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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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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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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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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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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Rice University set out to verify whether Facebook fan pages could have actual impact on businesses.  The case study followed a Houston bakery and café as they established a Facebook fan page and tracked the impact.  The café only saw about 5% of their regular customers become Facebook fans, but those who did become fans came more frequently and spent more than non-fans. The fan page also seemed to cultivate brand affection and loyalty.

I think this study sheds light on what all businesses can accomplish using Facebook.  The results suggest that although the café didn’t reach all customers using fan pages, there was significant impact on those they did reach.  This is a great example of “meeting your customers where they are”.  It is likely that those who did become fans where already Facebook users.  The café – rather than simply building a fan page and hoping “if we build it they will come” – used the fan page to meaningfully engage with their fans by offering giveaways and discounts.  And the campaign was effective for the target group because the café approached the tactic holistically. 

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The Sears brand has been around for over 124 years.  Reading this Chief Marketer interview with Sears’ Senior Vice President Online I was surprised to learn that they’ve been vigorously pursuing a multi-channel strategy including online merchandising, mobile commerce, and communities.  They’ve even gone as far as to open up an online marketplace, similar to Amazon.com, that allows consumers to shop directly from vendor sites.

Sears developed much of this approach based on feedback from their customers.  If you visit the MySears community site – you’ll notice that it includes everything from customer reviews and questions about products to compliments and complaints about service in the store.  I think the biggest fear companies face when embarking on an online community is the possibility of negative things being posted.  Sears has really faced this fear head on and their community includes the good, the bad, and the ugly.  What you might be surprised to read is that Sears’s customer satisfaction scores weren’t negatively impacted by the approach – they actually went up! 

Companies are beginning to realize that customers are taking to online communities to discuss products and services whether you want them to or not.  The question is will your company ignore them – or join in and be part of the conversation?

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Target now accepts gift card payments via mobile device at its 1,740 U.S. stores.  Card holders can enter the login and pin for the gift card online or on the mobile version of the site, and a 2D barcode appears for cashier to scan.  Target is the first national chain to incorporate mobile enabled scanning across all locations but there are several other retailers - including Starbucks and 7-Eleven – piloting similar programs in their stores.

As the ability to scan barcodes from mobile devices becomes widely available, I envision uses expanding greatly to include other functions.  This would be a powerful way for retailers or even consumer goods companies to offer coupons to customers.  Giving consumers another (and I’d argue more convenient) way to save at the register could do wonders for brand loyalty.  I would love to see this take off as a way to handle store membership cards too.  It seems as if every retail store I go into now offers me a membership card for discounts or rewards, and I have to be honest I have started to turn most of them down because I can’t fathom adding another card to my wallet or key chain.  If they could offer me a version of their membership that could be scanned from my phone when I come in, I’d probably accept every membership I was offered.

The key to this for me is that I go everywhere with my phone in hand.  A retailer or consumer goods company that allows me to more easily spend or save with a few clicks of my phone would definitely be higher on my list than one that didn’t.

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Online display advertising began as one of those memorable marketing channels that often grabbed my attention.  As the market got more crowded though, I seemed to find myself ignoring many online ads – regardless of how visually interesting I perceived them to be – typically, because they just didn’t apply to me.

Google is hoping to change that experience as a result of their acquisition of startup Teracent, developer of a series of “machine-learning algorithms that can create and customize an ad in real-time, based on user preferences and other characteristics”.

What this really means is that Google would have the ability to serve up more relevant display ads based on location, time of day, language, placement of the ad, or even which ads have performed better in a given time period.   Teracent offers an additional expanded ability that could make the ads more dynamic on the page – serving up different creative or size of ads based on the users visiting the site.

This acquisition could mean a lot for a medium that hasn’t seen a lot of innovation lately, so I – for one – am excited to see online display ads get more targeted.

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The thing that makes online marketing such a powerful force is its ability to be agile.  eBags used an agile approach to take what could have been a challenging holiday season into “Cyber Monday” sales that were up by 32%.

So what worked?

The marketing team kicked off their paid search campaign with the words they thought would generate the most sales, but they didn’t stop there.  They defined a firm target on how a word should be generating sales and reduced spending on those words that didn’t make the mark.  It has been my experience that people treat paid search as a “set it and forget it” marketing technique so I am always glad to hear about companies that follow my preferred “deploy, analyze and adjust” model for paid search.

I should also mention they deployed a targeted email campaign that was based on users’ previous purchase that led to a 25% in their email marketing.  This is a one-quarter increase in opportunities to sell to a current customer based on the understanding of what they like.  This is a great combination of the analytics gathered at purchase with a straightforward execution method.

With a nimble marketing strategy in place at one of the peak times of the buying season you can understand how eBags earned its spot as 93 in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide.

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