Retail marketers: Be on Mobile or be Left Out

For all the retail marketers, it is the mobile marketing era, in store and online shopping is no longer the only choices for customers to shop. You can now shop anytime and anywhere you want and won’t be limited into locations and devices. With my previous marketing experiences and as a student at Northwestern University studying Integrated Marketing Communications, I found some articles that talked about the mobile marketing trend is worth sharing.

The article from Marketing Land- How Marketers Can Keep Pace As Mobile Rises And Matures, by Soo Ji Oh showed the amount of mobile shopping in 2014 holiday shopping season (November to December) accounted for 45% of all online traffic. This is 25% more than the same time period in 2013. Even for online and chain retailer like Amazon and Wal-Mart said they have more than half of their customers use mobile devices to shop over holidays. Retailers are focusing more on mobile strategies now. They also enhance the payment platform and free shipping on mobile app in order to compete with larger scale e-commerce brands.

 

                                   

Sources: Social Media Impact

Another article is from Who What Wear- Why This New Credit Card Will Completely Change How You Shop, by Meaghan Blalock. According to the article, a quarter of all online sales transacted on Black Friday happened on a mobile device in 2010 and the number is still growing. Mobile shopping is definitely a growing trend and now the app developers want to create something that can combines mobile shopping and social network. This article talked about a new app called CardBlanc that can serve as a debit card for you to shop and also use as a social media tools to share your shopping experience with your friends.

Based on the two articles and with my experience and study in marketing trend, I have three recommendations for the marketers in retail industry to enhance their mobile marketing strategy.

• Build a Mobile App- It’s so easy to shop at your phone. Creating a mobile app for your customers to shop can not only engage your customers more but also have the access to their data and track their purchase behavior and learn more about your target customers’ profile.
• Be Mobile Friendly - You don’t have to create a mobile app in order to follow the trend. You can also keep in track by designing a more mobile user friendly website. The mobile user friendly website can make mobile user to read all the content easier in a different size of devices. This can increase their desire to brose or shop at your website through their smart phones even you don’t have a mobile app.
• Enhance in-store mobile interaction- Even more people use mobile to shop, they still like to stop at the store to see the actual products. This is a great opportunity to engage with them through your mobile app. A simple QR code or a promotion banner can be a good way to lead the customers back to the app.

Mobile marketing is definitely a trend and many retailers have already built their mobile app. But how to add value to the app and how to engage with the customers are more important than just have the app but customers are not willing to use it. Adding value by interact with the customers, special promotion or discount through mobile app or let them share purchase experience among friends using the app is some good ways to engage with your customers.

Cheryl Lin is currently pursuing her master degree in Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University. She has four years of solid working experience in marketing and especially interest in fashion and entertainment industry.
Contact Cheryl through twitter @cheryllin2015 or LinkedIn

Online Brand Managers: 3 Keys to Growing Your Brand Online

For online brand managers, attracting and maintaining consumer attention through effective digital strategy is crucial. As a Northwestern University student studying integrated marketing communications, my research online has lead me to two articles that directly address some of these strategies.

One article, "Online Marketing Tips That Won't Break The Bank," by Helen Scheuerer, details a variety of online marketing tactics that can improve visitor experience and increase engagement significantly and are accessible to anyone trying to grow their brand online, from small startups with no budget to large corporations. Scheuerer's first recommendation is to optimize your client's shopping experience to make purchases as quick and easy as possible through thoughtful design and a carefully planned navigation structure.  The article also stresses the importance of keeping contact information up to date and easy to find, so that site visitors can get what they need in a satisfactory and timely manner. Scheuerer further suggests adding a funky error message to add some character and relatability to  your site, and using as many keywords as possible to enhance search  engine optimization.

Another article, “Beyond Web Analytics: 5 Types of Online Data You Should Be Tracking,” by Joanna Lord, highlights the importance of tracking the behavior of your website’s visitors in order to gain insights about your site’s functionality and your visitors’ interactions with your brand. First, the article suggests tracking funnel analytics, which analyze how a visitor got to your site, as well as engagement analytics, which display visitor behavior within your site. For additional visitor data, Lord suggests customer analytics, which aggregate customer feedback, and lifecycle analytics, which consolidate data on customer interaction with a website or brand. Finally, the article suggests using marketing analytics, which measure data from across multiple marketing channels, allowing a manager to compare the effectiveness of various tools and platforms.

Based on these two articles and my own experience, I’ve come up with three keys to building your brand online

1. Spend Time on Analytics: While data can be tricky, and compiling analytics can take time, tracking important web analytics is crucial for a successful website. Drawing insights from analytics data will show you how your consumer is behaving on your website, what is working well, and what needs to be changed.

