reform

Digital marketing is set to get more scientific. And it’s about time.

Companies have an abundance of data available but at present much of it is not being utilised. By gathering data on customer behaviour, they can develop more valuable insight can and get into the mindset of each individual customer. Algorithms and complex calculations allow brands to predict specific actions, behaviours and activities.

Data gathering holds countless options for brands, not least ‘bespoke shopping’. Brands already know your favourite items and how you like to be contacted, but what if they knew your behavioural tendencies and odd behaviour as well? For example, if you suddenly started buying healthier food, they could recognise this from the data and offer you healthy recipes, deals on specific products and could even congratulate you.

Or, a fashion brand might know that you always bought certain styles but would always waver towards what is in fashion at the time. That means they’d know exactly what products to sell to you on any given week. It’s recognising this more ad-hoc behaviour which allows businesses to be a little bit cleverer with their marketing strategies.

This issue is that brands seem to have trouble with spontaneity at the moment – digitally at any rate. They usually have a very rigid marketing plan based around their target market and need to realise just how many variables there are which affect customers, all of which should be taken into consideration.

But digital marketing is not just about spontaneity, it’s also about transparency. So you want to know everything about your customers but you are telling them nothing in return? That’s just not going to cut it anymore.

By engaging customers you are increasing people’s interaction with the brand and hopefully, in turn, their loyalty. Rather than just trying to sell, attention has shifted to generating more of a community- and sharing-based attitude between brand and consumer. Brands will have to act more like a real person to get their story and brand personality across. It’s the human characteristics that will encourage customers to love a brand rather than just buy from it.

And, of course, humans make mistakes. There have been a lot of marketing mishaps over the past year, but what has separated the clued up brands from the not so clever has been the aftermath of those incidents. An apology or acceptance of a mistake goes much further than complete dismissal.

There will be a lot more brands trying to hide things under the carpet – but with the internet becoming the ultimate word of mouth reviewer there’s just nowhere to hide any more. What’s clear is that digital marketing is becoming more scientific and more human at the same time, contradictory though that might sound. Businesses need to understand how to do both and to do both well.

By Karen Hawey

Businesses should be aware, if they’re not already, that the way people watch video media online has changed.

Video content is becoming an increasingly popular form of online media due to the flexibility of the format. While short clips have historically been the meat and drink of online video, an increasing number are watching TV shows and movies over the internet instead of on their televisions. In fact, the amount of short clips watched online has decreased from 84 percent to 74 percent (http://techcrunch.com/2011/06/29/online-video-shift-primetim/), when compared to longer forms of video media online.

Users are also more likely to watch an online video in the context of an article or webpage. This change is not only relevant to the younger generation, but to all groups of people who use the internet regularly – including those who use the internet for research before making purchases. In fact, the majority of both senior and younger executives say their purchasing decisions are based largely upon the online video content of a particular website (http://www.socialnomics.net/2012/01/24/youtube-killed-the-tv-star-why-online-video-marketing-is-essential-for-marketers-in-2012/).

For businesses that engage in e-commerce, having clear video content that describes the product or service offered can be the key to more traffic visiting your website.

There’s also been a change in the way search engines are displaying their results: blended results, meaning a variety of content such as pictures, videos, and local listings, will usually appear on page one. In turn, search engines are giving video content higher rank, compared to other forms, to ensure a display of mixed search results.

Additionally, video content that is engaging and informative to the viewer can lead to longer visits to, or time spent on, a website. This can greatly enhance its quality score on various search engines and thus its ranking.

So, what does this mean for digital marketing? It means that businesses need to start taking advantage of their video content. The mere presence of a video on a page does not necessarily mean that it will be indexed by Google; these videos require proper submission. Currently, in fact, only a small percentage of video content is being properly submitted by users for indexation. However, users whose videos are indexed begin to start seeing results within days. According to Forrester Research, a video is 53 times more likely to appear on the first page of the search engine compared to traditional SEO techniques.

Therefore, making sure video content is properly indexed and implementing SEO techniques will help it appear in the search engine results page. A small amount of preparation before uploading a video can yield great results and assure that your brand’s video content is reaching as wide an audience as possible.

By Priya Chandra

With the Web being such a dynamic environment for businesses and users globally, one of the factors that has been toughest for many brand names (particular big names) to get their heads around is the targeting beyond their own national borders.

This means making sure their message is distributed accurately across all markets and that users abroad don’t just see the “English Site”. That site may even have content in other languages but it doesn’t fare well in Google – in fact, it often requires users to fish it out themselves when on the site.

At the same time, many companies may want to serve different content to different locations, show different prices to different users (even if the language is the same) and otherwise personalise their digital presence for each international market. But, what’s the right way of doing this?

From an SEO perspective, Google’s recent algorithm would lead one to recommend using a region by region targeting strategy, such as establishing a CCTLD (Country code top-level domain) for each region – e.g. company.de, company.ie, company.jp. This increases the ability to target each market and local link relevance. For example, this approach serves well for brands like Amazon and Trip Advisor.

