San Francisco — Adobe Systems has helped companies tackle digital marketing on computers and smartphones. Now, it wants the next key device: your car.

On Monday, the company announced new services that would help businesses use the reams of data in vehicles tied to advancements in voice capabilities, infotainment applications and, eventually, self-driving cars.

Adobe will provide analytics, marketing features and help automate audio adverts, enhanced by the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) feature called Sensei.

Adobe is trying to reach beyond traditional gadgets with its marketing-services arm. After spending about $500m on a video advertising start-up, TubeMogul, the company announced analytics for Amazon.com’s Alexa voice-activated assistant and similar services.

With cars, Adobe is taking on big rivals such as Alphabet’s Google, which provides software inside vehicles. « Just think about the amount of time people spend in their cars, » said Amit Ahuja, vice-president of emerging businesses in the Adobe Experience Cloud. « This is spot-on huge. » Vehicles today can be linked to the internet through a smartphone, and some car makers such as Daimler and BMW have begun to enable their cars to collect real-time data — with networking that makes it more like a mobile phone, said Michael Ramsey, an analyst with Gartner.

General Motors has been more aggressive with a service that connects with retailers. » It’s just in its very infancy — and not nearly in the way it’s being done with the phone, » Ramsey said, referring to how digital data can be gathered and analysed. « But that is the plan. » Ford has made moves as well. announcing a deal with Amazon for Alexa services in January.

The partnership offers consumers the ability to access their cars from homes, and call up other features from their vehicle via Alexa. Car makers have been slow to adopt more fully connected vehicles, partly because the costs are significant, Ramsey said, adding that more manufacturers would take on the technology in the future.

Vehicle makers are under pressure to show how it will make them money or help them sell more cars, he said. In addition, smartphones already can handle many digital services for drivers and passengers in a car. There are other challenges, including privacy concerns — and how much data consumers are willing to give up, analysts say.

At the same time, they may not embrace the new marketing and advertising messages inside their vehicles. Adobe said privacy was a key issue, adding that « consumer trust and transparency serve as guiding principles in developing new products and offering new services. » The company, which counts the largest car makers in the world among its existing customers, is targeting the broader vehicle industry and the developers who make applications designed for the vehicle. » We have expanded our vision and our market opportunity, » CEO Shantanu Narayen said on the last earnings call in June. Ahuja’s position was created earlier to help Adobe find areas where consumers would be spending time online in the future.

With the new analytics service, companies can capture behaviour signals in the vehicle, such as song selections or voice interactions with the infotainment systems. This could then help better personalise what driver or passenger sees or hears in their vehicles — such as an offer for a restaurant or a discount at the hair salon, based on navigation data.

Another feature could let a corporation send news or music content to the in-car screen. In addition, Adobe will help place audio ads for digital radio and streaming music applications. After the advert is played, marketers can target users again across a variety of platforms, such as video or search.

Adobe hopes car makers can use these tools to find new revenue for their vehicles. The company is working with the Automotive Grade Linux Project, an effort that competes with Google and others, and is being used by Toyota for helping run connected cars. While there are possibilities today, it will take fully driverless systems before the car truly becomes a digital device.

If a driver is doing little more than sitting in a seat with time and attention to burn, more full-fledged entertainment, productivity features and other services will be in demand. « That’s when the door swings wide open to the largest untapped information mine left on the planet, » said Eric Noble, professor of vehicle technology at ArtCenter College of Design in California.

Bloomberg

What you need to do to ride the social media wave…

It doesn’t seem too long since I started my social media agency along with my co-founder Gaurav Mishra in 2013. The beginning wasn’t a humble one, it was a “viral” start. Things went uphill from there and we were constantly working with clients, creating social media campaigns, making them viral and what not.

Four years have since passed and I still remain deeply with social media.

Here I share what it took to be a social media success then and what it takes to be one now. I will provide an insight into how things have changed and what you need to do in order to ride the social media wave.

