Bill McDermott, who went from teenage deli owner to SAP SE Chief Executive Officer, recently gave an inspirational talk about how focusing on the customer is the most important thing for any business to succeed. Below is a brief excerpt:
I came to the clear conclusion that there’s a perfect correlation between winners having dreams and accomplishing amazing things, but we all start somewhere. I traded in three part-time jobs to be a teenage entrepreneur running a delicatessen in Amityville Long Island. So I’m broke and somebody gives me a note for $5,500 which is $7,000 with interest, and I make the store a success. I keep it, then I miss one payment and I give the store back. That’s the deal.
What happens when you’re under complete pressure to deliver? You have to focus on one thing and one thing only, that’s the customer. I was between two very large conglomerates, Finer’s Supermarket over here and 7-Eleven over here. My little business is right in the middle.
What did I learn? I learned that the little one has to do what the big one is either structurally unable to do or simply unwilling to do… because they’re lazy.
We focused on three market segments:
One was senior citizens. What did we learn about senior citizens? They don’t want to leave the house, so we deliver. Then there were the blue-collar workers like my Dad, they were flush rich on Friday night and dead broke by Sunday morning. We give them credit and they keep coming back. But the hard part was getting those high school kids to walk a block and a half past 7-Eleven to come to my little store. After all, why would they?
Focus on the Customer:
One day, I said let me go down there to 7-Eleven to see what’s going on. I go down to the store and see 40 young people lined up outside the store and only 4 inside. I said to one of the people in the line, why are you all out here, there’s a big store in there and you’re standing here? They’re like, well they think we’re gonna take things. I said, don’t worry about all that, follow me down to my store, and I brought them down 40 at a time. I had a little trick though. I had built a video game room on the side of that store with Asteroids and Pac-Man.
I let them in 40 at a time, and at the end of a long day one of the young people said to me, Bill, when we want to be treated well, have good food, and play video games, we come to your store… and when we want to steal stuff we go to 7-Eleven!
It’s amazing, they talk a lot about CRM and fancy technologies. You know what my CRM system was, it was a window! I could see my customers getting off buses and cars and walking into my store. I knew everything about the 500 people that came in that store every day and I knew that without them returning, because they were very satisfied, the probability of my little business succeeding wasn’t very high at all.
The customer and the customer alone determines whether we win or we lose.
“We cannot control our adversary,” saysRick McElroy, Security Strategist for CarbonBlack, a leading next-generation cybersecurity firm. “Although we can choose to control them once in our environment. We have little to no control over when the “big attack” happens. For too long I think we have focused so hard on finding the adversary that our internal threat intelligence has suffered as a result”. Sharing threat intelligence has gotten easier. Vendors have done a ton to allow teams to cultivate and exchange threat intel and while there is always more work we have abandoned the one thing we have a hope of controlling. The home field advantage.”
Editor Note: CarbonBlack is offering a free webinar on why companies are moving toward next-generation security here:
McElroy adds, “I have heard major CISOs sit in a room and say “asset management is impossible, so why try?” How is this what a leader would say? Yes, this thing we do isn’t easy but giving up is a sure fire way to never achieve a strategic goal.”
“It’s time we bring this to all defenders, not just customers of a certain organization. Carbon Black is on a mission to make the world safe from cyber attacks. To achieve this mission, we need every one of us sharing and helping quiet the noise. We need application developers and threat hunters on the same page. We need to unite as a community.”
One of the things I’ve had to work on the most as an #infosec leader is patience.
Strategy and culture change take a long time. Don’t get frustrated on the journey. Be patient.
Thoughts on the long game and being patient to achieve strategy… I would love to hear them.. pic.twitter.com/XHXgYJOC3w
Just about every enterprise company is feverishly working on implementing next-generation solutions to protect against internet threats. The primary reason is that traditional AV software is no longer effective enough:
First, let’s look at why traditional AV is falling short against the cyber-attacks organizations face today. Traditional AV technologies still rely on a signature-based approach that can only identify known threats. Attackers can run circles around this approach by making small tweaks to their malware in between signature updates; this allows them to operate with impunity while organizations scramble to deploy new updates.
In short, traditional AV leaves organizations one step behind the attacker. Making matters worse, a signature-based approach cannot detect modern attacks that do not write files to disk (so-called file-less attacks) or techniques that use trusted system tools like PowerShell to perform malicious actions. In order to combat the shortcomings of traditional AV, organizations must ensure that they have AV technology that takes a proactive approach to cybersecurity. – Dan Larson, Vice President Product Marketing at CrowdStrike via Security Ledger.
The Security Fight Has Escalated
“Nearly 20 years ago, viruses such as the Melissa virus and Love Bug worm were causing millions of dollars’ worth of damage, hijacking email servers, corrupting corporate and government documents, and forcing systems to shut down,” stated Martin Borrett, IBM Distinguished Engineer and CTO IBM Security Europe. “Today, cybercrime is a global plague that will cost the world economy $6 trillion annually by 2021, according to Cybersecurity Ventures.”
Borrett added, “As cybercriminals, nation-state attackers and hacktivist groups have become more sophisticated, the security industry has grown up to defend our national security as well as the vital interests of businesses and consumers. Gradually, the battle between attackers and defenders has become something akin to an arms race: New types of attacks lead to new defenses to block them. Security innovations become outdated as soon as attackers find ways around them. Meanwhile, cyberattackers continue to rely on social engineering tricks that are hard to defend against.”
New Cybersecurity Approaches Are Clearly Needed
According to Dr. Kirk Borne, Principal Data Scientist at Booz Allen, what’s needed is for companies to modernize their current cybersecurity defenses:
For modern cybersecurity operations to be effective, it’s necessary for organizations to monitor diverse data streams to identify strong activity signals. This includes monitoring network traffic data to find well-known patterns of common adversary activities, such as data exfiltration or beaconing. While these detection techniques are critical to cybersecurity operations, it is imperative to leverage such signals to predict future activities. Further capabilities could even be created to modify the behavior of the actor (or analyst) to the benefit of the organization and mission. This could include systems on networks that are trained to autonomously take action, such as blocking access to resources or redirecting traffic, based on a predicted behavior.
Modern attackers are too agile and creative for organizations to rely on passive descriptive analytics or reactive diagnostics techniques for protection. Rather, building an ability to forecast future outcomes through predictive analytics that utilize prior knowledge of events, particularly the precursor signals evident before an attack, are proactive measures. – Dr. Kirk Borne via a recent post on O’Reilly Media.
Compared to the larger social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter, Snapchat is a bit like The Little Engine That Could. That’s because it’s been underestimated by numerous brands and marketers alike. They dismiss Snapchat as a viable advertising tool because of its reputation for being a purely social platform, used mostly by teenagers and young adults. But the image-sharing app has the potential to generate leads and keep profits rolling in.
In the first quarter of 2018, Snapchat reported 191 million active daily users—that’s a lot of potential customers. One survey also showed that 86 percent of the platform’s users fall into the 13 to 37 age group and more than seven billion videos were viewed on it daily in 2016.
Despite these numbers, businesses are still not overly fond of Snapchat. AClutch and Smart Insights study found that only 21 percent of businesses have Snapchat accounts. Compare that to the 89 percent of companies that are on Facebook, 80 percent on Twitter, and 56 percent on Instagram.
But this means that brands have fewer rivals and more room to maneuver on Snapchat. The platform is also evolving continuously, changing its user interface, featuring Stories for up to 24 hours, and adding eCommerce features. It’s also gaining popularity among older users as the teens who started using Snapchat when it launched in 2011 are becoming working adults.
Savvy marketers know that Snapchat can be a powerful tool for rising above the competition. Here are four tips to help you tap into the benefits of Snapchat:
1. Concentrate on a Younger Audience
Snapchat developer Snap Inc. designed the multimedia messaging app for teenagers. Recent data has shown that the company is doing a great job of keeping their young demographic engaged. A Pew Research Center study revealed that 78 percent of the respondents between 18 to 24-years-old are using the app. Meanwhile, only 45 percent of the same demographic use Twitter.
You can leave your competition in the dust by learning how to catch the attention of younger consumers. While a carefully worded call-to-action can be effective, creating an intriguing story or using entertaining filters in your Snap can exceedingly better.
In 2016, Taco Bell rolled out a comical Snap filter that turned the user’s head into a giant taco. The Cinco de Mayo promotion generated a whopping 224 million views. Now, image how that type of attention could change your business.
2. Launch Products and Push Promos
Snapchat has a high engagement rate. As a matter of fact, it gets almost 4 times higher engagement than Instagram. This makes it a great place to launch your latest products or to push promos. Makeup brand NARS launched their new product line to great success on the platform. The company drummed up excitement by giving followers a quick look at their new line. Snapchat allows you to create short, informal videos that look unpolished but relatable to more users.
3. Collaborate With Influencers
Influencer marketing is a very effective strategy. Companies can draw in a big audience because their content will be viewed by followers of the brand and that of the influencer. It’s a quick way of develop a large following in a short amount of time.
