LinkedIn Announces Matched Audiences (and other stuff)

Greetings everybody. Welcome to the Wednesday, May 3rd, 2017 episode of Free Webinar Wednesdays. This is Eric Cook, and I am with WSI Digital Marketing, where we work with businesses and organizations in helping them better understand and leverage the power of the internet as a strategic business tool. You can learn more about me and all the fun stuff we get to do here at WSI online at www.poweredbywsi.com. My good friend and Free Webinar Wednesday partner, Mr. Jeff Simpkins, is absent today. He unfortunately had a conflict, but instead of canceling the show, I decided I would go ahead and maybe fire up an abbreviated version, fly solo today. But those of you that are joining the webinar live or listening to it on replay, if you'd like to learn a little bit more about Jeff and all the stuff that he He does, you can visit his website at communitybankconsulting.com and learn more about Jeff and, and what kind of makes him tick. So today on the show, what I thought I would do, kind of taking— we talked last week and I just noticed actually, so apologies to those of you that are waiting for the recording, had a little bit of an issue getting the actual download to work off of our friends at GoToMeeting and It slipped off my to-do list, and so now it's in the process of actually getting updated. So we'll get last week's show actually on the site here shortly. But Jeff and I talked a little bit about Facebook's F8 conference and some of the interesting announcements that they had, talked a little bit about virtual as well as augmented reality and a few other cool things. So that video will be up here shortly. But today what I want to talk about are a handful of other little Spatterings that have kind of jumped in front of me from, I guess, a location perspective. Going a couple of shows back, Jeff and I talked a little bit about location awareness, Google Maps tracking businesses. We talked a little bit about Foursquare checking in. So I found this interesting little article from eMarketer that is talking about location-based marketing. If you're interested in getting a copy of this, Just reach out and get in touch with me. I'd be happy to share it with you, or I may just go ahead and link it directly to the post. Facebook also is testing some stuff as it relates to video that I wanted to share. And then I've got kind of along the same lines of video, in case you missed it, Twitter made a video announcement recently. And then lastly, I want to finish up with just a couple of things related to LinkedIn and Will probably be about a half an hour show. I don't think I'll end up taking the full hour, but a couple things I wanted to share. So hopefully, hopefully they will be of interest to you and you'll learn something. As with all shows, assuming I remember to download the video and then get it posted up to YouTube, all of our shows are recorded, made available at freewebinarwednesdays.com. So you can check out this recording as well as others online. at any point down the road if you so choose. And if you have a question, comment, thought, want clarification, whatever the case may be, please feel free to go ahead and use the chat functionality in the control panel and let me know. And I'll be keeping an eye on those as well as we kind of roll through today's conversation. So to get started, eMarketer, if you've never been to emarketer.com, they've got a pretty sweet site that pushes out information. Of course, A lot of their data is available for sale. You know, they do try to monetize the knowledge that they are providing the site visitors. But every once in a while, they'll push out a public item. And if you can catch it, chances are you'll, you'll find some really cool information that you can use either as part of your work or personal. They typically put together really good graphs and good research. So if you're looking for statistics and trends, eMarketer is, is one of the first places that I'll go. But you can see, like I said, a couple of weeks ago, Jeff and I talked about location awareness, Google Maps, tracking kind of where you're going in your life. We chatted a little bit about Foursquare and their Swarm application, how that data is now being kind of packaged up and provided to retailers to help them analyze in-store traffic. And when you use a service like Foursquare and their Swarm app, you can check in, identify that you're at a particular place of business. And so that data then gets collected by Foursquare, and it can kind of give some indicators of retail foot traffic and how small businesses are doing. And so in this, in this white paper, you can see it's about 12 pages long. They talk about kind of the whole concept of location-based marketing, where you're kind of building awareness when somebody is physically present, or you want somebody to be physically present as part of your specific business strategy. So one of the graphs that I thought was kind of cool is this one here, talked about the number of, I guess, respondents that choose to buy either electronically or digitally. versus in-store. And unfortunately, I didn't see where they included financial services, which is really Jeff and myself. That's kind of our area of expertise. But I don't think it's really a surprise. Automotive's right at the top of the list, major appliances. Although I do think, and I don't know as if anybody out there would really argue, before the actual purchase is made, I think if a A pretty good amount of research is being done online. So even though you're not necessarily buying a refrigerator or the washing machine or obviously getting your car fixed digitally, I still think that a majority of the research that goes into the process is done electronically as we kind of research our efforts. But these are all things that you kind of want to touch and feel and see versus just going ahead