Holiday countdown: 25 days of marketing with Bynder

Hate it or love it, but it’s time to dust off the old christmas balls, buy some new gifts and prepare yourself for the multi-day binge-eating fest we call Christmas. As we slowly approach this day we would like to bring some joy by providing you with some best practises in marketing. Everyday we have a new tip or trick, handy tool, or just something very cool. Make sure you come back tomorrow for a new tip or trick!

Want to read this in a different language? Click here for your holiday countdown in Dutch or German.

1. Brand association
2. Make it easy to understand
3. The golden circle
4. Always engage
5. The 9 word email
6. Selling is shifting to guidance
7. The need for speed
8. People are not search engines, are they?
9. Marketing automation without strategy is a train going nowhere
10. Keywords everywhere
11. The Swiss Army Knife method
12. Drive connections with your empowered customers
13. Think like your customers
14. Personalisation
15. Other people’s network, where growth hacking starts
16. There’s no school, like old school
17. It's finger lickin' good
18. Not just A/B testing: create better testing framework
19. Email marketing tricks: Get people to open, read and click
20. Video wins
21. Be known for what you do best and be loved for who you are
22. The early bird catches the worm
23. AI for marketing
24. Experiential marketing: The power of experiencing a brand
25. Creativity is fun

1. Brand association

Associate your company with strong brands. Your brand is strengthened or weakened by your connection to other brands. Find and leverage strong brands that can elevate your brand. Especially in fashion you can find that brands collaborate on very ‘exclusive’ collections. A great example is Rihanna x PUMA, a collaboration giving PUMA’s brand perception a glamorous touch while increasing sales by a remarkable amount. We at Bynder also have a few brands that we love:

2. Make it easy to understand

Explain what you do in a way a 7-year-old gets it: “Bynder Digital Asset management is a very smart toy box that contains all your toys. And if you decide that today you only want to play with the newest, plastic, yellow toys, Bynder will make sure that you will only see the latest Lego, that santa gave you this christmas.” Don't be an incomprehensible mystery, be exciting. Customers play an increasingly important part in shaping brand identity. Brand perception is not only shaped by us marketers but influenced by the experience your clients have and share about your product. Get one step closer to them and communicate in a language that they would use. If you feel brave enough make use of events such as a roundtable get-together where you will experience your clients' language, challenges and needs first hand. Make an effort to change your marketing strategy from pure selling to forming connections and amaze your clients by communicating on eye-level.

3. The golden circle

It may be a truly golden oldy, but it still is so so true. The Golden Circle in a nutshell: Whether they realise it or not, all great and inspiring leaders and organizations think, act and communicate in the same way... and it is the complete opposite from everyone else.

Every single organization on the planet, even our own careers, function on three levels:

1. What we do?
2. How we do it?
3. Why we do it?

When those three pieces are aligned, it gives us a filter through which to make decisions. It provides a foundation for innovation and for building trust. When all three pieces are in balance, others will say, with absolute clarity and certainty, “We know who you are,” “We know what you stand for.”

4. Always engage

Engage with each person that asks a question or mentions something about your brand. Even when it’s negative, no, especially when it’s negative. Because this way you can find out what’s wrong and try to fix it. Maybe your customer’s motivation is not always just, but your customer still is, and always will be king and you should always strive to keep them happy. Approach social media in a truly social manner. You will be remembered!

5. The 9-word-email

Surprisingly good results. How does it work? Actually, it’s pretty simple (and that is why it works). The subject of your email should be straight to the point. Afterwards you ask a very concrete question that provokes an answer. Then, the person will need more information and is more likely to interact with you.

6. Selling is shifting to guidance

B2B companies across industries are moving towards a journey-based sales strategy. This movement started out in B2C and is now slowly being adopted by business-to-business organisations. Successes have shown in various industries from industrial-equipment manufacturers, software firms, professional-services firms to telecom providers and basic-materials companies. The following three actions have proven to be very decisive:

1. Decision journey of buyer personas: Documenting decision journeys of buyer personas and focusing on customer expectations and needs at each stage of the journey.

2. Influence of sales and marketing: Focus sales and marketing resources to activities most likely to influence these decisions.

3. Alignment of sales and marketing: In order to succeed sales and marketing need to collaborate. Your customer should already be convinced before having the first personal contact with the product. Hard selling is shifting to guiding the customer.

