The Explosion of OTT Content
OTT content and distribution platforms continue to proliferate at an astonishing rate. Here’s what you need to know about marketing your OTT services. Remember when Netflix was a quaint little DVD delivery service? When they introduced a streaming component, it seemed more like a novelty, and less like the future of entertainment. OTT services (short for “over the top services”) have since become ubiquitous, thanks to the “Big Three” streaming content providers: Netflix, Hulu and Amazon. We’re experiencing another shift in the OTT services marketplace, however. Unwilling to cede the streaming entertainment category to the OTT Big Three, a number of major competitors are entering the market in force and creating ripple effects through the ad world. These days, everyone is a content provider… Disney, WarnerMedia, all the major TV networks, cable providers, technology companies etc. have all pivoted to become content providers and distributors. The end goal? To become OTT companies and capture as many eyeballs as possible, carving out a significant piece of the $70 billion spent in the U.S. every year on TV advertising. While OTT services account for roughly one-third of all TV viewing, ad spend (and budgets) don’t correspond. At the moment, OTT video services have only gained about 3% of total TV advertising spending. So what does this mean? It’s simple: Though OTT viewing is growing at an exponential clip, advertising and marketing in the OTT space hasn’t grown in parallel. That’s coming, however — and the brands that act today will be in the best possible position to create competitive advantages. Currently, OTT advertising is dominated by two large players: Hulu (which generated $1.5 billion in ad revenue in 2018) and Roku. Other major players are coming in strong, however. YouTube is refashioning itself as a platform with TV-like programming capable of going head-to-head with traditional television networks — a competitive, rather than complementary force. YouTube has one undeniable argument in its favor: Raw viewership. According to the most recent company data, U.S. residents spend 200 million hours each day watching YouTube videos, many of which are consumed on smart TVs or other large screens. Meanwhile, Amazon has been pursuing a new TV advertising strategy based around Fire TV. The technology giant has been heavily targeting TV advertisers and has created a dedicated TV ad sales team to further that goal. An OTT ad duopoly? This activity is sparked in part by a realization that, if other players in the space don’t fight for OTT ad dollars, Hulu and Roku could form a duopoly reminiscent of the digital ad duopoly created by Facebook and Google. TV advertisers, meanwhile, have their own imperative: Audiences are moving to OTT services in ever-increasing numbers. If advertisers don’t mirror the behavior of these audiences, their pitches will be less successful, and they’ll ultimately cede ground to competitors. There’s another reason why OTT advertising shouldn’t be a hard sell: It holds the potential to be far more effective than traditional approaches. While network TV may have been the gold standard in terms of reaching viewers, it can’t compete with OTT in terms of audience segmentation. The data-rich nature of OTT platforms allows for high-level audience targeting, allowing brands to deliver much more relevant ad content and target motivated buyers who have an interest in what they are selling. Finding the right OTT marketing agency OTT advertising can move the needle — but only if you’re working with an agency that has the experience and expertise to drive results. At Bigeye, we’re OTT experts, and we’d love to show you the power and reach of a well-executed OTT ad campaign.
Is Influencer Marketing Finally Out of Its Infancy?
