burak

Growing ecommerce

Affiliate – underused, easy to set up

CSE – Comparison shopping engines.

Amazon and Ebay ads. Amazon ads doubled last year. 3rd biggest advertiser after FB and G

Feed optimizer

Change history of the google ads account – you can see how often they work on the account

TRAFFIC ACQUISITION

9% conversion is very good.

BURAK NOTE – Create videos for all of the products for SEO

Find out what you are competing against

Write content on the website on blog, use social for distributing

It is better to invest on the same website

Shopify SEO issue – ahref tags ? Not very good for internationalization

Instagram – working well for now

85% sales go through buy box on amazon

Social commerce – having a FB shop.

Groupon – get potantial customer data

INCREASE SALES

Search bar is very important on way to purchase

Mobile conversion is lower.

Bounce rate 20-30% for B2C, it could be 50% for B2B

Event tracking on google analytics

Majority of ecommerce will get traffic from shopping ads. 70-80% traffic come from shopping ads.

Increase engagement –

Optimize product pages – promotionals, related products. Bring some homepage elements to the product page.

Trust signals, newsletter rewards, alternative products, engagement can be very low,

You can do much about CPCs. But you can optimize your website to increase conversion.

Increase avg. order value – you can pay for ads if you are able to increase. ROAS – you want it to be more than 5. Branded vs non-branded. Separate campaign for brand and non-brand phrases.

Buy 1 get 1 free, bundling,

Increase frequency – email, remarketing, ASOS payday sales.

TRAFFIC SOURCES

56% of all retail sales in EU goes through amazon now

Search and direct.

SHOPPING ADS

20% discount CSS partners

https://comparisonshoppingpartners.withgoogle.com/

Text ads – Ad extensions

Review stars in google shopping ads

Local citation – yelp, local directories. Name and website needs to be matched. NAP

Quidco

SEO

Focus on keywords that can deliver sales –

Magento sites inherently have seo problems

WordPress is much more SEO friendly

Landing pages, for different topics

Themes and topics,

SEO monitor – SEM rush – visibility score. Keywords are easy or hard.

Content marketing – right content – cherry picking the quick wins – easiest phrases

Domain authority – getting links. Quality of the links, age of the domain. Mentions on social.

Pagespeed – prioritize first meaningful print,

Deep crawl, moz,

You need to create lots of content to get the popular one. 1 in 300 content fly.

PR is good to get high quality links

Pagination tags, cannonical tags, ahref tags,

Rich snippets

You can put programmatic video ads on Sky at 3000 GBP. You still need to produce a video at anyway. Which can be expensive.

SOCIAL ADS

Target parents, segments.

Facebook CPC instead of CPM

CPA – CPC – CPM last resort

Conversion rate – 9% very good.

PAID ADS

Less efficient as you spend more budget

You need to big higher to get more traffic

Shopping ads – price very important.

Entrance products – lure customers in the website. They will buy something else.

G ads – good with number

FB ads – some level of creativity

Bidding on your brand – 1- Advantage of controlling the ad. 2- Getting high CTR throughout the account improves the quality score

For b2b – you can get rid of mobile traffic

Optimize what is not working.

Facebook and Google ads – can be helping the conversion. Do not risk testing in busy season. Test in normal season. Trust more in GA than FB.

G TEXT ADS

You can use Demographic targeting as well

Google shopping – VAT inclusive price. Product feed – keep feeds up to date.

Shopping ads – ad groups – certain products .

Title of the products – mainly google matches this when they are searching for this

Use dynamic text ads as a fishing net that catches things that have been missed

Bing – conversion rates are better.

Search partners network – AOL – virgin . Enhanced by google

CTR is a bit lower but converts well.

1 shopping with everything in it – does not recommend that.

Category names –

1 campaign – type of product and manufacturer. Can create Single product ad groups.

Quality score: Key phrase – ad matching – landing page matching – CTR

Google Shopping ads international – feed , product title and landing must be in that language

Feed optimize, shoptimize

https://anicca.co.uk/resource-library/

FB and G dynamic remarketing –

RLSA Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA)

FB and G is there to make FB and G money, not you. Default settings are not good.

Content filtering. Google display – might be waste of time.

FB lookalike audiences

Amazon ads – you can use when you have the buy box

CPC + amazon share. New product, new brand.

AFFILIATE MARKETING

You might not want to target first 30 days to affiliate visitors because you will be paying affiliate + CPC ad cost

Check if the sales is actual before paying commission

AWIN – expense.

