Digerati Magazine April Issue 2017

Proximity, Scale and Business Model Innovation What Actually Works on Social Media Will IoT Save Retail?

What Customers Think of Your Brand?

The Rise of the

Digitally Native Vertical Brand

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CONTENTS

> CONTENTS DIGERATI is designed to provide actionable digital insight for marketing and advertising in the digital era. Each issue delivers a 360-degree view of the digital sector from the worlds smartest marketers and technologists, spanning topics like digital innovation, content marketing, mobile, social, search, data and more.

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INNOVATION: Proximity, Scale and Business Model Innovation

A.I.: Artificial Intelligence on the path to

18 Personal Customer Experience

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22 IOT:

ISSUE 9, APRIL 2017

Will IoT Save Retail?

DESIGN

21 Common Mistakes Ruining Your Website – and Free Tools to Fix Them

social media

What Ac tually Works on Social Media

A.I.

Artificial Intelligence on the path to Personal Customer Experience

IOT

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DATA: Marketers Unprepared for Data-Driven Future

The Future of All Business: Proximity, Scale and Business Model Innovation

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social media: What Actually Works

The Rise of the Digitally Native Vertical Brand

UGC

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16 on Social Media

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Why Retail Customer Service Apps are a Waste of Money

INNOVATION

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FEATURE: The Rise of the Digitally Native Vertical Brand

APPS

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I came for content. I left with a tribe

Will IoT Save Retail?

BRAND

Do You Know What Customers Think of Your Brand?

ECOMMERCE

SEO for Ecommerce

MULTICHANNEL

Examples of AI in R&D, Diagnostics & Multi-Channel Marketing

data

Why ‘Gut Feel’ is better than ‘Big Data’

INNOVATION

4 things you need to know: About Chatbot Design

SOCIAL SELLING

6 Thoughts and 10 Tools for Fueling Demand-Gen with Social Selling

SEARCH

Are you playing hide-and-seek with your customers?

data

Marketers Unprepared for Data-Driven Future

search

Lessons in Innovation: The Power of Partnerships

APPS

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Why Retail Customer Service Apps are a Waste of Money

by Luis Salazar, Tech Entrepreneur & CEO

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obile devices are the preferred way to access the internet for the majority of the population, and while mobile apps continue to thrive, companies are struggling with creating engaging experiences with their customers as their apps get lost in a sea of social networks, games, entertainment, and news. Even when users give it a try, seven of every ten use it for less than 24 hours!

Couple that with the fact that there are two million apps available at any given time, just in the Apple store, with close to two thousand apps added each day.

It shows how a company’s chance of a customer downloading their app is very slim.

The retail sector offers a daunting picture to those enterprises seeking to better engage with their customer base.

Retaining those customers using the app is even more challenging. Only one of every twenty apps keep an active user for more than 30 days, and 70 percent of users disappear within 24 hours of downloading an app. It is a complicated situation when as much as 50 percent of apps are only used once.

It is an engagement dilemma, as retailers are trying to reach out to their customers using the wrong mechanism. Just like only 80 percent of Americans find phone calls as an inconvenient way to interact with a provider, mobile apps might not be the right tool either. App usage growth is slowing down in some sectors, but consumers are messaging more than ever.

App usage grew 53 percent in 2015 and slowed down to only 11 percent growth in 2016. Messaging apps, in particular, experienced a strong growth of more than 44 percent in 2016, while time spent within messaging apps grew by a factor of 4x.

Simply put, there is only so much room on a smartphone, and an enormous amount of apps available, that for any company to expect their customers to download their app is a giant leap of faith. According to Mary Meeker’s State of the Internet report for 2016, a typical person uses no more than 30 apps actively.

While retailer apps are facing critical times, instant messaging as a preferred way of engagement continues to grow.

Instant message sessions with customer service agents are getting traction and resulting in increased satisfaction among users, but at some point, automation is required to keep operational costs low. That is one reason why the chatbot market is poised to take off. According to Job Pal, $360 million was invested in chatbots in 2016, up from $194 million the previous year, and just $50 million the year before that.

Messaging seems natural, convenient and lacks any friction.

Whether it is through a Chatbot or a live session with an agent, the user interface is the same one that customers use when messaging

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Retail apps are on the decline, but consumers are messaging more and more each year. friends and family, so there is nothing new to learn, making the customer experience simple. There’s no sign-up and sign in necessary, and companies have 24/7 access to their clients, and vice versa.

Retailers might need to rethink their approach to customer engagement and explore beyond the mobile app paradigm into more lasting, seamless modes such as instant-messaging communication.

As a long-term business strategy, chatbots could be an investment that stands the test of time.

Original source: http://bit.ly/2o0gc8H

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FEATURE

The Rise of the

Digitally Native Vertical Brand

by Juliet Carnoy, Senior Marketing Manager at Pixlee

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e’re experiencing a notable transformation in U.S. retail where e-commerce is starting to displace physical retail. Online sales in the United States are expected to reach $523 billion in the next five years, increasing by an average rate of 9.32% a year. Yet no. 1-ranked Amazon is growing faster than the pace of e-commerce itself, forcing brands to rethink their online strategies to compete.

The Rise of the Digitally Native Vertical Brand Some analysts argue that the growth of online sales is a result

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of competitive market dynamics.

E-commerce companies are more efficient in terms of real estate and labor costs and they have higher profit margins than their physical counterparts.

As a result of the rising number of e-commerce companies and the growth of online sales, some physical retailers are dramatically downsizing or going bankrupt. The number of bankruptcy filings by U.S. retailers, with at least $250 million in liabilities, nearly doubled in 2016 and will continue to take center stage in bankruptcy courts in 2017.

But a secondary reason leading to this sea change is a renaissance in innovation among e-commerce players. Jeff Jones, a managing

partner at Andreessen Horowitz, refers to this as ‘e-commerce 2.0.’ However, the brands emerging in the retail sector that are seeing the greatest growth are quite different from their e-commerce predecessors.

These digitally native vertical brands (DNVBs) or v-commerce brands, for short, are trailblazing entirely new approaches to retail.

Digitally native vertical brands, a term coined by Bonobos founder Andy Dunn, follow specific criteria.

While v-commerce brands may ultimately expand offline through select partnerships or brick and mortar stores, they control their own distribution tightly.

The differences between a

FEATURE

digitally native vertical brand and an e-commerce brand are profound.

In addition to differentiation in the unit economics of the businesses and their growth trajectories, there are subtleties in the ways that v-commerce brands shape their identities to inspire consumers.

While it’s still incredibly early in the history of digital vertically integrated brands, many are beginning to turn entire industries on their heads. This report explores some of the major trends that are allowing for digitally native brands’ explosive growth.

Major Trends in Digitally Native Brands’ Innovation

Other companies, such as Everlane, have used their relationships with factories to better market their materials and to instate price transparency for customers on the true cost of their products.

2. ENHANCED BRAND EXPERIENCE Competing on retail alone is too commoditized an approach in the digital age. The number of channels that brands are expected to maintain in order to offer a seamless omnipresent customer experience has grown.

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packaging are designed to be shared on social media. These brands rely heavily on visual content displayed across a multitude of marketing channels. To scale content creation and to meet content needs, DNVBs often rely on user-generated content.

Take Glossier, for example. The beauty brand launched its product line on Instagram as part of its core promotion strategy. Glossier CEO, Emily Weiss, estimates that Glossier owes 90% of its revenue to its fans on Instagram. “It hasn’t been through paid or built marketing spend,” she said. “It’s been mostly word-ofmouth.”

1. DIRECT SOURCING OF MATERIALS One trend that we’re seeing in e-commerce innovation is a shift to direct sourcing. Through a direct sourcing model, retailers can realize between a 2% and 4% average reduction in the cost of goods sold, possibly netting millions of dollars in savings. Pressures on revenue and top-line contraction have created an intense focus on managing these costs.

Digitally native vertical brands are collapsing inefficient legacy supply chains by cutting out intermediate layers. Their direct relationships with suppliers not only allow them to vet the suppliers’ operating standards but also to facilitate a rapid feedback loop so that they can quickly iterate on product design and demand.

With direct sourcing, brands such as Warby Parker and Casper have bypassed antiquated industry standards and cost structures; both companies reaching over $100 million in sales in just a couple of years.

DIGITALLY NATIVE VERTICAL BRANDS ARE MANIACALLY FOCUSED ON THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE AND THEY INTERACT, TRANSACT, AND STORY-TELL TO CONSUMERS PRIMARILY ON THE WEB.

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ANDY DUNN, CEO @ BONOBOS The digital vertically integrated brand is Internet enabled, born digitally, and interacts with customers primarily online. It seeks to build a strong brand lifestyle that speaks to people and shapes their choices. To build such a community, v-commerce brands present and design their products in a highly compelling way and in a consistent voice.

DNVBs’ products meticulously represent the brand identity and both their products and their

Glossier consumers are not outliers, 74% of consumers identify word-of-mouth as a key influencer in their purchasing decision. In 2014, Deloitte’s Digital retail practice started exploring which content drives consumer action. They found that the brand’s advertising drove the majority of consumer action.

Two years later, with the rise of social media and user-generated content, the influence of retailergenerated content had declined to less than a third.

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Why do digitally native vertical brands rely on real customer photos and videos to scale their marketing efforts?

User-generated content builds trust, increases conversion 2X, amplifies the brand, and is an unlimited source of authentic content.

V-commerce brands have a deep understanding of what inspires their community, and they curate user-generated content to further brand image and reach, offer social proof for products, and welcome customers to engage with their brands.

3. ALTERNATIVE DISTRIBUTION METHODS A third major trend that we’re seeing is a shift in retail distribution. In the past, e-commerce consisted mostly of retailers distributing other companies’ goods. However, the reality is that third party e-commerce companies today are forced to go head-tohead with Amazon, which has become increasingly fierce in leveraging its tremendous scale and cost advantage to offer the largest selection of low-priced goods on the Internet.

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DNVBs have found an alternative route: directto-consumer (DTC) models that combine the growth of an e-commerce company with the controlled distribution of proprietary merchandisers. Across the e-commerce landscape, the DTC model is increasingly prevalent Direct-to-consumer sales will reach $16 billion by 2020—a massive increase from the $6.6 billion this channel generated in 2015. Investors have taken note, with 2015 and 2016 seeing the two

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TODAY, A COMBINATION OF PRODUCT, SHOPPER EXPERIENCE, AND CUSTOMER SERVICE COLLECTIVELY BECOME THE BRAND.

Company as examples. By selling directly to consumers, these digitally native consumer packaged goods brands are not only able to control their own distribution but are also able to better control their brand stories and relay messages directly to customers. As a result, they collect massive amounts of customer data that allows them to test and develop new products.

Despite online and mobile sales’ continued growth, 94% of total retail sales still occur at brick-and-mortar stores. Nearly half of US shoppers still prefer to make purchases instore rather than online.

The importance of brick and mortar has not been lost on digital vertically integrated brands. As they mature, DNVBs more often than not extend offline: either through experiential physical retail or through exclusive partnerships.

However, these physical locations are deeply integrated with the overarching brand experience and their openings are heavily marketed with influencers, strategic content, and promotions.

Alo Yoga, founded in 2007, is one such brand.

It was just this year that the company developed an offline presence and decided to open its flagship store in Beverly Hills. The 8,000 square foot location will house a yoga and fitness studio, kombucha on tap, and a lounge area— all very much on brand for the on-trend yoga retailer.

largest direct-to-consumer funding deals ever. There were 64 financing rounds worth $708M in total.

