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Learn From Gaming Companies How To Become A World-Class Marketer?.

Want to Be a World-Class Marketer? Learn from Gaming Companies.

By Aaron Taube

When people consider the world’s most successful online marketers, they often think of companies like Netflix, Amazon—eCommerce giants who used affordable pricing and smart marketing tactics to build themselves into globally famous brands.

But while what these companies have done is certainly very impressive, those looking for a glimpse into the future of online advertising would do well to take a look at an under-the-radar group: mobile game developers.

What are the game developers doing right?

While these firms might not yet be household names capable of stealing entire days from people as they binge-watch House of Cards or Transparent, companies like King Digital (“Candy Crush”) and Supercell (“Clash of Clans”) are some of the smartest out there when it comes to using their data to get the absolute most from their marketing dollars.

In a sense, these companies need to be nearly perfect at executing their mobile marketing strategy, just to survive. After all, they don’t have a chance to put their products in physical stores for people to see themselves, and some customers won’t take the time to compare product reviews before downloading a game.

As a result, one of the only ways to spread the word about their games—and to get a coveted high-profile spot in the Apple or Google Play store—is through mobile app install ads. And given that these companies often have limited marketing budgets to start, the only way to succeed is by being extraordinarily efficient.

To do this, game developers rely heavily on one metric that many other marketers have yet to fully exploit: user lifetime value, or LTV.

What’s LTV?

For those unfamiliar, LTV is the amount of money a company can expect to make from roping in a single customer. For instance, I downloaded Candy Crush in late 2013, and I have since paid King Digital $22.81 for extra lives and other power-ups while killing time on my subway commute. Since Candy Crush does not make money from running ads, that $22.81, plus whatever money I spend on in-app purchases in the future, is my LTV for King.

While these in-app purchases tally up to more money than I frankly would have liked to admit publicly, I’m probably not as valuable to King as someone who is independently wealthy and can afford to sit around playing Candy Crush and buying extra lives all day long.

As King and other mobile gaming companies have figured out, it’s smartest for them to use data to predict which kinds of people will be most likely to be big spenders over the long run (i.e., men aged 18-35 with household incomes over $100,000″ or “married women who live in Oregon” etc.) and allocate greater portions of their marketing budgets to getting those people to download their apps.

Right now, other performance marketers aren’t thinking as much about LTV as developers, but they will likely need to start in the near future.

Marketing short-sightedness

Other eCommerce companies are mostly thinking about the money they earn from the initial purchase users make after they see an ad. This conversion-focused approach is flawed, though, because just as not all app downloaders are created equal, the same is true for eCommerce customers.

For instance, while two people might purchase a subscription to Amazon Prime for the same price, their lifetime values will be different if one of the customers is a shopaholic and the other plans only to pay a flat fee for the sole purpose of being able to watch original programming. As such, the company should be willing to spend top dollar to make sure the shopaholic’s future purchases are made via Amazon rather than one of its competitors.

While eCommerce companies might be able to skate by—for now—focused solely on how much they make from a single conversion, they will soon be forced to follow the gaming companies’ lead and heed the laws of lifetime value.

The future is closer than you think

With the major channels for customer acquisition consolidating around big, auction-based platforms like Facebook, Google, and YouTube, competition for ad impressions will only get more fierce, driving prices higher.

In the near future, marketers who only factor the initial sale into their calculations will be priced out by companies willing to pay higher prices because they understand that they’re investing in far more than a single purchase. And once those companies get pushed out of the big auction platforms, it will be very difficult for them to build the sort of scale necessary to be successful.

While “sophistication” is not the first word one thinks of when “Angry Birds” and its ilk come to mind, there is simply no denying that mobile gamers are well advanced in new customer acquisition.

Performance marketers of all stripes hoping to remain in business over the coming years will do well to study their tactics, or face the consequences. Unlike in video games, there are no extra lives in business.

http://www.adknowledge.com/blog/want-to-be-a-world-class-marketer-learn-from-gaming-companies/?src=gplusR1

Website: A base step for business growth

As the business enters the market, the first step is to let the market know about its existence. The first step to achieve the same is designing a website. A website is a tool to introduce the company, their people, their products, their ideology, their launches and promotional activities. It speaks about everything about the business that the customer may be interested in knowing. The better the presentation of the website, the more informative and user friendly it will be and the chances of creating its space in the digital world would become higher.