Start with a low cost, but biggest you can afford. Preferably with less joining fee.

EMAILS

Transactional emails – opportunity for up / cross sell

When customer orders, it is a legal requirement to send a thank you, confirmation email. Lets make it interesting.

Be careful about abandon cart coupons – it can be abused.

It needs to come from a person, instead of sales.

Personalization. Cleaning data.

Mobile optimization. Can be opened more than once.

Email markups – auto completes.

Subject line + who it is coming from.

Split testing. Remarket to people that open emails.

Email popup on exit intent. Not on the start.

Include newsletter signup to product detail page

GDPR – distance selling regulations – DMA code of practice – directive on privacy and electronic communications – return politicies etc

TOOLS

Advanced ecommerce integration

If you have multiple payment gateways, it could be underreporting

Paypal, https://www.sagepay.co.uk/ , world pay.

Search console – link to GA

G Tag manager

PRE SALES COMMUNICATION

Big Tel number on the right handside – good trust signal

Dynamic tel numbers. So you can track them.

Don’t give people too much choice. They might not be able to decide.

Activate Search in GA

. REASSURANCE

Privacy and returns

Guarantees, tel no address, company info

Metapack, – logistics lin

CO Data link – finance link

Dont work with channel advisor

Veeqo

Paid Social Advertising

What is paid social advertising?

If you think your fans will see your content, you are wrong.

Organic social only drives 3-4% of the web traffic (15.000 business research)

Facebook limited again the organic reach of business posts:

Facebook overhauls News Feed to promote ‘more meaningful’ posts from family and friends – raising questions for businesses

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2018/01/12/facebook-overhauls-news-feed-promote-meaningful-posts/

UK is 3rd in ecommerce spending in the world (compared to 5th in GDP economy standing)

Half of the spending is paid search (google ads mostly)

Social spend is 20%

Digital advertising is half of all UK advertising (consider TV, newspaper all that)

If your content is working well organically, you can try using it in the ads. Because it is relevant and engaging for the audience (BURAK: But it might not bring in the conversions necessarily)

Ad fatigue:

Facebook ads can have ad fatigue if shown in high frequency (eg: 10). Because you are showing them to the same audience. You can rotate ads for the same audience.

Google does not have this as much because there is always a new customer proactively searching for your product every day. It is a dynamic audience so you can use same ad.

Ad optimization:

Do more of what works. Do less of what does not work.

Champion and challenger ad:

Invest in your best performing ad but try to experiment with new things with challenger ads to see if it resonates better with the audience.

When you have small budget, it is good to focus on leads and conversion rather than awareness, reach and engagement.

Dynamic Product and Remarketing Ads

is the most important for ecommerce.

(BURAK: We are already doing remarketing ads but need to look into just product ads to acquire extra customers)

For ecommerce: Website conversion ads and Dynamic Product ads

You need to have a high converting website to afford cost per click to do feasible advertising.

Linkedin cost per clicks are around 5 GBP

Linkedin inmails are about 40p – which can be more sensible compared to click

Social media generally assists the sale,

not usually starting and finishing the sale all inside social.

Facebook performs better in conversion leads rather than clicks. But you need to set the conversion up correctly.

Minimum budget per month should be 500 GBP.

Lead Generating Ads

List of benefits, why I should give out my information?

Explain why and what they are going to get exactly.

You can include your GDPR policy in the terms.

You can also test making people fill the form in your website, compared to lead generating ads

Sequential Ads

Show different ads to website visitors, cart visitors etc to move them further in the conversion funnel.

User returning to the website through social remarketing ads can convert up to 3x better

Honeypot – cross channel technique

Get people interested with facebook ads. Make them visit your website

Tag them

ReTarget them and adjust bids on Google

Quality of the image – social ads. Especially on Instagram

Pinterest over 40,

Instagram less than 40

Instagram works well with the younger audience.

Ad options starting to look similar to FB

5 GBP per click – highest

Good way is to grow organically via contacts on Linkedin

TWITTER

Transient platform

Good for targeting TV programmes, as they might be using TW at the same time.

Around 50p click mark

We tend to do last.

Check competitors if they are utilizing it.

Agencies 500-700 GBP per day for their services

FACEBOOK

You can focus on 2-3 themes

You can play around with different formats to see which one is performing better

If you have lots of options, it might be difficult to see which one is performing better and by

You need to spend enough money on different campaigns to see if it is working

Make sure you have all the content, images, photography in advance

Do not use boost post button. It is not targeted.

