Every marketer knows there are certain selling seasons that cannot be ignored -- Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas, Hanukah, Valentine's Day. However, they may not be aware that today's digital marketing should go beyond a one-size-fits-all approach, regardless of consumers' natural inclination to shop more at certain times of year. Marketers need to start going above and beyond offering deep discounts or clinging to catchy marketing messages.
With consumers spending more time and money online, marketers must prepare their digital marketing strategy to proactively target today's savvy shopper -- or risk losing prime revenue to the competition. This year, Channel Advisor's 2010 Consumer Shopping Habits survey found that more than 58 percent of consumers are very likely to purchase gifts online, as opposed to the 41 percent who choose to shop at brick-and-mortar stores.
According to comScore, consumers spent $29.1 billion online alone during the 2009 holiday shopping season, and eMarketer predicts that e-commerce spending will reach $51.4 billion by the fourth quarter of 2010. With numbers like these, the online opportunity -- both during holidays and off-season -- has nowhere to go but up. That said, driving online retail traffic is only the beginning: Marketers must step up their game and begin to truly engage customers by personalizing and tailoring the seasonal shopping experience.
What works
Improving web traffic via analytics and SEO methods has been digital marketers' focus for so long that most have pretty much mastered it. And while landing page optimization strategies are often given careful attention, content and design decisions are typically based on subjectivity. It's time to stop guessing and concentrate on what happens after visitors arrive. By neglecting the real tactics that convert browsers into buyers, marketers continue to miss out on tremendous revenue growth.
As consumers evolve, marketers attempt to improve website complexity and messaging -keeping it fresh and up-to-date. But sites that do not employ methods to truly remain dynamic are not equipped to optimally perform during seasonal holiday spending surges. Changing your content and adding new product offers isn't enough to drive double-digit revenue growth...
You'll need to go a few steps further:
1. Cater to your customers' mood. Create a seasonal site design to demonstrate your brand's holiday spirit. Display items most likely to sell during a particular season on your most popular website pages.
2.Target and recommend. Prominently display product offers, discounts and promotions targeted to match customers' needs. Make sure everything they may want to buy is easily located in a single virtual aisle.
3.Make it easy to buy. Thoroughly A/B test and improve important forms. If the registration, login, or checkout processes are too cumbersome, shoppers will simply give up at the point-of-purchase.
4.Use live multivariate testing and iterative tweaking to drive higher conversion rates. Subtle changes such as font size, color, and copy can have a huge impact on revenues. Test different variations to see what yields the best results based on your live visitors' interactions.
5.Monitor and learn from customer behavior. A one-size-fits-all website doesn't deliver the best brand experience. Improve behavioral targeting to deliver a better online experience by offering page layouts, product recommendations, sequences, content, and offers that have been dynamically selected based on users' demonstrated preferences.
6.Make navigation effortless. Shoppers won't fill their shopping carts or click anywhere near the checkout line if they are bounced around a poorly designed website. Go back to the basics: Make it easy for customers to find their way around by including a search facility; make the checkout page prominent; and avoid zeroing out filled-in forms every time they change pages.
7.Make it personal. Go beyond the standard "people who bought this, also bought this" suggestions by using website personalization. Product suggestions and wish list options that are relevant based on the individual shopper's site activity will vastly improve revenues.
Make every season a success
All the time and money spent on search, SEO, advertising, and landing page optimization will be wasted if true optimization strategies aren't put into place. Solutions such as multivariate testing, website personalization, and behavioral targeting make marketers' job easier every day -- they also automatically improve the digital experience with fluctuations and changes in seasonal spending and customers' shopping moods. Ensure every seasonal shopping experience with your website is a happy one, for each and every individual user, and never miss your revenue mark again.
Showing posts with label advertising. Show all posts
Showing posts with label advertising. Show all posts
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Friday, September 11, 2009
Optimizing Your Facebook Initiatives
Traditional search marketing holds that there are two ways to get search engine traffic. The first is to pay for it via pay-per-click advertising, and the second is to earn the traffic with optimal search engine placement. In the earned search marketing business of search engine optimization (SEO), a Facebook fan page is merely a web page, just like any other, except that it has the built-in benefit of residing on a very powerful domain. The same goes for YouTube, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Smart optimization, combined with the strong domains that house them, can propel your social media pages to the top of search engine results for relevant searches.
With that in mind, here are tips for optimizing your Facebook initiatives, as well as some brands that are getting it right.