Many other (usually older) brands, however, still pile everything onto one large .com domain. However, this has been proven to show less favourable results when going outside the US – especially into non-English language markets. As its overall algorithm developed, Google tried many times to look at different ways of serving users in each country an improved level of relevance, and in recent years factors such as hosting location, domain extension and even ‘where the sites linking to your site are from’ have become more important.

But a recent announcement on Google’s webmaster central blog looks at combining the canonical tag element (that diffuses any potential page duplication) with the link alternate tag that attempts to tell users the page is pretty much the same, but in country A you get page A, if in country B, you get B, and so on.

This would work well if your Portuguese site is similar to your Brazilian regional site, for example, but falls down if you want to serve those two countries different content in a way that is search-friendly instead of dynamically serving the content to each user off the same URL.

This also helps push a level of international best practice, as recent Google updates (Panda for instance) devalued a lot of sites that had “auto-translated” – and thus low quality – content.

It’s still inconclusive how this will work for international SEO moving forwards and CCTLDs are still the proven way at present – but businesses looking to create or develop an international presence should take a long, hard look at the best way to make their sites search-friendly in those other markets.

By Niall Madden

Back in the early days of search marketing, consumers all used PCs or Macs to find what goods and services they needed and to do their research. This restraint was a huge factor in determining how, and when, people were making use of search engines.

But in the last few years, it’s all changed. The number of devices and platforms that are capable of supporting internet usage and search has vastly increased, which in turn is altering what people search for and how they do it. And, of course, this has implications for every business looking to improve its search rankings.

Search has now found a home on every internet-capable device, including smartphones, tablets and the raft of new televisions that allow users to surf the internet. And as technology has improved across the board, consumers are becoming more and more sophisticated about how they use their devices.

For example, consumers now search for the venue where they are meeting their friends, if they are unsure where it is, as well as for getting directions. If they use an internet capable television, they can search for videos they want to watch. The new wave of HD videos on platforms like YouTube makes this even more attractive.

In addition, the advent of new technology is delivering a constantly improving technical environment. With the last few years we have seen the release of tablet computers like the iPad and Samsung Galaxy that can be used as portable computers. Meanwhile the technological advances in mobile devices have continued to expand at a furious pace, resulting in the boom in smartphones.

As a result of the ultra-portable nature of these advanced phones and tablets, they can often be connected to other, more stationary devices such as PCs and TVs to communicate data between them. It also means that while searchers might sit down to do their initial research at a PC, once the initial research period is over they could use their phone or tablet to do some final research before committing to the purchase.

Many businesses are aware of this trend and are producing applications that can help steer searchers in their direction at the last minute. An example of this is the Amazon app that encourages people in stores, ostensibly with the intent to purchase something there, to scan products to see whether they can get it cheaper on Amazon.

As technology continues to evolve at a furious pace, it becomes harder to predict what the next great innovation will be. However, movement over time shows us clearly that in the future all of our devices, including tablet, phone, TV and PC, will become even more closely tied together.

This could potentially provide consumers with the freedom of their portable devices, while still offering the size and improved capability of the stationary devices. Consumers could do an initial search on their phone, and then move the results to their TV or PC through wireless connection to be able to see a larger version of product images, or to be able to read large amounts of text more easily.

So what does this mean for businesses? Simply, that search isn’t static. If you want to steer customers towards your brand, you have to understand how they search, when they search and what device they’re likely to use – not just what keywords they’re most likely to employ.

By Juliette van Rooyen

For years businesses have been both generating large amounts of data and hearing from digital experts that they need to use this data to succeed. Frankly, some have been more successful at this than others.

So why is that? Every ‘unhappy family’ is unique, but a business’s failure to embrace the data-driven culture that is almost universally agreed to be a good thing can probably be summed up with one word: fragmentation.

What does that mean, you may ask? Actually, it can apply to several business areas (particularly in retail):

• Fragmentation of the analytical talent within an organisation. For example, analysts capable of understanding in-store product seasonality might never solve the problem because they are assigned to the email team. Businesses need to harness their analytics talent effectively – because in the modern digital world those men and women are worth their weight in gold

• Fragmentation of data into departmental silos. For example, the search team might continue to drive traffic to pages containing out of stock products, whilst last season’s colours sit unused in the warehouse. Data has to be managed holistically – so that every part of the organisation both requires and provides accurate information

• Fragmentation of goals and KPIs. What sometimes happens is that each department/silo optimises for the metrics that are easiest for them to measure rather than the long term profitability of the business. Again, a ‘whole organisation’ approach is needed, which means it has to be driven from the senior management at the top.

Some organisations still work from ‘gut instinct’ rather than data, but thankfully this is growing rarer. We think those that remain will quietly fade into the background as their pipeline of new customers is reduced through more effective competition from companies who understand and use data.

But even they have decisions to make. Businesses that are further along the ‘data road’ but are still currently siloed need a large influx of analytic talent in order to develop, but the talented analysts can have more fulfilling roles elsewhere. The war for analytic talent is set to hot up even further and it underpins a broader move towards organisational change. Businesses live, as the old Chinese proverb goes, in interesting times.

By Richard Fergie