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How social platforms changed digital marketing

The walled gardens of social media have dominated the digital marketing landscape for nearly a decade. With massive audiences, data-driven advertising and content-rich formats, advertisers have gone from dipping their toes to throwing their budgets into the wells of Silicon Valley.

But in 2022, the so-called “headwinds” of privacy and economic uncertainty — combined with more competition and an evolving user base — have created a new set of challenges for the giants and the marketers that fund them.

Throughout 2022, major platforms have each had both collective and unique challenges. Along with increased pressure from legislation, regulations, investigations and lawsuits against tech giants, smaller startups and advertisers themselves, Apple’s app-tracking changes have cut into tech giants’ bottom lines and weakened targeting and measurement capabilities. Meanwhile, competition from rivals like TikTok and Twitter’s disarray under the ownership of Elon Musk contributed to the industry’s existential dilemma about where to appear and what to avoid.

“I wouldn’t want to be in the seat of a buyer right now,” said Ryan Anthony, CEO and co-founder of Dirt, a marketing neuroscience startup. “I can’t think of a single advertiser that hasn’t had to blow up their [lifetime value] models this year because of privacy.”

The tumultuous year has left marketers, agency executives, analysts and other experts rethinking everything from data practices to content strategies to e-commerce efforts. TikTok’s rise, younger users’ demands, a growing creator economy and brand safety issues have all further complicated the already complex landscape and prompted some companies to re-consider their usual tactics.

At the center of much of this discussion sits the importance of data. A survey of 6,000 marketing leaders conducted this summer by Salesforce found that 75% still rely at least partially on third-party data, but 68% said they plan to move toward first-party data. Meanwhile, 51% said their measures to protect consumer privacy go beyond regulatory requirements and industry standards, down from 61% last year.

“There might be a little bit of a gap year happening as marketers have been retooling around first-party data to be able to create the right context and the right targeting on those platforms,” said Jay Wilder, vice president of product marketing for Salesforce’s marketing cloud. “Some of that is also shifting audiences from one platform to another, and marketers are going to be catching up with that.”

Read more: How social platforms changed digital marketing in 2022

Digital marketing: trends for 2023

What are the major digital marketing trends we are likely to see in 2023? No one can say for sure, but based on careful observation of the recent past and without launching into reckless predictions, industry professionals can offer insight into some of the possible developments.

In this post, we will try to identify the trends that might characterize the immediate future of digital marketing. In most cases, these are phenomena that have already existed for a few years but are now unfolding their full potential: more or less subterranean currents of marketing that seem destined to become even more diversified and inclusive.

Marketing that is not just tuned to customers’ imaginations but also capable of taking on their concrete needs.

According to Marketing Insider Group, the most influential digital marketing trends that will take hold in the coming months testify to a renewed focus on all things related to content visualization, and they will especially affect the customer experience and employee engagement.

We can also add, preliminarily, that in order to succeed in fueling the conversation with customers, acquired or potential, marketers will likely need to draw on topics that target audiences may feel are relevant, will need to avoid simplifications in targeting emerging markets (for example, Asian markets, which have grown tremendously over the past decade and are projected to continue to grow over the next decade), or in interacting with cultural groups (such as the highly courted and very often misunderstood Generation Z).

Before we delve into the digital marketing trends that will mark 2023, let’s make a couple of introductions so as to contextualize the role of automation and give an idea of the complexity of the issue we are going to address.

Automation as a commodity
Technology, which undoubtedly continues to come up with innovative solutions, will increasingly be conceived as an enabler and an instrument: the means through which brands can connect with people. After the two-year period of “forced digitization” that organizations experienced due to the healthcare emergency, in 2023 digital marketing will still be marketing that relies on automation. However, the “human” element will increasingly be more central within a communication ecosystem where technology returns to being a commodity in the service of people (from artificial intelligence applications to data management platforms, just to name the most obvious expressions today of this endless hymn to the magnificent fates of technological development).

