Category: News

Mattress startup Purple made waves last week when it went public with the secret sauce of its digital strategy.
Some in the industry were mesmerized to learn that Purple’s digital ad performance went up, and its costs went down, when it focused on creating quality ad creative. Just like traditional advertising, it developed multiple iterations of an ad, tested and tweaked, a tried and true process that the TV space has used for years but that digital has de-emphasized in favor of targeting.
Certainly, all of digital can benefit from optimization and testing, even native advertising.  As David Ogilvy wrote in his 1963 book, Confessions of an Ad Man, “A change in headline can make a difference of ten to one in sales. I never write fewer than 16 headlines for a single advertisement.”  To this day, David Ogilvy’s advice is wise and true. Data shows that the better the headline, the better a native ad performs.  The best performing headline that we’ve seen performed at 650% more than the average.
In native advertising, certainly the headline is the best chance for a quick win to drive more sales.  Here are five surefire tips to master your headline creative in your next native ad:
 

> Write for the time-poor reader. According to data from Microsoft, people lose concentration after eight seconds. This is why the best headlines are 70 characters or fewer and get straight to the point.

 

> Use high performance words. There are 49 words that best perform in headlines. Some of them are:Numbers and years: 5, 7, 9, 10, 20XX: The No. 1….

– Questions. What, Why, When, Which, Will, etc.

– Adjectives: Top, Exclusive, Essential and Critical

– Benefit:  Ways, Rules, Tips, Facts, Lessons, Reasons and Secrets

– Opportunity: Free, New, Easy, Now, Quick, Last and Chance

 

> Qualify the audience–We did this in our headline above and you should also qualify your reader in your native advertisement. Words like advertisers, marketers, moms, investors and students are all great examples of words that qualify the reader.

 

> A/B test: like in the situation of Purple, there is no reason why you cannot and should not test your native ad content. In one situation, we tested two headlines where one headline generated a 48% higher click-through rate than the other by making small tweaks to the overall headline.  Note: make sure your A/B tests are statistically significant with less the a 5% chance of random error.

 

> Get into your customer’s head. The key to any marketing is knowing what is important to your customers. A/B testing will only tell you how one ad performs against another. Spending time with your sales team, and understanding what’s important to your customers, should be key to informing any content strategy. The more meaningful your communication, the more likely a reader is to take notice.

 

To read article on MediaPost Click Here

 
 

With 90% of advertisers saying that they’re reviewing their programmatic advertising contracts and demanding more control and transparency, you know there’s a transparency problem. In programmatic, there are brand safety and measurement issues because too many advertisers have too little insight into where their ads are running and how each site is truly performing — e.g., is that traffic legit, or is it from a bot?
 
Demanding more transparency from agencies and platforms is one way to address the problem. Advertisers can also take steps on their own to track the effectiveness of a campaign. It starts with knowing on what publishers their ads are running.
Click Here to read the rest of the article
 

The power of a great headline applies to all forms of content. Whether you’re writing for infographics or promoting webinars, your headline is what will make the difference to open rates and click-throughs. It will make, or break, a campaign.
One of the most compelling ways to up your open rates is to use proven high performance words and follow a basic formula. It may sound simple, but it works. Many make the mistake of trying to make headlines too clever or obscure, but what you should be doing is making it immediately clear what your article will deliver.
As experts in creating digital adverts for financial brands which achieve cut-through, we’ve found the following are the 49 words found in best performing headlines:
 
• Number or Year: 5, 7, 9, 10, YYYY, The No. 1
• Question: How, to, What, Why, When, Which, Will, Compare
• Adjective: Top, Exclusive, Special, Essential, Critical, Key, Best, Worst, You(r)
• Benefit: Ways, Rules, Tips, Facts, Lessons, Reasons, Principles, Secrets, Mistakes, Steps
• Opportunity: Free, New, Easy, Now, Quick, Last, Chance, Save, Discover, Don’t, Miss, (N)ever
• Media: Magazine, Report, Guide, Video, DVD, Whitepaper, Download
(The list above includes: Ogilvy List + Jeff Goins List + dianomi List – Compliance headaches)
 
The formula = Number or Question + Adjective + Benefit + Keyword + Opportunity + Media.
 
