Top tips for moving your business online

Due to the impact of COVID-19 a huge number of independent brands who are traditionally wholesale are rushing to take their business online. As retail shops remain shut across the UK those brands with an online presence have been able to maintain or even grow their business in recent weeks.

Whilst the demand for certain sectors has dropped dramatically, the consumer appetite for others such as homewares, DIY, beauty or food have skyrocketed. However, with the rush to take business online many brands who are unaccustomed to direct to consumer selling are making mistakes and missing the opportunity.

With this in mind, we have put together our top tips for small brands to consider ideally before taking their wholesale proposition online. We understand that now is not the time to spend 6 months creating a carefully considered strategy BUT there are things crucial to think about before just replicating your wholesale business online.

1. Who are you going to be selling to?

As a wholesale business you are likely to have very limited information about the end consumer, those who actually buy your product. You may get top level information from your stockists, you may already have a social media following that you can take a detailed look at, but these won’t be a representative sample of who may be buying your products once you start selling online. Don’t assume for example if someone has bought your product before from John Lewis that they will automatically be interested in buy from you directly. The online customer is often very loyal to the retailers they already shop with online. You will be starting your own customer database from scratch. So do take the time to have a good think about exactly who it is you think is most likely to want to buy your products directly from you online. What is important to them and how do they like to shop? Every decision you take from this point should be tailored to making sure your direct offering gives these people every reason to want to buy from you rather than anyone else.

2. How will selling direct impact your wholesale relationships?

Moving from a wholesale only business to a B2C brand means that at some point you will end up in competition with some of your stockists. Make sure before you launch that you have considered that and made plans for it. Are you going to communicate with them before launch what you are doing? Have you checked your contracts to ensure you haven’t agreed that you WON’T sell directly online? Make sure you have pricing agreements in place, so you don’t end up in in a price war with your own products as that benefits no-one.

It’s common place for brands to appear next to stockists online so that shouldn’t be a barrier, just make sure you don’t surprise your wholesale customers.

Tips for not annoying your wholesalers are:

  • Sell a slightly different range on your site
  • Never undercut them
  • Notify if you are going to be promoting any items
  • Don’t keep all the good content for yourself, make sure the product info and pictures you supply them is just as good as that you save for your own site. You do, however, want to avoid having exactly the same product information as your wholesalers online as Google will view that as duplicate content and ignore one of your sites.

3. Why will people buy directly from you?

Consider the reasons why potential customers will want to buy online from you instead of your stockists? What can you offer that others are not able to? What experience can you give on your site that will make people want to engage directly with you? Often the reason a smaller brand can compete with larger online retailers is through a personalised experience and a real connection with the brand, your values and the people behind it.

Make sure you tell your story, communicate your values, show the people behind the brand. As well as the expectation of a slick buying experience the modern consumer likes to emotionally engage with a smaller brand before buying. Make sure you give them a reason to.

Also consider the product range you will offer. It is a beneficial practice for a smaller brand who sells through other online retailers to keep back a selection of exclusive stock for their direct site only. There is no competition with wholesalers and customers have to purchase from you directly to get the product.

4. What range will you put online?

A common mistake for brand when launching direct for the first time is to put everything online. This is not necessarily the right course of action. There may be some products which are just not profitable for you to sell online. Their volume is too low to warrant the stock storage, they may cost too much to send via mail or courier, the margin is too low if you are not selling in bulk. Before you launch, pick a selection of the products that are likely to sell well and have enough margin in them. Choice for the consumer is of course good but make sure the products you put online are going to be the right ones for the type of customer you are going after. Better to have a slightly smaller but more relevant range of product that you can be more focussed with your marketing for.

5. How are you going to sell and fulfil?

You need to give your customers the best possible shopping experience, but also need to turn this around in the shortest amount of time. Therefore, using a ready-made ecommerce platform for most brands will be the best option. There are a wide range available but the most affordable / commonly used and those that will plug into the most 3rd party finance, stock, reporting tools are as follows:

a. Shopify basic

b. Woo Commerce

c. Wix

d. Squarespace

e. Magento

All have readymade and tested templates that can be easily repurposed and then refined at a later date.

Make sure you have thought about your delivery options and how much it will cost both you and your customers for delivery. Can you make a small profit on each delivery? Will you offer a free delivery threshold? Make sure you have factored in the cost of packaging too.

