Why Influencer Marketing Should Be Part of Every Marketing Mix

We’re all consumers here, so let’s do a little thought experiment together. Think about the last few things you purchased or new spots in town you investigated. Do you remember how you heard about those products or places initially? Did any of the information you used in your decision originate from family, friends, coworkers, acquaintances, or celebrities?

If so, consider yourself INFLUENCED.

Word of mouth (WOM) isn’t anything new, and it’s certainly not a bad thing; as long as we’ve been conducting transactions of goods and services, we’ve expressed opinions and shared experiences. “Influencer marketing” is simply the modernized version of word of mouth, selectively enhanced by product placement originating from a trusted source (an influencer).

Today, many brands are using influencer marketing as a powerful amplification layer for their social and content initiatives.

Word of Mouth is Dead, Long Live Word of Mouth

“Advertisements are now so numerous that they are very negligently perused.” True words, indeed, but not a new circumstance. In fact, that quote is from Dr. Samuel Johnson in his The Idler essays—published in 1759!

The consumer world has become inundated, and we’ve adapted by turning off our attention—and tuning up our bullshit meter. With the barrage of ads we’re exposed to each day, it’s not surprising that we trust people more than logos. Nielsen studies show that we trust people about twice as much as we trust brands and organizations.

Do You Need Influencer Marketing?

Yes, you do. “But, Jay,” you ask doubtfully, “how can you KNOW I need it?” I know you need it, because you’re already doing it. Influencers already exist in your customer base.

These individuals are talking about your brand at this very moment. They are creating content through texts and photos and Tweets and Snaps. They are introducing new people to your business. They are advocating on your behalf and defending you during those times you have to hug your haters.

Formalizing relationships with existing and new influencers makes good business sense beyond curating great UGC and strengthening your brand’s reputation. According to consulting company Tomoson, brands are seeing average returns of $6.50 in revenue per $1 spent on influencer marketing. That’’ll work.

There are even more things that online influencers can do for you and additional ways to measure influencer marketing ROI, but I think you get the picture.

Know Your Influencer

Marketers commonly identify three types of influencers based on the number of followers they command and what value they may bring, but don’t fall into the trap of assuming that a bigger audience equates to a more “valuable” influencer. Even individuals with smaller followings can contribute to a winning influencer strategy and should be considered in your marketing mix.

Before launching any campaigns, consider both the tangible stakes of cost and time as well as the intangibles such as trust and reputation. The most successful brand-influencer partnerships are those that define goals, determine metrics, outline expectations, and communicate results.

Not every individual will be a good fit for your brand, so be strategic about with whom you work (and how). Influencers can be engaged under either paid and/or unpaid (“earned”) arrangements—the choice may change depending on business budget, timeline, and philosophy. As expected, there are both benefits and challenges to earned and paid influencer marketing, but no matter what, the best possible scenario is to find the right influencers and build relationships BEFORE you need them.

Finders, Keepers

Services including Insightpool and GroupHigh exist to help businesses efficiently identify and contact potential influencer partners. Criteria such as industry, audience size, content expertise, and more can be quickly matched with results displayed through user-friendly dashboards.

If you don’t want to perform outreach yourself, there are even influencer “talent agencies” like Viral Nation and IZEA who can assemble a custom social task force for you. Talk about some instant marketing super powers!

Whether a brand hires influencers via a service or earns them through organic interaction, what matters is this: “At the heart of both paid and earned influencer campaigns is creating long-lasting relationships.” After all, a successful brand-influencer relationship can have overarching effects beyond supporting a one-time campaign. It’s worth investing the time and effort to nurture long-term benefits.

At the heart of both paid and earned influencer campaigns is creating long-lasting relationships.
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Above and Beyond

Through the trust we extend to those in our circles of influence, we’re able to learn new information, solve existing problems, and discover new joys. That makes word of mouth a very powerful thing, when you think about it. Used selectively and managed correctly, influencer marketing can be a win-win-win for brand, influencer, and customer alike. As civil rights activist Andrew Young gently reminds, “Influence is like a savings account. The less you use it, the more you’ve got.”

Think about how you could use influence marketing to reach your customers, and let us know what successes and challenges you’ve been finding. If you want to learn more about the advantages of earned and paid influencer marketing and how influencer-based advertising can help scale your marketing efforts, download “Paid and Earned: The Two Sides of Influencer Marketing.”

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Insightpool and Convince & Convert.

