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eCommerce is an essential part of the market for many retailers today, with ready customers but cutthroat competition. While 58.4% of internet users shop for something online every week, there are hundreds or perhaps even thousands of online stores selling what you sell. You’ve got to be on top of your game to lure shoppers away…
The post Growing your eCommerce Store? Here’s your Tech Stack. appeared first on Benchmark Email.

Last Updated on April 13, 2022 by Rakesh GuptaBig Idea or Enduring Question: How do you automatically create a record using Salesforce Flow? Objectives: After reading this blog, you’ll be able to:  Understand the basic components of Salesforce Flow Learn how to auto-create a record using Salesforce Flow Business Use
The post Automatically Create a Record from a Flow appeared first on Automation Champion.

Big Idea or Enduring Question: How do you standardize the opportunity name to follow business defined naming convention?  Objectives: After reading this blog, you’ll be able to:  Understand when to use before-save flow Use the formula to concatenate fields in the flow Use assignment element to update the records  and
The post Flow Formula to Standardize Opportunity Name appeared first on Automation Champion.

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A few months ago, while I was driving to the airport, I saw a billboard for Kim Kardashian’s company, SKIMS. A week later, I saw ads on Instagram, then a SKIMS segment on “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.” 
I had one of those moments where I thought “SKIMS is showing up everywhere!” That’s because the company has an integrated media planning strategy.
A few months after these events, when I was shopping for shapewear for my wedding, guess what brand I thought of? (Spoiler alert: it was SKIMS.) That’s why, as a marketer, having an integrated media plan is important for your marketing strategy — below, we’ll dive into what it is, and how to adopt it in your marketing strategy. 
Already know what you need? Jump there with this table of contents:

What is integrated media?
Integrated Media Planner
Integrated Media Planning
Integrated Media Examples

Using integrated media essentially ensures that all of a businesses’ different audience segments can encounter its ads, and likely encounter them on various channels. The decision about which specific channels to use is the task of an integrated media planner. 

 
Integrated Media Planner
An integrated media planner makes all media planning decisions based on buyer personas, competitor analysis, reviews, and social listening. From this, the planner learns the best course of action that will help their marketing meet business goals. 
They choose the most effective channels, types of media (paid, owned, earned, etc.), and consider when and how frequently content will show up depending on the platform. 
For example, perhaps you’ll post Instagram stories around 5-7 p.m. when your audience is home from work and you’ll plan a radio spot for the morning, around 6-9 a.m., to reach your audience that is commuting.
Either way, deciding when and how often a piece of content will appear is an important aspect of an integrated media planner’s job, and ‌this happens during integrated media planning.

 
Integrated Media Planning
Integrated media planning is the process you’ll go through when you’re considering various media platforms you want to use in a marketing campaign. 
An integrated media plan answers questions like “Who is the target audience?” and “What medium will reach this audience?” For example, if you’re targeting millennials, you might consider Instagram and Twitter for your media plan. However, if you’re targeting Gen X, maybe you’re thinking that a combination of radio and Facebook might work best.
Integrated marketing plans also ensure that the ads you create across your different channels are consistent and cohesive for what you’re offering. As in, when you advertise something on one channel, you advertise it the same way on another channel so audiences can see a cohesive campaign regardless of how they come across your ad. 
Ultimately, an integrated media plan will use a multichannel approach with a mix of traditional and digital methods, such as radio, TV, billboards, social media, streaming commercials, search engine marketing, email marketing, events, or partnerships.
Below, we’ve outlined five steps to creating an integrated media plan:
1. Figure out your goals.
Before you can start planning your integrated media approach, you have to know your goals.
Just like any marketing campaign, you should have SMART goals written down so you can develop a strategy.
For example, perhaps you want to reach a certain amount of people in a certain amount of time. Or maybe you’re just looking to increase brand awareness among a new market.
No matter what it is, write down your goals and objectives so you can track your performance.
2. Decide your target market.
If your company has a buyer persona, or perhaps even a few, then this might be easy for you. Or maybe you’re deciding between which persona you’re going to target for a certain campaign. Either way, your personas should guide your media plan.
However, if you don’t have a target buyer persona, then now is the time to create one. Your buyer persona will include demographic information such as income, education, and gender. But it should also include pain points and goals.
Understanding your target market means knowing what’s important to your audience, what their life is like, and what problems they have.
Ultimately, you should know who you want to purchase your product so you can deliver personalized content.
Also, your buyer persona might tell you what type of media your audience likes to consume and the type of content they like.
To make this process easier, think about your customer journey. What are the touchpoints? Figuring out this information should help you develop your integrated media plan.
3. Choose various media platforms to disseminate your campaign.
This is the bread and butter of integrated media planning as its when you’ll decide where to distribute your marketing campaign.
Do you want to include social media, TV, radio, organic search, and blogging in your strategy?
Ultimately, you should make this decision based on research on your target market. You should have answered questions such as “Where does my audience want to consume content?” and “What type of content do they want to consume?”
For example, your audience might prefer short-form videos to long-form videos. Or perhaps they like reading a blog more than seeing a picture on Instagram. Either way, you should strike a balance between traditional and digital methods.
Ultimately, your integrated media plan should be audience-centric.
4. Produce the creative.
Once you know your goals, your target market, and most importantly, what type of content you’re going to create, it’s time to produce the creative for your campaign.
Write the copy, design the graphics, and take the pictures. Your creative elements should follow your brand guidelines and tell a story about who you are as a company.
To keep your workload easy, you might consider creating adaptable marketing assets that can be used for several channels.
5. Execute and analyze.
Now that it’s all said and done, it’s time to analyze your approach. Answer questions like, “Which channels worked best?” and “Did I strike the right balance between various media platforms?”
Once you’re armed with this information, you can incorporate it into your future campaigns.
However, don’t forget to let your strategy play out. Don’t switch it up so quickly that you don’t know how it will perform over time. Some campaigns include both short-term and long-term strategies and goals, so it’s important to see the impact before changing it out.