6. How are you going to get people to your store?

Ok so you have created a website with the right product and experience for your target customers. From a starting point of zero how are you going to tell people about it? At this point if you have never done any direct marketing before I would definitely get an expert involved to give you a plan, train you up, help you find people to do the things you can’t. The old adage “build it and they will come” just doesn’t work in a cluttered online world. If you have only been wholesale before you can’t just email customers to let them know. If you have a social following, then great that is a good place to start but remember don’t assume that those who follow you are not already loyal to one of your stockists. There are a number of ways you can launch and gain immediate brand awareness and site visitors but you need to pick the right one for your brand and budget. Paid search and social ads are the most immediate way of driving traffic, but you must make sure you are going after the right people with the right message or you will be throwing money down the drain. Longer term promotional work can often be more cost effective such as SEO, content, brand collaborations but they require a much longer period to get going and time resource as much as money. The best way to plan your activity if you have limited time and budget is to go back to your answer on the 1st point. Who are you going to be selling to? Have a real think about the following questions:

  • Where do they hang out on the internet?
  • How might they research a purchase?
  • Who else do they buy from?

Using the answers to the above just pick a couple of ways you can get your message in front of them at the right time? Perhaps just a single social ad campaign, a joint giveaway with just the right brand or influencer, or a very specific set of Google Ads will be enough to get going.

Pick and choose your battles and don’t be afraid to ask for advice.

 

As you can see just the above considerations can take a large amount of time and thought to get right, especially if this is the first time you have considered direct selling. Time however is not on anyone’s side at the moment. To speed up the process and help you get online quick the best thing to do is get someone to help you who has done this all before and can walk you through as you go.

If you want help in answering the above questions and getting online as soon as possible but in the right way, then please do speak to us. Email [email protected] or call 01273 322830.

A look at the future of influencer marketing

In 2019 we witnessed some wobbles and uncertainty in the influencer world, so what can we expect in 2020 when it comes to influencer marketing?

Firstly let’s take a look at what happened in 2019……………….

 

 

Is the worry over?

At the beginning of the year there were a lot of questions around trust. Uncertainty was rife as to whether influencers were being genuine and how authentic partnerships really were, resulting in the enforcement of #ad. We know as marketers and retailers that good influencer marketing is a key gateway to create brand awareness, so how can we move forward?

As a marketing tactic it can be very cost effective especially for smaller brands and the return on investment can be significant. Building a foundation of trust is absolutely key to the success of influencer marketing & there are certainly a few tactics that can really help with creating authenticity….

Organic influencers

We all know that we would trust someone we know or could relate to over a celebrity or public figure, which suggests that real people equal real influence. Rethinking your influencer strategy to include your customers can have real leverage when it comes to actual impressions.

According to a recent Stackla study 79% of people say that user-generated content (UGC) highly impacts their purchasing decisions, while only 8% say influencer-created content would do the same.

So how can you utilise your customers in this way?

Brand advocates, that’s what you need, the real people that buy your products, love them & want to shout about them!
So what content can be generated and used as marketing material?

  • Guest blog posts – making your customers feel valued can be very beneficial
  • Instagram takeovers from top brand advocates – putting sole trust in the hands of your customer
  • Asking questions and doing polls to your social audiences and displaying the responses
  • Case studies – Just how much impact has this product had on your life?
  • Genuine customer reviews – remember that sometimes reviews can be faked!
  • Testimonials – video & written content
  • Regramming customer Instagram stories and organic posts (e.g top customer of the week)
  • Retweeting and replying to customer queries (and complaints!) – Great customer service is essential….
  • Using user-generated feedback to guide your brand’s future content strategy

In 2020 we predict that there will be a big shift in how UGC is used by brands and how these trustworthy connections can be utilised to make an impact in retail.

So we have user generated content but what other organic forms of influencer marketing can we expect to see in 2020?

Employee advocacy

An employee, a real person, can create passionate and thought provoking content and build brand awareness across social media.

By activating employees on social media you can unlock an authentic voice that’s hard for even the best marketer to conjure up. It obviously isn’t as simple as saying ‘go’, brands need to create a plan with rules and guidelines but trusting your employees with your brand can go a long way!

In 2015 CISCO reported that employees’ social posts generate 8X more engagement than posts from their employer. That was back in 2015 so we imagine the impact will be far greater in 2020.

A great example of a brand harnessing the power of their people is Lush. They build a sense of community and are encouraged to post about what excites them and makes them happy.

If you search for #lushemployee on Instagram there are over 8,000 posts including photos of employees working instore with their colleagues, product reviews and videos, product displays, pictures of employees with furry friends & even photos of Lushies attending climate change demonstrations across the world!

Lush employees social media

Lush employees social media

Lush employees social media

Make your employees passionate about your brand and then open up Pandora’s Box to spread to word!

So there’s two forms of influencer marketing that we should see make a big impact in 2020. If you’re itching to do something like this and you need some support with your strategy then get in contact, we would love to chat.

