3 Steps to Lead Online Marketing in Tomorrow’s Digital Earth

Hi, and welcome to today's Biznology digital marketing webinar. I'm Tim Peter, one of the authors of Biznology. I'm president of Tim Peters and Associates, an e-commerce and digital marketing consultancy building brands and businesses via the social, local, mobile web. My award-winning work over the last 15 years for companies like Wyndham Worldwide, Charles Schwab, and others has generated billions of dollars in online revenue. I'm also president of Solo Segment, where I help companies discover how marketing, technology, and analytics tie together to drive business results. Today you'll be hearing from Dan Abelow, who will present 3 Steps to Lead Online Marketing in Tomorrow's Digital Earth. But before we start, we need to recognize our sponsors. Breakthrough User Experience adds the competitive advantage that grows your digital business. Garris Corporation, a full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency anywhere. Mountaintop Data is a B2B marketing intelligence company providing marketing lists as well as data cleaning, data appending, and data maintenance services. And SoloSegment, analytics that unlock the, unlock the revenue trapped in your site search. As we wait for more attendees to join, let's review the format of our webinar. Our Bizmology webinars last just 30 minutes, so you can easily fit them into your busy schedule. We record each webinar, and we'll email you that link later this week. During our presentation, you can use BigMarker to chat with your fellow attendees. Just type in the chat tab. You can also see tweets about our webinar, and feel free to tweet along with the hashtag #BiznoWebinar. If you have a question to ask our speaker, click the Q&A tab, and I will select a few questions at the end of the webinar to pose to Dan. Lastly, in the Handouts tab, you can find a PDF of today's presentation. Thanks again to all of you for spending 30 minutes with us. We know how valuable your time is. So let's introduce today's speaker. Dan Abelow is an inventor and senior technology consultant. Who holds degrees from Harvard and Wharton Business School. His previous patents have been licensed by over 550 companies that include Apple, Google, Samsung Electronics, and Microsoft. His new Expandiverse technology helps build a people-first digital Earth and has received over 750 patent citations. So if you're struggling to know how to compete in the age of the digital Earth, this is the webinar for you. Dan, take it away.