4. INCREASED ENGAGEMENT ON SOCIAL MEDIA

For digitally native vertical brands, the e-commerce channel serves as an enablement layer, not the core asset. Take Harry’s, Dollar Shave Club, and Walker and

Finally, digitally native brands place a tremendous amount of weight on community building through one-to-one marketing.

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Through strong presences on today’s leading social platforms, v-commerce brands bring their customer service and content to the platforms on which their customer base is active.

Bain Consulting found that 67% of consumers claim to use a company’s social media channel for customer service and 72% expect a brand to respond within the hour.

However, five out of six interactions go unanswered by the brand. When companies do engage and respond to customer service requests over social media, those customers spend 20% to 40% more money with the company than other customers do.

Digitally native brands attempt to stay highly engaged on social, but they go beyond the commerce transaction. They build digital

experiences that customers can engage with and share their brand allegiance about. These experiences cater to Millennial and Gen Z customers in particular, who make up the majority of digitally native brands’ customer bases.

the dialogue between people and brands. Retail is at a unique moment where brands can be scaled quickly thanks to technology but can still maintain a one-to-one connection that delivers an elevated customer experience.

Millennials are the first generation to be truly open not only to receiving ads, but also to engaging and sharing them. To optimize on this generational characteristic, digitally native brands do their best to reach out to these customers on social media and to encourage the creation of shareable content.

Digitally native vertical brands have taken advantage of improved technology, social sharing, and shifts in consumer buying behavior to transform the future of retail.

Conclusion The rise of social media has opened

But just like the vertical brands that shaped the era of offline retail (such as Zara, Ikea, and Gap), the digitally native vertical brands on this list will need to continue to watch for horizontal opportunities in order to succeed as the retail landscape continues to evolve.

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INNOVATION

The Future of All Business:

Proximity, Scale and Business Model Innovation

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by Robert C. Wolcott

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e are witnessing the beginning of a proximity onslaught. Emerging technologies and new business models enabling companies to produce and provide products and services ever closer to the moment of demand. Rooftop solar installations producing energy on site. 3D printing generating increasingly complex products at locations far smaller than traditional industrial facilities. Delivery drones plying our roads and skies.

All of these technologies and others, from artificial intelligence and blockchain to Internet of Things and cloud, enable us to distribute sensing, intelligence, decision

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making, production and transactions to ever more granular and numerous locations across the economy. This access to every moment in time and space offers opportunities to serve customers in ways never before envisioned.

This isn’t new. Innovations such as “just-in-time” inventory or the photocopier enabled proximity. The difference today is the magnitude and velocity of the trend. Over the next couple of generations, proximity will create Schumpeterian “gales of creative destruction” remaking every industry.

An axiom explains this trend: customers want what they want, where and when they want it. The

limiting factor has not been a lack of desire but a lack of capabilities.

Businesses simply couldn’t competitively produce and provide most offerings at the moment of demand. This is changing.

Proximity presents profound implications for business. Here we’ll explore two-- scale and business model change— and suggest paths forward.

Scale Ain’t What It Used To Be Proximity changes the competitive relevance of scale. Some pundits argue that technologies such as 3D printing or crowdfunding hand the advantage to individual

INNOVATION

entrepreneurs or smaller companies— a simplistic assessment.

While Uber was small when founded in 2009, it’s not small today. Few of the thousands of companies attempting to leverage Uber-like models will succeed.

Rather than advantaging small entrepreneurs, technologies that enable proximity exchange traditional heft for new forms of scale. Uber’s version of scale confers convenience and coverage. A user can access the same platform in hundreds of cities worldwide.

Scale still matters, but for different reasons.

We today have a global industrial supply chain optimized for scale manufacturing at a distance.

Generally, larger plants equal lower costs. Additive manufacturing will challenge traditional scale advantages particularly in cases where low production runs and/or local responsiveness add value, or where goods currently travel great distances. Consider that perhaps 20% of plastic automotive replacement parts cost more to transport than to manufacture. With a 3D printer, a dealer or consumer could hypothetically download a design file and hit print. Where onsite, on-demand production offers customer value, supply chains will transform.

Today, 3D printing capabilities and infrastructure are limited.

Change over the next few years will be modest. Over the 10 to 20-year horizon, an array of products will succumb to additive manufacturing.

Networked, distributed production will gradually complement or replace massive plants, though the transition won’t be linear. For many products, massive plants will continue to dominate for years. In other cases,

Access to every moment in time and space offers opportunities to serve customers in ways never before envisioned.

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production capacity for existing capacity negatively impacts asset utilization, a key performance metric. But those who don’t make the tough choices risk failure.

Christensen shared the case of large integrated steel manufacturers failing to address the rise of minimills. A similar dynamic will occur across a wide swath of manufacturing.

Established players with longer strategy horizons will be able to phase in distributed manufacturing capacity, perhaps instead of adding traditional capacity. Some players might decide to focus on defending core, traditional capacity, but why risk an “all-in” strategy if you don’t have to? When paradigms truly shift, defending tradition rarely prevails.

New Worlds, New Requirements

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Any robust proximity strategy must include a capability foreign to most enterprises: business model agility. Exploring and scaling business models on an ongoing basis. large 3D printer farms might win.

Still others will leverage numerous distributed, small-scale production capabilities, owned by themselves or others, benefiting from a scale of access rather than scale of ownership.

Hybrid models offer a path for incumbents. Continue optimizing traditional assets while simultaneously experimenting with production closer to demand. Those that do so are more likely to be ready when their customers are.

The transition will be difficult.

Substituting new distributed

In the 19th century, chemical industry pioneers BASF and DuPont invented the corporate R&D lab. What we might call the business model lab represents a 21st Century analogue, not replacing but complementing R&D. Ecosystems like Silicon Valley and Israel have succeeded in part because of widespread experimentation with new models. Start-up accelerators like Techstars or Y Combinator and innovation ecosystems like 1871 in Chicago are essentially business model labs, rapidly iterating combinations of technologies and business designs.

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INNOVATION

Smart incumbents are becoming more aggressive at such experimentation. GE created FastWorks to bring the power of start-up culture in to its centibillion dollar enterprise. FastWorks enables rapid product and business concept iteration with customers even in heavy industry or regulated environments like power generation and healthcare. It’s a challenging cultural evolution that their CEO, Jeff Immelt, and Vice Chair, Beth Comstock, have personally championed. They know it’s essential for GE’s future.

Many companies will find their current offerings marginalized or irrelevant.

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Proximity As Foresight Most businesses consider how new technologies might help them do what they already do, just better.

This isn’t enough. The more potent opportunities and threats arise from technologies enabling what was hitherto impossible.

Alas, it’s tough envisioning what has yet to arise. An exercise with proximity can help. First, consider your company’s offerings. What is their value for your customers? Not your specific products or services, but their value to customers and/or their customers.

Now imagine 20 years from now. Assume that this value can be

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completely produced and provided proximate to demand. For the exercise, don’t argue about whether this will be possible. Assume it will be so. How might your industry look different? How might your company fit within this new world? Many companies will find their current offerings marginalized or irrelevant.

Many companies will find their current offerings marginalized or irrelevant.

This exercise reminds me of a question I learned from Mike Johnson, the retired CEO of Castrol, the global lubricants leader. Under Johnson’s leadership, Castrol went from strength to strength, but he knew that in the future some customers might no longer need

lubricants (e.g.—electric vehicles require no engine oil). In 2010, Johnson challenged his team to consider, “How will Castrol make money when people no longer need lubricants?” Castrol identified opportunities and built a portfolio of relevant projects— options on the future—through their corporate venturing arm, Castrol InnoVentures.

Customers don’t care about your products. They want to solve problems and live better lives.

Companies that best offer this-- a moving target-- will win. Release your assumptions, consider how proximity might remake your industry, and get to work. You can be sure others are.

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21 Common Mistakes Ruining Your Website – and Free Tools to Fix Them

by TEAM TOP4

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very business wants to launch a website that is going to set them apart from the rest of the people in their industry. But hey, everyday, 822,240 websites get connected to the internet adding to the list of 644 million websites that are currently online.

All are fiercely fighting for the attention of visitors, but how many of them are really achieving that?

It is a scary fact, if you are thinking of launching your website.

It would be even worse if some of them managed to land on your site, only to find out your website is riddled with mistakes.

Tools you can use Tool: What It Does The Pit Honest feedback from the awesome folks at inbound.org, group moderated by Joel Klettke KickoffLabs: Free Live Landing Page Review by KickOff Labs Page Fights: Get your landing page reviewed by conversion experts Oli Gardner, Peep Laja & Tommy Walker Unbounce Checklist: A 50-Point Checklist For Creating The Ultimate Landing Page Tools you can use Keep these tools near you to save yourself from utter embarrassment.

Tool: What It Does Ginger: Improve writing by checking grammar, spelling error.

Now the Good News: To get you ahead in this hyper-competitive battle, we have put together a list of 21 best practices. These tips may seem basic at times, but if used correctly, they can work wonders.

Grammarly: Eliminates writing mistakes and indicates how to enhance writing

It is not an exhaustive website launch checklist by any means, but it contains many useful favourites.

Readability-Score: Great tool to find out about how readable are your text.

1. Proofread Typos are embarrassing. Imagine a visitor landed on your web page, only to find out that you spelt the industry name wrong. Now you have made the process harder for this visitor to believe in your product or service, since you cannot spell it right.

Heminwayapp: Detect complex sentences & provide hints to simplify the copy

2. Landing Page Review Clarity is the key to conversion. A human being has an attention span of only 8.25 seconds. When a visitor reaches your page, within this short amount of time you have to make him understand the purpose of your website. Nobody will go through your help guide to find out what your product does.

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3. Test Usability Your website looks stunning; it can rival any Renaissance-era painting.

Your friends cannot stop talking about how elegant your website looks. However, did it ever occur to you that you may have put too much importance on the design, and not enough on usability?

It is always a good practice to test the steps a visitor has to go through to complete any task. Find out where they get stuck and try to simplify the process.

Tools you can use Check these tools to measure your site’s usability.

Tool: What It Does Peek by UserTesting: Free 5-minute video of a real person using your website Five Second Test: Find out what people remember about your page in 5 seconds

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Clue: Do people really understand what you are trying to communicate?

Check My Color: Check the colour contrast of your page Spur: 7 different tools to critique your website and find out what’s working Daltonize: Color correction for colour blinds or colour vision deficiency (CVD)

4. Choose Simple & Responsive Design What do Google, Facebook, Twitter, & all the major websites have in common? They do not go overboard with the design. It only takes a visitor only 50 milliseconds to judge (based on the look) of your website. So stop thinking about all the complex website designing ideas you have in your mind.

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Just pick a theme or template that’s responsive and can serve any device. These days wherever you step foot, you will see people staring at their mobile phone. According to Flurry Insights, we spend over 3 hours a day looking at our mobile devices.

Tools you can use Paste your site’s URL to below tool and check whether your current site is responsive or not.

Tool: What It Does MobileTest.me: Test your websites in smartphone & tablet emulators HubSpot Device Lab: A tool built

by HubSpot to test your site on different devices Am I Responsive?: Test how your site looks on desktop, laptop, iPad & iPhone Responsive.is: Check your site’s responsiveness on various devices Responsinator: The Responsinator is designed to test responsive websites

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on different device Google Webmaster’s Mobile Guide: Find out if your site is mobile friendly and how to implement the best practices.

the data and turn it into usable insights.

Tools you can use Check out this free analytics application, it is just waiting to arm you with valuable insights.

5. Test & Fix The Bugs

Tool: What It Does

Browser compatibility testing should be one of your key focuses while launching a website. Your key features and styles should function across multiple browsers. Keep track of the releases of major browsers that might affect your website, since browsers are constantly developing and releasing new versions.

