Archives for September 2018

September
24, 2018

5 min read

In this ongoing column, The Digest, Entrepreneur.com News Director Stephen J. Bronner speaks with food entrepreneurs and executives to see what it took to get their products into the mouths of customers.

Bill and Leigh Keith didn’t have a typical childhood. They’re two of 13 kids who lived with their parents on the road — first in a motor home then on a bus — with much of their time spent off the grid.

“I hated it when I was a kid. We wanted certainty so bad,” Leigh said. “I see it as badge of pride now, because that type of upbringing made me into a self-starter, hungry to make something of myself.”

Related: This Entrepreneur Almost Quit Multiple Times, But After Appearing on ‘Shark Tank’ He Now Has a $100 Million Business

She and Bill became entrepreneurs when she was 19 and he was 22. They’re the founders of Perfect Bar, a company that creates protein bars that need to be refrigerated. When they started the company, fresh snacking — foods that need to be preserved in the refrigerator — was getting its start (for example: hummus and pretzel packs). Now, thanks in part to Perfect Bar, the category is driving a surge of sales in healthy snacks, while the conventional snacks category shrinks, according to Mintel. Perfect Bar, which was bootstrapped during its first 10 years, is now sold in more than 20,000 stores across the U.S., up from 5,000 stores just two years ago.

“We had a total uphill battle to get people to explore and spend $2.50 on something you didn’t know why was in the fridge,” Leigh said.

Image credit: Perfect Bar

Bill and Leigh are among the oldest of their siblings. When their father — who they dubbed an “eccentric nutritionist” — was diagnosed with skin cancer in 2005 (he died four years later), they decided they needed to do something to take care of the family. That something came in the form of their father’s recipe for a protein bar.

“We grew up selling those in Ziploc bags since we were little kids, so we knew how to buy and sell ingredients and sell the product,” Leigh said. “The backup to selling Perfect Bars was going back to junior college and working at Blockbuster Video, or climbing the ranks at an insurance company or selling real estate. It just was going to be a hamster wheel.”

The Keiths took out their parents’ equity from their property — $100,000 — and purchased a candy wrapper machine for $65,000. The rest of the money was used to pay for inventory and support. It was slow at first. But the siblings focused and hustled, selling the bars wherever they could, including vitamin shops, door to door, farmers markets and festivals.

Related: 5 Keys to Successful Sibling Partnerships

The harder they worked, the more they got out of it, Leigh said, “and we hung on to that idea that it eventually could become something that could sustain our family and give us a fine life.”

That turning point came when a Whole Foods buyer, who had tried a bar at a festival, gave Perfect Bar shelf space at a single store.

“I slept in my car [near the store in Berkeley] because I couldn’t afford a hotel and showered at the gym,” Bill said. “Sunup to sundown I sold [bars] through these demo tables and went back to Sacramento [to get more bars]. We did that for 30 days.”

It paid off. Whole Foods eventually gave Perfect Bar its first national launch.

“Fast forward to today, we’re one of the bestselling bars in Whole Foods and one of fastest growing bar companies in the country,” Bill said. “It was that foundation that made it work.”

Image credit: Perfect Bar

The siblings would employ a similar strategy during the company’s growth phase, since educating the customer was so important for a product in a nascent category; if they couldn’t demo the product at a store, they wouldn’t take the account.

“We just built that buzz and base,” Leigh said. “It was a slow-moving freight train. We didn’t know fresh snacking would be where it is today.”

Related: These Entrepreneur Brothers Ditched Coffee for Matcha and Built a Multimillion-Dollar Drink Brand

The Keiths’ advice for others? Don’t follow their example. Find mentors who can let you know whether you’re on the right track and watch your competition to see what strategies and efficiencies you can pick up from them. But the slow approach was good for Bill, from a personal development standpoint.

“I had to be the outgoing salesman, and I’m truly an introvert,” he said. “I had to be something for this family and this organization that I wasn’t good at. It’s so crazy, once you start tackling your fears it does truly feel like you can do anything.”

