Google made a few announcements for AdWords advertisers just in time, before Black Friday kicks off the holiday shopping season in the US next week. [Source: Search Engine Land]
As part of Facebook’s mission to ‘bring the world closer together’, international expansion, and the removal of borders as boundaries, is a key element in their development. And aside from seeking to better connect communities, providing businesses with new ways to tap into international opportunities is another part of The Social Network’s expanding framework. [Source: Social Media Today]
Google has quietly announced in its Google News forum that they have added a new URL referrer source that news publishers should begin tracking to get a “comprehensive view of traffic from Google News.” [Source: Search Engine Land]
Facebook is officially launching its standalone app for video creators to manage their channels on the social network. After previewing the Facebook Creators app in June, the iOS version is rolling out globally to all Pages and individual accounts, though the Android version won’t be available until sometime. [Source: Marketing Land]
After testing their professional mentorship connection process for the last few months, LinkedIn has this week announced that their ‘Career Advice’ option is being rolled out to users in the U.S., U.K., India and Australia, with all other regions to gain access ‘in the coming months’. [Source: Social Media Today]
Twitter confirms it’s testing a feature that allows users to more easily create “tweetstorms” – those series of connected tweets that have grown to be a popular workaround for Twitter’s character count limitations. [Source: TechCrunch]
Google is updating the look of of its product-oriented knowledge panels on mobile to show even more details about specific products in the search results. [Source: Search Engine Land]
Facebook will give brands, publishers and creators a better idea of who’s contributing to their videos’ viewership on the social network. [Source: Marketing Land]
Despite the negative press, Snapchat still remains popular with younger users, and still holds a level of cool cache that other platforms can’t attain. The company has announced a major revamp of their 5-month old Ads Manager platform, while also adding in a range of new ad targeting and creation options to streamline and improve the Snap ads process. [Source: Social Media Today]
After releasing its job listing search feature in June of this year, Google has updated the function so that new details about open positions will show up in search results. [Source: Search Engine Land]
Expert Opinion:
- Winning consumer attention in today’s hyperconnected digital era
The advertising industry is undergoing rapid transformation with every passing day. Today, brands are adopting newer ways to enhance their advertising efforts and utilising the latest technologies to drive better results. On the other hand, consumers are also evolving and consuming behaviour is rapidly changing too.
Today, brands find themselves in an overcrowded market jostling to get all the consumer attention that they can, through all the different platforms. In fact, industry studies show the average consumer is exposed to up to 10,000 brand messages a day. And as marketers are presented with more and more channels to reach their customers, that number is growing rapidly. For the marketers of today, it is the consumer’s attention that has become a premium.
This does not change the fact that consumers still do engage with marketing campaigns. However, what it does mean for new-age marketers is that they need to find more efficient ways to engage their consumers that drive real value out of their efforts.
Before we get to how marketers can enhance their advertising strategies, it is crucial that they change the way they approach digital marketing itself. Good content is the only way marketers can hope to drive any meaningful engagement as good content attracts quality audience that is highly engaged.
– At Times Internet, our bouquet of premium publishers means we always have highly engaged audiences. An Economic Times is where a marketer will always find an engaged audience because the quality of content and the audience it attracts. Gaana always ends up seeing very high engagement from the youth, given how the content on the platform manages to tap into the interest of this audience. It is therefore very important to consider the content platform that your marketing campaign will run on, before getting to it.
– People have gone digital and advertising also needs to follow suit. However, the spontaneous rise in adoption of digital has also brought along clutter making it challenging to grab consumer attention. While some of the factors that affect consumer attention cannot be controlled, there are several others that can be managed. One of them being creativity.
A good creative always stands out and audiences instantly connect with one that appeals to their emotional quotient. However, what will actually reel in a consumer’s attention is the content in your marketing campaign.
If your campaign features content that piques consumer interest, it can amp up the consumer connect with your ad and drive more engagement. Another small but important detail is the timing for appearance of the brand logo. Often, the consumers don’t like to look at the advertisements if the brand logo is seen too soon, or appears repeatedly.
– Marketers should work on building a relationship with their consumers incrementally, starting with small activities that demand relatively smaller window of attention. For instance, start with short ads and then work your way up to longer, cinematic ads. Similarly, instead of running with an ad that is smacked with content from the word go, start slowly with content that teases, then continues to build interest and finally drives greater audience stickiness. This way brands can slowly, but steadily earn consumer attention, drive greater brand recall and gain a loyal set of customers for the long-term.