One company who successfully leveraged an influencer’s popularity was Audi. The car manufacturer partnered up with the popular show Pretty Little Liars and quickly amassed 115,000 followers on its Snapchat account.
You can also have an influencer take over your Snapchat account and make posts on your behalf for a specific time frame. For instance, music producer Pharrell once took over one of the Adidas events.
4. Keep Followers Interested Longer
Snapchat is all about drawing people in and engaging them. You’ll have better sales results the longer people stay on your page or account. Other social network platforms keep followers engaged by having them take additional steps, like clicking on a link to send them to another website.
Snapchat keeps followers interested much longer because they have integrated eCommerce features in the app itself. For instance, users can use the app to call people, make dinner reservations, grab an Uber, or explore brands and their locations.
With its impressively high engagement levels, business-friendly features and low competition from other brands, incorporating Snapchat into your marketing strategy could prove to be a worthwhile investment.
One of the most important topics for retailers is getting your listings to the top of eBay search results, or in other words, eBay SEO. For many businesses, learning how to do effective eBay SEO can literally mean the difference between making a few hundred bucks or thousands of dollars.
JR Business recently talked about how they have risen to the top of very popular eBay search results and offered their insider advice for you to do the same. In fact, on one recent listing, they have made over $70,000 in just two months. Below are some highlights from their recent talk on how to do eBay right:
Getting Started with eBay SEO
We’ve been using eBay for ten years now and are very successful on the platform. We have hundreds of listings that occupy very high SEO rankings on search results. For example, there’s a search result with 1.8 million results and we occupy two of the top three slots. eBay SEO is very tricky, they are constantly changing things, tweaking things, updating the platform, so you have to stay up-to-date and if you don’t make certain changes when they need to be made you’re gonna drop in SEO ranking. It’s very hard to stay relevant and at the top but we’ve managed to do it by following 3 important steps.
The 3 big things are the performance of your account, the listing set up, and your customer satisfaction. eBay SEO really falls into those 3 categories and those are what’s going to make up your ranking.
Becoming a Top Rated Seller
eBay is not going to put their number one listing as somebody who has 4 seller feedback points, 40 points or even 400 points. You need a lot of seller feedback points to get to the top of eBay search results.
Being a top rated seller or a power seller is going to help immensely. However, becoming a top-rated seller is really tricky to get. You have to accept refunds, you have to have a certain shipping time and can’t be delayed on shipments, and you have to have a high customer satisfaction. You have to meet all these standards and also have a certain number of transactions and also hit a certain dollar amount in sales. All these things have to be there to become a top rated seller. Once you are there, you get a discount on seller fees and again it helps with SEO.
Pay for Everything eBay Offers
It is important to pay for everything that they offer sellers on eBay. If your listing is going to do super successful long-term, you’re going to make a ton of money from it, then pay for the $2 subtitle, the $4 bull title, the secondary listing category, the enlarged images for a dollar… all that stuff! It is very little in the grand scheme of things. If you’re gonna be making a lot of money for that listing, like its a cash cow listing, then you need to throw the money at eBay.
My theory is that since you’re paying eBay more then they may help you out a little bit. More importantly, in the buyer’s eyes, when they see a bold title, an enlarged image, and they can find you in two categories, this will increase engagement with your listing.
Pack Your Titles Full of Keywords
I also can’t emphasize enough the packing of your listing title full of keywords that people are going to search for. Based on what industry and niche you’re in you should know what keywords are going to do the best. If you’re selling iPhone chargers, you better know to pack that title with “works with iPhone six, seven, eight and ten, etc.
When you’re done with the title there should be zero characters remaining. You need to pack that thing full. When somebody searches something on eBay it is referencing off the title unless they do a description search, but otherwise, it has to be in the title to show up.
The subtitle isn’t searchable but it’s still important. Once they find your listing, you want to make sure they stay on your listing and that they have enough information.
Create Extremely Long Descriptions
They need to know about the product, so not only are you packing in information into the title and the subtitle, but also the item specifics. Those are the pre-fill in little boxes that eBay gives you based on what category you selected. So fill in that information but also the description, it’s one of the most important parts of the listing.
Please do not have a four-sentence description! I see it all too often, but that’s just gonna kill your listing. If you not giving them all the information they need to know about the item and if you’re not keeping them on your listing, they’re gonna go somewhere else and find one that explains it better.
You should have a nice attractive title, maybe inlay a picture or something in the description, but also just have paragraph upon paragraph about the item. Then talk about your shipping methods and if you’re an experienced account say so. We always say that we’re a trusted eBay seller for the past ten years with thousands of feedback points. We tell them to look at our recent feedback, reassuring confidence in them.
Ship as Fast as Possible and for Free
It’s unbelievably important to have quick shipping times. There’s no reason not to be shipping within one to two days, and you shouldn’t ever need three-day handling time because it starts to hurt your sales. Anything above five days or more is really going to affect your performance.
If eBay sees that you’re a fast shipper and that’s what you described, at the top of the listing they’ll post fast and free shipping and estimated time delivery. People want to get their stuff quick!
You should also offer free shipping. Personally, just about every single one of my items is free shipping. That helps with the algorithm because eBay can tell the buyers free shipping and they see it as a better deal.
Improve Listing Performance with Deals
One other big tip for listing performance, I have found a lot of success with using sales promotions. It may not even be that much of a sale, but something about buyers seeing sale is going to Incline them to buy. Sales also plays into eBay SEO as well.
Experiment with Sponsored Listings
One other thing that you can experiment with is the sponsored listings with eBay. I promote some of my listings and have found good success because it helps them move up in search results quickly.
To get the ball rolling I throw some sponsored ad budget through eBay and they’ll often bump it up to the first page. Then people start to see it and then some solds will start to appear. Once you start selling some items and you have good buyer satisfaction on that listing and people are leaving good reviews and they’re not returning the items that will help immensely with your eBay search ranking.
Keep Your Customers Satisfied
If you have 6 five-star reviews on your listing people are gonna feel super safe buying. We all know we feel reassured when we see good reviews on an item. Alternatively, if you see only one-star reviews on an item that will hurt your customer satisfaction. That’s why having good communications with your customer, working out problems and just making sure everything is top-notch with the transaction is so important.
Good reviews and good feedback on your account is so big because once you get some products sold on the listing everything is gonna compound pretty quickly. You’ll start getting some reviews on your products, you’ll start to get some sold quantity.
I Made $70,000 With One Good eBay Listing
Two months ago I added what I thought would be a good listing, nothing crazy, but I knew it’d be a decent cash cow listing. I probably spent about six hours making a full thorough description. I went really really detailed on that and I paid $12 for extra eBay boosts as I described above.
So $12 and six hours of my time and within a couple weeks it was starting to sell. I sold 30 or 40 quantity on this listing and each item is over 50 bucks apiece, so I was making some money. I’m like okay that’s pretty good, and then that point of compounding came and things just started to hit and the listing took off. It went crazy with people loving the items, had great reviews and eBay could see that fast and free shipping with timely deliveries tracking.
It was a perfect listing and it really started to take off and now two months later that single listing has sold over $70,000 worth of product!
The Google Ads Team recently provided an interesting profile on how Denny’s focused their marketing on digital in order to reach people as they were making decisions on where to eat. In 2018 Denny’s decided to move away from traditional print and TV advertising and instead focus on a more targeted digital approach.
“If you look at the history of Denny’s, it’s really been focused on the family,” noted Luis Martinez, who currently leads marketing for Denny’s. “We recognize that American families are changing. They’re becoming more multicultural and more diverse. But families still value experiences and good food.”
“Denny’s was pretty traditional in its advertising and marketing approach,” he said. “We relied very heavily on print, and very heavily on TV. The spray-and-pray approach that existed beforehand, it really was relying on the hope that you were talking to the right person with your message. Platforms like Google Ads, they remove the mystery from that.”
“The guest is usually the one that’s telling you what it is they want,” says Martinez. “You look at something as simple as a search campaign. They’re looking for “pancakes near me” or “I want a burger.” For people who want those items, we want to make sure that we’re surfaced and relevant in that moment of consideration, whether it’s lunch or late night.”
Google Ads Increased Our Late Night Business
“Google Ads data let us see that our late night performance was really strong,” explained Denny’s search marketing specialists Eric and John. “So after 8:00 p.m., we adjusted our ads to call out that we were open late night, and we saw that, as a result, click-through rates really skyrocketed. Google really gives you the holistic view across all the different channels. It gives you data, it gives you insights, and it gives you a real pulse on the performance of the overall brand.”
Martinez noted how working with data has really provided new insights for Denny’s. “That’s insight that is not necessarily built into a lot of other channels. It really is our responsibility to take what we learn about our guests and apply it across the entire marketing ecosystem.”
