Marketing Digest January 2017: Super Bowl Special

If the Super Bowl taught us anything this past weekend, it's that every second counts! Even when you leave it late, there's always an opportunity to get back into the game and go for glory.  Sporting analogies aside, the same is true for marketing your small business. Even if you didn't start out early with the latest new tool or a hot new trend, that doesn't mean you can't take advantage of it now. This month's marketing digest - our look back at the industry's most recent news, views, and analysis - follows that theme. Read on for some promotional ideas and branding resources that will deliver a motivational boost to your marketing that even Bill Belichick would be proud of! Marketing Digest: January 2017

The first month of the year is often an organizational one for marketers. Fresh from some (hopefully) hugely successful holiday campaigns, it's a time to review what went well, what could be done better, and how to translate it all into an improved strategy for the year ahead. That means that you'll find a lot of excellent resources and tools being mentioned that can help to build your brand. If you're looking for that X-factor to take your marketing to the next level, explore the articles and ideas below. We're confident that there will something valuable for businesses of all shapes and sizes here, so let us know on Facebook or Twitter what worked for you.

• In many ways, January sets the scene for everything to come over the next 12 months. With that in mind, Google asked five high-profile brand execs for their thoughts on the most important marketing questions to ask in 2017. What would your answers be? More importantly, what questions do you need to ask of your marketing team this year?
• Video is widely seen as the next frontier for marketers to conquer. New formats like VR and live-streaming will make getting up to speed a little more complex, but experimenting in this arena will be one of the best ways to take advantage of branded visuals and the greater organic reach that social networks offer, as they try to promote this kind of content.
• Brands stand out when they stand for something. The most buzzworthy brands at Super Bowl 51 were the little-known 84 Lumber, who circled around the subject of immigration, and Audi, who tried to champion pay equality. This is certainly not everyone's preferred method to get attention, but a surefire way to stoke interest and generate conversation.

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• Social media is the second most popular way to acquire new customers, according to Bizible, with only e-mail marketing ahead of it. However, questions remain about how social networks should be used and whether the ROI is sufficient to justify the time and money now required to cut through the noise. The takeaway here is to always have a clear metric in mind to judge the success or failure of your marketing channels and tools. Don't jump on the latest trend without a plan in place to measure its unique performance for your business.
• The Consumer Electronics Show opened 2017 in Las Vegas and was abuzz with smart home devices to make our lives easier. The digital assistants built into hardware like Amazon's Echo and Google's Home are seen as the most important aspect of this technology. They will link everything together, from phones and tablets to smart kitchens and cars, making voice-activated commands increasingly popular. While the potential to integrate with smartphones and place calls without lifting a finger is exciting, marketers must be aware that improved tracking and call analytics will be crucial to fully take advantage of this developing channel.
• Facebook made a big push to get users onto its standalone Messenger app in the last couple of years. Now it's becoming clear why, as ads rolls out on the popular mobile chat platform. It might take some time to get them rolled out globally but smart marketers will start thinking now about how they can use this new space. Messenger has more than 1 billion users at the time of writing and many see chat apps/chatbots as the future of customer communication.

This section is intended to help you plan, so let us know what you'd like to see in future monthly marketing digests. If you're here to make your marketing more memorable, take a look at the custom numbers available in your industry today!