Digital Marketing with Jemima

  • Why Artificial Intelligence is one of the Fastest Growing Features of Marketing Strategy

    Artificial Intelligence Image (Source: Emarsys)

    When I used to hear the words ‘Artificial Intelligence’, my mind would immediately go to robots and other extremely high-end, complicated tech. Never would I have pictured that AI is a marketing concept which can not only be accessible to even small businesses, but is something they should absolutely be integrating into their marketing strategy.

    Modern day artificial intelligence can be used to enhance your brand in so many ways – from website personalisation, to quick data analysis and customer service chatbots. Statistics have found that 91.5% of top businesses utilise AI strategies, with these same companies experiencing an average of 25% growth in customer satisfaction. These points clearly indicate a positive correlation between the use of AI and a business’s success, so with AI becoming increasingly accessible, you would be disadvantaging yourself to not hop on this growing marketing trend!

    While AI may seem like a daunting, expensive challenge to embark on in your business journey, it is gradually becoming a more financially viable option with incredibly high rewards. Little implementations of AI such as personalised recommendations for consumers visiting your webpage, or the provision of AI customer service (such as in the example shown below), can allow you more time to focus on more important tasks, and ultimately decrease costs in the long run.

    AMTRAK Customer Service Chatbot (Source: Outgrow)

    Even for more established businesses, AI can be used to further enhance your customer relationships by allowing you to retrieve more data showing what those customers truly want.

    Amazon is a prime example displaying the benefits that can be reaped from implementing AI. Their website has utilised AI to personalise its homepage offerings to each individual consumer, in order to provide options suited specifically to them and ultimately contribute to more sales from webpage visits.

    Personalised Amazon Webpage (Source: Weidert Group)

    With the use of AI in marketing currently growing at a rate of 27% per year, it is time that you hop on this digital approach for the good of your business’s profitability and corporate reputation.

    With AI becoming increasingly accessible, what do you see as the most useful way for businesses to implement it in their marketing?

  • The Cheapest Trick to Successful Marketing that Your Business Should Know

    Coca-Cola’s User-Generated Share a Coke Campaign (Source: UCraft)

    User-generated content – the concept of quite literally getting your consumers to do the marketing of your product for you! Sounds complicated? Trust me, it is far easier than it sounds, and this trick could be the key to triggering that user-engagement with your marketing without having to spend a ton on fancy gimmicks and advertisements.

    Some of the world’s biggest companies have shown how effective user-generated content can be, from Apple’s ‘#ShotoniPhone’ campaign, Calvin Klein’s ‘#MyCalvins’, and even the incredible ‘No Makeup Selfie’ initiative by Cancer Research which raised over £8 million without costing Cancer Research thousands.

    Cancer Research’s ‘No Makeup Selfie’ Campaign (Source: Medical Daily)

    Even musicians are using this form of marketing by paying a one-off amount to a Tik Tok star, or several smaller Tik Tok influencers, in order to get them to use their song for a viral dance or challenge. As a result, their song picks up recognition from a whole new fanbase which they never would have had access to previously, entirely due to people using their songs for their Tik Tok videos – all without said musician having to pay any extra than what they did to that beginning influencer.

    For your own businesses, whether they are small sole traders or huge corporations, it is time to get on board with user-generated content! Various studies have been conducted which found that nearly 60% of consumers believe user-generated content to be the most authentic way for brands to advertise, with authenticity being a priority for 83% of shoppers. Furthermore, brands who utilise user-generated content in their social media campaigns are found to have a higher engagement rate of 50% in comparison to their other, brand-generated content.

    Apple’s USer-Generated Content ‘Shot on iPhone’ Campaign example (Source: YouTube)

    This form of marketing can be as simple as offering a discount to consumers in exchange for them sharing your brand online with a certain hashtag, or even a competition where consumers can have a say in your future products by mentioning your brand online. Encouraging your consumers to share your brand can be done in so many easy ways, and just may be the trick needed to open yourself up to so many new consumers who would have never engaged with your brand previously.

    Do you have your own experience of engaging with user-generated marketing recently? Or perhaps even an idea for a brand you know to use this marketing? Please share down below!

  • The Changing Regulations for Social Media Marketing

    Misleading Social Media Advertising (Source: Lightspan Digital)

    In the early days of social media, brands were able to utilise influencers and celebrities to promote their products in a sneaky, hidden way that allowed people to be influenced subconsciously. They would promote these brands or products in a way that created a perception that they themselves used and trusted that product, when in reality they had often never used it nor had any knowledge of its credibility. This would therefore leave consumers with no awareness of the true motives behind the influencer using that product, and in certain circumstances led to the unethical promotion of products which were in reality, dangerous and harmful to society, thus resulting in authority’s first implementation of regulations to such promotion in 2009.

    However, influencers and brands continued to flout these rules for their own commercial gain. An extreme example of this was the 2017 controversy of Fyre Festival – a festival promoted by influencers with astronomical followings such as Bella Hadid and Kendall Jenner, despite the fact that they had no real knowledge of what this event would entail and failed to disclose that they were advertising the event in their promotional content for it. Instead of finding the luxury accommodation and gourmet food they were led to believe they would experience by influencers’ promotions, festival-goers were faced with dirty, unhygienic sleeping arrangements, and cheap slices of bread for ‘meals’.