Google Analytics; Free & powerful program to track visitor analytics

Tools you can use Tool: What It Does Browsershots: Convenient way to check browser compatibility Net Renderer: Check Internet Explorer compatibility Browserling: Live interactive crossbrowser testing Spoon: Test your website on various browsers Testingbot: Cross-browser testing with Selenium in the cloud Markup Validation: Check the markup of Web documents CSS Lint: CSS code quality tool

6. Set up Analytics To Know More About Your Visitors Installing web analytics should be higher on your to-do list. Without having any web analytics installed, you will fail to understand your audience.

By using analytics, you will be able to understand what’s working and what’s not. Based on the analysis, you can refine your advertising, spending, and content.

You will be armed with gigantic amounts of data. It is up to you now to decide how you can analyse

Piwik: Best Open source web analytics alternative to Google Analytics OWA: Another open source analytics application to track and analyse your visitors

7. Setup Webmaster Tool If you are not still using any webmaster tool, start using one. It is a good habit to check the webmaster once a week. It lets you see how search engines see your website.

And, with lots of critical information such as, which keyword brought traffic, submit sitemap, backlink profile, crawl rate, crawl error, mobile usability, security issues, and many other measurement factors.

Tools you can use Check out the two most popular webmaster tools Tool: What It Does Google Webmaster: Tool Monitor & maintain your site’s status in Google Search result Bing Webmaster Tool: Helps you to add your website to Bing index crawler

8. Submit Sitemap A sitemap is a list of your page URLs that helps search engine crawlers to discover & get a detailed understanding of your website. If your website is new and not lot of people linking to it, submitting sitemap to search engines through webmaster tools is one of the best

DESIGN

ways to get your site indexed by the search engines.

Tools you can use By using these tools, you can create a sitemap of your website Tool: What It Does XML Sitemaps: Build an XML sitemap online

data of your website. If you are using WordPress, you can read this detailed guide about WordPress Backups.

Tools you can use But if you are looking for more advanced tools, check these tools Tool: What It Does

XML Sitemap Generator: Generate an XML sitemap

ManageWP: Manage websites from a dashboard, update, backup, install and many more features

9. Monitor Website Uptime

WP Remote: Monitor and manage your WordPress sites from a single dashboard

Your precious website is up and running, all the hard work paid off.

You went to bed hoping that when you check the site in the morning you will see the awesomeness. You got up in the morning, rushed to your computer, only to find out that your website was down. To save you from those moments, there are many tools out there.

Tools you can use Checks below tools see if this helps: Tool: What It Does Uptime Robot: Monitor & get notified when your website goes down StatusCake: Website downtime monitoring

10. Backup Your Website Backups are extremely important.

According to the survey done by CodeGuard, 24% of the respondents said, “This site is my livelihood, I’d pay almost anything for a complete restore.” Prepare for the worst, you do not know when your website will be wiped out by a malicious application. You may have stored a copy of your original website, but you will lose all the historical

InfiniteWP: Manage updates, backup, install themes and plugins BackupWordPress: Automated backups for WordPress powered websites

11. Prevent Spam Some marketers use not so creative way to market their product or services on the internet. Every time you login to your email or look at your website’s comments section, you see them flooded with get rich quick comments.

Tools you can use Use these free tools to tackle these issues

a system set up to prevent hackers so that they cannot vandalise your business. Use professional tools to constantly monitor security.

And, it would be really awesome, if you have someone who really know their way around website security.

Tools you can use Here is a list of some widely known security tools: Tool: What It Does Sucuri SiteCheck: Scan your website for known malware, blacklisting status, website errors, and out-of-date software Wordfence: Best WordPress plugin for securing your website iThemes Security: Another great plugin for WordPress to secure your website

13. Focus on Website Performance

Plus, after Google has placed emphasis on site speed as one of the ranking factors, it has become even more important.

Tools you can use

Akismet: Prevents comment spam

Run your website through the tools below and see what you should optimise to increase your page speed.

Limit Login Attempt: Limit number of login retry attempts to eliminate brute force attack

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A slow website only frustrates a user and you should not forget the previously mentioned short human attention span. Microsoft studies show you will lose visitors if you are only 250 milliseconds slower than your competition’s website.

Tool: What It Does Disqus: Add Disqus Comment System to create a better community

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Tool: What It Does

12. Security

PageSpeed Insights: A powerful tool built by Google to analyse and optimise your website.

The Internet is still pretty wild, although it is getting better.

Nonetheless, it is safe to have

Pingdom Website Speed Test

GTMetrix: Analyses web page’s speed performance

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DESIGN

Test the load time of your page & find out what element taking more time to load Webpagetest: Website speed test from many locations and browsers Yslow: Analyse the website based on Yahoo!’s rules for highperformance websites

14. Run your website Through a Grader

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Modern technology is progressing at a lightning pace. It is easy to fall behind. And if you don’t have a technical team, it’s even harder to identify where did you fall behind. Like United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once said “But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

Knowem SMO: Check if your website is optimised for social sharing

15. Setup Permalink URL plays a crucial role in on-site search engine optimisation. Setup permalink for your URLs to set unique, short & keyword focused URL for your post or pages. Plus, making your URLs human readable is great for user experience.

See what Matt Cutts, Head of Google

Tools you can use Try these tools to know how your website ranks against the current standards and measure if your marketing efforts are lacking in certain areas.

Tool: What It Does Woorank: Detailed overview of your site in terms of SEO, Mobile, Usability & Social Quicksprout: Analyse website, social media and competitor analysis SEO Sitecheckup: Get a detailed SEO checkup

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ranking potential

Webspam Team has to say about putting keywords in the URL.

16. Monitor Your Brand Mention Only one bad testimonial is enough to destroy your online reputation.

You should have brand mention monitoring set up to rectify those testimonials and lead to a more positive outcome.

Tools you can use

Nibbler: Analyse SEO, Code quality, URL format, internal linking etc.

Below are the tools that can help you in social listening:

Feed The Bot: Check your site against Google Webmaster Guidelines

Tool: What It Does

Hubspot Marketing Grader: Review your website’s marketing effort

Mention: Set an alert for your brand and find out what’s being said about you in all the social media

SEOWorkers Analysis Tool: Analyse and measure your website’s

Topsy: Search and analyse your brand mentions on Twitter

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Google Alerts: Set an alert for your brand and monitor the web

17. Target Keywords & Create Valuable Content The Hopi native American proverb says, “Those who tell the stories rule the world.” Setting aside all the philosophy, content marketing can be a great source for unlocking steady organic traffic. A study published by Conductor shows, 64% of all website visitors come from organic search.

So, you know what you have to do, target a keyword that relates to your product or service and write valuable content on that subject.

While creating content, keep in mind that people do not search for your solution, they search for their problem. Find out what your potential customers are asking online, try to identify their pain point. Then, create content that helps them to solve their problems. Another reason is that, generally, people will not buy from you, if they do not know what you can do for them.

Still, think it is not how you should compete with big brands; Check out what Matt Cutts, Head of Google Webspam Team has to say about creating content: Tools you can use Some valuable resources that will help you on your content marketing journey: Tool: What It Does Google Trends: Find out what’s trending on Google Search Google Adwords Keyword Planner: List of keywords that people are looking for Keywordtool.io: Best alternative of Google Keyword Planner YouTube Trends Dashboard: See

DESIGN

what’s trending on YouTube, based on location & age Faqfox: Find out what people are asking online Buzzsumo: Find successful content Open Site Explorer: Analyse backlinks of successful content CoSchedule Headline Analyzer: Construct a perfect headline for your article Blog Title Generator: Generate blog title and get ideas WordPress SEO by Yoast: Optimise your website for better search traffic

18. Setup Newsletter And Build An Email List You have done all the hard work; People came to your website, they liked your awesome product or content, but wouldn’t it be silly if you have to rely on search engines to get them back to your website again.

They may forget or maybe it is hard to remember your product name after a long period. But, it would be helpful for both you and your visitors, if you set up a newsletter sign-up form and collect their email addresses. So, whenever you have some cool information that you want to share with them, they are just one email away.

Tools you can use Some free tools to power your email marketing campaign: Tool: What It Does MailChimp: Send 12,000 emails per month for free Icegram: Capture leads from your blog SumoMe: Free tools to grow your website

19. Utilise Social Media People mistakenly identify social media as a selling tool, but

this is how you should not use social media. Formulate a social media strategy and use it as an engagement tool. A tool for listening to customers, gather some awesome testimonials. Use social media as a tool to connect to potential customers. Think of all the cool Facebook pages you have liked, you liked them because they are either funny, helpful or kept you updated about a certain industry. No one wants to like a page who shares sales pitches, like an auto responder.

Tools you can use Some of the best tools to make your social media management less painful: Tool: What It Does Buffer: Must have tool, if you are looking for a post scheduler that can handle multiple social accounts HootSuite: Another tool for managing multiple social accounts Followerwonk: Learn about people who is doing the sharing

Squarespace Logo: Free logo generator by Squarespace

21. Create a Call To Action & Test It Often So now, you have so many visitors to your website that you can fill a stadium with it. The average time on the website is quite high, so that means that they are enjoying the content, but none of them is taking the next step (buying your product /service or whatever objective you have).

Take a look at your website again.

Did you tell your visitors what to do next? It can be possible that visitors are interested, but they are confused about what the next step is. To remove this confusion and guide them towards your desired action, place a button stating what people should do next.

Resources You Should Check Out

Canva: A free design tool for creating images to post on blogs, social media

Check out these awesome articles to get a clear understanding about CTA placement:

20. Create an Awesome Logo

How To Design Call to Action Buttons That Convert by Michael Aagaard

Throughout history, logos have played a key role in representing exclusivity. All the iconic brands that you can think of, have a simple, yet memorable logo. The power of a good logo is often underrated. It creates an identity, makes you look unique and separates you from the crowd.

Tools you can use Use these tools to design a logo for your business: Tool: What It Does Hipster Logo Generator: Create a simple logo without touching any photo editing software.

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Everything You Need to Know About the Psychology of the Call to Action by Jeremy Smith 21 Call to Action Examples and 3 Rules for Effective CTAs by Kathryn Aragon In this article, we talked about some powerful techniques and how to make your website distinguishable. Although it’s not like you have to follow all of them, requirements may vary according to the size of your business and how much time you are willing to spend on it.

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social media

What Actually Works

I

on Social Media

n April 2015, small business directory Manta surveyed 540 small business owners for their insights on social media return on investment (ROI). 59% percent report that they did not see ROI from their social media activities.

The SME report also revealed that just 33% of business owners find Facebook marketing efforts effective. Moreover, B2C marketers also have a more positive take than B2B, with 51% of B2C marketers finding Facebook effective, compared to just 36% of B2B respondents.

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One of the fat challenges social media marketers face is data collecting and consequently making sense of it. More often than not, both marketers and business owners are being pulled different directions in their operations neglecting the time and effort required to utilise social media marketing.

Some business owners pour more money into advertising hoping to increase sales overnight. As a result, they are often disappointed and end up completely disavowalling social.

The reasons they are unhappy are often around the following: content sucks and/or campaigns were only run for a short period of time, or they were unable to attribute any sales to their social media activities.

Both social media insights and Google Analytics are still dark waters for many organisations and marketers. While I am not a genie and unable to make you know everything about GA, I can definitely help you improve your social content, or at least try my best.

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You see, social media is social meaning this is where people hang out, socialise, share kids’ pictures, duck face selfies and crossed legs on the beach snaps. This is no news to anyone. But if it’s no news, how come when it comes to business, we aren’t sharing the same content we share when it comes to personal life? Why when it comes to business kids, duck faces and beach legs are no longer good? Because we’re afraid to appear stupid, not serious and unprofessional. We know how children snaps, selfie shoots and beach leg portraits are for our personal use only. Right? Wrong!

