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Tag: Digital Marketing

  • Entrepreneur | Why the Best Days of Digital Media Are Ahead of Us

    Entrepreneur | Why the Best Days of Digital Media Are Ahead of Us

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    The word of the year for 2022 feels like something straight out of science fiction: permacrisis, “an extended period of instability and insecurity.” If you’re in the media and advertising business, that sounds an awful lot like what’s going on right now.

    But despite the breakneck speed of change (and a really scary October that saw the free fall of ad-supported blue chip companies like Meta, Snap and Google), digital media isn’t really in permacrisis or even a crisis at all. It’s in a constant state of flux, and 2022 was no exception. In fact, I’d argue that all this change is a good thing.

    The first banner ad debuted less than 30 years ago. Search ads are even younger than that. Social media got its start 18 years ago, but TikTok has only been around for six years. The technology and tools for digital media are still very much in their infancy. Another brand-new medium that developed from the ground up? Television. It has taken almost 100 years for TV to hit its stride, and it still surprises us every year. We’re in the early days of digital media. As delightful and indispensable as the internet is in our lives, the templates we use today continue to be basic and unappealing; too many sites, even the really good ones, are crowded by poorly performing and poorly integrated ads. It’s hard to measure what works, and advertisers are still unsure of what they are always buying. Everything is fragmented and complex; there’s too much friction to get basic things done.

    That’s why the increased speed of change we’re witnessing is a good thing, and I believe we’re on the cusp of discovering the potential of what digital media can truly be. These trends tell me that the best days of digital media are around the corner because:

    Related: 5 Digital Marketing Trends to Know for the Decade

    Privacy is resetting the game

    We’ve spent years collecting data on people to advertise to them. Our industry chose to invest in harvesting people’s personal data and spent years doing it. This was at the expense of advancement as an industry in other technology solutions like contextual advertising that are less invasive and more useful. Advertisers used this data to build creative that relied on crude personalization (like your name) instead of focusing on real signals like attention time and engagement. It’s been lucrative for platforms, but people have found it annoying and creepy as we stalk them around the web. It’s also increasingly precarious for publishers and advertisers. While audience targeting initially gave interesting insights into people like never before, it’s no longer effective and won’t stand the test of time when it comes to emerging environments and platforms — or future privacy regulations. Massive penalties await publishers and advertisers that skirt the law. Fortune will favor those that move away from cookies and identifiers now.

    Context is everything

    Every advertiser I’ve spoken to believes that, at the end of the day, creative execution will be driven by contextual technology. So, why are advertisers still not moving quicker in understanding context in the current ways it can be leveraged at scale today? Why are brands not using deeper contextual insights to determine strategy, creative and more? Technology has already advanced to the point where it can comprehend the context of a digital environment. It can interpret words, videos, audio and metadata, providing a comprehensive understanding of the environment in order to pair it with dynamic and engaging ad creative. By doing this, digital advertising can produce something that consumers find beneficial and enjoyable (without personal data), no matter where it appears. We have the technology; let’s do this.

    It’s time to rethink metrics—and focus on attention

    Growing up, ads like Calvin Klein CK1 fragrance in magazines grabbed my attention — I can still remember those ads today. These days, the creative gets lost in the clutter, people skip preroll ads, and the metrics we use for success are flawed — yet we keep doing them. We need to take a fresh look at how we measure the success of digital advertising campaigns. With so much competition in the digital ad space, simply having an ad that is viewable does not always guarantee its success. We must find ways to capture attention and understand what drives people to take action. Through advanced contextual and attention solutions, we can identify the content and confirm if the ad resonates within the environment. And then, real-time optimization engines can be used to programmatically deliver the campaign in the most effective way possible. It’s a win-win-win combination.

    Related: 6 Marketing Metrics Every Business Should Track

    In-game advertising is the next big thing

    Every brand marketer knows gaming is huge. They play them, their kids play them, everyone does. And yet, in-game ads, specifically intrinsic in-game ads, are untapped and highly coveted: They let marketers reach consumers at their most receptive by integrating with the game world itself. There are more than three billion gamers in the world — with some groups spending more than six hours playing at a time. Talk about an engaged audience. Right now, most of the ad inventory is available on mobile, but consoles and big-screen gaming are about to come into their own. In-game advertising is set to grow 11% per year and reach nearly $18 billion in 2030. Early adopters get the added benefit of an uncluttered ad and media landscape — and unprecedented scale.

    CTV is an awesome, unstoppable freight train

    CTV spending rose 57% last year to $15.2 billion and is projected to more than double over the next few years. More importantly, 76% of video buyers consider CTV a “must buy” in their media planning budgets, as CTV allows them to leverage data and formats not available within linear TV. So, why are there no brand safety solutions, no contextual understanding of the content and no new ad formats? It makes no sense. Are brands simply not aware of the advancements in these areas and what is available? Why do we still rely on preroll in CTV instead of new formats that align with current customers? Innovations like AI, contextual intelligence and the widespread availability of more non-linear ad formats will make CTV ads work harder, and now that Netflix and other premium streamers are adding ads, it will be even more essential in an advertiser’s mix. Advertisers that figure out the medium early will also be the early CTV winners.

    The recession is real, but opportunity abounds

    Economic uncertainty, the U.S. dollar’s rise against other currencies and inflation are very real at home and abroad. Full stop. And ad spending cuts are happening. But digital still remains the single best and most effective way to target and reach consumers, and that’s not going to change anytime soon (consider that the average American spends 8.2 hours glued to their phone). Digital marketing is not discretionary for brands anymore. It’s a critical investment, and smart marketers will use the current ad climate to their advantage — to get noticed, to break out and to get ahead. After all, when competitors are cutting back, that can be your moment to get noticed.

    Related: How to Build on Your Digital Marketing Momentum in 2023

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    Phil Schraeder

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  • Trade Desk stock rockets after earnings as CEO says company is outperforming like never before

    Trade Desk stock rockets after earnings as CEO says company is outperforming like never before

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    Shares of Trade Desk Inc. surged on Wednesday after the advertising-technology company issued an upbeat outlook that helped quell fears about the digital-ad market.

    Chief Executive Jeff Green spoke positively on the earnings call about the company’s performance relative to rivals, saying that the company grew 24% in the fourth quarter while most of its “large competitors” saw negative growth.

    Trade Desk’s
    TTD,
    +25.60%
    revenue rose to $491 million from $396 million, while analysts tracked by FactSet were modeling $490 million.

    “I don’t think we’ve ever had the level of industry outperformance in our six years or so as a public company as we did in 2022,” he said, according to a transcript provided by AlphaSense/Sentieo. “And it means that we can be very confident that we’re gaining share and that our platform continues to gain traction with advertisers.”

    Shares of Trade Desk were up 28% in morning action. Shares of streaming-media company Roku Inc.
    ROKU,
    +9.04%    ,
    which is due to post results after the closing bell, were up more than 7%.

    Executives at Trade Desk, which makes programmatic ad technologies for connected television, see that area of the market as particularly compelling right now.

    “Not only is the shift from linear to CTV driving significant growth in digital spend as advertisers shift dollars from linear TV to connected TV, but more spend is happening outside the walled gardens as advertisers shift spend from user-generated content to premium streaming content,” Green shared.

    The company reported fourth-quarter net income of $71 million, or 14 cents a share, compared with $8 million, or 2 cents a share, in the year-earlier period. On an adjusted basis, Trade Desk said it earned 38 cents a share, down from 42 cents a share a year before but ahead of the FactSet consensus, which was for 35 cents a share.

    For the first quarter, management anticipates at least $363 million in revenue, along with about $78 million in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization (Ebitda).

    The FactSet consensus was for $358 million in revenue and $75 million in adjusted Ebitda.

    “2023 will be the year that everything in TV changes,” Green told investors on the earnings call. “The market needs an upfront that is always on, but also leverages data so that content owners sell fewer, more relevant ads at higher CPMs and advertisers get more efficacy.” CPM stands for “cost per mille” and measures what advertisers pay for impressions.

    The company also announced Wednesday that its board of directors has authorized it to buy back up to $700 million of its stock.

    “The new share-repurchase program is designed to help offset the impact of future share dilution from employee stock issuances,” Trade Desk said in a release.

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  • 3 Marketing Fails That Demonstrate The Importance of Fundamentals

    3 Marketing Fails That Demonstrate The Importance of Fundamentals

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    The temptation to find a simple solution to the ever-more-complex initiative of marketing growth is strong. Explore an effective website for just about any technology software you can apply to marketing, and soon enough, you’ll be convinced that this is the solution for your growth challenges.

    Consider the explosion of interest in AI (artificial intelligence) with the recent release of Chat GPT. (Click this Google Trends search, and you’ll see the buzz quantified.)

    ChatGPT is an impressive example of the power of AI (try a few queries and see what it generates). But AI’s influence can be misapplied or under-applied, and the precision of its algorithms can be debated ad nauseam. The same is true for most marketing technology (Martech) solutions I’ve encountered.

    Now, this article is not taking aim at the Martech industry in general or ChatGPT specifically. Martech has helped the industry take massive strides forward, even with the headwinds of the macroeconomy and privacy regulations curtailing data access. But technology, for all of its power, has huge adoption challenges. It is simply not a magic bullet for growth.

    While I’m at it, neither is any single initiative, no matter how often you hear buzzphrases like “customer-centric marketing” and “content is king.”

    Yes, it’s incumbent on good marketers to look for solutions to their challenges, whether they’re measurement, creative or audience-based. And yes, the industry changes so rapidly that it’s a big part of a marketer’s job to stay up to date with trends and releases that can improve performance, efficiency, or both.

    That said, none of this is a substitute for marketing fundamentals.

    Whether your fundamentals version traces back to David Ogilvy or the 5 Ps (people, product, price, placement, and promotion, an evolution of McCarthy’s 4 Ps), they must serve as your bedrock.

    Let’s look at three examples of fundamental marketing fails:

    1. Uber’s Jump Bikes and Scooters

    Another fundamental that’s been drilled into me in my marketing career is that things have to start with a market need for a product. How many products are created to fit a fad or a founder’s vision without an at-scale, long-term need to match?

    The echo chamber of Silicon Valley provided a great example of this in Uber’s “Jump” line of bikes and scooters — a market created out of the shaky idea that people “needed” these vehicles all over the streets of San Francisco to get where they needed to go. In a famously compact, walkable city, and without a mobility component that would have accommodated differently-abled people from whom walking wasn’t an option, the scooter project fell on its face and choked scrap yards in the process.

    Related: 5 Crypto Marketing Fails and How to Avoid Them

    2. Made.com

    This one’s a failure of placement — where the customer finds a product.

    With notable exceptions (Wayfair, Overstock), the furniture industry presents many challenges. Beyond the expensive logistics of shipping large items, buying furniture online requires the user to take a big leap of faith and trust that customer reviews (many of which are proving fake) will provide reasonable assurance that, yes, the product will look and feel good in your home even if you’ve never seen it or touched it in person.

    Beyond that, furniture etailers importing overseas goods often incur huge warehousing costs. Made.com was building a healthy business by turning that model on its head and purchasing goods only after taking orders for them, thereby reducing warehousing risks, until they overreacted to the online purchasing shift wrought by COVID.

    Just as the first vaccines were hitting the public in the spring of 2021, Made.com doubled down on its warehouse space, jacking up operating costs without considering that furniture customers who could return to shopping in person would be more likely to do so than customers in other, less sensory-dependent verticals. This failure to predict customer behavior was also a failure of people, and largely because of it, Made.com collapsed last November.

    Related: Ask These 5 Questions Before You Blame Your Company’s Failures on the Marketing

    3. A shoe company

    Since this company was a former client of my agency, I’m not going to name-shame them. But we had some tussles over promotions, another of the 5 Ps.

    This company had a CPA (cost per acquisition) target of $60 for new customers, but they were only willing to pay $20 per customer referral of new customers. Instead of optimizing referrals and lowering overall CPA, they pumped money into paid marketing campaigns with their $60 CPA target. My agency runs paid campaigns on all channels, but I could see the failure in this logic.