But it’s not enough just to apply the formula. The key to success is taking the formula and applying it to your own audience, evaluating what works best for them. Changing just one word can make a huge difference. Measuring and tracking results for all campaigns will help build a picture of what works best, as well as carrying out AB testing to optimise the results. Knowing your target audience and identifying what will resonate should be at the heart of all your digital content. Get the right message in the right place at the right time, and you’ll see results.
Essentially, it’s about blending science and art – combining the science of a winning formula, with the art of knowing your audience and what will appeal most to them.
Click here for more information on our services.
 

Online content has a perception problem, an issue highlighted by the following NY Times article: Lost in the Digital Swamp, click here.
 
Essentially, there’s a somewhat seedy side to online content – the world of click-bait and misleading adverts which tap into basic browsing behaviours. It’s the type of content which uncompromisingly fails to deliver on headline promises and leaves users feeling cheated. Some news sites have banned these links from their pages but some have been seduced by the easy revenue potential, to continue to allow them. And that’s giving digital content overall a bad name.
 
This perception problem can make many brands nervous of online content. And it’s not surprising that they would feel like this. You only have to look back at the recent scandal of adverts for well-known brands appearing alongside potentially damaging content, to see the perils of placing online content on a platform which can’t guarantee exactly where your advert is going to be placed.
 
Financial brands, in particular, have to be extremely careful about knowing exactly how and where their online content is going to appear. Protecting brand safety in a world where news travels fast is vital to avoid reputational armageddon.
 
Our ethos is that the quality of an online advert’s context is as important as the quality of the content itself. We only use 250 premium business and financial sites as channels and we guarantee 100% transparency – our clients are reassured that their content is only going to appear in context.
 
We start with the end user in mind, not the shock-factor of a clickbait article. Truly creating advocates only happens when there is trust and an expectation of a promise of content which will deliver.
 

Dianomi, the financial content marketing platform, are excited to announce the addition of AI-CIO to their roster of premium partners – with sponsored Financial Content recommendation units recently launching across desktop and mobile versions.
 
AI-CIO, Chief Investment Officer, informs and network the world’s largest asset owners and the people who advise them. CIO’s website provides the latest news, opinion, and research focusing on the overarching investment issues affecting public and corporate pension plans, endowments, foundations, healthcare capital pools, and sovereign wealth funds.
 
The addition of AI-CIO to the Dianomi publisher list increases the large decision making and influencer audience of the Dianomi network.
 
To find out more about partnership with Dianomi, please contact [email protected] for more information.

NEW YORK, June 05, 2017 – SourceMedia, a diversified digital B2B media company serving senior decision-makers in finance, technology and healthcare, today announced that it has entered into a strategic business relationship with Dianomi™, the leading financial content marketing platform.
Beginning today, readers of SourceMedia financial information services, including American Banker, The Bond Buyer, Accounting Today, and Financial Planning – will receive related content recommendations from Dianomi partner publications in the form of native ads. Dianomi-powered sponsor content recommendations and native ads are integrated across SourceMedia’s desktop and mobile sites, reaching influential communities of senior-level professionals at scale.
“SourceMedia is a leader in engaging professional communities through relevant, useful business information and services,” said Matthew Yorke, CMO, SourceMedia. “For modern publishers like us, this means both engaging our readers no matter where they are—even if they’re not on our website—and providing them with other valuable content, be that from our advertisers or other publishers, when they are. Dianomi will enable us do both.”
“SourceMedia’s trusted brands and services convene and engage executives and practitioners, providing them with premium information services that support decision-making and drive competitive advantage,” said Rupert Hodson, Dianomi founder and CEO. “Through the integration of Dianomi’s Sponsored Content Units, we are proud to be adding further value to this user experience, while also adding the additional capability to amplify SourceMedia branded content across our wider network.”
About SourceMedia
SourceMedia, an Observer Capital company, is a business-to-business digital marketing services, subscription information, and event company serving senior-level professionals in the financial, technology and healthcare sectors. Brands include American Banker, PaymentsSource, The Bond Buyer, Financial Planning, Accounting Today, Mergers & Acquisitions, National Mortgage News, Employee Benefit News and Health Data Management.
About Dianomi
Dianomi is the leading Financial Content Marketing Platform, serving over 3.5 billion content recommendations to over 100 million unique visitors every month on some of the Web’s most innovative business and finance publishers. Headquartered in London, Dianomi also has offices in New York and Sydney. Publishers, marketers, and agencies leverage Dianomi to monetize their traffic, and distribute their content to high-quality, financially engaged audiences. Learn more at www.dianomi.com.