Decline, eventual death and rebirth of Facebook organic reach

The ultimate buzzword on social media was The Facebook Organic Reach. Marketers have been attempting to devise ways to increase the organic reach of their Facebook posts. While it started declining towards the end of 2013, it finally started playing down the success of all Facebook page owners in 2014. So much so, they started calling 2014 – the year when Facebook Organic Reach declined.

Facebook pages that had sprung up since 2012 began having a hard time coping with the Facebook page reach decline. Slowly Facebook started coaxing everyone to pay in order to get reach. At one point, in 2015, marketers started advocating that a 17 percent Organic Reach can be considered great.

Facebook had its own reasons to cut your page’s organic reach. Content on user news feeds was increasing at an exponential rate and the media platform wanted to show the consumer only what was relevant to him.

In 2016, several social media influencers started emerging in the digital scenario. People started switching to YouTube and then Netflix to consume video content. On the other hand, Facebook was still not giving organic reach to creators.

Things changed at the end of 2016, when Facebook started giving reach to video content. In fact it started promoting video content across its channels for free. Creative images started gaining more reach as well.

Lately, Organic Reach has seen a rebirth. Influencers and content creators had started overlooking Facebook as a mode to grow their community. Thus Facebook started giving organic reach to good content again.

Facebook Organic Reach growth tips in 2017

• Create engaging content for your audience. Make Facebook analytics your best friend. Analyse what worked and create more of that content.
• Video is the king these days. Facebook gives more reach to video as compared to other forms of content. Ride on the video wave.
• Facebook has started identifying “trending” content and giving it more reach. The first 24 hours are important. If your content gets likes and comments when it reaches the first 500 people, it is more likely that Facebook will show it on the Newsfeed of the next 1000 people for sure.

Rapid rise of Instagram posts, stories and recently, links

Instagram was never considered as a marketing channel back in 2013. However by 2014, it had started getting popular and brands began using it extensively. Later that year, several individual Instagram users had even started generating sales for their products from the platform. I had written about some Instagram marketing tips for startups that work well.

Several brands and users had built mechanisms to capture leads from Instagram and created follow up systems via chat tools like WhatsApp. Thus, Instagram had begun to become a source of business for many.

Instagram then went on from posts to introducing stories and now, links. In the present times, Instagram is no more an optional marketing channel. It has become a channel that you cannot miss having a presence on. However, the golden days for organic reach have long passed by on Instagram as well. In mid-2016, Instagram announced an end to chronological feed.

However, Instagram still offers better opportunities for someone seeking organic reach. Instagram ads have also been introduced and are being used by brands worldwide.

Tips to grow your brand on Instagram in 2017

• High quality pictures – The ultimate secret to Instagram reach is posting high quality, aesthetically pleasing pictures, which is the whole point why Instagram exists.
• Stories – Post as regularly as you can. It would be a crime to not post stories on Instagram. In fact, Instagram stories help you get new followers more than Instagram posts.
• Post candid, funny and relatable content on Instagram Stories.
• When you grow to 10,000 followers on Instagram, the link option opens up on Stories. Thus, if you want to drive traffic from Instagram, grow, grow, grow!

Rise of the influencers

Back in 2013, influencer was not even a word in the social media world. Twitter did have some influencers, however very few. Things started taking shape in the influencer world in 2015.

Several influencers, started becoming popular in the food, fashion, and even humour niches. It didn’t take too long for BB ki Vines to become a household name. Women started looking up to other young women on Instagram for fashion tips, styling tips, make-up tutorials, and life advice in general.

In 2016, the number of influencers started growing by hundreds. People started writing blogs, using Instagram channels, uploading Vlogs on YouTube and more. Being an influencer became a real career. Brands started flocking to pay these influencers for product placements. It started looking like a golden egg, a win-win for everyone.

Let’s come to 2017. Influencers became one too many. Brands hardly pay the influencers anymore (except the extremely popular ones). Most beginners and mid-level influencers work on barter – for products being sent to them in exchange for marketing on their channels. At the same time, the extremely popular influencers are growing strides by launching their own fashion labels, brand product tie-ups, multiple YouTube channels and more. However, the future of influencer as a career is the subject of an endless debate.