Thank you, Tim. Hello everyone, it's exciting being with you because we're focused on solving one of the biggest problems that you face in content marketing, publishing, and media. Google and Facebook are capturing markets, advertising revenues, and page views right now. You're going to see that Google and Facebook have only won for today. And they are not prepared to face what's coming next. Then you are going to learn a 3-step process that uses today's rapid transitions into a digital earth so that you can take digital leadership. It's called exponential growth publishing. The first step is to anticipate so you see the big changes. The first step is to anticipate so that you see the big changes that give you the opportunities to take the lead. Step 2 is innovations, which is how your customers and markets will be transformed repeatedly. Those are the points where you can take leadership. And step 3 is the implementations, which is where and how you take the lead. You start by anticipating what's coming so that you can be there first and capture those markets. The biggest change to understand is exponential growth because this gives you the repeated marketing advantages, and it changes every industry including yours. This graph shows that when one company becomes an exponential competitor, it changes its industry. All the other companies usually stay linear competitors. They keep using faster, cheaper, and better, but the new exponential company takes off and outgrows them all. The real competition has now switched to exponential growth, and the new business goal is to take the whole market away from everyone else. You already know the best examples of exponential growth competitors. It's the companies that have created platforms with a billion users in them, but the most important fact to know is that 11 out of those 14 billion-user platforms have been created by Google and Facebook. In America, they and Amazon are the strongest competitors that could dominate the world's digital infrastructure for decades to come. 2 timelines show this exponential growth clearly. The first looks at the past. How much of our lives and our work have already changed? The left pie chart is 2001, around the peak of the first internet boom. By then, the average person spent about 6% of their waking hours online. The middle pie chart is around the arrival of the smartphone. In 2008, the average person spent about 18% of their time online. By today, being online everywhere is actually still just beginning. In 2016, an average person was spending 37% of their waking hours online. This second timeline looks at the future. You've heard of Moore's Law. It talks about doubling processing power every 2 years. That's why you're walking around with a supercomputer inside your mobile phone. Let's assume that Moore's Law slows down and takes 50% longer. That will produce a doubling every 3 years. So the world of 2020 will be twice as powerful as the world we live in today. And then 2023 will be 4 times as powerful as today. The word doubling sounds simple, but it really means that 2026 will have 8 times today's power. And here's the impact of exponential growth. The world of 2029 will be 16 times as powerful as our world is today. So for you, the most important realization needs to be that exponential growth happens across all industries at the same time. This means the changes combine with each other, and these combinations will produce entirely new ways to live and work and learn and play. GPS is a good example of this because GPS started with maps and directions. That meant no one will ever be lost again, but then marketing was added, so we are developing GPS savvy location-based marketing. That includes pushing coupons and sales based on where you are and beacons inside stores to sell you when you approach them. And GPS is also part of augmented reality. You will soon have a layer of information over the places and things around you, and it can put digital things into your environment. And the next combination is GPS and communications. An example is Snap Maps on the right. This is a step towards continuous live connections with your family, your teams where you work, and with your customers. Now that you're expecting exponential growth, where will this lead? Step 2, innovations, is about how the changes in your customers and markets will give you large new opportunities. The internet is changing around us, and its next stage will be always on. Shared life spaces are an example, and the center of this slide has one shared space. You will stay continuously connected with people like your family and friends and coworkers at work. You will also have continuous connections to the products and services you use and to lots of tools and resources. The 4 corners of this slide show some of the different kinds of shared spaces you will have. Starting at the upper left, you'll flip between shared spaces for living. In the upper right, social, entertainment, and then work in the lower left. When you flip to another shared space, everything in it will already be on and connected, ready for you to use it right away. One of today's steps towards this is Facebook Live. 1 in 5 Facebook videos is already a live broadcast. On Facebook, live videos are watched 3 times longer than recorded videos, and users comment on live videos 10 times more often than on recorded video. Another direction we are added— adding is connected consumption. Today's marketing includes only the 3 steps on top of find products, then buy and deliver them. But connected products and services are arriving, and when they do, marketing will expand to every part of the product lifecycle. Your marketing will be part of every user experience during installation, uses, servicing, and then upgrading to the next model. Your brand will be the total experience that customers have with your products and services and with you. This connected economy will operate through its supply chains and logistics, but now these will be directly driven by connected consumption. The vendors you use will know your personal pattern of consumption with their connected products. They will be able to deliver what you need when and where you need it. This will change how they operate businesses. Instead of huge distribution centers and big box stores filled with products, companies will reduce those costs by serving you in personal consumption relationships. You can skip shopping and your vendors can focus on making sure you are very pleased by receiving what you need when and where you need it personally. Connectivity will also turn today's devices into families. The way you experience your world will become simpler and consistent. As you switch from device to device, your devices will recognize you. Your shared spaces will follow you to the next device. Then when you go from place to place, From time to time and device to device, you will live in a consistent and continuous world that you enjoy everywhere. You already have physical boundaries like locked doors and the house where you live and the office where you go to work. On the left, today's world bombards you with a lot that you don't want, but next, digital boundaries will give you control of your digital world. On the right, your boundaries will control your interfaces at one or more levels, and one example is your screens on your devices. You can already see how your displays are changed on the fly by tracked advertising that follows you everywhere and by augmented reality and virtual reality. When you have control, if you want to eat healthy food, you'll see only the kinds of foods that you want and eliminate the others. And if you want renewable energy, you can block fossil fuel choices so that with your choices, you will help stop climate change. When users control their screens, they will take charge of the economy. If a company wants to appear on your screens, they will sell what you want to buy or else they will be invisible. Today's customer-centered marketing will soon mean that customer control takes place over company relationships. So what could exponential growth produce? A possible result is what I call partnership capitalism. At the top left, users have control through digital boundaries. They choose the vendors, ads, and content that they want to see. At the second level, your family of devices displays the choices that you have chosen and want visible for you. At the third level down is connected consumption. You are always connected with your preferred vendors. You receive what you want where and when you want it. And at the bottom, your vendors run a connected supply chain that delivers what consumers want all over the world. Now you've seen some examples of how much and how fast we can change. How do you use that to take the lead? Most companies are actually making a huge mistake when they plan their digital transformation. They think they're going to transform once, and in 18 to 36 months they're going to be done and digital. In reality, Becoming digital is a continuing journey that will keep growing and evolving. We will become a digital Earth that includes how we live, work, learn, and play. But the new normal for you, your business, and your marketing will be exponential growth that keeps growing and changing. In each one of these changes, you are going to have new first mover opportunities. So forget the idea that Google and Facebook have won. Forget the idea that if you miss today's big move, you've lost. We are all going to face many new points at which you and your company can reestablish yourself as a leader and others can fall behind. Here's a key principle: digital produces exponential growth because when you build something digitally, you can deliver it online to 1 customer or 1,000 customers at no additional cost. And once you prove your new digital advance at that level, it's scalable to 1 million customers. That's one of the ways your business benefits from exponential growth. Here's an example from today where you can see this taking place right in front of you with your own digital marketing. Email drives many of your customers and prospects into your marketing funnel. As of this past summer, more than half of all emails are now being opened on mobile devices. If the emails you send are designed and written properly for mobile, they can be read. But if you are still focused on desktop email, you're going dark on large parts of your target markets. But if your email is mobile first, here's a key question. When your users click on your email, is everything in your funnel designed for their mobile screen? Because if not, you can't close those customers on their mobile devices with their small screens. This is just one example of many changes that are coming. You can be there early, you can take the lead, and you can acquire customers and markets from competitors who are slow to make the change. And here's an example that shows you where you can take the lead many times. This table includes the whole economy, and each row is a different sector of the economy. It's from McKinsey Global Institute, and it's called the Digitization Index. At the top, the mostly green sectors are the most fully digital industries and companies. In the middle, the yellow and light green are areas that are in transition. These sectors are working to turn digital. At the bottom, the red and orange are the sectors that are less digital or not digital. The point is, is that in most sectors of the economy, there are many opportunities arriving all the time where you can take the lead. The kind of transition we just talked about, where email and your marketing funnel now needs to fit mobile screens, are happening today and will keep arriving in many parts of every industry and every business. Here are 4 starting points for looking at your industry. The first is Media 2025. This is a series of 22 weekly articles on biznology that introduce exponential growth publishing for taking back the lead in publishing and media. Then there are 2 resources that you will receive because you signed up for this webinar or because you get them from going to the Media 2025 website. First is an ebook that lets you skim through exponential growth publishing and learn about it. Second is a short e-course that guides you in planning how to take that digital leadership when each new change arrives. This is an e-course you can use over and over again to keep planning for new digital transformations as they get here. And for the last one, We can actually start this right now and you can begin. I want you to open an email and spend less than 60 seconds typing 3 short things in it. Just put numbers 1, 2, and 3 down the left. First, by number 1, what is the most important action that you need to take? Just type in 1 or 2 sentences. By number 2, second, what is the second most important action to take? And third, what is your biggest challenge when you take the actions? Email that to me and give it the subject line action or webinar, whichever you're comfortable with. And my email address is on the right. I will keep everyone's emails anonymous, but I will send you a ranked list of this group's most important actions and challenges. And very soon you'll begin to see how, how you and other people are thinking. in response to looking at the world in this new way. My email address is at the top in case you need it to send me your anonymous email. But I want to take a moment and have you realize how your thinking has already changed. We began with the huge problem that Google and Facebook have captured markets, revenues, and content displays, And we then took 3 steps to take online leadership in tomorrow's digital earth. In step 1, you saw that exponential growth is a giant force that has already changed the world and will keep changing it for decades to come. All industries will be transformed, including yours. In step 2, you saw that we are on a journey to becoming a fully digital earth. Every person will be continuously connected and in control in an economy that I call partnership capitalism. In step 3, we showed you the process for taking the lead. Many future changes will be like today's move to mobile first because you can be a first mover who captures markets and customers while your competitors fall behind. And then you saw McKinsey's index that shows the whole economy's digital transformation. There are many first mover opportunities for those who want to take the lead today and for those who want to prepare to lead a future transformation. You know, if we were together, one next step could be to identify your near-term quick wins to take the lead quickly. We would prioritize your quick wins and use fast and lean design testing of your top priorities with your real customers. And you would soon have a focused acceleration roadmap that is built on customer-proven options for growing your leadership quickly by becoming a first mover of the next exponential growth opportunities. Your online marketing would capture customers and markets by making you a leader of each coming transformation. But this is all the time we have right now. So now that you know how to begin and how quickly you could be taking the lead, don't hesitate to get in touch anytime. I'm very collaborative and I love to answer questions. My email address is right on these slides and it's on the ebook and e-course that you will receive. Tim, thank you for letting me share this exciting way to solve this giant online marketing problem with every one of you.

