Why Growth Channel AI is a Game-Changer for Meta Ads

Growth Channel AI has always been focused on enabling advertisers to reach niche audiences at scale through its omni-channel advertising platform. Now, with the introduction of the Meta Ads Beta Program, this capability is amplified. By integrating Meta Ads into the Growth Channel ecosystem, advertisers can now access a powerful new channel that offers full attribution for their campaigns.

What makes Growth Channel AI a game-changer for Meta Ads is its built-in 275+ integrations, micro-targeted audiences, advanced reporting, and easy-to-use dashboard. These features ensure that advertisers can achieve their core KPIs beyond just awareness campaigns, driving real, measurable results.

Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up Meta Ads with Growth Channel

Setting up Meta Ads within the Growth Channel platform is straightforward and intuitive. Here's a step-by-step guide to get you started:

Step 1: Create Pixels - Install remarketing and conversion pixels on your website to track relevant user actions. If you already have these set up for other programmatic ad campaigns, no further action is required.

Step 2: Define Audience Targeting - Use pre-set templates or layer multiple tactics to define your audience. All audience types are available, including Account-Based Marketing and Geofencing.

Step 3: Upload Creative - Use Meta's single video/image for your ads. Currently, only this type is supported in the Meta Ads Beta Program.

Step 4: Create a Campaign - Select 'Meta' as the campaign channel and link your audience. Choose your objective, set the goals with flight dates and budget, customize placements, and you’re ready to go live!

Maximizing Your Campaign's Potential with Advanced Reporting

One of the standout features of Growth Channel AI is its advanced reporting capabilities. Advertisers can get a bird's eye view of their campaign performance across all channels, making it easier to optimize and refine strategies.

The reporting tools provide insights by campaign, placement, ad unit, and location. This level of detail helps advertisers understand which elements are performing best, allowing for data-driven decisions to maximize campaign potential. Note that while the Meta Ads Beta Program currently does not support post code reporting, it still offers valuable insights at the country and region levels.

Case Studies: Real-World Success with Meta Ads and Growth Channel

Advertisers have already started seeing significant results with the Growth Channel platform. For instance, eCommerce brands have reported a 70% increase in ROAS, while store locations have observed a 125x increase in foot traffic thanks to integrated access.

These success stories highlight the effectiveness of combining Meta Ads with Growth Channel's advanced targeting and reporting capabilities. The platform's ability to micro-target audiences and provide full attribution has resulted in substantial cost savings and improved campaign performance.

Join the Meta Ads Beta Program Today

Don't miss out on the opportunity to be part of the Meta Ads Beta Program. By joining, you'll gain early access to new features and enhancements as they are rolled out, allowing you to stay ahead of the competition.

To join the Meta Ads Beta Program, contact your Growth Channel representative or request a demo. Start revolutionizing your advertising strategy today with the power of Growth Channel AI and Meta Ads.

1. AI-Driven Optimizations and Deep Learning

The advertising industry is undergoing a significant transformation, propelled by the rapid advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Its impact is becoming increasingly evident, reshaping how brands engage with their audiences and how campaigns are executed.

Enhanced Personalization and Targeting

By analysing vast amounts of data, AI algorithms can identify patterns and preferences unique to individual consumers. This capability allows for hyper-personalised ad content, tailored to the interests, behaviours, and demographics of each user. Such precision in targeting not only improves user engagement but also boosts the overall efficacy of ad campaigns.

"The privacy landscape in advertising has been in flux for years. Now that third-party cookie deprecation is actually in progress, 2024 will bring the most massive and disruptive change yet to the availability of user data for targeted advertising. The big trend will be the use of AI to fill the information gap advertisers will face when trying to make a targeting decision without a user ID. The most powerful uses of AI for cookieless targeting will be fully privacy-first – Using AI to build a rich understanding of the inventory, so advertisers can effectively target their messaging without any data about the user." shared Melinda Han Williams, Chief Data Scientist at Dstillery

For example, as ecommerce brands are fighting to increase digital purchases and multiply ROAS (return on ad spend), advertisers are able to leverage dynamic creatives using product feeds coming from platforms like Shopify to personalise consumer journey interactions with relevant product and special offers to increase those conversion rates. By leveraging AI, brands see as much as 70% increase in revenue with 21x ROAS.

AI is reshaping marketing from predictive analytics to personalized customer journeys. It's all about smarter targeting, optimized ad spending, and real-time customer insights. If you're not leveraging AI, you will be left behind. - Vince De Castro, Founder at De Castro Media

Predictive Analytics for Improved Campaign Performance

Predictive analytics, powered by AI, enables advertisers to forecast future trends and consumer behaviours. By leveraging historical data, AI can predict which advertising strategies are likely to yield the best results. This foresight helps in optimizing ad spend and improving return on investment (ROI). Advertisers can anticipate market changes, consumer responses, and potential outcomes of their campaigns, allowing for proactive and strategic planning.

For example, there is a significant shift in Google's advertising strategies, favouring Performance-Max campaigns with a future where AI-driven campaigns could become the norm, offering enhanced performance with less manual intervention.

I expect Google to encourage small advertisers to nix traditional search campaigns and use Performance-Max exclusively. Evidence for this is Google's recent rollout of search themes for P-Max, reducing reliance on search campaigns to inform query targeting. Experts might use temporary search "feeder" campaigns until P-Max finds its footing and then discontinue them. This shift is predicated on getting substantially better performance from solo P-Max campaigns, and I don't believe we're quite there yet. - Ed Goss, Managing Director at Ten Thousand Foot View

Greg Blackman, Co-founder at Product Pair added: "In 2024, the fusion of advertising campaigns with product analytics and sales data is not just a trend; it's a strategic imperative. Marketers who harness this integration gain a comprehensive view of their Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) and Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV) by ad campaign, enabling them to allocate budgets more effectively and tailor messaging to resonate with their audience at different stages of the customer journey. This approach transcends traditional silos, creating a hyper-personalized omnichannel experience. By leveraging advanced analytics, advertisers can pinpoint which campaigns drive tangible results, optimise in real-time, and ultimately achieve a competitive advantage in an increasingly data-driven marketplace."

Real-Time Bidding and Programmatic Advertising

Real-time bidding (RTB) and programmatic advertising technologies automate the buying and selling of ad space, making the process more efficient and cost-effective. AI algorithms analyse numerous variables in real-time to determine the optimal ad placement and bidding strategy. This automation leads to more effective ad placements, maximised ad performance, and reduced costs.

By year-end, AI will start to provide wizard-like optimizations. This means combining recommendations like bid strategy alteration, budget increase, and broad match keywords into a single action item for Google to execute. Whether that's good or bad for PPC managers is uncertain, but you can bet it's coming. - Ed Goss, Managing Director at Ten Thousand Foot View

Content Generation and Creative Development

AI's ability to generate content and assist in creative development is a game-changer for advertisers. AI tools can produce ad copy, suggest creative designs, and even help in video production. This technology supports creative teams by providing inspiration, speeding up the production process, and ensuring that the content resonates with the intended audience.

"With technologies advancing, the conversations surrounding tech or how we design through different tool stacks —we still come back to the echoes of the human imprint and this emphasis of conscious design needing to be encoded in the DNA of brands no matter the sector." shared Sakiko Hill, Executive Creative Director at Dos Mundos Creative

We'll see a wider adoption of real-time creative generation. Advertisers struggle with this as AI often still gets it wrong, and the current iteration from Google lacks transparency. But it'll be hard to resist the almost certain boost in performance the feature offers. Implementing this will require buy-in from both agencies and clients. - Ed Goss, Managing Director at Ten Thousand Foot View

Voice and Audio Advertising

There is an increasing focus on audio advertising, and AI is instrumental in optimising voice and audio ads, allowing for targeting based on listening habits, preferences, artist subscription, and even moods. This targeted approach in audio platforms offers a new avenue for advertisers to connect with audiences in a more intimate and personalised way.

We’re looking into making audio advertising more of a key aspect for our clients in 2024. There’s an increasing popularity of audio consumption and ad platforms offering more opportunities to cater to different target audience with voice only. A recent report by Statista shows an average 12.1% yearly growth rate for this type of channel. - Pamela Wagner, CEO at Ajala Digital

Read also: How Audio Advertising Helps Businesses Reach Highly Engaged Audiences

Data quality control

"All AI tools come with a major dependency and that is the data they were trained on. If your company's foundational data lacks quality, then you cannot expect your analytics AI tool to find gems of business intelligence hidden away in your data. Its recommendations will always be as poor as the data it was exposed to. Over the years, tagging and tracking have become more and more complex. Unfortunately, this has often led to confusion in terms of analytics implementation, which in turn has seen analytics data quality go down. Before we consider AI tools, data modelling, and other advanced techniques, we should all take a step back and make sure the data we collect is indeed correct so it can constitute the solid foundation we need." shared Mihai Milea, Digital Strategy Manager and Tealium SME at Indegene

With the growth of AI in advertising, ethical considerations and privacy concerns have come to the forefront. Advertisers must navigate the fine line between personalisation and intrusion, ensuring that consumer data is used responsibly and in compliance with privacy regulations. The industry is moving towards more transparent and ethical use of AI, prioritising consumer trust and data security.

Manonita Das, CRO at Growth Channel AI added: "Amidst the unfolding dynamics of 2024, collaborative efforts are essential to integrate innovative technologies while addressing privacy related challenges. Succeeding in programmatic marketing in this era involves optimising channels and attributing the rightful partners to minimise redundancy all with transparency in place for the advertisers. Marketers are evaluating potential partners based on platform capabilities in terms of user identification, audience targeting, attribution capability, and finally providing long-term viable solutions. GenAI - powered by advanced AI and ML, is reshaping the marketing landscape - evolving the predictive analytics, cross-device attributions, improving personalisation and targeting. The entire ad-tech industry is also pivoting towards privacy-first advertising (cookieless world and more stringent privacy policies in place). Businesses must adapt to strategies accordingly and collaborate with tech-driven platforms to incorporate ML for effective targeted campaigns and its measurement. Programmatic advertising is revolutionising in this medium, leveraging the omni-channel presence for an advertiser, impacting consumer journeys and evolving measurement techniques for increased return on advertising budgets. In essence, 2024 is poised to be a milestone, fostering advanced learning, introducing sustainable solutions, while upholding the rights to user privacy."

The growth of AI in the advertising industry marks a paradigm shift in how brands communicate with their audience. From enhanced personalisation to predictive analytics, real-time bidding, content generation, and beyond, AI is not just a tool but a fundamental driver of innovation and efficiency in advertising. As we continue through 2024 and beyond, the role of AI in advertising will only become more integral, offering unprecedented opportunities for brands to connect with their customers in meaningful and impactful ways.

2. Creator Revolution

The advertising industry in 2024 is witnessing a significant shift with increasing influence of micro-influencers. This movement is redefining traditional marketing strategies and opening new avenues for brand engagement where industry experts are becoming influential content creators, even in B2B marketing.

B2B marketing isn't just about the company anymore; it's about the people behind it. These creators are industry experts turning their knowledge into content gold. They're not just talking about products; they're solving problems, sharing insights, and building trust. It's content marketing on steroids. - Vince De Castro, Founder at De Castro Media

The Creator Revolution refers to the emergence and growing influence of content creators, particularly in digital spaces. These creators are not just celebrities or public figures; they are individuals with niche followings who produce content that resonates deeply with specific audiences. This paradigm shift is moving the focus from broad, mass-market approaches to more targeted, authentic engagements.

Micro-influencers are content creators with smaller, more dedicated followings, typically ranging from a few thousand to tens of thousands of followers. Despite their smaller audience size compared to macro-influencers, micro-influencers often boast higher engagement rates. Their followers tend to be more invested in their content, viewing them as more relatable, trustworthy, and authentic.

• Authentic Engagement and Trust. One of the key strengths of micro-influencers is their ability to foster genuine connections with their audience. Their recommendations and endorsements often come across as more trustworthy and personal, which can be incredibly effective for brands aiming to build trust with their target market.
• Niche Targeting and Specialized Audiences. Micro-influencers often cater to specific niches, whether it's in fashion, technology, fitness, or lifestyle. This specialisation allows advertisers to target audiences more precisely, ensuring that their message reaches the most relevant and interested consumers.
  
• Cost-Effective Strategies. Working with micro-influencers can be more cost-effective compared to traditional celebrity endorsements or large-scale advertising campaigns. This cost efficiency makes micro-influencers particularly appealing for small and medium-sized businesses or brands with limited marketing budgets.
  
• Enhanced Content Variety and Creativity. Micro-influencers bring a level of creativity and personal touch to content creation that can be hard to replicate in traditional advertising. They often produce a wide variety of content, from blog posts and social media updates to videos and podcasts, providing brands with diverse and engaging ways to reach audiences.
  
• Leveraging User-Generated Content. Micro-influencers encourage user-generated content, which can significantly amplify a brand's reach and authenticity. When followers share their own experiences with a product or service, it serves as a powerful form of social proof, enhancing the credibility and appeal of the brand.
  
• The Impact of Social Media Algorithms. Social media algorithms often favour content from individuals over corporations, meaning that micro-influencers' posts are more likely to appear in followers' feeds. This algorithmic preference can increase the visibility and impact of influencer-driven marketing campaigns.
  

Despite the benefits, working with micro-influencers comes with its own set of challenges. Brands need to ensure alignment in values and audience demographics for the partnership to be effective. There's also the need for clear communication and a well-defined strategy to measure the ROI of influencer campaigns.

The Creator Revolution and the rise of micro-influencers represent a significant evolution in the advertising industry for 2024. By tapping into the power of these influencers, brands can achieve more authentic, engaging, and targeted marketing. This approach not only aligns with the changing dynamics of consumer behaviour but also offers a more nuanced and effective way to build brand awareness and loyalty in the digital age.

3. Social Shopper Phenomenon

The convergence of social media and e-commerce is creating a seamless shopping experience within social platforms with significance of TikTok Shops, blending entertainment, community, and shopping in a seamless user experience.

A social shopper is a consumer who uses social media platforms not just for connecting and engaging with content but also for making purchasing decisions. This includes discovering products, reading reviews, and even completing transactions without leaving the social media environment. The rise of social shopping is a direct response to the changing habits of consumers, who are increasingly looking for convenience, personalization, and instant gratification in their shopping experience.

E-commerce is evolving. People don't want to leave their favorite apps to shop. TikTok Shops is a perfect example. It's a seamless blend of entertainment, community, and shopping. Users watch a video, see a product they like, and buy it without skipping a beat. It's the epitome of impulse buying. If your social strategy doesn't include social commerce, you're leaving money on the table. - Vince De Castro, Founder at De Castro Media

Social media platforms have evolved from mere networking sites to comprehensive shopping destinations. Platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook have integrated shopping features, allowing users to discover, interact with, and purchase products directly through the app. Features like shoppable posts, live shopping, and integrated checkout processes have made social media a powerful tool for advertisers and brands.

However, there is also an unexpected demographic in social commerce: baby boomers. Their increasing presence on platforms like TikTok and propensity for online purchases indicate new opportunities for targeting older consumers.

GWI's 2024 consumer research reveals a 57% increase in baby boomer TikTok users since 2021, with this group more likely than Gen Z to make online purchases weekly. Looking ahead, I do foresee major social media platforms continue to enhance their shopping features, offering seamless buying experiences, better product discovery, and immersive elements to boost sales. This may present an opportunity for businesses to start leveraging on social commerce even more - especially if they’re looking to reach out to older consumers in 2024. - Yashwin Naidu, Founder and CEO at KPI Media

While the social shopper phenomenon presents numerous opportunities, it also comes with challenges. Privacy concerns, data security, and the potential for impulsive and uninformed purchasing decisions are significant considerations. Moreover, there's an increasing need for transparency and authenticity in influencer marketing to maintain consumer trust.

The social shopper phenomenon is a defining trend in the 2024 advertising industry, signifying a shift towards more integrated, personalized, and socially influenced shopping experiences. As social media continues to blur the lines between networking and e-commerce, brands and advertisers must adapt to these changes to effectively engage with the modern consumer. Embracing this trend means not just selling a product but creating an engaging, convenient, and interactive shopping journey.

4. The Resurgence of Brand Fundamentals and Storytelling

The focus on strategic brand marketing is yielding significant returns, as companies look to establish long-term consumer connections. Kana LiVolsi, CEO & Co-Founder at Dos Mundos Creative shares about a shift back to brand basics and authentic storytelling.

"As content capacities reach new heights thanks to AI, we are seeing emphasis return to Brand foundations. Pandemic-era-quick-pivot-marketing strategies have long been showing their seams — creating costly breakdowns in the customer journey — so customised storytelling & achievable systems are back at the forefront. Dupe-culture will continue to render homogenised aesthetics and template brands obsolete; authentic storytelling, bold creative and customer-centric systems that maximise long term growth are now top priority. Companies are focused on the long-game — authentic consumer connection — as data shows investments in strategic brand marketing are more likely to yield 5x the return.

Alienating consumers with poor Brand CX is clearly not a luxury many companies can afford, 72% of executives plan to spend more on Brand Marketing in the next year. We are seeing a seismic shift in interest in having outside help to develop actionable Brand Ecosystems that include:

Smart companies are shifting from a product sales mentality towards the business of building connection and community. With women more visibility wielding their 85% of the buying power, yet still feeling misunderstood by advertisers (91%) - companies are realising that a lot of money is being left on the table looking to cash-in on the potential of untapped audiences. Expect continued rising interest from executives in better targeting personas for women and marginalised consumer segments with authentic-not-optical campaign efforts."

5. Deprecation of 3rd party cookies

"This was intended since 2019, but only in Q1 2024 Google has started rolling out the change to 1% of its users and it will gradually ramp this up to 100% by Q3 2024. This brings about many technical complications for essentially every website that relies on 3rd party advertising, such as Google Ads, Floodlight, Facebook Ads to name just a few. Website owners should start looking as soon as possible to move to 1st party trackers. If 3rd party cookies are required, fear not! They will still be around, but Google Chrome will now have a new attribute called "Partitioned". This will allow the website that set it to read it, but other websites will not be allowed to do so, thus rendering cross-domain tracking technically impossible. There is an exception and that is for what Google calls: "Related Website Sets" (RWS). RWS refers to domains owned by the same entity. Google has no issue with cross-domain tracking as long as you are the owner of all domains involved. With Safari and Brave, 3rd party cookies are still not allowed at all as has been the case for some time now. Using the Topics API from Google Chrome to connect users with interest groups will very likely become the norm for targeting users cross-domain." - Mihai Milea, Digital Strategy Manager and Tealium SME at Indegene

The digital advertising landscape of 2024 is multifaceted, marked by advancements in AI, the integration of new platforms like TikTok Shops, a resurgence in brand storytelling, the emerging influence of audio advertising, and the sophistication of programmatic DSPs. These trends underscore the need for businesses to adapt and innovate continually. As these developments unfold, staying ahead of the curve will be crucial for success in this dynamic digital environment.

In the ever-evolving realm of marketing and advertising, keeping pace with the latest trends and technologies can be quite the undertaking. To facilitate your navigation through this dynamic landscape with the utmost ease, we've introduced AVA – your dedicated marketing assistant. AVA is more than just a chatbot; it is your AI copilot trained on the Growth Channel data, readily available for instantaneous solutions, guidance, and insights whenever you require them.

Why AVA?

AVA, which stands for "Automated Virtual Assistant," has been thoughtfully designed to simplify your life as a marketer, making it not only more efficient but also more successful. Here's what AVA brings to the table:

• Real-time Support: With AVA by your side, you'll never feel alone in your marketing pursuits. AVA is at your service round the clock. Regardless of your location or the time of day, your marketing co-pilot stands ready to assist.
• Marketing Insights: AVA is a treasure trove of marketing wisdom. Whether you seek data analytics, campaign strategies, or the most recent industry trends, AVA has it all. Gain insights that empower you to make well-informed decisions and optimize your campaigns.
  
• Seamless Integration: AVA effortlessly blends into the Growth Channel platform, ensuring a seamless, user-friendly experience. You'll no longer need to toggle between various tools or windows, streamlining your workflow.
  
• Marketing Planning: AVA is your ally in crafting marketing plans and strategies. It can help you set objectives, identify target audiences, and even propose imaginative ideas for your campaigns.
• Campaign Optimization: AVA is well-equipped to recommend ways to fine-tune your marketing campaigns, whether through refining ad copy or adjusting targeting, ensuring you reap the best possible results.

How to Get Started with AVA

Embarking on your journey with AVA is a breeze. Simply locate the chat icon on the Growth Channel platform, initiate a conversation, and AVA will take it from there. Whether you're seeking guidance, advice, or simply a conversation, AVA is here to be your reliable partner in all facets of marketing planning and advertising.

With AVA as your ally, you'll find yourself better equipped to adapt to the ever-shifting marketing landscape, create impactful campaigns, and achieve your marketing objectives.

We're thrilled to introduce you to AVA and empower you with the tools you need to flourish in the world of marketing and advertising. Dive in and experience the future of marketing planning and advertising on the Growth Channel platform.

(This announcement was proudly created by AVA)

A widening access to data in marketing

2023 will see an increasing reliance on data in marketing. Marketing is the heart of business success especially when using the latest technologies to enable data-driven decision making. Robust data and metrics now flow through companies, simplifying how we track campaigns, gauge ROI, and analyze the behavior of target markets. Whereas before businesses hired market research analysts or data analysts to understand better the data they collected, a LinkedIn report argued that 2023 would see a data democratization, where all areas of the workforce have access to this data. This will lead to “new forms of augmented working, where tools, applications, and devices push intelligent insights into the hands of everybody in order to allow them to do their jobs more effectively and efficiently.” Through this increased data democratization, digital marketers will be able to access different data points from across the company to better promote products.

Personalized experiences with AI

The online space doesn’t always provide much of a connection between a business and a customer, but there are many ways to foster trust through digital means. As we have covered before, artificial intelligence offers personalized experiences to customers, so they can find the exact products and services they're looking for once they visit a company’s website. This is why the increased scope of personalized AI experiences is expected to be one of the biggest digital marketing trends of 2023. For example, Expedia Group built a Smart Shopping service that “uses AI to read through millions of room rate descriptions and pull out key attributes like room features and upgrades to help travelers pick their best options”. Consequently, in 2023 more customers are going to expect AI chatbots to aid them in the purchase of items and services, streamlining the retail experience.

Influencer and user-generated content marketing

Social media has become a reigning platform for digital marketing content. Besides the usual digital advertisements, influencers and content creators have become essential in influencing purchasing decisions. User-generated content (UGC) is a method that allows businesses to reach potential customers by harnessing content created by people outside of the company, such as influencers. Some examples are unboxing videos, reviews, and social media posts. This method has been proven to be effective too. About 80% of people have bought a product in direct response to content they see on social media. The 2023 State of Social & User-Generated Content has also found that UCG is the most trustworthy business-related content. People are now more drawn to authentic, unpaid reviews from real customers who will have firsthand experience with a business without being affiliated with it. This year, companies can leverage this trust by harnessing the power of user-led campaigns and trends to connect with more customers.

A human side to marketing

The words “digital” and “human” don’t seem to go together, but that is something that people want more of in this highly technological world. People respond well when they see brands showing a more human side to them than generic and highly commercialized statements and promotions. It provides a more down-to-earth approach that encourages deeper connections between consumers and businesses. Leading unified customer experience platform Emplifi predicts that authenticity will be key going into 2023. With social media users (most of whom are from Gen-Z) becoming more skeptical and critical of brands, highlighting the people behind the business or tapping into loyal customers can help foster more trust and interest. Humor and honesty will be incredibly important for content, showing people that you understand what they want and that your business can deliver.

Keeping track of these digital marketing trends can help your business attract new customers and retain loyal ones. With the online landscape heavily saturated by all kinds of content and advertising, you must stand out and make your brand noticeable to your target audience.

In this blog post, we’ll delve into the top 4 trends predicted to shape the programmatic DOOH advertising landscape in 2023. By staying ahead of the curve, advertisers can better reach and engage their target audiences and drive business growth. So, whether you're a marketer, advertiser, or simply interested in the future of the ad industry, keep on reading.

What is programmatic DOOH advertising?

DOOH advertising isn’t just a means of promoting a product or service, but also a way of influencing consumer behaviour. DOOH is present in various aspects of people's lives, including their daily commute, trips to visit loved ones, and vacations. By using programmatic DOOH, digital advertisers can target specific audiences, choose the locations where their ads will be displayed, and tailor their campaigns based on factors like time of day and weather conditions.

By 2024, ad spending for programmatic DOOH is projected to reach 11.4 million dollars, and this is for a good reason. DOOH offers what is becoming increasingly difficult for marketers: capturing busy consumers’ attention during noisy, media-cluttered days. By combining sophisticated technology with clever content, advertisers can create an emotional and engaging experience for millions.

Source: Statista

Programmatic DOOH trends to watch in 2023

The reach of programmatic DOOH advertising has grown significantly in recent years, as more and more billboards and other out-of-home media are connected to the internet and made available for programmatic advertising. A hefty 77% of advertisers have worked to increase their understanding of DOOH in 2021. This number indicates that programmatic DOOH advertising has already become an attractive option for many advertisers.

Now, you may be wondering what programmatic DOOH trends precisely to keep an eye on throughout 2023. Keep scrolling, we discuss the 4 key trends below.

1. Continued growth and adoption of programmatic DOOH advertising

As more advertisers and marketers see the benefits of programmatic DOOH advertising, it’s likely to continue its growth and become more mainstream in the advertising industry. Interestingly, The interest and investment in programmatic DOOH are on the rise, with 94% of media professionals planning to increase their spending in the next 18 months, and nearly one-fifth (20%) planning to significantly increase their investment by doubling it.

As programmatic DOOH advertising becomes more widely accepted and adopted by advertisers and marketers, it is likely to continue to grow in popularity and become a more mainstream option in the advertising industry.

2. Omnichannel scale with other forms of advertising

We predict that the omnichannel scale with other forms of advertising will be the future of DOOH advertising. This integration and collaboration will create more cohesive and consistent messaging for consumers across multiple platforms, resulting in a more effective and impactful advertising campaign. The more memorable and positive the impression your ad leaves, the more likely people will be interested in trying your product, right?

For example, a brand could run a television commercial, display the same advertisement on billboards and bus stations, and then retarget the same message to consumers through digital channels like social media and email. The idea behind this approach is to reach the consumer at multiple touchpoints, increasing the chances of the message being seen and remembered. Omnichannel scaling also allows for real-time data analysis and optimization, improving the targeting and overall effectiveness of the advertising campaign.

3. Significant ad tech improvements

Technology improvements in advertising are an essential component of the advertising landscape and will continue to play a vital role in shaping the industry for years to come. By saying ad tech improvements, we mean the advancements in technology that enhance the delivery, targeting, measurement, and optimization of advertising campaigns. These can include innovations in areas like data management and ad tracking, and analytics.

Innovation comes in different flavours. It’s not always about fancy technology or smart displays, but sometimes innovation can come in the form of better measurement and analytics. For example, a few years ago, investors were hesitant to invest in the adtech industry due to concerns that it would decline as the industry shifted from using tracking cookies to privacy-focused targeting methods. But adtech proved to be resilient and adaptable to the changing landscape, which has led to increased investor interest. Plus, we also anticipate that many adtech companies will face a significant challenge as they adjust their services to meet the new rules surrounding privacy to help advertisers and publishers succeed.

4. Development of industry standards and benchmarks

As the programmatic DOOH advertising industry continues to evolve, there will likely be a greater focus on developing industry standards and best practices to ensure the quality and effectiveness of campaigns. The programmatic DOOH advertising industry is relatively new and still developing, which means there is a lack of standardization and best practices in place. This can lead to confusion and uncertainty for advertisers, who may not be sure how to effectively use programmatic DOOH advertising to reach their target audience. Furthermore, without standards in place, there is a risk of fraud and low-quality inventory.

Establishing industry standards would provide a framework for programmatic DOOH advertising, making it easier for advertisers to understand and trust the medium. This will increase the adoption of programmatic DOOH advertising, making it a more viable option for advertisers. Additionally, it will also help to ensure that digital out-of-home advertising is more effective and efficient, which will benefit both advertisers and consumers.

Unlock the full potential of programmatic DOOH advertising

The capabilities of DOOH have reached new heights and are predicted to become even stronger in the future. By taking advantage of the emerging trends in programmatic DOOH advertising trends in 2023, you can ensure that your advertising efforts are reaching the right people in the right places at the right times. By dedicating a portion of your ad spend to this expanding field, your brand will be well-positioned to outshine your competitors.

Growth Channel is making confident steps in the direction of DOOH media integration into the global programmatic ecosystem. We provide our partners with programmatic demand sources and ways to integrate them with ease. Book a demo now, and see how you can create, manage, and optimize your display, native, in-app, TV, audio, and OOH advertising campaigns across every major global media with Growth Channel AI.

DSP platforms with more vital integrations allow for greater flexibility and reach in programmatic advertising. More integrations give advertisers access to a broader range of inventory and audiences. Plus, more integrations can provide access to more advanced features and data, allowing for more targeted and effective advertising campaigns. But what DSP integrations should you pay attention to while evaluating DSP platforms? In this article, I’ll cover the top 16 DSP integrations and ad exchanges.

What are DSPs and ad exchanges?

A demand-side platform, commonly referred to as a DSP, is an advertising technology platform that enables advertisers and ad agencies to efficiently purchase advertising inventory on a per-impression basis from a variety of publishers through the use of supply-side platforms and ad exchanges.

Ad exchanges are another key component within the programmatic advertising ecosystem, utilizing real-time bidding (RTB) technology to facilitate the buying and selling of ad space. The significance of ad exchanges lies in their ability to provide advertisers with the convenience of purchasing ads across multiple sites simultaneously, rather than having to negotiate directly with individual publishers.

Top ad exchanges

Native advertising

Outbrain- a content discovery network and native advertising platform that helps promote content to targeted audiences across the web. It helps publishers generate revenue through sponsored content and native advertising. Outbrain utilizes powerful algorithms to analyze user behavior and create tailored content recommendations for readers across an extensive network of websites.

Taboola native advertising and content discovery platform that links advertisers and publishers. With massive scale, unique content consumption data and world-class AI technology, Taboola helps thousands of advertisers reach their audiences with compelling native ads in a brand-safe environment. Plus, Taboola is powered by Deep Learning technology to leverage its data and suggest the most appropriate content to the right individual at the most opportune time.

Audio advertising

Pandora advertising works by leveraging the data collected from its users to serve targeted ads to listeners. This data is collected from user profiles, music preferences, and listening activities. The data is used to match the user with appropriate ads that are tailored to their interests. Pandora then uses algorithms to optimize the delivery of ads to users and ensure that the ads are relevant to them.

Spotify : Spotify advertising works by targeting ads to users based on their listening activity, demographic data, and other user-specific data. Spotify uses an algorithm to match ads to users based on these criteria and then presents the ads via video and audio ad formats. The ads are dynamically served to users as they are listening to music, so the ads are relevant and tailored to the user.

Connected TV advertising

Hulu premium streaming service in the US that offers a variety of options for advertisers, including targeting specific demographics, creating custom content, and using data to measure the effectiveness of ad campaigns.

Disney's advertising platform is a comprehensive and innovative solution for businesses looking to reach a wide and diverse audience. With access to the vast network of Disney-owned media properties, including popular television networks, movie studios, and theme parks, advertisers can target consumers through a variety of channels and touch points.

Digital OOH advertising

Place Exchange - a supply-side platform that unifies execution, reporting, and attribution for OOH with other programmatic channels. It enables media buyers to access high-quality inventory from a network of premium publishers and provides media sellers with a streamlined platform to manage and monetize their inventory. The platform is designed to facilitate efficient, transparent and cost-effective transactions for buyers and sellers, and is powered by advanced algorithms that optimize ad placements and maximize performance based on each buyer’s desired goals.

Zoom Media - a digital ad platform that enables brands, agencies, and publishers to buy, sell, and manage digital advertising across all devices.

Video advertising

SpotX is a global video ad exchange that provides technology and services for advertisers, publishers, and media companies to buy, sell, and manage their video advertising inventory. It offers a range of solutions, including programmatic buying and selling, real-time bidding, and ad server integration, as well as tools for audience targeting.

Mobile advertising

InMobi - a global mobile advertising and discovery platform that enables brands, developers, and publishers to engage with consumers on mobile devices. It provides a wide range of ad formats and targeting options, including native ads, video ads, interstitial ads, and in-app ads. A special focus is on in-game advertising.

Cross-channel

Xandr, formerly AppNexus, is a data-enabled technology platform that advances how advertisers buy and engage with audiences in Connected TV, digital video, display, native, audio, and digital out-of-home environments.

Verizon Media Exchange is assisting advertisers in overcoming marketing obstacles and achieving success through its data-driven strategy, premium inventory access, and advanced machine-learning optimization technology, allowing advertisers to target specific audiences on all formats and devices.

MediaMath - an intelligent ad tech platform that offers unrivaled advertising performance across all media channels. Their platform, called TerminalOne, allows marketers to plan, buy, and optimize digital advertising across multiple channels and devices using data-driven insights.

Google AdX (ad exchange) is a platform that allows advertisers to bid on and purchase ad inventory from various websites and apps in a programmatic, real-time auction. AdX is integrated with Google's DoubleClick ad platform and allows advertisers to target specific audiences, track their ad performance, and optimize their campaigns.

PMPs

OpenX - a digital and mobile advertising platform that helps digital media companies to unleash their full economic potential. OpenX uses a real-time bidding system that allows advertisers to bid for impressions on the publisher’s website. It also provides analytics and reporting tools to help advertisers track the performance of their campaigns.

PubMatic - a platform for programmatic advertising on the sell-side that maximizes your digital advertising revenue with a programmatic platform built for today’s omnichannel ecosystem. The platform uses real-time bidding technology to match ads with relevant content, allowing publishers to optimize their revenue and advertisers to reach their target audience.

Ready to optimize your advertising campaigns?

Integrating with multiple ad exchanges allows the DSP to access a greater variety of inventory, increasing the chances of finding the right audience at the right time. Overall, a DSP solution with more integrations is generally considered more powerful to advertisers.

Growth Channel DSP empowers advertisers to easily launch, manage, and optimize omnichannel campaigns across 150+ ad exchanges, all from one centralized platform. To accomplish that, Growth Channel team built a vast network of premium publishers spanning various verticals. With high-performing campaigns in a unified dashboard, Growth Channel makes it easy to create and optimize all your display, native, in-app, TV, audio, and OOH advertising campaigns across every major global media.

Book a demo now, and see how the solution helps you maximize revenue at every stage of the customer journey with data-driven marketing intelligence.

Programmatic display is expected to reach a global market size of $103.5 billion by 2022. Brands should consider taking advantage of this trend and include programmatic advertising in their marketing mix to reach their target audiences more effectively and efficiently.

Here are some of the key trends for 2023:

1. Increasing adoption of in-housing programmatic

More brands and companies are expected to bring programmatic advertising in-house, in order to have greater control over their ad campaigns, data and costs. With the increasing amount of data available to advertisers, brands are able to gain a deeper understanding of their target audiences and deliver more personalized and relevant ads.

Source: AdExchanger

If you’re considering to bring your programmatic advertising activities in-house, the following marketing roles can be relevant for the full coherence:

Not just the team, technology is an important part of inhousing programmatic and you will need to make the right choice for your strategic technology partner, being it an SSP or a DSP. Learn more about programmatic buying ecosystem.

2. Continued focus on data privacy and transparency

Privacy concerns are still looming, as regulators are tightening their grip on data protection and user privacy. This is expected to further enhance the importance of obtaining user consent, and also increase the use of anonymized and hashed data.

Overall, the state of programmatic advertising continues to be exciting and full of potential. With the increasing adoption of new technologies and the focus on data-driven and privacy-compliant advertising, brands will be able to reach their target audiences in more effective and efficient ways than ever before.

As regulations such as GDPR and CCPA become more stringent, and the industry shift to a more privacy-compliant advertising ecosystem, advertisers and programmatic platforms will need to focus on data transparency and user consent management.

Source: Insider Intelligence

3. Greater use of AI and Machine Learning (ML) technologies

The use of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI/ML) in programmatic advertising is gaining traction, allowing for more advanced targeting, optimization and prediction capabilities. For example, AI algorithms are being used to automate and optimize the buying process, enabling brands to reach the right people at the right time with the right message.

As the use of AI and ML continues to grow, we can expect to see more programmatic advertising platforms utilizing these technologies to optimize ad targeting, creative and budget allocation in real-time. Learn how Overstock Creates Individual Experiences For Each Customer Using AI.

Source: Marketing Charts

4. Growth in audio and video programmatic

The demand for audio and video programmatic advertising will grow as the use of streaming services such as Spotify and YouTube continue to increase. Programmatic audio advertising is expected to reach $1 billion in the US by 2022. This trend is driven by the growing popularity of streaming music services and the increasing number of people listening to podcasts.

Source: Marketing Charts

Some of the types of audio advertising include podcast ads, ad sequencing, skippable ads, and voice-activated ads. By using data on listener demographics, location, and music preferences, programmatic audio advertising can deliver ads to the right people at the right time. Additionally, programmatic audio advertising allows advertisers to reach listeners across different platforms and devices, such as smartphones, smart speakers, and connected cars.

5. Adoption of PMPs

One major development in the programmatic advertising space is the increased adoption of Private Marketplaces (PMPs) and Programmatic Guaranteed deals. These deals allow brands to strike direct deals with publishers, which allows them to secure premium inventory at fixed prices while still benefitting from programmatic targeting capabilities.

Source: DoubleVerify

PMPs are private, invitation-only programmatic advertising marketplaces where brands can purchase ad inventory from selected publishers at pre-negotiated fixed prices. PMPs offer brands and publishers the ability to transact programmatically in a more controlled, transparent and brand-safe environment. PMPs also allow brands to buy inventory in a more premium and exclusive way, providing them access to more premium ad placements and a greater level of inventory transparency.

On the other hand, Programmatic Guaranteed deals are similar to PMP deals, but these deals tend to take place between a brand and a publisher. With programmatic guaranteed, a brand and publisher can agree on a guaranteed amount of impressions, at a guaranteed CPM, over a set period of time. This allows brands to have more control over their ad spend and provides more certainty that their ad will be seen by a specific audience.

Both of these trends provide brands with more control over their programmatic advertising campaigns and allow them to reach their target audiences in a more effective and efficient way. PMPs and Programmatic guaranteed are seen as ways to address some of the issues in the programmatic advertising space, such as transparency and fraud.

PMPs and programmatic guaranteed deals allow brands to transact programmatically with more control, transparency, and predictability.

6. Greater adoption of Connected TV (CTV) programmatic

As CTV usage continues to grow, brands will increasingly adopt programmatic buying for this channel as a way to reach viewers on a one-to-one basis in a brand safe and fraud-free environment.

With the growing popularity of streaming services and the increasing number of viewers cutting the cord, the demand for CTV advertising is rapidly increasing.

One of the main advantages of CTV programmatic is that it allows advertisers to reach a large and engaged audience in a brand-safe environment, as well as providing them with the ability to target and personalize their ads in a way that is similar to traditional TV advertising. Additionally, CTV programmatic advertising enables advertisers to reach their target audiences on a one-to-one basis, providing them with more granular targeting and measurement capabilities.

To take advantage of the opportunities that CTV programmatic advertising offers, brands and advertisers need to ensure that they are using the right technology and platforms. This may include working with CTV programmatic platforms, CTV-specific data providers, and working with their existing programmatic partners who have CTV offerings, such as Growth Channel DSP.

As more and more people turn to streaming services and connected TVs as their primary means of watching television, the adoption of CTV programmatic advertising is expected to grow rapidly in the coming years. Brands and advertisers who incorporate CTV programmatic into their marketing mix will be well-positioned to reach their target audiences in a more effective and efficient way.

Recommendations for 2023

As programmatic advertising continues to evolve and grow in popularity, here are some recommendations for advertisers in 2023:

All in all, programmatic advertising will continue to evolve and grow in 2023, providing brands with new opportunities to reach target audiences in a more effective and efficient way, while taking data privacy and transparency into account.

It is also important to stay informed about industry trends and updates and to keep refining and optimizing your programmatic advertising strategy.

Plus, programmatic advertising gives you more control over who can see their ads and who can’t, instead of expecting that a randomly viewed ad will lead to a purchase. This type of advertising allows advertisers to target a wide range of platforms, including mobile, display, video advertising channels, digital out-of-home, audio, and even TV ads. Interestingly, in 2021, programmatic ad spending in the US reached a record high of $90 billion. It is expected to grow by over 50% in 2023.

