Do You Want More First Party Data From Gen Z Consumers?

Posted on December 13, 2022 by Paulo Jesus

Many first-party data marketing discussions and strategies have overlooked a key fact – the importance of value exchange. Publishers and brands want to connect, market, and sell to their audiences. Changing consumer behavior and regulations mean old practices of invisibly using cookies are no longer good enough. Millennials, Gen Z, and other digital natives will only consent to share their data with brands that offer them value.

Disclosure And Asking Permission Isn’t Enough To Build An Audience

Earning permission to market to customers sounds simple in theory. Put a pop-up on your website, collect contact information, and start marketing! For a small subset of customers – those who are actively comparison shopping, for instance – this simple approach to gaining the first party may be sufficient. For the vast majority of your audience, value exchange is critical.

Every time brands and publishers want to gather consent to market; it’s crucial to ask the value exchange question. Are users receiving sufficient value from our brand to welcome us to their digital world? The bar may be even higher for communication channels perceived as more personal, like email and SMS. Earning a place (and keeping it!) in those inboxes is not something to be taken for granted, as filtering and permissions technology keeps improving.

There are significant consequences for ignoring the value exchange question. Conversion rates are likely to deteriorate at first. That means digital advertising budgets to attract traffic will deliver fewer results. Ultimately, websites will struggle with having fewer and fewer engaged visitors. Hitting growth targets will get far more difficult. Worst of all, building deeper relationships with your audience, including learning their preferences, becomes increasingly demanding.

The starting point to avoid these problems starts with understanding your market’s needs, wants, and desires. Let’s take a closer look at the Gen Z demographic and what they want.

What Does Gen Z Want?

Generation Z is defined as those born between 1996 and 2010. The Generation is 68 million strong in the United States, slightly larger than Gen X (65 million) and smaller than Millenials (72 million). Gen Z is already becoming significant economically, with $360 billion in disposable income, according to Forbes. Today, Gen Z has less purchasing power and wealth than older generations. Millennials have an estimated disposable income of $1.4 trillion, which is more than triple the disposable income of Gen Z ($360 billion). That said, Gen Z disposable income will only increase over time. Therefore, publishers that build and retain a Gen Z audience now will have a long-term advantage.

That leaves the question: what does Gen Z want from brands and publishers? Some ways to answer this question include looking at surveys and drawing insights from other customer cohorts.

Industry surveys of American Gen Z behavior have found that:

Gen Z is highly demographically diverse

In comparison to other generations, Gen Z is highly diverse, according to the Pew Research Center. For example, 25% of Gen Z is Hispanic compared to 17% of Millennials or 12% of Gen X. Also, Asian Americans comprise a growing portion – 6% – of the group. Marketing efforts need to reflect these expectations.

Higher Online Shopping But Fewer Impulse Purchases

Growing up in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the pandemic, and high inflation, Gen Z has seen a lot of economic turbulence in a short time. A Creatopy survey found that 32% of Gen Z buy when there is a sale, and 48% buy when they need something.

Gen Z cares strongly about social responsibility issues

Does your brand fight racial and sexual discrimination? A 2022 survey found that 66% of Gen Z agree or strongly prefer brands that take social responsibility seriously. For more tips, and warnings, on sustainability and social responsibility, check out our blog post on The Top 5 Gen z Shopping Trends.

Gen Z Are Heavy Social Media Users

Gen Z social media usage typically exceeds three hours a day. Regarding purchase decisions, TikTok videos, Instagram, and Facebook are vital.

Meeting these expectations is crucial for your brand to have an opportunity to compete today. Immediate gratification isn’t the whole story, however. Eventually, Gen Z will advance in their careers, buy homes and make other life changes.

Putting Value Exchange For Gen Z At The Heart of Your Digital Strategy

For your digital strategy to thrive, each person who visits your online presence needs to see value in joining your community. Depending on your budget and strengths, there are different ways to offer compelling value. Some of the most popular ways to provide digital value to Gen Z include the following:

Classic Direct Marketing Incentives

There’s a good reason why the vast majority of ecommerce brands use discount codes

liberally. They work! Whether structured as a 10% off, buy one get one (“BOGO”), or some other structure, these incentives work well in e-commerce. The challenge is that so many brands use discounts that it can be tough to stand out in a sea of similar-sounding offers.

Content

Offering interesting content remains a proven way to attract attention. A content strategy for Gen Z will need to include highly visual media like Instagram posts and TikTok videos. Regularly posting content will keep your brand top of mind when the audience is ready to buy.

Community

allowing your audience to connect with you and their peers is a powerful form of value exchange. Unlike marketing incentives and sales, building a thriving online community takes more effort. That means there is a greater opportunity to stand out and earn Gen Z’s attention.

Expressing Values and Identity

Social responsibility is a top concern for many in Gen Z. If your brand has active partnerships with non-profits or charitable organizations, emphasize this fact. If you donate a portion of purchases to good causes, feature that decision in marketing. Giving buyers the ability to express their values with purchases and community participation is a powerful way to set your brand apart.

How To Get More Engagement And Leads With Community Value

You probably have an active content and marketing program to connect with the Gen Z audience. The next step is transforming casual, anonymous website visitors into engaged audiences. Live digital community experiences using Arena Live Chat are a powerful way to do just that by holding online conferences, live shopping events, and more. Learn more about Arena Live Chat.

Digital Engagement in a Transforming Social Media Landscape

Posted on December 8, 2022 by Arena

The Genesis of Social Media Platforms

The early 2000s saw the inception of social media, primarily centered on creating genuine connections between individuals familiar with each other. These platforms emphasized networking rather than a media-driven experience. Checking in at favorite spots like a local café was more common than sharing a personal video.

However, as the 2010s unfolded, platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and even LinkedIn evolved to prioritize content sharing over just networking.

The Paradigm Shift to Content-centric Platforms

Over the last decade, content distribution has surpassed networking as the chief purpose of social media platforms. Increased smartphone accessibility and the race to enhance platform engagement have been instrumental in this transformation. With 85% of American adults using smartphones by 2021, the implications for social media consumption were profound. The continuous content feeds offered by giants like YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook are prime examples of platforms adapting to these changes, even as they face criticism for potential addictive qualities.

The Downward Spiral of Facebook

Facebook’s decline is a multifaceted issue. Firstly, advertiser’s discontent led to notable revenue loss. 2020 saw significant brands boycotting Facebook due to concerns surrounding hate speech. The platform’s subsequent advertising policy changes in 2022 further alienated advertisers.

Additionally, business viability concerns have arisen. Despite generating immense profit, internal decisions like the massive investment in ventures like virtual reality and the metaverse have raised eyebrows. This, coupled with the company’s layoff announcements in 2022, could potentially harm its future recruitment capabilities.

Furthermore, recurrent controversies have tainted Facebook’s reputation. Scandals like the Cambridge Analytica debacle and the revelations brought forward by whistleblower Frances Haugen have deeply impacted the company’s trustworthiness and credibility.

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Twitter’s Ongoing Struggles

Unlike Facebook, Twitter’s challenges are deeply rooted. Issues like a wavering profitability record and the recent upheaval caused by Elon Musk’s takeover have placed the platform under scrutiny. Management decisions, like the hasty layoffs of over 3700 employees (nearly 50% of its workforce) according to TechCrunch, have further affected its stability. Even major companies like Apple are distancing themselves from Twitter due to the platform’s inability to effectively moderate content and combat misinformation.

The platform’s lax policies against harassment and doxing have been another area of contention. In such a volatile environment, it becomes increasingly challenging for brands to foster genuine connections.