(BURAK:

Marketplace eCommerce Retailer Interest Form

)

AUDIENCE TARGETING

You can do separate campaign for grandparents – they tend to spend more on grandkids.

Custom audience – interacted with previous ads

You can target according to – kids aged – having an iphone

For consumer goods audience could be between 500k- 1 million

For b2b it can be several 10k

Narrower the audience, expensive to get same amount of clicks. Cost per click goes up.

Edit placements – you can turn off audience network.

Instagram is a bit more expensive than FB

When you are charged – not impression – but for CPC

Bid options – automatic works better than manual

But on google you also need manual

Google Tag Manager – Easier and faster

GDPR and Cookie Policy

Facebook audience network – can get cheap clicks but might be accidental clicks.

Thumb stopping moment

You might need a text on the visual of a social media post / ad. So people can understand what it is about in 1 sec.

Psychology of the marketing

People follow the eyes of the model in the visual

(BURAK: some more examples on psychology of marketing:

https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/psychology-marketers-revealing-principles-human-behavior

https://www.smartinsights.com/marketing-planning/marketing-strategy/12-ways-can-use-psychology-marketing/ )

HOW TO WRITE COPY

AIDA Attention, Interest, Desire, Action

AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, Action. The way you grab attention is with your headline. … Once you build up the desire, you are ready for the last part of AIDA, which is the call to action for those people to buy whatever it is you are trying to sell to them.

Before/After/Bridge

Before – Describe the current state of existence

After – Illustrate how glorious the future could be

Bridge – How you can help the customer get there

Best for:

Blogs, social media, email marketing, landing pages

FAB – features advantages benefits

FAB stands for Features, Advantages, and Benefits. A FAB Statement is explaining the feature, what it does (the advantage), and how that benefits the prospective client. Features are one of the easier things to identify. … It connects the facts about your product to a solution for your client.

4Us, useful urgent unique ultra specific

Google search

Relevancy score
If it is less than 5, you should be improving the content

Generally FB does not like 3rd party tools of adespresso and hootsuite (for paid advertising)

You can use IN pixel and get B2B data – which companies are visiting your website?

Inmail – cheapest thing you can do in linkedin

Companion ad – it is free with inmail. If you do not use it, someone else’s ad will show

Digi-Publish notes

JASON HUGHES

THE BRANDED CONTENT ECO SYSTEM

Multi-channel campaigns

Branded content = Brand building tool

Trying to achieve brand uplift.

Video views are fine but what is the result of these video views? Did it resulted in improved brand perception?

Youtube is the home of longer videos. Use Instagram and stories to build around this primary content in YT.

DANIEL WONG-CHI-MAN

ADVERTISING EFFICIENCY IN A CHANGING MARKET

Digital advertising is 52% of all UK advertising now.

ALEX WHITE

TESTING NEW REVENUE STREAMS

JUDITH SECOMBE

THE PATH TO PURCHASE

Steady, consistent ability to build the relationship with customers that drives brand awareness and it can lead to an ongoing relationship.

Distress purchase

A purchase made out of necessity, rather than for pleasure.

Visibility is key

Make the customer feel comfortable

Remember time is of the essence

Have helpful, insightful content available

Never take advantage

Get ahead of the ‘event’

Details

(BURAK: Last minute book present purchases?)

FIRESIDE CHAT

CONTENT STRATEGY: THE OBSTACLES & CHALLENGES OF DISTRIBUTED STORYTELLING

There needs to be a balance between branded and non-branded content. People are there for the editorial content but you can mold commercial content with storytelling to make it through the filters of the viewers.

It is possible to apply some of the old publishing hacks into digital.

Prepare content for mobile first, social first.

Snackable content around 60 seconds that can be consumed in different times of the day.

There is a number of KPIs that you can utilize through content marketing, you might not be aware of.

Headline changes everything. You can use title / headline to make an emotional connection with the viewer / customer.

On online, you always have data. You can let the numbers do the talking.

HAYLEY COCHRANE

THE ART & SCIENCE OF LOYALTY

Leonardo Da Vinci

We get bombarded by ads. There is a need to cut through that noise.

Only thing you can do this is : quality and interest. Brands that people are loyal to.

Consumers can access content everywhere, on a device that want. They also want privacy, they do not want to be creeped at.