Although the purpose of programmatic advertising is obvious, the details of how it works may not be fully understood. In this article, I’ll examine the process in more detail and explain what it takes to effectively target the right audience with your ads.

How do ad exchanges work?

On ad exchanges, advertisers can bid on targeted ads shown to specific publishers and users, evaluating the value of the publisher and user to determine how much to pay for the ad. Basically, the role of ad exchanges is to auction ad space on a publisher’s website in real time. When a user visits a publisher’s page, the user’s browser contacts a server that triggers an auction on an exchange.

The ad exchange provides advertisers with real-time information about the publisher's website, such as the URL, ad size, type, and category of the site, as well as details about the user, such as their demographic information and metadata for tracking their activity across different websites. The exchange holds an auction to determine which advertisers' ads will be displayed to the user. Once the winning ads have been determined, the exchange delivers the ads to the user and credits the publisher for displaying the ads.

How do SSPs work?

A supply-side platform (SSP) is a technology that helps web publishers manage and monetize their advertising space. The SSP serves as an interface between the publisher and the various platforms on which they want to advertise. It allows publishers to easily manage their inventory and maximize their earnings.

The primary proposition of SSPs is to help publishers monetize and boost the yield of their inventory. In some cases, the SSP can also be used programmatically, which means it automates and optimizes the media space for the publisher in order to increase efficiency and revenue.

How do DSPs work?

Demand-side platforms, or DSPs, are programmatic advertising platforms that enable buyers—advertisers or agencies—to purchase programmatic advertising through real-time auctions. Basically, DSPs allow advertisers to use programmatic advertising to reach their target audiences more effectively and determine how much to bid for an ad in real time. Through a DSP, the buyer can specify targeting criteria, pricing, frequency, and other details for their digital ad buys.

A demand-side platform (DSP) is a digital advertising tool that helps advertisers purchase ad space at the lowest possible price and display ads to the most suitable users. It allows advertisers to manage multiple ad exchange accounts through a single interface, streamlining the process of purchasing and displaying digital ads. Some DSPs can optimize campaigns as they execute or provide performance data to let users change campaign parameters on the fly.

Similarities between SSPs and DSPs

Differences between SSPs and DSPs

Final thoughts on ad exchanges, SSPs, and DSPs

Ad exchanges, SSPs, and DSP integrations are all essential components of the programmatic ad ecosystem. If you're interested in learning more about how programmatic ads can benefit your business, be sure to explore the various ad exchanges, SSPs, and DSP integrations available on the market.

One of the many DSP solutions with 150+ integrations is Growth Channel, a demand-side platform (DSP) that helps brands and agencies plan, manage, and optimize their omnichannel marketing campaigns. Whether your paid media includes web ads, TV ads, digital billboards (DOOH), audio ads, or mobile, Growth Channel DSP makes it easy to launch and manage digital ad campaigns.

Then, what can you do instead? Consider native advertising—ads that are cohesive with the page content—to reach your target audience without distracting them. In this article, I’ll look at what native advertising is, various types of native advertising, and 4 ways native content advertising results in more conversions.

What is native advertising?

Native advertising is a relatively new concept of promoting a brand, product, or service, and its aim is consumer engagement. Unlike traditional advertising, native ads are designed to blend in with the page content and are consistent with the general perspective of the designated page and media platform, so it’s a type of camouflaged advertising.

Native advertising has great potential, and people are excited about that. A hefty 79% of respondents said they’d like to see ads blending in with their consuming content.

Whereas conventional advertising stands out to the consumer, native advertising strives to position the company as a partner for the target audience. Given that, native advertising can be seen as more of a partnership than a promotion. In other words, native ads depend on content marketing efforts to position the product as a partner for the consumers rather than the promoter's role.

How can you spot a native ad?

Pay attention to the below identifiers and you’ll be able to spot a native ad:

If these elements catch your attention to the ad, then you’re looking at a native ad.

Different types of native advertising

Native advertisements come in various formats, each with its benefits, much like any other type of advertising. Brands that seek to strategize and develop a native advertising campaign should understand the different types of native ads.

1. In-feed native ads

In-feed native ads are the best form of native advertising. These ads are inserted into newsfeeds or content boards of prominent applications, giving readers a seamless experience. The in-feed native ad format was adopted by large technology companies, such as Facebook, Pinterest, and Instagram, to offer the most relevant content to users.

A relevant example of an in-feed native advertisement is the British Airways in-feed ad that appears on Mashable, as shown below.

Source: Mashable

2. Recommendation widgets

The recommendations widget is strong tool publishers use to promote the most interesting, relevant, and engaging content on the website. That way, users stay longer and develop their relationship with the content.

You may find some widgets underneath the blog posts as a natural recommendation to other content or in the middle of the page. The below image shows how Forbes uses a recommendation widget on its content.

Source: Forbes

3. Display ads with native elements

Native display ads are a type of ads that are contextually relevant to the platform they appear on. Viewers usually ignore traditional display ads simply because they know they’re ads without even paying attention to them.

But display ads with native elements have an element of relevancy.

Source: The New York Times

4. Promoted search results

Marketers use promoted search results to improve their users' search experience. It lets brands decide what pages are offered to users when they search for particular key terms.

And yes, promoted search results are also native ads, given that they match the platform’s existing format. As shown below, Pinterest's promoted pin ads are a great example of this.

Source: Pinterest

5. Co-branded video ads

Native video ads refer to the integration of branded messages into existing content. You can see these types on many platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Snapchat.

Below is an example of a partnership between 3 brands, Eko, Tasty, and Walmart.

Source: Eko

4 ways native content advertising brings more conversions

Native content advertising has the potential to impact consumer behavior more effectively, and it can yield more conversions than traditional advertising.

1. Native ads receive a higher CTR

Click-through rate or CTR is one of the essential metrics for managing advertising success, and the performance continues to decrease for traditional display ads. According to an eMarketer study, native ads perform particularly well than conventional ads, and CTRs for native display ads are 8.8x higher than the average display ads, thanks to the native ads’ contextual relevance.

Yet, keep in mind that CTR changes based on the ad format, device, platform, audience, and industry.

Source: eMarketer

2. Native ads are easily remembered

We ignore anything that looks like an ad on a webpage. That’s called banner blindness where users skip information in online ads. The good news is that banner blindness can be avoided with native ads.

Did you know that native content advertisements receive 53% higher attention than display ads? The same study also revealed that at least 85% to 90% of respondents believe native ads offer more valuable content to the reader and can be used to drive action.

3. Native ads don’t interrupt the reading experience

Website visitors consume content, not ads. To avoid irritating visitors with ads, it’s critical for marketers to focus on the ultimate experience they provide to their consumers while preserving their trust. Otherwise, people start using ad blockers to block out the sections of a website that could be ads.

This isn’t the case with native ads because a native ad is clearly delivered as a relevant reading experience and corresponds to the natural reading behavior of the reader. When a native ad campaign is created correctly, the content adds value to the reader.

4. Native ads have a greater reach

A piece of content should be interesting, informative, entertaining, and relevant to resonate with many as many people as possible online. With native content advertising, you have better chances of reaching a wider audience and building brand awareness.

Because the content that native ads deliver is highly targeted, your audience will be happy to treat it as more appealing content. Furthermore, native ads are more natural and don’t push users to purchase anything, leading to more people engaging with your content.

Final thoughts on native content advertising

Digital ads are thought of as unwanted, disturbing, and noisy. They pop up in the middle of your screen while reading a blog post, not having a relation to the content you engage with. This annoys you, so you quickly close the ad to eliminate the intrusive content.

Native ads, however, are much less intrusive and offer the seamless experience that people enjoy. We anticipate that the importance of native ads will continue to grow significantly in 2023 and drive incredible user engagement. There are different native ad platforms that offer easy-to-implement solutions to help you get started with this strategy.

Are you ready to leverage native content advertising and apply it to your brand's media approach? Native content advertising is meant to be consumed, and thankfully, we at Growth Channel can help you create, manage, and optimize your native ad campaigns to get the exposure you’re looking for. Request a free demo of Growth Channel here.

However, SEO is a rapidly changing landscape, and what works today may not work tomorrow. As such, it's imperative for businesses to keep up with the latest trends and changes in order to maintain their high ranking.

In this article, we will share with you 6 growth-hacking tips that will help you boost your website's SEO. From optimizing your website for voice search to leveraging the power of social media, we'll cover all the latest and greatest SEO growth hacks that will help your business succeed in the online world.

It's All About Backlinks

One of the most important ranking factors in SEO is the number and quality of backlinks pointing to your website.

Backlinks are links from other websites to yours, and they act as a vote of confidence from the linking site. The more backlinks you have and the higher the quality of those links, the higher your website will rank in SERPs.

To get more backlinks, you can start by reaching out to bloggers and webmasters and asking them to link to your site in relevant articles. You can also submit guest posts to popular blogs in your industry, and include a link back to your website in the article or your author bio.

Another great way to get backlinks is to publish high-quality content that other website owners will want to link to. If you write an informative blog post or create an insightful video, for example, there's a good chance that other websites will refer to it.

However, SEO blogger outreach and content marketing are both time-consuming tasks, so you may want to consider hiring an SEO agency or consultant to help you with link building.

One of the ways to brainstorm backlink opportunities is to check the sites where your competitors are having backlinks or recently lost them. You can also use Growth Channel’s instant website audit to get those insights.

Optimize Your Website for Voice Search

Voice search is a growing trend, with more and more people using voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Home to perform web searches. 

Voice search is different from traditional text-based search, as users tend to speak in full sentences rather than keywords. For example, someone would say, "Alexa, find me the best Italian restaurant in town," rather than "Italian restaurant."

To optimize your website for voice search, you need to make sure that your content is natural, conversational, and easy to understand. You should also include long-tail keywords, as these are more likely to be used in voice searches.

In addition, you need to ensure that your website is mobile-friendly, as most voice searches are performed on mobile devices. You can do this by using responsive design, which guarantees that your website looks good and works well on all screen sizes.

Leverage the Power of Social Media

Social media is a powerful tool that can be used to boost your website's SEO.

When you post content on social media, you have the opportunity to include links back to your website. This can help increase traffic to your site, as well as improve your ranking in SERPs.

In addition, social media is a great way to build relationships with other businesses and influencers in your industry. These relationships can lead to valuable backlinks and mentions on other websites, both of which can help improve your SEO.

Finally, social media can be used to create brand awareness and reach a wider audience. The more people are aware of your brand, the more likely they are to visit your website, which can lead to more traffic and higher rankings.

Also read: 8 Best Audio Social Media Apps

Use Google My Business

Google My Business is a free service that allows businesses to manage their online presence on Google.

By claiming and verifying your business on Google My Business, you can improve your chances of appearing in local search results. That’s crucial, as local search is a growing trend, and users are more likely to click on results that are relevant to their location.

What’s more, Google My Business allows you to add additional information about your business, such as your hours of operation, contact information, and photos. This can help your listing stand out from the competition and attract more clicks.

Finally, Google My Business offers insights that can help you track your performance and see how users are interacting with your listing. This data can be used to improve your SEO strategy and ensure that you're getting the most out of your Google My Business listing.

Be Smart About Your Keyword Strategy

Your keyword strategy is one of the most important aspects of your SEO campaign.

The right keywords can help you attract the right audience, and the wrong keywords can do the opposite while also antagonizing Google. That’s why it’s crucial to be strategic about the keywords you choose to target.

First, you need to identify the right keywords for your business. To do this, you can use keyword research tools like Google Ads Keyword Planner or Ahrefs Keywords Explorer.

Once you've identified the right keywords, you need to ensure that you're using them throughout your website, including in your titles, headings, meta descriptions, and body text. However, you should avoid keyword stuffing, as this can result in penalties from Google.

Finally, you need to track your keyword rankings to see how your website is performing in SERPs. You can use tools like Google Search Console or Ahrefs Rank Tracker to do this. Only by tracking your keyword rankings will you be able to tell if your keyword strategy is working or if you need to make changes. Here’s how you can optimise your content for Google’s featured snippet.

Optimize Your Website for Speed and Mobile

The speed of your website is vital for two reasons.

First, fast loading times can help improve your SEO, as Google has stated that site speed is a ranking factor.

Second, fast loading times improve the user experience, which can lead to more traffic and higher conversion rates. In fact, research has shown that conversion rates drop by 4.42% with each additional second of loading.

To improve your website's speed, you need to optimize your images, minify your code, and use a content delivery network (CDN). You can also consider switching to a faster web hosting provider.

Moreover, in today's mobile-first world, it's essential to optimize your website for mobile devices. This means using responsive design, as well as ensuring that your pages load quickly on mobile networks.

Finally, you need to test your website's speed regularly to have it perform at its best. You can use tools like PageSpeed Insights or Pingdom to do this.

Conclusion

SEO is a vital part of any online marketing strategy. However, it's also a complex and ever-changing field, so businesses need to be constantly on the lookout for new ways to improve their ranking in SERPs.

The tips we've shared in this article will help you do just that. From optimizing your website for voice search to building backlinks, these SEO growth hacks will help your business succeed in the online world.

Bear in mind, though, that SEO is not a one-time effort. Rather, it's an ongoing process, so you need to be prepared to commit the time and resources necessary to keep your website ranking high in SERPs.

“Audio branding has increased dramatically in importance over the past few years. This is due to a variety of reasons: adoption of personal digital assistants and smart speakers (fuelling the adoption of voice-related searches and interactions; and that podcasting has achieved critical mass as a $2B industry in 2022 and looking to double in 2024. As a result, companies need to think about sonic branding (how their brand sounds) as well as explore the creation of branded content like podcasting. Companies can advertise on podcasts, appear as guests or create their own podcasts.” - Kent Lewis, President & Founder of Anvil Media: The Power of Podcasting

Obviously, audio has a proven ability to hook audiences and generate more engagement. In this article, I’m going to discuss what programmatic audio ads are, the types of audio ads, and the advantages of audio ads over other types of advertising.

What is programmatic audio advertising?

Programmatic is an umbrella term for all the processes enabling the purchase of online display space through automated algorithms. Programmatic audio advertising refers to automatically buying and optimizing digital campaigns in audio products like podcasts, digital radio, and streaming music services.

The programmatic process simplifies the ad-buying workflow with strategically distributed ads based on user behavior. Unlike traditional advertising, programmatic audio advertising enables data-driven targeting to connect with consumers that go beyond those targeted by display or video campaigns.

Types of audio advertising

Here are the five most popular types of audio advertising:

1. Podcast Ads:

Podcasts are quickly becoming the center of attention: there will be about 464 million podcast listeners worldwide by the end of 2022, which translates into 20.3% of internet users. Podcast advertising refers to podcasting as a medium to promote a specific product or offering. This involves podcast ads which are the promotional breaks in podcast content where the host announces an advertisement for a certain company. In some instances, the advertisement is pre-recorded content that is added to the audio. Are you still doubting the effectiveness of podcast ads? Super Listeners 2021 Report revealed that podcast ads were the most recalled ad types - corroborated by 86% of respondents. In short, podcast ads are memorable and efficient in producing tangible engagement.

“Podcasts are where the most engaged fans of creators go to hear their unfiltered pondering for hours on end. The influence is exponential, translating into massive return on investment for advertisers who tap into this underground-like medium. It's a medium filled with high income earners with an early adopter mindset: they want to try new things and have the money to make it happen.” - Adam McNeil, VP of Marketing at ADOPTER Media, a Podcast Advertising Agency

2. Ad sequencing:

Businesses use ad sequencing to personalize the message or present information to people in a particular order through multiple ads across one or several audio episodes over time. With this audio ad format, brands build awareness and end the episode with a persuasive call-to-action (CTA). By creating multiple ads and adapting to how the users interact, businesses can avoid saturating the same message over and over again.

3. Skippable Ads:

The main goal of skippable ads is to understand the user’s behavior as well as content interests. Skippable ads typically play before, during, or after audio episodes, so that the listener has an option to skip the ad. Here’s the harsh truth: consumers don’t like ads that get in the way of the content they are listening to. Skippable ads make sense, allowing uninterested people to skip ads instantly.

4. Voice-activated Ads:

Interactive voice ads are a form of audio brand engagement for voice-oriented channels, including smart speakers, voice assistants, mobile streaming services, and in-car infotainment systems. According to the State of Voice 2019 Report by Adobe Digital Insights, a hefty 38% of respondents stated that voice-enabled advertising is more engaging as opposed to online and social media ads. Do you wonder why? Because voice-activated ads speak directly to listeners, creating a two-way dialogue with their audiences. Voice ads are still nascent, yet they have a big potential to disrupt the audio advertising space.

Audio advertising channels

Here, I'll list the three most noteworthy examples of audio advertising channels. Let's walk through each of them in detail.

Audio streaming services:

Audio streaming services like Spotify, Pandora, Deezer, Tidal, and Apple Music are the future of audio. These services have disruptive power that offers brands new opportunities to reach specific audiences. The most significant advantage of investing in streaming audio ads? Ads on services like Spotify follow consumers across all their connected devices, from smartphones to tablets. There is plenty of room for advertising on streaming services. How we know this, you may ask. Audio streaming accounted for 84% of the U.S. music industry revenue — a number that points to an untapped opportunity that brands should embrace now.

Traditional radio or AM/FM radio:

Unpopular opinion — traditional radio is still very much alive! Perhaps not as fancy as digital audio, traditional radio still makes up the majority of audio ad spending. In 2021, over 75% of the time that US adults spent listening to ad-supported audio went to AM/FM radio, where podcasts came way behind traditional radio, grabbing only 11% of ad-supported listening. This number alone proves that AM/FM radio still shouldn’t be underestimated by advertisers and brands.

Social media:

Users view social media as a visual medium where photos, text, and video make up most of the social media content. That said, audio advertising on social media is gaining traction. Some of the prominent social media platforms that have been testing with programmatic audio ads are YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Clubhouse. Besides those names, Reddit has also started testing its own take on audio social in 2021, with audio rooms within subreddits. Such a feature would seemingly provide an excellent opportunity for Reddit users to enhance their community engagement via real-time chats.

Benefits of programmatic audio advertising

"Would you take a recommendation from your best friend? Yes, you probably would. And do you know who else speaks to your ideal customers every day in their headphones on their way to work? Their favourite podcast host… So what if, you were able to pay that podcast host to recommend your brand... would that be impactful for the listener? You got it. Yes it would. This is the power of audio advertising: you enter into someone's world as a recommendation from someone that your ideal buyer, knows, likes and trusts. So much more powerful than a billboard." - Tom Hunt, Founder at Fame and bCast

There has been continued growth in consumption when it comes to online audio listening. Numbers don’t lie: the average time spent listening per week was over 16 hours in the US in 2021, a substantial increase from 15 hours recorded in 2020. These numbers represent a historic opportunity for advertisers to reach new audiences via audio ads. There are numerous potential benefits of programmatic audio advertising which I cover below.

1. High precision targeting

Wouldn't it be amazing if your customers walked around with telling signs indicating their interest in your product or offering? Customers now live digital lives where it is an entirely different game to figure out customer interests and preferences.

As a result, marketing campaign personalization is moving from a novelty to a necessity. Programmatic audio advertising makes it possible for advertisers to engage with the right people at the right time, which means no more unwanted products and offers that are a major turn-off for customers.

2. Higher recall rate

The power of brand recall to generate more sales is a force that digital marketers should never undervalue. Once a customer develops a connection with your brand, they're more inclined to buy from you again without giving it much consideration, says HubSpot. Audio advertising has a 24% higher recall rate than traditional display ads. In short, programmatic audio advertising enables you to capture customers with a memorable brand personality and promote your brand strategically.

3. New audiences

One of the most considerable pain points that advertisers face? That'll be reaching their target audience effectively. With all of the available digital channels at companies’ disposal today, it can be challenging for advertisers to maximize their marketing budgets. Every business wants new audiences, and the best way to find them is indeed to try new methods or channels. A successful marketing plan has to reach audiences at scale and efficiently — this is exactly what programmatic audio advertising does.

4. Emotionally charged content

People rely on emotions over information when making brand decisions. Consumers respond to ads that move them, and audio ads have a higher potential than online or social media ads to build an emotional connection in meaningful ways. Audio is a powerful storytelling medium, and when implemented strategically, it provokes emotion, inspires audiences, and generates lasting memories.

Audio advertising not only provides delivery of brand messages but also enables brands to insert themselves into the consumers' own stories. Did you know that? Consumers will be 46% more likely to prefer your brand over others if you conjoin a recognizable tune with it.

Case study on audio advertising: Kia & branded playlist on Spotify

In 2016, Spotify expanded its revenue possibilities by rolling out sponsored playlists where brands could sponsor Spotify’s most popular owned and operated playlists. Sponsored playlists connect the brand with a loyal fanbase of listeners across their favorite playlists.

Kia is the first car company brand to take part in Spotify’s new sponsored playlists in 2016. The automaker has sponsored the “New Music Friday” playlist on Spotify to drive awareness and consideration of the 2017 model Kia Sportage. The campaign turned out to be a real success — it generated over 10 million impressions, a 30% lift in brand awareness, and a 100% increase in brand perception.

Programmatic audio advertising is a huge opportunity

Audio is flexible in its ability to follow consumers throughout their daily lives. So, the future looks bright for audio advertising, thanks to the rise of podcasting and audio streaming services. Lots of room to grow! And that means new potential ways or revenue opportunities for brands and marketers to reach out to specific audiences or target groups with audio content. If you haven’t started thinking about audio-driven advertising yet, now’s the time to start.

Growth Channel Activate offers audio advertising without any minimum ad spend requirements and advanced audience targeting capabilities. The platform gives access to 15 audio ad exchanges including premium publishers such as Spotify, Pandora, and SoundCloud.

So, what does that mean for you as a business owner? In short, it means you need to join the party. Keep on reading if you want to learn how to easily integrate TikTok into your video marketing strategy
AND why you should stick around.

Begin With the “Why”

As with most things in life, it’s always a good idea to begin a new pursuit by first asking yourself why you should do it at all. When it comes to marketing on TikTok, the “why” is pretty obvious when you look at the number of monthly users (over 500 million) and realize you could be the benefactor of: 

If the “why” isn’t obvious to you yet, we’ll sum it up in one word: revenue. Increasing your followers on TikTok and marketing to them effectively is a sure-fire way to increase your revenue in 2022.

Source: Digital Information World

How Do You Start?

If you’re new to TikTok entirely, you’ll need to first download the app and then create a business profile. If you’ve been using the app but only have a personal profile, we recommend going through the steps to create a separate business profile so you’ll have access to its features such as metrics, insights, and editing tools.

Next, take some time getting to know TikTok. Scroll mindlessly on the newsfeed that they call the “For You” page, visit your competitor’s accounts, and take note of what’s trending. The more observations you can make, the better of a handle you’ll have when it comes to creating your own content.

3-2-1, Action!

It’s time to bite the bullet and start creating your own content to post from your business account. After all, that’s the only way you’re going to get noticed on TikTok. The good news is that TikTok isn’t for the professional directors of the world. Rather, it’s for the average Joe looking to entertain the masses, and, luckily, the TikTok app makes it fairly easy to create content with the use of filters and editing tools.

Once you’re ready to film, remember to be yourself and be engaging. Users want to feel like they’re getting to know you so let your personality show and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. The more important thing is to post consistently and often. Your followers are hungry for content and if you’re not giving it to them, they’ll find it elsewhere.

Getting Noticed

Now that you’re posting content, you’re going to want to make sure it’s being seen. In the beginning, it’s a good idea to find an influencer that you can partner with to spread your brand awareness. By teaming up with the right person, you can quickly add hundreds of followers just because they said to check you out.

If influencers aren’t your thing, you’re going to want to post enough content to get you to the “For You” page of other users. If just one of your videos can get on this newsfeed, your content could end up being shared, going viral, and living forever with new users finding you daily. The key to getting on the FYP is to post engaging content and post it consistently .

Finally, consider putting some money towards paid advertising with TikTok. There are many ways to allocate some of your budget on the app and all of them are a great way to get users when you’re new to TikTok.

TikTok to the Top

With the way that TikTok continues to grow, it’s safe to assume that 2022 will be another record-breaking year for the social media giant. As users are added, the demographic that you could reach on the app will continue to spread, as well. Now is the perfect time to start building your presence and following so you’re ready to take advantage of the growth and make it your own.

About the author:

Torrey Tayenaka is the co-founder and CEO at Sparkhouse, a corporate video production agency. He is often asked to contribute expertise in publications like Entrepreneur, Single Grain and Forbes. Sparkhouse is known for transforming video marketing and advertising into real conversations. Rather than hitting the consumer over the head with blatant ads, Sparkhouse creates interesting, entertaining and useful videos that enrich the lives of his clients’ customers. In addition to Sparkhouse, Torrey has also founded the companies Eva Smart Shower, Litehouse & Forge54.

Overstock is an online retailer focused on providing smart value furniture and home decor to “create dream homes for all”. Overstock has been operating since 1999 and has evolved from a tech startup to the billion-dollar home furnishings retailer we know today.

What role does AI play in your marketing?

“We've always taken an innovative approach to marketing and customer experience. In marketing, we've seen success applying machine learning to areas where there's a lot of data. And the more data there is, the better.” 

“In 2019, we built a real-time streaming platform that feeds individual user events and attributes through Overstock’s customer data platform and we shifted our strategy to an individual’s unique experience, for every customer. What this means is, we've developed technologies like what we call LiveRecs, short for live recommendations, which are driven on machine learning algorithms to form a platform that enables real-time personalization. So when you've been to our site, your experience visiting the site is different from my experience. And by using this technology, between channels like email and our website, we create a custom narrative for each customer that guides them to the exact product they're looking for.” 

“Another place where we use AI in our marketing is Overstock sponsored products, which leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to enable our partner suppliers to bid on premium placement of their product on our website. This way they can ensure they get their products in front of the right customers at the right time. It's almost a bidding algorithm that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence.” 

What challenges have you faced so far with implementing the AI and how are you overcoming them?

“There's no magic bullet in AI. We've seen a lot of success applying machine learning to areas where there's a lot of data. For example, machine learning algorithms help us price and discount products efficiently. But they're not able to adapt quickly enough yet to seasonality and large traffic swings on big shopping events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. So how do we overcome them? Times like those require a combination of machine learning and human judgment. So when there's big seasonality swings, or big surges in the market, we look at what the machine learning is telling us, and we tweak it with what we've learned over 22 years of experience at those big holiday searches.”

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are wonderful tools, but they shouldn't be abused and they shouldn't be used in a creepy way. That's where human judgment comes in and moves the needle.

What’s your process for marketing planning when it comes to persona creation, identifying those customer segments, and the customer decision journeys?

“We've spent a lot of time trying to figure out who our customer is and what she wants, and then how to market to her. At the center of our marketing we have two target customers. The first we refer to as Savannah, a savvy shopper who comes to us for ‘smart value’. We define ‘smart value’ as the best product you can get for the money you're willing to spend. The second customer persona we refer to as Rebecca. She's what we call a ‘reluctant refresher’. She doesn't love to shop, but when she shops, she knows what she wants, and she wants an easy, convenient user experience. So when we build our campaigns, we're always looking to meet the needs of these two personas, provide smart value to Savannah, and provide a really easy customer-friendly user experience to Rebecca. This lets us stay true to our brand pillars of product findability with ease of use and smart value.” 

How do you pinpoint the customer journey for each of the personas? Do you use a technology for that, or do you have a team of analysts that would look into the journeys and segmentation?

“We have teams of analysts that follow the journeys of each, Rebecca and Savannah. We also apply machine learning to pricing, to make sure that we're price competitive. When you think about home furnishings, you cannot get a true price comparison for every product. It's not like books. So having a good algorithm for when there are comparable products on the site for us to win on pricing is particularly important.”

What are your marketing priorities for this year?

“Our top priorities for 2022 in the marketing group are campaign optimization, mobile application, and then growing our business into Canada. We are constantly making sure each digital campaign is receiving the best return on investment that it can through science and data. The second priority is increasing the adoption of our mobile application. Our mobile app is a great way to talk to customers and have customers talk to us. Increasing our footprint in Canada and trying to better understand the Canadian customer, how to market to that customer better, is another priority for 2022.” 

What’s your favorite campaign so far?

“In November of 2021, we focused on the adoption of Overstock’s mobile application. We created an omni-channel campaign by inviting customers to download the Overstock mobile app and receive a 20% off in-app coupon. This was presented throughout all our marketing, including our Thanksgiving Day Parade promotion online, in the app, and via email. During the fourth quarter of last year, we saw a 80% increase in app downloads quarter over quarter, and our app exclusive coupon on Thanksgiving Day helped us deliver app sales 3x higher than our typical run rate. That felt like a coordinated data-driven marketing campaign that had some really good success.”

Disclaimer: There is no direct affiliation between Growth Channel and Overstock

Although Nouria has been around for over 33 years, their consumer-facing brand was only launched four years ago. So they had to establish all of the digital media presence from scratch.

What role does innovation play in your marketing operations?

“We established a rewards program, that's essentially an affinity program to fuel in-store customers. And this is where we've had great success with over 200,000 members through compelling promotions and discounts.” 

“We're using primarily traditional media to market the brand, whether it's through local newspapers, ads, guerilla marketing, giveaways, and in-store promotions.”

“Our second version of the rewards program is build on Mobile. This is an all-in-one mobile ordering, payment, and rewards, in a single app. The program is expected to go live later this year.”

When you market the brand, you have to make whatever program you establish very intuitive, convenient, and simple for the customer to use.

What challenges have faced when applying technology and how you are overcoming them?

“The technology is changing so fast that by the time you implement one, either a new technology arises or another is already becoming absolute. There are so many solutions out there that some of them do the same thing, and some specialise in one area or another. So choosing the right solution has been a challenge. Like literally, I get 10s of solicitations a week from various providers for the exact same thing. And typically, the way we evaluate them is through case studies. We look at a solution, who's using it, how they use it, how effective it's been, how does it really help us, how much customisation does it need, do we need to have the program to implement it, is it something adaptable to our business, etc. On the other hand, we have an IT team, which is great at what they do but isn't always in the know about when it comes to marketing. They might understand it from the technology side, but they can't really articulate its benefits to the business. And that's another challenge we have. We're currently working on bringing a new role that understand both sides of the equation, the business side and the technology side.”

Can you describe the process and the different steps you're taking for marketing planning?

“In terms of the POS data that we get, it's a little bit cumbersome and that’s why we also have a relationship with Nielsen for the industry and market data. For example, it’s critical for us to know what product is doing well and in which market. With the different sources of data and ability to validate, we can connect all the dots that make up the big picture.”

What’s working today is creating a centralised data that looks at every aspect of a business within one context. This way we can understand the correlation of why, for example, some customers shop at certain locations for specific products.

“To understand when a customer is standing and pumping gas into a car, what they are doing at that point? Are they looking at their phone, are they looking at the store, are they looking at the pump, or the screen? And how can we best utilise those areas to communicate our offerings or to promote our products and our brand in that given moment.”

“We can see a very comprehensive market basket coming from transaction data. It’s a program that is like a regression analysis that correlates a set of products with other associated products. So we can see, for example, when customer bought a sandwich, what are they buying with that sandwich, how often, why in one store there's a higher product association with a single product versus another, and what factors are present in one location that are not present in any other. There's so much data right now, that if companies like us invest in the analytics, they can gain powerful insights from.”

“And essentially, the technology is not there yet. You still need someone with vast business experience to make sense of that data. But for the category analysts and marketing, a lot of younger talent who are new to the business cannot translate all data into conclusions. That is often because they don't have the relative kind of knowledge that would allow them to get the insights necessary to make some of those decisions. This is where a more senior data team is crucial.”

What are your marketing priorities for this year?

“The market used to be probably 50% creative and 50% data. I think that today, it's mostly based on data, and just around 25% creative.” 

We're changing the way we think about marketing, and starting to look at ways to analyse and understand the customer behaviour through the lenses of the data that we're gathering, versus having to guess.

“Our goal is to shift into a much more “laser approach” versus what I call a “shotgun approach” that we used in the past. This is where we’d throw a number of things and say, “Okay, let's hope one of them works”. In becoming more data-driven, we're going to be much more efficient in terms of how we market, how we spend, and also more and more importantly, how we serve our customers. I'm very excited about the path that we're shifting towards.”

Restore is a retail based health and wellness company with 150+ locations across the United States. The company is growing very quickly and expects to open another 50+ locations this year.

Restore has a relatively novel concept. Most people in the world don't realize that they can get things like IV drips, cryotherapy, and mild hyperbaric oxygen therapy to help them feel their best and do more of what they love. Restore wants to change that and make what they call “Hyper Wellness” affordable and accessible to everyone.

What role does innovation play in your marketing?

“We're driving awareness and interest for our locations and services, as well as foot traffic into the stores. But we're not a consumer packaged goods company nor are we an eCommerce brand. There's a fair bit of education that needs to happen with clients before they come into the store. So, a lot of our funnel is about driving leads before they come in and actually buy a service. This is where we've used AI. It’s essentially a chatbot that follows up with prospects for any missed call to the location. For example, a client calls a location during store hours or after-hours, and there's a missed call. Within a couple of seconds, that client will get a text message, something to the extent of, “Sorry, we missed you, how can we help?” Our conversational chatbot can then help with a consultation, answer basic FAQs, and book the appointment.

The chatbot helps convert about 20+% of clients that are looking to book an appointment.

It also helps reduce the amount of work that the store staff has to do to connect with clients over the phone to get their appointments booked. Now we're looking at using that concept even from a lead generation perspective. When a prospect fills out a lead form, our chatbot will send them a text right away. We're also looking at implementing the chatbot on our website to convert more of our new site visitors into booked appointments.” 

Have you faced any challenges when implementing conversational chatbot into your existing processes?

“There are several things that we have to consider. One is customizing the conversation for your brand. We have a relatively novel model that we offer to our clients. We have to teach the AI about our services and how to speak about them in a compliant way. Some of our services are regulated by the FDA and some are not, so we have to be able to customize the language to our brand and to ensure that it is medically compliant.”

“The other part involves technical integrations where we connect the AI to our booking point of sale system to ensure that the bot can actually go and book that appointment. It needs to pull information from the POS via API to determine what slots are available for the service that the client is looking for, and at the location that the client is looking for.”

What’s your process for marketing planning, especially when it comes to identifying the target audience and moving them across their customer decision journey?

“Like for any brand, Awareness is at the very top of the funnel. That's where we're looking for net new prospects that have never engaged with Restore before. From a targeting perspective, we exclude anyone that's ever visited restore.com as well as existing customer lists. So we truly want to get net new prospects and not just be advertising to existing clients or existing leads. At the Awareness stage, we're really just trying to expose these new prospects to the experience of the brand. We don't go into education at that point. What we're trying to show is what the experience looks and feels like in Restore to intrigue and create interest in learning more. Primarily, we do that with video advertising. We run 30- and 60-second brand spots across social platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and Connected TV.” 

“Once somebody's watched that ad through completion, we want to remarket to those engaged audiences into our Interest stage of the funnel. At this point, we want to drive traffic to restore.com to start learning about our modalities. Whereas at the Awareness stage the goal is just to complete a view of the ad, at the Interest stage we're looking for them to come to restore.com and explore. We’ll advertise at this phase with shorter slots like 8-15 second ads that then talk more about the benefit of the modality. Then we'll also run ads for articles from our blog or other pieces of content that will drive people to come over to restore.com to learn more.” 

“Then we retarget at the Consideration stage when they’re interested. You can also think of it as a Trial: what is the kind of deal or promotion that we're going to offer the client to get them to book an appointment. Then finally it's Conversion into membership and turning those members into Advocates.” 

“When we think about that funnel, from a planning perspective, we essentially have two work streams. The first is the Brand Marketing work stream. There, we're looking at what national marketing campaigns we need to run to drive Awareness and Interest for the brand. If our advertising is starting to lose performance, maybe because it's been running too long, we need to produce new creative to refresh the platforms with a new creative and continue to drive more of that awareness. Do we need to run PR campaigns or Ambassador programs that will reach the target audience?” 

“The other work stream is Local Marketing. As a franchise based organization, a lot of our time and effort is focused on driving leads and foot traffic to specific franchise locations. Essentially, with 150+ stores, we have 150+ local marketing funnels that we have to plan for and manage. Did our ads drive the target amount of leads that we need for that store that month? Were we able to convert those leads into booked appointments and into memberships? If our lead volume dropped, and our cost per lead went up, do we need to refresh the ad platforms with some fresh creative and new promotions to drive more leads at a good cost per lead for those stores?”

What are your marketing priorities for 2022?

“We're still a relatively young company.We were founded in June of 2015, and we started franchising in 2017. A lot of the growth has happened over the last two years in particular. The focus has really been on that local marketing side, helping individual stores open successfully and have good member growth.” 

“This year we have two major priorities for the organization, to drive awareness and interest for the brand. We're starting to get into the brand marketing side. We launched our new website in March, which was a significant upgrade from what we had before. It’s much easier to navigate, understand, and educate about the modalities, and to book appointments. We also launched our first national master brand advertising campaign. We just announced our first ambassador partnership and have partnered with Tim and Demi Tebow to help drive more awareness for what we call the ‘Hyper Wellness lifestyle’, which is a more proactive approach to your health and wellness.” 

“Over the next couple of months, you'll start to see more PR from a thought leadership perspective around proactive health, more education on the science and research that has gone into longevity, and how you can potentially improve your longevity by using Restore services. Additionally, we are starting to focus on frictionless digital experiences. Part one of that was launching the new website and continuing to optimize it. The second is launching our mobile app where you'll be able to see the credits of your membership, any packages that you bought, book and reschedule appointments.” 

The vision is to help personalise your health, and this is where AI will come back into play as we mature as a brand and with our technology stack.

“The idea is to be able to connect with your fitness tracking devices. For example, I wear an Oura ring to track my sleep, and a lot of people wear Apple Watch or Fitbit. You'll be able to connect with your health tracking devices and start to look at your health score. Those tracking devices will improve when you use modalities at Restore. For example, I know if my Oura ring says that I didn't get a great night's sleep last night, I can go into Restore. For me what helps is if I do go do either cryotherapy, or mild hyperbaric oxygen therapy, I will see an improvement in my sleep score that next night. We want to be able to better correlate health outcomes from using our services and then use that to provide essentially a personalised recommendation engine. We expect as we mature as an organisation, we’ll start to use AI and machine learning a lot more to really develop that personalised recommendation engine.”

Modere is a clean label health & wellness, personal care, and household brand primarily focused on eCommerce and direct-to-consumer (DTC) channels. For the past three consecutive years, Modere has ranked among the top five Fastest Growing Women-Led Companies by the Women Presidents Organization and JPMorgan Chase, in recognition of the brand’s position at the forefront of innovation in health and wellness.

Operating in 44 countries around the world, Modere’s holistic live clean philosophy drives every aspect of the brand, going beyond its ingredient paradigm to encompass business operations, company culture, community activism and environmental advocacy.

Let’s dive into the insights of how Modere is driving their marketing innovation.

How are you applying innovation in your marketing?

“It's really important to reach the consumer where they are, and today you can reach consumers in very different ways. It used to be that marketing was very physical in nature and focused on positioning a product on a shelf. Now, however, online channels such as social media, social commerce, and influencers have become much more important for reaching consumers via virtual platforms.

“When we're talking about innovation, we're really talking about adapting technology to reach the consumer, create more awareness, and drive conversion. Modere maintains a very high conversion rate, and that is directly related to the trust and loyalty that we have earned from our customers. Technology has been essential in helping us to cultivate that trust and loyalty by enabling us to better understand our target consumer and predict what she will do next after being introduced to the brand.”

If you can master the art of conversion, then your responsibility is to make sure that you’re satisfying the customers’ needs at every touchpoint after that relationship begins.

“By virtue of the continual evolution of technology, we’re gaining access to ever more new technical tools. What’s more, the suppliers and partners within technology have significantly evolved over the last three years, due in large part to the pandemic, which accelerated the digital transformation for many companies. Partners in the AI and data analytics space are even more accessible today than they were five years ago.

“AI is becoming prevalent in customer service, in the ability to achieve sales goals, in the consumer relationship, and in prediction models. It's also within automation. For example, we use AI to help us with things like forecasting and predictive purchasing behavior where AI helps create simple yet meaningful experiences for our consumers. We're investing our resources in bringing that technology to the forefront of our brand and making sure that our consumers benefit from the resources and investment that we're making.”

