The DOYO Live Marketing Show sponsored by Valley Digital Services – In this episode:

• Digital vs. Traditional Marketing Strategy – Integrating the two with Mike Pontikos, creative director at DOYO Live, YSU marketing professor and owner of the branding agency Sokitnop.
• 2016 – A year in review…What did we get right and wrong?
• Magic 8-Ball – 2017 predictions!

Digital vs. Traditional Marketing Strategy

In the digital era, many have taken to online marketing strategies due to two primary reasons. The first, It’s where the eyeballs are. 90% of the buying decision process starts with online search. We go to Google and type in where to get a pizza, new shoes, TV or car. It’s a fact. Therefore if your business is going to get found you need to have a strategy in place that will essentially get you found online.

The second is that many minimize the time that needs to be invested into a full-blown content marketing strategy often times giving up way too soon and needing to understand the depths of having great content and using social media as a delivery mechanism.

The fact that organic reach (minus video) has all but disappeared on Facebook, other social platforms will give you some extended reach, but largely social media is a pay-for-play for businesses. There is a way to implement a strategy to still get engagement, but free is no longer free.

Additionally, Google changed marketing significantly. Reason being is that we hold ourselves to a higher level of accountability. We no longer just laid emphasis on impressions. Which is how traditional marketing really justifies ROI. The DOYO Live platform delivers 80,000 online impressions each month across our website, email, social media, and other syndicated platforms.

However, with digital, we are able to drill down to understand where that traffic is coming from and what types of content people are interacting with our website. Connecting the dots is not a perfect science, as we’d like to believe in digital marketing. We are all looking to close the loop. The fact remains that the buyer’s journey, the path people take to make and complete their buying decisions is not the perfect path from top-middle-bottom of the funnel to conversion that we’d all like to believe.

It looks more like a person swatting at a bumble bee on a hot summer day. First, you may interact on social media, then a visit to a website, a friend might bring it up in conversation and then back to the website. A blog captures someone’s eye, maybe even a paid or sponsored ad then comes the moment of truth. An email registration. Now you’ve opted in, we begin to nurture the relationship with a weekly email newsletter, tailored to the content you want to see. However you are still not convinced and you download a case study of our website, maybe you drop by every Friday for The DOYO Live Marketing Show.

After all this, which takes place for 3 or 4 months you are finally ready to make a buying decision and convert. So now I turn to my digital marketing experts…What was the event that converted that individual from fan to customer? The answer is all of it!

It’s challenging, so in this process, if your budget makes sense, it’s still a very viable option to try to put the right information from a traditional perspective in someone’s hands. Yes, I know, a digital marketing expert is saying use traditional means, such as public relations, print, direct mail piece, and TV.

However in order to generate enough awareness for your business my preference, expertise, and budget align more with a digital strategy that will grow an audience. From there I like to mine the data and let it dictate where I spend my money and also how I align the strategy.

Typically what I’m doing, is that once an individual converts to my opt-in email list. I take a look at who is interacting with emails on a consistent basis. Knowing they’ve got some brand awareness I will generally target those individuals with a delightful postcard.

Nothing too wordy, but a high-end picture, like the one you see to the left, something you would use on Instagram on the front of the postcard that blows them away. On the back my business name and simple call-to-action. For this postcard, we used, “We’d love to see you at DOYO Live.” Cute kid, it stands out and it is tough not to pay attention to it. If you opened 3 or 4 emails in a given month to six-week time span this would make a lot of sense.

I’d also tell you that if you have an audience of 5,000 and a budget to send 5,000 postcards. I would NEVER spend my marketing budget on sending those 5,000 people 1-post card. Instead, I would go back to the online data, to try to identify the 500 – 1,000 that are interacting with my content on a consistent basis and send them 5-postcards in a series. We lose sight in all marketing, digital or direct that it’s like voting, early and often. You got to be consistent and put information in front of your audience with consistency and hit the frequency of 5 – 10 times in order to get them to pay attention. Include online touches blended with this strategy.

Traditional and earned media are proven, they have trusted resources and they have a built-in audience, that’s why you pay them to advertise. I would look to try to leverage one off the other. So if you are going to advertise, make sure you have your online house in order. Working with an entity like Valley Digital Services can be a HUGE play for your business because they have you covered with the digital aspect and can integrate both WFMJ and The Vindicator. That makes sense. Again look for ways you can blend the two, which will help you to maximize your ROI.

DOYO Live – 2016 Predictions – What Did We Get Right and Wrong?