Marketers have advanced tools to target customers, they have access to vast amount of data.

Visually creative way of telling stories is also important.

Viewers should want to become part of these stories.

You should have a tone of voice and stick to it.

Do not just curate, create.

Prioritize content, feature it more according to data.

Utilize heatmaps to measure how effective the content is.

You need open mindedness. You need science but you also need art. You need spark of genius.

Authenticity. Authentic to your brand values.

Get teams and people together to break barriers from artists and scientists.

BEN EBBRELL

HOW COMMUNITY-LED CONTENT GROWS TRUE ENGAGEMENT

Word of mouth

We prefer friendship to customers.

You can not rush friendship, you cannot buy friendship. It needs to be nurtured, organically.

Someone that you spend time with is not friend. Friends are:

You can revisit your old content. It doesn’t need to be corrected. You can amplify it with the new tools.

Ask for customer feedback.

Customers can spot the good stuff. They can know better than you.

User led content – get ideas from viewers and then produce content. It is loved instantly, because the viewers created the demand for it. It is their idea.

Service before self.

TAMSIN ANASTASI-PACE

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN THE ERA OF FAST PACES PUBLISHING

Change is hard.

You have to invest.

No one actually likes to change. You just like the concept of change.

Do not think change is something that can happen in 6 months and everyone has new behaviours? No.

You have the plans, requirements at first. But not everything goes to plan.

Then you have cracks and problems.

When you start to change, everyone will complain about their problems.

(Burak: Assuming the change will be the solution to all their problems.)

Scope is really important. You can end with dead ends. You need to know what you need to achieve. You need to have a roadmap. You need to stick to that plan.

When you are building a business case, you need deadlines and solid outputs to get funding.

You can’t just keep iterating forever. You need to know where you are going.

You can not do change with an existing team. They have different objectives and different timeframes. They are doing a certain operation to meet 2-3 months results. You can not make them focus on 3 years ahead.

There needs to be a designated change team. People know this is the change team or advocates.

Tell everyone. BCG – Boston Consulting Group says that you need to communicate things 3 times for people to understand it and remember it. You need to communicate it 9 times if it is a period of change. The reality is you need to talk about it, even if you think you have said. Over and over again.

If you don’t tell everyone, at some point people come out of the woodwork. You need to speak to everyone and dig it. If you missed even a small thing, you can not go live. Keep communication.

Try to look at what people can do. Get small wins. Keep morale high. Celebrate the small wins. We like to feel we have done a good job. If we don’t celebrate small wins, we might lose the goodwill of the team. We need all the stakeholders to help.

Momentum might start to slow at some point. You might need to do hard conversations with people. You would come up at cross roads. It is so easy to go off track. Stick to the long term.

You might eventually hit a crisis point. Hit pause, do not hit quit. You have the counter: Time is running out, money is running out. Go back to basics. Question everything. Discuss what you are trying to do in the first place. Go back to what you started with and what you are trying to come to.

You can revert back to manual anytime. It takes pressure out of everyone. Process the manual CSV for a couple of months.

You can’t always get all the bells and whistles. If you get the “thing”, it is enough.

Question: How to motivate the team?

Find the pain point. Choose the individual context for each person. Paint the picture, how it is painful now and show how it is going to better in every granular detail. Be realistic. Take people through. Mitigating, contingencies. Making people comfortable during the change.

PANEL SESSION

THE FUTURE OF YOUR REVENUE

3 main changes affecting the industry

Type of content

1- Original content demand.

400 million users in rural India, they are not ready for original content

2- Change in Format

People time poor now.

A film in 5 years time will be in whatsapp. A high quality production in 5 minutes.

3- Vernacular Content

Localizing content. Providing content for different languages spoken around the world. AI will help on this.

Future of advertising: Make advertising fun through game, people don’t want to be sold at.

Targeting people can be a challenge, could be interesting. GDPR, Block Chain.

Network and programmatic has seen a big rise.

Personalized advertising can bring in engagement with permission. When you get people’s trust.

Native advertising is the future but there is a bit of confusion what native advertising is.

Influencers, not regulated. Provides potential.

Digi-Strategy notes

How Can Artificial Intelligence Accelerate Audience Influence & Engagement

Roy Ionas – CEO and Founder, LeadSpotting

PANEL SESSION: RECIPE FOR SUSTAINABLE ONLINE GROWTH

Innovation goes both ways. Top down and bottom to up.