Read more: Digital marketing: trends for 2023

B2B Marketing Trends to Watch for 2023

The B2B market is facing younger buying committees, shifts in buyer expectations about the purchase process, overcomplicated tech stacks, and uncertain economic conditions. These factors are changing how marketers can reach, engage, and retain business customers.

Buyers Reject Traditional B2B Experiences
Younger, digital-first buyers want experiences that mirror their B2C journeys. Millennials and Gen Zers are now dominant in B2B buying committees. These age cohorts prioritize vendors that are easy to engage with and expect to manage their journey on their own terms. As a result, marketers will need to provide interactions that meet these buyers’ high expectations.

The buying committee is bigger and more diverse. Buying experiences now have more involvement from multiple stakeholders of varying generations but still must resonate with each person.

Read more: B2B Marketing Trends to Watch for 2023

Forbes – Three Tips To Help Marketers Prepare For The Post-Pandemic

WRITTEN BY: Larry Gurreri
CEO and Founder of Sosemo LLC, an award-winning digital marketing agency that specializes in media buying and search marketing (SEM/SEO).

Here are three tips to help businesses prepare for the post-pandemic period.

Leverage digital marketing to guide the virtual consumer journey.

Consumers are online like never before and that includes business decision-makers, doctors, buyers and administrators. Sales reps are grounded, and in-person meetings are rare. Grocery store buyers, doctors and hospital administrators are overwhelmed.

The way that most businesses have been able to sustain and even succeed in this environment is by providing streamlined, on-demand digital experiences for consumers with limited-time and personal access. Digital experiences aren’t just about presenting information online — though all marketing information should be made available. Digital experiences must also allow consumers to connect with sales reps and place orders remotely.

Digital marketing channels such as search marketing or paid social media should be designed to help consumers navigate virtually through to the point of sale. Digital marketing should not be viewed as a supplement to sales teams, but rather as a virtual guide for the consumer journey.

With so many consumers getting more and more used to working from home, this shift in behavior will most likely continue for the long term. Businesses should use this time to streamline digital experiences and enhance digital marketing campaigns.

Start planning marketing campaigns for the post-pandemic.

With businesses closed and so many Americans home, the future demand for goods and services is certainly brewing. At the end of the pandemic, when stores and restaurants reopen their doors and business networking resumes, there will likely be a resurgence in the economy like never before.

People will be lining up not just to go to restaurants and the movies, but also to go to the dentist, schedule medical procedures and get haircuts. They’ll also want to visit with family, friends, customers and vendors. Businesses will need to prepare for the release of the pent-up demand that has been building.

Having marketing campaigns in place that are ready to intercept consumers at this pivotal time will be essential. Those who wait will miss out on the largest spike in the economic recovery. Search marketing and paid social media are some of the more turnkey marketing channels to activate. However, planning a targeted marketing campaign, even within these channels, often still takes months. Online media inventory needs to be assessed. Budget allocation recommendations need to be determined. Creative assets need to be developed, and campaigns need to be set up.

I believe there will also be a shortage of skilled marketers able to develop these campaigns because, just as demand for restaurant reservations and haircuts will surge, so will the demand for marketing services.

Make sure you have good SEO for your website.

SEO is one of the most cost-effective marketing channels. It includes the process of conditioning a website so that it ranks highly for relevant keyword searches within the organic or nonpaid results on Google.

Content should be developed with target keywords in mind, and websites should be developed in a manner that allows search engines to determine what keywords to rank the site for within the search results.

Even though the coronavirus stimulus package is providing relief across the U.S. economy now, we don’t know what the future holds. In a worst-case scenario, where marketing budgets are cut and media buys are scaled back, having a website that is search engine optimized would be essential. High visibility within the organic search results can remain for some time. Therefore, for long-term security, SEO is pretty much fail-safe.