    Related: More Is Not Better: How to Effectively Target Retail Promotions

    While this is only an example, it’s part of a more significant marketing issue. In my experience, people tend to think about promotions as sales or discounts, but they can and should expand their options to include BOGOs, giveaways and rebates. Back in a college marketing class, I learned that rebates are a phantom cost — 80% of them go unclaimed, and as soon as they expire, all those “costs” go back to your bottom line.

    Whether it’s customer referrals, BOGOs, or giveaways of slow-moving clearance products, use promotions to lower your overall acquisition costs — but only if you have a solid plan to maximize customer lifetime value after the first purchase. Otherwise, you risk acquiring customers at a loss with no hope of profit.

    There’s a common thread here: neither Martech, content, mobile, nor any other shiny object would have prevented these. And there’s a lesson as well: marketing and growth leaders charged with keeping their eyes on the big picture must ensure their fundamentals are in order before leaping to take advantage of the next big thing.

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    Bryan Karas

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  • A Financial Advisor’s Secret Weapon: Their Digital Marketing Strategy

    A Financial Advisor’s Secret Weapon: Their Digital Marketing Strategy

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    You’ve done a lot to build your brand as a financial advisor. Your business is prominently displayed on bus benches, billboards and even at local little league sports games — but now, you could be missing the bigger opportunity.

    The internet isn’t just where people will find out the name of the actor that’s on the tips of their tongues or check the weather; the internet has become the one-stop shop for everything.

    With unlimited information at our fingertips, the world has gone digital and isn’t turning back. If you’re not taking advantage of digital marketing options, chances are your marketing strategy could use an overhaul. The internet is a treasure trove of new clients just waiting to be discovered, and here’s why you should be taking advantage of it.

    Related: 7 Things to Know about Digital Marketing

    Brand compliance and digital marketing can co-exist

    Just about every business industry has taken to the internet to attract new customers. However, the financial services industry, specifically financial advisors, has been slow to hop on the bandwagon. The reason is simple. As a financial advisor, you have a fiduciary responsibility to your customers that’s heavily regulated. Both brand and regulatory compliance are important, and you’re not willing to risk compliance issues to put your brand online.

    Well, what if you didn’t have to?

    When you partner with a strong marketing vendor that can provide the digital marketing strategy and automation needed to reach your prospects, your chances of actually converting these prospects into clients skyrocket. First, it’s important to understand why a solid online presence is key for your business.

    Why you should embrace this new age of opportunity

    Even if you don’t feel like you’re embracing digital marketing opportunities, there’s a strong chance that you’re already online. These days, customers share their experiences on social media and review websites, which have become crucial to building client trust in a new audience.

    If you take advantage of the opportunity to use online tools, you have more control over your brand’s identity online and the opportunity to tap into a vast audience you may not have known even existed.

    That’s why more than half of the companies in the United States are using some form of marketing automation.

    Related: The Top 5 Perks of Marketing Automation

    Get to know your options

    There are several ways you can go about advertising online. Some of the most popular options for advertising online financial services include:

    • Social Media: Social media is a hotbed for online activity. To put the power of social media into perspective, Facebook has more than 2.9 billion active users. That means nearly a third of the global population is on it.
    • Search Engine Optimization: Google started as a brand name but has become a verb. If you don’t know something, you “Google” it. So, what happens when a customer in your area googles “Financial Advisor Near Me?” Are you on the list? Search engine optimization (SEO) can help.
    • Local Listings: Online local listing websites are free to use and have massive audiences. You can use these local listing websites to expand your clientele.
    • Paid Search: You can also take advantage of pay-per-click advertising. This allows you to show up at the top of search results and only pay a small fee when someone clicks your link.
    • Display Ad Campaigns: Banner ads on websites could expose your brand to thousands of potential customers for a minimal cost. CPM, or cost per mil (cost per thousand views), advertising campaigns allow you to put banners on popular websites for between $10 and $20 per thousand views, in most cases.
    • Online Videos: You might be amazed at the response you get from creating YouTube videos. A few short videos telling people things they may not already know about finances and the financial industry could drive customers through the door.
    • Email Marketing: Keep in touch with previous customers to ensure they come back when they need services next time.

    Marketing automation is your biggest ally

    Of course, there are several moving parts to a solid online marketing plan, but technology has also created incredibly efficient solutions for that. Marketing automation is a hot ticket and continues to rise in popularity. You can automate everything from paid search, organic and social posting to display campaigns. With the help of a solid digital marketing strategy and marketing automation, you get to focus on what you’re best at – providing financial advice to your clients.

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    Adam Chandler

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  • 3 Digital Marketing Strategies That Will Save You 20 Hours Every Week

    3 Digital Marketing Strategies That Will Save You 20 Hours Every Week

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    Are you struggling to keep up with the demands of digital marketing? You’re not alone. Small businesses and entrepreneurs are often so busy that they don’t have time to focus on their marketing efforts.

    Don’t worry, though! There are ways to automate your digital marketing so that it doesn’t take up all your time.

    As a digital entrepreneur and marketing coach, over the past ten years growing online businesses, I’ve learned precisely how to save 20 hours a week with automatic digital marketing processes, which I’m here to teach you. By implementing the three following automation strategies, you can free up valuable time to focus on other aspects of your business. Let’s get started!

    Related: How to Build on Your Digital Marketing Momentum in 2023

    1. Social media marketing automation

    Automating your social media marketing is one of the fastest and easiest ways to save time in digital marketing. There are many tools available that allow you to schedule posts, monitor engagement, and more.

    At the beginning of each month, create a calendar by planning 30 days worth of social media content ideas. For example, each day of the week, you should vary your content by type (i.e., educational, entertaining, inspiring, tips and tricks, behind-the-scenes, etc.). This will help keep your social media audiences engaged and interested in your posts while making it easier for you and your team to create the content.

    Similar to how manufacturing facilities streamline production processes by batching work, the same technique should be applied to your marketing efforts. Instead of creating marketing content from scratch and posting to social networks daily, batch your workload by producing content in one sitting and then schedule your posts for the rest of the week. This will make it easier for you and save you a lot of time so that you can move on to other areas of your business.

    When filming videos or shooting photos for social media, aim to capture a variety of content that can be reused and repurposed for various posts. This will cut down on the content creation time, as you’re utilizing one shoot for multiple pieces of content.

    You can also share UGC (user-generated content) featuring your company’s products or services (either by hired content creators or real customers), which shows social proof while giving you easy-to-post original content that doesn’t require extra work or effort on your part.

    In addition to these social media marketing tips to save time and energy, you can also reshare posts from several months ago. For example, if you had a popular post on Instagram from at least 3-months ago that got a lot of engagement, repost that with a slightly different caption now. This drastically cuts down on your content creation time, helping to attract a wider audience of potential new followers interested in your business.

    Related: Top 12 Questions About Facebook Ads That Every Entrepreneur Needs To Know

    2. Automating email marketing

    Automating your email marketing is a great way to save time and increase efficiency while staying in touch with your customers and prospects. You can use an email automation platform like Flodesk, Mailchimp or Constant Contact to create automated campaigns that send personalized emails to your subscribers based on their preferences and interests.

    For example, creating an email sequence workflow that automatically is scheduled to send to people who opt-in to your email list is the absolute best way to streamline your email marketing process. It’s also important to segment your audience lists so that you optimize your email workflows — this way, you know where each person is in the customer journey experience.

    For example, if someone opts into your email list by signing up for a lead magnet (such as a free ebook), then you’ll want to add them to a cold lead list (since they’re just learning about your business). That way, you start to warm them up through emails before selling them on your products or services.

    By comparison, if you set up an audience list of past customers, you can remarket to them by offering reward-based promotions (such as exclusive Thank You coupon codes) to encourage them to purchase again.

    As you can see, setting up audience lists makes it easier to create different types of automated emails that drive brand awareness, boost sales conversions and incentivize repeat purchases.

    Related: Why Email Marketing Is Better for Your Business Than Social Media

    3. Implementing content curation tools

    Content curation is another excellent way for entrepreneurs and small business owners to save time on digital marketing. Using a content curation tool, such as Buzzsumo or Curata, you can quickly find and share relevant content in your industry without spending hours researching articles and sources. Content curation tools allow you to easily search for the best content related to your target audience, save it for later use, and share it on social media.

    In addition to sharing industry-focused content, you can also share inspirational quotes that relate to your target audience’s mindset. For example, suppose you’re selling beauty products geared toward women. In that case, you might consider quickly creating a beauty image (even a stock photo will suffice) with a caption by an empowering female icon (such as Coco Chanel or Marilyn Monroe). Women are inspired by motivational messages from these figures and will often engage with this type of content on social media (by liking, commenting, and sharing it). This is an easy, effective way to create content that gets results quickly.

    These are just a few simple ways that automation will help you save time in digital marketing. Implementing these strategies will allow you to focus more energy on other important business areas while growing brand awareness for your company and acquiring new sales leads.

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    Christina-Lauren Pollack

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  • How Facebook’s Demise Will Change Digital Advertising

    How Facebook’s Demise Will Change Digital Advertising

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    Facebook is in trouble. Social media platforms need constant growth to survive, but Facebook is no longer growing. In fact, it’s losing users. As Facebook’s core platform slowed down, Mark Zuckerberg made the fateful decision to shift focus to the metaverse, going so far as to change the company’s name, mission statement and stock ticker symbol to reflect this new direction.

    The public response was swift and decisive: People don’t want the metaverse, and especially not a half-baked version from Facebook. Even among those who are excited about the potential of virtual reality, there’s a sense that Facebook’s technology is decades behind the leading edge. And so people are leaving Facebook. Today, META’s stock is down around 70% from its highs.

    This exodus will have a profound impact on digital advertising. Facebook has long been the go-to platform for marketers looking to reach young people, and its targeting capabilities are unrivaled. But with Facebook no longer growing, and with users increasingly spending less time on the site, businesses will start to look elsewhere for their digital advertising needs.

    As a result, brands will need to find new platforms to reach their target audiences. They’ll also need to put greater importance on user privacy, as the public is no longer willing to tolerate Facebook’s cavalier attitude towards data. In addition, given the Facebook-fueled rise in ad blockers, brands will need to find ways to reach people that don’t rely on traditional display advertising.

    Related: 4 Digital Advertising Predictions You Need to Keep Your Eyes On

    Brands turn to new platforms

    When Facebook first launched, it was a novel way for businesses to reach their target audiences. There was nothing else like it, and so businesses flocked to the platform. But now there are many other social media platforms, and businesses will need to spread their advertising budgets across multiple sites.

    This won’t be easy, as each platform has its own quirks and capabilities. For example, TikTok is popular with young people, but it doesn’t have the same kind of targeting capabilities as Facebook. And while Instagram is owned by Facebook, it has a very different user base and set of features.

    Advertising on Twitter is an entirely new can of worms. Following the platform’s acquisition by Elon Musk and the subsequent removal of content restrictions put in place to appease advertisers, Twitter is now a Wild West of sorts. Many advertisers have pulled their budgets from the platform, but those who remain are finding that they need to adjust their strategies.

    Google is another behemoth that brands need to consider. While it’s not a social media platform, its search and display advertising businesses are still enormous. Like Facebook, however, advertisers face fake news and bots on Google. The company is also embroiled in antitrust investigations, which could lead to stricter regulation of its advertising business.

    All this is to say that brands need to be nimble and adaptable in the post-Facebook world. They need to be willing to experiment with different platforms, and they need to have a clear understanding of each one’s strengths and weaknesses.

    Related: What to Post on Each Social Media Platform: The Complete Guide to Optimizing Your Social Content

    Businesses focus on user privacy

    As people become more aware of the ways that their data is being used and abused, they’re increasingly demanding more control over their personal information. This is especially true of young people, who are growing up in a world where data breaches are commonplace.

