Following on from ensuring your retail marketing messages are both Accessible and Available (where and when people are looking), this article deals with the Applicability of that message to the recipient. Applicability, or relevance, is a key ingredient to effective digital marketing.

We all know that our messages are not applicable to everyone who gets them. The blunt instrument of mass media has meant that in order to get to those who we are targeting, we need to get to a lot more. Therefore there are many people out there getting irrelevant messages. It is all part of the famous advertising waste.

In the digital world, to be a successful marketer, you cannot have a mass audience message. It needs to be targeted. And more importantly, behind the veneer of a well-targeted message must be the substance (hereafter called content) to back it up - content that is relevant to each targeted consumer. Starting with search as an example, you can only appear high in search results if your messages and content are relevant to that search. It is even difficult (and more expensive) to pay to get into the search results if you do not have relevant information to take (link) the searcher to. If your advertising is completely relevant, then it magically transforms into information – rather than advertising.

So how do you build relevance into your message and your content for each target customer? It’s not easy, but there are tools and disciplines available today to achieve this. The key to these tools is scalability. If you need an individual message targeted for each consumer, then all of your costs will be eroded creating each of those uniquely crafted messages, unless you crate them dynamically.

Google allows for Dynamic Keyword insertion, which helps with the relevance of your creative, but not so much with your content. Some enterprise email targeting solutions allow for dynamic content insertion into specific email segments. There are advanced site tools to dynamically personalise the pages on your website as a user journeys through; based on what you know about them and how they are behaving.

Once you have a method of automatically generating messages you then need to match that up with how you target them. At your disposal are the current methods of keyword targeting, demographic targeting (network behavioural targeting), onsite behavioural targeting, day-parting (time targeting), technology targeting (eg – ads just for iPhones or Firefox) and geographic targeting. The important thing to understand is that this is now a well understood and mature business practice for online marketers. And it should be for your business also.

Now that I’ve finished with the three As, I’ve thought of a fourth. It’s one that should be close to your heart – Accountability. Next week I shall look at this new (and final) ‘A’ – Accountable marketing. This is something that the digital space makes easier. Until then, happy selling.

Paul Marshall
Executive Director
Salmat Digital
www.lasoo.com.au

I have been looking into the vast number of options available for retailers to move into the ecommerce space. It is a daunting task to understand your businesses requirements, let alone who will best meet them. even choosing between a licensed, hosted or SaaS model requires some significant forsignt into the future of your eCommerce business.

From the chair of the marketer, the key things to evaluate are:

1. Content management capability - content is still king
2. Site tools - you must have to tools (or at least be able to integrate them in) to engage the customer in order to convert
3. Site optimisation - your site must have a platofrm that works for optimisation and not against
4. Customer understanding & relevance -
5. Conversion - ensure you can improve the end game
6. Social media integration - it’s not going away so plan for it
7. Performance marketing tools - search, email etc need to be fully integrated into the platform
8. Cross channel -  synchronicity and integration with your other channels
9. Flexibility & integration - the key to longevity and performance and true multi-channel integration

Thoughs?

Paul

Following on from ensuring your marketing messages are Accessible where people are looking, as addressed in the previous accessible marketing article; these messages must also be Available at the time people are looking.

In the traditional offline retail store, people are looking during your opening hours and therefore you are “available”. However online researchers and shoppers do not restrict their research behaviour to store hours, instead they are looking 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. So, unless your marketing messages are accessible at a product level (remembering that this is predominantly how people research) and can be discovered every minute of every day, you are missing out on prospective customers.

With traditional stores, there was no availability conundrum. Stores were 100% available (open) during the time people would look in the store (shopping hours). However, it is impossible to get the same 100% availability through traditional media; due to logistics, cost and the nature of offline media.

So the paradigm of ‘Availability’ under traditional media and with traditional channels, was based around two key instruments

- opening hours; and

- promotional campaigns.

Opening Hours – online must be always open

The online behaviour of prospective customers changes this paradigm. Opening hours for a retailer online (whether a customer is buying or just researching) should be 24/7. This 100% availability is a significant change from the 33% availability (9-5, 7 days a week) current stores have. Fortunately, this is relatively easy to achieve online.

Promotional campaigns – re-think your marketing messages for online

The difficult thing for retailers to achieve is producing the information the consumer is seeking in order to make a decision and making it available 24/7. This is where the traditional marketing behaviour of promotional campaigns, with defined start and stop dates, must be modified or supplemented to be successful online.

What happens to the millions of searches that occur when you don’t have a catalogue campaign or a sale event on? Are you closed? Do you not sell products during these “down” times? Of course the answer is you do sell and you do want people to find you. So you must have content, applicable to helping people decide to buy from you, available at all times. In sales times and in non-sales times, every day of the year.

This content doesn’t have to be discount- or event-driven. It could be your key inventory lines with images and product information and your every day pricing. But it must all be easily accessible on your site and through other channels and be available whenever and wherever somebody chooses to look for it.

Filling the gaps between marketing campaign pushes with consistent information to cater for the person seeking for “thongs” in June and “woolly jumpers” in December is crucial to optimising the online experience. There might not be many of these searchers, but they exist in numbers greater than you expect; so you might as well be prepared for that opportunity.