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How to Use Instagram Stories to Propel Your Brand

Substantial Instagram algorithm changes are here! These changes mean big things for all Instagram marketers. Effective content creators in the future will drive engagement through thematic posts and stories – Instagram Stories. The new feature, introduced circa August 2016, allows Instagram content creators to put a narrative to a series of pictures. Stories also allows

Author information

Christa Donovan

Christa Donovan contributes a monthly column on Instagram. Christa is a staff writer for Maximize Social Business.

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3 Ways to Use Instagram Stories Ads for Business

Do you advertise on Instagram? Wondering how Instagram Stories ads can help your business? Instagram now lets businesses of all sizes deliver seamlessly integrated full-screen Stories ads to a highly targeted audience. In this article, you’ll discover three ways to use Instagram Stories ads. About Instagram Stories Ads Instagram stories appear above users’ Instagram feeds and

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The Homepage is Dead: A Story of Website Personalization

Posted by cara.harshman

In 1998, Jeff Bezos had a vision for the Internet. At that time he was four years into building Amazon. It was taking off as a humongous online emporium of books and music. In an interview with the Washington Post that year, Bezos made a visionary statement about the web. “If we have 4.5 million customers, we shouldn’t have one store. We should have 4.5 million stores,” he said.

Fast-forward 19 years and here we are in 2017. My Amazon homepage is extremely personalized to me. (In August it was showing me glow sticks and solar-powered lamps. It clearly knew I was going to Burning Man.)

Bezos’ vision is reality for Amazon.com and many more e-commerce sites. At this point, personalized product recommendations are table stakes for online retail. But we haven’t seen personalization become as popular across the rest of the non-retail web. Most businesses have one version of the homepage that is supposed to cater to all different sorts of people. The sites still say, “come one, come all!”

This is troubling. Marketers spend so much time and energy developing personas and messaging for the myriad audiences we want to turn into customers. But it usually stops there. It’s time we start extending this persona-driven, personalized marketing to our websites, and specifically the homepage. The homepage is the proverbial front door of our brands; often a landing page, it’s the first page you’ll go to find out who a company is and what it does.

As marketers, it’s our job to crack open the black box on how to do things that may seem like a mystery. SEO? Moz takes care of that one. Website personalization is another one of those mysteries. What are the problems you need to work through to get it done? How much does it cost? How valuable is it?

I want to help bust open that black box by sharing first-hand experience personalizing Optimizely.com. In my time on the marketing team there, we redesigned the homepage. We went from one average best homepage to 26 different versions of the homepage uniquely personalized to different visitors. Let’s talk about why we did it, what we did, and how it all performed (because of course we measured it).

The average best version of our homepage.

Homepage personalized for visitors from Target.	Homepage personalized for visitors from the travel industry.
Homepage personalized for visitors browsing optimizely.com late night.	Homepage personalized for visitors from Microsoft.

Why invest in website personalization?

We redesigned and personalized the homepage for three reasons:

1. To get closer to a global maximum. We had reached a local maximum on our current site. After four years of iteration and conversion optimization, we had achieved the best possible version of the existing design. New A/B tests on the page returned insignificant results. We had to design a radically different site to get closer to the global maximum with higher conversion rates and engagement. In other words, we were climbing a mountain and had reached a small hill, but our goal was to summit the peak.
2. To increase lead quality. Our existing homepage was filling the sales funnel with lots of not-so-great leads. Often, people wound up in a conversation with a sales-human who were not sufficiently educated about what Optimizely had to offer. Not a good situation for the lead or the sales-human. We had to redesign the experience so that folks understood our value.
3. To support account-based marketing (ABM). ABM is an approach to marketing and selling that deliberately aligns sales and marketing around a list of important accounts and delivers targeted campaigns to engage those accounts. The goal is to be highly intentional with who you sell to and nurturing those interactions with personalized content. This personalization campaign was intended to drive engagement with our target accounts.

What to personalize and for whom?

After knowing why we were personalizing, the next question becomes what are we personalizing and for whom? The “for whom” part of this question was our starting place. It’s the best starting point for any personalization campaign. You must define your audience (aka who you’re personalizing for) before you decide on the experience (aka what you’re going to show them).

Defining your audiences takes time and is a worthy investment because it’s the foundation of the campaign. We came up with a few traits for what makes a “good” audience:

• It should be identifiable. You should have a way to technically identify the thing that makes a visitor part of a specific audience.
• It should be valuable. Measured either in volume or strategic importance, the audiences should be worth something. Because of our account based marketing approach, some of our audiences consist of one company, but that company has humongous value to us.
• It should be differentiated enough to receive unique experiences. Your audiences should be distinguished enough to receive a unique experience.

