Stories Marketers Are Talking About Today

December: A Time to Celebrate?

We made it to December, the last month of 2018 and the most wonderful time of the year! Traditionally, the holidays are a slower time where we take time to reflect on the year and spend time with family and friends. But the marketing world stops for nothing. Here’s what’s been going on.

Executives and share-holders at Microsoft have plenty to celebrate this season. Microsoft has surpassed Apple as the world’s most valuable publicly-traded company. How did they do it? We can all take a lesson from their strategy. They diversified. They focused on the Cloud, new software and platforms like LinkedIn and Skype, and didn’t focus all their efforts on consumer retail products.

YouTube has less reason to celebrate. They’ve reportedly learned the hard way that consumers aren’t willing to pay a subscription for everything. Back in 2015, the platform started charging $9.99 a month to stream original series and movies starring YouTube stars. That didn’t work. Then they added YouTube music. Still didn’t work. The good news is the content will continue and will be available to all YouTube users, but with ads.

What will the new year hold for Facebook? The New York Times reports that the company is facing three major problems; political, perception and product problems. Mark Zuckerburg has been trying to turn them all around, while some are demanding he step down. Plan to grab a front-row seat to see what will unfold in 2019.

Changing Gears

Snapchat is putting its sights on older users. In order to continue growth, the platform plans to focus on tactics to attract the 35+ demographic. Experts are worried this could be a mistake as younger users are likely to leave if the developers change too much. It could also be confusing to advertisers as to who they will be reaching. Only time will tell!

Are you ready for voice-strategy marketing? Google Home and Amazon Echo do not run paid advertisements so companies like HBO are trying to figure out how to reach consumers through the popular voice technology. Some are trying to figure out how to get noticed in searches, while others are creating fun games for consumers to try and raise brand awareness. What will your strategy be?

Other News-You-Can-Use

The Pew Research Center has released a new study on teen social media use. The study measured both usage of social media along with attitudes towards social media in general. Findings for marketers? 6 out of 10 teens are on social media daily. The attitude findings could also help companies figure out the best messages to use towards the teen demographic.

Are you down with the marketing lingo? That is, do you understand all the references marketers make? Hubspot has put together a marketing term dictionary that all marketers new and old can use to check and make sure they’ve got all the terms correct.

Well, that’s our round-up of need-to-know marketing news from the past two weeks. Subscribe now to make sure you don’t miss out! 

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