September
23, 2018

1 min read

While recreational and medical marijuana are slowly infiltrating the market, CBD is as well. Unlike marijuana, however, the CBD business avoids all of the legality issues of selling and distributing the highly-debated drug.

Related: 12 Cutting-Edge Marijuana Marketing Tactics That Work

CBD stands for cannabidoil and doesn’t contain THC, so CBD won’t get a person high. It’s used for pain management and to treat anxiety and depression, immune issues and more. CBD is a $1 billion industry, and its sales are estimated to grow to a whopping $22 billion by 2022. The most common CBD product is CBD oil, which can be taken as a dietary supplement, as drops, through an e-cigarette and even as lotion.

Related: The Hemp Business Is Booming (Infographic)

From sleep disorders to appetite and weight loss — CBD has a number of medical and therapeutic benefits. Whether you’re looking to launch a new CBD business or try some out yourself, learn more about CBD by checking out BestCBDOils.org’s infographic below.

September
22, 2018

7 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Fraud might seem like an enigmatic problem, with no obvious remedy to stop it from taking your campaign budgets.

But, in fact, mobile ad fraud is somewhat limited in the operations or, how it can work. Though fraudsters are always developing new exploits to steal an app’s marketing budget, or to circumvent fraud prevention solutions, that doesn’t mean the underlying systems vary. Such a distinction is important when trying to develop a foolproof solution against the biggest challenge in the mobile marketing industry today.

At Adjust, we think about fraud differently. We view exploits, such as SDK Spoofing, as “methods,” or ways in which a fraudster can operate in order to steal. But, at its root cause, mobile ad fraud can only work in one of two established structures, or “types.”

This viewpoint may come across as an unfamiliar mindset, even unnecessary to some. However, we believe the problem of mobile ad fraud, once defined, can be dealt with much more effectively. Instead of arguing over semantics, the industry as a whole can move forward, dealing with fraud in a more cooperative way.

There are ultimately only two types of fraud.

In all types of fraud, a fraudster can spoof one (or both) of two types of ‘signals’ used in attribution. The two types of signals they can spoof are ad engagements (like views or clicks) and app activities (like installs, sessions and events).

Thus, we’ve created a distinction between types of fraud that spoof ad engagements or the user’s in-app activity. The former is known as Spoofed Attribution. The latter is called Spoofed Users.

Related: 5 Psychological Reasons ‘Social Proof’ Beats Everything Else in Marketing

Why make this distinction?

Whenever you discover a new method of fraud, it’s best to start an investigation into it by first identifying which type of signal this form of fraud wants to exploit.

For instance, one method of Spoofed Attribution began as ‘Click Spamming.’ As time passes you may discover more advanced methods — ‘Click Injection’ among them. Both methods result in stealing attribution, but they work in different ways. Don’t worry if you don’t know these both types of fraud, we cover that later in more detail.

By understanding that the two work within the same system, it becomes easier to apply solutions that deal with both. Basing the two in a single definition – Spoofed Attribution – it is much simpler to work in terms of fraudsters stealing attribution, while not getting them mixed up with other schemes.

Defining ad fraud – but to what purpose?

Essentially, in the process of trying to stamp out each individual method, certain patterns become identifiable. Instead of asking, “Is this fraud?” you should be asking:

What is the method of this fraud?

How did they get this user activity into our system?

How does Click Spamming really work?

If you begin by stating that there is a problem, and then look at the individual methods applied, you’ll gain a more assured understanding. Follow these proactive steps:

1. This is that method

2. This is the countermeasure

3. This is the yes-no filter

Fraud types

Combining the previously mentioned spoofed signals, here’s a visual matrix:

 

• Everything in Type I is considered genuine traffic, where real users are driven to interact with an app by an advertisement with which they have actually engaged.

• Type II describes Spoofed Attribution — where a fraudster spoofs ad engagements for real users, with the aim of stealing credit from a user that either organically interacted with the app or was driven by another legitimate advertisement. This type is also known as ‘stolen attribution’ or “poaching.”