Influencer marketing continues to grow at an extraordinary rate. Yet the field is on the verge of an even greater transformation. Here’s why. Influencer marketing as a general concept stretches back to early 20th century consumer advertising, when athletes, actors and astronauts were turned into pitchmen extraordinaire. Yet influencer marketing in the modern sense has been around for little more than a decade. Despite its relative youth, influencer marketing has proven remarkably popular — and successful. Total spend on Influencer marketing grew to $6.5 billion in 2019, a significant hike over the $1.6 billion spent in 2016. The industry is expected to crest $10 billion within the next two years, as roughly 70% of marketers expect to increase their spending in this category in 2020. To earn a competitive advantage, however, you can’t just throw money at influencers — you need to ensure resources are deployed wisely. This means divesting yourself of older influencer techniques that have lost their ability to engage and convert, and deploying new strategies that earn instant attention and cultivate meaningful brand loyalty. Understanding the evolution of the influencer market To help you develop a winning influencer marketing strategy, let’s take a look at a few techniques that have lost their relevance: Not giving your influencer the latitude to be creative. At one time, giving an influencer a fairly restrictive project brief made sense: Influencer marketing was new, and brands were taking a gamble by allowing non-traditional advocates to speak for their enterprises. Influencers, most of whom are used to engaging with audiences in an intimate and interactive setting, weren’t always shining examples of brand safety or caution, so it made sense to stick to a tight creative script. Today, however, most leading influencers are old pros and more than capable of adding value by stretching the creative bounds of a campaign. Focusing too much on size. In the early days, the size of an influencer’s following was the most important metric. Today, however, we understand that engagement is just as critical (if no more so). Audience engagement also tends to drop as size grows, so it makes sense for brands to try to hit the sweet spot that pairs wide reach with active engagement. Brands are also increasingly targeting the micro-influencer space. Even an account with a few thousand followers can deliver an exceptional ROI if those are the right few thousand people. Only using influencers within your niche. Again, this may have been entirely logical at one time, but you’re going to activate the Law of Diminishing Returns very quickly. To maximize the power of your influencer marketing strategy, reach beyond your niche or your industry and you can vastly widen the talent pool at your disposal. Great brand ambassadors can be found in the most unlikely places. I’ve retired my obsolete techniques…tell me what’s next? If you’re ready to refresh and recalibrate your influencer marketing approach, we think the following ideas are worth pursuing. Drop the one-off engagements and build long-term relationships. Finding great talent is the eternal battle for any business. You should view influencers through the same prism. People with engaged followings who can sell your brand in a compelling way that’s consistent with its values…those people are not easy to replace. If you want your influencer marketing efforts to be a sustainable driver of marketing ROI, it’s important to cultivate long-lasting links. Don’t get hung up on celebrities. Influencers sometimes get a bad name for being vapid or transactional. Brands that can avoid this and create influencer campaigns that deliver real value will have a great differentiator. Avoid shallow, celebrity-driven engagements and create something with more organic appeal and real value. Insist that your influencers use every tool at their disposal. The best influencers stay ahead of the curve on the formats they use (whether video or AR) and the creative approaches they take. Your influencers should be as eager to push the envelope as you are — it’s the only way to remain relevant in a saturated market. Finding the right influencer marketing agency At Bigeye, we’ve been harnessing the power of creatively inspired influencer marketing since the earliest days of the form. If you’re looking for an influencer marketing agency that can help you create the kind of campaigns that engage and convert, reach out to Bigeye today.
How to Reach the Parents-to-be through Effective Maternity Marketing
Maternity marketing typically reaches out to the current mom, without putting much emphasis on the woman who’s expecting. But particularly for first-time moms, these women and their supportive family members must also make decisions about what’s best for their as-of-yet unborn children… what color to paint the nursery, which toys to purchase for the tot, what types of formula to buy and what kinds of clothes the child should wear.Companies that target the current mom without thinking of the present mom may be too late – once she has the child, she may have already made up her mind about the best formulas, baby wipes and other newborn needs to suit her child. And once you lose the expectant mother, you may lose her for life – if she becomes loyal to one brand, it will be hard to get her to switch over. Many Expecting Mothers Google Everything Marketers can target expectant moms by reaching out to them through the avenues they’ll be using most. Perhaps one of the easiest ways is through SEO content and Google AdWords. First-time mothers may be anxious about what constitutes a “normal” pregnancy, potential parenting woes and the “right” parenting methods. They’ll often look to Google and other search engine tools for help. A Google search for “how to change a diaper” produces more than 29 million results. While it may be difficult to provide SEO content to beat the top-ranked page, a Google Ad campaign for your brand could do wonders for your diaper company and maternity marketing strategy. Educational Content is Valuable to New Parents Instructional content may also be a promising avenue for reaching your target mom-to-be. Content marketing is a way to reach out to your target demographics, and therefore a blog directed to the mom-to-be and the newborn mom practically has a built-in audience. Younger, hipper, smartphone-wielding moms may be drawn to video content, which is easily accessible from multiple devices. From Mom-Focused Content to “DADvertising” Okay, but what about the dad-to-be? According to a study conducted last year, 52% of millennial parents told us that ads they see are made for mothers more than fathers, and 83% say they think advertising for parents should appeal to both mothers and fathers equally. In fact, there was a successful online movement in the U.S. that put pressure on the site “Amazon Mom” to rename its service to “Amazon Family.” Some maternity marketing tips we think would be helpful in reaching dads would be to make it easier for dads to find the right information on their mobile devices at any time, to include dads in the story since household duties are shared amongst both parents, and to understand what motivates and works with dads may be motivated differently than their female counterparts. We’ve already begun to see a shift toward “dadvertising” – and we’re diggin’ it. So if you’re aiming to reach soon-to-be parents, our Orlando advertising agency encourages you to think about both parts of the story. Catching a mom-to-be in the pregnancy phase may mean that you’re attracting a loyal and valuable customer for life, and speaking to a “dad-in-training” may stand out more amongst a sea of mom-oriented messaging. To learn more about how you can market to parents in order to create brand preference and instill brand loyalty, contact us today!
