App Marketers: Let’s Talk About The Word Engagement

arc.applause.com

Be confident in your product and the conversation should be easy.

Go to a digital marketing seminar. Or a webinar. Or read a white paper, ebook, content marketing blog or analyst report. In any format you will encounter any variety of blowhards trying to appear intelligent, spitting jargon like they invented it.

It depends on the arrogance of the pundit, but sometimes they did.

All of these experts will throw out one word, over and over, like they have a crate full of life jackets on the Titantic:

Engage.

You must engage your customers. Engage your audience. Your users, your readers, viewers, clients, coworkers, family and puppies. Be engaged. Be awesome.

Here’s a question: what the hell does engage mean anyway?

Engagement has become one of those marketing buzzwords that has devolved into the realm of meaningless jargon. You know, like “content,” “inbound” or “micro moments.”

Let’s try it in a sentence:

“Engage your audience by creating delightful mobile micro moments throughcontent to deliver inbound leads.”

Somebody at HubSpot just swooned.

Define: Engagement Marketing

To be clear, engagement is not necessarily a bad thing. ARC encourages its journalists to talk to readers in the comments section of its articles, on Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook, via email and so forth. In a media world where publications are eliminating commenting systems, we will keep ours to address readers in conversation. We like to show that we are humans and we care and appreciate what our readers think of the styling of the magazine.

We are real people. Our readers are (mostly, I think) real people. We talk to people because we genuinely care what they think. If you want to call it that, I suppose we do … engage … with our readers.

See also: PSA To App Publishers: Don’t Break Push

I don’t think I have ever turned to ARC’s top lieutenant Dave Bolton and said, “make sure you engage with our readers.” I more likely said, “make sure to respond to reader comments.” The mandate is to be personable and conversational … confrontational if necessary.

Marketing automation engine Marketo* stated in 2014 that we are now in the era of engagement marketing. In a blog post, Marketo defined the seven principles of engagement marketing (see right). The principles are pretty straightforward: talk to people wherever they are basically all the time to get them to achieve a measurable goal for the company.

Is it just me or does engagement marketing look a whole lot like stalking?

*ARC’s parent company Applause is a customer of Marketo and ARC’s email newsletter system will soon be run by Marketo.

Data, persona modeling and predictive analytics make it a whole lot easier to “engage” with people in 2016. Especially in the world of mobile apps, where data is abundant and communication between publishers and users is nearly seamless.

Eliminating Jargon To Get To The Core Of Engagement

In our long conversation with Localytics chief marketing officer Josh Todd about the current state of app marketing, we asked him to define the notion of engagement … without using the word engagement.

Todd gave it his best shot:

The core question comes in that it has to be defined on an individual basis. What is the purpose of your app? What is the value that you add to somebody’s life? And then thinking about how you bring that to life through everything that you do.

If you are talking about the buzzword engagement, that might be as simple as how many times is somebody coming into my app? How long are they spending? Those are going to be superficial metrics until you know your core.

Let’s look at Uber. They don’t want you to spend a ton of time in their app. For them, they want you to be able to open up your phone (or maybe get to a point where you don’t have to) and a car is there right as you need it and you are on your way.

For them, engagement is that broader experience that you are delivering to help make your life easier and better. If you look at somebody like some of these fitness apps and trackers, what is their core purpose? Hopefully their core purpose, at some level, is to create a healthier world. I would hope. Each probably has some version of a mission statement that aligns around that.

I think they need to look at what engagement means to them on an individual basis to the value they are bringing to society and ultimately to their app users.

Todd’s advice seems counterintuitive: focus on your own product, your own persona and experience and learn what makes you great. Why did the person download the app in the first place?

And therein is the point: engagement … or really any type of brand-to-consumer interaction … should be easy if a company is confident in its product and knows that it has real value to people. Engagement does not need to be some forced and contrived policy, but natural communication of benefits and value between two interested parties.

“There is less mystery in apps,” Todd said. “It is the core marketing principles that are going to make you great. How well do you know your users and how well you can tailor things.”

What Marketers Need to Know About Snapchat [Infographic]

marketingprofs.com

Snapchat has emerged from its murky roots to become a popular app with 100 million daily active users. So, should marketers now consider having a strategy for this video messaging app?