Exploring Alternative Digital Communities

While Facebook and Twitter grapple with their respective challenges, users are flocking to platforms like YouTube and TikTok. Diversification seems to be a plausible strategy. However, depending solely on another social media giant might be short-sighted. The need of the hour is to build and nurture a digital audience on platforms that you can control.

One effective way to do this is by leveraging SEO, advertising, and other strategies to drive traffic to your own digital space. Upon their arrival, it’s imperative to provide a modern, engaging digital experience. Without it, your audience will inevitably revert to their preferred social media platforms.

The Essential Components of a Robust Community Website

Two pivotal components are vital to curate an engaging digital experience: content and community.

Engaging content is fundamental. Regularly updating your digital space with informative or entertaining content can encourage your audience to return, fostering a sense of trust.

However, content alone isn’t sufficient. A thriving community experience is equally crucial. Instead of replicating the exact model of giants like Facebook or Twitter, focusing on creating micro-communities can be more effective. And that’s where Arena Live Chat can be transformative. By integrating Arena’s live blogs, you can offer engaging digital events and cultivate a sense of community. Dive deeper into how Arena Live Chat can reshape your digital engagement strategy.

Journalism Competition and Preservation Act: 5 Things To Do

Posted on December 8, 2022 by Paulo Jesus

Remember when Facebook kicked Australian publishers off the platform in 2021? That could happen to news publishers in the US if the proposed legislation becomes law. Legal experts are still debating the impact of the bill. Some say it may help publishers, while others see it as a threat.

Whether the legislation helps or hurts your business, we can say one thing for certain. Building a direct relationship with your audience with first-party data remains a critically important hedge against uncertainty. We’ll unpack the key developments regarding The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act and then share five strategies you can use to grow no matter what happens with this legislation.

The proposed legislation – the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act of 2022 (JCPA) – is currently being considered by the U.S. Congress. The legislation is similar in spirit and objectives to the Australian legislation that prompted Facebook’s displeasure in 2021 and is currently in the news after being attached to a “must pass” defense funding bill on Dec 5th. Adding the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act to the defense bill would make the bill challenging to a Presidential veto.

One organization suggesting the JCPA could be a boon is the News Media Alliance, an industry group that includes over 1000 news publishers. In a recent blog post, the Alliance stated that “the Australian law resulted in countless jobs for local journalists and $140 million to news outlets, which translates to billions in the U.S.” That sounds good. But other sources, like The Hill, argue the bill is dangerous to journalism and a gift to extremist media groups who could exploit loopholes to force the promotion of misinformation and conspiracy theories.

The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act of 2022: The Key Points

In spirit, the JCPA is similar to Australia’s proposed legislation in 2021. It seeks to redefine the relationship between news publishers and online platforms. Depending on your interests, the bill is a boon or curse.

The key provisions of the bill include the following:

1,500 Employee Limit To Benefit Creates Winners and Losers

The bill focuses on benefiting “digital journalism providers” with less than 1500 full-time employees. Larger media brands like ABC News (8000+ employees) or FOX News (2800+ employees) are unlikely to be affected.

However, many smaller news organizations like the Miami Herald (700+ employees), Sports Illustrated (600+ employees), and WIRED (500+ employees) will be directly targeted by this new legislation.

Requires Large Digital Platforms To Negotiate With Digital Journalism Platforms

On the other side of the equation, the bill requires “covered platforms” to negotiate with news publishers. This requirement applies to platforms operating at scale with 50 million monthly active US users, 1 billion global platforms, or annual revenue (or market capitalization) of $550 million.

In brief, these rules apply to companies like Google, Meta Platforms (i.e., Facebook and Instagram), Reddit, Twitter, Yahoo, and many others. This bill would impose potentially significant costs on these companies, even as many are already struggling to maintain advertising revenue.

Publisher Deals May Be Mandatory

The bill goes beyond requiring publishers and Big Tech to come to the negotiating table. According to Senator Amy Klobuchar, Chairwoman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights, “[the bill empowers] news publishers to demand final-offer arbitration if their joint negotiation with a covered platform fails to result in an agreement after six months.”

Journalism Competition and Preservation Act Expiration

As a safeguard, the bill is set to expire within six years. If it becomes law and news publishers start to count on this revenue, there is likely significant pressure to renew the bill.

Don’t Wait For The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act Get Your First Party Audience Strategy Moving Now

While potentially game changing, it’s too early to tell for sure if the bill will help or hurt individual publishers. Even if the bill becomes law tomorrow, negotiations (or arbitration) is likely to take months. That gives you time to develop and execute your first party audience growth strategy now.

First party data comes from a direct connection with your audience. Instead of anonymous website browsers – or borrowing audiences from social media platforms – rich first party data means publishers can truly understand what their audience wants and market to them accordingly.

Strategy 1: Convert Free Users To Paying Subscribers With A Metered Stop Rate

Many publishers allow website users to view a certain number of articles or media for free. The meter stop rate measures what percentage of website users exhaust their quota of free content. Once you know this metric, track how many users convert to paying subscriptions (i.e. the paid stop conversion rate).

Continuing to offer some of your content for free remains a meaningful way to generate interest in your publication. Keep experimenting to see which content attracts public attention vs which to keep behind the paywall.

For example, look at using user-generated content to grow your audience. Working with influencers, or hosting exclusive Ask Me Anything (AMA) with affiliated personalities, is a powerful way to bring in clicks. As your audience sees value in your content, they’ll be more likely to pay for ongoing access to your premium content.

Strategy 2: Get A Mobile App

Building a mobile app experience for your content is critical. As of Q2 2022, 59% of all Internet traffic came from mobile devices. With a robust mobile experience, you’re missing out on a considerable portion of your potential audience.

Now, you might be thinking that creating a mobile app is expensive. Hiring a full time developer may not make sense if economic uncertainty is already weighing on you.

A new generation of low code and no code solutions are making it easier than ever to create mobile apps. Consider trying GoNative.io or Strapi.io. By removing (most) coding from the equation, these services mean you can create a mobile app quickly with minimal, to no engineering resources.

Strategy 3: Offer Exclusive Events For Your Audience

What if your audience was eager and excited to visit your website daily? That’s far better than relying on a tense negotiation with a Big Tech company. Organizing virtual events is one of the best ways to bring in your audience.

Planning your a virtual event doesn’t have to be overwhelming either. Use our virtual events checklist to plan your online event.

Strategy 4: Add Community Chat To Your Website

What if you had a way to encourage your users to spend 20 minutes, 30 or even an hour on your website? You can achieve high levels of engagement with a single platform: live chat. If you haven’t considered live chat before, here’s one good reason why you should: it’s the most popular engagement experience across all social media. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram: they all use Live Chat – with reactions, gifs, etc – to keep their audience engaged for an average of 30 min / day / platform.

By adding Arena Live Chat to your website, you’ll empower your audience to ask questions, and engage with each other. Are you worried about inappropriate content? Arena has you covered with a full suite of moderation tools so you can offer brand safe experiences to advertisers.

Strategy 5: Add A Live Blog To Your Website

When a breaking news story hits, it’s a significant opportunity to build audience engagement. Consider election news. There are exit polls, administrative developments, and other developments to cover. Publishing a full feature story on these micro-developments may not make sense. You need a way to publish quick updates.

By adding Arena Live Blog to your website, you can quickly publish breaking news style updates as often as you want filtered by accounts, hashtags, and audience size, and more to ensure only relevant content is pulled in. You can also use two filtering criteria (e.g. tweets using a certain hashtag from accounts with over 1 million followers). We’ve found that follower size filter, combined with a hashtag for relevance, helps to surface interesting brand safe content.

