Coming Soon: NZ Content Marketing Presentation 2017

We are now gearing up to release the presentation NZ Content Marketing 2017, on Monday July 3. This is the newest presentation in our New Zealand Marketing Insights series, which began last month with our NZ Consumer Trends 2017 presentation.

We just wanted to let you know a little more about it — and also let you know about a special hot offer, only available until Friday June 30.

Content Marketing 2017 was originally scheduled for release later this year, but because it was one of our most popular topics we’ve bumped it up the publication schedule.

Content Marketing continues to blossom, especially in New Zealand, as more and more brands realise that consumers are doing their own homework online rather than seeking advice from salespeople (who may — how can we put this delicately? — not be entirely objective).

Content Marketing (sometimes called Digital Storytelling) is also, according to a recent US study, one of the top two trends impacting the future of both Marketing and Public Relations.

That’s why Content Marketing has earned its place as one of the topics we cover in this year’s Marketing Insights Presentation Series.

Here’s a little taste of what the presentation covers:

The three types of content regarded as most important for effective content optimisation in 2017
The convergence of SEO and Content Marketing and what that means for marketing and communications professionals
Search intents across mobile and desktop, how and why they are different and the implications
The surprising new importance of voice search (and what marketers are doing about it)
What marketers think about artificial intelligence and its importance for the future of content marketing

And:

The power of Nearby and Micro-Moment Marketing
The ubiquitous smart phone continue to change the game. Where once longform content was king, now snackable snippets — served up in answer to queries like “restaurant near me” — have become the new currency. We explore the trend and its implications.

Content Marketing as Defensive Mechanism
So many people are talking — not always positively — about brands and companies online, and organisations don’t always get the chance to present their own point of view as part of that conversation. As a result, many are turning to Content Marketing as a means to get their message out there.

Talking to Your Own
Content marketing has also seen itself become an internal PR tool, used to communicate in a planned and more effective manner with staff, dealers and suppliers. How are you ensuring that your own people know what they should about your organisation?

Overcoming “Content Shock”
Even when marketers do invest in Content Marketing, there are challenges. One of the biggest challenge: getting heard out there, amongst the ever-increasing cacophony of social media posts, blogs, video and all. It’s been dubbed “Content Shock” — and we look at how to deal with it.

Content Will Get useful or Get Ignored
Smart marketers will begin to invest in bigger content projects such as creating free and robust online tools, writing the go-to books in their industries, and creating environments where their customers can build a community to share knowledge

Accountability
content marketers will be held accountable not just for how much content they create, but what it does for the business (much like demand generation teams).

Other topics that will feature in this presentation include:

Personalisation
Engagement
Data-driven Insights
Interactive Experiences
Face-to-face Opportunities & Live Events
challenges of developing engaging visual content
the talent shortage
Algorithm-driven content distribution
Live video
compelling content experiences
the emergence of AI journalism
Immersive Content Formats
Science-based content marketing
The rise of the Content Librarian
The continuing rise of paid promotion and the decline of organic reach

NZ Content Marketing 2017 is due to be released on Monday July 3.

The presentation looks ahead at what marketers should expect and plan for in 2017 and 2018 — based on local and global trends you may not yet have had the opportunity to examine — turning those forecasts into a comprehensive report & slide deck in PowerPoint format (with accompanying notes) – information that you can easily present to your team and your clients, bringing everyone up to speed on the latest New Zealand Marketing Insights as we accelerate through what remains of 2017. All presentations are unbranded, so you can add your own branding and comments.

All of our presentations in this Marketing Insights series consist of at least 150 slides, dealing with as many key insights.

SPECIAL OFFER

Each presentation is available to purchase and reuse, for $597 plus GST (with volume discounts available for purchases of multiple presentations).

As noted above, however, we are delighted to offer our NZ Content Marketing 2017 presentation, for just $547+GST, a saving of $50.

To purchase by credit card via PayPal, please click here:

This offer is valid until the end of Friday 30 June.

After that time, the price becomes $597+GST.

BILLING OPTIONS
If you would prefer to pay by bank deposit or require an invoice before making payment, please send an email to [email protected] with details of your request. (The service provider will be shown as Netmarketing Services Limited in your transaction and on your credit card statement).

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
1. Your purchase will be confirmed by email.
2. On Monday July 3, once the Content Marketing presentation is published, download instructions will be provided to you by email.

21 Reasons Why You Need Social Media Marketing Training

Too many businesses unfortunately seem to think that they can simply delegate their social media marketing efforts to a young(ish) staff member and then walk away.

“After all,” they reason, “these people grew up on social media. They already connect with their friends through Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp. Should be easy for them to run our social media marketing campaigns.”

Ummm, not so fast. Sure, it can work — but, far too often, it doesn’t.

Here, for your interest and edification, are 21 reasons why you and your team need training in the fine art of social media marketing:

First, as suggested by Business2Community:

1 Protect Your Brand

Training employees on the responsible use of social media protects the brand from employees sharing information (often unintentionally) that they shouldn’t have done about their work or the company.

2 Build Their Own Brand

If employees are able to build their personal brand online, they can establish themselves as thought leaders in a niche area that can help influence and educate potential buyers. By enabling employees to become ‘social’ with their own personal brand, you create a wealth of opportunities that you could only dream of with your brand channels.

3 Socially trained employees are more likely to share branded content

In my experience, when you educate employees on the importance of having a personal brand and building their network first, they are three times more likely to start sharing content than those that haven’t been given that context. By the time you introduce social sharing into the training model, employees will understand how this will impact their profile. They will have done the basic ‘profile’ updates. They’re in a place where they’re READY to start sharing and they know what to share, how often and to which channel. They are confident.

4 Socially trained employees will yield more impressions

Typically a trained employee will yield three times more social impressions per share than a non-trained employee and this is mainly because they have invested time in building their network first. I always emphasise the importance of building and nurturing a strong network around your personal brand. Once you’ve achieved this you’re ready to start sharing. For example, it makes no sense to jump into sharing content if you’re only connected to 20 people on LinkedIn.

5 Socially trained employees will increase your engagements

Naturally, if you’re gaining more impressions you will attract more engagements including likes, comments and shares. I’ve found that trained employees will generate anywhere between 30-50% more engagements than non-trained employees and this is because they know what kind of content works well on which network. They know how to encourage engagement.

6 Socially trained employees will generate more clicks

Marketing will understand the importance of this one because in the paid media world, every click costs dollars. In my experience, employees who share content generated 50% more clicks than when I shared the same piece of content via branded social channels. WOW!

Employees who were social media trained generated twice the amount of clicks than employees who weren’t trained.

This has a lot to do with making sure that the content is relevant for the employee’s personal brand and that it’s good content. Well written, full of useful insights and easy to read. Poor content won’t fly with your employees…or on any social channel for that matter.

PRSay adds several more:

7. Social media is a team sport

On social media, reach is a factor of engagement. The more people like, comment, retweet and +1 a share on a social network, the broader and further it travels. Posts that attract the most engagement are also the most visible. When someone interacts with a post on a social network, they do so in front of their online friends. If any of their friends engage, that message gets passed along. If you train the whole company and teach how to engage in company communications, the result is social media marketing at scale.

8. Policy isn’t enough

A social media policy is a critical component of any social media strategy. However, a policy only provides value if people actually read and understand it. “Probably as important as the policy itself is the training and the guidance that you give people around the policy. The best policy in the world is kind of useless if it sits on a shelf or it’s on your intranet and either people don’t look at it or really understand the nuances,” Daniel M. Goldman, general counsel at the Mayo Clinic, told me in a recent episode of the social media podcast On the Record…Online when discussing HIPPA compliant social media policies.

9. Official channels are less trusted

As much as digital natives have the impulse to share, most organizations have the impulse to channel communications through a public relations representative or their leadership. Now that everyone’s on social media, that strategy doesn’t work as well. Here’s why: there’s an increasingly wide gap between the degree of trust we have in institutions versus their leadership. It’s even wider for government than it is for business, and it shows that relying exclusively on CEOs and official spokespeople for external communications is a losing strategy. We trust subject matter experts more than the PR of the C-suite, research shows.

10. Industry leaders are tech savvy

Digital leaders in business outperform their peers in every industry. Businesses that invest in technology-enabled customer engagement and internal operations initiatives are, on average, 26 percent more profitable, and enjoy 12 percent higher market valuations, says a new report from CapGemini and MIT. Given the ease with which it enables collaboration, social media has the potential to supercharge customer and employee communications.

11. Training helps minimize employee turnover

Over the last two years, nearly half of all employers have had to deal with the misuse of social media by employees (or former employees). During that same period, nearly half of all employers have allowed access to social media sites at work, and these numbers are steadily rising. But less than one-third actually train personnel on the responsible use of social media at work, according to a recent report by Proskauer International. Providing access to social networks in the workplace without offering social media training is an ineffective way to achieve compliance.

Your colleagues are already using social media in the workplace to stay current on industry trends, collaborate with their coworkers, and to source and procure suppliers and service providers. Search tools and social media make it easier for them to get their jobs done. Why wouldn’t they take the shortest path to achieving their objective, and why wouldn’t you encourage them to do so? Remember, the by-product of all those online discussions is an arsenal of tweets, status updates and posts that become a trail of digital bread crumbs that lead back to you.

And Half a Bubble Out supplies four more:

12 Understanding Platforms

One thing that most people don’t understand is that there is a difference between business social media accounts and personal social media accounts. The back end looks different and the setup process is different as well. For people who aren’t trained or don’t have any experience with social media business pages, understanding this can be confusing. Since platforms constantly have updates and changes, business accounts need to be constantly monitored, have a strategy, have a planned message and be deliberate.

13 Strategizing for Goals

One of the best ways to improve your social media efforts is to strategize your message and actions before you do it. Then you can analyze the success of the strategy and make improvements from there. But everything that you do on social media should have a purpose. You might not have thought that social media training would include strategy, but this is important to an excellent social media presence.