 
Integrated Media Plan Examples
1. Baboon to the Moon
Baboon to the Moon sells bags for people to use on their adventures, from small weekend getaways to intense backpacking trips. It used integrated marketing to advertise one of its limited-run lines that pays homage to CDMX (Mexico City). 

It created marketing assets for three different marketing channels (email, Instagram, and website, respectively) that are cohesive in images, copywriting, and editing style. Regardless of the channel audiences are reached on, every single ad tells a story about the same thing — the CDMX collection. 
2. NPR Music Tiny Desk 
NPR runs a segment on NPR Music called Tiny Desk, where artists perform a live, acoustic set. It recently launched a Tiny Desk contest for the ‌public, where undiscovered artists can submit an original song for a chance to win a Tiny Desk concert. To advertise the contest, it created an integrated media campaign on Instagram Story and Twitter (pictured below),

 
And a humorous YouTube video ad. 
 

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3. GrubHub and Seamless 
Delivery service GrubHub absorbed delivery service Seamless in 2021 and launched an integrated marketing campaign to make users aware of the acquisition. Seamless created an Instagram post, shown below, that lets customers know with a unique and catchy slogan that “Seamless is GrubHub.” 

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The companies also advertised the new acquisition in New York City subways, creating an integrated marketing campaign using traditional forms of advertisements (physical ads) and digital ads (Instagram). 

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Over to You
The best marketing campaigns almost always include an integrated media plan. You should have a balance between digital and traditional marketing tactics. After all, the omnichannel experience is what customers expect and want. Marketing is all about delivering the right message, to the right people, at the right time, and that’s what integrated media planning is all about.

What was the first social network you ever joined?
While many people will recall it being Facebook or Twitter, others might remember some of the earlier, less popular social networks. You know, like Friendster, Open Diary, and Orkut?
A lot of these original social networks go forgotten, but that doesn’t make their stories any less important. After all, these networks laid the groundwork for the social media giants we use today.

In this blog post, we’ll dive into the stories of some of the earliest social networks — and why they didn’t stick around.
From Six Degrees to Snapchat: A Brief History of Social Media
One of the first versions of a modern social network is Classmates.com, which launched in 1995 and allowed users to share messages and photos with their childhood and college classmates.
In 1997, SixDegrees was founded based on the theory that people are only separated by six levels of friends and family members. It was the first social platform that allowed users to create and curate profiles and laid the groundwork for online social networking.
Blogging (once called weblogs) came to the scene in 1998 with Open Diary, which included a social networking feature where users in groups could read each other’s writing. Open Diary laid the groundwork for later blogging sites like Xanga and LiveJournal in 1999.
In 2002, Friendster was launched to help circles of friends find one another and communicate online. It paved the way for other sites like LinkedIn (2002), Myspace (2003), and Facebook (2004) to launch networks with similar features, such as Myspace’s Top Eight friends, Facebook friend groups, and LinkedIn connections.
In the late 2000s and early 2010s came Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Google+, which experimented with short-form and visual content, as well as aggregating and saving content for later consumption. Some of the latest social networks on the scene include Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok — platforms based on sharing authentic, ephemeral, visual content that requires as few words as possible.
Of course, this is a very brief history — and several social networks were launched and forgotten during this timeline. Needless to say, those networks still played a role in the development of the bigger social landscape we know and use today. Let’s discuss some of the networks we’ve forgotten and why they didn’t stick around.
8 Dead Social Networks You Might Not Remember
1. Vine
Launched in 2013, Vine was a popular video app where users created six-second looped videos. Users could make their content, follow friends and popular creators, and browse trending videos. It dominated social media networks from 2013-to 2016, and many of the popular videos remain relevant in pop culture and memes to this day.

