Blockchain can and will have an effect on digital marketing in a very positive way and it’s important that you know how this might impact you and your brand.

A Reduction in Advertising Fraud

Advertising is everywhere, and we might have become immune to it to a degree, but not all advertising is genuine. Fraudulent advertising actually comes at a high cost – $16.4 billion was the estimated cost to businesses last year and it was expected to keep growing. Until Blockchain.

Because Blockchain is decentralised it can audit ads, making it easier to validate ad impressions and because it saves each event, the fraud source could be identified more easily. As well as identifying the source of any fraudulent ad which is already in place it could also help to stop fraudulent ad activity in real time. This will lead to advertising costing companies far less money.

A Security and Privacy Boost

Blockchain is one of the most secure technologies around. Every single transaction performed using it is time stamped and encrypted and is verified through the involvement of multiple users. This means that no single user can manipulate any of the data without it being approved by others within that particular block, making it as close to impossible for any individual user to use any data for nefarious purposes.

Internet users are becoming more and more concerned about their privacy. Data harvesting has been a hot topic for several months and it has led to a lot of people having a mistrust of search engines and social media sites. Blockchain gives users more control over their data. They would in fact be in total control over what they shared and who it was shared with. This is an absolutely massive plus for using Blockchain technology in that they’ve created a more or less unhackable and 100% secure way of doing things. Customers and digital marketers alike both win in this situation.

More Accurate Tracking and Better Analytics

Not having access to data you need at any given moment can be something of a pain, but Blockchain eliminates this problem. It will give you multiple data points so that you know when ads have reached your customers and it can give you the figures you need relating to trends, patterns, reach, etc. The information is stored in blocks and can be used to monitor progress on all social media platforms or through any channel of your choosing.

Tracking segmented audiences would be easier as it is possible when using Blockchain to track people using a certain page or even a certain piece of content within a page.

As mentioned in the previous paragraph, tracking becomes easier. This means that Blockchain will give you the most accurate figures you can get relating to page views, hits, likes, etc. All figures can be produced in real time which is a huge help, rather than having to wait until the end of the day or even week in some cases.

No Third Parties

There are a number of situations, particularly in digital advertising, where it is necessary to use a third party. This increases cost for your business or brand, costs you could do without. With Blockchain, due to its trustworthiness, it will be possible for companies to deal directly with each other and eliminate the need for any middlemen. The amount of money this could save is an impressive amount, as well as improving the working relationships between parties.

While it seems that using Blockchain can only be a positive thing for both consumers and marketers it is yet to catch on. Not surprisingly, because as you will know, if you save money then somebody else loses money. In this instance, companies like Google would take a significant hit to their profits and they won’t take the introduction of Blockchain lying down. It was a while before Bitcoin was accepted, due to its decentralised nature, and the thought is that Blockchain will meet some similar resistance initially.

Even though it is unknown when Blockchain will begin to be used – because with the amount of positive impact, how could it not be? – but that doesn’t mean you can’t get ready for it. Be prepared for when it happens and be ahead of the rest when it comes to a new and more effective way of business and digital marketing.

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The Rise of the Chatbots

We’re all aware of bots being used on social media, but they aren’t just about allegedly gaining a certain outcome in an election. They can be used for many purposes. The AI technology which is used to create bots is improving constantly and they are now much easier to interact with.

Millennials are the target demographic for this kind of strategy. A massive 71% of them said that they would interact with a brand chatbot. Employing this method would mean there would be less need to have a social media team in place, at least one which constantly monitors a brand’s feed and the bots would be able to field any user questions.

Tell a Story

Everybody loves a story, but you don’t need to read a book to get this kind of information. Stories are getting ever more popular for users of Snapchat, Instagram and Facebook to present small sequences of film or photographs to tell people about their day. This method is spreading throughout social media and the advertising world is beginning to catch on to this. Now is the time to make stories a part of your digital marketing strategy.

Video Star

Video content is something that catches the eyes of social media users. Many people have their smartphones set to automatically play video content and as they scroll through their feeds, a particularly great piece of video will make them stop and look. There are more than 8 billion video views on Facebook every single day and 82% of Twitter users regularly view video content. These numbers simply can’t be ignored.