14 Creating Relationships

Social media is great for creating engagement, and also for nurturing relationships on the different networks. These platforms can help build trust and credibility when you share helpful and relevant content to your followers. And most of your conversations are public, so how you handle situations and comments can speak loudly for your business.

15 Abiding by Guidelines

Every company should have different guidelines so the expectations are clear. If you have a light-hearted audience like we do at Half a Bubble Out, then posting a picture of our employees enjoying a glass of wine to celebrate the week would be appropriate. But this might not be appropriate for all businesses. Training your employees to use their best judgement and following these guidelines is crucial to keep the integrity of your brand.

Oh, and here are another half-dozen reasons that we wrote about, back in the day:

Social Media Warning Signs

Get yourself social media training fast if your business makes any of these mistakes:

16 Getting into an argument and insulting your customers and followers

It was the customer service disaster heard around the Internet. An Arizona restaurateur, fed up after years of negative online reviews and an embarrassing appearance on a reality television show, posted a social media rant laced with salty language and angry, uppercase letters that quickly went viral, to the delight of people who love a good Internet meltdown.

17 Not replying to questions and comments on your social media platforms.

Too many brands simply ignore what’s being said to them, with entirely predictable results. This graph from SocialBakers shows which industries are the best (and worst) at responding:

18 All you talk about in social media is yourself

Only 10% of what you talk about in social media should be yourself and your own products or services. The rest of your discussions should be about things that matter to your followers. Don’t be like this Donut shop, constantly posting meaningless pictures of donuts and drinks to an audience that couldn’t care less (3416 followers but less than a dozen likes per image).

19 Nobody’s talking about you

As you may have heard, Facebook is dialing back its organic reach. What that means, in a nutshell, is that even if someone likes your Facebook brand page, it’s most unlikely that they will see your posts in their newsfeed. That means, to all intents and purposes, that you’re invisible to your followers — unless (a) you promote your posts to them; or (b) you write posts that are sufficiently interesting and engaging that they get shared by the few that do see them (and thus get out to a wider audience).

The Star Wars page on Facebook, for example, despite 11 million followers, was only averaging around 15,000 weekly talks — until May the Fourth (“be with you”), when interest surged and more than a quarter of a million people found Star Wars worth talking about again on Facebook.

20 Everybody’s talking about you (but not in a good way)

Justine Sacco, head of public relations for UK media giant IAC, flew towards Africa in December 2013, blissfully unaware of the uproar caused by her final tweet before boarding her 12-hour flight.

Even though Ms Sacco had a mere 200 followers, the tweet went viral even while she was flying. Her tweet was universally condemned as racist, resulting in the hashtag #HasJustineLandedYet trending worldwide. Unsurprisingly, Ms Sacco lost her job, her former employer apologised profusely and several AIDS charities received donations from appalled twitterati.

21 You post too often (or too seldom)

How often should you post to your social networks? That depends on (a) your networks; and (b) your followers.

If you’re posting to Twitter, for example, and reaching out to a business audience, then posting (variations on the same information) at three-hour intervals during the business day is acceptable — very few will see more than one post, given the transient nature of Twitter.

On the other hand, posting to a consumer audience via Facebook should be less frequent, because posts are likely to linger more there. Take a look at your Facebook page Insights data and view “When Your Fans Are Online”.

Post perhaps twice a day, at times that coincide with most of your fans being online.

Once you realise you need Social Media Training

We would be remiss if we didn’t point you to our range of social media marketing courses:

If you want a comprehensive overview of Social Media Marketing, its principles and its practices, start here
If you want a rundown of the various social media channels, check out our Advanced Social Media Marketing course here
If you already have a solid understanding of social media but need to keep up with the latest developments, check out our Social Media Marketing Essentials course
If you want to market your business on Facebook but don’t know how, our Complete Facebook Marketing course is the place to start
If you’re already active on Facebook but think you could be doing it better, our Facebook Accelerator course could be the one for you
If you operate in the B2B space, we strongly recommend you learn How To Use LinkedIn Effectively
If you plan to use social media but won’t be hands-on yourself, you should take a look at our course covering How To Prepare An Effective Social Media Brief

The Challenge For Kiwi Marketers

Today’s marketers clearly have a problem. And it’s one that’s facing businesses all around the world. The old marketing solutions simply aren’t enough anymore. Sure, consumers still watch TV, listen to the radio and read newspapers and magazines — but not as much, not as often, and certainly not with their full attention on the advertising messages that populate those spaces.

Most Kiwis, according to the World Internet Project NZ (2015), use the Internet:

All this connectivity comes at a price, of course. However, thankfully, more than half of us are now on an Internet plan that includes unlimited data.

We have the access — and we’re making heavy use of it. Today’s consumers are spending more and more time in the digital space.

Roy Morgan Research reveals that we now spend almost half of our media consumption time online …

… and the biannual World Internet Project NZ data reveals that two-thirds of us (in this instance, “us” means Kiwi Internet users) visit social media networks at least daily.

In other words, where once the best place for marketers to find Kiwis in large numbers watching TV, listening to radio or reading newspapers or magazines, nowadays online in general (and social media in particular) is where we mostly choose to spend our time.

So how many of us can be found hanging out on Social Media networks in a typical month?

Nielsen New Zealand to the rescue:

That’s a whole lot of cat pictures!

Another study, by New Zealand On Air, reveals that there’s still quite a digital divide between Kiwis Under 40 and older generations:

Source: NZOnAir Audience Report 2016

The most notable intergenerational differences?

If you’re under 40, you’re:

significantly more likely to be watching online video (typically via YouTube and Facebook) than traditional (linear) TV
reading newspapers (whether in print or online) at around half the numbers of your older counterparts
five times as likely to listen to music online through services like Spotify
four times as likely to subscribe to video on demand services such as Netflix, Lightbox or Neon

Oh, and if you’re Under 55, you’re virtually guaranteed to have a smartphone …

All that consumer attention switching to digital devices rather explains why NZ advertisers are following suit, with the inevitable result that Digital Advertising now attracts more dollars than any other New Zealand medium.

So if you’re one of those 47% of small businesses who still aren’t online (according to a recent MYOB “State of the Digital Nation” Special Report), or if you consider that you have only a limited understanding of Digital Marketing and how you can promote your business through digital activities, then we recommend you check out our NZ Digital Marketing 101 online training course.

NZ Digital Marketing 101 online training course

We’ve drawn on our (gulp!) 30 years of online experience to introduce our first ongoing course, DIGITAL MARKETING 101, to take participants from a standing start (knowing very little about Digital Marketing) through to more advanced topics building on earlier lessons.

DIGITAL MARKETING 101 runs weekly across six months, and covers:

