male-dominated industry. This means that every day, we need to find ways to be heard, be successful, and be leaders.

So, how do you lead when you’re the only woman in the room? As I look back at my career, most of my time was spent on teams in which males significantly outnumbered the females and, more often than not, I was the only female. Along the way, I learned (sometimes the hard way) what to do and what not to do to lead in these situations:

1. Don’t Make It Weird

Don’t fixate on the fact that you’re the only woman in the room. If you do, it makes things weird and you and everyone else will be uncomfortable. Remember that you are there for a reason. Recognize what you bring to the table and then use that to own your place in the room and on the team.

When I was working at an early-stage startup a couple of years ago, I was the only woman in the company (okay, we were only four people, but still). As we headed toward the release of our beta product, we met weekly to talk about the product. At first, I felt very out of place in those meeting because much of the discussion was highly technical, such as the merits of various open-source software we could use to develop the platform. However, as the conversation turned to the user experience, I immediately realized that this was the reason I was there. Advocating for the best user experience and being the voice of the customer was my expertise and what I brought to the table.

2. Use the Fact That You’re Female

Now, I’m not suggesting you play into a stereotype. However, as a female in corporate America, you may have the opportunity to reach out and put colleagues, partners, and customers at ease in a way that may be more difficult for some of your male counterparts. Research, like this Pew Research report, shows that women excel at compromise.

One day, I was in a meeting with our development team (again, as the only woman in the room) when the team became very polarized about the way we should approach a project. Team members were digging in their heels on opposite sides of the subject with little hope of bridging the differences. I stepped in and articulated the positions of each camp as I understood them, acknowledging the concerns that had been shared. Once I did that, the tension in the room immediately began to ease, like the air being let out of a balloon, as team members on each side felt heard. From there, I was able to throw out options that the team started considering. We didn’t solve the problem in that meeting, but we made progress. While I’m not saying that one of the male members of the team couldn’t have stepped into the role I played, as a woman, you may be better able to help your teammates compromise. Use that to your advantage to create connections, build rapport, and help your team excel.

3. Don’t Be Afraid to Stand up and Be Counted

Your male colleagues aren’t. Research has showed over and over that women are not as comfortable as men in raising their hands and speaking up in meetings. Often, it’s because they fear backlash. See Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant’s blog, Speaking While Female, for some interesting research on the issue and some creative solutions for interrupting gender bias. Namely, by actively adopting practices that focus more on the idea than the speaker and encouraging women to speak up.

Most of the time, in my own experience, when I took the risk to speak up and express my opinions and ideas, they were evaluated objectively, just like my male peers. So, my advice? Speak your mind and share your ideas. You may be pleasantly surprised at how positively your opinion and thoughts are received.

4. Ask for What You Want

Most of us women believe we will be noticed for the hard work we do, so we silently wait to be noticed, praised, and promoted. Unfortunately, this does us more harm than good. According to an internal Hewlett Packard report, men apply for jobs for which they only meet 60% of the requirements, while women only apply for jobs for which they meet 100% of the requirements, which means we’re missing out on a lot of great opportunities!

I remember pitching a client for a job for something I’d never done. Honestly, I felt a bit like a fraud. But I quieted that nagging voice in my head, squared my shoulders, told myself “Of course, I can do this!” and went out and got the business. And guess what? I delivered a kick*** project and my client was thrilled with the results! Push yourself to apply for that position you’ve always dreamed of even if you know it’s a stretch. You’ll never grow if you don’t take on new challenges. So, ask for the promotion—don’t wait. Be confident in your abilities and think back to all the things you’ve learned and all the skills you’ve acquired that have prepared you for it. You can do it!

5. Support Other Women

I’ve always believed that women should empower each other, and by this, I’m not saying we should create a “We Hate Men” club. Reach out to other women in your organization at all levels and talk to and support each other. Alexandra Nation spoke to this in her recent blog about women in tech and how groups of saleswomen (and men) support each other within Marketo. In fact, one of the best pieces of advice I got came from a female mentor. She shared her personal experiences with salary negotiations and told me to value my work and ask for what I believed I was worth, even if it felt like too much. She gave me the courage to ask for the big, scary number during salary negotiations.

How much faster can we crack that glass ceiling into a million shards if we build on the knowledge of those who came before? If we continuously break new ground with the support of other women, the sky’s the limit!

Some of the wisest people I know are women. What have you learned about cracking the glass ceiling? Pay it forward and pass on what you have learned in the comments below.

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Cracking the Glass Ceiling: How to Thrive as a Female in a Male-Dominated Industry was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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Changes in Google Ranking Factors - 2016

What is and isn't a ranking factor in search? Here are the latest thoughts by industry experts on search ranking factors and particularly Google Ranking Factors as they are in 2016.