Here’s to a prosperous year for retail!

Preparing for the festive season

If you are a retail business then I’m sure plans are well under way for the upcoming festive season. As a smaller, boutique retailer there is often a great deal at stake around this time of year, you have huge competition and it’s hard to compete on heavy discounts and offers especially around days such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Amazon Prime Day and the high pressure run up to the 25th December.

 

The market is saturated at this time of year but how can you stand out in the crowd? It’s all about the experience!

Consumers are becoming a lot more focused on connecting emotionally with brands that are aligned with their personal values and life choices. So this is how smaller brands can make a real difference around Christmas. It’s not about how much you drop your prices (to a certain extent!) it’s the delivery of your messaging and experience that will bring in the sales.
A recent report by customer journey experts, Yieldify on ‘The Shape Of Peak To Come’ reveals plans and predictions for peak trading season, surveying 400+ US & UK marketers to unlock key insights into the mad frenzy of retail in the run up to Christmas. Some of the most interesting stats and predictions being:

  • Black Friday – the first ‘peak within peak’ – is no longer a one-day event. Only 15% are treating it as such. When it comes to participation, online-only retailers are the most likely to opt out, with 1 in 5 choosing not to take part this year.
  • Pureplay e-commerce retailers are leading the pack when it comes to going against standard peak expectations. As well as opting-out of Black Friday, they were also the most likely to run discounts across longer periods. This seems to have led towards a greater focus on acquiring and retaining customers throughout peak, with website personalization their top-rated method for doing so.
  • For everyone else, email is still the king of marketing strategies. This was cited as a top tactic for promoting peak offers as well as converting visitors into customers. Retailers will need to have a solid lead capture strategy in place long ahead of peak to capitalize fully.

With the above in mind here are some quick tips to get your head above the sand.

Identify your key target audience for this time of year

Delve into previous year’s data and create a new segmentation lists including customers that previously bought in the run up to Christmas as well as your loyal/frequent purchasers. These should be your main focus at this time, they are far more likely to convert having had previous interactions with your brand. Gaining new customers around this time of year isn’t completely absurd but it might be harder to do so due to the saturation of the market.

Personalised content

Now you’ve segmented your data and created new customer lists to target, think about the content strategies that will convert for these audiences. Look at previous campaigns and take inspiration. Your strategy should include content for email campaigns and also the personalised messaging/offers on your website if you have these capabilities. You can also tailor your social media strategies accordingly and use different posts to target different segments.

Target key influencers for these audiences

Although influencer marketing is still under scrutiny by customers and also marketers it is still hugely beneficial to smaller/boutique retailers. It’s these close relationships with influencers that love their brand that makes independent retailers shine and create a loyal following. There is no doubt that influencer’s can directly inform consumer purchasing behaviour. The content and relationships can be very believable, especially if there is a strong connection with the influencer & brand values.

As part of your Christmas social media campaigns, if you have influencers you know well and trust, why not involve them at the ideas stage to curate unique, emotive and believable content that will appeal to your target audience.

Our advice on a low budget would always be to stick with micro-influencers with a following of under 5k. They tend to have a more engaged audience and wont cost the earth to work with.

Ask for feedback/feed forward

We’ve touched upon this before in previous posts but it’s so important to business growth and future success, especially at this busy time of year. After a purchase or interaction create a simple feedback form to gain insightful knowledge on their experience and what they might look for when making future purchases. This is not only useful for making quick tweaks to current campaigns and strategies but also pre planning for the following year. It’s never too early to plan for the next festive season!

We hope that these quick tips will get you thinking about what you can do now if you haven’t already begun preparations. Good luck and let the best man win!

T-minus 92 days.

Do you have your Christmas 2018 Strategy in place?

As we sit in a baking hot office in the middle of another heat wave, we long for cold winter nights, wrapped up by the fire, sipping mulled wine and snuggling under a thick duvet. You might think it’s too soon to start thinking about Christmas 2018, but it’s not, especially if you’re in retail. If you haven’t already it’s time to get your festive hat on………. or maybe a nice cool straw hat for the time being.

 

So what can the marketing teams be planning now, here are some tips to start future proofing your success for A/W 18:

Get your trend on

Look at the fashion, interior and Christmas trends predicted for Autumn/Winter 2018. Start pre-categorising your A/W product range into these trends. Re-write product & page copy ready to upload to dedicated pages, when the time comes, to maximise on natural search results.

Experiment with some of your paid search spend – what trend related search terms could you appropriately target to pull further traffic into your product pages?

Ensure your social team are incorporating relevant trend hashtags into their posts about your products, you could inspire engagement from a new audience if you’re visible.

