Online Branding & eMarketing Techniques

I’ve spoken to a number of leading companies in the ecommerce arena recently including retail, advertising, investment and travel. Most of the brands, which will go unnamed for reasons of trust and confidentiality, have a strong traditional ‘offline’ brand, well known as being leaders in their industry. However, they share 1 commonality – using their brand strength to drive online revenue, without too much focus on recreating the core brand messaging online.

What’s wrong with this if your company has continued to grow from strength to strength since early 2000? The problem is both of market saturation and losing out to your competitors. Using the stronghold that your brand has on a particular sector to drive online sales, will eventually mean you are losing out on a chunk of online sales of customers that do not know your brand well enough.

A true multi-channel sales approach considers online as more than an end-point and instead uses emarketing as an integral part of your marketing strategy. Consider direct mail; how many of your direct mail customers also receive the same marketing message via email? Which one do you consider most valuable? The DM piece that lands on their doorstep for immediate attention? The email that can be fully tracked from opening to clickthrough? How about using both mediums in tandem, holding back on emailing those that have received DM with a follow up email if they’ve not responded within a certain amount of time? Or perhaps you want to reduce print and distribution costs and encourage more customers to use their emails?

The key here is to think about your website as complimentary to traditonal marketing tools.

So how does this relate to online branding? What I’ve found time and time again is that brands are reaching a point now where they’re finding it difficult to continually grow the online channel, with 2 key elements missing from their websites; brand proposition and user experience.

Brand proposition is the portrayal of your core brand values; who are you? What do you do? Why should I buy from you? Why should I choose you over a competitor? How much? What’s in it for me? Etc etc

With brands driving traffic online through traditional marketing channels and seeing a heavy bias towards brand searches online, they’re not increasing their visibility online and not converting ‘brand virgins’ with their ‘buy from us if you want’ mentality. Sorry guys, this won’t cut the mustard too well these days, in a world of millions of choices and websites. Today, you need to maximise potential conversion of every visitor to your website to stand out against the competition.

User Experience covers your brand, product, marketing, pricing, competition and of course the look and feel of your website, ease of task completion and cohesion of each page to delivering a sale or lead. So much to cover, just where do you start?

You know your brand proposition right? You know your product(s) and you have a website. That’s a great place to start. Next, put yourself into the shoes of your customer and look at the various marketing messages you throw at, sorry deliver to your customers. Does online and offline carry a unified message? Do the designs and branding at least look like they’re from the same company? The place to start is to see things from the perspective of a new customer. Do you ‘get’ the brand and would you have enough information to at least visit the website?

Marketing material is as much a hook into your website as it is a communication channel. That’s why the user experience spans each customer touchpoint before you even consider how well your web delivers the user experience.

There are lots of optimisation techniques to hook potential customers in, but i’l leave that for another article. The next stage is how to give the customer what they want when they visit your website. Now worth pointing out is to appreciate and understand 2 things.

1) your customers expect to be able to find what they want quickly. They are the most important person on your website at that moment in time.

2) your customers don’t always know what they want!

Kinda tough to please everyone? Using a basic understanding of the hunter, tracker, explorer model of user journeys, you should at least cover off 80% of you user’s needs. For the other 20% ensure they can call or email you with ease.

Landing page optimisation is also in itself a key area of study, with numerous techniques and tools at your disposal. However, don’t rely on a one-size fits all design and consider instead at the very least, creating 2 landing pages for your marketing; for new and for repeat visitors. Their likely needs will vary with a number of areas of crossover.

Note: whilst this may not be the case for all businesses, invariably customers do not always type forward slash web addresses in. They simply go directly to the homepage. So if your DM campaign directs people to a dedicated microsite, you may be missing a trick if it is not also accessible via the homepage (an obvious challenge for below the line marketing).

Considering you have created 2 basic journeys into your website, again ask yourself whether you really fulfill the majority of customer needs. This is where an internal brainstorm with your brand/product team or external focus group with potential customers can really make a difference in uncovering hidden gems.

Creating a compelling brand journey doesn’t require a completely new approach to the layout of your website. Instead, incorporating existing collatorol into your key product and sales pages can in itself make a huge difference.

The point I wish to stress is to assume nothing. Once you crack it, your website will not only serve as a fully functional tool for those that already know your brand, but will also become a central platform in driving new business through your brand marketing.

What brand marketing challenges do you face? Get in touch for some advice or feedback.

Realistic Affiliate Marketing Expectations

Affiliate marketing is a hugely competitive arena. Even if you find your niche, it will only be a matter of time before a super affiliate or merchant challenges your space.

You need to be realistic in your vision of what you can leverage; if you’re working alone alongside your 9-5 role, it is very unlikely you’ll be joining the elite any time soon unless you hit a goldmine or perhaps suffer from insomnia with more hours in your day than most people.

