MARKETING
The Five Things to Think About For Your 2022 Marketing Budget
This time last year I was telling anyone who asked my opinion to think long term: Don’t cut marketing spending. Invest wisely. Yes, times are scary, but it is the firms that lean into their brand and digital presence that are going to emerge in a better place than those that do not.
Some firms listened. Others didn’t.
With 2022 fast approaching, it’s time to take stock of your firm’s marketing health. The longer you wait to make investments in critical marketing initiatives, the further behind your competition you will be. And take it from me: smart, forward-thinking firms are investing in marketing right now.
So, where should you focus your marketing dollars?
Marketing Automation
First and foremost, you need to invest in marketing automation tools. Marketing automation is the process of making repetitive tasks more efficient with tools like email marketing platforms, social schedulers, etc.
There are some things a human being should always be the one executing. But pushing “send” on a marketing email at a specific time, posting to your company’s twitter feed, or making a blog post go live? Nope.
“I’ve already got a social scheduler and email marketing platform,” you’re saying. Great! Now it’s time to kick it up a notch. What type of communications do your website visitors receive when they download a resource from your site?
Notice I said communications. A single “thanks for downloading” email isn’t enough. Setting up automations to nurture those contacts is simple and truly takes just a little bit of time.
Imagine: Visitor registers for a Trusts and Estates virtual CLE you are running. Once they register, they get an email thanking them for their registration, and they are entered into a workflow so that they also receive subsequent, tailored emails on trusts and estates and other related topics every three to four weeks. Enrollment in this workflow is triggered simply by signing up for the event. No further manual action required. Until they reach out for more information on your services that is.
Resources Required:
- Graphic designer
- Marketing technologist
- Project manager
- Marketing automation tool
Time Required For:
- Researching the options available in the tools you have or new resources.
- Creating automated emails from existing content and/or templates for new content as it is generated. (~30 mins/email)
- Designing automated email templates. (~30 mins/email)
- Setting up workflows. (Depends on the complexity of the workflow, but could be as quick as 5 minutes once you have all the right pieces in place.)
Multimedia Marketing
Call me captain obvious, but videos and podcasts are an increasingly valuable and important marketing method in your toolbox. And right now we’re in a great spot to be producing quick hit, high-value multimedia content. It doesn’t take much more than a ring light, a usb lavalier microphone, and a decent webcam (or your smartphone) to become a livestream or podcast producer. No one is expecting perfection.
“Do I have to?” No, you don’t have to. But here are some reasons why you really should:
- A one to three-minute video on social media gets your brand and your content in front of your audience in a method they are accustomed to consuming.
- Adding video to email can increase click-through rates by 200%+
- A video is 50x more likely to appear on the first page of Google search results, especially when it’s a YouTube video.
- 94% of video marketers say video has helped increase user understanding of their product or service.
- 68% of consumers say the pandemic has impacted the amount of video content they’ve watched online, with the overwhelming majority (96%) saying this has increased.
- 84% of people say that they’ve been convinced to buy a product or service by watching a brand’s video.
“When asked how they’d most like to learn about a product or service, 69% [of respondents] said they’d prefer to watch a short video. This compares to 18% who’d rather read a text-based article, website, or post, 4% who’d like to view an infographic, 3% who’d rather download an ebook or manual, and 3% who’d rather attend a webinar,” says Wyzowl.
What does take time is the planning and distribution of this content. Invest in resources — either internal or external — that can help you put together content that can be used multiple ways, multiple times.
Resources Required:
- Lighting for each contributor like this ring light from Amazon. This is another good option for on-the-go. (I have both)
- A decent microphone for each contributor. This lavaliere mic works with a standard audio jack, or has an iPhone lighting port adapter. Another good option is this Shure microphone. (Again, I have both.)
- Video and/or audio editing software OR an outsourced editor. You’d be surprised what you can do in Canva with video, but this is a truly worthwhile external investment.
- A place to host videos (YouTube works great) and/or Podcasts (Libsyn, BuzzSprout, and Soundcloud are all good options depending on what you want to achieve.)
- Royalty-free music (I recently subscribed to Artlist and I’m very happy with the options available. They also pre-test music for YouTube copyright passability.)