Getting noticed is the key and with the right video you could be reaching millions of new customers. With most social media consumed on mobile devices you absolutely need to be using video in your marketing campaigns.

Under the Influence

Social media influencer-based marketing is now an established method used by a number of top brands, but this year the influence of influencers is set to increase. Social media influencers can be used by a brand to gain traction and even celebrities are a part of this now. This can backfire in some cases as consumers can spot a disingenuous advertising campaign – knowing full well that some celebrities will say or do anything if the paycheck is right.

Authentic influencers with a genuine belief in a brand or product are the way to go and we can expect many brands to be taking advantage of this this year. One bonus of this is that it doesn’t need to cost anywhere near the price of a traditional marketing campaign.

A Halt to Data Collection

The harvesting of data has become something of a hot issue as it has been revealed that Facebook and Google, among others, are watching our every move. It has been said that this is to aid them in tailoring advertising campaigns to our needs and showing us content that is more likely to be of interest, but many people are beginning to find it intrusive.

The EU are ready to clamp down on this practice and that could spell disaster for some marketing campaigns. Any company that wishes to use a consumer’s data must now inform them of this and gain their consent before doing so. Failure to do this could result in hefty fines. Even if your business is primarily outside of the EU, the new rules are expected to have a knock-on effect worldwide. It means that brands will no longer be able to rely on algorithms to bring their content to users and they will need to do much more of the legwork themselves.

2018 is certainly going to be a challenging year for digital marketers, but not an impossible one. By thinking about the above trends when constructing a marketing strategy, you should be able to stay ahead of the pack and your brand will have as much reach as it’s possible to get in a fairly crowded market place.

Remember to keep learning and to keep an eye on your figures when employing any new methods. Growth might not always be immediately apparent, but in the long term, following trends is the best way to move your brand forward.

The post The 5 Digital Marketing Trends You Need to Be Aware of in 2018 first appeared on MediaHype.

Digital marketing can be presented through so many channels and you need to make sure you’ve got all your bases covered, whether you are focusing on SEO to help generate leads and sales or if you are more reliant on organic searches. The content and methods you use need to be consistent right across the board, and if you think about the following points you’ll be on the right track.

Set Your Goals

You should have a clear idea of what you hope to achieve. Whether it’s an increase in customer numbers and sales, to be more successful than a competitor or to reach a wider online audience you need to have a clear plan. With such plans in place, you’ll be working your way towards your end goal in a proactive way.

Be realistic with any increases you expect to see. Growth will occur more slowly in the first quarter than the fourth and your projected figures should reflect this. Success isn’t always easy and patience will be required, in addition to meticulous planning.

Brand Identity

Think of a famous brand. Chances are you can immediately say what colours they use in their campaigns, what their logo looks like and even what font they use in all of their campaigns. This is a sign of true success. It’s not just about creating a great marketing campaign, although that is very important, but it’s about a brand identity.

You want people to instantly recognise your name and your brand and that can be done, or at least helped along the way, by a consistent use of the same style. Make sure your logo is always present and make sure your use of colours and fonts are always the same. That way you have a greater chance of being noticed.

Your Voice

Content isn’t just there to pad out a website – it’s incredibly important to engage with your audience. That’s why more careful consideration need to be place on it. What kind of voice do you wish to have? It should be friendly and informative, never patronising or overly wordy and above all, interesting.

It might take a while to master this, but once you do you need to again ensure consistency. Every platform you use for digital marketing should present your content with exactly the same voice.
You don’t need to use identical content on every platform and you don’t even need to employ the same person to write it all for you. What you need is a style guide which any writer can follow in order to produce consistent content for every platform you use.

Learn from Your Audience

Customers are important – without them you’re nothing. Make sure you pay attention to them. If they give you feedback about any aspect of your marketing, make sure you take it on board. Look at analytics to see which aspects of a campaign are having the biggest positive effect and make sure you target people at the right time of day. Depending on where in the world your customer base is, it could pay to schedule posts for different times of the day or night.