Like a social media content feed, Live Blog includes comments & reactions to keep your audience engaged. To ease the workload on your team, you can invite a few influencers to contribute posts to your live blog.

Discover Arena’s Solutions For Publishers

The jury is still out on whether The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act will enhance or damage publishers. Even in the best-case scenario, additional revenue from the act may well be years away. In any case, the value of building a direct connection with your audience remains vital.

Use the strategies outlined here to build your audience. Discover more about Arena solutions for publishers and start growing your digital audience today.

Check Out Live Commentary Covering the JCPA

Why publishers have nothing to fear in a recession

Posted on December 1, 2022 by Paulo Jesus

Advertising spending on social media platforms is starting to fall. Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram) reported that average revenue per user fell to $9.41 in Q3 2022 vs. $11.57 in Q4 2021 (source). And, more recently, it’s been reported that ½ of Twitter’s top advertisers have left in the last month (source). This represents a significant opportunity for publishers to regain advertising market share.

This shift of ad dollars away from social media creates a once-in-a-decade opportunity for publishers. Even as worries of an economic downturn cloud the horizon, there are several significant opportunities for publishers who innovate using these strategies.

Four Ways Bold Publishers Can Win In The Downturn

Rising interest rates, increasing unemployment (although still at historical lows…), and other signs of economic distress are starting to bite. A downturn is a perfect time to experiment with new approaches and methods to grow engagement and increase your value to advertisers.

1. Offer Exclusive Access To VIPs In Online Events

Reddit, a mid-sized social platform, is known for its successful “AMA” (ask me anything) events. Past participants in these events include Jeopardy! champion, Ken Jennings, businessman and philanthropist Bill Gates, and countless other CEOs and authors. These events are popular because they give the audience a unique chance to interact directly with a celebrity.

As a publisher, you have relationships with politicians, athletes & community leaders. A city news publication might organize a panel or AMA event with the mayor, local investors, or local sports team. There are a few ways to pursue this idea: large-scale public events and exclusive smaller events.

Public Event With VIPs

This event format is a great way to maximize your audience and advertising revenue. For example, a lifestyle magazine might organize an event on local craft breweries. Offer attendees the chance to ask questions, enter draws for free drinks and meet fellow fans. This focused event makes it easier to sign up for paying event sponsors because your audience is more likely to be focused and engaged.

Running a successful event public event will take more planning. There’s an increased risk of inappropriate content when anybody can attend the event. That’s why it is essential to use a live chat platform with both manual and AI automated moderation features like Arena Live Chat. If running a large-scale event isn’t a good fit for your publication, consider offering a smaller event just for your paying subscribers.

Subscriber-Only Digital Events And Benefits

The disadvantage to a public event is the scale – you may have hundreds or thousands of attendees! Creating connections with your guests and audience can be difficult at that scale. That’s where exclusive events for your subscribers play a role. Here are a few examples of subscriber-only digital event experiences that publishers offer today.

The Economist Subscriber-only digital events

The British publication offers live events to its subscribers on topics such as The World Ahead 2023, The Year In Review, America’s Election Results, and China and Ukraine at war. The Economist’s digital events are relatively short – just one hour. Organizing a one-hour virtual event with a few of your top journalists is accessible to most publishers. It’s also a great way to surprise your subscribers with additional value.

The New Yorker Festival

The New Yorker Festival is a multi-day event featuring world premieres of documentaries, political events, and events with celebrities. The publication offers subscribers a 30% discount on ticket prices for the event. In addition, subscribers get early access to buy tickets. The New Yorker event has in-person and virtual aspects. The New Yorker approach takes more time and effort to organize. It’s also a powerful way to distinguish your publication from others.

With these smaller events, it’s smart to promote the limited nature of the event. For instance, if you only have 50 seats, emphasize that fact. In a smaller event, each attendee will have a better chance of having their questions answered.

2. Curate The Gold In Social Media Content

Editorial judgment is one of the most important ways publications add value to their audiences. Your journalists know their beats inside out. You can use that expertise to curate the best in social media for your audience. There are a few ways to curate social media content for your audience.

Enrich Your Coverage With Social Updates

Many publishers offer a live blog or series of breaking news updates when a major event occurs, like an election, sporting event, or conference. Publishing a steady stream of news updates as an event can tax the energy of your journalists. With Arena Live Blog, you can pull in social media updates through hashtags & specific accounts and apply filters to ensure brand-safe posts.

Fact Check Social Media Posts

Misinformation on social media is a major problem. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee published an analysis of COVID-19 misinformation trends in 2021 that illustrates one aspect of the problem. The study found that “fake cure” Tweets were common in the western US, while “Covid as a hoax” misinformation was more common in the mid-West.

Communicating complex scientific information, which often involves probabilities and uncertainty, is challenging. For publishers with professional reporters, evaluating this information critically is a strength. Fact-checking rumors, misinformation, and other social media content is important for publications to add value to their audience.

Invite Social Media Influencers

Many publishers have struggled to maintain a large staff of professional journalists, while others have closed up shop entirely (we miss you, Protocol!). Inviting freelancers and qualified influencers from social media to share their thoughts with your audience can help. For example, a growing community of true crime enthusiasts on social media are hungry to find the guilty and free the innocent. Inviting true crime influencers like Kendall Rae (over 3 million YouTube subscribers) and Shaun Atwood (over 700,000 YouTube subscribers) is one way you can enrich your coverage further.

Create the Best of Social Media Lists

Keeping up with all of the latest developments on social media is difficult! Help your audience save time by recognizing the best social media accounts in niche areas. Praising influencers is one of the best ways to get their attention and start building a relationship. After you feature them in one of these lists, you may find it easier to invite them to contribute to your website or join events.

Connecting your publication to other digital experiences may start with social media but it shouldn’t end there. Enriching the streaming experience represents another way to win in a difficult time.

3. Enrich The Streaming Experience

The average American household subscribes to 4.7 streaming services according to Bloomberg. However, Bloomberg also estimates that streaming service growth may have plateaued for the foreseeable future.

The relatively low cost of streaming services means they are likely to be somewhat recession-resistant. Unlike other leisure activities like travel and restaurants, streaming service costs remain relatively affordable for many households.

If there is a significant economic downturn in 2023 or 2024, affordable leisure activities like streaming services will likely gain more attention. That creates an opportunity for publishers to engage streaming fans more deeply. If your organization has significant entertainment news staff or access to stars, that is a significant opportunity!

There are a few ways to build or grow audiences around streaming service programming.

Organize Viewing Parties

Invite your audience to open their Netflix, Disney+, or other streaming service and watch the latest release alongside your staff. This type of virtual event works best when it is tightly focused. For example, a viewing party focused on fantasy adaptations like “House of the Dragon” or historical dramas like “Bridgerton” are more likely to attract audience attention. Use Arena Live Chat to power this event and make it easy for your audience to share their reactions as the event unfolds.

Invite Fans Behind The Scenes With the Cast and Crew

The chance to see your favorite actors, writers and directors talk about their work is incredibly appealing to many fans. Inviting a few cast members to a virtual event is relatively easy and low-cost. If you give fans the opportunity to ask questions, they’re likely to stay to the end.

Working with streaming services may not be suitable for all brands. What if you are focused on a different niche, like fashion and beauty? There’s another low-cost way for publishers to build their audience and keep people coming back for more: user-generated content!

4. Leverage The Authenticity of User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) built the social media platforms. It’s time for publishers to embrace user-generated content in new ways beyond comments on news articles.