Thanks, Dan. I'm sure our attendees have a much stronger idea of how to compete in the age of the digital earth, but I do have some really good questions from our audience teed up for you. I'd also like to remind our audience that it's not too late to ask your own question by typing it in the Q&A tab. People use— who use your site search are your best prospects. They know what they want and they think that you have it. If you're like most companies, your site search lets them down just at the moment they're ready to buy. If you're ready to improve your site search ROI, but you don't know where to start, Solo Segment has a special offer just for listeners to this webinar. The first three listeners to contact info@solo segment dot com will receive 50% off Site Search Inspector for their website for six months. You can immediately start tracking search metrics. Plus, you can give your team access to a knowledge base that tells them exactly what to do to improve those metrics. Again, email info@solo-segment.com and tell them you were at the Biznology webinar to get your half-priced discount while it lasts. If you're too late to be one of the top 3, you can still get 20% off by mentioning the webinar. We're about to start firing questions at Dan, but we need to thank our sponsors one last time. Breakthrough user experience adds the competitive advantage that grows your digital business. Garris Corp, a full-service digital strategy firm that reaches deeper into the conversation than any other agency anywhere. Mountaintop Data is a B2B marketing intelligence company providing marketing lists as well as data cleaning, data appending, and data maintenance services. And Solo Segment, analytics that unlock the revenue trapped in your site search. And now on to our questions. So the first question we received, Dan, is, what are some near-term disruptions where we can take the lead?