Our 2016 predictions below were originally published during Q1-2016. Not sure why we waited so long, but our blog is less than a year old. So here they are. Many people make the predictions for the upcoming year and then just move on. We are willing to take the good with the bad. So we predicted the process would be huge and along the same lines the behind the scenes. This is essentially a documentary of the brands and businesses bringing their decisions, products, and events to life. I LOVE THIS…I understand people love to see the finished, varnished product. It’s the reason why we produce a weekly live marketing show. To just be real, raw, in the moment discussion. I mean it’s part of our brand, DOYO Live, we have to be true to our roots.

I believe the process was accurate, as is, was, behind the scenes. I’m probably a little early on this one, so I believe if you are on SnapChat or active on digital this remained to be true and will continue to get bigger. Behind the scenes plays out on TV at every award show and on Twitter. The majority of the world watching these events, sports, live stuff. Continue to integrate TV with the sharing experience. No other TV event like the Oscars or MTV Music Awards can convince me of anything different. Last but not least the fundamentals.

Businesses are flocking to Instagram in mass quantities. I see it daily. SnapChat not so much, Pinterest and LinkedIn. Establishing yourself to leverage existing platforms and dominate will always continue to suffer from the advancement of applications and new sites, but more so with the advancements now. What you were an expert at 3-months ago on Facebook is now old. To stay current understanding, reading and keeping up is a challenge, fundamentally if you work at it. Put the social back into media and adapt to flourish still remains consistent. See what you think about 2016!

The Process

What do I mean “the process…” Everyone wants to access. We got to the point somehow that we understand that life is not going to be completely polished and either is marketing. Seeing the unvarnished product come to life is fascinating. It’s also engaging and keeping eyeballs on content. Nike recently produced a remarkable behind the scenes video, Be Courageous – A Nike Basketball Production. This video features Kobe Bryant as his career comes to an end. They enlisted the services of Robert Glasper, a wonderful jazz musician. It details how he came up with the musical score behind the video.

Way more interesting than Kobe or the final product. It is fascinating to watch a brilliant musician create music to this soon to be video.  Which launched around the NBA All-Star Game. Oh and by the way when you are done, Nike just engaged you for over 3 minutes!!!

Behind the Scenes

So this is a by-product of sharing the process and granting access. People want to see the process. We are living in a time where we can get unprecedented access. And because of this we get to go behind the velvet ropes, down the red carpet and see what’s going on behind the scenes.

Fundamentals

As we are always striving for the next best thing in the marketing world that’s going to help us standout. The fundamentals are boring, pragmatic, not often sexy. But getting back to basics: Starting with a plan, understanding the challenges, goals, reverse engineering the numbers, executing a strategy, etc. When it comes to social media looking at clean posts, great visuals, elements that bring value driven with great content in the right places is always going to be of tremendous value and perform well. Yes, while SnapChat, Periscope or Facebook’s new live streaming capability are very cool! You got to have the basics.

 

Magic 8-Ball – 2017 Marketing Predictions

We shook the Magic 8-Ball during The DOYO Live Marketing Show to see what predictions were going to come true in 2017. Who are we to question the accuracy of a $5, life-sized pool ball with the lucky #8 on it.

Prediction #1 – Will Video Dominate in 2017?

Magic 8-Ball decided it would be so…I and Mike Pontikos agree. However, if you need some stats that were presented at Ohio Inbound Marketing Day:

• 74% of all internet traffic will be video in 2017.
• 300% increase in video consumption on mobile.
• 157% increase in organic traffic due to video.

Does not take a digital marketing expert to figure out that Facebook is aggressively advertising Facebook Live on TV. You can join us pretty much every Friday at 11 AM for our DOYO Live Marketing Show. We discuss fun and informative marketing topics, often times on location.

Short form documentary style videos, if you’ve not seen the Matthew McConaughey, now the creative director for Wild Turkey, do yourself a favor. It’s amazing.

This is marketing that does not feel like marketing. It’s been released on YouTube. This is where I believe marketing investment is heading. Nike is similar with their Facebook strategy. So with Nike, they basically put out 2-to-4 videos per month. They have very little if any static post. Meaning post with a high-end picture. They are telling the story, via Facebook with high-end content marketing videos.

DOYO Live is about educating the masses on marketing. For us, we get almost no reach and engagement with our static post. Picture, link, tagline. This goes nowhere…Not because our content isn’t any good. There’s a limitation on social media to what is being shown, based on their (users) preferences. However video is exploding for us. Especially on Facebook, we get a couple thousand views and a lot of engagement. There’s a 108% increase in reach and a 200% increase in video on our Facebook Page. It doesn’t take a data scientist to know that video is huge.