There are more ways to modelling the customer journey, explore them here.

7. The need for speed

Speed to market is crucial in today’s fast-paced, digitalised world. If you are not the first to talk to your customers, your competitor will be. When launching a new product or campaign, it is key to provide departments with the best possible enablement tools such as branding automation, marketing resource management or insight, and analytics tools. By automating menial tasks and streamlining processes, valuable time is freed up. Instead of employing a suite solution, organizations need to move with the developing trend of specialised best-of-breed technologies. Combining the most suitable tools will help you integrate them smoothly into your technological ecosystem and enables your team to react quickly and agile to your customers' needs. Check out our MarTech takeaways to learn more about how technology can help you be faster and more efficient.

8. People are not search engines, are they?

We used to write unique content for the sake of high rankings in search engines. But we can honestly say that the focus is shifting from keyworded content to truly engaging information that is relevant for the readers. So make sure you start writing for people again, and you will see that if you answer their questions, and help them out, it is going to pay off. Today it’s about the post-click activity. Not only do you have to get the clicks, but you have to satisfy user intent. Google is putting extra weight on what Moz refers to as "content comprehensiveness", the degree to which a piece of content answers all potential questions. Check it out below:

9 .Marketing automation without strategy is a train going nowhere

We all know that marketing automation is a powerful tool if it fits your company’s technological ecosystem. But even more important is the ability to understand the business objective you want to use the tool for. Have a clear vision of your strategy and implement a tool that facilitates achieving it. Think of this like a train ride through a new city: Without a map of the city you will get lost at one point.Solutions always follow strategies. Consider the following examples:

• Increase your market share: Find a solution that speeds up your time-to-market
• Enter new markets: Find a solution that streamlines collaboration
• Increase value for your customers: Find a solution that analyzes your customers and provides insights

Many successful marketers follow these three steps: Define a strategy, find the right solutions, stay agile. This way you are able to create great customer experience by producing relevant content on a growing number of channels in a continuously changing market.

10.Keywords everywhere

Keyword research is an essential part of SEO, as it shows us which terms we should try to rank for. I have recently started using a cool chrome extension called Keywords Everywhere. If you search for a keyword on google, the tool will insert keyword volume and expected cpc costs under the search bar. This gives you instant insights into how popular that keyword is and how difficult it would be to rank highly for it.

11. The “Swiss Army Knife” method

Today is about how to create amazingly converting ads. Most people are too scared to boldly experiment with new ideas and approach customers from a completely different, surprising direction. Especially well-established businesses fear to hurt their CTR and stable, high rankings.

Most business find one decent formula, which they just refine. But you can do so much better! The so called “ Swiss Army Knife” method describes an approach of using a more emotion-driven communication style to evoke an emotional response in your customer. The goal is to combine as many of the 17 blades of the swiss army knife as possible. Among other you can choose from:

• Relationships
• Imagery
• Emotions
• Types of statements
• Time
• Proof
• Numbers
• Direct marketing offers

How do you feel about this example:

Are you a loser or a winner?
Make your brand image shine
Brand consistency is revenue of the future: Stop killing you company with bad branding!
www.bynder.com/trial

Brand consistency is revenue of the future: Stop killing you company with bad branding!In this extreme example you address your customers’ emotions with a question that puts blame on them, then aaa a visual description and finally a future outlook and active CTA triggering action out of fear.

12.Drive connections with your empowered customers

We all know that we need to offer relevant information to stay in the customer’s mind; but did you know that timing plays a crucial factor for achieving this? Standardised notifications will soon be replaced by personalised interaction as technology gives us the opportunity to share information based on individual, customers-based events. Boost customer experience and engagement by shifting real time to right time marketing activity.

The 4 R’s of right time marketing make the difference between good and great customer acquisition and retention:

1. The Right Person
2. The Right Channel
3. The Right Moment
4. The Right Answer

Only personalised content has the necessary impact on today’s empowered customer. Make the effort of catering specifically to individuals and keep your customers’ loyalty forever.

13.Think like your customers

You probably know everything about your product - which you should. Then you want to market the best side of your product to your potential users. “Ah this is awesome, and that is our USP, so they should know this and that”, is what you start to tell yourself when setting up a new product tutorial, or writing a piece of content. But think again: what do your users really care about? Your best target audience should have a question to be answered, or a pain to be killed. You talk to their needs, not to what your products can do or how awesome it is.