Content & Links Are the Two Most Important Ranking Signals

Eric Enge noted in a post that he participated in a Hangout with Google's Andrey Lippatsev, Search Quality Senior Strategist, who was asked about the top 3 ranking signals, noting that RankBrain was announced as the third most important. "I can tell you what they are. It’s content and links going into your site," answered Lippatesev.

"When you aren’t facing page relevance or quality issues, links can, and do, continue to significantly impact rankings." said Enge.

"Backlinks remain an extremely important Google ranking factor," said Brian Dean founder of Backlinko in a recent blog post on Google Ranking Factors. "We found the number of domains linking to a page correlated with rankings more than any other factor." Read more on the Backlinko Ranking Study at the end of this article.

RankBrain - Third Most Important Factor

Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand wrote an interesting piece on how RankBrain has now become the third most important ranking factor behind content and links. According to a report onBackChannel RankBrain is being used on almost ALL search queries helping determine the most relevant results and their order:

Google is characteristically fuzzy on exactly how it improves search (something to do with the long tail? Better interpretation of ambiguous requests?) but Jeff Dean says that RankBrain is “involved in every query,” and affects the actual rankings “probably not in every query but in a lot of queries.” What’s more, it’s hugely effective. Of the hundreds of “signals” Google search uses when it calculates its rankings (a signal might be the user’s geographical location, or whether the headline on a page matches the text in the query), RankBrain is now rated as the third most useful.

 
Click-Through Rate (CTR) is Not a Ranking Factor

"I think we can establish that CTR is not a direct ranking signal for Google. At the same time, it can have an indirect effect," said Eric Enge in a recent video (below) they posted on their marketing website Stone Temple Consulting. "Lots of people clicking on a certain result might indicate a real interest in it, and that might mean it’s a better result than the result above it. Notice I said might there. That will be important later. Anyway, many people have assumed that search engines like Google would use such a signal, of course, bouncing it off against other signals that it uses in ranking."

So with that answer, one wonders why isn't then CTR a ranking signal? Primarily because Google has told us they don’t, commented Enge. He noted that it's simply too easy to game and that it doesn't necessarily mean the user was satisfied with the result. Google uses it internally for studying search behavior but it is not a ranking signal. He provided this chart in a recent blog post. Enge wrote another article about CTR as a (non) ranking factor here.

Google Confirms 301, 302, 3xx redirects Do Not Lose PageRank Value

"30x redirects don't lose PageRank anymore," Google's Gary Illyes said in a tweet yesterday. Eric Enge asked Illyes in a Twitter reply if the redirects are "not even a dampening factor?" Illyes replied, "@stonetemple for PageRank, no." Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land has more.

Local Business Ranking Factors

2016 Quantitative Local Search Ranking Factors Study: If you want your business to rank better in local search results, focus on building popularity for your business, as the results of the study indicate that business popularity seems to outweigh all other factors, most importantly in the form of reviews and quality backlinks to your site. Google Review and Profile View are by far the two most important local business ranking factors.

Dan Leibson, Vice President of Local & Product at Local SEO Guide, made a presentation on this study at SMX Advanced 2016:

Mobile-Friendliness - a Ranking Signal on Mobile Searches

"Last year, we started using mobile-friendliness as a ranking signal on mobile searches," said Klemen Kloboves, a software engineer at Google, in a Google Webmaster blog post. "Today we’re announcing that beginning in May, we’ll start rolling out an update to mobile search results that increases the effect of the ranking signal to help our users find even more pages that are relevant and mobile-friendly."

Google Now Ranks Mobile Page Speed Separately

Jennifer Slegg of The SEM Post noted that Illyes mention of this at Search Marketing Summit Sydney was the first time that Google confirmed that it indeed plans to make page speed a factor in its next mobile friendly update. Illyes told Jennnifer that the update will be in a matter of months. Illyes has been hinting at mobile friendly sites ranking higher for months.

Google Updates Search Quality Guidelines

"We recently completed a major revision of our rater guidelines to adapt to this mobile world, recognizing that people use search differently when they carry internet-connected devices with them all the time," said Mimi Underwood, Sr. Program Manager of Google Search Growth & Analysis. "You can find that update here (PDF)."

