The Rise of the Global Sales Phenomenon: Black Friday

We are at the eve of one of the greatest shopping day of the whole year. I believe some rings already rung on your mind. Yes, we are talking about that magnificent day, aka Black Friday.

Black Friday is the first Friday of the week which comes after U.S. Thanksgiving holiday, but as a citizen of the world, we grasp that day’s meaning differently. In brief, we see it as a day full of discounts and special shopping deals. Moreover, given the fact that December is filled with holidays, Black Friday could stand for the beginning of the holiday shopping season. This can be mentioned confidentially that this very season plays a crucial role for not just the economy of the country, but the whole world. The ascending interest for Black Friday is plain as a day.

Just like 2020, this year as well, coronavirus pandemic loomed over the annual shopping event. For those who think Black Friday is a tradition, restrictions became a quite vexing problem. However, when it comes to discounts who can stop the shopaholics? eCommerce sales reach its climax when many retailers put their Black Friday deals and discounts online.

Enough with shooting the breeze, let’s dive into the serious stuff. Why this day play a tremendous role in the economy and how social media effect to the efficiency of Black Friday.

The Creation and Evolvement of Black Friday

history of the black friday

There are two occasions where the term Black Friday has been used and surprisingly they have a little connection whatsoever. First one’s history goes back to 1869, when financier Jay Gould and railway magnate James Fisk attempt to put gold market through the hoops to hike the prices. However, that plan backfired and in September 24, pass into the history as the date of financial panic. These implacable Wall Street financiers’ conspiracy unraveled on Friday and that event resulted with bankrupting everyone, from cashed up barons to penurious farmers.

Right now most commonly used Black Friday term is refer to the day after Thanksgiving, which is often considered the first day of the holiday shopping season and is known for featuring discounts from retailers. However, why choose the black color to express a quite jolly day, and is there any specific reason hides behind the selection of Friday out of all week?

The thing is retailers are the ones who kind of formed that tradition. During the year, retailers were marking their loss with red color, and black, on the other hand, was symbolized the profit they made. Moreover, supposedly on the day after Thanksgiving sales would go into the black , because holiday shoppers spent so much money on discounted products. We don’t know for a fact that retail companies used to record losses in red and profits in black when doing their accounting, this version of Black Friday’s origin is the closest version we have to the truth.

First Things First, Change

social media

Social media plays an irreplaceable role to drive the traffic towards online shopping. Coronavirus pandemic changed the whole worlds approach towards their traditional behaviors. That has been said that, this year 62% of the customers keep themselves away from entering to the actual store on Black Friday. This a good sign, at least we can be happy that people have the awareness to protect themselves, yet is it interfere with the astounding success of Black Friday? Certainly, not, because eCommerce fill in for the physical loss.

If you want to drive referrals to eCommerce sites you need to know which one could be more beneficial for your business. Although Facebook leads the queue, Instagram and Pinterest are the ones which are the most context-specific influential social media platforms.

Here comes one more necessary detail: If your focus is young audience, more specifically, Gen Z TikTok will be the gateway towards your aim. Snapchat and Twitter can seem left behind, but when you are roll up your sleeves to prepare your social media plan for Black Friday bear them in your mind too.

Everything Changes if One Thing Changes

Online shopping

At least once in our life all of us have seen a footage where people are literally marching into the stores at the crack of dawn. Pushing and pulling, fighting over an item or walking all over the things which stands on your way. Seems familiar for many of us, yet that is not the worst part at all. The destruction that these so called customers leaves behind evoke the scenery from post-apocalyptic movies for salespeople.

Fortunately, more and more, consumers are choosing to shop online. When we pause a little and think who would want to wait outside for hours or have an actual fight over the last most-cherished item? These all were happening years ago, but the coronavirus pandemic pushed shoppers online more than ever in 2020.

Tomorrow will be the biggest Black Friday ever for eCommerce sellers. Thereby don’t let anything hold you back or stir your vision. Try to make the most of it with social media, email marketing and advertising. Engage with your audience and stay true to your brand, success will come to you when you take the law in your own hand.

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Pharmaceutical Company Implemented Solutions based on AI and ML Technologies

For a long time, I have been engaged in search engine optimization of websites, which in turn helps websites to rise in search engine results. Such actions should contribute to the growth of business in general by increasing the organic users on the site, but unfortunately in practice, this is not always the case and business may not grow, or even work at a loss.

I know cases when unscrupulous SEO companies simply deceive their clients, for example, they promise a guarantee of getting into the top keywords, promise to increase traffic by N percent, I have also met cases of guarantees of receiving leads, so-called lead generation, but they all ended up failing and clients lost their money. In the future, I will write an article about what you should pay attention to when working with an SEO company or inbound link building service, so as not to get into trouble, but in this article I want to touch something else, about this below.

During my work, I have repeatedly encountered clients complaining about the lack of profit. Often this is due to the fact that the emphasis is placed on the wrong choice of keywords, in other words, keywords simply can not convert sales. For example, a client believes that certain keywords are important for him, but in fact, they do not convert into profit, or initially, the semantic core was created with errors.

Artificial Intelligence Examples, Use Cases based on AI and ML Technologies

Artificial Intelligence

Today, I would like to share the outcomes of my cooperation with a pharmaceutical company located in the United States. The business is focused on extending their research according to the needs of patients, as well as improving their products depending on the feedback from their clients. They contacted me to help them work on ways of communicating with their clients and potential customers.

Real Example of AI in Pharmaceutical Project

After a long discussion, filling out a briefing, deep penetration into this niche, discussing the goals and capabilities of the client, we divided the whole process of cooperation into several stages: analysis, development and implementation. Since the task was not trivial, I wanted to give the same solution, something crazy and at the same time effective.