However, one thing is certain – a brand’s social media strategy is now incomplete without influencer marketing.

Tips to create a successful influencer marketing campaign in 2017

• Find the relevant influencers for your niche. Go through their social media following and communities carefully.
• You can engage with multiple beginner level and mid-level influencers or engage with the popular one or two in a given budget. In most circumstances you would have to make a choice.
• Keep the guidelines for influencers clear. Give a brief and let them use their creativity for the implementation of a campaign.

Here were some excerpts from the journey of social media marketing through these few years. Presently, the dynamics of social media has completely changed and it’s time you adapt to it as well. Instagram and Influencers have become unavoidable for your brand’s presence. Keep growing keep hustling!

I was born in 1982, the same year the Atari 2600 went on sale. My dad waited until I was older and could fully appreciate it before purchasing the system for me. That purchase would shape my life more than he anticipated. In his spare time, we would sit in front of the TV together and play Tank and Pong and attempt to decipher the disastrously designed E.T. For my dad, it barely ranked as a hobby. He was more interested in fishing and grilling.

But I had a lot more spare time than him and was far less interested in the outdoors. Every Christmas list was packed with requests for video games and the systems that played them. Faced with requests for a new console every four years or so, my parents would complain about forced obsolescence, that frustrating moment when you realize that a perfectly good piece of technology is no longer useful—a trend that started with the Nintendo-Sega arms race and not with Apple’s iPhone, as many assume.

As a result, I was intimately aware of the evolution of the video game medium. This may be why I was both intrigued and underwhelmed by Andrew Ervin’sBit by Bit: How Video Games Transformed Our World. Ervin seeks to provide a kind of historical walkthrough of the form, offering us a bird’s-eye view of just how drastically the aims and audience of video games have changed over time. He comes at his subject matter from an outsider’s perspective, transporting himself back in time to the first-ever video game, Tennis for Two, and exploring the twists and turns of the art form’s history by way of its most noteworthy creative innovations.

An Outsider’s Encounter

So much attention has been given to the evolution of the video game industry—financial models, money earned, misguided marketing, and the player acquisition and manipulation that comes with it—that the art form itself has been mostly overlooked by the mainstream. This makes perfect sense in a world that proclaims value based on dollars spent, and dollars spent has indeed been the industry’s claim to fame. As video games came into their own in the ’90s, the industry was generating revenue more than two and half times larger than the film industry.

Add in marketing typically aimed at a primary audience of teenage boys and an innovation cycle tied to realistically depicted violence, and it’s easy to see why video games largely lost the trust and curiosity of the mainstream. Ervin himself writes, “I never wanted to associate myself with the millions of people for whom bloodlust—even virtual bloodlust—became a virtue.”

As part of this disinterested mainstream, Ervin was disgusted when he first encountered the darker tendencies of some video games. He writes of trying the violent first-person-shooter DOOM: “While dated, the original incarnation remained disconcertingly brutal, even in our desensitized age.” And on the prospect of shooting his friends in Goldeneye, he writes, “If shooting creatures from hell had felt vaguely disconcerting, shooting human avatars of my friends felt positively sickening.”

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Published Friday, Sep. 8, 2017, 10:48 pm

Front Page » Business » Four ways to boost your holiday marketing strategy

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It’s that time of year – fall and winter, which means your business must have a holiday marketing strategy in place. There are plenty of upcoming holidays and events that you can utilize in your marketing strategy. Not to mention, people are ready to start spending.

Continue reading to learn more.

Create Holiday Explainer Videos

People love videos because it takes out a lot of the work that is needed for reading text. In addition, creating an explainer video to supplement your content marketing helps to boost traffic and followers.

Think of all the ways your products and services can be tied into the various holidays during the fall and winter season. Then, create an explainer video showing your audiences exactly how they can benefit from your products and services during the holiday season.

This is the time of year where people are willing to spend the most. So, make sure you get your piece of those shopping dollars.