Introduction to digital marketing
The basics of Digital Marketing and what you need to know to promote your organisation and your brand online. In this lesson, we cover Digital Marketing Options available in the NZ marketplace and discuss which are the most important (based on your target market and your brand objectives).
Developing a web presence
In Lesson Two we discuss the various ways in which you can build your presence online (we assume that, like most NZ businesses, you’re operating on a shoestring so mostly we talk about free or low-cost options). We also look at the key online elements you should claim to ensure that you own your brand identity online.
Claiming your Google My Business page
In Lesson Three we cover the strategic importance of your Google My Business page — it’s how you tell Google your key information — and exactly what you need to do to claim that page.
Understanding the customer journey
The customer journey (also Customer Journey Experience, Customer Engagement Cycle) refers to the stages customers travel through in their relationship with a specific brand (as defined by DJS Research). In this lesson, we step you through what you need to know to map out your brand’s customer journey and market accordingly.
Creating a digital marketing calendar
As you market online, you’ll quickly realise that you constantly need to create fresh content, to feed your web pages, your emails, your social media posts, press releases and other online information — Google loves fresh and so do your customers. But what can you talk about (you can’t only talk about yourself, as you’ll soon discover). In this lesson, we talk about how to create a digital marketing calendar (and what to talk about).
Secrets of effective outsourcing
If you don’t already have existing arrangements with marketing suppliers, don’t miss Lesson Six. In this lesson, we talk about where you can turn for effective (and cost-efficient) marketing assistance, how to choose reliable suppliers and exactly what you should outsource to propel your business forward.
Mastering email marketing
It’s the oldest digital marketing tool of all, but it’s still the most effective for most target audiences. In this lesson we talk about email marketing strategies and best practices, and the tools you should use to promote your business as effectively as possible through email.
Lead generation principles
Generally speaking, as a business marketing online, you either want online buyers, online followers or online leads (those prospects who will convert into buyers later). In this lesson, we listen to highly-experienced digital marketers and draw on their collective wisdom to understand the best ways to generate leads (and turn them into buyers, consistently and efficiently).
Search engine optimisation (SEO)
Turns out that there’s quite a science to being found online (and an industry has grown up around the challenges of what’s now known as Search Engine Optimisation). In essence, if you want your prospects to find your web pages, those pages need to contain content that prospects are looking for. In Lesson Nine, we explore the How, What, When, Where & Why of SEO.
Pay per click search advertising
Not every page can be Number One on Google. So if you want to hit the top of the search engine rankings (especially for the most popular search phrases), sometimes you have to pay. In this lesson, we talk in detail about AdWords and other Pay Per Click advertising tools.
Social media marketing explained
Once upon a time — up until about 2012 — if you had a Facebook page and posted content to that page, all of your followers would see it. Sorry, not any more. In this lesson we explore exactly what you need to do to build an effective presence in social media.
Creating effective Facebook posts
What really works on Facebook these days? We spell out the characteristics of successful Facebook posts and identify 20 different posting formats that get noticed and get shared. Then we review the types of posts worth sharing, accompanied by a wide range of examples.
Conversion optimisation
In Lesson Eight, we talked about Lead Generation. In this lesson, we focus on what you need to do to convert those leads into sales. Every little improvement turns into extra dollars, so it’s definitely worth the effort optimising your conversion rates.
What you need to know about Content Marketing
According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. It’s particularly relevant to B2B marketers, but it’s important for B2C as well. In this lesson we explore the principles of content marketing, including Creation, Curation and Content Pillars.
Finding Kiwi influencers to promote your products
Influencer Marketing has come from nowhere to become a hot buzzword these days, as more and more businesses turn to “influencers” — those who have already developed their own followers, especially in social media — and sponsor posts to promote their products. In this lesson, we explore the Dos & Don’ts of Influencer Marketing, and how to find Kiwi Influencers.
What you need to know when writing for the web
Writing online copy has become more important than ever — but there are processes to follow, and structures and formats that are forced on us by the various digital media channels. This lesson covers the key facts that you need to know when writing for the web, including the seven deadly sins you need to avoid.
Mastering Visual Marketing
Images and visual concepts are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text, according to 3M Corporation research. Add in our seven-second attention span (shorter than goldfish now) and it’s quickly obvious why visual marketing has become so important online. In this lesson, we explore how you can use visuals to multiply the effectiveness of your online content (and free and low-cost tools you can use).
The basics of video marketing
Online Video is no longer an “up-and-coming” marketing tactic — it’s here, and it’s a powerful way to communicate your brand story, explain your value proposition, and build relationships with your customers and prospects. This lesson introduces you to the basic principles and explores some of the available tools.
Moving to Mobile First
In his book “The Third Screen“, Chuck Martin points out that “the world gone mobile is not a simple story of technological change, it is a story of fundamental shifts in consumer behaviour that are forever changing the practice of marketing and how you should view its application with your business”. In this lesson, we talk about why “Mobile First” — ensuring that your content looks good on mobile devices, even before you see how it looks on a desktop device — is now essential.
The principles of selling online
More than half of New Zealand (58%) now buys products online! Seven out of ten Kiwi internet users aged 25-44 purchase online — and 94% of NZ web users who research products and services online (even if they eventually buy the products offline). In this lesson, we introduce you to the principles and practices of effective ecommerce.
Mastering Google Analytics
It’s free, and it’s packed full with information that can transform your digital marketing efforts. We’re talking Google Analytics, and a great many online marketers use the free Analytics service to track the performance of their digital marketing. In this lesson, you’ll discover exactly what you can learn from Google Analytics and how to master it (even if you hate maths and stats).
Considering native advertising
The technology known as Adblocking can cause havoc for digital marketers, with ads stripped from web pages before users can see them. Native advertising — ads that mimic the editorial format of the pages on which they appear — is one of the more powerful ways to combat Adblocking. Of course, it’s not new. In the old days, we would have called it Advertorial. But these days it’s more prevalent, and more valuable, than ever.
Marketing through messaging apps
Messaging Apps, also known as Dark Social, have gone from strength to strength in recent years, with Facebook’s own Messenger and WhatsApp leading the way. In this lesson, we explore Messaging Apps and tell you what you need to know to use them effectively for marketing purposes.
The new importance of consumer reviews
The customer has gone from being always right to now always having an opinion — and, through social media and specialist services such as TripAdvisor, Yelp and even Trade Me, now having a direct and powerful influence on their peers. Look no further than Amazon.com, where one-star and two-star reviews can quickly kill a product. In this lesson, we look at customer input, how you should monitor it and what you can do about negative ratings.
When to use marketing automation
Marketing Automation — software tools designed to handle repetitive tasks such as emails and web actions — can improve your efficiency and even (if used effectively) enable you to take actions that would otherwise not be possible. In this lesson, we explore the capabilities of marketing automation platforms and consider if and how you might use them in your business.
Key new marketing technologies
In this lesson, we peek into the digital marketing technologies of today and tomorrow, including such topics as programmatic advertising, voice search, chatbots & Artificial Intelligence. The digital tools are getting smarter and smarter, and you need to keep track of what’s possible (and what’s inevitable).

Please note: all materials are online and can be accessed anytime 24/7, so you don’t have to make yourself available at a specific time to take this course.

At the end of DIGITAL MARKETING 101, you’ll be given the opportunity to move on to DIGITAL MARKETING 201, which covers even more advanced topics.

WHO SHOULD TAKE THIS COURSE

Any NZ marketer or business owner who needs to understand and master Digital Marketing.

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WHAT CUSTOMERS ARE SAYING ABOUT OUR COURSES

Here’s a sampling of the feedback we’ve received from those who’ve taken our courses:

Thanks for an informative and interesting [Facebook Accelerator] course. Your presentation held a good balance of theoretical and practical information and was clear and simple enough for a non IT Facebook novice like me to follow. There are many ideas that I have gained that I will attempt to incorporate in the overall marketing plan my team is currently developing for our brand. Facebook can offer so much more than I thought as a medium for communicating with our current and prospective customers. Julie D

I found this course fantastic, i started off knowing very little about facebook (just how to run my own personal page) to now having a thorough understanding of ALL the things you can (and there is a lot). The course format was great and allowed knowledge to be built up over time. Course length was great and this will definetly be something i come back to constantly as we develop our facebook pages more within my company. Aleisha H

I have really enjoyed the course and the way it was structured. It was informative and interesting – liked the way you incorporated slide-shows, video, statistics and different forms of media to provide information. Lisa C

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COURSE CREATION AND TUTORING
This course has been created and is tutored by Michael Carney.

Michael is a veteran marketer with an insatiable passion for whatever’s new, different, exciting or interesting in the world of communications (and especially in the digital space). Michael has been in the marketing game since 1971, online since 1987 — and can be variously described as a digital marketing trainer, adman, media director, strategist, researcher, copywriter, consultant, playwright and dad.

He is probably best known for his many years as Media Director of a number of leading NZ advertising agencies, including MDA Mackay King (now Saatchi & Saatchi) and HKM Rialto (since merged with Colenso BBDO). More recently he worked in strategic roles with MediaCom New Zealand and Grey Worldwide and was Strategic Planning Director for the Media Counsel before setting up Netmarketing Services Limited.

Michael is also the author of “Trade Me Success Secrets: How To Buy and Sell Effectively on NZ’s Favourite Auction Site”, now in its second edition.

Michael was chairman of the NZ Marketing Association’s Network of Digital Marketers from 2009 until March 2013.

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TIMING

This course begins on Wednesday 05 July, 2017.

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INVESTMENT

This ongoing online training course is available for $397 +GST per month (and you can cancel at any point). However we offer an EARLY BIRD DISCOUNT of $100 +GST — pay just $297+GST ($341.55 including GST per month) for bookings received by the end of Wednesday 28 June, 2017.

Bookings are confirmed on receipt of payment. We can raise an invoice in advance if you need it.

To reserve your place in this course, please pay by credit card through PayPal by clicking here:

Your credit card will be billed monthly by PayPal for six months.

If you require an invoice, please send an email to [email protected] with your requirements.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

You’ll receive our emailed confirmation of your booking. Then on the first day of the course we’ll follow up with details of your Login and Password, along with an Enrolment Key for the Digital Marketing 101 online training course.

If you have any questions, or would like more information, please email us at [email protected]

7 Facebook Advertising Tips for 2017

Facebook advertising continues to evolve, so it’s important to keep track of the latest trends and developments.

If you’re planning to advertise on Facebook this year, here are seven key considerations:

1 Make it Video

According to statistics quoted by Social Media Today, video on Facebook accounts for just 0.9% of all posts but 7.15% of all reach on the network. And that number is growing.

The popularity of video is driven by a number of factors, including:

Facebook’s algorithmic encouragement of video posts (Facebook is more likely to show your followers video content)
the spread of unlimited broadband (more than half of Kiwi households are now on unlimited data plans), so we now have the capacity for lots of video content
generational preferences (Gen Y and Gen Z prefer pictures and video to text)
limited attention spans, now less than a goldfish
scroll speeds on mobile — as we swipe through post after post on Facebook, moving pictures are far more likely to catch our eyes

In other words: if you can, go video, your posts are far more likely to be effective.

PS Check out our Online Video Marketing course if you need help with the medium

2 Use High Contrast Images

The AdEspresso blog suggests:

Ad images are the first touching point between people and your offer. And there’s a lot at stake. It’s either love at first sight or a sorry attempt to gain potential buyers’ attention. If your ad image catches people’s attention, they’ll read through your ad copy as well. It is incredibly important that your ad visuals manage to catch attention in crowded news feeds.

One of the best pieces of advice about Facebook ad design that I’ve ever heard is this: Use a high level of contrast.

Utilize contrasting colors and bold fonts, mix positive and negative space, and spice up your ad with complementary colors.

A high-contrast example:

3 Use an image of a smiling woman

Yes, apparently, according to Kim Garst:

This little trick has proven itself again and again; images of happy, smiling women lead to the highest click-through rates. Facebook also suggests showing people using your products rather than just images of your products:

“Remember that your ad may show in someone’s News Feed, and it should feel like it belongs there. Your image is competing for people’s attention with stories from their friends and family.”

Here’s an advertisement that follows Kim’s advice:

Our own view: if she’s relevant to your product and your target audience, sure, use a smiling woman in your advertisement. Otherwise, don’t.

4 Choose Your Target Location Carefully

Moz warns us to proceed with care when choosing a target location on Facebook:

Let’s say you want to target people who live in Wellington. You might type “Wellington” into the Locations box, leave it at the default 40-kilometre radius, and keep moving.

But, if you did that, you might miss the small drop down menu above the map that says “Everyone in this location.”

See it now? Well, if you click on that drop down, you’ll find out that Facebook’s Locations targeting gets way more granular:

That’s right — not only can you target actual residents whose home is in the selected area, but you can target people currently visiting Wellington who live more than 100 miles away, and people recently in Wellington.

As an example, a 40-kilometre radius for Wellington shows 310,000 audience members for “Everyone in this location,” but only 290,000 audience members for “People who live in this location.”

In other words, 20,000 people, 6% of the default audience, are irrelevant if you’re only trying to reach Wellington residents — which means you could have been wasting at least 6% of your ad budget.

5 Optimise your Ad Specifications

The ideal Facebook Advertisement specifications in 2017, for a single-image ad, according to Buffer, are:

Text: 90 characters
Image size: 1,200 x 628 pixels

If the post contains a link to a website, ideal link specifications are:

Link Headline: 25 characters
Link Description: 30 characters

The recommended image size ensures that your image always looks high-quality. The recommended text length is how many characters of advert copy could be displayed on smaller screens (the vast majority of your audience will see your Facebook ads on mobile devices).