Our research has shown that clients who want to report side effects of a particular drug or defects of the product, mostly communicate through the phone – approximately 70% of all contact attempts. This type of communication is especially problematic for the company as each case has to be treated individually and requires a lot of time from the support team. 

Customers on the other hand, were not always satisfied with the information they were getting from the support team as the problems are unique. That resulted in low customer satisfaction which in the long term can strongly affect the sales.

Artificial Intelligence Technology Solutions

Technological solutions in the form of a robot

Exactly at that moment I came up with the crazy idea (so it seemed to me at that moment), to use modern technologies for lead generation, namely artificial intelligence solutions. Solutions based on artificial intelligence and machine learning allow companies to better understand their customers, offer more relevant products, as well as get accurate and reliable information from their company data.

Nowadays, when everything is virtual, the implementation of artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies into the pharmaceutical industry is a big step forward in business development. Using artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms, pharmaceutical companies successfully join the global market and create an incredible boom in a short period of time. 

Addepto was chosen as a partner and AI Consulting Company. It was associated with many aspects, first of all, the financial component, as for the implementation of my crazy ideas has limited budget, and after a brief meeting with Edvin (founder of Addepto), it was clear that these guys will make all my dreams come true for not all the money in the world. For that, a special thanks to them and my recommendation!

Real-Time AI Voice Analytics

Voice analytics AI through a regular laptop

And so, the first thing that needed to be done was to improve customer service, increasing employee efficiency and customer satisfaction. To solve the previously mentioned problems with phone service, it was necessary to have something universal and flexible, such as CRM that would cover our requirements and solve our problems, as well as be open-source and scalable at any time. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find such a product in the market, the main problem was that we couldn’t make changes to fit our requirements. If you know such products, I would be glad to meet them in the comments.

The CRM we created could record conversations, had an autoresponder function outside of business hours, also had an analytics system, all the data was displayed on a compact and graphical dashboard so that the company owner (my client) always had important information about the number of calls, the percentage of clients served, and so on.

But there was also one feature that allowed for customer service, and real-time voice analytics at the same time. Our CRM with ML could measure pauses in the conversation in real-time, how many times an agent interrupted a customer, the tone of voice of both customer and agent, and whether the voice was dynamic and interesting or repetitive and boring.

It then provides real-time feedback to the agent so he has an idea of how the customer is feeling during the conversation. In addition, the AI provides recommendations on how to communicate with customers, which leads to stunning business results. The system provides step-by-step instructions to agents in real-time, thereby increasing employee efficiency and customer satisfaction.

Then we went even further, in less than a month we collected so much data that we were able to cluster customers who called, into different groups. That helped us improve customer satisfaction as well as make the job easier for the customer support team.

Predictive Dialing

Predictive Dialer programs select a phone number and dial it for a call center agent, reducing the time it takes to manually dial phone numbers every day. Predictive Dialer predicts how long it will take an agent to answer a call and its availability using algorithms and mathematical formulas.

Virtual AI Assistant

AI Chatbot is a powerful technology tool that is built to communicate with consumers and solve their problems using artificial intelligence solutions.

AI-powered chatbots deliver faster and more personalized customer service. AI virtual agents can understand and access customer data. Therefore, by understanding the needs of consumers, chatbots help consumers to make quick and easy Internet transactions. 

Customer Segmentation for Better Personalization

Customer personalization through segmentation

With the help of unsupervised learning algorithms, companies could divide customers into different groups that can be targeted. The algorithms take into account all available functions and create a wide variety of clusters.

The customer segmentation model allows companies to effectively allocate marketing resources and maximize opportunities for cross-selling and additional sales. Moreover, customer segmentation affects the improvement of customer service, increased loyalty and customer retention.

So, summing up, we continue to work on the project, in general we have been working on it for 12 months, after 10 months the cost of implementing these developments have been fully repaid. For ethical reasons I can not talk about the cost of the project and its profit.

In addition, I have collected a small selection of examples, which in my opinion are worthy of attention. And I would like to implement in my projects something similar

Real-life examples of AI and ML: 1-800-Flowers

1-800-Flowers, in partnership with the IBM Watson AI system, has created an AI customer service bot that receives orders through its website and mobile application. This chatbot accepts customer orders more intuitively than the traditional online ordering form by using Natural Language Understanding (NLU) and Natural Language Generation (NLG).

Sensory Fitness

To handle phone calls to the support service, the brand Sensory Fitness developed Sasha, an AI voice assistant. The AI voice assistant uses natural language understanding (NLU) and natural language generation (NLG) technology for dynamic conversations. In addition, the voice assistant Sasha has built-in text – to-speech technology (TTS), which talks to callers aloud. This solution allows the company to save $ 30,000 a year.

The North Face

The North Face, a major e-commerce retailer, is a great example of a company adopting AI to better understand its consumer’s requirements. Using the IBM Watson AI solution, they help online buyers in finding their perfect jacket. Through AI voice input, the company asks customers questions such as “Where and when will you wear the jacket?” While other IBM software analyzes hundreds of items to identify perfect matches based on real-time feedback and own research, including the weather in the area.

Statistics – AI in Pharmaceutical Industry

Available dashboards for quick analysis
  • According to recent research conducted by USM, about 50% of global healthcare companies plan to implement AI strategies and broadly adopt the technology by 2025.
  • OpenText surveyed 125 pharmaceutical executives to determine how familiar each respondent is with AI technologies within their industry. The survey results revealed that an interest in AI increased to 85% in 2020.

Keypoints

  • Artificial intelligence and machine learning have a huge impact on the pharmaceutical industry.
  • AI-powered and machine learning solutions allow companies to better understand their customers, offer more relevant products and get reliable insights from their company data.
  • Nowadays, customers have a simpler, faster, more personalized and more convenient way to communicate with companies than ever before.

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How To Become An Influencer In 2021

Are you wondering how to become an influencer in 2021? If yes, then you are not alone. With the growing popularity of social media platforms, more people are starting to realize the importance of becoming an influencer. 