More Causes for Lower Ranking

Enge also says that there are other factors contributing to less appearance of a site on the first page of a Google search result, which is in effect a lower ranking:

1. More real estate allocated to paid search
2. More content from other sources, such as image search, YouTube, and the other factors I mentioned above
3. Some pages that have less than 10 web results
4. Portions of the web results that are clearly less driven by links, such as local web, query deserves diversity, and in-depth article results

Backlinko Study

The Backlinko Study is unbelievably helpful in understanding all ranking factors, not just the new ones that happened in 2016. Backlinko analyzed 1 million Google search results to answer the question: Which factors correlate with first page search engine rankings?

Backlinko identified 11 main ranking factors that I've summarized summarized below:

1. Backlinks are still the number one factor in determining search ranking.
2. Site Authority correlates to ranking.
3. Tightly focused content ranks better.
4. Longer content ranks higher.
5. Sites using HTTPS do better than equal sites using HTTP.
6. Schema markup doesn't help.
7. An image in content raises ranking.
8. Small correlation with title tag keyword optimization and ranking.
9. Speed is now a huge ranking signal. It matters a lot.
10. Exact match anchor text has a strong influence.
11. Low bounce rate  improves ranking.

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How to Find a Marketing Automation Platform That Grows With You

Author: Patrick Groover

Let’s face it, resources are limited and money doesn’t grow on trees. Some of the biggest challenges that marketers face are the cost of programs and the infrastructure needed to support multi-channel communication in this digital age.

Throughout my career, including my current role as a Solutions Consultant, I’ve seen how many business decisions sacrifice long-term functionality for a short-term gain in cost savings. Many marketers out there are making similar decisions, in which features and functionality are ultimately weighed against platform cost.

As part of a ‘wait and see’ or ‘grow into it’ mentality, the total cost of ownership for a less sophisticated marketing automation platform can hide below the surface. In this blog, I’ll walk you through nine short-term and long-term considerations that you should incorporate into your marketing automation evaluation to find a solution that grows with you:

Short-Term Considerations

1. How quickly can your team get up and running on this solution?

While any new solution has a learning curve, the marketing automation platform that you choose can greatly impact the time it takes for you and your team to get up to speed. As you’re evaluating a marketing automation platform, it’s worth asking about the platform’s track record for bringing users up to speed quickly and the average time for getting campaigns launched. All new tools take time to learn, but leading solutions take onboarding seriously and invest in local resources with expert marketing backgrounds to help your team with the implementation.

2. Can this system clone entire programs, campaigns, and forms?

Sometimes, the presence or absence of the most obvious features of a platform is a telling sign of how successful and efficient your team will be when using it. The ability to clone previously developed programs, campaigns, and forms is a huge timesaver and also helps cushion for human error. These are important features for accelerating your time-to-market, so it’s important that your platform can support them.

3. Can you easily build audiences and workflows side-by-side?

Many marketing automation platforms require users to build audiences (segments) and responses (workflows) within different screens. Having to switch between multiple pages to configure audiences and workflows is not only time-consuming, but it indicates a potential breakdown in the logical architecture for consistently matching target audiences with relevant communications.

Instead, look for platforms that place audience definition side-by-side with campaign and content execution–ultimately allowing you to adjust the qualifying criteria and flow within the same stream-of-thought. Additionally, complete marketing automation platforms leverage a consistent pattern for building audiences across the entire system, which reduces the amount of time needed to execute campaigns, expands the effectiveness of centralized data, and improves the consistency of your program results.

4. How easily can you incorporate other best-of-breed solutions?

For most marketers, it’s likely that marketing automation platforms are only one part of your marketing tech stack. Its acts as the foundation and connective tissue for interactions between your content and assets, driving opportunities and conversions forward within the customer lifecycle. Whether the length of your purchase cycle is in minutes, hours, weeks, months, or years, the ability to integrate best-of-breed tools for web design, e-commerce, social engagement, retargeting, data-cleansing, and more is a sure way of making sure that your marketing techniques are making the most impact, without having to completely redo your marketing strategy–both now and in the future.

Long-Term Considerations

1. Will this platform centralize all of your core marketing needs over the next three to five years?

In my customer-facing role, I’ve encountered many marketers who spent the first year implementing a basic platform, then find that in two or three years’ time, they wish they had chosen a different vendor to begin with. Many of our customers express that they quickly reached the maximum value of their previous platform and had to spend the next few years working with serious limitations. Taking the time to evaluate the best short-term and long-term solution can prevent this situation.

2. Will you be incorporating multi-channel marketing?

All stages of the customer lifecycle–from brand awareness to advocacy–are becoming more closely intertwined with personalized content through multiple communication channels. Your ability to build out multi-channel marketing side-by-side with other campaign elements is an important factor in maintaining program consistency, while reducing the strain of executing campaigns. By thinking ahead to your future channels of communication, you can save both time and money trying to incorporate these objectives later on.

