Leader’s Blog

The term “digital out-of-home marketing” covers a wide range of things from those video screens you see in your local supermarket to a video playing in a peep hole at a construction site.

Although digital out-of-home has been around for some time, it has recently begun to evolve from a way to deliver an interesting aesthetic to a true interaction with customers.  This evolution is consistent with what we’ve seen with other digital mediums. Users just don’t want to consume information pushed at them; they want to be engaged and truly interact.

Marketers have an interesting opportunity to with digital out-of-home campaigns.  For some brands campaigns that are gimmicky are going to be the most effective while for others, a straightforward approach like demonstrating product features will work the best. 

One thing you can count on being consistent is that the brands that are most successful will use digital-out-of-home to involve their customers with the brand and let them interact with the information.

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Titanium is a huge step toward closing the gap on multiple version, same application development cycles. The primary advantages to companies will be reduced costs, mitigated risk of bugs, and efficient management of a single code base, in turn allowing brands to deliver total quality experiences, regardless of platform or device.

No longer will application developers need to manage multiple sets of code across multiple platforms. And Titanium enables developers to work with application coding languages many already are experienced with. That translates to minimal learning curves, heightened levels of innovation, and faster time to market.

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of Titanium is the ability to more consistently represent the brand across digital marketing assets and multiple mobile devices. Users will still experience interfacing differences native to platforms such as the iPhone and Android, but companies will be empowered to cost effectively provide the same set of functionality and content to every user. That means we are truly nearing seamless experiences in the 360 degree delivery of digital marketing.

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InStyle magazine launched its first e-commerce site to offer its readers an online shopping experience in a fully branded InStyle environment.  So what would encourage a publishing company to try its hand at online retail?

The leap isn’t as far as it sounds.  InStyle has long been evaluating fashion, trends, and designers within the pages of its magazines, so it makes sense that that they lend some of that experience to selling apparel online.  The site, which borrows its look from the pages of InStyle magazine, is also carefully tied to the magazine content to cross promote products on and offline.  The other piece of the puzzle that InStyle brings to the table is editorial credibility.  Loyal readers of the magazine will find “editors pick” merchandise and feel confident that the publishers who have provided them savvy fashion advice on the pages of the magazine will continue to do so on the online store.

Many have discussed monetizing content as a way to lifting the publishing industry out of its current slump but it will be interesting to see if an approach like this one will keep them viable.

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More companies are working with outside consultants to help reveal the science behind customer behavior. It seems like just about every company is employing customer experience design and measurement services from outside experts these days to better understand the customer mindset, browsing and purchasing habits.

However, few analytics companies have fully realized the importance of studying the role integration plays in the science. And that is why EMC’s acquisition of Conchango is not only refreshing, but should give consumer product and retail companies confidence that the art behind the science is being considered and factored appropriately.

After all, multi-channel marketing is much more then segmentation, tactics, capturing metrics, and studying them to turn analytics into actionable insights. In fact, most experiences begin with one simple factor, attraction. May it be visual or messaging that connects with the customer, the science is often the result of the creative. And as more analytics companies begin to take those factors into consideration, the more their clients will win and gain true insight into their customer’s behavior and be able to pinpoint what it is that achieved that first point of attraction.

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Promotion via social media is most effective when companies leave it in their customers’ hands.  Fashion Magazine did just that when launching White Space, a contemporary designer section at the Bay in Toronto.  The guests were treated to food, fashion, and music during this exclusive, invitation event.  Throughout the venue there were laptops set up encouraging guests to tweet or post Facebook updates about the event. 

Fashion Magazine and White Space really hit the mark by asking their guests to drive the social media “chatter”.  Not only did they save the cost of an agency-driven social media campaign, but they also kept the content in the hands of the guests.  Some might argue there is risk in replacing company sanctioned content with guest tweets, but I’d argue there is also significant opportunity to improve the viral reach. 

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Opera 5 nailed it by achieving 90% remote compression of content before transmission.

As most iPhone users know, there is nothing more frustrating than slow page loads when browsing the web on AT&T’s 3G network in low-bandwidth areas. And trying to browse apps that transmit large amounts of data is out of the question.

But Opera 5’s approach, using remote compression helps ensure Android users never have to experience those issues. By compressing content on Opera’s servers and then completing transmission to your mobile device, Opera leaves more processing power on your device free and available to run other functions critical to browser performance. The result is not only faster load times, but the elimination of lags in performance when browsing.

Combined with Android’s ability to simultaneously run multiple applications, Opera 5 users will quickly find themselves efficiently multi-tasking in ways they have only dreamed about before.

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This article from Marketing Vox offers readers ways to sell mobile to consumers that are simple but maybe not so obvious.  All of them are solid tips for businesses to reach consumers, but the one that stands out to me the most is number 4 – build a mobile website.  There was a time that creating a mobile version of your website was the hot ticket item.  But with faster mobile browsers and the emergence of apps, many companies put mobile websites on the back burner. 

Mobile websites can often deliver a more robust experience than an app can.  Apps are also limited to the number of people who are familiar enough with your brand to have downloaded it, whereas a mobile website can be found in search or by anyone browsing the web.  As mobile marketing tactics continue to evolve, mobile websites should continue to be an option to reach users.

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Online sales are expected to reach 12 percent of the total retail market by 2012, up from 6 percent, or $211.7 billion, now, according to Forrester Research.

Not surprising and most know is just the beginning of the continued growth of online shopping.

So how can companies maximize return on investment of their own online storefronts?

By optimizing their cross-sell and up-sell opportunities – fine tuning them to increase spend per transaction.

But it requires more then just personalization and product recommendations. Companies need to be able to identify trends across customer’s previous purchase behaviour and customer segments and use predictive analytics to foresee what a customer will most likely next want to purchase.

And use the ability to control cross selling and up selling across digital marketing assets, to primarily invest in the campaigns that return the highest level of engagement and close the most selling opportunities following the customer’s visit of your online storefront.

As a result of anticipating a customer’s wants, customers perceive a brand to be the one that best understand them, a deeper more compelling connection, and superior customer loyalty.

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I have worked in digital marketing long enough to remember when email marketers only option was the plain text email.  Many marketers have abandoned plain text for flashier delivery methods, but there are many reasons to once again embrace plain text.

I am not suggesting you abandon the well formatted emails you send now, but rather consider giving your plain text version some extra attention.  This article gives helpful tips on the “how” so I am going to focus on the “why”. 

Professionals and consumers are doing more and more “on the go” which means the likelihood that your email is being read on a mobile device is increasing.  A well thought out plain text email improves the chances that your email will arrive to the mobile inbox in a way that the recipients can read it.  You also need to consider the recipients who receive plain text email in their inbox due to preference or because the HTML is blocked by spam filters.  Taking the time to perfect the text version of your email can help you stand out from the crowd when many senders are ignoring plain text. 

When you accept the idea that users may not be seeing that formatted email you created you’ll realize that spending time optimizing your plain text email is going to be well worth your efforts.

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Digital advertising continues to grow as more and more customers shift to online shopping. And it’s not experimental anymore. Due to the evolution of real-time personalization and deeper customer care programs, digital media is able to transform marketing programs around a single individual.

• Paid Search is enabling advertising to get local.
• Banner Advertising is making the experience more interactive. Used as complimentary content on article pages, customers are able to become aware and knowledgeable about their products on third-party websites. The result is more completed purchases, profitability.
• Email has transformed from advertising to loyalty. Companies are able to learn from their customers and use that information to provide promotions and rewards they will most appreciate, ultimately encouraging repeat business.

It’s more then the rise of a new advertising age, it’s the rise of a target audience of one.

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