Include nods to the trends that sit best with your products with any seasonal photography, to ensure your imagery stays fresh and ahead of the curve

Try product placement or developing a relationship with key influencers within each trend niche – featuring in their marketing and media not only positions you well within a trend, but is worth PR riches.

The top fashion trends as cited at Paris Fashion Week in March are:

1. Head to toe animal print
2. Leather dresses
3. Cape crusaders
4. Silver, holographic and Sci-Fi
5. Tweed
6. The 70’s – think shearling & crochet
7. Pleats
8. Silk
9. Obvious logo/brand placement
10. Layering coats

Interior design colour trends are:

Colour trends

1. Navy Blue
2. Autumn Maple
3. Neutral Gray
4. Toast
5. Scarlet Red
6. Tawny Port
7. Golden Lime
8. Shaded Spruce
9. Light Blue

Christmas 2018 trends as shown at Christmas World are:

Vivid heritage
A mixture of traditional handicraft skills from different cultures combined with strong colours similar to Golden Lime, Scarlet Red and Shaded Spruce. Think embroidered patterns inspired by folklore and ethnic tradition.

Eclectic Gathering
This trend includes reflective, shiny and sparkling materials such as crystal, foil, mirrored glass and mother of pearl incorporated with lively details, over the top shapes and patterns. Colour palette combines pink, lemon, mandarin, azure, rosé, black and gold.

Balanced Sobriety
A mixture of matt brass, light coloured wood and shiny black surfaces with a Japanese influence. Colours range from pure white to rose gold, a shiny but cool grey, a deep red and black.

Splendid History
Think historical treasures. Lace, feathers, semi-precious stones, pearls and marble combined with dark, saturated colours with accents of aquamarine and gold.

Plan ahead for big shopping days

Don’t get stung by Black Friday or Cyber Monday but embrace them and create a plan that works with your business. Also look back at last year’s data and see what your best shopping days were and use them as additional opportunities.

You don’t have to discount all your products to keep your head above the water but create exciting deals for your existing customer base, that could also entice new customers. This could include exclusive offers and enhanced loyalty offers.

Think cleverly around your content strategy on all your platforms. Create a content plan specifically for the run up to and including big shopping days which includes engaging content in partnership with key influencers.

For smaller brands, Black Friday or Cyber Monday can actually be an opportunity to catch the eyes of new customers. Yes they’re hunting for the best deal but remember they are also looking for a great experience so make sure that you have all your ducks in a row and the experience from pre purchase through to post purchase is seamless. A great returns policy goes a long way!

Not forgetting the importance of resource. Ensure you have enough staff clued up and your website and team can handle the high volume of customers and sales. Your customer service team need to be super charged and understand all the many things that could go wrong so they are fully prepared to diffuse any situation that might arise.

Connect with your customer

Get the customer involved by sending out a small survey to see what they want around Christmas, exclusive offers? Exclusive content? Tips and how to guides etc. This sort of priceless insight can help to shape your content plan as well as boosting your customer engagement by making an emotional connection.

Christmas can be a joyful experience for most but also very stressful for those that have big families entertaining large groups or those that just dislike Christmas! Think about how you can alleviate some of that stress for your customers. Try and tap into your customers’ needs and help solve their stressful shopping problems. This sort of insight can be gained by using the survey. Content can then be created around the specific pain points and drip fed across all your channels in the run up to Christmas.

If you have a physical presence, connect online with offline by offering unique services instore to gain footfall like a free gift wrapping service, instore product demonstrations or personal shopping services. Try and make the shopping experience as enjoyable as possible as it can become quite the chore.

Listen to your customer

Did you get any bad reviews, feedback or complaints last year? Take a look back at what issues your customers voiced and make sure everything is fixed for 2018. This could be delivery problems, product information, site speed, checkout issues, the list can go on but ensure you have all of them ironed out and content updated so that your customers don’t face any of the same issues.

The key thing to remember is that a retailer’s main focus around Christmas is to inspire customers and take the stress out of the largest shopping event of the year which will lead to more revenue. Try and make it fun and interesting but most of all be prepared!

If you want any help or advice in putting together your 2018 Christmas marketing strategy give us a shout on [email protected].

5 Top Tips to Tackle GDPR

GDPR can be a little daunting, especially to small businesses that don’t have the resource to analyse and implement a compliant procedure. There is so much information out there it’s hard to define what needs to happen.

However, the main concepts and principles of the current data protection act don’t differ too greatly to the new law, therefore if you’ve already got a comprehensive procedure in place that’s a great starting point you’ll need to enhance some elements and change a few points along the way. In particular the new law has greater emphasis on the data controller’s documentation and the individual’s rights.