    In response to this, brands will need to start respecting user privacy. They’ll need to be more transparent about how they’re using data, and they’ll need to give users more control over their personal information. This will require a fundamental shift in the way that many businesses operate, but it’s something that needs to be done if brands want to stay on the good side of the public.

    I’ve written before about the rise of zero-party data. This is a new kind of data that users voluntarily share with businesses, such as through quizzes, surveys and sign-ups. This data is incredibly valuable, as it allows businesses to get to know their customers on a much deeper level. Unlike third-party data, which is often inaccurate and outdated, zero-party data is fresh and accurate.

    As user privacy becomes more important, brands will need to start collecting this type of data. They’ll need to find new ways to engage with their customers, and they’ll need to invest in the necessary technology. This will require a significant amount of time and money, but it’s something that needs to be done if brands want to stay relevant in the post-Facebook world.

    Related: The 5 Best Digital Marketing Strategies to Empower Your Business

    Interactive content dominates

    The most successful advertising campaigns of the future will be those that manage to break through the clutter and capture people’s attention. In a world where people are bombarded with hundreds of marketing messages every day, this is no easy feat.

    One way to do this is with interactive content. This is content that requires people to take some kind of action, such as answering questions for a style quiz or responding to a poll measuring interest in a new product. Because interactive content is more engaging than traditional display advertising, it’s more likely to capture people’s attention and get them to take notice of your brand.

    Facebook’s sheer staying power has meant that many brands have been slow to catch on to this trend. But with the platform’s decline, they’ll need to start experimenting with new types of content if they want to stay ahead of the curve.

    Ultimately, the demise of Facebook will have a profound impact on the world of digital advertising. Brands will need to find new platforms to reach their target audiences, and they’ll need to put a greater emphasis on user privacy. In addition, given the rise in ad blockers, brands will need to find ways to reach people that don’t rely on traditional display advertising.

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    Vlad Gozman

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  • These 20 stocks were the biggest losers of 2022

    These 20 stocks were the biggest losers of 2022

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    This has been the year of reckoning for Big Tech stocks — even those of companies that have continued to grow sales by double digits.

    Below is a list of the 20 stocks in the S&P 500
    SPX,
    -0.72%
    that have declined the most in 2022.

    First, here’s how the 11 sectors of the benchmark index have performed this year:

    S&P 500 sector

    		 2022 price change

    		 Forward P/E

    		 Forward P/E as of Dec. 31, 2021
    Energy

    		 57.8%

    		 9.6

    		 11.1
    Utilities

    		 -0.5%

    		 18.8

    		 20.4
    Consumer Staples

    		 -2.7%

    		 20.9

    		 21.8
    Healthcare

    		 -3.2%

    		 17.4

    		 17.2
    Industrials

    		 -6.7%

    		 18.0

    		 20.8
    Financials

    		 -12.1%

    		 11.7

    		 14.6
    Materials

    		 -13.4%

    		 15.6

    		 16.6
    Real Estate

    		-27.7%

    		 16.2

    		 24.2
    Information Technology

    		 -28.8%

    		 19.6

    		 28.1
    Consumer Discretionary

    		 -37.4%

    		 20.7

    		 33.2
    Communication Services

    		 -40.4%

    		 14.0

    		 20.8
    S&P 500

    		 -19.2%

    		 16.5

    		 21.4
    Source: FactSet

    The energy sector has been the only one to show a gain in 2022, and it has been a whopper, even as West Texas Intermediate crude oil
    CL.1,
    +0.41%
    has given up most of its gains from earlier in the year. Here’s why investors are still confident in the supply/demand setup for oil and energy stocks.

    Looking at the worst-performing sectors, you might wonder why the consumer discretionary and communication services sectors have fared worse than information-technology, the core tech sector. One reason is that S&P Dow Jones Indices can surprise investors with its sector choices. The consumer discretionary sector includes Tesla Inc.
    TSLA,
    +0.70%
    and Amazon.com Inc.
    AMZN,
    -1.17%    ,
    which has fallen nearly 50% this year. The communications sector includes Meta Platforms Inc.
    META,
    -1.21%    ,
    along with Match Group Inc.
    MTCH,
    +0.50%    ,
    which is down 69% for 2022, and Netflix Inc.
    NFLX,
    -0.44%    ,
    which is down 52% this year.

    There have been many reasons easy to cite for Big Tech’s decline, such as a questionable change in strategy for Facebook’s holding company, Meta, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg has put so much of the company’s resources into developing a new world that most people don’t wish to enter, at least yet. Meta’s shares were down 64% for 2022 through Dec. 29.

    You might also blame the Twitter-related antics and sales of Tesla shares by CEO Elon Musk for the 65% decline in the electric-vehicle maker’s stock this year. But Tesla had a forward price-to-earnings ratio of 120.3 at the end of 2021, while the S&P 500
    SPX,
    -0.72%
    traded for 21.4 times its weighted forward earnings estimate, according to FactSet. Those P/E ratios have now declined to 21.7 and 16.4, respectively. So Tesla no longer appears to be a very expensive stock, especially for a company that increased its vehicle deliveries by 42% in the third quarter from a year earlier.

    Analysts polled by FactSet expect Tesla’s stock to double during 2023. It nearly made this list of 20 EV stocks expected to rebound the most in 2023.

    The worst-performing S&P 500 stocks of 2022

    Here are the 20 stocks in the S&P 500 that fell the most for 2022 through the close on Dec. 29.

    Company

    		 Ticker

    		 2022 price change

    		 Forward P/E

    		 Forward P/E as of Dec. 32, 2021
    Generac Holdings Inc.

    		 GNRC,
    -0.84%         		-71.4%

    		 13.7

    		 30.2
    Match Group Inc.

    		 MTCH,
    +0.50%         		-68.9%

    		 20.1

    		 48.5
    Align Technology Inc.

    		 ALGN,
    -0.52%         		-67.7%

    		 27.4

    		 48.7
    Tesla Inc.

    		 TSLA,
    +0.70%         		-65.4%

    		 21.7

    		 120.3
    SVB Financial Group

    		 SIVB,
    -0.38%         		-65.4%

    		 10.8

    		 23.0
    Catalent Inc.

    		 CTLT,
    -0.40%         		-64.6%

    		 13.0

    		 32.5
    Meta Platforms Inc. Class A

    		 META,
    -1.21%         		-64.2%

    		 14.7

    		 23.5
    Signature Bank

    		 SBNY,
    -0.34%         		-64.1%

    		 6.2

    		 18.6
    PayPal Holdings Inc.

    		 PYPL,
    -0.01%         		-62.6%

    		 14.8

    		 36.0
    V.F. Corp.

    		 VFC,
    +0.15%         		-62.5%

    		 11.9

    		 20.4
    Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. Series A

    		 WBD,
    -1.64%         		-59.9%

    		 N/A

    		 7.5
    Carnival Corp.

    		 CCL,
    -0.23%         		-59.8%

    		 38.1

    		 N/A
    Stanley Black & Decker Inc.

    		 SWK,
    -0.42%         		-59.8%

    		 17.0

    		 15.9
    Lumen Technologies Inc.

    		 LUMN,
    -1.79%         		-57.8%

    		 7.7

    		 7.8
    Zebra Technologies Corp. Class A

    		 ZBRA,
    -0.44%         		-56.7%

    		 14.5

    		 30.1
    Dish Network Corp. Class A

    		 DISH,
    -0.96%         		-56.5%

    		 8.6

    		 10.9
    Caesars Entertainment Inc.

    		 CZR,
    +0.24%         		-55.7%

    		 51.4

    		 144.5
    Lincoln National Corp.

    		 LNC,
    +0.26%         		-55.1%

    		 3.4

    		 6.2
    Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

    		 AMD,
    -0.97%         		-55.0%

    		 17.8

    		 43.1
    Seagate Technology Holdings PLC

    		 STX,
    -0.55%         		-53.1%

    		 15.0

    		 12.4
    Source: FactSet

    Click on the tickers for more information about the companies.

    Click here for Tomi Kilgore’s detailed guide to the wealth of information available for free on the MarketWatch quote page.

    Another way of measuring the biggest stock-market losers of 2022

    It is one thing to have a large decline based on the share price, but that doesn’t tell the entire story. How much of a decline have investors seen in the holdings of their shares during the year? The S&P 500’s total market capitalization declined to $31.66 trillion as of Dec. 28 (the most recent figure available) from $40.36 trillion at the end of 2021, according to FactSet.

    Shareholders of these companies have suffered the largest declines in market cap during 2022.

    Company

    		 Ticker

    		 2022 market capitalization change ($bil)

    		 2022 price change
    Apple Inc.

    		 AAPL,
    -0.63%         		-$851

    		 -27.0%
    Amazon.com Inc.

    		 AMZN,
    -1.17%         		-$832

    		 -49.5%
    Microsoft Corp.

    		 MSFT,
    -1.15%         		-$728

    		 -28.3%
    Tesla Inc.

    		 TSLA,
    +0.70%         		-$677

    		 -65.4%
    Meta Platforms Inc. Class A

    		 META,
    -1.21%         		-$465

    		 -64.2%
    Nvidia Corp.

    		 NVDA,
    -1.37%         		-$376

    		 -50.3%
    PayPal Holdings Inc.

    		 PYPL,
    -0.01%         		-$141

    		 -62.6%
    Netflix Inc.

    		 NFLX,
    -0.44%         		-$138

    		 -51.7%
    Walt Disney Co.

    		 DIS,
    -1.62%         		-$123

    		 -43.7%
    Salesforce Inc.

    		 CRM,
    -0.96%         		-$118

    		 -47.8%
    Source: FactSet

    So there is your surprise for today: Apple is this year’s biggest stock-market loser.

    Don’t miss: Best stock picks for 2023: Here are Wall Street analysts’ most heavily favored choices

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  • Here Are 5 Trends to Watch Out For in Sales and Marketing in 2023

    Here Are 5 Trends to Watch Out For in Sales and Marketing in 2023

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    As we close out 2022, sales and marketing teams everywhere are evaluating the year’s performance. They’re looking at what lies ahead and crafting new strategies to appeal to buyers and boost revenue. In a time where customer behaviors and expectations evolve faster than ever, these strategies often hinge on a business’s agility, flexibility and willingness to adapt to industry shifts.

    Two such shifts that arose from the pandemic’s disruption were an emphasis on personalization and customer experience. Moving into the new year, organizations can expect these trends to continue and undergo further refining as hybrid buying and selling solidify as the new normal. Tools and tactics that can better leverage customer data and create a greater sense of relevancy with consumers will be the key to a competitive edge.

    As you prepare, here are five trends to watch and incorporate into your strategies.

    1. RevOps is on the rise

    Internal fragmentation of the sales process has long been a source of friction in the buyer’s journey. It can have a detrimental effect on the seamless customer experience consumers are hoping for. Businesses need to unite their internal sales process to mirror what their customers prefer and expect. One of the ways they can do this is through revenue operations. This business model knocks down silos and gets everyone working toward the same goal: revenue. And since revenue is tied closely to customer purchases, it often translates into uniting behind the customer experience.

    Processes and tactics that focus on shared data, agreed-upon procedures and clear communication will be vital to creating the seamless experience that so many customers now expect. Successful implementation of a RevOps model can see a 10-20% increase in internal customer satisfaction.

    Related: Are You Reducing Friction For Your Sales Team? If Not, Here’s Why.

    2. Curated content is key to one-to-one selling

    In the age of digital selling, content is one of the most potent tools businesses have at their disposal. In B2B especially, there is an elevated reliance on content during the decision-making process. As the buyer’s journey becomes increasingly self-led, the best way to attract customers’ attention is by providing relevant information throughout the sales cycle. With the amount of data marketing and sales teams now have about their prospects and opportunities, it’s possible to leverage content further than the broad one-to-many messages that have taken dominance.

    By carefully looking through previous customer actions, along with communication from marketing, sales teams can see what content a lead has seen. They can then use the historical data to make informed decisions about other content that would be most valuable for the lead as it progresses through the funnel. Not only does this provide the lead with relevant content, but it also demonstrates that you are listening to them and understanding their problem, which can go a long way to building trust.