Facebook
Quick tips for optimization:
Provide regular updates. Like most social media, a Facebook page is only as good as the content available for fans to interact with. Generally speaking, the more digital assets (videos, photos, etc.) the better. Provide regular updates (at least daily and preferably more, though this will depend on your niche) that encourage user participation. Respond to user feedback. To keep from falling behind, consider creating a calendar of updates at the beginning of each week or month.
Choose a good name for the page. The name of your Facebook page is arguably the most important early decision you will make because this is the very first thing the search engines will see when they visit your page. At the very least, you should include the name of the business. You might also include targeted keywords if appropriate.
Choose a good username. A username allows you to have a "clean" URL. For example, if you choose "dwaynejohnsonrocks" as your username, your page URL will be "www.facebook.com/dwaynejohnsonrocks." These URLs look nicer on business cards and letterhead, and they are easier to remember.
Vanity URLs, as they are called, also provide an opportunity for further optimization with your business name or a selected keyword. Given the choice between the two, the business name will be more appropriate in most cases.
Take advantage of the "about" box. The "about" box is a great place to include relevant content and keyword-rich descriptions. This is one of the only places on a page's "wall" that allows for fully customized copy to be written. Many pages use this space to simply provide a link back to the corporate website or place their tagline, but it is an ideal place to help the search engines understand more about your page.
Customize your page. Facebook allows for a moderate amount of customization. You can't change backgrounds or otherwise skin the page, but you can completely customize other things. For example, you have a large degree of control over how your tabs appear. In addition to adding unique content inside "boxes," you can frame a page hosted elsewhere, which allows for full control over the look and feel of that particular tab (within the confines of the Facebook page that surrounds it, of course).
A customized page immediately communicates credibility to the user and also shows a commitment to your brand's involvement with not only Facebook but also social media as a whole.
Who did it great
Threadless
The online T-shirt company Threadless has been active in social media since its inception. Its business model of printing user-submitted and user-voted designs requires an environment that encourages feedback and user interaction.
With that in mind, here are tips for optimizing your Facebook initiatives, as well as some brands that are getting it right.
Quick tips for optimization:
Provide regular updates. Like most social media, a Facebook page is only as good as the content available for fans to interact with. Generally speaking, the more digital assets (videos, photos, etc.) the better. Provide regular updates (at least daily and preferably more, though this will depend on your niche) that encourage user participation. Respond to user feedback. To keep from falling behind, consider creating a calendar of updates at the beginning of each week or month.
Choose a good name for the page. The name of your Facebook page is arguably the most important early decision you will make because this is the very first thing the search engines will see when they visit your page. At the very least, you should include the name of the business. You might also include targeted keywords if appropriate.
Choose a good username. A username allows you to have a "clean" URL. For example, if you choose "dwaynejohnsonrocks" as your username, your page URL will be "www.facebook.com/dwaynejohnsonrocks." These URLs look nicer on business cards and letterhead, and they are easier to remember.
Vanity URLs, as they are called, also provide an opportunity for further optimization with your business name or a selected keyword. Given the choice between the two, the business name will be more appropriate in most cases.
Take advantage of the "about" box. The "about" box is a great place to include relevant content and keyword-rich descriptions. This is one of the only places on a page's "wall" that allows for fully customized copy to be written. Many pages use this space to simply provide a link back to the corporate website or place their tagline, but it is an ideal place to help the search engines understand more about your page.
Customize your page. Facebook allows for a moderate amount of customization. You can't change backgrounds or otherwise skin the page, but you can completely customize other things. For example, you have a large degree of control over how your tabs appear. In addition to adding unique content inside "boxes," you can frame a page hosted elsewhere, which allows for full control over the look and feel of that particular tab (within the confines of the Facebook page that surrounds it, of course).
A customized page immediately communicates credibility to the user and also shows a commitment to your brand's involvement with not only Facebook but also social media as a whole.
Who did it great
Threadless
The online T-shirt company Threadless has been active in social media since its inception. Its business model of printing user-submitted and user-voted designs requires an environment that encourages feedback and user interaction.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Why Good Design Matters!
One of the first design and advertising books that really spoke to me was Pentagram’s - Living by Design. Its basic premise was that design extended to more than graphics, architecture, advertising - but was the entire consumer/brand experience- long before people were talking about experiential marketing.
So, when I stumbled onto Pentagram’s blog - and saw this logo - I was instantly reminded of why design does make a difference.
Take a look at this elegant logo - then read their description:
Pentagram's: One Laptop Per Child
Pentagram has designed the identity and website for One Laptop per Child, the non-profit organization with the goal of providing laptop computers to all children in developing nations.