Here are our 5 top tips:

Communicate

Ensure that you communicate within your business about the impending change to the law. Having input from key stakeholders within the business can help to identify risk of compliance. If you have a team working together from different areas of the business then you’re likely to uncover any problems quickly.

Ensure you designate a Data Protection Officer if you carry out large scale systematic monitoring of individuals and large scale processing of special categories of data or data relating to criminal convictions and offences. The role of the DPO is to implement procedure, be accountable for the processing of data, to monitor compliance of GDPR and data law and be the first point of contact to supervisory authorities and the individuals whose data you process. However, allocating a GDPR project manager will be very beneficial in reaching compliance if you are a small business and you do not carry out any of the above.

Some aspects of GDPR will have more of an impact on businesses than others so with a team of key personnel you’ll be able to highlight which parts will have the biggest impact and then prioritise your planning.

Take a step back

Yep! It’s time to take that famous step back to audit and document the personal data you currently hold, this includes customer data but also employee data and why and how you process it. You must ensure that the data is correct, in date and relevant. If you have any incorrect data this needs to be rectified and documented. This is also proof for the GDPR’s accountability principle, you must be able to show your path to compliance which brings me to the next tip……….

Create policies and procedures

If you have policies and procedures or not, you’ll either have to create from scratch or adapt what you have to ensure you’ve taken on the new changes in the law. If you have all the relevant documentation for your data processing you’ll be able to prove your compliance quickly and easily.

Get consent

I’m sure you already gain consent to record and process data but you’ll need to review your messaging and ensure the following:

  • Be granular, clear and specific
  • Make sure the message is prominent and not hidden or in small type
  • Include a positive opt in – the individual needs to physically tick or sign to give consent
  • Properly documented
  • The ability to easily withdraw

Clarity is King!

You must be transparent in your privacy notices about what data is held, how it is used and for how long it will be held for. Clearly state the above and make sure it’s easily accessible to the individual so they fully understand how their data is stored and processed.
You need to include the following:

  • Your lawful intention for processing the data and how it might be shared
  • How long you will retain the data
  • The individuals rights: to complain to the ICO, to request access to their data free of charge in a commonly used format and within one month, to request correction or deleting of data and to object to data processing

These tips just scratch the surface of what the new law implicates, but this gives you a framework to tackle GDPR within your business. GDPR not only effects marketers and retailers, it effects any business that processes data. These tips come from how we’ve approached the changes in data law that GDPR is enforcing.

For detailed resources visit the ICO’s Guide to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

If you’re a small retail business looking for help then please contact our sister company Digital Team on Demand who will be able to swoop in a GDPR hero to help you plan for compliance by 25th May 2018.

Note that this blog post is not intended to construe legal advice or offer comprehensive guidance on GDPR. This is just our professional opinion.

Onwards and Upwards

And just like that January was over, we’re all eating pancakes and love is in the air!

It’s safe to say that it’s been a bit doom and gloom in the world of retail last month. Looking back at 2017 in a haze as many retailers (but not all!) report a disappointing end to the year.

 

It’s now February so let’s not let all that news bring us down! There’s also a great deal to look forward to as we continue to march into 2018 with arms wide open and prove that retail can overcome the many obstacles it faced in 2017.

Here’s what we’re excited about:

Artificial Intelligence for the marketeer

Proper Sci fi geekery alert! Yes we’re at that point in time, artificial intelligence is now becoming the norm and something retailers are going to have to open their minds to if they want to be competitive.

It’s a bit mind blowing really, there’s now too much data for the human brain to handle on a daily basis which means we’ve needed to bring in the big guns and ask for a little help from the robots.
Using technology such as machine learning and deep learning methods can be hugely beneficial to brands, it’s basically adding brain power to your business that doesn’t sleep.

Machine learning and deep learning methods can assist data analysts to help recommend optimisations to content to improve organic search as well as detecting patterns in real-time to give marketeers an advantage at understanding customers, competitors, or market changes – turning insights into action!

If you want to read more about AI we recommend the following:

“artificial-intelligence-and-machine-learning-what-are-the-opportunities-for-search-marketers”– Search Engine Watch
“innovation-how-can-brands-keep-up-with-unpredictable-audiences” – The Drum

Understanding the customer even MORE

It’s no secret that retailers, especially if they haven’t already, need to get to grips with their customer data to stay ahead of the curve. Many retailers out there still don’t understand their customer’s behavioural patterns, needs and desires and this needs to change.