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When Did It Fall?
Vine was discontinued in October of 2016.
Why Did It Fail?
Vine ultimately failed because it could not keep up with other growing networks of its day that championed video, like Instagram. Many Vine executives and co-founders were also against monetization and did not want to take sponsors from brands, so creators and marketers moved to platforms like YouTube where they could monetize their content.
2. MySpace
Myspace is a social networking site where users could create a profile page to share their interests, photos, and connect with friends. It also appreciated music, so users could set a song that would play every time a friend visited their profile.
In its prime, Myspace was the most popular social networking site, even surpassing Google as the most visited website in the United States.

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When Did It Fall?
In 2011, Myspace’s CEO Mike Jones announced that the platform would no longer try to rival Facebook. It would instead pivot to a social entertainment style site and, while it still exists today, does not remain a fraction as popular as it did in its prime.
Why Did It Fail?
The New York Times cites Myspace’s decline as result of consumers and changing tastes, coupled with the rise and popularity of Facebook.
Myspace also had a change of leadership when bought by News Corporation, and Tom Standage, Deputy Editor of The Economist, said “Its new owner treated it as a media outlet rather than a technology platform and seemed more interested in maximizing advertising revenue than fixing or improving the sites underlying technology.” The site soon became inundated with advertisements, affecting usability.
The site ultimately fell because of a failure to focus on site users and their experience, but instead on monetization and advertisers, which sent consumers elsewhere.
3. Friendster
Friendster, launched in 2002, was the first social network to allow users to create profiles and share content with their contacts. It was also used to learn about local events, pop culture news, and to connect with brands. At its peak, Friendster had roughly 115 million users around the world. The website currently ranks 2,949,342 in global internet traffic and engagement over the past 90 days, according to Alexa.

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When Did It Fall?
Friendster rebranded as a social gaming website in 2011. It closed for good in 2015 after Mark Zuckerberg bought Friendster’s suite of social networking patents for $40 million.
Why Did It Fail?
Jonathan Abrams, Friendster’s founder, says “The problem was that Friendster was having a lot of technology problems,” and people could barely log into the website for two years. He adds, “By the time Facebook and MySpace were doing those things, Friendster had lost a lot of market share in the U.S. for stability issues.”
Computer scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology conducted an “autopsy” on Friendster to uncover its demise, and they cited a disastrous site redesign in 2009 that caused traffic and users to plummet. They also determined that it took much more effort to navigate the platform than the benefits that came from using it.
Friendster also wasn’t widely adopted by users’ friends and families, so their time was better spent on other networks where more of their real-world network was online — namely, on Facebook and Myspace.
4. Google+
Google+, launched in 2011, was a social network owned and operated by Google. It was essentially a way for all Google users to have a central location for all of the actions they took across all of the different Google platforms and services.

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When Did It Fall?
The Google+ developer API was discontinued in March of 2019, and the site was shut down for business and personal use in April 2019.
Why Did It Fail?
Low user engagement was a significant factor in Google+’s demise, and the company reported having difficulty “Creating and maintaining a successful Google+ that meets customer expectations,” and said that 90% of user sessions lasted less than five seconds.
In addition, an API update in 2018 potentially exposed the personal information of 52.5 million users to outside developers, and this occurred for six days before being discovered. The Wall Street Journal reported that “The move effectively puts the final nail in the coffin of a product that was launched in 2011 to challenge Facebook Inc. and is widely seen as one of Google’s biggest failures.”
5. Open Diary
Open Diary, founded in 1997, was an online blogging and journaling website that laid the groundwork for features we see on modern blogs, like comments. Writers could add friends and change privacy settings so only specific people would see what they were writing, and it eventually expanded to different topic areas so users could write about a variety of themes.