• Type III and IV defines Spoofed Users: this type of fraud focuses on simulating the behavior of user in-app activity. By spoofing installs and events for non-existent users, fraudsters can steal ad budgets aimed at rewarding app-based conversions. “Botting,” “bots” and fraud related to “fake users” are all associated with this type.

Currently, fraudsters can easily fake ad engagements for any users they’ve fabricated. So, whenever spoofed app activity appears, it’s always coupled with fraudulent engagement data. For the sake of simplicity, types III and IV have been grouped together.

When discussing fraud, it’s useful to think of these “types” (such as Spoofed Attribution) as the “what,” and “methods” (like Click Spam) as the “how.”

Related: How to Be Invisible Online — Without Going Off the Grid (Infographic)

Fraud methods

So, what do these ‘methods’ look like in practice? Splitting them into their respective types, you gain more clarity into what each fraud method does.

Methods of Spoofed Attribution include Click Spam and Click Injection. With Spoofed Users where the activity is faked, there are Simulators, Device Farms and SDK Spoofing. When applying our above matrix, the configuration of fraud looks like this:

 

Let’s cover each type in a little more detail.

Spoofed Attribution

Spoofed ad engagements started out with simple Click Spamming and its variations like “click stacking,” “views as clicks” or “preloading.” These methods function by targeting as many clicks to an attribution company as possible and gaining attribution for users by randomly matching device IDs or fingerprints.

Advanced methods (like Click Injection) create fake clicks during the download of an app, claiming attribution with an impossible to beat “last click.”

Spoofed Users

The first cases of Spoofed Users detected involved simulators on cloud computing services running Android apps that were pretending to be real users. On iOS, device farms exist in southeast Asian countries where real devices and actual humans created non-genuine app activities.

Recently, there’s a much more devious method: SDK Spoofing. This cuts the cost for creating fake user interactions by only faking the requests made from an app to servers of attribution companies and app publishers, instead of actually running the app. Fraudsters have broken encryptions and hashed signatures, which has led to an arms race between fraudsters and researchers.

Simulators, cheap labor and bots can all be used to create fraudulent app activities. They are all different methods used to commit the same type of fraud.

Related: Giving Advertisers a Way to Bypass Facebook Click Fraud

What is fraud prevention?

Finally, it’s important to examine the lack of distinction between fraud solutions, and exactly how you apply a methodology to create a stronger system.

A lot of confusion exists among prevention, detection and rejection – often to the detriment of advertisers who want to run campaigns without interference. The industry often uses detection, prevention and rejection in the same context interchangeably. This creates uncertainty from a lack of expertise, which is advanced maliciously to keep the market in an ongoing state of confusion.

Fraud prevention is the act of rejecting attribution to known methods of fraud.

The chart below illustrates an important flow to follow for detecting a type of fraud, then researching the method used before finally creating a logical filter for its unique characteristics.

 

When applying this prescribed definition of fraud prevention, you’ll find that only attribution companies are in a position to apply filters effectively. Third-party tools can only show detection metrics after the fact, unless an attribution company allows them to interfere with the attribution.

Fraud prevention should not just be a marketing ploy, or a means to muddy the water — it’s a serious responsibility. If done correctly, anti-fraud solutions will help to advance the entire mobile ad ecosystem. If done without the proper attention to detail and the research necessary, it will end up as the snake oil of our industry.

September
21, 2018

9 min read

In this series, The Gambit, Entrepreneur associate editor Hayden Field explores extraordinary risk, speaking with successful people about how they overcame unusual obstacles to found a company or switched industries entirely in a “career 180.”

Mark Greene started his path to the Air Force during a time of peace, but when the 22-year-old graduated, he was sent almost immediately to Afghanistan.

“I was the class that graduated right after the towers came down,” Greene said. “It was a really strange time to start a career as a military pilot.”

