Digital Marketing Outlook. 2012.

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Digital Marketing Spending to Increase Across All Channels

While traditional digital channels such as search and email continue to dominate retailer marketing spending, social and mobile channels are growing in importance. Marketers are also seeking to improve data analytics capabilities to identify the most profitable channels and design the optimal marketing mix for driving engagement and sales. These are the top-level findings of a recent survey of 110 retailers conducted by Lauren Freedman and the e-tailing group, an e-commerce consultancy for merchants.

The report, “Surviving the Current Market Mania with a Solid 2012 Plan,” was sponsored by Bronto Software, the leading marketing platform for retailers and other commerce-focused companies. The free report is available for download at bronto.com.

Regarding revenue generation, merchants surveyed said that they expect top-performing channels will be SEO (31%), Mobile (mCommerce, iPads, mobile application – 30%) email (22%), paid search (22%) and social media (14%).

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70% impulse purchase - no more.

70% of the brand decisions are made in the last mile - we have been following this "theory" for years and I have written plenty about it on this blog. Retailers and brands have taken it for granted that attractive presentation and packaging profoundly influence most shoppers’ purchasing decisions. 

While Paco Underhill in his bestseller Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, described supermarkets “as places of high impulse buying…. 60% to 70% of purchases there were unplanned, grocery industry studies have shown us.” These prompted retailers to devote ever growing resources to in-store promotion.

However, new(er) research by Wharton marketing professor David R. Bell differs with Underhill, describing the idea that most supermarket purchases are unplanned as something of an urban legend. In a new research paper, “Unplanned Category Purchase Incidence: Who Does It, How Often and Why,” Bell argues that the amount of unplanned buying is closer to 20%.

The above research is extremely significant and while I still believe that the "last mile is the new prime time" (when compared to the traditional TV prime time), there are a number of reasons for Prof. Bell's findings to be relevant today. One of the primary reasons is the emergence of the internet as the Zero Moment of Truth for brands and its impact on the First Moment of Truth in the store.

The shopper today walks into a store with far more per-purchase knowledge, recommendations & peer suggestions than was possible in the times when "Why we buy" was penned about 12 years ago. It is time to dump the 70% theory and focus on multichannel strategies and web-influenced retail sales.

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AaramShop is a Finalist for the 2011 Red Herring Top 100 Asia Award

AaramShop has been selected as a Finalist for Red Herring's Top 100 Asia award, a prestigious list honoring the year’s most promising private technology ventures from the Asian business region.

The Red Herring editorial team selected the most innovative companies from a pool of hundreds from across Asia. The nominees are evaluated on both quantitative and qualitative criteria, such as financial performance, technology innovation, quality of management, execution of strategy, and integration into their respective industries.

This unique assessment of potential is complemented by a review of the actual track record and standing of a company, which allows Red Herring to see past the “buzz” and make the list an valuable instrument for discovering and advocating the greatest business opportunities in the industry.

"This year was very rewarding," said Alex Vieux, publisher and Chairman of Red Herring. "The global economic situation has abated and there are many great companies producing really innovative and amazing products. We had a very difficult time narrowing the pool and selecting the finalists. AaramShop shows great promise therefore deserves to be among the Finalists. Now we’re faced with the difficult task of selecting the Top 100 winners of Red Herring Asia. We know that the 2011 crop will grow into some amazing companies that are sure to make an impact."

Here is a list of all the finalists and great to see that Indian companies stand tall.

AaramShop - digital marketing solution for CPG.

Rapid change in technologies and way the consumer interacts with and consumes media using various technologies has had a profound impact on the way brands use communication & marketing tools. However, this is just the start. 

Brands will need to re-think their current strategies and would need to augment their current brand marketing strategies with web, social networks, mobile & whatever else comes along the way. 

Delivering a seamless and an integrated experience across all consumer touch points represents a tremendous change, challenge and opportunity. 

Brands will need to adopt their marketing to being relevant locally. They will have to think more broadly in terms of opportunities for a given brand or store format and more narrowly in terms of consumer needs in different communities or groups of consumers. 

The biggest challenge is for brand thinking to become channel agnostic. The transformation of where shoppers are touching your brand – from how they research you, how they buy the brand, whether it is brick and mortar, mobile based commerce, web based commerce, social network commerce – means you need to have the capacity to ship your product from anywhere to anywhere as a true multi channel retailer. 

That’s where AaramShop intents to offer a solution rather than advice – as a hybrid retail platform, it will enable FMCG / CPG brands to be present across the consumers path-to-purchase and encourage an effortless purchase at any of the touch-points.

This seamless inter-operatability between channels is what will allow shoppers to purchase brands irrespective of where they are.

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Google Instant - game changer for Brands and their agencies.

Google Instant – Google’s new, very quick, letter-by-letter search result offering, would have huge impact on brands and their online spend strategies. Almost instantly the user behavior has adopted to “acceptance of suggested search terms”, this was something which was completely missing earlier.

The results seem to be driven by user history and geo-locational logic and therefore a boon and a matter of concern for brands who are vying for attention and click thrus’.

Just typing “a” in India (ND) throws the following brands up.

The Instant would have an impact on the entire logic of SEO. Previously, search-engine optimization for brands was about making sure your web pages rose to the top of Google’s results once someone had typed in the company’s full name. Now, it appears that a brand that wants to remain top in Google Instant also needs to see a critical mass of repeat visits in relevant locations in order to shore up their results. SEO will have to become a more local, retail-oriented endeavor.

While at the onset, the differences seem trivial but they will get critical as soon as one starts to look at consumer search behavior while using a mobile phone, where in keying is is tedious and hence instant suggestions would be taken quicker.

