But away from the glitz of Glasgow and driven by changing consumer trends, brands too have been acclimatizing to new sustainable practices and they are making these known to consumers. In fact, 30% of Fortune 500 companies have set themselves up to achieve a climate goal by 2030, up from just 6% in 2016. 

Whether its big impact projects like P and G’s pledge for 70% of its sites to send no waste to landfills or even smaller-scale initiatives like IKEA providing all its employees with bikes to cut down on their carbon footprint, it’s likely that your favourite brand has in some way, embraced greener practices.

The cost of ‘Going Green’

However, ‘Going Green’ is not without its challenges. Brands can face numerous challenges such as:

1. Higher manufacturing costs due to committing to pay workers a living wage as well as less focus on goods produced on mass

2. A larger bill for sustainable practices like renewable energy. Although this is cheaper in the long run, it can be costly short term.

3. High costs for green licences like organic certification which are necessary to prove green credentials.

Seeing no other option as to pass these costs onto consumers, green products have an average of 75-85% premium rising as high as 200% for fashion and beauty products:

But how does this affect purchase intentions?

While 52% of consumers in the UK describe themselves as ‘green’ only 33% of us actively buy sustainable products. This gap between intentions and actions is known as the green gap and the underlying cause is premium placed on green products:

Ok… So how much are consumers willing to pay..

Most consumers are willing to pay about 10% more, only 15% of consumers are willing to pay 30%:

Higher prices must come with a purpose. Research shows that consumers will pay more when they know the details of the products being offered. Therefore, brands must start to articulate, in creative ways, the benefits of their green products such as superior product performance, organic ingredients, recycled packaging or social responsibility.

Enter Green Marketing

Green Marketing, also known as environmental marketing or eco-marketing, is the highlighting of environmental or green issues within campaigns when showcasing products to consumers. For instance, brands may curate content that advertises the reduced emissions associated with its new manufacturing processes or its commitment to recycled materials in packaging.

In doing so, it can articulate the unique benefits of its green products to consumers which can serve as justification for higher prices. However, while information is power, advertising campaigns must also seek to win consumers hearts and not just their minds. Therefore, green marketing must also be human, striking a chord with emotions and a higher purpose. Striking this balance can be challenging but is necessary to convince consumers to pay the higher premiums.

60% of consumers want to know what brands are doing to limit their carbon footprint, emissions, water usage and damage to the earth (Forbes)

52% of shoppers are attracted to brands that stand for something bigger than the products they sell (Forbes)

Go green and be seen

Here are a few examples of green marketing campaigns that caught our eye:

Dunkin’ Donuts x Airbnb: ‘The home that runs on Dunkin’

Dunkin’ Donuts invited its customers to live their tagline “Do more with less’.” As part of their campaign, they partnered with Airbnb to create a tiny house that runs on eco-friendly biofuels that utilises 65,000 lbs of used Dunkin’ ground coffee. This tiny house has been travelling across America, promoting sustainable practices and a stylish immersion into all things Dunkin’.

O’Neill’s Ocean Futures Campaign

As part of their green marketing campaign, surf-wear brand O’Neill’s released a video of a consumer engagement experiment they ran in Amsterdam to highlight the recycled plastic emergency. 

A brand ambassador invited unbeknown members of the public to take a selfie before throwing their sunglasses in a nearby trash can. He explained that plastic bottles and sunglasses are made of the same materials, yet you bin plastics but keep sunglasses. The ambassador then guided participants to a 3-D printer where their plastic bottle was used to make a souvenir. 

Check it out for yourself below:

Unleash the power of your green marketing content with Knexus

These campaigns from Dunkin’ and O’Neill’s are powerful strategies to capture the hearts of consumers while educating them about more sustainable practices. However, like many marketing campaigns, they drive engagement and impressions but can often fail at converting customers into sales.

This is because green marketing content, which can be described as validation & social proof, isn’t necessarily seen during the buying journey as it’s locked away on social media or your blog or any other channel for that matter. This means shoppers who are influenced by a brand’s sustainable practices or ethics and values won’t receive the validation they need to make a purchase. However, brands can leverage this content to validate purchase decisions in eCommerce journeys to give shoppers the confidence to purchase. How? With Knexus.

