Month: August 2022

The Media Minute 8.31.22

By prioritizing blog conversions within your content marketing strategy, you could be racking up high-quality leads and, eventually, quantifiable sales results. By optimizing your blog for conversions, you could also stay ahead of the competition. While there’s no one-strategy-fits-all model for increased conversion rates, Mirabel’s Marketing Manager will dive into key conversion metrics, how to optimize your blog for a high conversion rate, and more.

Google has begun rolling out a series of improvements to Search to make it easier to find helpful content “made by, and for, people”, part of a broad continuing effort to bring more authentic info into Google Search. According to the search giant, the “helpful content update” tackles content that seems to have been primarily created for ranking well in search engines rather than to help or inform people.

Thanks to Google, making sense of a world without third-party cookies continues to be a challenge. And it’s hard to plan for the end when it’s so unclear when that will be. The already-crowded market for alternative ways to do this will only get more crowded. To separate the wheat from the chaff, here’s a primer on how the different alternatives are shaking out. There are exceptions and nuances, of course, but in general the alternatives tend to fall into one of three categories.

Programmatic advertising, at its most basic, provides a variety of ways to automate the proactive efforts mentioned above. With that automation, opportunities abound to provide advertisers, publishers, and audiences only those quality ads that make sense. And with that quality comes ample opportunity for all to profit. With that inspiration, we present a glossary of programmatic ads terminology to help your ad sales reps get familiar with the terms and concepts that they will have to understand to sell programmatic ads.

The Media Minute 8.24.22

In order to maintain deliverability, each campaign needs to be good enough to successfully pass through spam filters, be opened, read, and not marked as spam by your recipients. The best way to achieve this? By only emailing those who’ve opted in to your campaigns and optimizing elements like your sender name, subject lines, and content. For now, let’s specifically look at sender name best practices and optimizations.

Engagement metrics are considerably more valuable for publishers compared to page views and bounce rates. A new whitepaper by Poool looks into the most useful engagement metrics and also provides tips on building engagement backed by examples from a variety of publishers.

Audio is evolving rapidly. Going beyond podcasts, publishers are experimenting with audio articles, live/social audio, flash briefings, and so on. FIPP’s Innovation in Media report rounds up the exciting innovations happening in this area with informative case studies and valuable insights.

When it comes to magazine media and digital publications, reliable software tools are a necessity. From publishing CRM and magazine design, to circulation and subscription management, this ultimate guide to magazine software is an overview of the most popular software tools in the publishing industry.

The Media Minute 8.17.22

One of the most important factors to consider when formulating your newsletter campaign is the template you choose. The best email newsletters should remain relatively consistent throughout each edition you send, be easy to read, and feature intriguing headlines and visuals. In this blog, we’ll take a look at some of our favorite email newsletter templates and explain the advantages that come with each design. By the end, you’ll have a better idea of not just how newsletters can look, but how your company can benefit from implementing specific features that will be most effective for your business and your target audience.

The Topics API is part of a series of browser APIs Google has introduced to Chrome to help ad tech companies adapt to the deprecation of third-party cookies. More precisely, the Topics API is designed to support behavioral targeting approaches, which have historically relied on third-party cookies. Rather than sending identified data (cookies) along the ad tech chain, Topics uses the browsing directly from a device to assign users to categories, known as “topics.” These topics are then exposed directly to ad tech vendors via the API, without ever requiring an identifier to leave the browser. Google Chrome believes this will enhance the privacy of its end users.

For businesses of all kinds, standard operating procedures are at risk. After cookies vanish, the job of monitoring website traffic, collecting user data to improve product and digital experiences, and delivering, measuring and attributing targeted advertisements will be affected… Effectively leveraging first-party data helps ensure strong outcomes for campaigns, user experiences and customer relationships. By successfully utilizing customer insights provided by the customers themselves, marketers are carving out a new competitive advantage for their organizations.

If you work in ad sales and depend on your CRM, some tools are absolutely essential. At the bare minimum, you will want your CRM to integrate with your email account. After all, if you spend all day in Outlook or Gmail, why not take advantage of it? However, there are plenty of other marketing tools out there that a publishing CRM can offer. And just because you aren’t using them now doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t be.

 

 

The Media Minute 8.9.22

Developing and leveraging your customer database is vital to digital marketing teams. A growing database of customers means more potential engagement, buying decisions, and more. The information you get from your customers is also incredibly beneficial to guiding your sales and marketing strategies for lead generation. Knowing so much about your customers allows you to properly use those insights to create and adjust strategies. If you need a refresher on how to build and how to leverage your customer database, Mirabel’s Marketing Manager has a few ideas.

“Publishers need to cut through the marketing pitch that adblock wall vendors give them and really listen to what users want,” Marty Krátký-Katz, co-founder & CEO of Blockthrough, suggests. “Users install adblockers to avoid interruptions—and at the very basic level, the pop-up messages triggered by adblock walls are a disruption in the browsing experience. So, as a solution, adblock walls perpetuate the very problem that they intend to solve.”

The biggest winners in the protracted end of granular tracking in Google’s Chrome browser: procrastinators. Barely a week has passed since the announcement that the third-party cookie’s execution has been stayed further and there’s already evidence that ad executives are using it as an excuse to slow down post-cookie preparation plans.  In fairness, it’s sort of understandable. The further away a problem is, the less inclined someone is to tackle it — least of all marketers. Simply put, extended deadlines are an anathema to urgency, as the discourse over Google’s decision makes clear.

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”  You hear that warning a lot when you plan for the future. I know I heard that plenty when I was a publisher helping ad sales teams transition from a print-focus to digital. As far as business expressions go, there are few that I disagree with more than that one. Its dismissing message bears no reality on what I experienced in helping salespeople and advertising teams make the leap to digital ad sales. So let’s dispel this oft-repeated phrase, once and for all.

The Media Minute 8.3.22

With spam filters constantly advancing, digital marketers need to know what triggers spam filters in order to increase email deliverability and land in inboxes. That’s only half the battle, though. Email marketers also need to stay on top of subscribers’ behaviors and interests in order to continue getting opened, because engagement (clicks, forwards, and replies) affects deliverability. Both avoiding the spam filter and getting a campaign opened relies heavily on your subject line. It’s the first thing your subscriber sees in their inbox.

The use of algorithms to optimize ad performance has provided tremendous value for digital advertisers over the last decade. Publishers need to demand similar technology to optimize their performance, too. The major benefit of optimization algorithms in content recommendation ads is their ability to analyze thousands of ad-to-content combinations. This enables publishers to run ads that will generate the greatest revenue while providing advertisers the highest conversion rates and users the best experience.

There are two competing narratives on advertising at the moment. They sit uneasily with each other. But both are correct. Ad dollars are being spent, but they’re also being cut. Yes, these two things can be true at the same time. No, the latter perspective doesn’t make the former any less valid or vice versa. Really, it’s a matter of perspective.

At its most basic, an ad sales management program can track all stages of a sale through a customer relationship management (CRM) system. At its best, it’s a proactive tool that ensures work is done efficiently, effectively, and in step with every move that both your team members and your valued clients make. What’s important to remember is that these systems are a means for your business. In this article, we’ll go industry by industry to spotlight not just the systems that are available, but also the traits and capabilities you should look for and count on.