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www.sanicondigital.in

How Eric Schmidt Plans to Save the World

Five years ago, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt started a venture capital fund called Innovation Endeavors, with the goal of providing early-stage capital to startups innovating in old industries. 

It made early investments in Uber, the car share company, now one of the most highly priced startups in the world, and Addepar, which uses big data to analyze portfolio risk, started by Palantir executives.

Now the fund, which has just one limited partner in Schmidt, has shifted gears, venturing into environmental investments. On Monday the fund announced it is leading a $9 million round in a company called CropX, founded in 2013 by Isaac Bentwich. The company, which started out in New Zealand and now has headquarters in Silcon Valley and Tel Aviv, uses big data to help farmers save up to 25 percent of water used to grow crops.

“We did not have a focus on sustainable agriculture to begin with,” says Dror Berman, Innovation Endeavors’ managing partner. “Our mission has been to enable the next generation of companies.”

A New Mission

It’s one of the first investments as part of Innovation’s involvement with something called Farm 2050, a cross-industry collaboration with companies ranging from fertilizer producer Dupont, to search engine giant Google, to supply chain management software company Flextronics. The partnership has the goal of increasing farm production by 70 percent by 2050, to meet the global demand for food from a human population that is expected to reach 11 billion by that time. The partnership was launched at the end of 2014.

As the drought in California shows, it’s not a trivial concern, especially as food and water are inextricably linked. By some estimates, California’s agriculture industryuses 80 percent of the state's water. Nationally, the statistics are less pretty. The U.S.'s 140,000 farms use upwards of 90 percent of the nation’s water, and more than 90 percent of those farms don’t use any form of advanced water management tools, according to a recent study by the Department of Agriculture.

So there's clearly a need for new firms innovating in agriculture technology, as well as an opportunity for businesses. In the past year, Innovation has received requests for funding from 400 agriculture technology startups, Berman says. And in March of 2014, it participated in a $10 million investment in Blue River Technology, which uses data science, the cloud and robotics to help farmers manage nutrient delivery on a per plant basis.

For its part, CropX, is all about better irrigation. It uses a combination of sensors placed in the ground, cloud based software and an application that can be downloaded to any mobile device, to analyze irrigation data and produce a detailed map that allows farmers to control how much they're watering in a particular field, based on the plants' needs.

“We save water and boost crop yields,” says Bentwich, who adds it takes just three sensors to manage 125 acres of farmland. 

CropX is testing its products and services in an advanced beta in more than a dozen farms in Colorado, Kansas, and Missouri. It plans to roll out services to as many as 1,000 farms in 2016, using three tiers of service for which it will charge between $4 and $18 an acre, with progressively more sophisticated irrigation data and capabilities. Savings to farmers, Benwtich says, can be from $12 to $100 an acre. Sensors are provided as part of the package, and there's no need for expensive equipement upgrades, a critical factor considering the extreme cost sensitivity of farmers.

Growth Areas

While technology like CropX’s is a start, environmental business experts say the goal shouldn’t only be to increase production. Another important area of focus should be food production waste. Nearly one third of food produced today is wasted or winds up in landfills, by some estimates.

“If you’re throwing out [one third] of food, you’re also throwing out 1/3 water,” says Andrew Winston, an environmental strategist and founder of Winston Eco-strategies, in Greenwich, Connecticut.

And food producers could increase food supplies by 50 percent by getting rid of waste, adds Brad George, a professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College who specializes in sustainability.

Still for Berman, Farm 2050, and Innovation Endeavors, investments in companies like CropX are just the beginning. Berman says he envisions applying IT and data analsysis to agriculture, ultimately, the way it’s being applied in enterprise today.

And the data that CropX will collect on farmers’ fields to help them water more intelligently should also help the next generation of agriculture technology build even better software platforms and services for agriculture.

“Over the next decade or so, the first successful digital agriculture companies will pave the way for others, which in turn will be able to go to market more quickly with more data,” Berman says, adding that these companies should also be critical in managing food production by 2050.

Credits:

http://www.inc.com/jeremy-quittner/farm-2050-cropx-aim-to-make-digital-technology-for-farms-ubiquitous.html

SMO to pass information on promotions.....

In today's scenario users drift is moving from computer screens to mobiles and tablets and the scope of social media in marketing has increased manifold. Social media has become a crucial mode of marketing to let the customers approach the business by letting them know what the business is offering. The social media plays a vital role in letting the market know about the promotional activities launched by the company.