- Graphic designer for intro/outro if your outsourced editor is unable to provide.
- Video caption creator.
Time Required For:
- Recording videos. Start with one-hour blocks and try to get enough content for three to four one-minute videos. (1 hour/recording.)
- Designing video intro/outro (Varies)
- Researching content and writing scripts (Varies)
- For video: reviewing captions and editing transcript (Depends on length of content.)
- Posting transcript to website (15 minutes)
- Related email, social, and other promotion (varies)
Integrated Systems
I’m going to go on record right now and tell you there are dozens, if not hundreds, of tools that all do kind of the same thing when it comes to marketing automation. I couldn’t possibly compare all of them for you, but here is what I will say: At the heart of what you should be doing is connecting all of your marketing functions to your Client Relationship Management (CRM) tool.
CRMs and their connected marketing platforms today are not the tools they were 10 years ago. Fully integrated systems today can and should be the hub of all marketing activities, helping you attract attention, validate your presence in the marketplace, and convert prospects into clients.
Why is this important? When you have a fully integrated marketing ecosystem, your web traffic, social performance, business development pipeline, email marketing, and contact database all live in one place. This means you can better track your marketing efforts and reach your target audiences efficiently and effectively.
We at LISI are big fans of HubSpot, but like I said, there are other tools that might get the job done.
Resources Required:
Time Required
- System configuration
- Template migration
- Contact migration
I won’t lie, this is going to take a lot of time. This is not a project you’ll enter into lightly, but I promise you, you won’t be sorry you did.
Branding and Marketing Messaging
Is your brand tired? Does your visual representation in digital and print reflect where your firm is today? Sometimes it’s just time for a refresh. Nothing is necessarily “wrong,” but your brand is outdated. That’s a subliminal message to prospects that your firm isn’t investing in itself. In technology. In systems and processes. That you’re slow to change.
Resources Required:
- This is one of those times you need to bring in an outside perspective. Depending on how deep of a dive you decide to do, this can range from brand ‘lite’ to full brand overhaul.
- Graphic designer (internal or external)
Time Required For:
- Conducting stakeholder interviews
- Conducting client interviews
- Doing a comprehensive brand audit
- Creating a new Brand
- Creating all the “things” that go with a new brand
In total, this can take 3-6 months for a comprehensive process. I recommend ensuring you’ve got all your stakeholders on board so this doesn’t drag out. You want these conversations to be fresh in people’s minds and reasoning behind decisions to be clear.
Omnipresent Digital Presence
I read this term recently and it really resonated with me. Having an omnipresent digital presence means being present across all the appropriate channels for your brand, consistently. This requires diligent strategic planning, consistent content production, and coordinated efforts across each platform.
In practical terms this means:
- Focusing on Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Optimizing your website for organic search is a critical first step. Whatever type of law you practice, when someone searches for information about that area online, you want to be front and center. Ranking high on search engine results pages (SERPs) is a long game, but having a coordinated strategy to get you there starts with the first step.
- Investing in Pay-Per-Click search engine marketing (PPC SEM) if warranted for your practice. Essentially all consumer-facing practices need to invest money in targeted PPC. Why? Because SEM completely changes the face of digital marketing and if you don’t show up in ads at the top of the SERPs, you’re missing out on business. Plain and simple.
- Putting a mechanism in place to generate content consistently. Two to four valuable pieces of content per month, depending on your practice. I’m talking about guides, infographics, videos, podcasts, FAQs, blogs. How? Pick a broad topic, then make a list under that topic heading of all the things that could fall under that topic. Then plan out a content generation plan to address each of those items. Vary your mediums.
- Creating a social media strategy. Think about the audience on each platform. On LinkedIn, for example, you’ll go for referral sources and professional contacts. Twitter, possibly media sources, or clients looking for news. Instagram is for the softer side/behind the scenes. Pick the platforms that make sense for your audience and tailor your content accordingly.
Resources Required:
- A digital marketing specialist who knows what they’re doing re: SEO/SEM. You might have this resource internally, but if not, you’ll need to hire someone to help you with this.
- A content specialist. Someone who can create the strategy and execute production, whether as a project manager, or as the person who is actually producing it herself. Again, this could be done internally depending on your staffing, but is a good place to outsource.