2. Put Yourself in Your Consumers’ Shoes: Pretend you’re the consumer. How easy is it to navigate your site? How many clicks does it take to get to a final purchase or service? It’s easy to get caught up in your own vision for your website and forget about what’s best for user experience.

3. Don’t Be Afraid to Get Creative: Consumers appreciate a personal touch here and there. Entertain them! Throw in a quirky error message or a clever wording. It will give your brand personality and make your consumer feel connected with your brand.

With these three components, your brand can go beyond that first step from just "having a website" to fostering a platform for engagement and nurturing loyal consumers online.

Kim Eyers studies integrated marketing communications and journalism at Northwestern University. She has worked in the marketing services department at Morningstar, Inc. for over a year. Kim is particularly interested in online marketing and branding.

Entrepreneurs: Build an Online Social Presence, Go Beyond the Website

As an entrepreneur, you recognize the importance of going to market with a website, yet many entrepreneurs start their businesses with very little plans on how to manage an online social presence.  Online social networks and the exposure within online sources have become an essential component in the visibility of a company’s resources.  As a graduate student in the Northwestern Medill IMC marketing program, I have been researching ways for companies to create an online presence that goes above and beyond the typical company website.  I have found two great articles that articulate specific steps that you need to follow in order to be a successful entrepreneur with a strong social presence.

One of the first steps essential in creating your business' online presence, is to "be social".  According to the article, "Beyond Your Web Site: Nine Ways to Build an Online Presence," by Angela Hribar, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer of GlobalSpec, Inc., "To compete effectively, it's necessary to expand and enhance your exposure in the same online sources your customers and prospects use while searching for products and conducting research."  Developing a deep online presence is critical in creating a strong company brand and a message that can relate to your customers.  Creating a more visible and recognizable presence online, beyond a company website, is the way that a company can generate attention about their products and services as well as create maximum visibility about their company.

When establishing an online presence, it is important to surround yourself with other professionals by joining online communities relevant to the products and services of your business.  According to the article, "8 Specific Tactics to Establish and Grow Your Company's Online Presence," by Sandra Morgan, Founder/CEO/Editor in Chief of Kalon Women, "Social media sites can increase your business' visibility, give you an opportunity to present a more personal side to potential customers, drive awareness through social activity and check-ins, and turn casual buyers into true fans."  Entrepreneur's need to connect with other professionals and communities in order to see suggestions for businesses to tap into new markets and to view recommendations on how to create your company's "digital checklist".

After reviewing these articles, I have developed three main action items that you should consider when marketing your business: 

1. Be Social - Establish a basic online presence using social media sites (Google+, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) and participate in online discussions.
2. Join Online Communities - Surround yourself with other professionals in your industry by joining online trade associations.  
3. Advertise Online - Become more visible by advertising in e-newsletters and creating banner advertisements on social media sites.

As an entrepreneur, it is important that you keep your company competitive.  Use every tool within your marketing toolkit and every available marketing option online to connect with your high value markets.   

Kari McMullen is a Business Analyst on the Customer Communication Strategy Team for TEKsystems at State Farm Insurance.  She has a Bachelor of Science in Organizational Communications and a Master of Business Administration, both from Bradley University.  She will soon obtain her Master of Science in Integrated Marketing Communications from Northwestern University and intends to pursue a career in Corporate Communications and Marketing Management.

Contact her on Twitter - @karimac23 

LinkedIn – Kari McMullen

Alert Marketers! Are You Making Mistakes on Social Media?

By Eridana Ai

If you are a digital marketing professional, you probably are familiar with social media marketing. But do you know that there are mistakes you might be making that could have a negative impact on your brand? As a master candidate in Medill IMC Program concentrating in direct and interactive marketing, I strongly recommend that you read the following two articles to avoid possible social media mistakes. 

"The 7 Biggest, Counterintuitive Social Media MistakesYou May be Making" alerts you on several common mistakes made on social media and instructs you on the correct ways of managing social media marketing. The tips include the best time to publish posts and the steps to take in order to avoid measurement overwhelm. 

"Top 10 Things You Should Never Do on Twitter" focuses on communications via Twitter. It highlights some of the things you should not do with your Twitter messaging—for instance, using too many hashtags in your posts. The tips given in the article teach you how to be successful in marketing your business and grabbing consumer attention through Twitter.   

Based on the articles and my previous experience in building social media presence for clients, here are three action items that I suggest you put on your to-do list:

1. Review past content—When people find you on social media platforms, the first thing they do is likely to be looking over your history of posts and shares. Now that you’ve learnt about the social media mistakes to avoid, you should certainly go back to your accounts and check if you’ve made any of them in the past one or few months. Don’t worry about the posts older than one year though as people normally would not dig that deep.