How it works:

1. Content intelligence

Knexus uses content intelligence to identify all content that’s available to your brand & creates a single dynamic view of this content. This can be your brand’s own content living in your CMS, blog, social channels, or influencer & user-generated content. Knexus uses AI to understand the content & automatically tags & indexes it to ensure it’s intelligently delivered to the right shopper.

2. Customer intelligence

Knexus uses machine learning to build intelligence around each shopper & customer through the use of transactional & behavioural data. With a single view of all content & an in-depth understanding of each shopper & customer, Knexus uses these insights to pick the most relevant influencer, UGC or brand content to deliver to the shopper at the key moment of their buying journey.

3. Make your green marketing shoppable

Knexus uses AI to match the influencer, UGC & brand content to the relevant product. At the same time as a shopper is consuming the content, Knexus delivers the personalized product recommendation alongside – fuelling product discovery at the same time as providing social proof & validation to inspire confidence & encourage purchases.

4. Real-time delivery 

Knexus delivers personalized content in real-time through dynamic widgets which update to show the relevant influencer, UGC & brand content based on each shopper’s unique profile. These widgets are added to an existing page(s) which can either take over existing sections on the page which are being underutilized or to create new sections. Widgets are SEO optimized & are fully flexible to suit the look & feel of your page & display the content type of your choice.

Interested in finding out more about Knexus and unleashing the potential of your green marketing content? Book a demo.

Influencer marketing – the latest weapon in a brands arsenal. But what really is an influencer? How do Micro and Macro influencers differ? Influencer content is powerful on it’s own but what are brands missing? Read our blog to find out…

The role of the influencer is yet to be defined…people say it’s someone with 20,000 followers, others, someone who is passionate about a certain lifestyle, or could it just be a knowledgeable individual brands utilise to promote their products? … There is no set definition.

But one thing’s for sure. They’re powerful. Very powerful for brands who want to create an authentic message and start a dyadic, personal relationship with their customers.

Self exposure

Brands can’t self-expose like real influencers can. Consumers are all too aware of a brands motive – sales and conversion. So, when it comes to advertising, consumers perceive a disconnect between what a brand says and what it does. This leaves consumers suspicious – is this actually a good product? Or are they just trying to sell me things?

Enter the influencer… Using influencers, brands can advertise to customers through a pre-established relationship that already exists between them and followers. This relationship is built on trust and goodwill. It’s evolved over time and so it’s authentic and increasingly real. 

Therefore, with a unique identity, influencers have perceived independence from the brands they promote. And so… their recommendations are more trustworthy, reliable and genuine compared to the brand line. And that’s the type of recommendations consumers want brands to promote.

Percent of consumers trust an influencer more than an advertisement

The Micro-Influencer

Trends in influencer marketing are changing. Today, 36% of brands now look towards influencers with smaller followership (less than 10,000) across social media channels to promote their content rather than traditional macro-influencers and popular celebrities.

So why is this the case? Isn’t this counterproductive to brands trying to amplify their message?

Well – The high life of Macro influencers and celebrities, with their millions of followers, private jets and extravagant lifestyle seems increasingly unattainable to the average consumer. Their product promotions on Instagram or videos on YouTube or TikTok can be construed as arrogant to a brands customer- it flaunts a lifestyle that consumers know is unachievable and so they become despondent to their message.

However, ‘micro influencers’ with their smaller followership and more grounded lifestyle, are perceived as ‘more like you and me.’ Their possessions are seen as increasingly affordable to the average person and so their recommendations are more attainable. What’s more, with fewer followers’ micro-influencers can really create that dyadic relationship central to the influencer-follower dynamic. This means their content is more intimate, more engaging, and yes, more impactful.

Micro-Influencers boast up to a 60% increased engagement rate compared to Macro-Influencers.

Ok…so influencers can engage…but can they sell and convert?

