Utilize these important trends this year if you have a niche product
Niche businesses usually cater to a relatively small and well-defined market by tapping an unmet demand. For example, Lefty’s store is a good example of niche business as it sells products for left handed people. Other examples of niche businesses include GetOutfitted, YearBook Innovation, and boutique consulting firms which provide consulting services to specific industries. Google, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are all examples of niche technology businesses which went on to become mass business later.
Niche businesses need to do focused marketing to become profitable as they serve a small segment of the market. Traditionally, niche marketers have used demand based marketing methods such as Pay-per-click advertising and focused industry events for promoting their products or services. However, advancement…
Thinking like Sun Tzu to improve your strategic position
This is the second part to last week's interpretation of how Sun Tzu's Art of War can be applied to digital marketing.
Here I'll cover three ways in which applying Sun Tzu's Art of War can help develop your marketing or digital marketing strategy, starting with the 5 elements...
The 5 Elements to defining your strategic position
Sun Tzu defines five key elements to help understand your position that make total sense when applied to marketing too. Your strategic position is never strong or weak... it is only strong or weak in relation to something or someone else.
Mission or the way: This is what unites all of the people in the Army (organisation) and the customer. It helps everybody to share the same goals and objectives, it allows everyone to 'get real', to feel that what has been…
Focusing your efforts on redesigning your brand identity is crucial for your startup’s success. Here are some tips that’ll help you head in the right direction.
With new businesses appearing almost out of thin air everywhere around us, there is no doubt that in order for your startup to reach your target audience and make a difference it has to stand out. While your startup’s product or service may be the one thing this world has been missing if no one ever hears about it, did it make a sound? This is exactly why your brand identity is so important.
A business’ brand identity refers to the ways in which your company is represented, what its values, purpose, passions and goals are. There are many advantages to creating a strong brand identity. These include your being able to develop a competitive advantage in the…
Chart of the Day: Utilizing digital to drive consumers into store sees a resurgence with Retailers
Customers are increasingly expecting retailers to give them the convenience of browsing online from where ever they are; in the car, in a bar, from Wichita...you get the idea. This ability to visit a store, find the same products at the same price and take it home at the point of purchase with no waiting or delivery charges, can make or break a consumer's choice to spend their hard earned money. In the last few years, many high street brands are embracing multichannel here in the UK e.g. Argos, Debenhams and Next to name a few but many others aren't.
In this research from RSR Research, we see that while the primary role of digital channels is to sell products,…
Does your digital branding match your audiences search interests?
Defining the metrics of success is of the utmost importance when establishing a brand online. One of the most important metrics which define a brand’s true strength is one that is often overlooked, an audience interest graph. A brand’s true strength is the perception that it holds in the minds of its consumers. There are many metrics that online marketers use to define a brand’s success, however an audience interest graph is most often either unheard of or completely overlooked. This happens mostly because there are so many other metrics available that are easy to understand and completely misrepresented in the industry, such as monthly number of visitors, average time on page, social outreach metrics such as number of likes, shares or comments, bounce rates, click through rate, average cost per click etc. What people fail to understand is that this speaks…
Chart of the Day: Benchmarking digital media and technology adoption of the UK with eight developed countries
At one level, it's simple. The online opportunity for businesses to reach and influence their audiences online depends on the levels of use of the web by different types of individuals and businesses. Defining the Opportunity, Creating a Digital Strategy and taking action works best if you can define how many of your target audience are actively using digital media and technology to inform their buying decisions.
At another level, it's now highly complex to define this opportunity. While we can still use search engine gap analysis to assess the number of people searching for information about products online and review our 'share of search' or search impressions, many other platforms are involved. These include cross-device use from mobile to desktop and use of social media and influencers. Plus, we shouldn't forget that, even in developed…
Will 2017 see a revolution in the way we think of branding and brand strategy?
For many, the sound and sights of fireworks exploding on New Year’s Eve already seem a lifetime away.
Slowly but surely, marketers are getting back into the swing of the pendulum of routine marking out yet another year of deadlines and performance assessments. In the spirit of making a resolution to change, during January, some will send the odd surreptitious online application to a recruitment agency’s ‘black hole’ of resumes on sites like LinkedIn. In time-honoured tradition, many will invest in Apps which measure strides on runs, or calories at burger bars. For most January is about picking up where projects were last left.
Conventionally, campaign messages supported by features feeding into benefits… an approach that has been tried and A/B split tested for eons… centre on rewards of happiness ‘hits’ in exchange for buying a product/service.
In 2017,…
How to develop a marketing strategy for expanding globally
Globalisation is no longer an obscure term reserved for academics: it is a very real and ever growing phenomenon affecting most people and businesses all over the world. In the digital arena, this means that a company's website also needs to be a part of the global mix. If you'd like to focus on trading and exporting your products and services worldwide, you need to have a solid international digital marketing strategy in place.
The aim of this post is to highlight a wide range of considerations that need to be addressed in order to tailor your strategy to a global target market. The areas that will be focused on are: website design, international SEO, international PPC and international social media marketing.
International Digital Marketing Considerations
Before looking into the international best practices of each of these areas, there are some important points to bear in…
Chart of the day: Neuroscience reveals that for long-term impact ads should appeal to emotion or make us laugh
In this example of neuromarketing, brain responses to over 200 TV ads were analysed. By looking at how the respondents' brains engaged in long-term memory encoding whilst watching the ads, Neuro-Insight were able to establish what makes for effective TV ads.
Since short-term memory only lasts a few seconds and then is lost forever, if you manage to get your ad into someone's long-term memory they'll be able to recall it for years. That means it's critical that your ads are able to make an impact and become part of someone's long term memory.
As the chart shows, information-based ads or discount-related ads make very little long-term impact on our brains. Opting for the 'hard sell' is clearly not effective. Humour stands out as the most effective…
Grow your e-commerce sales using RFM analysis - an undervalued online retail marketing technique
We can all agree that conversion rate optimization is one of the most creative and efficient marketing techniques for designing an on-site experience that will amaze customers. Yet even though CRO will help you rectify your approach as you work to align marketing goals with customer’s needs, there is one important aspect to consider: conversion rate optimization is often used in the wrong way.
As a marketer or e-commerce website owner, your main goal shouldn’t be only to improve key metrics such as conversion rate, bounce rate, average order value, revenue, etc. These represent a direct consequence, the effects of how you treat your customers and how you communicate with them.
You should also optimize to create long-term relationships with customers that have chosen your products and services from the crowded e-commerce market. The…