What challenges are you facing with implementing AI into your current marketing processes, and how are you overcoming them?

“It's probably the kind of challenge that every company is dealing with, which is to work backwards from the end goal to make sure we use the most meaningful intelligence. For us, the objective is growth and sales, higher retention, higher conversions, customer satisfaction, NPS, and to ensure that all indicators of customer experience are at the optimal level.” 

Can you talk a little about your process for marketing planning?

“We start with our company objectives. We always operate on a three-year plan for executing our top initiatives. From there, we want to make sure that our marketing objectives actually fulfill the overall company objectives. Marketing then uses technology and AI to obtain the targeted objectives- whether that be to increase customer acquisition, improve NPS, or improve retention rates. We do a lot of testing to find out whether or not the marketing message is actually working and fits the company objectives. Above all, it has been and will always be about how we can simplify the customer journey.” 

What are your marketing priorities? 

“We have goals for market expansion. Although Modere is currently in 44 countries right now, we have hardly touched the full potential of our brand. We just launched India distribution a little over a year ago, and we have plans to further expand into Latin America and the Middle East.

We also have a very clear target when it comes to NPS, customer satisfaction, and the impact we want to make on customer retention. We're very fortunate that an overwhelming majority of our customers- over 90%, in fact-  plan to purchase something else from us in the next 12 months. We also have metrics and studies indicating that our consumers plan to purchase more products from us because they trust our brand and the efficacy of our products for health and wellness. We need to make sure that the technology we use makes it easy for consumers to stay with us longer, take advantage of our loyalty programs, and extend that lifecycle.”

What’s one of your successful multichannel activation campaigns?

“The opening of our first brand experience center in Soho, New York is one example. As we have a very digitized and online relationship with our consumer, the brick & mortar presence allows for that consumer to actually be immersed in our brand. It also helps us to gather key data points for our R&D and Product teams by sampling products and gathering feedback from the consumers. This is where our customers can try new products that we're developing and give us that direct feedback.” 

The most important thing for us is to ultimately be closer to the consumer at all times and really understand them.

Even though NFTs have been around since 2017, there was a massive increase in popularity in 2021. NFT trading hit $17.6 billion in 2021, an increase of 21,000% from 2020, according to CNBC. As of March 2022, volumes have averaged around $687 million per week. You can read our Guide to NFT marketing to learn more about advanced NFT marketing strategies and read about other NFT campaign examples. In this blog post, we're featuring 7 of the most popular NFT campaigns that we’ve seen so far in 2022.

1. NBA Top Shot

NBA Top Shot is a website that sells NBA Collectibles, or “Moments,” that show highlights from the NBA’s top players. This includes live on-court video, action shots, stats from the game, and individually numbered collectibles in limited edition. In February 2022, NBA Top Shot debuted their “NBA All-Star VIP Pass NFT Auction and Giveaway hosted by Top Shot”. According to NFT Now, “The auction included 30 unique NFTs and exclusive digital collectibles representing every NBA team. These grant each owner a VIP pass for the ultimate fan experience at the next five NBA All-Stars.” NBA Top Shot also created a video ad for the NFT campaign featuring NBA star Kevin Durant. This campaign brings NBA superfans into the NFT world and gives them a chance at a once in a lifetime opportunity. Token holders have the opportunity to either keep the token for the next five years, or they can resell it to a new holder.

Source: NBA Top Shot

2. Bud Light NEXT

Bud Light created Bud Light NEXT, launched on February 7, 2022, just a week before Super Bowl LVI. The NFT collection was launched at the same time as the new product was announced. Bud Light tweeted:

The NFT is made up of 12,722 tokens which symbolize the date the NFT was announced. Like most NFTs, buyers have exclusive benefits like voting on new brand merchandise and different surprise rewards. The tokens sold out an hour before the Super Bowl started and brought in $4.5 million in revenue. Bud Light NEXT also had a Super Bowl Ad spot to promote the new beer, no doubt creating more interest in the new product, which also leads to more interest in the NFT world.

3. Adidas Originals “Into The Metaverse”

In Adidas's NFT campaign, NFT holders get access to exclusive physical merchandise items from Adidas, Bored Ape Yacht Club, GMoney, and PUNKS Comic. In addition to the physical benefits, holders can also access the open Metaverse virtual land experiences that have been co-created with the community. The drop has multiple phases, the most recent being phase two, which dropped on April 28, 2022. Token holders had to claim their physical merchandise to be eligible to enter into phase two. The physical merchandise included pieces from Adidas Originals that featured images or graphics from the partners Bored Ape Yacht Club, GMoney, and PUNKS Comic. Below is an example of a digital token that can be used in the Metaverse virtual land experience. Adidas is not the first sportswear brand to break into the NFT world. In 2019, Nike jumped in with their Cryptokicks.

Source: Open Sea

4. Bored Ape Yacht Club

Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) is one of the most popular NFTs on the market. The current floor price is 90 ETH which is equivalent to over $164,000 and their trade volume is 579,300. BAYC is notorious for having celebrity buyers. Celebrities purchase these NFTs and share them on social media and tag BAYC, therefore creating an unorganized influencer marketing NFT campaign. With the purchase of a Bored Ape, users have access to the “club” that is available to NFT owners only. People see celebrities buying these NFTs and then want to buy one themselves to be able to have the chance to hang out in the rooms or on different servers with these celebrities. Each ape is unique and belongs solely to the token holder to do whatever they want. Famous Ape owners include:

Source: Twitter

5. A Journey with the Dogg

Snoop Dogg’s latest NFT drop, “A Journey with the Dogg” is a collection of the rapper's early years combined with NFT art. The drop also included an original song by the rapper called “NFT”. This is only one of many of Snopp Dogg’s NFT drops. The artist has made himself a known and prominent member of the NFT community. A portion of the proceeds from “A Journey with the Dogg” will “support young, emerging artists in the crypto space as well as Snoop’s Youth Football League” (Crypto).

Source: Crypto

6. VeeFriends

Created by Gary Vaynerchuk or “Gary V” as he’s more commonly known, the “VeeFriends” NFT campaign is a collection comprised of 10,255 different character NFTs. Each token includes a “smart contract” with metadata that Vaynerchuk can use to interact with its buyer. This year, VeeFriends hosted the first-ever NFT-ticketed event. In addition to this year's event, token holders also have exclusive access to the VeeFriends event for three years after their purchase. The event was hosted in Minneapolis, Minnesota at U.S. Bank Stadium and featured keynote speakers that have recently become popular in the Web3 scene. The lineup included Snoop Dogg, Spike Lee, Deepak Chopra, Eva Longoria, Mila Kunis, and more.

Source: VeeFriends

7. Women Rise

​Women Rise is a collection of 10,000 randomly generated and unique NFT art pieces created by the well-known artist Maliha Abidi. Each image is diverse and features different characteristics of women all over the world. Not only does the collection feature women from different cultures and parts of the world, but it features women from different career paths. Some include women activists, artists, scientists, coders, astronauts, and many others. The goal of Women Rise is to “build the first school in the metaverse for the 258 million children around the world who have no access to education. 129 million of them are girls.” NFTs featuring and celebrating women are becoming increasingly popular, as Women Rise is not the only one. 

Source: Twitter


As NFTs evolve and become more popular, the types of NFTs we are seeing will continue to change. When it comes to NFTs, the possibilities of what can be produced is endless. Considering the level of popularity of NFTs right now, it’s hard to imagine the tokens growing even more. So what’s next for NFTs? CNBC says even though we are seeing fewer people, fewer buyers, and fewer sales, the global market is still really high and the value of some of these assets has continued to increase. He predicts more large companies and financial institutions will enter the market. With the right strategy, you can successfully market your NFTs and make yourself known in the busy market.

Which NFT campaign is your favorite? Join the conversation on Twitter @Gr0wthChannel

It’s important to focus on delivering the right content to the right people according to their specific stage in the sales funnel. This enables you to generate and convert high-quality leads not only into customers but also into brand evangelists.

Before we dig into the top ways to create content for each sales funnel stage, let’s understand what a sales funnel is.

What is a Sales Funnel?

A sales funnel, also known as a marketing funnel, is a visual representation of the complete journey a prospect goes through to become a customer. It comprises different stages of this journey—right from the prospect’s first conversation with you to the completion of their purchase.

A sales funnel is commonly divided into three parts, the top, middle, and bottom which indicate:

• Where exactly prospects are in their buyer’s journey
• What pushed them to the next funnel stage
• Where leads are dropping off the funnel
• Areas your prospecting efforts are lacking in
• Where you need to alter or improve your sales process

Each part of the sales funnel includes a specific stage potential customers go through until they become buyers. The top of the funnel (TOFU) includes the awareness stage, the middle of the funnel (MOFU) includes the consideration stage, and the bottom of the funnel (BOFU) includes the decision stage.

Your content strategy needs to be unique and specific to each stage to be able to move prospects down the funnel and eventually convert them into buyers.

On a side note, you can look at the funnel from the sales view (the one we cover in this post), and also from the customer point of view - the customer decision journey.

TOFU: Content Strategies for the Awareness / Discovery Stage

The awareness stage of a sales funnel is where prospects start their buyer’s journey. Here, they are mainly looking to meet their needs, solve their problems, and are seeking answers to their queries. Sometimes, a prospect may even discover a pain point they were unaware of earlier until they reached the awareness stage.

Did you know that 45% of prospects say they wanted to evaluate their needs and look for solutions themselves, before contacting any salesperson? This means that potentially half of your customers are already in the discovery stage and could become a target to your content strategy.

It is at the awareness stage where you need to attract the right prospects and create value-add interactions by sharing easily digestible and discoverable content with them. Bear in mind that your content should be interesting, helpful, and educate prospects at the awareness stage. Statistics reveal that 74% of buyers chose the company that was the first to add value to them.

Some of the great examples of short-form content for the awareness stage are:

• How-to videos
• Social media posts
• Informational blog posts
• Infographics
• Checklists
• Educational content and templates

How-to, instructional, and best tips videos work great to hook and educate target audience at the awareness stage. They can also be used to create awareness about a problem and show how your product is one of the top solutions for it. Social media content is another powerful short-form content that is more likely to catch the attention of prospects. Studies suggest that 54% of social browsers use social media to research products.

If you want to add depth to your content strategy for the awareness stage, you can use long-form content types like ebooks, whitepapers, and webinars. Having said that, whether you’re using short-form or long-form content, your goal should be to present your brand as a trustworthy thought leader, industry expert, or a go-to resource for information. At the same time, it needs to attract the attention of prospects and help them with the topics they’re researching at the awareness stage.

Hint: you can generate your personalized growth tactics with content taglines for each step of the customer journey with Growth Channel App

MOFU: Content Strategies for the Consideration / Evaluation Stage

Now that you’ve managed to attract a prospect, it is time to convince them why and how your product can best solve their problem or meet their needs. At the consideration stage, a prospect is heavily researching different brands and considering multiple solutions to find the one that is the best fit for them. Approximately 95% of B2B buyers research companies online before making purchases.

Your content for the consideration stage needs to make it easy for prospects to choose you over your competitors. It should do the thinking for prospects as they choose among different options. It should also assure them that your solution is the most suitable for their particular need.

With B2B sales intelligence solutions like intent data, you can easily find out who is actively researching your solution or those similar to yours and even the topics they’re researching. Intent data also enables you to know whether a prospect is searching for a competitor’s product. Furthermore, it helps you understand a prospect’s content consumption, online behavior, purchase intent, interests, needs, and challenges.

You can use these insights to inform your content strategy by personalizing and customizing it to effectively target prospects at the consideration stage. You’ll be able to address their needs and problems and use the right keywords in your content. More importantly, you’ll be able to deliver such content to “in-market” prospects—who are most likely to buy from you—in their preferred format and at the right time.

Not to forget, the following also make up great content to target prospects at the consideration stage:

• Testimonials
• Case studies
• Product comparison guides
• Lists of pros and cons
• Customer reviews

For example, a case study can be used to give a proof of how your solution works for a client running a similar business or operating in the same industry as that of the prospect you’re targeting. Your case studies can include statistics and other quantitative data that stands out.

This helps convince prospects about your genuineness, capabilities, and why your product is the best one to choose. Moreover, you get to show why your clients trust you and do business with you, thus compelling prospects to consider you over other brands in the competition.

BOFU: Content Strategies for the Decision / Purchase Stage

At the decision stage, you continue to engage and nurture qualified prospects using your content until they make the final purchase decision. Your content for the decision stage should provide that final nudge to push prospects to purchase your solution. It needs to include the right offers, compelling CTAs, contextual messaging, and tailored value propositions to reinforce the confidence of prospects in your brand and solution.

Your content should help prospects at the decision stage to continue to see you as the best vendor and your solution as the most ideal fit for their specific need. It should also answer a prospect’s vendor-driven concerns, queries, and questions like: what would it take to become your customer?

To target prospects at the decision stage, some of the best content types to use are:

• Competitive feature analysis
• Live demos
• Free trials
• Consultation offers
• Product feature videos
• FAQs and their well-explained answers

After prospects decide to purchase your product, make it a point to create content to delight your new customers. This goes a long way toward creating brand promoters, word-of-mouth referrals, and improving customer lifetime value.

For the delight stage, you can use knowledge base content that provides a deeper understanding of your brand, your product’s functionality, and includes your product’s specific use cases. To delight your new customers, you can use:

• Immersive and interactive content
• Industry or business-specific advice
• User-generated content
• Content that is customer-centric, insightful, and solves their problems

You can also use these content ideas to delight your existing customers. After all, existing customers spend 31% more and are 50% more likely to try new products than new customers. Furthermore, it costs five times more to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones.

Read more: Growth Marketing Tactics for Each Stage of the Buyer's Journey

The Wrap

Optimizing your sales funnel is key to improving your sales results. A critical part of achieving this goal is to create well-targeted, resonating, and applicable content for prospects at each stage of the funnel. When you map your content to different stages of the funnel, you’re well-positioned to increase sales conversion rates.

According to statistics, targeting users with content that’s relevant to their position along the buying process yields 72% higher conversion rates. Furthermore, 95% of buyers choose a vendor that provides them with sufficient content helping them navigate each stage of the buying process.

By implementing the content strategies discussed here, you’ll be able to efficiently move prospects across the sales funnel and improve your win rates. Keep in mind that it’s extremely crucial to have intimate knowledge of your target audience, no matter where they are in the funnel. This allows you to produce the right  type of content needed to advance them further down the funnel.

About the author

Ariana Shannon is the Marketing Director at SalesIntel.io. SalesIntel provides accurate and affordable contact data available for sales and marketing teams.

With the rise in digital technologies and eCommerce forecast to hit $1.08 trillion by 2022, it’s safe to say that this is the new norm. Long gone are the days of searching for products in stores or waiting in long lines to checkout. Now, the customer is in control. They determine when they want a product, how they want it, and where they can get it from. This means brands are focusing on personalization and automation as the driving force for eCommerce.

This can be seen as new technology trends like artificial intelligence and augmented reality are redefining the ways customers interact with products and brands. These solutions offer incredible user experiences that streamline the buying process by saving consumers time and money. That’s why major furniture and apparel companies using these technologies are projected to grow the fastest online with 20% YoY growth in 2021. This is just one way eCommerce businesses are bringing the store to your home.

Since this industry is ever-changing, it’s important to stay on top of trends to make valuable business decisions. With new eCommerce brands popping up every day and slingshotting themselves to high profits, you need to learn to adapt. These trends, along with our eCommerce marketing strategies, are designed to help you stay informed and profit from one of the most important changes in consumer history.

So without further ado, here are 13 trends to consider for your eCommerce business in 2024.

1. Social media as a sales channel

Source: TikTok x Shopify

Businesses can now sell products on leading social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and Twitter. This is an incredibly useful feature for eCommerce brands as 74% of buyers confirm their purchase decisions based on social media presence.

As a result, brands are building business pages on multiple platforms to engage with customers through different channels. On Facebook and Twitter, brands can redirect customers to their eCommerce site through product ads. On Instagram, companies can have consumers purchase products directly from the app with Checkout. On TikTok, creators can make mini-storefronts with the recent Shopify partnership, and now Google has plans to do the same with YouTube too.

As so many platforms encourage shopping features, social commerce will likely become the norm as it’s an easy, enjoyable, and straightforward experience. Combine this with the power of influencer marketing, and you have an unstoppable machine for generating online sales.

Brands will likely have social media at the top of their spending list going into 2022 for these reasons.

2. More alternative payment options

Source: Global Payments Report

Having multiple payment options like credit cards, debit cards, alternative payment methods, and digital currencies greatly increase the number of people you cater to online.

In recent years, we’ve seen a large shift in users adopting alternative payment solutions like PayPal, Stripe, Square, Amazon Pay, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and cryptocurrency. Supporting these payment methods may help increase user satisfaction and allow you to reach new customers.

The same can be said for E-commerce platforms that have brick-and-mortar stores. Retailers now allow online shoppers to pick up items at several store locations and pay at delivery with contactless payment or curbside checkout. This is in part due to the pandemic and rise in mobile wallets which will only continue to grow.

Another form of alternative payment that is growing in popularity is buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) solutions. These are payment plans where buyers can spread their purchase cost out over several months. Since the pandemic, 56% of Americans say they’ve used BNPL solutions and 62% say it could replace credit cards. The main reason is financial.

3. Demand for personalized products

Source: Website Magazine

Personalization is everywhere in the customer experience. From made-to-order products to customer service chatbots, users are quickly switching to brands that offer personalized solutions and tailored products. So much so that 22% of customers said they would be happy to share some data in return for a more customized product or experience.

"Behavioral targeting is one of the most effective marketing strategies for capturing attention and retaining customer attention. Messaging triggered by specific actions like pages visited, geo-location, or average order value (AOV) resonate more with website visitors reaching them when they’re most likely to convert and with their specific interests in mind." - Justuno

By investing in personalization efforts, you can increase revenue from 10 to 30 percent and create lasting loyalty. Big brands like Nike have already captured this trend. Their 3D sneaker customization platform allows users to build custom-designed shoes that match their feet and style perfectly. Along with their NikePlus loyalty program which offers personalized benefits like local data on favorite shoes, special pick-up lockers, QR code availability, and instant checkout. These are just several ways that Nike puts its customers in control.

Other brands are redefining the customer experience as well. Whole Foods has an app that keeps track of customers' purchases and offers new suggestions. Stitch Fix, an apparel company, delivers personalized styling recommendations through survey quizzes and allows customers to choose the items they like. Apple also introduced customizable features like personal engravings on their product so customers can add emojis or their name to make it special.

We’re starting to see a lot more personalization as brands are more intent on delivering the right product to the right customer. However, on the flip side of the coin, there are also privacy concerns, compliance, and zero-party data collection.

"With the impending demise of third-party cookies and increased privacy regulations, ecommerce retailers continue to face challenges in understanding the true performance of their marketing spend. Moreover, customer acquisition is continuing to get more expensive." - Sushil Goel, CEO at LayerFive

"In addition to personalization, A/B Testing has come to the forefront too. Even though A/B testing is no new trend by itself, many e-commerce companies initiated their experimentation journey during pandemic due to the robust competition. They are now yielding huge benefits as they have better pulse of customer journey & experience at every touch point." - Arnab Chandranath, Head of Revenue (APAC/ANZ/IMEA) at VWO

4. D2C Brands adopting subscription models

Savvy businesses are adjusting their products and services to subscription models to better align with the shift in consumer behavior online. This has resulted in a doubling of subscription sales since the pandemic, according to eMarketer.

The three most common subscription models include:

Subscription models are very favorable for new brands starting out but have posed a serious threat to existing D2C eCommerce brands. Yashwin Naidu from KPI Media, explains how D2C brands are struggling to keep up with the rising customer acquisition costs (CAC) as a result of the massive shift towards eCommerce. He describes one way to overcome this is by increasing your CAC threshold by retaining customers for longer durations. This raises CLTV and promotes a healthier long-term business model.

There are many companies that have found success with subscriptions including HelloFresh, Dollar Shave Club, and most streaming platforms. Their models offer ideal predictability, recurring revenue, and customer insights so they can easily track their business and grow with demand.

5. One-click purchases

If you’re an Amazon member, you’re probably familiar with the one-click purchase option. Instead of adding a product to your cart and sitting on it, you can purchase it instantly through the “buy now with 1-click” button. This checkout method offers ultimate convenience while encouraging impulse buys, an estimated 40% of e-commerce. It also makes checkout faster and easier, reducing fraud and personalizing the brand experience.

To implement this feature you can use a third-party plugin or a platform like Bolt which keeps shoppers in your store for secure one-click checkout. This results in 60% higher conversion rates and happier customers. It’s also one way to combat the 70% abandonment rate of shopping carts. Since Bolt has over 50 million customers, their information is stored over all the merchants that use their platform, creating a network effect.

One-click buying and checkout experience platforms are likely to be one of the most adopted trends.

6. Voice search optimization for web

Buyers are starting to look towards their mobile phones, smart hubs, and connected devices for assistance. People find it a lot easier to ask Siri or Google a question rather than searching for it themselves. With this increase in voice-assisted search, businesses need to have their websites optimized for audio by prioritizing the kinds of information people are seeking. This could range from your store address, operating hours, to a certain line of products. All this information needs to be readily available on your sites and in good standing with Google search, preferably in “position zero”.

One way to optimize your site is by integrating questions we ask during voice search on the website. Adam Binder from Creative Click Media says, “this makes it more likely that your website will show up as a top result the next time someone asks that question via voice search.”

You can do this by building your FAQs with “who”, “what”, “when”, “where”, “why”, and “how” queries. These are common questions that fulfill an immediate need for your customers. Once you have enough content you can provide context by using Schema to tell Google exactly what your sites are about and attract more searches.

7. Augmented reality solutions

Businesses are experimenting with new forms of technology to meet the demands of their customers. Augmented reality (AR) is one technology that creates unique customer experiences and increases user engagement. It has wide use in business ranging from customers viewing product variations in their homes to companies streamlining the onboarding process with AR training programs.

“If you want to sell more products online, nothing will increase conversion rates like 3D and Augmented Reality will” ― Trevor Crotts at ScanShop.io

The overall experience with AR is that it enhances one’s physical world by overlaying sensory information in a way that drives new understanding and insight. This is beneficial for e-commerce where 45% of people said AR features saved them time in their buying decision and 61% said they preferred to make purchases on sites that use AR.

One company taking AR to the next level is MOD Tech Labs. MOD makes 3D easy with their no-code solution for e-commerce companies to digitize products, people, and worlds. You can use any camera or the MOD 3D scanning tool to capture images of the real world and then transform them in the cloud 99% faster using AI. These digital assets are delivered ready for any device making playback for mobile, web, virtual, and AR easier to tell the story of people, products, and profit with 3D.

8. Livestream shopping

Source: Business Insider

Livestream shopping — or live selling— has already taken off in China generating $300 billion this year and growing 85% from last year, according to eMarketer. This trend was fueled in part by the pandemic as brick-and-mortar stores shut down and have continued growing since.

Now big US companies are jumping on the trend. Walmart experimented with shoppable live streams on TikTok. Amazon released its live platform for influencers to promote items and chat with customers. Facebook started Live Shopping Fridays for fashion and beauty brands. Instagram launched selling in live broadcasts and many others have adapted as well.

Live shopping has blended the convenience of online shopping with the entertainment of live video. Users can find emerging products and brands while also having the ability to buy items from a live stream. This makes it easier for brands to find potential customers and utilize influencer marketing to strengthen their reach. We have only scratched the surface of this trend and will likely see more brands enter this space.

9. Shoppable short-form video

Along with live streams, new forms of video commerce are coming into play. Shoppable short-form video is making strides in the social media world as big brands are finding new ways of delivering content to viewers. We're seeing more products and services being showcased through Instagram ads, TikTok videos, and even on e-commerce websites. This allows brands to communicate the value of their products in an interactive and seamless way.

Several studies have shown that leveraging video can boost conversion rates up to 80%. Thanks to higher engagement and conversion, shoppable video ads also return higher ROI. Currently, 51% of marketers say that video has the best ROI out of any content type.

Pamela Wagner, Founder of Ajala Digital, explains how capturing customers with shorter and more engaging material is key to a successful video strategy. Leveraging multiple channels for your video ads is one way to grow your audience and explore different features. You may find that reels on Instagram provide a better conversion rate than bumper ads on YouTube. It’s all about picking and pulling the right solutions for your business.

10. Bridging the gap between AI and data

Organizations are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to improve their workflow and processes. With personalization at the forefront of e-commerce , AI has become a driving force for improving the customer experience. Specifically in customer service, sales, and marketing.

AI is capable of completing tasks normally performed by humans in record speed and consistency. Like sorting your data, writing content, or providing helpful information through a chatbot. While AI is not a genius, it helps you “understand” topics in different ways and lets you work on more demanding tasks while completing the repeatable ones. Since AI is still relatively new, researchers are constantly improving its use.

Adam Pivko from Autumn DNA pointed out the rapid moves AI technology has made by referencing OpenAI ’s DALL-E which transforms natural language input into corresponding images. This technology represents the power of deep learning from unlabeled internet data. Another example of AI for e-commerce is how CRM platforms like HubSpot use machine learning to enrich their insights and highlight key information on competitors. This is done by using a large volume of data that most retailers don’t have access to.

At the same time, AI is now also capable to autonomously optimize omnichannel digital advertising campaigns, so only things you have to do is confirm the target KPI, duration, and budget, and the system will make sure to hit your goals through real-time bidding (RTB) combined with automated A/B tests and benchmarking.

AI is extremely beneficial for eCommerce and will continue to be influential in technology as more processes become automated.

11. Unbundling of marketplaces

Source: David Haber

We will continue to see the unbundling of horizontal marketplaces like eBay, Craigslist, and Amazon into distinct verticals. This happens when new companies take a chunk out of a large platform by addressing a specific niche. Think Uber, Airbnb, and Fiverr. These companies disrupted the original marketplace by tailoring to one vertical with unique attributes.

Airbnb owns 20% of the U.S vacation rental business because it broke down the rental market into one platform. This digitization has reduced the need for hotels and trip advisors because it tackled issues with time consumption and cost.

Another example is Etsy. Similar to how JungleScout helps sellers on Amazon, Shaan Puri described how building SaaS tools for sellers on second-tier marketplaces like Etsy and Poshmark could be valuable in this video. Like JungleScout, this tool could help sellers understand the search volume, monthly revenue, growth, and competition of a product all from a chrome extension. But by creating this tool on Etsy or Poshmark, you would be tackling your own niche and contributing to the unbundling trend.

It’s important to remember that when you find success in your vertical, there will always be competitors who arise with similar products.

12. Continued growth in mobile shopping

Mobile shopping is growing fast! M-commerce is projected to make up 6% of all retail sales and over half of e-commerce sales in 2021.

Retailers are adapting to this trend by offering mobile apps that make finding products online and in-store easier. Making sure your website is optimized for mobile devices is one step towards generating higher profits. Enabling personalization on mobile is next. Online shoppers are likely to avoid sites that have poor product recommendations or a buggy interface, especially on their phones where users spend up to 5-6 hours a day.

Source: Hootsuite

Most of m-commerce can be attributed to its convenience. A lot of users browse through shopping lists on their phones before making a purchase, so it’s important to have multichannel reach. With the growth in mobile wallets, there’s also been an increase in customers’ mobile experiences. Three out of four customers say they shop on mobile devices because it saves them time. This benefit along with the ability to shop anytime, anywhere is the main reason why m-commerce will continue to grow in the future.

13. Focus on green consumerism

Source : GWI

Since the 90s businesses have been using environmental focus as a selling point. Products that were sustainable, renewable, or made using green materials were typically held at high praise.

This trend revived with the pandemic as consumers are seeking healthier, greener options for their lifestyles. Thanks to Gen Z, 54% of young shoppers believe companies’ environmental and social efforts are very or extremely important when purchasing a product or service. This is the main reason why 96% of businesses are feeling increased pressure to become more sustainable.

One major way companies are turning green is by lowering packaging waste. Coca-Cola Company has a “World Without Waste” initiative, which aims to make its packaging 100% recyclable by 2025. They collect and recycle a bottle or can for each one sold, and aim to use 50% recycled material in its bottles and cans by 2030. Initiatives like this are a great way to bring attention to your brand for a good cause.

However, having a green business isn’t just for the image. 60% of internet users say they’ll pay more for products that are eco-friendly and 86% of businesses expect their sales to grow over the next year thanks to sustainability.

With profit on the line, green consumerism will continue to be monumental for businesses.

As our world continues to grow digitally, shopping as we know it will be changed forever. Adapting to technology and current trends is one way to stay ahead of the game and make a profitable business. This collection of AI marketing tools can help you discover the next technology to power your eCommerce business.

Do you have an e-commerce case study you want to share? Tweet us @Gr0wthchannel - the best comments will be featured in this blog! Until then, happy shopping 😃

1. Launch an animated infographic series

Sometimes we forget simplicity can go a long way.

Why an animated infographics series? For one, they can deliver essential information and statistics to a large audience. Basic infographics can no longer do that because you need to have content that is impactful and visually appealing. With the influx of digital information, you can not only add content on a topic but also make your content the go-to when people want answers.

Email Uplers presents an innovative idea for optimizing your landing page with interactive infographics. By scrolling down the screen, you are in control of a car driving down “Landing Page Road”, leading straight to a company's “Business Success”. Just as with a customer’s journey, you can think of clever ways to lead them down your animated road. Just remember to keep it simple, short, humorous, and close to your target audience!

2. Try a multi-channel campaign

A Multi-Channel campaign helps you reach more of your audience while cutting down the need to constantly create new content. You have the opportunity to connect on websites, digital ads, social media, direct mail, catalogs, email, and even mobile devices. You have to remember that campaigns are an investment and what may not work on one channel can surely work on another.

A great example is Single Grain, a digital marketing company that thrives on B2B SEO growth. CEO Eric Siu uses a multi-channel marketing campaign by having a daily marketing podcast called Marketing School, as well as the weekly Leveling Up podcast and a YouTube channel. By taking a topic that works from one channel he can repurpose it for other channels.

3. Create a messenger drip campaign 

If you haven’t heard of a Messenger Drip campaign, I suggest you check it out! It’s a marketing strategy that sends, or “drips,” a pre-written set of messages to subscribers over time. Based on the subscriber’s input, they will be assigned a designated drip campaign that you have pre-created.

For example, Mobile Monkey took their $250 cost per lead and reduced it by 97% by utilizing messenger as an origin point for leads. With this they were able to create a more personalized experience for each person. Similar to a workflow but built within a messenger.

4. Start a Referral Program

The infamous Referral program never goes out of style. Did you know that companies who use employee referral programs have average retention rates of 46 percent and employee referrals finish training and onboarding sooner? Why is that? Well, when you think about it, people who are referred are coming in more knowledgeable than the average person. So the desire to come work or use a product is more appealing.

When you look at DropBox, they use a referral program that gives you and a friend 500MB of additional free storage space, and up to 16GB in total. This alone increased their signups permanently by 60% and decreased their ad spending in just 15 months.

5. Launch a collaboration with an influencer

Influencer marketing increases brand awareness and grows your audience. According to LeverageMarketing, it’s the “management of exchange relationships between service and product providers and trusted consumers with authority over a target audience”. With 4 billion people using social media each month, leveraging influencer marketing is an effective way to reach pre-existing social spaces.

BMW launched their new series one model and partnered with 4 popular TikTok influencers. The influencers were able to create a hashtag challenge of a dance they created for the release of the car. The challenge gathered over 200,000 likes and 6 million views.

Remember, working with influencers can cost as low as $100 but have an ROI that is 11x higher than other digital marketing channels, such as banner ads. This profit potential explains why influencer marketing platforms have a 30.3% expected annual growth rate from 2021-2028, per data.

6. Create a design challenge

Canva recently announced a design challenge called #DesignedWithCanva to inspire users to create beautiful designs using their platform and share them on social media with the world. This campaign showcases the power of their product while incentivizing creators for user-generated content. This way, not only is Canva showcasing some of the best artists around the world, but they're gaining awareness in doing so. Several other brands that ran a similar challenge include Adobe’s “Little Dream” and GoPro’s “Million Dollar Challenge” which were both aimed at content creators. If you want to replicate Canva’s concept, here are the three steps format.

Generate your Holiday Marketing Campaign Plan with Growth Channel AI
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Seasonal Marketing Campaign Ideas

Seasonal marketing campaigns are a great way to engage with your audience, build brand awareness, and turn prospects into customers. Here are a few of the great campaign examples:

7. Halloween campaign

Halloween is an excellent target for marketing campaigns as consumers tend to buy many seasonal Halloween-related item. It’s also one of the biggest days for retail with an estimated $102.74 spending per person and $10.14 billion overall.

As an example, M&M’s chocolate created an interactive social media ghost story which was a hit for weeks! Users had the chance to follow around the main character Millie as she tracked some delicious chocolate candies. This choose-your-own-adventure type series featured 30 second animated videos with a ghostly theme. A great way to keep your audience engaged during prime candy buying season!

8. Thanksgiving campaign

Thanksgiving is widely celebrated in the US with over 85% participating and $1.05 billion spent on turkeys alone! This family-style tradition is a great place for marketers to get on the dining table and talking list. You can place your campaign efforts around food, history, or sports which are all abundant on this holiday.

Thanksgiving is one of the easiest holidays to market on Instagram since everybody loves to post pictures of their meals! You can build off these interactions by including quizzes, live polls, and memes on your media channels to relate to the Thanksgiving festivities. You could even throw a contest for wackiest turkey custom or food dish!

9. Black Friday rush campaign

Black Friday is one of the most talked about events during the holiday season. It is arguably the biggest shopping day of the year. So it’s important to capitalize as a marketer on some of the new trends. One being the switch to online shopping. At least 93 million shopped online in 2020 and there’s a predicted 20% increase to $17 billion spending online this Black Friday season. So what does this mean for marketers?

For example, the keyword “early” has seen a 160% increase from 2019 as brands are beginning to spread their online deals out longer than just Black Friday. It is very important to follow through with this and use social media campaigns to release sneak peak discounts or other incentives. You can also mix this with a flashy hashtag to support your holiday season and drive impressions like #earlybird.

10. St.Patrick’s Day email campaign

St.Patrick’s Day, also known as the luckiest time of the year, saw 49 percent of U.S. adults celebrating in 2020. With each adult spending an average of $40.77 on St Patrick’s Day items, this holiday is one you don’t want to miss! 

West Coast Shaving not only gave a 15% discount for the day but also added a little humor to their campaign. They were able to weave the different styles that customers can achieve with their product by showing leprechauns with various facial hairstyles. This not only highlights their product but helps create brand awareness and familiarity for new subscribers.

11. Easter egg hunt campaign

Easter eggs aren’t just for hunting, they can bring in new leads and customers! According to MediaValet, Easter visuals present an element of surprise which drives deeper engagement with content or a product. In general, Easter is one festival with lots of feelings attached and is celebrated all across the world. So what can you do? You can offer discounts or run Easter deals, give Easter vibes to your home page, promote Easter gift cards, or simply run a giveaway! Just take a look at Personal Creations 👇

Personal Creations designed a personalized email that featured its latest Easter sale offers with a GIF animation. This was a cute and colorful way to increase their click-through rate. You can also try redirecting your existing campaigns during the season and implement them into ones that you already created. You want your customers to feel the love of Easter as much as you do, so make sure you are catering to this holiday season.

Advertise across TV, digital billboards, and the rest of the internet with Growth Channel AI

12. Cinco De Mayo email campaign

Cinco de Mayo is a historical holiday for the independence of Mexican people. Running a campaign during this time is great for reaching new demographics and celebrating an influential holiday with some partying festivities.

A great example of this is the Bloomingdale Cinco de Mayo email marketing campaign. Instead of just advertising their drink, they gave a recipe to appeal to Bloomingdale’s younger, status-conscious shoppers. This helped categorize their brand as outgoing and fun, which relates to lots of their fashion products and accessories.

A few other great tips for these Cinco campaigns are: 

• Buy four items, get the 5th item free
• Give a goodie bag to the first five customers
• Get 5%, 15%, 25% off any item
• Give a special discount to every 5th (or 50th) customer
• Have a specialty item available at the counter with purchase for $5

13. Mother’s Day Gift Campaign

Mother’s Day is an important gift-giving holiday. As marketers it’s our job to provide the best promotions and products for this special time of year. In 2020 alone, U.S. consumers planned to spend a total of 2.56 billion U.S. dollars on flowers for Mother’s Day. Even during the pandemic, 66% of US consumers planned to celebrate virtually in case they couldn’t be with their mother on the holiday, according to Digitalcommerce360.

So mother’s day is kind of a big deal in the US! 

Let’s take a look at Lush! A fresh, handmade, cruelty-free, and vegetarian product for your body. At a glance, you see that they are not just offering a product but a narrative of “time”. They even have a link to their blog that gives great tips for how mothers can wind down. You can make this campaign as simple or as personal as you would like and it doesn’t have to be just a one-time event. You can continuously build off of it each year and own the meaning of the holiday. After all, the greatest gift is giving, not receiving 😉

14. Memorial Day Savings campaign

Memorial Day is a day of remembrance, but did you know that a lot of marketers do it wrong? SpinSucks talked with military families and this is what they have to say:

1.“Happy Memorial Day,” for example, is a disrespectful phrase. It’s not a “happy” day.

2. “Words Matter”

3. “Don’t Be Tone-Deaf”

When it comes to this holiday critical thinking is important, especially when as marketers we can get lost in the sales. So, how can we navigate this holiday properly in a campaign?

Lowe’s did a very good job of honoring and promoting sales throughout their store and even in their parking lot. The idea is that this campaign does not just start on a random page when you have an online platform. It starts on the homepage with a personal narrative or even a short acknowledgment of the meaning of Memorial Day. A little can go a long way when it comes to this campaign!

15. Virtual Christmas Party for B2B Enthusiasts

Virtual Christmas parties are a great way to come together as a team and brainstorm ideas just like marketing campaigns. The top reasons to have them according to ahaslides is they are great for “remote connections, super flexible, and a great practice for the future.”

If you are interested in trying it out yourself, a great free virtual Christmas party tool by Ahaslides makes it easy to do just that!

16. Valentines Day Campaign

Valentine’s Day is one of the biggest holidays of the year! With an average of $165 spent by American customers, tons of great gifts like flowers, chocolates, and jewelry are bought! As marketers, targeting that special someone is important for making the Valentine’s Day campaign work.

One company who utilized this to their advantage was Etsy. They offered a ready-made social graphic for store products and promoted their #makeitmeaningful hashtag to generate social media buzz. This campaign helped drive sales at their eCommerce platform while also forming a sense of community through celebrating our wonderful loved ones.

These are just a few of our favorite examples, but the internet is endless! We would love to hear about some of your favorite marketing campaigns? Share it with us on Twitter, and don’t forget to tag @Gr0wthChannel so we can retweet 😉 Happy campaigning!

What is Connected TV?

For many years linear TV has been the main consumption of entertainment. Users would subscribe to a cable or satellite provider that broadcasted content on a set schedule. Viewers would then have to tune in at a certain time to watch the program and saw commercials during the breaks. Seems pretty tedious, right? That’s because it is! Nowadays, we can stream any media we want, when we want, with over-the-top (OTT) and Connected TV (CTV).

While it’s easy to get both terms confused with each other, OTT, or over-the-top, refers to the delivery of content over the internet to your TV system. This could be media delivered through streaming services or an on-demand format that does not require subscriptions to cable or satellite providers. Some of the most notable OTT services include Disney+, Netflix, HBO MAX, Prime Video, and Hulu. On the other hand, Connected TV refers to any TV that has access to the internet and can load and stream digital content. This can be achieved through a smart TV or a traditional TV with an internet-connected device like an Xbox, Playstation, Apple TV, Roku, Fire Stick, or Chromecast. Connected TV allows users to stream music, watch movies, play games, browse the internet, and control your smart home all from your TV or a remote server. A large benefit of this technology is the accessibility of content at any time, anywhere, with little to no restrictions. As a result, more and more people are consuming media over the internet.

Source: MarketingCharts

Connected TV and OTT have been growing for several years now. In the US it’s estimated that over 82% of US TV households will own at least one connected TV (source). That comes out to 40% of US adults being CTV customers with a reach of approximately 100 million adults. So not only are more people using CTV but the length at which people are accessing digital media services is increasing as well. Out of all CTV viewers, 63% watch daily, and the vast majority (94%) watch at least weekly. Additionally, US adults will spend on average 2 hours and 29 minutes per day viewing digital video in 2021, according to eMarketer. This growth in viewership presents a huge opportunity for businesses to implement connected TV into their digital media strategy. This year CTV ad spend has nearly doubled to $11.36 billion, with a projection of hitting $18.29 billion by 2024.