The Benefits of Geo-Fencing for Apartment Marketing
Among the countless advantages that digital marketing has over traditional media marketing, geo-fencing ranks near the top. Briefly defined, geo-fencing establishes an invisible perimeter (or “fence”) that covers a particular geographic region, allowing digital marketers to specifically target the audience that lies within it. Countless industries and business sectors have benefited from geo-fencing, but its value to marketers within the residential real estate sector cannot be underestimated. Geo-Fencing Explained As the old cliche goes, the three most important criteria for determining real estate desirability are location, location, location. Renters in search of a new apartment almost invariably look within very specific areas and have little interest in properties that lie outside of those areas. Geo-fencing allows you to make the most of your marketing efforts by reaching out to apartment-hunters inside a precise geographic region that you are able to define and alter at will. With geo-fencing, you can program automatic alerts to launch to smartphone users who happen to stray close to your apartment community. Prospective tenants who are using Zillow, Yelp, Pandora, or any other mobile app that supports geo-fencing are instantly identified through technologies such as radio frequency identification (RFID) or the Global Positioning System (GPS) and can receive one or more instant alerts when they enter your targeted area. 3 Key Benefits of Geo-Fencing Unsurprisingly, more and more apartment marketers are employing geo-fencing to specifically target individuals who are most likely to engender conversions and, ultimately, fill property vacancies. The majority of prospective tenants also benefit from geo-fencing. After all, what apartment hunter wouldn’t appreciate a tip or a special offer regarding a great place in an ideal location? Here are just three key advantages of apartment marketing and hunting with geo-fencing: 1. Optimized search operations based on location Real estate websites and online rental databases that employ geo-fencing technology do much of the legwork for apartment hunters by automatically and instantaneously sorting through a nearly infinite number of listings to show only the properties that fall within the parameters of a specific geographic location. In addition to targeting only the most likely future tenants on an individual basis, geo-fencing allows apartment marketers to send them relevant sale suggestions at the most opportune moments. 2. The delivery of key apartment information in real-time In addition to sending relevant listings to a localized audience and vacancy alerts to individuals who are close to your various listings, geo-fencing technology can aid with prompt apartment showings and spur-of-the-moment apartment applications. More generally speaking, it can do wonders when it comes to helping apartment complexes and other real estate organizations build their brand and engage with the most relevant audience possible. After all, why spend the money and energy on an extensive and protracted branding campaign that will reach thousands or even millions of uninterested people? 3. Convenient, value-added apartment hunting assistance Geo-fencing goes a long way toward placing the power to find and obtain the perfect apartment in the palm of any smartphone user’s hand. In addition to optimizing the online apartment hunting process, geo-fencing allows even the least tech-savvy Zillow, Redfin, or Realtor.com users to schedule relevant apartment search alerts that do most of the hunting for them. By setting specific rental interest criteria within a particular geographic area, they can let their favorite real estate app do the work, notifying them of key apartment prospects while they concentrate on career, family, and other important matters. To Learn More If you have any questions about geo-fencing for apartments, contact the real estate marketing leaders at BIGEYE today. The professionals at BIGEYE offer a broad spectrum of marketing services that can benefit anyone in the property rental sector.
