We’re experimenting with a different approach to our Marketing Trends reports in 2019 — but only for a limited time and only on a first-come, first-served basis [you should contact us at bookings@socialmedia.org.nz to reserve your sponsorship topic].
In past years, we’ve created Trends Reports on various marketing topics, and made them available for anyone to use under a non-exclusive licensing arrangement.
This year, we’re experimenting with the notion of releasing the reports on an EXCLUSIVE basis, one sponsor per topic, to enable sponsors to get the most out of the reports.
Each Trends report is intended to demonstrate Authority and Thought Leadership in the chosen space, to help position your organisation as the go-to people for that specialty, and to act as a door-opener to get you in front of clients who otherwise might not be aware of, or not willing to consider, your services.
As you’ll see below, we’ve identified many key content strands for each report; however the final nature and content of the report will be determined in association with the sponsor.
We’re offering sponsorship in two different forms in 2019, either:
1 Sponsorship & Naming Rights of a single, 100-page Annual Trends Report, providing comprehensive coverage of the topic; or
2 Sponsorship & Naming Rights of four Quarterly Reports, each approximately 30 pages, enabling you to promote the sponsorship and demonstrate thought leadership on an ongoing basis
For either report, the sponsorship fee is $100+GST per page. We require 50% deposit upon commissioning, with the balance due upon publication.
ABOUT THE CREATOR OF THESE REPORTS
Oh, in case you’re wondering who we are to be preparing such reports: each report is being prepared by Michael Carney, author of seven books, adman, media director and strategic planning director. Michael is also the creator/training director of Netmarketing Courses, which provides online training across a wide range of digital marketing disciplines. See our About page for more.
Of necessity, we conduct a wide range of research for our various digital marketing courses, and that research forms the basis of these Trends reports.
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Here are some of the Trends Reports currently available for sponsorship:
Search Marketing 2019
This report provides an examination of Search Marketing Trends as we head through 2019.
In this presentation, 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. In March 2018, Google introduced mobile-first indexing. We explore the implications.
Three Seconds is the New Fast
According to a study Google presented in late 2016, websites 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 2019, 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.
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. Collectively, Bing powers voice search for approximately as many Voice Assistants as Google, around a billion each. Ignore Bing at your peril.
Video Optimisation
Voice search isn’t the only SEO trend taking over the Internet; videos are, too. They are an ever increasingly popular information medium, which makes them a rich source of customer traffic when you use them cleverly.
While your videos need to be excellent in order to rank on YouTube (any other quality standard is unacceptable there), they won’t be able to without being optimised for carefully picked keywords.
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The Search Marketing presentation also looks at:
- how Voice Search is transforming the ways in which consumers gather information, and how that in turn requires a whole new approach to keyword optimisation
- what you need to know about Topic Clusters, to ensure your priority placement in search engine results
- the opportunities inherent in Featured Snippets
- how keyword search is giving way to User Intent as the most meaningful search signal
- the dramatic growth in Natural Language Search
- the increasing importance of structured data as Google uses AI more and more to handle search results
- why E-A-T (Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness) is an essential content metric in 2019
- the convergence of SEO and Content
- why speed is now vital to your search success
- how Location, Location, Location is now a search engine mantra as well
Online Video Marketing 2019
Online Video is 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 2019 report and slide presentation, coming soon.
Social Media Marketing Trends 2019
Now we turn the spotlight on social media trends for 2019, inspired by an infographic from Filmora (available here).
1 Video
First on the list is the least surprising of all: social goes video. Yep, all those moving pictures clamouring for attention on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Instagram (now joined by LinkedIn, which has recently added its own native video offerings) will continue to get all the attention.
What that means for marketers: if you are not using video in social media, you are much less likely to get noticed — and even less likely to get remembered. According to data gathered by Filmora, 95% of video messages will be retained by consumers while only 10% of text-based posts will enjoy that privilege.
Oh, and if you can, make those videos live. Facebook Live videos are watched three times longer than regular videos.
2 Ephemeral is Hot
The move to short-lived content, pioneered by Snapchat and shamelessly copied by Instagram Stories, will continue to be a thing in 2018.
Why? There are a few factors at work, including:
- increased concentration on the actual post content, precisely because it will disappear
- fear of missing out, because the messages are limited and time-constrained
- users can afford not to worry about little things like spelling, grammar or accuracy, because their messages don’t hang around long enough to be critiqued
3 Chatbots are multiplying
There are now some 12,000 active chatbots on Facebook Messenger and it is estimated that 30% of our chat conversations will be with the little creatures this year.
Why? Because, in many cases they are smarter than humans — at least when it comes to talking about what they know (are programmed) to chat about.
If you already know the most frequently asked questions about your products, a chatbot is the simplest, most efficient and friendliest (!) way to share that information with your prospects and customers.
4 Influencer Marketing is growing strongly
Influencer Marketing is the fastest-growing marketing channel, according to Filmora data.
That’s because, with all due respect to traditional media channels, Influencer Marketing is (or can/should be):
- more targeted
- more credible
- more affordable
Influencer Marketing can also be more successful, according to 94% of those who use the channel.
And, since these days consumers put more trust in friends, whanau and peers, Influencer Marketing is an easy approach to gather endorsements that hopefully turn into sales.
5 Mobile, Mobile, Mobile
Yeah, we may never actually arrive at the long-promised “year of the mobile“, but this is pretty darned close.
More than 90% of Kiwis under 55 now have smartphones and, guess what, we actually use them — most especially, for checking in on social media many times a day.
And yes, that means that any marketing or promotion that you do on social media needs to be mobile-friendly — and, if you are sending anybody from a social medium to your own website, that better be mobile-friendly as well.
All that and of course much more, in the Social Media Marketing NZ Trends 2019 report and slide presentation, coming out soon.
Influencer Marketing 2019
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.
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 2019 report and slide presentation.
Content Marketing 2019
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:
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 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
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Other Topics In Development
We’re also planning Trends reports covering:
- eCommerce
- Email Marketing
- Artificial Intelligence & Marketing
- Marketing Automation
We will consider developing reports for any marketing topic, so get in touch with us and tell us what content would be most relevant for your business.
CONTACT US TODAY
As we’ve already noted, these reports will be produced exclusively for a single sponsor for each topic, and are available on a first-come, first-served basis. We’re already talking to potential sponsors for several of the reports, so if you’re interested we recommend that you contact us today on bookings@socialmedia.org.nz or by phone on 021 1493 403.