and ordering it up. You can see down here at the bottom, obviously books. a number of items here that are kind of really more digitally delivered entertainment, especially with services like Netflix and Google Play Store and Amazon being able to deliver that entertainment information electronically. So just kind of a breakdown of digital versus in-store, and then it kind of walks through, you know, if you're a brick-and-mortar shop, you know, what consumers are actually looking for. It mentions some case studies here. I see Crate and Barrel got mentioned, you know, as far as what they do to try to lure people in. And then we get into the advertising and the digital. This is kind of a little bit of the crossover. You can see Facebook and Google, 2 of the probably most powerful ad platforms on the planet today, offering location-based Digital advertising opportunities. So when you're close by or in a particular area, having the ability to reinforce either a purchase decision or a desire with a location-aware advertisement. And so this talks a little breakdown of Starbucks. I think Jeff and I may have chatted About this on a prior show, but if you have not taken advantage of this, a little bit of a coffee fiend, and I've got the app. Unfortunately, the store that's closest to me here in Battle Creek doesn't allow the order-ahead functionality, but some of the more— I didn't want to say progressive, but some of the bigger stores that have a little bit more traffic have implemented this. order-ahead functionality where it's almost a blend of the actual digital and in-store. And so if you've not used it, you get the Starbucks app, you pick out what you want to drink or what you want to eat, you find the store that is closest to you, and you order and pay for it right through your phone. And then basically you show up at the Starbucks location and go right to the front of the line and pick up your product. You don't have to wait, you don't have to check out. As soon as you order it, it goes into the order process. So if you're lucky enough to wander into a Starbucks that's got a line of 5 or 6 people and your order is in, chances are by the time you get in the door and the person that you would have been standing behind gets to place their order, your order is going to be done, delivered in your hands. You'll be sipping it or munching on it and be on your way. So kind of a, kind of a cool process. So let me see. Let me see. Thank you, Daniel. Looks like for some reason— okay. I've just clicked. Looks like the screen sharing stopped for a minute. So— Let me go back and take a quick little check. I am now looking at a Starbucks title, Order Ahead is a Game Changer. Can you confirm with a little chat that this is now the page that you're seeing? So go ahead and type into the chat area just to make sure. Not sure what happened there. All right, I'm going to assume that you guys are now seeing this eMarketer. So there we go. All right, sorry about that, everybody. Let me go back and see. I don't know where I ended up losing you, but this is the report that I have been referring to thinking that everybody has been seeing it, but obviously that may not have been the case. So my apologies on that. Here's the eMarketer report. location-based marketing in a retail roundup. So the graph that I had referred to here with automotive sitting at the top and books at the bottom, so you can kind of see how that's all laid out. And then kind of scrolling on through the process, and I was at the Starbucks order-ahead functionality. So just out of curiosity, if anybody out there that's attending live, has ever used the order-ahead service from Starbucks. But it's kind of cool when you can just kind of walk into Starbucks and go right over to the order counter and pick up your stuff without even having to go through the line. So this is a good one that I think those of you that have got retail as well as a digital presence might be interested in taking a look at. It kind of touches a little bit. And beacon technology, if you're not familiar with beacons, little location-aware devices, almost like RFID, radio frequency ID identification devices. I think that's probably what it stands for. But RFID devices, so it can kind of give you an idea of your proximity and where you're at. Actually, in our book Digital Minds, I talked a little bit about beacon technology in the chapter that I wrote. On mobile marketing and gave an example of how a beacon could potentially be used in a bicycle store, as you've got somebody from a wide range just kind of walking by the store versus coming into the store versus spending some time in a particular section of the store, and how that can kind of give you as the store owner a little bit better idea as to what in particular You, your customers or your store visitors might be interested in. I know we talked a little bit last week, if I'm not mistaken, about conference-goers and how beacon technology and proximity devices are starting to be used a little bit at conferences and conventions, kind of identifying where people are spending their time, what vendors seem to be getting the most foot traffic. So here's a little interview from From Bloomingdale's to kind of set the stage as well. And then GasBuddy, which is a kind of a full-blown app. They don't have any retail stores, but how GasBuddy can help drive in-store traffic and identify inexpensive places to go ahead and get your gas while you're traveling. So check it out. It looks like it's got some pretty cool information. I printed it out, started making some notes. And then again, as a reminder, Hop over to eMarketer.com, type in some of the topics that you're looking at learning a little bit more about. You can browse some of their daily updates and kind of give you some interesting information and some cool statistics about what's going on in the world of e-marketing. The, the next item that