4 Multifamily Marketing Analytics Tools for Your Lease-Up Goals
To optimize the marketing analytics that drive your promotional efforts, pay close attention to these four key platforms. Although advertisers still debate the comparative value of traditional vs. digital media, there is no doubt that digital analytics reign supreme when it comes to tracking the effectiveness of specific marketing campaigns and their various components. While measuring the total audience for any given radio, television, print, or billboard ad is speculative at best, modern analytics systems can not only accurately identify every individual viewer of an online ad, they can follow each viewer through the entire post-ad exposure process, measuring criteria such as click-throughs and conversions as they (hopefully!) lead to the final sale of a product or service. Even better, these systems can accomplish all of this and deliver results in real time. So where, exactly, should you go to reap the benefits of digital analytics? If you’re looking to attract renters to meet your specific lease-up goals, you’ll want to pay particular attention to the following four marketing analytics tools. 1. Google Analytics If you’re going to achieve your desired lease-up level (typically round 95%) in a limited amount of time (typically between 6 and 15 months), you’ll need a strong foundation of analytics support. A platform that is nearly ubiquitous in the world of digital marketing, Google Analytics provides just that. According to Entrepreneur Magazine contributor Thomas Smale, “no list of marketing analytics tools can be complete without Google Analytics.” The tool is so common due to its unparalleled power and versatility. In particular, it is great at tracking lead sources and helping users concentrate resources into the most effective media channels. To more effectively allocate its multifamily marketing resources, for example, an apartment rental organization can use Google Analytics to discover whether its Facebook page or its Twitter page is generating the most leads. The platform works by asking marketers to define their goals by entering a specific goal ID. A common event ID might track the number of times that users click on a specific piece of content. A company in the apartment rental industry might be interested in determining which of its three floor designs are generating the most public interest. Using Google Analytics, it can establish clicks on these floor plans as individual goal IDs and watch each as they begin to accumulate clicks in real time. In short, Google Analytics can create a report for any set of data you might desire, from simple audience overviews to complex conversion progress statements. And if you’re not impressed by its ability to lead you to unprecedented ROI, you still have to enjoy its initial price-point. Google Analytics is absolutely free. 2. Google Tag Manager An extremely flexible platform that you can easily tailor to meet your specific wants and needs, Google Tag Manager helps you capitalize on the ability of Google Analytics to track information. Briefly described, Google Tag Manager uses bits of code called tags to generate detailed information about your audience members including who they are, where they’re located, what pages they’re visiting, and even what devices they’re using. By default, Google Analytics places tags on your official website, social media pages, and other online locations to report on a wide variety of visitor behavior. As you begin to accumulate more and more tags, Google Tag Manager becomes indispensable when it comes to keeping them organized. Google Tag Manager is particularly helpful because it offers a single place to manage your Google Analytics tags as well as your tags from other platforms such as Hootsuite and Facebook Pixel (which we will discuss when we come to must-have analytics tools, numbers three and four). By clearly identifying every trackable item in Google Tag Manager, you’ll be able to easily read the data in each report and translate it into real world leads and conversions. 3. Hootsuite Hootsuite is an analytics tool with a specific focus on social media monitoring. Due to the unparalleled outreach of Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and the other major social media networks, a specialized social media analytics platform makes absolute sense. With Hootsuite, you can monitor a wide range of user activity across multiple channels of social media to discover what your audience is posting about your business and track the relative performance of your own posts on your official social media pages. By monitoring these activities, Hootsuite can show you which types of content produce results and which don’t, helping you optimize your social media presence with posts that are both specifically targeted and highly relevant. 4. Facebook Pixel Although overall Facebook advertising revenue has stagnated in recent months, it remains the dominant force in digital marketing, outpacing the other major social media networks by a significant measure. Facebook owes much of this success to Facebook Pixel. An analytics tool that businesses add to their official website and other online pages, Facebook Pixel specializes in tracking/analyzing the performance of your Facebook ad campaign, helping you refine/focus your marketing efforts and monitor the online activity of both existing and prospective renters. If you want to pursue more advanced Facebook Pixel analytics, you can establish event tags that are similar to those you can create using Google Analytics. Using these tags, you can gain even deeper insight into overall user behavior. To learn more about the top analytics tools A forward-thinking and creative marketing agency, Bigeye specializes in apartment analytics to aid in the development of effective leasing strategies. For more information, contact a Bigeye representative today.
Next-Gen TV Trends and How They Can Impact Your Brand.