3. Does this platform have a history of marketing innovation and being forward-thinking?

Innovative marketing automation providers are continually adding new features and staying up to date on the latest capabilities in digital marketing. Many platforms attempt to be everything to everyone, yet the core purpose of a marketing automation platform should be to connect and deliver high value marketing interactions. Innovation impacts the modern marketer in a number of ways: it keeps your team on the front line of communications, it lowers the cost of marketing over time, and it enables powerful programs through highly organized and accessible information.

Moving into the start of the next decade, marketers who can truly leverage the knowledge supplied by buyers actions and interactions will be able to own the customer experience and distinguish their brand as industry leaders. Similarly, marketing automation providers that stay innovative, helping to connect and deliver the most relevant communications, will be the best partners for producing results.

4. What kind of ongoing support can you expect?

Long-term platform experience is heavily tied a marketing automation company’s commitment to answering questions and providing support on an ongoing basis. Ask about external customer support evaluations, accessibility to specific account managers assigned to your account, and company investments in industry knowledge experts. Regional support that is internally sourced shows a company’s commitment to speaking your language and helping to solve real world business problems.

5. Is this platform capable of growing with your data management strategy?

In your initial evaluations of marketing automation platforms, you’re often looking for features, functions, and triggers that support your short-term needs. But it’s important to consider today’s needs and tomorrow’s needs when making a final decision. Going back to the point about being able to incorporate multiple channels, “good-enough” solutions are very email-centric and may not be able to consume interactions with mobile devices, personalized banners, e-commerce activities, or custom records.

A great way to look at the long-term depth and breadth of different marketing automation platforms is to define a multi-channel marketing strategy and ask your potential vendors to build out a sample campaign that acts on a wide variety of interactions and delivers a wide variety of responses. Sophisticated solutions will allow both interactions and responses to be built with continuity and simplicity.

All of the questions above ultimately help you understand whether a marketing automation platform is scalable and reliable, two things that are critical to business growth. They ensure that your investment in marketing automation today will sustain and support your marketing initiatives of tomorrow. Carefully review the short-term and long-term functions and requirements of your implementation to ensure that your platform has strong roots that will continue to support results and happy employees now and into the future.

What other questions do you ask when you’re making marketing investment decisions? Share them in the comments below!

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How to Find a Marketing Automation Platform That Grows With You was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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7-Eleven, Slurpee Drones, and What It Means to Turn Your Company Around

For years, I stopped going to 7-Eleven. I’m guessing it was likely almost a decade. Heck, once I realized how much sugar a Slurpee had in it, and what it was doing to my waistline, I literally had no reason to go to the convenience store, especially with newer, better options like Sheetz, WaWa, and…

The post 7-Eleven, Slurpee Drones, and What It Means to Turn Your Company Around appeared first on The Sales Lion by Marcus Sheridan.

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Do You Need to Worry About CAN-SPAM Lawsuits?

Author: Leah Hamilton

Disclaimer: This blog post is for general information purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. The opinions presented in this blog do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Marketo.

Unfortunately, I don’t really need to introduce the idea of spam to you. No, not the (beloved by some) canned meat product, but the clutter of unwanted, unsolicited, and unnecessary emails that pretty much anyone with an email address has experienced. As a consumer, you have probably received your fair share of spam messages, but as a marketer, you’re probably interested in the dangers that spam and spam laws can pose to your marketing activities and business. Aside from affecting your email deliverability, sending emails that are classified as spam can get you in serious legal trouble.

To combat spam and protect consumer privacy, anti-spam laws for email marketing have been rolled out in numerous countries over the past 10-15 years, such as CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) in the US, CASL in Canada, and the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations in the UK. You might think that these laws don’t apply to you because you’re not a spammer, but these laws are intended to govern the way that marketers communicate by email generally and may cover some aspects of email marketing that you didn’t realize were “spam” under the law.

This blog will explore CAN-SPAM—how it works, what it means for marketers, the consequences of violating it, and where it may be headed in the future.

How CAN-SPAM Works, and What it Requires

CAN-SPAM is the US anti-spam law that sets out rules for commercial email messages, including guidelines for contacting email recipients, email content, and penalties. It applies to all commercial emails, including business-to-business messages.

To quickly recap CAN-SPAM, the main takeaways for marketers are:

• No false or misleading header information.
• No deceptive or misleading subject lines. If your email is for marketing purposes, you can’t make your subject line deceptively personal, such as “Uncle Bill is sick!” Your subject line should be an accurate reflection of the content of the email.
• Identify your message as an advertisement.
• Tell your recipients where you are located (include a valid postal address).
• Include information about how your email recipients can opt out.
• Promptly honor opt-out requests (for CAN-SPAM, this is within 10 days of receiving the opt-out request).
• If someone else is sending marketing emails for you, monitor what they are doing and ensure they follow CAN-SPAM’s rules.