2. Establish standards—Having just read the articles, you now have a clear understanding of the do’s and don’ts about social media marketing. But be careful. Memories may not last long and you would probably forget about these tips and run into the risk of upsetting your followers/fans again in the future. To prevent that from happening, you should start to establish your own social media communication standards and make sure you follow them through. If you are a CMO or a marketing director, you might also want to consider establishing common standards for your fellow workers.

3. Keep your ears open—Social media industry is changing rapidly and continuously. To keep up with time and competition, you need to have an open ear and be keen to the changes, updates and trends. What is the norm now may not be norm forever. So be ready to modify your social media outreach strategy frequently as you move on.

Be aware folks—your competitors are ahead of you not because they are way smarter but because they are more prepared. Marketing through social media is cost-effective, interesting but not always easy. It requires careful planning and consistent effort. The good news is that the online platforms make it convenient for you to correct the mistakes you have made and prevent yourself from falling over again. So why not start acting now?

Eridana Ai is a graduate student studying Integrated Marketing Communications at Northwestern University with a focus on social media marketing and marketing analytics. Her prior work experience in finance industry and project experience in online marketing enable her to bridge the gap between the science of data analytics and the art of marketing. Feel free to connect with her @eridana_ai on Twitter or via LinkedIn. 

Source:

http://blog.bufferapp.com/7-big-social-media-mistakes-and-the-counterintuitive-advice-that-can-help-you-avoid-them

http://www.socialbakers.com/blog/1916-top-10-things-you-should-never-do-on-twitter

Photo:

http://healyourlifeforever.com/i-made-a-terrible-mistake-nobodys-perfect/

http://www.socialbakers.com/blog/1916-top-10-things-you-should-never-do-on-twitter

Upgrade your search marketing: integration of social media and search

by Evana (Yi-Fan) Wu

Online marketers, it is time to upgrade your search marketing with an integration of social media. Increasing companies benefit by making their websites highly visible on search engine and social media friendly. The motivation is simple. As consumers are frequently switching between social media and search engine, brands that leverage the search engine and social media optimization will get the most. To win ahead of the social web trend, it really requires marketers to use both right brain and left brain well. 

Top search engines already changed their algorithm to catch this integration trend with social media. They know that when people search, they trust more with information comes from their social network. When you now search on Google, you can easily find sound bites from Facebook, twitter, or Google+, on paid search or organic search. Bing even creates the right-hand social column that includes results from social media or online influencers. The recent introduction of Google Knowledge Graph is another example worth watching.

We can think of integrating social media and search marketing in two related questions. First, how to increase social shares in your web strategy? Content optimization of your website that enables sharing and interaction is essential. Second question, how to optimize your social media campaign in the search results? Cross-channel syndication of keywords and strategic evaluation of social keywords can help. Understanding your social customers by doing Social CRM is another big step to take.

 

Here are three useful tips you can act on to upgrade your search marketing and social media strategies.

1.      Create socially enabled content

Consider the keyword relevance in your social campaign to optimize search. Read more here to understand how to create the optimized content that can easily travel between search and social. You will find that sharable and engagement is always vital to create socially enabled content.

2.      Think of syndication

Start to think of your syndication strategy in the social web. Sync keywords you use in your website and social media to optimize the search and social results. In addition, social sign-in is a good way for this track to get more information and social signals from your customers.

3.      Advance your measure and analytics

Successful and sustainable online strategies always depend on good measurement and analytics. Now you just need to think more social in search and more searching in social. 5 Social Media SEO & Analytics Tools Worth Checking Out is a good article that introduce some good tools.

Sounds easy and fun? Move forward to the integration of social and search to drive profitable traffic and links!

Evana (Yi-Fan) is a graduate student at Northwestern's Medill School, studying Integrated Marketing Communication. Specialized in digital marketing and data analytics, she is highly interested in working with the tech industries. Follow her @evanawu and connect with her on LinkedIn: Evana Wu.

How Social Media Saved the Day for Hyatt Hotels

By Ruth Han @han_ruth

Companies are setting up Facebook and Twitter accounts to latch onto the social media trend and engage their customers, hoping it will transfer into incremental revenue.  However, as case studies have shown, many companies are unprepared for the various unexpected events that could occur on social media; for example the ChapStick Facebook fiasco.  You can read about it here if you are unfamiliar with it.