The identity is a hieroglyph, designed to be universally understood, that utilizes the icons of the OLPC laptop interface, also developed by Pentagram. The website design employs these symbols as the basis for navigation. Each icon leads to a corresponding section of information: the laptop to a section about hardware and software, the arrow to a section about participation, and so on. The site launched in English but is currently being translated into many languages.
For all the companies that don’t think they can afford to do a proper logo on start-up, just remember, you can pay now, or pay later. A well-designed brand mark can make the difference between having a corporate identity- and becoming a lifestyle brand, ala Nike, Apple, BMW, Mini etc.
And, by the way, if you aren’t familiar with the One Laptop Per Child initiative, you need to read more about it - it’s truly something that could change the world. http://www.laptop.org
So, when I stumbled onto Pentagram’s blog - and saw this logo - I was instantly reminded of why design does make a difference.
Take a look at this elegant logo - then read their description:
Pentagram's: One Laptop Per Child
Pentagram has designed the identity and website for One Laptop per Child, the non-profit organization with the goal of providing laptop computers to all children in developing nations.
The identity is a hieroglyph, designed to be universally understood, that utilizes the icons of the OLPC laptop interface, also developed by Pentagram. The website design employs these symbols as the basis for navigation. Each icon leads to a corresponding section of information: the laptop to a section about hardware and software, the arrow to a section about participation, and so on. The site launched in English but is currently being translated into many languages.
For all the companies that don’t think they can afford to do a proper logo on start-up, just remember, you can pay now, or pay later. A well-designed brand mark can make the difference between having a corporate identity- and becoming a lifestyle brand, ala Nike, Apple, BMW, Mini etc.
And, by the way, if you aren’t familiar with the One Laptop Per Child initiative, you need to read more about it - it’s truly something that could change the world. http://www.laptop.org
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Resolving Cultural Contradictions
Claude Lévi-Strauss, a structural anthropologist who described the purpose of myth as 'provid[ing] a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction.' Contradictions stem from opposing structural relations, made up of universal binaries, which Lévi-Strauss considered to be universal concerns of all cultures.
One of the first people to apply Lévi-Strauss' thinking to the branding world (commercially at least) were the UK marketing semioticians Ginny Valentine and Monty Alexander, who started using the myth quadrant around the early nineties. This is basically where two binaries - that have high structural relevance to the category - are paired off against each other to generate two 'cultural norms' and two 'cultural contradictions'. The two cultural contradictions provide an opportunity for brands to engineer a resolution that has the potential to transform the category. Here's the model brought to life based on the fundamental structure of female beauty, featuring the ever-popular blog case study, Dove ...
Various explanations have been offered for the success of Dove, but I'd argue that this is one of the more powerful ones given that Dove is ultimately resolving the modern day contradiction of female beauty - attractiveness with 'real' curves, in larger sizes etc. The irony of course, is that Dove's images are still not a 'real' depiction of female beauty as such, since they remain an aspirational ideal for many 'everyday women'. On browsing through a selection of ads for this example generally, it was quite disturbing just how few ads use 'everyday women', other than insurance, anti-smoking and other government-led campaigns.
That said, it's certainly a more motivating and realistic goal for most women compared with all other cosmetic and beauty communications, which only draw on 'unreal(istic) beauty'. Dove broke the mould, and the rest, as they say, is history. I can't say that I know how the insight really emerged, possibly from a stream of insecure, fed-up women in focus groups and interviews. Be that as it may, this insight turns out to be a glaring opportunity once we turn our attention to locating modern female beauty within culture.
I would also like to turn briefly to another case study favourite, Persil's 'Dirt is Good'. I don't wish to debate whether the campaign's really working for Unilever in financial terms here (this has already been discussed at length elsewhere), only to show that it's really a simple semiotic inversion strategy at heart ...
Admittedly the examples that I've used here are a little crude to serve the model's structuralist ends, so please, no hate mail or spam for suggesting that everyday women are unattractive - hopefully you get the point! It's also worth noting a number of theoretical limitations. To start, it offers a snapshot of a reality at a fixed moment in time; it does not account for the instability and historical specificity of cultural meanings over time e.g. during the Victorian period in England appreciation of 'real beauty' was the dominant norm by far. Nor are the contradictions necessarily applicable cross-culturally. Beyond this, it is also fair to challenge the very notion that universal binaries structure culture, as not only does the model account for a limited set of structural relations at any one time, but it strips away, and is unable to cope with, the sheer cultural complexity of everday life. Although I subscribe to these (poststructuralist) criticisms theoretically speaking, when it comes to the 'practical crunch' these limitations are less problematic, and it still remains one of the more powerful semiotic-type tools around.