You are trying to solve problems for your customers. Give them tools to customers and employees doing the actual work to provide suggestions.

Put customer first – like Amazon.

What value are you providing to your customers? What problems are you solving?

Gather information: To make sure that what you are doing that will solve a problem. Small trends and behaviours can mean something too. You can do mini experiments and scale them up if they work.

Small scale experiments. They don’t need to cost any budget. Get people talking about it (internally) You don’t have to involve lots of people, too.

These doesn’t have to be scientific. It just needs to give tips and hints.

Take the fear out of change and innovation.

Do you have a testing, experimental or innovation budget?

METRICS

Metrics are everything. If you can not measure it, you should not be doing it.

Time spent on site is not the only metric for Facebook. They focus on meaningful time spent. (Burak note: Facebook limit newsfeed content that is shown in each session.)

Your organisation needs to have a mindset about metrics.

(Burak: It needs to become the part of company culture. Decisions needs to be data driven compared to gut-feeling most of the time)

Good ideas can come from anywhere.

Innovation should not be done by the same team/person. Get people together for 1 day and see what kinds of ideas can come out of it (Burak: All inclusive 1 day innovation workshop for B2D and SCP?)

How to tackle culture:

You need to be open to anyone and any idea. Employees should not be afraid to suggest stupid ideas. Also make sure people needs to get credit for their ideas.

Utilize data and innovation champions in the organisation to spark ideas and engage employees.

Subconscious bias.

You need to represent customer base in decision making process.

AI in digital strategy.

Machine learning.

User engagement with the content. Recommendations.

Do you really need AI or machine learning?

New technologies?

Voice control. 50% of search will be voice in 2020.

How do we adapt to continue engage with these customers.

Voice – younger demographics.

Attribution – Google Amazon Apple, voice interaction.

You are not typing in and getting 10 results. On voice 90% will be the one choice.

AR – Augmented reality. Interacting digital with real world. A bit over-hyped.

Make it useful not just for the sake of tech.

You can get anything as a service.

(Burak: Year of books: One book delivery per month )

Try to deliver change not in the country that you are in the world.

Most interesting things are not published. Events.

Design Thinking

Design Thinking is a design methodology that provides a solution-based approach to solving problems.

Gaurav Bhatnagar

HEAD OF MARKETING DIGITAL, AMAZON UK

Thinking customer first in a time of disruption

Customer behaviour is changing constantly.

How customers are evolving?

Price, value, post purchase, experience, relevancy

Huge load of expectations.

I want it now. I don’t want to wait for 10 minutes on the phone.

Maintain customer trust in the long term.

Be authentic.

Netflix – learns from customer experiences, producing own content accordingly.

Monzo –

1- Focus on customers: Abstract customer needs, as simple as possible.

2- Move quickly to harness capabilities in the market

Cost of acquisition vs cost of retention

Cost of providing alternatives is coming down

Levers to accelerate impact.

1- Ability to gather lots of data

2- Machine learning

1- Customer first. Make it the guiding force in every place of your business.

It is not responding or reacting to every piece of feedback you get. Think long term.

You need to know how to de-prioritize.

2- Ask right questions in leadership level.

Focus on a problem customer is trying to solve.

3- Integrate deeply in the core business.

4- Execute, set up the right ways of working

Before evaluating, is it executed properly?

5- Refine your strategy

Make data and analysis accessible to the team

Manage data risk. Manage permissions.

6- Obsess about talent

Skill up your employees. Analytical skill.

7- Organise for skill

Think about what skillsets you are putting together.

ORIGINAL VIDEO PRODUCTION AND MARKETING FOR SOCIAL ALVIN HUSSEY

https://www.thehook.online/

Quality over quantity.

Snackable content

The New York Times bestseller, Contagious: Why Things Catch On.

People are not viewing your content isolated. They have a life going on.

Consider these when creating content:

Narrative, triggers, emotion, social currency

Allegro English ad – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO6AUFdgcgU

BUILDING AN IN-HOUSE ACCELERATOR ON A SHOESTRING – LYNN ROBERTS

Action for children – https://www.actionforchildren.org.uk/

Market research

Design fast – 5 days – from problem to solution

Do something in front of the people quickly. You don’t want to waste time on something is not needed or meaningful

Identifying unmet needs in growth areas

Funding pipeline

Lean product development:

Lean product development is a lean approach to counter the challenges of product development, notably: Lack of innovative solutions Long development cycle times Many redevelopment cycles High development costs Long production cycle times High production costs

Learnings

Be scrappy and resourceful

Surface ideas

Think outside in not inside out

If it exists, use it – you do not need to custom build almost anything in terms of software

Start small

PANEL SESSION – BUILDING CUSTOMER CENTRIC DIGITAL STRATEGY

There are key points in omnichannel customer journey that you “have” to nail

Other touchpoints in the customer journey are there to make the whole thing better but not necessarily a show stopper

Technology Adoption

How can be bring technology quickly into the business and not be afraid of it

It is almost growth hacking

What if we fail? It is OK. We learn.