With those traits in mind, you can define audiences across two axes: behavioral/what a visitor does and demographic/who a visitor is.

For our homepage campaign we chose to create unique experiences for these audiences:

• Named accounts: Current and prospective customers that are part of a target account list. We defined this by uploading a list into Optimizely and using Demandbase to identify the IP address of visitors coming from those companies.
• Industries: Visitors from target verticals which have strong use cases for A/B testing and personalization. We used Demandbase data for this as well, and CRM data.
• Geography: Is the visitor from North America or Europe or APAC and so on. For geography we used Optimizely targeting abilities.
• Customers: Visitors who are known Optimizely customers. We defined customers by identifying visitors who had an Optimizely login cookie on their browser.

A wireframe drawing of the new site with ample space for personalized content.

• Engaged visitors: Return visitors who have engaged with one or more of Optimizely’s digital properties in the past (blog, website, community, knowledge base, etc.). We executed this with behavioral targeting through Optimizely.

Once you have audiences defined — and don’t be surprised if this takes a while — you are ready to dissect your page and identify the places you want to personalize.

Sidenote: We had to redesign the homepage in order to make space for content that could be personalized. Take a look at the original site; you can see that there’s hardly anything on the page, no content to personalize! In order to do website personalization, you need ample real estate to create personalized experiences.

How did personalization perform?

This personalization campaign was, importantly, an A/B test: 50% of homepage visitors saw the old version, and 50% saw a personalized one. Personalization is a hypothesis like any other design/functionality change and should be treated with similar rigor as A/B testing. You want to know that the personalization is improving the experience/conversion rate/metrics, not decreasing them.

Here’s the A and B:

In the test we measured lead conversion rate, accounts created, lead qualification rate, and softer anecdotal data like how it helped our sales team in conversations and how our customers reacted to it.

#PracticeWhatYouPreach #Personalization @Optimizely is pretty cool; Went there at 430 AM & greeted w/ "Still Awake?" http://pic.twitter.com/iuSs0DVPU9
— Vic Maine (@Vic_Maine) June 6, 2016

Well done @Optimizely! Super personal home page! Haven’t visited site on this computer before and yet they know me! http://pic.twitter.com/ElXJ5H8nC6
— Sean Kennedy (@Sean_Kennedy) April 14, 2016

Let’s start with the qualitative data. In short, people loved the new homepage. They even tweeted about it and sent emails to our team. If your homepage design is worth tweeting about, that’s either a fantastic or a horrible sign. We were glad that it was all positive sentiment.

Quantitatively, the new individualized homepage experience performed better than the original.

Overall, we saw a:

• 1.5% increase in engagement
• 113% increase in conversions to Solutions page
• 117% increase in conversions on “Test it Out” CTA to start account creation process

The personalized site did not affect lead conversion rate immediately. Like most online businesses, Optimizely is constantly striving to improve conversion rate (for the right leads, of course). While this new personalized homepage experience is not immediately improving lead quality, the team were confident enough in the results — and in the future optimization opportunity — to move 100% of traffic to the new homepage experiences.

What’s next?

Optimizely successfully killed THE homepage, or rather the single version of the homepage for everyone. They now have a new baseline of personalized homepages to optimize from. Like it goes with A/B testing, one test just leads to another; we always learn something, whether the test wins, loses, or is inconclusive.

The homepage was the tip of the iceberg with personalization. Since launching the homepage, Optimizely has used personalization to add content recommendations on the blog, to run a highly targeted Apple Watch campaign to target accounts (an effective ABM campaign), and to surface relevant product information to potential customers.

The web Jeff Bezos imagined in 1998 has become reality and the opportunities to use personalization to design better web experiences just continue to grow.

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40+ Free, Must-Have Mobile Apps for Marketers

For efficient marketing, we need instruments. With hundreds of them available, we try dozens and opt for the best. But how to choose the best without money to burn, especially when it appears that most instruments digital marketers need for work are free?

Here’s our list of over 40 useful, multifunctional, and free mobile apps for marketers. Chances are you’ve heard of them, but you probably haven’t tried all of them. It’s a high time to name leaders and choose those best suited for your marketing goals.

Organizers

A functional organizer is a primary thing to have because the whole process of your work depends on it. Have you tried these?