It’s time to dig deep into the data and updates in Google Analytics are allowing marketer’s to do this on a daily basis. The standard report function now enables more insight into user-level behaviour within sessions, User Explorer has been re-vamped to include lifetime metrics and dimensions for individual users, marketers can create audiences and publish them for analysis within the platform which enables comparison between different audiences over a period of time and finally conversion probability – Google can now identify recent site visitors with the highest probability of a future conversion by analysing historical data and automatically identifying the patterns between variables within sets of high-value customer. We’re in analytics heaven!

#BFF

We read a great article from Econsultancy last month explaining how the ‘working backwards method is key to superior customer experience’. We’ve been thinking this for a long time now and working with our clients to better understand their customer profiles before implementing any kind of digital strategy. Addressing their customers’ needs/desires and problems using the insight provided by the data.

In 2018 brands should be able to predict their customer’s behaviour even before they can, getting to know them inside and out, essentially becoming their #BFF.

GDPR

Ok…this one isn’t as exciting BUT very important and ties in nicely with the necessity of customer data. It’s the talk of the town and we all need to get prepared for 25th May 2018.

The regulation is there to protect EU citizens from privacy and data breaches in an increasingly data-driven world. It isn’t new but it’s the latest evolution of regulations on data privacy and protection so if your business is already compliant with the Data Protection Act you should be most of the way there.

We will be dedicating one of our next posts to GDPR, so watch this space……

Let’s not put our heads in the sand after a tricky year, let’s keep them high and rise to the challenges that 2018 will bring.

Remember, the customer is always right!

Customer vs Content – Who is King?

In a world where marketers are being told day in, day out that “Content is King” we have noticed at Leapfrogg that many businesses have taken this mantra too far and are producing content for contents sake.

Our thoughts seem to be shared by many other marketers shown by the number of similar comments in this brilliant SEO Mythbusting piece we have come across this week.

In this article a number of digital marketing experts have commented that too many times they see businesses churning out a huge amount of un-engaging or useful content because they have been told that if you create lots of content, people will link to and visit your site, which will in turn increase rankings on Google.

This just isn’t true. Yes having interesting, useful and optimised content on your site is very important and forms a large foundation of Googles ranking algorithm BUT there is no point in creating that content if it isn’t going to engage with your customers and if no-one is going to know that is it there.

Likewise content isn’t “just” a load of blog posts housed in a particular area on your site. Content is the entire experience you give your customers and potential customers both on and off your website.

As we have been preaching for years (see our guide to “Customer First Digital Marketing”) putting your customer at the heart of everything you do in your business is the path to success.
Here are our 3 top tips for retailers to follow to make sure the content they are creating will achieve results.

1. Make sure you know who you are creating the content for? Have you really taken time to profile the type of people who might read this content and how useful and engaging it will be to them? What benefits will they get from consuming that content? Will it drive them to take a particular action? Would they want to share it? Remember its quality over quantity. A couple of bits of content that really engage and generate buzz is far better than dozens of pieces of static content that no-one interacts with.

2. Don’t just stick to blog posts. There are a huge number of different types of content that can be used as part of an effective engagement strategy across many different channels. Think Instastories, Interactive guides, Video, Pinterest boards, Facebook apps, Podcasts etc. Every content workshop we run with clients includes up to 30 different types of content! Again think of the type of content that works best for your brand AND your customers.

3. Amplify your content once you have created it. Don’t just create your content, upload it and keep your fingers crossed it works! Make sure you proactively promote it! Share it via email, social, influencers, link to it from other content. Better still get influencers to co-create content with you and share it with their community.

The above tips are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to effective customer engagement that will also increase online visibility. However, remembering them when it comes to planning your content will start you off in the right direction.

Always remember content isn’t king, your customers are!! Make content for them, not the search engines.

For further advice on effective content & customer engagement please don’t hesitate to get in touch on 01273 322830 or email [email protected]

Tips to help retailers win in 2017

With today’s warnings from high street bell-weather, Next, on the challenging year ahead, there’s no denying that the perfect storm of economic climate, tighter spending belts from cannier consumers and shifts in the sale seasons we’ve seen as the UK embraces Black Friday, has had a knock on effect on Christmas shopping patterns and a detrimental impact on retail revenue this season.

It’s now more important than ever to have a solid January to make up any shortfall from Christmas and put good foundations in place for a successful 2017.

We’ve put together some tips for retailers to get 2017 trading off to a good start:

Do you really know who your customers are?

The key to successful retailing, is of course, acquiring and retaining the right type of customer for your business. This is, in turn, reliant on being able to identify who they are and how to attract them.

When was the last time you had a look at your transactional data to explore who your best customers actually were, what they buy from you, how often and what they actually want from your product range and marketing?

If you don’t know that now, with 2017 set to be another fierce year competing for consumer £££s, you must spend January digging into your data and learning everything you can about your customer.