To think like your targeting audience, you need to understand them better. Go where they go: if your TG's are on facebook, check out their interests using facebook similar page analysis for your own and competitors’ pages. Do what they do: do as the Romans do, their needs always come from their daily jobs, their current and future goals. Gather soft data to enrich your hard data: if majority of people are dropping from certain pages, can you conduct a survey to find out why? Or watch web event recordings like what Hotjar offers? There are so many tools out there to understand what your users are doing on your platform. Even more important, also talk to them. From real conversations you can find the best insights to validate your buyer personas and how to think like them and talk to their needs.

14. Personalisation is all about relevance

Personalization will become the dominate marketing communication tactic for the coming year. You want your users to feel important at a personal level and let them know that you understand their needs at the very moment. Personalization is way beyond just adding {user.firstname} in your email copy. “Being personal” is not just about calling someone by their name, but also about understanding who your customers are, what they are looking for and what you can best offer to meet their needs.

Here are a few easy but powerful tips for improving personalization in your strategy:

• Use segmented emails for personalizing your email copy
• Identify the core pains your product is resolving and get personalised data from your targeting audience; E.g. if you are selling a solution, which integrates well with others, find the tools your target audience is using and if they are integratable with your product.
• Start with small steps of personalization, such as geographically targeting clients and offering testimonials on your landing pages.
• Develop a psychological buyer personas strategy if you don’t have one yet, which focuses purely on buyers’ interests, desires, demands. Then tailor your messages based on these personas.
• Personalization in your storytelling, think like your customers and tell what they want to hear.

The future is offering even more. Find what suits your business best:

• Personalised websites with most relevant design and copy;
• Personalised copy for at-the-moment marketing;
• Personalised recommendation engines powered by prediction analysis;
• Increased usage of psychological buyer personas and elimination of demographic personas;
• Personalised customer care and chatbots for all-around marketing and customer relations;
• Personalisation will be based on both relevant interests and intentions;
• Personalisation will scale up across all channels and devices, including wearables;
• The personalisation process will all be automated, while strategies still rely on persuasive marketers who can fully understand their target audience.

All sounds difficult? No worries, the robust algorithms and machine learning in form of AI will be the biggest enhancer of all personalization means. We will talk about AI for marketing in the coming days so stay tuned!

15. Other people’s network, where growth hacking starts

Acquiring new customers is always top priority of business development. But customer acquisition also counts to the most difficult task. Think of the “unicorns” that are enjoying organic growth of active users: Facebook, Airbnb, Uber, Dropbox and even Google’s gmail. Where do they get the first batch of early adopters to hit their tipping points? The answer is other people’s network.

We all know that it’s extremely difficult to acquire new users these days. But let’s take a step back and look at the whole map of the Internet: your users are already present somewhere else, on other people’s platforms, in other people’s network.

The amount of Internet users is growing over 3.4 billion this year, so is the number of channels available to reach out to them. The choice ranges from established social media platforms to online communities to growing channels like snapchat and slack. As the next “big thing” is constantly changing, the question occurs: Which network will your targeting audience choose?

When Airbnb “hacked” Craigslist, they were on the direct track to find and acquire their targeting audience, people who demand short term rentals. Back then, Craigslist was the biggest go-to site in this niche market. Airbnb realized their first big growth by posting rentals on this platform.

A perfect example for the power of referral is Dropbox’s early growth. By incentivizing users to invite friends to get more storage, they increased the core value of the product. From the referral, Dropbox tagged into existing user’s personal networks. Plus, they also made the referring process as simple as possible with only one click. This simple referral program helped dropbox to increase the amount of users from a few thousands to 4 millions in just 2 years, while 2.8 million invites were sent in April 2010 alone. Up to today, 35% of their paid users came from referrals.

16. There’s no school, like old school

Don't forget about old school marketing. We are so deep in online marketing, technology, AI and all the other groundbreaking solutions, that we tend to forget the great things we can do with offline, print and out-of-home. Gather inspiration from all the creative ideas out there and surprise your customers.