    Related: How Content Creation and Content Curation Should Work Together

    3. Businesses are leaning on automation

    Automation may sound counter-intuitive to a personalized customer experience, but the truth is that automation makes personalization at scale possible. There are two main functions of automation in sales and marketing: removing repetitive, rote tasks from human workers and analyzing large amounts of information. Automating repetitive tasks frees employees to focus on higher-level priorities and reduces the chances of an overlooked task, such as email follow-ups. With scale becoming such an issue, customers can get lost in the details of the daily grind. This is the last thing you need in an experience that is supposed to make them feel noticed and understood by your business. Automation can also assist with data analysis and provide team members with actionable insights.

    4. Account-based marketing is driving personalization

    Quality over quantity is vital in terms of leads. You can show your ads to a hundred people, but if they are the wrong audience, they won’t produce any sales. The scattershot, blanket method of marketing that pushes views and clicks over engagement and interest is no longer in fashion. Today’s customers are inundated with ads and companies. They’ve learned to tune out the noise unless it’s something that actually interests them.

    Account-based marketing takes this concept and digs deeper. It’s getting to know specific accounts and their details to craft a message that meets their specific and individual needs. It works alongside RevOps and aligns sales and marketing to take information from both teams to identify the best and most likely accounts to win.

    5. Buyers expect self-service experiences

    A rising number of consumers, especially from younger generations, prefer to conduct their buyers’ journey independently, without interaction from sales or marketing teams. 81% of customers want to see more self-service options. This poses a complex problem to businesses that have relied for decades on human assets to push products. Instead, companies must now place focus on product experience and allow interactions with the product itself to drive consumers further down the sales funnel. For example, in software, self-service demonstrations will be vital in driving more independent customers. Once they have had their own self-activated experience with a product, they will be more inclined to seek assistance from high-end sales activities because they can curate their own questions from experience.

    Related: Customer Experience Will Determine the Success of Your Company

    The customer experience has always been a vital element of business success. As we become an increasingly digital society, a larger part of that customer experience will be defined online and through the screen. Just like the sales and marketing tactics of the past, businesses will have to work to differentiate themselves from the competition. But, they need to do it according to the expectations and preferences of digital behavior.

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    Margaret Wise

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  • How to Advertise to Customer Emotions Without Invading Privacy

    How to Advertise to Customer Emotions Without Invading Privacy

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    It’s probably not difficult to grasp that our customers’ purchase behaviors are deeply entangled with moods.

    There’s a reason that we call shopping therapeutic. Purchasing things we want sends a serotonin surge to the brain that can temporarily make us feel better if we’re stressed, depressed or anxious. Moreover, according to widely-cited research by Gerald Zaltman, 95% of purchase decisions are made subconsciously and driven by emotions — so it’s no surprise that advertisers have been interested in understanding and evoking particular mood states for generations.

    Now that data about internal states of mind is becoming more available, the stakes are higher when we consider how to act on this sensitive consumer information. For example, how far should brands go to utilize emotional data to encourage purchases?

    Let’s take a look at where we’re at and how brands can take a human-centered approach to the use of this sensitive information.

    Related: 5 Insights Into Human Behavior That Will Boost Your Sales and Marketing

    How we gauge emotions

    Let’s start with how we gauge emotions. Until recently, our data about feelings relied on self-reporting by consumers since it’s impossible to embody another person’s emotional experience. Self-reporting means that consumers answer direct questions about how they are feeling at a given time or in a given context. Usually, this happens via market research surveys.

    Neuroscience is advancing to the point that we may be able to accurately predict emotional states without relying on overt consumer admissions. This type of emotional assessment may prove to be even more accurate than direct consumer reporting since many people struggle to predict how they’ll feel in particular contexts.

    Technology that assesses activity in our brains is getting more advanced and better capable of predicting mood states. While most of this innovation is happening in research labs, we’re getting closer to realizing this technology as a marketing tool.

    Neuroscience and wearables

    The Art of Shopping, a subconscious shopping experience between art retailer Saatchi and eBay, is one of the most direct campaigns that aimed to utilize this technology in shopping.

    During the experiential retail event, attendees browsed an art gallery while wearing headsets that were designed to track a consumer’s mental engagement. When the software suggested that viewers were inspired, eBay added similar items to the patron’s shopping cart.

    While the activation was interesting, getting consumers to voluntarily and consistently wear mind-tracking headsets is far-fetched in our current environment. Although, it may become more common as more consumers adopt augmented and virtual realities.

    Today, wearables like fitness trackers and smartwatches are becoming more ubiquitous and can aggregate mood data inferentially or from the self-assessment of consumers. The devices can assess everything from our heart rate and breathing patterns to our mindfulness activity. This can imply or correlate to stress levels or provide more direct mood data on apps like Calm and Halo that encourage emotional reporting.

    Related: 4 Neuromarketing Hacks to Reach More People and Maximize Results

    Inferring emotional data

    There are other ways to gauge the mood of consumers, and some of them have a troubling history.

    Meta, formerly Facebook, was famously under the microscope for conducting a large-scale emotion experiment aimed at understanding if emotions spread through networks.

    It actively manipulated the algorithm of nearly 700,000 users without their informed consent, in order to serve them positive or negative content and to gauge the apparent mood in their resulting posts. Among other goals, the company was interested in how emotions might make the site more or less engaging.

    The more engaged users are on the platform, the more valuable they are to Meta’s advertisers. Critics worried that the company wanted to understand how to manipulate emotions to bolster its bottom line and increase purchases for its advertisers, without apparent regard for the impact on the consumer.

    Meta isn’t the only tech company making actionable inferences about emotions. Search engines like Google track emotional effects by utilizing software to assess language for positive and negative sentiments in search, among other tactics.

    In conjunction with the rest of their consumer data, such as browsing and purchase history, these tech behemoths have real power to understand, contextualize and leverage consumer emotion without the use of neurological equipment.

    Related: If You Want to Win Over Customers, Appeal to Their Emotions

    How are we using this data?

    Marketers are curious about how mood impacts purchases, and thereby interested in creating purchase paths that are aligned with particular feelings. Payment providers are paying attention as well. In fact, in their latest Future of Payments research paper, Worldpay from FIS identified personalization, including emotional engagement, as a trend that payment providers are attending to.

    Creating payment journeys that utilize emotional information from consumers may sound troubling. But it’s worth noting that consumers increasingly expect these kinds of personalized experiences from brands — as long as they are additive to the consumer journey.

    When an experience provides convenience to a consumer and helps the brand connect meaningfully with them, it can make the consumer feel supported and improve emotional engagement and loyalty.

    Striking a balance between utilizing emotional data to offer mutual brand-consumer gains while respecting consumer rights and privacy is tricky. This is why we need to think deeply about creating consumer safeguards as we venture into the future.

    Related: Personalization: A Perspective On The Future Of Targeting

    Where do we go from here?

    There’s no shortage of data, and we’re only going to get better at detecting and reacting to emotional states in various contexts. As advertisers and marketers, we need to be thoughtful about how all this emotional data is applied.

    We’ve already seen social media companies exploiting negative emotional states like anxiety and depression to move users toward a purchase path of aspirational products in categories like beauty and fitness (What’s even more troubling is that the algorithms are likely contributing to the negative emotional state, but that’s a conversation for another day). We’ve seen the same algorithms promote negative headlines that are likely to elicit engagement, which results in exacerbated political polarization and negative societal impacts more broadly.

    As an advertising community, we need to implement safeguards to protect consumers. These safeguards should come from regulators, as well as individual brands. Creating an ethics playbook prior to locking in uses of emotional data in the purchase path, conducting thought experiments for secondary and tertiary impacts of the use of mood-based information, and defining and acting in accordance with a brand’s values can help to ensure marketers are responsible brokers of mood data.

    It’s worth remembering that understanding emotion can have powerful positive consequences as well. As humans, we’re emotional beings and brands that can meet consumers where they are in their internal experiences are likely to create better and more meaningful connections. It’s imperative for brands to think through how they’re using emotional information, not only to create lasting relationships with consumers but also to take a human-centered approach to innovation.

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    Tina Mulqueen

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  • How to Prepare Your Digital Marketing Team For 2023

    How to Prepare Your Digital Marketing Team For 2023

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    As the shift to digital continues, traditional marketing is increasingly being disrupted by digital marketing. Digital marketing teams are under enormous pressure to manage this transition, seize the opportunities offered by digital marketing and deliver outsized gains. Here are seven tactics for doing that.

    Automate to improve workflow efficiency

    Improving workflow efficiency is a great way to enhance the client experience, reduce costs of service and improve agency profitability. A decade ago, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen said that “software is eating the world.” Today, it is truer to say that artificial intelligence (AI) is eating the world. AI is disrupting industry after industry, and digital marketing is no exception. One easily deployable tool is the use of conversational intelligence to unearth insights from conversations with clients and improve marketing strategies. For instance, conversational intelligence can determine which keywords clients use and shift marketing so that products and scenarios reflect customer language.

    SEO remains important

    Any marketing expert will tell you that search engine optimization (SEO) has grown beyond the days when all that mattered was sending a site up Google’s page ranking. Although rising up Google’s page ranking remains important, SEO has changed in fundamental ways. Digital marketers have to consider alternative SEO strategies. Although Google’s dominance among search engines continues to rise, search strategies on platforms such as Amazon, Instagram and Twitter will become increasingly important.

    Stand out with thought leadership

    Thought leadership is a novel and increasingly important way to grow a brand. It’s also a high-margin way of doing it, requiring very little economic investment. What it does require is an investment in developing unique insights. This may even require having someone whose job is to do nothing but read, think, write or post videos.

    People are hungry for insight, and what they want is someone who can deliver profound insights that make it worth their time. If you can win people’s trust as a reliable authority, you will build the value of your brand.

    Accumulate data

    In the era of Big Data, data is the new oil. Possessing data is the foundation of a great business. Your business needs to invest in tracking your client’s activity not just on client websites, but also on third-party websites. On Apple products, they will of course have to explicitly consent to this, and you might even proactively seek their consent when they land on the customer’s website. The fraction of traffic that you can track will give you insights into what people want. Lead conversion tracking is vital.

    If you can’t measure something, it’s hard to know what you are doing right. Data collection is key for understanding what’s working in your digital marketing strategy and therefore reducing the cost of acquiring each customer. It’s also important for doing right by your customers by giving them just what they want and need. Without data, you cannot maximize the return on investment (ROI) on your campaigns. In this way, you can increase your chances of retaining your customers.

    Prepare for Google Analytics 4

    From July 1, 2023, Universal Analytics will no longer process data. Although you will still be able to see Universal Analytics reports for some time, new data will be processed by Google Analytics 4 properties. Google Analytics 4 has been touted as the “next generation of Analytics”.

    It’s advisable to start running both Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4 in preparation for the transition so that by the time July arrives, you are comfortable with Google Analytics 4. Furthermore, you should start using Google Analytics 4’s tracking features to give yourself a little treasure trove of data once the July deadline arrives.

    Build customer loyalty

    Each customer’s lifetime value is determined by the degree of customer loyalty that you can foster. This is not only because clients will stay longer the more loyal they are, but it is also because loyalty will lead them to use more and more of your services, allowing you to “land and expand”.

    In order to enhance customer loyalty beyond what your own operational excellence can achieve, you should offer customers freebies, loyalty and referral discounts, and you should over-communicate your fulfillment expectations to build trust. These things are even more pertinent in times like these when customers exist in a state of uncertainty and might even be experiencing declining revenues. These investments pay off in the long run. You want to go the extra mile for repeat customers so they understand just how valuable they are to you.

    Forget third-party cookies

    Third-party tracking is dying. Apple is one of the big reasons for this, as it leads a push to answer customer fears about privacy. For digital marketers, what this means is that you will have to reimagine how you advertise in a world without third-party cookies. More specifically, digital marketers will have to do more to collect first-party data. Data’s importance remains, but now, success will depend on if you own enough data to gain meaningful insights. Digital marketers who can succeed in building out their first-party data will be ahead of those who cannot and will be able to analyze and forecast the performance of their ads and conduct better market research.