The new fighter pilot had just completed a training program in Mississippi, and he began his first day as a second lieutenant — outranking 85 percent of the military. Greene said he remembers 19-year-old Marines being shot by snipers or running from roadside bombs, and from the air, it was Greene’s job to listen to what was happening on the ground and then respond accordingly.

Image credit: Alec Lloyd

“[There was] really no air battle in these fights — it was more protecting people on the ground,” he said.

Whenever he returned home, Greene would hear news reports mention dead Americans in Mosul and other cities. He could imagine those places. It was difficult to come home, but Greene said it was also tough to go back. By 2008, he was spending as many as 220 days a year overseas.

In the following years, Greene went on to fly about 170 combat missions. However he felt about the war itself, he enjoyed the “mission aspect” of his job: responding to the needs of struggling U.S. soldiers.

Later, he’d apply that same mission-oriented thinking to something else entirely: creating new financial tools for struggling consumers across America.

Image credit: Alec Lloyd

Greene is the director of SafetyNet, an innovation lab that’s part of CUNA Mutual Group, a nationwide insurance company. The innovation lab’s ultimate goal is what sets it apart: Listen to the needs of millions of Americans struggling through financial hardship — people that banks and credit unions may not view as first-priority customers — and create entirely new financial tools for them. Here’s his story.

The Itch

Greene’s family is staggering in number. His father is the youngest of 14 siblings, while his mother is the youngest of five — yielding hundreds (yes, hundreds) of cousins. Relatives of all ages riddle Greene’s childhood memories. His family members’ future trajectories would vary as much as their personalities — some found great success, others struggled with personal finance and still others, as he put it, ended up on the “wrong side of law.”

Greene’s parents didn’t often discuss money, but he remembers seeing them struggle — there were hints, he said, that the family wasn’t necessarily on secure financial footing. One memory in particular sticks with Greene, and it would go on to shape how he thinks about service and gratitude. When, at age 10 or 11, he had his heart set on the newest pair of Nike shoes, his father presented him with a pair by a brand Greene had never heard of. He recalls that his reaction — upset and ungrateful — hurt his father deeply.

“That’s something that affected me my whole life,” Greene said. He recalled thinking, I have to change this. From that point forward, he had a renewed resolve to help people struggling in any difficult situation.

The Detour

After the financial crisis hit in 2008, the government decided to consolidate military bases, and Greene’s squadron was discontinued. He had a choice: Either relocate to Germany or do something else. Greene decided to apply to law school with the goal of eventually prosecuting war crimes — after all, he’d learned about law by studying the laws of war as a pilot. At the same time, one weekend a month, he flew training missions for the Air National Guard.

Greene’s first class in law school, Contracts 1, changed his career trajectory. One day in class, he read about a costly dispute that could have been avoided if the defendants had organized their business differently from the get-go. Since Greene had been trained as an engineer, he was naturally interested in how things are built and put together. Because of that, he said, learning about the structure of businesses “blew [his] mind.”

Image credit: SafetyNet

“Studying how a contract is written kind of changes the way you think about how everything is structured,” he said. “That was the first moment where I saw the power of business.”

The class didn’t only teach Greene about long-term business structure — it also taught him that companies could effectively boost their efficiency by listening to direct feedback from consumers. Through his time in the military, Greene had learned that on the government side, that feedback loop — connecting directly to the people — was exceedingly convoluted.

The idea of listening to customers to inform a business’s foundation would come into play sooner than Greene realized. Post-graduation, he snagged a job at Merrill Lynch in Madison, Wis., but his affluent client base — and a report on the state’s racial disparity — sparked new resolve in Greene. He felt he could be doing much more to help a larger cross-section of consumers on the ground. 

The Leap

One day in 2016, Greene met with Dan Kaiser, an executive at CUNA Mutual Group. Kaiser wanted to talk through ideas about different financial solutions Greene wished existed. Kaiser was helping to develop an innovation lab, he said, to focus on solutions for consumers’ personal finance issues, and it was being kept largely under wraps. The project was spurred by a Federal Reserve report citing figures that close to half of Americans would be unable to come up with $400 in an emergency — and that a greater number of individuals than that didn’t have $1,000 in savings.

