By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
Native ads here, native there, native ads everywhere. That seems to be the prevailing theme of digital marketing nearly halfway through 2013. Native ads — or sponsored stories, or advertorials, or whatever is the trendy buzzword of the day — are all the rage at the moment.
A recent eMarketer report puts some numbers behind all of the hype. According to eMarketer, native ads are providing new ways for marketers to reach target audiences and new avenues of monetization for content sites that are under intense revenue pressure.
But, as we wrote back in February, native ads aren’t without their detractors. Some media and marketing executives are concerned about the potentially negative effects of blurring the lines between content and advertising. Others questions the return on investment of these ads, arguing that native ads cannot scale for multiple placements (we happen to agree on latter).
Despite those concerns, there is no doubt that native advertising has grabbed a significant foothold within the online marketing industry. eMarketer estimates that native ads will generate $4.57 billion in revenue in the U.S. by 2017, up from $1.63 billion in 2012.
So what makes for a great native ad? As my colleague Sultan Riaz wrote last February, a powerful native ad comes down to two crucial factors: a seamless blending with the editorial content and a non-disruptive message that is relevant to the consumer.
Below is an example of native advertising on Twitter.
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By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
Today’s announcement by Twitter of the launch of its new Lead Generation Card represents a major milestone in the evolution of both the microblogging site and performance marketing. Lead Generation Cards are part of the suite of Twitter Cards, which are essentially expanded tweets that allow organizations and businesses to promote their content and offers.
For Twitter, it is a recognition that engagement and social media buzz are great but the days of advertisers being able to live solely off of that as justification for investing in social media campaigns are quickly coming to a close. As Twitter said in announcing the new direct marketing offering, the key goal for many marketers “boils down to one more theme: generating leads and ultimately driving purchases.” We couldn’t agree more.
For performance marketers, Twitter’s Lead Generation Cards should become a useful tool in their performance social marketing campaigns. Performance marketers have longed argued for more lead-gen-specific capabilities within social platforms. As we wrote recently, Facebook’s recent development of CPA bidding for direct marketing advertisers is an important step toward making that social network a more performance-marketing-friendly advertising platform.
So how do Twitter Lead Generation Cards work? Here is how Twitter explained them on its blog:
Twitter Cards let you bring rich experiences and useful tools to users within an expanded Tweet. The Lead Generation Card makes it easy for users to express interest in what your brand offers. Users can easily and securely share their email address with a business without leaving Twitter or having to fill out a cumbersome form.
When someone expands your Tweet, they see a description of the offer and a call to action. Their name, @username, and email address are already pre-filled within the Card. The user simply clicks a button to send this information directly (and securely) to you.
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By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
Ahh, summer. That most glorious time of year. The sun is shining, the beaches are beckoning and everywhere you look, people are on their smartphones — shopping and watching entertainment.
At least, that appears to be the trend for summer 2013. According to Adweek, “brands are preparing for what could be a break-through quarter in mobile advertising as consumers spend more time outdoors while constantly checking their iPhone or Samsung.” Summer, according to Brian Ng, marketing director and lead for brand strategy and trademark development at Del Monte Foods, presents an “unstructured environment” in which mobile is key to bridging the “planning-to-purchase divide.”
Mobile marketing and the summer go together like peas and carrots, to quote Forrest Gump. And to that combination a mobile performance marketing functionality, such as mobile lead gen, and marketers could see a big growth opportunity for their brands over the next three months. (more…)
By Kristen Pulver | Director, New Verticals
When looking for a distribution method for your marketing budget, where do you start? There are relationships with aggregators, vendors and others but with the ever-changing nature of the education industry and the goals related to school success, how do you know who to partner with? Who will give you what you’re asking for? Most importantly, who will deliver to you — the end buyer — what they’re promising?
This is a conundrum that many schools and education marketers deal with. Some providers haven’t survived the changing landscape. Whether it’s falling behind with compliance requirements, or struggling to maintain enough traffic to stay afloat, many online education marketers and agencies leave the business and move on to other, less-quality driven industries.
But what is important to a college or university should be of the greatest importance to the school’s marketing sources. We all know that high-quality, compliant leads are necessary for success with any higher education marketing campaign, but a partnership with the right aggregator needs to be more than just that; and a school’s expectations should be nothing less.
Compliance, quality and an understanding of a successful admission life-cycle from the first point of contact with potential students to enrollment is what most satisfies a client. (more…)
By Caroline Ramos | Director, Client Services
Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of blog posts focusing on best practices for lead generation in the online education industry.
Year after year universities struggle with enrollment rates. At the same time marketers are testing new advertising channels, shifting budgets, designing new creative assets and everything in between to reach that seemingly elusive enrollment goal.
But why is nothing changing? Why are enrollment rates dropping after all that investment in time, money and effort?
It’s simple, really: The first point of contact is your first impression and it can make or break the success of a prospect’s enrollment. The best advertising campaign in the world is frustratingly useless if the admissions process deters prospective students.
Many universities with large marketing budgets fail to focus on what’s happening right under their nose, and in most cases, right down the hallway. I have seen everything from a first point of contact being a direct-mail piece to callbacks that occur two weeks after an online information request is submitted.
A successful online marketing campaign for a college or university isn’t just measured by a conversion rate. Performance marketing in education requires three critical components to be successful:
- High-quality traffic sources: You need to have traffic (students) who are interested in learning more about a particular school.
- Optimized creative: A high-quality landing page, great email design and banner ads that really catch the eye of prospective students.
