Analytics, Mobile, Social Media and Digital Marketing Strategy
Amazon has and will remain one of the worlds fastest growing companies. Since 2006, the online retailer has grown an average of 31% year over year, with no end in sight.
To maintain their massive growth rate, Amazon has been expanding by acquiring everything from Whole Foods to Zappos. This allows them to dominate their competition but Amazon’s key obsession and rapid optimization is what sets them apart.
In this series I want to give the benefit of my experiences as both a traditional and online retailer and more recently (well 10 years!) as an ICT Specialist who has worked with numerous “bricks and mortar” and ecommerce businesses.
In the last installment (see ecommerce 101) we looked at getting started and explored some of the questions that need to be considered before thinking about starting to trade. In the second of the series I’d like to explore a key component of any online business and that is the development of your digital strategy.
The term “Digital marketing” is regularly bandied around, but what does it actually mean? For many it comprises of no more than Search Engine optimisation, but with the rise (and rise) of social media, Google may well not be the first port of call for any potential customers – latest research says that 60% of web browsers first engagement with your brand will be somewhere other than your brand’s website. As Google moves inexorably towards more and more personalised search results, achieving that coveted #1 position for your brand’s website becomes increasingly challenging. The old rules of “nuke your website through seo and they will come” no longer stands. It’s now more about a “blend” of activity across a variety of digital mechanisms – all working in harmony to achieve the desired results.
So, where do we start? Some considerations:
Who are your customers?
Simple, you’d think, but if I had a £ (or $!) for every time I’ve heard the response “everyone”, I’d frankly have a lot of £’s (or $’s)! Even the most all encompassing retail range has key customer groupings – whether that be for the entire range (if a niche area) or for a subset of the range (for more “variety store” retailers). It is important that time is spent developing personas for these customers – Are they male or female? What age? What type of job do they do? what ‘s their lifestyle? Where do they hang out online? How do they want information delivered to them? What’s the style of delivery that will engage them? How do they buy? There are plenty of articles on the web about persona development and how to go about it. By doing this you for your (eg top 3) customer personas you’ll have a clear idea of what makes them “tick” and as a result how they are likely to engage and what they are likely to engage with.
Who are your competitors and what can you learn from them?
This area of research is too often omitted. You can learn a lot of very valuable lessons – both good and bad from researching your competitors. This phase will help to inform your positioning within the market place.
How will people get to your website? (what’s your inbound marketing strategy?)
Getting traffic to your site is key and you need to define how you will engage with the market and entice them to your offering. For more information have a look at the Web Analytics World article here.
What are the key performance indicators against which success will be measured?
As with any business you need a set of metrics against which you can measure your success. The “blunt” ones are traffic to the site and conversion to sale, however certainly for an ecommerce store you also need to consider margin, spend per head, basket value, customer retention, value of “dead stock” etc
What do you want to achieve and how will you know when you’ve been successful?
This is an interesting one and something I fell foul of on my first ecommerce site back in 1998 – I was so tied up in adding new product to the site, trying to be the most definitive in the market place that I’d lost sight of the fact that my original goal was to make as many profitable sales as possible. What I hadn’t realised was that I was achieving this goal from less than 20% of the catalogue and that if I factored in the additional time to source, photograph and add the other 1600 items, then my profitability was shot! What I’m trying to say is – have a goal and aim for that. Don’t lose sight of it and make sure that you test all your assumptions/ actions against it.
What channels should you spend your money on and in what proportion?
An interesting one and one where I’m starting to see a ground-shift. Overblown websites are a thing of the past as people require information in a flash. Social Media also has its part to play with “traditional” web content now being deployed across a wider digital estate, with traffic then being delivered back to the site for conversion to sale. Again, this is a huge subject and not one I intend to go into here, however what I would say is that in my recent experience, of total online marketing budgets, less is now being spent on the website as more is being devoted to social media. So just consider this before blowing all your money on the best website in the world ever – it may not be your customers preferred choice for first engagement.
Consider PEST (Political, Economic, Social, Technological) factors
As part of any ecommerce build you need to consider the territories you want to target and what impact that will have on your strategy. Multilingual sites and local hosting/ SEO is a given for businesses that want to develop overseas markets, however, far fewer businesses consider the variants in the Social Media space in countries throughout Europe, let alone the rest of the world. You’ll need to consider the language and tone used, different design and user experience requirements, shopping behaviours in different territories etc. eConsultancy has a useful guide on the subject of the Internationalisation of eCommerce .
The other key consideration is the product – what sells in one territory and is seen as the height of fashion – is not necessarilly the case in another territory – eg you only have to go on vacation somewhere where there are multiple nationalities to realise that fashion tastes vary dramatically across the world!
Summary
It is important to realise that the answers to these question will impact on everything from the technical build of your site to the resources you bring in to manage marketing, your online spend allocation etc. The findings from many of these questions particularly around customers and competitors should actually serve to validate your business (by establishing market size, reach and commerciality) as well as shape up a digital marketing strategy tailored to reach and service a target customer base.
Because attaining accurate and insightful information on all of this is so vital for success it’s important to realise the importance of bringing in specialist help in these planning stages (unless you possess all of the relevant skills yourself). For example – When researching customers and competitors this requires interrogation of Google data, in-depth commercial competitor analysis, an assessment of competition vs opportunity in the search space, Adwords search and display network analysis related to space in question etc. It also requires a wider digital analysis in the space to determine key influencers, authority sites, an analysis of the social landscape etc
When it comes to Analytics you will need help to determine an analytics strategy which can deliver insights and actionable information. Tracking traffic and conversion to sales is not enough. Multiple insightful metrics such as engagement levels, visitor segmentation and tracking success of different traffic sources etc can all provide useful actionable information. With advanced analytics tools you can often link to publishing capability to dynamically display more relevant information to users based on their referral path to your site, their behaviours on your website etc.