Start Planning Now

It is never too early to plan for the holidays. One of the most important lessons you can learn is what took place during the previous holiday seasons. Today, it is important to understand your target audience and to personalize your marketing.

People won’t pay attention to one-size-fits-all marketing techniques and deployments. To illustrate, millennials have interests that differ from that of baby boomers. If you want to dive even deeper, people in different zip codes want different things too.

So, while this time of year is rife with spending, you must earn those dollars through personalization.

Market for Every Event

The holiday season starts in October and ends in January. It is a long stretch of celebratory events that feel like a whirlwind. Let’s start with Halloween marketing, perhaps you can offer some spooky discounts.

If you sell food items, well, now is the perfect time for pumpkin spice. Other seasonal events to market for include:

• Kwanzaa
• Hanukkah
• End of fall
• Start of winter
• Christmas
• New Year
• Holiday vacations

Of course, this list also depends on your customer base and target audience. If you cater to families, then your marketing may center around gifts and activities. For consumers without children, they will be celebrating too and will appreciate specials and coupons.

Communicate with Your Customers Where They Are

The bulk of the holiday spending is done between November and late December. Still, people are already thinking of what they will buy from gifts to food to their holiday attire and tickets to events.

As a result, now is the time to reach out to your customers where they are, which is on platforms such as:

• Pinterest
• YouTube
• Instagram
• Twitter
• Facebook

Don’t hesitate to reach out to your customers now because they are expecting the holiday deal floodgates to start pouring wide open. The excitement has just begun, and it will last for several months. Plus, if you start marketing now, you can fine tune your tactics just in time for prime holiday spending.

Final Thought

The holiday season is the biggest shopping stretch of the year. Make sure your marketing is aligned with all the upcoming events and the needs of your target customer.

[Barron’s contributor Nathaniel Wice was at the U.S. Open in New York Wednesday night at an event sponsored by IBM, and filed this report for Tech Trader.]

As the thrilling upset unfolded Wednesday night of #1-ranked Roger Federer by #24-seeded Juan Martín del Potro, the upper decks led the stadium singing, “Olé, olé, olé, olé, Delpo, Delpo!” and IBM (IBM) SlamTracker dutifully  reported that Federer was still winning two-to-one on Twitter (TWTR) with hashtag mentions.

This is the 28th year IBM is sponsoring the US Open to woo press and clients, but the highlight of the visit for tech-heads has been moved away from the corporate box where it’s usually found to a data operations room down a cinderblock hallway in the bowels of Arthur Ashe Stadium.

IBM’s showcase feature this year has Watson, the quasi-personified, catch-all marketing term for IBM’s data-analysis services, compiling its own video highlights. Watson analyzes the ESPN broadcast feed for cheering and for player gestures, along with the significance of the point in the match, to compute a rankable « Excitement Score » for every video clip.

The idea is to identify a big come-from-behind break point or electrifying rally, in the process demonstrating IBM capabilities that might be useful, say, to a retailer or manufacturer for learning from aisle traffic or shop-floor activity.

Another Watson-powered feature combines the same point-by-point, match-by-match data feed — Madison Keys wins with an ace; CoCo Vandeweghe errs at the net — with automated analytics like the running match count of total aces. (Try it out for yourself in the free US Open 2017 app or at the U.S Open site.)

Watson’s nascent artificial intelligence also makes stabs at strategic commentary based on the ongoing gameplay in the context of eight years of Grand Slam Tennis data, such as where Nadal tends to hit winners, how many second-serve points he can afford to lose, whether he’s rushing the net more than usual, though you’d expect more from a real live Joe Buck.

“We’re using sports as a platform to perfect this,” says IBM’s sports marketing manager Elizabeth O’Brien.

In the meantime human video editors may still find employment for the time being: O’Brien reports with amusement that Watson was compiling odd highlights for Venus Williams until the IBM team realized Watson thought that Venus was pumping her fist in victory when she was merely reaching in between games for a towel.

The US Open concludes this weekend with the Women’s Final on Saturday afternoon and the Men’s on Sunday.