If you are selling your producer/ service to people, why do you have to discount things people like and ant to do.

Why businesses don’t share social content on their social media channels?

I gave a “Creating Brand Awareness Online” talk at the very first Leaders in Heels’ workshop where I shared the basic 5 keys to attracting followers on social. These don’t get old; thus I am going to run

you through them. And then I’ll show you some mind-blowing real life examples, you know, so you believe me.

Be Engaging Awesome social media content is awesome because it is planned, consistent and relevant. And, of course, engaging! How often, while scrolling through your Facebook feed, you click on something like ‘we are professional lawyers with great expertise in the industry blah blah’ because you really want to find out more? How often? Honesty?

Last year I wrote an article mentioning influential role of emotions in consumers’ behavior – it might worth re-visiting the core data. Advertising research shows that emotional response to an ad has far greater influence on a consumer’s reported intent to buy a product than does the ad’s content. However the engaging content is what making the purchasers a purchase.

The main motive of products usage by consumers, a study

INNOVATION

suggests, revolves around objectives either to create a sense of pleasant feeling through purchase or to attain it through senses and to obtain emotional arousal. There are varieties of product purchases which have negligible or very small functional value; but still these products are purchased purely for their ability to arouse emotions.

With social media, you are able to reverse engineer it designing your content with pleasant feelings in mind. Does the ‘we are professional lawyers with great expertise in the industry’ makes you feel anything pleasant? How about an image of you sipping a cocktail in Santorini? I think this is much better now. Find what your audience gets excited about.

Be Entertaining This is a great opportunity to introduce humor to your social media content strategy. Although sometimes businesses are unsure how entertaining they should be, finding your perfect balance isn’t very hard.

When planning what you are going to post on social media, introduce humor as one of your themes.

Be Visual Here, at Content Queen, we are very proud of our high quality content.

We try our best to bring the feel and the look of expensive brands to the smaller size businesses making them look irresistible.

A lot of your content production success will depend upon testing and figuring out your perfect audience. And if you know who they are, the job is half done. However, most organisations don’t have a laser clear understanding of their current and potential customers.

Once you know your audience

you know what they like ad want to see online and simply give it to them.

High quality imaginary and video production can be time and resources consuming and overall challenging. This is why our team puts a lot of effort into designing the right content for you.

Why do we care about the looks?

Evaluative criteria, the study reveals, are certain characteristics that are important to yo when you are considering a purchase. Some of these characteristics are more important than others. For example, the size of a backpack and the price might be more important than the color—unless, say, the color is the one you really hate.

Marketing professionals have been working hard on convincing consumers that the evaluative criteria you are considering reflect the strengths of their products.

For example, you might not have thought about the weight or durability of the backpack you want to buy. However, a backpack manufacturer such as Osprey might remind you through magazine ads, packaging information, and its Web site that you should pay attention to these features – features that happen to be key selling points of its backpacks.

Well thought through visual content helps highlight key features and benefits. Moreover, good visuals may easily convey the outcome consumers want to obtain. For example, a desire to travel can be enhanced with the help of an image (or better, video) of a happy (looking alike your audience) person sipping a cocktail on the each or entering a gorgeous temple or riding an elephant.

Be Valuable It often feels like this goes without saying; but we cannot be more

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wrong. Being valuable to your customers is often confused with flogging your product. We all have awesome offerings and we know that our clients will benefit from getting them. However, they don’t know it yet. Telling them that might not help you sell.

However, telling them about your awesome offering through a story, a joke, a testimonial or a piece of advice can be the content to go for.

Sometimes, cold selling your offering may also work, for example, flesh sale or irresistible offer.

Being valuable means being helpful, useful, educational and being the go-to source. Who wouldn’t want this?! No one is born into being an authority but can become one.

Be Shareable All of the above, when come together, make your content shareable.

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There are generally 2 reasons why people share something on social media: 1. When bumping into an awesome piece of content they like and think to themselves: ‘Shoot! I wish I came up with that!‘ 2. We often want to look a little better, taller, brighter, smarter, etc… thus we share content on social media we believe helps us look the way we want.

Shareable content can be entertaining or educational (or both) but it s always valuable to someone hence shared.

Content that sparks strong positive emotions, content with images, news and lists tend to get the most shares online.

If you are unsure what to post on your social media channels, download our 50 ideas for your posting planning.

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A.I.

Artificial Intelligence on the path to Personal Customer Experience

by JosĂŠ de la Rubia

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Artificial intelligence may sound scary at first.

It conjures up images of robots that outpace us intellectually and eventually dominate us. But we actually come into contact with AI on a daily basis. And we are increasingly gaining an appreciation of the convenience it provides. So how can we take advantage of intelligent self-learning systems in marketing?

T

he facial recognition on Facebook photos, the page and contact suggestions we get from LinkedIn, Google ads for the exact same products we were just looking for – these online features that we use on a daily basis are not possible without artificial intelligence. AI-based technologies also perform valuable IT security tasks. Algorithms are capable of detecting the patterns of hacker attacks faster and better than the best cybercrime experts and then prepare the security systems precisely for these threats.

On the path to personal customer experience In the world of marketing, artificial intelligence helps analyse the exponentially growing data

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quantities and detect patterns in order to make predictions. Machine learning helps the systems become more intelligent, because they learn from experience as we do.

Targeting, which refers to specifically displaying advertising or other marketing activities to specific target groups, is only possible using artificial intelligence. AI is used here to find those users, for whom certain advertising media has been designed. The product recommendations that we are familiar with from Amazon and others are also based on this technology. To achieve this, AI analyses the behaviour of countless users in the background to find items that are highly likely to meet the needs of a consumer, who has just clicked on a certain product.

Artificial intelligence also has remarkable potential for e-commerce applications.

Intelligent systems modify the landing pages, product listings, discounts, services and prices in real-time in web marketplaces.

As a result, AI shapes a dynamic and empathetic, personal shopping experience.

Advertising follows users Retargeting has become one of the most effective online

advertising tools. It consists of delayed, cross platform advertising for users who visit a web site and then leave again.

Retargeting targets potential customers, who have already been

A.I.

in contact with the provider. This usually comprises visitors to a site (site retargeting), but can also include other target groups such as Facebook fans or those who have viewed a promotional video for example. The contact is considered a signal that the viewer is generally interested in the product or offer.

As soon as a user visits the site and takes a closer look at a specific offering, a small tracking code (cookie) is stored in his or her browser. The user can then be recognized on his journey through the web and his or her particular interest or general personal data can be taken into consideration. As long as they navigate through the internet on pages within the display network, on which the retargeting campaign has been launched, they will receive advertising which is more or less tailored to their interests.

This attention-grabbing form of advertising is particularly suitable for: Sale/conversion Visitors, who have left a web site without conversion (e.g. shopping cart cancellation), are reminded of the offer and ideally brought back to the site.

Branding Image and branding campaigns can be extended using retargeting by repeatedly pushing the message into the user’s (sub)consciousness.

Synergy effects Retargeting is also suitable when it comes to the creative interaction of various advertising campaigns.

Example: if a user is interested in product A, then they might also be interested in product B. In addition to this, “similar target groups” can be addressed, which show similarities to web site visitors and their intentions

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the ads and refusing to purchase the goods or services advertised.

Artificial intelligence provides companies with a tool for making more targeted use of their marketing budgets. with regard to specific factors.

Research conducted by the service provider myThings stresses the prominent role of retargeting in online advertising. Out of 116 e-commerce executives from major companies in the United States and Europe, 32 percent are planning increased retargeting spending this year and 45 percent also want to try mobile retargeting. According to an earlier study by AdRoll, retargeting is about 20% cheaper than traditional display advertising, while being twice as effective in terms of click-through rate (CTR).

However, online advertising that follows users for days or weeks often also results in disinterest or rejection. This is reflected by the IAB internet advertising revenue report conducted by PwC and sponsored by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), for which approximately 6,000 Internet users were surveyed. A third of those interviewed felt seriously disturbed by repeated advertising, which is why many use ad blockers and hide the advertising completely. About 30% of the users deliberately punish “annoying advertisers” by ignoring

In order to avoid such negative effects, retargeting should necessarily entail a differentiated campaign strategy. Tact is required: the better the advertising is designed, the less it is seen by users as such.

Providing crucial momentum at just the right time Artificial intelligence provides companies with a tool for making more targeted use of their marketing budgets. For example, they can filter their database to find customers who respond to specific activities or who are interested in specific products due to the situation they are currently in. When thought through to the end, this will enable marketers to identify those customers, who need an stimulus at a specific time to spur a purchase decision.

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Artificial intelligence can also be used successfully in other areas of marketing like display advertising or content marketing by calculating the most successful advertising space or automatically optimizing text for search engines.

Personalization instead of ‘one size fits all’ The described usage scenarios illustrate what is already possible today. But this only represents the beginning of a very exciting development, which ultimately allows for automatically tailoring online marketing measures to fit specific user groups based on a variety of customer data. The good news, however, is still the fact that artificial intelligence simply helps marketers optimize their measures and campaigns. Even the smartest algorithms cannot (yet) replace human creativity.

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UGC

I Came for Content.

I Left With a Tribe.

by Zach Messler

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W

e take for granted something precious.

In fact, at times it virtually disappears.

And without it, we become less human.

What is it?

Personal connection.

You may think you can capture personal connection online.

And, you’d be right.

You may think you can find it over the phone.

Right again!

Skype! Facetime! Hangouts!

Yes! Yes! Yes! But…here’s the thing…Even if you take advantage of all those communication channels, you still miss out on something much better… much deeper.

This was the idea behind an experiment dreamed up by the amazing Sarah Elkins, a selfdescribed storyteller—and truth be told—one of the finest human beings you could ever meet.

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For lasting, meaningful personal connection, there is nothing like live and in person.

How do I know all this?

I attended the inaugural No Longer Virtual Conference last week in Atlanta.

This was no ordinary conference.

Always interesting…at times, it was intimate.

At times, energizing.

At times, so much more: Fascinating Eye-opening Perspective-shifting Intriguing Touching Hilarious Heartwarming Tear-jerking Useful Educational And…downright fan-freakintastic.

So, what made it so great?

The people.

Sales stars Marketing pros IT execs Storytellers Badass writers Customer engagement leaders Incredible entrepreneurs Social media influencers Gamification enthusiasts Neuroscientists People management experts Even a certified Grammar Goddess!

The subject matter.

Story-telling that resonates We learned how to identify the pivot points we all experience in our lives, and how to turn those stories into engagement magnets—able to pull in any audience.

UGC

Customer experience strategies We learned how to tune in to everyone’s unique story to improve relationships and build loyalty.

Behavior change We learned a system for transforming behaviors and shaping culture.

Audience engagement We learned that to stand out, it helps to be opinionated.

Brain science We learned the ins and outs of how the brain works, the importance—to your brain—of breaking away from habitual thinking, and why red wine quite possibly could be the best drink in the world.

Sales approaches We learned a sales approach where you don’t sell a product at all…you sell the experience of buying the product.

Personal branding We learned to more easily connect with our audiences by being intentional and authentic.

Twitter explosion We learned—step-by-step—how to increase our impact on Twitter. One great method? The #supertweet.

Empathy building We learned to step out of our comfort zones in an attempt to uncover and better understand the perspectives and feelings of others.

The collegiality.

100% interactive sessions Networking Amazing meals Crazy antics Engaging discussions Inside jokes And so much more I cannot even begin to explain All those connections you make on LinkedIn and other social channels?

Often, they’re fleeting…they come and go.

You think you get to know someone...

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And, there’s always something missing.

Across the Internet, a connection is virtual. It’s not quite real.