Don’t market to your customers – give them a great experience!

The luxury retail trend of providing customers with a fabulous in-store experience has finally filtered onto the high street, with TopShop and John Lewis both launching in-store facilities that brought the shopping experience to life in 2016. Creating a shopping ‘environment’ isn’t a trend that is going to go away, it’s how clever retailers now ensure retention of happy customers and it’s not confined to bricks and mortar.

When you know what your customer wants from you, emulate that experience online. Is excellent customer service more important to them than price? If so, invest in live-chat, or a better presence on social channels to answer customer queries. Do your customers ask friends and family for advice before committing to a big purchase? If so, make sure your reviews are showing up in your internet search results or work with key industry influencers to give you that editorial cache.

Most importantly, do you have the right team to deliver?

Does your existing team have the skill set to cope with the shifts in consumer expectations and the cannier digital execution needed to retain them?
Digital disciplines established in silos for years; SEO, social media, affiliates and PR are seeing a convergence like never before and you may find that a team that was previously structured beautifully now has glaring gaps from those experts who can see the bigger picture of what a customer wants and have the ability to develop quick solutions to provide it.

Use January as a time to take an objective look at the team you currently have in the business and identify where you may need to skill up.

With these foundations in place, you can look forward to 2017 and coping with all the retailing challenges it throws at you.

Using the Christmas rush to build 2017 sales

For most retailers, the run up to Christmas is a very busy time, when sometimes planning and strategy fly out of the door to be replaced by ringing tills and fast and furious seasonal transacting.

But approached with thought, your Christmas rush doesn’t just need to be a short sharp peak in your annual sales figures, but can be coaxed into something a lot more meaningful for your brand.

In this blog post, we look at 3 simple tips to keep your Christmas rush paying throughout the year.

Collect, collect, collect:

Make your data collection process as quick and simple as possible.

For ecommerce retailers, as well as collecting data during the check-out process, ensure you enable relevant pop up data capture points at key areas on your homepage and as browsing customers leave the site.

For bricks and mortar retailers, investigate how you can capture email addresses along with transactional data at till point. Can you email your customers a receipt? In its simplest form, can you ask customers to leave their email addresses while the transaction is going on, with the offer of January discounts?

Ensure the process is as easy as possible, so your full time staff can fit it in to the conversation at a busy till point and seasonal staff don’t feel awkward asking. If relevant for your business, reward staff for the number of email addresses and data captured to keep that data being collected.

Segment, segment, segment:

Once the Christmas rush is over and we’re in the February lull, take the time to look through the transactional data and see what sparkly Christmas treasures it holds.

For online retailers and those bricks and mortar stores who were able to capture data electronically at till point, you should be able to segment Christmas sales into at least three simple segments:

  • Existing customers buying more at Christmas
  • Brand new customers who have never bought before
  • Those who bought last Christmas and came back for more

Each of these segments can then be nurtured with different messaging over the coming months to turn them from Christmas customers into loyal, year round shoppers:

Existing customers – communicate your thanks, ask them if their friends and family liked their gifts, (or if they enjoyed their own Christmas treats!). Offer them a friends and family incentive for those who they bought gifts for, or a thank you offer for being such a loyal customer (to coincide with any SS17 collection, obviously…).

Brand new customers – welcome them into an engagement programme, share with them your social and blog content, involve them in what you’re doing as a brand and motivate them to return to purchase.

Christmas (or sale) only customers – ask them why they don’t shop with you at any other times of the year, you’re sure to find out something useful; thank them for their input and pop them on the back burner to re-invigorate at your next sale period or Christmas.

If you can’t segment, just say thanks:

For those retailers without the ability to cross reference transactional data with customer data, a simple “thank you” can often work wonders.

Tell them you were grateful for their custom, that they made a difference to you and offer them an incentive to come back soon.

Happy Christmas!

Boost your Festive ROI – Five top tips to maximise Christmas sales

With £24 billion spent online in the UK in the 8 weeks running up to Christmas in 2015 and a further 11% rise predicted for 2016, how prepared are you to take advantage of this years bumper sales season? In this post I am going to explore five top tips to turn up the dial up on the activity you are doing already to boost ROI.

 

Dedicated Landing Page / Onsite Content

Your onsite strategy must include bespoke landing pages dedicated to Christmas, ideally getting pages live in October so they have time to bed in and become well established in time for the busy period.

Make sure your customer is at the heart of your content, consider how they might be searching, who are they buying for, what budget will they spend? Creating relevant onsite content that is useful, engaging and that has a clear call to action will be key to driving conversion.