One reason for this media investment trend is the fact that CTV offers the highest video ad completion rate at 95%. While this is mainly due to unskippable video ads, there are many benefits to the large-screen, interactive experience of CTV. High ad viewability and immersive content are just a few examples. You can watch major movies from the leisure of your couch with premium subscriptions to streaming services. A trend that has only increased since the pandemic. Another benefit is viewers are watching on-demand, meaning they are more engaged with programs and the advertising that comes with it. This creates a more positive response when viewing ads and potentially better conversions for your campaigns.

How does Connected TV Advertising Work?

The process for advertising on Connected TV is not as tricky as you might think. It’s a whole lot easier and cost-effective compared to traditional Linear TV advertising. Before CTV, buying ads was a lengthy process in which buyers at agencies had to spend countless hours negotiating deals with media. This involved multiple business meetings, contracts, and the possibility that you would be outbought by a competitor. Programmatic advertising solves this problem by allowing people to buy and sell ad spaces through an automated web service platform. To better understand this type of advertising it’s important to know what an ad exchange, DSP, and SSP are. Similar to a stock exchange, an ad exchange is an online marketplace that connects buyers and sellers of digital advertising spots. There are both Open Market (OMP) and Private Marketplace (PMP) options. These platforms allow buyers (brands and ad agencies) to view and bid on ad spaces in real-time, increasing transparency and lowering the hassle of negotiation. It also allows smaller buyers to bid on ad spaces that would have been unattainable to them in a traditional setting. In theory, an efficient ad exchange allows sellers (publishers) to earn the most amount of money when selling an ad, due to competition from buyers. This maximizes the revenue for selling ad space and acquiring one.

So then what are a DSP and SSP? A DSP, known as a demand-side platform, is another term for a service that allows brands and agencies to view and purchase ads across multiple exchanges. There are several benefits to demand-side platforms like the ability to launch, track, and optimize campaigns from a single platform.

Looking for omni-channel reach with access to premium inventory and no minimum commitment? Check Growth Channel Activate DSP >>

An SSP, also known as a supply-side platform is the exact opposite of a DSP. These are services that allow publishers to supply their ad spots to exchanges to attract buyers. By offering their ads across several exchanges, a publisher has a better chance at finding the highest bidder and maximize their revenue. This whole process of programmatic advertising reduces the headache of traditional advertising while also allowing a more dynamic playing field for advertisers to share in media costs.

With connected TV advertisements, you essentially take advantage of all the distinct services offered by OTT devices to generate high-quality personalized ads. It may look like running ads on normal TV, but there are distinct differences in the way the content is delivered, its impact on the masses, and benefits to you as an advertiser. Let’s take a look at some of them - read on!

Benefits of Connected TV Ads

1. Precise Audience Targeting

Connected TV allows advertisers to reach the right audience at the right time with the precision of digital advertising. The key to audience segmentation is that it allows advertisers to target viewers with relevant messages that bring awareness to their brand. For example, advertising a new video game to someone who plays on an Xbox, or recommending a new pair of hiking boots to someone who watches outdoors videos on YouTube. It’s important to target audiences who you know would be compelled to click your ad. Some of these unique identifiers come from the connected Google or Amazon account associated with your device and provide information about IP, geolocation, device type, online behavior, interests, and social accounts.

2. Cost-Effective TV Advertising

While Connected TV is generally regarded as one of the most expensive video advertising tactics with an average of $35+ CPM. The CPCV, cost-per-completed-view, and impression rate are generally better than any other video ad placement. That’s because more people are watching TV together with friends or family members, whether it’s the NBA finals, Super Bowl, or the newest Marvel movie. This allows for greater reach compared to other internet-connected devices which may only have one viewer (i.e on a mobile phone or a tablet).

3. Real-Time Metrics

A big benefit of Connected TV is the ability to track and optimize your ad campaigns in real-time. This can be done through metrics like clicks, direct responses, conversions, and cost-per-completed-view. Metrics allow advertisers to gain new insights into their audiences and continuously change the quality, frequency, and targeting of their ads to make compelling content and maximize investment.

4. Premium and Responsive Audiences

An estimated 22% of daily ad requests on CTV take place at primetime between 8 pm and 11 pm. These viewers are consuming premium content like news, sports, live events, popular series, and movies. Targeting these viewers during peak advertising time allows advertisers to reach their audiences on premium channels. In addition, CTV users have a high degree of freedom when it comes to choosing their content. This level of control results in high user satisfaction and more response rates when viewing your ad, as shown by the case study below.

Source: MediaMath Leveraging CTV for Performance Case Study

5. Variety of Ad Formats

Connected TV advertising is highly versatile. Marketers can experiment with static, animated, and interactive video ads to determine what drives consumer engagement and conversion. Whether you have a static ad on a home page, an interactive pre-roll, or an unskippable in-stream video ad, CTV allows you to optimize for any platform. You can then perfect ads through A/B testing to determine which ad format and call-to-action drives the most response and adjust to increase performance.

Successful Connected TV Campaigns

1. Beauty company Coty leverages CTV for the holidays

To compete with the growing switch from TV to streaming platforms, beauty company Coty leveraged YouTube CTV ads for their 2020 holiday campaign. To do this, they repurposed old video content into new ad formats to showcase their up-and-coming fragrance, Gucci Guilty Pour Home. This campaign was massively successful with CTV resulting in 63% of its total campaign reach with considerable lifts in purchase consideration and video view-through rate.

2. Subway’s “Eat Fresh Refresh” campaign with big-name celebrities

In anticipation of their brand’s menu, app, and store overhaul, Subway hired big-name celebrities like Stephen Curry, Megan Rapinoe, Tom Brady, and Charles Barkley to act as spokespersons. These stars introduced several new menu items including bread, seasoning, and ingredients, as well as announcing a 50 sub giveaway at every participating Subway. The campaign generated a 33% increase in sales for the top quartile restaurants and the highest unit volume per week in over eight years. It was touted as one of the largest media investments in Subway history.

3. Volvo drives incredible sales lift with interactive CTV ads

In showcasing their new S90 model, Volvo designed interactive CTV ads for Roku and Samsung streaming devices. Viewers were given a chance to explore the new interior and exterior features of the vehicle, while also receiving personalized messages directing them to their nearest Volvo dealership. The campaign drove 526,000 unique engagements across 95,500 households and saw a 35% sales lift. The interactive features also proved effective in driving buyers across the full purchase journey. This was shown by 1,200 requests for more information on SMS.

4. Adidas uses Connected TV to launch a campaign in a matter of days

Adidas wanted to share the impact of sports on people’s lives and bring diverse people together. Their “Ready for Change” campaign, which promoted justice and equality, used Google’s Display and Video 360’s connected TV solutions to get their message out in a matter of days. With so many athletes and sports fans turning to on-demand content, Adidas capitalized by securing premium channels and reaching over 24 million viewers on Hulu, ESPN, and Roku. As a result, they successfully increased reach while staying within budget by cherry-picking the 37.5% most relevant impressions. They also saved time from the automated workflow of programmatic technology.

5. David’s Bridal leverages CTV to combat the pandemic

2020 was a very trying year for both brides and bridal companies. To adapt to the growing concerns of consumers, David’s Bridal knew they had to adjust their marketing strategy. They leveraged the audience-first approach of CTV to drive in-store and virtual appointments. The highly personalized ads reached the right consumer at the right time, providing the most viable path to conversion. In just one month of CTV support, they reached thousands of unique households, scheduled hundreds of appointments, and drove a considerable increase in eCommerce sales. They praise CTV for its ability to quickly pivot campaigns and leverage real-time learning for optimization.

6. Auto repair company Meineke reaches premium audiences

Auto repair company Meineke was struggling to understand the reach of its digital media strategy. To gain new understanding and traction, they developed a Connected TV campaign that targeted premium audiences from NHL and NFL games. As a result, they found a 63% higher conversion rate with live sports ads set to a third of the frequency of linear TV. This produced 48,000 in-store visits over two months. Their ads were also on-target for the campaign by more than 180% compared to linear TV in the 18-34 age bracket.

7. RV manufacturer Jayco brings fun back to travel

Jayco’s “Sounds like fun” video campaign showcased happy memories associated with family activities on camping trips. To optimize this campaign, they ran a 2-month test pilot during peak RV camping season intending to increase overall brand awareness. Their CTV campaign generated 582,000 ad impressions with 342,000 completed views.

To wrap things up, Connected TV advertising offers incredible opportunities for maximizing your digital strategy through engaging and interactive content. Think of CTV as a canvas and the marketer as an artist. The marketer has the power to create an immersive and compelling story that will reach the lives of thousands of people through TV screens. How would you tell that story? Let us know your ideas on Twitter @Gr0wthChannel.

If you’re interested in running Connected TV ads for your business on premium channels without spending a fortune, check out Growth Channel Activate DSP. We can help you launch, track, and optimize your ads across 150 different exchanges and the world’s most popular websites and platforms. To learn more about our DSP click here, or sign up now to join our private beta.

Why are marketing plans important?

Sometimes startups and new founders approach marketing with a “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” approach. While experimentation is great, this type of strategy can be detrimental in the long run if your marketing decisions aren’t backed by research and data. Without a strategic plan, it’s easy to waste resources on tactics with low returns, missed opportunities, fall behind your competition, and respond too slowly to market changes. Although marketing plans are time-consuming and can be challenging to create, there are many benefits you should consider:

You can create an overall marketing plan for your entire business, but you should also make plans for smaller campaigns, like product launches, events, new partnerships, limited time discounts, and major company updates. In other words, you should create a marketing plan whenever you want to communicate something important with your target audience or persuade them to take a certain action, like sign up for an event, make a purchase, or refer a friend.

11 Key components of a marketing plan

The size, granularity, and elements of a marketing plan differ for every business, depending on its industry, goals, and available resources. However, there are some elements that are common in most marketing plans:

1. Executive summary

The executive summary explains the overall purpose of your marketing plan and briefly describes all the relevant components. It includes an overview of your marketing and advertising goals, a description of your current marketing position, an overview of your campaign’s timeline, and a description of your product/service and target market.

2. Mission statement

A mission statement is a short statement reflecting the purpose of your business at that point in time. It can talk about what you do, the types of products and services you offer, your target market, or your competitive advantage. Here are some mission statement examples:

3. Market analysis

A market analysis asks you to look deeply at your business and industry. For this section, you will reflect on where your business and your marketing strategy stand right now. You should include what you’re selling, your unique selling proposition (what separates you from competitors), your best performing marketing channels and campaigns so far, and your current marketing objectives.

4. SWOT analysis

A SWOT analysis looks at the internal and external environment your business operates in.

5. Competitor analysis

If you offer a similar product or service to other companies, you need to communicate why your offering is more valuable. To do so, you must understand what your competitors are selling, who their audience is, and how they’re communicating with that audience. The best place to start is your competitors’ website and social media accounts. Buy their products, sign up for their newsletter, or attend one of their events. Read their customer reviews and media coverage to learn more about their successes and failures.

6. Target market and buyer personas

Create your buyer personas with Growth Channel’s free template or customize a pre-populated template in the Persona Builder.

Your target market represents the ideal customers of your product or service. You may have one ideal customer, or you may market to a few different personas. When thinking about your target market, consider these attributes:

7. Marketing objectives and KPIs

Your objectives are the goals of your campaign, or what you hope to accomplish. Your KPIs, or key performance indicators, are the metrics you will track to determine if you met your objectives. It’s also important to track how your KPIs change over time. Here are some example KPIs to track based on your campaign:

8. Pricing strategy

You need to consider how you will price your products and services. There are many types of pricing strategies, but these are the main three:

9. Marketing channels

Consider the best channels to promote your business on. You may even decide to create a separate social media and/or content marketing strategy within your overall marketing plan, including your editorial calendar, content types and topics, and the channels you’ll be posting on. When choosing marketing channels, think about where your target audience spends their time and what type of information they engage with. You also need to decide whether to use free channels, paid channels, or a combination of both. Here are some examples of popular channels:

Not sure what channels you should be focusing on? Growth Channel’s free customer journey template can help you decide where to focus your resources.

10. Growth strategy

Growth strategy refers to your long term plans and goals. Think about where you want your business to be in six months, a year, or even five years. How does this individual campaign or plan fit in with your overall marketing or business strategy? If your plan is successful, what project will you take on next? If your plan is unsuccessful, will you move on or try a different approach?

11. Budgeting

In order to actually execute your marketing plan, you will need a realistic budget. Your goal is to execute your plan in an affordable and cost-effective way. In other words, you should be seeing more returns, sales, or benefits than what you’re spending. There are many free budgeting templates online you can use to track your expenses. However you decide to create a budget, it’s important to build in a little flexibility for unexpected changes in your plan.

Tools to help you create your marketing plan

Want to build your own marketing plan? Growth Channel has a free marketing template resource that walks you through every step of the process!

Organizing your marketing plan and tracking success can be challenging. Luckily, there are a lot of great tools out there specifically designed to help marketers and businesses create robust marketing plans. At Growth Channel, we’ve built a Growth Library of hundreds of marketing tools and resources. You can even filter by customer journey stage, marketing objective, and industry. Here’s a snapshot of some of our favorite marketing planning tools:

For organization and visualization

Trello is a visual project management platform that breaks down complex tasks into customizable boards, lists, and cards.

With CoSchedule’s simple drag and drop marketing management software, you can schedule projects, track progress, and see everything your marketing team is working on.

Source: CoSchedule

Visualize your customers’ journey with Funnelytics. Map funnels, calculate stats that make them profitable, and identify bottlenecks that prevent conversions.

For launching and managing campaigns

SocialBu is the ultimate social media management and automation platform, letting you run all your social media accounts in one location.

Trumpia offers the easiest platform to create a variety of targeted and automated text messaging marketing campaigns.

Get instant access to brand mentions across social, news, blogs, videos, forums, podcasts, reviews and more with Brand24.

Source: Brand24

Unstack's content marketing platform is designed to help you rapidly build, measure, and scale your digital presence without code or developers.

Attract more leads, manage contacts, deliver personalized experiences at scale, and automate your marketing campaigns with Freshmarketer.

For branding

Design like a professional with Canva. You can use Canva’s customizable templates to organize, create, export, and share your marketing plan and other promotional assets.

1Brand creates shareable brand guidelines within minutes from your business’ website, so all your campaigns and promotional materials remain consistent.

Source: 1Brand

For competitor analysis

Monitor your competitors’ keyword and SEO strategies with SEMrush.

Competitors App automatically monitors your competitors and alerts you of any major changes to their marketing strategy. Competitors App tracks their keyword rankings, website changes, newsletters, social posts, reviews, and more.

Use Visto AI to get a top view of the latest marketing trends and direct access to your competitors' top ad campaigns. Easily filter thousands of new ads or millions of archived ones, and access key performance metrics.

Source: Visto

For tracking progress and measuring ROI

With Apteo, you can segment customers, monitor lifetime values, identify cross-sell opportunities, and track product journeys.

Get real-time visibility into your data, understand the full story behind every customer journey, and automatically uncover how each marketing activity impacts your KPIs with InfiniGrow.

Plannuh, an AI-driven marketing management software, lets you create agile marketing plans, budgets, and accurate ROI reports. You can even automate budget import, invoice entry, and expense reconciliation.

Source: Plannuh

For automating the entire marketing planning process

Growth Channel collects your market research from over 500 data sources and simulates thousands of campaigns, presenting the strategy with the highest chance of success for your business. Generate a plan today .

Source: Growth Channel

For fun :)

Listnr helps you to convert text into High Quality Speech. You can then use your synthesized Speech to add voice overs to videos, distribute blog posts as podcasts, or convert an ebook to an audiobook.

Convert, retain, and grow your customers with delightful personal video emails with Bonjoro. By connecting Bonjoro to your existing tools, you can send personalized video emails at key moments in your customer’s journey.

Source: Bonjoro

Luckily, there are a lot of online tools available to help you conduct market research, collect and analyze data, automate tasks, and optimize your campaigns. In this blog, we’re sharing 18 of our favorite tools to help you create and execute a great marketing plan. You may already be using some of the items on this list, which is great! However, we also included some lesser-known, more niche resources, so you can find new opportunities you may not have considered before.

Why do you need to have a marketing plan in the first place?

A marketing plan is a roadmap that outlines your business’ marketing strategy, including your goals, target market, tactics, budgeting, roadmap, and key metrics. It also includes the exact steps you need to take, and when you need to take them, to properly execute on your marketing strategy. You should create a long term marketing plan for your overall business, but you can also build plans for smaller campaigns, like new product launches, events, and major announcements.

Want to build your own marketing plan? Growth Channel has a free marketing template resource that walks you through every step of the process!

Marketing and project management tools

Manage your projects with Trello

Source: Trello

Trello is a project management platform that breaks down complex tasks into boards, lists, and cards. With Trello, every single part of your task can be managed, tracked, and shared with teammates. Use cards to organize assignments in a visual manner. Inside a card, you can select labels to designate the stage of the project, assign team members to tasks, leave comments, collaborate with your team, and upload documents and files. You can also move cards to different lists as your project progresses. You can also quickly switch your board into a timeline, table, or a calendar.

$0/user/mo - $17.50/user/mo

Keep your team’s work on track with Asana

Source: Asana

“Here at ABC Fitness Solutions we use Asana daily. It is one of the most intuitive project management tools and it was easy to deploy for our rapidly growing team. One of my favorite features of Asana is the robust templates and views that are designed for marketing – for example, the board view for social management and the timeline for large complex campaigns or product launches. As a CMO, I very much appreciate the ease of tagging and reporting.” - Cristine Kao, Chief Marketing Officer at ABC Fitness Solutions.

Asana is a project management tool that helps teams get organized and increase their efficiency. Projects are viewable as lists, timelines, and boards, so teammates understand the big picture but also know exactly what they need to complete and when their work is due. With real-time charts and other visual highlights, you can keep an eye on your team’s progress. You can also create custom workflows to automate common tasks and reduce errors. Asana makes it easy to set up forms for work requests and submissions. Plus, with over 50+ customizable project templates and 100+ integrations, you have all the tools you need to successfully launch and manage any project.

$0/user/month - $24.99/user/month

CoSchedule is the content management software designed specifically for marketers

Source: CoSchedule

“After managing far too many Google Sheets for far too long, we switched to CoSchedule for our project management software. It's really efficient for task and project management, for both internal and freelance projects. The calendar view is the foundation of our weekly campaign meetings. Plus, we were able to move our social planning and scheduling for more of a one-stop shop.” - Christine Lee, Managing Director at Interfolio.

CoSchedule’s Marketing Calendar and Marketing Suite help marketers get organized. The Marketing Calendar allows you to schedule assignments, track progress, see everything your marketing team is working on, get instant clarity into all your projects, and confirm you’re working on the right priorities. Simple drag and drop technology makes it easy to add, update, and reschedule projects. CoSchedule’s Marketing Suite is a family of agile marketing products. See every project on a unified calendar of record with Calendar Organizer, optimize your editorial process to save time and deliver more with Content Organizer, implement consistent, defined workflows to speed up production with Work Organizer, and customize taxonomies to quickly find, update, and share files with Asset Organizer.

Marketing Calendar: $39/user/mo

Align your marketing team with Jira

Source: Jira

“Our marketing operations and creative teams use JIRA to track projects, allocate resources and keep folks updated on project status.” - Jane Nevins, Sr. Product Marketing Manager at Udacity.

Jira’s interactive timeline makes it easy to create project roadmaps, track progress, and keep everyone on top of important milestones. The calendar helps team members stay up to date on important deadlines, and with Jira’s drag and drop form builder, you can easily collect work requests for projects. Plus, Jira’s custom and pre-built automated workflows help you accomplish more in less time. With 20+ customizable project templates, you can get a new project up and running almost instantly. Jira offers a flexible pricing strategy, ensuring you only pay for the exact number of users on your team.

$0/user/month - $5/user/month

MailCharts helps you run seamless email marketing campaigns

Source: MailCharts

MailCharts has been collecting emails from brands for almost a decade, making it a great database for email marketers. MailCharts helps you plan upcoming campaigns, identify industry trends, and improve your strategy with in-depth competitive data. Find inspiration with MailCharts’ curated email examples from ecommerce brands, browse emails from over 80+ industry groups, and access hundreds of examples of email automation sequences. You can also easily save your favorite emails and share them with your team.

$0/mo - $149/mo+

Track KPIs, create comprehensive budgets, and analyze ROI reports with Plannuh

Source: Plannuh

Plannuh is the first AI-driven marketing budget software. Plannuh helps you build comprehensive marketing budget plans including goals, campaigns, and activities. You can also track your achievements against numeric goals and spending for a true impact on your ROI. Easily import your budget into Plannuh and share it with your team. Manage your marketing expenses down to the penny, quickly modify plans and reallocate your budget based on changing market conditions, and access accurate CPO and ROI insights. Plus, you can even automate budget import, invoice entry, and expense reconciliation with Plannuh.

$500/mo+

Automate the entire marketing planning process with Growth Channel

Source: Growth Channel

If you feel like you don’t want to do all the market research yourself, there are automation tools that can help! Growth Channel automates the entire market research process, saving you weeks of research and thousands of dollars. Growth Channel AI will identify your micro-segment within minutes, simulate thousands of different campaigns and present the strategy with the highest chance of success for your specific business. Plans include buyer personas, customer journey maps, competitor analysis, personalized campaign suggestions, budget allocation, and more. Learn more on our website.

$0 - $999 

Branding and design tools

Design marketing collateral with Canva

Source: Canva

With Canva, you have all the tools you need to design like a professional. You can use Canva’s customizable presentation templates to organize, create, export, and share your creatives. Canva offers hundreds of templates, fonts, graphics, images, videos, animations, and more to choose from. Plus, you can upload your personal brand kit and collaborate with your team. Canva makes it easy to create professional, branded designs. Besides creating your marketing plan, you can also create a variety of digital and physical promotional assets like videos, social posts, flyers, brochures, infographics, and business cards.

$0/mo - $327.99/mo+

1Brand helps you keep your branding consistent and strong

Source: 1Brand

As you begin to execute your marketing plan, it’s very important to maintain clear, recognizable branding. 1Brand creates a custom brand guidelines website for your business, making it easy to manage your brand assets and keep your marketing messages consistent and strong. 1Brand automatically creates your brand guidelines from your website. Simply enter your business’ website address and 1Brand will collect the colors, fonts, and logos used on your website to pre-populate your brand guidelines within minutes. Once your website is created, you can easily update and customize your guidelines. 1Brand’s brand guideline websites are perfect for sharing with your partners, vendors, and team, so all your campaigns and promotional materials remain consistent.

$0 - $99/yr+

Competitor analysis tools

Monitor your competitors’ keyword and SEO strategies with SEMrush

Source: SEMrush

SEMrush is a great all-in-one SEO and keyword research tool. You can use it to track your own progress and monitor your competitors’ strategies. You can generate many detailed reports and use a variety of filters to find exactly what you’re looking for. Here’s a small sample of what you can do with SEMrush:

$119.95/mo - $449.95/mo (limited free version available)

Track competitors’ marketing moves with Competitors App

Source: Competitors App

Competitors App monitors your competitors and alerts you of any major updates or changes to their marketing strategy. Competitors App also automatically detects new competitors and informs you through email. Get every email and newsletter your competitor sends, track their keywords and rankings, get notifications when they make big website changes, and receive their social media posts on your timeline. All competitor updates can be sent directly to a chosen Slack channel, so you’ll never miss a beat. Competitors App even monitors more than 60 reviews sites and alerts you every time a competitor receives a new review, so you can monitor their online reputation and learn more about their products and services.

$9.90/competitor/month - $14.90/competitor/month

Consumer research tools

Conduct online focus groups and surveys with iResearch

Source: iResearch

With iResearch, getting into the mind of your customers or employees is no longer out of reach. iResearch allows you to easily and affordably conduct online focus groups in any language. Respondents, clients, and moderators can participate from anywhere in the world, so you can screen participants on the most important criteria rather than by geography. iResearch achieves an additional level of depth and richness, since all respondents can respond simultaneously, without interruption. Plus, it helps reduce visual biases.

Pricing available on request

Track customer behaviors and launch targeted campaigns with Apteo

Source: Apteo

With Apteo, you can segment customers, monitor lifetime values, identify cross-sell opportunities, and track product journeys. Apteo uses AI to learn about your customers, helping you target them with the products they're most likely to buy. Apteo will automatically segment your customers based on their behavior and keep your segments in sync with your email marketing tools. Apteo will identify which customers and customer segments are most likely to buy which products, find products that are frequently bought together, and recommend new cross-selling opportunities based on previous purchase behavior. For subscription based businesses, Apteo will even identify which customers are likely to make a repeat purchase so you can incentivize them to sign up for a subscription.

Apteo also uses neural networks and deep learning to accurately forecast customer lifetime value, helping you see which of your customers are likely to be your best customers. Apteo tracks retention across your store and all your segments so you can make sure you're making the most of your existing customers.

$57/mo - $257/mo

Monitor e-commerce trends with Jungle Scout

Source: Jungle Scout

If your business sells on Amazon, then Jungle Scout may be the perfect tool for you. Jungle Scout helps you uncover high-demand, low-competition keywords to find products with maximum profit potential on Amazon. You can also track a product or group of products to evaluate sales over time and spot trends, unexpected spikes, and seasonality. Discover what Amazon customers are searching for with Keyword Scout and find daily sales, inventory data, and revenue for any Amazon product with Product Tracker. You can also monitor your competition, see what products they’re selling, and determine what keywords they’re targeting. Jungle Scout will even track your sales, revenue, expenses, performance over time, and other key metrics.

$49/mo - $129/mo

Analyze and predict consumer behavior with Olvin

Source: Olvin

Olvin’s Almanac platform has analyzed ten million real-world locations and processes one billion events everyday to help you analyze past data and accurately predict future consumer behavior. By creating a comprehensive view of upcoming consumer trends in an area, industry, or brand, Almanac helps you react quicker and make the right decisions ahead of time. Almanac also offers granular customer segmentation insights and forecasts. You can also compare your performance to competitors and see how you stack up against industry benchmarks. With Almanac, you can even analyze and review data from over 2,000 retail chains.

$249/mo+

Social media management tools

Manage your social media campaigns with SocialBu

Source: SocialBu

SocialBu is the ultimate social media management and automation platform, letting you run all your social media accounts in one location. You can draft posts and automatically publish them, respond to comments, messages, and replies, analyze your performance, and automate a variety of tasks, all within the SocialBu platform. You won’t need to switch between various social networks to keep up with all your accounts and followers anymore. With a built in calendar, you can easily plan and schedule weeks of content, letting SocialBu take care of the actual posting for you. Keyword and hashtag monitoring alerts you of places where your brand can join the conversation. SocialBu’s granular automations ensure you're always giving the right response to followers in a timely manner. You can execute complex automations when a specific event occurs, and you can even specify multiple conditions that need to be satisfied before your automations run.

$8/mo - $199/mo

Improve your influencer marketing campaigns with Influencity

Source: Influencity

With over 700 million influencers and thousands of ways to combine filters, you can find the best influencer for your campaign and target audience. Easily analyze influencers’ stats, rankings, niches, and demographics. Plus, manage all your influencer relationships, share your influencer lists with teammates, keep track of your budgets,and organize multiple campaigns, all within Influencity’s dashboard. You can even access campaign results within seconds of executing. Influencity also lets you personalize your workflow and automate your campaign process so you can save time and money.

$48/mo - $698/mo

SmarterQueue lets you manage all your social media profiles and tasks in one place

Source: SmarterQueue

SmarterQueue takes the headache out of content scheduling and eliminates manual posting on social media. Build up a Queue of content with their flexible, drag-and-drop weekly schedule, and sort your posts into color-coded Categories, each with a specific Queue and automated Posting Plan. Set rules for content recycling once, and your evergreen content will automatically be re-added to your Queue and published as many times as you want. SmarterQueue also makes it easy to discover high-quality curated content and add it directly to your Queue. You can manage multiple profiles at once and respond to your social media messages from one inbox. SmarterQueue will even help you analyze your competitors’ social media profiles and uncover their strategies. With detailed reports and analytics, you’ll be able to see what types of content drive the best results for your business.

$19.99/mo - $79.99/mo

Does your business use any of these marketing planning tools? Are there any we missed? Let us know on Twitter @Gr0wthChannel. If you're looking for more marketing tools and resources, check out the Tools section of our Growth Library. Here, you can filter between 200+ marketing tools based on buyer’s journey stage, marketing objective, industry, and more.

What is DOOH?

Before companies could create television commercials, target ads on social media, or send a coupon directly to someone’s email inbox, they had to rely on out-of-home advertising (OOH). Think of billboards on the side of a busy highway, posters on the sides of bus and train stops, newsstands, kiosks, wallscapes, murals, flyers posted on streetlights or telephone poles, and mobile ads on the sides of buses and taxis. While OOH may not be new, and traditional forms of OOH certainly still exist, the advertising channel is undergoing an extreme makeover. As society becomes more focused on technology and innovation, OHH is shifting to a data-driven, digital version, known as digital-out-of-home (DOOH).

Digital-out-of-home advertising is a marketing channel used to describe any type of digital promotional material that appears outside of the home, in public places. For example, electronic billboards like the ones in New York’s Times Square, TVs in a mall food court, digital screens in subway entrances, and digital kiosks in places with heavy foot traffic are all examples of DOOH. Unlike social media and search ads where you can go granular on demographic targeting and keyword searches, DOOH advertisers focus a lot on on contextual advertising and location marketing techniques. This helps DOOH advertisers create engaging and eye-catching ads that capture consumers’ attention and persuade them to further engage with the brand in that specific location.

OOH and DOOH are expected to see steady growth in the coming years. According to WARC’s Global Advertising Trends report, OOH is forecasted to be the second fastest growing medium in 2021, with ad spend rising about 20%. Research And Markets predicts that the DOOH industry will reach $35.1 billion by 2027, growing at a CAGR of 9.3%. Given that the average U.S. citizen spends 70% of their time outside of their home, it makes sense that brands are investing more in DOOH campaigns.

What is programmatic DOOH?

Buying and selling traditional OOH advertising space used to take forever, and often shut out smaller businesses who couldn’t afford to pay steep prices. Buyers and sellers would often have to communicate back and forth constantly in their negotiations, and the use of middlemen only made the process more complicated. Companies would likely have to be located near the space they were bidding for, so they could set up their ad if they won. Further, only one company could occupy an ad space at a time.

Programmatic advertising solves many of these issues and makes the process of buying and selling ad spaces much more efficient. Programmatic DOOH advertising (pDOOH) occurs when the buying and selling of digital media spaces are automated using a computer program. Bidding happens in real-time, and the highest bidder wins the right to the ad space. Programmatic advertising is more transparent, leads to less complex negotiations, and makes it easier to track expenses and revenue. It eliminates the need for brokers and middlemen and makes it easier for smaller buyers to bid on ad spaces. With DOOH, changes in ownership and creatives can be implemented quickly, and media buyers and sellers no longer have to live near the media units they’re exchanging, decreasing operational costs and increasing efficiency. Since DOOH advertising units are dynamic, sellers can maximize revenue by selling play time to more than one advertiser, and advertisers can share media costs. Programmatic also makes it easier for advertisers to optimize campaigns by moving budgets around, adjusting the media units they own, and changing the ads they’re running.

Benefits of DOOH

Impossible to ignore - DOOH displays have the opportunity to make an impression on a large audience. While people find online ads a nuisance, often ignoring banner ads, clicking out of popups without reading them, setting ad blockers, and skipping YouTube ads, DOOH displays are hard to ignore. You can’t skip them, turn them off, and rarely walk by without seeing them. For this reason, they’re great at increasing brand awareness. And when done correctly, audiences can actually be excited to interact with a DOOH display.

Improved data collection - traditional OOH advertising lacks key metrics that advertisers rely on to measure performance. How does a regular billboard keep track of how many cars drive by it? How do you know if anyone stopped and read the flyers you posted on the neighborhood bulletin? How can you retrieve audience segmentation data? In short, you really can’t. By tapping into the web and the Internet of Things, data from DOOH displays is much more accurate and granular. DOOH displays can be integrated with various types of sensors and software, which give advertisers insights into how many people viewed their ad, who viewed their ad (age, gender, etc.), and what time of day the ad was most popular.

One trend right now in data collection is that many digital displays are moving their data to the cloud. For example, some roadside kiosks in New York with digital ad displays are connected to the web and offer free wifi to the public. While this certainly benefits the public, it also allows the kiosk to accurately track how many devices are connected to it, as well as collect information about those devices.

Cost savings - DOOH displays may be a significant upfront investment, but they offer high returns. With traditional OOH advertising, it takes time and money to print a new creative, travel to the media unit, and remove and replace the old creative. Plus, the process of buying and selling ad space is complex and often requires a lot of back and forth communication. With DOOH, much of the process is automated and managed by computer software, known as a demand side platforms (DSP). Advertisers can buy new ad space and update creatives with a few clicks. For example, Magnum Ice Cream used programmatic technology to run ads simultaneously across the United States, with digital billboards in Boston, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C. Changing ownership is quick and requires no installation costs. Plus, many digital displays run through a variety of ads, so companies can share the cost of the ad space with others.

Durablity - DOOH is more secure than traditional OOH advertising spaces. All modern digital displays are built to withstand harsh weather conditions. This way, ads can be played year round without much need to upkeep or repair the devices. On the other hand, traditional OOH ad spaces experience everyday wear and tear. It’s common for the creative to rip, fall apart, sustain water damage from rain or snow, or lose its luster after a period of time. In some cases, the OOH display itself may even break.

Dynamic - the digital aspect of DOOH means that companies are no longer confined to a single static image. They can create videos, moving images, slideshows, animations, interactive games, and so much more. For example, in an ad for HP, a cartoon version of tennis superstar Serena Williams fought a robot across ten digital screens in New York’s Times Square.

When compared to OOH and other forms of advertisement, like native and display ads, DOOH offers many more opportunities to capture attention, engage directly with audiences, and try out a new innovative idea. Digital displays can also cycle through a variety of ads at the desired frequency, which increases viewability and leads to more engagement than a static banner ad.

Another popular DOOH trend right now are omnichannel campaigns, where companies run similar ads on mobile, desktop, digital displays, and other marketing channels. This really enhances the brand experience for the consumer and creates one clear, consistent, and cohesive message. Audi’s 2011 A7 Bold Design campaign in Times Square is a great example of an omnichannel campaign. The ad directed viewers to a landing page, included a number to text to learn more information and a scannable QR code, and promoted the Twitter hashtag #bolddesign.

Variation and personalization - the digital aspect of DOOH makes it easy to send creatives to the media unit, giving advertisers the flexibility to change and update ads. Advertisers can easily play different creatives based on the weather, time of day, traffic patterns, who’s interacting with the ad, and more. Smirnoff created ads for their summer cider that only appeared when temperatures in the UK exceeded 20℃. When promoting the new Baywatch movie in 2017, advertisers used location data to identify the 16 coldest cities in the United States and published ads with the tagline “Frostbite. Summer is Coming.”

Responsive - traditional OOH displays take a long time to update or replace, but digital campaigns can quickly be created, uploaded, and sent to media units. This gives advertisers a chance to get more personal and create ads that are highly relevant and relatable. The responsiveness of DOOH played a major role during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, many brands quickly pivoted their advertising strategy, creating more relevant content, encouraging individuals to wear masks and get vaccinated, and celebrating the many contributions of front-line workers. At the beginning of the pandemic, Outsmart, the OOH trade body in the UK, partnered with Mother London to show gratitude to essential frontline workers. The campaign used lighthearted language to thank and celebrate key workers who were incredibly valuable during the pandemic.

Solidify the brand experience - DOOH displays are commonly seen outside of a company’s store. However, in-store DOOH displays are also gaining popularity, as they’ve proved to be a great way to direct traffic, highlight particular products, and secure the final sale.

10 innovative DOOH campaigns

One of the advertisement goals is to make a long-lasting impression in the mind of consumers. While it’s great if an ad directly leads someone to make a purchase, the main benefit of outdoor advertising is to increase brand awareness. The hope is that when a consumer is ready to make a purchase, they’ll remember a brand’s specific ad campaign and choose to interact with that brand further. This strategy works well, as companies’ advertising budgets and revenue have a positive relationship (companies that spend more on advertising generate more revenue and control a larger share of the market). Coca-Cola spends an average of $4 billion on advertising, and has been the leader in the soft drink industry since 2004, achieving a market share of 43.7% in 2019.

DOOH campaigns can be very memorable. As we’ve discussed, companies have the opportunity to push the boundaries and really surprise audiences with their DOOH campaigns. With technology advances, access to the entire digital ecosystem, and extremely creative advertisers, the chances for innovation are high. Here’s some of the most memorable DOOH campaigns from the world’s biggest brands:

1. Coca-Cola’s drinkable advertising

In 2015, Coca-Cola created the first ever omnichannel drinkable campaign with the tagline “Drink an Ad.” They started by building regular OOH billboards that served actual Coke Zero. Then, they partnered with Shazam on a TV commercial. By Shazaming the ad, the Coke Zero bottle on the TV screen poured Coke into a glass on the viewer’s mobile device. Everyone who interacted with the ad was rewarded a coupon for a free Coke Zero. Coca-Cola also used print, flyers, radio, and DOOH posters that, when Shazamed, turned peoples’ phones into straws that could be used to “drink” the Coke on the display screen.

2. GMC uses facial recognition to create a personalized ad experience

When promoting their next-generation Acadia SUV, GMC used facial recognition to play different variations of their ad, depending on who was interacting with their DOOH display. The display used cameras to anonymously detect an audience profile, like age, gender, and expression, and then used artificial intelligence to respond with one of thirty different targeted creatives. As people engaged and interacted with the digital kiosks, the creative would invite them to play games, like a staring contest.

3. Apotek’s DOOH display recognizes cigarette smoke

DOOH displays can react to their physical surroundings, and Swedish pharmacy brand Apotek took advantage of this feature to launch an anti-smoking campaign. Their displays had sensors that were able to detect smoke, activating whenever someone smoking a cigarette walked past. The creative featured a coughing man, followed by a promotion for nicotine patches. The display even used location data to direct smokers to the nearest store where nicotine patches were being sold.

4. Foodora stays relevant with ads that change based on external factors

The German-based online food delivery service foodora used a programmatic targeted DOOH campaign to increase awareness of their pick-up option. The company bought ad space on 50 display units in office buildings across three German cities. They then used data triggers in their DSP to customize their campaign based on factors like weather (promoting delivery on rainy days and pick-up when it was sunny), time of day (featuring lunch options during the afternoon and dinner at night), and location (encouraging pick-up at a local restaurant). Using location data, individuals near a screen were also served mobile ads to increase campaign reach.

5. Guinness directs fans to pubs serving their drinks

Using DOOH displays to drive customers to a physical location is a great technique. For example, during the men’s rugby Six Nations Championship in 2017, Guinness used DOOH displays to direct fans to pubs that were serving their drinks. And to take their campaign one step further, the displays automatically updated, directing people to the next closest location when the nearest pub reached its capacity limit. Rigged with sensors, participating pubs were able to capture football data, which helped the DOOH displays tailor their creative in real-time. Before the RBS 6, Guinness also used their London displays to serve ads including upcoming matches, kick-off times, and distances to local pubs.

6. McDonalds relies on traffic patterns

McDonalds used real-time data from Google Traffic to display relevant advertisements designed to get drivers to visit their restaurants. The campaign reacted to the amount of traffic in a specific location and sent a relevant creative to each roadside digital billboard. The creative would change throughout the day, presenting traffic-related messages during morning and evening rush hours. The campaign lasted for about a week and spanned ten different cities.

7. Toyota displays users’ drawings to everyone in Times Square

When promoting their Prius in 2009, Toyota created an interactive DOOH ad in Times Square that let people draw on their billboard. After downloading the Prius iPhone app, users were able to sketch, sign, and submit their own drawing. The Toyota digital billboard then cycled through the drawings, displaying them to everyone in busy Times Square.

8. Google’s creatives answer popular search queries

Google’s responsive “Make the Most of Summer” campaign in the UK highlighted popular local and seasonal queries from Google Search and Google Maps. The main goal of the campaign was to provide useful information, like search results, star ratings, and business hours, to those who saw the digital ads. In some locations, the creative even reacted to the weather, temperature, or time of day, presenting the most relevant ad in that exact moment.