The business card can still–when executed correctly–be a very strong marketing tactic. Not only should you drop it whenever you get a chance, but you should be creative when it comes to the how. Make a lasting impression and you’ll be the person that gets the call.

17. It’s finger lickin’ good

So you are probably expecting an insight on a very innovative technological solution. And I hate to disappoint you, but I think it’s great when people find an obvious solutions to a problem we have been experiencing for years. Like separating egg yolks with a bottle.

KFC Japan did not feel like their dirty fingers were an additional feature to the chicken they are selling. So they came up with a surprisingly simple, but smart idea: Plastic gloves for your index finger and thumb to keep them nice and clean. Ironically enough they launched the chicken-finger-condoms right before Christmas. As you may or may not know, it’s Japanese tradition to eat KFC during Christmas. Saying goodbye to your family has never been more hygienic.

18. Not just A/B testing: create better testing framework

Online marketing relating to UX design is shifting from design-centric to user-centric, focusing on usability more than ever. Therefore, testing is rather important to make design decisions based on real user reactions.

Never say “this will work for sure” until you actually test and prove that it’s right. Online marketers should adopt the mindset of growth hacking: everything we come up with is just another assumption without being tested. Version A or B, only your actual users can tell you which one works better. With the best help from the newest technologies, we can gather better insights from users, understand their behaviours and directly apply data into practice.

All elements on your website can be testing variables, but they are not all important for your users. Focus on the potential, importance and ease of the experiments you want to run to validate and prioritize your ideas.

What makes a good experiment? It starts with a good experiment design, which you and the whole team are clearly aware of. This includes agreement on:

• Hypothesis of the experiment: what result do you expect and what impact would it have
• The variables, which are tested
• Duration and details on how to run the experiment: normally a test should take at least one week to cover all weekdays, and up to 4 weeks because of people’s cookie duration
• The most important factor: your success criteria

But be aware that A/B testing can never give you the perfect answer. Also as people’s behaviours are changing along the landscape of the Internet, what works now won’t guarantee success 3 months later. This is also why continuous testing is important for general conversion rate optimization.

19. Email marketing tricks: Get people to open, read and click

Email is one of your most powerful channels and accounts for the highest ROI in digital marketing. In order to measure performance Marketers have two key metrics: Email opening rate and click-through rate.

How effective is your campaign?

CTR is the most important performance indicator when evaluating effectiveness. The average CTR differs between industries, but also target audience and type of email play a role. For instance, CTR of B2C newsletter is with around 3% lower than in B2B (5%). The following tactics show amazing results in obtaining high CTR, standing out and winning the war of attention in the inbox:

• Keep it simple: Short, vague subject lines containing less than 10 characters have 49.73% open rates
• Mix of marketing and transactional emails: Combine content and offers
• Test everything: You have the ability to test nearly everything from headline and content length, to design to time and day
• Selected audience: Emails sent to smaller groups (50 to 100 people) have higher open and click rates

But it’s about more than a great open rate and CTR. Have you ever thought about the impact of being filtered out and ending up in the spam folder? Not only do people not see your emails anymore but if they do your brand is shown next to dirty advertisement and shady businesses. So let’s be honest: How likely is it that someone who received your mail without opening it for a year will all the sudden turn into a sale? Increase engagement and ROI by dividing your database into segments that you can target instead of sending irrelevant emails in bulk. Start testing, optimizing and targeting specific personas and watch your CTR rise. Check out some of the best email marketing campaigns here.

20. Video wins

In a world of increasing awareness competition, stand out with your videos. Content marketing is embracing visuals as more engaging and shareable elements. It’s not surprising, considering that the human brain can generally process visuals up to 60,000 times faster than text. Mobile is another factor that boosts the usage of videos. On mobile devices, users spend more than 40 minutes watching videos, according to YouTube.

We will see more video formats develop in the future:

Interactive video

Videos are shifting from passive messages to engaging platforms. Check out the interactive videos that won this year’s Webby Awards.

Livestreaming

Perfect for events. Livestream videos create a “live” and “real time” connections with your customers. In order to succeed the content needs to be very conversational and personal. A few brands already use it successfully for engaging customers online, as well as expanding social media and general public relations.