Across the table?

Sharing meals…ideas…inspiration?

No Longer Virtual connected us.

Nah…No Longer Virtual BONDED us.

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There will forever be only one inaugural NLV conference.

And for many of us, it was the beginning of incredible relationships and what could be life-long friendships.

The good news? It worked…

I’ll be at the second annual No Longer Virtual conference, unequivocally. And the third…and the fourth…and whatever comes next.

I feel like I’ve said it so many times since last Friday. This was a different conference experience...

I came for connection. I came for content. I left with a tribe.

Original source: http://bit.ly/2npuDAl

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IoT

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Will IoT Save Retail?

by Luis Salazar, Tech Entrepreneur & CEO

A

s I write this article, one of the trending posts on Reddit shows a 7x price difference between a brick and mortar large office supplies store and Amazon on a Cat-5 Ethernet cable. There are hundreds of comments and most point to the fact that we will always vote with our wallets and that retailers might still survive but they better get their houses in order and address the inefficiencies behind those outrageous prices. Will the Internet of Things (IoT) and its Connected Devices save retail?

The convenience of eCommerce goes beyond pricing, and retail

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stores are taking a hit, as illustrated

by Macy’s, Sears, Sports Authority, and Office Depot closing doors at many locations in 2016. Can IoT technology stop this trend in its tracks? The rise of IoT in retail shows that many companies feel this is the case, and perhaps their saving grace, but there are causes for concern when it comes to connecting retail commerce to the Internet, and most companies are either not ready or do not know how to go about it.

In recent years, the retail sector has been investing big in the Internet of Things. Juniper Research forecasts that by 2020, retailers worldwide will spend

$2.5B on IoT-related hardware alone, including beacons, RFID tags, sensors, and their installation costs.

This investment represents a nearly fourfold increase from 2015.

IoT can indeed deliver substantial benefits for the industry. For example, one of the biggest points of waste in retail is the management of inventory, as overstocking, understocking and the resulting deep discounting of those products cost the industry more than one trillion a year in missed opportunities.

The National Retail Federation reports that retailers spend $175 billion a year on IT technology,

IoT

but that empirical data shows the minute you finish your inventory, it is 10 percent inaccurate due to human error. IoT Sensors could provide retail companies with increased visibility and tracking abilities, and therefore more accurate and up-todate inventory management.

Many big name companies are banking on this and hoping to offer compelling customer experiences that can’t be delivered by e-commerce. The new Amazon Go stores have been hyped to a substantial degree recently in the news, where customers will be able to walk in, grab their items, and leave without ever checking out with a clerk. They are also beginning to connect our fridges, washing machines, and other appliances to the internet so that they can order supplies on our behalf. Target is testing different IoT projects such as the “connected living experience” at a Minneapolis store which will educate customers through product displays. Walmart and Disney are also incorporating IoT to track customer data and deliver insight.

However, many are concerned about what this means for companies and their clients

regarding privacy and cybersecurity.

IoT privacy and security was one of the core topics that more than 100 tech leaders from different sectors and regions brought to the attention of lawmakers in DC on Feb 14, 2017, as part of the CompTIA event. The supply chain in IoT is complicated, and there is a void concerning standards designed to ensure the privacy of consumers and the security of the Retailers embracing IoT. At that event, a panel of lawmakers, industry experts,

Many big name companies are banking on this and hoping to offer compelling customer experiences that can’t be delivered by e-commerce.

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and representatives from the NSA explained how the security exposure starts with the lack of visibility of every component and the particular exposure of each chip, device and communication channel.

CIO reports that as companies roll out these sensors and devices to connect consumer appliances to online grocery carts and grocery items to apps, hackers can get into the gateway to the back-end server where data is transmitted.

Each device or sensor is a point of vulnerability to hackers, and considering IoT still lacks security standardization being in its beginning stages, retail companies open themselves up to significant risk with their customers’ personal data.

One such security risk lies in IoT’s dependence on periodic updates.

However, less than one of every two manufacturers offer remote updates for their smart “things.”

Manufacturers do not conduct these updates themselves and rely on their customers to perform this function, but less than a third of users update their connected devices as soon as updates become available. That percentage is set only to get worse as customers have more and more devices to manage. If retailers wish to protect their consumer data, they need to take on more responsibility themselves; otherwise, they will expose themselves to liabilities and business losses.

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Leading retailers embracing the internet of things are very likely going to create new, promising value in their business and may improve the slump in brick and mortar sales. The Retail sector must have plans in place to address the security risks associated with these devices. Otherwise, their innovation, investments, and efforts will just create new and more expensive problems that will accelerate the pace at which they go out of business.

Original source: http://bit.ly/2nGzBur

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brand

Do You Know What Customers Think of

Your Brand

by Madeline Jacobson

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t doesn’t matter if you think your brand has the potential to be the next Apple or Nike—what matters is what your target audience thinks of your brand.

discovery exercise:

Understanding brand perception is essential to succeeding in a competitive marketplace, according to Brian Woyt, founder of the branding agency Wolf & Missile. “Ultimately, your brand is what the marketplace says it is,” Woyt says, “Not what you think it is.”

2. Determine the consequences of the attributes (With the power of FidoVac5000, pet owners will be able to suck up pet hair from all surfaces).

To be long-lasting, your brand must form a connection with your audience.

That connection is based on trust, and your brand earns trust when it remains true to what your audience expects of it. Unfortunately, it’s hard to remain true to your customers’ expectations when you don’t understand those expectations in the first place.

You need to research how customers view your brand so that you can develop resources that meet your audience’s expectations.

Brand Discovery: When You’re Starting from Scratch If you’ve been in business for a while, you’ll be able to use real customer feedback to understand your audience’s perception of your brand (more on that later). But if you’re new on the scene, you won’t have any marketplace feedback yet. Instead, Woyt recommends performing a brand

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1. List the attributes or features of your product or service. (e.g. The FidoVac 5000 has a power rating of 8.5 amps.)

3. List the benefits of your product or service. (FidoVac5000 owners will enjoy the appearance of a cleaner home and won’t have to worry about pet hairs getting stuck to their clothes when they sit down.)

4. Determine the value of your product or service to your customer. (FidoVac5000 owners will enjoy greater peace of mind in their clean home.)

This exercise should help you move from the features of your product (which you already know) to the value of your product (which is what customers care about).

Once you’ve identified the value your product or service offers, you can use this to define your brand.

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Positioning: How Your Customers See You vs. Your Competitors Your brand doesn’t exist in a vacuum.

Like it or not, most of your potential customers are weighing you against your competitors. To stand out, you’ll need to determine what makes your brand different from similar brands.

Ask yourself: What does my audience want that I can deliver but my competitors can’t?

Woyt suggests taking the following steps to position your brand: 1. Research the competition.

2. Create a four-quadrant map of the

brand

competition’s positioning, as in the example below.

3. Add your brand to the positioning map.

4. Ask yourself what you need to do to minimize overlap or set your brand apart.

Next, you should write a brand positioning statement. This can be a sentence or two that states your brand’s unique value in the marketplace. To write this statement, ask yourself:

To whom do my products/services appeal and why?

What are the people at my company passionate about?

What promise is my brand making to the customer?

Understanding Brand Perception If you’re an established business, you should be talking to real customers (and potential customers) to better understand how they see your brand.

Conduct surveys by phone and email, and organize focus groups if possible.

Questions to ask your customers include:

brand and other keywords in online publications

What attracted you to our brand instead of a competitor? Or, if you chose a competitor, why did you go with them?

Hootsuite: Lets you view brand mentions (on social channels, blogs, and news sites) in real-time and gauge brand sentiment

What are the biggest frustrations you experience when trying to do business with companies in our industry?

Talkwalker: Lets you track mentions across all major social channels, print publications, and TV and radio broadcasts globally

Have you ever recommended our brand to another person? If so, who? And why?

Buzzsumo: Lets you view social shares of your brand’s content and identify specific users who have shared your content

What’s the first word that comes to mind when you hear our brand name?

In addition to interviewing customers directly, you can also use social monitoring tools to track what people are saying about your brand on social media and review sites.

There are dozens of social monitoring tools on the market, and you’ll have to do your due diligence to determine what’s best for your business. Here are just a few of the most popular tools: Google Alerts: Lets you set up email alerts for mentions of your

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Pay attention to both positive and negative sentiment. Looking at negative sentiment can help you identify what you need to change to improve your customers’ perception of your brand.

Your Customers See Your Brand Differently Than You Thought—Now What?

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If your research reveals that brand sentiment is largely negative, it may be time to rebrand. As part of your rebrand, develop buyer personas.

Identify buyer needs and pain points.

Think about how your messaging can better connect with your customers.

Work through the brand discovery exercise (if you haven’t already) to make sure you’re focusing on the value you bring to customers, not just the features of your products or services.

If brand sentiment is largely positive, but your customers think of your brand differently than you do, it’s still worth making some changes.

Ask yourself if your brand’s actions and interactions are aligned with your positioning statement. If they’re not, think about how you can better tailor your marketing resources to your audience’s expectations. www.theleverageway.com

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SEO for Ecommerce

by Martin McGuire

The Ecommerce market is forever growing and so are the challenges facing those competing in it. There are countless ways to advertise online now, but implementing a foolproof SEO strategy can differentiate you from your competitors and ensure that your business is in it for the long haul.

Why is SEO so Important for Ecommerce?

Ecommerce can be lucrative, but challenging business. As with anything, where there is a lot of money to be made, you can usually find lots of competition. Whatever product or service you are offering online, you can be guaranteed that there are countless others offering something similar. The struggle is real for those running an E-commerce business. Competing in a highly competitive environment,

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with ever increasing numbers of competitors, means that it has become increasingly difficult to differentiate yourself and stand out from the crowd.

On top of all this, there is the challenge of gaining new customers, which can be a steep (almost vertical) uphill battle if they can’t even find you. The best way to combat this is to try and earn yourself a good seat in the higher ranking search results pages of Google. After all, if you’re positioned higher, you will have a higher conversion rate. Yet so many

online businesses still don’t have an SEO strategy in place and wonder why their competitors are getting ahead.

Hubspot recently published SEO statistics highlighting the importance of carrying out good SEO practice;

66% of marketers say improving SEO and growing their organic presence is their top inbound marketing priority.

81% of shoppers conduct online research before making big purchases.

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72% of marketers say relevant content creation was the most effective SEO tactic.

Now you’re thinking, what is it that really makes a good strategy and where do I start?

By the end of this article you should have a better understanding of what tasks you need to undertake to optimise your Ecommerce site for SEO, but most importantly you should have an understanding why each element is so valuable to your business.

Let’s start with the basics.

SEO and the Buyer Funnel Keywords are at the heart of SEO, they are the foundation of a good strategy.

Rather than going into detail on how to research appropriate keywords, how to analyse your competition and the various tools that can be used to do so; it could be more relevant to see how different types of keywords can be used to target customers at different stages of the buyer funnel.

There can be some variations in how the buyer funnel is represented, depending on the product or service.

Ultimately it represents the process of how a user becomes aware of a need and it tracks their journey to the point of finding a solution and making a purchase. The funnel shape is an appropriate representation of the wider section of the triangle represents the wider audience, at

this point, there are the most amount of potential buyers. As the funnel narrows, a number of potential buyers lessen but become more likely to make a purchase.

The Buyer Funnel Explained Need Recognition: This is represented by the top and widest part of the funnel. At this point, the user has become aware that they have a particular need or problem that needs to be solved.

Solution Exploration: At this point, the user begins to seek out a potential solution.

Evaluation of Options: Once the user is happy with the information gathered from researching the various solutions, they compile a list of the most relevant vendors and begin to make comparisons.