Conclusion

Though tragic, the coronavirus pandemic has been an eye-opening experience. Businesses can endure, even when cities and states are locked down, through digital experiences fueled by digital marketing. The reliance on digital has never been higher and will likely continue. Many businesses suffered a loss in revenue over the past weeks. However, those that plan to activate marketing campaigns now will hopefully be able to recoup earnings during the economic resurgence, which hopefully will sustain. An investment in SEO now would add additional security.

Original Source…

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SaaS Cloud–It’s What’s For Dinner

The world over, folks ask the same two questions every day–what’s for dinner, and what’s the weather forecast? In the government IT space, every day we’re all asking about the cloud forecast. A recent report from P&S Market Research provides new insights on the global government’s cloud appetites.

Big and Getting Bigger Fast

According to the report, the global market for government cloud services is expected to reach $49.2 billion by 2023, growing at a compounded annual rate of 15.4 percent. It states that SaaS offerings will see the highest revenue growth because government agencies are attracted by the low cost of ownership and the pay-as-you-go model.

What Tastes Good?

Government agencies have been adopting cloud for storage, disaster recovery, identity access management (IAM), risk compliance management, and other applications. The P&S report projects that the largest growth in the next five years will take place in disaster recovery and IAM applications as agencies turn to cloud solutions to prevent transaction and data losses from disasters and vulnerabilities.

FedRAMP Breadcrumbs

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions have figured prominently as agencies have turned to a variety of subscription-based cloud offerings for customer relationship management, financial management, and human resource functions. Judging by the 60 cloud services currently going through FedRAMP security accreditation, the trend toward SaaS solutions is likely to continue–90 percent of these are SaaS solutions. And to date, about 80 percent of the 97 services that have received FedRAMP authorization are also SaaS solutions.

Agency Appetites

Recent agency requests for information give a view into what agencies are looking for in cloud infrastructures. For instance, the FBI is looking to acquire Platform as a Service (PaaS) and SaaS offerings from established cloud service providers with an existing, large-scale commercial offering that can provide resource pooling to support multiple government agencies. The cloud platform must meet intelligence community security requirements for handling secret data, assuring high availability, and providing significantly more cost-efficient computing than traditional approaches. The FBI is also looking for services that provide middleware, such as identity and security management, log analysis, and audit capabilities.

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is also looking to migrate applications to a commercial cloud provider. CBP wants to migrate all its applications out of its National Data Center in Springfield, Virginia to the cloud by the end of October 2022. CBP’s objective is to procure FedRAMP-compliant services to migrate to the cloud service provider’s platform. The agency is looking for Infrastructure-as-a-Service, PaaS, and SaaS cloud providers.

DoD’s JEDI infrastructure cloud deal’s headlining the cloud menu–but look out for SaaS solutions to keep tickling Uncle Sam’s taste buds.

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Why Non-IT Employees Are Now Driving Decisions About SaaS And Cloud Applications

Ryan Duguid, SVP of technology strategy at Nintex, spoke with TechRepublic’s Dan Patterson about the role of non-IT employees in cloud transitions.

Watch the video or read the transcript of their conversation below:

Patterson: The cloud has had an undeniably transformative effect on the enterprise and SaaS, of course, is at the heart of cloud growth. Now, the growth of SaaS might be up to non-IT workers.

Ryan, thank you very much for your time today. I wonder if we could first define how SaaS has grown historically to this point, and then we’ll talk a little bit about why it’s up to non-IT employees to help the growth of the cloud, and cloud-based applications.

 Duguid: Certainly, so at the end of the day, the massive upswing in SaaS is driven for obvious reasons, right? There’s cost savings associated with it, a lack of requirement for as many IT administrators to keep the lights on, but fundamentally, I think it’s about speed of delivery of technology to the business, and that’s always been a problem in the IT sector, and SaaS really makes the promise to solve that problem.

Patterson: So what is it about SaaS that has either reached an apex, or what is it that is now demanding non-IT employees to buy in as well?