When you’re just starting a business, having some help in the form of education, training and even financing can provide a huge boost. This week, Goldman Sachs announced a new investment in the Baltimore small business community that could give businesses that essential boost early on.

You can read about the new investment, along with other updates from PayPal and more in this week’s Small Business Trends news and information roundup.

Finance

Goldman  Sachs Announces New $10 Million Investment in Baltimore Small Businesses

Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) just announced a new $10 million investment in Baltimore small businesses. The latest investment is a continuation of Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Businesses program in Baltimore, an initiative aimed at creating jobs and economic growth in the area.

PayPal’s New Cash Back Mastercard Could Encourage Your Customers to Buy More from You

PayPal (NASDAQ:PYPL) has announced a new cashback Mastercard credit card. The new card may encourage your customers to make more purchases with cash rewards and make it even easier for you to accept in-store credit cards. The PayPal Cashback Mastercard was launched in a partnership between PayPal and Synchrony Financial.

Economy

New Canadian Tax Legislation Could Be Hugely Damaging to Small Businesses

A set of proposed tax code changes in Canada could potentially have a negative impact on small businesses north of the border. And even though U.S. businesses might not see any immediate impact due to these changes, the impact on partners, clients and others in Canada could eventually make a difference to U.S. businesses as well.

Employment

What is Google Hire, And How Can Your Small Business Use It for Recruiting?

Finding the right talent for your small business has just become easier. And he solution won’t cost thousands of dollars. Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has entered the recruiting space with a new app geared specifically to small businesses. The app makes Google another player in an already crowded recruiting software marketplace.

Interviews

Who Knew? A Small Business Powers Major TV Shows

The team at Telescope.tv might be small in size, but the interactive experiences they deliver are globally scalable. As a social and video solutions specialist for Fortune 500 brands such as CNN, FOX News, the NBA, Vans, Twitter and Facebook, Telescope has a client list any small business would envy — including all the case studies to underscore their hard-earned reputation.

Marketing Tips

17 Percent of Small Businesses Still Advertise Regularly in the Newspaper

You’d have a hard time convincing small business owners that print is dead. But perhaps someone should try. In a new survey of small business owners, researchers with G2 Crowd learned that 17 percent of small business owners still regularly run promotions in the newspaper.

B2B Influencer Marketing: Trends, Goals and Budgets to Set

Influencer marketing has made a huge impact on a lot of B2C businesses. But B2B businesses shouldn’t feel left out. The strategy has a lot of applications for businesses that offer products or services to other businesses as well, though it might look a bit different. Lee Odden is the CEO of TopRank Marketing, a B2B marketing agency that offers influencer marketing services.

61  Percent of Consumers Prefer Promotional Email to Other Small Business Communications

Email is arguably the lifeblood of modern business. Small business consumers still prefer longer form, more intimate email messages from brands. Sixty-one percent of consumers report preferring to receive offers via email as oppose to other communication methods like Slack and Snapchat. So says a recent Adobe Campaign consumer survey.

10 Things Your Small Business Can Learn About Marketing from Apple (INFOGRAPHIC)

Building a universally loved brand without engaging in price wars against competitors is not easy. But one brand that has achieved this seemingly impossible feat is Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL). Behind Apple’s phenomenal success lies its strong product portfolio and design standards.

App Lets Customers Invest in Your Small Restaurant By Paying for Food — in Advance

One of the major challenges of running a food related business is finding a way to pay for the ingredients and supplies you need to make your products before getting any money for actually selling them. But a new app aims to change that for small businesses.

Sales

LiveShopCast Turns Your eCommerce or Retail Store Into a Home Shopping Channel

Video lets you make more impactful connections with your audience, which gives you a better chance to turn them into customers. If the video is live, the impact is even greater. This has led many platforms to deploy live video, but what LiveShopCast has done is to directly drive eCommerce revenue at the same time.