Purchase: The user has now determined which solution best fits their needs and they make a purchase.

Post-Purchase Evaluation: The purchase is now complete, however, this point is still crucial, it can lead to customer retention and brand loyalty.

There may be other actions to follow once the purchase is complete. If they have the good experience buying the product and it lives up to its expectations they may leave a good review. Post purchase dissonance may also occur at this point, where a buyer hasn’t had a good experience and they themselves may leave a somewhat unfavourable review.

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the “Solution Exploration” stage of the buyer process. Consumers have usually already recognised their need and have started exploring solutions and evaluating the different options to make a purchase. At this point, it is usually a good idea to start using broad keywords that appeal to the wider audience.

This can be difficult, especially if you are in a competitive industry.

Usually, you will find a lot of your competitors are already using the obvious keywords that relate to your business and product offering.

Obviously, you will need to use these essential keywords and phrases to position yourself somewhat within the search range that is visible to users, however thinking outside the box can help target a wider audience especially those that may potentially slip through the net.

For example, let’s look at a yoga studio providing classes in Dublin city. They already have a site up and running and are fully optimised for searches related to yoga in Dublin.

The analysis would show that there is already high competition around the city centre between the different yoga studios.

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Top of the Funnel SEO is normally first implemented around

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In this instance, rather than targeting with the usual competitive keywords such as “Yoga Classes Dublin” and “Yoga Studio” etc. targeting users with alternative broad keywords could widen the net on your target audience. Optimising the site with keywords such as “ Lower Back Pain” and publishing a blog highlighting how yoga can be an effective treatment for lower back pain. The aim is to provide a solution to their problem.

Bottom of the Funnel

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Moving further down the buyer funnel, the user, in theory, becomes closer to making a final decision about a purchase. At this stage, search terms become more specific as they narrow down possible solutions. This is a good opportunity to begin targeting users with more niche, long-tail keywords, and phrases. Rather than using broad terms like “Back Pain” the yoga studio could use phrases such as “alternative treatment for lower back pain” or “treating back pain without medication.”

A good tip is to create a list of all the different variations of niche search terms and phrases. Compile a list of appropriate keyword modifiers that are relevant to your industry. For example, if you sell products online use keywords such as; “Buy….”, “Shop for….” and “Compare….”.

Over time it will be possible to assess what works and what doesn’t, but combining both broad and narrow keywords gives the best results.

Clean URLs: Think of all the hard work, time and resources that have gone into the designing and building a beautiful website. Ease of use and

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user navigation are some of the key components to any site design. Making sure that the navigation menus are clear and easy to understand. It is important that the user knows where they are along their journey. More importantly, if they want to revisit they know the quickest route to get there.

Why have unorganised and difficult to understand URL structures?

An Ecommerce site may showcase hundreds if not thousands of products.

As with most online purchases; a user will usually browse through a catalogue of products, find the particular one they like, leave the site and evaluate their options and hopefully return and make the purchase. As browsers now store our previous searches, the user may re-enter the website where they found the product into the URL, in an attempt to take a shortcut. Doing this will give the user the option to visit all the previous pages that were visited last on that site.

Confusing and illegible URLs can be a deterrent to users, they can also cause problems for search engine crawlers. Locating the product they have decided to purchase needs to be easy and fast. After all, they have already put the time and effort into finding your product, so why add an extra barrier. Here are a few tips to

beautifying your URLs; Get rid of the ugly string query parameters.

Replace with lower case words relating to product and category.

Great opportunity to use targeted keywords.

Don’t over do it, keep it short and to the point. The user has to understand it in an instant.

Use dashes to separate the words, over spaces and underscores.

Implement HTTPS: It has has been over two years since the initiative to drive HTTPS by Google. If you haven’t implemented it, then maybe it’s time to consider it. The basis of success for any Ecommerce business is ensuring site visitors carry out financial transactions. HTTPS was specifically developed to allow for these transactions to take place within a secure environment. Ultimately it follows the same protocols as HTTP, however by using SSL to transfer confidential data, it adds an extra layer of security.

Ultimately it follows the same protocols as HTTP, however by using SSL to transfer confidential data, it

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adds an extra layer of security.

There are two main benefits for its use; 1. Other than credit card details, Ecommerce sites also collect other private and confidential information, such as home address and contact details. HTTPS ensures that all of this information is securely encrypted. Creating a safe environment for your customers to shop will only help to increase conversions.

2. Google will love you for it. HTTPS is now listed in their top 200 ranking factors. Implementing this throughout your site will give you higher ranking preferential.

I should point out that an SSL certificate is valuable for all websites, even if they don’t fall under the Ecommerce umbrella.

Canonicalization: It’s not the sexiest of SEO practices and-and it’s difficult to pronounce, maybe that’s why nobody really likes to talk about it, but it is important.

Consider an online business selling shoes. There might be separate URLs for the different sizes and colour options. This is essentially the same product with multiple URLs associated with it. In this instance, it would be best practice to canonicalize the main product page. A similar practice is advised for content syndication. This is allowing for your content to be copied onto another site. The practice enables for greater exposure from more authoritative site’s audiences. In doing so, multiple URLs are being created for the same content, so you can see how it is important to set a preferred URL. There are a number of ways to define a canonical URL. One tip is to set a preferred domain, by canonicalizing the “www” version of your domain so that users will be

directed to that version without having to type it in. For example “bigdog.ie” is redirected to “www.bigdog.ie”.

There are a number of other ways you can canonicalize URLs:

Entering a rel=”canonical” link element onto the desired page will tell search bots that page prioritised.

Use a site map to tell the crawlers which URLs are preferred out of the duplicate content.

Use 301 redirects for URLs that you do not wish to canonicalize.

It can take a little time, but it is worth it in the end.

Internal Linking: Internal linking is one of those SEO practices that once you begin to do on a regular basis, it will just become habitual. For any site, especially Ecommerce, this is a good practice to get into. It is described as hyperlinking specific keywords or terms in your content that link to other pages on your site.

Two tips before you begin hyperlinking are; 1. Make sure that the pages you are linking to are relevant to the page the user is already on.

2. Ensure that the anchor text you are using is descriptive of the topic you are covering and the page you are linking to. This is beneficial to both the reader and Google as it can understand the topic from the appropriate anchor text.

Important: Don’t use links such as “Click Here for more details”. It doesn’t read well and crawlers won’t understand the relevance of the link.

There are a number of key benefits for internal linking, from the user’s

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perspective and the search engine’s.

Benefits of Internal Linking: It is a great way of presenting site architecture so that crawlers can easily navigate and understand pages and content. It also establishes page and information hierarchy, which helps also helps with indexing.

Linking also allows for link juice to be passed on to pages from links.

In layman’s terms,

it allows for the authority built up from the linked page to be passed on to that page. This is also the case for external links.

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Using this link juice can also help rank for certain keywords.

From a user-experience perspective, it can improve navigation.

It encourages users to engage further with the site and explore more content.

Mobile Optimisation and AMP: With Google now prioritising mobile pages over desktop, it is essential that your site is fully mobile optimised and responsive. If you’re not sure, Google provides a free mobilefriendly test. As you may have read in my previous post, there has been a recent drive towards integrating with Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). The primary focus of this initiative is to improve user-experience, by creating

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instantaneous loading of rich media on mobile pages. Faster loading site content = Happier customers.

AMP is great for articles and blogs, as it provides rich snippets of information for the user. From an Ecommerce perspective, it also gives the opportunity to truly showcase the product selection. Not only will images and videos load almost instantly, but it will allow you to jazz up product pages with carousel images and even display related products to the user.

Encouraging the user to further explore the site content for alternatives or extras before making a purchase.

and extra SERP real-estate also has a higher potential to attract customers.

They have a higher CTR and conversion rate. If you are going to try and advertise pricing information and customer reviews, make sure you can do so with confidence. Are your prices competitive and are your reviews positive?

Schema Markup for Ecommerce:

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Schema first came to fruition around 2011; created by search engines Google, Bing, and Yahoo! The initiative was driven by an effort to standardise structured data markup on web pages.

Although it has been around for a number of years, it really is only coming into the popular spotlight in recent months. You can expect to see a surge in the number of sites implementing this across the board.

There are a number of benefits to implementing structured schema on to your Ecommerce site.

Search Engines — It enables search engines to easily identify and understand content on a page. They can differentiate between a large number of elements. Whether they are products, descriptions, reviews, contact details and even availability for purchase.

User — It also gives the user more insight into the product they are searching for. When implemented correctly, Google can display a product image, pricing details, it’s availability and customer reviews.

Business — This rich information

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Content is Key: Lveveraging content can boost both traffic to your site and increase sales.

Customers like information and I don’t just mean product details. Creating content is an opportunity to showcase the product and how to get the most out of it. Presenting to your audience how the product works and more importantly how it will fit into their everyday lives is key to great content.

If the customer can resonate with your message, there is a higher chance of a conversion. It is also an opportunity to validate your authority in the industry, after all, you are helping the user by passing on your knowledge and expertise. Oh yeah, and Google likes authoritative websites.

Steps to creating content: Take for example a company that manufactures and sells modern cooking utensils.

1. Find out what is trending in the

market. What are your potential customers talking about? The aim here is to find ideas to use later on. Is there a growing trend in vegetarian dishes? Are they following any celebrity chefs? What restaurants do they like? Keep an open mind and take note.

2. Review what content strategy you think could work for you.

With video growing increasingly popular, this is an area that should be considered if at all possible. In the case of your cooking utensils company, this could be extremely beneficial as videos are great for demos.

3. Create memorable content. It is possible to have a multifaceted approach to your content strategy.

Implementing a series blogs, guest blogs, interviews and videos around a product could see your traffic and sales soar. An example using our cooking utensils company, for instance, could be publishing blogs on how to cook certain meals.

What about interviewing top chefs and restaurants for tips on cooking techniques or how to cook their favourite dishes.

The goal here is to create content that will engage users and encourage them to share, increasing your traffic flow and sales.

Conclusion: The checklist for implementing an Ecommerce SEO strategy can seem endless. For this reason, it is important to evaluate and prioritise what elements are important to your business. Building on a good foundation is vital. Depending on your business and specific needs, you can decide the direction you wish to take from there. If you want to stay ahead, you need to have the ability to change things up and be flexible.

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Examples of AI in R&D, Diagnostics & Multi-Channel Marketing by Mads Petersen

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he promise of AI and machine learning fuels the last years’ excitement over Big Data, as data is put to practical use across the healthcare value chain.

Close to the development of pharmaceuticals, AI and Machine Learning can lead to discovery of new medicines, identification of the optimal therapeutic targets, the repositioning of known treatments to be effective in other diseases and more.

Close to the HCP-patient interaction, AI can analyse large amounts of patient data data to perform algorithm-based diagnostics, providing support in medical decisionmaking.

And farther from R&D, machine learning can also contribute to pharma marketers’ understanding of their market and customer needs at a deeper level, effectively ending of the days where million-dollar marketing budgets are allocated based on small focus groups, interpretations of poll surveys and activated through loosely connected creative concepts.

Who dares to argue with the numbers?

Obviously, AI and machine learning are first and foremost applicable to areas of the healthcare industries where data is available and already a necessity for decision-making. Here are some examples: Suggesting treatment options in oncology, AI can help to reach a 90% concordance score, compared to panel of breast cancer specialists.

Along these lines, AI can precisely

predict patient outcomes for cardiologists, as computer simulations are faster and more accurate in predicting risk of death in people with serious heart disease.

Tapping into centralized data reports of patient health journals, an AI platform for epidemiologists can predict dengue fever outbreaks with 87% accuracy.

One AI platform is potentially minimizing the need for in vivo studies, making animal rights and patient safety less pressing issues in early development.