Digital Has Changed Our Culture
“Digital has changed our culture, and it’s actually changed the way we do business,” says Daniel, Denny’s restaurant manager. “Over the last year, we have experienced an increase in sales. It’s bringing in a new crowd. “You can have confidence not only in serving that right message to the right consumer but that digital marketing translates to in-store traffic,” added Martinez.
Google Ads Are Bringing Customers to the Table
“Ultimately it brings the customer to the table,” noted Martinez. “As Denny’s has made more investments in Google Ads, we’ve been more and more successful in bringing in a more representative sample of today’s America to set our stores up for success in the future.”
Every generation is grouped according to the time its members were born, but for years now, there’s been an ongoing debate about the specific cutoff point between Millennials and Generation Z. The United Nations data marks the years 2000/2001 as the intergenerational split, while otherresearchers define it earlier, around 1995 to 1997.
Gen Z, also called iGeneration and Post-Millennials, is the demographic cohort following the Millennials and is set to overtake them in terms of headcount by next year. According to theBloomberg analysis, Gen Z will account for nearly a third of the 2019 global population at 2.47 billion, surpassing the estimated 2.43 billion millennials in the world.
Because of the vague delineation between the two generations, marketers often make the mistake of using similar strategies in selling to each of these groups. They forget that Gen Z’ers are vastly different from millennials in terms of formative experiences, including world events, economic changes, social shifts, and primarily, technological advancements.
One thing that separates Gen Z’ers from their predecessors is their exposure to digital technology in their early years. Thanks to mobile devices and fast Internet services, many Gen Z’ers grew up with apps, social media, and constant online presence. Sometimes referred to as the post-digital generation, they have an intuitive relationship with technology.
Surprising Statistics About Gen Z
Gen Z’ers have a complicated relationship with digital technology, despite growing up with its ubiquity. Based on an UNiDAYS and Ad Age Studio 30 study of 22,700 college students, 98 percent have smartphones. Of these, only 22 percent have used their devices for purchasing online, unlike millennials who rely on the ease and convenience of mobile shopping.
The digitally savvy generation has, in fact, a few, quirky analog habits. This includes their preference forpersonal interactions with brands, as Gen Z’ers are 23 percent more likely to visit malls and physical stores compared to older generations. This unexpected trend from the recentFoursquare and Carat study has prompted retailers to integrate the brick-and-mortar experience with tech features like augmented reality and self-service.
Technology adoption comes easy to Gen Z’ers, so it’s not surprising to know that many of them have social media accounts. But what is surprising is the fact that the majority, or 59 percent of those surveyed, are distrustful of Facebook with their personal data, perhaps in light of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
The post-digital generation is also not as preoccupied with social media as they’re depicted to be. Gen Z’ers are more likely to be anxious or depressed over these platforms, which can cause them to consider taking a break from social media or quitting altogether. They have become increasingly selective and wary of oversharing on social networks but still believe in its role in establishing connections and developing relationships.
How to Actually Market to Gen Z
When it comes to marketing strategies, what works for a particular generation might not fly with younger or older cohorts. Compared to the Baby Boomers and the lure of mass marketing during their time, the tech-savvy Gen Z has probably seen the old tricks and usual come-ons of brands when it comes to selling. One way to entice these true digital natives is through effective communication online.
Much like their need to be constantly connected to others, Gen Z’ers appreciate brands that reach out to their clients and engage with them. An online presence, be it on social media or through email, is necessary when businesses choose to cater to the post-digital generation. According to the UNiDAYS study, 40 percent of surveyed Gen Zers prefer to communicate with brands via email.
However, this doesn’t mean that brands should stick to email correspondence, as it often lacks interaction and feels impersonal. Gen Z’ers are searching for relevant exchange and emotional approach in marketing through social media—given that it’s on the right platform. If businesses can evoke a sense of purpose behind their brand or an experience with a product, then it’s the first step in making themselves noticed by the younger, more discriminating generation.
There’s no one single marketing solution applicable to every generation. Marketers should realize that for them to touch base with Gen Z, they must maintain a human, two-way interaction, even if it’s online. While Gen Z’ers exhibit ambivalent behavior towards social media, marketers and brands alike should learn how to get their message across effectively. Understanding the younger audience is going beyond selling the product; it also means discovering how they feel about your brand and earning their loyalty in the process.
Jonathan Um, Cofounder, and COO of Holler.com, the world’s first online dollar store, recently spoke at Retail (R)Evolution 2018 about how important the supply chain and automation is to his young start-up.
We are on the extreme end of the online spectrum. For us, carrying about 10,000 SKU’s, providing the ultimate digital hunt to our 6 million users, the number one thing we focus on, first, second and third, is supply chain excellence. We take a holistic view of the supply chain, from the way we buy, what we buy, how we source, how we bring it in, how we pay, to the way we fulfill and ship. It was inevitable for a bunch of scrappy guys trying to squeeze every ounce of fat from that supply chain to turn to automation. Not just your run of the mill automation, but robotics.
Speed Isn’t Everything
I think with Amazon out there in the market there is a misconception that speed is everything. You have to deliver next-day, same day, and that’s simply not true. In fact, what rings the most true is free is king. And customers will do amazing things to try to get to free shipping. It is the end all, be all for the extreme value segment. For us, we are very focused on how to deliver free shipping and make our unit economics work. That’s number one. Number two is transparency. Customers want to know what’s going on with their order?
If it’s getting picked, packed–there are actually features in our WMS with HighJump Software where you get a Facebook notification if the order is being picked at that very instant. For the customer, it’s really about not worrying that you have our attention on your order because you receive regular updates. That whole stat about 8 contacts per package is a real cost and that is a reality that we’re living through. Every time we update and add transparency is a win for our business.
Same Day: The Exception for Delivery but Not for Notification
In terms of click to ship, it is same day, that is the expectation. When you place an order on Holler.com, the expectation is that you get a shipping notification the same day. The constraint is that we have a 5-day work schedule, we don’t have a 7-day work schedule, so we need to catch up on Monday and Tuesday very quickly. But that same day ship notification, that is the standard.
Small Start-Ups Must Outsource Automation to be Successful
We are a well-funded company, but we don’t have the capital to deploy traditional automation. You ask us to spend $2 million, $5 million we are just going to say no out of the gate. It’s a non-starter for us. There is no scenario that would payback for us, ever. I don’t know what my order volume is in Q4 five years from now. I can barely tell you five quarters from now. So I cannot put up $5 million, $10 million or $15 million.
We are working with a solution called Invia Robotics. It’s basically a little robot, costs no more than a couple thousand dollars to build, and it’s a pay as you go service. So in the day of Uber and Lyft and Airbnb, why would you pay for your own capX as a small company like us? We pay by the pick, the replenishment tasks, and the inventory tasks. This is a great solution for where we are as a business, doing about 3,000 orders a day and 30,000 lines.
If we were to scale up to 100,000 lines in a couple of years, I’d be totally open to insourcing.
Mattel is one of the largest distributors and brands sold on Walmart.com. Meredith Wollman manages the customer experience and all of the digital marketing for Mattel products that are sold through the Walmart.com channel. Wollman was interviewed at the eTail Conference by Tammy Everts, Senior Director of Research at SOASTA, now part of Akamai.
How do you deliver the high conversion rates that Walmart and Mattel expect?
If you don’t have the fundamentals down no campaign is going to be successful. Before we consider an ad campaign we go back to the cradle and look at setting up the items. We make sure that each item has the correct title, correct brand attribution, the right content in terms of A+ asset, beautiful imagery, lifestyle imagery, package, out of package, the right videos, whether we have short TV commercials, and any user-generated content.
Whatever the case may be, making sure that those items are set up and that they are optimized properly is very important to do before we even look at a campaign. No campaign will be successful if the item isn’t set up properly and they aren’t engaging for the consumers and there aren’t reviews already on the product.
How do you plan a campaign for Mattel on Walmart.com?
We are looking at what are our big bets? Where do we have the biggest investment in terms of the products that we want to put in front of the consumer? Every campaign looks at our on-hand inventory and where we are hoping on having the consumer lean in big. What we do is set up the campaign around that. We determine that if we can only have 5 or 6 hero images, what are those going to be? What are the products that we are going to use as the enticement for the consumer to come in and look at more?
Then, which brands are we going to focus on? We also look at all of the analytics in terms of geo-targeting. In this particular zip code, are consumers leaning in towards our latin Barbie? Are they leaning in towards our African American Barbie? We want to really personalize what shows up on the screen for the consumers so they are seeing what they want to see and what they didn’t even know that they wanted to see.
It’s Definitely a Data-Driven Process…
I think the days of gut testing everything have gone the way of the Dodo Bird. Everything has to be data-driven now. That doesn’t mean that you can’t test something new, we do that all of the time. We really look at the data first to determine which products, where, who, when and how. All of those key factors are looked at when determining what we are going to put forward. It has to be data-driven.