Next time, we’ll look at how to specify your eCommerce requirements.
Read Part I of Chris’ eCommerce Series: Getting Started
I’ve been helping businesses to specify their requirements in relation to web sites as effective sales and marketing tools for over 10 years and in that time – apart from the tech, little has changed – until now (well, when I say now, I mean over the last couple of years). If you’re currently looking at improving your website or are in the process of building a new site, then take note, the world has changed and due to the rise (and rise) of Social Media your website today performs a very different role to what it did a few years ago.
1) How well are you currently performing online?
And I don’t just mean traffic to the website, but looking at individual channels into the site – What are the bounce and exit rates? Where is most of your traffic coming from?
How many people are converting to one action against one of your defined key performance indicators? Without this information there’s really no point at even looking to change your web site.
2) What is the extent of your Digital estate?
Is it just a website? Have you engaged in other digitial channels? How active are you in these? What’s working well and not so well? Are they the right channels for your business?
3) How does your website fit into this picture?
Your website is no longer an island in a digital ocean with passing traffic from the odd reference on a 3rd party website or search engines delivering traffic based on key terms – your website should be bang in the middle of the shipping lane, with traffic directed towards it from multiple sources. Your website increasingly is not the place where decisions are made, but more often than not will be made outwith your site, with the site itself just nailing the “sale”.
Having said that we’re not there quite yet, so you still have to consider how your website stacks up, how it interacts, but you also have to be aware that individual pages of your site will be referenced across the web and so each key entry page has to work as hard as the Home page, with consistently placed calls to action (although these may vary based on what you’re trying to achieve on any given page). You need to think of your site as a series of landing pages.
4) What are your competitors up to?
This is very often missed and shouldn’t be, as it gives great insight in to how your competitors interact with their customers. You can use some of the free tools out there such as Yahoo site explorer (http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/uk/) to see what 3rd party links they have pointing into them, a keyword density analyser (I use http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html) to see what they’ve optimised individual pages for, and one of the Social Media monitoring tools (there are loads – Addictomatic/ Twazzup etc) to get a feel for what their customers are saying about them and where they are saying it.
5) What’s the purpose of your site?
Strange question? But I see so many sites that have absolutely no purpose whatsoever other than to look good in the developer’s portfolio. You need to really think what you want to get out of your site, set KPIs so you know when it’s been successful. You also need to understand how the website fits in to your other online activity.
6) Who are your customers? What do they want? Where do they hang out online?
Persona development is key to delivering to your customers the information they want (and the information you want them to know) in the environment that they frequent. There are lots of great articles on persona development and that may be worth exploring in a future blog post, but in essence – consider your top 3 types of customer (there’ll be more, but lets focus on the key ones) – who are they? How tech savvy are they? How do they want information delivered? What are the triggers that will make them engage?
You’ll end up with a profile of your key customers and that’s as good a place as any to start building content which addresses their issues.
7) Content, Content, Content
You may think that you have the greatest website on earth, but is this where your primary engagement with your customers will take place?
I’ve recently undertaken an excercise with a couple of clients whereby we got a large sheet of paper (very high tech I know!) and written down the left column all the information (based on the personans) that we believe customers want to know as well as information that we need to tell them. Across the top we then put up their entire digital estate – blog/ Facebook, youtube, flickR etc. We didn’t take this for granted, we saw based on previous interactions which were working best, others which weren’t working as well and others we hadn’t considered up until the persona exercise. We then decided for each piece of information where it sat and what purpose it performed.
Let’s take an example – “recipes” – the call to action takes place on the website where the recipe is downloaded and they sign up to receive regular recipe updates, but the activity to get them to this point takes place across You Tube (“watch the video on how to make the recipe”); Facebook (“lets discuss the recipe and other ways of making it”); Twitter (Tweets relating to the recipe having just been made and how successful or otherwise it turned out) …..you get the idea.
8) Ensure that your relevant web content is syndicated
Lots of websites have great content which never sees the light of day and there are plenty of other places on the web that would just love to have your Presentation, Whitepaper, Press Release, Video, Images – the list goes on – don’t let your content hide on your site, get it out there (a number of my clients use PixelPipe – http://pixelpipe.com).
9) Ensure that even if your primary call to action is not fulfilled that an engagement mechanism is
This may be “Sign up for a weekly digest of information”; “Use our RSS feed”; “Follow us on Twitter”; “Like us on Facebook” etc). By allowing the customer to engage on their terms, you then have the opportunity to engage with them.
10) Monitor, measure, react, adapt
Lastly, you need to be able to be able to make decisions and refine your strategy – you can’t do this without measurements in place. Decide at the outset what your KPIs are and what you’re going to measure and then review regularly to ensure that you’re on-message.
We’ve just written a new white paper (download here) explaining how behavioral analytics can dig into your web analytics data to uncover how visitors truly interact with your website.
But, you’re probably asking, “What is behavioral analytics and why can’t my current web analytics tool deliver the same info?“
Behavioral analytics refers to the ability to uncover patterns of behavior in interaction data, uncovering clusters of people that demonstrate a propensity to go through similar sequences of actions, such as clicks on web pages, online or offline purchases, responses to marketing offers, etc. The payoff from understanding these behavioral patterns is huge: you can use this insight to optimize your site, influence people’s behavior, and ultimately drive actions that you care about – clicks, page views, purchases, etc.
The white paper explains how behavioral analytics helps you identify the content that visitors will look at next, ways to increase transactions, attributes that indicate likely-to-return visitors, factors that make visitors click on ads, and more.
You can download the paper here. Once you do, we’d like to know what you think. Comment on this blog posting, or email us at info@quantivo.com, and let us know!
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