When consumers empathise with content from influencers they can often be inspired to purchase. But there are a few things that must happen first:

Integrate influencer content into eCommerce journeys for to validate purchase decisions

It’s often the case that all the great content a brands influencer curates can get lost within millions of hashtags and lost in the social media abys. This means some of your most influential social proof & validation content can be missed by the shoppers who need it most.

Given 85% of shoppers research a product before buying, this runs the risk of them stumbling across your competitors during their research. By integrating this content into ecommerce journeys it automatically provides consumers with the social proof & validation necessary for confident purchases rather than abandoning the journey to search for it themselves elsewhere. 

Deliver personalized influencer content to every shopper

When we talk about integrating influencer content into ecommerce journeys we don’t mean static images which are seen by every single shopper at the same stage of the buying journey. We are talking about dynamic influencer content which updates to reflect every shopper.

Males and females subscribe to different types of influencer categories. Women prefer beauty (56%), entertainers (48%) and fashion (48%). Men more commonly follow gamers (54%), technology influencers (46%) and finally entertainers (44%)

What’s more, is that different types of consumers prefer content across different channels:

Prove the ROI of your influencer content

Understanding what content drives value is vital but it is not always easy never mind understanding what influencer content actually generates sales. In fact, tracking the ROI of influencer campaigns can be a real headache for marketers. 52% say it’s the biggest challenge they face when running campaigns and even when they perform some analysis it’s often engagement and impressions based rather than sales and conversion:

Influencing buying decisions with influencer content

Knexus delivers personalized influencer content in real-time through dynamic widgets which update to show the relevant influencer, content based on each shopper’s unique profile.

How Knexus makes this possible:

1. Automatically surfaces, index’s & tag’s influencer content: Knexus uses content intelligence to identify all content that’s available to your brand. This can be your brand’s own content living in your CMS, blog, social channels, or influencer & user-generated content.  Classifying influencer content to make it structured, indexed and – ultimately – useful is a mammoth manual task. Knexus uses AI to understand the content & automatically tag & index it to ensure it’s intelligently delivered to the right shopper.

2. Unleashes influencer content from social media & integrates it into eCommerce journeys: Knexus uses machine learning to build intelligence around each shopper & customer through the use of transactional & behavioural data. With a single view of all content & an in-depth understanding of each shopper & customer, Knexus uses these insights to pick the most relevant influencer, UGC or brand content to deliver to the shopper at the key moment of their buying journey.

3. Matches influencer content to relevant product recommendations: At the same time as a shopper is consuming an influencer post or video, Knexus automatically displays the related product alongside – making your influencer content shoppable & fostering discovery for a seamless transition to customized products.

4. Understands what influencer content generates sales:Knexus understands what influencer, UGC & brand content actually drives value in terms of sales & conversions. Knexus’ unique content reporting allows brands to understand how each content asset is performing throughout individual customer journeys across the website, CRM campaigns, mobile apps or digital advertising campaigns. Don’t stop at engagement metrics, analyze content based on sales impact – allowing for better-informed content investments.

What’s more, is that the Knexus platform works across multiple channels and content (influencer, UGC & brand content) delivering personalized & shoppable content to the right shopper at the key moment of the buying journey – creating confident purchases. Book a demo.

This has now changed notably with the advent of content optimization. According to Gartner, “content optimization is a process by which a content provider is able to use a variety of techniques to improve search results and ranking.” For instance, an excellent design and user interface can supplement high-quality content to improve the experience of customers – enhancing success thanks to a first positive impression.

As you can imagine, this is easier said than done. Optimizing content is a dynamic job which starts with becoming relevant and attractive to consumers at all times. So the first step for businesses is to build and nurture a two-way relationship with their customers – listening carefully to what they have to say, understanding their needs, and responding with individualized content.

Image Source : cysticfibrosisnewstoday.com

The actual optimization part is then to present that content in the best light possible – e.g. developing engaging aesthetics, minimizing page load time, maximizing uptime, etc. This means that users, not search engines in isolation, should become the priority of brands. Let’s illustrate that point by looking at a key indicator that impacts customer experience as they browse the web.