Without any doubt, social media influencers are in high demand and popular these days. People follow them, brands want to collaborate with them, and they become a known face in no time.

Are you wondering what influencers are? An influencer is someone who has millions of followers on social media and whose recommendations are followed by brands or individuals. Further, influencers can be skilled individuals, groups of industry leaders, travelers, sportspeople, and other professionals.

There is also an increase in influencer marketing as it gives marketers direct access to an influencer’s loyal fan base. Following these tips will help you become an influencer in 2021 and beyond.

Find Out Your Niche


The first step is to identify the niche as it is an essential part of your journey as an influencer in 2021. The niche should be something that allows you to showcase your skills and help you grow them further.

When deciding on to become an influencer, you have the following categories to choose from:

·  Travel

·  Health

·  Fashion

·  Gaming

·  Food

·  Lifestyle

·  Phone reviews

·  Market reviews

·  Entertainment

·  Tech and more.

But you don’t need to limit yourself to one niche, according to your interest and skills, you can combine two or more niches. You can even turn your hobby into an influencer, which you can read more about here: https://keepface.com.

Choose Your Platform

Now, the next step is to decide or pick the platform to cover your niche on social networks. There are Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and many more platforms that you can use to become an influencer with your niche.

If you desire to create videos of travel or any other niche, then YouTube or Instagram is the best option. On the other hand, for blogs and content in a niche, LinkedIn is the best choice.  

 Media like Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram are especially successful for fashion, lifestyle, travel, and beauty. The key here is to choose a format or social media network according to your niche. Also, you should get a domain name for your channel or blog. You can check premium names from trusted sites like https://domainify.com/.

Create High-Quality Content


Keep in mind that the “content is king.” High-quality content is really important to become a successful influencer. So, think about how you can create good content that is related to your niche.

Make sure you will need to offer value to your audience through the content so that people feel connected with you and wait for your next content piece. You will get attention only if you offer what the audience wants.

Be Authentic and Consistent


People can follow you or see you only if you are consistent with your work as an influencer. No one likes a person who is not authentic and consistent. Your followers will unsubscribe you or forget you over time if you fail to regularly offer them good content.

Majority of the audience of influencers follows them because they put so much effort to be the best version of themselves. Moreover, they always brace themselves to meet the expectations of their followers. Being honest and authentic is somehow part of the game. Because once they get caught while cheating or double-dealing you will fall from grace overnight.

Listen to your viewers

Another best way to become a perfect influencer is to offer what your audience wants. For this, you can search your niche on Google and find what kind of content people like. After this, determine the long-tail keywords used by your audience and create content similar to them. You can also make use of social media platforms to understand the taste of your audience.

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Their Turn To Shine: Micro Beauty Influencers

I don’t know how many of you will agree with me but right now make-up is like a way-out, not just for beauty influencers but for many of us from troubles of the world we live in. Given the fact that 2020 was a complete mess, and unsurprisingly 2021 is on the skids, things are not going smoothly for us. Deadly pandemic, global movement for racial justice, wars, illnesses, feminine, stock market crash, wildfires and many more. However, in our little, shiny worlds we try to escape from the world’s brutality in different ways. 

Maybe that will sound a bit cheesy but make-up unites us. Besides, I have proof to support my opinions.

Hello, You Beautiful Things

Whether you are into make-up, beauty topics or not, we all have heard the name of “ Huda Beauty”. An Iraqi-American make-up artist and entrepreneur Huda Kattan founded her brand Huda Beauty with her sisters, Mona and Alya. That woman is the true definition of determination because she turned a $6,000 loan into a billion dollars business. Struggles, disappointments, exertions burn into ashes and she just remembered that the passion was her true north. 

The Dutch make-up artist, Nikkie de Jager could also be a great example to prove my point. De Jager, better known as NikkieTutorials, made it known that she was threatened and blackmailed by people who had knowledge about her true identity. They were bullying her by leaking  her story to the press. However, it all backfired because after Nikkie’s coming out video her make-up community supported her cordially.

Both of these marvellous women are quite popular, yet there are countless number of micro influencers who made a name for themselves on the beauty topic and are high on the agenda because of their make-up tutorial videos. Nevertheless, have you thought about why make-up and beauty topics set the wood on fire? If the answer is negative then let’s find out together.

Black Days in the Bright Era

Unfortunately, things were a bit more severe in the past. During the second world war production of cosmetics diminished and it was subjected to the luxury tax. make-up announced as lessening morale and putting interest in people’s appearances. Buying beauty products condemned by so many during the economic recession.

Beauty and make-up topics are a little bit controversial from the beginning. Even right now, in our current era,the Cenozoic, if the amount of product you put on your own face or body is not appropriate for some, you will be criticized, marginalized or even abused by a complete stranger.

Despite all those condemnation, in our social-media era, we are not using make-up to diverge, we are using it to communicate, to make ourselves heard. Increasing interest over make-up and beauty topics are not coming from quarantine weariness, it is a safe haven from brutal realities. Besides, if something is making both creator and viewers happy, why drill it with questions.

Beauty Shines Through The Flaws

Before occupying ourselves with the speculations about what are the trends thriving amongst niche beauty micro-influencers on Instagram at the moment, we should raise our heads and take a look around. Everyday we pass by far too many fashionably elegant and sophisticated women, on the crosswalk or at our local cafe, yet most of the time never give our attention to their appearances.  Because organic make-up, astounding colors on upturned eyelids, flashy lip glosses on full lips, breathtaking voluminous hair shouldn’t slip beneath the radar. 

Whether you’re a brand who wants to find the best matching beauty influencers or just a beauty addict knowing who shows the maximum effort to deserve being your brand face or mentor is your right. In our list we have collected more than  2000 high quality beauty, make-up influencers from the US who will be the best match to carry out your marketing campaign. Moreover, their signature style and devoted following will make sure everything will go smoothly during and after the campaign.

