Day one of eTail2010, in Palm Springs California, covered in-depth two critical areas of retailers’ marketing success: search and email.

These two areas are number one and number two respectively in importance to a retailer and their ROI in digital marketing. Both were covered with a full day of workshops, panel discussions and presentations. As US retailers continue to refine their strategies in these areas, the message was to “tune and prune”.

The Search stream covered in-depth paid search, organic search, search feeds, attribution, ROI, strategies, technology and new innovations. Presentations were given by eBay, Gap Inc. and Drugstore.com. Highlights included insights into strategies for new innovations from search engines; such as personalised search, real-time search and product search. The importance of optimising your product feeds, integrating SEM and SEO strategies and reporting; and properly attributing further forward than the last click were illustrated with real case studies and figures.

The Email and Personalisation stream continued to highlight the value of this channel for any retail marketer and the payoff for offering personalised, relevant messages to your customers. Key presentations from the very successful eBags and Dell were complemented by a series of focused round-table discussions with key vendors and retailer partners. This was an opportunity for retailers to discuss individual issues and ask key questions. The key outtakes of the day were consistency of data, case studies and research. Best-practice email and personalisation techniques were clearly communicated along with meaningful hints, tips and strategies on how to achieve it.

Paul Marshall

There are many different approaches to search marketing, and so many different levers to pull to cater for different strategies. It’s understandable that people feel overwhelmed when making decisions, or disappointed when looking at results. A lot of the time it comes down to experience and unfortunately there is a cost associated with learning, be it time or money - depending on how you like to learn your lessons. One thing that is often overlooked and/or misunderstood is the keyword matching strategies at your disposal.

The options are “Broad”, “Exact” and “Phrase”. To provide you with a better understanding of these search strategies, our customer insights and search manager Damien Donnelly explains all below.

Broad Match means your keyword is matched with any set of keywords containing that word.
Phrase Match means your keyword phrase is matched with exact combination of words in the same order with any other words.
Exact Match means the keyword phrase exactly matches the keywords you are bidding on.

Each of these has their place in a campaign in terms of the strategic benefits that they can deliver, but, as with most things in life, there is always a trade off.

Broad Match is the best friend of Google – and the lazy marketer.

This will have your keywords matching against anything that remotely resembles your keyword, so long as it will produce a click through. This is fantastic for casting a wide net, which is highly targeted by traditional media standards, but pretty poorly targeted from a digital perspective. It will help you get to scale quickly in terms of volume, but there is a price to pay for this. By keeping Broad Match bids low (in proportion to the actual value of a Broad Match visitor), you can wield this blunt tool of search with far less risk of blowing you budget purely on untargeted clicks in the long tail.

Phrase Match is the slightly more dignified cousin of Broad Match.

It gives you less of the irrelevance issues of Broad Match while still delivering more reach than Exact Match. Obviously, the results from this kind of targeting are more valuable than Broad Match and less than Exact. As a result bid values should reflect this and be somewhere in between Broad and Exact.

Finally we have Exact Match.

This is the logical end-point for the perfect search campaign with optimal spend efficiency (but possibly not build efficiency). Exact Match is often overlooked because building and managing a large campaign that predominantly uses Exact Match is very time consuming. Yet for smaller retailers with small budgets, Exact Matching is the only option – find those terms that you are completely relevant for, craft the perfect ad copy (A/B tested) and bid based on the revenues generated. However, for large campaigns, this thinking often gets thrown away because of scalability.

With the tools available today, it is possible to Exact Match large proportions of well-targeted campaigns to give you much more granular control over what is actually happening within the campaign. Sure, it may look unwieldy when you are essentially seeing data for every single query that you used to be Broad Matched against, however knowing this information allows you to act and control or refine. (Conversely, Broad Matched campaigns can look deceptively neat until you see a raw query report – ie the report that shows the exact phrases that your broad keywords were matched against). By using a highly Broad Matched strategy, data is often obfuscated under raw queries that often never see the light of day in reporting.

How much of each strategy you should use is highly dependent on factors like time, money and objectives. Despite these variable factors, the most important take away is that each match type should be valued appropriately to prevent overvaluation for search, which is quickly becoming an essential marketing service.

Paul Marshall

Lasoo.com.au

In retail, content is a collective noun for many things. Today these many things have many names - such as images, assets, product information, SKUs, barcodes, EANs, merchandising, pricing, sales collateral, training, inventory, catalogues, user guides, warranty details etc. Yet as you become multi-channel it all becomes important content; and it is all very important to your multi-channel success.

Why is content important? There are many reasons, but I’ll highlight the top three – each one strong enough to take content seriously.

1. If you don’t have the information people are looking for, they will go elsewhere to get it. This is the case in physical stores but is even more so for your online presence. The 50% of people who research online prior to buying go to sites with the content that will satisfy their needs – whether that be images, video, product specifications, ratings and reviews, price, warranty information, user guides etc. These sites will influence why they buy and from where. Great content will help ensure you are one of the influencing sites.

