News You Can Use

Study Up on Omnichannel to Ace This Back-to-School Season

• Posted: August 17, 2015

According to a recent Direct Marketing News interview with Julie Krueger, Google’s industry director of retail, nearly one third of back-to-school shoppers have already started loading up on essentials. What does this mean for marketers and retailers? “If they’re not present as customers browse and consider products while outside of the store, then the odds of them winning shoppers over for their in-store purchases are not high,” Krueger said. Marketers and retailers need to be everywhere given that:

• 50% of back-to-school searches are happening on smartphones—up from 40% last year;
• 22% of 18 to 24 year olds visit YouTube to figure out what’s cool to purchase;
• 120% increase in watch time for back-to-school videos, and back-to-school YouTube searches are up 43%.

How can marketers and retailers do that? Jonathan Alferness, VP of product management for Google Shopping, focuses on three key moments in the shopper’s journey:

1. I-want-to-know moments: These are moments when the customer is deciding what to buy and is looking for facts (e.g., price, product details) to help him make a decision.
2. I-want-to-go moments: These are moments when the customer is looking for stores that carry the items that they need.
3. I-want-to-buy moments: These are moments when customers are ready to purchase fast and easily.

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The Digital Shopper Genome

• Posted: August 17, 2015

In this McKinsey Insights article, Gadi Benmark and Maher Masri analyze how to build a meaningful picture of the online shopper. Cracking what these authors call the shopper genome requires converting the vast amount of data regarding consumer behavior and desires into meaningful insights.

Until recently, technology barriers were the major challenge to combining insights across different elements of the organization. As these barriers start to fall, more e-commerce companies and their technology providers have an opportunity to develop a coherent, comprehensive profile of their digital customers and effectively engage them across the seven primary digital touchpoints: Internet display advertising, email, mobile advertising, search, shopping engines, social media, and video.

The authors report that the rewards of building a comprehensive view of the online shopper are substantial. They have found that companies that are able to build this profile to inform the way they interact with customers can achieve revenue increases of 10 to 20 percent.

Cracking the shopper genome will enable the company to build a comprehensive customer engagement program and to deliver on the customer’s increasingly high expectations of the digital shopping experience.

 

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Tips to Reduce Click Fraud

• Posted: August 17, 2015

 The Interactive Advertising Bureau reported that bots made up 36% of Internet traffic in 2014, which indicates that invalid clicks are wasting the ad budgets of many firms. Rich Kahn, writing for MarketingProfs, provides tips for avoiding click fraud and the related spending losses.

-Closely track campaign data in real time and investigate any unusual activity in traffic or other metrics.

-Accurate targeting to consumers based on location, behavior, and interests makes the message more visible to more consumers and fewer bots.

-Consider engaging a click fraud specialty firm to help establish what type of traffic is visiting the sites on which you advertise.

-Although no laws have yet been passed, click fraud issues and botnet theft have a high profile with legislatures.

This article suggests that these tips can help rescue marketing budgets from click fraud.

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Creating Personal Digital Experiences For Customers

• Posted: August 17, 2015

Tjeerd Brenninkmeijer, CMO and co-founder of Hippo, analyzes the factors necessary to create a relevant digital experience for each customer in this iMedia Connection’s article.

Factors include:

-Providing responsive design.

-Developing contextual awareness.

-Building a profile of the individual website visitor’s interests, preferences, and intent based on engagement with the online content.

-Delivering relevant content.

Both B2C and B2B companies need to understand the needs of their customers and to provide relevant, contextually appropriate content for their online business. This relevant content  has two goals:

-To support the customers at any stage of their relationship with the brand.

-To expand the reach of the customers’ journey.

The goal of creating a personal digital experience and relevant online content is to develop a customer who is engaged, who will return to the site, and who will advocate for the business and the brand.

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Both Brand and Client Research Contribute to Marketing Strategy

• Posted: August 17, 2015

In order to communicate your company’s unique selling proposition and to ensure that it appeals to your target audience, as well as your current clients, it is important to undertake research about both your brand and your clients. Joshua Conran analyzes these ideas in a MarketingProfs article.

By researching your own brand, you will be able to discern your unique features or services. The goal of this information is to create, maintain, and grow a robust brand.

Intensive client research will provide insights into what current, former, and potential clients feel are your company’s strengths and weaknesses. Analysis of this information will reveal the opportunities, as well as the threats, to your brand. This information will also also shape your messaging to target groups.

Conran reveals how your marketing will benefit from brand and client research:

-You will capture an unbiased 360-degree view of your brand and clients.

-You will discover a better product-market fit.

-You can maximize your company’s potential.

A stronger brand, a more focused company vision, and higher revenue will result from this brand and client research.

 

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Disrupting beliefs: A new approach to business-model innovation

• Posted: August 10, 2015

Every industry is built around long-standing, often implicit, beliefs about how to make money. In retail, for example, it’s believed that purchasing power and format determine the bottom line. Success in pharmaceuticals is believed to depend on the time needed to obtain approval from the US Food and Drug Administration. And so on.

These governing beliefs reflect widely shared notions about customer preferences, the role of technology, regulation, cost drivers, and the basis of competition and differentiation. They are often considered inviolable—until someone comes along to violate them. Almost always, it’s an attacker from outside the industry. But while new entrants capture the headlines, industry insiders, who often have a clear sense of what drives profitability, are well positioned to play this game, too.