Keepface will assist you during the process as an influencer marketing software which helps you identify, recruit, and negotiate with influencers in one platform. You can find influencers with any audience and engagement rates in Keepface database with spending less time. Filter influencers by category, country, engagement rate, followers, gender, budget as well as analyze their key metrics to find the best-fitting influencers for your campaigns.

Hall of Fame 

If we have your attention then let’s take a look at these remarkable micro beauty influencers. Once you have access to our influencer  lists you will see that the spectrum of influencers vary from 1K to over 300K and you can find lifestyle, fashion, travel and many more focused influencer categories within the list. 

For instance in the DailyCurlz website you will see an influencer who lives her life to the fullest. Her page isn’t dedicated to just simple hair or beauty hacks, she shares her view on products she used firsthand, events she attended, even you can find a segment where she posts about food and wine, even DIY included into her site. Despite the fact that she has a lot on her plate, yet her engagement rate is 11.51%. 

Now time to talk about another wonderful example of a micro beauty influencer, Madeline Torres. This young mother regularly shares compelling posts on her Instagram account. She has 58.6K followers and her engagement rate is 4.16%. So, if you have a brand that wants women who just bought a life into the world to feel included in the beauty topic, you should give it a thought to collaborate with her too.  

The lists we have prepared for you will definitely help you to get the result you aimed for your campaigns more easily. That method will prevent you from losing the most precious thing for a brand in a rush which is time. Moreover, most importantly finding the right influencers for your campaign is quite risky and majority of the time the reason for campaigns to fail. Only the right match will give the feeling of belonging to the target audience. Once the target audience shares the same outlook with the product micro beauty influencers there will be no odds to jeopardize the results you aimed for. So I don’t think there is much to talk about, now you should go to Keepface.com and purchase your first list then enjoy your campaign.

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Take a Look into the Future of Social Media Influence: An All-in-one Decentralized Ecosystem

Keepface has been a bridge between influencers and brands since 2017. As an influencer marketing (IM) platform, Keepface enables advertisers  to reach the most relevant influencers, communicate with them, and manage campaigns using up-to-date analytics. With its 1.3 billion potential outreach and more than 400K influencers in its database, Keepface has managed 1500+ campaigns with well-known brands such as Uber, Microsoft, Samsung, and many more.

Now, it is time to share with you some great news that we are all excited about!  

Given the challenges and hardships involving commercialized influence between advertisers, influencers, and their audiences, we at Keepface, decided to work on a potential permanent fix – a decentralized and tokenized ecosystem that will enable all the stakeholders to easily engage in a transparent and incentivized manner. 

As a native currency of the soon-to-be decentralized and tokenized Keepface ecosystem, Keepcoin will enable all the stakeholders to easily engage in a transparent and incentivized manner.

In order to understand the current issues related to the commercialized influence and to demonstrate our solution, we will have a detailed look at each party involved in the process: advertisers, influencers, and the audiences. Let’s start with the advertisers.

Advertisers

To work with the right influencers for their campaigns, it is important for advertisers to track influencers’ key performance metrics. Currently, with the advanced influencer analytics, our Keepface platform allows advertisers to find the most suitable influencers based on their location, category, engagement rate, audience, gender, average or estimated price, and tags alongside with the audience filters. Additionally, the Shop Discovery and Smart Matching features also will allow advertisers to search for relevant influencer shops where their products can be listed. 

Despite the functionality and usability of the current Keepface platform, we have observed that advertisers face some difficulties when working with influencers given fraudulent Social Media activity, lack of transparency, payment and authenticity issues. Non-disclosure of influencers’ past campaigns and inability to run performance-based campaigns makes it more complicated for advertisers to work with influencers. However, with the decentralized Keepface ecosystem, advertisers will have access to influencers’ past campaigns, and they will be able to focus highly on the results. More importantly, Keepcoin will ensure transparent and smooth transactions between influencers and advertisers. Also, the mentioned parties will communicate in a more efficient and incentivized manner. 

Influencers

When it comes to influencers, they are most likely to encounter challenges in regards to the direct monetization of their influence. Also, the advertiser compensation could be often lower than the advertiser requirements. Not to mention, they risk losing their credibility if advertised products do not meet audiences’ expectations. So, the mission of Keepcoin is to address the aforementioned challenges and allow influencers to easily monetize their audience via influencer shops ranging from physical to digital products and NFT marketplaces. 

How do we maintain transparency between influencers and advertisers?

One of the key points of the proposed ecosystem is transparency from the perspective of both sides: influencers, and advertisers. The ad affinity will not only allow advertisers to see influencers’ past campaigns and performance, but also their rankings determined by the previous advertisers’ rating. Likewise, influencers also will be able to rate their experience with the advertisers through evaluating their authenticity, product quality, requirements, and offerings.

The Audience

The decentralized Keepface ecosystem will also facilitate audience and influencer engagement. The influencer sub-platform will be built with a strong emphasis on communications with audiences allowing them to rate the influencers and their shop products. More importantly, they will be able to tip and directly message (DM) the influencers. The performance of the audience will also be assessed, as regular users will get points based on their activity such as tipping and rating influencers. While the audience points will not have any intrinsic value, they will demonstrate community reputation and dedication encouraging loyalty.

Keepcoin, Commercialize Influence!

We are building a transparent, second layer decentralized ecosystem that addresses the very challenges involved in commercialized influence. With Keepcoin, advertisers will be able to work with influencers on a data-driven and performance-based mechanism; influencers will be able to effectively monetize their influence, and the audiences will have the opportunity to directly engage with, and support influencers. Hence, as an integral part of Keepface ecosystem, Keepcoin creates a tokenized and incentive-based network for all the involved parties.

