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trendyourway45-blog · 6 years ago

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20 Inventions of all time.

Introduction

Since the time primordial man first picked up a rock and thwacked a scurrying rodent on its head to fix his dinner, mankind has always been inventing things. Improvising, innovating, crafting tools out of almost nothing to overcome the many difficulties of day-to-day life. Whether it was the rudimentary spear crafted by sharpening the end of a stick or much later a simple chair, inventions have shaped our very evolution.

Before you get worried we’ll assure you we’ve not gone that far back in time.

The inventions we’ve covered span core-science aeronautics, biology, physics, medicine, automobiles, electronics and of course technology. We’ve avoided things like “fire” or “the wheel” because quite frankly no one really knows how the former was discovered (not invented) and who invented the latter.

1.3D Printers

The 3D Printer is one of the greatest inventions of the 21st century allowing you to turn your ideas into real objects.

The latest Bond movie, Skyfall used a 3D printer from a German company called Voxeljet to produce three 1:3 scaled models of 007’s Aston Martin just to blow up during the movie!

What sounds like a really cool toy to have is actually used for some very serious operations. Let’s first understand how it works.

3D printing is achieved using an additive process in which successive layers of materials are laid out in different shapes. Cutting and drilling (also known as subtractive processes) are not involved at all making the process easy, efficient and highly suitable for prototyping.

The biggest consumer of the 3D Printer is the medical industry. So far it has produced prosthetics and bones and the ability to generate human

organs from these machines is currently being tried out. If this is managed, it could revolutionize medicine and completely obliterate the need for organ donation. Using a 3D printer in conjunction with CAT scans, surgeons can print out tumours so that they know exactly what they’re dealing with.

We’re sure you’re familiar with Pirate Bay, the file sharing company. It has launched a new content category called ‘Physibles’ i.e. data objects that can be made into physical products. 3D blueprints are uploaded and shared with those who want to print out the actual objects.

2. Airplane

The Wright brothers are given credit for the invention of the Airplane in 1903. The first flight lasted a little over 12 seconds at Kill Devil Hill, Northern Carolina. Since then, much progress has been made in the world of aviation. The sky wasn’t the limit here. War and sci-fi stories inspired great minds like Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and Werner von Braun to achieve flight beyond the atmosphere, making space travel a possibility.

The invention of the airplane sped up services in every single field starting with the postal service in 1920. World War II in 1939 kick-started developments in the aviation sector. Countries competed with each other to one-up the others’ sophisticated developments, with the British developing the airplanedetecting radar followed by the Germans developing radio wave navigation techniques. Fighter jets, advanced landing systems and high altitude aircrafts followed.

In 1947, US Air Force Pilot Captain Charles Yeager broke the sound barrier in the first supersonic flight becoming the fastest man alive.

Commercial flights started not long after and now, well, an airplane makes a landing somewhere around the world every three seconds!

Air travel is considered to be the safest form of travel in the world. A funny but true fact reveals that donkeys kill more people annually than plane crashes. Inspite of these phenomenal odds, 80% of the population of the world has Aerophobia, viz fear of flying. In some (5%) this fear is so intense that they abandon flights and opt for other modes of transport.

We’ve come a long way since 1903. In fact the wingspan of a Boeing 747 is longer than the Wright brothers’ first flight! The world today would be crippled without the discovery of flight. Businesses would crash, economies would slow down, worse still, holidays would be cancelled!

3.Artificial Intelligence

AI could be on either end of two extremes – man’s best invention or worst. In its best light, Artificial Intelligence would showcase robots, drones, machines serving us making daily life easier and more efficient or, as seen in movies, taking over the human race and entirely replacing the work force leading to unemployment, depression and general laziness.

The study of Artificial Intelligence formally began in Dartmouth College in 1956, as an effort by a group of research scientists to evaluate and mechanically replicate human intelligence. That is, they wanted to program machines to think and respond like humans. Their research was based on the assumption that a machine can be made to simulate learning, reasoning, logic and intelligence demonstrated by humans when given proper description and direction.

Every future invention by man will have its base in AI. Every invention will require an intelligently thinking bot to perform tasks faster and more efficiently than their human counterparts.

Essay grading software, weapons that have minds of their own, Siri by Apple, Kinect the 3D gaming interface, Watson by IBM – formerly a trivia expert machine now used to make decisions on lung cancer treatment and smart CCTVs that can identify crime as it happens: these are the varied and most advanced productions of AI.

4.Biometric Scanners

Biometrics – turning yourself into an identity card. No need for passwords, ids, pin numbers, etc. All you need is you. It’s a move from traditional access control systems to feature-based authentication that provides access based on physical presence rather than token (such as passport or drivers license) and knowledge based (password or PIN) methods.

With advancements in e-commerce and e-transactions, individuals have to retain a large number of passwords, PINs and identity cards. This number will only grow in size with passing time. Passwords and PINs are easy to crack by the right hacker, thus compromising your security. Biometrics couldn’t have come at a better time offering the ideal kind of security since no two fingerprints are alike.

The use of Biometric Scanners could unleash an era of super secure gadgets. It is already being used in cars programmed to operate only when a known driver is in the driver’s seat, weapons which fire only on detecting the owner’s fingerprints and smart household security systems that keep intruders out, among other applications. Not only fingerprints, facial scanning biometric devices are also not rare. Take the Samsung Galaxy S III for example. It has a Face Unlock feature which makes sure that only its owner can unlock the phone.

Fingerprint scanners are the cheapest and hence most commonly used biometric devices. Face and voice recognition follow, as iris and retinal scanning are concepts that most people find intrusive and are not too comfortable using.

The invention of Biometric Scanners was a big step into the future. They’ve led to the creation of the ultimate unique identifiers – those that cannot be forgotten, changed or lost.

5.Bluetooth

A wireless technology used to exchange data over short distances using short-wavelength radio transmission, Bluetooth was created by Ericsson in 1994 as an alternative to data cables. The term “Bluetooth” is an anglicized version of Blatand, the epithet of 10th century Danish king Harald who united separated Danish tribes into a single kingdom. The technology was named after him as Bluetooth does what Blatand did but with communications protocols – unites them into one universal standard.

Since its introduction, Bluetooth has increased in popularity over the years – while in 2008, only 5% of mobile devices were Bluetooth-enabled, in 2013, roughly 95% of mobile devices support it. Also, while traditional Bluetooth devices only worked within a range of 10 feet of each other the newest versions now enable transfers to a distance of up to 100 feet. However, what makes Bluetooth stand out as a form of wireless data transfer is that it uses very little power, can be incorporated into a wide variety of devices and can have up to eight devices communicating with each other at once and automatically without a user’s prompt.