As long as you comply with these requirements, there shouldn’t be any issues, right? Wrong. 

What if you or one of your employees make a mistake or overlooks a misleading aspect of an email? It’s important for organizations to consider and understand what could happen on the off chance that they do get it wrong and someone decides to pursue it in court, especially when each individual email violating CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $16,000.

Who Can Sue Under CAN-SPAM?

When it comes to who would actually bring legal action against you in a CAN-SPAM lawsuit, your assumption might be that it’s the customer. But it’s actually the Federal Trade Commission, state attorneys general, or in some cases the internet service provider (ISP) of the customer. The ability of an ISP to bring a lawsuit, however, hinges on them being a provider of “internet access services” and them being adversely affected by a violation of CAN-SPAM. For most consumers, this is not a useful route for them to go down to bring a lawsuit.

Your customers may be able to take action under some state laws, but many state laws dealing with spam are explicitly preempted by CAN-SPAM (which means that CAN-SPAM essentially overrules them).

How Successful Have Lawsuits Been in the Past?

CAN-SPAM has been described by numerous commentators, namely the University of Chicago School of Law, as “weak,” and it may, in many respects, not be as effective as it should be at stopping spam. However, there have been successful lawsuits in the past against those who violated CAN-SPAM, and the law will most likely be strengthened in future. Let’s take a look at a few examples of lawsuits and how they played out in the courts:

A number of anti-spam cases have been brought to trial in the past few years. One of these cases was a major San Francisco IT support company, who was fined $900,000 in 2006 for sending emails with false or misleading headers. They also didn’t identify their message as an advertisement, inform recipients that they could opt-out, and process any opt-out messages that they received. Even worse, some of their messages were disguised as personal messages to try to trick the recipients into opening them. It’s like they didn’t read the CAN-SPAM requirements at all!

In another case, a pharmaceutical manufacturer was fined as much as $2.5 million for using false and misleading headers, misleading subject lines, and not including opt-out mechanisms. CAN-SPAM fines are certainly nothing to sniff at.

However, a 2013 case brought by the group Spam Arrest, a company that provides anti-spam services by blocking senders until they verify themselves, highlighted a few of the issues prosecutors and claimants face when trying to stop spam. The verification process for Spam Arrest involved senders being sent a link to a verification page, where they could click a “verify” button and agree to a two-paragraph “Sender Agreement”. The Sender Agreement stated that by clicking the “verify” button, they agreed to the Sender Agreement, which stated that email senders must not send “unsolicited commercial e-mail.” Their lawsuit faced a number of barriers to success, a number of which related to the validity of the Sender Agreement.

First, the court found that Spam Arrest had not properly ensured that senders had actually agreed to the Sender Agreement, as the “verify” button was not sufficiently linked with the Sender Agreement. They also found that even if the Sender Agreement had been properly agreed to, Spam Arrest could not verify that any employees of the marketing companies had sufficient legal authority to enter into that Agreement on behalf of their business. Finally, the Court found that the burden was on Spam Arrest to prove that the marketers had sent “unsolicited commercial e-mail” and didn’t have consent to send the email. This is a high bar to pass for those fighting against spam.

The anti-spam lawsuits that have succeeded haven’t really stemmed the tide of spam. “To date, the CAN-SPAM Act has had no substantial impact on the flow of spam,” stated the president and CEO of email security firm Postini, Shinya Akamine. “In the four months after CAN-SPAM went into effect [2003], spam increased from 78-83% of the messages processed by Postini.” And, despite the FTC expounding the effectiveness of CAN-SPAM, even years later, it does not seem to have much impact on how spammers act.

Will the Law Change in the Near Future?

 

As you can see, in a general sense, CAN-SPAM hasn’t been very effective, which means that customers tend to ‘over ignore’ emails because they are used to receiving an abundance of spam. But changes in the law can help CAN-SPAM become more effective, which is good news for legitimate marketers and bad news for ‘real’ spammers.

One example of improvements that will be made to spam legislation in the near future is cross-border cooperation. Anti-spam laws in the US and EU are both subject to the weakness that they cannot prevent cross-border spam. However, Australia, Korea, and the UK have already signed a Memorandum of Understanding to cooperate on fighting against spam. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) also includes requirements for signatories to maintain anti-spam legislation. If more of these agreements are put in place, cross-border spam will be more tightly controlled and legitimate marketers benefit from tighter regulations, as their customers will see less spam coming and will be more likely to trust and open emails.