    Fyre Festival Social Media Promotion Example (Source: YouTube Fyre Festival Announcement)

    More recently, even smaller UK reality TV influencers have been under fire for their lack of ad disclosure, with ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) calling them out to consumers in widespread campaigns. As a result of this rise of influencers flouting the regulations for their brand promotions, ASA have now altered their laws for content marketing to explicitly outline that repeated non-disclosure of ads will lead to “direct forms of enforcement”.

    ASA’s Page Calling Out Misleading Influencers (Source: ASA)

    It is now therefore vital for digital marketers to stay vigilant in their knowledge of influencer regulations, particularly due to the further consequences they may face in addition to that of the influencers themselves, as seen by the Fyre Festival organiser facing jail time and recent threats by the ACCC regarding the liability for businesses endorsing the misleading of their consumers.

    So, with these growing penalties for social media marketers, I now ask you whether you agree with their severity and the implications for businesses and influencers, or whether you believe consumers should bear the responsibility for their purchases, no matter what the potentially misleading influence was on that purchase?

  • How to Capitalise on the Modern-Age Consumer’s Dependence on Media

    Person viewing their phone in bed (Source: The Economic Times)

    This morning as I woke up and turned off my iPhone alarm, my first activity was not to read the newspaper with breakfast, or even to start getting ready for my early University classes. No, instead as I turned off this alarm, I commenced my daily habit of checking the news and important happenings of the day on my online media platforms.

    The reason that I draw attention to this routine that I know for a fact I am not an outlier in partaking in, is due to the manner in which it highlights how the dependence that today’s society holds on online media is so immense that it has quite literally transformed the way individuals’ function in their everyday lives. This is emphasised by over 67% of Americans under the age of 50 finding their daily news on their phones or tablets, and Australian over-18’s spending an average of 6.6 hours a day on digital screens.

    So why are such anecdotes and statistics so important to digital marketers? Because, now with this clear prominence of the internet in individuals lives, marketers can utilise this knowledge to their advantage by presenting their brand online in such a way that can directly influence consumers behaviours, beliefs and actions.

    Australian media usage statistics (Source: Bandt)

    By using techniques that make consumers want to spend a portion of their daily screen time looking at your webpage and then translating this screen time into sales, marketers can truly capitalise on this in ways that won’t cost a fortune, yet can provide immense returns. For example, small tweaks to an online site that allow greater personalisation for consumers and then framing their most suited product option to appear limited or rare in order to push consumers to take the final action in purchasing the product, is just one way that demonstrates how marketers can make slight digital alterations which can subconsciously persuade consumers to translate their digital activity to purchases.

    A recent example of personalised framing in digital marketing (Source: Bookings.com)

    With this form of persuasive marketing gradually growing in popularity, it is hard to not see it occurring so frequently when you visit digital webpages. I know for a fact that even this morning on my daily newsfeed scroll I noticed these persuasive marketing tricks, so I now invite you to share your recent experiences with it. Did it push you to make that final purchase?

  • The Key to Transforming your Webpage Growth – it’s Easier Than You May Think!

    When I began entering the world of digital marketing, the idea of developing and optimising a webpage in order to derive maximum return from its existence seemed far too difficult a task. Webpage growth seemed like a role I should leave to the top tech gurus as I believed it to be too difficult to conquer with my abysmal tech skills. However, there is one trick in the book that can transform the reception from consumers to your brands’ webpage and while there is no special formula to perfect this concept, there are features which any business owner or digital marketer can target to maximise its use.

    Visualisation of what SEO is (Source: Sitechecker)

    What is this special secret I speak so highly of? Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short. SEO is a process which involves maximising the traffic to your webpage by heightening its appearance in the search results order, through using factors such as keywords, hyperlinking and improving the webpage itself.

    This concept is vital for digital marketers to utilise due to the fact that it can assist in mitigating the competitive advantage that larger businesses hold, through there being no way for someone to completely beat the algorithm of search engines. If factors that influence SEO are evolved consistently over time, small businesses can use this as a method to build their sales without having to spend exorbitant amounts on other forms of advertisements.

    Graph demonstrating the impact of not utilising SEO (Source: Ahrefs)

    Obviously, SEO cannot be used as a marketing strategy alone, however when implemented in conjunction with other methods, it is able to assist in bridging the gap between themselves and competitors. If digital marketers fail to keep up with their competitors SEO tactics, they may find themselves and their brand falling behind on their search result position, and subsequently their website and sales intake.

    So now I ask you, as SEO is likely to play a strong role in webpage growth for the foreseeable future, particularly while Google consistently evolves their algorithm to alter search result positions, why are so many businesses unaware of its existence and fail to capitalise on the benefits that SEO can ultimately provide them?