- A social media strategist who can create the strategy and tailor content for each platform.
Time Required For:
- Creating content (3-5 hours/piece)
- Optimizing your website for SEO (varies depending on how many pages your site has.)
- Creating SEM campaigns (varies)
- Creating social media (10-20 hours/month or more)
MARKETING
YouTube Ad Specs, Sizes, and Examples [2024 Update]
Introduction
With billions of users each month, YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and top website for video content. This makes it a great place for advertising. To succeed, advertisers need to follow the correct YouTube ad specifications. These rules help your ad reach more viewers, increasing the chance of gaining new customers and boosting brand awareness.
Types of YouTube Ads
Video Ads
- Description: These play before, during, or after a YouTube video on computers or mobile devices.
- Types:
- In-stream ads: Can be skippable or non-skippable.
- Bumper ads: Non-skippable, short ads that play before, during, or after a video.
Display Ads
- Description: These appear in different spots on YouTube and usually use text or static images.
- Note: YouTube does not support display image ads directly on its app, but these can be targeted to YouTube.com through Google Display Network (GDN).
Companion Banners
- Description: Appears to the right of the YouTube player on desktop.
- Requirement: Must be purchased alongside In-stream ads, Bumper ads, or In-feed ads.
In-feed Ads
- Description: Resemble videos with images, headlines, and text. They link to a public or unlisted YouTube video.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that play outside of YouTube, on websites and apps within the Google video partner network.
Masthead Ads
- Description: Premium, high-visibility banner ads displayed at the top of the YouTube homepage for both desktop and mobile users.
YouTube Ad Specs by Type
Skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Placement: Before, during, or after a YouTube video.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Action: 15-20 seconds
Non-skippable In-stream Video Ads
- Description: Must be watched completely before the main video.
- Length: 15 seconds (or 20 seconds in certain markets).
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Vertical: 9:16
- Square: 1:1
Bumper Ads
- Length: Maximum 6 seconds.
- File Format: MP4, Quicktime, AVI, ASF, Windows Media, or MPEG.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 640 x 360px
- Vertical: 480 x 360px
In-feed Ads
- Description: Show alongside YouTube content, like search results or the Home feed.
- Resolution:
- Horizontal: 1920 x 1080px
- Vertical: 1080 x 1920px
- Square: 1080 x 1080px
- Aspect Ratio:
- Horizontal: 16:9
- Square: 1:1
- Length:
- Awareness: 15-20 seconds
- Consideration: 2-3 minutes
- Headline/Description:
- Headline: Up to 2 lines, 40 characters per line
- Description: Up to 2 lines, 35 characters per line
Display Ads
- Description: Static images or animated media that appear on YouTube next to video suggestions, in search results, or on the homepage.
- Image Size: 300×60 pixels.
- File Type: GIF, JPG, PNG.
- File Size: Max 150KB.
- Max Animation Length: 30 seconds.
Outstream Ads
- Description: Mobile-only video ads that appear on websites and apps within the Google video partner network, not on YouTube itself.
- Logo Specs:
- Square: 1:1 (200 x 200px).
- File Type: JPG, GIF, PNG.
- Max Size: 200KB.
Masthead Ads
- Description: High-visibility ads at the top of the YouTube homepage.
- Resolution: 1920 x 1080 or higher.
- File Type: JPG or PNG (without transparency).
Conclusion
YouTube offers a variety of ad formats to reach audiences effectively in 2024. Whether you want to build brand awareness, drive conversions, or target specific demographics, YouTube provides a dynamic platform for your advertising needs. Always follow Google’s advertising policies and the technical ad specs to ensure your ads perform their best. Ready to start using YouTube ads? Contact us today to get started!
MARKETING
Why We Are Always ‘Clicking to Buy’, According to Psychologists
Amazon pillows.
MARKETING
A deeper dive into data, personalization and Copilots
Salesforce launched a collection of new, generative AI-related products at Connections in Chicago this week. They included new Einstein Copilots for marketers and merchants and Einstein Personalization.
To better understand, not only the potential impact of the new products, but the evolving Salesforce architecture, we sat down with Bobby Jania, CMO, Marketing Cloud.