CAN-SPAM compliance is important and it’s fairly easy to comply with because the rules are relatively simple. However, even if you make a mistake, the likelihood that a lawsuit will make its way to you is small, as individual consumers cannot bring claims. But if you’re sending out emails that violate CAN-SPAM, it’s possible that you could face a lawsuit from the FTC. And, many of the CAN-SPAM lawsuits have succeeded, despite CAN-SPAM’s many weaknesses. The law is likely to become more severe in future rather than weakened, so it’s best to put compliance measures in place now.

How have spam laws affected your best practices? Share your experience in the comments section below.

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Do You Need to Worry About CAN-SPAM Lawsuits? was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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All Hail the Rise of Native Advertising

Native advertising, sponsored content or branded news (all the same) is booming and with some online publishers it's now their main source of revenue.

It's important to note that native advertising is not content marketing. Content marketing is a content strategy by brands where typically, they own the content, such as their blogs or content on a product website. Native advertising is sponsored content, more typically created by the publisher to be in alignment with an audience that the advertiser wants to reach. I think where the confusion happens is when an advertiser creates biased and conversion oriented content that is placed on websites for a fee. To me, that's content marketing more than native advertising because content marketing has evolved to be measured by conversions, while native advertising looks at other metrics.

Fractl and Moz conducted a survey of more than 30 content marketing agencies and obtained cost data from more than 600 digital publishers and determined that "content marketing has a better overall return on investment."

"Readers are necessarily less engaged with advertising vs. editorial content, and metrics show lower share rates, lower engagement rates, lower view counts, etc. in most cases," said Kelsey Libert, partner and vp of marketing at Fractl. "You can’t simply push through a mediocre, thinly veiled advertorial. Content marketing puts the brand and the consumer on equal footing, and in the process necessitates the brand elevate the content they are creating. When done correctly, the result is a true match between brand and content consumer, where the content created has true value, and spreads based on the merit of the content. Through this, content can enjoy true virality in a way that is nearly impossible with Native ads."

"The fact that people find it necessary to pit one form against the other is a little bemusing," said Cas McCullough, Founder at Writally PTY LTD, in a comment on Adweek. "When used together, good content and native ads are very powerful. On their own they don't get the same ROI. Our case studies prove this consistently, so we'll stick with an integrated approach."

Sites such a Buzzfeed and Vice have built their entire business model around native advertising. Slate says that it now relies on native advertising for nearly 50% of its revenue. According to Digiday Slate trained its 10-person sales team on a its new native ad product called Slate Custom, and also hired Jim Lehnhoff, the former head of Gawker Media’s native advertising strategy. The goal with Slate Custom is to make native ads that are aligned to Slate's "edtorial DNA."

“The differences between five years ago and now, in client expectations, are enormous,” said Keith Hernandez, the president of Slate, in a New York Times article on native. "Creating something that’s delightful and that’ll make someone stop and click and share…that’s really hard. But doing the easy thing is not fun.”

The Atlantic's Hayley Romer, their Publisher, expects "native campaigns to drive 70 percent of its ad revenue this year, up from 60 percent in 2015."

"We know that our audience is engaging really deeply with our native content on our site," she was quoted as saying in a NiemanLab article.

The 2016 Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report, the largest study of its kind, based on more than 50,000 people in 26 countries, was released recently (PDF) and shows the rise of sponsored content. Here’s a chart from the Report:

The report noted that with existing models of online advertising increasingly broken, publishers have been trying alternatives such as "branded and sponsored content." Sponsored content still has numerous legal and political obstacles, with labeling "sponsored" still an area of confusion. Geographically, the US and Canada are most accepting, while Germany and Korea branded content faces tremendous consumer confusion and resistance.

The New York Times has created a 100-person native ad unit, T Brand Studio, in a huge push for native advertising revenue. The Times is openly declaring "sponsored content to be an important part of their strategy.".

The motivation for publishers in looking for a new monetization model for their digital properties is the continued weakness of online display advertising.

"Display still has a place, but we believe that the digital advertising of the future will be dominated by stories conceived by advertisers, clearly labelled so they can be distinguished from newsroom journalism, but consumed alongside that journalism on their own merits," said New York Times CEO Mark Thompson in a commentary in the above report. "This is a more compelling and creative vision of digital advertising than conventional digital display, and it requires new skills, talents, and technologies, and substantial fresh investment. Audience scale and global reach will still count, but the audience which publishers will need to find will not be super-light users, the one-and-dones who spend a few seconds on many different sites, but truly engaged readers and viewers who are prepared to devote real time to content of real quality and relevance."