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    Mark Pierce

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  • How to Build on Your Digital Marketing Momentum in 2023

    How to Build on Your Digital Marketing Momentum in 2023

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    I’ve been in the digital marketing game since the AOL days — before even Google and certainly long before Snapchat and TikTok were ever a thing. As I’ve seen the landscape change over the years, I’ve developed some pretty good foresight into where the industry is headed in the future. For the past two decades, my job has been to predict where digital marketing is headed and to get there before my competitors do.

    As a digital marketing entrepreneur, you’ve always got to be looking ahead. Until 2026, the compound annual growth rate of the online marketing industry is 9%. Therefore, you’ve got to think in the long term if you want to succeed in a market that’s getting more crowded every year.

    Now that 2023 is visible on the horizon, let’s go over the top industry trends that I think you’ve got to be on top of if you want to stand out in tomorrow’s digital marketing space:

    Related: 5 Digital Marketing Trends to Know for the Decade

    GPT-4 and the rise of “smart” chatbots

    When Generative Pre-Trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) was released in 2020 by Silicon Valley-based OpenAI, its capacity to create human-like natural language shocked the world. As the most sophisticated AI language model in the world, GPT-3 is capable of writing convincing poetry, prose and dialogue using just a basic user prompt.

    In 2023, we could see the long-awaited GPT-4 released. Although AI-based language processing has come a long way in recent years, there are still some hiccups. Chatbots that are powered by GPT-3 still don’t pass the Turing test, and many consumers loathe having their support queries handled by a bot.

    With GPT-4 on the horizon, chatbots are about to see a quantum leap in their development. Once chatbots can produce language indistinguishable from humans — with all our emotional nuance and subtle interpretations — chatbots are going to take over. We may even see GPT-4 chatbots replace human support agents altogether. Savvy entrepreneurs will keep their eye on new chatbot developments based on GPT-4 and embrace them when the time comes.

    Hyper-personalization

    In Dale Carnegie’s 1936 classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People, he wrote that a person’s name is to him or her the sweetest and most important sound in any language. He wasn’t wrong. We naturally love to be addressed by name, as doing so is dignifying and a marker of respect.

    Our marketing campaigns should reflect this tendency. Emails and SMS that don’t include your lead’s name are a major no-go. As third-party cookies are being cracked down on in 2022 and likely will continue to be in the future, it’s important to ask for your lead’s name and other identifiable information when they sign up. Cookies are slowly becoming a thing of the past, so collecting personalized user data is something you will have to do increasingly on your own.

    Related: 4 Marketing Personalization Tips for Digital Businesses

    More mobile-first visuals

    Who doesn’t love stunning visual content, such as infographics, reels and informative videos? For many of us, this is how we prefer to learn, rather than through long walls of text (no, the irony here is not lost on me). I suggest ramping up your visual content production if you want to compete in 2023’s information space, and more generally, in a world with increasingly shorter attention spans — currently at about only 8.25 seconds.

    Optimizing your visual content for mobile devices should always be top of mind. Desktop visual production should be an afterthought. These days, the clear majority (nearly 54%) of web traffic comes from mobile devices, and this percentage will increase in 2023. Therefore, I suggest keeping vertical, mobile-friendly visuals at the top of your content schedule.

    Clips, reels and videos

    While we’re on the topic of visuals, we can’t ignore the enormous influence that TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels have had on the industry in recent years. With TikTok nearly doubling its monthly users in 2022 to almost two billion, it’s likely that its influence is only going to continue to climb in the year ahead.

    Creating short, vertical video content in the 30-second to 3-minute range is ideal. Long video content has its place on YouTube, but to unlock the true viral potential of your videos, it’s best to shorten them and make them mobile-optimized. The more short vertical videos you produce, the greater the chances of going viral and having your content shared widely.

    Up the interactivity

    Social media marketing should remain at the center of your marketing strategy in 2023. However, our feeds are already flooded with promoted content. Instead of a simple 4×3 image post, create more interactive content that ropes your audience in with a question. For example, I recommend using the following Instagram features in your Story content:

    • Polls

    • “Ask a Question” widgets

    • Quizzes

    • Rating sliders

    There’s something about interacting with a brand that’s much more powerful than simply passively viewing its content. Including interactive Story content in your social media campaigns is a highly effective way to gain engagement and to keep your audience glued to your brand.

    Related: 7 Tools That Make Interactive Content Creation Easy

    Keep the momentum rolling in 2023

    As we head into the new year, let’s not squander all the progress we made in 2022. Instead, let’s keep moving forward by honing in on the digital market trends of tomorrow. Specifically, I recommend keeping a close eye on AI developments such as GPT-4, collecting more precise personalized user data, creating mobile-first content (and especially short video content) and incorporating interactive media into your content strategy.

    If you can stay abreast of these trends in the coming year, you’ll be better positioned than many of your competitors. As the industry continues to balloon year over year, staying on top of these trends will become less of an option and more of a necessity if you want to stay afloat — so, what better time to start than now?

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    Amine Rahal

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  • Are You Treating Customers Right? Ask Yourself These Questions

    Are You Treating Customers Right? Ask Yourself These Questions

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    We hear it all the time: Businesses are more digital than ever before, and this continues to affect almost every aspect of how things are run within a company. But even in a “post”-Covid-19 world, what is something we will (hopefully) never replace with digital? Human interaction.

    Connecting with others remains crucial to pretty much any successful relationship, business or otherwise. Strong customer relationships are the crux of just about every business out there — that one-on-one relationship helps them to know what their customer needs and anticipate problems before they arise. It’s one of the only things that really separates a company from its competitors, especially as new ones seem to pop up every day.

    So what techniques do businesses need to be implementing so that they continue to foster personalized relationships in the midst of all things digital? Here are three questions every business owner should be asking themselves.

    Related: The 7 Stages Of Customer Relationship Management

    Question #1: Do we have a single, comprehensive view of our customer data, interactions and information that is shared across the entire company?

    To begin, you need to assess where your company is at when it comes to having a single view of the customer and their journey with your organization. All internal teams that ladder into each customer relationship should have information that is in real-time. You need to not only know which products they are using but also any problems they’ve had, what their ultimate goals are for their organizations and their communication preferences — anything and everything. Further, once you have all of that information available to you, everyone needs to access it; your sales, marketing, customer support and operations folks all need access to the same set of data.

    Recently, we surveyed 500 B2B sales, marketing, customer success and operations professionals from mid-market organizations to find out how teams are leveraging CRM for a better customer experience. When asked what their strategic priorities were for the year ahead, only 17% cited aligned departments as a top priority, yet 55% cited improving the customer experience.

    What many don’t realize is you simply cannot have one without the other. Real-time feedback and aligning your business’s data and departments have a direct effect on customer experience and of those surveyed, the businesses that reported the best customer service were 2.5 times more likely to report significant revenue growth. Simply put, a focus on customer experience makes a huge difference.

    Related: Customer Relationship Management: It’s More Than Just Conversions

    Question #2: How can we go deeper with our personalization tactics?

    Once you’ve got your data from real-time feedback that has been shared across all internal departments, you’re ready to get personal. And in case you’re not caught up, personalization in sales and marketing today has gone way beyond using a customer’s first name in an email campaign.

    Personalized interactions and service will allow for those exceptional one-on-one relationships mentioned above. How can you possibly serve your customers with exceptional service if you are not addressing their very individualized wants and needs? You need to know what their pain points are, what their successes are and what they need most in order to make things happen.

    In short, do your research, then craft your personalized outreach. Note: There is no shortcut here. The calories you burn doing research or merging data will result in better outcomes.

    Further, personalization can help mitigate any tone-deaf missteps in communication. If a customer is having an issue with something, the last thing you want is your marketing team sending them an email with an offer or an upsell. Plus, you should always be procuring and incorporating as much direct customer feedback as you can — field surveys, post questions and polls on social media and ask direct questions. One tactic is to have your customer service team host quarterly business reviews with customers. A 30-minute meeting once per quarter can mitigate issues before they snowball, while also looking for upsell opportunities. Once you get the answers, as mentioned earlier, that data should get shared across internal departments so your employees can continue making personal interactions.

    Related: Staying Ahead of the Curve: How the Customer Experience Is Evolving

    Question #3: Are we taking every opportunity to have a human touch?

    When we do have a chance to share our human sides, we should excel at it.

    Virtual backgrounds were all the rage early on in video conferencing because they presented a neat, homogenized view of every caller. Guess what? That’s boring, and it could be a missed opportunity for a better, deeper connection. Let your clients see your real background. Is that a guitar? A piece of art you admire? A plant that you are tending to or a book you’re reading?

    How can we use these cues to start real conversations and connect as humans? While there were likely some exceptions early on in the pandemic when people rushed home to haphazard and makeshift workspaces, today’s remote worker will likely have a space that reflects his/her personality and can add value to an interaction.

    Another place to be more human is LinkedIn. If I’m going to do business with you and I visit your LinkedIn profile, what will I see? A laundry list of your qualifications is good, but I’d love a short story as to why you chose this field, what successes you have had and where your passion lies. Don’t miss out on these chances to inject humanity into the digital world.

    Related: How to Create Authentic Relationships and Build Customer Trust

    Moving forward

    By implementing these tactics within your organization, you will be better poised to foster successful customer relationships as things continue to move more and more towards digital, because let’s not forget what’s most important: human interaction.

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    Chip House

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  • I Quit My Job Last Year and Have Made More Than $300,000

    I Quit My Job Last Year and Have Made More Than $300,000

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    When I left my job as a consultant in October 2021, I had never made more than $5,000 per month from my business.


    Courtesy of Clo Bare Money Coach

    In fact, when I made a plan to leave my 9 to 5, I had an honest conversation with myself about whether or not I was okay with the possibility of only making $60,000 per year as a money coach — less than half what I was paid at my consulting gig.

    And my answer? Absolutely.

    As a 31-year-old millennial who graduated college with around $80,000 of debt for a degree in English and Spanish, I never would’ve dreamed I’d be able to someday consider taking a pay cut to quit my job and go full-time with my business. In fact, prior to 2018, I was still living paycheck to paycheck, knew nothing about investing and assumed I’d work the rest of my life.

    You see, I grew up believing I was just “bad with money,” like it was some character flaw you were either born with or without. I’d seen my parents struggle with credit card debt, furloughs during the Great Recession and the unending stress of living paycheck to paycheck while raising five kids. I thought struggle was normal, especially when it came to money.

    I started working at the age of nine to have a little spending money and hoped I’d someday do better, but money always burned a hole in my pocket, no matter what I did.

    I kept telling myself if I just had more of it, things would be fine.

    Spoiler alert: No matter how much money I made, it never fixed the problem of my overspending.

    It wasn’t until 2018, after spending most of my 20s without an emergency fund, overspending, not investing and thinking I’d die with student loan debt, that I decided it was time for a change.

    Related: Instead of Panicking, Deal With Your Student Loans Like a CFO Would

    I started learning about the debt-free community, which led me to the FIRE (financial independence, retire early) community, and eventually I thought, Why not me? Why not at least try?

    Well, I’m glad I did.

    Not only do I now know the peace of financial flexibility and a retirement savings that I’ve already invested enough in to have millions by the time I retire even if I don’t invest another dollar, but it also led me to something I never expected.

    I started writing about budgeting and investing online, which led me to creating content on Instagram and TikTok, which led me to become who I am now: a multi-six-figure business owner.

    But this time last year?

    I was just excited to even be able to consider quitting my job to pursue my passion of teaching people about money full-time.

    So, with a year’s emergency fund saved and a solid $5,000 from one-on-one coaching filtering into my bank account each month, I went off into full-time entrepreneurship land.

    Last month was my one year anniversary, and I did not make $60,000.