Dig deeper: Salesforce piles on the Einstein Copilots
Salesforce’s evolving architecture
It’s hard to deny that Salesforce likes coming up with new names for platforms and products (what happened to Customer 360?) and this can sometimes make the observer wonder if something is brand new, or old but with a brand new name. In particular, what exactly is Einstein 1 and how is it related to Salesforce Data Cloud?
“Data Cloud is built on the Einstein 1 platform,” Jania explained. “The Einstein 1 platform is our entire Salesforce platform and that includes products like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud — that it includes the original idea of Salesforce not just being in the cloud, but being multi-tenancy.”
Data Cloud — not an acquisition, of course — was built natively on that platform. It was the first product built on Hyperforce, Salesforce’s new cloud infrastructure architecture. “Since Data Cloud was on what we now call the Einstein 1 platform from Day One, it has always natively connected to, and been able to read anything in Sales Cloud, Service Cloud [and so on]. On top of that, we can now bring in, not only structured but unstructured data.”
That’s a significant progression from the position, several years ago, when Salesforce had stitched together a platform around various acquisitions (ExactTarget, for example) that didn’t necessarily talk to each other.
“At times, what we would do is have a kind of behind-the-scenes flow where data from one product could be moved into another product,” said Jania, “but in many of those cases the data would then be in both, whereas now the data is in Data Cloud. Tableau will run natively off Data Cloud; Commerce Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud — they’re all going to the same operational customer profile.” They’re not copying the data from Data Cloud, Jania confirmed.
Another thing to know is tit’s possible for Salesforce customers to import their own datasets into Data Cloud. “We wanted to create a federated data model,” said Jania. “If you’re using Snowflake, for example, we more or less virtually sit on your data lake. The value we add is that we will look at all your data and help you form these operational customer profiles.”
Let’s learn more about Einstein Copilot
“Copilot means that I have an assistant with me in the tool where I need to be working that contextually knows what I am trying to do and helps me at every step of the process,” Jania said.
For marketers, this might begin with a campaign brief developed with Copilot’s assistance, the identification of an audience based on the brief, and then the development of email or other content. “What’s really cool is the idea of Einstein Studio where our customers will create actions [for Copilot] that we hadn’t even thought about.”
Here’s a key insight (back to nomenclature). We reported on Copilot for markets, Copilot for merchants, Copilot for shoppers. It turns out, however, that there is just one Copilot, Einstein Copilot, and these are use cases. “There’s just one Copilot, we just add these for a little clarity; we’re going to talk about marketing use cases, about shoppers’ use cases. These are actions for the marketing use cases we built out of the box; you can build your own.”
It’s surely going to take a little time for marketers to learn to work easily with Copilot. “There’s always time for adoption,” Jania agreed. “What is directly connected with this is, this is my ninth Connections and this one has the most hands-on training that I’ve seen since 2014 — and a lot of that is getting people using Data Cloud, using these tools rather than just being given a demo.”
What’s new about Einstein Personalization
Salesforce Einstein has been around since 2016 and many of the use cases seem to have involved personalization in various forms. What’s new?
“Einstein Personalization is a real-time decision engine and it’s going to choose next-best-action, next-best-offer. What is new is that it’s a service now that runs natively on top of Data Cloud.” A lot of real-time decision engines need their own set of data that might actually be a subset of data. “Einstein Personalization is going to look holistically at a customer and recommend a next-best-action that could be natively surfaced in Service Cloud, Sales Cloud or Marketing Cloud.”
Finally, trust
One feature of the presentations at Connections was the reassurance that, although public LLMs like ChatGPT could be selected for application to customer data, none of that data would be retained by the LLMs. Is this just a matter of written agreements? No, not just that, said Jania.
“In the Einstein Trust Layer, all of the data, when it connects to an LLM, runs through our gateway. If there was a prompt that had personally identifiable information — a credit card number, an email address — at a mimum, all that is stripped out. The LLMs do not store the output; we store the output for auditing back in Salesforce. Any output that comes back through our gateway is logged in our system; it runs through a toxicity model; and only at the end do we put PII data back into the answer. There are real pieces beyond a handshake that this data is safe.”
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