Next gen TV, also known as ATSC 3.0, is redefining traditional broadcast TV by breathing new life into the aging medium. So now we answer the first question, what is ATSC 3.0? It’s the update that broadcast TV has been severely lacking. This new system will leverage current technologies to enhance picture, sound, framerate, and overall range of the medium without losing a moment of your favorite shows. ATSC 3.0 technology enhances everything about broadcast to bring it into the digital age. This will reinvigorate traditional TV, and dramatically increase its value as an advertising medium. What will Change The short answer? Everything. But let’s start with picture. The current—let’s call it classic, broadcast system caps out at 1080p. Next gen TV will span all the way to 4K! Making the new ATSC standard an HDTV over the air experience. Raising the quality of the experience without adding cost, the ATSC 3.0 system will drive conversion like never before. Furthermore, next gen TV is designed to be an ever-evolving technology. Building on the concept of technological adaption, ATSC 3.0 is designed for easy integration as new technologies develop. This way, broadcast television will not fall behind as time passes. Allowing room for future growth is an incredible capability for any technology in this day and age. This system will entice users who want to get the best service over time without paying to switch hardware or service providers as technologies evolve. This broadcast method will also have a stronger, wider range. Meaning that every user will receive more channels in higher quality without the need for a large antenna. The system will even allow mobile devices to access broadcast shows. By building in capabilities across devices, broadcast TV is broadening its scope and making itself a far more advantageous advertising tool. The Impact Next gen TV enables stronger geo-targeting capabilities than cable or satellite TV. As over-the-air TV is intrinsically contained in a specific geographic area, it is a medium that lends itself to area-specific messaging. This makes next gen TV the perfect platform for local businesses such as community banks, mom-and-pop shops, and more to reach their target market without breaking the bank. How it Works This system is able to achieve its unique capabilities by connecting on more than one front. The classic broadcast system is accessed simply by an antenna while the next gen TV system uses both an antenna and a wi-fi connection to strengthen the quality and broaden the service range; This is also what allows it to be accessed across devices. Not only is ATSC 3.0 perfect for geo-targeting, but by enabling tracking as well as use across devices it presents as both a traditional and digital media. With next gen TV, experienced advertisers can reach their audience on a whole new level. The Takeaway Broadcast TV is getting a much-needed facelift that will skyrocket its importance both as a service and as an advertising medium. Paying attention to this change now will open up avenues for effective, low-cost campaign strategies that will reach the right people, at the right time, for the right price. When you’re ready to enhance your advertising strategy reach out to our innovative channel experts today!
Why Digital Marketing Drives Revenue in the Multi-Family Industry
Don’t let your multi-family digital marketing strategy become stagnant, now is your chance to extend them beyond the walls of your complex. The multi-family industry has long used traditional advertising and marketing approaches to drive revenue through local TV, brochures, etc. Yet as the industry changes to adapt to larger societal changes, these legacy approaches need to play a more complementary role. Today, multi-family digital marketing supported by data-driven insights is the best way to reach audiences and create sustainable revenue. How multi-family digital marketing helps cultivate leads and meet occupancy goals What’s driving the multi-family space’s foray into data-powered digital marketing? According to some industry observers, digital marketing is essential in order to help resolve several entrenched business problems. These include diagnosing underperforming properties, identifying gaps in lead management and merchandising specific product types (such as floor plans and unit sizes) on demand. By integrating data analytics into their approach, multifamily operators are able to gain the insight they need to convert leads more effectively and identify inefficiencies and opportunities within specific properties. Decisions supported by real-time data can help managers increase yield and minimize lost opportunities. So how are multi-family operators incorporating these strategies? By mastering the fundamentals: High-quality lead generation, a robust online presence (great UX, compelling content, and tools such as online chatbots) lead forms, and contact centers. Other key developments Multi-family digital marketing tactics need to extend beyond lead management and well-designed websites. Marketers in this space should also give due consideration to the following: Consumer search preferences are evolving. Multifamily operators must stay current on SEO best practices in order to ensure visibility when prospective customers search for properties within their area. This is especially true given the impact of Google Places on organic search placement. Internet Lead Management (ILM) analytics can help property managers gain deeper insight into the lifecycle of a lead and how various channels are performing. ILM analytics can also provide a window into performance on the agent level, as communication can be analyzed to determine what prospects are responding to and what they aren’t. Analytics can also shine a light on whether there is a problem within the lead management process, or the sales process. Data-driven insights can also help optimize revenue management. Property managers can identify upcoming occupancy problems and make adjustments to ensure that rates remain stable. Those adjustments may include ramping up an existing marketing campaign to get additional prospects in the sales pipeline, or hitting pause on a campaign if long-term occupancy projections are higher than previously thought. Property managers can also use digital tools to introduce dynamic pricing, optimizing revenue based on shorter-term demand fluctuations. The takeaway The multi-family property space is quickly modernizing its marketing approach, shifting from traditional TV ads and brochures to sophisticated, data-driven digital marketing. This approach is paying significant dividends in terms of creating more leads, optimizing lead management, and improving revenue management practices. At BIGEYE, we’re experts in multifamily digital marketing — and we’d design a campaign that increases your leads and boosts your bottom line. Contact us today to learn what a top multifamily digital marketing agency can do for you.
