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
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
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
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
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
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’
(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
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
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
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
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/
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
TRAFFIC SOURCES
- SEO
- PPC
- Social Media
- https://www.facebook.com/business/m/going-global
- It is challenging to get people from browsing social media to get into purchasing mode
- Newsletter
E-MARKETPLACES
- Access to customer in a trusted environment
- You keep control of the brand
- Stock control
- Pricing control
- Less listing and transaction fees
- Excellent way to test the local demand for your products
- Research opportunity for customer behaviour
MULTI-CHANNEL INTEGRATION
- Multi channel integrators, Integration partner
- Order management system
- Channeladvisor platform – very expensive
- Anatwine – fashion only
- Linnworks – order management
- Pentagon interactive – SE Asian market
MEMBER’S FLASH SALE SITES
- Have bad rep in the UK
- Work very well on many other countries
- You can put your products on different country sites for it not to affect UK
- Subscription models (Printer – ink model)
WHOLESALE
- B2B e-marketplaces
- Alibaba
- Directories
- Product Listing
- Niche or procurement platforms
- Product feed, API, EDI