One particular AI and deep learning venture is so ambitious that it even pursues to reverse aging.

And perhaps the most comprehendible here-and-now examples, AI and machine learning can help select the right therapeutic targets in clinical trials, and postlaunch, enable highly targeted and personalized treatment in oncology through ongoing monitoring of the individual patients’ health developments.

Machine Learning in Pharma Marketing At Vertic, we are equally engaged in AI’s application to the practices of understanding stakeholders, communicating and promoting pharmaceutical services and products.

Increasingly, pharma adopts more and more marketing tactics from more digitally advanced industries.

In doing so, AI becomes more and more relevant for refining pharma’s data-driven marketing strategies.

One outcome of AI for Marketing is the identification of unique user

profiles with corresponding highly personalized needs and preferences in terms of content. The incredible volume of social media conversations and search activity provides the data foundation for such profiling via approaches such as Digital IQ. However, the continuous and efficient authoring of content is an infamous Achilles Heel in most Healthcare organisation.

Is AI a turn key solution for the creation of healthcare content?

Sure, certain types of AI are capable of producing content faster than humans, but AI seems to consistently fall short on key elements within communication, namely contextual understanding and emphatically relaying messages based on understanding the target audiences’ needs. And even in a future where AI may be able to deliver refined personalized content to the different healthcare stakeholders, such LeftBrain approach to of communication still falls short on engaging recipients emotionally. Emotional engagement is scientifically proven to most efficient than rational engagement in terms of initiating the Process of Influence. Yet again, who knows if West World or Ex Machina AI is just beyond the horizon?

Articoolo has developed an interesting beta version. But for now, we need to keep using analogue technics such as the Heart2Head model to create compelling content. This admission is even echoed by the CEO of IBM Watson Health, Ginni Rometty, who recently stated at HIMSS 2017, that the first principle of the operation she is heading is to “augment human intelligence, not replace it”.

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Why ‘Gut Feel’ is better than

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‘Big Data’

ell according to the Netflix CEO, Reed Hastings, it is: “We start with the data but the final call is always gut. It’s informed intuition”. He reckons that “data science simply isn’t sophisticated enough to predict whether a product will be a hit”. Does he have a point? Or is he talking garbage?

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Hastings digs much deeper into the detail on how Netflix takes an intuitive approach to portfolio management when they determine which ideas to ultimately produce. It’s not that they dismiss the use of data (that would be foolish, of course) not least because they invest millions of dollars in analytics to help them consider the huge variety of content ideas that may, or may not, be commissioned.

He talks about how Ted Sarandos (Chief Content Officer at Netflix who has the enviable job of selecting original programming for the platform) evidently has the midas touch when it comes to selecting successful series.

With hit shows such as ‘Making a Murderer’, ‘Black Mirror’ and ‘Narcos’ to name but a few, he clearly has 24 carat intestines. Or to put it another way (if you will indulge me for a second) Sarandos is ‘The Man With the Golden Gut’. See what I did there? Oh well, please yourself...

So basically what Hastings is alluding to is that big data can help to inform, and maybe even verify, a theory or an idea but it actually

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isn’t very good at predicting what is going to be a popular product. With current trends it may be able to have some degree of accuracy in foretelling extensions, but breakout hits? Not so much. That takes someone with a strong hunch or a smart intuition that something (whether it be a TV show, a gadget, a toy or an item of apparel etc.) is going to capture the zeitgeist.

It seems that Hastings is not alone in this thinking either.

A Harvard Business Review article entitled ‘Instinct Can Beat Analytical Thinking’ cites the work of Gerd Gigerenzer, an eminent Psychologist who has dedicated his life’s work to the study of how some humans have the ability to make the right decisions and how we can actually learn from those same people to do it for ourselves. His assertion is that by using “heuristics, rules of thumb and other shortcuts” we can all become better decision makers and even beat the rational models developed by mathematicians and statisticians which rely on big data to make their predictions.

The main premise behind Gerd’s philosophy is built around the notion of ‘uncertainty’ in an imperfect World.

Basically it’s all about risk management and Gigerenzer tells a nifty story about a turkey to exemplify his point. Yes, you read that right, a turkey. He asks you to believe that you are a turkey (okay, I’m there with all

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the trimmings) and then imagine that although you are scared that humans will kill you they actually feed and care for you, day after day. The probability that you will continue to be fed and not killed increases every single day until after 100 days the trust is established and it becomes second nature so the fear disappears. That is until the day before Thanksgiving when you literally become ‘dead meat’.

The moral of the story? The turkey confused the world of uncertainty with the world of calculated risk.

based on gut feel. However, he does concede that many business leaders would never dare to admit it. Instead, they post rationalise their decisions by employing third party consultants to corroborate the reasons why they made that particular choice. Surely a somewhat expensive way of justifying what has already been done whether it’s successful or not?

The late great Steve Jobs was a prime exponent of gut feeling over big data. Apparently he wasn’t really one to endlessly pore over reams data or crunch the numbers. His particular genius came from his innate ability to detect a trend before it even happened. The genesis of his

In my opinion (albeit slightly predictable and possibly even quite dull) it’s a ‘blend’ of the two. Now, sitting on the fence is not my usual modus operandi but I do have a redeeming caveat... I believe that it works best when gut feeling comes BEFORE big data. Like with Netflix, their most popular long form content has emanated from the creative thought of an individual backed up with robust analytics to prove that there is a market for it. And I believe that the advertising / communications industry which I work in, performs in a similar way. A brilliant insight into a consumer doesn’t come from the masses of statistical data on the way

If you’re in the world where you can calculate the risk, then statistical thinking is enough.

If you go in a casino and play roulette, you can calculate how you will lose in the long run. But most of our problems are about uncertainty

ideas was not ignited by analytic rigour but by pure intuition and fuelled by his single minded belief that he was right.

So how does all this relate to business? Well the Professor has worked with major international conglomerates (plus their leaders) for many years and he estimates that an astonishing 50% of their decisions are

So what’s the conclusion here? Is one better than the other? Does gut feel beat big data? Or vice versa? If so, which one wins? And in what ratio?

Well if we really knew the answers to these questions then I guess that we would all be doing it...

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humans behave, it is derived from a smart planner who uncovers a human truth and then seeks to support that hypothesis with the numbers.

So how does ‘gut feel’ play a part in your industry? From an Accountant to a Zoologist, is there a difference in the interplay between the two variables?

In your chosen field, is intuition more or less important than big data? And if so, why? As ever, I’m keen to hear your point of view.

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INNOVATION

3. WHO ARE YOU?

4 THINGS YOU NEED TO KNOW:

About Chatbot Design

by Wally Brill

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hatbots present some amazing opportunities in customer care, marketing etc.. I’ve been reviewing a number of them from a customer experience perspective and a few things are becoming clear.

1. CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE: No matter how many hundreds of thousands of chatbots get built with great AI etc., the customer experience will always be of paramount importance. One of the challenges is that the people most experienced in conversational interaction are speech recognition, VUI (Voice User Interface) designers. These are the people who understand how to design a great interaction in speech or text.

They know the rules around prompt repetition, verbosity and persona. But with the meteoric rise of the chatbot, there aren’t enough experienced people to go around so many bots are poorly designed.

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2. WHERE’S DON DRAPER? So a lot of companies are hiring copywriters who are terrific wordsmiths but who have no experience in creating a two way conversation. And that’s what it is: A conversation. There are rules of discourse in communication and even now, when spoken and written interactions are melding together through texting, these rules need to be adhered to. Otherwise the chatbot appears odd at best, and potentially schizophrenic at worst.

Take register for example. Register is the level of formality we use when we communicate. We speak differently to an old friend than we do to a stranger. Unfortunately, in too many examples, the persona of the chatbot is wildly informal and very, very chatty. This is understandable as the people writing them may have no experience in tying persona to brand and get really excited to be writing in this new medium.

The other day, I used a chatbot from a major, national department store.

The demographic of the customer is quite broad but most likely skews towards age 35 and up.

The very first prompt from the chatbot was “Let me show you how I roll.” Now, that might be fine for a brand serving millennials, but it was out of place in this context. When there’s a dissonance in the perception of the persona of any conversational system, it can erode trust in the service provided.

Maybe less critical for a department store but supercritical for a bank.

4. REPETITION, REPETITION: Finally, prompt repetition is another persona breaker. Many bots simply repeat a prompt if they don’t understand the user’s entry.

SYSTEM: Now, please enter your account number.

USER: (enters wrong number) SYSTEM: Now, please enter your account number.

It makes the bot seem less intelligent than it might be.

Again, this is an artifact of the rush to create bots in the absence of people with real interaction design experience.

There’s no sign of the bot craze ending anytime soon. It’s a legitimate channel and can be very, very useful.

I’d just suggest to anyone writing for them or hiring designers, that you get some conversational dialog design training to avoid the pitfalls that impede the customer experience and will make people less inclined to use them.

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6 Thoughts and 10 Tools for Fueling Demand-Gen with Social Selling

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n February 27, 2017 in San Francisco, I presented at the NorCal BMA Marketing Roundtable to a group of 50 marketing professionals on the topic of Fueling the demand-gen engine with social selling.

For the past two years, my team @ Fatima Afzal and I at TriNet have built out a center of excellence for social selling. Initially, it was an extension of our public relations efforts. A way for us to share content with the sales team and to more closely connect communications and sales.

But very quickly, we realized the immense potential of social for the sales process. We studied (and learned) a lot and have developed in-house sales on-ramp classes and workshops on social selling for the sales team.

Seeing the tangible results that sales can achieve with social selling is incredibly encouraging and fun for communicators. Social selling is certainly no silver bullet. But it’s a fantastic addition to other sales techniques.

Based on what I hear in conversations and what I discussed with marketing colleagues at the evening of my presentation, I know that social selling is still not used much across marketing departments.

To help change that, I wanted to share some thoughts and tools to help other marketers embrace the social selling revolution.

If you like this article, please share - if you have comments, please post them below. I would appreciate it a lot!

Six Thoughts on Developing Your Social Selling Strategy

by Jock Breitwieser

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First, as you start to deploy social engagement and social selling techniques across your marketing and sales teams, take a moment and START WITH A PLAN!

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Define your target audience and identify the key social platforms where you expect to engage with your audience. Be mindful to not overcommit. Consider the budget and resources you have available.

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recommend that you focus on owning (i.e. comfortably and successfully manage) 1-2 key platforms first. Expand once you successfully manage those.

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Consider how you want to manage the platforms: what is a reasonable cadence of engagement and sharing content that you can maintain in the long run. It’s best to start slow and increase the cadence/volume as you go.

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Work closely with your marketing team to make full use of integrated marketing communications by leveraging SEO insights and keywords, featuring earned media, white papers, events and company-generated surveys. Also make sure to incorporate sharing buttons into your online products/materials or your app. Feature your clients in regular social spotlights and make it easy for them to share your content by providing them with tailored content they can share directly.

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For all activities and content you share on social, always use Google Campaign URL builder, to be able to track engagement of the content as you distribute it to marketing and sales efforts.

What about tools?

There are many amazing tools available and many times they overlap in functionality.