I wanted to chat a little bit about was, and it kind of ties in video, so the next couple are actual video items. But Adweek recently reported that Facebook is in the process of testing video cover images. So, and I guess if it's a video, it's no longer a cover image, it's a cover video. But they said video cover images for pages. And so they've gone through, I guess in my days of using Facebook, probably 5 or 6 different incarnations of different options. I think you might remember back in the day when your profile picture actually used to sit on top and then you had information. Now it's just super clean. It's the picture. Information's been relocated to fall beneath it. And so maybe that was kind of all along in their master plan is to move that more into kind of video. I think anybody that is using Facebook now and even Facebook's own statistics are showing video gets better engagement engagement. You're seeing some of the video now starting to incorporate closed captioning and text over, because as the videos go through autoplay, they don't have the sound playing. You have to actually click on the video to get the sound to play. But from a closed captioning perspective, if the video is rolling and you can read what the video is about, that's also going to be a little bit, you know, maybe you're going to be a little bit more likely to click on the play button or to allow the sound to start telling you what the video is about. So they've given us the example of Narcos. If you've ever watched the show on Netflix, you can see that this is kind of rolling through. Not exactly a super smooth process. I'm not on a super fast connection, but I'm not on dial-up either. So it could be that they're working on some other optimization. You can see that it looks like the video kind of cycles through. So once it goes through and it loads, you can see all the money kind of scrolling through, and then it's going to go into a little bit of a loop. Right now you can see that the sound is actually turned off. If you wanted to actually have the sound play, you could. And then if it goes through, looks like it does one cycle, and then it kind of rolls up and gives you the ability to play it again. So from a branding perspective, if there's a message, if there's something that you want to share, if you want to jump, kind of get your visitors attention, you know, this may be something to keep an eye on. I didn't see anywhere in the Facebook announcements or anywhere within the actual AdWords or Adweek article if there's any set plan, but looks like they're doing some testing. And, you know, video continues to be a popular, popular option. I was on a call actually earlier today with one of our clients Talking about ways to use video from a training perspective, financial education perspective, and then the conversation rolled into using live video at events and activities. They are getting ready to do some community events and talked about ways that, you know, you could build up some anticipation for the event. You could put some pre-promotional information out there. If you are going to be in a particular area of your market, you can boost those posts and restrict the visibility to a certain geographic area. So there's a lot of different ways that you can start using live video as well as more of a canned video to help kind of tell your story. Along those lines, you may have seen recently Twitter announced, and they had done some stuff with football and a few other things, Twitter is now kind of moving into the television arena. I think they're still struggling somewhat to figure out what their purpose in life needs to be. I've seen a couple of articles that have said they are continuing to grow their user base, so people are still joining Twitter. I still very much enjoy Twitter as an opportunity to find, I guess, happenstance chances to kind of create conversations and dialogue and interaction with other people. So Twitter is a nice little conversation tool, and you know I leverage the list functionality and search for hashtags. I've got a few people that I follow that post some really good stuff, and so if you're not really kind of jumped into the Twitter sphere, this is something that you you may want to reconsider. But being able to add video content, I don't. Think I have ever seen an NFL game or any of those sorts of things from a Twitter perspective. But, you know, I do use Periscope occasionally, which is a Twitter-owned service that does live streaming video very similar to Facebook Live. But it'll be kind of interesting to see how Twitter kind of rolls out and sees how they're going to actually start using live video as part of their Twitter sphere. The last item that I wanted to chat about, and I've talked quite a bit on Free Webinar Wednesdays about the concept of marketing automation, and in particular the ability from a B2B, a business-to-business capability, because the marketing automation tools that are out there, one of the ones that we use is a platform called SharpSpring. That, for example, if a business— if an individual that is working at a business is using that business's internet connection, that internet connection is registered to that business name. And when they visit websites, if you have the ability to do reverse IP lookup, you can actually see where those visitors are coming from at the business level. And so within the SharpSpring system, for example, It gives you not just the business name, but it will also give you some additional data related to that business. So it'll tell you what industry it's in. It'll give you approximate employee counts, kind of does a reverse D&B just to give you a little bit more detail. LinkedIn continues to grow, and with LinkedIn being obviously the largest business-focused social network on the internet today, its continued growth, despite the fact that we've had some Some episodes where we've