Brands that can ensure constant presence within search results for just one- or two-letter searches can expect to substantially more hits than those that require a full word for relevant results. Add this to the location-aware mobile ads run by Google, and one can visualize the SEO relevance battle turning very geographically driven.

Little Red Riding Hood - RETOLD

What a wonderful project.

""The brief told us to do a classic ad to be printed in the magazine "Filter". The target group was swedes in ages 15–30 years. After some thinking and researching, we realized that a small ad in a small magazine wouldn´t do that much of a difference.""

Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

The video takes you through the most memorable day in the life of Little Red Riding Hood and along the way, you learn all sorts of details. Like the air resistance experienced by a Volkswagen Type 2-61 Minibus at 43 MPH as measured by Volkswagen GmbH in 1955. Or the wildlife density of the Hundred Acre Wood, showing a surge in the rabbit population. Not to mention the nutrition facts of Grandma with a total caloric value of 10,000 kilocalories. :-)

Eye tracking study reveals website tactics.

Eye tracking studies tend to be very informative and reveal valuable information about how people read and interact with websites. Eyetrack III recently published their eye tracking results for news sites. Some of the findings were quite the on lines of what we have commonly believed, however there are some interesting findings too.

Have listed 12 of the findings I thought were most interesting.

1.Headlines draw eyes before pictures.

2. People scan the first couple words of a headline.

3. People scan the left side of a list of headlines.

4. Your headline must grab attention in less than 1 second.

5. Smaller type promotes closer reading.

6. Navigation at the top of the page works best.

7. Short paragraphs encourage reading.

8. Introductory paragraphs enjoy high readership.

9. Ad placement in the top and left positions works best.

10. People notice ads placed close to popular content.

11. People read text ads more than graphic ads.

12. Multimedia works better than text for unfamiliar or conceptual information.

Read the full report here.

How Digital Marketing Can Help Reinvent Direct Marketing - From Adage

Found this to be really relevant and hence requesting all to read thru. "traditional direct is stuck in the limits of a one-to-one model created and perfected for a previous age" - how true!! Read the article here.

My A to Z list of digital tools. (ABC)

This is a list which I have complied after a request from a few friends, who wanted to be more effective with their own online presence. A to Z listing of online tools is a compilation of tools which can assist you in being in better control of your digital marketing effort. These are effective, insightful, very useful and have been tested extensively. Together they can provide a very comprehensive ability to manage digital marketing – and you would notice that a lot of them are free. These are my personal favourites and not in any specific order;

A.

This tool forecasts the impression count and predicts demographic distributions of keywords.

B.

This tool helps in visualizing and analyzing the customers' search sequences.

C.

This tool helps test & improve a website performance. It calculates the size of individual elements and sums up each type of web page component. Based on these page characteristics the script then offers advice on how to improve page load time.

Read about more tools on my A to Z list of digital tools. Click here.

My A to Z list of tools contd. (IJKLM)

I.

This is a great tool that’s helps you generate heat maps of what and where people clicked on your site. This tells you what’s hot and what’s not, so you can make changes that matter.




J.
Good ol' good ol'. Basics of SEO. This one and about 10 others are mandatory.


K.
Another great tool which generates heat maps of useage patterns of the website.


L.
This tool allows you to compare feed subscribers across various sites. Great way to look at competitions effectiveness.


M.
A very effective tool for one to stay informed and updated about latest & relevant news, queries and topics / content pertaining to the website.

Read more about digital tools on my A to Z list of digital tools; Click here

My A to Z list of tools contd. (STUVW)

S.
SearchStatus is a toolbar extension for Firefox and Mozilla that allows you to see how any and every website in the world is performing. Designed for the highly specialised needs of search engine marketers, this toolbar provides extensive search-related information about a site, all conveniently displayed in one discreet and compact toolbar.

T.
You can use readability.info to analyze the characteristics of your writing and ascertain a multitude of readability scores.

U.
Statbrain uses different resources on the web combined with mathematical and statistical methods to estimate how many visits a website has.

V.
Technorati collects, organizes, and distributes the global online conversation.

W.
With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics.









Read about the last three tools on A to Z list of digital tools ; Click here

My A to Z list of tools (XYZ)

X.
Website Grader is a free seo tool that measures the marketing effectiveness of a website. It provides a score that incorporates things like website traffic, SEO, social popularity and other technical factors. It also provides some basic advice on how the website can be improved from a marketing perspective.



Y.
Find out how well your site is doing in popular search engines, social bookmarking and other site statistics.




Z.
Site Explorer allows you to explore all the web pages indexed by Yahoo! Search. View the most popular pages from any site, dive into a comprehensive site map, and find pages that link to that site or any page.

Hope you are able to put the tools on this list to their effective use.

Click here to go back to the top of the list.

The last mile just got longer! Contd..2

2. A consumer’s source of information, research, evaluation and influence are not led by an organisation or brand.

The consumer seeks information from a myriad of sources that he defines and trusts. These opinion forming communities can destroy the prospect’s chance of ever buying the product or build up a frenzy and passion. The need to own “the” iPhone, for example, made passionate consumers queue for hours, although everyone of them already had a mobile phone.

There are communication and interaction opportunities that allow brands to deploy a broader set of messages, tailored to reach their audiences where they live and play. It is critical to address all these touchpoints because while the consumer undertakes his brand research through one touchpoint, he seeks affirmation of his choice through a different touchpoint and will probably make a purchase at a very different touchpoint.

3. The central idea of the campaign has become more important than the media used. The campaign idea needs to create the ripples which should take a life of their own.

Or go to the main post