Leader’s Blog

The concept of remarketing first began and delivered on the promise of targeted relevancy. Retailers captured what products a customer browsed while shopping online and then used digital media to remarket those same or similar items across third-party websites, encouraging customers to complete purchase.

And now that the approach is proven and more retailers have adopted the approach, integrating it into their cross-selling and up-selling strategy, the new realization is coming to light, that remarketing not only presents customers with a second chance opportunity to purchase, but it also reduces the overall sales cycle.

Prior to the evolution of remarketing, sales cycles tended to be long, fragmented, and were often unable to be accurately measured. Tracking the cycle was guess work at best, and offline and online customer behavior was loosely stitched together, leaving retailers with a wealth of data but no real insight into what actually was successfully driving the sale or what the actual number of interactions and total time from awareness to purchase was.

Remarketing is now offering the ultimate outcome in customer insights. Know the product your customer is interested in. Know the number of interactions required to connect the product to the customer. And know the typical amount of time it takes to present the interactions to the customer in order to successfully lead the customer to purchase. The result is more then just relevancy and preference for the customer. The result is better overall spend of marketing budgets, decreased cost of marketing, and increased profitability for the business – a truly remarkable outcome for retailers that invest in remarketing.

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It is in digital marketer’s nature to segment, segment, segment when analysing customer behaviour. And in the majority of cases, that is a good thing.

But if we look closer at the findings in this article and we group them together to gain a fuller view of what is resulting in the success, we find the effectiveness of multi-channel marketing at work.

The measurements at the tactic levels help indicate what specific media is most effective in the trigger role however many customers won’t consciously acknowledge the multiple impressions from other media that lead up to the trigger point. Although there is an indication of influence, noted by the preference to act on articles that include brand information. Many recent studies continue to be published connecting customers actions resulting from the combination of product information – many times from third-parties – and online advertising placed in close proximity, on the same page as the product information.

After all, there is no better marketing then word of mouth marketing, so if an online publisher features a favourable product review and the manufacturer’s media is clearly positioned on the page, the advertiser greatly increases the chance a customer will act on that specific media. The specific media placement typical receives the credit for the action, while the article did all the work.

 So what does it all mean? Keep pushing for true connect, relevant experiences and strong representation of the brand, and customers will continue to act.

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Nokia has created a text book example of best practice in product development. Identify what your customers want and build products that satisfy their desire.

Many companies drive for this endgame in their own product development but it remains elusive. Unfortunately, one of the factors that block companies from achieving similar product development insight is a too common adversity for social media. Some call Nokia’s approach crowd sourcing, some simply call it marketing, and some call it social media or community. And that can often be the deal killer in an organization.

But there is a way to progress people’s thinking and luckily the Nokia example can be leveraged to educate others to the deep business value that is achieved – even as deep into the enterprise as product development – from incorporating social media.

For other examples of great product development, community driven, enterprise destinations be sure to visit My Starbucks Idea and The HP Community.

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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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