  • Why Brands Must go Beyond the Basics of Digital Marketing

    When people first think of digital marketing their minds immediately go to two words; social media. It’s not really surprising that so many perceive this realm of social media as encompassing the entirety of digital marketing, particularly in this current climate of brands utilising the rise of influencer culture. However, with the world of technology providing so many opportunities to brands beyond this small sector, it is imperative that brands unlock the full potential of digital marketing in order to access and benefit from its complete range of capabilities.

    Image of ‘Influencer Marketing’ (Source: True North)

    In order to stay competitive in the current climate of business, decisions must always be driven by data and analytics which provide key information on consumers, the broader industry, and even a company’s rivals. If harnessed correctly, digital marketing is a tool which can both assist in generating such data, and most importantly can utilise the data in a manner which can trigger extensive returns.

    Cotton On recently made a business move which highlights how vital of an impact efficient use of such data can hold on your company’s operations. In announcing their partnership with Lexer, a customer data platform which will allow Cotton On Group to receive analytics of customer segment trends across all of their stores and platforms, they emphasised their stance of this being a critical choice in better understanding their consumers buying patterns, and thus provide a more unique experience, both on their digital platforms and in-person stores.

    Image highlighting the broad impact of ‘Big Data’ (Source: Spencer Stuart)

    While social media marketing is certainly a crucial tool for modern day marketing, it is only as useful as the success of its alignment with the data gathered.

    This direction of marketing and its digital data does not appear to be disappearing anytime soon in the future, so do you think companies are doing enough to tailor their behaviours to the information gathered from analytics? Or are companies getting too comfortable with the easy option of an influencer endorsement on social media?

  • The Persistent Influence of Pinterest

    Image of Pinterest logo and example site page (Search Engine Journal, 2020)

    Generally, in the field of digital marketing we see the influence held by different media platforms rise and fall as their popularity with consumers evolves. We saw it occur in the early days of digital media platforms as MySpace was the most popular website on the planet in 2006, but faded into obsolescence by 2011. We are even seeing a potentially similar decline in popularity occur in front of our eyes from the very site which overtook MySpace, Facebook, as it too begins to lose touch with its younger audience.

    However, one site which has remained consistent in its engagement from its target audience is Pinterest. Despite being a site which attracts light usership, it is shown to experience significantly higher user growth than established sites Facebook and Twitter.

    Growth of Pinterest users over time  (Sprout Social, 2022)

    This growth is something we are seeing have a positive effect on the companies which make use of it. Beacon Lighting recently showed how Pinterest can be utilised to promote their products in an inspiring, organic way by attracting consumers to what the product can be in their ‘dream’ home project, as opposed to obvious product-centric advertising.

    So, what does this ongoing trend of Pinterest marketing show us digital marketers? Well, it clearly highlights that consumers appreciate a natural viewing experience where they visualise products in a customised setting which suits their personal tastes. Statistics showing that 75% of users are frequent shoppers and that 8 out of 10 predictions made from Pinterest trends come to fruition, indicates that this platform is a key site for marketers to not only create awareness and desire for their products as a part of consumers ‘aesthetic dream’, but also gain insight into what consumers want from the products which they fantasise about owning.

    Now I posit to you the readers, do you think this influence of Pinterest on consumers wants, and its subsequent use for marketers is here to stay? Or will it soon experience the eventual downfall that we see from so many others?

  • The Environmentally Crushing Impact of Digital Marketing

    It is no secret that the world of marketing has evolved away from the days of newspaper clippings and hand-out flyers, and instead toward a new digital realm of technology, the internet and social media. Since the rise of the Web 2.0 – a concept coined by media guru Tim O’Reilly in 2004 which emphasises the collaborative, user-oriented nature of the internet – people are now seen to be able to connect with friends, brands and celebrities with ease.

    Thus enter the latest era of digital marketing and its overarching ruler; social media. Following O’Reilly’s first mention of Web 2.0 in 2004, we have seen social media transform from early Facebook days, to the current prominence of Tik Tok. With each step in the evolution of social media, we see this interconnectedness that Web 2.0 describes grow further and further.

    With this ability of people to see what others are wearing, eating, or saying nearly 24/7, comes an unbelievably fast turnover of trends. Luckily from a business sales perspective, marketers have evolved their digital use to keep up with these trends. However, there is unfortunately one major loser in this influencer-driven marketing game; our planet.

    A recent article by environmental journalism company ‘goodonyou’ (2021) outlines how the need for fast production in the trendy fashion industry in particular, inevitably leads to a decline in sustainable practices. Whether it be through excessive water usage, the use of fabrics which are harmful when disposed of, or the emittance of greenhouse gases – each of these features of adhering to ‘fast trends’ ultimately contribute to it being the third largest polluter to our atmosphere.

    Image: Environmental Impact of Fast Fashion Trends (BBC, 2018)

    When we are being constantly warned that right now is the time to start changing our practices for the sake of our planet and our people, does it not seem that it is our responsibility as digital marketers to trigger that change and stop being dictated to by influencers and their trends?

    When will profit in the now stop being prioritised over an Earth for the future.

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