People don’t exactly know what to do with it, especially live. But Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram all have live streaming video. For those of you that sit back and wait, in 6-months you are going to wish you were doing something weekly and eventually daily with live video. I’m not saying that everyone turning their lives into a reality show is a good idea, but in a year to 2-years, everyone will be their own reality TV star.

Prediction #2 – The End of SEO is Near?

Magic 8-Ball – It’s very possible.

Artificial intelligence has arrived, in a big way, by some very big companies with very deep pockets. Apple, Amazon, and Google are now all competing to have a device in your home that is machined based learning and machines talking to a machine. The way Google works now is that you type something into search. It will then show you information based on your keywords, relevancy, location, previous search preferences, etc. Otherwise the fundamentals of SEO.

This is all changing, Siri has been around for quite some time. It’s the reason when you ask Siri for a location or a restaurant, and it’s getting better. That you only will get 1-or-2 recommendations. Or it’ll populate a map or even Yelp for some crazy reason. I don’t quite understand all the technology behind it. They leverage Natural Language Processing and are studying deep neural learning of the brain to make these predictions.

Artificial Intelligence is here, it’s only going to get bigger. For the small business down the street trying to just get online and figure out how to use Facebook. Guess what? This is already complicating your life. It’s all the more reason you need to be on Facebook, because as Facebook Recommendations grows this is just one example of A.I.

Prediction #3 – Establish Networks vs. Hub and Spoke Model of Web 2.0

Magic 8-Ball  – So it shall be done.

The life and blood of online marketing are this…Put your website at the center of a wagon wheel. All the spokes represent the delivery mechanisms. You’ve got social media, email, public relations, paid for advertising online and traditional, 3rd party delivery networks, publishing sites like Medium or LinkedIn Pulse, your blog, and the list continues.

The next thing we’ve been doing for the past decade or more is the rip and replace model. We show a picture, include some links and drive people from their homes, essentially where they were all comfortable and we re-locate them to our website.

When we look at Google Analytics they say, hey this is working. Your web traffic went up 25% month-over-month. The traffic came from organic, social and direct. And we all walk around high-fiving. We preach value, we preach give people a great experience. Well if it’s so great then why do we ask them to leave Facebook, LinkedIn, Medium, your blog and come over to our website. Yes, I get it, we want that email address. If we get the email address we in-turn can send them more personalized messages, we know who they are and get more sticky.

Giving us an opportunity for conversion. But what if, we just let people hang out on LinkedIn, read our content there, and once they’ve really bought into our content they will take the next step to find us. My belief is this…That I can pretty much get anyone to click on a link. Not a click-bait link with Megan Fox or Brad Pitt pictures, but good intelligent content.

However, the time and depth spent on my website vs. someone that came from a search are trivial. I have a belief, which I think is risky, is not just that Jab, Jab, Jab, Jab, Righ Hook by Gary Vaynerchuk tells us that 5 to 7 posts need to be educational and entertaining, and then we throw the right hook on the call-to-action to buy something.

I believe we are actually in a time where it’s not just the call-to-action, but also incorporating links to your content. Meaning this, here’s what I’ll be doing moving forward in 2017. We will post our content on our blog, likely focusing on video more. Letting The DOYO Live Marketing Show serve as the content creator, we will transcribe this information as we’ve done for a few months now and syndicate it out through our various delivery channels.

For the most part, we will just post the article, no links to up and root you from that platform to ours. Every so often I will include a link back to our website or our registration. Otherwise, you can go on living happy right where you are…I believe establishing networks is going to be the move in 2017.

What predictions do you have for the new year, we would love to hear it. Where are you focusing your efforts and how will you grow your business?

ABOUT DOYO Live

DOYO Live is a digital marketing and UX design conference being held in Youngstown, Ohio on August 2 & 3, 2017. Our event will feature a world class keynote speaker soon to be named, 15+ breakout sessions, thought leadership panel, deep dive workshops, networking, partner hub to interact with sponsors, exploratory short form content marketing video exhibition and a now legendary after party.

Both the deep dive workshops and short form video are new this year. DOYO Live’s mission is to provide ongoing professional development for marketing, sales, business and design professionals through our web properties, in-person workshops, and the annual conference. Last year over 200+ attendees came to DOYO Live and likely will double in size this year. Be sure to grab your DOYO Live 2017 – Super Early Bird Ticket and save $125 on full-ticket price!