I know of an Australian retailer whose online manager is measured by the volume of traffic to the website, rather than the quality of that traffic, or most importantly, the influence the online channel has on in-store sales. It’s disappointing that in 2009 a retailer can have staff working on a marketing channel with no performance tied to sales. In other words, they really have a website manager and not an online channel manager. Sadly there are more.

This is a strategic mistake many large retailers have already made in more advanced online retail markets, such and the States and UK. However, these mistakes have been reversed, the lessons have been learnt. The USA and UK markets are great windows into the future for how retailers and consumers are interacting online. We can learn from this and not make these mistakes in Australia.

An online marketing strategy should of course include a website and various KPIs around that. However it should be much bigger than your web site. Why? Because your website is not where the majority of your potential customers are making decisions about what to buy and from where. If your messages are not found in the places consumers are online, and are confined to your site, you are missing out on the majority of the active market at any one time.

Your key focus should be to have your message online, when and where the consumer is looking for it. And we know from Google search insights and website trends that most of them are not looking on your site. The most obvious example is being discoverable among the product terms they are researching and not just your retail brand.

As a quick test, look at the search terms (you should be looking at these regularly) that are bringing people to your site. How many of these search terms are for the products or brands that you sell? How many are for products that you advertise heavily in other media? I would guess most of them will simply be your brand terms. So you are not being found by people who are looking for the products and brands you sell and advertise so heavily in other media. If you take that back into traditional media and did not advertise any offers, products, brands, sales, benefits etc, and instead only advertised your brand name, what would happen to your store traffic and sales?

To achieve this you need to do two things. Firstly, make sure your marketing messages about what you sell are discoverable online in a style that can be directly linked to. Secondly, make sure you advertise these messages actively off your site. Consumers are searching across multiple channels including manufacturer sites, consumer review and networking sites. Universal search engines (such as Google) and vertical search engines (such as Lasoo) are important places to be because this is where many customers start their research online.

The bottom line is that reducing all the barriers to finding your product offers for a consumer is the name of the game, and these barriers consist of time, money and effort. By leaving your home turf and playing “away” you can reduce the time and effort for consumers. From there, many will go straight into your stores, without ever having visited your web site. This should be a celebrated achievement and a measure of success, not a failure because they did not make it into your monthly visitor numbers for your site.

Of course, once you have found them on their home turf you can try to bring them to your site, which is an opportunity to focus on engagement and conversion. A good number will do this, but this should not be the only number you focus on for online success.

Paul Marshall

CEO

There are three important digital marketing principles, which will become more important over time. They are Marketing Accessibility, Availability and Applicability. In my regular piece in Inside Retailing, I will be exploring each in some detail over the coming month. However, briefly, they are as follows.

Accessibility. This refers to having your product and marketing information easily available; at the place (and time, which falls into Availability) where someone is looking. Accessibility well beyond your own website’s search and navigation. More important is the need to be discovered and available where people are looking, including search engines, industry portals, social sites, RSS readers, desktop tools, mobile phones etc.

Availability. People are not making buying decisions only when you have your marketing campaign running or your stores open. Digital media changes the paradigm of retail marking in that people are now seeking information and purchasing from anywhere in the world, at any time of the day or night. How do you respond to that? How can you ensure the availability of your information when people are looking for it?

Applicability. Digital media is by its very nature interactive, selective and user-controlled. It is a media-optimised and individual experience and therefore difficult to use as a marketer. Replicating mass media marketing (untargeted display advertising) does not work. Relevance is the key to marketing in the digital media; ensuring your brand and your messages are applicable to each recipient is essential for both the health of your brand and the success of your campaigns. Applicability all starts with understanding each customer. If your advertising is relevant, it is indistinguishable from information.

Each of these will be explored in further detail in Inside Retailing and also in this blog over April/May.