Check out these stats about Snapchat users from by NewsCred and Column Five.

Some 54% of users are on Snapchat daily; 32% users engage with the app 2-5 times a week.

"Even though Snapchat users are engaging with the app on a daily basis, most users aren't interacting with branded features, such as Snap Live Stories, Snap Discover Stories, or branded filters," states the infographic.

Find out more about Snapchat users by tapping or clicking on the infographic.

How Do You Secure a Valuable ROI in the Complex World of Mobile Programmatic?

exchangewire.com

A recent IAB survey of marketers in the UK revealed that 50% use programmatic for buying mobile inventory. However, programmatic advertising on mobile is one of the least understood mobile topics, with almost 45% of respondents reporting having no or little knowledge of it. ExchangeWire talked exclusively to Jonathan Tom (pictured below), the recently appointed head of mobile programmatic for EMEA, RadiumOne, about the four things to bear in mind when developing a mobile programmatic strategy.

The disconnect between usage and knowledge isn’t uncommon as one moves into unchartered technology waters; but it is a reminder that you should really look down before you leap. Thus, to ensure you make the most of this new technique, or don’t waste valuable spend, or worse, actually damage your brand. Here are the key things to bear in mind before embarking on the mobile programmatic voyage.

The incredibly short shelf life of valuable mobile data

In other words, mobile data goes from valuable to useless in a matter of minutes. To be valuable, data needs to be collected, processed and acted upon as quickly as possible. Think of sending a discount code based on a user’s location and search activity (say wanting to find a restaurant). At the right time you’re a valuable resource adding value to the consumer experience. Do the same thing, even 20 minutes later – when the decision or purchase has already been committed to – and you’re an unwelcome intruder.

Mobile is the most effective channel to act accurately and quickly to capitalise on those first few minutes of consumer activity, but you need high-quality data and technology to make it work. These are critical ingredients, so its imperative marketers use the right tech partner to be able to seize the opportunity to reach and engage individuals at each moment of their digital journey. It’s about dramatically reducing the time and losses between data capture and activation. Can your provider collect, analyse, and activate user insights from mobile data immediately and efficiently?

Efficiency and creative can live together

People are slowly coming around to the idea that programmatic doesn’t mean efficiency and creative are mutually exclusive. Indeed, ‘programmatic creative’ will be one of online advertising’s big themes this year.

Yes, programmatic media is largely dominated by efficiencies, in both media targeting and delivery (media + data). However, programmatic achieves its utmost potential when it’s used to personalise the ad creative itself. That is, the technology is deployed so that a user will only see highly relevant messages at the right time and right place – instead of non-relevant and disruptive ads.

When it comes to mobile, marketers should be coming from the opposite direction of normal marketing practice. What I mean is, it’s about tapping into live intent signals and the emotional states of consumers as the catalyst for marketing activity, rather than the actual goal. In more simple terms, mobile isn’t about trying to generate emotional states from ads but, instead, simply acting on the states that currently exist.

The combination of native ad formats, dynamic creatives and location can all be fed into the programmatic machine to enhance the quality of data by delivering a better ad experience for users, which will result in greater engagement and ROI of paid media. It’s worth calling out the location element – in the IAB study, location-based advertising was seen as the most exciting mobile opportunity this year by two-thirds of marketers.

Programmatic improving creative also produces a wonderful by-product – more relevant and useful ads will help reduce the need for ad blocking; thereby addressing one of the industry’s biggest challenges.

Tying together various mobile marketing functions

Due to their interdependence, data, analytic tools and programmatic media functions are becoming more tightly integrated. Just as some advertisers and agencies have initiated a move towards a ‘self-service’ approach, another trend already taking shape is around the automation and customisation of analytic tools. The buy side are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of – and rewards from – gathering, analysing and utilising insights from high-quality data sources and analytic tools. This is spurring further interest in tightly integrating data assets, generating user insights and activating insights through paid media across devices.

Consequently, we’re seeing an appetite among clients for mobile audience solutions that can fuse various mobile app marketing functions, including analytics, geolocation and push notifications, into a single product.