Visit keepface.io to learn more.

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Advertisers, Influencers, and The Audiences: A New Look at the Challenges of Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is a type of social media marketing that uses endorsements and product mentions from influencers–individuals who have a dedicated social following and are viewed as experts within their niche. Influencer marketing works because of the high amount of trust that social influencers have built up with their following, and recommendations from them serve as a form of social proof to your brand’s potential customers. Today, more than ever, consumers are choosing to listen to each other over brands. That’s why influencers are so powerful. They are trusted individuals with loyal followings across digital platforms. Influencers start conversations and make it easier for brands to target their audiences on a big scale. 

First thing you need to know is that influencer marketing is heading to be bigger than ever, recent estimates show influencer marketing set to become a $15 billion dollar industry by 2022, according to Business Insider. To add, 63% of marketers plan to increase their influencer marketing budgets in this year (2021). And, despite influencer marketing being a relatively young industry, 89% of marketers find it more profitable

With the rise of influencer marketing, more and more advertisers choose influencers to promote their products in the most authentic and efficient way. Thus, influencer marketing is a great way to reach your target audience and build brand awareness among like-minded individuals. But, despite the exceptional growth, there are a number of unaddressed challenges that advertisers, influencers, and influencer audiences are encountering. Let’s look at what these challenges are.

Advertisers

Influencer marketing has risen in popularity over the years, driven in part by driving sales, quality content creation and third-party credibility. But as the industry has grown, some issues have emerged. These are major problems which advertisers can come across during influencer marketing campaigns.

  • Difficulty and time-loss in finding the right influencers.
  • Fraudulent SM activity and fake following of an influencer. Inability to acquire in-depth SM audience analytics. 
  • Difficulties in conducting payment transactions, especially if the parties are based in different countries (includes government regulations as well).
  • Trust concerns among advertisers and influencers. This is a common issue especially when both, or one of the parties is anonymous. 
  • Scalability of the campaigns – difficulties that involve dealing with a large number of influencers.
  • Difficulty in tracking the overall campaign results, especially the sales. 

Influencers

Like advertisers, influencers also face some issues in the commercialized influence. Influencers pursuing commercial activity may encounter the below-mentioned challenges in general.

  • Advertiser offerings that demand higher quality posting but offer lower compensation. 
  • Difficulties in direct monetization of the audience (selling influencer products or getting ad revenue). The lack of easier solutions.
  • Uncertainty in the advertiser’s product quality, which may lead to the loss of the audience credibility.
  • The risk of losing some credibility because of sponsored postings. This may become a major issue for an influencer if the sponsor becomes a target of a public backlash.
  • Inability to gather and address all the channel audiences in one place.  

The Audiences

The parasocial relationship between the influencers and the audience trumps the opinion leadership and the audience is usually more willing to engage if the influencer content is more authentic. However, with the current state of influencer marketing and in a context of commercialized influencer – audience relationships, the audience engagement is mostly limited to social media features such as “likes”, “comments” and “shares”. Although some popular social media platforms have already implemented rewarding systems like badges or  the ability to tip influencers, a thorough solution for commercialized influence is missing. Moreover, the audience is interested to engage with, and support all social media channels of an influencer in one place without constantly visiting different platforms. 

The Solution

The solution is to build a transparent, second layer decentralized ecosystem on top of the existing Social Media networks. At Keepface, we are building that very ecosystem by addressing the challenges of all the involved parties. With the launch of Keepcoin, which will be the native currency of the Keepface ecosystem, we are developing a tokenized and incentive-based network for advertisers, influencers, and the audiences. 

At the current stage, our Keepface platform effectively allows more than 5000 registered advertisers to communicate, and work with over 400 thousand influencers globally. More than 100 influencers have their own Keepface e-commerce shops where advertisers too can list their products by agreeing with the influencers.

Keepcoin would allow us to take the Keepface ecosystem to the next level by tokenizing, decentralizing and more importantly, by adding the missing piece of the puzzle, which is the audience. 

  • Advertisers will have easier, more data-driven and performance-oriented solutions. 
  • Influencers will have more means to monetize their influence with their shops and NFT marketplaces.
  • Audiences will be able to engage closely with influencers by direct communications or support, product, and personal ratings. 

Visit keepface.io to learn more.

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Influencer Marketing: The What, Why, and Hows

In recent years influencer marketing gained momentum over traditional digital marketing, and it is a hot topic for everybody these days. To promote their products, prestigious advertisers spend fortunes on influencer marketing. 

It is the known fact that running influencer marketing campaigns consume plenty of resources, including significant budgets alongside with a small-size separate team. However, what if you are a company with a limited budget, a startup, or you simply do not have the money to pay an agency to start an influencer marketing campaign for you. You cannot afford celebrities, but you also want to be promoted in social media efficiently. Firsts are always harder than seconds, but Keepface makes every step of the process easier for you. 

influencer-marketing

Sure you have already heard about influencer marketing but let’s briefly sum it up now. Influencer marketing goes conjointly with two other types of marketing which are probably more familiar to you: social media marketing and content marketing. Influencer marketing, on the other hand, is a type of marketing that content creators- influencers- that have a unique relationship with a particular audience to promote a brand through social media. 

Word of mouth marketing has always been the most dominant form of marketing, from the first time when people start to sell their products, the verbal message still stands valid today. So influencer marketing is based on the fact that consumers trust other consumers more than they believe advertisers.

Here is the list of key steps to make influencer marketing work for your business.

#1 Set Your Goals

This will help you to find the right influencer for your brand. Why would you like to work with influencers? What are your goals? What are you looking for? Impressions? Clicks? Conversions? All these metrics serve to measure the performance of your campaign. 

Awareness

Awareness is your main goal if it is your first promotion or you are promoting a new product. It is better to advertise your brand through influencers from a specific niche. Impressions are key metrics for measuring awareness.