    The gross revenue I made from my first year as a full-time business owner was $305,000 with about $45,000 of expenses.

    How did I do it?

    By recognizing I had to scale, bringing in an expert and focusing on one funnel and one product.

    Recognizing I needed to scale

    When I quit my job, almost 100% of my income came from one-on-one coaching. In fact, during my first month of full-time business ownership, I had 60 coaching calls, with more than half of the calls lasting two hours.

    By the end of the first week, after 17 coaching sessions, I was already losing my voice, and feeling drained and discouraged.

    I knew I couldn’t keep up with that kind of grueling schedule, so I increased my prices in October and again in December, thinking it would lighten the load without really impacting my income.

    I was wrong.

    By the end of the year, I charged $499 for a two-hour session and $299 for a one-hour session — but no matter how many times I increased my prices, I still sold out within 24 hours of announcing openings in my coaching calendar.

    The coaching clients kept rolling in, and I had a hard time saying no to the emails requesting help as soon as possible or clients who needed another follow-up call. So, despite trying to manage my client load, I’d always end up with more than I could handle. Between October and December that year, I ended up coaching nearly 150 people.

    I was exhausted and already burned out, just two months into full-time entrepreneurship.

    Then, one day while lying on the couch to close my eyes for three minutes before the next coaching call, it hit me: I needed to scale. At the rate I was going, I’d be back in corporate in three months. I was capped, and despite wanting to help more people, my system at the time was unsustainable.

    I needed to find a way to move beyond selling my time. But I had no idea where to begin. That’s why I decided to bring in an expert.

    Related: 5 Marketing and Branding Tips to Scale Your Online Business

    Bringing in an expert

    Scaling beyond coaching was new territory for me, and although I’d seen other creators create courses and digital products, I wanted to make sure I was doing what was best for my business.

    When I started shopping for a business coach, I was nervous because there are so many problematic business coaches who teach people how to run a business despite never having run a business before. I wanted someone I could trust, and who I knew had worked with people in a similar niche, with similar goals.

    After doing my research, I decided to hire a well-regarded coach who had helped the giants in the space scale to multi-six-figure — and even seven-figure — businesses. She’d be the person who would teach me how to launch a course and build a funnel.

    By working with my coach, I was able to go full-speed ahead and avoid a bunch of mistakes I would’ve made trying to do it all myself — mistakes that would’ve cost me time and money.

    Investing $2,000 into my business resulted in my first product launch bringing in $35,000 — but I would’ve never gotten these kinds of results if I hadn’t hired my coach and implemented a funnel.

    Related: 10 Reasons Why You Need a Business Coach

    Implementing a funnel

    I did not know what a funnel was when I quit my job, but my funnel was the single most important investment I made in my business.

    A funnel allowed me to make sales without doing anything — no posting, no DMing people, no going live to push the sale.

    Instead, I was able to get people into my funnel and let the funnel do its automated magic.

    Here’s how my funnel worked:

    1. Instagram or TikTok followers would sign up for a free guide.
    2. The free guide would invite them to my free class.
    3. The free class would have a small pitch for my course, and all registrants would be put into a sales funnel of emails for the next 2-5 days.

    Keep in mind: At each stage, I was providing more value.

    My funnel made me sales even while I slept. No posting. No exhausting my followers on all my accounts to get in on the sale. My emails were set up to do it all for me so I could spend my time doing other things to build my business.

    The emails people received after signing up for the free class addressed their concerns, answered most frequently asked questions, shared testimonials and painted the appealing picture of what their life would look like after they completed the course.

    I’ve come to view my funnel as a relationship builder.

    So many content creators create a course or digital product and push it out to their audience without a funnel. They just put it on sale and hope people from their Instagram or TikTok will buy it because it exists. If you build it, they will come, right?

    Not exactly.

    We have to nurture the relationship, and an Instagram follower is at a much different stage than an email subscriber or someone who has downloaded your free guide and attended your workshop.

    We have to provide consistent value that builds trust with our ideal audiences. Going straight for the killshot of “Hey, buy my product” would be like asking for a job without having ever applied or submitted a resume. You need to date your leads and nurture them by providing value.

    Focusing on perfecting my funnel has allowed me to zone in on what is and isn’t working, understand my audience better and not get distracted by the shiny-object syndrome that so many new entrepreneurs face.

    Related: 5 Steps to Building Your First Online Sales Funnel

    Focusing on one product

    Focusing on one product also allowed me to scale for several reasons.

    First, it allowed me to streamline my messaging to my audience to make sure they were never confused about what I have to offer. I wanted to guarantee people went to my page and saw immediately what I specialized in: lazy investing. Not a little bit of lazy investing with some debt pay off, credit repair and budgeting sprinkled in. I want my audience to come to my page and understand exactly how I can help them.

    Think about the last time you were shopping for a service: for example, a person to clean your home.

    If you came across someone who had a list of services that included lawn care, car detailing, oil changes, handyman services — and oh yeah, they’d also clean your home for you — you likely wouldn’t choose that person over someone who made it clear that cleaning your home was the only thing their business did.

    Focusing on one product also helped me master the product, which only made my confidence in the product stronger and, in turn, allowed me to sell with ease.

    When we know without a shadow of a doubt that our products solve the problem we say they do, selling becomes simply highlighting the problem and explaining how our product is the solution.

    I don’t think I could’ve made as strong of a course had I not focused on only that course in the last year. Every month I added to it, tweaked, surveyed my members and found new ways to improve it. And the result is more than 500 happy customers who are now out there building wealth on their own.

    We all know how overwhelming and stressful it can be to manage a million different things: coaching, courses, digital products, group coaching and the list goes on. The mental space and clarity that come with focusing on one thing is something I’ll continue to prioritize as I build out more products in the future.

    Related: 3 Things You Need to Know About Launching a Product Business

    So, what’s next?

    Now that I’ve worked on The Lazy Investor’s Course and its funnel for a year, you might be wondering if I’m moving on to something new.

    But in 2023, I plan to continue to perfect the funnel and my offer. Because even though I’ve made more than $300,000 from my business so far, I know I can still make improvements. So I’ll continue to refine this one offer I have until I’m confident I’ve squeezed everything out of it that I can.

    And then — and only then — will I move on to the next thing.

    As my friend Allison Baggerly said in her keynote at Fincon this year: simple scales.

    And for me?

    Simple allows me to maintain a level of sanity and make sure I don’t burn out.

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    Chloé Daniels

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  • Table Needs Launches Table Needs Marketer to Provide Done-for-You Digital Marketing for Locally-Owned Quick Service Restaurants, Coffee Shops and Food Trucks

    Table Needs Launches Table Needs Marketer to Provide Done-for-You Digital Marketing for Locally-Owned Quick Service Restaurants, Coffee Shops and Food Trucks

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    Press Release
    –

    Nov 9, 2022 08:00 EST


    MOBILE, Ala., November 9, 2022 (Newswire.com)
    –
    Table Needs, Inc. announces today the launch of Table Needs Marketer, a done-for-you digital marketing service that makes it simple and easy for quick service restaurants, coffee shops and food trucks to elevate their digital presence, attract more first and repeat customers, and boost revenue. Built and executed by food industry vets, Table Needs Marketer offers a variety of full-service options that include digital discoverability, organic social media, paid advertising, email marketing, and more.

    “Launching Table Needs Marketer is a big milestone for both Table Needs and our client partners,” says Ben Simmons, co-founder and CEO of Table Needs. “Restaurants know they need great marketing to grow their business and I’m really excited that Table Needs can fill that need in a way that takes the pressure off and makes a real difference for our partners.”  

    Working with Table Needs is easy, flexible and affordable. Restaurants can pick and choose services or go all in with customized, integrated campaigns that cover all the bases. Currently, Table Needs Marketer includes the following services, with plans to expand in the near future:

    • Engaging Organic Social Media keeps restaurants top-of-mind
    • Digital Advertising boosts awareness and promotes special offers
    • Customized Landing Pages offer unique promotions and coupons
    • Digital Discoverability amplifies restaurants on Google, Yelp and more
    • Personalized Email Marketing for announcing special offers and updates
    • Lead Generation with an easy, secure opt-in through your restaurant’s WiFi 

    “Marketing is no longer an option for restaurants, it’s a necessity. But to market effectively requires a lot of time and skills that restaurants running on a skeleton crew simply don’t have,” says Robby Trione, Marketing Director of Table Needs. “Table Needs Marketer provides done-for-you digital marketing so restaurants can focus on doing what they do best while we work on delivering more customers to their door.” 

    Table Needs is a fast-growing provider of restaurant technology and business services for quick service restaurants, coffee shops and food trucks. Their growing suite of products includes point of sale, commission-free online ordering, digital menu management, time clock, payroll, digital marketing and more. Learn more at tableneeds.com/marketer.

    For more information about Table Needs Marketer, contact Robby Trione, Marketing Director: robby@tableneeds.com.

    Source: Table Needs

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  • How B-schools are introducing digital technology courses to keep students’ skills updated

    How B-schools are introducing digital technology courses to keep students’ skills updated

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    B-schools are responding to the pandemic-led acceleration of digitisation of businesses. IIMB has introduced a new core course on digital businesses this year, while electives like gamification, Web 3.0 and Metaverse respond to some of the latest technology trends. IIMA has started courses on digital strategy and transformation and digital marketing. “The traditional way of marketing or strategy or managing HR are all changing. Real-time data about what employees are doing is useful to understand how giving a day off in the middle of the week may improve productivity,” says D’Souza.

    Consulting major BCG India, one of the largest recruiters at the leading B-schools, recently launched ‘BCG X’—a vertical to bring together more than 2,500 digital and AI experts, tech designers and builders globally to service client needs, as the nature of businesses they consult for is also evolving. “We do a lot of work with large start-ups now, which are digital-first companies,” says Sankar Natarajan, Managing Director and Head of Recruiting at consulting firm BCG India, adding that the new vertical has a mix of people with specific functional and domain expertise, but also requires management and consulting skills.

    Also Read: What are India’s top B-schools doing to prepare students for the digital age?

    Meanwhile, agility, an umbrella term for skills required to overcome the VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity) world’s challenges, is a key ingredient for managers leading the businesses of tomorrow, the country’s top B-schools and businesses agree. “Post-Covid, while companies continue to think and implement long-term strategic plans, there is a need to be more agile about certain decisions. For example, clients we work with have to revisit decisions due to external shocks such as supply chain uncertainty, geopolitical developments, changes in commodity prices, etc. So, companies and consultants have to be adaptive and all these elements come to bear a lot more,” says Natarajan. Adds Varun Nagaraj, Dean of S.P. Jain Institute of Management and Research (SPJIMR): “The pandemic exposed to the whole world that somebody falls sick somewhere and, suddenly, the prices of auto rickshaw parts go up. Therefore, an appreciation for people who can operate in that kind of a world has gone up.”

    Institutes are going about preparing students for unfamiliar and shifting situations in different ways. D’Souza says IIMA has introduced courses on innovation, including one on ‘Innovation, Live!’, a hands-on, practical course aimed at developing a student’s ability to come up with out-of-the-box solutions, understand innovation methodologies and learn corporate decision-making processes. “In the last few years, we have been thinking a lot about divergent thinking, where there are different solutions to a problem. This has become central to quite a few courses operating on the campus,” he says. For SPJIMR, one way is to focus on solutions in core courses. “For example, in human resources, how do we introduce a diversity, equity, inclusion solution in Afghanistan or in a company that’s like that?” says Nagaraj. IIM Bangalore (IIMB) is emphasising on digital, data and ESG-related skills to help students catch early trends in external changes that contribute to VUCA. “If you see a change in demand, or you see a new trend towards a new technology, or you see some other consumer or social trend, the focus on data will help students understand these kinds of changes,” says Rishikesha T. Krishnan, Director of IIMB.