Thoughtfully highlighting UGC on your website is smart because it can bring additional trust and engagement. Social Media Today reports that consumer-created content is perceived to be the most trustworthy. UGC is also considered the most significant in influencing purchase decisions. For media brands like the Wirecutter that generate affiliate sales, featuring UGC on your website makes sense.

While exciting, increasing the amount of UGC on a publisher’s website needs to be done carefully. Publishers need to exercise editorial oversight over this content including enforcing their codes of conduct. To reduce the burden of oversight, starting with less polarizing content themes like lifestyle topics and sports may be helpful. Influencers with a few thousand followers may be willing to contribute to your publication in return for exposure.

Do You Have The Right Technology To Grow Your Digital Audience?

A growing, highly engaged audience is indispensable to growing advertising revenue and thriving in tough times. Allow your audience to interact and join events with Arena. Arena Live Blog is the perfect tool to enhance your coverage of breaking news. Arena Live Chat is what you need to create more engaging digital events. The economic downturn is your opportunity to grow – seize it!

5 Ways News Media Can Grow Using Social Media Strategies

Posted on December 1, 2022 by Paulo Jesus

For years, news organizations have struggled in the cold war with social media. Initally, classified revenue plummeted thanks to the rise of Craigslist, then, Google, Facebook, and Amazon stepped in, pulling billions of dollars in advertising revenue that used to be owned by traditional publishing. Today, a handful of mega-companies have successfully built global audiences around content: social media platforms.

To survive and thrive in the 2020s, news organizations need to study and model the specific tactics and strategies of the social media giants. Given that many social media platforms have been knocked down from their high-ground recently, the timing has never been better to take action.

Lesson 1: Offer A Highly Personalized Content Experience To Grow Engagement

Customized news feeds and streams lie at the heart of successful social media. Facebook gives you news updates on friends and family. Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and other platforms offer a curated experience focused on individual users’ interests. Developing this highly curated experience requires the contribution of many engineers, algorithms, and countless experiments.

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Applying this lesson to the news organization starts by offering filters. Some of your audience might only want business news, while others simply want coverage of their favorite sports team. Rather than forcing all users to flip through all of your news content, let them choose their interests. In addition, offering subject-specific email newsletters focused on different news interests (e.g., sports, business, local news) will help to deepen audience engagement.

Building detailed profiles of your audience’s likes and dislikes is vital for boosting engagement. Another benefit to offering a customized experience is that you will have better first-party data on your audience. Consequently, you will be able to market your subscriptions more effectively. Also, you will have the opportunity to offer more targeted advertising options to your advertisers.

Lesson 2: Adapt To Changing Media Consumption Habits

Consuming social media content and updates is addictive for a reason. These platforms offer the potential for social validation and a constant stream of novelty. That’s not all – many users are turning to social media to access news content.

Consumption of news is a primary driver of social media.

According to Deloitte’s 2022 digital media trends research, the top five reasons US consumers use social media include reading or watching the news (27%), listening to music (28%, watching TV shows and movies (23%), shopping (17%), play video games (22%) and watch sports (13%). These findings tell us that there is considerable appetite for news. Deloitte points out that the popularity of news consumption on social media is driven by algorithmic customization and cost (i.e., no paid subscription needed).

User-Generated Content Is Gaining In Popularity

Above and beyond news consumption, many social media users are interested in user-generated content. It’s important to note that user-generated content is a broad term that covers professional-grade content creators with high production values, hobbyists, and much more. Deloitte’s research found that 70% of Gen Z now regularly consume user-generated content – a figure that has rapidly increased over the past year.

Short-Form Video Content Is Booming

Short video content, typically less than a minute long, is thriving. The most popular content creators on TikTok, like Khabane Lame, Charli d’amelio, and Addison, have uploaded over 1,000 videos to build their audience. Many successful short videos feature videos, dancing, and humor.

Adapting To New Media Consumption Habits

Adapting to these habits as a news organization is challenging. Traditionally, news organizations focus on high production values and professionalism, which isn’t always found in user-generated content. Despite that challenge, there are opportunities to respond to this challenge. Take video content as an example. Your organization likely has significant strengths in video production and editing. Use those capabilities to create content like TikTok videos and YouTube shorts like the Washington Post.

Lesson 3: Emphasize Individuals In Addition To Your Corporate Brand

Many, if not most, social media success stories involve individuals. Take MrBeast (i.e., Jimmy Donaldson) on YouTube. With more than 100 million subscribers, he has built one of the most successful channels on the platform. Many other top channels on the platform are built around individuals like Eminem, Justin Bieber, and Swedish YouTube star PewDiePie.

Applying this lesson in a new organization is relatively easy. For the past decade, many successful journalists like Maggie Haverman (New York Times), Rachel Maddow (MSNBC), and Anderson Cooper (CNN) have built a large following on Twitter. The opportunity to interact directly with your journalists is crucial. Fundamentally, engaging with a specific person is easier than with a brand.

Building an audience around a personal brand is easier for several reasons. Forming a parasocial relationship where an audience member feels connected to the content creator is easier. Social media personalities sometimes deepen these relationships by adding exclusive experiences to paying customers using platforms like Patreon.

There are a few ways to apply this social media lesson to your news organization. Look at all of your public-facing journalists and personalities and their online profiles. Find out who successfully engages with their followers by looking at replies, likes, and comments. Invite your most successful journalists to present their best practices to others in the organization.

Lesson 4: Encourage Niche Communities

Social media platforms are excellent at bringing together small groups of people with shared interests. For example, there are online groups for people interested in obvious things like real estate investing, auto repair & fashion and each of these larger audience can be further cut into niche segments.

Let’s take sports as an example. Spending five or ten minutes searching through Facebook you can easily find groups like:

Obsessed with NCAA Wrestling Updates (9,000+ members)
NBA Fantasy Basketball Discussion (11,000+ members)
Mets Fans For Life (18,000 members)
Yankees Fans (100,000+ fans)

These examples show an audience like “sports fans” has multiple significant segments. News organizations with deep connections in local sports teams have an opportunity to shine by creating dedicated niche communities. Getting started is easier than you might imagine because news organizations already have high-quality content to build their communities on.

Lesson 5: Embrace Technical Innovation

Move fast and break things is a well-known saying in the technology industry. Social media platforms often launch new features as they observe their users and advertisers. For example, Instagram has recently focused on video content to compete more effectively against TikTok.

News organizations may not have the same kind of product development, engineering, and technical bench strength as social media companies. Fortunately, this is less of a disadvantage than you might think. The rise of no-code and low-code platforms and integrations means adding new technologies to your website is easier than ever.

Want to improve your coverage and engagement of rapidly developing news stories like international conflicts and elections? You can install Arena Live Blog on your website in a few minutes. Want to build online events like the Wall St Journal’s Live Q&A Events? Add Arena Live Chat to your website to supplement the video streaming experience so your audience can share their feedback and questions.

Don’t Ignore Your Greatest Strength As You Innovate

There’s no doubt that news publishers can draw lessons from social media platforms. Yet, there’s a danger in drawing too much inspiration from these platforms. You don’t want to lose the soul of your organization as you chase growth.

The most trusted news organizations have built audiences for decades. Social media companies don’t invest in investigative journalism. News organizations hold elected officials accountable for their actions and words. The best news organizations focus on fact-checking and admitting mistakes. In contrast, social media platforms have a much less impressive track record of quality and accountability.

Investigation, fact-checking, and taking on powerful interests carry a cost. Yet, those commitments are ultimately critical for maintaining your reputation and keeping engaged subscribers. If your audience loses trust in your organization, selling subscriptions and advertising space will become more difficult.