That's a great question, because you're actually talking about how to apply what we've gone through today. And there's actually many near-term disruptions that are already taking place, and you know about quite a few of them, Because, for example, augmented reality shopping is about to arrive, and IKEA— IKEA has an app that puts furniture in your home so you can see it in place. So how could you position your products and services visually in your customer's space and use that to deliver information so your customers see how it'll immediately improve your customer's life or their business? Another is voice browsing and interacting from mobile devices. How can you make it easy for customers to interact with your websites, your resources, your content, and your people by speaking? Is there a service company, for example, that could quickly add voice to your online interfaces and resources? Another one is, you know how AI is going to replace people at work. There's a lot coming about that, but how could you actually use AI to help your customers immediately in their space as they're using your products and services. Because as you improve what your customers receive, they need your relationship with you more, and then because they're getting more benefits quicker and faster. Another one is personalization. That's a huge shift that's going underway right now. And according to BCG Research, and I'm going to quote, over the next 5 years in 3 sectors alone, retail, healthcare, and financial services, Personalization will push a revenue shift of some $800 billion to the 15% of companies that get it right. So there are— those are only 4 of the examples. I could come up with more, but you're really talking about a basic principle of what's changing in the world today. All of these replace atoms with bits. Atoms are physical, they're slow and expensive and costly to do things with, but bits are moved and changed ever faster, ever cheaper because of Moore's Law. So that's why people are gonna be able to control, for example, what their screens display. They're just simply telling computers which bits to move around and what to display. But in each one of these examples, whether you're talking about augmented reality shopping, that's bits, voice browsing, that's moving audio bits, AI, that's taking bits and bringing them to people while they're doing things with your products and services Personalization again is moving what people see and how they see it. You're just simply using the ability of digital to transform what people are getting at very low cost, and the exponential principle applies here, which is that when people— when you've built it and delivered it to 1 customer or 10 customers, you can scale that to 10,000 customers or 1 million or 10 million customers. That all— every one of these advantages, by becoming digital and moving bits, becomes a transformative impact that you can have and capture.

That's really fantastic, Dan. I think we have time for one more question. I've got a question here for you about— you talked about shared spaces, you know, a fascinating concept of how these work together. You know, can you talk just a little bit about how businesses can take advantage of these shared spaces?

Sure. Well, let's just look at the 2 most obvious directions to go. The first is the way people are going to live in their personal lives, and the second is the way employees are going to interact at work. And you already begin to see precursors of shared spaces at work in applications like Microsoft Teams and Slack and what Atlassian is doing with HipChat and Jira and other services and tools that people are using at work. These are just the beginning of being able to have online relationships in the way you work with people, not just in your workgroups but all over the world. It's going to spread to customers, and companies are going to want their employees to really be able to operate at high levels of performance. That's also then going to spread into people's personal lives, and we don't have time to go into that, but the reality is that this is coming and it's going to transform how you work and live, learn and entertain, and are entertained in everything that you do.

That's fantastic, Dan. I really appreciate it. And as you indicated, that really is all the time we have for today. But I would like to thank you, Dan, for these great ideas. And thanks especially to our audience for your participation and your questions. If any of you had questions that we did not have the opportunity to answer, You can email those to eileen@mikemoran.com, and she'll be sure to get them to Dan for the answer. Later this week, we'll also send you a link to the recording of this webinar to listen to again and to share with others. We'll also invite you to mark your calendars for our next Biznology webinar, A/B Testing for Your Site Search with Steve Zaker, scheduled for 11:00 AM US Eastern Time on January 23rd. We hope to see everyone back here then, and until then, we hope you have a great rest of the week. Bye-bye, everybody.