Tick All the Boxes

You need to make sure you always follow the basics with your content too. If you’re using keywords, make sure they are evenly distributed throughout your content and never seeming forced or spammy. Make sure you use images and give them appropriate tags. Videos and links to other pages are also helpful.

The length of content is something of a bone of contention and it should never be too long or too short, but what is too long or too short? 500 to 1,000 words is considered the ideal length which customers will engage with. Make sure to break the content up with headings or lists – nobody wants to read a 1,000-word paragraph on their smartphone.

Observe and Learn

When you launch a new campaign you need to make sure it’s a success. Keeping a constant eye on your numbers will help you to tweak your digital marketing methods if necessary. You’ll find out which channels work better than others and where you should be concentrating the most effort.

Every piece of information or feedback you receive about your campaign is helpful and can be used to your advantage. Remember that digital marketing is an ongoing process – it’s not just about saying ‘go’ on day one and sitting back and reaping the rewards.

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While AI has been successfully used for many years in performing basic tasks, recent advancements have made it possible for us to be more reliant on this technology for business purposes. There are a number of significant advantages to using AI in your business.

Cost

Certainly, the initial set up cost when using AI might seem like a significant outlay but focus on the long-term plan. Ultimately you will have a system that can make decisions or predictions for you in a fraction of the time and the reduction in man hours spent on decision making will save you a lot of money.

AI is designed for predicting purposes and if you use it for this it will prove beneficial and means that you can put your efforts into other aspects of running your business while this pretty much takes care of itself.

The amount of time and money you save will far outweigh the set-up costs and it will leave you wondering why you didn’t jump onboard with AI much sooner.

Data Analysis

AI can be used to analyse and interpret data. It will do this in a logical way and can possibly notice things that the human eye does not. It is an incredibly useful tool for helping you to see which parts of a strategy are successful or not so successful. Again, the analysis can be done in a fraction of the time and you can implement changes sooner as a result.

It can perform effective analysis quickly and will check its findings to make sure they are correct. The work that AI can perform, analytics wise, will save you money and time once again.

Accuracy

The best thing about AI is it makes decisions purely based on statistics and logics. Human decision making can be flawed due to personal opinions or beliefs influencing them. This is never the case with AI and yet again, it will make decisions in a much smaller amount of time than it would take at a meeting.

AI will make decisions that are sometimes perhaps too complex for the human mind, based on relevant and up-to-date statistics. It will run calculations multiple times to ensure accuracy every single time. It continues to learn and adapt and will always be aware of any changes to the market.

Effectiveness

Removing the human error aspect from any situation will obviously be a big help and AI will help you remain streets head of competitors who aren’t using it. Imagine making a decision that turned out to be miscalculated and not noticed for days? The damage could be significant, both financially and in terms of your brand or business’ reputation. With AI it’s not an issue. The decision will be analysed several times to determine it is correct and it will statistically always provide you with the best decision. It’s not infallible, but it’s pretty close.

Choosing an AI System

There are a number of systems to choose from and you may find that the most expensive, all singing all dancing versions are beyond what you actually need. That’s not to suggest that there’s any form of bargain basement AI – it’s just that some offer far more advanced capabilities than others.

You can try before you buy with most systems which will give you the chance to see how it operates. There is a good chance that you will find this so enticing that you will make the switch to AI immediately and that’s great, it will help you grow your business further.

When using AI, it is always the human who has the ultimate power. If your AI system makes a decision you don’t agree with, you can overrule it. AI will make a decision which is statistically best, but that doesn’t mean that it is always the absolute correct way to go. As with most things, there is a learning curve with AI, but once you get to grips with it you’ll know it was the best decision you ever made for your business.

Some people are sceptical to the use of AI and worry that the machines will take over. For now, man is very much in control and there is no sign that we will become slaves of robots are anything quite as far-fetched as that.

Other people worry about the loss of jobs that could result from the use of AI. Sadly, for some this is a very real prospect, but as a business owner you can see this as a cost-cutting exercise. While it would be nice if everyone had a job, there is no gain for you in employing people you simply don’t need.