360-degree video

Even though this format of video is still relatively new, it catches customers' attention and engages every time. Embrace this unique experience of sharing videos on Facebook. Some big publishers like The New York Times and National Geographic are doing great jobs in sharing their 360-degree videos on social channels. Google’s research shows that well-done 360-degree videos encourage viewers to watch more and interact. Therefore, it can potentially bring in big wins for video ads.

The next step is virtual reality. This technology requires a higher level of visual storytelling asits core is creating a specific experience. More and more brands are discovering the opportunity that VR holds for an improved brand experience. Will Virtual Reality play a key role in your marketing strategy in 2017?

21. Be known for what you do best and be loved for who you are

People hitting gongs, cracking giant bottles of champagne open, mannequin challenges during company lunch, tiny blue moustaches and even an actual Bynder heart tattoo! Yes of course not every day looks like this behind our office walls, but we know how to celebrate our achievements. So why not highlight all the moments that made this a very special year for each and everyone of us in a touching video?

Think of your customers and how they perceive you. They will want to work with you even more if you can demonstrate how proud you are of what you do. Today's most successful companies are perceived as lovable. Being known for your amazing product or service is important but the real and lasting success comes from showing good nature by treating employees well and fostering company culture.
Be a lovable and authentic brand and share your achievements with your customers and employees alike.

22. The early bird catches the worm

In a time where marketing teams are faced with constant deadline pressure, time-to-market is one of the top challenges. Handling multiple projects simultaneously can lead to difficulties in prioritizing tasks and finally reduced your flexibility and speed of launching new projects. Especially unavailable resources and the time needed to search for specific material hinders the timely development of a new product or campaign. Don’t lose potential customers and opportunities to generate traffic because you were too slow!

Make use of the many possibilities to leverage revenue by optimizing time-to-market and work more organized and efficiently:

Structure your work

Well-defined workflows minimize waste of time throughout the process and make collaboration more efficient. Make sure you stay flexible in adapting to customer preference changes by aligning sales and marketing efforts in so called smarketing.

Test quicker

Be bold when you test if you want to make decisions quicker. Many companies need too much time to obtain insights because they are afraid of experimenting boldly. Especially if traffic is low, go for the biggest difference between version A and B. If you test a responsive retargeting ad, don’t only vary the picture in the add but also text, CTA and tone of voice.

Use technology

Process automation and technology for media and information management are crucial to stay competitive. Before implementing any technology in your processes ask yourself one question: Which tool fits your organizational needs? A suite solution, such as Adobe, which helps you with all your needs in one tool or a best-of-breed solution, which offers the best service for each individual need?

23. AI for marketing

Artificial intelligence is the talk of the town. Where can AI help with marketing? AI can be the next major wave of innovation. With the extensive applications and opportunities out there, it will largely change the landscape of technology for better understanding and as some big players in the industry are taking further steps in developing AI, including Google, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon and Salesforce, the technology is already available to us on many different levels.

We need to start thinking how exactly we can make use of AI as our marketing assistant to understand our target audience better (deep learning and analysis), and to craft and deliver the most relevant content (dynamic content) faster, better and easier.

Here are some already existing examples of AI applications that can serve marketing in smarter ways:

• AI for copywriting
• AI for frontend design
• AI for a/b testing
• AI for predictive analysis and recommendation
• AI for dynamic content and behavioral targeting

24. Experiential marketing: The power of experiencing a brand

Experiential marketing is a very good tactic to establish a relationship between your brand and your customer. A way to do this is letting your customers experience your product or service to prove it’s value. By facilitating an experience where the senses get stimulated you really spark the conversations they are having about your brand. Globetrotter is a German company that sells outdoor equipment and clothing, and to prove the quality of their products they created weather rooms instead of fitting rooms where they tried to simulate different weather conditions. A small slice of brilliance, in my opinion.

It doesn’t even have to prove the quality of your product, just make sure something unexpected happens, that you catch them off guard and make it surprising. The North Face also indulged in experiential marketing by literally sweeping its customers off their feet.

Start to think about how people experience your brand or product, what problem does it solve and how can you jump in at the right moment. Because your customers actually do need you; they simply don’t know it yet.

25. Creativity is fun

We hope you enjoyed our holiday countdown and wish you a merry Christmas and a happy new year! Let’s fill the upcoming year with a lot of fresh ideas, innovative technology and inspiring content. Always try to be original and try to move people. Like EDEKA did.

Merry Christmas!