Community Engagement

community-engagement

You may grow awareness about your brand or products in multiple ways, but this one is the greatest and favorable. Engagement helps to see the customer attitude towards your brand. Trigger responses from a specific community, through vouchers, contests, and targeted campaigns. This helps your content reach new users, and gives the influencer something unique to offer their followers.

“It’s important to gain trust initially rather than focus entirely on how you’re going to earn. It can take time, but ultimately worth it,” comments Ruban Selvanayagam of UK homebuying company / group, Property Solvers.

Sales

The sale is the ultimate goal of any project. But if it is your primary goal, you need to focus on click and conversions. The niche community you target may prove to be a good and reliable source of customers.

Business Fit

Along with social media metrics you need to pay attention to other qualities like niche and brand fit. The importance of the influencer niche is laid on a coherent base because you need to be sure that it aligns with yours. In other words, any influencer you choose needs to be in accordance with your particular audience. 

Reputation is another crucial factor to consider when finding an influencer even though some influencers have a loyal following but alienate many others. If the influencer you want to engage in is not an authentic person, consider the fact that you may forfeit your potential or existing customers.

Once you know what you aim to achieve, you can set a budget to pay an influencer for your brand. This also lets you think about how to reward influencers. For example, you may consider an upfront payment in addition to the commission for any sales made.

#2 Identify Your Channels

social-media-platforms

Before all else, your audience has to be your first concern. What do your potential clients or customers like? Where do they spend their time? Then think about yourself: what is the most estimable thing for your brand? Which channel do you want to grow and which one would be the place you can thrive? By knowing your consumers well you will easily incorporate those data to your influencer marketing. 

First, determine which social media platforms you should use based on your business. You can grow your website through influencers on specific niches or just through specific bloggers who generate a lot of traffic and write about things comparable to your technique or you can go with social media platforms.

Instagram

Now an almost $2 billion industry, Instagram influencer marketing has taken the social media world by storm. The app offers the perfect space for the brand ambassadorship, with influential users authentically recommending products and services to their loyal audience. With the influencer space estimated to grow to a $5-10 billion industry by 2021, it’s a marketing force that isn’t going anywhere.

Youtube

YouTube is swiftly becoming one of the most popular influencer marketing channels. With recent advancements in internet speeds, video content has become the most preferred content for online activities. While you will find videos on most social networks now, and Instagram has even created a competing long-form video platform – IGTV, YouTube is still the de-facto place for people to come to get their video fix. 

Facebook

In many ways, Instagram has grown to be the star of the Facebook stable of social media apps. It may no longer be the social network of choice for adolescents, but it can even claim dominance of the social market, with over 2.32 billion active users at the end of 2018.

We don’t talk about Facebook influencer marketing as much as we do marketing on Instagram. But if your target demographic uses Facebook, it is where your influencer marketing should be.  

Twitter

As of 2019, there are approximately 330 million active monthly users on Twitter, making it one of the biggest social networks globally. Consider the steady growth in the number of active monthly users on Twitter for the past few years. 

TikTok

As with all influencer and social media marketing, you have to avoid coming across as too salesy on TikTok. This is particularly the case because of TikTok’s youthful demographic – advertisers find Generation Z notoriously difficult to reach because of their total disdain for anything that resembles a traditional advertisement. As with all influencer marketing, the key to success on TikTok is working with influencers whose followers match your target market. 

#3 Find Your Influencers

After doing numerous research the next thing is finding the influencers to work with you and to create compelling campaigns around your brand. And to roll with your campaign, you have to make sure that you have a perfect influencer brief. 

But, you shouldn’t be a hundred percent sure that they’ll work with you. Sometimes it’s unlikely that they’re accessible from a financial or logistical viewpoint. Also, it’s worth knowing that the influencers you’ve picked might not be in your niche, that means they won’t help you to spread your business’s message to the right people.

At Keepface Influencer Discovery you can easily find the right influencers for your brand without spending extra time and money. If you truly want a successful marketing campaign, you’ll need professionals to do the tasks for you. 

There are no strict rules to prevent you from getting creative or let your influencer be the one. If you use the opportunities social media presents for you to connect with your audience and rely on your influences to act on behalf of you, all those efforts will yield fruitful results.

#4 Manage the Relationship

After hiring influencers for your campaign, you need to nurture the relationship with them for further collaborations. Keep in mind that influencers are business people just like you, with a job to do and a reputation to uphold. 

#5 Measure the Results

You’ve concluded your influencer marketing campaign, now time to measure the results versus your original goals to put a figure on whether it’s worth repeating. Did you get more followers, impressions, leads, clicks, or sales? Calculate your ROI too. What results did you get for the time and money?

Ready to Roll Out Your Influencer Campaign?

Once you’ve assessed your results, then you’ll have an idea of what worked and how to proceed next time to do your utmost. Rinse and repeat the steps for the upcoming campaign. You will have a clear picture of who you’ll work with during your next campaign, and it will help you to refine your strategy. Keepface provides advertisers with all the necessary information they need for influencer marketing. 

Nevertheless, if you are not getting desired results, try a different approach to your influencer marketing. The marketing business changes in a blink of an eye, but these main concepts will mostly hold. Now it’s time to go out there and make the most out of influencer marketing!

Visit keepface.io to learn more.

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Keepface ile Kendi Sanal Mağazanı Kur!

Influenser Mağazası, Keepface tarafından başlatılan yeni bir sanal alışveriş sitesidir. Mağaza Nisan ayında faaliyete başlasa da bu seminal platformun bir parçası olmak isteyen influenserlerin sayısı her geçen gün artıyor. Influenser Mağazası hakkında henüz bir şey duymadıysanız, bu blog kesinlikle sizin için.