9. CVS highlights unaltered selfies from their audience

During their Beauty Mark campaign in 2019, CVS used a DOOH display to encourage people to post unedited selfies of themselves on social media, tag @CVS_Beauty, and use the hashtag #BeautyUnaltered. CVS then displayed the photos on a giant digital billboard in Times Square. The campaign celebrated real beauty, showing a different unfiltered photo every ten seconds. The responsive and dynamic digital billboard was paired with a regular digital billboard featuring awareness messaging. CVS even set up a YouTube livestream so people around the globe could interact with #BeautyUnaltered. The campaign, which only ran in Times Square for a few days, generated over 3.6 billion impressions. As a result of the campaign, 11 major beauty brands committed to being more transparent in their marketing, 80% of consumers had a positive impression of CVS’ beauty offerings, and 50% of aware consumers said they would shop at CVS more often.

10. The Ad Council shares messages of gratitude to frontline workers

During their interactive “Out There For Us” campaign, the Ad Council, a non-profit organization based in the United States, used DOOH displays to celebrate and show appreciation for essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Ad Council asked individuals to share messages of gratitude using the hashtag #OutThereForUs. All the messages were aggregated and featured on OutThereForUs.com. Some of the messages were then displayed on digital billboards, kiosks, and posters, strategically located near hospitals, grocery stores, and highways.

Digital-out-of-home advertising offers tremendous opportunities for businesses and brands to successfully increase awareness and create engaging, innovative advertisements. Which DOOH display is your favorite? Let us know on Twitter @Gr0wthChannel.

If you're interested in running DOOH ads, Growth Channel Activate DSP can help you launch, manage, and optimize your campaigns. In our ad management platform, you can easily run targeted omnichannel ads across the world’s most popular websites and platforms. Plus, with no minimum ad spend or annual contracts, you have full flexibility to experiment with your campaigns. You can learn more about our DSP here, or sign up now to join our private beta.

Getting started

Before you start exploring everything Growth Channel has to offer, there are a few steps you need to take to get your account up and running.

1. Fill in our onboarding questionnaire

The very first thing you’ll want to do when you log into your Growth Channel account is fill out our onboarding questionnaire. It includes questions about your business, customers, competitors, campaign goals, and main KPIs. It’s very easy to fill out and takes only a few minutes to complete. Growth Channel uses your answers to define your micro-segment and recommend resources in the Growth Library, our massive collection of marketing tools, case studies, templates, and additional resources. Plus, for paid Members, Growth Channel will perform a competitor analysis, website audit, and compile a list of personalized growth tactics.

2. Connect your Google Analytics account

Your next step is to connect your Google Analytics account, if you have one. Once connected, you’ll receive a weekly summary of your key website performance metrics, including what’s working, what’s not, and personalized optimization suggestions to improve your site. Many agencies and freelancers use this feature to monitor their different clients. You can disconnect your account at any time.
Here’s how to connect your Google Analytics account:

1. Log into your Growth Channel dashboard
2. Under Account, select Integrations

3. Connect a Google account
4. Select the Google account you want to connect
5. Allow Growth Channel to access your account

6. Select the proper account, property, and view
7. Click save

Note that currently Growth Channel only supports Google Analytics Universal integrations, while GA4 is still in the BETA.

3. Enable two-factor authentication

Here at Growth Channel, we view customer and data security as a top priority. That’s why we offer optional two-factor authentication to add an extra level of security to your account. To set up two-factor authentication, head over to your Profile, under the Account menu. You can verify your account using either Google Authenticator or email. Two-factor authentication can be disabled at any point when logged in.

Free features for all users

Growth Channel offers numerous features for all its users, designed to help you optimize your marketing efforts and rapidly scale your business.

1. Persona Builder

Create, edit, and manage all your buyer personas with our interactive Persona module. To access the module, select Personas under the Plan menu. This will bring you to the Persona homepage, where you can manage all your personas.

You can build a persona from scratch or use one of our 15+ pre-populated persona templates. We created our persona templates with extensive research and data, and each is designed to represent a real customer segment. All our templates are completely interactive, so you can customize them based on your business’ specific needs.

To learn more about the importance of buyer personas and how to create personas with Growth Channel, check out this tutorial blog post.

2. Growth tactics

We have a database of over 230 growth marketing tactics. These tactics are easy and quick to implement, designed to help you grow your business, increase conversions, and generate more revenue. Each tactic has a title, a short description, and an image example. To see more tactics, click the See Another Example button. You can view and shuffle between 5 tactics per day on a free account. Members get full access and a custom set of growth tactics based on their goals and KPIs. Free users are able to view a preview of their personalized tactics immediately after submitting their onboarding questionnaire.

3. Growth Library with personalized resources

Our Growth Library is a massive collection of 250+ marketing tools, case studies, templates, best practices, podcasts, educators, and agencies. We’re constantly updating it, so make sure to check back often and see what’s new. After filling in the onboarding questionnaire, you can view recommended resources based on your micro-segment and marketing goals. To make it super easy to find the perfect resource, you can filter the Growth Library by customer decision journey stage, objective, KPIs, customer type, and industry.

If you’ve got a great marketing resource you want to recommend to the library, you can submit them using this form.

4. Private growth communities

Once you become a Growth Channel user, you’ll get special access to our exclusive LinkedIn Community, Growth Hacking Strategies, Techniques, Best Practices and Case Studies, and our exclusive Slack community, Growth Channel Talk. We often post product updates and announcements, helpful marketing content, and free resources. Plus, we encourage members to introduce themselves, ask for support from the community, and share their current projects. Access the community from your Growth Channel dashboard and send us a request to join. Once you’re approved, you’ll get access to the community feed!

Here’s what you get by joining our communities:

• Directly communicate with our team and get your questions answered fast
• Be the first to hear about our product updates, events, newly available resources, trending growth tactics, strategies, and other announcements
• Interact with other Growth Channel members and followers
• Share your experiences and advice with the rest of the community
• Share your own updates (products, content, or events)

5. Smart Notifications

Want a smarter way to measure your website’s performance? As mentioned above, connecting your Google Analytics account helps Growth Channel send you better alerts and marketing recommendations. Growth Channel analyzes your Analytics data and helps you identify website growth opportunities, saving you hours every week.

Our notifications will tell you what's working, what's not, and how you can improve your web performance. Here’s some of the metrics we track for your weekly summary, sent directly to your Growth Channel dashboard every Monday morning:

6. Website analytics

Because Google and website analytics platforms are often overwhelming, we’ve compiled your most important metrics so you can get an overview of your site quickly. Connect your Google Analytics and monitor your website performance with our integrated dashboard view.
In our interactive dashboard, you can set a custom date range and track metrics like visits, bounce rates, top locations, and average session duration. You can also view reports on top traffic sources, top social channels, and top site pages.
You can access your analytics under the Progress menu.

Paid features for Members

Once you're ready to upgrade to your annual Membership with Growth Channel, your business will get even more access to the platform's great features to help you grow.

1. Competitor analysis

Growth Channel will perform a competitor analysis for the competitor URLs you submitted in your onboarding questionnaire. You can access your competitor analysis under the Progress menu. In this dashboard, you can explore your competitors' top organic and paid keywords, latest landing pages and media publishers, top backlinks, monthly traffic, text ads, referring domains, landing pages, and more. You can also download the analysis as a PDF report and share it with your team or clients.

2. Website audit

You can access your website audit within the Growth Channel dashboard. We will give you an overall website health score, created from an analysis of on-page SEO, links, usability, performance, and social performance. You can also drill down into the details of each category to see what’s working and what’s not. Plus, we’ll give you tips and optimization suggestions so you can improve your website. For agencies and resellers, you can also get actionable insights into your clients’ websites. We can also white label the website audit upon request.

3. Consultancy call

All paying members get one free consultation call. You’ll be able to discuss your marketing strategies with one of our growth experts and learn how to take advantage of everything Growth Channel has to offer. The consultation call is also a great opportunity to get any of your questions answered.

4. Personalized growth tactics set

While all users can view one growth tactic at a time on their dashboard, we send members a set of personalized growth marketing tactics right after they submit their onboarding questionnaire. These tactics are tailored to your specified goals and KPIs. You can also generate a new set of custom growth tactics whenever you want. Plus, you’ll get full access to all our growth tactics in the library. You can view sample tactics for a SaaS, pet food company, education company, tech startup, and others here.

5. Premium features in Persona Builder

Members can generate personas nearly instantly with Google Analytics data and via a Growth Plan (available as an add-on). To learn more about premium features, check out our Persona Module blog post.

To create a persona with Google Analytics, make sure your account is connected via Integrations, click on Create New Persona button, and then Get Started in the Generate From Analytics tile.

It will just take a couple seconds for Growth Channel to scan, analyze, and organize all your Google Analytics data. Personas include information about the demographics of your site visitors, what pages they’re visiting on your site, what social networks and technology they prefer, and what market segments and categories they belong to. Just like with the persona templates, you can export the persona as a PDF and deliver it to a client or share it with your team. If you are an agency or a freelancer, you can connect multiple Analytics accounts and generate separate personas for each client.

If you don’t know who your target audience is and how to communicate with them, or if you don’t have time to research and create your personas, let Growth Channel AI generate personas for you. All Growth Channel marketing plans include 2-4 custom-generated buyer personas. Growth Channel AI uses over 500 data sources to determine the best and most relevant customer profiles for your campaign. For B2C campaigns, the demographics are coming via Facebook, and for B2B campaigns - via LinkedIn. Growth Channel matches the audiences on those channels, and helps you (automatically) identify their psychographic and behavioral characteristics.

6. AI Content Writer

With Growth Channel AI Content Writer, you can generate high-converting copy in seconds. You can find the Content Writer under the Plan tab. Simply enter a short description of your product, service, or company (up to 100 characters), specify your target audience, and select your desired content format. Our AI will instantly generate a few content ideas for your Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google ads, with more formats coming soon. Plus, all your outputs are saved in your dashboard, so you can access them at any time.

7. Generate a growth marketing plan with AI (add on for Members, included in Marketer Plan)

After realizing just how time consuming and expensive it can be to research and create a marketing plan, we decided to build Growth Channel to automate the process. Growth Channel collects marketing data from over 500 sources and helps you identify the best go-to-market strategy for your campaign. Our data-driven and comprehensive marketing plans are available as add-ons for Members and are included in the Marketer access. Plans include buyer personas, customer journey maps, competitor analysis, personalized campaign ideas, budget allocation, and more. If you’re not sure if our growth marketing plans are right for your business, you can look through an example plan or schedule a one on one demo call.

8. White Label for agencies and resellers on the Marketer Plan

Growth Channel offers white labelled plans for agencies and resellers, so the generated marketing plans look like your own. Once you become a member, send us your agency’s branded master presentation deck. Acceptable formats include Google Slides, Power Point, and Keynote. This way, all your marketing data will flow directly into your template, and you can edit anything as you please. If you don’t have a presentation template, simply send us your logo and color hex codes, and we will apply those to our own template.

A day in the life of a Growth Channel intern

It’s difficult to sum up exactly what I do, as every day is different! That’s one of the benefits of a startup: no two days are exactly alike. My daily agenda typically consisted of making any updates or changes to previously submitted work, then completing urgent tasks and any smaller assignments that popped up during the day, and, when I had time, working on bigger projects and longer content pieces.

Some tasks I performed on a fairly consistent basis include brainstorming and writing blog posts on topics related to marketing or startups, researching, writing, and scheduling social media posts, writing and building biweekly newsletters for subscribers, creating promo for Growth Channel’s product, content, and events, preparing social media images, and writing copy for landing pages. Some other projects I’ve been working on include writing a video script for the explainer video, doing keyword research for content marketing and SEO, identifying guest blogging opportunities and preparing content, making website updates in Growth Channel CMS, preparing copy for paid ads, and creating long form downloadable marketing resources.

Growth Channel is an entirely remote team, with employees around the globe. As such, my entire internship was remote. I was able to set my own schedule and work at the pace and rigor I wanted to. The only things set in my weekly schedule were a few weekly team calls.

Tools I used as a Marketing Trainee at Growth Channel

The Marketing Traineeship is a hands-on program. The tools I used most often include:

The highlights of my internship

I truly had a flexible schedule. I could pretty much work whenever and wherever I wanted to, as long as I had my laptop and a good Internet connection. I was able to change my work schedule daily to fit around my summer class, family activities, and other events. Plus, it was nice to work everyday in leggings and a sweatshirt and never have to set a morning alarm.

One great thing about a startup is that the traditional corporate hierarchy and division between departments is less established. Everyone on the team is in the same Slack channel and Trello workspace, so I could see what the CEO, developers, designers, and sales people were working on. I worked directly with Growth Channel’s CEO on a daily basis, an opportunity most interns don’t get. Even though I was a part-time intern, I was treated as an equal on the team. My ideas were always respected and listened to, and everyone took my feedback seriously.

I really appreciate that Growth Channel let me establish myself as a content marketer and creator. Although my content was posted under Growth Channel brand, I was almost always cited as a direct author, and some of my longer content pieces even include an author bio. When promoting in communities, I was also able to use my own personal profile. All my outreach campaigns came from my work email address, rather than a generic Growth Channel account. This gave me a great opportunity to market myself and build up a personal profile.

Going into my internship, I knew I liked writing and social media, and Maryna, Growth Channel’s CEO, helped me dive deeper into these areas of marketing. After we learned I was good at content marketing, I chose to make it the main focus of my internship. In other words, I got to focus on the tasks and projects I actually enjoyed and excelled at.

I had a lot of freedom in the content I created, so I was able to express my creativity and research topics I found interesting and relevant to Growth Channel. For example, once I got a blog title approved, I could research, write, add links, and create images in my own way. Maryna and I would then collaborate on edits. Maryna expected high quality work, so I was always pushed to never settle for anything less than the best of my capabilities. She always offered great comments, feedback, and suggestions to help me polish my content. I can truly say my content improved and my responsibilities increased as my internship progressed. I’m very proud of the projects I completed under her guidance.

I always felt my work was respected and appreciated, and I was able to make a positive impact on the company. For example, my social posts were actually posted and my original blogs were published on the website (albeit with a few edits and updates). My internship was truly a hands-on experience, and I loved doing work that benefitted Growth Channel.

Want to work for Growth Channel?

Now that my internship is over, someone needs to replace me! Growth Channel’s Marketing Traineeship is a great learning experience and resume booster. Wondering if you’re qualified? You don’t need to have a significant amount of marketing knowledge or prior hands-on experience (I certainly didn’t) to be successful in this position. Here’s some characteristics a Marketing Trainee should have:

• Desire to produce high-quality work, every single time
• Open to feedback
• Passionate about marketing and/or startups
• Ability to work in a fast-paced environment
• Good, stable Internet connection
• Great writing and communication skills
• Excited to learn new things
• Disciplined and organized
• Great at managing multiple tasks at once
• Knowledge of HubSpot, social media, and Canva are a plus, but definitely not required

If you’re interested in the Marketing Trainee program, you can apply on LinkedIn. If you have any questions, you can email hello@growthchannel.org or send me a message via LinkedIn.

That’s all from me for now. Happy hacking everyone!

-Hailey

Big Data is a term used to describe massive, complex, and varied sets of structured and unstructured data. The Big Data industry attempts to analyze, extract information from, and manage these large data sets that traditional data-processing software can’t deal with.

We want to thank Data Magazine for compiling this great article and congratulate all the other amazing companies that were featured. Companies were chosen for exceptional performance in innovation, growth, management, and/or societal impact. We can’t believe how much Growth Channel has flourished in the past year, and we can’t wait to see where the future will take us.

Data Magazine is managed and owned by Fupping LTD, a London based media company. The publication aims to showcase the latest innovations and breakthroughs in data and analytical industries. Data Magazine also explores how individuals and businesses use data to enhance their daily lives.

Want to learn more about what makes us one of the best Big Data companies in Texas? Learn more about our marketing planning solution or book a demo call to see if our services are right for your company.

B2B SaaS lead generation is evolving and becoming more web-centric. This is because people tend to search for product and service recommendations through online platforms like Google, Capterra, and G2. The competition is quite hard to deal with. As such, you must keep up with digital trends and updates to stay on top of your competition.

Still skeptical? Well, here’s how content marketing will help improve your B2B SaaS lead generation strategy.

Attract more potential customers

Content marketing helps people in all stages of the buyer’s journey, which includes the awareness, consideration, and decision stages. Content marketing helps prospects identify their needs before they may even realize they have a problem. This is what makes it different from traditional marketing, where the seller only caters to the buyer when they are going to buy.

Content marketing also guides prospects through every step of their buying journey. For instance, you can create content that provides education to your niche on a relevant topic, finds solutions related to their needs, compares products, and informs prospects why your product is the best choice.

Once you become part of every stage of the buyer’s journey, more people will come to you for information. You can grab this opportunity to step up your game.

Growth Channel customer decision journey framework

More website engagement

Content marketing is not only focused on blog posts or newsletters. It covers all types of information, from product materials, to website pages, to FAQs and return policies. Once you have all of this high-quality content, more customers will visit you as their go-to source for information.

However, when it comes to marketing your products, detailed and informative content is a must. Product description articles will help prospects compare products. In this way, they will be able to buy the best products for themselves or their company. Improving your product web pages is one of the best B2B SaaS lead generation techniques. By using keywords and following SEO best practices, you can increase your search engine rankings, driving more relevant organic traffic to your site and increasing brand awareness.

More frequent customers

Having a prospect buy your products should not stop you from creating content. Content marketing is all about driving more frequent customers through consistent communication.

Utilize content marketing to establish a strong relationship with your prospects and customers. You can target current customers by publishing informational tutorials, new ideas, product releases, and other relevant information about your products.

You will never run out of content. Think of all the ideas you can publish on your website to encourage customers to upgrade or make an additional purchase. It could be a social media post, new blog articles, podcasts, and other relevant information.

Analyze engagements

Besides brand awareness and online visibility, here’s another content marketing benefit - the metrics! 

B2B marketers love analyzing their engagements because it helps them identify whether their marketing strategy is working or not. Analytics will help you determine if your campaign is effective and reveal what areas in your strategy should be improved.

There are a lot of B2B SaaS lead generation services that can help you with data analytics. You can have a marketing team, Google Analytics, Spring Metrics, Saas Metrics, and a lot more. For example, by connecting your Google Analytics account inside Growth Channel’s dashboard, you can take advantage of weekly smart notifications, which summarize all your key website metrics, successes, and areas for improvement.

The capabilities of metric services are incomparable with traditional marketing strategies. While you can have a general idea of your business engagements with traditional marketing, you can’t identify the specific audience or numbers with it. With content, you can track session duration, bounce rate, shares, likes, and conversions to see how your audience is engaging over time.

Higher credibility

To achieve high credibility, most B2B marketers follow the EAT guidelines in their content marketing. EAT stands for Expertise, Authority, and Trust. The EAT guidelines will determine your success in your field. It could make or break your B2B lead generation strategy.

Once you assure your prospects that you are an expert in your field, you will drive authority to your content. Having a great level of authority means that your prospects are more likely to trust you. You can build authority by explaining your previous experience or education, including customer testimonials, success stories, references and links to any piece of data or research you include in your content.

Being credible and trustworthy is a must to achieve high-ranking results on the internet. Take note that the almighty Google will rank your content higher in search results once you follow the EAT guidelines.

Quality leads

Someone commenting on your content could mean that you have gained a quality lead... if they didn’t only visit your website, but also find your content informative and interesting.

Having leads on your website is a big deal. Hence, don’t frown when you are getting more leads than prospects. These leads mean that your hard work in creating quality content is paying off. More quality leads mean more potential customers.

Moreover, always remember that the foundation of content marketing is a healthy website. As such, you need to keep your website active to nurture your leads. Having a stock of content ready for posting will support the nurturing process. Hiring a bunch of content writers or finding guest bloggers will also help you in this journey.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Due to digital evolution, the sales and marketing department have a lot of things to adjust. This is not a bad thing though, as it has made the job of the sales and marketing team a lot easier. For instance, a sales team no longer needs to look for leads. Through content marketing, leads should come in without much effort from them.

The sales and marketing duties have evolved. Their main responsibility no longer focuses on brand awareness for your company. Nowadays, their job is focused on nurturing more leads by coming up with valuable content.

The effectiveness of your B2B SaaS lead generation depends on the content marketing strategy of both departments. If they are not aligned, you will be less likely to meet your business goals.

The sales team should know what content is pumping out and check that it is accurate. On the other hand, your marketing team should understand the type of leads they bring in through their content marketing and find ways to seamlessly pass off quality leads to sales representatives.

Bottom Line

If you haven’t tried content marketing before, it is normal to get overwhelmed. There’s no pressure here as content marketing requires careful thinking anyway. However, once you keep on providing valuable content, the sky is surely the limit.

The quality of your content marketing will either flounder or flourish your online visibility. Hence, you have to make sure you’re crafting informative, relevant, and quality content. In this way, you can encourage potential leads to move through the buyer’s journey and ultimately become your customer.

Lee Gladish is the former Co-Founder at Reply.io and the CEO at AirborneApp, which is the industry’s first sales engagement application purpose-built for Agencies. He has been in the software sales space for over 10 years. After working with countless (sales) agencies he understands the necessary tactics required to achieve massive results. He’s also helped many other businesses & entrepreneurs build a better sales engine.

What is a buyer persona?

As marketers, sometimes we create campaigns that we enjoy or that we think are amazing, while completely neglecting our target audience. Yet as Seth Godin explained,

“If you’re only willing to market to people like you, then there’s no one left.” - Seth Godin

The goal of marketing is to create and communicate value. If you want more leads, repeat customers, and positive word of mouth, you must satisfy the needs of your target audience. But how do you learn what your audience actually wants and deliver it to them?

That’s where buyer personas come into play, or often referred to as ideal customer profiles. A buyer persona is a fictional representation of an ideal customer segment, and it includes information like demographics, location, social media usage, likes, dislikes, goals, and pain points. Companies create personas from extensive research. They may even give their personas a name and image, like “Stacy the stay at home mom” or “Freddie the full time student,” to make them feel real. Many businesses also cater and market to more than one persona. For example, a university may target high schoolers from affluent families for their traditional four-year program on campus. But they may target their more affordable, online classes to middle aged parents who haven’t received a college degree. Yet another persona may be working professionals in their mid-20s looking for a part-time graduate program.

It’s important to remember that buyer personas are a general representation of your target audience. Not every customer will exactly match the profile you created, and some customers may belong to a completely different profile. Even so, buyer personas are still important because they help you understand your target audience and better satisfy their needs, leading to more sales and revenue growth.

Why are buyer personas important?

Knowing your audience helps you anticipate their wants and execute personalized campaigns, rather than marketing to the masses and hoping something sticks. Once you know the most relevant personas for your business or product, you can identify customer profiles that aren’t in your audience, so you don’t waste time and resources marketing to people who are unlikely to convert.

Not everyone in your audience thinks exactly the same, uses the same communication channels, or has the same problem. Buyer personas help you understand your overall audience, and then segment that audience into groups of like-minded consumers so you can create a more customized marketing strategy and build stronger relationships. Creating different personas makes it easier to provide relevant and valuable content to the right people, on the right platform, at the right time. For example, Growth Channel uses communities like Pioneer, Indie Hackers, Startup School, Slack and Facebook Groups to connect with other startups and founders. However, to reach agencies and enterprise teams, we rely more heavily on LinkedIn, email campaigns, and events from partners, like Agorapulse’s Agency Summit. Most times, we don’t send the exact same message to each group. We typically send different variations of the same base newsletter, updating the messaging and including information each segment would find most relevant.

6 Aspects of great buyer personas

In order to create a helpful buyer persona, you need to know a lot of information about your audience, including demographic, geographic, psychographic, and behavioral insights. To make it easier to organize this important data, all of our persona templates include the following:

Demographics - demographics include data points such as age, gender, race, nationality, education, income level, and occupation. These categories often affect people’s buying power, desires, and preferred communication channels. However, it's important to avoid outdated stereotypes (for example, more and more men are becoming stay at home dads, a role traditionally associated with women), and remember that similar demographics don’t always think the same way (for example, not all young girls want to play with dolls). The demographics are easily used to target specific audiences on ad platforms such as Facebook, Google, or programmatic buying.

Goals and pain points - consider what your audience wants to achieve and how you can help them reach their goals. And on the flip side, think about what problems and struggles your audience currently has and the solutions your business can offer. For example, Growth Channel helps startups who want to scale their business (goal) by automating the market research process so they don’t have to waste hours of their precious time or pay expensive outsourcing costs to build their own marketing plan (pain point).

If you aren’t sure what your audiences’ goals or struggles are, search keywords related to your company and browse Google’s "People Also Ask" box and "Related Searches" section. You can also check forums like Quora and Reddit to get insights into the conversation around your industry. Customer testimonials and success stories on your website are great ways to highlight how your product or service helps your audience achieve their goals and eliminate their pain points.

Influence - Sometimes you need to appeal to someone else in order to persuade your audience to make a purchase. What might be influencing your audiences’ buying decisions? Do they care about online reviews? Do they follow certain influencers or celebrities? Do they rely on advice and recommendations from friends and family?

Decision criteria - think about what your audience truly wants. What factors are affecting their decision? Will they look at price point, product comparisons, a case study, or immediately make a purchase? What will trigger them to buy your product or service?

KPIs - consider the key performance indicators that are important to your audience. How will they measure the success or impact of your product? How will they determine if they should make a repeat purchase? Examples of KPIs include performance, features, reliability, durability, conformance, aesthetics, quality, speed, ease of use, emotions, feelings, and responsiveness. KPIs vary greatly depending on the purpose of your product or service. However, you should always deliver on the promises you make in your marketing and promotional materials.

Likes and dislikes - knowing what your audiences’ preferences are can help you tailor an authentic message that really resonates with them. You should include what your audience likes in your ads and promotional materials. You should also either avoid highlighting things your audience doesn’t enjoy or show how your product solves their dislikes.

How to use Growth Channel Persona Module

Growth Channel’s Persona Module helps you create, organize, and manage all your buyer personas. To access the module, log into the Growth Channel Planning module (if you are logged in to Activate, use the left hand menu to navigate to the Planning section). This will take you to the Overview page of the Planning Module, where you can generate a new marketing plan, view all your current personas, and browse through our marketing resources.

Access the Persona Module

Generate personas with AI in minutes

If you don’t know who your target audience is and how to communicate with them, or if you don’t have time to research and create your personas, let Growth Channel AI generate personas for you. All Growth Channel marketing plans include custom-generated buyer personas. Growth Channel AI uses over 50+ data partners, industry benchmarks, and generative AI to determine the best and most relevant customer profiles for your business.

The feature is available as a part of all Growth Channel plans and takes 250 data credits from your account to generate.

Each persona represents a real person, even though generated automatically, and is suitable for all, B2C, B2B, nonprofits, employer branding, and affiliate marketing campaigns. Growth Channel helps you (automatically) identify your audience's psychographic and behavioural characteristics. If you’re planning your next marketing campaign and don’t have time for lengthy interviews and surveys - you may want to check it out 😀

Growth Channel lets you generate custom, data-driven personas in under 5 seconds in just a few steps. Once you're ready to generate a new marketing plan, click on the green button in the first block of the Overview screen and fill in a short brief about the company, product or service.

Lastly, you will confirm persona profile generation for the given marketing plan with 250 data credits. Growth Channel uses data as a quota for generative AI features and custom audiences.

The below video goes through an example of Persona creation with Growth Channel AI:

The goal of these persona profiles is to make your ideal customer into as much of a “real” person as possible, so you can create relevant and authentic communications and messaging. That’s why we include a section for a name, an image and a featured quote. Considering your audiences’ goals and pain points will help you create focused and persuasive promotional materials. Technology and social networks help you determine the best channels to reach your audience.

You can edit your persona by clicking on the Edit icon per each content block. Once ready, click to confirm or click to Cancel if you want to revert changes. Click on the 'trash' icon if you want to delete any of the elements.

Once your persona is ready with edits, click to Submit changes to save the Persona profile.

You can create more Personas for the specific marketing plan by navigating back to Personas overview in the sub-navigation and clicking on the plus + icon. Note that each persona profile takes 250 data credits.

Growth Channel supports additional Persona types in the legacy app Marketing Planning module which are described below.

Create a persona from a pre-populated template

Growth Channel currently offers 15+ pre-populated templates to make your persona creation much easier. Each template is completely customizable, so you can edit it based on your specific business or product. Templates are great if you’re just starting out, or if you don’t know all the details about your ideal audience. Each template represents a real person and is based on data analytics.

To preview a template, select the green icon listing persona's identifier. To open the editable template, click Select This Template.

As you fill out your template, consider what your persona looks like, how they act, and where you can find them. Tags are a great way to differentiate your personas, and they can be used as filters when creating audience targets for digital ads. For example, you wouldn’t want to market to Gen Z through LinkedIn or radio, because they don’t use those channels. Instead, you’d want to build a brand presence on apps like TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram.



Let’s break down how you can customize this template:

To remove a Selected tag, click the x icon in its upper right hand corner. To add a tag, type in the search bar and hit enter.

Create a persona from scratch

Creating a persona from scratch is great if you have a very niche audience or if you’ve collected enough data to know specific details about your customers. To start building your persona, select the green plus button from the Persona Module and select Get Started under the Create From Scratch tile.

This launches a blank interactive template with the same categories and layouts as the pre-populated templates. The sections and titles are there for guidance and to ensure you have a complete 'big picture' of your audience.

You can navigate and edit the blank template in the same way as the pre-populated templates (see previous section). All personas created from scratch are titled “Name - Enter role.” Once you add the name and role of your persona, the title will update on the Persona homepage and within the template.

Note that Growth Channel legacy app no longer supports generating Personas from Google Analytics Universal accounts.

Manage and share your personas

To get from a template back to the Persona Module homepage, click All Personas at the top of the template. To create a new persona, click the Create New Persona tile. To edit a current persona, click the gray plus icon or click anywhere in the white tile to open up the template. To delete a persona, click the trash can icon. This brings up a confirmation popup with the option to cancel or delete the persona permanently.

You can export all your persona profiles as a PDF, share it your team, or send to a client.

Ongoing Persona Management

As your business grows and evolves, it’s highly unlikely that your buyer personas will stay exactly the same. As you start to gain more leads and customers, you can optimize your buyer personas based on the data you're collecting. Oftentimes, the people who end up buying your product or service are different than what you originally predicted, and your buyer personas need to reflect these changes so you can focus your marketing efforts on those who are most likely to convert.

Regular updates to your buyer personas keep them aligned with the changing landscape. How do you know when it’s time for a refresh? Consider it akin to a health check-up for your marketing strategy:

Embrace the Power of Buyer Personas with Growth Channel

Growth Channel's Persona Module isn’t just a tool; it’s a catalyst for strategic alignment. Here’s how you can truly embrace its power to transform your marketing strategies:

And the timing was perfect. As the months of remote work and social isolation added up, everyone became fatigued with video conferencing. There is a lot that goes into jumping on a video call, and frankly, people were looking for something simpler. To those who yearn for user-friendly simplicity, audio-only social media apps are a great solution.

Why Social Audio is the Future of Content

Audio content is the most accessible type of content because it is entirely passive. As a society that loves multi-tasking, we can consume content while driving, cooking, working out, and relaxing. Many prefer audio because it is an intimate experience between the creator and the audience with a unique ability to convey emotion and build a connection.

While text-based content probably isn't going anywhere, we are in the midst of a shift to supplement engagement with audio. And in social audio—specifically live debates and engaging conversations, people are connecting without worrying about where to look on the screen so that no one sees up their nose. As apps like Clubhouse gain more notoriety, conversations are joined by big voices like the green tech giant Elon Musk, celebrity Ashton Kutcher, and comedian Kevin Hart. And the prospect of joining a conversation with celebrity idols is enough to bring the crowds.

The move towards social audio might have benefited from the pandemic, but it's a medium that will be here to stay. It comes in many different forms, from static audio posts that function like tiny podcasts to monetized live shows. Many platforms are even experimenting with audio interactions to replace traditional text commentary.

Changing the Social Media Landscape

The concept of audio content is not new; in fact, radio talk shows were the early predecessors of the modern-day podcast. We've used audio to provide news and share information, enjoy music, audiobooks, and sports. We’ve used it to learn and invest in self-development. Radio is still on the radar, but advances in technology and the introduction of smartphones have put a hot mic in the hands of anyone with an internet connection to broadcast their message to the world.

More platforms are adopting live and limited features. Live means that the content is not prerecorded but shared in real-time with an audience. Live content is great for synchronous social media interaction but also risky and less controlled. Limited features include the likes of Instagram Stories, which are short-lived pieces of content that disappear instead of living in a feed.

Social audio is taking advantage of both. Popular apps like Clubhouse focus on the here and now by catering to live conversations that disappear and cannot be accessed once the talk has ended. This is big news for the entertainment industry. One way that audio is shaping social media is by allowing performers to provide sneak-preview shows that are limited in duration. In turn, those who see the show are 67% more likely to purchase tickets to a live event.

And in the world of sports, it's a modern take on calling into a radio show. Hosts have been covering games and giving highlights for as long as spectator sports have been around. And a new wave of social audio platforms will give this commentary a facelift. Like a traditional radio show, guests will be able to participate in the conversation by being called up on stage—so to speak. Take a look at the sports talk platform Locker Room. It’s an audio-only social media app that connects sports fans, athletes, and industry insiders in a common space. The app takes the typical play-by-play commentary and turns it into a social experience.

The Best of Audio-only Social Media Apps 

Where do we start? As audio content takes the social media world by the storm, you may be wondering which apps are worth checking out and which ones are likely just a flash in the pan. While the best is undoubtedly yet to come, here are our current favorites.

Riffr

Riffr took the popularity of podcasting, shrunk it down to three minutes or less, and built a platform around it. This social network is available on Android and iOS devices, and it's free to use. While podcasting is popular, it’s also long-form audio content that is time-consuming and expensive to produce. Riffr is the casual alternative, offering fun and spontaneity!

Audlist

This audio-based social media network is the most flexible. There is no maximum length for audio files, so users can post short bits or longer diatribes depending on their needs. Text content is limited to a short title, while community interactions are limited to short audio files. However, cover photos for each post are totally acceptable.

There are plans in the works to add multiple images, direct messaging, voice modifiers, autoplay, and audio stories (similar to Instagram stories). Audlist is available for both Android and iOS.

HearMeOut

This audio-based social media platform focuses on short snippets up to 42 seconds, like the Twitter of audio content. Every post on the platform can be accompanied by one cover image. And the platform plays well with others—allowing users to share content on more popular networks like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. And like a true social media platform, HearMeOut users can interact with posts through a text-based comment feature. HearMeOut is available for both Android and iOS.

Clubhouse

One of the most popular social audio apps has recently exploded in popularity. In one month, the Clubhouse app went from 2 million downloads to 10 million downloads. Clubhouse originally launched on iOS and after rising to fame quickly, it launched an Android app that is still fairly new and invitation-based. It seems that everyone is jumping on the social audio bandwagon. One user described the app as one part TED talk and one-part early 90s chatroom.

It's new, and it's fun, and it's bringing live conversation back into the mainstream. One notable drawback that has received a lot of criticism is the platform's moderation practices which include publicly branding blocked users. But on the upside, the app is still attracting millions of new users every month and has introduced a new genre in social media to the world, paving the way for others to follow.

Clubhouse is a great platform for businesses to expand their network, collaborate with peers, and directly engage with their target audience. If you’re interested in startup stories, Growth Channel is teaming up with Go, Go, Startups! on Clubhouse to interview a new early-stage startup founder every second Friday of the month.

Discord

A social app that spawned in the gaming world, Discord has proven itself to be adept at identifying needs and filling them. The app's original focus was to provide a voice-to-text communication tool for gamers who couldn't pause their game to converse. But in light of the global pandemic that upheaved lives around the world, the platform re-branded to appeal to a wider audience and provide a much-needed way to connect during isolation. Discord has more than 140 million active subscribers, tripling their customer base during the pandemic.

Wavve

This app was designed for audio by people who love audio. The original target audience was musicians and podcasters who had audio content to share. It was a happy accident that the world of social audio was growing around it at the same time. Using the Wavve app, users can combine audio files with animations and captions to create engaging videos and share the content on all major platforms.

Spoon

Spoon is very similar to Clubhouse in that it allows users to create discussions or shows and invite audience members to participate. However, the upside to Spoon is that creators can get paid for their shows through an in-app donation feature.

Checkmate

The online dating world equivalent of an audio-based social platform is Checkmate. With the platform restricting users to audio and video formats only, the risk of catfishing is all but eliminated.

Old Dog, New Tricks

As the popularity of social audio continues to boom, the established platforms aren't leaving anything to chance. Facebook is launching new integrated audio features to allow users to record and post audio content directly within the platform. Twitter has already launched a feature called Twitter Spaces, which are audio-based chat rooms for live discussion. And Spotify has launched the Green Room.

How Brands Can Leverage Audio-Only Social Trends

People are listening—really listening! An estimated 193 million users consume an average of 16 hours of audio content every week. There is an opportunity for brands to get in on this growing trend early and provide the type of content that is effortless and even enjoyable to consume. Consider these ideas to get a head start on social audio marketing this year.

1. Sponsored Advertisements
2. Thought Leadership Discussions
3. Live Q&A Events
4. Inspirational Behind-the-Scenes Audio Blurbs (3 minutes or less)
5. Mini Interviews with the CEO or Front-line Employees

The Bottom Line on Social Audio

It turns out that the ballooning popularity of social audio apps like Clubhouse is just the tip of the iceberg. In the spirit of embracing "what's-old-is-new," people will be revisiting the idea of open conversations. Audio-only social media trends are expected to continue to grow, and we expect to see many new incarnations of these apps in the coming months and years. The move towards audio will be for everyone—individuals, creators, brands, and entertainers.

Imo Bennard is a marketing professional that hails from Nigeria. He has developed a knack for finding the perfect advertising strategy to match his client’s needs and goals. He excels at developing meaningful relationships with his business associates and goes above and beyond to ensure that each client achieves their goal with each content campaign developed. When Bennard is not creating marketing projects, he spends his time swimming with friends and family.

What is the featured snippet?

Ranking highly on a search engine results page is very important. 71.33% of searches resulted in an organic click on the first page of Google, and 67.6% of clicks went to the top five ranking pages. However, for some search queries, a featured snippet will appear above all the organically ranked pages, in a spot known as “position 0.” The featured snippet is a short summary answer to a search query that shows up at the top of the search engine results page. Google pulls the featured content from a website and includes the page title and URL of the original source. In some cases, the featured snippet may also include an image.

The great thing about featured snippets is that you don’t need to hold the number one page ranking to have your content included. According to a study by Ahrefs, 99.58% of featured snippets are taken from website pages ranking in the top ten organic positions, or on the first results page. Getstats also reports that 70% of snippets come from sites that aren’t ranked number one. So, if a page on your site ranks highly on Google’s search engine results for a specific keyword, then you have a great shot at getting in the featured snippet position.

Typically, a “people also ask” box will show up underneath the featured snippet, designed to help users find more relevant content related to their search query. Similar to featured snippets, Google also displays website content in this section, including the page’s title and URL. Having your site featured in the “People also ask” box is great because your content will show up even if users didn’t type the exact keyword or phrase you were targeting. In other words, you can reach more users who may find your content relevant and helpful, even if they weren’t specifically searching for your business, products, or services.

Types of featured snippets

There are four common types of featured snippets, most of which you’ve probably come across during your own searches. These include paragraphs, lists, tables, and YouTube videos. Let’s dive deeper into each type of featured snippet:

Paragraphs: Paragraph snippets feature a few sentences that provide a direct answer to a searcher’s query, and they can be pulled from anywhere in a piece of content. They are the most common type and often show up with question keywords starting with “how to do,” “who is,” and “what is.” Paragraphs are also more likely to include an image than other types of snippets.

Lists: Google displays both bulleted and numbered lists as featured snippets. Numbered lists typically show up when a searcher is looking for rankings or a set of chronological steps, like when they want to know how to perform a certain task. Google sometimes copies content directly from a summarized list that a writer places at the beginning of their blog. In other cases, Google will create a list based on the headers and format of a piece of content. For a bulleted list, Google typically pulls the H2 headers from a post to create bullets.