How can we reach excellence from average. We can do that through technology.

Audience segmentation

Different customers have different needs. You need to recognize this process.

Who knows, what? What are they assuming internally?

Who are your core customers?

Customer centricity. Design campaigns and structure business around that.

How to overcame challenges of implementing customer centric digital strategy internally:

1- Data. Structure. Right data flow. If not, it falls down.

Understand data sources. Is a legacy data set holding you back?

2- Company was one person at one time. And it was set up to serve a customer. To serve efficiently as possible. Through time, you add capacity. It is like a lego tower. This simple artifact is often ignored.

People making the thing needs direct contact people getting the thing (developer – customer)

(Burak: Feeding customer feedback summary back to the team)

Ultimately you are serving the customers outside. But you have customers inside that can make better products / campaigns for the customers outside.

Co-creation: How to best align.

American Express lab: Internal teams tried to pitch projects to customers.

(Burak: Customer does understand. Customer does know. You need to know how to ask.)

Digital Strategy – Young

Diversity. How can we use technology effectively to reach these people.

Get as close to the customer as possible

Buy – ready to use software, just need to configure

Partner – white label software

Build – agile devops

Robotic process automation – you can adapt to legacy platforms with this

Content Marketing

You can use fragments to move users to a place in that same post. Similar to an outline.

Get the right context and focus on every single post.

Authority, you know what you are talking about. So make sure you reflect this.

It’s all about the content

At the end of every link is content
There are lots of content type
Information
Meaning
Context
Authority
Credibility
Content that will drive traffic that will convert

Why is content important?

Content communicates your message
- Brand
- Product
- Service
- PR message
Builds a community of loyal customers
Helps make your brand an authority
Get to know your customers better
Improve SEO
Adds value

Effectiveness: The degree to which objectives are achieved and the extent to which targeted problems are solved.

Setting content goals

Goals give us something to measure against
Clearly defined success criteria
Understand how effective we have been
Modify goals based on data insights
Set new goals once a goal has been met

Content goals statement

Increase brand awareness
- Double the number of social shares within 3 months
Drive more traffic to your website or blog
- Increase the number of unique visits to my blog by 20% within a month
- Hit 10% returning customers in 12 months
Generate sales leads
- Generate at least 5 new sales leads per product video published
Convert more leads into customers
- Increase conversion rate to 15% on landing pages published in the next 6 months
Improve retention and drive upsell
- Increase revenue from “Customer also bought” feature by 8% over the next 4 weeks

What is content?

Company info
Sales info
Customer service content
Event content
Employee generated content
Marketing content
Campaign content
Advertising content
Customer generated content

Content marketing is a strategic marketing apprıach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience – and ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

What is content marketing?

Attracting an audience to an experience or destination you own
Linked to a marketing objective or business goal
Not overtly selling a product or service

Make your buyer more intelligent
Consistency
Value driven
Expertise
Knowledge
Part of the team / club

CONTENT TYPES

Website content page
- Clear descriptive heading
- Short but descriptive summary
- Section headings
- Links to other relevant content
- May have a CTA
News article / press release
- Headline
- Summary
- Body content
- Image
- Publish date
- Author
Blog
- Title
- Summary
- Body content
- Images
- Lists
- Links
- Quotes
- Comments
- Category
- Tag
- Parts
- Quality over quantity: Generate more quality content with the same amount of time and energy.
- Analyse, use data, make research, expert opinion
- Use visual breaks in the blog posts to rest people’s eyes and minds
- https://buffer.com/resources/
- Storytelling, enough words
- Good content, helping people with their problems