The good news is that you can innovate without selling your soul as a news organization. The first step is to add the right technology to your website. These technologies don’t require weeks or months of customization and implementation either. You can be up and running in a matter of hours when you choose Arena.

Transform The News Into An Interactive Community Experience

Publishing high-quality news, analysis, and information are no longer enough to sustain news organizations. Your website needs to offer an online community to win attention and engagement from social media platforms. Your audience wants to ask questions, meet people who share their interests, and more. Right now, social media offers these community experiences. Yet social media lacks the commitment to investigation, reporting, and truth that leading news organizations have.

Give your audience a chance to interact with each other, and engagement will go up. Page views and time on site will also increase. Book a demo with Arena today to discover how to engage your audience more.

How to know the ROI for a Customer Data Platform

Posted on November 29, 2022 by Paola Magni

Adding a customer data platform to your sales and marketing workflow takes some work. So, it’s worth asking the question: is it worth the effort to use a CDP? To find the answer, let’s look at ways to measure the ROI of a customer data platform.

Calculating Customer Data Platform ROI Step By Step

In principle, deeply understanding customer behavior should drive higher revenue. Achieving that result takes time and the right approach. Let’s start by gathering the correct numbers.

1) Know Your Sales And Marketing Numbers Before Using A CDP

To fully understand the impact of a customer data platform on your business, it is crucial to gather some numbers. Precisely, measure these numbers before using a CDP and then look at them afterward.

The number of leads. This measure should be the easiest to track – count the number of leads you typically gain per month. If possible, look at six to twelve months of data and take the average.
Lead quality. There are different ways to determine lead quality. For example, you might measure the proportion of marketing-qualified leads that convert to sales-qualified leads.
Ad campaign effectiveness (e.g., cost per lead). Running a lead generation advertising campaign is much easier when you deeply understand your audience. If you’re just getting started, you are likely to have a high cost per lead. With better data, you can bring this figure down over time.
Sales cycle time. Measure the time between a lead’s first encounter with your business and purchase. While external factors, like the overall economic environment, also impact this figure, it is still intelligent to track.

With these data points in mind, let’s proceed to the next phase of the ROI measurement process.

2) Install and configure your customer data platform.

In this step, install and configure your customer data platform. For this platform to deliver maximum value, take the time to review your customer data for quality. The ROI from the CDP will be low if you start with poor data.

To assess your customer data quality, consider the following points:

Do you have accurate information about customers and how they became customers?

Take a list of your 100 most recent customers and look at the customer journey. Ideally, your CDP should help you to understand their experience. For example, did the majority of prospects interact with sales only after attending a virtual event? If you don’t have this customer data yet, start planning to gather it. Customer surveys and automated tracking can help to address these points.

Without the ability to accurately trace the customer journey, measuring marketing effectiveness and making data-driven decisions about what to focus on next is difficult.

Are you gathering zero-party and first-party data from customers and prospects?

Third-party platforms like lead providers and social media have a role to play. However, these sources are limited. They don’t tell you what a given person thinks or feels about your specific brand. A fully implemented customer data platform can equip you with these insights.

Zero-party data is data that customers decide to share with an organization like product preferences in a survey. For example, you might run a survey to customers about what websites and brands they like the most. Responses to this survey would be zero-party data. First-party data, on the other hand, is a bit different. It is data that a customer agrees to provide by using your website, interacting with your emails, and so forth. Regularly gathering these data points is an important way

Are you using a scoring system?

Scoring becomes more important as you scale up your lead generation and marketing efforts. Large companies develop higher sophisticated models to score leads, but that’s not the only way. You can take a simpler approach if you’re just getting started. For example, you might distinguish between new prospects (i.e., they have been on your email list for less than five days), highly engaged leads (i.e., they have been on your email list for 30 days and have participated in an online event) and customers (i.e., they have purchased in the past 12 months). Classifying prospects into these three categories will help you make better decisions about using your marketing resources.

With this foundation, you’re ready to install your customer data platform.

3) Generate first-party data for your customer data platform

On its own, a customer data platform does not produce a return on investment. To achieve results, there are two more crucial ingredients. First, it’s vital to feed more data into the platform regularly. Second, taking sales and marketing actions is vital based on what you find in the CDP. Let’s start with the first ingredient.

Generating a steady stream of first-party data is one of the best ways to make your CDP more valuable. For most brands, it makes sense to focus on getting more people to your website and ensuring they have an engaging experience. A website visitor that arrives and leaves a few seconds later will not give you much to work with.

There are a few ways to make your website more appealing to customers. You start with a foundation of design, fast technology, and a simple user interface. Next, publish content that directly speaks to your customers’ needs and problems. Finally, enrich your website by transforming it into a virtual events platform using a live blog or a live chat experience. Taken together, technology, content, and community experiences will make your website more appealing. As website visitors keep returning over time, you will have more opportunities to gather data about their preferences.

Once your website generates a significant amount of first-party data, how do you transform that data into valuable insights? That’s what we’ll cover in the next section.

4) Develop new sales and marketing ideas based on CDP data

Your next step is to develop new ideas based on the data you’re seeing in your customer data platform. Success requires both art and science. The art is coming up with sales and marketing ideas regularly. The science is grounding those ideas in the data available on your platform. Let’s illustrate this principle with two examples.

Online publisher

A digital publisher is concerned about subscribers not renewing their subscriptions after the first year. To solve this problem, the publisher reviews their CDP and looks for patterns between people who renew their subscriptions and those who do not. The publisher may notice that 90% of renewing subscribers access paid content once per week and have attended at least two subscriber-only online events.

Based on these patterns, the publisher decides to test the following marketing campaign ideas:

Highlight the “best article of the week” to subscribers. The objective is to make it easier for subscribers to use – read just one article.
Improve virtual events with special guests. To make subscriber-only virtual events more enticing, the publisher invites celebrity guests to a “Ask Me Anything” session to make subscriber-only virtual events more enticing.

After developing these marketing campaign ideas, the publisher can measure the ROI of the campaign using their customer data platform.

Ecommerce company

A clothing e-commerce company is finding it difficult to achieve a reasonable return on its online advertising campaigns. By using the CDP, the marketing manager quickly discovers the problem. Many customers buy only when the company offers discount codes and never buy again. Fortunately, the company has noticed that customers who come through referral campaigns (e.g., Instagram influencers creating sponsored posts) seem to lead to ongoing campaigns.

The e-commerce company developed a few new marketing campaign ideas based on these insights.

Increase budget allocation to influencer marketing campaigns.
Change the creative focus for paid advertising campaigns. Instead of advertising a discount offer, new campaigns take advantage of holiday promotions (e.g., back-to-school season).
Increase content marketing campaigns with partners to drive more referral traffic.

5) Gather the right data for a marketing ROI comparison.

If you’ve followed the process, you’ve installed a customer data platform, gathered new data, and implemented some new marketing ideas. Now, you can compare your marketing effectiveness before and after using the CDP.

To avoid confusing data, aim to make the pre-CDP and post-CDP implementation comparison as similar as possible. For example, focus on the same period (i.e., January to July of this year when you had the CDP vs. January to July of the previous year before you had the CDP).

Aim to exclude other factors that might significantly skew the results to the degree possible. For example, if there have been significant changes in the monthly marketing budget (e.g., $10,000 per month last year vs. $15,000 per month this year), be mindful of those changes.

6) Measure the ROI of your customer data platform

In this step, you’ll directly compare the results achieved before using the CDP and after using the CDP. If you’ve been feeding high-quality data to the CDP and making business decisions based on CDP insights, you’re likely to see a substantial improvement in CDP return on investment. In this case, take a moment to celebrate with your marketing team! You’ve successfully leveraged data insights to grow your business!