Curate your best edit into a Christmas Gift guide, price band filtering to easily aid customers who have a specific budget in mind, along with ‘Gifts for him’, ‘Gifts for her’, ‘Gifts for kids’ to direct users to the most relevant content.

Getting your onsite content nailed then allows you to integrate your offsite strategy and funnel people to the most relevant content. Creating a consistent message on and off site, increasing awareness, engagement and ultimately conversion through a targeted approach.

Make sure messaging, offers and promotions in your offsite activity are clearly detailed on the landing page you are directing customers to, there’s nothing more frustrating than landing on a page without the relevant information on the offer, promotion or product you’ve seen.

Brand Paid Search

Brand Paid Search can be used cheaply and effectively to promote onsite messages and promotions. Creating consistent messaging across touch points.

“But no one is bidding on my brand term” I hear you cry “why would I pay for traffic I am getting organically?!” A very valid question…

Not all retailers run brand Paid Search year round, if you have no competition on your brand terms why would you? Competition or not, tactical use of Brand and Brand + Product Paid Search gives you seasonal and time sensitive flexibility in your message, that your well optimised but generic Natural Search listing can’t. Using site links to drive traffic to your Christmas content, gift guides and dedicated landing pages, plus call out extensions to highlight key messages such as delivery, price matching, returns etc.

If you haven’t already completed your trademark authorisation with Google, this allows you to associate your Adwords account as the trademark owner, create a list of authorised resellers if appropriate. We’ve seen clients brand CPCs drop after they have claimed and managed their Trademark authorisation.

Personalisation of offers

Use your data wisely, tap into your customer segments and personalise your message across touch points. Offering your customers relevant and timely offers that will drive them back to the site to buy.

Not all site visitors are made equal, use your remarketing lists and customer segments to create a more personalised message depending on the visitors site behaviour.

Abandon baskets being the Holy Grail and those primed to buy. Often retailers are all too quick to go straight in with a discount, when people can be tempted back without taking a big hit on your margin. We have seen great success with a tiered offering, for example:

No purchase within 24 hours – Free Next Day Delivery
No purchase within 1 week – Gift with purchase / free gift wrapping
No purchase within 2 weeks – X% discount

New vs returning – Depending on your strategy whether that be acquisition, retention or both! Use your remarketing list for search ads to show new and returning visitors different, relevant and personalised messages e.g. introductory offer to new customers, returning visitor promotional code. Also optimise bids based on behaviour so perhaps a 25% bid increase for returning customers.

RLSAs will also allow you to target terms you wouldn’t normally target, it opens up keywords that perhaps would be too expensive and perhaps broad, just for visitors who have been to the site or who have converted before.

Create sense of urgency

Black Friday was the busiest trading week last year with estimated sales of £4.3 billion last year, up 62% on 2014. In just two years the shift from Black Friday being a Bricks and Mortar event on a single day to a week of online offers.

Why have we all gone so crazy for Black Friday and Cyber Monday? Creating that sense of urgency with time sensitive offers is a brilliant conversion tactic to push people to purchase, however don’t over use it or people will learn to ignore it.

  • Some examples on how to do this:
  • Flash sale / promotions for a limited time period
  • AdWords dynamic countdown ads are a great, they have proven to significantly increase CTR and drive more traffic to the site
  • Sneak previews for your VIPs – let them have access to say the Christmas edit, Sale or similar 24 hours before it’s unveiled to the general public
  • Shipping offers for a limited period
  • Last order dates to get in time for Christmas
  • Stock levels for products with limited availability

Social commerce

So you’ve spent 2016 gaining followers, driving engagement, so how can you monetise social further in the busy period?

Optimise your calls to action, for example on Facebook:

  • Shop Now – direct fans to your website if sales are the primary objective
  • Send Message – Allows fans to send a private message directly to your Facebook account, where you could start the order process
  • Call Now – you get the idea right!

Facebook Shop:

Most ecommerce platforms now have an app or plugin to pull your site inventory into Facebook. We saw sales increase 50% after launching a Facebook Shop and promoting through Paid Social ads. With the rise of mobile commerce people are far more comfortable buying direct from their phone and through social commerce.

Content Optimisation:

Ensure that content is optimised for each channel. This will ensure a high quality appearance, better visibility within users’ timelines and increased engagement. One size does not fit all!

Promoted Content:

Organic reach has declined dramatically on all platforms, particularly Facebook. Boosting posts on Facebook and Twitter with small amounts of budget can drastically increase reach and engagement, as well as driving fan acquisition.

Ultimately these tips are designed to help you squeeze the ROI out of activity you are already doing, maximising visibility and efficiency of budget and time invested over the next 10 weeks.