Grasping the ‘User First’ Logic of Search Engines

As much as possible, Google’s spider and other crawlers indexing results try to see the web through the eyes of internet users. Simply put, their approach is to identify the websites and pages on a given topic that provide the most value to visitors and place those at the top. And they repeat that procedure for millions of queries every day – relying on signals of quality content to guide them through the task.

Image Source : brafton.com

For instance, crawlers consider the recorded bouncing rate, which is the % of people entering and leaving a website immediately, to assess relevance. Their rationale is that a higher rate indicates a lower satisfaction.

The objective for brands is thus to increase the probability of a “long click” with users staying enough time to show a real interest in the page visited. And content personalization solutions like Knexus can help to generate such an interest by optimizing content experience with machine learning and predictive analytics.

Redefining Your Content Strategy for User Experience

Content is and remains king. But when poorly presented, even the best content fail to impress visitors and lead to suboptimal results and low conversion rates. It is thus time for marketers to take a step back and switch to a new approach – blending content and user experience right from the start to boost search engine ranking.

Knexus platform automatically transforms UGC, influencer & brand owned assets into hyper personalized, shoppable content for ecommerce. Move visitors through inspiration to buying! Get a demo to find out how we can help you to make content sell.

How much is it growing? It’s estimated that there will be approximately 2.55 billion social network users worldwide by 2018, up from 1.87 billion in 2014.

Real-Time Marketing Personalization

These marketing opportunities are happening in real time. Because it’s instant, you can gain a commercial advantage over your competitors if your processes are quick enough, see: 3 Reasons to Embrace Real-Time Marketing.

According to analyst Bernard Marr, “Big data combined with machine learning algorithms gives marketers the opportunity to personalize their offers to individual customers in real time. Personalize what products and promotions a particular customer sees, even down to sending personalized coupons and offers to a customer’s phone when he walks into a physical location.”

Technology has improved to the point where marketers can gain an insight into user behaviour and preferences at an individual customer level and in real time. The benefit of this is that companies can make their offers much more relevant.

Everyone Is Their Own Marketing Segment

There is no such thing as a Mr or Ms Average. Amalgamating too many people into segments could mean that you serve content that doesn’t really fit any of them.

In the words of Arc Worldwide CEO Ryan Silberman, “Once we understand the different mindsets of the consumers, we can start to communicate with them in different ways.”

It’s all very well targeting your content to a more individualised level but if it fails to get through to those people, then your efforts are wasted. This is where content optimization comes in. The challenge presented by this is being able to see what content is available and using it appropriately. What might have once been categorized manually can be automated, and on the Nexus platform, for example, your collated content is then searchable.

Can this pay off? Microsoft cites the example of a retailer who connected seasonal marketing and promotional messages with localized weather information and saw some product sales increase by 18%.

Data-Driven Content Marketing

The aforementioned use of “big data” means that you can experiment with different kinds of content to see what delivers a better ROI by running tests. Creating personalized messages based on the behaviour patterns of your users and their interests – gleaned from social media – can guide you towards a better return from your content spending.

“Data generates better consumer insight, which opens the door for bespoke impactful brand messaging,” suggested Julian Baring, Adform’s GM of North America, writing in MartechAdvisor. “Tools like data management platforms are instrumental for media planning and executing ad delivery”.

This process can now be significantly automated to improve your ROI. Tools based on artificial intelligence (AI) are playing a greater role and provide the following benefits:

• AI can put together bespoke content combinations at scale
• Machine-learning tools gather and process vast amounts of data
• The software then works out what content suits each user the best
• It can include rich media such as photos or video

Knexus platform automatically transforms UGC, influencer & brand owned assets into hyper personalized, shoppable content for ecommerce. Move visitors through inspiration to buying! Request a demo to find out more on how we can help you.