Your image should include a minimal amount of text, ideally less than 20%, otherwise Facebook will restrict delivery.

6 Add a call-to-action button

These days, Facebook enables you to include a call-to-action button as part of your advertisement.

It’s a familiar sight to Facebook users, and they are now well conditioned to clicking such buttons, so make sure you take advantage of the option.

You have ten different possibilities:

Choose the one that is right for you.

7 Track your ads to see which are the most effective

As Kim Garst notes:

There is nothing more frustrating than paying for ads and then having no idea if they are working. Conversion tracking solves this problem by allowing you to know exactly which ads led to conversions.

For more on this, see Facebook’s help article on Conversion Tracking and Optimization.

LEARN MORE

There are, of course, plenty of other tips that we offer to help guide your Facebook activities and 2017 beyond. We recommend that you check out our Complete Facebook Marketing course (for those new to Facebook marketing) or our Facebook Accelerator course (for more experienced Facebook marketers).

How to Get Found on Google in 2017

Let’s face it — getting found in the search engines in 2017 feels like a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Just when you think you’ve identified an approach that will satisfy the great algorithmic idols, along comes another quaintly-named but terrifyingly-lethal update that stamps out all your gains.

Now, however, assistance comes from a highly unexpected source: the Gplex itself. In an article released a few days ago, Google tackles the issue of snippets — the words underneath your link in search results that describe your webpage — and recommends some best practices.

Before buying a book, people like to get a snapshot of how they’re about to spend a few hours reading. They’ll take a look at the synopsis, the preface, or even the prologue just to get a sense about whether they’ll like the book.

Search result snippets are much the same; they help people decide whether or not it makes sense to invest the time reading the page the snippet belongs to.

The more descriptive and relevant a search result snippet is, the more likely that people will click through and be satisfied with the page they land on. Historically, snippets came from 3 places:

1 The content of the page
2 The meta description
3 DMOZ listings

The content of the page is an obvious choice for result snippets, and the content that can be extracted is often the most relevant to people’s queries. However, there are times when the content itself isn’t the best source for a snippet. For instance, when someone searches for a publishing company for their book, the relevant homepages in the result set may contain only a few images describing the businesses and a logo, and maybe some links, none of which are particularly useful for a snippet.

The logical fallback in cases when the content of a page doesn’t have much textual content for a search result snippet is the meta description. This should be short blurbs that describe accurately and precisely the content in a few words [think Executive Summaries for each page].

Finally, when a page doesn’t have much textual content for snippet generation and the meta description is missing, unrelated to the page, or low quality, our fallback was DMOZ, also known as The Open Directory Project. With DMOZ now closed, we’ve stopped using its listings for snippeting, so it’s a lot more important that webmasters provide good meta descriptions, if adding more content to the page is not an option.

What makes a good meta description?
Good meta descriptions are short blurbs that describe accurately the content of the page. They are like a pitch that convince the user that the page is exactly what they’re looking for. For more tips, we have a handy help center article on the topic. Remember to make sure that both your desktop and your mobile pages include both a title and a meta description.

What are the most common problems with meta descriptions?
Because meta descriptions are usually visible only to search engines and other software, webmasters sometimes forget about them, leaving them completely empty. It’s also common, for the same reason, that the same meta description is used across multiple (and sometimes many) pages. On the flip side, it’s also relatively common that the description is completely off-topic, low quality, or outright spammy. These issues tarnish our users’ search experience, so we prefer to ignore such meta descriptions.

Is there a character limit for meta descriptions?
There’s no limit on how long a meta description can be, but the search result snippets are truncated as needed, typically to fit the device width.

Another Google article provides even more specific advice:

You can help improve the quality of the snippet displayed for your pages by following the general guidelines below.

The description attribute within the <meta> tag is a good way to provide a concise, human-readable summary of each page’s content. Google will sometimes use the meta description of a page in search results snippets, if we think it gives users a more accurate description than would be possible purely from the on-page content. Accurate meta descriptions can help improve your clickthrough; here are some guidelines for properly using the meta description.

Make sure that every page on your site has a meta description. The HTML suggestions page in Search Console lists pages where Google has detected missing or problematic meta descriptions.

Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site aren’t helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. In these cases we’re less likely to display the boilerplate text. Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else.

If you don’t have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.

Include clearly tagged facts in the description. The meta description doesn’t just have to be in sentence format; it’s also a great place to include structured data about the page. For example, news or blog postings can list the author, date of publication, or byline information. This can give potential visitors very relevant information that might not be displayed in the snippet otherwise.

Similarly, product pages might have the key bits of information—price, age, manufacturer—scattered throughout a page. A good meta description can bring all this data together. For example, the following meta description provides detailed information about a book.

<meta name=”Description” content=”Author: A.N. Author,
Illustrator: P. Picture, Category: Books, Price: $17.99,
Length: 784 pages”>

In this example, information is clearly tagged and separated.

Programmatically generate descriptions. For some sites, like news media sources, generating an accurate and unique description for each page is easy: since each article is hand-written, it takes minimal effort to also add a one-sentence description.

For larger database-driven sites, like product aggregators, hand-written descriptions can be impossible. In the latter case, however, programmatic generation of the descriptions can be appropriate and are encouraged. Good descriptions are human-readable and diverse, as we talked about in the first point above. The page-specific data we mentioned in the second point is a good candidate for programmatic generation.

Keep in mind that meta descriptions comprised of long strings of keywords don’t give users a clear idea of the page’s content, and are less likely to be displayed in place of a regular snippet.

Use quality descriptions. Finally, make sure your descriptions are truly descriptive. Because the meta descriptions aren’t displayed in the pages the user sees, it’s easy to let this content slide.

High-quality descriptions can be displayed in Google’s search results, and can go a long way to improving the quality and quantity of your search traffic.

Oh, and here’s a (dated but still mostly relevant) video explaining even further:

Work your way through as many of the above steps as possible. You’ll be amazed how well it improves your search results.

PS We’d be remiss if we didn’t mention our forthcoming Search Marketing Trends 2017 presentation:

This is a slide presentation, with accompanying notes, providing an examination of Search Marketing Trends as we head towards 2018.

Like our other NZ Marketing Insights presentations, Search Marketing Trends looks ahead at what marketers should expect and plan for in 2017 and 2018 — based on local and global trends you may not yet have had the opportunity to examine — turning those forecasts into a comprehensive report & slide deck in PowerPoint format (with accompanying notes) – information that you can easily present to your team and your clients, bringing everyone up to speed on the latest New Zealand Marketing Insights as we accelerate through 2017. All presentations are unbranded, so you can add your own branding and comments.

Each presentation consists of at least 150 slides, dealing with as many key insights.

In this Search Marketing Trends presentation, to be published late July 2017, we’ll wax lyrical about a wide ranging collection of topics, including:

Mobile Really Must Be First
In May 2015, Google reported that mobile searches had surpassed desktop searches on its search engine. Since then, the company has taken many steps which signal that mobile, not desktop, should be considered as the default user experience. Google is moving towards giving priority to mobile-centric indexing, which means that your website must as well.

Three Seconds is the New Fast
According to a study Google presented in late 2016, website that gain priority in search results will be expected to load in three seconds or less. That’s simply a recognition by Google of the impatience of mobile-wielding web surfers. As you might imagine, that has direct implications for your website structure — and whether or not you opt for accelerated mobile pages (AMP) or Progressive Web Apps (PWA), which allow a website to work as if it were an app.

How Machine Learning is Revolutionising Google Search
Google CEO Sundar Pichai laid out the corporate mindset: “Machine learning is a core, transformative way by which we’re rethinking how we’re doing everything. We are thoughtfully applying it across all our products, be it search, ads, YouTube, or Play. And we’re in early days, but you will see us — in a systematic way — apply machine learning in all these areas.”

Perils of the Google Answer Box
In 2017/18, brands will need to place value on optimizing their digital content based on intent rather than specific keywords. As you have no doubt noticed, Google has become more and more likely to offer up specific answers rather than simply links to search results.

For example, here’s Google’s answer to the query “what is the height of mt egmont”:

So how do you get chosen to be the answer to such a query (and is it a good thing)? We explore the options.

Google Shopping Now in NZ
Google Shopping has arrived in New Zealand and is likely to play a larger and larger role in commerce-based search queries. We look at the players so far and examine the possibilities.

Big Data + Search = Attribution Challenges
Today’s conversion paths are extremely complex and as a result, micro-moments matter more than ever. Engaging with customers’ days, weeks, and even months before they’re ready to convert is going to be the new norm.

Reconsider Bing
Bing is a big player amongst the new breed of digital assistants. It’s fueling the search of Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, apart from being the default search engine of Microsoft’s Cortana. Ignore it at your peril.

The Move to Natural Language Queries
Why does Google have this irresistible interest in natural language? Sure, on an ideal level, it’s because Google wants “to provide the better answer to users’ needs,” and to do that, Google must:

Understand what each web document is about (semantics);
Understand what users are actually searching for, now that more and more using their voice to search

Voice Search
Already 20% of mobile queries are Voice Search (and will be 50% in 2020, according to Microsoft). Voice Search is going above and beyond voice recognition and evolving into voice understanding. This involves several changes with respect to:

previous searches
location-based context
context based on frequently used apps
personalised information
keyword research based on spoken queries

How should marketers modify their content to cope with those new search parameters?

The Search Marketing presentation also looks at:

the big challenges of cross-channel marketing
getting to know Google RankBrain
image recognition searches
Key SEO Stats
Google’s top 3 ranking signals
User Experience Optimisation
Content Marketing That Impacts SEO
and, of course, a whole lot more

TO PRE-ORDER THE SEARCH MARKETING TRENDS PRESENTATION

The Search Marketing Trends presentation is due to be published in late July 2017, and will be available for $597+GST. We are currently offering a special advanced booking discount — pay just $497+GST (saving yourself $100) if you order before Wednesday June 14.