They want these separate technologies that are typically spread out among multiple providers, being brought together and accessed via a single tool that can then be applied programmatically in real-time to campaigns. It’s about eliminating the tangle of multiple SDKs and data sets a marketer has to deal with.

Furthermore, both app creators and brand marketers want to capture in-app user engagement data and make use of it to identify and target high-value consumers both within apps and beyond. All this, becomes particularly powerful when it’s combined with cross-device ad platforms so campaigns can work as hard as possible across many screens, particularly factoring in location data.

Weaving in dark social data

The vast majority of online content shared among people happens in private communications such as emails, instant messages and texts which cannot be measured by web analytics. Thus, it’s often beyond the grasp of marketers – hence the term “dark social”.

In the UK, approximately 75% of all content is shared via dark social compared to just 20% shared via Facebook and Twitter. Brands are too pre-occupied with Facebook and Twitter, which are relatively ineffective, compared to dark social’s power in harnessing shared content to reach a wider audience. That’s because dark social represents content shared with one another based on an intimate knowledge of what matters most to those close to them. Being done on a one-to-one basis, it carries more emotional weight than the ‘blanket’ approach on social networks.

For example, The Jockey Club, the largest commercial group in British horse racing, used dark social to improve the effectiveness of its marketing activity and provide increased value to their sponsors. Analysing dark social sharing, they identified over 3.5 million people who’d interacted with their content in some way at least five times over the previous 90 days. They targeted this audience for the Cheltenham Festival and saw a 12-1 ROI on ticket sales. They also found out that when a sponsor and The Jockey Club were included in the same ad, effectiveness doubled.

Dark social represents a rich source and more holistic view of consumer behavioural data and insights. It becomes even more powerful when merged with mobile targeting capabilities and real-time media buying. Integrating these insights into a broader mobile campaign will make mobile efforts exponentially more targeted and impactful.

Bringing these four elements into your mobile strategy will go a long way towards ensuring a valuable return on investment – making sure you swim, not sink, when it comes to mobile programmatic.

5 Super Bowl Advertisers That Nailed Their Instagram Marketing

adweek.com

Instagram reps today said that 38 million people engaged with the app's Super Bowl-related content 155 million times on Sunday. Indeed, the visual platform is becoming an increasingly important communications channel for consumers—and marketers are meeting them there. 

So how did Big Game advertisers do on the Facebook-owned app? To find out, social-media vendor Engagement Labs compared brands' data from the week leading up to the game and their traffic on the app last night.

The Toronto-based company's numbers are comprised of three stats—engagement, impact and responsiveness. Engagement stats measure likes, comments and clicks. Impact logs how many people saw the content either organically or through paid ads. And responsiveness clocks marketers' speed, quality and rate of response to followers' comments.

Based on those three pieces of criteria, brands were given an "eValue" score between zero and 100. Each score is benchmarked against Engagement Lab's database of 100,000 brands' posts.

Here's a quick look at how the top five Super Bowl advertisers used Instagram, and their respective scores.

1. Pokemon's eValue score: 84.23 
The brand released its full commercial before the Super Bowl, asking fans to spot references to Pokemon in the spot and comment on Instagram.

2. Walt Disney Pictures' The Jungle Book's eValue score: 77.22 
Once the ad aired on TV, the film studio posted a link to the full trailer on its Instagram page.

Walt Disney Pictures also used the platform to post a series of trailers leading up to the game.

3. Squarespace's eValue score: 74.65 
Squarespace scored particularly high for engagement on posts featuring comedy sketch artists Key & Peele.

For example, the first video that it posted six days ago with Key & Peele garnered 1,731 likes and 171 comments. The website domain company posted a total of four posts with the comedians.

4. SoFi's eValue score: 70.6
Although the financial startup only has 2,570 Instagram followers, its fans actively commented on and liked its content.

According to Engagement Labs, part of the brand's success is attributed to the fact that its product—financial loans and services—serves a niche market.

5. Acura's eValue score: 69.37
While Acura scored relatively low in engagement, the quantity of posts trumps other brands.

The car maker is promoting a Super Bowl sweepstakes on Instagram that encourages folks to comment on a Facebook video for the chance to win an Acura NSX sports car.

