Digital Strategy

Will you survive the logged-in user revolution?

If you don’t think identity plays a significant role in user experience, think again.

Case in point: I was recently browsing my favorite footwear site on my smartphone for the perfect pair of shoes, but when I returned to purchase my pair of choice via desktop, I had to spend upwards of 10 minutes trying to find it again.

How much better would my experience have been if I had instead been greeted with a personalized product showcase featuring my ‘most recently browsed’ items?  

Covert native ad campaigns can catfish consumers

A New York City doctor with a Witherspoon personality, Nicki Minaj body, Sinatra eyes and love of fried donuts might be your perfect match.

She’s 34, single and looking to meet other local singles in the city. She may seem too good to be true, and that’s because she is.

This New York City bachelorette’s main motivation is to prompt you to tune in for the season premiere of her primetime TV show, The Mindy Project, on Fox Primetime.

Online marketing: should you focus on traffic or conversions?

If you are entering the online world for the first time as a business it doesn’t matter whether you are a startup or an established bricks-and-mortar company, you need to choose what to spend your resources on.

So far so obvious; that’s all part of your marketing strategy. But when you’re thinking about that strategy there’s one big, tough question that will almost inevitably come up:

“Should we spend more of our resources trying increase brand awareness or increasing conversion rates?”

The answer to that question is much less obvious than the question itself.

How marketing and IT are working together

Businesses are becoming increasingly customer centric, which is moving the focus of marketing efforts firmly onto improving the customer experience.

To help with meeting that core objective, marketers are looking every which way for technology that can help them deliver a better customer experience. They want to do it all, and they want to do it now! 

IT teams, on the other hand, have been in the game of buying and implementing technology a little longer. They know there are considerations that have to be made before diving in headfirst, and they’ve dealt with the repercussions of security and integration issues. 

With the lines blurring between technology ownership, I’ve been looking into how the relationship between the two teams is – or isn’t – working. 

Weibos, WeChat & Renren: how to approach social marketing in China

Chinese social networks can seem a daunting challenge for brands that are trying to expand their business in APAC.

Beyond the obvious language barrier marketers have to get to grips with new functionality, cultural behaviours and consumer expectations.

The Chinese internet population currently stands at 618m, with 81% connecting via mobile, so the opportunity is too big to ignore.

And with internet penetration at just 45% there’s still plenty of room for growth.

To find out more about social media in China and how brands should be approaching social marketing, I spoke to HootSuite’s APAC managing director Ken Mandel.

For more information on this topic, download Econsultancy’s South-East Asia Digital Marketing Trends Briefing or our Chinese Digital Market Landscape Report.

Econsultancy Enterprise subscribers are also invited to attend a free roundtable on Ecommerce in China on Tuesday 15 April. Spaces are limited so click here to apply for a place.

Ecommerce information architecture: the devil in the detail (part three)

This blog is the third and final part of my ecommerce information architecture mini-series and takes a look at some of the key components and guidelines for what ecommerce teams need to think about.

Today I’m going to send you to sleep talking about SEO and integration of non-product content.

I’d welcome comments to add to my views and share advice/experience of what works, what mistakes to avoid and useful resources. Hope you find it useful reading.

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The many ‘deaths’ of digital marketing

In the last six months there has been talk of the death of digital marketing. Forrester recently mooted that digital marketing is dead and that we are now in an era of “post-digital” marketing. 

In his keynote address at Dmexco in Cologne last September, P&G’s global brand building officer Marc Pritchard also talked about the end of digital marketing as something separate or distinct.

Indeed this is a view that Econsultancy and Marketing Week espoused in our Modern Marketing Manifesto which we published almost a year ago.

We cut ‘digital’ as one of the key elements of marketing from the initial draft and focus instead on integration, customer experience, brand, data and other elements irrespective of medium or channel.

How are finance brands helping customers to bank safely?

The reality today is that we, as consumers, have more and more digital engagements requiring different security elements, hence simplicity is key.

Banking is one entity that we all see as fundamental and need access to.

Through this article, I will highlight what banks are doing to help customers to manage their finances safely, the direction that digital banking security will take in the future and how security fits into a wider context. 

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10 excruciating signs your organisation is digitally deficient

At Econsultancy we’ve discussed several times what the elements of digital culture are and why it’s good for business.

But we’ve never really covered what is really horrendous, quite possibly because we do like to focus on the positive whenever we can.

Today, I’m going to focus on the signs that show your organisation is desperately behind the times, because unfortunately such issues are rife in many corporate environments today.

If your organisation has any of the below, chances are they are irritating people beyond all comprehension, getting in the way of work and have no genuine utility behind them. 

Banish these things immediately, or make a quick buck by shorting the share price of the offending institution.

Read below. I accept no responsibility for any migraines you suffer…

‘Intent plus audience’ is a powerful new combination for search marketers

Search advertising has come to dominate performance marketing over the last decade, with advertisers seeing amazing returns from targeting messages at consumers based on their intent.

If a consumer is searching for ‘best golf clubs’ it’s a pretty safe assumption that they’re in purchasing mode and likely to be interested in an advert promoting golf clubs.

But, any search marketer will tell you that one of its weaknesses is that you have to use a degree of guesswork when it comes to audience characteristics.

In the example above, if you knew the consumer was a female then your advertising creative would be far more powerful if it promoted just clubs for ladies. The trouble with search is that unless someone is very specific in their search term, you’re forced to make assumptions.

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