Once a minority in the ‘real world’ population, millennials are the global economy’s new powerhouse. Researchers at Barkley calculate that millennials control $200 billion of direct purchasing power, and the U.S. Census Bureau estimates that they are the largest demographic group in history.
Once upon a time, clicks and impressions were the currency of digital media. But today, times are changing. With banner blindness being the norm, advertisers are looking for new ways to get more out of their digital advertising investments. They’re looking to build long-term relationships through leads that they can nurture. The problem? There’s often a disconnect between media companies and advertisers.
How do our brains react to advertisements?
Well, it depends on the ad. It takes 250 milliseconds for the brain to absorb visual cues, but only 13 milliseconds for images to elicit emotion — even if you aren’t fully absorbing what you’re seeing. So if you want to create more effective advertisements, you should use design and copy that foster an emotional response in your viewers.
We all know that improving conversion rates on lead generation campaigns translates to more leads for advertisers. Yet most publishers don’t have a strategy in place for improving these numbers. Easier said than done, right?
It’s getting harder—much harder—for media companies to acquire engaged audiences. There are two major reasons behind this trend: there’s a lot of content floating around the Internet, and readers’ attention spans are spread thin as a result. Not to mention, audiences will often find content through feed-style engines on Facebook and Twitter or through search engines when they’re looking for information, in-the-moment.
When Jonah Peretti was in college, he didn’t think he’d be founding and growing two of the biggest internet media empires in the world. He was an environmental studies major who took computer classes on the side — but he was always curious about why ideas spread.
Ten years after he graduated college, this same curiosity spurred him to build The Huffington Post and BuzzFeed, which are now regarded as some of the most popular sites on the web.
Ad blocking is causing a lot of stir in the the news lately, most recently brought into the spotlight by Apple’s release of iOS 9. That which has come to keep the lights on for many publishers is now seriously at risk of being taken away if ad blocking continues to scale and prevent display ads from being served to mobile users.
The emphasis that publishers are placing on their email lists is stronger than ever. HubSpot’s Publishing Benchmarks Report shows that 64.6% of B2B and 48% of B2C media companies rely on email banner ads and newsletter sponsorship for monetization. The reason why is clear: email remains one of the most direct ways to engage audiences. Research from VentureBeat shows that email marketing delivers the highest ROI of all marketing channels.
Twitter is a busy place, with more than 500 million tweets flying out into the world each day. This global conversation among people, companies, brands, and industries is reshaping how B2B publishers communicate. And frankly, some are transitioning better than others.
The waters of the publishing industry have been turbulent at best over the past few years. First, media companies had to find a way to connect with readers online amidst the onslaught of free content produced each day.
The digital ecosystem has reached a critical inflection point: mobile exceeded desktop usage for the first time in Internet history. This trend creates new opportunities and challenges for the digital publishing industry. How do you create consistent experiences across devices? How do you quantify the value of your mobile audience? How can you better support your advertisers’ mobile marketing goals?
When we first started HubSpot over nine years ago, I didn’t know much about marketing; I only knew I didn’t like being marketed to. I didn’t see what good it did to interrupt people just to push a product on them. It’s not the sort of thing you’d wish on yourself, so why put it on others?
It was that observation — that flaw in the way that marketing traditionally worked — that laid the foundation for inbound marketing.
This post originally appeared on HubSpot’s Agency Post. To read more content like this, subscribe to Agency Post.
With clickthrough rates of 1% to 5%, mobile banner ads are a sad savior for publishers looking to drive advertising revenue. But they can’t ignore this, as people are increasingly turning to their mobile devices to consume content.
Consider this: Elite Daily saw a 61% drop in desktop traffic between January 2014 and June 2015, said Nicole Goksel, vice president of revenue operations, at the Digital Publishing Innovation Summit.
Rory Brown, chief content officer at Bleacher Report, said at the same conference that he has seen points in time where 90% of the site’s traffic came from mobile devices.
Reading on mobile devices has skyrocketed, opening up a world of opportunities for publishers and advertisers looking to hedge big bets on small screens.
However, mobile ad-blocking technology is also making strides. Apple, titan of mobile devices, indicated recently that they were planning to include content-blocking technologies in iOS 9 – an addition that would also cut off majority of ads encoded in a site’s JavaScript. Advertisers and publishers alike might be in trouble if they don’t step back and reassess their mobile strategies.