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When Did It Fall?
Open Diary closed in 2014.
Why Did It Fail?
After two major security breaches, falling subscription revenue led the Open Diary team to offer more expensive paid subscription options to recoup its losses. This move instead drove users away towards free alternative blogging sites, like Xanga and LiveJournal.
6. Ping
When he launched Ping in 2010, Steve Jobs referred to it as “Facebook and Twitter meets iTunes.” Ping was a social networking feature within iTunes where users could add friends, follow artists, and look up local concerts. Friends could also preview songs their friends were downloading and listening to.

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When Did It Fall?
Ping was terminated in 2012.
Why Did It Fail?
Ping was originally meant to feature an integration with Facebook that would allow users to easily connect with friends and artists they already followed on Facebook, but the partnership fell through. Users were then left with a blank slate on which to build another social network of people to follow.
Additionally, Ping only allowed users to listen to 90-second previews of songs on its network — any longer and they had to buy the song. Since Ping was part of iTunes, it became redundant instead of an enhanced experience. Apple replaced Ping with a better integration with Facebook and Twitter that allowed for easy music sharing.
Many of the features meant to make Ping stand out from the crowd can now be seen on Spotify, where users can connect their Facebook and follow friends, see what they’re listening to, and learn more about their favorite artists.
7. Orkut
After a failed attempt to purchase Friendster, Google launched Orkut in 2004 as a place for people to add friends and share content. Users could view profiles, rate friends, add them to lists, and like their friends posts. At its peak, Orkut had 300 million users around the world.

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When Did It Fall:
Google shut Orkut down in 2014.
Why It Failed:
Orkut took hold in a few countries, primarily India and Brazil, but never achieved widespread international popularity. At the time, YouTube and Google+ were outpacing Orkut’s growth, so Google refocused on these platforms in an attempt to compete against Facebook and social media. As such, the Orkut team cited the growth of Google’s other social media assets as a reason to shutter the site.
8. Eons
Eons, launched in 2006, was touted as “Myspace for boomers,” and set age restrictions that prevented anyone under the age of 50 from joining, which was later lowered to 40 in 2008. The site never experienced a huge boom in popularity around its launch and, at its peak, had roughly 800,000 users.

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When Did It Fall:
Eons.com shut down in 2012.
Why It Failed:
The age targeting was restrictive for a reason, but this had detrimental effects as the user base was rather limited. It also prevented the site from being widely popularized and, as social media was just coming onto the horizon and wasn’t yet widely adopted, the platform was unable to build a successful network out of such a small user group.
Lessons for Marketers From Failed Social Media Networks
There are several lessons for modern marketers in the stories of these fallen social networks. We’re not saying that you’re always at risk of killing your brand, but keeping these tips in mind may help you maintain and grow your followers and engage with them authentically.
1. Understand your audience.
The most significant factor of success when creating a social media network is creating for the audience that you want to have. For example, you wouldn’t create a text-based blogging site if you’re hoping to attract multimedia creators.
As with all marketing practices, make sure that you have a solid understanding of your audience, who they are, and what they want, so you can create a platform that will meet their needs and keep them on the platform.
2. Meet your audience where they already are.
Many social networks fail because brands try to reinvent something that already works well, or requires extra work for users to be able to participate. For example, Ping wasn’t able to integrate with Facebook, so users had to recreate social networks that likely already existed for them on an entirely new platform.
Instead, meet your audiences where they already are and supplement their experience. Part of Facebook’s success and longevity is due to its creation of an infrastructure where users don’t need to leave Facebook to get things done. It’s grown beyond just a social network into a destination for news, commerce, and content consumption.
Marketers should experiment with new technologies and offerings to keep followers interacting with their brand more, such as creating helpful chatbots, publishing on new forms of media, and trying new strategies like virtual reality or experiential marketing to keep audiences engaged and on a website or social platform for as long as possible.
3. Borrow from your competitors.
Borrow a page from the Facebook playbook and be aware of what your competitors are doing. For example, Vine was forced to shut down because other networks were offering similar features, but did it better and provided more opportunities, like creators who could monetize their content. A recent example
4. Be authentic and not overly self-promotional.
A common thread between Ping and Open Diary’s downfall was the brand’s attempt to monetize. Users didn’t like Ping advertising iTunes music that they could only listen to for 90 seconds, and Open Diary users didn’t want to pay for something that was free on other sites.
Users want an authentic experience on social media to interact with friends, family, and their networks, not logging on to a site and being bombarded with advertisements. The next time a new social network comes onto the scene, we’ll be here to tell you the story — and predict if it will be here to stay.