Most Mattel Shoppers Start on Mobile in the Store
About 75 percent of our consumers start their journey on mobile. They are either in the store looking at a product and then they go on their phone and look for reviews or they are in the store and looking at products to see how quickly it could be shipped. A lot of people start their journey online which is why it’s so important to be mobile optimized.
They don’t all necessarily buy online but that’s where they start their journey. Some will buy online but then go pick up in the store, which is actually considered a store purchase.
How are conversions for Mattel on Walmart.com?
They are slightly higher than the norm of 4-6 percent. If you are hitting the consumer when they want to see the product and with the product, they want to see you will, of course, have a greater conversion rate. It comes down to being scientific and artful at the same time about not necessarily telling the consumer what we want them to know, but giving the consumer the information that they want.
Those two don’t always mesh as easily as we’d like because we have things we want to share at certain times, but that’s not always what works best for the consumer. The better we understand the consumer and what they want and when they want it the more successful the campaign. It’s always the case when we are communicating something that we want them to know in the time frame that we want them to know that it’s not nearly as successful.
Akamai Study Shows Load Time Impacts Revenue Significantly
A study by Akamai shows that every 1 second of load time improvement on Walmart.com equaled a 2% conversion rate increase.
Also, for every 100ms of improvement, incremental revenue grew by 1%. All ecommerce sites can benefit from increasing both the speed and efficiency of the consumer experience.
“Ecommerce is essentially digital disruption,” says David Spitz, ChannelAdvisor CEO, at the recent Retail (R)evolution 2018 conference. “If you are a brand or retailer and you are in that supply chain, or flow of commerce, digital disruption for ecommerce is like what Netflix did to Blockbuster. There’s a lot of retail disruption. The alternative of being able to click and get products very quickly, where you can now get deliveries in as little as an hour, makes the value proposition of getting in your car and going to the store very diminished.” Spitz says this leaves retailers looking for what they can do to remain relevant.
He says that if you are a brand, manufacturer or CPG type company the path to the consumer is changing very rapidly. “In the US, ecommerce is still only 10 percent of total retail spend,” notes Spitz. “Most companies are still driving 90 percent of their revenue through the traditional retail channels, but the growth is in that (ecommerce) 10 percent. The path to the consumer is changing and it’s creating a new world order with the landscape shifting very rapidly.”
Spitz is focused on the challenges of retailers. “I’ve spent a lot of time talking to a variety of brands such as paint manufacturers, tire manufacturers, apparel companies, etc. They are in this interesting crossroads because the bulk of their revenue still comes from the traditional retail channel and those are partnerships that are important to them and they don’t want to upset those partnerships. On the other hand, if you look at the rate of growth of Amazon, they are approaching half of US ecommerce. It continues to grow at roughly twice the rate of the industry so it’s not hard to imagine waking up in a world where Amazon accounts for 60-75 percent of US ecommerce.”
Here they come…..😎👊
Amazon rolls out branded delivery vans in Austin https://t.co/r47hekaFph
If you are a brand, how do you reach those consumers? “Consumers are saying this is how I like to shop, it’s an easy app, I click and know I’m going to get the product quickly,” says Spitz. “Last summer, Nike decided to start selling on Amazon, and Nike had resisted selling on Amazon for the last 10 years. I think there was some dawning realization at some point that this is how customers want to shop. So a lot of these brands see it as inevitable, that’s how consumers like to shop and why make life hard for your customers?”
Amazon is to e-commerce what Netflix is to media. This is why I believe they will ultimately own >75% of e-commerce in the West. https://t.co/2WAddW3tPR$amzn
“I think that channel mix conflict is very much real for brands but at the end of the day, the customer is what matters the most. If the customer says this is how I want to purchase your product if you are a brand you have to listen to that.”
Every year, millions of new websites are launched, and they’re directly or indirectly competing for the same visitors you are. That makes driving traffic your website, increasingly more difficult. Even major social networking sites like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter are having trouble generating organic reach. But that doesn’t seem to be a problem with Pinterest.
Pinterest has become more than just a visual search platform. It’s more of a search engine now where prospective customers go to look for products.Statistics have revealed that 93 percent of account holders use the platform to plan what they want to buy while 50 percent have actually bought something after seeing a Promoted Pin. And with 20 million monthly users, it makes sense for marketers to take advantage of Pinterest’s power.
These seven marketing tools are among the best for helping generate more website traffic with Pinterest in 2018:
1. Canva
You need captivating images if you want people to notice your Pins, and Canva is just the design software to help you achieve this. Canva offers ready to use Pinterest Pin templates with a variety of layouts to choose from. The layouts are customizable, so you can easily change the font, text, and background image. You can also add more graphics or take out elements that don’t fit with your vision or website theme. You can use the app for free and just purchase new images or assets for $1. However, a paid version will give you more designs and photos to choose from, as well as the option of saving your logo or brand to make designing a board go quicker.
2. Hootsuite
Hootsuite makes it possible for you to create boards, make a publishing schedule, and post pins directly to Pinterest from its dashboard. You can also manage several accounts using this tool, making it easier and safer for your team since you’re just using one secure workflow. This full integration on a single dashboard saves time and makes it easier to reach a wider audience.
3. PicMonkey
Eye-catching images are what sets Pinterest apart from other social platforms. Retailers and service-based companies willhave more impact on this platform if they use a visual format for their content. PicMonkey is an online image editor that can help with designing and editing your brand’s images so that simple shots become more compelling. You can give photos a quick touch-up, resize images, create image quotes, and overlay photos with text. More importantly, it’s free so you won’t even need to hire a digital artist or invest in Photoshop.
4. PinFollow
You need a lot of followers to establish your brand’s credibility, influence, and popularity. One way to get more followers on Pinterest is to follow other Pinners and hope they will do the same. PinFollow will help you weed out which Pinners are not following you so you can unfollow these accounts. This will streamline your list and leave you with more loyal followers.
5. PinGroupie
One of the fastest ways to make connections on this social media platform is through groups, but finding the right group board to join is tricky. PinGroupie helps you establish the best Pinterest Group Boards for your brand. This tool lists live group boards, allowing you to reach out to the owners and see if they are willing to let you join or contribute to the board. PinGroupie also has an industry sorting feature that you can use to check what kind of content other brands are offering and see if there’s anything unique that you can provide.
6. Pinterest Analytics
This tool provides Pinterest users with the basic metrics about their Pins, like reach, impressions, and what people save from their website. It also shows how much traffic your site receives and indicates what your customers want. It’s very simple to use; just click on the stats icon on your Pins to get an overview of the essential metrics. You can use the tool to improve your marketing strategy and come up with ways to get more clicks, saves, and impressions.
7. Tailwind
Tailwind is one of the most essential tools you need to successfully market on Pinterest. This analytics and campaign management tool will help you do everything, from scheduling the content you need published, to pinpointing your most influential followers to determining the most popular pins. It can also monitor your competitors and track the engagements on your account. What’s more, it seamlessly integrates with Google Analytics.
Controlling the search position of your brand is very important to your business. However, this has become increasingly difficult due to changes in Google brand policies that have opened the door to competitors stealing (or buying) your brands traffic and business. Puneet Vaghela, Head of Paid Search at PHD UK, a global communications planning and media buying network recently spoke about these important challenges:
Why is brand search difficult to control in PPC?
With brand search, you are expected to get most of the traffic. However, what we are seeing increasingly is more and more competitors entering the market in our brand space. Back in the day, it was there but you could just get them kicked off by Google or Bing. Nowadays, it’s a lot more difficult with all of the policy changes. What this actually means is that they are not only cannibalizing our traffic but they’re also pushing up our CPCs and our CPAs.
As a brand, you are always looking for ways to get people to your website and get them to convert more. It used to be just interest-based keywords on generics related to your own brand. Now you can cannibalize other peoples brands and get those incremental gains. The problem then is competitors coming into our brand space and pushing our ads down or increasing the CPCs on our ads. It’s not just direct competitors either, you have resellers, aggregators, etc. In the automotive space you have dealers and many automotive brands are having issues with trying to control how their dealers are bidding because dealers don’t have as much experience.
What we are seeing now is traffic is being lost from our brands’ brand-related search terms onto our main website and it’s going away.
This is even more important on mobile
As you know with mobile there’s a lot less space on the SERP, and usually with the size of the ads above the fold takes up most of the space and not many people are going to scroll down all the way to the bottom. Also, with mobile, it’s when people are actually looking for stuff at the moment and they’ve got less attention span, so it’s even more important that we actually pick up this traffic. Chances are that whatever they click on they are going to then stick with that. This is especially the case for retailers and automotive businesses who have local offerings and people looking for local specific information.
On mobile, the lower your ad position is the higher (negative) impact it has on your clickthrough rate.
On tablet and on desktop the actual CTR decrease as your ad position goes down isn’t as significant as it is on mobile. This goes to show that on mobile we need to make sure that our ad positions are up there at the top.
How valuable is your brand space?