Influenser Mağazası platformumuzda, influenserler için sanal mağazalar oluşturuyor ve onları e-ticaret sahiplerine dönüştürüyoruz. Siz de kendinizi influenser olarak tanımlıyorsanız  yapmanız gereken tek şey hoş içerikler oluşturmak ve sosyal medya hesaplarınızda ürünlerinizi tanıtmaktır. E-ticaret mağazanızı en sevdiğiniz  markaların ürünleri ile dekore edebilir ve kendi yaşam tarzınızı  izleyicileriyle paylaşabilirsiniz.

Temel olarak, sizin için bir sanal mağaza oluşturuyoruz ve bu mağazada siz, test ettiğiniz, sevdiğiniz ve onayladığınız ürünleri ekliyor ve hiçbir yatırım yapmadan ürünleri satıyorsunuz. Yalnızca sosyal medya hesaplarınızda kendiniz ve ürünlerinizle alakalı  ilgi çekici içerikler tanıtmanız  yeterli olacaktır.

Influenser mağazalarında sistem böyle çalışıyor: 

  • En sevdiğiniz ürünleri seçip ilgi çekici, markalı içerik oluşturuyorsunuz;
  • Kitlenizi onları satın almaya teşvik ediyorsunuz;
  • Tüketiciler, sizin onayınızdan dolayı influenser mağazalarından markaların web sitelerine yönlendirilir;
  • Böylece markalar dönüşüm ve kaliteli trafik alır;

Bu sanal mağazaya katılırsam ne tür bir kar elde edeceğinizi düşünebilirsiniz. O zaman hadi Keepface Influenser Mağazasının bir parçası olursanız ne gibi avantajlar elde edeceğinize bir göz atalım:

  • Stabil ve artan gelir;
  • En iyi yerel ve uluslararası markalarla uzun vadeli işbirliği;
  • Kitlenizin ilgisini paraya dönüştürme imkanı;
  • Ücretsiz e-ticaret mağazası;
  • % 30’a kadar komisyon ücreti;

Influenser mağazaları oldukça basit bir arayüze sahiptir, bu nedenle kullanıcılar tarafından benimsenme süreci de epey kolaydır. İyi bir kullanıcı arayüzü tüketici ve web sitesi arasındaki etkileşimi kolaylaştırdığı için potansiyel ziyaretçileri alıcılara dönüştürebilir.

Keepface Influenser Mağazası arayüzü hakkında dikkatinize sunmak istediğimiz bazı önemli özellikler var. İnfluenserin mağazasına girdiğinizde en üstte beş bölüm göreceksiniz; Ana sayfa, ürünler, markalar, uygulamalar ve hikaye.

  • Ana Sayfa bölümü sizi influenserlerin mağazasının açılış sayfasına yönlendirecektir. 
  • Ürün düğmesi ile tüketiciler, influenserlerin kullandığı ve önerdiği ürünleri görebilir, ürünleri etiketlerine göre filtreleyebilirler. 
  • Marka bölümünde, influenserlerin  favori markalarını görebilirsiniz.

Hikaye bölümünde, influenserlerin günlük yaşam fotoğraflarıyla paylaştığı ürünleri görebilir ve bir ürünü nereden satın aldığı ve benzeri ürünler hakkında bilgi edinebilirsiniz. Bunun için daha fazla oku düğmesini de tıklamanız yeterli olacaktır.

Genel olarak, influenser mağazaları üç kavramın birleşimidir; satış ortaklığı, influenser marketing (etkileyici pazarlama) ve sosyal satış. Markalar influenser mağazasına katıldıklarında sosyal medya odaklı kitlelere ulaşmak ve ürünlerini satmak için üçünün de avantajlarından birlikte yararlanabilecekler.

İnfluenser mağazasıyla siz  hedef kitlenize ulaşabilir ve ürünlerinizi herhangi bir pazarlama stratejisinden çok daha kolay satabilirsiniz.  İnfluenser mağazasında, ürünlerinizin hedef kitleniz veya sizinle etkileşime girebilecek kişiler tarafından görülmesi daha olasıdır – bu da influenser mağazasının nihai hedefidir.

 İnfluencer Mağazası , influenserlerle ortaklık kurarak markanızın güvenilirliğini artırır. Tüketiciler influenserlerin tavsiyelerine güvenme eğilimindedir. Bu nedenle, influenser mağazasına ürün eklediklerinde, gerçek bir geri bildirim olarak görülecektir ve güvenilir bir bağlantı kurmanıza yardımcı olacaktır.

Keepface’nin  yüksek yatırım getirisi ile para kazanma mekanizması, sizin için yeni gelir kapıları açacaktır. Böylece ne kadar çok para kazanırsanız, o kadar çok ürün tanıtıyorsunuz ve daha sonra kendinizi hoş bir sonsuz döngünün ortasında bulacaksınız. Keepface Influenser Mağazasının kullanışlı özellikleriyle yüzlerce tanınmış ve göz alıcı markalar artık parmaklarınızın ucunda. 

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How Marketing Can Respond to the COVID-19 Crisis

Life has changed considerably over the last several weeks. Many of us are under stay-at-home orders and there are policies that are preventing us from going about our lives as usual. The impact on business has been dramatic, and professionals in the field, especially those at a digital marketing agency, are wondering how they can respond.

On one front, marketing professionals have been working from home so the functions of marketing can continue when they can’t go to the office. While this has been helpful, there is a recognition that the business landscape has changed and marketing departments will have to adjust. Plans that were on track a few months ago may no longer be relevant, so many of us will need to look into coronavirus resources for businesses and find ways to adapt to the new reality. 

Marketers are going to play a vital role in helping businesses adapt during the coronavirus pandemic. Businesses may need to make a shift in the types of products they sell or they might need to change their messaging to reach customers or clients in a way that is more likely to resonate in light of the new reality.

The following are a few of the steps and strategies for marketers and business leaders who are trying to figure out what they can do to respond to the coronavirus outbreak.