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  • Strategies to Optimize Returns in Franchise Digital Marketing

    Strategies to Optimize Returns in Franchise Digital Marketing

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    Return on Investment (ROI). It’s what every brand wants from its franchise digital marketing dollar — money that’s often begrudgingly spent even though most brand leaders know they need to budget for it. Still, doing so isn’t like allocating money for research and development or human resources, where cost can be more easily measured against return. Now more than ever, digital marketing is a nuanced tool that can add tremendous value to a brand name.

    For the same reason, it can leave investors feeling like they aren’t getting their money’s worth. So, how do you measure its value? What criteria do you use, and how focused should you be in determining your franchise’s digital marketing ROI? Well, a lot depends on, well, a lot.

    The right partnership

    Getting a good read on your franchise marketing ROI should always start with establishing a clear and consistent baseline against which it can be measured. It should account for external factors that may impact a campaign’s success, like weather, seasonal trends, economic pressures (think pandemic) and more. Perhaps most importantly, it should consider the skill and experience of the person or the team doing its monitoring and measuring.

    These days, most consumers take their time before purchasing, partly because there are many ways that decisions can be influenced. The digital landscape is increasingly fragmented, and the buyer’s journey doesn’t always start at A and end at Z. A buyer’s digital experience is virtually limitless, which is why it’s essential that your team measures ROI holistically, not just channel — or platform-specifically — and that means it’s essential to partner with marketers who can see the big picture and help you see it, too.

    Related: The Importance of Seeing the Big Picture

    Think about it: we all rely on the advice of experts — accountants, plumbers, lawyers — and you should seek out a digital marketer with the same intention as a doctor or mechanic, as someone who can help you understand a complex scenario and guide you through choices. Good franchise digital marketing integrates many efforts — content, paid advertising, social media, SEO, and more — and experienced franchise digital marketers know that ROI should be measured using a predetermined set of key performance indicators (KPIs), metrics that reflect your objectives. Common franchise development KPIs include cost per lead, click-through rate, organic traffic and more. An experienced franchise digital marketer can help you determine which KPIs are best to focus on, given your brand’s history and goals.

    Emerging vs. established brands

    Identifying what KPIs to focus on as a franchisor will very much depend on whether your brand is an emerging one — new to the industry with a lot to prove — or an established one with a reputation, one that’s either served you well or hasn’t (and here’s where reputation management is critical. An experienced digital marketing agency can help you with that, too!). All franchisors measure success by the number of franchises they sell each year. Still, an emerging brand may have other criteria they’ll use in addition to sales, like whether or not they’ve articulated their story and purpose effectively, whether they’ve reached the best and broadest audience possible, and how clearly they’ve outlined their value against that of the competition. This will mean adopting a long-view marketing strategy that may take more time to measure.

    Related: Can’t Rush a Good Thing: Effective Franchise Digital Marketing Takes Time

    Conversely, an established brand with a good reputation will likely have very different goals that are a subset of the ultimate goal, which is to sell franchises. They may want to reach new personas, like multi-unit owners or veterans, the market for a specific territory or region, or focus on a particular competitive advantage. These goals are more precise and, therefore, may be more easily measured; they might also be more quickly realized because marketing strategies can be highly tailored to meet them. For brands suffering from poor reputation management or a history of dissatisfied customers, marketing efforts will take on a completely different tone and objective, one that looks to reestablish trust and reiterate worth, neither of which can happen overnight.

    The lifetime value of your brand

    As someone who’s been in the franchise marketing sphere for a decade, it’s my experience that whether you’re a franchisor or a franchisee, ultimately, the real return on investment depends on how you view your marketing dollar in the first place: is it an expense meant to deliver results quickly, or an investment, one made for long-term growth? You’d be wise to approach it from the latter perspective.

    All your marketing efforts should add to your brand’s equity or its lifetime value — the place it has in the hearts and minds of consumers and the public, people who include potential franchisees — and that almost always takes time to establish. Most investors want to align with brands they can believe in and trust, in other words, brands that have worth beyond what can be measured by KPIs and ROIs. A brand’s worth is built over time — often years — through creating awareness, articulating culture and values, delivering on promises, and encouraging loyalty; again, this means taking a long-view approach to your marketing strategies and determining ROI.

    Related: How to Vet Franchisors and Predict Your ROI on a Franchise Business

    Taking a long view is especially important in franchising because it’s set up to reward patience financially. Hefty one-time franchise fees paid by new investors and ongoing monthly royalties (typically 5-8% of gross sales and the real bread and butter of a franchise brand) can add up and contribute tremendously to brand value. Every franchise that is sold adds to a brand’s inherent worth, and that growth can only happen if you commit your marketing dollars to work over time. Franchisees, too, should view their local marketing efforts as an investment in their presumably long future, one that’s meant to slowly and steadily grow their presence and value.

    In the end, ROI should always be gauged against the cost of not creating a budget for regular and comprehensive digital marketing. Your brand doesn’t exist in a vacuum and can’t grow unless you do what others want: believe and invest in it.

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    Stephen Galligan

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  • Facebook earnings cut in half, Meta stock sinks toward lowest prices in more than 6 years

    Facebook earnings cut in half, Meta stock sinks toward lowest prices in more than 6 years

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    Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc. on Wednesday became the latest tech titan tattooed by a precipitous drop in digital advertising, reporting less than half the profit it had in the same quarter a year ago and sending its stock plummeting toward the lowest prices in more than six years.

    Meta 
    META,
    -5.59%
     posted third-quarter earnings of $4.39 billion, or $1.64 a share, down from $9.2 billion, or $3.22 a share last year. Total sales, most of which come from ads, were $27.17 billion, down from $29 billion a year ago. Both results missed the average forecast for profit of $1.90 a share and sales of $27.44 billion, according to analysts polled by FactSet.

    Meta executives issued a fourth-quarter revenue forecast of $30 billion to $32.5 billion, while analysts were forecasting $32.3 billion.

    Daily active users, which edged up 3% to 1.98 billion, were in line with analysts’ projections of 1.98 billion for the quarter.

    “While we face near-term challenges on revenue, the fundamentals are there for a return to stronger revenue growth,” Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement announcing the results. “We’re approaching 2023 with a focus on prioritization and efficiency that will help us navigate the current environment and emerge an even stronger company.”

    In prepared comments, Meta’s departing chief financial officer David Wehner said it is “making significant changes across the board to operate more efficiently. We are holding some teams flat in terms of headcount, shrinking others and investing headcount growth only in our highest priorities. As a result, we expect headcount at the end of 2023 will be approximately in-line with third-quarter 2022 levels.”

    Shares in Meta plunged nearly 20% in after-hours trading, which would put it at levels the stock has not seen since 2016 if the decline were to last into Thursday’s regular trading session. Meta’s stock has been among the worst in tech this year, crashing and burning 61% so far, while the broader S&P 500 index 
    SPX,
    -0.74%
    has declined 19% in 2022.

    After closing with a 5.6% decline at $129.82, Meta shares cratered to less than $115 in after-hours trading; shares have not traded at that level in a regular session since the end of 2016, and have not closed that low since July 2016.

    “Meta is on shaky legs when it comes to the current state of its business,” Insider Intelligence analyst Debra Aho Williamson said in a note late Wednesday. “Mark Zuckerberg’s decision to focus his company on the future promise of the metaverse took his attention away from the unfortunate realities of today: Meta is under incredible pressure from weakening worldwide economic conditions, challenges with Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency policy, and competition from other companies, including TikTok, for users and revenue.”

    In a conference call outlining the results, Wehner pointed out softness in advertising among buyers in online commerce, gaming and financial services.

    Meta’s mess of a quarter came a day after Alphabet Inc.’s
    GOOGL,
    -9.14%

    GOOG,
    -9.63%
    Google reported disappointing ad sales — it missed FactSet analyst estimates by $2 billion — and warned of a deepening pullback in online ad spending. Last week, Snap Inc.
    SNAP,
    -0.21%
    posted slackening ad revenue that sent its shares tumbling more than 25%.

    Read more: Google ad sales take a hit and widely miss estimates, Alphabet stock drops 6%

    Meta announced the results two days after a hellacious Monday, when a major shareholder chastised its metaverse strategy and called for a 20% reduction in payroll costs, as well as a Bank of America note that downgraded the stock.

    Read more: Scathing Meta shareholder’s letter calls for layoffs, less spending on metaverse

    While acknowledging that some people object to Meta’s multibillion-dollar investment in the metaverse, Zuckerberg believes the investment will ultimately prove to be vitally important to Meta’s — and tech’s — future, he said in the conference call.

    Meta executives have blamed inflation, a decline in ad sales, the war in Ukraine, supply-chain issues, increased competition from services such as TikTok, and — most significantly — wrenching changes Apple Inc.  
    AAPL,
    -1.96%
    made to its mobile operating system that make it more difficult for apps to track consumers in ads.

    “We continue to see strategic diversification away from Meta by many advertisers, largely due to stubbornly high CPMs relative to other social platforms and persistent challenges in performance measurement,” Josh Brisco, group vice president of acquisition media at search-engine marketing company Tinuiti, told MarketWatch.

    One factor is a 13% decline in traffic to the Facebook web page in September, year-over-year, according to new report from Similarweb
    SMWB,
    -0.47%    .
    “It’s been down all year, which makes you wonder if they’re going in too many directions — social media, the metaverse, Reels — and whether they are no longer the flavor of the month with competition from TikTok,” David Carr, senior insights manager at Similarweb, told MarketWatch.

    “First and foremost, the discussion needs to pivot to how to build an engaged community of users,” Alex Howland, president and founder of Virbela, which builds virtual worlds, told MarketWatch. “And for that, the metaverse must improve or compliment real-world experiences in some way so that people find value and keep coming back.”

    “Brands have to be focused on what is paying the bills now,” Mike Herrick, senior vice president of technology at Airship, an app-experience platform, told MarketWatch. “Metaverse is going to happen, but not during the life of this recession.”

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  • Snap stock plummets more than 25% as online advertising continues to struggle

    Snap stock plummets more than 25% as online advertising continues to struggle

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    A bruising year for Snap Inc.’s shares worsened Thursday, as the stock plummeted more than 20% in after-hours trading as executives launched the company’s first major share-repurchase program amid revenue issues in a poor environment for online advertising.

    Snap
    SNAP,
    -0.64%
    executives revealed that revenue increased less than 6% year-over-year in the quarter — its slowest quarterly grow ever recorded — and said that the holiday season is shaping up similarly, with sales increasing 9% so far in the quarter. The social-media company, which laid off roughly 20% of its staff this summer in response to the issues, also declined to provide a full forecast for the important fourth quarter.

    “Our revenue growth continued to decelerate in Q3 and continues to be impacted by a number of factors we have noted throughout the past year, including platform policy changes, macroeconomic headwinds, and increased competition,” executives said in a letter to shareholders, outlining the results. “We are finding that our advertising partners across many industries are decreasing their marketing budgets, especially in the face of operating environment headwinds, inflation-driven cost pressures, and rising costs of capital.”

    “Forward-looking revenue visibility remains incredibly challenging, and this is compounded by the fact that revenue in Q4 is typically disproportionately generated in the back half of the quarter, which further reduces our visibility,” executives explained about the lack of guidance in a letter to investors.

    The board did approve a $500 million share repurchase, a first for the young company. In a news release, executives said that the move was meant “to opportunistically offset a portion of the dilution related to the issuance of restricted stock units to employees as part of the overall compensation program designed to foster an ownership culture.”

    Snap’s results — the first among the major tech companies who rely heavily on digital advertising — likely portend even more turbulent times ahead for Alphabet Inc.’s 
    GOOGL,
    +0.34%
     
    GOOG,
    +0.24%
    Google, Facebook parent company Meta Platforms Inc. 
    META,
    -1.28%    ,
     Twitter Inc. 
    TWTR,
    +1.18%    ,
     Pinterest Inc. 
    PINS,
    -0.30%
    and others in the grip of inflation, a war in Ukraine, foreign-exchange worries and a widening recession.

    Snap’s desultory news sent shares tumbling in extended trading for Pinterest (-8%), Trade Desk Inc.
    TTD,
    +2.26%
    (-5), Meta (-4%) and Google (-3%).