To pre-order, please pay by credit card via PayPal through this link:

BILLING OPTIONS

If you would prefer to pay by bank deposit, or require an invoice before making payment, please send an email to [email protected] with details of your request. (The service provider will be shown as Netmarketing Services Limited in your transaction and on your credit card statement).

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT

1. Your purchase will be confirmed by email (if you have not received a confirmation within 24 hours, feel free to email [email protected]).
2. Once the Search Marketing Trends presentation is published, download instructions will be provided to you by email.

Marketing Insights NZ 2017 Presentation series

Following on from the success of our Marketing Insights for 2017 trends presentation (which is still available here), we’ve just launched a new monthly Marketing Insights NZ 2017 Presentation Series which focusses in on some of the hottest and most important NZ marketing topics and trends for 2017, 2018 and beyond.

These presentations look ahead at what marketers should expect and plan for in 2017 and 2018 — based on local and global trends you may not yet have had the opportunity to examine — turning those forecasts into a comprehensive report & slide deck in PowerPoint format (with accompanying notes) – information that you can easily present to your team and your clients, bringing everyone up to speed on the latest New Zealand Marketing Insights as we accelerate through 2017. All presentations are unbranded, so you can add your own branding and comments.

Each presentation consists of at least 150 slides, dealing with as many key insights.

We’ve settled on six of the most important topics of the year ahead, starting with a comprehensive look at the New Zealand consumer:

1 NZ Consumer Trends 2017 (available NOW)

This presentation starts with a helicopter-level overview of the New Zealand consumer, drawing on local research to get an understanding of current Kiwi demographics, interests and behaviours.

Then, based on McKinsey research, we explore the dynamics (and the marketing implications) of five prevailing forces that are likely to have a lasting impact on Kiwis over the next few years — and which you need to factor into your marketing plans:

the changing face of the consumer
evolving geopolitical dynamics
new patterns of personal consumption
technological advancements
structural industry shifts

From there, we turn our attention to some of the specific trends influencing NZ consumer behaviour today. Here are just a few of the key issues covered in this Consumer Trends presentation:

The Longevity Economy
We’ve been warned about it for what seems like a very long time. Now it’s here: the baby boomer age wave has finally arrived, bringing with it all sorts of changes, not just for that generation but also for their children and grandchildren (and, needless to say, for marketers as well).

Kids in Charge
At the other end of the spectrum, we see younger children having a much greater influence on the household and its purchasing behaviours. What are the implications for your carefully crafted brand persuasion campaigns?

If They Don’t Know You By Now
One of the unintended consequences of the carefully curated, infinitely personalised Internet experience is that, as MINTEL notes, “many consumers find themselves in a perpetual cycle of being exposed only to ideas, beliefs, opinions and services with which they already identify“. When search results, social media posts and video suggestions are all tailored “just for you”, you’re unlikely to be served serendipitous content that doesn’t reflect your worldview. That’s true of brands and marketing messages as well. So how do you break through and get noticed?

Right Here, Right Now
Kiwi consumers, in common with their peers in other parts of the world, have moved to an expectation of instant gratification. With their trusty smart phones in their pockets or purses, they head out into the world confident that whenever they need food, fuel or shopping satisfaction, such delights are merely a swipe or a tap away. It’s a significant challenge for marketers, to rearrange their data geolocationally to meet consumer needs — and to make sure that the information is available in formats that our digital intermediaries Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and Amazon (and their voice-activated minions Alexa, Google Assistant & Home, M, Siri and Cortana) can understand.

Shopping Glocal
As the Internet caught on down under, Kiwi online shopping was quick to go global, especially for those products unavailable in New Zealand (or too expensive to source locally, for a variety of reasons). Even so, the perceived complexity of global shopping limited its adoption amongst the tech-timid.

Times have changed, particularly because leading US retailers have come to recognise the potential revenues to be gained from global audiences. Over the last few years, famous brands such as Macy’s and Neiman Marcus have been welcoming Kiwi visitors to their websites with the news that they are:

now shipping to New Zealand
displaying prices in Kiwi dollars
offering low international shipping rates
calculating duties and taxes at checkout
providing guaranteed landing costs

All in all, it’s an attractive mix — but it is now becoming even more so, as global retailers move into the neighbourhood. Already, many of the biggest sellers on Trade Me are now international operators. H&M, Top Shop, David Jones and Zara have begun colonisation of local shopping precincts. And Amazon is about to open distribution centres across the Tasman, reducing shipping costs even further.

“Glocal” (Global+Local) is a horrible neologism — and an even worse reality for Kiwi retailers. We examine the trend, its implications and possible solutions.

Other Shopping trends we review include:

Fashion for “Real bodies” — clothing tailored for real people, not just supermodels
Healthwear — clothing that monitors (and sometimes helps with) health conditions
Fashion’s fast lane — leading fashion designers are slashing the timelag between runway shows and getting products instore

What other topics do we cover in this NZ Consumer Trends presentation?

Try these:

Authenticity and its importance in a world of fake news, overblown hype and unsubstantiated promises
The expectations (and the perils) of Personalisation
Subscription Everything — curation meets recurring revenue
Fitness on display — “look at me” sportwear
Experiential Digital — what Pokemon Go taught us about blending real and virtual
Gone Incognito — hiding in plain sight, consumers rebel against the death of privacy
The Ethical Consumer — we won’t pay more but we expect brands to behave
Addiction in your pocket or purse — the smartphone breeds subservience
Always On, unlimited — the connected majority
Streaming Video changes us all — bingewatching, your programmes whenever and wherever
Adblocking goes mainstream — display ads are under threat as adblocking gets built into browser software
AI everywhere — Skynet takes over, one “OK Google” at a time
Voice input ascendant — voice recognition software is now faster and more efficient than keyboard entry
Biometric ID — your face, your eye or your fingerprint is now your password (and much easier to remember)
The Sharing Economy — cars, bikes, accommodation: what else can we share?
P2P Financing — why should the banks make all the money?
Maori Cuisine — coming to a restaurant near you
Back to Traditional Products & Tastes — a return to authentic values
V Power — plant-focused formulations wow the mainstream
Night Foods — food ingredients designed to help us sleep

All that and plenty more (many of which we’re keeping under our hats for now), in the NZ Consumer Trends 2017 report and slide presentation, to be published in May 2017. To order this presentation, see the available packages below.

3 Content Marketing 2018 (to be published June 2017)

Content Marketing continues to blossom, especially in New Zealand, as more and more brands realise that consumers are doing their own homework online rather than seeking advice from salespeople (who may — how can we put this delicately? — not be entirely objective).

One of the solutions: provide helpful, relevant content online so that when consumers do their homework, you’re able to shape their thinking accordingly.

That’s why Content Marketing has earned its place as one of the topics we cover in this year’s Marketing Insights Presentation Series.

Here are some of the issues we feature:

Accountability
content marketers will be held accountable not just for how much content they create, but what it does for the business (much like demand generation teams).

Other topics that will feature in this presentation include:

Personalisation
Engagement
Data-driven Insights
Interactive Experiences
Face-to-face Opportunities & Live Events
challenges of developing engaging visual content
the talent shortage
Algorithm-driven content distribution
Live video
compelling content experiences
the emergence of AI journalism
Immersive Content Formats
Science-based content marketing
The rise of the Content Librarian
The continuing rise of paid promotion and the decline of organic reach

Scroll down to order.

4 Search Marketing 2018 (to be published July 2017)

Next: an examination of Search Marketing Trends as we head towards 2018.

In this presentation, we’ll wax lyrical about a wide ranging collection of topics, including:

For example, here’s Google’s answer to the query “what is the height of mt egmont”:

So how do you get chosen to be the answer to such a query? We explore the options.

Understand what each web document is about (semantics);
Understand what users are actually searching for, now that more and more using their voice to search

previous searches
location-based context
context based on frequently used apps
personalised information
keyword research based on spoken queries

How should marketers modify their content to cope with those new search parameters?

The Search Marketing presentation also looks at:

the big challenges of cross-channel marketing
getting to know Google RankBrain
image recognition searches
Key SEO Stats
Google’s top 3 ranking signals
User Experience Optimisation
Content Marketing That Impacts SEO
and, of course, a whole lot more

4 Influencer Marketing 2017 (to be published August 2017)

Our next special report/presentation deals with the fast-growing topic of Influencer Marketing.

If you’re not sure exactly what Influencer Marketing is, allow TapInfluence to explain:

Influencer marketing is a type of marketing that focuses on using key leaders to drive your brand’s message to the larger market. Rather than marketing directly to a large group of consumers, you instead inspire / hire / pay Influencers to get out the word for you.

Influencer Marketing has evolved from humble origins to end up as the preferred buzzword to describe the current iteration of a well-established and familiar marketing tool: using “celebrities” to promote your products.

There’s a bit more to Influencer Marketing than just plunking a few celebrities into a TV commercial, however. Today’s definition of “celebrities” (Influencers) has broadened to encompass those who are, in the words of Andy Warhol, “famous for 15 minutes”.

At the same time, the number of celebrity followers that an Influencer might attract has shrunk from hundreds of thousands to, sometimes mere hundreds (whose celebrity leaders have been accordingly dubbed micro-influencers).

The Internet in general, and social media in particular, has brought us thousands of influencers and micro-influencers, whose hustling on behalf of a product can encourage many of their followers to actually purchase said product.

Why? Because, according to a report by Nielsen, 92% of people trust recommendations from individuals over brands. And, let’s face it, many brands have brought that fate upon themselves by their own less-than-trustworthy behaviour.

Anyway, here’s how Google Trends depicts Influencer Marketing’s growth in search popularity over the last few years:

How hot is Influencer Marketing, really?

Here’s one indicator: 84% of US marketers are planning to use Influencer Marketing this year (according to Acorn Influence).

So, to bring you up to speed with Influencer Marketing, we’re producing this special presentation, whose topics include:

The Seven Most Effective Influencer Marketing Strategies
As it turns out, there’s a bit more to Influencer Marketing than simply tracking down people who seem to have a lot of followers in social media. We share proven strategies which will help lessen potential heartache.