Over the past two weeks, the brand has posted 11 photos about the NSX car.

Report: Mobile App Installs, Engagement Highest On Weekend & Evenings

marketingland.com

Conversion and retention rates also vary by platform, according to AppsFlyer.

This morning,  AppsFlyer released its State of App Marketing report. The report looks at more than one billion “non-organic” (paid) installs and five billion app opens across 6,000 apps in the second half of 2015.

Weekends see peak installs for both iOS and Android apps; however, iOS installs drop off midweek much more dramatically. (The following data are for North America, but the report covers global trends.)

The practical recommendation for iOS developers is to “reduce spend midweek as users are less likely to download your app.” However, Android publishers and developers are counseled by AppsFlyer to continue spending midweek.

The peak time for iOS and Android installs is late afternoon through late evening, between about 4 p.m. and 11 p.m. AppsFlyer says that peak app engagement also follows the same weekend and time of day pattern. However, there’s relatively consistent, if lower, app usage throughout the week.

The report also examined conversion and app retention rates. It found some interesting and meaningful differences between the platforms. For example, the chart immediately below shows click-to-install conversion rates, comparing iOS and Android.

Android apps see much better conversion rates in some categories than others, and the same is true for iOS apps. For example, iOS apps convert much better in the Health & Fitness category, whereas Android sees better conversion rates in the Lifestyle category.

The report doesn’t offer an explanation or speculate on the reasons behind these discrepancies.

Another interesting discussion in the report is app retention by platform. The chart below reflects the differences between iOS and Android in terms of different verticals. Some of the categories — such as Productivity, Music and Social Networking — show significant retention gaps between the platforms.

AppsFlyer advises developers to try to determine “what’s working in the version with the higher retention score” and transfer that to the other platform app.

As the company points out, app engagement and churn remain major problems for developers. Therefore, it’s critical to understand and analyze the available data and implement best practices.

The Internet Of Things Will Be The World's Biggest Robot

forbes.com

(Photo by Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)

The Internet of Things is the name given to the computerization of everything in our lives. Already you can buy Internet-enabled thermostats, light bulbs, refrigerators, and cars. Soon everything will be on the Internet: the things we own, the things we interact with in public, autonomous things that interact with each other.

These “things” will have two separate parts. One part will be sensors that collect data about us and our environment. Already our smartphones know our location and, with their onboard accelerometers, track our movements. Things like our thermostats and light bulbs will know who is in the room. Internet-enabled street and highway sensors will know how many people are out and about—and eventually who they are. Sensors will collect environmental data from all over the world.

The other part will be actuators. They’ll affect our environment. Our smart thermostats aren’t collecting information about ambient temperature and who’s in the room for nothing; they set the temperature accordingly. Phones already know our location, and send that information back to Google Maps and Waze to determine where traffic congestion is; when they’re linked to driverless cars, they’ll automatically route us around that congestion. Amazon already wants autonomous drones to deliver packages. The Internet of Things will increasingly perform actions for us and in our name.

Increasingly, human intervention will be unnecessary. The sensors will collect data. The system’s smarts will interpret the data and figure out what to do. And the actuators will do things in our world. You can think of the sensors as the eyes and ears of the Internet, the actuators as the hands and feet of the Internet, and the stuff in the middle as the brain. This makes the future clearer. The Internet now senses, thinks, and acts.

We’re building a world-sized robot, and we don’t even realize it.

I’ve started calling this robot the World-Sized Web.

The World-Sized Web—can I call it WSW?—is more than just the Internet of Things. Much of the WSW’s brains will be in the cloud, on servers connected via cellular, Wi-Fi, or short-range data networks. It’s mobile, of course, because many of these things will move around with us, like our smartphones. And it’s persistent. You might be able to turn off small pieces of it here and there, but in the main the WSW will always be on, and always be there.

None of these technologies are new, but they’re all becoming more prevalent. I believe that we’re at the brink of a phase change around information and networks. The difference in degree will become a difference in kind. That’s the robot that is the WSW.

This robot will increasingly be autonomous, at first simply and increasingly using the capabilities of artificial intelligence. Drones with sensors will fly to places that the WSW needs to collect data. Vehicles with actuators will drive to places that the WSW needs to affect. Other parts of the robots will “decide” where to go, what data to collect, and what to do.