1. Evernote

Create projects and to-do lists, add reminders and visual notes, and organize your teamwork with the help of Work Chat in Evernote. It’s a user-friendly, fast-working, and visually pleasing application available at both iTunes and GooglePlay.

Plus points:

• Usability
• Design
• Multiple operation features

2. Trello

Free to use, this organizer is multifunctional and mobile. Trello allows you to create boards with checklists, assign tasks, get notifications, control a workflow, and more. The detailed interactive manual and Taco the Dog can’t leave you cold.

3. Todoist

With big dogs such as Forbes, Entrepreneur, and HP as clients, this organizer has both web and mobile versions. Create projects, control them offline, assign tasks, get email notifications, and tag and prioritize to-dos with Todoist.

How do marketers find the best mobile apps without a ton of money to burn?
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Messengers

You know them, but you’ve hardly tried all of them. Choose the best fit for your business communication.

4. Skype

This one needs no introduction, but in case you haven’t tried it yet, here are Skype‘s main functions:

• Free video calls (up to 25 people)
• Free phone calls for Skype’s users
• Up to 300 people in one chat

5. HipChat

A group messaging app, HipChat sends messages, creates team chat rooms, shares files, and integrates with over 80 products such as MailChimp, Hangouts, Twitter, Wunderlist, and more. It allows you to collaborate with co-workers around new ideas, projects, and campaigns. It’s safe and secure, faster than email, and it integrates with Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket.

6. Viber

Core functions of Viber are the same as other messengers’: free calls, chats, and data connection.

Plus points:

• Synchronization with phone contacts
• No registration needed
• Synchronization between a desktop computer and mobile devices
• Public chats
• Games and funny stickers (Marketers don’t have to be all business, do they?)

7. Basecamp 3

A group messaging application, Basecamp 3 designed around six features including scheduling, data storage, real-time chats, to-do lists, messaging, and automatic check-ins. WWF and NASA are among its users.

8. Asana

TED, The New Yorker, Samsung, BBC, and Pinterest use this corporate messenger for work. Asana helps to create chats, tasks, and to-do lists; it allows you to comment, share files, track work, and get results.

Plus points:

• Notifications on projects in process
• Quick registration via Google
• User-friendly interface

9. WhatsApp

WhatsApp is a popular service for calls and message communication. Available for Android, iOS, and Windows Phone users.

Plus points:

• No registration needed
• Text, voice, and video communication
• Public chats and mailing
• Synchronization with phone contacts

10. Hangouts

User-friendly and visually pleasing, this messenger is popular with Google users. Hangouts allows message communication and video conferences (up to 10 people), phone calls, and SMS. You can pinpoint a geolocation here, too.

11. Slack

Slack is a group messenger to try for team communication and workflow organization. Marketers use it to:

• Message
• Share and edit documents
• Search for a team’s past conversations and files
• Organize work on projects
• Stay focused on what matters

Slack integrates into Dropbox, Asana, Google Drive, Twitter, and more.

12. Periscope

Live stream videos work best for business meetings, brainstorming sessions, sharing the news with team members, and more. Periscope is available on iTunes and Google Play; it’s multifunctional and free to sign in with your phone number or Twitter account.

Blogging

Digital marketing depends on content to a great extent. Business blogs become a core source of communication with customers, so consider the following instruments by all means.

13. WordPress

If you blog with WordPress, you need the mobile version of this platform. It allows managing content even if you have no internet access at the moment. As with the web version, you can create, edit, and publish posts, moderate them, get notifications and analytics, etc.

14. Plagiarism Check

This one is a savior for marketers dealing with word-oriented content. No matter if you write or outsource texts for marketing goals, PlagiarismCheck allows proving that your posts have no problems with copyright.

Plus points:

• Interactive and fast
• Complete privacy
• Advanced algorithmic solutions (Detects not just exact matches but also paraphrases, synonyms, and reordered sentences/sentence parts.)

15. Blogger

For those using Blogger, its mobile version is a must-have. Its core functions are the same: create posts, assign publication dates, switch between several accounts, etc. Find it at Google Play.

Office

No marketer can manage projects and campaigns without documenting them. What instrument do you use for that?

16. Kingsoft Office

A free alternative to Microsoft Office, this tool allows creating text documents, notes, sheets, and presentations. Kingsoft syncs with Google and Adobe PDF files, gives you access to Dropbox, OneDrive, Evernote, and Box, supports over ten file formats, is available in 46 languages, and isn’t large in size (30 MB).

