Digital Marketing & Analytics Articles Summary
Topic 1 – DMA Overview & SEO
1.1 Digital Marketing Trends Report 2020 – Sparxoo
Ten core trends affecting what’s next in digital marketing and how a brand can navigate to
success.
Trend 1: Gen Z is here. Eight seconds or less is how long you have to win or lose the
attention of a Generation Z consumer online.
Let your biggest fans join your brand
o Feature actual customers in ads and testimonials.
o Serve snackable content: Get more views with short-term video (heavy
stories viewers). Snapchat campaign strategy.
Be brave with your mission
o Choose the right cause for your brand to support (and for the right reasons).
Gen Z is more likely to buy from a company that contributes to social causes.
o Be prepared to lose some of them when you choose that cause.
Gen Z is about individualism: Getting to know the behaviors, tastes, opinions and
influence of micro-generations will be more important than ever before.
Trend 2: Cause guided storytelling. Progressive storytelling helps brands stay authentic,
allowing them to make real connections. Creating and sharing authentic content will help
brands develop deep and meaningful connections with potential customers. Keep it real. No
matter if it’s for a good cause or just because, unless brands make a move toward deeply
rooted authenticity and transparency, they risk alienating a huge swath of eager consumers
who crave truth and are willing to reward companies that tell their truth.
Put values front & center: Let the world know where you stand, take consistent
action that aligns with your values. Brand should make it easier to see their values
before making a purchase.
Loyalty does exist: A consumer who feels a personal affinity with a brand because of
its values is more likely to return.
Don’t wait, start the conversation: Genuine conversation, engage, share, don’t sell.
Connect, don’t hustle.
Tell your brand’s story: Don’t interrupt consumers, engage their attention.
Successful brands will, in addition to providing excellent products or services, take
meaningful steps to improve the world. Make way for cause culture, and consumers
that embrace similar values will respond favorably.
Trend 3: Trust the influencers. Online influencers, or prominent advocates recruited by
brands to offer opinions about products or services, remain reliable partners to help create
awareness and drive conversions. They are trusted by their followers and provide built-in
authenticity for brands. Shift toward the key performance indicator that is the Holy Grail of
influencer marketing: engagement. Favorable engagement statistics reinforces your
consumers have a strong connection and trust with influencers. Micro- or niche influencers
are poised to make bigger contributions (1000-50000 followers). Influencers with engaged
,audiences can be most effective by issuing a direct call to action that produces measurable
results. A direct consumer response can be tied to a business goal, such as growing a
subscriber base or making purchases on the spot. General goals are to increase brand
awareness, reach new audiences and generate sales.
Scale down to scale up: Build relationships to create a deep bench of niche
influencers to provide a versatile, reliable pipeline of engagement-driven
conversions.
Trust the connection: Micro-influencers are extremely familiar with their audiences
and know the topics that appeal to them most.
Give creative freedom
Make cost-effective connections: Micro-influencers are more affordable than
celebrities.
Trend 4: The evolution of connectivity.
Content is king, but video rules: Video content will become more dominant on social
media, includes B2B efforts on LinkedIn.
Video converts: Video goes well beyond brand awareness: 68% of people prefer to
learn about a product/service from a short video.
Time is ticking: Social landscape is changing; the longer you wait to adopt social
media platforms in your marketing strategies, the more opportunities you miss to
connect with potential customers.
Is your open light on? Consider how to better leverage technology to provide the
levels of services the connected consumer expects (24/7 availability).
Trend 5: Playful experience design. How browser modernization will enhance experience
design. It’s time to phase out Internet Explorer; extra time to make everything work for a
browser that doesn’t jive with modern JavaScript. Progressive Web Applications (PWA) are
taking shape. Will start to look more like smartphone apps, absorbing features from mobile-
based applications into everyday web experiences. Allows for smoother, faster, more
engaging animations and keep digital brand experience in line with current developments.
Build a PWA for 2020’s mobile strategy.
Invest in experience design – it pays off: Well-designed user interface could raise
conversion rate by up to 200%.
Shift your mobile app strategy.
Trend 6: Smarter creative is on the rise. Advancements in creative content optimization will
show the best numbers, because in 2020, AI will change what it means to personalize your
creative messaging. Time to uncover thoughts, feelings and behaviors of your audience,
masked by bucketed consumer data. Consumers expect companies to understand their
needs and make relevant suggestions before they make contact. AI and optimization
platforms are evolving, resulting in personalized marketing that has more context, coming to
life using behavioral and situational tactics to nudge users toward goal completion without
disrupting user experience.
Win more business with contextual marketing.
Build better customer relationships.
Get to know customers’ tastes.
,Trend 7: The elevation of pillar content. Content assets must work in harmony to lift the
message. Every piece of content needs a purpose, and that purpose should support a
business goal. Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to
only 10% when reading it in text. Video drives downloads, downloads draw attention to a
website, the search algorithm interprets increased traffic as a signal of authority and
elevates the site in search results, and the video gets found and viewed more often through
the website.
Define the right goal.
Create your content: Determines the success of a strategy.
Target with metrics: Use analytics to find out how, where and when people consume
content.
Test & repurpose: Experiment and use results to inform needed revisions.
Trend 8: Privacy design is more than a good deed. Privacy design becomes a major pillar for
digital brand trust. Organizations that focus on privacy designs are setting the benchmark
for privacy design that empowers users to share. Online privacy practices are becoming
more digestible and more human by explaining the intentions behind each piece of
collected data.
Empower users to share with better privacy design.
Convert more sales by building digital brand trust.
Evolve your privacy UX to align with AI business practices.
Trend 9: Disrupting beyond regulations. Regulations and laws can restrain marketing
creativity – or they can set it free. If necessity is the mother of invention, then governance
can inspire innovation.
Do the research: Learn the laws and monitor regulatory updates in your industry.
Be inclusive: Collaborate with people who don’t share your experiences and
background and integrate different points of view in the process.
Free your imagination.
Trend 10: Marketing in a society divided. What do brands stand for? Agencies and brands
have a choice to play it down the middle, or to take a stand and stay true to their values.
The trick will be to identify which path makes the most sense for them. Ideally values and
business goals will align comfortably.
, Topic 2 – Search Engine Advertising & Web Analytics
2.1 Search engine advertisements: The impact of advertising statements on click-through
and conversion rates – Haans, Raassens & van Hout (2013)
Search engine advertising has emerged as the predominant form of advertising on the
internet. The study examines the impact of evidence type on click-through and conversion
rates in a search engine advertising setting.
Click-through rates are higher for advertisements involving expert evidence and
statistical evidence than for advertisements involving causal evidence.
On the contrary, causal evidence results in higher conversion rates than other types
of evidence.
Help marketers to fine-tune their advertising in search engines. If their aim is to
attract people to the website, expert evidence and statistical evidence should be
used, while causal evidence works best if the main objective is to generate
conversions.
Search engine advertising: The placement of advertisements alongside organic (non-
sponsored) web search results, in which advertisers pay a fee per click on the
advertisements.
Argument quality in a persuasive message plays a crucial role in the outcome of the
persuasion process. An important determinant of argument quality is the type of evidence
that is included in the message to support the claim. Claim: The basic idea behind
advertisements or the basic reason why an audience should act.
Evidence: Data (facts or opinions) presented as proof for an assertion.
To enhance the persuasive effectiveness of advertisement texts, advertisers may choose to
support their claims with different types of evidence; anecdotal, statistical, causal, and
expert evidence.