It’s been five years since the term content marketing started taking over the Internet. An overwhelming majority of both B2B and B2C companies are now using content marketing in some form – about 70% of the companies that practice content marketing are creating more content today than they were a year ago. Today’s marketing teams are held increasingly responsible for quantifying their efforts and contribution to revenue, making it essential that marketers make the most of their budget and justify their expenditures. (Enterpreneur)

Unfortunately, as there is so much hype around the “right” and “wrong” ways to practice content marketing, some brands will end up wasting their money and time on unnecessary activities. SiriusDecisions suggest that 60-70% of content produced by B2B companies goes unused, while Corporate Visions suggest it is even higher (90%)

B2B marketers spend roughly $5.2 billion annually on content marketing, but $1 billion of this total is reported lost due to “inefficient” spending. As B2B content marketing continues to boom, it becomes even more important for companies to understand exactly how these funds are wasted. Where are marketers going wrong?

Here are 6 ways businesses waste their resources on content marketing:

1. YOU’RE NOT TRACKING YOUR RESULTS

One popular definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. To break the cycle, you should periodically be taking a critical look at your content marketing to understand what’s working and what isn’t.

The best solutions is KPI’s. Key performance indicators are metrics you and your management team have selected as the most critical measurements of your content marketing program’s performance. Which metrics will give you the most insight as to whether or not your content is helping you reach those business goals? It’s helpful to understand your averages. How many tweets your average post receives, or what your average number of email subscribers is per post? CMI suggests that updating your tracking document on a regular basis increases your chances of better content performance. Decide when you want to update your spreadsheet and what actions you need to take on the key metrics.

2. YOU’RE NOT REPURPOSING YOUR CONTENT

Every piece of content you make should be converted into at least one other piece of content. This is the only way to generate the amount of content you need without having to work around the clock.

Blog posts are a great example of this because they’re so flexible. Each post you write can be made into:

• 0-15 tweets
• 2-5 Facebook/Google+/LinkedIn updates (focus on a different aspect of the post in each update)
• A SlideShare
• An infographic… even a simple one
• A short video
• A Pinterest pin
• A section of an ebook, whitepaper or case study

3. YOU AREN’T AUTOMATING AT LEAST PART OF YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA ACTIVITY

With every technological advancement designed to make our lives easier, our dependence on technology for day-to-day tasks grows. Technology helps us do things with greater efficiency, and when it comes to social media, it’s only natural to find a way to automate our social media efforts. This can involve anything from automating your content sharing activity to queuing tweets and recycling evergreen content. Automation is done via tools like >Buffer, CoSchedule and HubSpot, and can reduce time spent on marketing by taking over repetitive, energy-consuming tasks.

4. YOU AREN’T TESTING

Whether it’s the call to action in your emails, or your order buttons, or just different social media update formats, it’s always critical to test.

Did you try…

• Tweaking small design elements can have a major impact on how your audience interacts with the page
• Playing with page elements like “suggested posts” on a specific piece of blog content
• Experiment with the headlines
• A/B or “split” testing
• Mapping content to your sales funnel

5. YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT CONTENT YOUR AUDIENCE WANTS

More often than not, the problem is a disconnect between you, the content creator, and your audience. When a piece of writing (or any other form of creative content, really) fails to resonate, it’s usually because it’s not what the audience was looking for. This is a fundamental part of marketing your business – before you can deliver a marketing message effectively, you need to know who you’re delivering it to and why.

If you don’t understand who your audience is, and their pressing needs, then you can’t really address those needs effectively in a way that the reader would understand. It doesn’t click with them, and they move on. Take the time to research your audience and know who you want to do business with.

Ask yourself:

• What’s my ideal customer look like?
• What are their biggest issues and concerns?
• How can I solve that problem for them
• What do I want them to take away from this?

6. YOUR WORK IS INVISIBLE TO THE SEARCH ENGINES

Google processes more than 3.5 billion searches every day. So, it’s no wonder that so many companies are scrambling to get involved in search engine optimization (SEO). For the majority of marketers, SEO often seems complex, intimidating and bogged down with technical logistics. But it doesn’t have to be. The foundation of every SEO strategy is to create and post high-quality content. To make your website more visible online, make it a point to post content regularly. As revealed by a HubSpot study, the frequency of blog posts significantly affects incoming web traffic.