Tables: In most cases, Google pulls data from an article and reformats it into a table. In other words, your content may show up in a table featured snippet even if you didn’t include a succinct table in your post. Tables show up most often for any type of data that can easily be displayed in rows and columns.

YouTube: YouTube snippets can show up in the form of a video or text. For videos, Google will include a large thumbnail of a relevant video and even highlight the part of the timeline it thinks a user will find most relevant and helpful. Some featured snippets linking back to YouTube videos also feature text, extracted from the video itself or the description.

Why is the featured snippet important?

There are numerous reasons why you would want your business’ content and website pages to show up in “position 0.” Because the featured snippet shows up as the top result on the search engine results page, it leads to a lot more impressions and exposure, especially if the original source ranks lower. They always show up above the fold, so searchers don’t have to scroll or click anything to see your content. Your page title and URL is included in the snippet, so users can easily navigate to your site.

Featured snippets also build trust. Remember, Google’s job is to supply helpful answers and related content as fast as possible, so users are satisfied and spend more time on the search engine. Therefore, Google won’t place anything in “position 0” unless it’s highly relevant, well formatted, and detailed content. Users trust Google, so they also trust the sites Google recommends and features.

Ahrefs found that at least 13% of search results return a featured snippet, which typically receives 8.6% of all clicks for a given search query. In most cases, these clicks are stolen from the number one ranking source. Snippets actually tend to reduce the number of total clicks, because users can get a direct answer to their query without having to click anything. While the top ranked organic search result typically receives over twice as many clicks as the featured snippet (about 20%), they’re still a great option for brands to increase awareness. If you manage to snag the featured snippet and the number one ranking, your page will receive about one third of the total clicks and organic traffic for a given keyword.

Source: Ahrefs

It’s much easier to optimize your content for a featured snippet than it is to move a lower ranking page to a higher position, and as mentioned previously, you don’t need the top ranking page to win a featured snippet. If you’re a newer website, don’t be discouraged. Ahrefs also found that “the backlink metrics of a ‘featured’ URL seem to be on par with the rest of the pages in SERP.” This means that Google isn’t prioritizing pages with lots of backlinks.

Source: Ahrefs

Plus, one piece of content can rank for thousands of featured snippets. Getting your content featured also typically leads to a major traffic boost. For example, SEMrush saw site traffic for a particular blog post skyrocket 500% once its content was added to a featured snippet:

Source: SEMrush

Featured snippets are also becoming more important with the rise of virtual assistants and voice search, as they’re typically the results that are read first.

How to optimize content for the featured snippet

There are many ways to increase your chances of getting a featured snippet. In this post, I’ll cover six strategies:

1. Optimize blog posts that already rank in top spots
2. Create new content around relevant keywords with featured snippets
3. Optimize the format of your existing content
4. Update your HTML structure
5. Add a Q&A section to your site
6. Submit URLs to Google so they can be re-crawled

Let’s jump into these six strategies:

1. Optimize blog posts that already rank in top spots

Before you spend time researching and writing new content, it's best to perform an audit of your current content to see if you already have featured snippets, or if you’re ranking highly for a keyword where another site holds the featured snippet. To perform this audit, you’ll need some type of SEO or keyword research tool. I’ll be using SEMrush, but Ahrefs and Serpstat work as well.

First, see if you already have any featured snippets. You can do this by typing in your site’s domain under the Organic Research Tab on the left menu (1), scrolling down to the section titled SERP Features (2), and clicking Featured Snippet (3). This brings up a list of keywords where your domain appears in the featured snippet, along with the linked URL. To see the content of the featured snippet, click the square icon under the SERP column (4). If you want to keep track of these keywords, you can add them to a separate keyword list within SEMrush (5).

Check out this example of Nike. Nike has 947 featured snippets linking to its domain, meaning that there are 947 keywords where Nike’s content shows up in the featured snippet. Nike has 94,300 featured snippets not linking to its domain, meaning Nike ranks for 94,3000 keywords where there is a featured snippet owned by another company.

For the first keyword, “nike sneakers phone number,” SEMrush shows a paragraph featured snippet linked to Nike’s contact page:

Once you check if you have any featured snippets, the next step is to identify keywords you’re ranking highly for that have a featured snippet owned by someone else. You’ll start the same way as before. Navigate to the Organic Research Tab and type your site’s domain (1). Switch from the Overview report to the Positions report (2). This shows all the keywords you are ranking for. To find keywords that already have a featured snippet (which you do not own), click on the SERP Features filter (3), hover over Domain Does Not Rank (4), and select Featured Snippet (5).

You really only want to look at keywords you’re ranking in the top ten for, as these pages are most likely to steal a featured snippet from a competitor. To add this filter, click the Positions dropdown and select Top 10. If this returns too many results, you can use more filters like KD (keyword difficulty) and volume to narrow the keywords. Click on the SERP icon for a specific keyword to the featured snippet. Make a note of your ranking page URL, the type of snippet, who owns it, and the content.

Let’s look back at our Nike example. There are 11,000 keywords with featured snippets owned by someone else where Nike’s content is already ranking in the top ten.

When I click the SERP icon for the first keyword, “nike logo,” it reveals that an article by LogoMyWay claims the featured snippet.

2. Create new content around relevant keywords with featured snippets

Now that you’ve determined if featured snippets exist for content you already have, you can also research new keywords with featured snippets and create content for them. Again, you’ll need a keyword research tool to find these keywords.

In SEMrush, navigate to the Keyword Magic Tool Tab in the left hand menu. Type in any relevant keyword you want to create content for. To find keywords with a featured snippet, click Advanced Filters, Search Features, and check Featured Snippet.

Similar to before, you can click the SERP snapshot icon to view the content and owner of the featured snippet for a specific keyword. When you find keywords you like, don’t forget to add them to a saved list by clicking the gray plus button.

Depending on your initial keyword, SEMrush or your preferred SEO tool may return thousands of similar keywords. If you want to narrow down your results, try these filters:

Once you’ve built a set of keywords you like, use the SERP snapshot to start exploring the featured snippets and identify ones you may be able to improve. When you start creating your new content, make sure it matches the format of the current featured snippet.

3. Optimize the format of existing content

There are multiple ways you can adjust the format of your high ranking content to make it more likely to appear in a featured snippet:

Source: SEMrush

Source: Ghergich & Co.

Source: Ghergich & Co.

Source: Ahrefs

Source: Neil Patel

4. Update your HTML structure

The format of your HTML code plays a major role in optimizing your content for a featured snippet. If your code is messy or formatted incorrectly, Google won’t be able to understand your content and turn it into a featured snippet. Here’s some best practices to optimize your HTML:

5. Add a Q&A section to your site

A Q&A section is a great way to target multiple related question based keywords on one page. Maintaining consistent, proper formatting is essential. Write every question with an H2 tag and add a short paragraph underneath that answers the question in around 50 words. If you’re not sure what questions to answer, check out the related keywords Google suggests at the bottom of the SERP or the “People also ask” box. If done properly, you can optimize this one page for numerous featured snippet opportunities.

6. Submit URLs to Google so they can be re-crawled

Once you make SEO and content updates to your site, you want to submit the URLs to Google so the pages can be re-crawled. This is the best way to alert Google that you’ve made updates, instead of waiting for Google to notice. Head over to Google Search Console’s URL inspection tool. Enter your URL and select the “Fetch as Google” option to submit the page for re-indexing. This will help your updates get into the SERP faster.

Are you going to try any of these strategies? Let me know your results on Twitter @Gr0wthChannel. And if you’re looking for more ways to rapidly scale your business, check out our blog post on growth tactics for each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Lead generation and lead capturing strategies are the cornerstones of your B2B marketing. When you have tactics that result in audience engagement, it gives you the chance to optimize the customer experience component of your business.

In a recent study, experts found that customer experience surpassed product and price as main brand differentiators. For B2B companies, this means using strategies that result in a positive perception of your business.

When you build a positive perception for your business, you must consider the following aspects: 

• Brand experience
• Product experience
• Experience with the service

However, before you can even create engagement, you must first capture your audience’s attention to your brand. You can hire the services of a B2B sales and lead generation agency to guide you all the way.

In preparation for such a partnership, know the effective lead generation strategies for your B2B business.

What Is B2B Lead Generation?

B2B lead generationis the process of obtaining new leads or prospects for your business. As a B2B business, your company markets and sells to other businesses. These are the businesses you want to capture using lead generation techniques. Generating leads is an integral component of any business strategy. Your business needs to bring in new customers to increase revenue and achieve growth. Also, more leads allow you to engage with more potential customers.

B2B Lead Generation Strategies You Need to Know  

A lead is a few steps away from becoming a customer. For B2B lead generation, you must provide value and show that your products or services will solve the problem of your target companies.

When you decide on a specific strategy, make sure that your end goal is to generate quality leads . You don’t want to waste time and resources generating leads that are unlikely to convert or make a purchase. Every lead generation marketing strategy should enable you to capture quality leads that can also help you gain more customers and generate revenue.

Effective strategies that successful B2B businesses use for generating leads include: 

1. Email Marketing

One of the best options for generating leads for your business is using an effective B2B email marketing strategy or tactics. The best email marketing strategy has two components:

• Outbound – This part allows you to bring new leads into your funnel.
• Inbound – Use an inbound methodology to nurture your audience until they become buyers.

With these two email marketing techniques, your funnel will remain topped up with new, warm leads. Here, you are not tied up with the brutal game of waiting for your target market to discover your brand and content. You are making it available to them right in their inbox.

Top Lead Nurturing Email Examples to Inspire Your Strategy

Here are the top lead nurturing examples that you can refer to and review while developing your emails.

B2B Lead Nurturing Email Examples:

Litmus is an excellent example of how to utilise clever, clear language to present readers with a relevant email that adds even more value.

Ecommerce Lead Nurturing Email Examples:

Video is an excellent way to communicate or explain visual items. Sephora delivers a fun video with instructional content as well as product offerings from an employee. Although there are numerous calls to action, the major focus is on watching the tutorial, which is beneficial to the reader. A visual email for a visual brand that attracts your attention and displays the products in a fresh and interesting way.

Most customers read reviews, testimonials, and check on ratings before making a purchase, therefore your product is only as good as its customer feedback. Casper adds social proof to this typical abandoned cart email by including a hilarious customer testimonial.

Casper's abandoned cart email is short and sweet. It asks the reader if they'd like to return to a cart they've put items to, displays what they were shopping for, and provides a link to return back to their shopping cart to complete the purchase.

For the outbound B2B outreach, consider these 390+ (free) email templates from successful brands such as Hubspot, Dropbox, and Box used for initial outreach, follow up, lead re-engagement, and booking demo calls.

2. Live Events

Another B2B marketing lead generation tactic you can use is with live events where you have a chance to engage with your audience and promote your products in real time. Events can be in-person or virtual. During the event, encourage attendees to check in on social media and tag the event in their posts, videos, and photos.

Also, create a hashtag that is easy to remember. For example, Agorapulse’s Agency Summit asked attendees to use #AgencySummit and the Women Tech Network Global Conference used #WTGC. Hashtags allow you to continue engaging with your audience after the live event. With a simple search, you can monitor the conversation around your event. Attendees can also use the hashtag to easily find more content and posts about the event. Remind your audience that the highlights of the event will appear on their feed, and their tagged friends can also see those highlights.

Interact with the attendees as much as you can to create the best possible experience. Remember to thank your audience, tag them in photos and videos, and respond to their comments and reviews.

3. Content Marketing

In this option, you have valuable content to share, including blogs, infographics, videos, and so on. Informative and educational content positions your business as an industry expert and helps you build trust with potential customers. You can also use content marketing to explain how your products and services will help visitors solve their pain points.

Google requires websites to provide valuable content. The longer your visitors browse your pages, the higher your pages will rank in search engine results pages. Therefore, you need to create content that is helpful and relevant to your target audience.

Study the latest upgrade on the Google algorithm, the Core Web Vitals. The update focuses on placing value as the topmost factor for search engine ranking.

4. SEO

Search engine optimization is the process of optimizing your website pages to get higher organic rankings in search engines... If they rank high, searchers are much more likely to find and click on your pages, driving up your website traffic and generating more leads.

Again, optimize your content by making it valuable and helpful for your target audience. Along with content optimization, use keywords in your content.

Make sure to include your keywords in a manner that sounds natural on your content. Keyword stuffing is a big no-no in SEO.

You can easily check your current SEO score and get a step-by-step report on what can be improved with an instant website audit.

5. PPC (pay-per-click)

One of the lead generation strategies for B2B that you can use is pay-per-click. For this, you pay Google (or another ad serving platform) to provide you their Google Ads services.

With this strategy, you place ads online on a variety of relevant sites. The best part about Google Ads is that you have the freedom to choose where and when your ads appear, so you can put your ads right in front of your target audience. Once they click your ads, they will gain access to your landing page, where you can engage with them and move them further down the funnel. However, it’s important to note that you will have to pay Google every time your ad is clicked, even if the user doesn’t convert.

Other alternatives include Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads, Quora Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and so much more… Make sure you choose the right platform based on your marketing objective and the type of your buyer persona.

6. Social Media

If your target market uses social media, then you can engage with them there. More and more companies are using social media to capture a significant part of the burgeoning social media audience.

Through social media platforms, you can do many things for lead generation, including: 

• Hosting a live stream
• Posting social media ads
• Using referral tactics
• Conducting surveys and polls
• Using direct messaging features for cold outreach
• Giving special offers

Sharing your content on social media is also one of the best strategies available for B2B marketing. When you share your content via social media, make sure to urge your followers to introduce your content and services to other people, experts, and agencies related to your business.

7. Linking Strategies

Building links – both outbound and inbound – is a great way to generate leads as well. This strategy is easy to do.

When you guest blog, lead your audience to your website by providing them links. This is a great way to drive traffic from another blog or site back to your own content and boost your SEO. Make sure you have the information or the blogs that visitors want to read when they click a link and land on your pages. In short, provide what you have promised to provide.

Share your links everywhere you go, operate, and participate – forums, social sites, YouTube, paid ads, blog, content contributions, etc. You can also use internal linking, where one of your pages links to another page on your site, to direct users to more of your content. Just keep in mind not to appear ‘spammy’, as this will drive away both - your potential customers and Google.

Conclusion

When targeting other businesses, you need to find people who are interested in buying before you even consider selling your product or service. B2B lead generation strategies, like email marketing, social media, and live events, are a great way to find quality leads. These strategies also help you engage with leads, move them down your funnel, and convert them into customers.

About the author

Lee Gladish is the former Co-Founder at Reply.io and the current CEO at AirborneApp, which is the industry’s first sales engagement application purpose-built for Agencies. He has been in the software sales space for over 10 years. After working with countless (sales) agencies he understands the necessary tactics required to achieve massive results. He’s also helped many other businesses & entrepreneurs build a better sales engine.

The word “community” has been used over the last few years to refer to a variety of different things, and not always correctly. But the concept of community is actually a very simple one: a group of like-minded people who share the same interests, values, or goals, and build relationships while working towards them. Communities are spaces where members can feel accepted, share their experiences and discuss topics they’re passionate about.

As traditional types of communities like churches and village communities are less active, especially among younger people, other types of communities that are available online and to everyone worldwide are flourishing.

Online communities have been essential during the last year, not only for information exchange and knowledge sharing, but for the mental health of many that lost access to their physical communities due to the pandemic. We’ve seen incredible progress and refinement in how people communicate and collaborate online, during a year when organizing an event or coordinating a project, or even running a company had to happen remotely.

But why is building a community important for your company?

A brand can learn a lot about the wants and needs of their community members. It’s like having a study group, but for free.

Another pro of building a community is that the most engaged members will invite their friends to join, and will spread the word about your brand - think of it like micro influencer marketing.

“The biggest influencing factor when it comes to making purchasing decisions is friends' recommendations.” - Rob Fuggetta, author of Brand Advocates

Plus, it’s proven that those who participate and enjoy being a part of your community will more likely purchase your products over and over.

The main difference between physical and online communities

Virtual communities make it easier for people of different ages and nationalities to connect and engage, but that’s mostly where the differences end. Both physical and online communities are formed upon a shared identity among the members and a “ collective effort in reaching a goal through diversity of expertise- where it is not necessary for every member to know everything.” 

In this article, we’ll mostly refer to online communities, but these guidelines for building a community apply to both physical and online ones. As the world opens up, we can anticipate a hybrid solution to many online communities that will choose to hold in-person meetings in certain locations and, while basing most of their communication online, will be a great way for people to discover other community members in their area.

Build your community around a shared mission

The vision and the mission of a community are the foundation of the community itself - without shared values between the participants and a common purpose, why would the community exist at all?

As Spencer Jentzsch, former CEO of Hacker Paradise said:  

“What are we accomplishing together that we can’t do individually? That’s the big reason that people are going to keep coming back to your community. That’s why they want to be part of it. If it’s something they can do on their own, and they get that same value on their own, why would they need to be part of this greater group? It’s really about honing in on what’s that thing we can accomplish together that we can’t do individually.”
- “ How to build a remote community” 

It’s important to define the “why” of the community before building one.
However, if you're just starting out, you might want to let the founding members of the community define the community’s mission and vision. Defining these two statements might seem easy, but it’s actually a complex process that will define how strong the foundation of the community really is. Having a say in defining the purpose of the community will help the first members to create an emotional attachment with the community.

Once the mission and vision of your community are defined, make sure to keep them visible for everyone as a reminder of what the community is all about, and why they are a part of it.

But a shared vision and mission aren’t sufficient for communities to take action. That’s where  shared goals and concrete plans come into play. Whether they’re short-term or long-term goals, they need to exist so that members can find their role in contributing to them and the group overall.

What value does your community offer?

Why do people decide to join a community?
Because they trust that the community will bring them value.

This value can be quantifiable in some cases, for example if the brand or organization that created the community gives special discounts for products and services that are valuable to its members. In other cases, the community’s members can simply find value in being able to have exclusive access to information.

Plus, “ an online community brings people together and provides users with a quick and easy way to navigate and find a resolution to a problem”, therefore saving people’s valuable time.

Another benefit that communities bring to its members is the sense of companionship that arises from daily interactions with a whole new set of people. People want to help others and contribute with their experiences and knowledge.

How to keep the community active?

Building a thriving community is a long-term process that requires persistence and nurturing.
Even if the community already functions on its own and members engage with each other in an organic way, community leaders need to encourage and facilitate conversations and interactions within the community.

The role of a community builder and leader is to ask powerful questions, and create content that encourages discussions and conversations (and eventually deeper connections) among the members. A leader doesn’t have to actively take part in the conversation that ensues, but has to remain vigilant behind the scenes in case there are misunderstandings or doubts.

While it’s great if members engage with and help each other, a community leader needs to be present and not let any post/question go unanswered, especially in the first stages of a community. Later on, a community leader (or a community manager), has to strike the balance between maintaining order in the community, and letting the members feel like the community is a safe space where they can freely express themselves.

Activate your new community members from the start

The dream of every community builder and leader is that every single one of the members check in multiple times a day or a week and interact with fellow members. For most groups, that won’t happen organically.

Each community has a number of members who are passionate about the shared purpose of the community and are active on a daily basis, and some other members who might join the community and assume the role of a quiet observer (or a lurker, as some communities call them.) Different levels of participation are completely normal for every community. However, there is something that a community leader can do to facilitate engagement and activate a new member from the moment they join the community. Some people won’t be comfortable with engaging at all, but some might just be hesitant and looking for an opportunity to introduce themselves to an already tight-knit community. It’s on you to give them that opportunity!

This means creating somewhat of an onboarding process, a series of emails, for example, where you can introduce the community to the new member, reply to some frequently asked questions, and help them get acquainted with the vision, mission, and the culture of the community they are joining. Then, give immediately your new members a way to give input by encouraging them to introduce themselves or giving them a task to work on so they immediately feel part of the community, and not outsiders.

“Tell us what projects you’re working on” is also a great way to give new members a way to say something about themselves and what they’re passionate about.

Which platform to use?

Where are you going to host the community you’re building?
There are many great platforms you can choose from, each with their own pros and cons. A comparison would require a whole new separate article, but let’s mention very quickly some of the best options.

• Facebook Groups - it’s the tool used by most people around the world for building a community built upon a shared interest. Not the most original solution, but certainly one that’s easy to set up and scale (and you can trust that the majority of people are very familiar with it already.)

• Slack was born as a messaging platform for distributed teams, and it’s now also used to run communities that have a very specific topic/niche. It’s a great solution for professional networking.

• Teamflow - why not go all out and create an entire virtual experience and a place for your community? Teamflow allows you to set up an entire space that you can design, create different rooms in, walk around the space and communicate with other members just by coming close to their avatar.

• Telegram - an instant messaging service that is both used for personal interactions and as a tool for groups. Telegram groups can in fact support up to 200,000 members. This is a good tool for simple messaging only, if you want to provide more value to your members, you might want to check the other ones on the list.

• Discord is another instant messaging platform where topic-based text channels (Discord servers) give communities an organized way to talk about their shared interests.

• Circle is a community platform for creators where creators can bring both their audience and their courses and members-only content.

It’s also important to establish clear rules and norms for the community members, so that no one spoils the experience for anyone else. Make sure the new members are aware of the guidelines, that can be as simple as not spamming the group and being respectful to all other members. Don’t be afraid to enforce the rules and kick out members who are not a good fit for your community.

What is the role of a community manager?

As the community grows, you’ll need help to moderate members’ posts and questions.
Your community manager should:

The right community manager ideally also needs to share the same values and goals of the community - but then, why look for help outside of the community? The best people you can hire as community managers are the most active members, who are already passionate about the community and share the same vision and mission.

You might also think about creating an ambassador program where your most engaged members become ambassadors of your brand or organization, in exchange for referral credit that can be used to purchase your products and services, or other types of special benefits.

As Spencer Jentzsch explains, “if you can get other people to invest into the community, other people to try to work, to build it, and they feel personally invested, they want to see it succeed. They want to invite their friends. They want to keep building it.They turn from this passive member of the community, into an ambassador where they’re going out and talking about you.”

What does your community need?

Understanding the needs and pain points of your community members is the best way to encourage discussions about these topics, but it’s also the best way for a brand to come up with products and services that provide solutions to the members’ needs and problems.

For example, with remote work becoming so widespread, remote workers and companies needed a health insurance product that didn’t exist before. SafetyWing launched Remote Health, a health insurance solution that lets remote companies onboard everyone in their team to one plan, no matter where they are in the world.

Instead of researching health insurance plans for every employee in their current country of residence, this product works for everyone in the team, at the same price and with the same conditions, no matter where the team members are based.

Building a community of like-minded individuals has never been more important for brands and organizations. As Sergi Mateo, founder of one of the biggest Facebook groups for digital nomads & entrepreneurs, says: “ Humans are social species mainly because we tend to live in communities instead of segregating ourselves as individuals and dispersing to unoccupied territories. We want to be part of a supporting tribe of individuals whose values are aligned with ours.” Through his community, he realized members were struggling to find fully remote roles to apply for, which resulted in him creating one of the biggest remote job platforms.

Your community can help you create better and more valuable products and solutions. All you need to do is ask the right questions, and provide the space where those conversations can happen.

Start with the advice we’ve outlined in this article, listen to the first group of members in your community and evolve it to their needs and preferences. We’re confident that this will help you build a community that is inclusive and engaged.

Share any feedback or advice you have on keeping your community engaged with us on Twitter!

About the author

Stefania Guglielmi is a digital nomad, the writer behind Every Steph, and one of the researchers contributing to Borderless - a resource for travelers on travel restrictions, containment measures and vaccination information around the globe, created by SafetyWing. Connect with her on Instagram and Twitter.

An NFT is a non-fungible token. But what exactly does non-fungible mean? A good or commodity is fungible if its individual units are interchangeable and indistinguishable. For example, if you went to the grocery store, paid in cash, and needed five dollars in change, you wouldn’t care whether the cashier gave you one $5 bill or five $1 bills. You also wouldn’t care whether they gave you the $5 bill at the top of the stack, the bottom of the stack, or if they pulled the bill out of their pocket (which would be a little weird, but this is a hypothetical). Regardless, in each scenario you’re still leaving the store with $5, because money and currency are typically fungible. Each individual unit is interchangeable with, and indistinguishable from, another unit. On the other hand, if you ordered a Picasso painting off Amazon and instead received a third-grader’s art project, you probably wouldn’t be too happy. Although both are pieces of art, the paintings don’t have the same value, and they’re not interchangeable. In other words, the paintings are non-fungible.

An NFT is a digital certificate of ownership for a one-of-a-kind cryptographic asset that cannot be interchanged with another item. NFTs can be sold and traded online and are maintained and protected in a digital ledger, known as blockchain. In other words, NFTs allow people to own and trade digital assets, as opposed to physical, tangible assets. Examples of NFTs include photos, videos, digital artwork, and Tweets; but the cryptographic tokens can be attached to virtually any digital file. When an NFT is encrypted, it’s assigned a unique digital hash. This process ensures that each NFT is truly one-of-a-kind. Richard Yao, Manager of Strategy and Content at IPG Media Lab, describes this process best: “In a way, NFTs are like the serial numbers that a luxury brand would issue for each of their products to verify their authenticity.” However, there’s no central authority that issues and regulates NFTs. Instead, a decentralized, open-source blockchain, such as Ethereum or Solana, circulates and verifies most NFTs. When someone buys an NFT, their unique identifier gets encrypted into the token to keep track of ownership changes. This ownership information is then distributed across the entire network, so anyone with access to the blockchain can see it. However, only the owner can access the NFT with their unique cryptographic key.

NFTs create scarcity in the digital world, and because they’re easily tradable, they can quickly become valuable. Bridge Oracle CEO Sina Estavi purchased Jack Dorsey’s first Tweet after a bidding war for $2.9 million. Lindsay Lohan minted her own token, an image of her face, which originally sold for $17,360 but then resold for over $57,000. She also sold her electronic music comeback single “Lullaby” for over $85,000. And “Charlie Bit My Finger” recently sold for over $760,000.

Big firms are also joining the NFT craze as seen by Visa’s recent purchase of a CryptoPunk for nearly $150,000. These events have further driven speculation on the price and usage of such digital assets. “We think NFTs will play an important role in the future of retail, social media, entertainment, and commerce,” stated Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto at Visa, in a recent blogpost.

Why is marketing important for NFT success?

NFTs can become very valuable, very quickly. NFT’s are more popular than ever before, and if you want the highest bids, you’ll need a comprehensive NFT marketing strategy to promote your work and generate buzz around your projects. Because of the increase in popularity, the NFT market is flooded and crowded, increasing competition amongst sellers and resellers. If you want your pieces to sell, and especially if you want to sell for a high price, you need to differentiate yourself and show people why they should desire your work. You also need to spread the word and make it easy for people to access your work. This is where your marketing strategy steps in. Marketing is all about creating demand, identifying and communicating with a target audience, and guiding that audience towards your ultimate goal, which in this case is a bid on your NFT. However, before you start promoting a specific NFT, you need a strategy, or a roadmap, to ensure you're optimizing your resources and getting the most growth from your NFT marketing efforts.

A guide to creating an NFT marketing strategy

If you already have some experience with marketing, you can skip this part and head straight to NFT marketing strategies. However, if marketing is as foreign to you as an NFT is to my grandma, then this section is designed for you! If you want your NFT to be as successful as possible, you need to promote it to the right people, on the right platform, at the right time. You need to get into the mind of an NFT bidder or buyer, and determine how they move through the buyer’s journey, what channels they use, the content they like to consume, and the best ways to interact with them. This may sound complicated, but we can break it down into three simple steps:

1. Identify your target audience
2. Determine the best channels to connect with your audience
3. Create content for all stages of the buyer’s journey

Identify your target audience

One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is attempting to promote their products to everyone, everywhere. This can be a tremendous waste of resources and it doesn’t allow you to form close relationships with the people who are most likely to purchase what you're selling. If you don’t know who your audience is, how can you connect with them and convince them to buy your NFTs? You wouldn’t want to send an advertisement for baby clothes to a single young adult who doesn’t have kids. You also probably wouldn’t send it to empty-nesters. Both segments will find your messaging irrelevant. You want to be strategic and limited when identifying your target audience, especially if you have constrained resources.

The same principle holds true for marketing an NFT. You need to determine who is most likely to buy your work. This process will be different for everyone, but here are some questions to guide you:

Growth Channel’s free user persona template helps you identify and organize your target audience

It is important to note that your target audience may be made up of a few different segments, or groups of people that share similar characteristics. For example, some of McDonald’s segments include teens who want a place to hang out after school, businesspeople who want a convenient way to get breakfast on their way to work, and busy individuals who value quick and cheap meals.

Determine the best channels to connect with your audience

Once you identify who your target segments are, you need to determine the best channels to communicate with them. This may be easier if you already have a following on certain social media channels. However, if you’re just starting out, or if you’re looking to gain more engaged followers, here are some tips:

Reddit, Discord, and Telegram - these channels have a significant amount of crypto users and communities. If engaging with other NFT creators, buyers, and enthusiasts is one of your priorities, then you definitely want to be active on these platforms.

Clubhouse - NFTs, crypto, and de-fi are hot topics on Clubhouse. Clubs like NFT and NFT.tips are great places to engage with the NFT community, contribute to the conversation, and hear advice from experts. If you want to learn more, check out our blog posts on getting started on Clubhouse and marketing on Clubhouse.

Facebook - Facebook has the most monthly active users out of any social media platform. While known to tailor more towards the older generation, 86% of people aged 18-29 use Facebook. Facebook groups, like Official NFT Marketplace, are great for community building and NFT promotion.

Instagram - Instagram is used primarily by young adults aged 18-29 and has 500 million active daily users. Instagram’s demographics are pretty evenly split between male and female. It’s a good platform to build a business page, as 83% of users say they discover new products and services on Instagram.

Twitter - Twitter is the best platform to share quick updates or announcements and directly communicate with your followers by responding to their Tweets. Shares, re-tweets, and mentions are a great way to gain exposure. Do note though that users spend the shortest amount of time on this platform (about 3 minutes per session), so you need to strategically schedule your posts.

LinkedIn - LinkedIn may be a good platform to build your brand and connect with high value investors. LinkedIn is primarily used by 25-34 year olds who are middle and upper-middle class, and skews more towards males. The platform also has a variety of NFTand cryptocurrencygroups.

Steemit - Steemit is a blockchain-based blogging and social media site that uses the cryptocurrency STEEM to reward users for creating and posting content. Imagine having a Medium platform but specific to blockchain and cryptocurrency.

Rarity.tools - Rarity tools is a platform dedicated to ranking and discovering new NFT projects. Their site offers a wide variety of information on NFT collections including their rarities, making it a great resource for pricing your NFT. They also have an upcoming NFT drops section with information on drop times, mint price, and social channels for new projects. This is a very popular website for researching the next best NFT.

Howrare.is - Howrare.is a another ranking platform for Solana projects. They also have an upcoming drops section where you can find information pertaining to new projects.

Create content for all stages of the buyer’s journey

The buyer’s journey can be summarized as the active process someone goes through leading up to a purchase. From the perspective of an NFT marketer, the main steps include:

Growth Channel’s free customer journey template helps you identify how buyers move through your funnel

Everyone’s buyer journey experience looks slightly different. For example, someone may stumble upon your work on an NFT marketplace platform and decide to buy it. Another individual however may see one of your Tweets, visit your website, read a blog post about NFTs, and then decide to bid on your work. Typically, someone needs to interact with your brand multiple times before making a purchase. For each of the stages in the buyer’s journey, you’ll need to create or culminate different types of contentto persuade an individual to purchase your NFT. Your goal is to raise awareness about NFTs, attract contacts, engage with them, and delight them after they become a customer. Here are content ideas for each stage of the buyer’s journey:

Awareness - you want to educate your audience. Imagine that individuals in this stage know very little about NFTs or your specific work. Consider educational and informational videos, blog posts, and social media posts. Topics could include who you are, what an NFT is, how to create, sell, and buy an NFT, how to use NFT marketplaces, and how to get started with cryptocurrency.

Consideration - you want to present yourself as an expert. Buyers in this stage are likely knowledgeable about NFTs, so your content can be more complex and specific. Content ideas could include a step-by-step guide to creating and selling an NFT, an in-depth look at different NFT selling platforms, a behind-the scenes video of how you created your newest NFT, a blog post sharing your advice to people just starting out in the NFT community, and social media posts promoting your specific NFTs.

Conversion - you want to show why your work is better than your competitors. This is where you reinforce the message of why people should be buying NFTs, and why specifically they should be buying your work. Promotional posts, like this Tweet from Jose Delbo, a live Q&A session, and giveaways are great content for this stage.

Delight - you want to continue engaging with customers. The goal is to turn them into advocates who will share and promote your work on their behalf. Personalized content, like a thank you email, exclusive discount, or a social media shoutout, work very well in this stage.

Still not sure how to build the foundations of your marketing strategy? Growth Channel can generate personalized marketing plans for your next NFT drop by creating your target personas, mapping their customer journey, and offering custom growth tactics to help you successfully promote your NFT.

Advanced NFT marketing strategies

Now that you have the broader marketing basics down, let’s dive into strategies more specific to NFTs and NFT selling.

Create a website - a creative website is the perfect hub to compile all the information about your NFTs and publish your content. Unlike social media sites, you have more freedom with a website to share your information, tell your story, and optimize a user’s experience. Check out the websites of these NFT creators for inspiration:

Participate in relevant discussions on NFTs and cryptocurrency - the best platforms to find NFT communities are Clubhouse, Discord, Reddit, and Telegram. Share your insights, learn from other creators, answer questions, and engage with potential customers. However, don’t spam or flood the conversation with self-promotion. Instead, ask the community for feedback on your work, website, content, etc.

Determine the best place to sell your NFTs - there are multiple different marketplaces you can list your NFT on. If you’re more knowledgeable about NFTs and cryptocurrency, you can even create your own platform. Ideally, the marketplace you choose should fit the features of your project.

Host AMA sessions - Ask Me Anything sessions are very popular in the tech and crypto space. These are a great way to engage with your audience on various platforms and build awareness around your NFT projects. Clubhouse, Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and Discord are great channels to host your AMA sessions.

Collaborate with influencers - leveraging the audiences of NFT influencers can expand your project’s exposure. You can find influencers on almost any social channel, but YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, and blogs are most popular for cryptocurrency. If you don’t know where to find NFT influencers, check out Coinbound’s articles on the best NFT influencers, popular NFT Instagram accounts, and top NFT blogs. Keep in mind that you may have to compensate influencers for promoting your NFTs.

Build buzz around your NFT drop - if you treat your NFT launch like a grand affair, your audience will as well. Spread the news across all of your platforms, collaborate with influencers, share in various community forums, and reach out to media outlets. Build excitement through a countdown, cryptic social post, or interview. If people perceive your NFT as exclusive and highly valuable, the price will likely increase.

Utilize Cross-Promotion tactics - It’s very common for projects to partner up and offer special promotions such as giveaways to people following both projects. This allows two parties to bring their communities together and generate extra social media buzz for an upcoming launch or existing collection. You should encourage users to like, comment, and share these posts in order to participate. Since collectors are usually loyal to a particular NFT community, collaboration with a new project can increase engagement tenfold.

Incentivize referrals - Granting special benefits to early adopters or promoters of your project is a great way of establishing awareness to your brand. Upcoming projects have recently adopted incentives for inviting new members to social channels such as Discord. One of these incentives is pre-sale access which grants investors early access to purchasing and minting an NFT before public sale. This allows buyers to avoid the competitive drops and secure an ownership spot.

List your project on Rarity.tools or Howrare.is - These websites offer a tab for upcoming NFT projects and are a popular resource for prospective NFT buyers. They include information on your social channels (Twitter, Discord, Website), release dates, and prices.

Utilize email marketing - email campaigns are a great way to lead a contact through the buyer’s journey. Use emails to welcome new users, inform your audience about your NFTs, send interesting content, and create buzz around your next drop. There are numerous free email services you can use to set up email lists and automated workflows, like Mixmax.

Add utility to your NFT - Try to find ways to bring utility to your NFT to make them worthwhile investments. Lots of projects are utilizing NFTs for in-game content so holders can interact with their digital art in the metaverse. Other NFT projects are bringing utility through real-life benefits for holders. For example, The Hundreds is offering a number of incentives for holding one of their 25,000 Bombs ranging from exclusive deals on clothing drops to in-person meetups.

7 examples of creative NFT marketing campaigns

1. Nike’s CryptoKicks

In December 2019, Nike patented shoes as NFTs, called CryptoKicks. Nike created cryptographic digital assets for articles of footwear, allowing users to exchange digital shoes in a blockchain. Each asset includes a digital shoe and a unique digital shoe ID code. CryptoKicks were designed to combat the counterfeit sneaker market and let customers ‘breed’ different shoes together, creating a customized pair that can be manufactured in real life.

2. Pringle’s New Flavor

Pringles joined the NFT party when it created an entirely digital flavor, CryptoCrisp. Only 50 versions were created, each priced for $2, the approximate price of a can of physical Pringles. However, bids quickly jumped as high as $600 for a can of CryptoCrisp.

3. Post Malone’s “Celebrity World Pong League”

Post Malone and Dre London teamed up for a crossover event, releasing “Celebrity World Pong League” NFTs on the platform Fyooz, which is known for issuing NFTs for music and sports celebrities. Malone named the NFTs after his popular Facebook Watch Series. Fans who collected enough of the NFTs were given a chance at playing pong with the rapper. Post Malone’s concert streaming service will also begin minting NFTson Fyooz that will memorialize the concert experience and grant owners access to exclusive events.

4. The Burning of a Banksy Original

Injective Protocol bought a Banksy original, “Morons” for $95,000 from a New York gallery in early March. The company then burned the artwork during a live Twitter stream. Directly after, Injective Protocol used OpenSea to create a digital version of the piece in the form of an NFT.

5. Pizza Hut’s Pizza NFTs

To promote their new pizza flavors, Pizza Hut Canada released “ One Byte Favourites.” The NFTs featured a pixelated image of a pizza and originally sold for the equivalent of $0.18, or the price of one bite of pizza. A new slice was released every week to promote one of the four new flavors.

6. Microsoft x Minecraft NFTs

Microsoft and blockchain developer Enjin teamed upto release “Azure Space Mystery,” a game celebrating International Day of Women and Girls in Science. During gameplay, players are rewarded with NFTs that are compatible and transferable with Minecraft. The NFTs unlock a secret Azure Space Mystery sequel game within Minecraft.

7. Bratz Collectible Cards

Bratz recently released NFTsin the form of digital collectible cards on the WAX blockchain, targeting the nostalgia of older fans. The cards featured first generation and newer Bratz dolls and came in five levels of rarity. The most rare card, featuring a doll named Shimmerin, could be redeemed for a physical Bratz doll. Owners of a collectible card also have an advantage in the new Bratz Lookz game.

8. Adam Bomb Squad

The Hundreds, an iconic streetwear company based in LA, has recently entered the NFT space. Their Adam Bomb Squad collection features 25,000 unique bombs and backgrounds which relate to over two decades of brand history. Each bomb and background contains a story of how that specific design was created and implemented into the brand.

When it comes to NFTs, the possibilities are endless. It doesn’t seem like NFT mania will die down anytime soon, especially as celebrities and big brands continue to create and offer innovative NFTs. As cryptocurrency, digital assets, and NFTs become more mainstream, NFT creators and sellers will need a plan to differentiate themselves from the competition. With the right marketing strategy and a little bit of patience, you can successfully promote your NFTs and stand out from the crowd.

What’s your experience selling and trading NFTs? Do you have any additional NFT marketing tips? Let me know on Twitter @Gr0wthChannel.

What is the buyer’s journey?

The buyer’s journey can be summarized as the active process someone goes through leading up to a purchase. There are many variations of the buyer’s journey, each with slightly different steps and stages. However, they all focus on the path an individual takes when forming a relationship with a company. We’ll be focusing on a six-step buyer’s journey:

Not sure what your buyer’s journey looks like? Growth Channel’s free customer journey template helps you identify how buyers move through the funnel!

Everyone’s buyer journey experience looks different. For example, someone may stumble upon your website and quickly decide to buy your product or sign up for your service. Another individual however may see one of your Tweets, visit your website, read a blog post related to your industry or product, and then decide to convert. Typically, someone needs to interact with your brand multiple times before making a purchase. For each of the stages in the buyer’s journey, you’ll need to create or culminate different types of content to persuade an individual to take the desired action. Growth marketing tactics are a great way to attract new leads and guide users through the entire buyer’s journey.

As promised, let’s explore 3 growth marketing tactics for each stage of the buyer’s journey.