17. Google Docs and Sheets

Docs and Sheets’ core functions are the same as with the web version: Create and edit files, work in groups and offline, inter-operate with Microsoft Word, and auto-save your documents. Available for Android and iOS, Google Sheets share the same plus points: inter-operation with Excel, auto saving, group work on projects, and offline access.

18. Adobe Reader

This application allows you to open and create PDF files, comment on them, choose a reading format, highlight texts with different instruments, and more. Adobe‘s plus points include:

• Opens files from any application with public access
• Prints documents from mobile devices
• Exports files to Word and Excel
• Works with Dropbox files

19. Google Presentations

As with the web version, this app allows you to create beautiful presentations for your marketing goals. Google Presentations make it possible to organize a video meeting. It’s inter-operative with PowerPoint, it works offline, and it gives you the opportunity to demonstrate slides on different screens.

News

To stay in step with trends, you need a news application on your mobile device. Check the ones below.

20. Flipboard

Flipboard tells the latest news worldwide. Follow interesting topics, create your articles and journals, add accounts, get notifications, etc. It’s available at iTunes and Google Play.

21. Feedly

It’s an RSS reader to find, check, and save publications from any resource on the web.

• Check updates of your favorite news blogs and YouTube channels.
• Find interesting websites by topics.
• Share materials on Facebook, Twitter, Buffer, Evernote, and Pinterest.

22. BBC News

The most popular news channel is on your mobile device now. Download from Google Play or iTunes, watch livestreams, and listen to BBC World Service radio to stay on top of things.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is an integral part of marketing campaigns, so be sure to try the best applications for SMM.

23. Buffer

Manage several social media accounts with Buffer, schedule dates and time for publications, set auto-posting, analyze your activity on social media, and more. Register with a social account and plan your marketing campaigns on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, and LinkedIn.

24. Hootsuite

Join Herschel and NYC in using Hootsuite for marketing, download the application. You’ll get:

• Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn accounts management
• Message exchange
• Scheduling dates and time of publications
• Tracking keywords and brand mentions on Twitter and Facebook
• Analytics

25. IFTTT

If This, Then That is a platform for using functions of several services simultaneously. They call these “recipes,” and you can find them in their Recommended or Collections sections, as well as create your own. Just choose an action (for example, a “like” on Instagram), assign the same for another account (for example, Twitter), and you’ll have a recipe in progress. Also, you can check recipes from other users and share them on social media.

26. Facebook Pages Manager

Use it to create several Facebook pages and manage them from your mobile device. The multifunctional and user-friendly interface allows publishing photos and videos, getting push notifications, scheduling posts, assigning ad campaigns, etc.

27. Facebook Ads Manager

Manage ads on the go, and create and track them to reach people on Facebook and Instagram. Available at Google Play and iTunes, this application helps you assign campaigns and measure results.

Plus points:

• Timely notifications
• Ad editing
• Schedules and budgets adjustment
• Account settings management
• Up-to-date metrics

Also, don’t forget about mobile versions of your favorite social networks: Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and others are perfect marketing channels. Learn how to write compelling content for them, and you’ll rock.

28. Everypost

This social media publishing tool helps to create, customize, schedule, and post content to your accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Flickr, Linkedin, and others.

Plus points of Everypost include:

• Search and curate content
• Create and schedule posts
• Send posts via email
• Sort preferred channels
• Check trending topics
• Shorten URLs
• Mention on Twitter
• Save posts in Dropbox
• Manage groups

29. Tumblr

Tumblr combines blogging and social media. You can read and post articles, network with bloggers, and read the news there.

Plus points:

• Registration from the application itself
• Diversity of file formats to publish
• Tracking posts activity after publication
• Awesome design!

Analytics

No matter how creative a person you are, you need to analyze your marketing strategy to measure its effectiveness and results. Sure, you have these instruments, but have you considered their mobile versions?

30. Google Analytics

A must-have for all digital marketers, Google Analytics‘ free application is available for both Android and iOS users. There’s no need to enumerate all the data you can get from this analytical tool (there’s a lot!). All it takes is in-depth analysis and tracking of key marketing metrics in real time.