A more nuanced cultural reading of female beauty ideals in the West might reveal how they are changing over time, broadly inline with global and local fashion, film, music, and other significant culture/media industries. The cultural resonance and success of Dove's campaign for 'real beauty' for example, is also due in part to the broader naturalness tsunami that is sweeping across everything from food and healthcare to holidays and architecture. The root cause of which is a backlash against the philosophy of scientific progress to a large extent, and the detrimental environmental and societal effects it’s being blamed for. This also includes a cultural backlash against cosmetic surgery (despite its increasing popularity), airbrushed pictures, perfect models, celebrities and the like (think Getty Images vs Flickr). But it's important to keep in mind a sense of cultural relativism at this point. Dove is only 'real' because the rest of the beauty industry is so 'unreal'. And with the exposure and influence of people generated content rapidly increasing, I suspect the real 'real beauty' resolution has only just stepped off the catwalk.
One of the first people to apply Lévi-Strauss' thinking to the branding world (commercially at least) were the UK marketing semioticians Ginny Valentine and Monty Alexander, who started using the myth quadrant around the early nineties. This is basically where two binaries - that have high structural relevance to the category - are paired off against each other to generate two 'cultural norms' and two 'cultural contradictions'. The two cultural contradictions provide an opportunity for brands to engineer a resolution that has the potential to transform the category. Here's the model brought to life based on the fundamental structure of female beauty, featuring the ever-popular blog case study, Dove ...
Various explanations have been offered for the success of Dove, but I'd argue that this is one of the more powerful ones given that Dove is ultimately resolving the modern day contradiction of female beauty - attractiveness with 'real' curves, in larger sizes etc. The irony of course, is that Dove's images are still not a 'real' depiction of female beauty as such, since they remain an aspirational ideal for many 'everyday women'. On browsing through a selection of ads for this example generally, it was quite disturbing just how few ads use 'everyday women', other than insurance, anti-smoking and other government-led campaigns.
That said, it's certainly a more motivating and realistic goal for most women compared with all other cosmetic and beauty communications, which only draw on 'unreal(istic) beauty'. Dove broke the mould, and the rest, as they say, is history. I can't say that I know how the insight really emerged, possibly from a stream of insecure, fed-up women in focus groups and interviews. Be that as it may, this insight turns out to be a glaring opportunity once we turn our attention to locating modern female beauty within culture.
I would also like to turn briefly to another case study favourite, Persil's 'Dirt is Good'. I don't wish to debate whether the campaign's really working for Unilever in financial terms here (this has already been discussed at length elsewhere), only to show that it's really a simple semiotic inversion strategy at heart ...
Admittedly the examples that I've used here are a little crude to serve the model's structuralist ends, so please, no hate mail or spam for suggesting that everyday women are unattractive - hopefully you get the point! It's also worth noting a number of theoretical limitations. To start, it offers a snapshot of a reality at a fixed moment in time; it does not account for the instability and historical specificity of cultural meanings over time e.g. during the Victorian period in England appreciation of 'real beauty' was the dominant norm by far. Nor are the contradictions necessarily applicable cross-culturally. Beyond this, it is also fair to challenge the very notion that universal binaries structure culture, as not only does the model account for a limited set of structural relations at any one time, but it strips away, and is unable to cope with, the sheer cultural complexity of everday life. Although I subscribe to these (poststructuralist) criticisms theoretically speaking, when it comes to the 'practical crunch' these limitations are less problematic, and it still remains one of the more powerful semiotic-type tools around.
A more nuanced cultural reading of female beauty ideals in the West might reveal how they are changing over time, broadly inline with global and local fashion, film, music, and other significant culture/media industries. The cultural resonance and success of Dove's campaign for 'real beauty' for example, is also due in part to the broader naturalness tsunami that is sweeping across everything from food and healthcare to holidays and architecture. The root cause of which is a backlash against the philosophy of scientific progress to a large extent, and the detrimental environmental and societal effects it’s being blamed for. This also includes a cultural backlash against cosmetic surgery (despite its increasing popularity), airbrushed pictures, perfect models, celebrities and the like (think Getty Images vs Flickr). But it's important to keep in mind a sense of cultural relativism at this point. Dove is only 'real' because the rest of the beauty industry is so 'unreal'. And with the exposure and influence of people generated content rapidly increasing, I suspect the real 'real beauty' resolution has only just stepped off the catwalk.
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