- Structured workflow: A cohesive admissions process that is ready to work a lead. (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
There’s no question that mobile marketing and advertising is the hottest area of digital marketing at the moment. Big consumer brands are seemingly tripping over themselves to launch the fanciest mobile app.
We’ve written a lot recently about the foibles of mobile marketing campaigns that don’t have a direct lead generation or sales component tied into them. Heck, it’s for this reason that we launched MediaWhiz Mobile, our new mobile performance marketing service. Advertisers and publishers consistently tell us there is a big need to help them more profitably engage, acquire and retain customers and generate mobile-specific traffic.
And yet a number of leading advertisers complain that all of their mobile spending doesn’t improve their most important marketing metric: sales.
Mobile certainly captures a lot of eyeballs but its ability to produce a consumer action — leads, sales, downloads, etc. — is often lacking.
That may be starting to change, though. A recent eMarketer report shined some light on how mobile branding and marketing campaigns are starting to translate to sales and brand lift. And, most crucially for advertising, mobile marketing spending is beginning to make a serious dent in consumers’ purchase intent. (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
What’s driving the biggest gains in Facebook’s worldwide growth? It’s not the U.S. It’s emerging markets.
According to eMarketer, India, Brazil and Russia, along with the Middle East and Africa, are contributing the most new users each month to Facebook. According to new estimates from eMarketer, Facebook will pass 1 billion active users worldwide in 2013 as the company sees particularly strong growth in its Asia-Pacific, Middle East and Africa, and Latin American user bases, with each region set to rise by about 30% or more this year. By next year, Facebook will reach 1.26 billion global users.
These astonishing numbers — the sheer fact Facebook will soon have 1 billion active monthly users worldwide — combined with Facebook’s recent implementation of new CPA bidding for direct marketers, portend huge opportunities for performance and affiliate marketers. Just tapping into 1/10th of this user base could hold significant potential online marketing value to most brands.
What is your brand doing to tap into Facebook’s expanding performance marketing opportunities? (more…)
By Marc Purtell | Director, SEO
SMX London is right around the corner, and the conference agenda is packed with some great panels discussing everything from prioritizing marketing efforts to advanced tactical recommendations. Search and social media are two intertwined topics on which there will be a great deal of discussion.
I will be joining a panel alongside Kelvin Newman, director of strategy at SiteVisibility and Justin Sanger, CEO of SupportLocal, to discuss Facebook’s new graph search and its marketing implications. Although Graph Search is currently available to a small beta this new search function will eventually be available to billions of users around the world.
This panel discussion will focus on the implications of Graph Search on SEO, including the opportunities and challenges it will present advertisers and publishers.
As part of the discussion, I will present a history of Facebook advertising as it pertains to the evolution of search within Facebook. I’ll how Graph Search fits into the direction Facebook is going with its search and advertising options. Of course, knowing how and why an advertising medium has evolved can provide some very strong clues into what the future of marketing through Facebook may look like. (more…)
By Keith Trivitt | Director, Marketing and Communications
What are your plans for early June? An early beach vacation, perhaps? Maybe you’ll be stuck at work, patiently counting down the days until your two-week siesta in Madrid. Better yet, why not join MediaWhiz at the annual Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU) Convention and Expo.
That’s where you’ll find us June 5-7 at the Rosen Shingle Creek resort in Orlando, Fla. There, you can chat with Kristen, Kyle, Caroline and Shon from the MediaWhiz team at booth #708. We’ll be on-site throughout the convention to discuss our education-specific performance marketing services, including our new education portal, ChooseYourColleges.com.
About MediaWhiz’s Education Marketing Services
MediaWhiz has the lead-generation tools to make your student prospecting strategy a success!
We offer a comprehensive suite of performance marketing tools and services designed to help advertisers, colleges and universities engage, enroll and retain prospective students. Our education-specific Internet portal, ChooseYourColleges.com, offers a well-balanced lead-generation platform that helps students narrow their search by curriculum, geography and affordability.
By using a variety of online marketing channels MediaWhiz can accurately target, attract and help match prospective students to schools that meet their needs. We ensure a consistent flow of highly qualified candidates for our advertisers and abundant traffic for our publishers. (more…)
By Sultan Riaz | Marketing Coordinator
Editor’s note: “Ask the Performance Marketer” is a regular series in which MediaWhiz’s performance marketing, SEO and digital media experts answer some of the most popular questions we from clients.
To get more answers to your performance marketing questions, download our free eBook, “The CMO’s Guide to Performance Marketing.”
Mike Sisto, MediaWhiz’s director of performance marketing, has worked in performance marketing for 14 years. He’s seen it all, from the earliest days of the industry to the current evolution in which media, mobile, content, SEO and many other digital media channels are mixed together. Needless to say, he knows how to help his clients engage, acquire and retain customers more profitably.
Recently, we sat down with Mike to discuss some of the most common questions he gets from clients about accountability in affiliate marketing campaigns, email acquisition and optimizing lead quality.
How do you ensure accountability of affiliates for campaign and creative materials compliance?
We first establish accountability with each affiliate by employing a suite of external and internal tools to monitor advertisements. We hold publishers accountable for compliance violations. Once our high standards are made clear, the possibility of losing out on business due to compliance violations exerts pressure on affiliates to comply with advertiser guidelines. With adherence, publishers have the opportunity to cultivate a long-term business relationship with MediaWhiz as they continue to provide quality traffic via compliant marketing practices. (more…)