Similar event happened to Hyatt 18 months ago, but took a very different turn.  The story started with a customer finding a leftover box of Mexican food gone bad in his fridge upon checking in.  The customer responded by taking a picture of the leftover and tweeting it to @HyattConcierge, and headed out to dinner.  Within a few hours (when the customer was in the middle of his appetizer), he received a phone call apologizing for the mishap, and offered him a free breakfast for two.  He was further greeted with a bottle of wine and a hand-written card upon returning to his room.  The experience has turned the customer into a customer for life to Hyatt, and also provided positive publicity for the hotel.

While the ChapStick case may be seen as a warning to all marketers, the Hyatt case study showed how companies can use the social media to detect problems in the early stage and resolve it before it snowballs into a larger fiasco.  The lesson?  BE PREPARED when launching social media!  Without proper guidelines and company infrastructure set up to deal with customer’s various voices online, your company could be treading on thin ice, without knowing when the next social media fiasco will strike.

Here are some actions your company can take to ensure you’re covered for the danger of social media:

1. Set guidelines: Have a clear guideline for all employees, from frontline to back office, to follow.  What do they do when customer complains about your product?  Should they escalate the complaint to their manager, or can they resolve it firsthand?  What’s the time frame each complaint should be handled and responded to?  These guideline forms the foundation for your company in the face of unexpected event.

2. Be prepared for potential failure: Always be prepared for unexpected happenings online.  Any action taken by the company may result in a backlash from your customers.  Draw out a list of possible reactions from your customers before taking actions, and be sure your team is ready for them.

3. Mean it when you apologize: No matter how prepared your company is, there will always be some time when you make a mistake.  In those events, be sincere and apologize to your customers in a way that shows you care about their opinions.  Dancing around the mistake and offering a half-hearted apology won’t get you anywhere (as seen in ChapStick’s case).

In a nutshell, while social media can open up tremendous opportunities through interacting with customers, marketer should also be aware of the flip side of the new channel.  Whether your company scores high or falls flat in the next social media crisis depends on how prepared you are in the field.

Further reading: I recommend Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty, a book we recently studied as a part of the Integrated Marketing Communications curriculum.  This book goes into depth to show how companies can follow the “Five HRO Principals” and strive under the impact of unexpected events.

Ruth Han is a graduate student in the Northwestern Medill IMC marketing program and specializes in social media strategic planning and data analytics. Ruth will be graduating in December 2012.  Ruth can be reached through twitter @han_ruth.

Online viral marketing leads to paranormal success of the Paranormal Activity series

  Nowadays, online marketing has been the key factor of integrated marketing communications. Especially, thanks to the escalating popularity and influence of social media, online marketing is getting bigger and bigger power of utilizing word of mouth. 

 The Paranormal Activity (2007), was probably the most successful case of online viral marketing, especially when social media was just beginning to explode. As a mere $15,000 budget independent film, the movie was only screened in a horror film festival. 

 It took 2 years for Paramount to purchase the distribution right and actually decided to release the movie on theaters. However, the movie was likely to be fail, mainly because it's an independent film with no celebrities. In order to minimize the risk and find out the demand, Paramount made viewers to "demand" the movie to be screened in their town. If certain number of people demand the movie in a website called eventful.com, then Paranormal Activity would be released. As a result, both people who loved the movie, and those who wanted to see the movie went online and spread the word. 

 Surprisingly, within a month, Paranormal Activity was expanded to nationwide release, from 13 college town release in initial stage. Thanks to the successful viral marketing, The film earned nearly $108 million at the U.S. box office and $194 million worldwide.

 Based on the enormous financial return from the first movie, the sequel came out in 2010. Interestingly, even though the film title was already proven to  have enough demand to be lucrative, marketers used the same viral marketing technique to promote Paranormal Activity 2 (2010). 

screenshot 

  Once again, people were encouraged to demand the movie to be screened in their town, by spreading the word through social media such as Facebook and Twitter. As a result of the marketing tactic, the sequel earned $84,752,907 in North America and a worldwide total of $177,512,032, which is slightly less than the first movie, but still generating a huge ROI.

  And this year, Paranormal Activity 3 (2011) was released. As the movie gets successful every year, the production cost increased to $5 million for the third one. Still, it is a very low budget in Hollywood. 

 Maintaining consistency, Paranormal Activity 3 has also used lots of viral marketing. The difference is that people now do not demand to have the movie screened in their city, but rather to have the movie released earlier than other parts of the world. And the campaign was targeted toward the entire world. The result was even more successful than predecessors with $102,619,000 in the United States and a worldwide total of $197,119,000.

 Overall, such paranormal success was possible thanks to the power of viral marketing. Would Paranormal Activity 4, if it comes out, follow the same path? Probably Yes, as it can increase the user engagement and can generate buzz with less effort than traditional marketing.

NU IMC certificate

Ian YS Lee

@ianyslee