I want to stay ahead of my competition, keep up with trends and be the first to implement actionable growth strategies but what should i be watching out for?
Hey, you are not alone there, practically all successful marketers and brands continually strive to remain on top of their game by looking into the future. The practice is as old as mankind itself. Where there is competition, there is always a need to gain competitive advantage.
In this post i will be giving you more actionable insights from my post of yesterday where i promised to give you a two-part series of what to expect in Social Pay Per Click (PPC) and Targeting in 2016 and how you can use it to attract more customers and revenue to you business.
In case you missed the first segment, you can read it here.
Still sticking with Nativedge’s Techsuccess interview with Larry Kim, I be elaborating to insights that you should really pay close attention to if you want to gain competitive advantage in 2016 and beyond . In the interview, he cites two things namely:
- Rise of Mobile
- Identity based targeting
That will be the focus of this article on the need for you to pay close attention to the rise of mobile and identity based targeting. Below is an excerpt form our interview:
What changes will digital marketing likely witness in the next 5 years?
“Just check out the rapid-fire evolution of digital marketing over the last five years! I expect we’ll evolve at an even faster pace in the coming few years. The rise of mobile in established markets has been insane, and we’re now seeing exponential adoption across emerging markets.
Over 4 billion of the 6.8 billion people on earth now have mobile devices and companies like Google and Facebook are trying to get one in the hands of every remaining person.
All of these people represent socially and digitally savvy new audiences for brands, so expect that trend to spill over into physical businesses expanding into these new markets as they discover lower cost, super effective ways to reach these consumers.
Identity-based marketing is another hugely important digital marketing trend that will continue picking up speed over the next 5 years.
It’s allowing marketers and brands to communicate and build relationships with consumers on a much more personal, emotional level, which is far more compelling and leads to greater conversions.”
Larry is absolutely right. The use of mobile devices has grown exponentially over the years and it’s only going to become more dominant. Affordable smart devices means more and more people are connected to the internet.
More people use their smartphones to browse the internet than desktop computers. Therefore it is imperative that you incorporate mobile optimization in your digital marketing strategy.
Larry Kim has seen businesses use mobile optimizing strategies to succeed. To quote him, here he replies a question in another interview when asked the kind of success he’s seen from search marketers investing in mobile.
“Think with Google is one of the best resources for mobile stats and success stories, like this one from Florida law firm Colombo & Hurd. In one month, these guys grew their click-through rate by 53%, tripled their conversion rate, and cut their costs per click by 13.5% simply by adjusting their bidding and targeting strategy.
There are so many options in AdWords for improving your mobile campaigns, adjusting bids based on time of day or proximity to your business, for example. Try to understand the most likely intent of your different audience segments based on their keywords and location, and make sure you’re making mobile bid adjustments.
Then create mobile-preferred ads and ensure your PPC landing pages are mobile optimized. And make sure you use call tracking!”
The second biggest trend Larry Kim says we will witness in 2016 is identity based targeting.
Identity based targeting is the evolution of display ad targeting. It involves 5 things namely:
- Identity
- Remarketing
- Keyword targeting
- Interests and market segments
- Website targeting
Identity based marketing allows you to target people with very specific ads using those 5 elements above. It is even possible to target people with just their phone numbers and email addresses. As Larry Kim described it, “This is the most important trend happening in PPC today.”
This enhanced targeting makes PPC feel more like email marketing but better. Because of the personalized information, you know who you’re promoting to, unlike with search or social ads.
It solves many common challenges with email, as well: you don’t have to limit the number of emails you send, and you don’t need people to sign in to receive your emails. They can’t unsubscribe from ads.
Identity-Based Marketing opens up new ways to use PPC more efficiently
Viral content is something many businesses are after. The problem is, it is something you can’t buy. You could pay for your content to be viral but you risk upsetting a lot of people. There is a solution to this, right where identity based targeting and PPC intersect.
So, how does content go viral when people are so attention-deficit and millions of other pieces of content are competing for their eyes and shares?
Larry Kim cites an example of how identity based marketing and PPC worked for him:
“This blog post was published on a Friday afternoon at 5 pm. I shared it out to my social media channels, including Google+ and Twitter. Then, I promoted it to a custom list of influencers on Twitter, including people who work in journalism.
Within hours, it started showing up in different publications, like Marketing Land. Over the weekend, it absolutely blew up and showed up all over, being cited by Lifehacker, VentureBeat, The Washington Post and hundreds of others.”
As you can already tell, identity based targeting is incredibly effective at getting your content in front of a very targeted audience, who can then turn your content viral.
Larry Kim also describes the effects of having an influencer promote your content.
What you benefit from having an influencer share your content is his his audience which is usually in the high numbers.
Getting a share from an influencer in your space can also help you attract the attention of the media.
Target people with big social profiles, then layer in demographics on top of identity. If your list is half a million people, you can qualify them by above average income, a certain job title, etc.
This type of segmentation is what sets identity based marketing apart from email marketing, it allows you to get granular and manipulate the tiniest inputs.
If you use identity and demographics in PPC content promotion, it’s very powerful. It greatly increases your chances of getting noticed.
cookies don’t work on mobile apps. People are spending more time in apps than on desktop and remarketing is all based on cookies. The only way to get those ads to show up is based on the user’s logged-in identity, so that’s something to keep in mind.
Conclusion
That just about concludes our two-part series on what to expect from digital marketing in 2016. To briefly recap, 4 things will set the trend in 2016 and beyond namely
- Social PPC
- Precise Targeting
- Rise of mobile devices
- Identity based targeting
Paying attention to those 4 trends in 2016 will give you the competitive advantage you need to stay ahead of the pack.
If your content is engaging on? social media, promote it with PPC, target your core audience and share your content with influencers. Then you can sit comfortably and watch your content go viral.
Many thanks to Larry Kim for sharing his expertise with us. If you have any questions or concerns, please drop a comment down below!
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