Thompson is adamant that the editorial and commercial sides must work as one. "Editorial and commercial leaders need to work together on integrated strategies which combine editorial mission and standards, user experience, innovations in data, technology and creative design, and radically new approaches to monetization," he said. "Not five different strategies, not even ‘aligned’ editorial and commercial strategies, but a single shared way forward."

Sponsored content does not have to be biased content, but instead can be content that is paid for by an advertiser, because that advertiser wants to reach the type of people that read a particular content subject area.

Interestingly, a study (PDF) by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and Edelman in June 2015 uncovered that consumer perceptions of sponsored content isn't all negative.

Roughly 45% of those seeing sponsored content related to business or entertainment recognized the value-add.

The IAB study says that brand relevance, authority, and trust are the most important factors to driving consumer interest in sponsored content across all media. "Make the ads and product more on target… also give info [on] how to enhance the experience with the latest and best products," commented one consumer interviewed in the study.

The value (or lack of value) for the advertiser is that the credibility of the site hosting the sponsored content is largely transferred to the advertiser.

Sherrill Mane, formerly of the IAB and currently Head of MAdTech Strategy, and Steve Rubel, Chief Content Strategist for Edelman recommend these steps for publishers that intend to incorporated sponsored content:

• Control the experience and be prepared to walk away from advertisers who aren’t relevant/trusted
• Encourage aligned brand marketers to work together in a more authoritative manner
• Go the distance when it comes to transparency/disclosures

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Facebook Getting 68% of Social Ad Spending... and That's Just for Starters

According to research by eMarketer, Facebook will receive 67.9% of all social media advertising revenue in 2016. The study predicst that Facebook will generate $22.37 billion in net ad revenues this year, up 30% from 2015 revenue of $17.08 billion. eMarketer says that 70% of this years revenue ($12.08 billion) will come from outside of the US.

"Facebook is seeing momentum across its ad business,” said eMarketer principal analyst Debra Aho Williamson. "On the branding side, video ads are becoming more and more popular for marketers whose objective is broad awareness. And products like Dynamic Ads, which let advertisers upload their product catalog to Facebook and then deliver relevant targeted ads, are proving highly effective for marketers that want to drive lower-funnel activities, such as purchases."

eMarketer notes that this revenue growth is due entirely to ads on Facebook itself and that Facebook has not yet added monetization to Messenger, which it has been transitioning to a stand-alone app for the last couple of years. In June, Facebook announced that they mobile users would soon not be able to use Facebook Messenger without downloading the separate Messenger app.

Just last week, Facebook announced that Messenger is now being used by over 1 billion people, which matches the number of users that WhatsApp had as of February 2016, according to Statista.

"Messenger is gaining traction among marketers that want to experiment with chat bots,” said Williamson. "These are very early days for conducting business activities on Messenger, however, and it remains unclear just how important it will be as a marketing vehicle."

Facebook has also not brought serious monetization to WhatsApp, which it purchased for $22 billion in 2014, or to Instagram, which it paid $1 billion for in 2012.

It's very likely that once Facebook finds a way to monetize WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram their social revenues will significantly accelerate.

Another significant source of future ad revenue for Facebook are video ads, which Facebook may actually see as its future primary source of revenue. At Fortune‘s Most Powerful Women International Summit in London this past June, Nicola Mendelsohn, VP EMEA at Facebook, predicted that the Facebook newsfeed will be all video in 5 years. "It will definitely be mobile. It will probably be all video," Mendelsohn said. "I just think if we look, we already are seeing a year on year decline in text. We're seeing a massive increase as I've said on both pictures and video. So yeah, if I was having a bet, I would say video, video, video."

Mark Zuckerberg recently conducted the first live video conversation with ALL Facebook users. "A few weeks ago I started off trying to do an internal live Q&A and I found it was so much more fun and engaging and I could see peoples comments as I was going," Zuckerberg told millions that were live watching. "So rather than just having a few hundred or a few thousand people in a room we could do this here and we could have tens or hundreds of thousands of people participating in a town hall Q&A together all across the world."

Facebook knows that video is remarkably effective for brand marketing. Remember the Chewbacca Mom video? Well, you might not remember that was originally a Facebook Live video and benefited Kohl's immensely. Facebook and all of its social and messaging platforms are ripe for video advertising, and when Facebook goes all in with video, even TV networks won't be able to compete with both its reach and its ability to micro target audiences.

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[Ebook] 3 Best Practices for Your Mobile Marketing Strategy

Author: Ashika Balani

With rapidly evolving digital marketing and the proliferation of devices, marketers are faced with the challenge of staying ahead, or simply keeping up, when it comes to capturing and keeping their audience’s attention. How can they do it?

