by Mattr | Jan 29, 2015 | news
(Originally published in Entrepreneur.com) Recently, I went car shopping with my wife. We were casually browsing when a salesperson approached us. After listening to his pitch, he turned to me and — in front of my wife — said, “Most of the ladies won’t care about looking under the hood, so I won’t bother giving her the marketing spiel on the performance.” His comment surprised me. Yet this kind of stereotyping happens all the time in marketing. Just look at the gender bias in advertisements: Whether it’s a reference to sports, clothes or professions, companies try to typecast men and women in ads. But doing this can be detrimental to marketing efforts. In fact, stereotypes can inadvertently prompt a company to ignore important customer segments — consumers who could be top buyers. But when marketers explore other audiences, they may find an upside in places not expected. Look at Coca-Cola’s 2014 Super Bowl commercial. It depicted a wide range of people, from same-sex parents to hijab-wearing women, as red-blooded Americans. As a result, Coca-Cola may have connected with several new markets. Stop stereotyping your customers: Instead, tap these ignored markets to reach people who may have wanted your product all along. When you open things up to more genders, ages and cultures, you can find hungry new customers. Here are just a couple examples of underserved audiences: The lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community is traditionally overlooked and incorrectly marketed to. Tiffany & Co., however, recently targeted the LGBT community with its first ad featuring same-sex couples. In an effort to combat pigeonholed gender marketing, the conservative jewelry company celebrated its same-sex customers. Leaving out the powerful sector of elderly Americans...
by Mattr | Jan 21, 2015 | news
(Originally posted in Entrepreneur.com) Disney knows what its customers love and that’s just what it gives them. The entertainment media giant understands that a well-proportioned content strategy is crucial to effective marketing. The media company satisfies its audience by posting behind-the-scenes movie footage and crafting engaging blog content that hooks readers. This works because Disney knows how to balance two important kinds of content: traditional and lifestyle content. A call to action typically asks consumers to visit a store or fill out a contact form. But lifestyle content engages customers with information that adds value without a direct link to buy. You’d be thrilled to read an email from your best friend, right? Treat customers like friends by developing relationships built on shared values and interests, rather than always asking them to do something for you. With the right traditional-to-lifestyle content ratio in place, you can expand your company’s reach, increase click-through rates on call-to-action posts and improve your organization’s overall brand’s success. The Future of Marketing is Here – Custom Content Did you know that 78 percent of chief marketing officers surveyed a few years back considered custom content the future of marketing? With the lifestyle method of content marketing gaining momentum, you need to incorporate it into your promotion strategy. For example, Puma has shifted its content focus from functionality of soccer shoes to lifestyle qualities such as self-expression and leisure. Puma lets its audience experience the branded lifestyle. My company was intrigued by the move toward lifestyle marketing and wanted to identify the proportion of traditional content to lifestyle content. So my organization aggregated a year’s worth of Facebook posts from Adidas and Nike to compare how each used lifestyle content...
by Mattr | Jan 19, 2015 | news
Is Your Brand Really Getting Greener? Monitoring the effects of a campaign on your brand has never been very easy, particularly if it’s a specialized campaign, like trying to increase your brand’s reputation for environmental friendliness. To address this need, we’ve added two exciting features to the Overview section of an influencer report. The ‘Time Machine’ allows you to go back to the baseline of when a report was created or any range of days in-between. Now you can see the percent of environmentally-friendly people responding to your messaging as a simple ‘Before/After’ metric, or monitor the changes in real-time as you launch new content. Use Time Machine to track the report metrics most important to your campaign, everything from influencer interests to audience personas. Further, we all want to see social metrics tied to our campaigns. Are specific brand handles gaining or losing followers? Are our engagement numbers increasing or decreasing? Each of these metrics is now available to you in near real-time, as well as time ranges from creation to current. Want to see for yourself? Check it out now; it’s live on your reports! Select any of your current reports, including your Favorites, and go to the Overview screen. See the video links below for a more in depth description on how the new features work. Time Machine Brand Tracker We hope you find great value in these two features and continue to send excellent feature requests and feedback our...
by Mattr | Jan 6, 2015 | news
2014 has come and gone, and while the holidays provided a nice time for reflecting on all that happened during the past year, they also gave us the opportunity to look ahead to 2015. Another year of hopes and possibilities. Another year of advancements in digital and social media. What will the new year bring? What’s the next Selfie or the next Ello? How will Facebook change its platform next – and how many times in the next 12 months? Over the past few weeks, we’ve been thinking about potential trends and advancements our industry will see in 2015 based on things we’ve already seen and what we’re hearing from customers. Here’s what we think will happen in 2015: Traditional researchers will begin to incorporate social media data into their current research methods. We’re already seeing this to a degree, but we think we’ll see the practice increase significantly in 2015. There are vast amounts of information readily accessible to researchers online and as it continues to grow at a rapid pace, more and more will realize the power of using it. But we’re not only talking about secondary research. Brands and Marketing organizations need to connect with customers in a seamless, ongoing, meaningful and personal way. Using social media for conducting primary research can be an efficient and less costly way to handle gathering primary data compared to traditional formats like focus groups. Some social media analytics companies are already strengthening relationships with researchers, doing things like giving them guidance on how they can use social media data. Marketers will expand the uses of influencer marketing beyond pushing promotions...