Coming soon (15 more)

#inventions #digital #India #real estate #Bluetooth #digital marketing #internet

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remelitalia · 4 years ago

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Why SaaS Brand Advocacy is More Important than Ever in 2021

It’s no secret that the field of marketing is constantly evolving, and SaaS brands are not immune from the challenges that arise due to the fast-paced nature of the field. One great way SaaS companies can keep up is through brand advocacy.

2021 SaaS Trends that Affect Brand Advocacy

For starters, consider the overwhelming push toward personalization.

According to a Forbes article, 71% of consumers “feel frustrated when a shopping experience is impersonal.” 74% are displeased with websites that aren’t personalized.

This signals the need for SaaS brands to segment their content assets and interfaces to hone in on messages that speak directly to specific customers. Personalization will continue to be expected in the years to come, and brands will have to figure out how to deliver it.

In the SaaS industry, where every interaction is ideally tracked, the opportunities for personalization are enormous.

Changes to Facebook’s algorithm a few years ago have also caused organic reach for pages to remain in decline, though you may still be able to find some success in organic if you get creative.

There’s also the rise of automation to think about.

New and existing SaaS companies are investing heavily in AI and machine learning to reduce churn and win more new customers simultaneously. From services that provide A/B testing to conversational bots that capture leads on-site, brands are rapidly experimenting with new ways to optimize their content.

Why Brand Advocacy is Such a Big Deal for SaaS

Simply put, your content marketing strategy is at the core of your capacity to adapt as a SaaS brand. Beyond the basic benefits of driving traffic and raising brand awareness, an effective content strategy is essential to consistently nurture and onboard leads.

Conventional wisdom says that we should shell out piles of money for paid media or sponsoring influencer posts to grab people’s attention. However, is this sort of “pay-to-play” strategy really the best way to go?

In an era where social proof is such a powerful currency for marketers, it’s more important than ever for SaaS marketers to seek out brand advocates wherever they possibly can.

Who could possibly be better brand advocates than your own customers and employees? These people are already emotionally invested in your product’s success, and they know your brand better than anyone else.

Encouraging your own network to promote your content and product from their personal social accounts is a potential game-changer for SaaS brands. Rather than spend the resources to chase paid outlets and influencers, brands should focus on advocacy, which can produce better results in a shorter amount of time.

“By creating a product that solved a problem that a lot of people faced, it meant there were already millions of people looking for us when we launched,” Canva CEO Melanie Perkins told Forbes, “so when they found us, they told their colleagues, friends and families.”

Here are some of the biggest benefits associated with brand advocacy, along with some ways that SaaS marketers can get started with realizing them.

1. Overcome Content Overload

In an era where people are on their phones nearly 4 hours or more per day, your customers obviously have a lot to sift through.

While the concept of “quality content” might be cliché at this point, consider how a higher volume of shares highlights a piece of content as buzzworthy. This is social proof at its best.

Content shares and product recommendations work because people trust peers and thought leaders more than they trust brands and institutions.

Bear in mind that employees who serve as active advocates on social media can quickly emerge as influencers on your behalf. Indeed, transforming your own employees into thought leaders is a desirable byproduct of brand advocacy.

2. Expand Your Organic Reach through Brand Advocacy

No matter how you slice it, competition in the SaaS space is fierce.

Considering that there are approximately 8,000 brands in the martech space alone, SaaS companies must fight tooth and nail for the attention of potential customers.

Think of advocacy as a sort of numbers game. The more people promoting your content, paid or otherwise, the more likely you are to break through the noise and reach the people who need your product most.

When you encourage employees to regularly promote your content with their own social media audiences, you essentially amass a small army of promoters you can call on time and time again. Through social brand advocacy, you exponentially increase your social reach and potential to be seen by leads.

Keep in mind – in many cases, all it takes is for the right person to see a link and opt-in for a free trial to pave the way to the sale.

TOPO CEO Scott Albro notes that the smaller the company your prospect works for, the more likely he or she will be to stick with your product once the trial period expires:

“SaaS buyers won’t engage in more than one trial. Our data shows that this is particularly true in the small and medium size business market where buyers tend to comparison-shop less. You need to make sure that buyers find your trial first. You also need to make sure that you don’t squander that opportunity when you get it.”

3. Engage Your Employees to Help Grow Brand Awareness

Perhaps one of the most overlooked aspects of encouraging brand advocates among employees is the actual task of asking them to do so.

While most workers would be glad to promote your content, keep in mind that brands should treat advocacy like any other sort of campaign. That means having a defined strategy and measuring performance.

However, SaaS teams often have highly specialized skill sets. You can’t expect everyone to be a seasoned content marketer and social seller, too.

Instead of having employees post content haphazardly, consider some of the tools out there that help streamline the process of internal brand advocacy. You can also help them with the content of their post.

One such tool is Smarp, which aggregates company news and industry-relevant content to categorized feeds. Team members can pick up the content that speaks to them most and schedule posts for their own profiles with just a few clicks.

This cuts down on potential wastes of time on social media and streamlines the process of sharing new content amongst your workers.

Features such as gamification signal the most active advocates within any given company, providing additional incentives for employees to become eager advocates. In addition to content aggregation, Smarp provides analytics on both a company-wide and personal level to identify top advocates.

This type of system works because it makes employees from all departments into partners in your SaaS product’s exponential sales growth success, a process which Roketto Co-founder Ulf Lonegren compares to the growth of a tree that spawns more trees:

“Make your employees proud of the work they do, make them feel like an important part of the process by reminding them how the software provides value and informing them of the successes, listen to their ideas, and provide a sales chart in the engine room that tracks the progress. Set sales goals and provide rewards for reaching those goals. Provide incentives for team members to make sales. In this world of mass marketing, word of mouth often provides the authenticity that buyers want when seeking a product, so remember that every member of your team could be that one oak tree, and from one tree many nuts can fall.”

4. Supercharge Your Social Selling

SaaS customers are heavily influenced by what they see on social media when it comes time to make purchases.

This rings true in terms of how often they see content and the sharers of that content. If social posts from sales pros, marketers, and brands themselves are deemed less worthy of people’s attention than social posts from peers and laymen, then your prospects are more likely to respond favorably to content shared by a high volume of people.