For More Details:
www.sanicondigital.in

Business Challenges...

This is how I overcame my biggest business challenge. The content is inspired by the Office Depot Business Solutions Center as part of a sponsored post for Socialstars #GearLove

Throughout the last decade, I have started a lot of businesses. Some of them worked for a certain amount of time, earning as much as $50,000 a month. Others just flopped as soon as they were started. Some put me into debt. Others carried no risk but wasted time.

The biggest challenge I had when running a business was trying to figure out how to move from offline marketing to online marketing.

I was born in 1984. I’m at the age where in school, brick and mortar business practices were taught, yet our whole economy was moving digital.

I had the skills of how to sell in person. I could market something through traditional means of marketing. I could write collateral and make it work. But figuring out how to maximize off of the digital market was one of the hardest challenges I encountered.

There was just so much to learn and understand. I saw some people get millions of views on their website. But each time I tried to get something up and running, I just couldn’t figure out how to get it to work online.

So even with the businesses that I had that were based on the Internet, I did most of my marketing and sales through offline channels, such as the phone and by mail.

To overcome this, I realized I needed to take a step back.

I decided to take a break from doing business. Instead, I indulged myself into studying resource after resource of how to maximize my efforts online. Two great sources I went to in that frame of time was a site made by my friend Neil Patel from high school, Quicksprout, and Copyblogger, a site that teaches people how to write sales copy.

For a whole year, I studied. Then in 2011, I tried to take what I learned and put it up online. After writing about three posts, I saw that no one was reading what I wrote nor could discover it. I recognized that I failed miserably at it. So I gave up and took another break.

Then in 2013, I discovered James Altucher, a bestselling author who ran hedge funds and created various multi million dollar businesses. I was at a point where I was no longer sure of what I wanted to do, so I got inspired by his content then just tried writing online on the same platform he wrote on.

Somehow, my content this time around caught on.

Within 6 months of writing, I had picked up 10,000 followers and 2 million views on my content, mostly on a site called Quora. I decided that it was time to restart a business, since I figured out how to attain the visibility. I set up my blog and laid out the blueprints of what kind of business I wanted to do and rode the wave of the momentum.

Within another year, I picked up a total of 10 million views on my content, had it featured in publications such as Inc. Magazine, Huffington Post, La Times, BBC, and so forth. On Twitter, I went from 550 followers to 30,000 in eight months. I leveraged my whole social media network to help upgrade my personal network, connect with everyone I thought I needed to know and reestablished a successful business out of it all.

The costs weren’t even as abhorrent as many people may have thought it would be.

Emery Skolfield, VP of Digital Strategy & Marketing for Office Depot & OfficeMax says that the biggest mistakes that he sees small businesses make when it comes to their digital marketing is inactivity.

Emery Skolfield says, ”Many small businesses, unfortunately, feel they can’t get involved in digital marketing — that it’s something only big companies do. The reality is you don’t need a million dollars to run a social media marketing campaign or to send regular emails to your customers.”

I was always under the impression that I’d need millions of dollars to gain exposure on my own.

I thought that the guides provided online that help you gain visibility were just theory and not something that would work in practice. Yet, when I tried to practice what was preached, on the proper platforms, I achieved more success than I could ever imagine.

My total investment when setting up my blog was about $700. I asked for a lot of custom work that really wasn’t that necessary and could have got away with creating it for a lot less. I spent around $150 a month on the maintenance of my site through a virtual assistant. Plus, maybe a few hundred dollars on ads here and there. Compared to what was made, that was a drop in the bucket. Yet, even with these minimal costs, most of my visibility and growth was organic. All I really needed was time, a computer and a phone to post the content.

Nowadays, I haven’t spent much more as far as costs go. Just the cost of a GoPro camera and a few accessories (around $600) as I start to move my content into the video sphere.

Since I have been involved with so many businesses in the past, I realized something else that stuck out to me.

I invested most of my time into the company’s brands that I worked with. Yet, even though I made them recognizable brands in the past, that they were not around today. On my resume with either current or potential clients, they meant nothing.

So I decided to shift my way of building a business.

Back in 2006 when I used to do sales, I was taught to follow a specific method. It was called the ten steps of a sale. So I looked back on the ten steps of a sale and focused on the first three:

1. Meet and greet.
2. Sell yourself.
3. Sell your company.

Something about that finally clicked. I always led with the company first. But then I thought about how much more trust I would have with my clients if they believed in me first. So I realized what I needed to do was first lead with myself.