How to Choose the Influencers Who are Right for You
Not all Influencers are created equal (and there are more than a few pretenders to the throne out there). We discuss what to look for (and what to avoid) — and why you should proceed slowly as you assemble your Influencer team.

Best Practices on Connecting with Influencers
Once you’ve determined the most appropriate Influencers for your brand, it’s time to reach out and connect. If you’re not careful though, and haven’t thought through the right approach, you might be turned down — or end up paying too much. We share lessons from others that will help ease the way.

Where and How to Find Kiwi Influencers
There are surprising numbers of influential New Zealanders who have attracted a wide following through their efforts on YouTube, Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and elsewhere. We show you how to find them — and also sound a few cautionary notes.

In the Influencer Marketing NZ Presentation, we also examine:

the top Power Words to use
creative ways to incentivize influencers
Influencer Marketing measurement, KPIs & ROI
the four Rs of effective Influencer Marketing
how to run successful Influencer Marketing campaigns
what Google’s purchase of Famebit tells us about the future of Influencer Marketing
why major players are now buying Influencers
Influencer Case Studies
Influencer Marketing Tools
why Influencer campaigns fail
the fastest way to destroy your Influencer Marketing efforts
twenty trends that will shape Influencer Marketing in the next year

All that and of course much more, in the Influencer Marketing NZ 2017 report and slide presentation, coming out in August. Again, to order this presentation, see the available packages below.

5 Online Video Marketing 2017 (to be published September 2017)

Online Video is no longer an “up-and-coming” marketing tactic — it’s here, and it’s a powerful way to communicate your brand story, explain your value proposition, and build relationships with your customers and prospects.

And the statistics show that it’s working its socks off, especially with younger audiences:

The 2016 Nielsen New Zealand Multi-Screen Report, covering trends of Kiwi video viewing, reveals that around a quarter (26%) of New Zealanders watch TV content through other devices (not a TV set) in an average week. Besides the TV set, the most popular devices for watching video content across a week are desktops/laptops (39%), smartphones (27%) and tablets (18%).

We offer a training course covering Online Video Marketing, but the topic has become so important that we’re also creating this special report/presentation to bring you up to speed with the latest developments in Online Video.

In the presentation, we cover:

Google Loves Video
It’s not always evident down our way, but Google gives priority in search results to those that include videos. Which spells opportunity: add videos to your pages, optimised for relevant keywords, and feel the Google love.

Customers Now Expect Moving Pictures
When you realize that 25% of consumers will lose interest in your brand if you don’t have a video explaining your product or service, you’ll quickly decide the videos are really important for your brand as well.

The Transformative Nature of Live Video
Facebook and YouTube have gone all-in on live video, giving live content pride of place on their respective networks. If you can create relevant, entertaining live video for your brand, this just could be the most effective weapon in your marketing arsenal.

One Size No Longer Fits All
Gone are the days when you could make one video on Youtube and share it all over social media. Nowadays, it’s vital to create content that’s relevant to each platform.

Vertical Videos Are A Thing
The near-universal adoption of smartphones, as both capture and viewing mechanism, means that Vertical Video is now a valid — and desirable — format. But you do need to develop content that’s optimised for that format.

More Videos Will Be Designed to Play Without Sound
According to Digiday, 85 percent of Facebook video is watched without sound. Suddenly, that stark statistic underlines the necessity of providing effective captions for your videos. In this section we reveal a surprisingly easy way to create captions for Facebook.

Other topics featured in this presentation include:

the steady growth of VR and 360 degree videos
how brands have already started integrating videos into their website design
the unexpected value of video voicemail
skyrocketing Video Advertising budgets
the accelerated growth of Video Retargeting
Increase in A/B Video Testing
Crisis Management and Video
the viral ingredients of successful videos

All that and the latest breaking news and trends, in the Online Video Marketing NZ 2017 report and slide presentation, coming out in September. Again, to order see the available packages below.

6 Messaging Apps 2017 (to be published October 2017)

According to Evan Wray, Co-Founder and VP of Swyft Media:

“Messaging today is very similar to where traditional social media was in 2007/08. Brands know that there are hundreds of millions/billions of highly engaged users, but these same brands are also still trying to figure out exactly how to engage these users effectively. This is a massive opportunity for first movers in the messaging space, just like there was in 2007/08 for those brands that took advantage of social.”

Well, we’ve been there done that in the social media space, so we know an opportunity when we see it — and we’re more than happy to share it with you through this Messaging NZ 2017 presentation.

The presentation covers:

Users Getting Older
In the early days of messaging, early adopters were largely drawn from younger generations. Now, as they usually do, the grown-ups are getting into the act. By mid-2016, 29% of those aged 30-49 used messaging apps compared with 42% of 18-29s (US data).

Chatbots becoming useful
Chatbots have been around a whole lot longer than you think (since 1994, according to Wikipedia, when they were first described as chatterbots). But they’ve only really gone mainstream in the last couple of years, thanks to messaging apps in general — and Facebook Messenger particular. At the Facebook f8 developer conference in April 2017, Facebook announced that Messenger has grown to support 100,000 developers who have made 100,000 bots. Most don’t do much — but the technology has now moved from novelty to utility, especially in terms of enhanced customer service and truly personalised results thanks to machine learning.

The Top 5 Chatbot Capabilities
According to a study by the US interactive advertising bureau, these are the top five capabilities that chatbots make possible:

personal connection
discovery
curation
utility
online to off-line connection

What Else Might Messaging Apps Do?
To peek into the future of messaging apps, turn our attention to China’s own WeChat.
WeChat provides what several different apps would normally provide – text messaging, voice messaging, group messaging, video conferencing, video games, content sharing, location sharing, payment options and more. You can perform almost any task within the WeChat app – buy a mortgage, trade a stock and even grocery shop. Most recently, WeChat announced that users will be able to pay for Starbucks via the app’s payments.

Brands Will Embrace A2P (application-to-person) Messaging
Received a text message with an appointment reminder or an authentication code whilst banking online? That’s A2P, and is a great opportunity for brands to enhance their offerings and communicate more effectively, one-to-one, with customers.

Minimum Effort
Many of the development opportunities within messaging and machine learning are embodied in the notion of “minimum effort”. In a nutshell, when communicating with a company, consumers want their interactions to be made easier because the company already “knows” certain things about them (such as their clothing and shoes sizes, for example, or their preferred pizza flavours). Such knowledge is not typically available to front desk staff in the real world — but should be available in the virtual world once the customer identifies himself or herself.

Effective Enterprise Messaging
The majority of workers today prefer and expect to communicate with colleagues and receive company-related content on their mobiles.

Other topics that this presentation will cover include:

Chat-based commerce and payments
Security issues and opportunities
and the latest developments in messaging trends when the presentation is released

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NZME & Fairfax Merger: Should It Have Been Rejected?

The CommComm axe has fallen on yet another media merger, as the Commerce Commission rules that the proposed deal between NZME and Fairfax is null and void.

The argument against the merger, as articulated in the Commerce Commission decision, revolves around two factors, loss of plurality and quality:

PLURALITY
“The fundamental detriment we described in the Draft Determination – and again here – concerns the likely loss of media plurality. Plurality ensures that there is a diversity of viewpoints available and consumed across and within media enterprises. Plurality helps safeguard against concentrating influence over public opinion and the political agenda. A loss of plurality cannot be quantified in a mathematical sense.
…
“The merged entity would have direct control of the largest network of journalists in the country, employing more editorial staff than the next three largest mainstream media organisations combined. Its news media business would include nearly 90% of the daily newspaper circulation in New Zealand and an overwhelming majority of traffic to online sources of New Zealand news. Including its radio network, the merged entity would have a monthly reach of 3.7 million New Zealanders.”

QUALITY
“We also consider that the proposed merger would be likely to cause a loss of quality. This loss is also unquantifiable. However, the Commission considers that there would be a reduction in quality in reader markets due to a loss in competition. While we were conscious not to double count plurality and quality detriments in reaching our decision, our view is that quality detriments from the merger would be significant, in particular for consumers of online New Zealand news.”

In terms of the commercial challenges faced by the two organisations without the cost efficiencies and savings of the proposed merger, the Commerce Commission was unconvinced:

“On 25 November 2016, following the Draft Determination and before the Conference, the Applicants presented the Commission with a significantly altered prediction as to the likely future for each of their businesses without the merger. The details of this submission are confidential. In this decision we reject that these are likely scenarios without the merger.”

All in all, the Commerce Commission seems to have given credence to the notion of “loss of plurality” as the most important consideration — even though, at least in our view, NZME and Fairfax have very little geographic overlap (with one exception, the Sunday newspaper market) and there are plenty of other competing editorial voices, most notably online and on television.

WHERE’S THE MONEY?
We live in interesting times, as the old curse has it, and newspapers more than any other medium have felt the pain of digital competition. If we look back five years to 2012, NZ newspaper advertising revenues stood at $553 million whilst interactive stood at $366 million.

By the end of 2016, newspaper ad revenues had dropped to $417 million (excluding digital revenues) but interactive had grown to $783 million (digital only), $891 million if you include the digital dollars earned by traditional media (ASA figures).

It’s difficult to argue that four hundred million dollars plus change is just one step away from the poorhouse. Still, a print revenue decline of 24.6% over five years, whilst your biggest competitor has grown by 143%, is cause for concern for any CFO.

Worse, according to IAB/PwC NZ data, most of the growth in digital dollars is happening in social media, mobile and online video — channels where newspaper are underrepresented.

iab-q42016

Factor in the news that Google and Facebook between them now siphon up one-fifth of global ad revenue and that’s a scenario no business operator wants to see.

REVIEWING THE ISSUE OF PLURALITY

We are obviously not privvy to the arguments mustered by NZME and Fairfax in response to the Commerce Commission’s concerns. However, if it were us debating the case, we might point to two pieces of research that should be taken into consideration.