Research from Sana, published in 2018, indicates that social media is the number two driver of digital sales in the B2B sector, ranking just behind onsite buying. This is how the brand advocacy strategy can really boost your sales. The more people who share your content across social channels, the more customers you attract to your business.

According to LinkedIn, 87% of social customers have a favorable view of products that were introduced to them through their own network. By promoting products via employees, you have access to personal networks that you might not otherwise reach exclusively through a brand channel.

Last year, B2B buyers looked at 13 content pieces before selecting a vendor. Similarly, 61% of customers have made a purchase based on a recommendation from a blog.

A greater number of brand advocates translates into more brand equity in the minds of potential customers, which makes it easier for sales reps to build relationships on social channels and to close more deals in shorter sales cycles.

This is fortunate, as sales cycles need as much shortening as they can get, in order to remain scalable. The Bridge Group’s Matt Bertuzzi notes that the total contract value for a SaaS conversion correlates with the number of days it takes sales reps to seal the deal. According to his firm’s data, B2B SaaS sales cycles can last anywhere from five weeks to five months.

Dennis Koutoudis from LinkedIn SuperPowers told SalesHacker that he sees prospecting on social media, especially on LinkedIn, being the key SaaS sales opportunities:

“I predict that the usage of LinkedIn Sales Navigator by Sales Teams will increase considerably, enabling them both to zero in on their target prospects with extreme precision and also to delve deeper into Social Selling. The key here is to focus on providing value, build trust and develop solid professional relationships with target prospects that will ultimately improve sales figures. Great emphasis will also be placed on the way we present ourselves as Sales Professionals on the LinkedIn platform since with such fierce competition, now more than ever, we need to not only stand out in our professional field but also to engage in actions that will significantly increase our visibility on the LinkedIn platform.”

Prospecting platforms are major game-changers in this regard. Social selling teams can use them to scale operations, thanks to smart libraries of content assets that reps can append to posts on the fly, as well as sophisticated contact intelligence data that can be used for qualifying leads mid-discussion and enriching CRM entries.

5. Keep Your Content Budget Under Control

According to the Content Marketing Institute, 46% of brands spent less than $1000,000 on digital marketing budget in 2020. Given the emphasis on automation and other tools that could potentially cut into any given SaaS company’s budget, a leaner content marketing strategy just plain makes sense.

When your employees and customers are doing the legwork of promoting your brand, you cut out any sort of middleman when it comes to promotion. While there might be a time and place for paid media or influencers, SaaS brands should focus on an organic promotion strategy that keeps costs down.

Encouraging brand advocacy costs next to nothing compared to paid media. Additionally, popping up more and more via social media could actually score you earned media mentions as an added bonus.

Rather than paying for promotion and distribution, creating your own advocates represents a more financially sensible strategy.

Conclusion

As competition continues to emerge in the SaaS space, having voices on deck to promote your content becomes a critical piece of standing out from the crowd.

Not only does advocacy keep content marketing costs down, but allows SaaS brands to seamlessly signal their authority. Rather than pay for that same credibility, why not generate it yourself?

While marketing strategies at large never stay the same for long, brand advocacy is here to stay. If you want help growing your brand awareness or with any other content marketing needs, let us know!

The post Why SaaS Brand Advocacy is More Important than Ever in 2021 appeared first on Neil Patel.

Original content source: https://neilpatel.com/blog/saas-brand-advocacy/ via https://neilpatel.com

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shirlleycoyle · 6 years ago

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Revealed: Microsoft Contractors Are Listening to Some Skype Calls

Contractors working for Microsoft are listening to personal conversations of Skype users conducted through the app’s translation service, according to a cache of internal documents, screenshots, and audio recordings obtained by Motherboard. Although Skype’s website says that the company may analyze audio of phone calls that a user wants to translate in order to improve the chat platform’s services, it does not say some of this analysis will be done by humans.

The Skype audio obtained by Motherboard includes conversations from people talking intimately to loved ones, some chatting about personal issues such as their weight loss, and others seemingly discussing relationship problems. Other files obtained by Motherboard show that Microsoft contractors are also listening to voice commands that users speak to Cortana, the company’s voice assistant.

Apple and Google recently suspended their use of human transcribers for their respective Siri and Google Assistant services after a backlash over similar media reporting on the companies’ practices.

“The fact that I can even share some of this with you shows how lax things are in terms of protecting user data,” a Microsoft contractor who provided the cache of files to Motherboard said. Motherboard granted the source anonymity to speak more candidly about internal Microsoft practices, and because the person is under a non-disclosure agreement with the company.

Do you work at Microsoft or one of its contractors? Did you used to? We’d love to hear from you. You can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, OTR chat on [email protected], or email [email protected].

The snippets of audio obtained by Motherboard are typically short, lasting between five and ten seconds. The source said other passages can be longer, however.

In 2015 Skype launched its Translator service, which lets users get near real-time audio translations during phone and video calls. Before the feature’s launch, WIRED published an article titled “How Skype Used AI to Build its Amazing New Language Translator.”

The product does use artificial intelligence and the translations are impressive in Motherboard’s own tests. But like many other AI or machine learning projects, it turns out that some of the work is facilitated by humans laboring away, completing the very same tasks the AI is supposed to in order to improve the algorithms themselves.

Some of the audio obtained by Motherboard is specified as coming from the Translator feature of Skype’s Android app, according to accompanying screenshots of the contractor’s screen. An FAQ for Skype Translator says that when people use the service, “Skype collects and uses your conversation to help improve Microsoft products and services. To help the translation and speech recognition technology learn and grow, sentences and automatic transcripts are analyzed and any corrections are entered into our system, to build more performant services.” Another section adds, “To help the technology learn and grow, we verify the automatic translations and feed any corrections back into the system, to build more performant services.”

That section does not say that humans may listen to audio captured by the Translator feature of Skype’s various apps. Microsoft’s Privacy Policy does not make this clear either.

“Some stuff I’ve heard could clearly be described as phone sex.”

“People use Skype to call their lovers, interview for jobs, or connect with their families abroad. Companies should be 100% transparent about the ways people’s conversations are recorded and how these recordings are being used,” Frederike Kaltheuner, data exploitation program lead at activist group Privacy International, said in an online chat.

“And if a sample of your voice is going to human review (for whatever reason) the system should ask them whether you are ok with that, or at least give you the option to opt out,” she added.

Pat Walshe, an activist from Privacy Matters, said in an online chat “The marketing blurb for [Skype Translator] refers to the use of AI not humans listening in. This whole area needs a regulatory review.”