How can incumbents do so? McKinsey introduces a framework to think differently about established business models.  The process begins with identifying an industry’s foremost belief about value creation and then articulating the notions that support this belief. By turning one of these underlying notions on its head—reframing it—incumbents can look for new forms and mechanisms to create value. When this approach works, it’s like toppling a stool by pulling one of the legs.

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By 2025, Internet of things applications could have $11 trillion impact

• Posted: August 10, 2015

The Internet of things, the term used to describe the use of sensors and other Internet-connected devices to track and control physical objects, opens up entirely new ways of doing business. For instance, in manufacturing the application of this technology can reduce maintenance costs by up to 25%, cut unplanned outages by up to 50%, and extend the lives of machines by years.

The Internet of things can also give rise to new business models that could alter the basis of competition. Products that report how they are actually being used can provide much better insight into customer behavior than focus groups. Connected products can even adapt to their customers’ preferences. And the ability to offer almost anything—from a drill press to a car to an aircraft engine—as a service can transform the very nature of what is bought and sold.

In a recent study from the McKinsey Global Institute, it is estimated that 150 specific IoT applications that exist today or could be in widespread use within 10 years could have a total economic impact of $3.9 trillion to $11.1 trillion per year in 2025. It is also estimated two-thirds of value will be generated in business-to-business settings and that business customers and consumers will likely capture more than 90% of the value created.

To capture this value, however, businesses need to overcome three significant obstacles:

• Push technology vendors to provide connected, interoperable components and systems, with analytics;
• Address security and privacy concerns; and most importantly
• Make organizational changes to maximize the operating and strategic benefits that IoT data can provide.

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2016 Marketing Trends

• Posted: August 10, 2015

Himanshu Sareen, writing for ClickZ, presents four marketing trends for 2016:

1.Oculus Rift-Acceptance of virtual reality by consumers is increasing rapidly. Oculus Rift will inevitably have a huge impact on the ways in which marketers engage with consumers.  As consumers come to expect full immersion with marketing campaigns, companies who don’t supply a virtual experience for customers could lose sales.

2.Snapchat is a platform that enables users to digest social media in real-time.  Snapshot allows marketers the opportunity to offer exclusive content that has an expiration date, which is especially attractive to millennial customers.

3.Stronger search capabilities within social media represent a potential marketing benefit for brands.  Buy buttons and payment messaging within social media will allow the development of an all-in-one platform.

4.The Internet of Things is being rapidly adopted.  Wearable technology is expected to achieve a 28% user adoption rate by 2016.  IoT is expected to become a more important marketing tool for customer engagement.

 

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http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2419469/4-marketing-trends-to-watch-for-in-2016

Digital Strategies Mature According to Cannes Study

• Posted: August 10, 2015

Digital Strategies Mature According to Cannes Study

According to Warc’s analysis of the 2015  Cannes Creative Effectiveness Lions, digital-led advertising strategies, particularly those combining video and PR, are increasingly delivering business results for marketers.

Of the shortlisted and winning entries:

• 60% used social media as a lead channel vs. 50% of the total pool of entries.
• 44% used online video as a lead channel vs. 34% of the total pool of entries.

According to Warc, 2015 marked the first year that a truly digital-led campaign won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Creative Effectiveness Lions. The “Live Test Series” campaign from Volvo Trucks utilized a strategy built around online video and PR.

Social media, online video and PR have all seen significant growth in recent years: 85% of case studies used social media in the 2015 Lions compared with 51.9% in 2011; 64% of entries used public relations, and the same percentage used online video – in both cases more than double the 2011 figures.

 

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10 Key Building Blocks for an Integrated Omnichannel Ecosystem

• Posted: August 10, 2015

Fiona Blades, President and Chief Experience Officer at MESH Experience, David Guenthner, Senior Director, Global Customer Insights and Analytics at Walmart, Scott Johnston, Director of Client Services at Infoscout, and Marty Siewert, SVP, Consumer & Shopper Analytics at Nielsen discussed key building blocks to achieve a seamless online-offline shopping experience during the 2015 ARF Shopper Insights Chicago forum.

Here are the Top 10 building blocks for an integrated omnichannel ecosystem:

1. Imaginative talent management to bring disparate specialists together

• Overarching function that bridges gaps and fosters the right spirit
• Providing teams an overall purpose, so that each member plays to their strengths to create something better together

2. Putting the customer first

• More observation than question
• Passive data collection
• Better use of mobile

3. Collaboration FOR the shopper

• Again, putting the shopper as the focus and re-thinking collaboration in relation to this

4. Focus on theory

• Thinking about recency or adjacencies
• Not rushing into decision, but think and create hypotheses, models and theories about all the new knowledge and data

5. Test-and-learn approach

• Creating agile market research
• Encouraging fast failure and move on
• Making change safe/acceptable

6. Practical hardware and tools

• Get a big enough server!
• Ensure flexibility of data platforms

7. Get the assortment right

• Both, online and offline

8. Personalized approach

• Given the blurring of online in physical spaces (augmented reality, etc.), new approach needs to transcend online and offline and feel totally seamless and personal

9. Get the RIGHT data

• Although there is a plethora of data available, there is still a need to identify knowledge gaps and find the right data to answer these

10. Millennials understanding

• As this audience will be of growing importance, there is still the need to focus on a deep understanding of their emerging attitudes and behaviors

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