Small Biz Spotlight

Spotlight: Algomus Offers Chatbot Technology for Business Use

Chatbots offer a variety of potential benefits for businesses. And Algomus is a tech startup that was one of the early adopters of AI technology, creating a chatbot that can help businesses with some of the more tedious data related tasks. Learn more about Algomus and the company’s chatbot, Algo, in this week’s Small Business Spotlight.

Small Business Operations

Does Your Small Business Need Commercial Flood Insurance?

Josh Beasley opened a gym in Houston that was devastated by Hurricane Harvey. He expects the cleanup and rebuild to cost $35,000. Don’t think you have any need for commercial flood insurance for your small business? Some statistics from the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) might change your mind.

Social Media

Instagram-Based Small Business New Fork City Nears a Million Followers

Scroll through Instagram on any given day and you’ll likely see more than a few pictures of food. But did you know that those food pictures could also represent a business opportunity? Gillian Presto, Emily Morse and Natalie Landsberg are three college students who have built an entire business around sharing food photos on Instagram.

Technology Trends

31 Percent Say They’ve Arrived Late or Missed an Online Meeting Due to Tech Problems

There’s a push-pull dynamic surrounding remote workers. They could be saving your small business a lot of money but they can hinder productivity. A new study from CyberLink reveals just how disruptive some remote workers can be to small businesses. And it also shows just how much workers from home believe that dynamic hinders their work.

Lenovo Yoga 920 Offers Tools for Mobile Entrepreneurs – But is Hardly Budget Friendly

With the 8th generation Intel Core processors, the Lenovo Yoga 920 might’ve just made a huge year-over-year mobile processor upgrade. And businesses, including small businesses engaged in design and other creative fields may end up the big beneficiaries.

Logitech  CRAFT Keyboard Should Help Small Businesses to Edit Video, Work In Adobe and More

Logitech (NASDAQ:LOGI) has introduced a new flagship keyboard that features a creative input dial, which should grab the attention of small businesses users who do video editing, use Photoshop and more.

Nest Unveils New Smart Thermostat to Help Your Small Business Save Even More

With the average monthly commercial energy bill coming in at $670 nationwide in 2015, the new Nest Thermostat E may be a welcome option in two ways. First, the company says the new Nest continue to save your business money by managing your energy usage. Second, the device is also $80 cheaper than its predecessor.

Does Your Small Business Need Data Breach Insurance?

Cyber security breaches cost businesses billions of dollars each year. Breaches in 2016 reached a record peak. Data from the Identity Theft Resource Center reveals in 2016, U.S. businesses and government agencies suffered a record 1,093 data breaches, a 40 percent increase from the previous year.

Motorola’s New Moto X4 Offers Pros and Cons for Your Small Business

Motorola (NYSE:MSI) is resurrecting its Moto X line with a fourth generation called the Moto X4. With Amazon’s Alexa and a rugged build, the X4 can be an affordable utilitarian phone for small businesses. Since being discontinued in 2016, the has phone lost its place as the company’s flagship mobile device.  The distinction is now held by the Moto Z2 lineup.

Goldman Sachs Photo via Shutterstock

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I recently participated in an amazing webinar masterclass by Hubspot about SEO for Video, with SEO expert Eric Enge.  The overall content for the webinar was primarily centered around YouTube and how to master SEO for video success there.  As a digital marketing agency for credit unions, we found his advice to be very helpful and relevant for our market.  Here are 6 tips we wanted to share with you from the webinar to create effective credit union videos.

Tip 1: YouTube has a different ranking algorithm for videos than Google.

During the webinar, Eric showed some ranking results for a query he did on Google and compared it to the same search on YouTube for videos.  Surprisingly the videos ranked differently on both platforms (see image below).  This is surprising because intuitively you’d think that it would be the same ranking, since Google owns YouTube, but there are differences.  Make sure your video has a good title, description, and category to rank higher on YouTube.

Tip 2: Increase your total view time for YouTube video with paid social promotion.

Paid social promotion for your videos on YouTube will drive up your organic traffic for those videos. YouTube operates on a “total session time” type of model as part of its algorithm.  As long as people are watching videos associated with your video, then that will also drive up your organic traffic.

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