After reviewing the Skype Translator FAQ, he added, “I’ve looked at it and don’t believe it amounts to transparent and fair processing.”

“Companies should be 100% transparent about the ways people’s conversations are recorded and how these recordings are being used.”

A Microsoft spokesperson told Motherboard in an emailed statement, “Microsoft collects voice data to provide and improve voice-enabled services like search, voice commands, dictation or translation services. We strive to be transparent about our collection and use of voice data to ensure customers can make informed choices about when and how their voice data is used. Microsoft gets customers’ permission before collecting and using their voice data.”

“We also put in place several procedures designed to prioritize users’ privacy before sharing this data with our vendors, including de-identifying data, requiring non-disclosure agreements with vendors and their employees, and requiring that vendors meet the high privacy standards set out in European law. We continue to review the way we handle voice data to ensure we make options as clear as possible to customers and provide strong privacy protections,” the statement added.

Microsoft said both its Skype Translator FAQ and documentation on Cortana are clear in that the company uses voice data to improve their services. Again, they do not say a human may listen to that voice data, however.

When a contractor is presented by Microsoft with a piece of audio to transcribe, they are also given a series of approximate translations generated by Skype’s translation system, according to the screenshots and other documents. The contractor then needs to select the most accurate translation or provide their own, and the audio is treated as confidential Microsoft information, the screenshots show.

“Some stuff I’ve heard could clearly be described as phone sex. I’ve heard people entering full addresses in Cortana commands, or asking Cortana to provide search returns on pornography queries. While I don’t know exactly what one could do with this information, it seems odd to me that it isn’t being handled in a more controlled environment,” the contractor said.

Microsoft said audio data is only available to contractors through a secure online portal, and that the company takes steps to remove identifying information such as user or device identification numbers.

Despite the sensitivity of the information, it is at least in part work-at-home contractors who are listening to and handling the Skype and Cortana audio. Motherboard found online job listings from Microsoft contractors that say employees can work from home.

The contractor said, “I generally feel like that while we do not have access to user identifiable information, that if Microsoft users were aware that random people sitting at home in their pajamas who could be joking online with friends about the stuff they just heard that they wouldn’t like that.”

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csemntwinl3x0a1 · 7 years ago

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How to build analytic products in an age when data privacy has become critical

Privacy-preserving analytics is not only possible, but with GDPR about to come online, it will become necessary to incorporate privacy in your data products.

In this post, I share slides and notes from a talk I gave in March 2018 at the Strata Data Conference in California, offering suggestions for how companies may want to build analytic products in an age when data privacy has become critical. A lot has changed since I gave this presentation: numerous articles have been written about Facebook’s privacy policies, its CEO testified twice before the U.S. Congress, and I deactivated my mostly dormant Facebook account. The end result being that there’s even a more heightened awareness around data privacy, and people are acknowledging that problems go beyond a few companies or a few people.

Let me start by listing a few observations regarding data privacy:

We tend to talk about data privacy in the context of security breaches, but there are many instances when privacy violations involve people who have been granted access to data.

The growing number of connected devices enabled to collect data means our most sensitive data—see this article on smart homes—are being gathered and monetized.

Concerns about the use of data privacy cuts across cultures. As someone who travels to China, I can attest that users there are just as concerned about how companies are using their data.

It is true that regulators across the world are approaching data privacy in different ways. To the extent that many companies conduct business in the EU, the upcoming General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will influence how organizations across the world build and design data services and products.

Which brings me to the main topic of this presentation: how do we build analytic services and products in an age when data privacy has emerged as an important issue? Architecting and building data platforms is central to what many of us do. We have long recognized that data security and data privacy are required features for our data platforms, but how do we “lock down” analytics?

Once we have data securely in place, we proceed to utilize it in two main ways: (1) to make better decisions (BI) and (2) to enable some form of automation (ML). It turns out there are some new tools for building analytic products that preserve privacy. Let me give a quick overview of a few things you may want to try today.

Business intelligence and analytics

For most companies, BI means a SQL database. Can you run SQL queries while protecting privacy? There are already systems for doing BI on sensitive data using hardware enclaves, and there are some initial systems that let you query or work with encrypted data (a friend recently showed me HElib, an open source, fast implementation of homomorphic encryption).

Let me describe a recent collaboration between Uber and UC Berkeley’s RISE Lab.

Their joint analysis of millions of queries executed at Uber led to a system that lets analysts submit queries and get results that adhere to state-of-the-art differential privacy (a formal guarantee that provides robust privacy assurances). As I mentioned above, privacy violations can involve people who have been granted access to data. What this new Uber/RISE Lab system implies is that analysts can be granted access to a database to do their standard SQL-based analysis, while data privacy is preserved. Their system is open source and can be used with any SQL database, and it is being used in a pilot deployment within Uber (see the paper and code).

This takes care of BI for reports that rely on SQL databases. But can one build a privacy-preserving BI system that gathers real-time data from millions of users? The answer is “yes”: recent announcements from Apple and Google detail analytic tools designed to help them understand how users interact with devices. For example, Apple and Google analysts can run queries to help them gather aggregate typing statistics and browsing behavior.

Apple described their system in a detailed blog post:

Our system is designed to be opt-in and transparent. No data is recorded or transmitted before the user explicitly chooses to report usage information. Data is privatized on the user’s device using event-level differential privacy in the local model where an event might be, for example, a user typing an emoji. Additionally, we restrict the number of transmitted privatized events per use case. The transmission to the server occurs over an encrypted channel once per day, with no device identifiers. The records arrive on a restricted-access server where IP identifiers are immediately discarded, and any association between multiple records is also discarded. At this point, we cannot distinguish, for example, if an emoji record and a Safari web domain record came from the same user. The records are processed to compute statistics. These aggregate statistics are then shared internally with the relevant teams at Apple.

Other companies like Microsoft are developing similar systems involving other smart devices.

Machine learning

For machine learning, let me focus on recent work involving deep learning (currently the hottest ML method). In 2015, researchers at the University of Texas and Cornell University showed that one can “design, implement, and evaluate a practical system that enables multiple parties to jointly learn an accurate neural network model for a given objective without sharing their input data sets.” One application could be medical institutions wanting to build and learn a more accurate, joint model, without sharing data with people outside their respective organizations.

In 2016, Google took this “shared model” concept and scaled it to edge devices! They use it for products such as On-Device Smart Reply and their Mobile Vision API. This new system, which they dubbed "Federated Learning," is able to leave training data distributed on the mobile devices, while learning a shared model by aggregating locally computed updates:

The two previous examples involve learning a shared (single) model, without sharing data. There might be instances where you want a highly personalized model, or you might have natural (demographic/usage) clusters of users that would benefit from more specifically tuned models. These scenarios were the focus of recent work by researchers at Stanford, CMU, and USC: they used ideas from multi-task learning to train personalized deep learning models. In multi-task learning, the goal is to consider fitting separate but related models simultaneously.

Closing thoughts

My main message is that privacy-preserving analytics is very much possible and something you should consider today—both for BI and machine learning. It is not only the right thing to do for your users, with GDPR about to come online, privacy becomes necessary to incorporate in your data products:

At its core, privacy by design calls for the inclusion of data protection from the onset of the designing of systems, rather than an addition.

One last thing: the two technology trends I’m following very closely are automation (AI) and decentralization (blockchain, crypto, and more). There are people actively working on rebuilding key services—identity management, data storage, payments, data exchanges, social media—and moving them away from centralized systems. I believe that the data science and big data communities are well-positioned to contribute to both automation and decentralization. Our community has spent years working on productionizing important building blocks—machine learning and distributed systems—that will remain at the core of future platforms.

Related content:

“We need to build machine learning tools to augment machine learning engineers”

“The ethics of artificial intelligence”

Your data is being manipulated: danah boyd explores how systems are being gamed, how data is vulnerable, and what we need to do to build technical antibodies.

“It’s time for data ethics conversations at your dinner table”

Haunted by data: Maciej Ceglowski makes the case for adopting enforceable limits for data storage.

Continue reading How to build analytic products in an age when data privacy has become critical.

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webanalytics · 7 years ago

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Why SaaS Brand Advocacy Is More Important than Ever in 2018

Although it’s no secret that the realm of marketing is constantly evolving, it seems that the space is changing especially dramatically for SaaS companies nowadays.

And these changes are cause for concern for brands looking to flourish in 2018.

For starters, consider the overwhelming push toward personalization.

This signals the need for SaaS brands to segment their content assets and interfaces to hone in on messages that speak directly to specific customers.

Gartner predicts that by 2020, 90% of all brands will practice at least some form of real-time personalization. Currently, nearly half of the businesses polled use real-time personalization to inform the majority of their messaging. In the SaaS industry, where every interaction is ideally tracked, the opportunities are enormous.

Then, there are the recently announced changes to Facebook’s algorithm that basically mean that organic reach for pages is finally altogether dead.

Afraid of being frozen out of users’ feeds, SaaS marketers are trying not to panic in the face of what could potentially put their existing marketing funnels in jeopardy.

There’s also the rise of automation to think about.

SaaS companies are investing heavily in AI and machine learning to reduce churn and win more new customers simultaneously. From services that provide A/B testing to conversational bots that capture leads on-site, brands are rapidly experimenting with new ways to optimize their content.

Why Brand Advocacy Is Such a Big Deal for SaaS

In an era where social proof is such a powerful currency for marketers, it’s more important than ever for SaaS marketers to seek out brand advocates wherever we possibly can.

And who could possibly be better brand advocates than your own customers and employees? These people are already emotionally invested in your product’s success, and they know your brand better than anyone else.

“By creating a product that solved a problem that a lot of people faced, it meant there were already millions of people looking for us when we launched,” Canva CEO Melanie Perkins recently told Forbes, “so when they found us, they told their colleagues, friends and families.”

Here are some of the biggest benefits associated with brand advocacy, along with some ways that SaaS marketers can get started with realizing them.

1. Overcome Content Overload and Mistrust

In an era where people are consuming a staggering 12 hours or more of content per day, your customers obviously have a lot to sift through. And trust in the media – which includes “platforms” like social apps, by the way – continues to sit on shaky ground.

While the concept of “quality content” might be cliché at this point, consider how a higher volume of shares highlights a piece of content as buzzworthy. This is social proof at its best.

Content shares and product recommendations work because people trust peers and thought leaders more than they trust brands and institutions.

2. Expand Your Reach Organically

No matter how you slice it, competition in the SaaS space is fierce.

Considering that there are approximately 5,000 brands in the martech space alone, SaaS companies must fight tooth and nail for the attention of potential customers.

When you encourage employees to regularly promote your content with their own social media audiences, you essentially amass a small army of promoters you can call on time and time again. This year’s State of Employee Advocacy study from JEM Consulting found that over 75% of respondents see their advocacy program as yielding satisfactory or better results.

Whether you’re dealing with a few dozen or a few hundred employees, those numbers are nothing to scoff at. Through social brand advocacy, you exponentially increase your social reach and potential to be seen by leads.

And keep in mind – in many cases, all it takes is for the right person to see a link and opt in for a free trial to pave the way to the sale. TOPO CEO Scott Albro notes that the smaller the company your prospect works for, the more likely he or she will be to stick with your product once the trial period expires:

3. Engage Your Employees

Perhaps one of the most overlooked aspects of encouraging brand advocates among employees is the actually task of asking them to do so.

But SaaS teams often have highly specialized skill sets. You can’t expect everyone to be a seasoned content marketer and social seller, too. Instead of having employees post content haphazardly, consider some of the tools out there that help streamline the process of internal brand advocacy.

This cuts down on potential wastes of time on social media and streamlines the process of sharing new content amongst your workers.

4. Supercharge Your Social Selling

SaaS customers are heavily influenced by what they see on social media when it comes time to make purchases.

This rings true in terms of how often they see content and the sharers of that content. If social posts from sales pros, marketers and brands themselves are deemed less worthy of people’s attention than social posts from peers and laymen, then it follows logically that your prospects are more likely to respond favorably to content shared by a high volume of people.

Research from Sana indicates that social media is the number two driver of digital sales in the B2B sector, ranking just behind onsite buying.

Again, the numbers game of brand advocacy comes to light based on what your customers see on social media.

According to LinkedIn, 87% of social customers have a favorable view of products that were introduced them through their own network. By promoting products via employees, you have access to personal networks that you might not otherwise reach exclusively through a brand channel.

Keep in mind that the average buyer consumes over 11 pieces of content before they’re ready to respond favorably to a sales pitch. Similarly, 61% of customers have made a purchase based on a recommendation from a blog. A greater number of brand advocates translates into more brand equity in the minds of potential customers, which makes it easier for sales reps to build relationships on social channels and to close more deals in shorter sales cycles.

And those sales cycles need as much shortening as they can get, in order to remain scalable. The Bridge Group’s Matt Bertuzzi notes that total contract value for a SaaS conversion correlates with the number of days it takes sales reps to seal the deal. According to his firm’s data, B2B SaaS sales cycles can last anywhere from five weeks to five months.

Dennis Koutoudis from LinkedIn SuperPowers told SalesHacker that he sees prospecting on social media, especially on LinkedIn, as one of the key SaaS sales opportunities of 2018:

Prospecting platforms like 2Factr’s SocialPort are major game-changers in this regard. Social selling teams can use this tool to scale operations, thanks to smart libraries of content assets that reps can append to posts on the fly, as well as sophisticated contact intelligence data that can be used for qualifying leads mid-discussion and enriching CRM entries.

5. Keep Your Content Budget Under Control

According to Content Marketing Institute, 38% of brands are looking to up their content marketing budgets in 2018. Even so, that’s no excuse for brands to spend recklessly.

And given the emphasis on automation and other tools that could potentially cut into any given SaaS company’s budget, a leaner content marketing strategy just plain makes sense.

Encouraging brand advocacy costs next to nothing compared to paid media. Additionally, popping up more and more via social media could actually score you earned media mentions as an added bonus.

Based on the previously noted CMI study, 50% of marketers believe that their ROI is closely linked to the way they go about distributing content. Rather than paying for promotion and distribution, creating your own advocates represents a more financially sensible strategy.

Conclusion

As competition continues to emerge in the SaaS space, having voices on deck to promote your content becomes a critical piece of standing out from the crowd.

Not only does advocacy keep content marketing costs down, but allows SaaS brands to seamlessly signal their authority. Rather than pay for that same credibility, why not generate it yourself?

And while marketing strategies at large never stay the same for long, brand advocacy is here to stay.

About the Author: Nadav is a veteran online marketer and the Founder & CEO of InboundJunction, an Israel-based content marketing company. Nadav helps well-known brands in boosting their online visibility through PR, SEO and Social Media.

from Search Results for “analytics” – The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog https://ift.tt/2FwUH3Z #Digital #Analytics #Website

#Analytics #Search Results for “analytics” – The Kissmetrics Marketing Blog

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filipeteimuraz · 7 years ago

Text

Why SaaS Brand Advocacy Is More Important than Ever in 2018

Although it’s no secret that the realm of marketing is constantly evolving, it seems that the space is changing especially dramatically for SaaS companies nowadays.

And these changes are cause for concern for brands looking to flourish in 2018.

For starters, consider the overwhelming push toward personalization.

This signals the need for SaaS brands to segment their content assets and interfaces to hone in on messages that speak directly to specific customers.

Then, there are the recently announced changes to Facebook’s algorithm that basically mean that organic reach for pages is finally altogether dead.

Afraid of being frozen out of users’ feeds, SaaS marketers are trying not to panic in the face of what could potentially put their existing marketing funnels in jeopardy.

There’s also the rise of automation to think about.

Why Brand Advocacy Is Such a Big Deal for SaaS

In an era where social proof is such a powerful currency for marketers, it’s more important than ever for SaaS marketers to seek out brand advocates wherever we possibly can.

Here are some of the biggest benefits associated with brand advocacy, along with some ways that SaaS marketers can get started with realizing them.

1. Overcome Content Overload and Mistrust

While the concept of “quality content” might be cliché at this point, consider how a higher volume of shares highlights a piece of content as buzzworthy. This is social proof at its best.

Content shares and product recommendations work because people trust peers and thought leaders more than they trust brands and institutions.

2. Expand Your Reach Organically

No matter how you slice it, competition in the SaaS space is fierce.

Considering that there are approximately 5,000 brands in the martech space alone, SaaS companies must fight tooth and nail for the attention of potential customers.

When you encourage employees to regularly promote your content with their own social media audiences, you essentially amass a small army of promoters you can call on time and time again. This year’s State of Employee Advocacy study from JEM Consulting found that over 75% of respondents see their advocacy program as yielding satisfactory or better results.

3. Engage Your Employees

Perhaps one of the most overlooked aspects of encouraging brand advocates among employees is the actually task of asking them to do so.

This cuts down on potential wastes of time on social media and streamlines the process of sharing new content amongst your workers.

4. Supercharge Your Social Selling

SaaS customers are heavily influenced by what they see on social media when it comes time to make purchases.

Research from Sana indicates that social media is the number two driver of digital sales in the B2B sector, ranking just behind onsite buying.

Again, the numbers game of brand advocacy comes to light based on what your customers see on social media.

Dennis Koutoudis from LinkedIn SuperPowers told SalesHacker that he sees prospecting on social media, especially on LinkedIn, as one of the key SaaS sales opportunities of 2018:

5. Keep Your Content Budget Under Control

According to Content Marketing Institute, 38% of brands are looking to up their content marketing budgets in 2018. Even so, that’s no excuse for brands to spend recklessly.

And given the emphasis on automation and other tools that could potentially cut into any given SaaS company’s budget, a leaner content marketing strategy just plain makes sense.

Encouraging brand advocacy costs next to nothing compared to paid media. Additionally, popping up more and more via social media could actually score you earned media mentions as an added bonus.

Conclusion

As competition continues to emerge in the SaaS space, having voices on deck to promote your content becomes a critical piece of standing out from the crowd.

Not only does advocacy keep content marketing costs down, but allows SaaS brands to seamlessly signal their authority. Rather than pay for that same credibility, why not generate it yourself?

And while marketing strategies at large never stay the same for long, brand advocacy is here to stay.

Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2018/05/why-saas-brand-advocacy-is-more.html

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hotspreadpage · 7 years ago

Text

Automation, AdWords and Amazon: Ashley Fletcher on the future of paid search

In 2017, Google rolled out 43 separate updates and changes to its AdWords platform.

From showing local information to display ads to the launch of Smart Display campaigns to visibility over landing page performance, each update from Google – whether big or small – has an impact on the way that PPC practitioners and search marketers go about their craft.

Going by the major announcements we’ve already seen from Google in January, with the roll-out of an Actions directory for the Google Assistant, home hubs with smart screens, and a significant update to its mobile algorithm to take page speed into account, 2018 is going to be an even bigger year for Google all round. AdWords is likely to be no exception to that.

Meanwhile, there’s another key player on the horizon: Amazon. With the saturation of the Google Shopping landscape, Amazon Shopping is opening up as a potentially lucrative new avenue for retail search marketers.

I caught up with Ashley Fletcher, VP of Marketing at Adthena and former Product Manager at Google, to talk about what we’re likely to see from AdWords and paid search in 2018. Ashley Fletcher has been in the industry for 12 years, with five of those spent at Google working on a range of products including Google’s Compare products, Google Express, and Google Shopping in its infancy.

Fletcher shared his thoughts with me on the overarching trends in paid search, why PPC still needs a human touch, and why search marketers should be getting in early with Amazon Shopping.

Keeping up with the pace of change

Last November, Google unveiled a revamped version of its AdWords product just in time for the holidays. The new AdWords platform was redesigned in Material Design, Google’s design language, and built on top of a new infrastructure, meaning faster-loading pages and a cleaner look.

The redesigned AdWords also brought with it custom intent audiences to help marketers reach people as they’re making a purchase decision, and promotion extensions that serve up special offers for products and services.

Image: Google Inside AdWords

I asked Fletcher how advertisers can get the most out of AdWords in light of the November redesign, and other recent updates.

“My overarching feeling is that it’s highly customizable,” says Fletcher. “That plays into the advertiser’s hands, because you can shape the metrics and views to your needs.”

This is important as advertisers now are working with increasing amounts of data from different sources, making it crucial to have that level of customizability and flexibility in visualizing it all.

“Advertisers are accessing increasing amounts of data via APIs,” Fletcher explains. “More and more advertisers are getting comfortable using something like Data Studio to ingest all of the AdWords metrics, plus all of the metrics from an independent source like ours, and overlay them onto their day-to-day KPIs.”

Not all advertisers are comfortable with using APIs, however, and for AdWords – as well as for external tools like Adthena – there is a need to strike the balance between making great data insights available via an API, versus adding more bells and whistles to the interface.

The metrics that advertisers are working with can often shift partway through the year as Google rolls out an update. For example, in October 2017 Google uncapped the daily budget in AdWords, making it possible for advertisers to spend up to twice the daily budget that they had allotted. This type of change directly affects the metrics that go into an advertiser’s dashboard.

But rolling with the changes has become par for the course in paid search. “There’s a huge dependency on the part of AdWords advertisers to keep up with the pace of change,” says Fletcher. “There’s always something else to learn and adapt to.”

On the topic of change, what does Fletcher believe is on the horizon for AdWords in 2018?

AdWords and automation

“The first thing I would say is that we can expect more automation,” says Fletcher. “Google has been focusing a lot on developing its AI and machine learning capabilities, and we’re likely to see that continue.”

He pointed to the example of Dynamic Search Ads, which is heavily reliant on automation to help users scale their campaigns. DSA have seen widespread adoption amongst advertisers, and Fletcher predicts that this particular feature is likely to evolve over the coming year.

Display is another area in which Google has ventured into automation, launching smart display campaigns in April 2017. These seem to have been positively received, although Fletcher observes that automation can be a contentious topic among advertisers.

“How comfortable advertisers feel about [automation] is really 50/50 – some people like to go hands-on, others like to go hands-off. Working with advertisers over the Black Friday period, a lot of them opted to go with manual bidding because they felt they needed that control.”

Marketers may need to become comfortable with increasing automation in PPC – but there will still be room in the industry for the human touch

Given that the trend in the industry seems to be veering towards increased automation, does Fletcher believe that advertisers will need to become more comfortable with it in future?

“Yes. But any kind of automated feature also needs to be clearly measurable, and give advertisers the transparency they need. If you’re going to opt in to these features, you need to know what they’re triggering on, and what the content is.”

However, this is not to say that search marketers are going to be losing their jobs to the machines any time soon, as Fletcher believes firmly in the value of the human element in PPC, as does Adthena.

“We need to utilize machine learning to do the legwork and work out the smarts for those insights,” says Fletcher. “But the human piece will always be to action and verify those – and to pivot to bespoke business needs. One may be around cost-saving, one may be around entering new markets, one may be around customer acquisition.

“You need the human element to pivot to those goals – but I would certainly leverage the machines to give me the insights to go and action. It’s a fine balance you need to achieve between being hands-on with search and search advertising, and using machine learning where it’s suitable.”

The rise of Amazon Shopping in retail search marketing

Meanwhile, in retail search marketing, a different kind of shift is taking place – between two industry titans.

Since Fletcher started working at Google, he has observed the Google Shopping landscape becoming increasingly saturated and competitive, to the point where an additional half a percent of performance can be key.

“When I started at Google, Google Shopping was really taking off – the ad unit was getting bigger, and exposing on new queries. Now, Product Listing Ads trigger on 58% of all retail queries – which is huge. It’s a very big shift there.

“Meanwhile, Amazon Shopping has become a destination site, and that’s changing behavior.”

Amazon Shopping has become a destination site, which is changing both shopping and advertising behavior

We’ve covered this trend previously on Search Engine Watch, with studies showing that more than half of consumers begin their online product searches on Amazon instead of on Google.

“Amazon’s Shopping product is currently on the rise – CPCs are low, advertisers are enjoying really good ROI; but it’s only a matter of time before that landscape becomes saturated, too.”

Fletcher believes that the low CPC and high ROI currently available through Amazon Shopping makes now a perfect time for retailers to get in on the platform.

And Amazon is still expanding into new marketplaces across the world – Fletcher points to Australia, where Amazon launched for the first time in December 2017. Because we’ve seen Amazon launch and expand in more than a dozen countries over the years, it’s possible to predict with relative certainty how events will unfold, and so search marketers in those new markets need to be aware of the trends.

“We have the data points to say, ‘This is what will happen to your market’ – we’ve seen the market share that Amazon takes from search in the UK and the US, and we can forecast what’s likely to happen to Australia, in turn.”

Does a competitor intelligence platform like Adthena have the same level of insight on Amazon as it does on Google’s platforms? “We actually have more,” says Fletcher. “We can do a huge amount with Amazon, in terms of mapping out the market.”

Google Home: Coming soon to an AdWords set near you?

Overall, Fletcher believes that we’ll be seeing growth in automation products in AdWords over the next year, with Google continuing to develop what’s working well. He is confident that AdWords will continue to set the bar for campaign reporting, encouraging best practice in attribution across the paid search industry.

Following the announcement of smart screens for the Google Home at CES 2018, Fletcher also predicts that this year will be the year that Google offers campaign targeting for smart home hubs in AdWords.

“To me, screens seem like the first step towards monetizing smart home hubs. I think Google needs the screen in order to execute that, because it’s hard to see how else you would advertise on a voice device without completely messing up the user flow.”

Smart screens on the Google Home could be the first step towards making campaign targeting available for smart home hubs

Certainly, the closest thing we’ve seen to advertising on Google Home thus far – a possible plug for the Beauty and the Beast live-action film which Google denies was intended as an ad – was very jarring, and received a great deal of backlash from Home users, suggesting that Google needs to tread carefully if it wants to make monetization on the Google Home work.

“It’s still very early days – maybe Google was testing something with that, and maybe they weren’t. But if I were an AdWords advertiser, I wouldn’t expect it to be long before these devices feature in your set. By the end of 2018, I expect AdWords to have campaign targeting, or something like it, for Home devices.”

Automation, AdWords and Amazon: Ashley Fletcher on the future of paid search syndicated from https://hotspread.wordpress.com

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sheilalmartinia · 7 years ago

Text

Automation, AdWords and Amazon: Ashley Fletcher on the future of paid search

In 2017, Google rolled out 43 separate updates and changes to its AdWords platform.

Fletcher shared his thoughts with me on the overarching trends in paid search, why PPC still needs a human touch, and why search marketers should be getting in early with Amazon Shopping.

Keeping up with the pace of change

Image: Google Inside AdWords

I asked Fletcher how advertisers can get the most out of AdWords in light of the November redesign, and other recent updates.

“My overarching feeling is that it’s highly customizable,” says Fletcher. “That plays into the advertiser’s hands, because you can shape the metrics and views to your needs.”

This is important as advertisers now are working with increasing amounts of data from different sources, making it crucial to have that level of customizability and flexibility in visualizing it all.

On the topic of change, what does Fletcher believe is on the horizon for AdWords in 2018?

AdWords and automation

Marketers may need to become comfortable with increasing automation in PPC – but there will still be room in the industry for the human touch

Given that the trend in the industry seems to be veering towards increased automation, does Fletcher believe that advertisers will need to become more comfortable with it in future?

The rise of Amazon Shopping in retail search marketing

Meanwhile, in retail search marketing, a different kind of shift is taking place – between two industry titans.

“Meanwhile, Amazon Shopping has become a destination site, and that’s changing behavior.”

Amazon Shopping has become a destination site, which is changing both shopping and advertising behavior

We’ve covered this trend previously on Search Engine Watch, with studies showing that more than half of consumers begin their online product searches on Amazon instead of on Google.

“Amazon’s Shopping product is currently on the rise – CPCs are low, advertisers are enjoying really good ROI; but it’s only a matter of time before that landscape becomes saturated, too.”

Fletcher believes that the low CPC and high ROI currently available through Amazon Shopping makes now a perfect time for retailers to get in on the platform.

Google Home: Coming soon to an AdWords set near you?

Smart screens on the Google Home could be the first step towards making campaign targeting available for smart home hubs

from Search Engine Watch https://searchenginewatch.com/2018/02/05/automation-adwords-and-amazon-ashley-fletcher-on-the-future-of-ppc/

0 notes

reputationiseverything · 7 years ago

Text

Why SaaS Brand Advocacy Is More Important than Ever in 2018

email marketing affiliate programs

Although it’s no secret that the realm of marketing is constantly evolving, it seems that the space is changing especially dramatically for SaaS companies nowadays.

And these changes are cause for concern for brands looking to flourish in 2018.

For starters, consider the overwhelming push toward personalization.

This signals the need for SaaS brands to segment their content assets and interfaces to hone in on messages that speak directly to specific customers.

Then, there are the recently announced changes to Facebook’s algorithm that basically mean that organic reach for pages is finally altogether dead.

Afraid of being frozen out of users’ feeds, SaaS marketers are trying not to panic in the face of what could potentially put their existing marketing funnels in jeopardy.

There’s also the rise of automation to think about.

Why Brand Advocacy Is Such a Big Deal for SaaS

In an era where social proof is such a powerful currency for marketers, it’s more important than ever for SaaS marketers to seek out brand advocates wherever we possibly can.

Here are some of the biggest benefits associated with brand advocacy, along with some ways that SaaS marketers can get started with realizing them.

1. Overcome Content Overload and Mistrust

While the concept of “quality content” might be cliché at this point, consider how a higher volume of shares highlights a piece of content as buzzworthy. This is social proof at its best.

Content shares and product recommendations work because people trust peers and thought leaders more than they trust brands and institutions.

2. Expand Your Reach Organically

No matter how you slice it, competition in the SaaS space is fierce.

Considering that there are approximately 5,000 brands in the martech space alone, SaaS companies must fight tooth and nail for the attention of potential customers.

When you encourage employees to regularly promote your content with their own social media audiences, you essentially amass a small army of promoters you can call on time and time again. This year’s State of Employee Advocacy study from JEM Consulting found that over 75% of respondents see their advocacy program as yielding satisfactory or better results.

3. Engage Your Employees

Perhaps one of the most overlooked aspects of encouraging brand advocates among employees is the actually task of asking them to do so.

This cuts down on potential wastes of time on social media and streamlines the process of sharing new content amongst your workers.

4. Supercharge Your Social Selling

SaaS customers are heavily influenced by what they see on social media when it comes time to make purchases.

Research from Sana indicates that social media is the number two driver of digital sales in the B2B sector, ranking just behind onsite buying.

Again, the numbers game of brand advocacy comes to light based on what your customers see on social media.

Dennis Koutoudis from LinkedIn SuperPowers told SalesHacker that he sees prospecting on social media, especially on LinkedIn, as one of the key SaaS sales opportunities of 2018:

5. Keep Your Content Budget Under Control

According to Content Marketing Institute, 38% of brands are looking to up their content marketing budgets in 2018. Even so, that’s no excuse for brands to spend recklessly.

And given the emphasis on automation and other tools that could potentially cut into any given SaaS company’s budget, a leaner content marketing strategy just plain makes sense.

Encouraging brand advocacy costs next to nothing compared to paid media. Additionally, popping up more and more via social media could actually score you earned media mentions as an added bonus.

Conclusion

As competition continues to emerge in the SaaS space, having voices on deck to promote your content becomes a critical piece of standing out from the crowd.

Not only does advocacy keep content marketing costs down, but allows SaaS brands to seamlessly signal their authority. Rather than pay for that same credibility, why not generate it yourself?

And while marketing strategies at large never stay the same for long, brand advocacy is here to stay.

FaceBook

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