Once you have the data and you know about your brand space it’s about analyzing the data and finding out how valuable is your brand space to you? Years ago you could just log into Google Analytics and look at the value per click of your organic brand and the value per click of your paid search brand. As long as the value was more than your cost per click it made it viable to bid on your brand. It was a pretty simple analysis.
Then seven years ago Google took away the ability to see organic keyword data and analytics have become harder. What we are seeing now is that’s it’s a lot more difficult to access this data and so people are having to think of different tests that they can come up with.
I like to use standard deviation to get the validity of the data in the beginning in order to measure the success of the ad test. The reason for this is that gives a much better data set to work with so once you actually have the data in you can use a range to look at the changes we see if we then turn the brand off. If it fits within this range then fine, we don’t need to work on brand PPC. If it’s outside of the range then we know that PPC needs to be turned on because it’s having a significant impact on our business.
Successful internet entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk recently spoke about how so many people continue to underestimate the amazing power of the internet to change their lives. Don’t miss the part about Facebook and Instagram about half way down below. Hint… this is the part that can literally change your life and your business.
Here are the highlights:
I think that everybody in here is underestimating how special this era is.
Whether you’re a young kid and never knew a non-internet world, whether you’re my age, 42, or above and you understood it because we grew up without it, even the people that can appreciate it because we grew up without it, I don’t think are really understanding that this internet thing is no question the biggest change in the human race, ever. It just is.
All the things we’re thinking about, whether it’s political or social or financial things, they’ve just started. Everything that’s changing has just started.
In my adulthood, not even in my childhood, Best Buy rose and was eliminated because of this environment. I’ll be honest with you, I mean, it’s tough to say but I actually think Target is remarkably vulnerable in an Amazon/Walmart battle world. I actually predict, pretty aggressively, that Target will be bought by either Amazon or Facebook or Apple or Google because I think the internet companies have to buy retail to compete with Amazon.
There’s a real, real disconnect between the reality of what’s happening, all the opportunity.
What I think is happening is this extremism. Much like our social issues where we’re starting to really go in opposite directions. There’s this extremism, yes, there are hundreds of 11-year-olds making a million fucking dollars a year, making slime, selling it on Instagram, yet 99% of people that raise $2 million in capital for their start-up to make the Uber a fucking pizza delivery are going to fail.
I think the thing that’s grounding me is in this ridiculous change in our society, things like 15 years ago, if you dated on the internet and dated somebody you met on the internet, you were weird and a loser and it was taboo, and now every single person dates through the internet and swipes left and right 24/7, or slides into the DM.
Do you know how crazy Uber is as an early investor? Uber’s insane. Uber, or Lyft, or whatever you want, literally, if I stood up here and said guys, in 15 years you’re going to wan your 13-year-old daughter to go into a stranger’s car, because you’re going to think that’s safer than her driving with her friend. Parents actually, and probably correctly, think it’s safer for their 16-year-old daughter to go into strange 40-year-old men cars multiple times a day. I mean it.
But I would have never been able to sell you on that if this was 10 years ago and I’m like, let’s do start-up ideas and I pitched you on that, you would have laughed me out of the room. I know because I laughed the founders of Uber out of the room when they were like, what if everybody could get a limo on their iPhone? I was like, yeah, 1% of rich people. I never saw it playing out the way it did.
I think it’s a very interesting time.
What’s interesting to me about it is as the world’s changing, as people watching video games, more people watch people play video games than watch people play baseball. That’s just real. ABC, NBC, and CBS are finished. They’re done.
Remember when four years ago you had one show on Netflix that you liked but then you watched cable? Now you have Netflix and there’s one show on cable or regular TV. Do you understand when all the sports go to Netflix and Amazon? Amazon has bought the rights to English Premier Football, you know, proper football, soccer shit.
Tennis, Amazon’s going to be bidding for the NFL. Hulu’s going to have hockey. Google and Apple are going to have basketball. You’re never going to turn on two, four, five, or seven. Ever.
In this world, think about nothing we believe in or use, YouTube, the iPhone, Netflix, Facebook, none of that existed 15 years ago. Nothing that our entire society is running on. Everything we run on, guys, almost everybody her remembers the world pre-smartphone. You couldn’t, it’s just five minutes ago that you were like the internet on your phone! We struggle with things.
Parents all the time, when SnapChat blew up three or four years ago, parents were like, Gary, but I don’t want my kid on SnapChat. I’m like, you do know your son has Safari and can type in JizzHut.com, right? You’re worried about the one floozy 13-year-old in the fucking state and the dude’s got porn at his fucking fingertips.
That’s what I think a lot about.
Nobody here has actually quantified what’s really happened here.
For example, there’s a term in start-up land or in the business world called the last mile. It’s this big debate of how we’re all going to get everything delivered to us within an hour. Is it going to be Amazon, is it going to be Uber, is it going to be Postmates?
What I don’t think people understand is 7-11 is actually out of business in the next 15 years because of the last mile. You need deodorant or a fucking 20 ounce Mountain Dew you’re going to press a button and it’s going to be in your fucking house or office in a second.
What I think I’ve done really well in my career by launching a wine business on the internet in 1996 when people told me the internet itself was a fad. Or buying Google Adwords when nobody even knew what a search engine really was. Or when I started a wine show on YouTube in the first six months it existed. Or went all in on social media when everybody shit on social media, I was there.
I remember what everybody thought about Twitter and how stupid it was. Or that Facebook was a college thing. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
We put the past on a pedestal. We demonize the current and the future.
In all these changes, in all of this stuff that is going on, the thing that is most fascinating to me and the thing that I want to talk to you about is that this, doing the right thing and gratitude and honor and all this propaganda that I push, is actually more valuable than ever because let me tell you what the internet’s going to do.
I’ve been saying this for a long time and I feel like people are finally starting to believe me. I had this woman yelling at me over dinner about how this internet thing is scary and it sucks and this and that. And she’s an incredible activist for all women’s rights and all these other things. I’m like, you do understand that your media that you’re putting on a pedestal, the New York Times and NBC, is the reason all this bad stuff was able to happen?
When five or six old white guys control the media, a lot of stuff doesn’t hit daylight. When we control the media it gets a lot harder. Let me give you a news alert. Russia didn’t make you do anything. It didn’t, it didn’t. Meaning, if you’re a good person, a bad person, voted Democrat or Republican, you do you.
I have zero interest in debating politics with anybody these days because everyone’s on tilt. I just want everybody to know, the Russians didn’t hack your fucking brain. You didn’t go in saying I’m going to vote for Hillary, and vote for Donald, or the other way around. That’s not what happened. What happened is, you believe in what you want to believe.
Technology’s exposing us, it’s not changing us. What’s happening, where does this all go? What I want you to do more than anything is understand the following.
It has never been a better time in the human race ever to actually just go all in on you.
We are in a remarkable time. For all the things you may be worried about, left, right, up, down, there has never been a better time to be alive in the human race than right now.
Medicine, life expectancy, poverty, every issue we have, better. The best people to talk about what’s going on in America are 90-year-olds. They shit on everybody. They’re like, she thinks it’s bad? Ah, fuck!
This like 92-year-old woman stopped me in the street, she’s like, keep doing what you’re doing, I’m like, I mean, she looked like 190. I was like, thank you. I got to talk to her for a second and she’s like, by the way, these women, and she’s wrong but it was still funny, these women, fuck, if I didn’t have somebody grab my ass everyday in the office, I was pissed!
I was like, I get it. I was like, don’t say that in public. She’s like, fuck public! I was like, man, 92 is some gangster shit. I’m obsessed with practicality. People think I’m a destructor, I’m practical.
Facebook and Instagram ads are grossly under-priced.
If you go how tonight and Google how to run Instagram story ads, and learn how to do that, and then make a video or picture and run Instagram story ads for whatever you’re trying to do in life, become the mayor here, sell some peanuts, kombucha, get people to sign up for your fucking track team, I don’t care what, An Instagram story ad will work better than anything else you can do if you care about people 15-45. If you care about people 30-75, Facebook works better than anything.
If you sit here tonight and you are not completely fucking pumped completely pumped about your life, it’s up to you to change that.
I can’t implore this audience enough to realize that Facebook and Instagram right now is so remarkably under-priced in its ability to change the outcome of your business, your dreams, your mission. If I could do anything today, it would be to encourage people to go home and Google how to run Facebook ads, how to run Instagram ads, because that will absolutely change your game.
I think about this all the time. The ROI. The ROI of a basketball for LeBron it’s a billion dollars, for me it’s zero. Just because you didn’t have a successful ad campaign on Facebook or Instagram doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, it means you suck.
If you don’t run a successful ad campaign right now on Facebook and Instagram in the way that it’s so under-priced, you actually really suck. Now, here’s the good news. A lot of people run ads that are self-serving. The reason so many things aren’t working for people is that it’s good for you, not for the other person. Nobody wants your $897 bullshit e-book. That’s why your fucking Facebook ad didn’t work. That’s the problem, not Facebook.