So instead of following traditional means of branding underneath a company, I focused on personal branding and built my brand underneath my name instead. I knew for certain, that no matter what happens, as long as I’m alive, I will still be here to maintain my personal name. So instead of building my content on behalf of a company that may or may not be here tomorrow, I could build my content underneath my name instead.

Then when I am able to build trust and rapport with my audience, they will be more than happy to buy from the company that I represent.

So I guess my biggest obstacle was really two fold.

1. How to get visibility and traction online.
2. How to build credibility underneath my personal brand as opposed to a company brand.

For other tips on how to overcome your business challenges or get insights through a wealth of information on many topics relevant to your business, visit Office Depot Business Solutions Center and check out the expertise provided in the articles on their site.

What challenges and obstacles did you face when you started your business and how did you overcome them?

For More Detail:

http://leonardkim.com/business-challenges-the-biggest-one-i-faced-and-how-i-overcame-it/

Bonding between marketer and business: a great success mantra

A business owner and the promoter or the marketer are usually two different entities who work for the same goal - growth and success of the business. It is very important for the business that they both have a great bonding and clear understanding between them for promoting the business in the right direction for great success and continuous growth.

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5 Boring Companies With a Fascinating Social Strategy...

While social media is becoming a great channel for both B2C and B2B companies, in most case we associate great social media campaigns with "interesting" companies and "cool" industries.

Fast food, apparel, entertainment, and even software companies are using social media in creative and interesting ways. But what about companies that operate in seemingly boring industries? Can social media be an effective marketing channel for those companies?

Some "boring" companies have proven that even the boring can become fascinating when smart people are at the helm. Here are five examples of how "boring" companies take full advantage of social media with great social strategy.

H&R Block

Is there anything more boring than taxes?

Tax giant H&R Block has a strong social presence on multiple social networks, but the most impressive one is their work on Facebook. With almost 380,000 fans, the company sees an average of over 500 engagements per post with a 28.3 percent of fans engaged

Comparing H&R Block Facebook activity to that of their two biggest competitors – TurboTax (Intuit) and TaxACT – H&R Block leads on every single category (with the exception of fans).

Diving deeper into the data we find that H&R Block connects daily events that on the surface should have nothing to do with taxes, with their brand experience and message. And the result is impressive.

For example, for Valentine's Day, the company created an IRS (Internal Romance Services) form to guide people through the process of buying a Valentine's Day present.

The post generated more than 3,000 likes and almost 5,000 total engagements.

Maersk Line

Maersk Line's social strategy has been covered and congratulated pretty frequently in the last year or so, but it's still worth mentioning. After all, this is a container shipping company that embraced social media in ways that even sophisticated social companies should envy.

It starts with a website dedicated to social media, continues with their presence across 10 (!) different social networks, and is rounded out with their impressive engagement numbers.

More than anything, their consistency is impressive. In the last two weeks, they have published branded posts on every one of their active social networks at least once a day. In addition, they have completely adopted the visual content approach and are seeing great engagement because of their stunning photography.

General Electric

You could argue that GE isn't a boring company, but I include it here because of its product diversity. Trying to create a consistent and intelligent social presence for such a diverse company is no small feat.

Just look at their Products page. The same company manufactures drilling motors and dishwashers. Even with such a wide diversity of products, the company has an impressive and cohesive social presence across more than eight social networks.

GE creates an experience and connect emotionally to their unique audience on each of the different networks. They highlight the "cool" factor in their products and the stories that they are featured in.

Their Tumblr page on Badass Machines is one of the coolest I've seen. I never imagined I could stare at machine parts for so long.

CBRE

As a commercial real estate services and investment company, CBRE is a B2B company that could have decided to completely ignore social media. They have been successful before social media and could have continued their market dominance without it.

CBRE decided to adopt social media as a way to stay ahead of the competition. Of all the social networks that would make sense for a B2B company, they've seen great success on Instagram.

What makes them unique? In the words of their CMO, Paul Suchman:

Instagram presents an opportunity for CBRE to demonstrate the elasticity of our brand. Real estate plays such a huge part in all of our lives, both professionally and personally. Instagram enables us to transcend the traditional B2B conversation and become meaningful in the consumer space.

Neenah Paper

My last example is of a smaller company, and possibly the most "boring" of them all – a paper company. Neenah Paper has more than 23,000 followers on Twitter, but theytweet frequently and they have realized the power of images on social media.