The first, US Pew Center research from 2016, points out that newspapers are no longer the journals of record they once were:

As of early 2016, just two-in-ten U.S. adults often get news from print newspapers. This has fallen from 27% in 2013.
This decrease occurred across all age groups, though the age differences are still stark: only 5% of 18- to 29-year-olds often get news from a print newspaper, whereas about half (48%) of those 65 and older do.
Compared with print, nearly twice as many adults (38%) often get news online, either from news websites/apps (28%), on social media (18%) or both. (81% of adults ever get news on these online platforms.)
Still, TV continues to be the most widely used news platform; 57% of U.S. adults often get TV-based news, either from local TV (46%), cable (31%), network (30%) or some combination of the three. This same pattern emerges when people are asked which platform they prefer – TV sits at the top, followed by the web, with radio and print trailing behind.

Secondly, as 2016 NZ On Air research points out, newspapers now only reach a third of Kiwis Under 40 on a daily basis:

In other words, our argument would be that plurality is no longer an issue because there are now so many other sources of news (and only the Over 65s rely heavily on printed newspapers for their news).

How To Find Kiwi Influencers

According to SimpliLearn, Influencer Marketing (using influencers to promote your brand) is the most effective customer acquisition channel of all.

That makes perfect sense in today’s social-centric, famous for 15-megabytes world – if you’re an influencer with a community who dwell on your every word, you can gently encourage your fans to follow your advice and buy the products you recommend. Think Oprah Winfrey, but on a very small scale.

However, unless you’re already a world-renowned YouTuber, Instagrammer or Tweeter, chances are that you don’t have many following you.

Instead, you’re going to want to track down key influencers relevant to your market sector, so that they can share your brand messages with their devoted followers.

Whilst there are a few tools such as Klout and PeerIndex that track influencers, they’re inevitably US- or UK-centric and aren’t particularly useful for identifying NZ digital celebrities.

So how exactly do you find local heroes-with-a-following?

A. Traditional Media

We would be remiss if we didn’t first point you in the direction of good old-fashioned Kiwi print and broadcast media. The media world may be in transition but newspapers, magazines, radio and television still have more readers/listeners/viewers than their digital counterparts.

The barriers between church and state (i.e. journalists and advertisers) is lower than it ever was — note, for example the prominent position of the “Brand Insight” native advertising section on the front page of nzherald.co.nz — but as the wall comes down, prices go up.

It’s no longer so difficult to get journalists to write about you, as long as you’re willing to pay. If not, then the barriers are as high as ever.

B. NZ Influencer Marketing Agencies

As you might expect, where there are buyers and sellers who don’t necessarily know each other, intermediaries have sprung up to connect the two groups.

Here are some of the influencer marketing agencies that will help Kiwi marketers find and connect with Kiwi influencers:

1. Populr

Here’s how Populr describes itself:

Populr is a world-class platform built to connect both influencers and brands looking to take advantage of influencer marketing.

What makes us different? Simple. Our purpose built platform works hand-in-hand with some of the smartest creative, digital and social media minds in the country to create effective marketing campaigns that will ensure your brand, product or service is part of the online conversation. We have the ability to produce a series of authentic conversations and content that’s created, overheard, shared and interacted with on a mass scale across all major social media networks.

Populr is the largest influencer marketing platform in the country with over 1,000 movers and shakers from the biggest names in sport to actors, musicians, entertainers, through to bloggers and content creators. We work closely with brands to ensure they have the right mix of influencers, create the right conversations for their audience and ensure they’re maximising their return on investment.

2. The Social Club

And The Social Club’s self-description?

Our mission is to bring authenticity, consistency & transparency to Influencer Marketing.

Much of the inspiration for The Social Club came from our own experience within the industry. Coming from marketing and digital backgrounds, we had all worked extensively with both influencers and brands. We’d seen just how successful these collaborations could be, but we’d also all noticed just how much could be done to make the influencer marketing process more transparent, efficient & effective.

A lot of great stuff was happening, but we recognised that the process just wasn’t quite right, and most people seemed to focus too heavily on large scale influencers, forgetting about the reach and connection that smaller, more localised influencers can harvest. So, over a beer and a few yarns, The Social Club was hatched, and here we are.

We’re committed to helping New Zealand and global brands scale the storytelling process: by bringing efficiency, fairness & transparency to influencer advertising.

Our community of influencers are working alongside brands, as well as agencies, to help with brand awareness, new product releases, event promotion, sponsorship arrangements and subtly amplifying existing campaigns & competitions.

Whether you’re representing a New Zealand household name or a local cafe, in Auckland or Te Awamutu, touch base with us and see how our community can help.

3. We Are Anthology

What you need to know about “We Are Anthology”:

What is WAA?

We Are Anthology is more than just an agency, it’s also home to thousands of leading lifestyle bloggers, vloggers and social influencers. The #WAAHouse is also a shared space we manage in Ponsonby. It allows us to have strategy, project management, content creation, and social media expertise in house, and to utilise the branding/graphic design, copy writing, photography, and PR companies that hang out with us every day.

Who is the WAA woman?

Meet the #WAA woman – or as we like to call her, the influenced mind. She’s the digital and physical embodiment of our brand. She represents your target audience and how we use social media and influencer marketing to talk to, share with, and ultimately, influence the end user’s mind to think positively about your brand, and perform an action from that influence.

4. Bloggers Club

And the Bloggers Club (now better known as BC.) description:

BC. is a social influence marketing and digital talent management agency. We work with brands to help them achieve their objectives, and create meaningful impact, through the use of digital channels and influencers.

BC. was started by digital entrepreneur, Jenene Crossan, in 2014 to provide support to the growing New Zealand blogging community. The moral and personal support Bloggers Club provided quickly expanded to include commercial support – Bloggers Club, the agency, was born. Nowadays, BC. still provides support to digital talent, assisting them to build their brand, creativity, professionalism, reach, engagement and commercial potential.

At the heart of everything we do are our values and purpose. Our purpose is to connect brands and people, we do this through building relationships. Our values speak for themselves, see them below or reach out to a team member to discuss how these impact you.

C. Social Media

Social Media, of course, is where most non-traditional Kiwi Influencers hang out. It’s beyond the scope of this article to step you through how you can find Kiwi Influencers on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube (although Lesson Eight of our Social Media Marketing Essentials course does just that). But we encourage you explore for yourself.

Sooner rather than later, you’ll find yourself looking for advocates and evangelists for your brand. Influencer Marketing just might be the answer.

The Dangers of Relying on Sports Rights

Back in February, the NZ Commerce Commission declined clearance for the proposed merger between Sky and Vodafone, citing in particular its concern that:

Specifically, the Commission cannot exclude a real chance that the merged entity would leverage its market power over premium live sports content, foreclosing competition in the relevant broadband and mobile services markets over the medium to long term.

Turns out that Sky’s “market power over premium live sports content” may not be as “long term” as the Commission thought.

How so?

Last year, Twitter scored online streaming rights for ten US National Football League (NFL) games for around $5-$10 million.

As the NFL observed at the time:

For the NFL, this is a chance to experiment. The league is aware that a growing number of households are comfortable streaming video over the Internet, and this is an opportunity to appeal to so-called cord-cutters, as former cable-TV subscribers are known. The NFL has streamed selected games, but this is its first season-long streaming deal.

That was 2016, this is now. Earlier this month, Variety reported that NFL streaming rights for those ten games for 2017 had been picked up by Amazon for a cool $50 million:

The 2017 NFL games will be available to Amazon Prime subscribers, on the Amazon Prime Video app for TVs, game consoles, set-top boxes and connected devices. The ten games will also be available to Prime Video members internationally in over 200 countries.

As always, Amazon is playing the long game. Its Amazon Prime service already has at least 66 million subscribers, each paying around $100 a year for a bundle of benefits that include free shipping and plenty of free streaming video content. That’s 6.6 billion dollars worth of income, much of it from the US. Bound to be a few dollars spare to overpay for sporting rights.

In late 2016, Amazon expanded Prime Video globally, largely on the back of the ex-Top-Gear renegades, Jeremy Clarkson & co. And what drives video? Sports and movies. So we can expect Amazon to be on the prowl for even more sporting rights, not just in the US but globally as well.

Down our way, Amazon is scaling up in Australia, reportedly opening up distribution centres across the ditch for a full-scale launch in 2018. Major retailers in both Australia and New Zealand are gearing up to compete with the ecommerce giant when it steps up its efforts down under.

And our broadcasters need to prepare as well. SANZAAR (South Africa, New Zealand, Australia and Argentina Rugby) broadcast rights deals reportedly expire in 2020, which is just around the corner.

This time, the bidders won’t just be broadcasters. As streaming becomes ever more entrenched, Amazon, Netflix, Facebook, Google and Apple just might be looking for fresh video content.

New Course: Digital Marketing 101

Too many NZ businesses still aren’t online (47% of small businesses, according to a recent MYOB “State of the Digital Nation” Special Report). And even those who are online have only a limited understanding of Digital Marketing and how they can promote their business through digital activities.

That’s unfortunate, because Digital Marketing is now New Zealand’s most important advertising medium.

According to the NZ Interactive Advertising Bureau, New Zealand digital advertising revenue generated $890.86m for the full year in 2016, leapfrogging expenditure levels for traditional media.

Most dramatic growth was seen in the following digital categories:

In other words, Digital Marketing is now the most important skill to master.

So we’ve drawn on our (gulp!) 30 years of online experience to introduce our first ongoing course, DIGITAL MARKETING 101, to take participants from a standing start (knowing very little about Digital Marketing) through to more advanced topics building on earlier lessons.