Want Effective Property Management Marketing? Mind your P’s & C’s
Didn’t grandma ever tell you to mind your own business? Now it’s time to shift focus to the P’s & C’s of property management social media marketing. Social media moves fast — so it’s critical to stay up to date with the most innovative new ideas. The recent Multifamily Social Media Summit gave property management professionals the perfect opportunity to exchange such ideas and ruminate on the state of property management social media marketing. If you weren’t able to travel to Napa Valley to attend the conference, don’t worry — we’ll take a seep dive to highlight all the most intriguing ideas. Avoiding the “deadly four Ps” Have you ever noticed that brands within some industries handle their social media with much more skill than brands in others? Part of this has to do with the nature of the business — it’s hard to make industrial supplies compelling, for example. Property management falls somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. Yet this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. For property management firms that get social media right, it’s a chance to become highly differentiated within their market. One of the easiest ways to get it right is to prioritize storytelling. Let’s face it: Most people don’t care about the “deadly four P’s,” as marketer Steve Crescenzo refers to them: Policies, programs, products and procedures. What do they care about? According to Crescenzo, the “four Cs” — compelling, creative, concise and conversational content. Partner with a property management social media marketing firm to present your content in the form of a narrative, rather than a dry report where you’re simply pushing out information, and you’ll keep your audience from tuning out. Higher impact on a lower budget Every marketer has heard it repeated ad nauseam: Video is critical to your success. More video content is now being uploaded every 30 days than all the content the broadcast TV networks have ever created. Additionally, audiences report deeper engagement with video content. Unfortunately, video does present challenges. Many brands don’t have the time or the budget to create high-level video content on a consistent basis. However, there is a simple solution — the use of short animated videos. These videos are high impact and relatively inexpensive to produce. By partnering with the right property management social media-marketing agency, multifamily businesses can reap the benefits of video marketing within their social efforts without deploying excessive resources. An influential marketing approach Influencer marketing isn’t new or novel, but it’s just now gaining traction within the multifamily space. By joining forces with an influencer, brands gain access to highly engaged users and receive an endorsement that carries more weight than traditional online marketing messages. The best influencers combine the weight and value of a word of mouth recommendation with the reach of digital. Some multifamily properties are taking this strategy to the next level by offering free or discounted living space to partnered influencers. These influencers agree to share their living experiences within the community on social media in exchange for this consideration. While partnering with influencers does require some due diligence and careful guidelines in terms of how content is presented, it’s a strategy that makes sense for multifamilies seeking to improve engagement and grow their social media audience. The takeaway If you’re seeking help with property management social media marketing, don’t wait to call our property team today. We’ve got the multifamily expertise, creative talent, and digital skills to help you creative a marketing campaign that creates interest, generates revenue, and increases occupancy.