Duguid: I think there’s two parts to this, right? The first part is that at the end of the day, SaaS has largely been driven by demand from the business. IT historically has struggled to keep up with the requirements of the business, and so the business is constantly pushing for the latest and greatest technology.

I think the other side of it, is now there’s a proliferation of SaaS vendors out there, when in the early days it was the big boys like the Workdays, and Salesforce and the likes. There’s not a SaaS application for everything, for every business function, for every industry, no matter how large or small, and so as a result there’s really this thirst or appetite for the business to get in and self-serve, even if IT’s not willing to be a part of that journey.

SaaS Adoption Is Outpacing Business’s Ability To Secure It

Two-thirds of ITDMs at large organisations are concerned about keeping up with security requirements for SaaS adoption

As the rate of cloud and SaaS adoption increases in businesses, IT teams are primarily concerned with data privacy, new research contends, with 64% of ITDMs believing that their organisation’s SaaS adoption is outpacing their ability to secure it.

But nearly half agree that their organisation is hesitant to adopt SaaS-based security solutions, according to a survey of 200 ITDMs by cyber security firm iboss for its 2018 Enterprise Cloud Trends Survey Report.

In the early days of SaaS, security was one of the primary concerns limiting adoption because the SaaS delivery model was relatively new, and companies felt uncomfortable storing sensitive data outside their own security measures.

Although the SaaS model has matured and has so far proved to be highly stable and secure when compared to on-premises solutions, it is easy to understand why there are still outstanding concerns around it.

Three-quarters of ITDMs told iboss that their organisation’s data was more secure using on-premises, purpose-built appliances rather than a SaaS solution. The most likely reason for this is because they feel that their data is less secure when using a SaaS solution, because such solutions store their data on shared servers – a reason 66% of respondents agreed with. A quarter also thought that security wasn’t a priority for SaaS solution providers.

“While these concerns aren’t unfounded, they also aren’t completely legitimate,” argued iboss CEO Paul Martini, analysing the findings of the report. “There are an array of cloud types and delivery models that both laymen and tech pros aren’t aware of that address many of the top concerns found in the survey head-on.”

Of course, there are many vendors who are committed to security, and to keeping their clients’ data safe, with incoming GDPR data protection rules meaning that they could be held partially responsible for any breaches.  Part of the solution is being diligent when choosing an SaaS provider, especially if they will be processing personally identifiable information or financial data.

A good vendor will be transparent in their security practices and be able to demonstrate multiple layers of security to protect customer data. This can include physical site security of the data centre facility, as well as application and database security, where defenses are core to the software development process.

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Addressing IT Decision Makers’ Concerns About Software As A Service

For a long time, IT departments have had concerns about Software as a Service; the resistance can be traced to concerns about reliability and security, integration, customization, accessibility and job security. Find out how to best respond to the concerns

Service provider takeaway: SaaS-based products face an uphill battle in most IT departments. Service providers should take IT’s concerns about Software as a Service seriously and be prepared with answers that will smooth the path to SaaS sales.

In a recent story, I outlined how Software as a Service (SaaS) is changing the software sales process, giving more power to the business decision maker. But, of course, IT still has tremendous influence over software sales, and if you want to sell SaaS-based tools to IT departments, you’ll need to know how to best approach them.

As you know, IT departments have historically had concerns about Software as a Service (SaaS) systems, and that resistance has been a fundamental roadblock to SaaS sales. In order to sell SaaS-based systems to your customers, you’ll need to pay attention to their objections and be able to address them with solid advice. And, exposing your customers to a new generation of SaaS solutions specifically aimed at IT professionals could be what convinces them that SaaS is viable for their entire enterprise.