Keep Your Clients and Customers Up to Date

Whether you are a business selling products, a B2B service provider or a marketing professional, you have to stay in close contact with your customers and clients at this time. Along with that, you have to acknowledge the current circumstances. If you try to carry on like things are normal, you are going to seem out of touch and unprepared.

Let them know what you are doing to respond to the crisis and assure them that you can still meet their needs. Make sure they know you can develop plans to help their businesses during this difficult time. 

You should also stay in touch so you can learn about the challenges they are facing. Ask them about what they need from you and what you can do to better support their mission. 

This contact can be in the form of phone calls or through email, but you should also make sure to keep people informed by posting on social media and by releasing information on your website. 

Assess Your Market Position 

It is actually a great time to reassess and adjust your market position. People are staying at home and using the internet more than they normally would, so this offers the perfect opportunity to get new messaging out there. 

Start by looking at your ideal customer. Is it the same person it was a few months ago or last year? Consider how your product or service is going to benefit your customers and think of ways to demonstrate the benefits. With an understanding of who your customer is and how they can benefit from your product or service, you can create messaging that will resonate and inspire action.

Once you know your ideal customer and the value proposition you are offering, you should consider your market positioning strategy. Do you want to be a cost leader by offering the most competitive prices on the market? Maybe you want to differentiate your brand and target a segment of the market. You could also consider combining these two positioning strategies together.

Adjust Your Marketing Strategy

Now that you have established an ideal customer and you know how you want to position your brand, you can start developing a marketing strategy to meet your goals. 

Take a look at the audience you are pitching to. What is their age group? Are you selling primarily to men or women? Are you selling to businesses or consumers? Does your ideal customer fit into a specific income range? What are their interests? 

The list of questions could go on. The more specific you get, the easier it will be to target the right customers with the right messaging. It will also help you select the right marketing strategy and the marketing channels that will be most effective when trying to reach the customers you want to reach.

Prepare for the Future

Finally, this is a good time to prepare your marketing strategy for the “what ifs”. Most of us did not see the coronavirus coming, and that left us scrambling to react without much of a plan. Now is the time to try to forecast what may happen, run some tests and make plans for different possible outcomes.

Look at different timelines for the economy in your area reopening. Consider the possibility that some of these timelines might change and try to project what the impact will be on your business for different scenarios. Maybe run some market research and try to project the numbers for things like expenses and revenues. Think about how your marketing strategy will need to change to respond to different outcomes and the messaging you will need to have ready for these events.

Marketing won’t be able to solve every problem that businesses experience as the result of the coronavirus, but it should play an important part in the response. By reviewing your marketing strategy and making the necessary adjustments, you can keep your business in the minds of customers and reassure them that you can continue to meet their needs.

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How to Choose an Affordable SEO Package for Your Startup

Imagine coming to the office every day and opening your laptop to find hundreds of emails from prospects who are hungry to do business with your startup.

While this can be a dream for many startups, the reality is that millions of searches happen every day on Google and if you can get a fraction of those users to reach your website through Search Engine Optimization, you could end up with more customers than you really need.

How to Choose an Affordable SEO Package

macbook pro on brown wooden table

SEO Packages can range from as low as AED 500 per month to as high as AED 18,000 per month. The range is so wide that most startups make the mistake of going with the cheapest offers. Google has some of the smartest engineers in the world working on their search algorithm and if the startup believes that an agency charging AED 500 per month can get their site on the front page of Google for the chosen keyword, they could be living in an alternative reality. When a user searches using a keyword, within a faction of a second Google has to decide which 7 sites they have to show on the front page from among the millions of sites that they have in their Bigtable.

Bigtable is a distributed storage system (built by Google) for managing structured data that is designed to scale to a very large size: Petabytes of data across thousands of commodity servers. Many projects at Google store data in Bigtable, including web indexing, Google Earth, and Google Finance.

Affordability is not what matters

SEO has one of the highest conversion rates of all marketing channels but it also happens to be the toughest channel to get traffic from Google’s mission is to bring relevant information to users and if your website is not relevant enough to the user, no matter how many links you build to your site it is not going to show up on the front page.

In fact, when startups hire cheap SEO agencies they are hiring companies which use software to generate thousands of backlinks to their site. In the past, SEO was based on the number of backlinks that a website had and the more links you had, the higher the chance to rank on the front page of Google

That is no longer the case today and if you wish to go from zero traffic per month to 4712 visitors a month (like the one shown below), you can longer depend on backlinks.

Give Google What it Wants

If Google is trying to be as relevant to its audience as possible, your SEO efforts should be centered around relevancy and the smartest way to get an affordable SEO Package in Dubai would be to hire an agency that can make your site highly relevant to the search term that you are trying to rank for.

Google’s relevancy score is based on technical relevance including site hierarchy, tags, descriptions, structured data markup and internal linking. The content relevancy is based on keyword usage, semantic context and depth of content authority. Off Page relevancy comes from the domain authority of the site, range of contextual links pointing to the site and the inflow of traffic.

Growth Hack for SEO

Most startups would like to know if there is a growth hack for SEO and fortunately for you a secret growth hack does exist! It is being used by SEO agencies like Seo Souq and what they do is when they take on a new SEO project they blog about it on LinkedIn (which has a domain authority of 98) and get thousands of people from LinkedIn to visit the Startup website. If the content on the website is highly optimized, the bounce rate on the site will be below 30% which is a key indicator of the site’s quality inside Google Analytics. This combination of new traffic from a high authority domain and low bounce rate is a powerful signal to Google that the new site is highly relevant and worthy of being shown on the front page of Google.

Final Decision

As you can see, SEO packages range from AED 500 per month to AED 18,000 per month and there are thousands of options available in the UAE. However, your decision to choose an SEO agency should be carefully evaluated based on the outcome that you are expecting.

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