I really, really, really want to implore people to understand that I sit here with a lot of business regret because when my dad’s business grew from $3 to $60 million, it should have been from $3 to $250 million. But I didn’t run enough Google ads.
I hit hard on Google when it first popped but I didn’t spend enough because I was a kid and I didn’t realize how special that moment was. That moment went away. Buying the word cabernet and Merlot and pinot grigio and Bordeaux and Napa Valley and wine and wines and wine gifts and this and that, they were five and 10 cents a click. I bought them all and nobody knew what the fuck was happening.
There were millions of people on Google and I got bigger than Haskell’s and Sam’s and Sherry Lehman’s and Wine Club and everybody was confused why. That’s what’s happening right now on Facebook and Instagram.
I’m telling you the fucking truth, I’m giving it to you, and 98% of you will not do anything about it.
We have to understand what’s going on. Why is Toys R Us going out of business? Why are all these things happening? It’s happening because the internet is eating up our society.
Why do we have such big opportunities?
Because everybody here can start a competitor to Coca Cola, which used to take $50 million because you had to buy into Albertson’s and to Safeway and Target and you had to make it and you had to fucking market it on television and now it costs $200,000.
You make something, you slap it on Amazon, 3PL, you run some Instagram influencer ads, and you’re in the game. It’s crazy.
What’s crazy about the internet, unlike what we grew up with whereas if you wanted to open up your store, your dream store, you had to be there so by the time you got home at seven, you couldn’t do that. The fact that you can do this from 7PM to two in the morning until it means something, enough to give you the courage to jump off the other thing, this is just practical.
The dream of being happy and living your life has actually become practical.
You’re sitting on the information but because it wasn’t like that for last 300 years, you can’t wrap your head around it. And because it seems so crazy, the idea of doing it and nothing happens for six months, makes you feel like it wasn’t meant to be and you get out. Because you were built and groomed within a school environment.
The only reason I’m successful is because I got Ds and Fs and I didn’t listen. I mean it. It’s how I see things differently. You need somebody else to have already done it. You need to see the path. I don’t like paths. I need blank slates. This is a blank slate.
I can’t wrap my head around it. That so many people here can build a $50,000 to $500,000 a year business on Amazon just by going on websites in China, buying something, and then relisting it on Amazon. That, my parents and I had dinner in New York and we had this nice dinner and we were coming out and our waitress ran out and grabbed me and said, thank you so much. She said, my fiance was out of a job for 19 months, depressed, doing drugs, saw one of your Instagram videos and a year later on Amazon is making $1.3 million a year. To me, this is fucking nuts.
So I am super excited about the time that we’re living in. I love what’s going on, I love that the big companies are losing, I love that the establishment is in trouble. I love it because I think it’s going to be better. I think we’re all going to be happier. I really do.
When Best Buy goes out of business, I don’t see that as a negativity.
I see that as an opportunity. I love that people are like, oh, Best Buy shouldn’t go out of business. Best Buy put people out of business. Everyone’s like, this is unfair, Walmart, like Target, Target put people out of business.
How are you confused by this? All of a sudden this was the moment to stop capitalism? Because Target’s here? Target put people out of business. Ironically, if you really play out my thesis, the people that are going to put Target out of business are back to the small people.
That is the most interesting shit to me of all time.
This internet thing is big. It’s real big. It’ll be bigger than we all thought. To me, the fact that you’re not doing Facebook or Instagram or YouTube out of a social point of view, to the detriment of your business and happiness and opportunity, is nuts. Because you’re mad that people aren’t talking to each other in real life, you’re leaving opportunity on the table for yourself is not a good idea.
One of the most powerful ways for a business to drive sales is via video reviews on YouTube. Earlier this year, Google made that even more effective by combining the power of video on YouTube with Google Search. Nicky Rettke, YouTube Group Product Manager for Video Ads spoke to an audience at Search Marketing Expo 2018 (SMX) and explained exactly how easy it now is for businesses to make use of this marketing one-two punch summarized below:
As you know we’ve been we’ve been working on direct response video formats for ad promotion for quite a while now, but we haven’t had a comprehensive solution for driving web conversions until now. I’m going to share some of our newest innovations that help you harness the combined power of search and YouTube together.
I want to start off by just having everybody take a minute to think about the things that you bought last week and how you decided what to buy. If you’re like most people, 86% to be exact, then you know you turned to Google for help where we have the world’s information at our fingertips when we’re shopping. We can read reviews, we can search product details, and we can even watch videos to help us make the best decision possible.
What that means is that even small everyday purchases like a toothbrush can kick off a big research project. Did you know that mobile searches for toothbrush reviews have more than doubled in the last two years? Whether it’s a car or toothbrush, we want to literally see things in action before we buy them. This is why people are increasingly turning to YouTube in addition to Search for help with their purchase decisions, and we can see this trend in YouTube search data.
Over the last two years, review videos on YouTube have had over 50,000 years worth of watch time on mobile alone. That’s over 438 million hours!
It’s not a hard jump to go from review to purchase. We’ve seen 100 percent increase in online conversions coming from YouTube ads globally over the last 12 months. That’s showing that consumers are coming to YouTube not only to research but to take action.
3 Features Helping Brands Harness Commercial Intent on YouTube
1. Custom Intent Audiences – Find People Who Recent Searched
Remarketing lists on search used to be the only way that you could re-engage users who did not immediately convert with custom intent audiences. You now have a second chance at winning them over using the most persuasive tool in the world… video.
Custom Intent Audiences allow brands to reach people who searched for relevant keywords on Google. All you have to do is create a keyword list, or you could just repurpose the keyword lists that you’re already using on your search campaigns.
Purple, the online mattress retailer, used Custom Intent Audiences to sell mattress protectors. Targeting YouTube viewers who had recently searched for queen bed sheets, they were able to lower the cost per visit by over 30 percent and they saw a 3x increase in the number of people searching for Purple on Google.
2. TrueView for Action – Make it Easy to Take Action!
Once you have found the people with the strongest intent, the next step is to make it really easy for them to take action. TrueView for Action is YouTube’s new format optimized to do exactly that. You can use it to drive whatever action is most important to your business, like clicks to your website or new signups.
It’s most powerful if you combine it with Custom Intent Audiences, that way you can reach people who are just on the brink of making that purchase decision.
3. Target CPA Bidding – Auto-Optimize for Results
TrueView for Action campaigns use target CPA bidding to automatically optimize bids using Google’s advanced machine learning technology. Simply put, you can now bid and buy for your video campaigns just like you do on search today.
Combining Video with Search Improves KPIs
This suite of features makes YouTube more actionable and early adopter brands are seeing it in the KPIs that matter most to them. Whether it’s the investment startup, Betterment, who increased their return on ad spend by 6x or the online education platform Masterclass, who grew class signups by over 140 percent, or travel giant Kayak, who reduced their CPA by 80 percent, brands around the world are using YouTube to drive meaningful and efficient business results.
Even if you already have a strong customer base, you can grow it further by building a branded community around your business. Many consumers are drawn to these communities because they offer inspiration, encouragement, and support. Your business, however, benefits by getting a boost in brand exposure and credibility, reduced need (and costs) for customer support, better customer retention, and more sales.
But as a small business owner, you already have enough on your plate, and building a community for your brand might seem expensive and difficulty. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to be. Here’s how you can do it.
4 Ways to Build a Community Around Your Brand
Provide Instant Opportunities
Once a customer or a prospect joins your online community, you want to keep them interested and onboard. It’s similar to welcoming someone to the neighborhood. Help them get their bearings. You can direct a member to the website page that features discounts or any new deals you’re offering. After all, new members are excited about what they can get from their new community. But don’t make the mistake of overwhelming or annoying your new community members with a barrage of emails and upselling tactics.
Develop a Loyalty Program
A rewards or loyalty program is a simple but effective way to get repeat customers. This program is quite popular for a variety of businesses, like coffee shops, boutiques, and restaurants. A typical loyalty program would have points rewards whenever a customer makes a purchase. They would then give a prize once a certain target is hit.
Try to come up with a unique loyalty rewards program or be more creative with the prizes. For example, instead of giving away free coffee on the customer’s 10th visit to the store, maybe they could win a cool coffee mug with your logo on it. You can also partner up with another business for the rewards. Post the names of winners on your website or do a follow-up on them about the reward they received (but make sure to ask their permission first).
Make Allies of Other Businesses
You can have a stronger presence or reputation within the community by developing partnerships with local businesses. Align yourself with companies that complement your business. You can even work with your competitors. For instance, if you own a boutique, you can team up with a jewelry designer or a handbag company. Or if you have an online bookstore, collaborate with other sellers and organize a book fair.
There are many advantages to partnering with other business owners in your community. Your company gets a boost in reputation, especially if you’re working with a bigger or more established brand. You also get the chance to reach a wider audience.
Share Your Skills and Become an Authority
Your loyal customers and prospective clients will want to learn more about your products or services. Share your expertise with them through well-written content or by conducting seminars. Speak at local events or give a talk at the community college. It’s a way of giving back to the community. It also helpsbuild you up as an authority in the niche.