What if the return on investment results aren’t that exciting? That’s entirely possible! In this situation, remember that marketing is a work in progress. Learn what you can from the campaigns that didn’t work out and try something new.

Three Ways To Improve Customer Data Platform ROI

The following strategies will help you to get better results from your CDP. While each strategy is distinct, you’re likely to get better results using multiple strategies.

1) Look For Missing Customer Data

Missing key data points is a crucial reason customer data platforms provide limited results. For example, your focus might be on gathering data from website users. However, if the majority of customer conversations come from sales calls or social media, you might be missing key developments. Ensure your customer data platform gathers information from your website, social media, and key offline channels.

2) Validate Data With The Sales Team

For B2B companies, completing the transaction requires the sales team. Few customers are willing to make a $10,000 or $100,000 purchase without the chance to speak with a salesperson and get answers to their questions.

There are a few ways to validate your CDP insights with the sales team. Start by looking at reports and reports from your customer relationship management (CRM). For example, look at the most recent 10-20 completed sales. Does the customer journey involve multiple touchpoints with sales representatives? If so, you might be missing those interactions in your CDP.

In addition to reviewing reports, make the time to speak with your sales colleagues. They’re emailing and calling customers every week. They can give you insights into the relevance of marketing materials (e.g., “customers loved the state of the industry report we released this year in January – can we produce more reports like that?”).

3) Take More Chances

The final way to get better results from your customer data platform is to take more chances. Specifically, we often see people gather plenty of data from customers and prospects and look at the patterns. However, some marketers are reluctant to set aside their preferences and take a risk based on what the CDP is telling them. For example, your CDP might show that video customer stories lead to better conversions. Yet, recording customer videos are often quite labor-intensive and require permission from multiple parties. Despite these challenges, it may be time to invest more in creating these assets.

How To Get More Value From Your Customer Data Platform

You’ve seen that gathering data from a customer data platform is a powerful way to get more conversions and increase engagement. Ensure you have the right technology to gather and import first-party data into your systems to make the most of your platform. Arena Personas is a powerful tool to help you use first-party data to better segment your audiences and improve marketing efficiency.

Could Budweiser Profit Despite World Cup Sponsorship Disappointment

Posted on November 22, 2022 by Paulo Jesus

Put yourself in Budweiser’s shoes for a moment. The beer company has spent at least $75 million to sponsor the World Cup, one of the largest sporting events of the year. The company probably thought selling beer in Qatar, known for its strict alcohol prohibitions, would be difficult, but thought they had reached an agreement to sell alcohol in the stadiums, and other select areas. Then Qatar decided to ban alcohol sales in stadiums less than 48 hours before the start of the first game. AB InBev’s now deleted tweet, “well, this is awkward”, pretty much sums up their sentiment…

Without question, it’s disappointing news. As marketers who market to marketers, our hearts go out to the hard-working teams at Budweiser who have spent months, if not years working toward the 2022 World Cup (not to mention the fans who just want a beverage!). It’s not just beer companies that are worried, either. The Guardian reports that several other World Cup sponsors have “ brought up contractual concerns with Fifa following its late decision to ban alcohol from stadiums during the World Cup.”

Seeking compensation or other solutions through the legal process will take time. Regardless of the outcome, what else can Budweiser do? To answer this question, we’re turning to an unexpected place – wisdom from a long-dead Roman Emperor.

The Obstacle Is The Way: The Surprising Solution From A Roman Emperor

In his best-selling book, “The Obstacle is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials Into Triumph,” Ryan Holiday presents Stoic wisdom from ancient Greece and Rome. The book’s title is based on an observation from Marcus Aurelius (Roman Emperor from 161 to 180 CE).

Marcus Aurelius wrote the following in Meditations, his book of reflections:

Our actions may be impeded… but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions. Because we can accommodate and adapt. The mind adapts and converts to its own purposes the obstacle to our understanding. The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.

Marcus was one of the most influential people who ever lived. Yet, he suffered great disappointments and frustrations, like a trusted friend betraying him and struggling through the Antonine Plague (which lasted for 15 years). With these Stoic principles in mind, what can brands like Budweiser do when they face disappointment?

5 Ways Budweiser Can Turn Its World Cup Trial Into Triumph

No company, let alone a major event sponsor, wants to see its products prohibited from sale at a significant event. These ideas are no substitute for the company’s lost sales. Yet they may help the company to thrive in the future and find even more excellent opportunities.

1) Gain New Insights For Marketing In Alcohol Restricted Markets

Laws and social customs restrict alcohol consumption in many countries around the world. An estimated 14 countries, including Pakistan, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Brunei, Iran, Kuwait, and the Maldives, prohibit or, significantly limit alcohol sales.

Yet, there are millions of consumers in those markets. Traditional beer advertising campaigns are not well suited to these countries.

As the World Cup unfolds, we encourage Budweiser to pay close attention to how fans – locals and international alike – engage with its Budweiser Zero product. Ask staff on the ground to see how consumers like its alcohol-free product. For example, there may be new ideas to leverage – like being able to drink a lot during the competition without putting on weight!

2) Leverage Sober Curious Audience

For an alcoholic beverage company, the growth of the sober curious trend may be problematic. The market research firm Nielsen found that 21% of US consumers cut back on alcohol consumption in 2021. The key drivers for this behavior change include losing interest in drinking alcohol, going out less, and wanting to live a healthier lifestyle.

The sober trend is even more eye-opening when considering it from a demographic trend. Several research studies have found that Millennials, the largest US demographic, drink less than older generations. Generation Z adults are also telling researchers that they plan to consume less alcohol.

These trends present an opportunity to promote Budweiser Zero. In fact, Budweiser might go a step further and position its product against soft drinks. Budweiser has 50 calories, while a standard 330 ml (11.1 fluid ounces) cane of Coca-Cola Original has 139 calories. For consumers interested in losing weight or pursuing other health goals, Budweiser Zero might be a good fit.

3) Find Inspiration For More Inclusive Marketing

Many traditional alcoholic beverage advertisements show people enjoying life while drinking. (We get it, drinking beer can be fun!) Yet, many people don’t want to drink alcohol. They might not like the taste, avoid alcohol for health or religious reasons or simply prefer other drinks.

Instead of advertising that subtly pressures everyone to drink alcohol, see this World Cup disappointment as an opportunity. Picture this – a commercial showing a couple planning a party and debating what drinks to offer. They could start with beer and then recall, “Hey, what are we going to serve to other people who don’t drink?”

4) Lean Into The Disappointment Angle

It might not be the healthiest habit, but sometimes enjoying a beer after hearing awful news just feels right. Other brands have directly referenced disappointments in the news to significant effect. For example, Oreo famously created the dunk in the dark tweet during the 2013 Super Bowl when a power outage impacted the game. That fast Tweet received over 6,000 likes and more than 13,000 retweets.

There are a few ways to use World Cup disappointment as fuel. The direct approach: create marketing featuring the disappointed Budweiser staffers drowning their sorrows with their favorite beer! The indirect approach offers an alternative if that feels too on the nose.

Create marketing campaigns around a series of disappointments like:

Your favorite team didn’t win the championship.
You didn’t get the bonus or raise you wanted.
You got injured playing sports.

Build a series of ads around each disappointment and then end with friends coming together to cheer up their friend with a peer. The message is simple: Budweiser is there for you when your life throws disappointment your way. Budweiser wouldn’t want to condone irresponsible drinking! Enjoy a single beer and company.