What makes Neenah Paper unique is the fact that their retweet to original tweet ratio is one of the highest I've seen. In the last 10 days they have tweeted a total of 57 times, from which they have retweeted 52 times. That's a 91 percent of their total sent tweets.

In addition, almost half of their Tweets are photos with the vast majority of those are photos of their product being used by customers.

Credits:

http://searchenginewatch.com/sew/how-to/2352618/5-boring-companies-with-a-fascinating-social-strategy

Happy Eid To All Of You.....

Review of marketing tools, a requisite for prompt changes.

Once the strategies are planned and executed, there come the role of the reports. The reports play a crucial role in growth of the business. They provide the actual face of the business in comparison to the planned strategies and gives a direction to make changes in the strategies and other fields to meet the current demands of the market.

For More Details:

www.sanicondigital.in

The Amazing Power of Humor in Social Media Marketing

Have you heard this one?

"I have to breakup with you. We've connected on so many platforms—Facebook and Twitter—but I just don't feel Linkedin." - Derek Kessinger 

The funny bone can be a fickle thing. Writing jokes is hard work. But if you have a gift for humor, your marketing campaigns will be better. Why? “Laughter is a universal language and one of our first communication methods,” writes Angie Pascale of ClickZ. “Before we had spoken or written language, humans used laughter to express our enjoyment or accession with a certain situation.”

I’m sure you’ve noticed that funny memes and witty hashtags are popular. Most viral content is funny.There is even study to prove it. Its results state that “humor was employed at near unanimous levels for all viral advertisements. Consequently, this study identified humor as the universal appeal for making content viral.”

So, brand benefit one: Funny content gets shared more on social media. But what else does humor get you as social media marketer?

Joke from Hootsuite post:

An elderly grandma is on her death bed. She leans over to her granddaughter, knowing that death must be close, and says, “I want to leave you my farm. That includes the villa, the tractor and other equipment, the farmhouse and $22,398,750.78 in cash.”

The granddaughter, about to become rich, says, “Oh Grandma you are so generous. I didn’t even know you had a farm. Where is it?” With her last breath, she whispered, “Facebook.” 

Jokes trigger positive emotional and psychological responses

One of the most effective ways to market is to evoke emotion.

People feel good when they are laughing. It releases endorphins, relaxes the body, boosts the immune system and helps to relieve stress. If you want your customers to associate good feelings with your brand, make ‘em laugh.

“Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg held a press conference to announce that if you post one more picture of your cat sleeping, they’re going to delete your account.” -Jimmy Kimmel

Make your brand memorable with humor

According to Pascale, research shows that just 42% of positive experiences are forgotten, while 60% of negative experiences fade from memory.

Think about what TV ads you remember. You don’t remember stuff that is dull, certainly. The funny ones, right? Little kid Darth Vader? The one where the wind is personified and everyone hates him?  

“Facebook has been redesigned and it now contains a real-time news ticker. Every update says, ‘Breaking news: You’re screwing around at work.'” -Conan O’Brien

Laugher brings people together

“Laughter is social,” writes Pascale. People laugh 30 times more when they are with other people than when alone, according to Professor Robert R. Provine of the University of Maryland Baltimore County.

“Laughter eases tension and forms a sense of unity through groups,” writes Pascale. “Get your Facebook fans or Twitter followers laughing, and you'll be helping to establish a sense of community and building connections with your brand and amongst your fans and followers.”

“Facebook: What’s on your mind? ... Twitter: What’s happening? … Myspace: Where did everybody go?” – Will Ferrell

What people find funny provides audience insights

What is humor exactly? Why are some things funny? Peter McGraw, director of the Humor Research Lab and author of the Humor Code, says that "funny" is the intersection of benign and violation.

If something is benign, it's not going to be funny. Washing the dishes. Setting your alarm clock. Rabbits. Boring and benign.

If something is a violation, it's also not going to be funny. An insult. A scary point of view on the world.

“But that sweet spot between everyday and offensive, that's where funny happens,” writes Pascale. Setting your alarm clock for insults. Rabbits with a scary point of view on the world. Funny?

Figuring out that sweet spot will tell you a lot about the values and desires of your audience.

“Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg held a press conference to announce that if you post one more picture of your cat sleeping, they’re going to delete your account.” -Jimmy Kimmel

Credits:

http://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/sarah-snow/2015-07-02/be-funny-amazing-power-humor-social-media-marketing