The beauty of the online channel is that for the first time you can reach all the people searching for the products you sell at the time they are searching, something no other media can do. This could be late at night, or at work during the lunch hour, or in the car via the mobile phone. If you have nothing available for people to find you are putting up a “closed” sign – when in reality, for most products retailers are open for business.

Having covered marketing that must be accessible and available; next week we shall look at the final “A” – Applicable marketing. Until then, happy selling.

Paul Marshall

Executive Director

Salmat Digital

www.lasoo.com.au

I believe there are three ‘A’s of digital retail marketing; Accessibility, Availability, and Applicability. These key principles are a prescription to follow for success at using digital media to reach and influence your customers.

This entry starts with Accessibility. This refers to the ease with which consumers can discover, access and interact with your brand, your consumer information, your product offers and your marketing messages. It may seem self evident, but your information needs to appear in the locations where the customer attention is.

The challenge with digital media is that the definition of ‘place’ is now vast. Traditional media is still limited in its number of ‘places’ to put your messages; be that TV stations, radio stations, magazines, or newspapers. That scarcity means high prices –despite the fact that consumer attention is shifting, and much more fragmented. The letterbox still maintains a good amount of attention, even among ‘netizens’ who still check their mail, and continues to be a powerful and effective place for retailers to put their marketing messages; hence it continues to be a dominant marketing channel for retailers.

In all of the traditional channels above, accessing the information is straight forward, ubiquitous and easy. Passive consumption tends to have that advantage.

Digital media on the other hand is different, and comes with its own challenges and complexities. People could be in one of any number of ‘places’ when they are making purchasing decisions, and be somewhere else seconds later. Quickly jumping from place to place is the underlying heart of the Internet. Adapting to active consumption, and acknowledging the power shift to the consumer, is paramount if you are to succeed online. How do you catch the attention of the freedom loving information junkie? The challenge becomes more complex when we look at the many different devices now used to access digital media.

Accessible marketing therefore refers to your marketing messages being:

1. Where the consumer is

2. Able to be ‘consumed’ through multiple devices and media types

3. Able to be to be shared, forwarded, printed, saved etc

1. Be where the consumer is.

Fundamentally this means you must be in more places than your own web site. Regardless of the strength your brand and marketing, only a minority of people who are making buying decisions on the products you sell, will come straight to your website. These people are already loyal to your brand. You need to have a strategy to reach new people, either through some sort of paid online marketing, or as a vector of those people already at your website.

So where are they? They are of course in many places. Search engines are the first place to start – as the majority of Australians start their research journey here. Then there are vertical search engines (such as Lasoo.com.au), comparison sites, shopping sites, blogs, social media, industry portals etc. All of which form a very important part of accessible marketing.

To be across the spectrum there is a balance of paid and unpaid media. For example search engines can give you consumers through advertising (paid search marketing) and through being found naturally or organically in the search results. Appearing organically remains a big challenge for Australian retailers, a topic to be covered in  a future blog.

Being in many of the other places requires you to advertise, targeting your marketing messages selectively based on performance. Again this is also a challenge for many retailers who do not have their marketing messages in a suitable digital format for online distribution. Finding the right format is more than the end result that ends up on a consumers screen far away, it is tightly baked into the process of how that information gets to its destination.

2. Be accessible through different devices/media

In addition to your marketing messages being available to you as defined data, suitable for distribution; your distribution vehicles should be optimised for the various browsers, device types and applications which people will choose to access your information through.

Starting with the basics, web sites need to be optimised for a range of browsers now and not just IE. Mobile devices, particularly smartphones are increasingly being used to access the internet via WAP, web-browsers or purpose built applications which optimise the experience. People will also want to access what you have to tell them through other means such as RSS readers, desktop applications or widgets, and applications in their favourite online social networks. It is important to plan campaigns to be truly multichannel and be able to be found through all of the above, and to be prepared for what is coming around the corner.

3. Be easily shared and talked about

You need different web pages (or landing pages) for each of your marketing messages, each product offer, every product you sell. Why? Because this is what people link to, what Google indexes, what people share, print, email onto a friend etc. If you take out paid search advertising you need relevant pages to land people on. Behind this is the need to have structured or defined data. For it is only with defined data that you have the flexibility to build pages for multiple devices and can be effectively, shared, printed etc.

For example, a common mistake retailers make with their catalogues, is not having landing pages for each of the products they are advertising. This means there is of very little benefit to the retailer in attracting new customers to their site. It reduces “shareability”, “discoverability”, and “mashability”.

Making your marketing accessible is clearly important, and your own web site is the essential starting point. The next step is making that website, its content and pages, easily and well indexed by search engines, and easily shared and consumed by customers. Finally, comes pushing out your information to the many sites, tools, applications and devices that people are interrogating to find out what to buy and from where. Surely you would rather be in the search results when the alternative is to be invisible?

Stay tuned for part two, when I explore the second “A” of digital retail marketing, Availability.

Paul Marshall

CEO, Salmat DigitalForce