Tool Recommendations Content Generation http://buzzsumo.com: identify trends/topics/influencers by social platform http://buffer.com/: great tool to identify/share/stage content http://beatrixapp.com/: identify and share content that fits your keywords https://contentgems.com: discover timely and relevant content for your key business areas

Marketing-Oriented

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http://gaggleamp.com/: lets you prepare content and easily share with sales/customers/partners – you control the message and give others content that’s ready to be used and helps them position themselves as thought leaders https://business.linkedin.com/ elevate: LinkedIn solution to share content, increase reach & engagement http://www.outbrain.com: to amplify reach of your content and drive measurable results for reach/ engagement

Sales Focused http://charlieapp.com/: gives you dossier-style breakdown of the people you want to prospect or meet http://crystalknows.com/: creepy and amazing AI tool that tells you how to engage with anyone http://www.dux-soup.com: lets you visit profiles on LinkedIn and drives visits to your profiles; lets you scrape info from the profiles you visit

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SEARCH

Are you playing hide-and-seek with your customers?

by Doug Berg

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hen I was a kid, I used to love to play hideand-seek with my friends. The problem was, I was very good at hiding, and my friends had short attention spans and would give up and leave, which unfortunately left me wondering if my friends were still searching for me.

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Unfortunately, many shopping sites are also very good at hiding things, and their customers also have a short attention span and quickly leave to shop somewhere else.

Optimizing product search and discovery is only half the battle in driving high conversion and keeping the your customers in the game of seeking for those products of interest.

If you’re hiding out-of-stock products, even if only by certain models, sizes or colors, product page bounce rates will skyrocket.

Nothing frustrates customers more than when they find the product they want, only to discover that their size or color is not available. Have them experience this on 2 or 3 different products that aren’t available in their search experience, or as they are viewing products for size or color, with no ability to see the historical sizes and colors it was available in, or with a way to communicate if/when those might come back in stock.

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Without letting the customer see the original sizes and colors (even if marked out of stock), you’re not even playing the “warmer or colder” game with them, and will have likely lost the customer’s faith that if they continue to view other products, they will know that you have product selection in their interest areas.

Here’s some scenarios: Hiding products from search when out of stock.

Unwittingly, your merchandising team or search product managers may have made a decision to hide any products that are out of stock.

The typical thinking by the retailer mind is that customers would prefer NOT to see a product that they can’t purchase so hide all products that are out of stock.

However, say a customer is searching for a Keurig, or the Nintendo Classic, or pair of black booties or that perfect summer dress that you would usually sell, but when this happens you’ve trained the customer that you don’t carry these items and they move on.

You may have also saved the chat/ service team a few questions

from customers asking if or when a product might be back in stock, but I’d suggest that those are great questions to be getting from interactions with your customers, but unfortunately where “process” oriented people are trying to save what are perceived as negative customer experiences, I’d suggest these are actually good one’s to have as your customers are on your site, finding what they want, their visit wasn’t wasted, and they know you care enough to engage with them and will offer them great customer service in the future.

By the way, adding product availability alerting to your product pages is the ultimate solution as you both allow products to be found, and mitigate the customer service interaction by allowing customers to “self serve” the notification for future product availability alerts, which also provides you visibility to the demand for your product graph helping with demand planning.

Hidden sizes and colors out of stock.

While you might have products in stock, unfortunately, you still might have chosen not to show the sizes or colors of any product should

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those be out of stock at that level.

On many shopping sites, they will appropriately show that a size or color is sold out with an icon or X’d out selection, but I’m astonished at how many sites only show what’s left in stock, hiding the original sizes completely.

The customer is left guessing as to what sizes or colors might have originally come in, and if they have the unfortunate experience of seeing this 2x to 3x when on your site, they can only assume you don’t carry their sizes or colors, which sends the seekers elsewhere.

Again, this is where showing the out of stock variants of your products can actually communicate that you did carry their specific sizes and colors, as well as that they need to act faster the next time they see something of Interest, which helps increase the urgency factor which is a basic element of scarcity marketing on any site.

In this case, having product availability alerting on your site is the best possible scenario, not only because you’ve captured that purchase intent of the customer who’s giving you explicit opted in permission to email them, but they’ve also told you a little bit about themselves. Their sharing what sizes, colors, brands, and categories of products they are interested in, not only in that visit, but likely for the future.

So why not do this?

I know what the typical merchandisers are thinking right now after reading this. The typical thought is “It’s not that easy…there’s a lot of products that will never come back in stock, or we won’t get any more of them” which is the way to avoid this aspect of your

site, and continue to frustrate your customers and continue to avoid their invested time on your site.

And your tech team might say “It’s easy to build this, you just slap a email opt-in on the product pages, and we’re done!” Or the email marketing team will try to convince you that your email marketing system can capture and send these, but if you have hundreds or even thousands of products on your site, most email marketing systems have no ability to monitor product availability and trigger an email campaign when products are finally in stock.

Now let’s flip the “hide-and-seek” game around, and assume that the customer is “hiding” what their are interested in buying in the future.

Shopping sites invest millions into predictive and recommendation technology to guess what the customers is going to “seek/buy” next, but wouldn’t you also like to be able to hear from your online customers if you are “warm or cold” with the exact products they would want to buy more of?

Another issue is high demand products. What if you have a high demand product where 10,000 customers sign up to get notified when any product is available next and say you get 50 back in stock. If you send 10,000 emails out, the first 50-100 customers will be happy, then then the other 5,000 (or more) who click to return and buy the product only to see it back out of stock will be upset and likely won’t sign up for future notifications.

Having a method for throttling availability alerts based upon inventory or an algorithms will be key to insure that you can delivery a predictable notification that doesn’t cause “next level” customer satisfaction issues.

Change the game The irony is, your customers will tell you instantly if you ask them, resulting

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in better loyalty, understanding, and engagement with your best customers.

Unfortunately, most sites that avoid this part of their strategy will continue to communicate to your customers something like “We hope you like the products that we have for sale today, but we don’t really care about what you might have interest in for the future, so we’ll just hopefully keep guessing well and in the end most of the products will sell, and our daily deals will clear out the rest, at a loss.”

Smart retailers simply use good communication as an integrated part of their strategy to communicate that there could be limited quantities, or suggest “We might make more” like True Religion does, which removes any suggested promise to customers that they will get any alert, but also informs the merchandising team as to which SKU’s could be an easy re-run, and even what the size and color demand demographics are for their entire customer community.

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So if you’re playing “hide-and-seek” with your products and customers, you might want to re-think things and change the game to “show-and-tell” which would allow your customers to cast a vote for what future products they have interest in from your site, giving more relevance and engagement for both you and your customers.

Best of all, you’ll gain real-time visibility to the demand of products from your customers online, along with the ability to recapture the revenue of past visits of your online shoppers. Imagine taking the guesswork out of what your winnersand-losers are in your product mix and being able to double-down on captured demand. The right engagement engine will not only help alert your customers when what they want is available, but will also alert you to when there is unmet demand that you can capitalize on.

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data

Marketers Unprepared for Data-Driven Future

by Jim Marous, Co-Publisher of The Financial Brand New technologies and advanced analytics have the potential to create an exceptional customer experience. Unfortunately, most banking organizations continue to use the same outdated, siloed processes.

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nderstanding the customer journey is at the foundation of being able to deliver the type of experience expected by today’s consumer.

Disconnects occur when organizations are unable to link online and offline customer engagements, and when internal silos create communications that don’t reflect a customer’s needs and behaviors in real-time.

Over a third (37%) of respondents said that the customer journey is owned by a mixture of different departments and nearly a fifth (19%) said no-one has responsibility.

The New Marketing Reality report, produced by Econsultancy in association with IBM Watson Marketing, is based on a survey of more than 1,000 marketing, digital and ecommerce professionals. The findings illustrate many of the challenges faced by both financial and non-financial organizations, and the opportunities that new marketing tools provide in understanding the customer journey.

According to the report, there is no dominant philosophy when it comes to tracking customer journeys online to offline. “Companies are largely using technologies that have been available to them for some time and of those, codes generated online for offline use (33%) or offline codes used online (22%) cover the bulk of respondents.”

Some of the key findings of the 59page report include: First-party data is the most available and the most used by organizations.

Audience segmentation is a top priority, with 72% of firms using data for this activity.

67% of survey respondents use data for customer journey mapping, and only 54% use data for personalization.

Most respondents remain in a channel-focused mindset, mostly

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caused by siloed organization structures.

Overall, less than a third (28%) of executives can tie their customer experience activities to revenue and/or cost savings.

In some cases, not having the right tools is an issue. In other cases, not knowing how to use the available tools is an issue. Two-fifths (42%) of the marketers surveyed agreed that they have the right tools, but didn’t know how to use them, while 50% stated that a technical barrier to progress is poorly integrated marketing technology.

Data, Data, Data In travels worldwide, the availability of data does not seem to be the biggest problem for financial institutions. The

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real challenge is knowing what data to use for a specific objective and how to move from great reports to great customer experiences.

As the sources of data continue to expand and the tools to leverage this data become more sophisticated, the challenges increase … as do the opportunities. When executives from all industries were asked about their company’s ability to act on customer data, exactly the same number of executives stated that their ability was ‘good’ as those who said it was ‘poor’ (43% each). Almost nobody thought they were ‘excellent’ (3%) while 11% admitted to being ‘very poor’.

When asked about data sources, first-party sources (website, customer data, explicit preferences) represented the vast majority of data used on average (75%), with second-party data (someone else’s first-party data) and third-party data (data from data providers) being less used (13% and 12% respectively). First-party data is the most available (and least costly), and can be a key driver of current customer value growth.

However, this internal data is not nearly as valuable for acquisition efforts and may not be as helpful when trying to predict future behaviors of current customers.

Original source: http://bit.ly/2npse8y

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Lessons in Innovation:

The Power of Partnerships

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by Olaf Swantee, CEO at Sunrise Communications AG

atman and Robin. Tom and Jerry. Strawberries and cream. Lennon and McCartney. Ham and pineapple (controversial)?

These are just some of the most famous and feted partnerships in popular culture, if you believe what you read on the Internet. And as I live in Switzerland, I feel obliged to make the case for including bread and cheese (or fondue) here too.

Just what is it that fascinates us about great partnerships? In the best cases, I guess you would have to say that each person or element brings something unique and complementary that, when combined with the other parts, produces a result that is far better than any of the contributing individuals could have achieved alone.

There are also of course some very famous partnerships from the business world – such as Bill Gates and Paul Allen, the founders of Microsoft, or Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who created Google. Many of us are familiar with the stories of what brought them together. Gates and Allen were childhood friends who shared a love of computers and embarked on a teenage hacking career before founding their company, while Page and Brin met at

Stanford and bickered – a lot – before a joint research project became the basis of Google.

Yet for every Allen and Gates, Page and Brin or brand collaboration such as GoPro and Red Bull, there are a multitude of other vital business partnerships hidden under the surface. These tend to be the functional alliances that basically drive the operations engine and enable companies to innovate, to go that step further, and to get things done.

Because no matter how innovative you are, how many brilliant ideas are on the table, how ingenious your best talent is, you have to know where your strengths ultimately lie, and where you need some other experts to take care of things. To use a well-known phrase: it’s not rocket science. But it’s something that I’ve seen company after company get wrong, when they either couldn’t see, or forgot, what the core of their business actually was.

In my mind, partnerships deliver real power when they:

Complement your very best with their very best

Help you avoid mistakes

Come to the table with new ideas

Make you smarter

Challenge you Ultimately, the most powerful business partnerships teach you how to do business better. And, once you have tasted success together, this paves the way for a fantastic relationship based on mutual trust and respect.

That’s why I’ve been spending time with Huawei on their stand at Mobile World Congress this week. They are THE experts in network innovation and a trusted partner of my company, Sunrise. If you want to find out more about what we are working on together, you can find out on the Sunrise website.

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As for my tips on the tech partnerships to watch this year – well, other than Sunrise and Huawei, obviously – I’m keeping an eye on Apple and SAP as they co-develop new business apps. Another one to watch is IBM and VMware, who are tackling enterprise data security together.

To everyone involved in a partnership, whether business or personal, may your joint interests flourish and prosper.

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