5) Play The Long Game Virtually

What if Budweiser had an environment where World Cup-style surprises simply couldn’t happen? Even better, what if that environment could accommodate vast numbers of beer fans from all over the world? That’s all possible by creating a virtual community directly on Budweiser websites. With Arena Live Chat installed, beer and sports fans can gather together to celebrate their favorite drinks and sports.

We get that suggesting brands like Budweiser “take their audience home” is self-serving, since our technology enables this, but it’s more than just a self-promotional tactic. The reality is that, like regional governments, 3rd party social media platforms can also change their minds about what’s allowed or not allowed on their feeds and betting your business, or $75M marketing campaign, on platforms that can disable your content with the flick of a switch may not be the best forward facing strategy.

Discover How To Build A Own Disruption-Proof Virtual Community

The silver lining for AB InBev here is that they’re getting a lot of “free”global publicity. Was it worth the $75M, probably not, but, on the flip side, here we are, a SaaS company, writing a blog about beer. And there’s a lesson for every brand, publisher and influencer here: don’t trust your livelihood, and budgets, to organizations (political or technical) that can turn off your programs with the flip of a switch.

At Arena, we believe the technology, and the time, have arrived at a point where marketers CAN take their audience back from social media, and evolve their own, digital properties with social-media-like experiences that drive community led growth. Want to see how it works? Check out our world cup coverage page, or, if you’d like to learn more Contact Arena today to find out how you can grow a digital community on your own website – an asset that can’t be taken away from you!

Create Your Live World Cup Coverage for Every Game

Posted on November 18, 2022 by Paola Magni

Here at Arena, we’re big fans of football / soccer, so we used some of our out-of-the-box features to create live feed coverage of all the games in the World Cup. If you’re in media, publishing, or just a huge fan, we’ll show you how to do this on your site as well. This is a fun way to cover the event, even if you don’t have people on-site, but can also help you boost digital property metrics like average session time, registration rate or even CTR for direct or programmatic sponsorships.

Step 1: Create a free account

To build a custom version of this, you’ll need an arena account, or you can just DM us in the chat on any of the pages and we can send you the snippet you can add to any webpage or app. Still, creating an account is easy and free: just click here.

Step 2: Create an event for a match

We bet this is simpler than you picture. When you create a sports event in the Arena Dashboard, you can already pick “soccer”, the exact tournament you’ll cover – World Cup, in this case – and the list of matches will come right up!

This is when you can enable automatic sports features that make your life much easier:

Countdown the match
Live score update
Automatic play-by-play

These are features that will work automatically and set you free from updating everything that happens in a game, like goals, yellow cards and substitutions.

Step 3: Embed the Live Blog in your web page

Next thing is to add the embed code in your page. It’s usually just a copy-and-paste process, but it can vary depending on the platform you use (WordPress, Webflow, etc). If you have any difficulties, check Arena’s Help site.

Step 4: Add some social accounts for automated publishing

To create a live experience that also filters for more brand-safe content, we set two high level filters:

We pulled in any twitter post with the hashtags #WorldCupQatar2022, #Qatar2022, #WorldCup, etc but set a filter for only accounts with over 1,000,000 followers. This gives us global reach that can pull from any publisher, influencer or player post, but also ensures random garbage doesn’t clutter the feed.
We selected several official accounts, like FIFA World Cup, FourFourTwo, ESPN, etc to pull in any of their posts related to World Cup.

Next we add the countdown clock, then set live score counter to auto update. Now, anyone who comes to the page early will know when the experience will go fully live, but, for our team, it was basically “set it and forget it”.

Step 5: Enable the Live Chat

For engagement, we added a Live Chat to the right side which allows the community to engage with each other when the match starts. Since we’re NOT a publisher, and our website traffic is much lower than, say, pretty much any online media company, we opted to create a single chat that spans over every game, but, we could just as easily have created dedicated chats for specific game audiences. For high traffic sites, setting different chats for different segments of your audience can be a good idea.

Step 6: Add Conversion Cards for CTAs

After that, we added direct calls to action with Conversion Cards. For our purposes, we added two:

For our fun Chrome extension
For our new publishing solutions page

For these, we’re basically just promoting some cool content we made, but these could just as easily have been sponsored ads from partners, or even programmatic ads from a DSP.

Finally, we just toggled which match we wanted & copied and pasted this on to different pages and within about an hour, we had set up live coverage experiences for every game in the World Cup. For a list of all the pages, please see below!

World Cup calendar and live coverage links

Check Out Arena Live Blog Live Updates With World Cup Content From Social Media

Arena Android and iOS SDK November 2022 updates

Posted on November 1, 2022 by Arena

Arena has two big news for iOS and Android developers – we’ve updated our SDKs. This means that Arena Live Chat & Live Blog can be added and enhanced in the most used mobile platforms in the world.

What’s new for Android developers?

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Android developers can now add Polls and Q&A to their Arena Live Chat. This helps businesses increase engagement as well as get valuable insights from their customers. It’s also important to note that these new SDK features are only available to our Enterprise customers, but they are already included in the web version.

What’s new for iOS developers?

Arena’s iOS SDK allows developers to add Arena Live Chat to their apps with one of the most powerful engagement tools: Polls. This offers a great opportunity for businesses to increase retention, engagement and conversion by providing a more interactive experience. Plus, it gives businesses another way to collect valuable insights with an extra layer of real-time interaction.

Arena’s new SDK features: Polls & Q&A

About Polls

Arena Live Chat has a Polls feature, which allows to gather audience feedback, identify important topics for your users, and gain insight into what they think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDBpllB64lg

About Q&A

The Q&A is an Arena Live Chat feature that provides real-time engagement with users and gathers all of their questions and opinions in a moderation queue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnPfQUdy2oA

Conclusion

Arena is committed to helping businesses provide the best possible user experience. Our latest update is just another example of how we’re working to make that happen. We hope that these new features will help our customers increase audience retention, engagement, and conversion.

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Get More Customers With A Retarget Customer Data Platform

Posted on September 30, 2022 by Paola Magni

A customer data platform needs the right fuel to achieve growth—data from sales systems, customer loyalty data, insights from programmatic advertising, and advanced analytics all help. Ultimately, the way to lift conversion rates requires significant first-party data.

Why First Party Data Should Be The Core Of Your Marketing Strategy

If you ask most marketing teams, they’ll say they are drowning in data from analytics tools. The burden gets even more significant when you factor in customer insights from third-party data. That’s why your customer data platforms need to emphasize direct interactions with customers (i.e., first-party data).

To make the most out of your marketing activities and get better retargeting results, you need the proper foundation in place first. With the right marketing technology, it is far easier to focus your advertising campaigns to achieve better click-through rates and increase conversion rates.

Gathering Your First-Party Data For Retargeting

Fulfilling your business strategy is easier when you can make Facebook ads, email marketing, and overall digital marketing deliver more results. Effectively gathering first-party data into a centralized database makes it easier to provide personalized experiences.

To build accurate customer profiles, look at the data you already have, like purchase history, insights from your legacy systems, and other data points available in your marketing automation platform. These data points are vital to building a company’s first-party data foundation. However, there is much more high-quality customer data you can gather.

4 Marketing Opportunities To Gather And Use First Party Data

Online events and community experiences give you an unusual way to transform anonymous visitors into potential customers. To achieve this feat, your tech stack needs to be equipped with marketing automation tools like Arena Personas and live chat. Once your email systems and preferred marketing solution are ready, it’s time to engage your target audiences.

1) Offer Online Experiences To Potential Customers

Using marketing campaigns to gather today from various customer segments is easier when there is a value exchange. Every single customer should get something out of interacting with your company like a community experience, pricing (e.g. discounts), early access to products or useful insights.