We’re already seeing this kind of thing in warfare; drones are surveilling the battlefield and firing weapons at targets. Humans are still in the loop, but how long will that last? And when both the data collection and resultant actions are more benign than a missile strike, autonomy will be an easier sell.

By and large, the WSW will be a benign robot. It will collect data and do things in our interests; that’s why we’re building it. But it will change our society in ways we can’t predict, some of them good and some of them bad. It will maximize profits for the people who control the components. It will enable totalitarian governments. It will empower criminals and hackers in new and different ways. It will cause power balances to shift and societies to change.

These changes are inherently unpredictable, because they’re based on the emergent properties of these new technologies interacting with each other, us, and the world. In general, it’s easy to predict technological changes due to scientific advances, but much harder to predict social changes due to those technological changes. For example, it was easy to predict that better engines would mean that cars could go faster. It was much harder to predict that the result would be a demographic shift into suburbs. Driverless cars and smart roads will again transform our cities in new ways, as will autonomous drones, cheap and ubiquitous environmental sensors, and a network that can anticipate our needs.

Maybe the WSW is more like an organism. It won’t have a single mind. Parts of it will be controlled by large corporations and governments. Small parts of it will be controlled by us. But writ large its behavior will be unpredictable, the result of millions of tiny goals and billions of interactions between parts of itself.

We need to start thinking seriously about our new world-spanning robot. The market will not sort this out all by itself. By nature, it is short-term and profit-motivated – and these issues require broader thinking. University of Washington law professor Ryan Calo has proposed a Federal Robotics Commission as a place where robotics expertise and advice can be centralized within the government. Japan and Korea are already moving in this direction.

Speaking as someone with a healthy skepticism for  another government agency, I think we need to go further. We need to create agency, a Department of Technology Policy, that can deal with the WSW in all its complexities. It needs the power to aggregate expertise and advice other agencies, and probably the authority to regulate when appropriate. We can argue the details, but there is no existing government entity that has the either the expertise or authority to tackle something this broad and far reaching. And the question is not about whether government will start regulating these technologies, it’s about how smart they’ll be when they do it.

The WSW is being built right now, without anyone noticing, and it’ll be here before we know it. Whatever changes it means for society, we don’t want it to take us by surprise.

Cisco: Internet of things, video will lead to global mobile data surge

zdnet.com

More people will have mobile phones than electricity, running water and cars by 2020.

Global mobile data traffic will hit 30.6 exabytes per month in 2020, up from 3.7 exabytes in 2015, according to a Cisco report. Mobile devices, video and the Internet of things are contributing to swelling mobile data traffic.

Cisco's Virtual Networking Index and Global Mobile Data Traffic Forecast is designed to gauge data traffic and mobile data traffic is growing twice as fast as fixed network.

According to Cisco, there will be 5.5 billion mobile users in 2020, or about 70 percent of the global population. Smart mobile devices will represent 72 percent of total devices by 2020, up from 36 percent in 2015. More people will have mobile phones than electricity, running water and cars by 2020.

A few of the data points from Cisco include:

• Annual global mobile data traffic will hit 366.8 exabytes in 2020, up from 44.2 exabytes in 2015.
• By 2020, 55 percent of total mobile data traffic will be offloaded to WiFi.
• 75 percent of the world's mobile data traffic will be video.
• 98 percent of mobile data traffic will come from smart devices by 2020. Of those smart devices, smartphones, laptops and tablets will be about 92 percent of global mobile data traffic, down from 94 percent in 2015.
• Machine to machine traffic will be 7 percent of global mobile data traffic by 2020, up from 3 percent today.
• 66 percent of mobile devices and connections will be IPv6 capable, up from 36 percent in 2015.
• There will be 600 million wearable devices in use, up from almost 97 million in 2015.
• 4G connections will be 40.5 percent of the total global footprint by 2020, up from 13.7 percent. 72 percent of mobile data traffic will come from 4G networks.
• By 2020, there will be 432 million global WiFi hotspots (including home), up from 64 million in 2015.
• In 2018, voice over WiFi will top voice over IP in number of minutes.