Super affiliates become a network of specialists in their own rights, leveraging highly skilled talent to help further their profits.

I’ve seen a number of affiliates struggle from setting unrealistic expectations. Take my example. I aimed to become profitable after 6-9 months and achieve my first monthly income target within 12 months, using a structured approach to building my online presence. I’m well on track and with continual traffic and revenue growth at a steady pace, giving as much back as we put in.

Knowing what to set and how to set targets comes with knowledge of the industry which many affiliates may not have, but start small and over achieve. It will help massively with your motivation and give you further confidence to build on from each success.

What is worse than striving for success without seeing any payback? We have more ambitious targets next year, followed by global domination! Ok, maybe not just yet, but by starting small, your failures are also less magnified, from selecting the right host for your website to creating and marketing it the right way.

Finally, having consulted on a number of affiliate ventures, through the brilliant affiliates4u forum, I know how daunting and tough it can seem, but with a wide network of support available through forums and down to earth super affiliates there really is no reason to give up!

What challenges have you faced and how have you kept your motivation levels up?

Analytics brought my site down!

One of the most crucial tools in your online toolbox is your website analytics tool (you do have one right?)

I’m currently using Google Analytics and a newer application called GetClicky. I’m using 2 because Google Analytics is quite possibly the most functional and useful of the free web analytic tools with advanced features and functionality. However I love Getclicky for its real-time reporting and simple dashboard. The paid for version opens up more functionality but for the time being I’m quite content.

Personally I use Getclicky everyday to check site visits and GA less frequently for a more in-depth analysis. It is this very thing that had me running circles recently…

I’d changed a few things on the site, to improve usability and help better our SEO. A day later and visits had plummeted to barely 20 or 30 unique visitors a day from a far healthier number! What had I done? Was I being penalised for black hat SEO that I wasn’t aware of? Was this a seasonal shift (being the bank holiday weekend).

I decided to wait a 2nd day before worrying – yet the same again! Getclicky was reporting only 25 UVs.

It was only until my other half suggested looking at Google Analytics that I found the problem.

I’d inadvertently deleted the code required for the Getclicky tool, except for on the homepage! Google analytics was showing the correct volume of visits!

It is these experiences which help you as a marketer to sometimes remember that the most obvious of answers can reveal the best solution.

But most of all, don’t always trust the numbers!!

The Art of Selling – Can Online Shops Compare

One of my facinations in ecommerce is in comparing the real world of ‘bricks and mortar’ sales to online.

Real world commerce existed ever since man decided that he wanted more than what he could create himself. Therefore, with online commerce barely 15 years old, it comes as no surprise to see so many websites failing so badly; after all, humans have been trading for many centuries. The art of traditional selling is light years ahead of the Web.

Having a little time on our hands we ventured into London town for some site seeing (yes even Londoners do this). However en route to Bond Street via Oxford Circus we alighted the bus outside of Hamleys, the self-confessed biggest toy shop in the world.

As she’d never been to Hamleys, my wife wanted to ‘take a look’ – generally for women, (a generalisation may I emphasise) going into a shop to take a look could result in losing several pounds – not of the weight-loss kind either.

It is indeed a vast experience, with toys for genders, ages, types and crafts – quite a daunting experience being parents, knowing where to start. Back in my day (many moons back) a toy was usually something second hand, received quite unexpectedly, though with appreciation. Of course these days it is a given right of children it seems… I digress.

So why was I compelled to write this article? With so much choice, Hamleys would surely suffer if it were not for their fantastic team of skilled helpers. We walked out a few hundred pounds (£) lighter than if these helpers were not available.

Put simply, not only on hand to offer assistance, they were always willing to offer that little bit extra to find out exactly what we were after and demonstrated their knowledge of the toys they were responsible for enough so to pursuade us to buy them. Had they not been on hand we may well have bought fewer things otherwise not available at our local Toys’r'Us and shopped again later. Instead I spent the rest of our ‘relaxing’ afternoon together carrying bags upon bags of toys around, to the amusement of tourists.

So how can we create this experience online? Amazon.com do a great job with lots of great widgets such as recommendations, wish-lists and peer reviews, but do these websites really know who I am and what I want? Surely if the Web was a truely great sales tool, traditional shops like Hamleys would suffer.

I for one believe that the mid-term future is a better integration of these traditional trading establishments together with a web presence fully integrated in giving the customer the best possible experience.

Long-term the Web still may mature enough to become intelligent. I wrote a while back on Web 3.0 and the possibility of the web actually knowing enough about you to give you truly customised experience. Imagine searching for a summer holiday and the results knowing that you love the Med, prefer a villa and have a family of 4…

Until then perhaps we will constantly swim the tide trying to out-do well run businesses like Hamleys…