https://backlinko.com/hub/seo

6 RESOURCES

Social
- Employees can link business related posts on their personal linkedin
Images
- Format
- Size
- Resolution
- Colour
- Style / filters
- Alt text
- Usage rights
Videos
- Professionally produced
- Produced on mobile
- Hosted
  - Youtube
  - Vimeo
- Embedded
- Shared
- Meta info
- Comments
Web forms
- Gather info
- Simple
- Multipart
- Surveys
- Questionnaires
- Dynamic
- Embedded
- Secure
- Autofill
- Rich controls
- Make sure it is working
Infographics
- Visual representation of information / data
- Diagram
- Chart
- Dataflows
- High design values
- https://www.canva.com/
Podcasts
- Digital audio file
- Series of episodes
- Downloadable
- Subscription
- Free usually
- Can be consumed while doing something else (eg while driving)
- Accessed via apps, itunes, google play
- Utilize another podcast that has already have a following
Whitepapers
- Heavy weight content
- Domain expertise
- Technical knowledge
- Pretty valuable
- Designed as a print or pdf
- Formal language
- Includes images, charts, figures and stats
- Sometimes paid for content
- or require email or other info before download (gather leads)
Comments
- User generated content
- Moderated and edited
- Onsite ie blog posts – probably no one will comment on your blog
- Easier to get comments on social
Testimonials
- Provided by customers
- Short form – quote
- Long form – more descriptive
- Versatile content type
- Customer trust
- Credibility

Who creates your content

Marketing department
Technical experts
Products owners / specialists
Suppliers
Customers
Industry experts
Not recommended but can be tested, relevant freelancers
- https://www.peopleperhour.com/

Created by your business

How regularly will you create content
How will you ensure the tone is correct
What media items will you need to include
Who will check content before it is published (it should not be the author)
What extra support do non-marketing team members require
What feedback will provide
You can record meetings or internal talks and transcribe them into blog posts

Created by others

What value does their content bring
How can you make sure it fits your guidelines
- Provide guidelines
- Edit once submitted
- Does it even matter?
What about deadlines?
Can you offer to create content for them?

Ingredients of effective content (for humans)

Information
Attraction
- Being different
Engagement
- Being funny is a way of doing it
Strong message
Memorable
Be developed with an audience in mind
Consistent

Ingredients of effective content (for search engines)

Well written, natural content (like humans like to read)
Semantically well formed
Descriptive content
Inbound links
Good use of images (don’t forget alt tags here)
Design
Well UX really
Bounce rates are a good indication of the quality of your user experience
SEO for beginners by Moz
- https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo

Audience

Understanding who you are developing content for is very important
Style
Tone
Language
Attention span
Level on knowledge
Propensity to share
Appetite

Content Marketing Infographics

https://www.pinterest.com/michaelschmitz/content-marketing-infographics/

DESIGN AND LAYOUT

Why Design Matters?

Good design sells
Strong consumer trust
Perception of your product or service
User-friendly content
Good first impression
Sets you apart from competitors
Consistency = quality
People get attracted to design.
- But they do get attracted to different things, different designs
Motivate people to take action
Design is more than how it looks, it is how it works, too. (User experience)

Designing effective web content

Ensure your html is correctly formed
Ensure all relevant tags and attributes are included
- Meta tags
- Image alt tags
Clearly defined section headings
Short concise paragraphs
Responsive content
Whitespace is important
Lightweight
- Performance
- Device
- Connections
Consistency

LANDING PAGES AND CTA’S

Usually a standalone web page
Communicates a single message
- A promotion
- A product launch
- A whitepaper download
- A newsletter signup

Before you start for the landing page

What is the goal
- Buy something
- Fill out a contact form
- Signup for a newsletter
- Define the conversion
Who is my audience
- Who are you hoping to attract and convert?
- We’ll do more on personas later
How did they get to my landing page?

Anatomy of a landing page

clean , uncluttered and short is key
Impeccable grammar – you can’t afford to lose trust due to a silly mistake
High quality content
Single idea
Testimonials are great – trust indicator
Buttons and CTAs should stand out – make it really easy to convert
Make sure the design is really good – you only have a moment to impress
Limit your links – do not distract users
Use images and videos that relate to the copy – strong imagery
Shorter to conversion, the better

What is the call to action (CTA)

CTA is an element on a webpage that invites a user to commit an aciton
CTA is a priority item on a page
Every page ideally have a single CTA

Content strategy steps

Define customer personas
Create a keyword list
Identify which types of content you are going to create
Develop an attractive personality and style
Determine a frequency problem
Decide how you are going to promote your content

What is a persona

Represent a major user group for your website
Express and focus on the major needs and expectations of each user group
Give a clear picture of the user’s expectations
Describe how users are likely to use your site
Help to uncover universal features and functionality
Describe real people with backgrounds, goals and values

How to create a persona

Describe the user
- Age,gender
- Highest level of education / expertise
Profession
- Professional background
Motivation
- What is your person motivated by?
- What are they looking for?
- What is your person looking to do?
- What are their needs?