lamented about some of the changes that LinkedIn has implemented and some of the services it's removed. It's still very much the network that businesses go to get things done. And so you can see they've recently announced the surpassing of their 500 million mark. Up until then, 300 or 400 million, I think, was the number that they would disclose, but they've now jumped over half a billion users and are up there with one of the largest networks on the planet. So it's certainly a place that the business community is spending time in. The thing that I'm the most excited about, which came out right around the same day, is in a world of digital advertising— and Facebook has allowed us to be able to do this for a while— the ability to remarket or to selectively identify a targeted audience with things like predictive information, custom audience lists, remarketing tracking pixels, for example. So you put a little snippet of code on your website, somebody stops by the website, the snippet of code tags the browser with a cookie that says I've been to poweredbywsi.com. And then if that individual leaves poweredbywsi.com and tries travels around the internet or goes onto Facebook or goes someplace else, that tracking pixel is there as a beacon that kind of signifies that that individual has been to your website. And if you're going to be doing any advertising, it'll increase the likelihood that your advertisement will be shown to that individual because there's the familiarity. It's almost like the déjà vu effect. We're probably all most familiar with this from going on to amazon.com, for example, and you start looking for a particular product or a particular little trinket. And then as you travel around, whether it's on Facebook or the general web, it seems like those advertisements just kind of continue to show up reminding you that you wanted to buy this. You've been looking at this. There are some businesses that go a little bit overboard, in my opinion, and they don't know when to turn it off. So they almost feel like you're being stalked. That certainly is not, that's not the right way of doing it. And if you, obviously with any technology, if you abuse it or you go overboard, it can actually hurt you. Kind of jump in the shark there, use a Happy Days reference. So you want to make sure you know where that tipping point is, how many times you want to remarket to somebody, when that cookie is going to expire in their browser, because the last thing that you want customers or prospects to feel is that you're stalking them and, and really trying to go after them aggressively. And so I mentioned Facebook has had a tracking pixel available for a number of years that can help increase the relevancy and the success of a Facebook advertisement campaign. But those, I guess, functions have been absent up until now on LinkedIn. And so LinkedIn just announced the ability for us to create what's called matched audiences, and there's 3 new tools that they've announced, and we've not had much time to actually play with them yet, but I'm really excited because in the world of marketing automation, when you start thinking about the power of B2B and how business-to-business has some of the best opportunities— it's not to say that business-to-consumer doesn't have an opportunity, But in a business-to-business world, that has probably some of the greatest opportunity from a marketing automation perspective because of the reverse IP lookup and the customer targeting and whatnot. Now that LinkedIn has allowed marketers a little sneak peek into the back end of its platform and giving us the ability to create these matched audiences, I'm envisioning the power and the effectiveness of ad campaigns that we run for our clients, or that you may run for yourself, can be a whole lot more effective if individuals that are on LinkedIn are your target audience. The decision makers, the C-levels, technology, finance— there's certain demographics within LinkedIn that seem to be more popular than others. And so the 3 areas that they've got are website retargeting, account targeting, and contact targeting. And if you visit the LinkedIn blog, you'll be able to kind of read all about this. But in a nutshell, the 3 items— website retargeting is just like every other website retargeting item. You take the tracking pixel, you place it on your website, somebody stops by your website, then they leave and they go to LinkedIn. That tracking pixel puts a cookie on their browser that says, hey, this person has been to the website. And then if that individual meets your advertising criteria. They live in your market area, they have a profile that fits the, the sector that you're looking for. Maybe you're going after chief financial officers or CEOs or marketing individuals. So if, if that individual goes online and they have been to your website, now you can increase the likelihood that your advertisement is going to be shown to them. It also gives you the ability to track metrics so you can kind of get an idea of how many times your ad is being shown just to normal kind of everyday visitors versus those that you're actually using the tracking pixel for. So you can take somebody that's been to your site and, and really kind of work on pulling them back in or making sure that your website and your brand stays top of mind. Um, you can go after specific accounts. So this is where we talk about going after particular influencers and decision makers at specific accounts. So you can go in And you can create a list and you can create a comma-separated value list of specific company names, information. You can see 12 million different company pages that are on LinkedIn. And then if there's a particular business that you want to get into, you can identify those businesses. And if somebody is browsing LinkedIn and they're associated with that business, you now have the ability to increase the likelihood that