After ordering coffee, the men talked about how insurance could be flipped on its head to help struggling people with immediate cash flow needs or insure their savings accounts. But Greene didn’t realize he was interviewing for a job until he received a game-changing phone call that same week. “We’re building a team,” he recalled hearing from an executive on the other end. Greene accepted the offer and joined the innovation lab as soon as it launched.

On Greene’s first day as director of SafetyNet, he said he met the team and read the mission statement on the wall: “Improve the financial well-being of millions of hard-working people by developing innovative financial solutions that help individuals manage unexpected cash flow, bill payment and savings challenges.”

Members of the team were tasked with thinking of creative ways to solve enduring financial problems, and Greene soon discovered he would embark on a nine-month venture to talk with 7,000 consumers in states including Texas, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Illinois about the tools they wished they had to take control of their money. Greene said he didn’t believe the statistics that Trunzo had cited in their coffee meeting until his eight-person team began speaking with consumers across the country.

The Breaking Point

On April 11, 2016, Greene sat in a Hilton hotel in Madison, Wis. He was waiting to speak with a woman named Chelsea about her money struggles as part of SafetyNet’s new venture. Chelsea had called earlier in the day to cancel the interview, but she eventually changed her mind and finally walked into the Hilton around 5:30 p.m.

Greene listened as Chelsea explained how hopeless she felt — that she avoided almost all contact with her financial institutions, including opening mail, and that managing her money paycheck to paycheck had become almost a traumatic experience. She said the money that she owed family members had driven a rift between them, and though she wished she could take control of her financial life, she didn’t know where to begin.

Image credit: SafetyNet

Chelsea shivered as she talked, and as she unloaded more and more of her story, she became more emotional. Her pain was so great that Greene felt like he was speaking with a victim of domestic violence. All he could think to do was offer her a glass of water — and listen.

“I left that conversation with the feeling that that relationship that she had with her finances and financial institution was abusive,” he said. When he imagined Chelsea representing millions of people in the U.S., Greene said he knew he had to work to change the way people interact with the financial institutions that should be serving them.  

The photos of the consumers Greene and his team spoke with ended up in neat rows on the wall of SafetyNet’s primary meeting room. Every time the team meets to discuss an issue, they’re under the watchful eye of the people who were honest enough to share their money woes with a company they believed may be able to help them.

The Next Step

After 7,000 conversations with consumers, Greene started brainstorming solutions he and his team could build — including “layoff insurance” for people without emergency savings.

This year, Greene’s team is building 25 different products to meet the needs of financially strapped Americans, including an employer-match savings account product, a type of insurance aiming to protect people from eviction, a new type of peer-to-peer lending platform and even pet insurance. The conversation Greene had with Chelsea in April 2016 inspired SafetyNet to develop a new type of budgeting app, and Chelsea is currently beta testing it.

By the end of 2017, SafetyNet was growing at a rate of more than 8 percent week over week — primarily via word of mouth, Greene said, and without using insurance agents. The company now operates in 10 states.

“What we want to be,” Greene said, “is a company that understands our consumers better than anyone.”

September
19, 2018

6 min read

Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

As a business owner or marketer, there’s no worse feeling than the sound of crickets. When there’s a lack of contact form submissions, online orders or phone calls, you have to do something to fill your pipeline.

Related: Use This Google AdWords Hack to Lower Costs and Increase Leads

I recently read a ridiculous article that stated you shouldn’t use AdWords for the following reasons:

1. You pay for clicks.
2. It’s hard to compete with big companies.
3. You have a limited number of characters.
4. Mistakes can cost you dearly.
5. It doesn’t fit your niche.

I’m going to explain to you why this article was completely inaccurate and how you can grow your business instantly through AdWords. My digital marketing agency manages millions of dollars in ad spend so we have extensive experience when it comes to pay-per-click advertising.