31. Brand24

Brand24 is a powerful tool for real-time social media monitoring and analytics. It allows keeping track of conversations about brands and products, as well as collecting social data from multiple sources. Its features include but are not limited to:

• Email alerts
• Customer insights
• Influencer analysis
• Infographics
• Metrics around buzz and sentiment
• Automated PDF reports

Visual Content

Why care about visuals for your marketing strategy? Because content with images increases view rate by 94 percent and your audience’s desire to read it by 80 percent. Posts with images produce 180 percent more engagement, and people are 85 percent more likely to buy after watching a video about a product. To make your visuals rock, consider the following applications.

32. Aviary

This photo editor is a powerful tool for creating and editing images in seconds. Download Aviary to take photos, upload them from any device or online, adjust color and contrast, crop, use filters and effects to make your visual content more appealing, and more.

33. Flickr

Flickr is a popular service to upload, organize, and share photos and videos from any device. Download from Google Play or iTunes, and you’ll get:

• Free 1000GB to work
• Instant access to Flickr collections
• Dozens of filters and visual effects for editing content

To use this application, you’ll need a Yahoo profile. Also, Flickr doesn’t allow you to edit videos.

34. Adobe Photoshop Express

This application from Photoshop helps you edit photos with over 20 instruments and filters. You can crop and flip images, adjust contrast and white balance, remove spots and dust, import photos in raw format, and share to all social sites.

35. Flipagram

Create fun photo-video content for your marketing projects with Flipagram. Choose music to add to your images and videos, and tell your brand’s story in a visually pleasing way.

36. Adobe Premiere Clip

Use this application from Adobe to create and edit videos for your marketing campaign. Premiere Clip allows branding video clips, importing content to Dropbox, and publishing to Twitter directly.

Plus points:

• Sound synchronization
• Interactive images
• Photo collections
• User-friendly interface for better editing
• Automatic video creation

37. BeFunky

This photo editor is one of the most feature-filled editing apps, as it allows you to make collages, use fonts, frames, and stickers. BeFunky needs no registration, it’s user-friendly and visually pleasing, and it makes your visual content appealing and loved by consumers.

Email Marketing

Use emails as an extra source of traffic and conversion? Consider these specific instruments to help you succeed.

38. MailChimp

The world’s leading email marketing platform is available for both Android and iOS. Download MailChimp to send letters, add contacts, track a mail status, and get reports.

39. Zoho

Used by The New York Times and Mashable, Zoho is an email platform that allows you to sign in with social accounts (Facebook, Twitter) and schedule newsletters.

Plus points:

• Multiple account support
• Conversation view
• Quick swipe actions
• Advanced search
• Work offline
• Integrated calendar

40. SendPulse

Send different types of letters and SMS through SendPulse. Add contacts, track results, get notifications, analyze effectiveness, and modify your email marketing strategy accordingly.

41. TED

No matter if you crave more creativity or analytics in your marketing, we all need inspiration to keep on moving. The application to help here is TED with its huge collection of video lectures on diverse topics. With the “ideas worth spreading” motto, TED allows you to learn and inspire from personal stories of successful people.

Plus points:

• Over 2,000 videos with subtitles 100 languages
• Downloadable videos and podcasts
• TED Radio Hour
• Bookmarks for creating individual playlists
• Watching on mobile devices or with Chromecast and Android TV

Useful marketing instruments are many, and it’s close to impossible to test them all and choose the most appropriate ones. Be on the lookout for compelling lists of top tools of digital marketers (like the one you’re reading right now), consider free versions to find out if their features are efficient enough for your projects, and choose sides for good.

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Top 8 Web Trends in China You Need to Know

The Chinese web and social media landscape changes so quickly. New functions, apps, trends and patterns of usage emerge day by day. If someone hasn’t paid close attention, they’ve missed a lot. So many new digital players are competing in this area but the most prestigious ones are Alibaba and Tencent. The BAT BAT stands

Author information

Olivier Verot

Olivier Verot contributes a monthly column on Chinese Social Media. Olivier, who describes himself as, "A French man lost in China for several years," speaks Chinese, reads Chinese, and uses Chinese social media almost everyday. Passionate about Digital Marketing, in 2012 he realized his dream : to open an agency to live from his passion. Olivier likes to share his knowledge with others, exchange ideas, and is always open to meeting new and interesting people in Shanghai.

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How to Set Up a Facebook Messenger Ad

Do you want to boost revenue for your next launch or promotion? Have you thought about using Facebook Messenger ads to engage prospects? Messenger ads provide a personal experience for customers and prospects. In this article, you’ll discover how to create a Facebook Messenger ad. What Are Messenger Ads? A Messenger ad is a Facebook

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