your advertisement is going to be shown. To that individual. So if there's a specific bank or financial institution that I'm trying to break into, I could go ahead and I could create an advertisement. I could add that specific bank's, um, you know, LinkedIn page URL, and then any of the employees that are part of that organization would be part of my campaign that I could target with advertisements. And then the last item down below is And it kind of goes from broad to a little bit more narrow to a little bit more laser-focused. This gets into the specific contact targeting. So these are specific people that you really want to get kind of in their face, if you will, but from a non-confrontational kind of pleasant way, if you will. So you can see some of the other marketing automation platforms are mentioned here, like Marketo and Eloqua. I've not had an opportunity to find out whether or not the SharpSpring system has integration, but certainly SharpSpring can kick out CSV files and email addresses as well. This is similar to what you have the ability to do on Facebook. So you could take an email list, like let's say you've got a list of individuals that have subscribed to your newsletter. You could take that list of email addresses and you could upload those into Facebook, and Facebook would do a cross-match to see if there's anybody on Facebook that's using that same email address as their Facebook login. And if so, they now become part of your audience. And then you can also in Facebook extend that even further and do lookalikes and say, okay, well, you've matched, uh, you know, 70% of my list. So maybe, you know, out of the X thousands of subscribers You've got 70% of those now that are hits. What do those people look like? What are their characteristics? What sorts of things make them similar? And can you go out Facebook and find more people like this that match where they live, educational background, personal preferences, those sorts of things? So my gut tells me that within the contact targeting, we'll also have the capability of doing that directly within The world of LinkedIn. So on this page, there's a cool little video that you can watch that probably does a whole lot better job of explaining it than I just did, because it's been professionally done by LinkedIn and it looks like it's got some nice little graphics in there. But there's some statistics that LinkedIn throws in. They've been doing some pilot, pilot testing on this. Obviously, that's what we saw with Facebook doing some testing on the kind of the video cover photo. So it, it seems that the click-through rates and the ROI and other sorts of variables that matter to businesses when they get into doing advertising and whatnot really seem to get a boost as a result to, or as a result of what we're seeing here. So doesn't surprise me. I think a lot of the campaigns that we run the, the remarketing activities seem to do almost a better job than the native searches and the native clicks themselves, because consumers, I think, very rarely will make a decision based off of their very first visit. They're going to come, they're going to sniff around, they're going to see what you're all about, and then before you know it, if you've done your job right and you're remarketing to them and keeping yourself top of mind, As long as your product and service stands on its own 2 feet and is worthy being in front of the customer or the prospect and making sure that you can convince them to come back, that you stay top of mind, you're going to see some success there. And so I'm pretty excited about LinkedIn now making this available for businesses that really have kind of a B2B function. So if you've not done so, hop over to LinkedIn, check this one out. I think it'll be worth your time. And then if you, of course, need some assistance or want to chat a little bit more about the wonderful world of marketing automation and how you can, you know, maybe put together a cool little one-two punch, you know, feel free to give me a ring and I'd love to chat with you more about that. So those are the items that I had on my list of things to talk about. I kind of mentioned today would be somewhat of a shorter show, And apologies for the, the issue with the screen sharing, but Daniel, thank you very much for the little note nudge in the chat box there to give me a heads up that for some reason GoToMeeting did not start sharing my screen when I punched live. So if there's any questions, I'll go ahead and Leave the chat box open just for a quick second. And I ran through those relatively quickly if we wanna go back and revisit any of those. And I'll start doing a little countdown in my head. And if there are not any questions, we'll go ahead and we'll wrap today's show a little early. I do wanna let everybody know we're gonna be taking some time off. We'll post the schedule out to Free Webinar Wednesdays. But next week I am actually going to— I'm going to be at a conference. If you are in the Ohio area, I will be at the Senior Management Symposium for the Ohio Bankers League down in Columbus. So I'll be doing a presentation for the OBL. And then the week after that, I'm actually going on a little bit of vacation. And then I head to Memphis where I will be teaching at the Barrett Graduate School of Banking. And, and so we're going to take about a 3-week hiatus, but we will be back probably in June. So we will look forward to seeing you then. If you've got questions, comments, or thoughts, feel free to email them to me directly, eric@poweredbywsi.com. Leave them in the comments on the Free Webinar Wednesday site. So I guess that's it. Enjoy the rest of your week. We will see you after a little bit of a break. Thanks for joining me live. And those of you who have watched the video on recording, thanks for sticking around, and I hope you got some good info. So have a great week, everybody. Take care. Bye-bye.