Keyword Research

Choosing Content Types

What content do your customers currently engage with
What are they asking for – do you get asked the same questions a lot
What do your competitors do
Do you have the skills
Does the content type fit with your overall goals
Can you calculate a ROI
What tools are out there that I can use

Personality and style

Conversational
Formal
Technical
Funny

B2B
Consumer
Adult
Teen
Children

High design values
Quick and dirty

Content Promotion

What channels are you going to target
How will you promote?
- Organic SEO
- Social shares
- Paid advertising
Are there specific channels for different content types
How can you use your community
Promotion calendar / schedule

Sharing your content

Social media
Email marketing
Direct email (B2B)
Industry websites / publications
3rd party websites

Scheduling

What time is best
What platforms are best
Cumulative campaigns
Re-scheduling

Social media scheduling tools

Buffer
Hootsuite
Sprout social
Viralheat
Socialoomph
Tweetdeck
Sprinklr
Watch out: Algorithms are demoting content posted by these tools

Testing your content

Content goals statement
Measuring success
Improving our content
Repeating what works
Stop doing what doesn’t work
Our Facebook page appears busier
- Instead, double the number of shares in 3 months
Data is key

A/B Testing

Also known as split testing
Compare 2 versions of a web page
Discover which performs better
Experiment with 2 or more variants
Variants shown at random to users
Statistical analysis
Results based on predefined goals

Issues with A/B Testing

Usually tests small variations
Small changes often regress back to the mean
- Small changes = small results

Google Optimize

This is better than traditional A/B testing
You can create loads of variations and test with AI
https://optimize.google.com/optimize/home/

SEO Marketing Hub

A great resource

https://backlinko.com/hub/seo

International eCommerce

MEET YOUR CUSTOMERS ONLINE

Be visible
- Advertise, no one knows you are there
Build trust
- Is the currency in their own currency?
Deliver great individual customer service
Have the right product or service

Most companies get into international ecommerce accidentally. Do your research.

CHALLENGES

Logistics
Taxes and Import Duty
Data policies
Translation and Localisation
Payment
Process / Customer service and returns
Cost
How and where to start

LOGISTICS MODELS

Direct shipping, drop shipping
Amazon FBA
3rd Party logistics

TAXES & DUTY

No deal Brexit guidelines
Now: From UK to EU: Pay VAT to UK
If you ship more than 50-100k EUR to EU companies you might need to register in those companies
From UK to US. You do not need to pay VAT
If it is under 800 USD – no import duties
Nexus – business entity in USA. If you do not have nexus in USA no local sales tax. Which means tax free. If you are pricing exactly as UK, there is an extra 20% you can play with (as there is no VAT)
If you are hosting stock in USA, it is complicated. Ask an expert.

COUNTRIES

Germany and France ecommerce is growing.
Japan is different from S. Korea in terms of culturally but similar in ecommerce.
USA, different behaviours in different states. Amazon is 50% of ecommerce in USA.
China ecommerce 1 trillion GBP revenue in 2020. It is different than rest of the world.
- Great firewall of China. Different apps and platforms.
- You do not need registered business in China now. But need right partners.
Middle east – ecommerce is filling mid range products. Tech savvy. Logistics is challenge.

RESEARCH

Global Market Finder
G Analytics
G Keyword planner
G Trends
G Shopper Insights
G Consumer Barometer
Paypal Passport
Santander or Lloyds Trade Portal
The Paypers

WEBSITE

Objective of the website
Target audience – their triggers and barriers
Are there multiple user journeys?
Conversion points?
Catalogue Management
Payment gateways
- Paypal – bad exchange rates. Stripe is better for localized payments. You can get payments in different currencies in Stripe.
Management and maintenance
Ease of use, user experience
Scalability
Multi-channel integration

Translation
- Google Translate can work to an extend. It is better with AI in 2018.
Localization
- Local language – Google Translate for mass translations. Manually translate important bits
- Use metric measurements relevant to that country
- Currency converter / local currencies
- Provide information about duties and taxes in different markets
- Make sure contact form fields accept different language