Companies often don’t give enough thought to the idea of building or joining a community. This can be a costly mistake as community members can have a big impact on the long-term success of your business. So take the time to develop your community and make sure to treat your members well.
Over the past decade, there has been an exponential rise in the integration of artificial intelligence in many areas of our daily lives. You encounter it every time Amazon recommends a product for you, or when Google predicts what you are looking for before you’re done typing it in the search box. AI is also likely to be the first thing you talk to when you call your bank to check your account.
Because of AI’s efficiency and ability to give consumers a one-to-one experience, its use will continue to grow. A Gartner Study predicts that by 2020, as much as 85 percent of all customer interactions will be done without humans.
If you own an eCommerce store, it’s essential to make yourself aware of these trends and decide on how you will apply them to your business.
Take a look at some of the ways AI is changing eCommerce:
Provides More Personalized Customer Experience
One big advantage of using AI is how much it canpersonalize a customer’s shopping experience. A good example is The North Face’s collaboration with IBM to assist customers in finding the right jacket.
[Image of user interface via TheNorthFace.com]
When customers visit The North Face website, IBM’s Watson pops up to ask where and when the jacket will be used. The AI will also ask follow-up questions based on the answers the customer gives. Once it has enough data, it will scan The North Face’s inventory and recommend several jackets based on its relevance to the client’s answers.
Boosts Customer Trust and Exposes Fake Reviews
Online reviews have a big impact on whether a consumer will make a purchase. Unfortunately, not all reviews are made by people who legitimately bought a product. This can affect a site’s algorithms and result in mistrust between buyers and sellers. AI can combat this dilemma. Let’s take Amazon’s example. Its AI puts more weight on verified customer purchases while also taking into account reviews that are marked “helpful” or new.
Making sure that the reviews consumers read on your site regarding your products are trustworthy is essential to building your reputation and brand loyalty. Customers will also be more willing to return and buy more if they know the reviews they’re reading are genuine.
Makes Search Easier and More Customer Focused
As a consumer, you’ve probably experienced seeing something that you want but have no idea what it’s called, who makes it, or even if it’s on sale. AI is now making it easier for you to find the information you need, thanks to its enhanced capabilities to interpret, classify, and understand images.
Pinterest has already been making use of AI technology with its enhanced visual search tool. Now, if a cool pair of shoes catches your eye while looking at Pinterest, you’ll be shown items that are visually similar to it.
The tool reduces the time a consumer will spend searching for an item. It also boosts conversion rates and retargeting options for businesses that market their items via the platform.
Improves Inventory Management
AI is also making a big difference in how companies manage their inventories. People who work in retail understand how difficult it is to keep shelves stocked, track everything accurately, and ensure that inventory is up-to-date.
Inventory management traditionally utilized a hindsight perspective, something that doesn’t work in today’s dynamic online marketplace. AI technology uses predictive analysis to assess what demands will likely rise and gathers key information about factors that are driving this demand.
AI’s machine learning feature also means that the longer the company uses it, the more it learns about the business, its customers, and site visitors. It will then get better at accurately predicting what items the company requires in its present inventory and what it will need in the future.
AI is becoming a driving force in how businesses cater to their clients’ interest and needs. With it, eCommerce platforms can give more personalized services, provide better recommendations on products and improve trust between the customer and the brand.
Words are powerful. For marketers, they can mean the difference between successful conversions or a failed campaign. Certain words can pique a customer’s attention while others might repel them. So what words have the most power to get people interested in what you have to offer?
7 Words That Will Grab the Attention of Your Customers
1. Free
People love to get free stuff, so it’s no surprise that “free” is one of the most persuasive words in the English language. It’s often the primary factor in what product a customer chooses.
While the word canhelp with conversions, be mindful that it will also attract those who prefer bargains, and this might not be the type of customers you want. Instead, use it as a way to draw attention to your business, maybe by offering free guides, seminars, support, information, etc.
2. You
Using the word “you” in your marketing can be as attention-grabbing as calling someone by their name. It personalizes your message and helps you to quickly connect with your customers.
You can use this personalization to great effect in your email marketing. Make it more effective by developing distinct lists for your products and the customers who would prefer them. Integrate “you” in the message for a more personal touch.
3. Try
If your product is new to prospective customers, they’ll likely need time to decide on whether they want to buy it. Using the word “buy” can seem aggressive and could make the customer feel pressured. A better word to use is “try” since it’s non-threatening, but can still motivate people to act.
Give your customers a little push by encouraging them to try your product or service first. Offer a 14-day free trial period to test drive your brand or send them samples so they can know exactly what to expect from you.
4. New
When it comes to marketing, people prefer a recognized (or old) brand but love “new” products. This is due to the novelty aspect of an experience. It activates the brain’s reward center and is a great way to keep customers alert and interested.
You can keep your customers engaged by refreshing your website’s design or changing your product packaging. Add new features or find a different way of sending a message or making an offer. Your customers will be interested even in something as simple as a new background color for your ad.
5. Now
Delayed gratification has no place in marketing. Most customers want things immediately. So it’s no surprise that “now” is among themost powerful words in marketing. The word easily evokes your fear of missing out and pushes you to action. Your brain also gets all fired up as it imagines the rewards it will soon be receiving.
Make the most of the word and use it in your headlines, email subject headings, and calls-to-action. Boost the chances of instant conversions by making easily realized promises, like giving customers “Access Now” to services or by giving direct instructions on what they should do (Subscribe Now! Shop Now!). You can also use the word “instant” as it provides the same effect. In some cases, it might even generate a more powerful response.
6. Best
People love knowing which items or services are popular, especially when it appears to come from word-of-mouth. This is why consumers look for best sellers or are interested in the best products that a company has to offer. It also gives the impression that many people have already bought the product and had good results.
7. Easy
People want products or services that will make their lives simpler and easier. Use this adjective to call attention to the fact that your product will make things easy for them. Easy is also a very positive and encouraging word to customers.
Make the most of the word by using it to emphasize how easy your product is to use or operate. You can also interchange easy with other adjectives like “simple” or “hassle-free.” But be careful since the former tends to generate a simple response while the latter could cause customers to just focus on “hassle.”
And the Runner Up is…
If those seven words are the winners, then “sale” and “tips” are the runners-up. Sale is actually the granddaddy of advertising words. After all, who doesn’t love a good sale? The word also has the power to motivate customers into buying something. Meanwhile, customers love to receive suggestions on how they can do things better. This is why emails or blog posts with tips about a product or service are always appreciated.
Conclusion
You have to grab your customer’s attention if you want to win in digital advertising. These seven words are simple and can easily be included in any ad or conversation, yet they are powerful enough to generate interest among consumers. Learn to use them in the proper context and improve your online marketing.
Jeff Bezos is the founder and CEO of Amazon, a company that only sold books online when it launched in 1994. Today, Amazon sells virtually any consumer good you can think of, and under Bezos’ leadership, has become the world’s largest online retailer with a valuation fast approaching $1 trillion. The visionary also owns The Washington Post and established Blue Origin, an aerospace manufacturer and spaceflight service. In July, Bezos added to his many achievements when he surpassed Microsoft founder Bill Gates to become the world’s richest person.
Needless to say, Bezos is a wildly successful businessman. And when he shares his thoughts on business, people listen. Over the years, the mogul has given many interviews sharing his experience and offering advice on how entrepreneurs can become more successful in business.
Here’s a compilation of seven of the most powerful business lessons he learned along his journey.
1. There’s no shame in being stubborn and flexible.
It might seem like a conundrum, but it is possible to be both stubborn and flexible. As a matter of fact, being stubborn in the pursuit of your goals (but flexible in how you go about it) has helped the 54-year-old Bezos to succeed. Heexplained in a Fast Company article that “If you’re not stubborn, you’ll give up on experiments too soon. And if you’re not flexible, you’ll pound your head against the wall, and you won’t see a different solution to a problem you’re trying to solve.”
2. Only hire the right person for the job.
Amazon is infamous for having very high standards when it comes to hiring personnel. Only the people who would fit the company to a T are hired. This is because Amazon’s president believes that to keep your culture of success intact, you have to be very careful about the people you bring in. The same Fast Company article claimed that the Amazon chief once told a colleague that he’d “rather interview 50 people and not hire anyone than hire the wrong person.”
3. Don’t rush growth.
A lot of people want success, and they want it now. However, making a mark in an industry or transforming your startup into a profitable one in under a year is next to impossible. Take it from Bezos. It took him more than six years to turn Amazon into the money-making venture it is now. His slow but steady approach might have delayed his success, but it allowed him to keep product prices low while he funneled revenue back into Amazon. This strategy is even incorporated in theprinciples Amazon wants from its leaders — “ They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results.”