Trigger and Awareness

Find email partners - Nowadays we often stumble upon many newsletters from industry leaders and follow blogs that promote trends and best practices . Reach out to the newsletters you’re subscribed to and offer to promote their product, service, or event in your own newsletter in exchange for a feature or promotion in theirs. This process has two major benefits: you become visible to a new, relevant audience and delight your subscribers by providing them with additional valuable content. This mutual exchange of sponsorship is a free and low effort way to increase your reach.

Steal backlinks of competitors that no longer exist - A backlink is a hyperlink on another person’s website that directly links back to a page on your website. Backlinks are important for many reasons: they build brand awareness, expand your reach, drive organic traffic to your site, and help boost your SEO. It’s important to pay attention to what sites are linking to your competitors. Keep an eye out for your competitors' backlinks that are lost or no longer exist. Reach out to publishers and offer your own fresh content to replace your competitor’s lost or broken link. You can track backlinks with tools like semrush , ahrefs , or even Growth Channel .

Tag content contributors on social media - Whenever you mention another company, event, partner, or individual in your social media posts, make sure to tag or mention them. This alerts them that they’ve been featured in your post, and they’ll be more likely to reply or share your content with their audience.

For example, we wrote a post featuring quotes from e-commerce experts and tagged all the contributors in our Twitter promo. A third of the contributors then retweeted our original Tweet with their audiences. Others shared on LinkedIn and Facebook. Here’s an example of how you can create content and encourage others to share it:

• Watch as many of those you featured retweet, favorite, share, or send a thanks, helping you reach their audience.
• Don’t forget to retweet, comment, or engage with any post your company is mentioned in.

Consideration

Focus on question-based keywords - As competition for high volume keywords rises and Google gets better at interpreting search intent, you may want to consider having content around question-based keywords . Try creating content for question-based keywords that are relevant to your audience and have high search volume with low competition or keyword difficulty (KD) scores. Ranking for these types of keywords helps deliver your content to the most relevant audience. For example, if a user searched “smoothies,” they could have multiple intentions. Maybe they’re looking for smoothie recipes, aesthetic images of smoothie bowls, places to buy smoothies, or the best blender to make delicious smoothies. However, if a user searches “what is the best way to make a smoothie?” or “how can I make a good smoothie?” you have a much better idea about their intent and can provide the type of content they’ll find most valuable. Targeting complex keyword questions that can’t easily be answered by Wikipedia or Google is also a good strategy to increase your chances of getting a featured snippet, a search engine result that shows up above the top ranking site.

Discover & rank on your competitors' keywords - It’s important to pay attention to what keywords your competitors are ranking highly for. Researching your competitors’ keywords can help improve your own keyword strategy. You can easily find new keywords to add to your list, and you can try to outrank your competitors on their keywords, meaning your website will show up above theirs on a search engine results page. Also, customers in the consideration phase often compare solutions, and you want your content and website pages to show up right alongside your competitors for relevant search queries.

Source - semrush

Focus on benefits instead of features - Benefits sell better than features. Convince potential customers why your product, service, or opportunity will give them the greatest amount of value by highlighting all of its benefits. A benefit solves a higher order need and will convince a user to pay more or buy from you instead of a competitor. Not sure how to promote benefits instead of features? Check out this chart comparing the features and benefits of Growth Channel’s AI-generated marketing plans:

Conversion

Have an exit intent popup on your website - Exit intent popups show up only when a user is about to leave your website or close the browser tab. They’re great for increasing conversions and decreasing bounce rate. Your popup could include a specific resource, event reminder, promo code, or any other offer that encourages users to keep interacting with your site. You can also program your popup to only display for users who’ve spent a certain amount of time on your site, visited a specific page, or clicked on a specific resource.

Consider sales abandon offers - When a would-be customer goes to quit the checkout process, hit them with a pop-up offering a discount code or a coupon. At this stage, it's clear your lead is seriously considering converting or making a purchase. You definitely don’t want an individual who’s so close to a conversion to fall out of your funnel. Sometimes, an additional 10% discount is enough to turn a lead into a customer.

Place your main CTA above the fold - If there's not already a CTA above the fold, you're likely not optimizing for most of your visitors, as many never make it below the fold. Within the first 10-20 seconds of landing on your web page , users typically decide whether they want to stay or leave. In other words, you have to make a great first impression, and you have to make it fast. Pages with a strong value proposition and clear call to action are much more likely to attract the user’s attention for longer. By placing a CTA above the fold, all users who visit your page will understand the action you want them to take. However, you may also want to place a CTA towards the bottom of your landing page for uncertain visitors who need a more in-depth explanation of your offer before they’re willing to convert.

Delight

Add a resources page to your website - Many sites include a list of resources for users to gain more information about their product or a relevant topic. Your resources page can include tutorials, news, case studies, how-to blog posts, and any other type of content that provides value to your customers. Your resources page may include links to your own and external content.

Resources pages of other companies are also a great opportunity to get backlinks. If you find a resources page that is relevant to your industry or product, reach out to the site publisher and see if they’ll add a link to your content. This type of outreach works especially well if you find sites with outdated or broken links that need to be replaced.

Give beta access to your power users - Reward your loyal customers by letting them be the first to test new features. Giving loyal customers exclusive privileges increases emotional investment in your product and helps build long-lasting relationships. To find beta users, reach out to your most engaged and most supportive customers through email invitations and targeted in-app messaging. Giving beta access to users is a win-win situation: your customers feel special because they get exclusive access to new features, and you get people to test your updates and share valuable feedback for free.

Send a tutorial email - Many people who purchase or sign up to use your product may not be fully aware of all the value it can provide. When someone doesn’t understand how to use your product, or isn’t aware of all your product’s benefits, they’re much more likely to become a lapsed user. Tutorial emails are a great way to introduce yourself and help new customers get acquainted with your product. Tutorials can take many forms, including how-to guides, blog posts, and videos. Of course, your product probably has many awesome and complex features, so make sure to focus on the most relevant and important tutorials in your email. You don’t want to overwhelm or confuse customers by sending them too much content. More detailed or advanced tutorials should instead be easily accessible on your website.

Advocate

Run an affiliate program - An affiliate program lets you offer commissions on referred sales. The most common type of affiliate program is when a business would pay commissions to an affiliate site, like a blog, to send them traffic. The affiliate site posts images or links that redirect users to the merchant’s website. Affiliates often receive payment every time they send users to the merchant’s site or every time a user clicks on a link to the merchant’s site and performs a desired action, like making a purchase. However, there are many different ways to run affiliate programs. For example, affiliates who join our Friends of Growth Channel referral program receive a 20% commission every time they refer a friend to Growth Channel.

Offer rewards for inviting friends - Incentives and tiered rewards programs are a great way to turn your customers into advocates. For example, you could offer a discount code to customers who share an offer with 5 friends and a free gift for those who share with 20. You should have a custom tracking link ready so you know who’s sharing and generating referral traffic. Make it super easy for customers by including buttons on social media, newsletters, in blog posts, and in the product itself (if it's digital) that allow users to directly share their link with their friends.

Focus on employee advocacy - If you want happy customers, then you need to make sure your employees are happy as well. When a company has an internal culture of respect and support, those values often extend to external interactions with partners, leads, and customers, creating a better experience for everyone involved in the process. Satisfied employees are also much more likely to recommend their employer’s products and services to their friends and family, increasing your brand exposure. You can also turn your employees into brand advocates by making it easy for them to share your marketing content.

These tactics are a great way to get started with your growth marketing efforts. However, since the buyer’s journey is ever-evolving, it's important to track and measure the outcomes of these tactics so you can see what’s working and what isn’t. You don’t want to spend time and resources on a strategy that isn’t helping you achieve your goals, but you also don’t want to neglect trends and proven strategies that have a high potential for success. As you begin to implement growth marketing, remember that it’s all about experimentation . Make a change, measure the results, improve as needed, and repeat. With some creativity, patience, and perseverance, growth marketing will have you achieving your business goals in no time at all! 

If you enjoyed these strategies, make sure to check out our full list of 230+ growth marketing tactics before your next campaign, which can easily be sorted by buyer’s journey stage, marketing objective, industry, and more!

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Online | July 14

MozCon

By popular demand, MozCon once again is coming to a computer screen near you! As the world changes, SEO doesn't stop — searchers keep on searching, and marketers need to stay sharp to meet their needs. Gain new insights and attend tactical presentations from industry leaders in SEO, search marketing, mobile, conversion optimization, local search, and more.

Online | July 12-14

Digital Summit

Digital Summit brings together top marketing talent and innovative brands to produce conferences and digital content experiences for Fortune 1000 companies and other leading organizations of all sizes. Over the years, Digital Summit has become the go-to resource for those seeking to further their knowledge and skill set in the ever-evolving digital ecosystem. Digital Summit produces over 1,200+ sessions, workshops, and seminars annually covering digital marketing best practices and tactics.

In-person summits held in various U.S. states | Aug-Oct

Lunch and Learn Webinars by Agorapulse

Have you ever wanted an easier way to create personas? Could your client onboarding use a refresh? Have you heard about Account Based Selling but aren't really sure how it applies to your agency? These are just some of the topics Agorapulse's Lunch & Learn webinar series will be covering. Every webinar is 100% free with no up-sell, packed with tactical advice to help your agency. Plus, if you attend a live session, you'll get the opportunity to ask questions to the amazing presenters.

Online | Thursdays in Aug. & Sept.

Outranking Summit by Outranking.io

Join 5,000+ SEO consultants and content experts for 40+ talks from the industry’s best and brightest, all to help you produce content that ranks. Outranking Summit is a free online event where the top SEO and content leaders driving innovation share their playbooks on producing content that generates business outcomes. This two day event is uniquely structured to provide high-impact and measurable value. Each session will also have a live Q&A, so you can get your questions answered directly by the amazing presenters.

Online | Sept. 1-2

Growth Marketing Summit 2021 by konversionsKRAFT

Growth Marketing Summit is Europe's biggest conference for digital growth and optimization, uniting like-minded optimizers from around the world. Share topics that move the digital world, hear world-class talks, and learn how a data-driven, customer-oriented, and agile approach can help you scale sustainably.

Frankfurt am Main, Germany | Sept. 2

TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 by Verizon Media

TechCrunch Disrupt is three days of non-stop online programming with two big focuses: founders shaping the future of disruptive technology and startup experts providing insights to entrepreneurs. It's where hundreds of startups across a variety of categories tell their stories to 10,000+ influencers from all around the world. It's the ultimate Silicon Valley experience where the leaders of the startup world gather to ask questions, make connections and be inspired.

SaaStr Annual 2021

10,000+ SaaS executives, founders, and VCs will come together both in-person and digitally for SaaStr Annual 2021, the world’s largest SaaS community event on the planet. Experience 3 full days with 100+ tactical sessions from world-known founders, new voices, and up & comers, 200+ speakers from the best SaaS companies across the world, and 750+ VCs in attendance. If you are a B2B founder, exec, revenue leader, or investor, SaaStr 2021 is a must-attend event!

San Francisco, CA | Sept. 27-29

SaaStock EMEA Online by SaaStock

With a curated agenda of actionable content and networking opportunities, SaaStock will help you hear the growth stories, learn the proven strategies, and meet the right people to scale your SaaS business. At SaaStock EMEA, 3000+ SaaS Founders and their teams will come together and leave equipped to scale. Attend networking sessions, fuel your growth with actionable content for companies on the journey from $0.1 to $10M ARR, and connect with CEOs, Founders, and VCs from across the world.

Online | October 12-14

Product Marketing Summit by Sequel Media

Join the largest collective of product marketing managers who live at the intersection of product, marketing & sales. With two days of groundbreaking keynotes, breakouts, and panel discussions, Product Marketing World Summit assembles product marketers from the world’s largest companies and most exciting startups to share and discuss success stories, best practices, and product marketing challenges.

Boston, U.S. | Oct. 20-21

GrowthHackers Conference

This five day virtual conference offers 25 free talks from growth leaders in SaaS, Mobile, E-commerce and more! Each day will be dedicated to bring actionable and practical examples on how companies run experiments across the AARRR funnel. Mornings will be filled with free talks and afternoons will be reserved for exclusive paid workshops, where teams can get guidance on their growth hacking and experimentation efforts. This conference is a great opportunity for online retailers to learn about how an experimentation culture can benefit their businesses.

Online | Oct. 25-29

Ad World

Join 50,000 of the world’s brightest minds in advertising to learn, share secrets, and connect online. Ad World will stream 10+ Digital Advertising Tracks, consisting of hyper-focused speeches, panels, and live Q&A sessions to help take your business to the next level. The all-in-one advertising event will bring you closer to leading marketers and brands than ever before, all from the comfort of your home.

Online | Oct. 27-29

SAAS NORTH by L-SPARK and Cube Business Media

SAAS NORTH is recognized as the best conference for the fastest growing SaaS companies to learn, network, and grow. SAAS NORTH brings the entire Canadian SaaS ecosystem under one roof. Whether a start-up or a global brand, an investor, or a service provider specializing in SaaS, SAAS NORTH is your opportunity to interact with SaaS professionals from coast-to-coast.

Ottawa, Canada | Nov. 17-18

What events will you be joining? Have any startup events we should add to the list? Let us know on Twitter @Gr0wthChannel !

I recently published a blog post with 5 steps to get your business started on Clubhouse, and now I’m here to share 7 strategies to successfully market your business on the app! After setting up your account and exploring the app, you’ll need to create a Clubhouse marketing strategy. In this post, I’ll be exploring best practices to grow your business on Clubhouse and take advantage of everything the app has to offer. If you haven’t read my original post yet, make sure to check it out before continuing with this post. I go into more detail about how to use Clubhouse and optimize your business’ account.

Should you be marketing on Clubhouse?

Because Clubhouse is still a fairly new and exclusive platform with many features under development, it is difficult to predict how the app will function in years to come. Clubhouse’s popularity also sky-rocketed during the pandemic, and as restrictions are lifted, it’s unknown if users will continue to spend their time on the app. However, Clubhouse’s possibilities should not be overlooked.

Here are a few thoughts from the community:

Although Clubhouse doesn’t work like traditional social media sites, it offers great opportunities to strengthen brand awareness, develop your business as an industry expert, engage with customers, and create valuable content. Clubhouse is also a great way to reach new audiences, host private or public events, and collaborate with other industry experts. If you’ve already established that Clubhouse is a good platform for your business, then yes, you should be using Clubhouse as part of your marketing strategy.

With audio-only capabilities, building and engaging with an audience on Clubhouse requires forethought and strategy. However, with a little bit of planning and some creativity, you can find ways to leverage Clubhouse for your business. Here are 7 best practices to successfully market your business on Clubhouse:

1. Create a consistent schedule for your Clubhouse content
2. Schedule rooms ahead of time so they show up on the community calendar
3. Moderate conversations to keep them from spiraling
4. Run a giveaway
5. Collaborate with others
6. Remind listeners to invite their friends into the room
7. Identify leads and use other social channels to follow up

Let’s dive right into these tactics!

1. Create a consistent schedule for your Clubhouse content

Before you start marketing on Clubhouse, you’ll want to create a detailed plan. How many rooms a week will you or your club host? Who will be moderating these rooms? What will be the focus or topic of the rooms?

As you start exploring Clubhouse, you’ll find that many clubs place their weekly schedules in their bios, giving everyone a glimpse into the value and insights they offer the community. Check out the example above from The Bookmark Club. Making and sticking to a consistent schedule has two benefits: it keeps your Clubhouse marketing strategy organized and also makes it easier for your followers to engage with you. For example, you may decide to host a panel discussion every Monday at 10am and you may share a part of your professional journey every Wednesday at 3pm. A schedule like this helps you determine how much time and effort you’ll need to put into Clubhouse every week. Your followers will also enjoy the predictability. They’ll know when to expect your rooms to go live and they’ll have a good idea about the content that’s going to be discussed.

Of course, you don’t have to stick to your schedule all the time. Just make sure to communicate in advance so your followers can stay up to date with your events.

2. Schedule your rooms ahead of time so they show up on the community calendar

Instead of clicking the green “Start a room” button in the Clubhouse hallway, schedule your rooms ahead of time. Scheduling has many advantages: it notifies your followers, gives you a shareable link, allows you to add an event description, and publishes the event for other users to see. To schedule an event, follow these steps:

1. Tap the calendar icon in the top left of the main screen
2. On the calendar page, click the calendar icon with the + on it in the top left corner

3. On the New Event screen, name your event, add a co-host (who can cancel, edit, and remove people from the event), select the date and time, assign your club to the event, and write a short description
4. Tap “Publish”

5. You can now share the event, tweet it, and copy the link
6. To edit or delete your event, navigate back to the calendar tab
7. Tap “Upcoming for You” and select “My Events”
8. You can now see all your scheduled events and make any changes to them
9. When you’re ready to open the room, click the green “Start a room” button and your scheduled event will show up

3. Moderate the conversations to keep them from spiraling

If you want followers to keep coming back to your club’s events, you need to create a welcoming environment and prevent the group from getting too unfocused.

If there will be multiple moderators, or if someone else will be moderating the room on your behalf, you want to make sure everyone knows how to control the room. For example, how often should you reset the room (update new listeners about the topic, conversation, and room rules)? How will you deal with someone who is hogging the stage? How can you refocus or revive the conversation? What will you do if a listener says something inappropriate? Clubhouse users tend to be very considerate and polite, but you still want to be prepared for anything.

For ideas on how to be a successful host, attend other rooms and see how the moderators are leading and controlling the conversation. You’ll find that some rooms are more audience and discussion focused, while others are more moderator driven, like a webinar or podcast. Some moderators will bring multiple speakers up to the stage at once, while others will bring up a limited number to better control the conversation. Check out The Bookmark Club, Silicon Valley Startups, Marketing Club, or Social Media For Businesses Club for inspiration. The more you interact on Clubhouse, the more you’ll learn what moderator style you like best.

4. Run a giveaway

Do a product giveaway for a random listener in your room at the end of a club event. Marketers use giveaways all the time to build buzz around a brand and encourage word of mouth. Plus, free giveaways and prizes show that your business cares about its customers. Promote your club’s giveaway in the event title and description. Because users can come and go from Clubhouse rooms at their own discretion, announce the winner immediately after you decide who it will be. You can even invite the winner to the stage to accept their prize and say a few words.

There are multiple ways you can run a giveaway on Clubhouse. One of the easiest ways is to create a form where attendees can submit their contact information. Place the link in the event description and remind listeners of your campaign during the event. Just make sure the URL for your giveaway is short and easy to remember. At the end of the event, you can randomly select a winner from the list and award them the prize, as long as they are still present in the room. This is also a great method to collect contact information and generate new leads. Gleam, Rafflecopter, and ShortStack all offer a free plan to help you run a social giveaway campaign.

5. Collaborate with others

6. Remind listeners to invite their friends into the room

If you want to grow the number of users in a room, don’t be afraid to ask your audience for help. Remind listeners that they can ping their friends into the room. Pinging is basically like sending an invite, and it notifies users that someone wants them to join a specific room. If you're providing valuable content, your audience should be more than willing to invite their friends into the conversation.

7. Identify leads and use other social channels to follow up

Clubhouse currently doesn’t have a direct message or chat feature. But don’t fear, there are still ways to capture leads and message your audience and followers! Users can connect their Clubhouse bios to their Twitter and Instagram accounts, and both of these social platforms offer private messaging. Here’s three ways you can use this to your advantage:

Nurture a lead: if a Clubhouse user is highly engaged in your room and they seem like they may be a good fit for your product, write down their Instagram handle and follow up with them after the event through a direct message. Explain your product or service in more detail and why they might find it useful. You can also offer them a special discount code or gift.

Ask people to reach out to you: Include your Instagram handle and tell your audience members to DM you with a certain keyword (like Clubhouse or the name of your club) in your bio and during your events. You can then use a tool like MobileMonkey's Instagram beta to autoreply to every DM that includes the keyword, easily sending all your leads into your marketing funnel.

Build brand awareness: if your rooms typically have a small number of attendees, have someone keep track of all the users who ask to speak or who stay for the whole event. Afterwards, follow up with these individuals through Twitter or Instagram and thank them for coming to your event. You can also provide them with another relevant piece of content or a small thank you gift, like a coupon code.

Find collaborators: if you hear someone speak in another room and you want to collaborate with them, check their bio and reach out via Instagram or Twitter. Remember to be personable and specific. Introduce yourself, reference the Clubhouse discussion you both attended and how you found their insights valuable, and suggest a few ways you could partner up to create high-quality content in the future.

In conclusion...

Clubhouse offers many new and unique ways to produce valuable content and engage with your audience. You don’t need any fancy cameras or lighting, witty taglines, or advanced video editing software to succeed on Clubhouse. All you need is your voice and creativity. By taking the time to learn how Clubhouse works now, you’ll be able to optimize new features quicker and gain a competitive advantage. Leverage the loyal community that already exists on the app, and explore different ways to build your own following. Use Clubhouse to nurture long-term relationships with customers and prospects by engaging directly with your audience. But most importantly, have fun and be genuine!

If you found this post interesting, check out my first article, “Introduction to Clubhouse for Businesses: 5 Steps to Get Started” for more helpful tips and strategies!

Clubhouse is a new social media platform that gained major popularity during the pandemic. Unlike traditional social media platforms, which facilitate the sharing of images, videos, comments, and messages, Clubhouse is audio-only. According to the developer, Clubhouse is “a space for casual, drop-in audio conversations - with friends and other interesting people around the world.” Think of Clubhouse as a platform to hear live podcasts and interact with creators and experts in real time in so-called “rooms” or what we often call events. You can join a room created by someone else and listen or participate in their live conversation. You can also host your own room and open it to the public, your followers, or specific individuals.

Another important part of Clubhouse are clubs, which are used to create communities centered on a specific topic, industry, or interest. Clubs are to Clubhouse like Groups are to Facebook. When you follow a club, you will be notified whenever the founder or an admin schedules a public room. Clubs are a great way to connect and collaborate with Clubhouse creators and further explore the Clubhouse community.

Who uses Clubhouse?

One aspect that makes Clubhouse appealing is its current exclusivity. Users can only join the platform if someone on the app invites them, and invitations are limited. For a while, Clubhouse was also only available to iOS users, but a beta version for Android users was launched in the U.S. in early May 2021. Now, Android users worldwide can download Clubhouse from Google Play and take advantage of everything the app has to offer.

Those who haven't received an invite yet can join the waitlist by downloading the app and reserving their username. However, the creators of Clubhouse haven’t said officially when the app will open to the public. If you have friends on the app though, they may receive a notification that you reserved a username and be given the option to wave you through, without having to send an official invitation. There are also social media groups giving out invites in a “pass it forward” mentality, like this chain from Telegram or this group on Facebook .

Clubhouse currently has around 10 million weekly active users , a number that is likely to increase as worldwide and Android rollouts gain steam this week. While 10 million users may seem high, the majority of other popular social media platforms have significantly more users (Source: Sprout Social)

Many celebrities and influencers have been known to host or join a discussion on Clubhouse, including Tiffany Haddish , Mark Zuckerberg , and even Clubhouse’s own CEO, Paul Davison . When Elon Musk appeared live on The Good Time Show , over 5,000 people joined the room, breaking Clubhouse’s previous limits. A small us er base and constant appearances by celebrities give Clubhouse its status as an elite social media platform.

Should your business be on Clubhouse?

Once you understand the basics of navigating the Clubhouse app , you may wonder if you should create a Clubhouse account for your business. Clubhouse offers great opportunities to strengthen brand awareness, expand your network, collaborate with other industry experts, engage with customers, and create valuable content. However, there are a few things you should consider before deciding if Clubhouse is the right platform for your business:

How to get started

Building an audience on Clubhouse requires forethought and strategy. There’s currently a lot of information about how to use Clubhouse as an individual or influencer , but not a lot of resources about how to use Clubhouse successfully as a business. To help you integrate Clubhouse into your overall strategy, I’ve come up with a list of 5 steps to get your business started on the platform:

1. Optimize your bio
2. Build and engage with your community
3. Consider starting a club
4. Understand what type of content works on Clubhouse
5. Brainstorm ideas for different events and discussions

Let's explore how each of these can help you market on Clubhouse!

1. Optimize your bio

Unlike other social sites, Clubhouse lets you write a long bio. Your bio is the introduction to your story and your business, so make it informative and engaging. When creating your bio, here are a few tips:

If you’re looking for some clubs to join and explore for inspiration, check out Growth Channel Talk (our official club), The Bookmark Club (where we interview early stage startup founders), Silicon Valley Startups (hosted by our partners), and Marketing Club (a personal favorite).

2. Build and engage with your community

As with any social media channel, you need to build a following in order to optimize your marketing efforts. It’s important to look for users who will find your insights valuable, as they’re the ones who are most likely to share your information with their friends. Creating a strong community on Clubhouse will probably take awhile, but don’t be discouraged. Here are some ways to promote yourself and your new account:

• Shoutout your Clubhouse account on your current channels (company website, email, Twitter, Facebook, blog, newsletter, etc.) so people know how to find you.
• Follow interesting individuals, attend events, and interact with other Clubhouse users.
• Join other clubs related to your industry who already have an audience relevant to your business. Actively participate in their rooms, but don’t just ‘speak to speak’. If you provide thoughtful insights and add value to the conversation, others will see you as an industry expert and be more likely to follow you or your club.
• Network with other Clubhouse members, especially those in your industry.
• When hosting a room, engage with your listeners and give them plenty of opportunities to participate in the conversation. If users have a pleasant experience with your events, they’ll be more likely to tell their friends about it.

3. Consider starting a club

If you run a sole proprietorship, a very small business, or if you are a well-known expert in your industry, you may be able to use your personal account, under your name, to market your business. However, for most businesses, you’ll probably also want to form a club based on your niche or industry. As mentioned earlier, clubs are similar to Facebook Groups, and they allow you to build a community of individuals who share similar interests. Any Clubhouse member can follow your club, and they’ll receive notifications when you start a public room. As the founder of a club, you can also designate your employees to be admins, allowing them to create private and public club rooms. This is beneficial, because it means you won’t always have to be the one moderating a room or leading a discussion.

In order to start a club on Clubhouse , you will need to create a personal account and actively engage with the Clubhouse community. This includes entering rooms, following other users and clubs, engaging in conversations, and hosting your own talks. When you are ready to start your club, you can do so by clicking the white plus sign button at the end of the list of clubs you are currently a member of (located at the bottom of your profile page). It is important to send your club request as soon as you’re able to, because the club approval process is done manually. It may take weeks for your club to be approved. Forming a club now is important because you can leverage the current exclusivity of Clubhouse. By the time the app is open to the public, you’ll be in a great position if you already understand how the app works and how to engage with your followers.

You cannot change the name of your club after it’s created, so make sure you choose wisely! The name of your club should give some indication as to the type of content your talks will discuss, and you may want to use keywords or buzzwords related to your industry. It may be tempting to simply copy your company name for your club name. However, remember that Clubhouse isn’t like other types of social media, and if you search some of the biggest brand names, nothing will come up. Clubhouse is more about creating valuable content and engaging with your community, rather than directly selling your products.

Once your club gets approved, make sure to review your responsibilities and new capabilities as a club founder . Club founders have a lot of power, so make sure you know how to use all the new features available to you. To expand your club’s audience, follow the same steps you took to build your personal account (choose a good profile picture, optimize your club’s bio, follow other relevant clubs and individuals, host and participate in events, announce your club on your other channels, etc.)

4. Understand what type of content works on Clubhouse

The type of content that works well on other social platforms might not work on Clubhouse. For example, there is currently no way to monetize clubs or run ads on Clubhouse. Clubhouse currently is less promotional than traditional social media because you can’t post an aesthetic product image, a detailed video tutorial, or write a paragraph explaining a new offer. You’ll also need to prepare longer content, as Clubhouse rooms typically last for at least 30 minutes, and some have even lasted for days. However, no one wants to sit and listen to you read a 30 minute script about why your product or company is the best. Instead, users want engaging, interesting, and exclusive content. They want to feel like they’re part of the “in” crowd.

Clubhouse is built around live audio and communication. Content is less scripted, staged, and filtered than other social media sites. As with anything live, there’s always a sense of unpredictability that makes Clubhouse rooms feel more genuine and personal. You may want to prepare a script or create a bulleted list of talking points before starting a room. However, be prepared to adapt quickly and change your plan as the conversation takes on a life of its own.

5. Brainstorm ideas for different events and discussions

To be successful on Clubhouse, you’ll need to produce high-quality, unique, and valuable content. You have the freedom to be creative when it comes to the types of rooms and discussions your club hosts. Don’t be afraid to try out new ideas, as many Clubhouse users are still navigating content production. The key is to produce content that benefits both your customers and your brand. You don’t want to be overly promotional, but you still want to occasionally remind your audience about what your business offers. If you don’t know how your club can contribute content to Clubhouse, consider these room ideas:

Again, the opportunities are endless when it comes to the types of discussions you can lead and participate in on Clubhouse. Consider what your audience wants to learn or hear about, and design a room around that subject. Also, see what types of rooms similar clubs are hosting. No matter what topic you choose for your room, remember to engage your listeners and give them opportunities to directly participate in the conversation. For inspiration, check out Social Media For Businesses Club’s Social Media Monday (Mondays @3pm ET), The Bookmark Club’s Startup Founders Interview (every 1st Friday of the month), and Invest’s The Sixty Second Pitch (Mondays @8pm ET).

In conclusion...
There is risk involved with investing time and resources to marketing your brand and products on Clubhouse, especially when the app is still in its early stages. Nevertheless, people seem to really enjoy using Clubhouse. Take the time to learn how Clubhouse works now so you’ll be in a favorable position to implement and optimize future features and upgrades. By building a presence on Clubhouse today, you can leverage the loyal community that already exists. Plus, you’ll be way ahead of the competition by the time the app becomes public. While there’s still a lot of unknowns when it comes to Clubhouse, the audio-only platform offers many innovative and worthwhile opportunities to help any business grow.

If you found this post interesting, keep an eye out on the Growth Channel blog for part 2, where I’ll be discussing 7 strategies for marketing your business on Clubhouse!

What do you want to talk about on Clubhouse? Have any unique ideas to engage your audience? Let me know on Twitter @Gr0wthChannel , and if you’re already on Clubhouse, join our Growth Channel Talk club 😉

Making purchases, comparing offers, buying subscriptions, and placing orders online is the new normal. Online consumer spending with U.S. merchants increased by 44% in 2020, almost 3x greater than the increase in 2019. The COVID-19 pandemic and closure of many retail locations changed the way both customers and businesses engage online. Retailers had to adapt quickly, finding ways to display, market, and sell their products online, and then package and ship orders to the right locations. Many consumers quickly embraced online shopping, turning to the Internet to purchase everything from a new pair of shoes to fresh groceries. Amazon Prime Day 2020 was the biggest ever, generating over $3.5 billion dollars for third-party sellers, almost a 60% increase year over year. E-commerce’s share of the global economy also rose from 14% in 2019 to 17% in 2020.

The popularity of e-commerce isn’t going away anytime soon, even as restrictions are lifted and life returns to a new normal. I guess ordering a new dishware set at 1am while in your pajamas will always be more convenient and desirable than actually getting dressed and going to the store. Of course, the increase in e-commerce also means an increase in competition, as businesses battle it out for the attention of online shoppers. How can you ensure your e-commerce business stands out among the crowd?

We asked e-commerce industry experts for their favorite tips and tricks and compiled a list to guide your strategy below.

These 8 e-commerce marketing strategies for 2021 and beyond will help your business achieve long-term success online:

1. Utilize augmented reality
2. Salvage unsubscribes
3. Omnichannel orchestration: deliver a personalized e-commerce experience
4. Don’t skip the ideation process
5. Experience over ANYthing
6. Use smart targeting
7. Optimize your paid ad spend
8. Drive ROI with data
9. Pay heed to website speed and page experience
10. Consider Pinterest as a marketing channel
11. Be wary of reported revenue for paid ad spend

Let’s see what the experts have to say!

1. Utilize augmented reality

“Augmented reality (AR) isn’t just a hype. It’s the one trend we see more ecom and DTC brands using. Augmented reality has been around for a while but 2020 brought it to the forefront. Ecom and DTC brands are looking for ways to make the shopping experience more personal and at home. Let people try on your clothes, or picture that piece of furniture in their home (as EQ3 does). Merge the digital and real world to create a cohesive customer journey that starts and ends with digital but has a real world stop in between with AR. Our agency Take Some Risk believes that the world isn’t going back to 2019, we are changing course and putting the customer first. We are letting people shop how they want on their own time.”

- Duane Brown , CEO & Head of Strategy at Take Some Risk

One brand exploring the world of AR is Snap, owner of the popular social media platform Snapchat. Snapchat filters, or lenses, already use AR to overly art and the real world. However, Snap’s new version of Spectacles, smart glasses capable of recording short video segments and syncing with the Snapchat app, will allow users to

for an immersive experience. These new glasses are currently available to creators in the AR field by application only. Snap is also launching a futuristic e-commerce platform that allows users to try on jewelry, clothes, and other products. This marketplace will also make it easier for AR creators to connect with brands.

2. Salvage unsubscribes

“This strategy may seem a bit counterintuitive at first but we successfully employ it at The Email Marketers for our clients to generate sales. When customers choose to unsubscribe we give them a ‘goodbye gift’ on the unsubscribe confirmation page. It can be a discount anywhere from percentage discounts to added gifts to the next order. We see sales come through from this all the time and while it's counterintuitive it certainly is an easy way to make more money.”

- Melanie Balke , Founder of The Email Marketers, E-Commerce Email Experts

3. Omnichannel orchestration: deliver a personalized e-commerce experience

“Digital customers in 2021 use several devices, interact with brands and stores at different endpoints and jump from one communication channel to another. And most importantly – they expect a smooth and fully personalized experience. They expect companies to know their preferences, likes and dislikes as well as to have 360-degree knowledge about them. The worst that can happen is when they log in to a given store from another device and notice the system doesn’t recognize them. People don’t want to be treated as a different person in each channel. The truth is they want just the opposite – unlike businesses assume, digital customers are, in most cases, open to share their personal data in exchange for smooth digital experience (of course in compliance with the standard privacy policy regulations).

To be successful, e-commerce companies need to have a single source of truth about their users – a CDP platform where they store the entire history of interactions between their brand and each user. Having all the user information in a single and robust platform, businesses can easily aggregate that data and leverage the knowledge they already have to personalize communication in every communication channel (email, live chat, SMS, phone, push notifications, in-app messages and more). Collecting data pieces about user behaviour at different stages of their customer journey, getting insights and turning them into smart omnichannel strategy is a must if you want to provide your customers with flawless experience and stay ahead of competitors.”

- Mike Korba , Co-founder & COO at User.com

4. Don’t skip the ideation process

“ A majority of corporations have no in-house talent to help translate data insights into sales performance, but the ideation process is often skipped or skimmed on. Data holds a multitude of dimensions, besides keeping score of: "are we winning, or losing?" The goal of quantified data is to become something you can TRANSLATE into qualified insights and eventually creative resources in order to get performance. During my talk at Hubspot's Inbound I break this idea down, piece by piece. At the end of the day, you want something that creates emotions in your customers. This means storytelling.”

- Allen Martinez , Chief Strategist at Noble Digital

5. Experience over ANYthing

“Competition in e-commerce is now more fierce than ever. So how can e-commerce brands engage with their customers in a way that drives valuable relationships? Brands, especially mobile apps, need growth trends that can help boost conversions, increase retention and level-up the customer experience. Interactivity, customization and rewarded campaigns are all great but unless brands find a way to create an immersive experience around them, the overplayed offer of “if you like these shoes, you will love these socks” won’t get them very far.

Features within e-commerce apps are already limited to a fracture of a screen. Designing a truly immersive experience on mobile is essential to onboarding the user to what’s curated in the app, keeping the attention long enough for discovery and conversion to cart. The quality of a user’s experience will determine the possibility of a second sale. In-app stories that can offer interactive video-on-demand, live streaming, product tags and segmentation can help achieve that.”

- Emre Fadıllıoğlu , CEO & Co-Founder of App Samurai – parent company of Storyly

6. Use smart targeting

“With the ability to communicate so effectively, one large issue organizations quickly run into is not being able to target their messages for specific groups of people. If you’re a sports supply store, you don’t want to be sending promotions for a discount on golf clubs to your customers who hate golf, and instead are fans of soccer or basketball. This would lead them to see your messages as irrelevant, leading them to opt-out of your messaging campaign, and leaving you without a way to connect with them. With Smart Targeting you can sort their contacts based on data like age, interests, and location. And if the user doesn’t have this information readily available, they can use a Data Capture tool. It asks subscribers questions like what sport they’re interested in, and automatically stores their responses into the user’s database.”

- Andrew Su, Strategic Business Consultant at Trumpia

7. Optimize your paid ad spend

“ Targeted messaging along the customer journey, quantifiable buyer personas, and greatly improved cross-channel attribution can help you use your Google and Facebook ad spend more efficiently. You can improve overall ad performance by ensuring your campaigns are being served to a curated and prequalified audience. Target highly qualified lists and exclude users who aren’t within your target audience. Audi ence Sync allows you to automatically connect your data from your onsite pop-up email lists with Google Ads and Facebook Ads platform. By importing this data directly into Facebook or Google, you will see dramatically improved targeting, prospecting, and return on ad spend (ROAS) . Plus, Audience Sync is completely first-party data and privacy compliant, saving yourself from the difficulty of manually exporting and importing data across platforms where privacy complications can appear.” 

- Michael Wadsworth, Partner Marketing at Justuno

8. Driving ROI with data

“Don’t just rely on your gut-feel and guesswork. In today’s digital world we are surrounded with so much data, we should no longer ignore it.

Consider marketing AI technology to work on the power of your internal data sources, but also look at the whole spectrum of external data (competitor analytics, industry benchmarks, marketing and industry trends), to give you a 360 degree overview of all the possible options for a marketing campaign.

To prioritize them, running A/B tests months over months can be a daunting task with tens of thousands of dollars in budget spent. So instead, consider simulating all that in a fraction of the time in a virtual setting. That’s exactly how Growth Channel AI helps thousands of marketers achieve better marketing ROI with data-driven insights.”

- Maryna Burushkina, Founder of Growth Channel AI

9. Pay heed to website speed and page experience

“There is no denying the fact that in our fast digital world where our audiences have many alternatives to look to, it is indispensable to maintain fast loading website pages. Research shows that even if the pages take 1 second of extra time to load, the business loses out on a plethora of possible customers and some hefty revenue. With the recent Google update which lays emphasis on user experience, it's high time to consider the newly added search signals (LCP, FID, CLS) and not lose rankings in SERPs. Online store owners should ensure that they have quality plugins and tools to tackle the same. Both of these stated factors are set to rule in 2021 and beyond, and therefore, every online business must pay attention to them.”

- Himanshu Rauthan, Co-Founder at MakeWebBetter, BotMyWork and the Director of CEDCOSS Technologies

SEO is an important component of everyone's strategy, but especially e-commerce SEO has to be taken with special focus, as you can build over 90% of your website traffic from organic visits without spending a ton of budget on paid media.

10. Consider Pinterest as a marketing channel

There are now 5 billion search queries on Pinterest every month. While this number seems small compared to Google, which processes over 3.5 billion searches a day, Pinterest is still a great platform for DTC and e-commerce brands, especially brands with a strong aesthetic or visual image. According to Naveen Gavini, SVP of Products at Pinterest, “The future of search is visual...every day we’re making improvements to relate images to how people think of them, through machine learning. Each time we improve our model we see engagement go up.” In Q1 of 2021, product searches were up more than 20% YoY, and 85% of weekly Pinners buy something based on pins they see from brands. According to their Media Agency Advertising Guide, 97% of Pinterest searches are non-branded, which means users come to the platform looking for a particular product, but not a particular brand. This gives you a great opportunity to introduce your brand to buyers who are already interested in discovering and engaging with you.

11. Be wary of reported revenue for paid ad spend

“Being able to identify your most valuable revenue generating channels down to the exact dollars they're responsible for generating can be the difference between massive return-on-ad-spend and wasting critical ad budgets. It's rare that any business, be it B2C or B2B is only running one marketing channel or platform. It's much more likely that they're running several paid channels like Google Ads, Facebook Ads, and others, as well as having email platforms, marketing automation platforms, etc. Because these channels and platforms can't see into one another's eco-systems to see how each contributes to an overall revenue generating customer journey, they often overstate how much revenue they generated with regard to that sale or order. For marketers, that often means over-allocating budgets to channels that look like they're performing well, when in actuality, those channels are only responsible for a small portion of the overall revenue generating event, and budgets need to be allocated accordingly. The old saying that 20% of customers drive 80% of revenue is alive and well, and the same is true for marketing, which is why Click360 is solving for the 20% of marketing efforts that generate 100% of revenues. For the business, that means you can allocate otherwise wasted budgets to highly profitable marketing channels and efforts.”