2. Good, relevant and unique content will help with your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). For the search engines to consider your web pages relevant to a search, the content on that page must be relevant. The more content, the more specific, the more unique – the better the result.

3. Your web presence is as important as your physical presence and an extension of your brand. If any of the following are important to your brand or to your stores - service, advice, range, convenience, expertise, stock, quality etc - then it should be online.

Develop and manage your content as an important asset for the business.

It is important to develop your content for success in the multi-channel world. Some tips:

1. Start now. The earlier you start the greater the lead on your competitors and the greater the impact on your SEO.

2. Externalise all your content. This means making it suitable for all audiences – particularly external customers. Avoid short codes, internal language and jargon, and poor copy.

3. Describe your content well. Understand how search computers will read and understand your content, and ensure that you cater for this audience. For example. consider the way you name content (images, video etc) and the words used (consider keyword density).

4. Structure your content. Develop your taxonomy and content database to best represent your content assets. Structure the content consistently and try to separate data into unique fields wherever possible to enable good publishing, search and comparison for the user.

5. Create unique content. Author, produce, design and create content which is unique to your site. It will be favoured by the customer and the search engines.

Content is king. It will be the important differentiator moving forward. Start to tackle the challenge now and the benefits will come.

Paul Marshall

Lasoo

The importance of location for physical stores is replaced by the importance of search ranking in the online world. There are two ways to get onto the first page – a paid listing and natural or organic listing. Today let’s talk about natural listings, but don’t assume they don’t come without cost. 

The art/science (yes that old debate is applicable here also) of ranking naturally high in search engines like Google and Bing is called SEO – Search Engine Optimisation. I’ve asked our in-house search specialist, Maurice Peigna, to put together a few pointers about SEO for your retail site.

SEO is an ongoing process

The first thing you should understand is that SEO is not a one-off tactic; it is an ongoing process. Your website is (or should be) continually changing with pages being deleted and updated on an ongoing basis. SEO should therefore be seen as a long-term ongoing process, with constant evaluation and updates where necessary. Behind it must be a well thought-out strategy and plan. For example, the question “what are you optimising for?” is a surprisingly difficult one to answer, but one you must answer upfront. These keywords will become the “anchor text” for the hyperlinks that will later be used for link building.

Using tools such as on-site web analytics as well as the range of tools made available to you (such as Google’s insights for search) will reveal changing search behaviour and opportunities for SEO improvement over time. This won’t stop. You will need to plan and allocate resources to this ongoing.

Search engines care about relevance

Your challenge is to make the search engines understand that you are relevant. Your web pages must use the users’ language and contain the words and phrases that their target audience types into search queries. These pages will have a relevant unique keyword focus. Building relevant content on the site will contribute towards ranking higher on search engines results pages; allowing it to get crawled earlier, faster and deeper by the search bots. In addition, ensure your website internal linking structure makes sense and has a clear hierarchy that is visible throughout the site. For example, breadcrumb navigation: Home > Electronics > TV > Plasma TVs.

Search engines care about popularity

Links to your site indicate that other sites find your site relevant, for something. The higher the quality of the sites linking in, the better it is for your site. It contributes to what is called Page Rank by Google. Think of a link like a recommendation; and the more trusted the recommender, the higher value placed on the recommendation.

Be wise with your link building. When selecting third-party sites to obtain links from (to build your page rank), focus on the quality of the links you are building (ie from a trusted page using the anchor text your want to rank for), rather than the quantity. On the other hand, linking from too many sites in a short period of time could be interpreted as link-spamming. “Spamming” (or “Black Hat SEO”) may get you blacklisted by the search engines and throttled to the nether regions of the Web. Other spamming techniques include: creating fake pages not related to the website’s real content; hiding key words on the page by having their colour the same as the background colours; creating duplicate pages; and reciprocal linking to commercial “Link Farms”. Read more here.

Look the part; and keep your house tidy

It is important to optimise your URLs. Search engines are not fans of dynamic URLs or complex URLs with multiple parameters and session IDs. The URL should describe the content and hierarchy of the page and be readable to humans. Ensure that your URL structure is clear and relevant to page content. In addition, when a page has been permanently removed from one URL to another, use a server side redirect (known as a 301-redirect), which will tell search engines to go to the new page and drop the old one.

Be an individual

Search engines do not like unoriginal content. Ensure your content is unique and refreshed on a regular basis to provide maximum exposure for your SEO endeavours. Use social media to help with your content generation and SEO. Creating a Facebook, Twitter and blogging presence all increase SEO visibility.

SEO should be part of your business review, every month. If you do manage to get to the top of a search result naturally, pat yourself on the back; then get back to work on SEO to stay there.

Paul Marshall, CEO

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