Take a page from Hollywood, which understands that they need to be on top of the latest trends in order to create compelling content that captivates their audience. Looking at the pictures below from popular films and television shows over the past decades, what do they all have in common?

You go it—the use of a mobile device. Over the decades, the telephone has evolved from car phone to cellphone to smartphone, and as consumers adapt to these changes, marketers should too. In fact, in the U.S. alone, 75% of citizens over the age of 13 have a smartphone, and there are more mobile devices in the world (7.8 billion) than people (7.1 billion), due largely in part to our voracious appetite for “new.” That’s a huge audience you’re missing out on if you don’t have a mobile marketing strategy in place.

Mobile phones have progressed from being used as a way to communicate with our friends and families and coordinate destinations, to a comprehensive tool for messaging, emailing, web browsing, time management, and everything in between. They’ve changed the way we live and communicate, not to mention they have reinvented our language (emojis, anyone?). Mobile devices are now the key entry point to the digital world and it’s up to marketers to understand how to stay ahead of the game to keep their buyers engaged.

As you’re building, or improving, your mobile marketing strategy, here are three things to keep in mind:

1. Think About the Big Picture

As you’re planning your mobile marketing strategy, consider how it fits in with your initiatives on other channels and how each channel will inform the other. Identifying this information will inform how you should adapt your message to each channel and individual. Mobile devices give you access to billions of users on their most personal device, and with that comes billions of different data points from their interactions. Because of this, it’s critical to integrate mobile interactions within a unified, single view that spans the channels where your audience engages.

Even mobile-only companies, like Uber, can benefit from a multi-channel strategy. For example, Uber uses app engagement to inform their email communications, sending disengaged users new offers to reactive them. For your own strategy, consider how a buyer’s actions on your website or email can be used to trigger a relevant response on their mobile device, and vice versa. After all, as modern marketers, we’re increasingly the stewards of the customer journey and therefore responsible for meeting users’ expectations of a personalized and seamless experience—wherever they are.

2. Acquire the Right Users

It’s expensive to acquire new users in a highly competitive mobile atmosphere—the number of new users has gone up more than 84% over the last year, according to research from Fiksu. So, it’s important to have a plan in place to ensure your acquisition efforts are not wasted on users who will not remain loyal or engaged.

To avoid wasting your effort, dollars, and resources, conduct research upfront to build a solid profile of the right user. Understand what makes your current users loyal and profile their unique demographics and interests. This insight allows you to more quickly and effectively target the right people—those likely engage with your app and stay loyal over time—bringing in higher levels of engagement, lower cost per install, stronger reviews and referrals, and new user growth.

Once you’ve identified the right audience, leverage your different channels to drive acquisition. You can run an install campaign to your existing marketable email database to drive awareness of your mobile app among contacts that haven’t downloaded it yet. You can even offer exclusive information or a particular motivation to download. Another option is to detect users coming to your website from mobile devices and encourage them to download your app. For example, while Bank of America’s website is mobile optimized, a CTA appears to download the app, with the incentive to be able to connect directly to a customer service rep by downloading and using it.

3. Focus on Long-Term Growth

A growth mindset goes beyond a narrow focus on acquisition. A solid mobile marketing strategy engages users from the second they’re aware of your brand to long after they’ve converted into users or customers. For example, in the case of mobile app marketing, this would entail the key mobile customer lifecycle stages of acquisition, engagement, retention, and reactivation (for those who stray).

By understanding where a user is in the mobile app lifecycle, it provides you with the opportunity to automate and trigger relevant activities to encourage lasting user engagement. You can do this by tapping into mobile signals and insights to deliver relevant responses, which include:

• Timing: Deliver messages at the moment a user interacts with your brand, whether that’s in a mobile browser or your app or on your mobile site
• Behavior: Present content and messaging based on a user’s actions or inactions on a device
• Proximity and location: Leverage technologies like GPS, iBeacon, and geo-fencing to deliver relevant messages or offers
• Stage/sequence: Track specific actions to deliver messages that are meant to accelerate conversion or drive a specific behavior

Even if mobile is not the primary way your brand interacts with your buyers, it’s a key component within a holistic customer journey, one that each of your buyers will go through. An effective mobile marketing strategy boils down to understanding how it fits into your overall marketing strategy, understanding who your target audience is, and engaging them long after acquiring them.

Ready to take your mobile marketing to the next level? Download our ebook on Best Practices for Mobile Marketing: How to Acquire, Engage, and Retain Users.

 

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[Ebook] 3 Best Practices for Your Mobile Marketing Strategy was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

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