4. No one is more important than the customer.
Amazon is known for its customer-first approach. Every innovation the company introduced was aimed towards providing better service to their customers. Bezos had emphasized in his1998 letter to shareholders the importance of focusing obsessively on their customers. Companies who put their customers first will reap big dividends, especially in this age when word of mouth reviews can quickly spread across all social media platforms.
5. Keep evolving.
If there’s one thing that Bezos is afraid of, it’s to become stagnant. The CEO’s inclination to break barriers by pushing the envelope has led to innovations that have helped Amazon. For instance, the company started out as an online bookstore. It then moved on to develop its own products. Now it has evolved into an empire that sells over 12 million products, not including books, media, wine, and services.
6. Listen to your employees.
After your customers, your employees are the second most crucial people in your business. It’s very important that you listen to them and that you allow them to give suggestions and feedback. It’s how Amazon came up with ideas like the Gold Box and Bottom of the Page Deals. Feedback is particularly crucial to those in management. Company owners and CEOs oftenend up in a protective bubble, surrounded by people who are either wary about giving them information because they believe the boss doesn’t want to hear about it or who only tell the boss the things they think he or she wants to hear. Bezos said that he had to invent ways to get out of this bubble and get the feedback he needed.
7. Learn from your competitors.
It’s a good idea to keep a close eye on your competitors. In a speech he gave at Lake Forest College, Bezos admitted that Amazon watches its rivals in order to “learn from them, see the things that they were doing for customers and copy those things as much as we can.” After all, if something isn’t broke, why fix it? It’s better to build on something that’s already proven to work and put your own twist to it.
These tips have helped Jeff Bezos reach the pinnacle of success. Which ones resonate with you most? Share your thoughts in the comment section.
Envato has grown its presence in North America, with the acquisition of one of the web’s fastest-growing digital mockup and templates tools, Placeit.
Purchased for an undisclosed amount, the Mexico-based company adds to Envato’s globally renowned creative community, providing a series of responsive mockups, smart design templates and maker tools for designers of all skill levels.
Headquartered in Guadalajara, Mexico’s second-largest city and the country’s well regarded tech hub, Placeit has grown rapidly since its inception in 2012, with more than seven million templates sold and doubling in size in the last 12 months.
The company’s most recently recorded Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) was over $3M USD. Envato’s current subscription business Envato Elements has an ARR of $21M, and grew over 100% in the last year.
Placeit counts companies such as Google, Facebook and Oracle as among its more than 55,000 regular paying customers, with more than 87% of these customers coming from outside Mexico each month, reflecting the global footprint it has.
The platform currently allows users with no previous design experience to make everything from on-trend logos and branding kits for everything from restaurants to sporting clubs, through to t-shirt design templates, social media videos, high-resolution iPhone and apparel mockups and more.
Users can do all of this very simply from their browser, without the need to purchase and learn how to use specialist design and creative software.
Envato founder and CEO Collis Ta’eed said that the acquisition of Placeit was an exciting one.
“Placeit extends the Envato offering in a big way. We’ve made our mark in the world helping creative professionals get inspired, work faster, and level up what they do for clients.”“With Placeit we’re opening up Envato’s creative magic to absolutely anyone. Whether it’s an entrepreneur just getting started, a marketer working on their own, or just a pro user who doesn’t want the hassle of opening Photoshop – Placeit is just plain fun and simple to use.”
“My ‘aha’ moment with Placeit was sitting down with my kids to make a logo for their basketball team. Watching a seven year old make something that I, as a professional designer, liked was pretty special, and really solidified to me what an opportunity Placeit has to connect with a whole different design audience. Seeing something come to life that simply was not possible before is why I love working in the tech industry.” concluded Mr Ta’eed.
Placeit founder Navid Safabakhsh said he looking forward to the company becoming an integral part of Envato’s global creative community.
“The origin story for Placeit is very similar to the one Envato has; we came up with an online, smart solution to a very particular set of problems that many digital creatives face around the world today, anchored by hard-working local tech talent.”
“In building a series of easy-to-use and on-trend maker tools, we’ve seen first hand just how much we’ve been able to empower creatives of all skill levels around the globe to complete their projects faster, and with better outcomes. We think it’s a perfect match for Envato, one that builds on the strengths of both companies.”
The upgraded Placeit by Envato platform officially went live last week.
In June of 2017, Walmart announced that it wanted to tap its massive workforce of over 2 million people to bring online orders directly to the front doors of its customers. The retail giant planned to have employees make the deliveries on their way home after ending their usual work shifts. According to Marc Lore, head of Walmart’s eCommerce operations, the strategy would make the company’s deliveries more efficient, a move that would help it fend off rival Amazon. But before launching the employee “last-mile” delivery service nationwide, it was first tested in New Jersey and Arkansas. Walmart reeled employees into the program by offering additional compensation to cover labor and fuel expenses, but the experiment flopped. As it turned out, the last-mile program had more drawbacks than benefits for its workers.
In January of this year, Walmart quietly shut down the pilot program and is now testing employee deliveries on a smaller scale.
But exactly why did its last-mile delivery fail? Employees who participated in the program spoke to Reuters about their experience and explained some of the issues they had with it.
Stripe has just revealed that it will be offering businesses the capacity to make their own credit cards. The online payments company also announced that they will be using Mastercard and Visa as the operating networks for their new service, aptly called “Stripe Issuing.”
The company explained that the service is “an API for creating cards and new business models” and can be utilized to develop a variety of credit cards, both physical and virtual. For instance,Stripe Issuing can be used to create expense cards with customized credit limits for employees and can even be used by new banks to issue credit cards to their customers.
Since its launch in 2010, Stripe has experienced steady growth in the payments sector. Its system has made it easier for businesses like Lyft, Postmates, and Slack to process payments for ride-sharing, food delivery, and team collaboration services, respectively.
Stripe’s Annual Transaction Volume Since 2015
Now Stripe’s new service aims to fill another gap in payment processing. Lachy Groom, the head of Stripe Issuing,explained to Bloomberg that the company has “tackled many of the major problems on accepting payments” but that businesses still have difficulties in moving their money.
Analyst Jordan McKee expounded on the appeal this new service will have on enterprises. He said that developing a customized payment infrastructure is very complicated and expensive, which is why the majority of companies don’t bother with it. However, Stripe offering a “simplicity value proposition” will definitely bring to light new cases that haven’t been considered previously.
Stripe Issuing service may also generate a tidy sum. Not only will it receive a percentage from every payment made on a card, it could also grow its revenue by retaining customers who are looking for a one-stop source to issue and receive payments.
Dozens of companies have reportedly tested the product, although no names have yet been shared. Businesses who are interested in Stripe’s new service can head over to thecompany site to request an invitation.
President Donald Trump once again attacked Amazon and the Washington Post in some of his recent tweets.
In his latest Twitter rant against the company, the President railed that the Washington Post “has gone crazy against me” since Amazon lost their Internet Tax Case in the Supreme Court. He also jibed that the Washington Post is losing a fortune and described it as “nothing more than an expensive lobbyist for Amazon.”
Trump alsoblasted Amazon for using the US Postal Service as a “delivery boy” for its packages at only “a fraction of real cost.”
The Amazon Washington Post has gone crazy against me ever since they lost the Internet Tax Case in the U.S. Supreme Court two months ago. Next up is the U.S. Post Office which they use, at a fraction of real cost, as their “delivery boy” for a BIG percentage of their packages….
….In my opinion the Washington Post is nothing more than an expensive (the paper loses a fortune) lobbyist for Amazon. Is it used as protection against antitrust claims which many feel should be brought?
Trump’s latest tirade came on the heels of a Washington Post’s report that was critical of how he handled North Korea. The paper claimed the president was frustrated with how long it was taking to see some progress after his talk with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Trump tweeted the country had not launched a rocket in 9 months and that “all of Asia is happy.” He also said what the “Fake News” is claiming is wrong and said that he was “very happy” with the way things with North Korea were proceeding.
Amazon’s shares dipped slightly after Trump’s tweets. However, the loss was minuscule when compared to the company’s 55 percent gains since the start of 2018. Trump’s tirade also did little to harm Jeff Bezos’ standing as the world’s richest man. The owner of Amazon and the Washington Post has a net worth amounting to about $150 billion.
This isn’t the first time that Trump attacked Bezos and Amazon regarding the e-retailer’s use of the USPS. In a tweet last December, Trump questioned why the USPS was charging the online store so little when they “Should be charging MUCH MORE!” He also tweeted in April that the Post Office was losing a fortune but that this will change.
It is true that the Post Office is losing money. The USPS reported a loss of $2.7 billion in 2017. Increasing the rates of shipping packages is one way to resolve the situation. However, the USPS’ main function is not to generate profit but to serve civilians. This is why the department’s shipping rates are very low.
Amazon also isn’t the only company using the US Postal Service. FedEx and UPS also drop off packages and utilizes the USPS as their “last mile” delivery. If the postal service does raise prices, it wouldaffect all companies that ships packages, including small businesses that may find it difficult to cover increased shipping costs.