- Mike Lewis, Chief Revenue Officer at Click360

Running an online business can be overwhelming, especially when the competition is fierce. However, these experts have proved that with the right marketing strategy and a lot of perseverance, success is not only possible, but probable! E-commerce is an exciting industry, always evolving with innovations in technology and communications. These 8 tips can help you make sense of your e-commerce marketing strategy and stay one step ahead of the competition, setting up your e-commerce business for years of success.

What strategies are you going to implement in your online business? I’m interested to know what works best for you and your company! Let me know your results on Twitter @Gr0wthChannel .

Last week, I attended Ad World Conference 2021, the largest advertising and marketing conference in the world. Although the pandemic moved everything virtual, the conference was still a major success, with over 100 speakers, 50,000 attendees, and 4,000 companies participating . Being relatively new to the marketing scene myself, I was worried I wouldn’t be able to relate to the different speakers. However, I found many of the presentations insightful and impactful, and I wanted to share my seven key takeaways from Ad World 2021:

1. Customers are becoming more demanding - can your business keep up?
2. Know your audience better than you know yourself
3. Content is the intersection between business goals and reader goals
4. Transform the marketing funnel into a marketing megaphone
5. Use brand storytelling to build lasting relationships with customers
6. Optimization doesn’t have to be scary
7. A good first impression is crucial

Let’s dive into these lessons!

1. Customers are becoming more demanding - can your business keep up?

Nowadays, customers expect faster and higher quality support than ever before. They want brands to quickly interact and respond to them though a variety of different channels. For this reason, one-to-one customer relationships have become the backbone of successful marketing strategies. Consumers want brand communications tailored to their unique goals and 80% of customers are more likely to buy when given a personalized experience.

While these increasing customer demands may seem overwhelming, your business cannot ignore the demand for personalization and quick customer support. 90% of customers expect an immediate response, and if you can’t help them fast enough, they’ll likely switch to a competitor. So how can you please your customers and gain their trust?

Source - Julia Whatley, Strategic Partner Manager at Gorgias

2. Know your audience better than you know yourself

You cannot begin to market until you know who you are marketing to, and you won’t always be marketing to people like yourself. As Seth Godin explained, “If you’re only willing to market to people like you, then there’s no one left.” He believes experimenting with your customers, learning about the psychology of your audience, and understanding what they actually want is necessary. By knowing who your audience is, you can anticipate their wants and desires, helping you beat the competition. Understanding your target market also helps identify those who aren’t in your audience, so you don’t waste time and resources marketing to people who aren’t interested.

Not everyone in your audience thinks and acts the same, or has the same problems and goals. For example, different age ranges prefer different methods of communication, and different genders typically gravitate towards different social channels. Enter segmentation, where you divide your contacts into different personas, or groups, based on various demographic, behavioral, and psychographic data. Knowing your audience personas and where they are in the buyer’s journey can help you produce and send relevant, valuable content. Segmentation lets you interact with your audience on a more personal level, building stronger relationships that are more likely to lead to conversions.

Growth Channel’s free user persona template helps you identify and organize customer segments

3. Content is the intersection between business goals and reader goals

Expanding on lesson #2, knowing who your audience is and where they are in the buyer’s journey is important because it impacts the type of content you should present to them. One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is failing to send the right information to the right people at the right time.

If you want your content to perform well, you need a detailed content strategy. Tyler Hakes, Strategy Director at Optimist, explained that every piece of content has four dimensions: the strategic goal, the tactical goal, the reader’s goal, and the funnel. Let’s break down exactly how these pieces fit together.

Strategic goal - how does this piece of content fit into your overall content strategy?

Is the purpose of this content to create links? Drive traffic? Convert leads into sales? Knowing the purpose of your content beforehand ensures you produce targeted and focused content aligned with your business’ goals.

Tactical goal - what action do you want the consumer to take?

Do you want the reader to fill out a form? Share a social post? Buy a product? You must include a proper call to action in your content and provide enough information to persuade the reader to act. This tactical goal should add value for the reader and for the business.

Reader’s goal - what is the reader hoping to get from your content?

Do they want to identify or understand a problem, accomplish a specific task, or compare potential solutions? Your content needs to align with the reader’s goal in order to provide enough value for them to complete the desired action.

The funnel - where is the reader in the buyer’s journey ?

You need to know where the reader sits in the funnel to help them progress through it. Your content needs to reflect this position, or else it won’t be relevant.

These four pillars will help you create content with purpose and distribute that content to readers who will get the most value from it.

Growth Channel’s free customer journey template
helps you identify how buyers move through your funnel

4. Transform the marketing funnel into a marketing megaphone

Seth Godin’s interview was the most attended event of the conference, and I sat in awe of his marketing genius the whole time. What stuck with me the most was his view of marketing funnels. Almost every marketer has used a funnel to model the buyer’s journey. The funnel shape suggests that many contacts will drop out at each stage of the journey. Therefore, you want to populate the top of your funnel with many potential contacts to maximize the number that reach the bottom of the funnel and ultimately convert or become a customer. Yet to Godin, the funnel is “bogus.”

“Every single success story that I can think of,” he said, “succeeded not because they grounded out and churned people through a funnel. They succeeded because people decided to talk.”

Godin suggested that you flip the funnel sideways, turning it into a megaphone customers can use to become evangelists of your products and services. Because at the end of the day, people are the best promoters . We are much more likely to buy something a friend or family member recommends to us, as opposed to something a brand markets to us. Friends and family have our best interests in mind, so they appear more genuine and trustworthy than brands. Maybe that’s the secret to success: make something so remarkable and innovative that people can’t help but share it!  

5. Use brand storytelling to build lasting relationships with customers

Building one-to-one relationships with customers is incredibly important for customer retention and long-term business success. Brand storytelling is one tool that helps create these connections. Brand messaging takes longer to see returns than sales-focused or promotional messaging. However, brand messaging delivers higher returns in the long-term, making it a main driver of growth. Brand storytelling captures those who aren’t in your target market yet, but may be in the near future, placing you ahead of the competition. But how do you build a genuine and impactful brand story? According to Ken Porter, founder of PMG agency, a brand story is based on a brand’s value and purpose. A great brand story is:

A successful narrative keeps your brand on the top of consumers’ minds and makes them more likely to share your story, driving growth long into the future.

6. Optimization doesn’t have to be scary

To a new marketer, and even to the seasoned marketer, optimization can be a daunting task. It can be difficult to know where to start, how to test, and what to measure. In his presentation, master marketer Oli Gardner offered many tips to improve the optimization of your website:

7. A good first impression is crucial

Milly Schmidt, a Director of Product at UsabilityHub, focused on why marketers fail to notice mistakes, ultimately sending the wrong first impressions. Sending the wrong first impression has serious consequences: it can damage brand reputation, waste resources, confuse or anger customers, and reflect poorly on the marketing team. When it comes to why marketers miss the mark, it’s all because of psychology:

A good first impression is critical, as consumers make decisions incredibly quickly. For example, users typically determine in the first ten seconds whether they will stay or leave your website. So how do you avoid mistakes and make the right first impression? Problems are much easier to fix if you identify them early on. Testing early and often is therefore critical, as it gives you more time to alter your course. Identify and test your assumptions to make sure you aren’t misunderstanding your audience’s perceptions. Take a step back from your design and return later with fresh eyes, or have someone outside the project review the design. Always ask for feedback to ensure you’re making the right impression. Finally, remember that it’s never too late to make changes, especially if they’ll help you send the right impression to your audience.

The brilliant speakers at Ad World 2021 only scratched the surface of marketing’s complexities with their lessons and insights. I gained new knowledge from the conference, but there is still so much to explore and experiment with. If I had one main takeaway from Ad World 2021, it'd be that the field of marketing and advertising is always changing and ever-evolving, and you never know what might happen next.

Do you agree with my list of takeaways from Ad World Conference 2021? Which was your favorite? Let me know on Twitter @Gr0wthChannel . If you couldn’t attend Ad World, you can still access replays until the end of May!

Hailey Jennato is an undergraduate student at Bentley University studying Marketing and Media Arts. She is also currently a Marketing Trainee at Growth Channel. Hailey is passionate about creative storytelling and exploring the trends shaping the future of marketing.

So how about Artificial Intelligence?

A survey of more than 1,200 senior marketers at companies in the U.S. and Europe shared the following findings:

“Marketers don’t have the technology they need to take full advantage of their data assets,” said Andrew Karpie, executive vice president of corporate strategy and global marketing at SAS. “While AI holds great promise, marketers are also concerned about the potential for bias with machine learning and the lack of standards in the field.”

The survey found that nearly half of marketers believe that AI is the most promising technology for improving marketing performance. However, marketers are not yet making major investments in AI applications.

56% of marketers said in the study that they use no AI tools at all, and only about 1/3 said they had made a significant investment in AI.

“Marketers want to take advantage of AI but aren’t ready to invest in the technology,” said Steve King, chief marketing and innovation officer at SAS. “This is a familiar scenario for us. It happens every time a new technology comes along. It happened with mobile and it happened with social, and now it’s happening with AI.”

The new study also found that marketers are seeking guidance on how to achieve higher levels of maturity in their AI investments.

How is Growth Channel applying artificial intelligence to generate personalized marketing plans for businesses?

That is another question that we are often asked - how can a robot generate a strategy for my business? Here is an infographic explaining the process:

You might be wondering, what on Earth is GPT-3?! It's the latest AI technology by OpenAI, and at Growth Channel, we have embedded it into various write-ups generated inside the growth plans. By the way, the whole intro text above was written by an AI too! Could you see a difference?

Watch our interview with Michael Devellano, Author and Founder of Automate & Grow, about how companies can be using AI to build a growth marketing channel

Are you applying AI in your marketing operations? Tell us on Twitter @Gr0wthChannel 🙌

Figure 3:WFH is challenging for many employees

Source : Pre-COVID data from the BLS ATUS . During COVID data from a survey of 2,500 US residents aged 20 to 64, earning more than $20,000 per year in 2019 carried out between May 21-25 2020, by QuestionPro on behalf of Stanford University. Sample reweighted to match the Current Population Survey.

In theory, the idea of working from home seems easier as you can choose when you start and end, traveling time shortens and snack time is anytime. However, as attractive as these terms sound, I would say quite a lot of us have found out that remote working is not just about us working from home,but includes all the other aspects of being in a home.

Staying with my parents during this epidemic has been no easy task. Especially, when I needed to create even more space for myself beyond just four walls. A room where you can focus not just mentally but emotionally. For me it means:

🔥 Visisuals: Organizing all items in my room (clothes, books, etc)

🔥 Energy: Open my blinds for sunlight

🔥 Space: Advocating to my parents when I have to work (sometimes more than once)

🔥 Aroma: Light a candle (my favourite is mango coconut)

It wasn’t easy to find what suits me and to help me center myself. And honestly a lot of it had to do with self learning and discipline. But when you find something that works for you, you mimic that if it’s in your room, or thoughts, you have to make that your constant reality when you're working remotely.

Last year when the pandemic broke in, we published best practices of remote teams , when many businesses had to go working from home. Today, we will talk about how teams are managing this process, technically, featuring some of the best tools for remote work.

So what tools are people using when working from home?

Communication takes on a different meaning when we are navigating from our homes rather than the office. There is no walking to coworkers cubicles for a quick question. Or having that 10 minute coffee session where you mingle with different departments. So how can those small activities be substituted and repurposed by the tools we use during remote team interactions?

Kris Fischer, Saas Marketing Specialist at CloudTalk , shares his experience with the remote ready phone solution:

“Our sales and customer support teams use CloudTalk for phone interactions. Moreover, it offers useful features which help us improve team performance. With this tool, managers can easily see how the specific agents performed (call per agent, customer satisfaction, etc) or listen to call recordings.”

Similarly as we navigate on the other hand, it becomes just as important to understand project management when we are assigning tasks, managing clients and most importantly - ourselves.

Roman Peysakhovich, Co-Founder at Onedesk (3 team members), discusses his interface navigation tool:

Timothy Murenzi, Founder of Social Mako (8 employees; working remotely for 2 years), shares multiple applications to make transitions easier:

“Our project management is custom coded, but sometimes we use Monday.com . For video conferencing, we use EyesOn.com , and Process.st for process management.”

Above all we want social engagement to not just be left for the outside world. We want to bring the conversation in-house where ideas, productivity, and discussions can all mingle and be shared with partners. Also being able to end the conversation with the perfect emoji 😄

Katie Lio, Chief Operations Officer at WORK180 , shares the tool she uses to mitigate that human interaction:

“ Donut is a plugin for Slack that we cannot stop talking about. Donut randomly pairs team members together at intervals of your choosing to have a donut and a coffee. As a remote team, our donuts are often shared via video conference, though we do try to get together face to face when locations permit. ‘Donut’ waste any time implementing Donut with your team!”

Jacob Baytelman, Founder and CTO of BTLR (4 core team members; working remotely for 10 years), expresses how simple channels work:

“On top of all the common stack, we also use our own social messaging platform called Krowd ”

Maryna Burushkina, CEO & Founder of Growth Channel , discuss how she uses tools to stay connected to external and internal members:

“Our entire company uses Slack as our main source of communication. We have all kinds of channels - from ‘Sales’ to ‘Why We Do What We Do’, from ‘Plants’ to ‘Pets’ - where team members can share photos, discuss news stories or have meme battles. For the record, ‘Business Cat’ is the undefeated champion.”

These are just a few examples of how tools that have impacted CEO’s, founders, and marketers just like you:

• Slack allows you to communicate through channels on different topics
• CloudTalk is a phone software designed to enhance customer experience
• EyesOn is a 100% browser-based video meetings platform
• Monday allows you to manage, track, and organize tasks with one visual tool
• Process is a powerful free tool to manage team checklists
• Shift is a desktop app for streamlining your accounts and workflows
• Donut allows you to connect with peers to learn or share a donut and chat
• Krowd is a simple instant messaging platform

These three key components are what drive the usage of these marketing tools when it comes to remote work. Just like when you're working on your marketing task you have to have a goal in mind. And if you haven’t seen a tool that has peaked your interest, there are tons more to learn and discover along the way👇

So what’s the best piece of advice for new remote teams?

“Have a system ! Use Google Calendar and make a repeating schedule for certain check-ins. Without a system in place, it's difficult to know what needs to get done and when.” - Roman Peysakhovich, Co-Founder at Onedesk (3 team members)

“One of the most effective ways workers can stay productive is by taking breaks throughout the day. The Pomodoro Technique is one such method for employees to decompress for a moment and come back refreshed and ready to focus.”- Business News Daily

Alina, Sales and Marketing Manager, at Xplicity (with 20 employees) believes:

“If you are a beginner at remote work - look for some instructional courses, ask for advice on Facebook business groups. Plan your time thoroughly and make sure you aren’t distracted by tasks not related to work. If it's difficult - promise yourself that it will be maximum 3 tasks no longer than 15 minutes each. Make a plan of tasks for a day and close your PC only when the list of implemented tasks is complete (unless this objective requires more time or some parts do not depend on you)”

Marya Kazakova from SE Ranking suggests:

“The entire marketing team holds biweekly calls with the goal of sharing meeting/campaign results and planning out for the weeks ahead. During these calls, we do a retrospective analysis of the completed tasks: what went right, what could have been done better. The team also discusses what it’s like working from home–with an occasional cat, dog or child popping into the screen–and shares some life hacks on staying productive.”

When we really think about it, we are in a space where work-life balance blurs to a point that we have to redefine what it means. We are not finding a balance that can be separated because our life has become immersed in our “work.” For some people however, it is easier than others. So how do we normalize it for now and for the future? Where does this all balance out?

“Working from home post-COVID should be what we look forward to. Of the dozens of firms I have talked to, the typical plan is that employees will work from home between one and three days a week and come into the office the rest of the time. This is supported by our evidence on about 1,000 firms from the Survey of Business Uncertainty I run with the Atlanta Fed and the University of Chicago.”- Stanford University

“Knowing what you want and focusing on the right things are essential. Minimizing distractions with working from home is also key.” - Oznur Aytekin, Founder & CEO of Edhabit

“Assume the best of your colleagues. Let go of right control and give trust.” - Dennis van der Heijden, Founder and Chief Global Happiness at Convert.com

You don’t want people who are going to work for you, but work with you. Working in the professional world for me has always been built on consistency, trust, and teamwork. And these traits are transferable through any part of life and any job that you acquire. Then how does one transfer and translate their work ethic, especially when you're working remotely?

Maksym Babych, CEO at SpdLoad (75 employees), believes in testing skills:

“Hire people who can accomplish tasks without micromanagement activities. Sometimes it’s hard to find such employees. And it is only possible by crash-testing their skills .”

On the other hand, Faheeza Rangunwala, Senior Statistical Programmer at IQVIA , believes in trust:

“Trust the employees that you have hired. They are more capable and responsible than you think.”

In order to make remote work less “remote” one still has to push themselves beyond the confinement of their workspace. You have to discover how to get away when you're not in the office. So here are a few thoughts on that matter from people in the remote working world.

“Leaving the comfort zone is always a good idea - this is when learning and innovation actually spark best.” - Alexandra Nicolae, Product Owner at Axel Springer Ideas Engineering (40 employees)

“Do some indoor sports and meditation.” - Elisa Salcudean, Sales Executive at iFlow (22 employees)

Check out these podcasts that will surely enlighten and realign your thinking on what it means to work remotely:

Remote Work Life is a podcast by Alexis Wilson Campbell, who is a digital marketer and family man, in which he interviews remote CEOs and mission driven leaders.

Reimagine Work podcast hosted by Paul Millerd, engages with solopreneurs, thought leaders and philosophers about the role of work in our lives.

"I love it, it's like a casual professional coffee chat"

The Remote Show is an interview style podcast that discusses applications, tools, management concepts and much more in order to help today's remote workers be more productive.

So does being remote really work beyond the pandemic?

Timothy Murenzi, Founder of Social Mako (8 employees; working remotely for 2 years)

“Two years ago we all were in an office, and at that time - it was just 8 of us. We kept running into issues with employees losing focus, being tired and simply just not liking the idea of coming into work. The Co-Founder and I decided to do a 6 month long test on allowing the 8 workers we had to work remote. Performance skyrocketed 250%. We then began to hire remote employees for development, customer service, customer acquisition, operations, design and social media management. Since then, we've implemented programs for remote workers to stay healthy, like gym membership reimbursements, challenges on who walks the most between the team, and many more. We've kept it going to date simply because it's so much easier to manage the team remotely. As weird as that sounds. But when employees are more FREE with their work environment, the performance follows. The other benefit to this remote work environment is we lose ALL of the overhead for an office, so the company was actually able to increase the pay for all employees by allowing them to work remotely!”

What you can do will be limitless with these tools. Check them out:

--Communication--

1. Live Agent - multi-channel customer service software
2. Bonjoro - customizable video messaging platform
3. Webex - develops and sells web/video conferencing
4. GoTo Meeting - online video/meeting conferencing software
5. Meet - real-time meetings by Google
6. Microsoft Teams - multi-channel software for easy collaboration
7. Skype - telecommunications software for video and voice calls
8. HangOuts - cross platform messaging app developed by Google
9. Zoom - video communication software
10. GlassFrog - holacracy cloud- based software
11. Slackbot automations - allows instant and organized communication

--Project Management--

1. Kanban Zone - online collaboration and analytics
2. Product Board - helps product managers understand what customers need
3. Helpjuice - knowledge base software that makes it easy to collaboratively capture, store, and share knowledge with other employees
   
4. Nuffsaid - centralizes all your work apps—gmail, slack, salesforce, jira, and more—then using AI to identify the work that’ll move the needle in your role.
   
5. Attendacebot - app to track PTO’s, vacations, and sick days
6. Quire - collaborative project management tool that allows users to plan and organize projects
7. Mural - leading digital workspace for visual collaboration
8. IPEVO - allows you to display the video feed from your computer camera, record it and modify it
9. Loom - video recording and screen sharing solution
10. MeetFox - online business VoIP solution that helps small to midsize enterprises connect with clients through video conferencing and messaging
11. Miro - infinitely zoomable canvas and web whiteboard enables you to work the way you want to
12. Fellow.app (internal ) - Have meaningful 1:1s, build collaborative meeting agendas, and record decisions
13. Toggl - offers online time tracking and reporting services through their website along with mobile and desktop applications.
14. Clickup - cloud-based collaboration and project management tool
15. Time Doctor - a SaaS time tracking and productivity tool
16. iFlow app - allows you to manage your employees’ working and overtime hours, vacation holidays or sick leaves
17. Bundy.io - Time’s attendance software can be integrated with cloud payroll systems, making it easy for you to integrate time tracking with payroll and pay
18. Focusmate - is a remote coworking community where people get things done together
19. Trello - a web-based, Kanban-style, list-making application and is a subsidiary of Atlassian
20. Nuclino (internal wiki) -allows you to create real-time collaborative documents
21. JIRA - is a proprietary issue tracking product developed by Atlassian that allows bug tracking and agile project management.
22. Evernote - is an app designed for note taking, organizing, task management, and archiving
23. Notion - is the only project management software that connects your notes, projects, and wiki in one tool.
24. Basecamp - project management tool that helps with communication and lesson meetings
25. OneNote - is a note-taking program for free-form information gathering and multi-user collaboration.
26. Markup - is the leading visual commenting platform for images and live websites
27. Asana - inbuilt time tracking, custom client permissions, and ability to assign tasks to more than one person
28. GitHub - provides hosting for software development and version control using Git.
29. GitLab - is a web-based DevOps lifecycle tool that provides a Git-repository manager providing wiki, issue-tracking and continuous integration
30. Assemble Systems - offers efficient solutions to your collaborative BIM need

--Social--

1. Signal - Share text, voice messages, photos, videos, GIFs and files for free
2. WhatsApp (internal) - Connect with your customers easily by using tools to automate, sort and quickly respond to messages.
3. Telegram - is a freeware, cross-platform, cloud-based instant messaging software and application service.
4. Viber - is a cross-platform voice over IP and instant messaging software

--Storage--

1. Azure Storage - Gain access to an enormous amount of cloud storage—disk, blob, queue, and other types
2. Google Drive - is a file storage and synchronization service developed by Google
3. Dropbox - is a file hosting service that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software
4. One Drive - is a file hosting service and synchronization service

--Having Fun--

1. Giphy - database and search engine that allows users to search for and share short looping videos with no sound
2. GetEmoji - Copy and paste every emoji with 👍 no apps required
3. Dragapp - Top Discounted Tools for Remote Teams
4. Good old Notebook - Put the pen to paper

A little extra for the road:

--For mac--

What will be your story?

Taking your office home with you shouldn’t seem like a daunting task. With these practices, it should guide you to create a daily journey of your own. One that can be crafted out of the tools and knowledge that was shared here today. And in return, you can share that journey with us 😀 Tell us about your experience with the world on Twitter @Gr0wthChannel #WorkingFromHome

COVID-19 Alert: Event status could change. Check with the organizers before visiting.

1. Growth SaaS Summit

The event is powered by a marketing automation software, user.com, and is bringing 12 industry pioneers who will be sharing their growth strategies and tactics. If you’re focused on launching or growing your business - this event is a must to attend! Some of the most notable sessions include Product Led Growth Masterclass by Wes Bush, Precision Scorecard by Dan Martell, Marketing Prior To Product Launch by Rand Fishkin, and many more.

Online | February 11

2. Unicorn Battle North America

Unicorn Battle North America is organised by Startup Network, where the winner will be presenting the region at the Unicorn Cup Finals on February 18, 2021. Pitching at the Unicorn Battle is absolutely free and is a great opportunity to meet with investors, get practical feedback on the pitch, and expand your network. Only 10 startups will be selected to pitch live, and the deadline for applications is January 11, so hurry up!

Online | January 21

3. Indie Worldwide

Worldwide is an online meet-up group for hackers, makers, and founders from around the world. The events are happening every month on Hopin, where you can exchange ideas with fellow founders, get feedback, meet potential business partners, clients, and beta testers. Indie Worldwide also has a community on Slack and an Indie Podcast + a YouTube channel with prominent guest speakers.

Online | January 21 ( first meet-up )

4. Digital Summit GO!

Digital Summit GO! is a free online event designed to reload and recharge your digital marketing in 2021. 12 speakers will deliver quick, lightning talks on four critical marketing topics of Content, Social, SEO, and Email. 

Online | January 27

5. Fundraising Hour

Fundraising Hour is a more spontaneous, ‘open-door’ solution to video calls. In other words, it's an alternative to what we know as Zoom, Hopin, and other online event platforms, but for smaller chats. Powered by Remote Hour, investors and VCs are hosting AMA chats, where you can have a direct connection and actual discussion with the investors about your business idea or a startup. 

Online | Weekly

6. Texas Startup Scene AMA

Texas has always been an attractive place for startups, but now even more companies are moving to the South West, even from the Silicon Valley. Do you want to hear how to plug into the Texas Startup Scene? The event is organised by the Capital Factory and will connect you with other entrepreneurs, mentors, and investors in the Texas startup ecosystem. During January event, some of the prominent speakers will include Marc Nathan, Vice President, Client Strategy at Egan Nelson LLP, and Jonathan Chavez, Venture Associate at Capital Factory.

Online | January 19

7. Founders Academy

Starting a startup is easy. Building a great company is not. Founders Academy, organised by the Capital Factory, is a 3-day lunch-n-learn study curriculum designed specifically for driven entrepreneurs who are passionate about their business potential. Whether you're working on your MVP and preparing for launch or already generating revenue, you will be exposed to fundamental insights and tools to help dramatically increase your odds of success.

Online | January 19-21

Know another cool event for tech startups to join? Let us know about it!

The way customers perceive brands have changed over the year and we have seen brands struggle to keep up and maintain the status quo. At different times during the year, new statistics, technologies, and strategies have evolved, and brands who are eager to tap into the disruption caused by the new normal have adapted to forge a stronger image in the minds of their customers.

Going into 2021, how can businesses ensure they succeed, particularly in the face of the ever-changing landscape and consumer behavior?

Let’s take a look at some of the trends that are sure to step up your game in the coming year🕺💃

1. Building content communities

With the focus on personalization in marketing and the rise of Facebook, Linkedin, and Slack communities across the tech industry, building communities has been booming all year. Building communities around content creation allows businesses from various industries to expand their reach.

This is not only a great way to boost brand awareness and metrics, but this form of inclusion is also good for nurturing a sense of community with your customers, too.

Either it’s content for your blog, social media, or a webinar, building communities makes your audience feel valued so it’s a trend that should continue picking up pace.

Did you know that Growth Channel has a LinkedIn community for growth hacking? Join us here >> 

2. Featured snippet (no-click searches)

A lot of brands strive to be the first to appear on Google’s search results. However, in recent times, a new number one position emerged. As we go into 2021, the goal is for most brands to continue to shift to more SEO visibility in “position zero”.

Position zero signifies Google’s “featured snippet”, and it is being prioritized as the top of 2021 SEO marketing trends. This snippet is displayed uniquely than the other SERP entries as it is separated by a small box and located at the top of the search page. Moreover, it shows added, relevant information as it strives to help people find answers quickly without them needing to click on it, which prompted the name ‘no-click search’.

This could be frustrating for business owners as it can be counter-intuitive to forgo attracting visitors to their website. But, it is not always a negative effect as these snippets are occasionally read out loud with Google voice search.

The trick to targeting a featured snippet is to focus on optimizing your content with a suitable format which is mostly ‘long-tail keyword phrases’ in the form of questions (e.g steps to creating Instagram content).

The significance of featured snippets is growing as time goes on. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the trend persists for a while.

3. Implement a voice search

Siri, Alexa, Cortana… It’s safe to conclude that you’ve used or come across these before?

Not only do these voice assistants respond to brief questions such as ‘Who played Jess in New Girl?’ or ‘What is zero divided by zero?’, but they’ve also started to process native, chatty, and personalized searches. Some of which could sound like, ‘Where is the nearest Domino Pizza to me?’, ‘Have they closed?’, and ‘Do they serve Chicken Tikka?’

Due to this rising practice, brands have to acknowledge and optimize their content for voice.

An approach businesses can take is to pick a topic and think about the questions their users could ask about it. Next, they should seek opportunities to insert questions. Doing this will allow digital assistants to grasp questions easily and proffer content they perceive as solutions.

Embracing a voice search approach is not only about staying relevant — it is mostly about constructing a distinctive and improved customer experience that will help build customer loyalty and strengthen relationships.

4. Embrace virtual and augmented reality

In current years, virtual and augmented reality have become popular as top marketing trends. Most people might not know what this is.

So simply put, virtual reality is viewing a computer-generated lifelike scenario, while augmented reality is viewing the real world augmented with visual, haptic, olfactory, or visual additions. They both offer different experiences but are making waves in the marketing world today.

Gartner predicts that by 2022, 70% of enterprises will be experimenting with immersive technologies, and 25% will have deployed to production.

Virtual reality and augmented reality are used to complement and boost clients’ experiences at events and virtually. These marketing strategies are used by businesses to promote brand awareness. Although virtual reality (VR) is everywhere and gets people hyped with grand sci-fi ideas, augmented reality (AR) is much more actionable from a marketing point of view. It is predicted that AR will carry on outdoing VR in the market share sphere.

With AR improving rapidly, we will see a huge uptake in brands finding useful applications for the technology in the future.

For example, MOD TECH is using AI to automate visual effects. Check them out >>

5. Artificial intelligence integration

Our day-to-day lives have been penetrated by artificial intelligence. If you didn’t realize it, a lot of people woke up to the dominance of AI in 2020. 

Artificial intelligence is gradually taking over a lot of simple jobs, and it is certain to be the heart & soul of industries worldwide in the near future.

Forrester predicts for 2021 that:

• AI and machine learning will permeate new use cases and experiences.
• Workplace AI will boost automation and augmentation needs.
• 2021 will hold more progress toward trusted data for AI.

AI and machine learning (ML) will permeate new use cases and experiences.

From a marketing point of view, AI has many applications, it requires investigating data about customer behavior to help form enlightened business decisions. As fresh data is collected, algorithms tend to be more precise. For example, Growth Channel is using AI to automate market analysis and then map personas and customer journeys to generate marketing plans for businesses.

When you hear a song you want on your phone, you open up your Shazam app to hear and identify the song, You’re tapping into AI. As Artificial Intelligence is being utilized by customers, brands will be obligated to acknowledge this.

There is a lot of good that can come from utilizing AI, some of which include;

• Boost customer loyalty and retention
• Improve digital targeting across multiple channels
• Optimize for voice search queries
• Quantify the performance of your marketing campaigns, and many more!

Artificial intelligence is said to be the driving force behind many services, and if you’ve not jumped on this trend, you are likely to be left behind.

One of our partners is also using AI to build custom websites in a matter of minutes. Check them out >>

6. Interactive content

Buyers today look for new experiences whenever they are online, which means more interaction. Gone are the days when customers were prepared to stay on your site and consume content to the last word. Nowadays, various websites are playing in the same niche. This has given way to a plethora of information which has played an active role in reducing the attention span of customers.

Including interactive content like charts, quizzes, timelines, VR content on your website, social media and email is a key way to give value to customers, learn about them and get them to engage with your business. It is also a good idea to design a content strategy that links a shopper to the right product. This entices consumers to explore the site a little longer.

With the advance in technology and customer demands, brands are discovering creative ways to structure and deliver interactive content.

7. Adopt a minimalist email marketing design

Email marketing is not likely to ever go obsolete. Brands are now intent on creating personalized content for their targeted audience. However, since customers receive a huge amount of emails, any brand needs to stand out from the crowd. When it comes to designing striking emails, a lot of people believe that vivid images attract curiosity.

However, in this generation of paid posts and excessively - people crave originality. So to humanize your business and initiate an emotional connection with your clients, sending straightforward emails can help. This also implies that you have an advantage over your competitors whose main focus is their products, not the audience and their needs.

Doing this helps you gain their attention to the offer and not be blinded by the image. Which as a result, you ultimately share a direct message that aids in more sales. Here are some examples for your inspiration from GetResponse.

8. Conversion rate optimization

This isn’t by any chance a recent trend, but it is a trick that many brands ignore even with the many benefits.

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of testing and implementing changes to a site to increase the percentage of users who perform a desired action. And if you’re intent on sticking to one thing to drive sales, this one is presumably your best bet.

Running tests to help polish up your unique selling points and communication is one of the best practices that CRO offers. Many of us depend, to a certain degree, on instincts when deciding the way we communicate with customers, which is honestly absurd if you consider the fact that messaging is one of the primary factors determining if customers convert or not.

Testing your USP will help you discover the approach you must use to reach your audience. Additionally, any other thing learned in your tests can be used to refine other areas of your marketing. To learn more about CRO, head over to CrazyEgg.

9. Mobile optimization

Forecasts have predicted that the number of mobile users worldwide will be 7.1 billion by 2021 as opposed to 6.95 billion in 2020. This goes without saying that mobile usage is soaring, particularly for research.

In today’s market, you might as well walk and hand money over to your competitors. That’s what a lack of a mobile-friendly site is doing. By not having a website that can adhere to smartphones and tablets, you’re alienating a vast portion of your online audience. This will surely play a part in losing out on revenue.

Starting out with Google Page Insights might be the right choice.

10. Integrate chat on your website

Chatbots will continue to be an integral part of marketing in 2021. This AI-based technology uses instant messaging to provide real-time support, day and night, with both existing customers or new visitors to your website. Also, to stream, customers prefer interacting with chatbots because they are 24/7 responsive, promptly give answers, accurately recall your entire inquiry and buying history, and never lose patience.

Studies show that 80% of businesses are projected to integrate some form of chatbot system by 2021.

And with projected worldwide market size of more than $1.3 billion by 2024, chatbots will be a driving force for business communications.

With this in mind, consider this massive window of opportunity. In the sense that these virtual assistants offer outstanding customer service by meeting customers’ expectations and automating repetitive tasks — which means that you can focus on more important work. MobileMonkey is one of the great tools to achieve that!

11. Shoppable social media

As of now, social media is known to be the largest and most valuable medium for online marketing. And, it is no secret that with the launch of Facebook Shops, Instagram Shops, and Pinterest Shopping Ads and Catalogs, social commerce is set to become one of the substantial marketing and eCommerce rage of 2021!

With the Instagram report stating that they have 1 billion users, and 90% of them follow active shopping brands, it’s now more essential than ever to make your business, products, and services 'shoppable' on social media. This helps to leverage the massive potential social media has to offer, especially as more businesses move online to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Shoppable posts are rapidly becoming the way of the future as it is being embraced by both, small business and large enterprises. Research has shown that shoppers are more inclined to buy when given a streamlined retail experience. Social commerce allows brands to optimize the shopping experience over many platforms and channels, allowing their consumers to buy products every step of the way.

12. Micro-influencers

Influencers nurture a massive following by getting engaged in relevant topics and staying on top of trends, irrespective of it they have a Youtube channel, a blog, or drop posts on Instagram. Any influencer that has an online connection with your target audience can use their reach to boost your brand.

More often than not, influencers tend to be relatable, and this makes their followers believe them. As a result, their point of view is usually respected and can effortlessly determine the actions of a target market. Brands are most interested in this trait. Businesses build brand awareness, connect with customers, and promote content all by leveraging the influencer’s position.

According to the report; 63% of consumers trust influencers’ opinions of products much more than what brands say about themselves; and 58% of people have bought a new product in the past six months because of an influencer’s recommendation.

Let it be known that micro-influencers are the future. Even though it may be appealing to determine the impact an influencer had through their number of followers, always recall that true influence is determined by engagement (clicks, subscribers, and purchases). Influencers also push virality when they create and post personal content.

13. Short form video marketing

Content marketing has changed a lot over the last couple of years. Nearly all the facets have had an upgrade; from the way it is designed to the way it is presented, and finally absorbed.

For sure, content will never stop reigning, but the type of content that dominates the internet is changing. A content type that is one of the paramount marketing trends today and likely for the next 5–10 years is video marketing.

Studies show that:

48% of consumers want videos to reflect what they are interested in.

People will spend 100 minutes a day watching online videos in 2021.

Adding videos on landing pages can increase conversion rates by 80%.

Video marketing is an effective way for brands to engage consumers and aid with their decision-making process. It’s simple to display your product, describe how it is used, and strengthen brand authority when you use video content.

With video marketing, there are a lot of avenues to drive a high level of engagement, as you can go live or create a video on Youtube, Instagram, Facebook, and Linkedin. Video marketing is also cost-effective as you do not need to hire a production team or agency. All you truly need is a smartphone, video editing software, and a creative team.

Going into 2021, It is expected that brands invest more in webinars and live to stream. Businesses that fail to integrate videos in their future will be left on the sideline. Tools like Biteable can make it easy.

Next Steps

You’re up to date … at least for the time being. Now if you notice that your recent campaigns don’t add up with the trends listed above, don’t sweat it. Gradually implement these into your marketing strategy and keep an open mind going into 2021.

If applied correctly, every trend is bound to have a positive influence. The 13 listed above are some of my picks. Confidently, these will assist to push traffic and increase sales in 2021.

If you'd like more growth marketing trends in your inbox, subscribe to our newsletter!

WomenTech Network announced the finalists for its upcoming award ceremony that will celebrate 100 000 women, minorities, and allies in tech.

WomenTech, the world's largest community for women in tech with more than 4300 ambassadors representing 161 countries, named Growth Channel as a finalist to be recognized at the largest virtual awards live celebration in technology for women, minorities and their allies, WomenTech Global Awards 2020, on December 03 across 16 time zones.

2238 contestants from 153 countries in 22 categories

Growth Channel earned the finalist spot in the Women-Led Startup in Tech category for innovative marketing AI technology and startup leadership. The winners will be announced on Dec. 3 at the WomenTech Global Awards 2020.

“I am very proud to have Growth Channel come so far in our journey. We started earlier this year with just the 3 of us, launched the product, onboarded over 400 users, went through an amazing startup accelerator, and before the year end - are getting this amazing nomination. All of this thanks to our great team, customers, partners and investors” - quoted Maryna Burushkina, Founder of Growth Channel

The celebration and conference will be accessible virtually on modern technology provided by Hopin, and give access to top names in the industry and besides awarding ceremonies, the finalists and guests will be able to attend motivating keynotes, engaging discussions, and virtual face-to-face networking with people from all over the world across 16 time zones from the comfort of their home.

The WomenTech Global Awards 2020 are a natural continuation of the WomenTech Global Conference 2020, the largest virtual conference for women in tech.

“After the WomenTech Global Conference 2020, we received tons of positive feedback, many sharing about their hardships with uncertainty, job security and work-life-balance while working remotely and how the community inspired them to overcome them,” Anna Radulovski said.

“We understand the importance of celebrating small and big successes while adapting to a life in a digital-first world. This is why we want to give visibility and recognition to accomplished and aspiring female tech leaders as well as allies, working toward a more equal and inclusive world.”

People interested in attending one of the largest awards ceremonies for women in tech can apply for an invite or get tickets for themselves or on behalf of the company they work for: https://www.womentech.net/tickets

Companies and organizations interested in sponsoring the WomenTech Global Awards 2020 or the WomenTech Global Conference 2021 can connect with Anna Radulovski via email anna@womentech.net.

Anyone interested in joining the WomenTech Network can find details about all global events, as well as news and updates at: https://www.womentech.net

About Growth Channel

Growth Channel is an artificial intelligence platform for marketing planning. Growth Channel AI generates personalized growth marketing plans with clear personas, funnels, and data-driven growth strategies.

Press Contact:

Maryna Burushkina

hello@growthchannel.org

About WomenTech Network

WomenTech Network is the world's largest community for women in tech with more than 4300 ambassadors representing 161 countries. The Network’s mission is to empower communities of talented and motivated women in tech through leadership development, professional growth, mentorship, and networking events to make a difference by building impactful and inclusive technology, while introducing them to like minded people, inspiring speakers and opportunities at leading companies and innovative startups that aim to create diverse teams and a culture of belonging. More information available at https://www.womentech.net/

Press Contact:

Anna Radulovski

anna@womentech.net

US: +16506030080

Europe: +352661536253