Precision and Reach: Why Streaming TV is a Powerful Weapon for DTC Brands
TV streaming is more intricate than you or your watching habits probably realize, which is why you need a video production services company. When it comes to advertising and marketing, Direct to Consumer (DTC) brands are best known for sponsored social media posts and banner ads. This makes perfect sense, given their low overhead and brand-focused business model. Yet many of these brands are migrating to a new channel — streaming TV — and partnering with top video production services to create compelling content designed to connect with a younger, mobile-first audience. Why DTC brands are choosing connected TV as a channel New research from Hulu and Telaria (a video adtech firm) underlines the potential impact streaming TV can have for DTC brands. Roughly 70% of DTC consumers indicated they spend more time watching streaming TV each week than they spend on social media. These consumers reported spending approximately 13 hours watching streaming TV each week — a figure 20% higher than their reported consumption of traditional broadcasting. As a recent piece in Adweek maintains, this shift in media watching patterns is now being reflected in the retail sector. Brands are cognizant of this reordering of viewing habits and seeking to benefit from it. A recent report from the Video Advertising Bureau showed that the top DTC brands spent roughly $2 billion on streaming ads in 2018, a figure that likely represents just the tip of the iceberg in terms of ad spend in coming years. In just the last two years, DTC brands doubled their total streaming ad spend. Why DTC brands are choosing streaming TV Traditional broadcast TV isn’t an ideal fit for many DTC brands for two reasons: It’s expensive, and it targets a general audience. Streaming services, however, offer DTC brands the ability to target audiences with much greater precision. As Adweek notes, this gives DTC brands the benefits of TV (spectacle, sight, sound, motion through excellent video production services) and marries it with the precision of digital advertising. How much of an impact does this added precision have? According to the Hulu/Telaria study, shoppers are twice as likely to purchase a product after seeing it in a streaming ad as opposed to a traditional ad. Study respondents also indicated they found streaming TV ads to be more relevant than traditional TV ads — hardly a surprise given the scattershot nature of conventional television advertising. By focusing on streaming ads, DTC brands also gain much more insight into the purchase cycle. Gaining insight into ad placement and audience targeting allows these brands to better define conversion rates and customer acquisition costs. Ultimately, streaming TV ads formerly came with a major trade-off for brands — audiences were much, much smaller than those watching traditional, linear TV. However, that state of affairs is rapidly changing. As streaming audiences grow, the value of advertising through this channel grows in parallel. The takeaway At BIGEYE, we understand the value of a highly targeted, creatively inspired, and well-executed streaming ad campaign for DTC businesses. Please reach out to us today to learn more about how our video production services can enhance your DTC successes.
How Can Small Banks Compete Against Large Banks? Supercharged SEO
Supercharge your SEO services and launch your community bank into the future with these key digital marketing strategies and concepts. The banking industry has been consolidating for 30 years, dropping from 14,000 banks in 1985 to fewer than 5,000 today. With smaller players being swallowed by industry heavyweights, it’s natural for community banks to wonder how well they can compete against national lenders. Fortunately, there’s one simple tactic that can help even the playing field: Well-executed SEO services grounded in a deep understanding of local buyers. How community banks can gain an SEO edge Community banks are, at their core, local businesses. While they might not be capitalized at the level of the big banks, they can instead compete on responsiveness and understanding of the local market. A local SEO strategy also pays dividends. Banks should give each of their local branches a dedicated web page rather than having each branch listed through a simple location finder. These pages should include information about each branch and its neighborhood and should be optimized for SEO. This means taking commonly searched phrases relating to banking in that area and incorporating them into the body and metadata of branch pages. The power of the public’s endorsement Adding customer reviews for each local branch to individual pages is also a smart tactic. Reviews play a critical role in establishing credibility and are a key cog in the conversion process. This also extends to external entities such as Yelp! and other directories. Establishing a presence on these outside sites does more than allowing you to bump your online review count. Sites such as Yelp! validate your bank’s address, phone number, and name with Google’s search algorithm, giving your site a rankings boost. Linking with high authority publishers is also key. Inbound links coming from high authority publishers is perhaps the most consistently effective tactic in the SEO playbook. Staying on top of local search terms It’s also critical to give extensive thought to the kind of questions prospective customers are searching for in your region — everything from “how to open a checking account” to “nearest bank to me.” These are the kind of questions for which community banks want to rank, so it’s important that they are addressed somewhere within your online presence. You can address them both on your sites and within the content you publish. Stressing your competitive advantages Community banks should play to their strengths when marketing. Larger banks tend to be viewed as faceless monoliths who treat their customers like a number on a spreadsheet. Community banks, on the other hand, are in a position to establish personal relationships by properly utilizing SEO services. This may not affect whether a customer qualifies for a loan, but it does impact how customers feel about their experience. Community banks should underline the closer, more responsive nature of their relationships with customers in their marketing messages. The takeaway Small banks can neutralize the advantages of larger competitors by highlighting the benefits of a more personal approach and pursuing a smart SEO strategy. If you’d like to hear more about the impact of high-level SEO services, reach out to our banking experts today.
