New Year’s resolutions for advertisers

The New Year offers a fresh start. Along with all those personal pledges, marketers may want to make a few resolutions of their own. Here are some suggestions.To be fair, some advertisers have come a long way, baby, in their portrayals of women. But for every brand challenging the use learn social media marketing of the phrase “like a girl” as an insult, or pledging not to Photoshop its models, or abandoning its tradition of puerile and demeaning Superbowl ads – as GoDaddy finally did this year – there are plenty still getting it wrong.Subway had to pull an ad that told women to diet so they could fit into sexy, skimpy Halloween costumes. Veet also had to nix a campaign that shamed ladies for failing to keep up a regimen of perfect hairlessness. (Its ads conflated a hint of stubble with disgusting “dudeness” – a message that also managed to insult men.) Victoria’s Secret promoted its “Body” lingerie brand with ads for “The Perfect ‘Body” featuring an array of models with just one body type. And Old Spice’s ads feature women so stupid, they don’t notice the man they are flirting with is a robot.“The whole social media universe, and Twitter, has allowed for all these conversations that have never happened before,” said Jo-Ann Munro, creative director for advertising firm Marketel and its marketing-to-women division, Marketelle. “There’s a whole new world out there that [advertisers] are not controlling.”It cuts both ways. Happily, fewer ads are using incompetent, embarrassing father figures as the butt of their jokes. That progress needs importance of social media marketing to continue too, both because men deserve not to be insulted, and because the women who love them aren’t laughing at this tired trope.

Review your business resolutions that you made at midnight because you are now sober!!

If you wish you could find the time to post more often, or actually respond to your customer chatter, then why not resolve to manage your social media marketing agencies contact better by using Hoot-suite or another similar system to make it easier for your to manage your activity without having to sit for hours Twitter gazing or Facebook staring while waiting for a post response. By channeling multiple social media accounts through one portal, you can free up some precious time that would be otherwise spent posting individual updates to each of your social media accounts. Better still, if you find it a struggle to write engaging posts as well as schedule them, why not outsource your social media tasks to a professional outside agency. It can be more cost-effective than you think, and putting your social media into the hands of experts can pay you back three-fold in the time it saves you that can be spent elsewhere on your business. Marketers have also discovered recently that they can endear themselves to consumers by showing them a basic understanding of our diversity. There is nothing wrong with white couples and their photogenic children. But brands such as Cheerios and Honey Maid are being rewarded for search and social media marketing celebrating a more diverse picture of family life: one that recognizes same-sex couples and people of different races and cultural backgrounds.

Ask questions with the aim of understanding

Curious about something? Unsure of a piece of data that came from another part of the team? Make it a resolution to ask questions. Marketing – especially with social media marketing applications the use of a DMP – works best when silos break down and members of different teams talk to one another. It’s easy enough to ignore what you don’t know, or accept the answer to a question without requesting further information. But ultimately, the strongest teams (and strongest strategies) are built by those who ask with an aim to truly understand.Companies such as Home Depot, JPMorgan, and Target have seen their brands damaged when customer information was vulnerable to hackers. But investing in protection against cybercrime is just one part of the issue.Digital advertising is based on tracking consumers’ behaviour, and even large companies do not always handle sensitive information correctly. The industry has offered people the ability to opt out of behavioural targeting online. But privacy policies for many services where people share information are still written in lengthy legalese. And mobile devices remain a dicey area: global privacy authorities – including in Canada – recently highlighted how mobile apps collect user information, often for advertising purposes and without adequate user controls. “Involve your customers. Make sure you communicate with them,” said Ann Cavoukian, the former Ontario information and privacy commissioner, and now executive director of the Privacy and Big Data Institute at Ryerson University. “People like to feel that they’re in control of their data. If you marketing using social media make it easier to see how data is gathered and stored, they’re more likely to trust you.…When you have their trust, they will be more likely to give you permission to use their information,... It’s not privacy versus marketing. It’s privacy and marketing. Privacy is good for business. It will give you a competitive advantage.” she added.