For example, you can use Arena live chat to deepen your customer relationships by running engaging online events. As you add more engaging experiences, customer acquisition cost may go up for a period of time. In the long term, providing customers live event experiences can raise customer retention.

Instead of attempting to understand the desires of anonymous segments, tracking user engagement in different types of online activity (e.g. chat and website use) leads to more actionable insights. Let’s break down how gathering first-party data with an online experience can help.

E-Commerce Business Use Case

For example, B2C customers may react with excitement in a chat session during a livestream event. To see how this information could be used, consider e-commerce brands. They may be considering launching 10 products over the next quarter but can use this insight to improve the results of product launches. By observing the chat and related behavior patterns like website clicks, you can estimate demand for products (e.g. “Hey, we noticed over a hundred people wanted the new blue shirt!”).

With this insight in mind, there are at least two ways you can get more business. First, you can run a targeted campaign to your current customers and reference your chat experience (e.g. “We saw that many of you are excited about our new linen blue shirts! Order by Friday and you’ll get 10% off!”). Second, you can then make changes on your advertising platform to emphasize the new shirt.

2) Create Campaigns For Your Current Customers

Marketing campaigns often focus on bringing in net new customers and prospects. In addition to that objective, it’s important to engage your current customers. In many respects, it’s easier to execute data-driven personalization is to focus on customers. Unlike anonymous website visitors, customers have signaled what they value with their buying behavior including offline purchases. Let’s illustrate this use case for enterprise-level companies in the software industry.

B2B Enterprise Use Case

Selling complex business software often feels like a Herculean task. Achieving business success often requires a full team of sales professionals like account executives, sales development representatives and others. Further, the marketing team is constantly working hard to collect customer stories, optimizing online advertising campaigns and more.

In this context, it’s vital to make the most of your customer base. For example, you might have a significant percentage of customers on a mid tier plan while your goal is to emphasize the top tier enterprise plan. In that case, you might offer online experiences showcasing the success of users in the top tier plan and encourage them to share their success stories. For instance, enterprises users might rave about the analytics capabilities and native integrations available in your top tier plan. Running a live event where customers have the opportunity to share their experiences with each other is powerful!

There are some downsides to this type of campaign. It requires significant insight into customer behavior. It’s vital to know your customer satisfaction levels so that you shine a spotlight on your most delighted customers. This type of campaign also requires significant collaboration between sales and marketing. Fortunately, solutions like Arena Personas make such marketing efforts easier to arrange.

3) Get Better Lookalike Audiences

In Facebook advertising, it has been a common practice to create a lookalike audience by uploading your customer list. Facebook then uses its customer match capabilities to find more people who are similar to your current customers. This approach to Facebook advertising isn’t your only option. What if your target audience isn’t on Facebook or Facebook campaigns aren’t producing satisfactory results? The first party data you gather can help you to market more effectively.

The downside to relying entirely on an advertising platform for lookalike audiences is that you are dependent on their database. If some or many of your customers are not active users on Facebook, retargeting via the Facebook pixel may not work well.

The alternative is to build your own lookalike audiences. With a large enough audience, you may be able to pursue granular segmentation in a custom audience as shown in the following example.

Individual Audience Factors

Every purchase is ultimately made by an individual, whether they are buying as a consumer or at a company. Therefore, it is usually wise to start with these factors.

Age: understanding the typical age profile of your ideal audience helps you to decide which channels, creative and offers to use.
Gender: it is helpful to know if gender differences are relevant to your market.
Geography: contrast the geography of your website visitors to your ideal customer profile.
Interests: find out the topics, publications and media your audience likes. If you offer online event experiences like virtual conferences, look at registration records to see

B2B Audience Factors

If you are focused on appealing to B2B audiences, the following customer attributes are important.

Industry: to minimize confusion, use a standard industry classification like the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS).
Company Size: use number of employees or revenue as a filter.
Technology Stack: If you offer technology products or services, knowing the customer’s tech stack is helpful. For example, does it matter if the customer uses Salesforce?

Is Your Audience Segment Too Large?

Audience segmentation can become less useful when the audience becomes too large. IF you end up with an audience segment with millions of individual customers, it may need to be narrowed down. Leverage feedback from the sales team and customer service to narrow the list. They may be able to help you identify the customer attributes associated with the most valuable customers (e.g. people who tend to move through the customer journey quickly).

4) Lapsed Customer Engagement

When a customer cancels their account or stops buying for a long period of time, all hope is not lost. In many cases, you have a good chance to reengaging lapsed customers with a retargeting campaign. To build this type of audience segment, it’s important to choose who to include and who to exclude.

Start by defining a lapsed customer. For simplicity, let’s define a lapsed customer as a prior customer whose last purchase was six to twelve months ago. Once you have that list, it’s vital to filter it further using your customer relationship management data. Specifically, you want to exclude customers who complained or experienced significant problems. Reengaging such former customers is much more challenging and may require more guidance from the sales team.

Now that you have your audience segment prepared, prepare a custom advertising campaign. B2C companies often find that a simple “we’ve missed you!” style message with an incentive (e.g. 10% off coupon) is an effective way to bring back customers. For B2B campaigns, communicating new features or capabilities can help. Even better, reengage lapsed customers by inviting them to an online event.

The Final Ingredient To Successful Retargeting: Leverage Market Awareness

Once you choose one of the ideas from above to execute, there is one more critical point to consider: market awareness. The three part market funnel – top of funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of funnel – gives us a good framework. Let’s pair the market funnel concept with the audience segmentation we covered earlier.

1) Top of Funnel

In the top of the marketing funnel, most prospects have little to no understanding of your product and how it might help them. This is the marketing equivalent of cold calling. The advantage of top funnel marketing is that you have the greatest opportunity because this segment is always the biggest. The disadvantage is that you usually need to be more patient.

With a top of funnel focus, leveraging the “Offer Online Experiences To Potential Customers” strategy makes sense. In this case, your primary marketing campaign would focus on inviting prospects to an online event. After the event, you would follow up with retargeting campaigns to offer an event recording or other assets to give people a reason to opt in to your marketing.

If you use events, use our how to promote your virtual event guide to get more attendees.

2) Middle of Funnel

Also known as the evaluation stage, the middle of the funnel is an intermediate step in the customer journey. In this stage, the potential customer has some awareness of what you offer. It’s now up to you to nurture the prospect further. In contrast to top of funnel, you likely already have some prospect or customer data in place so you can start off with a retargeting campaign.

Consider adapting the “Create Campaigns For Your Current Customers” concept to middle of the funnel campaigns. Highlighting your current customers via an event, case study or interview is a powerful way to prove your credibility. Using your customer data platform, identify prospects who have interacted with your brand in the past 3 months (e.g. attended a webinar, participated in a live chat etc). Once you have identified this audience segment, create a marketing campaign to emphasize your case studies.

3) Bottom of Funnel

Converting leads at the bottom of the marketing funnel depends on your business model. If customers make an online purchase, a campaign offering a deadline and incentive is often a good bet. For B2B or enterprise sales, running marketing campaigns may not be your best best. Instead, it may be more effective to collaborate with the sales team to find out what type of campaigns they want. For example, highly customized and targeted direct mail campaigns may be the best way forward.

Use Arena Personas To Get More of The Right Data

Data driven personalization campaigns and advanced audience segmentation all depend on having high quality data. To help companies get more of the data they need to grow, use Arena Personas. It’s the fastest way to collect and import first-party data into your customer data platform. Then you’ll find it far easier to run retargeting campaigns across the marketing funnel.