The post How Using AI in Business Could Benefit You first appeared on MediaHype.

Here, you will find a selection of the best and infallible marketing strategies that will take your business to the next level. Furthermore, we not only point out great marketing strategies as well as how and when to apply them since marketing is all about implementation – it needs to be done at the right time, the right way and with the right people.

1. Location-specific Marketing

Advancements in mobile technology and the internet have played a huge role in forging what is referred to as ‘on-the-go consumerism.’ The electronic evolution has been slowly taking shape in the past decade and now it is mature enough to incorporate a great deal of opportunities in marketing. Mobile-based technologies such as GPS can be utilized to effectively market products and services to appropriate audiences based on their location and activities. Mobile technology is widespread which makes it the most suitable avenue for delivering marketing content and to top it all off, it can be done in a matter of seconds.

2. Diversifying Outreach Platforms

This point follows the location-specific marketing strategy because as we mentioned it makes use of the most prevalent outreach platform which is mobile technology – and this is where some businesses tend to go wrong. It is undeniable that the world has become so deeply entrenched in the social space, but when we speak digital it does not mean that all the priority should be given to the internet and social media. As unlikely as it may seem, some audiences might not have access to some of these platforms. To effectively market or publicize your product you have to try different way which may involve such marketing methods as Radio and TV.

3. Marketing Automation with Machine Learning

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are already being applied in more often in email marketing automation and it has been working great so far. However, with current advancements, there are very many opportunities for the automation of ad-targeting using machine learning in the same way it is done for web personalization.

4. Customer Engagement in Content Marketing

The idea here is to treat content as more a strategic resource rather than a disposable tool. To achieve this, the development of a customer engagement strategy using various media allows for the fine-tuning of marketing content using such techniques as content marketing and personas. Customer-centric analysis has evolved and it now plays a key role in effective marketing of products and services.

5. Tapping into the Power of Social Media

Social media platforms have undergone a great deal of changes and it keeps getting better. It is therefore up to digital marketer to fully maximize and tap into the power of social media. Even though is important to stay actively present in the older social media sites such as Twitter and Facebook, it is important to give a lot of attention to new social media sites like Instagram and Twitter among others. Social media is vital to the establishment of sustainable relationship between a business and its clients hence a strong presence in whichever platforms they love most is a great a way to get started.

6. Make Marketing Interactive

There is nothing wrong with the old method of conveying digital marketing information – well, except for the fact that they are old. It is therefore upon digital marketers to take advantage of new technologies that allow them to focus on some interactive methods of marketing on platforms such as YouTube and Vimeo. Even social media sites like Facebook have introduced similar features that make interactive content more accessible to audiences from all over the world. This way, you can deliver powerful content that will reach out to all the senses of your audience.

7. Maximizing on Backlinks

Search Engine Optimization is another key aspect of digital marketing that should not be taken for granted and as far as SEO is concerned, backlinks are still very important. However, we are not just talking about backlinks, they have to be natural but at the same time be of high quality, to say the least. This may involve approaching great reputable websites to publish reviews which is a truly authentic way of effortlessly and quickly grabbing high quality backlinks.

8. Remarketing (Ad Retarget)

This is one of the oldest tricks in the books it still deserves some cheers in 2017. Every adept marketer knows that getting a user to visit your website if they showed interest in the first should not be too difficult. The trick here is to tune the ads well enough to get the customer to return – for instance, by offering discounts for return visits and purchases.

9. Social Media Automation

As mentioned earlier, being active in social media is very important and this strategy ensures that you can do so effortlessly. Designating manual posting and monitoring to automated tools gives marketers more time and room to focus on creating actual content for the target audiences. Also, with the growing number of social media users from all corners of the world, keeping up might be cumbersome.

10. Utilize Google Services

Google evolves constantly and at the moment it is impossible to dismiss the importance of how your company ranks in terms of searches – this may apply to other search engines as well. Some of the helpful changes that Google has introduced include rich snippets that digital marketers can include alongside Google search results.

The post Top 10 Digital Marketing Strategies first appeared on MediaHype.