Dianomi, the financial content marketing platform, are excited to announce the addition of Proactiveinvestors to their roster of premium partners – with sponsored Financial Content recommendation units recently launching across desktop and mobile versions of their UK, US and Australian sites.
Proactiveinvestors is a leading multi-media news organisation, investor portal and events management business with offices in New York, Sydney, Toronto, Frankfurt and London – operating five financial websites in four languages; providing breaking news, comment and analysis on hundreds of listed companies across the globe daily. They are one of the fastest growing financial media portals in the world.
The group also operates hugely successful “investor forums” where three or four companies present to an audience of high net worth sophisticated investors, fund managers, hedge funds, private client brokers and analysts.
To find out more about partnership with Dianomi, please contact [email protected] for more information.
 
   

Recent news headlines illustrate how damaging it could be for a brand’s digital ads to appear alongside irrelevant, or potentially damaging, content. Major organisations in the UK – including the government, major banks and media groups – have pulled their advertising from Google and YouTube in response to concerns about where and how their content has been appearing on their platforms.
 
Advertising in the digital age can be complex. This recent row highlights the need for transparency as brands look to protect their brand safety online. The quality of the environment in which their content appears is as important as the quality of the creative.
Rupert Hodson, Dianomi CEO comments: “Marketing in context is absolutely paramount. The idea of marketing in context in online advertising is being lost as programmatic networks seek to deliver ‘audiences’ for brands, irrespective of environment.”
As well as protecting brand safety, having content in context ensures target audiences are receptive to the content they’re consuming. Delivering campaigns targeted to specific audiences, while they are actively engaging in that type of content has been a proven recipe for success in marketing.
The following principles underpin dianomi’s commitment to ensure that every piece of content is displayed in the right place at the right time:

• Our network is controlled and only has 250 premium sites.
• We believe delivering digital content in context is essential. Consequently, we ensure that our advertisers financially focused content will only appear on financial and business pages.
• We guarantee 100% transparency on where our client adverts are displayed.
• We enable advertisers to optimise by publisher and see exactly what generates results.

dianomi wins the Gramercy Financial Marketing Strategy Award for Brokerage  

The award was won for the optimisation of Nerdwallet’s Investments campaign, resulting in a 69% reduction in costs for the client and a 35% increase in Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).
The Gramercy Institute is the world’s largest network of senior marketers from leading financial brands and the Gramercy annual awards honors excellence in marketing strategy. See press release of awards here.

Cabell De Marcellus (CTO), Paul Hughes (Head of Product) and Jenny Linder (Head Account Manager) were in New York to pick up the award on 30^th March 2017.

People read the first three words of paragraphs and bulleted items and often stop reading and skip on. They read the tops and bottoms of things before they read the middles (Marketing Sherpa).
 
With that in mind, your headline and first few words are vital. You’ve only got a few seconds to demonstrate thought leadership and generate enough trust to make your audience read on. Those first attention-grabbing words have to encapsulate your brand, as well as driving engagement by appealing to your audience and their needs.
 
You need to think about who your target audience are and what their needs are; what problems do they face, what do they talk about, what words do they use? If you always write your headline with those questions in mind, you’ll tap into exactly what they’re looking for, and deliver content they believe in.
 
Our tips for getting it right:
1. Write for time-poor readers. What would make you click-through?
2. Keep it simple, specific and short – it should be 70 characters or less.
3. Make sure it’s straight to the point and obvious what will follow. Don’t try and trick readers by misleading them.
4. Is it topical and relevant? If it’s not, readers won’t be interested.
5. It has to be useful to your audience – is it going to add value?
6. The headline has to be A/B/n tested and carefully optimised based on statistically significant data.
7. Make sure it’s evergreen and always-on – it should be capable of lasting years.
8. Make it widely re-used on all your channels – email, social, display, search, outdoor etc.
9. To be successful, it will need to be an exact match to your landing page.
10. Use high performance words and follow a formula – it sounds obvious but it does work.
 
Who are dianomi?
We serve 3.4 billion native ads a month to 95 million users for 250 clients across 300+ premium publishers in North America, Europe and APAC. We A/B/n test over 2,100 competing headline variants daily. If you’d like more information on how we can help improve your native financial content, click here