1. You pay for quality and strategic clicks.

With pay-per-click advertising, you only pay for the keywords you strategically bid on. For example, if I’m a plumber and want to generate new leads for “plumbing companies near me,” I can bid on just those keywords and I’ll only get charged when someone clicks my advertisement and visits my site.

According to the Google Economic Impact Report, businesses make an average of $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend on AdWords.

Can you think of another form of advertising where the intent to purchase is higher? Your potential customer is literally typing what they want into Google and your advertisement will only populate based on the keywords you select and you will only get charged when someone clicks on your ads.

If you do a good job managing your search terms report and add negative keywords, you can drive amazing quality traffic to your site.

Make sure you are bidding in a smart way using broad match modifier, phrase match or exact match to drive traffic quality. 

Related: How to Improve Your Google “Quality Score”

2. You can compete with big companies.

Unlike television ads in the ’80s and ’90s where a business needed a substantial budget to get on the air, you can get started on AdWords for as little as $300. Theoretically, you can start with less of a budget, but $300 is the minimum we recommend for our clients. The reason behind the $300 budget recommendation is so we can generate enough clicks and data to make changes and enhancements to drive conversions.

According to CLUTCH, 45 percent of small businesses use PPC advertising. Once you start generating conversions for your business, whether that’s ecommerce purchases for an online retailer or contact form submissions, and prove the effectiveness of this form of advertising, you can increase your budget.

If you have the proper tracking in place and can justify the return on investment with a metric called ROAS (return on advertising spend), you can double down on your advertising spend. That’s the beauty of AdWords. You can actually track the performance and once your campaigns are profitable, you can continuously invest more. If you aren’t seeing results, it can be paused with the click of a button.

3. Be creative with a limited number of characters.

People are obsessed with quality score for AdWords. They have this notion that if they place the exact keyword they are bidding on in the advertising copy, their quality score will improve and their cost per click will be reduced.

I’ll let you in on a secret. If everyone is bidding on the term “Columbus Digital Marketing Agency” in the title of their advertisement, there’s not going to be anything that distinguishes your ad versus the competition. I’ve included an advertisement below that is unique and distinguishes our agency versus others. Don’t make your ad copy similar to everyone elses.

Related: The 6 Best Bidding Strategies for Google Keywords

4. Mistakes can cost you dearly.

According to the CEO of Disruptive Advertising, 61 percent of Google AdWords budgets are completely wasted. Mistakes can make or break your AdWords campaign. The same notion is true in every component of business. If you have a lazy accountant, your taxes could be inaccurate and cause you penalties down the road. It helps to hire an expert who knows what they’re doing. If you haven’t set-up an AdWords campaign before, I recommend letting a Google Certified Expert do this as it will save you time and money. Be transparent with the PPC manager and inform her that you want to learn the tactics she is deploying so down the road, you can do this yourself, if you have the time and are willing to learn the craft.

Below are the biggest mistakes we most often see on AdWords:

• Improper bidding, not using broad match modifier, phrase match, exact match and broad match properly
• Not monitoring the search terms results and adding negative keywords
• Improper conversion tracking set-up, which leads to inaccuracy on reporting and the right decisions can’t be made
• Poor advertising copy
• Location targeting not properly set-up based on business objectives
• Improper budget allocation — Budget should be better distributed to most profitable parts of the business or areas business is looking to grow
• Improper date/time bidding — For many businesses, there is no need to bid from 1 a.m. to 6 a.m.
• Bad landing page experience where the user is exposed to content not directly related to what’s being seen in the advertising copy

5. It doesn’t fit your niche.

If you can’t think of a search term that will help someone learn more about your business, then Facebook or Instagram could be a better play. The majority of businesses can reap the benefits of Google AdWords and drive instant traffic to their site for relevant keywords.

If executed properly, AdWords can be a gold mine for your business. The beauty is that if you want to get started on AdWords, a campaign can be set up in less than an hour and can make a monumental long-term impact for your business.