Resistance to SaaS

IT department resistance to SaaS has stemmed from a number of concerns, both valid ones and debatable ones. Among the valid reasons for IT departments to question SaaS is its reliability and security. They also are right to ask how a SaaS-based product will integrate with existing applications and databases or how it can be customized to meet a company’s needs. And they have a legitimate reason to be concerned about where their company’s data will reside and how they can ensure access to that data if their company decides to discontinue their SaaS subscription.

On the debatable side of the equation, many IT professionals simply refuse to consider SaaS products because they believe they cannot match the functionality of traditional, on-premise applications. Others are concerned that SaaS tools will alleviate the complexities of software deployment and day-to-day management to such an extent that they could threaten the IT staff’s job security.

Smart service providers will anticipate all of these potential concerns about SaaS and either proactively address them or be prepared to respond to them.

Addressing concerns about Software as a Service

If you take the proactive route, a good first step is to educate your customers’ IT staff about the potential IT and business benefits and real technical requirements of SaaS solutions. Carefully evaluate the functional capabilities of the SaaS offerings up for consideration to clearly understand how they compare with traditional on-premise applications. While some SaaS offerings may offer fewer opportunities to customize the applications, these shortcomings may be offset by quicker deployment capabilities and greater ease of use for multiple users, which brings greater productivity. Educating your customers on these tradeoffs is important.

To address concerns about job security, you should help the IT department identify how they can redirect the IT resources that will be freed up by Software as a Service from mundane daily tasks toward more strategic and valuable activities.

To address IT’s concerns about reliability and security, it’s important to ascertain that the SaaS vendor you recommend has provisions for SAS (Statement on Auditing Standards) 70 certification. This certification verifies that the SaaS vendor, or its hosting company, has implemented the right technology and business processes to ensure the reliability and security of its hosted applications.

It is also essential that you clearly understand where your customer’s data will be located, the security parameters that have been established to safeguard the data, and the policies that are in place to ensure that they have full accessibility to the data, especially if the SaaS vendor goes out of business or decides to discontinue service. In some cases, you might want to negotiate an escrow arrangement for your customers, in which access to the application code is guaranteed in the event that the vendor folds or discontinues a service.

In addition, it’s important that the SaaS vendor you align with designs its solution to permit users to reconfigure their format, workflow and data migration processes to accommodate their business requirements.

And to ensure interoperability with various legacy applications and data sources, make sure that the SaaS vendor you recommend not only architects its on-demand applications to include open application program interfaces (APIs) and Web services, but also leverages third-party integration tools and integration service providers.

Finally, you should work with your SaaS vendors to provide IT departments with detailed service-level agreements (SLAs) that clearly state their performance objectives, problem resolution policies and escalation procedures, as well as penalties for failure to meet these expectations.

Demonstrating the business case for SaaS

Once these concerns have been addressed, you can move on to building the business case for Software as a Service. You should develop total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) assessment tools that can help the IT department fully understand and appreciate the cost savings and productivity improvements that can be generated from a SaaS-based product. These tools should be designed with the goal of helping your customer better understand the additional hardware, consulting and staff support costs that are associated with deploying traditional, on-premise applications. They should also be able to document and measure SaaS utilization levels.

A new generation of SaaS solutions aimed at helping IT departments better manage their day-to-day operations can serve as an effective proof-point for demonstrating the power of SaaS. These new SaaS solutions include Web-based security, storage, desktop and server management services from companies such as Symantec, EMC, Dell and Cisco Systems. These SaaS solutions are designed to meet the needs of IT departments seeking to automate their management requirements. IT departments that adopt these services will gain a first-hand understanding of the power of SaaS and why it appeals to business users. This first-hand experience will have a significant impact on their role in the overall selection and deployment process and could produce a fundamental shift in the corporate sourcing strategy.

By exposing the IT staff to Software as a Service, addressing their concerns about the delivery model and demonstrating the business benefits, you can serve as a trusted advisor who helps IT departments select, implement and fully leverage SaaS solutions that can enable them to better align their work with their business end users and support the strategic objectives of the organization.

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