    Deteriorating macroeconomic conditions have left advertisers with little choice but to delay or cancel buys. At the same time, intensifying competition from the likes of TikTok and others has deepened headwinds.

    “As a smaller player, Snap is more susceptible but no platform is immune,” Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg told MarketWatch. “I expect more of the same results next week” when Google and Meta report, she added.

    Snap reported a third-quarter net loss of $359.5 million, or 22 cents a share, compared with a loss of 5 cents a share a year ago. Analysts on average were expecting a loss of 24 cents a share.

    Snap’s sales increased less than 6% to $1.13 billion, barely falling short of Street estimates of $1.14 billion. Daily active users rose 19% to 363 million. FactSet analysts had modeled 358.2 million.

    Snap shares initially fell more than 20% in after-hours trading. They closed the regular trading session down 0.6% to $10.79. Shares of Snap have nosedived 77% this year, while the S&P 500 index 
    SPX,
    -0.80%
    is down 23%.

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  • These 11 stocks can lead your portfolio’s rebound after the S&P 500 ‘earnings recession’ and a market bottom next year

    These 11 stocks can lead your portfolio’s rebound after the S&P 500 ‘earnings recession’ and a market bottom next year

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    This may surprise you: Wall Street analysts expect earnings for the S&P 500 to increase 8% during 2023, despite all the buzz about a possible recession as the Federal Reserve tightens monetary policy to quell inflation.

    Ken Laudan, a portfolio manager at Kornitzer Capital Management in Mission, Kan., isn’t buying it. He expects an “earnings recession” for the S&P 500
    SPX,
    +2.78%
    — that is, a decline in profits of around 10%. But he also expects that decline to set up a bottom for the stock market.

    Laudan’s predictions for the S&P 500 ‘earnings recession’ and bottom

    Laudan, who manages the $83 million Buffalo Large Cap Fund
    BUFEX,
    -2.86%
    and co-manages the $905 million Buffalo Discovery Fund
    BUFTX,
    -2.82%    ,
    said during an interview: “It is not unusual to see a 20% hit [to earnings] in a modest recession. Margins have peaked.”

    The consensus among analysts polled by FactSet is for weighted aggregate earnings for the S&P 500 to total $238.23 a share in 2023, which would be an 8% increase from the current 2022 EPS estimate of $220.63.

    Laudan said his base case for 2023 is for earnings of about $195 to $200 a share and for that decline in earnings (about 9% to 12% from the current consensus estimate for 2022) to be “coupled with an economic recession of some sort.”

    He expects the Wall Street estimates to come down, and said that “once Street estimates get to $205 or $210, I think stocks will take off.”

    He went further, saying “things get really interesting at 3200 or 3300 on the S&P.” The S&P 500 closed at 3583.07 on Oct. 14, a decline of 24.8% for 2022, excluding dividends.

    Laudan said the Buffalo Large Cap Fund was about 7% in cash, as he was keeping some powder dry for stock purchases at lower prices, adding that he has been “fairly defensive” since October 2021 and was continuing to focus on “steady dividend-paying companies with strong balance sheets.”

    Leaders for the stock market’s recovery

    After the market hits bottom, Laudan expects a recovery for stocks to begin next year, as “valuations will discount and respond more quickly than the earnings will.”

    He expects “long-duration technology growth stocks” to lead the rally, because “they got hit first.” When asked if Nvidia Corp.
    NVDA,
    +6.14%
    and Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
    AMD,
    +3.69%
    were good examples, in light of the broad decline for semiconductor stocks and because both are held by the Buffalo Large Cap Fund, Laudan said: “They led us down and they will bounce first.”

    Laudan said his “largest tech holding” is ASML Holding N.V.
    ASML,
    +3.79%    ,
    which provides equipment and systems used to fabricate computer chips.

    Among the largest tech-oriented companies, the Buffalo Large Cap fund also holds shares of Apple Inc.
    AAPL,
    +3.09%    ,
    Microsoft Corp.
    MSFT,
    +3.88%    ,
    Amazon.com Inc.
    AMZN,
    +6.63%
    and Alphabet Inc.
    GOOG,
    +3.91%

    GOOGL,
    +3.73%    .

    Laudan also said he had been “overweight’ in UnitedHealth Group Inc.
    UNH,
    +1.77%    ,
    Danaher Corp.
    DHR,
    +2.64%
    and Linde PLC
    LIN,
    +2.25%
    recently and had taken advantage of the decline in Adobe Inc.’s
    ADBE,
    +2.32%
    price following the announcement of its $20 billion acquisition of Figma, by scooping up more shares.

    Summarizing the declines

    To illustrate what a brutal year it has been for semiconductor stocks, the iShares Semiconductor ETF
    SOXX,
    +2.12%    ,
    which tracks the PHLX Semiconductor Index
    SOX,
    +2.29%
    of 30 U.S.-listed chip makers and related equipment manufacturers, has dropped 44% this year. Then again, SOXX had risen 38% over the past three years and 81% for five years, underlining the importance of long-term thinking for stock investors, even during this terrible bear market for this particular tech space.

    Here’s a summary of changes in stock prices (again, excluding dividends) and forward price-to-forward-earnings valuations during 2022 through Oct. 14 for every stock mentioned in this article. The stocks are sorted alphabetically:

    Company

    		 Ticker

    		 2022 price change

    		 Forward P/E

    		 Forward P/E as of Dec. 31, 2021
    Apple Inc.

    		 AAPL,
    +3.09%         		-22%

    		 22.2

    		 30.2
    Adobe Inc.

    		 ADBE,
    +2.32%         		-49%

    		 19.4

    		 40.5
    Amazon.com Inc.

    		 AMZN,
    +6.63%         		-36%

    		 62.1

    		 64.9
    Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

    		 AMD,
    +3.69%         		-61%

    		 14.7

    		 43.1
    ASML Holding N.V. ADR

    		 ASML,
    +3.79%         		-52%

    		 22.7

    		 41.2
    Danaher Corp.

    		 DHR,
    +2.64%         		-23%

    		 24.3

    		 32.1
    Alphabet Inc. Class C

    		 GOOG,
    +3.91%         		-33%

    		 17.5

    		 25.3
    Linde PLC

    		 LIN,
    +2.25%         		-21%

    		 22.2

    		 29.6
    Microsoft Corp.

    		 MSFT,
    +3.88%         		-32%

    		 22.5

    		 34.0
    Nvidia Corp.

    		 NVDA,
    +6.14%         		-62%

    		 28.9

    		 58.0
    UnitedHealth Group Inc.

    		 UNH,
    +1.77%         		2%

    		 21.5

    		 23.2
    Source: FactSet

    You can click on the tickers for more about each company. Click here for Tomi Kilgore’s detailed guide to the wealth of information available free on the MarketWatch quote page.

    The forward P/E ratio for the S&P 500 declined to 16.9 as of the close on Oct. 14 from 24.5 at the end of 2021, while the forward P/E for SOXX declined to 13.2 from 27.1.

    Don’t miss: This is how high interest rates might rise, and what could scare the Federal Reserve into a policy pivot

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  • The Secret to Driving Revenue Even When The Markets Are Down

    The Secret to Driving Revenue Even When The Markets Are Down

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    Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

    As conversations around a looming recession increase, startups and scale-ups have seen more and more calls and letters from investors to tighten the ship and focus on profitability. Inflation, rising interest rates and the stock market’s decline have all caused investors to run scared of companies that have yet to prove their ability to move nimbly through uncertain waters. Companies are feeling the pinch of a recession, and their reserves are dwindling — and the imperative is to extend one’s runway until the tide turns again.

    But how does that affect the investments in digital that brick-and-mortar enterprise companies have been making? The companies that will be able to weather the storm can drive revenue, even when the market is down, and digital is key to this. However, investments will also be scrutinized similarly but not to the same extent as in the startup world. That’s why the answer lies in digital efficiency.

    Digital efficiency can be seen as a two-pronged approach:

    1. Refocusing what we’re pursuing with our digital initiatives: We need to place less investment in potentially disruptive innovation and more in the application of technology that will allow our business to be more efficient in its current iteration — operational efficiency, be it in sales, servicing or any other area of the business.
    2. Being more efficient in how we get to those results: Improving how our teams work to generate more business value faster with the same or lesser investment. This is certainly not trivial, and I outline below four fundamental steps toward that.

    Related: How the Changing Labor Market Is Impacting Digital Transformation

    Embrace the product mindset

    The first step toward digital efficiency is transitioning from a project-based mindset to a product-based mindset. With a project mindset, we focus on finishing each project or delivering one specific functionality. A product mindset moves away from completing a single project and toward achieving business results that tangibly show up for our customers and clients daily. Perhaps ironically, in the current context, this is a lesson from startups that most enterprises haven’t learned yet.

    A project ends, but our products and processes should constantly evolve based on customer feedback. There can be no scheduled beginning, middle or end to a product but rather an acknowledgment that we must continuously adapt and evolve as the market and consumer needs change. We must focus on going to market fast, with a minimum set of features, listen to customers through data analytics and evolve quickly with minimum investment, understanding at each step how much closer we are to achieving our business goals.

    Digital efficiency requires we prioritize continuous iteration in product development. Treat your products like living organisms — ones that will suffocate if you don’t release them to the market and allow them to grow as soon as possible. The work does not stop just because the project does. It simply moves into the next phase of its life cycle.

    Related: Does Your Business Need a Digital Transformation?

    Bring your engineering practices into the future

    Assuming we’re already pursuing business goals with a product mindset, digital efficiency implies that we will get there quickly and efficiently — meaning that our engineering practices are not only up-to-date but ahead of the curve. Take stock of your practices, including developer velocity, automation and product quality, and measure how they stand against peak performance metrics.

    With the abundance of data now available, it is easier than ever to benchmark our processes and improve our DevOps. DORA Metrics has conducted in-depth market research to identify four metrics that measure elite performance: deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate and time to restore service. And while I won’t go into the minute details of the importance of each right now (you’d be reading for another ten pages), leaders can and should utilize these metrics to analyze their engineering practices and bring them up to the standards of elite performance in the 2022 marketplace.

    Related: The Role of Company Culture In Digital Transformation

    Lean teams are agile teams

    The final element of digital efficiency is creating lean teams. Digital efficiency requires teams to become more autonomous to avoid communication delays and unnecessary meetings or check-ins. Lean teams focus on operational efficiency, asking, “can we achieve more with the same level of investment?” There is no more coasting from project to project — give your engineers a reason to have skin in the game and truly invest in the success of each product they release.

    Lean teams will be essential as we potentially head toward a recession. With less overhead, we can easily face the upcoming tumult — there is no unnecessary baggage to weigh us down, and we can move through even the stormiest of skies with agility.

    Transparency with outsourcing partners

    Brick-and-mortar companies leverage a lot of outsourcing, and those they are outsourcing with must keep their practices transparent so the companies can see how well their outsourcing partners are doing. Businesses need to know that their partners understand their initiatives as digital products rather than projects. Ensuring their partners fully understand this mindset is essential to raising the bar and setting internal benchmarks.

    It’s one thing to know on paper what a good metric is, but another struggle to feel those metrics are possible. Everyone can be an elite performer, but they must have the right mentality, practices and teams to achieve that standard. This standard is not only something the unicorns of the world can achieve. It is something companies should aim to have in their organizations. Once you find partners that demonstrate they can not only achieve the benchmarks set for them but excel, your team will be supported enough to achieve that elite status.

    Don’t be caught skinny dipping

    It is easy to get comfortable with the status quo when the economy is doing well — the cash is flowing, so how could there be any room for improvement? However, to paraphrase Warren Buffet, when the tide goes down, you can see who’s naked.

    With a looming recession, we are all set to determine our company’s effectiveness. Don’t let yourself be caught swimming in the pool without a bathing suit or even a towel in sight — prepare for the economic downturn today by prioritizing digital efficiency.

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    Leonardo Mattiazzi

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