DIGITAL MARKETING 101 runs weekly across six months, and covers:

Introduction to digital marketing
The basics of Digital Marketing and what you need to know to promote your organisation and your brand online. In this lesson, we cover Digital Marketing Options available in the NZ marketplace and discuss which are the most important (based on your target market and your brand objectives).
Developing a web presence
In Lesson Two we discuss the various ways in which you can build your presence online (we assume that, like most NZ businesses, you’re operating on a shoestring so mostly we talk about free or low-cost options). We also look at the key online elements you should claim to ensure that you own your brand identity online.
Claiming your Google My Business page
In Lesson Three we cover the strategic importance of your Google My Business page — it’s how you tell Google your key information — and exactly what you need to do to claim that page.
Understanding the customer journey
The customer journey (also Customer Journey Experience, Customer Engagement Cycle) refers to the stages customers travel through in their relationship with a specific brand (as defined by DJS Research). In this lesson, we step you through what you need to know to map out your brand’s customer journey and market accordingly.
Creating a digital marketing calendar
As you market online, you’ll quickly realise that you constantly need to create fresh content, to feed your web pages, your emails, your social media posts, press releases and other online information — Google loves fresh and so do your customers. But what can you talk about (you can’t only talk about yourself, as you’ll soon discover). In this lesson, we talk about how to create a digital marketing calendar (and what to talk about).
Secrets of effective outsourcing
If you don’t already have existing arrangements with marketing suppliers, don’t miss Lesson Six. In this lesson, we talk about where you can turn for effective (and cost-efficient) marketing assistance, how to choose reliable suppliers and exactly what you should outsource to propel your business forward.
Mastering email marketing
It’s the oldest digital marketing tool of all, but it’s still the most effective for most target audiences. In this lesson we talk about email marketing strategies and best practices, and the tools you should use to promote your business as effectively as possible through email.
Lead generation principles
Generally speaking, as a business marketing online, you either want online buyers, online followers or online leads (those prospects who will convert into buyers later). In this lesson, we listen to highly-experienced digital marketers and draw on their collective wisdom to understand the best ways to generate leads (and turn them into buyers, consistently and efficiently).
Search engine optimisation (SEO)
Turns out that there’s quite a science to being found online (and an industry has grown up around the challenges of what’s now known as Search Engine Optimisation). In essence, if you want your prospects to find your web pages, those pages need to contain content that prospects are looking for. In Lesson Nine, we explore the How, What, When, Where & Why of SEO.
Pay per click search advertising
Not every page can be Number One on Google. So if you want to hit the top of the search engine rankings (especially for the most popular search phrases), sometimes you have to pay. In this lesson, we talk in detail about AdWords and other Pay Per Click advertising tools.
Social media marketing explained
Once upon a time — up until about 2012 — if you had a Facebook page and posted content to that page, all of your followers would see it. Sorry, not any more. In this lesson we explore exactly what you need to do to build an effective presence in social media.
Creating effective Facebook posts
What really works on Facebook these days? We spell out the characteristics of successful Facebook posts and identify 20 different posting formats that get noticed and get shared. Then we review the types of posts worth sharing, accompanied by a wide range of examples.
Conversion optimisation
In Lesson Eight, we talked about Lead Generation. In this lesson, we focus on what you need to do to convert those leads into sales. Every little improvement turns into extra dollars, so it’s definitely worth the effort optimising your conversion rates.
What you need to know about Content Marketing
According to the Content Marketing Institute, content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. It’s particularly relevant to B2B marketers, but it’s important for B2C as well. In this lesson we explore the principles of content marketing, including Creation, Curation and Content Pillars.
Finding Kiwi influencers to promote your products
Influencer Marketing has come from nowhere to become a hot buzzword these days, as more and more businesses turn to “influencers” — those who have already developed their own followers, especially in social media — and sponsor posts to promote their products. In this lesson, we explore the Dos & Don’ts of Influencer Marketing, and how to find Kiwi Influencers.
What you need to know when writing for the web
Writing online copy has become more important than ever — but there are processes to follow, and structures and formats that are forced on us by the various digital media channels. This lesson covers the key facts that you need to know when writing for the web, including the seven deadly sins you need to avoid.
Mastering Visual Marketing
Images and visual concepts are processed 60,000 times faster in the brain than text, according to 3M Corporation research. Add in our seven-second attention span (shorter than goldfish now) and it’s quickly obvious why visual marketing has become so important online. In this lesson, we explore how you can use visuals to multiply the effectiveness of your online content (and free and low-cost tools you can use).
The basics of video marketing
Online Video is no longer an “up-and-coming” marketing tactic — it’s here, and it’s a powerful way to communicate your brand story, explain your value proposition, and build relationships with your customers and prospects. This lesson introduces you to the basic principles and explores some of the available tools.
Moving to Mobile First
In his book “The Third Screen“, Chuck Martin points out that “the world gone mobile is not a simple story of technological change, it is a story of fundamental shifts in consumer behaviour that are forever changing the practice of marketing and how you should view its application with your business”. In this lesson, we talk about why “Mobile First” — ensuring that your content looks good on mobile devices, even before you see how it looks on a desktop device — is now essential.
The principles of selling online
More than half of New Zealand (58%) now buys products online! Seven out of ten Kiwi internet users aged 25-44 purchase online — and 94% of NZ web users who research products and services online (even if they eventually buy the products offline). In this lesson, we introduce you to the principles and practices of effective ecommerce.
Mastering Google Analytics
It’s free, and it’s packed full with information that can transform your digital marketing efforts. We’re talking Google Analytics, and a great many online marketers use the free Analytics service to track the performance of their digital marketing. In this lesson, you’ll discover exactly what you can learn from Google Analytics and how to master it (even if you hate maths and stats).
Considering native advertising
The technology known as Adblocking can cause havoc for digital marketers, with ads stripped from web pages before users can see them. Native advertising — ads that mimic the editorial format of the pages on which they appear — is one of the more powerful ways to combat Adblocking. Of course, it’s not new. In the old days, we would have called it Advertorial. But these days it’s more prevalent, and more valuable, than ever.
Marketing through messaging apps
Messaging Apps, also known as Dark Social, have gone from strength to strength in recent years, with Facebook’s own Messenger and WhatsApp leading the way. In this lesson, we explore Messaging Apps and tell you what you need to know to use them effectively for marketing purposes.
The new importance of consumer reviews
The customer has gone from being always right to now always having an opinion — and, through social media and specialist services such as TripAdvisor, Yelp and even Trade Me, now having a direct and powerful influence on their peers. Look no further than Amazon.com, where one-star and two-star reviews can quickly kill a product. In this lesson, we look at customer input, how you should monitor it and what you can do about negative ratings.
When to use marketing automation
Marketing Automation — software tools designed to handle repetitive tasks such as emails and web actions — can improve your efficiency and even (if used effectively) enable you to take actions that would otherwise not be possible. In this lesson, we explore the capabilities of marketing automation platforms and consider if and how you might use them in your business.
Key new marketing technologies
In this lesson, we peek into the digital marketing technologies of today and tomorrow, including such topics as programmatic advertising, voice search, chatbots & Artificial Intelligence. The digital tools are getting smarter and smarter, and you need to keep track of what’s possible (and what’s inevitable).

Please note: all materials are online and can be accessed anytime 24/7, so you don’t have to make yourself available at a specific time to take this course.

At the end of DIGITAL MARKETING 101, you’ll be given the opportunity to move on to DIGITAL MARKETING 201, which covers even more advanced topics.

WHO SHOULD TAKE THIS COURSE

Any NZ marketer or business owner who needs to understand and master Digital Marketing.

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WHAT CUSTOMERS ARE SAYING ABOUT OUR COURSES

Here’s a sampling of the feedback we’ve received from those who’ve taken our courses:

Thanks for an informative and interesting [Facebook Accelerator] course. Your presentation held a good balance of theoretical and practical information and was clear and simple enough for a non IT Facebook novice like me to follow. There are many ideas that I have gained that I will attempt to incorporate in the overall marketing plan my team is currently developing for our brand. Facebook can offer so much more than I thought as a medium for communicating with our current and prospective customers. Julie D

I found this course fantastic, i started off knowing very little about facebook (just how to run my own personal page) to now having a thorough understanding of ALL the things you can (and there is a lot). The course format was great and allowed knowledge to be built up over time. Course length was great and this will definetly be something i come back to constantly as we develop our facebook pages more within my company. Aleisha H

I have really enjoyed the course and the way it was structured. It was informative and interesting – liked the way you incorporated slide-shows, video, statistics and different forms of media to provide information. Lisa C

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COURSE CREATION AND TUTORING
This course has been created and is tutored by Michael Carney.

Michael is also the author of “Trade Me Success Secrets: How To Buy and Sell Effectively on NZ’s Favourite Auction Site”, now in its second edition.

Michael was chairman of the NZ Marketing Association’s Network of Digital Marketers from 2009 until March 2013.

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TIMING

This course begins on Wednesday 05 July, 2017.

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INVESTMENT

Bookings are confirmed on receipt of payment. We can raise an invoice in advance if you need it.

To reserve your place in this course, please pay by credit card through PayPal by clicking here:

Your credit card will be billed monthly by PayPal for six months.

If you require an invoice, please send an email to [email protected] with your requirements.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

If you have any questions, or would like more information, please email us at [email protected]

SocialMedia.org.nz

Social Media Training Courses

Coming Soon: NZ Content Marketing Presentation 2017

The Challenge For Kiwi Marketers

NZ Digital Marketing 101 online training course

To reserve your place in this course, please pay by credit card through PayPal by clicking here:

7 Facebook Advertising Tips for 2017

1 Make it Video

2 Use High Contrast Images

3 Use an image of a smiling woman

4 Choose Your Target Location Carefully

5 Optimise your Ad Specifications

6 Add a call-to-action button

7 Track your ads to see which are the most effective

LEARN MORE

How to Get Found on Google in 2017

NZME & Fairfax Merger: Should It Have Been Rejected?

How To Find Kiwi Influencers

According to SimpliLearn, Influencer Marketing (using influencers to promote your brand) is the most effective customer acquisition channel of all.

A. Traditional Media

B. NZ Influencer Marketing Agencies

C. Social Media

The Dangers of Relying on Sports Rights

New Course: Digital Marketing 101

That’s unfortunate, because Digital Marketing is now New Zealand’s most important advertising medium.

In other words, Digital Marketing is now the most important skill to master.

To reserve your place in this course, please pay by credit card through PayPal by clicking here: