Databases like Oracle can be costly, inaccessible, outdated, and offer limited cloud support. For innovative businesses wanting flexibility in the cloud, Enterprise Postgres is open-source and the fourth most used database in the world, offering a seamless transition from legacy applications to hybrid or cloud environments.
However, any form of migration is costly and complex, requiring applications compatible with the new database and the company’s service levels. As you consider migrating from a legacy database, what should you know about Postgres’ capabilities?
Organizations are pivoting to address evolving customer concerns and technological advancements. For instance, some companies require flexibility in a hybrid environment with cloud-like features in their on-prem data centers. Yet these initiatives are hampered by antiquated software, vendor contract agreements, and prices. A new database comprises only 10-15% of the total cost of migration, with legacy applications, staff training, consulting fees, cloud transitions, and breach of contract charges constituting the remainder. How can you transition to a best-in-class solution while minimizing risk and costs?
Postgres offers extensibility to integrate additional capabilities, functions, and applications in a single database. With Advanced Postgres, this extensibility allows you to incorporate various Oracle applications seamlessly into a Postgres database, maintaining the structure of your original tech stack while offering resiliency and flexibility. Upgrading your capabilities while minimizing a full migration can reduce your costs by 80%.
When transitioning to a new database, data migrations remain a pressing concern. Large data sets are often stored in multiple warehouses, creating inefficiencies and losses. Postgres can integrate with any cloud environment, allowing you to scale and store workloads across multiple regions, creating data consistency and eliminating loss. Migrating from a data center to the cloud requires careful consideration of use cases, objectives, and providers. Here’s what you should know about transitioning to the cloud:
Before moving to the cloud, you must perform a readiness assessment. This extends beyond data management and involves preparing your applications, assets, and workloads without disrupting business operations during the transition. Some foundational steps include determining your users’ locations and evaluating regulations, governance, and risk compliance. Cloud readiness also requires prioritizing business initiatives by establishing and redefining operational characteristics. Tom Rieger, the Principal Solution Engineer at EDB, lists the criteria organizations should consider when assessing cloud readiness, “What is the most important thing the cloud has to do for you first? Is it to save money? Is it resiliency? Is it security… or is it performance?” Identifying a primary use case for the cloud allows you to structure additional initiatives around your objectives.
Another key factor in your decision is understanding your chosen database’s capabilities. For instance, Postgres provides transparent data encryption governed entirely by the database, whereas cloud data encryption requires consistent management at the disk level. By assessing the components and offerings of both the cloud and your database, you can determine where to place your functions.
Many complications exist when migrating from legacy Oracle databases. One challenge occurs when users from various locations encounter security regulations when attempting to access or relocate data. Postgres has integrated globally allocated data, where each user is assigned a serial number with a unique key for authorized access. Another conflict involves software end-of-life, where outdated applications shut down after migration, compromising the new database environment. Active-active replication in Postgres allows rolling upgrades in the cloud or on-prem to scale gradually without risking database security.
Whether migrating to Postgres from a data center or the cloud, the transition should occur incrementally, beginning with a database transfer before executing innovation in the cloud.
Zero Trust has become a widespread framework for verifying network use across every access point. As network and cloud security evolve, some organizations have adopted and deployed SASE (secure across service edge), which expands upon Zero Trust to consolidate layered security controls within a single cloud architecture.
SASE integrations are unique to a company’s objectives, industry regulations, security policies, and cloud structure, making deployment a comprehensive journey with many considerations. How can you build and integrate an ideal SASE model into your corporation?
Before deploying any SASE model, you must assess your current cloud environment, network security protocols, and fundamental business systems. This includes evaluating your AD (Active Directory) infrastructure for consistent communication and management of authorized users, devices, and domains within your network. A mature cybersecurity program for shared infrastructure in the cloud is also required for SASE deployment. One of the core pre-qualifiers of a SASE model involves analyzing compatibility with applications used to conduct crucial business functions.
After performing the initial assessments, select a tech stack that aligns with your organizational framework. The two standard SASE deployment methodologies include a routing topology and a proxy server. With a routing topology, users connect to a network through an encrypted VPN (virtual private network) integrated with a firewall. You can then connect this back to your cloud architecture through a BGP (border gateway protocol) link. Proxy servers involve connecting encrypted traffic to your cloud infrastructure. When determining which strategy to employ, it’s useful to identify the type of network traffic. For instance, proxies are ideal for providing network access to specific users while minimizing traffic flow, whereas topology requires a mature routing strategy for general traffic.
During a SASE deployment journey, some businesses experience complications when integrating additional applications into their tech stacks. This occurs when organizations develop narrow or vague deployment criteria and lack consideration for application dependencies. Russell Moore, the Senior Cybersecurity Architect at GDT, explains how to mitigate deployment failures, “There needs to be a fair amount of testing to make sure that proper dependencies are met and that it's not causing problems in workflow.” By testing various products and vendors, you can guarantee a high-performing, mature tech stack.
Key cost considerations for SASE include software integrations, licensing, and training. Although SASE is more expensive than traditional network security solutions, you can maximize ROI by investing in the appropriate applications and maintaining the system long-term. Replacing legacy applications with updated security systems eliminates costly shutdowns and enhances operational efficiency. While training staff on these implementations is a large initial investment, SASE models save time by simplifying tasks. For instance, experience management capabilities provide visibility into the underlying architecture, allowing you to identify and resolve access issues effectively.
Zero Trust frameworks are a requirement for many organizations, and mature SASE solutions offer cost-saving options for this journey. GDT’s Director of Security Services, Robert Davila, explains how SASE deployments streamline Zero Trust initiatives, “I like to think of SASE deployments as a Zero Trust enabler…It solves a lot of the challenges around a Zero Trust strategy…It covers a lot of buckets and helps you think about what the next thing is that you need to look at.” As a comprehensive tech stack uncovering fundamental security challenges, SASE is a cost-effective solution for modern encryption needs.
Assessing potential SASE vendors is a comprehensive decision-making process requiring you to align your organization’s use cases with the provider’s capabilities. With integrated platforms managed by multiple users, understanding application dependencies, access models, data encryption, and traffic type is crucial in identifying an optimal security level. The vendor you select should integrate your multi-tenant applications with your workflows for operation efficiency.
However, no vendor can provide all-inclusive solutions, so you must prioritize initiatives as you develop a deployment strategy. Brian Engle, GDT’s Senior Principal of Security Services, says the basic security functions you should prioritize are “visibility, being able to monitor and protect…your ability to respond and react, and the implications into incident response plans and containment strategies.” When making a selection, ensure you partner with a qualified vendor to integrate technologies holistically.
Regardless of the vendor you select and the capabilities you implement, you must evaluate your existing technologies’ compatibility to reduce operational overhead.
Customer reviews are the leading driver of purchasing decisions, influencing sales and product iterations. Amazon has expanded these capabilities by launching AI-generated review summaries. These tools collect and summarize the most relevant and frequent product feedback. The initial tests focused exclusively on electronics and small appliances before evolving to include hundreds of products across various categories.
As Amazon breaks into the AI space, how can you leverage and optimize these review summaries to enhance the shopping experience and guide crucial business decisions?
Reviews and ratings provide consumers with feedback and measurements of a product’s value. However, traditional reviews are limited since they emphasize quantitative rather than qualitative value. With review summaries, consumers gain insight into the reasons behind ratings and the products’ positive and negative qualities, allowing them to compare similar items. By sorting through relevant product attributes, these AI summaries compile buyer guides to present shoppers with quality options, personalizing and streamlining their experiences.
While Amazon’s AI-powered review summaries have gained traction in the market, only about 30% of brands have activated the tool. Consequently, many are unsure of how to analyze and predict summary trends. These review assessments have a broad and consistent structure and pattern beginning with the most common positive attribute. This is followed by a secondary favorable quality appearing in a list or sentence form. The final portion of review summaries consists of a key negative element and impartial sentiments. How can you segment these details to identify core product themes?
According to Spencer Kelty, the Head of Marketing at Yogi, conducting a thorough review analysis requires “sorting through your reviews by most recent, pulling out the attributes or themes that are mentioned, and recording the frequency of the mentions and whether they’re positive or negative.” This allows you to rank the most positive and negative features by percentage. Review summaries contain approximately 7-10 elements, so by categorizing them, you can correlate the percentages with your star ratings.
Once you’ve evaluated and structured your review summaries, you must apply the data to your business. Reviews are the most accessible form of consumer and competitor data, creating a feedback loop between your brand, the market, and the shopper. You can leverage an AI analysis tool to benchmark your review summaries against competitors and gauge consumer responses and behavior attributed to these aggregations. Then, use the data and insights to iterate products, update PDPs, refocus your marketing messages and claims, and replenish gaps in the market with innovations.
Yogi’s Co-founder and CEO, Gautam Kanumuru, shares a tip for brands to consider when applying review data, stating, “What you emphasize in your PDPs ends up in reviews. Because review summaries are based on what people are writing about, especially in the most recent reviews, it will show up in your review summaries.” This provides the opportunity to govern the narrative of your feedback notes. Ultimately, improving products with AI-powered review data boosts star ratings, sales, and growth.
As digital transformation accelerates rapidly, organizations have pivoted into a cloud-native environment to attain the scale and speed needed to meet customer demands. One transition strategy increasing in popularity is the hybrid application space, where workloads function between on-premises and cloud infrastructures. This dynamic requires integrating various technologies, including legacy applications, microservices, and containers, creating silos that must be consolidated with the infrastructure.
With these growing challenges, corporations must maintain a high level of observability to integrate additional capabilities and comprehend the application’s full trajectory. How can you unify your on-prem and cloud infrastructures using an observability approach?
At its core, observability involves gaining insight into each aspect of the application to determine its impact on the end user. However, the telemetry data sets are embedded in each capability function independently, so various departments must manage individual environments. Gregg Ostrowski, the Executive CTO at AppDynamics, shares the fundamentals of building an observability plan, “The strategy from the get-go has to be about aligning resources so that you all have a good understanding of what you’re doing and how it’s impacting the app.” Collaborating with internal departments creates an observability path from the top down, displaying the application’s dependencies and identifying the sources of key performance issues. With observability at the forefront of your hybrid approach, you can develop a strategic plan for transitioning technologies from legacy environments.
After deploying an observability strategy, you can incorporate cloud-based technologies gradually into your tech stack. This necessitates identifying an ideal use case, analyzing each application’s capabilities, and conducting tests to observe results. In industries with stringent regulations, security concerns require companies to maintain sensitive data on legacy applications. In this case, focus on the application’s core functions to preserve fundamental business operations. As you expand your infrastructure, aggregate telemetry data from various software to create a centralized platform that allows you to correlate metrics and gain analytical insights from specific use cases and solutions.
Transferring large amounts of data between environments leads to higher egress fees. You can reduce these costs by restructuring polling intervals to shift only the essential data. Telemetry data is customary for cloud environments, so compiling and relocating it ensures you have the necessary information while minimizing data flow.
Egress fees are separate from costs associated with cloud workload. Expanding resources in the cloud without an optimization and management strategy can escalate rates tremendously. It’s pivotal to justify monthly costs per workload by aligning user experience goals and scaling expectations with your ideal margins.
Observability is mandatory in outlining an effective transition into the cloud and developing technical solutions to customer problems.
As Q4 approaches, retailers are preparing for the most lucrative holidays of the year. With sales escalating, brands must anticipate and manage considerable demand. Effective Q4 planning occurs on both DTC and marketplace channels, aligning internal teams to strategize and consolidate initiatives. Preparations are comprehensive and include managing catalogs, merchandising, inventory, advertising, and marketing.
How can you maximize these areas to drive sales and revenue during Q4?
On this year’s July Prime Day, consumers searching for discounts and perks at accelerated rates were detected, with this trend expected to continue throughout the Q4 holidays. Meeting these demands requires refining product content to generate conversions. Since Amazon has prolonged the content approval process, updating content before the start of Q4 is crucial. This may include researching the latest keywords, modifying images and videos for new product launches, and highlighting promotional pages.
As Amazon becomes more profit-driven, brands have evolved strategies to optimize their catalogs and merchandise. As you develop content, consider promoting overstocked items on Vendor Central and DTC. This creates additional inventory space for next year’s new products, prompting Amazon to restock items. New product launches in previous years have focused on secondary items to initiate awareness. As retailers prioritize conversions, these launch tactics have shifted to promoting best-selling products for new customers, then advertising and selling auxiliary merchandise through DSP retargeting. Another profitable launch approach involves creating custom holiday bundles in advance to boost average order value. These offers should be supported with banner ads at the front of your Amazon page.
After finalizing your budget and forecasting promotional offers, restocking your inventory to support these strategies is vital. To avoid shortages and inbound restrictions, ship 20% more than your estimated inventory in advance. Incremental sales often arise from promotional initiatives like Buy with Prime and TikTok Shop, disrupting your warehouse operations, so acquiring temporary staff ensures you can anticipate demands and stay on top of shipping cut-off dates.
Brand loyalties are shifting, and with 82% of consumers switching retailers for preferred value, businesses must employ branded and conquest campaigns to protect market share and outperform the competition. This increased spending results in tight budgets for Q4 advertising.
So what techniques can you leverage to enhance advertising value on Amazon and DTC?
DTC platforms offer numerous advertising tools that brands leverage simultaneously at the start of Q4, leading to platform glitches and campaign collapses. Rather than waiting until the fall holidays to launch campaigns, run ads beforehand while developing your Q4 objectives. If launching a last-minute campaign, ensure that you monitor and recover the ads immediately. With longer shipping times, DTC sales decline by the second week of December, so driving purchases immediately following Black Friday guarantees a profitable Q4.
Brands are adjusting their Amazon advertising bids and budgets to compete with aggressive CPC campaigns. Once the holiday season arrives, analyzing campaign performance becomes increasingly challenging. Additionally, Amazon’s algorithms support frequently launched campaigns, so conduct testing before the holiday season to run campaigns successfully without interruptions.
Lifecycle Marketing Tips for Q4
According to Nicole Reich, Blue Wheel’s Chief Growth Officer, “73% of consumers expect brands to understand their unique needs and expectations.” Lifecycle marketing — including email and SMS campaigns — plays a critical role in customer personalization, encouraging repeat purchases and loyalty. These marketing efforts should drive 30% of your DTC revenue, so segment your audiences to target consumers through email suggestions, build personalized workflows, and establish exclusive deals for VIPs or engaged subscribers.
Repurposing Creative Campaigns for the Holidays
Nicole also notes that “41% of consumers find ads displaying relevant products or discounts most influential in their purchasing decisions,” so retailers must produce engaging, creative video content on TikTok and Instagram. For efficiency and relevancy, record one comprehensive video emphasizing product functions for use across DTC and Amazon. This video can be segregated into short-form clips for various promotions and discounts. You can also test multiple versions of the same campaign, revising and improving your strategy as you see fit.
With these tactics, you can create an extensive checklist to prepare your operations for a profitable Q4 holiday season.
As retail prices surge, customers are restructuring their budgets to align with shifting priorities. With so many product subscriptions accumulated during the pandemic, users are canceling ones that no longer meet their needs. Consequently, brands are competing to maintain relevance in the market. So what trends and patterns can you observe in the subscription space, and how can you leverage them to retain customers?
According to Chargebee’s subscription industry report surveying over 300 top brands in the space, 87% of leaders affirm retaining a subscriber is more valuable than acquiring one. Consumers are becoming progressively savvy, and many only subscribe to businesses prioritizing engaging customer experiences. Additionally, as the economy ventures further from a hyper-growth phase, subscription companies recognize the profitability of existing subscriber bases, leading to increased retention efforts to monetize customers and drive brand growth and value.
However, added emphasis on the customer journey has prompted retention complications. Notably, brands struggle to personalize the user experience amid developing competition. Customized engagements correlate with service and product value propositions, so companies must develop and curate loyalty programs to outperform the competition and drive relevant incentives. This requires evaluating and applying customer data, but many subscription businesses experience difficulties in this area.
How can you address these issues to facilitate customer satisfaction and loyalty?
Chargebee’s Director and Head of Product Retention, Carl Nightingale, confirms “59% of people are looking to increase customer retention and customer satisfaction in their subscription businesses.” Accordingly, he has observed the most frequent retention strategies among brands. One traditional, low-risk opportunity is to offer discounts and incentives. These involve adding items to subscriptions and providing exclusive rewards once customers reach a desired loyalty threshold. Another method entails driving preemptive user engagement, where businesses contact inactive customers to offer cancelation, upgrades, or downgrades. You can accomplish this by automating the customer journey through social channel retargeting efforts like email and SMS.
With confusion surrounding customer data, subscription companies have deployed new technology and tools like AI for data aggregation and management, improving quality and powering personalization.
Best-in-class subscription providers customize loyalty programs, so authentic initiatives are crucial to boost LTV. Although rewards are delayed and ROI is more difficult to quantify with these programs, they foster incremental improvements in retention metrics and the customer journey.
Some brands have observed success by bundling products or services for exclusive members. For instance, when customers reach a milestone in their journey, you can advance them to quarterly, biannual, or annual plans at discounts to lengthen LTV. Another strategy is to monetize the subscriber separately from the recurring subscription by exposing them to additional products and one-time purchases.
One of customers’ most pressing demands is the ability to manage subscriptions independently. Consumers are more likely to continue their subscriptions when given the option to pause or skip recurring packages instead of canceling and renewing frequently. Similarly, if subscribers receive excess products, you can allow them to regift their subscription, creating a consistent referral program.
Each retention strategy depends on your ideal customer profile, so you can integrate and test campaigns and programs to maximize results for your brand.
Amazon’s complex terms, conditions, and fines have hindered brands’ financial clarity, and the consistent influx of Vendor Central chargebacks and shortages compromises account profitability. While many sellers believe they have low chargeback and shortage rates, they often lack the appropriate data to identify and report errors and claim refunds. Moreover, there is a significant disconnect between Vendor Central finance and Amazon Direct teams, as neither party communicates about financial discrepancies and the associated dispute opportunities.
How can you verify overcharges to your Vendor Central account and manage your finances to ensure optimal profitability?
Amazon charges are separated into three distinct categories: chargebacks, shortages, and excess trading terms. Amazon reports shortages and chargebacks under the belief that you made a shipping error, and excess trading terms are undisclosed fines that brands often overlook. Trading terms fees occur when Amazon bills product units they claim not to have received or charges trading terms on orders never placed. Hannah Blackburn, Co-founder and Director of The Hawkers Club, explains Amazon’s systematic accounting errors, stating, “So even if you deliver right; even if you do everything right, there are glitches in their accounting system, which means they’re overcharging you on trading terms accidentally…there hasn’t been a single Vendor Central account…that I haven’t found this issue.”
Sellers should also acknowledge the SIOC (ships in own container) incentive program, where Amazon allows you to claim incentives for each SIOC unit. However, these are not granted automatically, so you must contact Amazon within 9-12 months to request these rewards. Similarly, Amazon monitors and fines errors made when fulfilling SIOC deliveries, making the incentive pivotal to your annual revenue.
Before filing disputes with Amazon, sellers should conduct quarterly meetings with internal teams. This ensures you remain informed of upcoming incentives, trading terms, and expenses. For instance, Amazon no longer allows sellers to reject returns, despite prior no-return agreements. Consequently, the platform invoices brands that don’t adhere to these guidelines. Yet by referencing previous no-return contracts, Amazon will fully refund these charges. Collaborating with departments empowers you and your teams to take the appropriate actions to recover funds.
Sellers may avoid disputes based on the false but common belief that Amazon allows only 60 days to file claims. Rather, you have 24 months to address overcharges on trading terms which can be extended another year for excessive fines. Conversely, the time limit on shortage disputes is not specified. Amazon is also likely to reject claims, further disincentivizing brands from addressing unnecessary expenses. But even if the time limit has expired, you can still request rejection evidence from Amazon since the statute of limitations only applies to shortages that have not been disputed yet. This evidence may prove that Amazon didn’t review your disputes, permitting you to resubmit them for additional consideration.
When preparing for disputes, compiling data and documentation is critical for maximizing returns. During team meetings, you should prepare a gross margin agreement to ensure Amazon doesn’t overcharge on guaranteed profitability. It’s ideal to address this with Amazon monthly to demonstrate that you’ve met the platform’s required profit margin. Accounting and finance teams should also understand drop shipping trading terms and establish price-per-vendor code requirements. Ultimately, sellers should comprehensively examine Amazon’s audit claims to mitigate oversights.
In a post-pandemic landscape, customer acquisition costs are rising, and shoppers are more likely to adjust their preferences and brand loyalties. Consequently, conversions are a pressing concern for many brands as they look to identify new data sources to assess shopping habits and competition, make informed business decisions, and refine the customer experience.
Analyzing customer sentiment — feelings and opinions about a particular brand — through product reviews and ratings can provide valuable insights that shape brand performance. How can you leverage these rich metrics to improve the customer experience and drive conversions?
Traditionally, brands have analyzed product reviews during purchase points, aiming for high ratings to entice customers and outperform competitors. While this approach is influential, it lacks consideration for customer preferences, limiting informed decision-making. Since these ratings are unbiased and readily available, you should scrutinize them consistently to gather relevant information addressing product complaints, favorable attributes, and marketing campaign impacts.
You can leverage these insights to update PDPs (product detail pages), refine product features, and align marketing strategies with consumer priorities, ultimately improving the overall shopping experience and increasing conversions. Tylenol’s dissolve packs present a practical example of how reviews influence business performance. 90% of the product’s negative reviews resulted from misunderstanding its use. In response, Tylenol revised its packaging, messaging, and key features in its PDP to offset those reviews. Additionally, the brand utilized positive feedback mentioning a fast-acting product feature not part of the original messaging and optimized marketing to reflect the claim. As a result, Tylenol experienced a one-star increase in its organic ratings, boosting conversion rates by 9%.
When assessing the market for product launches, competitor ratings can be valuable for developing strategies. You can leverage customer sentiment feedback for identical products to determine standards to structure your release. For instance, a negative review of another brand’s packaging may shape your design decisions. This sentiment analysis method can expedite the product life cycle by two to three years.
Since most brands already obtain insights from other marketing strategies, competitive reviews can help you structure your campaigns. Spencer Kelty, Yogi’s Head of Marketing, speaks to the advantages of gauging rivals’ reviews against your messaging: “If you have a good review volume and analysis strategy, you can look at how a competitive product is positioned, look at the reviews, and then treat it as you would your own. Basically, pretend it’s your own product, and decide what changes you would make to the marketing strategy based on what you see in place for that product and what the reviews are saying.” This allows you to position your products and brand precisely in the global marketplace.
Evaluating product feedback requires taking a calculated approach to identify and achieve brand goals. There are two phased strategies brands can implement to analyze this data effectively. You can start small by selecting three to six top-performing products, collecting the 10 to 20 most recent reviews, and interpreting the findings. Sharing these ratings across internal departments allows you to obtain additional perspectives and exchange ideas to drive meaningful change.
The second approach involves addressing and resolving a specific concern through the product life cycle. For instance, if some products have lower conversion rates and reviews, you can compare your feedback with competitors and other higher-converting products to identify the problem and gauge your product roadmap to make actionable modifications.
The Value of AI-Powered Review Analytics
Although these manual review analytics strategies generate noticeable results, they are time-consuming and lack the granularity required for significant, long-term performance impacts. Conversely, AI-powered review analytics provide comprehensive insights by gathering every product review from your brand and competitors across multiple online sources. AI tools can venture even deeper to accumulate metadata, including review times and locations and demographic information like verified buyers, sponsored reviews, and other filters.
Yogi’s Co-founder and CEO, Gautam Kanumuru, shares some key considerations for choosing analytical methods, “For someone who’s doing this for the first time…if you can extract value, that’s where starting with the manual review analysis piece is a good way to go…when you truly start to understand the power of it…that’s when something like…AI-powered review analysis becomes justified.” Whichever framework you choose, it’s imperative to ensure it aligns with your objectives and drives the ideal conversions for your brand.
Omnichannel eCommerce has gained widespread recognition and adoption in recent years as brands look to offer customers a unified experience. As these capabilities progress, content creation has emerged as a pressing concern for many brands — especially with the development of new digital platforms like TikTok — so altering your content strategy to meet audiences where they are is crucial for a valuable marketing campaign.
So how can you develop creative content for various digital mediums?
Traditional content forms are designed to build brand equity using a comprehensive storyline or campaign. While typically long-form content, these productions can be deconstructed into shorter segments of the same concept and launched onto a single platform. Conversely, digital-first creative content extends beyond a brand equity approach and encompasses multiple channels to optimize the marketing funnel. This performance-driven method employs diverse content and advertising forms to focus on value proposition rather than brand equity.
What should you consider when optimizing content for digital platforms?
When developing an omnichannel creative strategy, you must align your advertising and marketing priorities with your selected channels. Lindsay Kean, Blue Wheel’s Senior Director of Creative Services, explains that a holistic omnichannel approach requires “looking at all of the different channels, their hierarchy of needs, and then being able to take those needs and put them into a full-funnel approach of what type of content, what part of the funnel, and what different channels are a priority.” It’s crucial to ascertain the ideal content for each platform. For instance, photography GIFS and short-form video content perform positively on TikTok. Soundless videos are best utilized on Meta, whereas platforms like YouTube are sound-dependent. Product-specific advertising can be executed on Amazon through lifestyle photography and holiday content promotions. No matter your content creation strategy or the platforms you leverage, each campaign must provide value to reach a diverse audience sifting through endless feeds of related content.
Optimizing Digital Content by Tapping Into Full Funnel Marketing
The marketing funnel is fundamental to driving engagement and conversions, and curating content for various stages of each digital platform’s funnel enhances your advertising efforts. Generally, the customer journey has three phases: awareness, consideration, and conversion. Product introduction and walk-through videos, UGC content, and brand anthems promote awareness by informing consumers of your brand. As customers consider your products, you can employ problem and solution approaches through unboxing videos demonstrating how the product solves a foundational issue. Promotional messaging, such as call-to-actions, encourage click-throughs and drive conversions.
Creative content often holds a high production value, so some brands are hesitant to transition to digital. But excess content from traditional campaigns can be recycled and employed in digital mediums. Instead of recreating content, you can combine assets, including previous photo and video shoots and UGC influencer content, to convey a cohesive story that aligns with brand goals and emphasizes digital-first.
An alternative strategy involves repurposing conventional social media ads to obtain a greater Thumbstopping rate, which measures audience engagement. Standard video ads are often lengthy, lack hooks, and have limited on-screen text, diminishing performance. An effective Thumbstopping video is five seconds and relays a captivating brand story that captures audiences’ attention within the first three seconds.
Reusing creative content requires careful consideration of digital engagement techniques and marketing funnel and channel goals.
Since digital creative emphasizes performance-based metrics, understanding precise measurements and experimentation methods is crucial to success. Many of the same metrics utilized in traditional campaigns apply to digital creative, including KPIs, ROAS, and CPA (cost per acquisition), but differ based on funnel and channel objectives. Digital campaigns should also incorporate granular measurements to assess the rationale behind performance ratios. This may involve evaluating likes, follows, shares, and comments for organic social, helping you understand customer value and plan for future campaigns.
Testing is a key component of the creative planning stage and can be executed in two approaches: iterative and phase testing. Brands with a large monthly ad spend can produce multiple content iterations and compare them against each other to assess their performance. For instance, you can employ various personas within the same ad to determine audience interpretations. Additionally, developing different versions of Thumbstopping videos allows you to evaluate metrics on each one and adjust your approach based on the data. Phase testing is useful for brands with a lower monthly spend and entails releasing content following production, gauging its effectiveness, and tweaking or repurposing it according to the results.
Planning is especially effective when involving the entire organization. This ensures all digital assets are arranged and in alignment with business goals. Blue Wheel’s VP of Sales and Marketing, Nicole Reich, stresses the importance of company-wide participation, “So I have found in some companies that the more you pull in other teams early on to plan, the better… But then also having someone take the lead and saying, ‘I’m accountable for knowing that we have all the resources, the assets that we need, and I know who to go to understand their wishlist.’”
To capitalize on digital assets, you must plan your productions, determine the content you need to produce and the platform to advertise on, and develop messaging unique to each content form and channel.
The search marketing landscape has shifted, with Google and Bing competing for market share following ChatGPT’s release by Microsoft-backed OpenAI. The chatbot’s immediate acclaim caused Bing search to experience a 40% overall user growth rate, compromising Google’s place as the leading search engine. In response, Google launched Bard, a conversational, generative AI chatbot that fell short of Microsoft, furthering the possibility of Bing dominating Google.
The search engine’s recent success allows brands to diversify their ad spend to reach various audiences. So how does Bing advertising differ from Google, and how can you optimize the search engine to expand your marketing efforts?
When evaluating advertising platforms, it’s crucial to note that Bing’s value outperforms Google’s in multiple areas, including ROAS. As Bing search gains recognition and popularity, keyword bidding has increased on the platform. Consequently, Bing advertising is more cost-effective, with a 70% CCP (cost-per-click) discount compared to Google’s 35% discounted rates. Additionally, although Google is the prime search engine on mobile devices, most desktop users run Windows applications where Bing is preinstalled, so brands with products that must be purchased on a desktop should pursue Microsoft advertising.
Marketing varies considerably between each search engine, with key considerations for SEO optimization. Bing and Google have exclusive methods for analyzing users and available websites in categories, including search drivers, performance, frequent keywords, experiences, and rankings. The primary distinction in assessments between these search engines is their emphasis on indexing and social signals. Google prioritizes search engine indexing to accumulate and store large amounts of data, producing accurate information to remain informed of comprehensive online activity. Conversely, Bing places significance on social signals by evaluating websites’ likes, shares, and visibility to rank meaningful content in various categories. Brands must focus on social performance to advertise on Bing effectively.
Generating social engagement through content creation is key for optimizing SEO on Bing. Some brands produce content for specific categories in select online communities, initiating adequate involvement within those groups and classifications. But Microsoft adjusts rankings based on social performance, favoring profiles with multiple tags, links, and shares, so it’s essential to create and launch content related to your brand or products. This may involve optimizing product detail pages (PDP) for specific search terms and generating content highlighting those PDPs. You can also develop influencer campaigns to grow your social presence.
However, brands sometimes struggle to grow their following organically, so you can assess campaigns and relationships to select ideal influencers based on value offerings.
Bing can be used alongside Google ads to diversify your reach and revenue and experiment with Microsoft campaigns. Microsoft’s auto import function allows you to transfer data from Google ad campaigns to a Bing advertising account. Once you’ve launched campaigns on Bing, you should disable recurring imports to operate ads separately on each search engine, allowing you to gain distinct and precise insights and metrics.
President of Coalition Technologies, Jordan Brannon, lists best practices for launching and managing Bing campaigns following a transfer, “Make sure that your conversion counts match up to what you’re seeing in your store…Make sure that your landing page URLs made their way over correctly. Make sure you have the right landing page for the right ad group…Make sure you’re running the right targeting.”
Although Bing is not likely to surpass Google in the near future, Microsoft advertising can be a profitable long-term investment when considering its growth trajectory and influence on various users and businesses.
