Geary Fresh

Top 10 Retail Marketing Mistakes

We often get asked, “What could we be doing better?” And while the answer varies from client to client, we have compiled a list of the top 10 marketing mistakes we see in the retail industry. So check it out…how do you measure up?

10. Incomplete tracking of shopping cart abandonment- You might know that X% of users abandon your conversion funnel, but do you know where they go afterward? Do they return to your website or make their purchases elsewhere? Make sure you have a complete view of how and why users abandon their shopping carts. This information will help optimize your checkout process and increase your ROI and ROAS. Something as simple as condensing shipping and billing lead forms onto one page could make a difference.

9. Using market-speak instead of user-centric language in keyword strategies- There is a distinct difference in how marketers and consumers talk about products. Make sure your keywords cater to consumers and not marketing folks. Think like your customers and which terms they use to find your brand. From here, you can direct them to relevant content that progresses them through conversion stages.

8. Overlooking mobile coupons to attribute online engagements to in-store purchases- Retail marketers crave ways to connect cross-platform touch points, and mobile coupons are one mean to this end. If you’re engaging consumers online, direct them to coupons they can access from their mobile devices (via apps, email or mobile ads). This way you can concretely attribute an online interaction with an offline purchase. Connecting these dots will present you with a holistic view of how various touch points affect your ales.

7. Idle social media efforts- What have you done for social media lately? Do not go the way of social-flunkies before you and create profiles/ accounts and let them die. Users who engage with retail brands on social media platforms are actively requesting information. Do not let these customers down. They want to talk with you, so shape up, staff up and get your social media marketing plan in gear.

6. Not thoroughly segmenting paid search marketing- Paid search can be as scalable and targeted as you need. Take advantage of paid search’s targeting technology and reach various consumer segments with personalized ad copy. This will increase your click through rate, and if the rest of your sales funnel is optimized, conversion rates can greatly increase.

5. Undefined attribution model- Most retailers execute campaigns that span display, paid search, SEO, social and offline tactics. If this is your scenario, make sure you have a plan in place to know where sales originate. By creating an attribution model to track sales sources, you will have the data you need to maximize subsequent programs and gain better insights into how consumers engage with your brand.

4. Lack of landing page optimization- Capturing consumers using paid search and display media is only part of the battle. From here, where do consumers land? Does the information relate to ad copy? If not, you’re risking a high bounce rates and losing potential sales. Think about a complete path to sale and value your landing pages. They need to make a good impression and logically transition consumers from third party sites into your conversion process.

3. Fragmented CRM program- Keeping existing customers happy is a critical component of  marketing–especially for retailers. Whatever your preferred communication vehicle, make sure your CRM program resonates with consumers and maintains desired frequency and messaging.

2. Viewing SEO as a one-time effort- Search engine optimization is a continuous process. There are only a finite number of first page rankings, so if you want to stay there, you must keep ahead of your competitors. This can be accomplished through premium link building and adding original, quality content that attracts engine crawl bots. You must also think about consumer evolution. As their search habits change, so must your SEO strategy.

1. Working with multiple digital agencies to create a cohesive marketing program- If you want an integrated campaign, find an agency (like Geary Interactive) that meets your comprehensive digital needs. They will be better suited to execute a cohesive message across multiple disciplines because they understand the core of your business needs. One agency, one team working cooperatively to help achieve your marketing goals.

Advertising’s Top Stock Photography Model

Meet Wade. He’s a stock photography model and wants to invite you to the American Advertising Federation’s 2011 conference in San Diego. He might also throw in a jab about “low hanging fruit” along the way.

Advanced SEO at Interactive Marketing Day SD

Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz bestowed upon us some advanced SEO strategies. He’s already talking about statistics, but promises not to get too statistical. The presentation covers four areas where one could improve.

He notes that paid search gets about 14% of SERP clicks while organic areas get 86%, per Avinash Kausnik. He notes the tremendous imbalance in industry wide paid search spends and SEO spends considering these stats.

Four methods accelerate SEO:

• Increase rankings in individual results.
• Getting rankings in universal search (video, news, GPS)
• Improve long tail traffic
• Better convert existing search traffic

Think about search volume, the value of a visitor, and the competition when doing keyword research. This can be done with tools or manually, depending on the scope. Analyzing the competition and their on-site strengths, as well as their linking. Look at domain diversity in backlink profiles, this is a sign of strength. You have to also be weary of altering anchor text. And of course links from authority sites is fantastic.

Now Rand goes into correlation data that he has gathered that points out the heavy influence that exact match keyword domains have in rankings. Links from exact match keyword rich domains as well as just owning them is a powerful strategy.

Badge strategies are a good link building technique. He uses Picnik as an example of offering badges, that have keyword rich alt tags, for fans to post on their sites.  They rank VERY well because of this.

Infographics are great for link building. Don’t just focus on people linking to your infographic. Offer your infographic in an embeddable format for people to use.

Content licensing is another great link building tactic. Allrecipes.com offers licensing of their recipes, images, and other content as long as you link back to them! this solution is highly scalable.

The Search Engine Ranking Factors at SEOmoz are discussed next. I am highly familiar with this and feel that it is spot on. It is reproduced every two years and put on to the same URL, with the old info moving to a different page. This allows that URL to gain strength over and over again with time. So if at first you don’t succeed in ranking, try try again!

Next he gives some resources on how to get visibility in Universal Search. Video results are a great place to get visibility. Video results get high CTR in the SERPs and not many people are optimizing for it. You can use many different platforms to host the video for you, making it very cost effective and scalable.

Local/maps results are another fairly easy way to get more visibility through Universal Search. If you do not optimize for local searches you need to submit to the Google Local Business center. Here is a great local optimization resource.

Image results can be another great place to get traffic and exposure. Believe it or not this drives significant traffic and are hyper effective for certain verticals like crafts, furniture, design. Some best practices for ranking well in image search are keyword rich alt image tags. The image file name is no long a high ranking factor but having the image posted on other sites seems to have an effect. Size matters in image search rankings. Check sizing of images ranking for what you want to rank for and mimic that.

News results require an RSS feed with title, date, author, etc. Google does look into your business to see if you provide enough good content when you submit for inclusion. Blogs will get accepted to Google News. If you do not submit, you’ll never get in so go for it.

Real time results depends on speed of publishing of course. Big media firms have staff ready 24/7 to post breaking stories. But anyone can break news with the advent of Twitter! This is bigger than ever with the recent Google Caffeine update rolled out completely just a few weeks ago. Google Caffeine allows for faster indexing and ranking of results and is based on predictive modeling and topics.

Blog results are similar to Google News. But all you really need is an RSS feed. Getting referenced (linked to) from other authority bloggers really helps you get into blog results faster.

Shopping results are based on product data feeds that you submit. Reviews are aggregated and posted within these results. High volumes of reviews seem to really help, not necessarily good ones just get volume.

25% of all queries are brand spanking new, the long tail is still very strong and I do not see that changing. Lot’s of unique content really helps here. It is really easy to rank for long tail search. Rand does not think that blogging is really a big long tail strategy, he feels that it is just too difficult to scale. UGC is the way to go for scaling content. Gawker Media pays his writers based on how much traffic their articles command. Finally, Twitter is a great way to build content.

Now he moves into conversion optimization as the final strategy. Look at the conversion funnel and isolate opportunities at each point in the funnel. Even the smallest incremental increase in conversion rate has such a huge impact. It is highly effective because of this! There is a ton of psychology is powerful in CRO. Making your higher price points or add on the default selection has a huge impact. Social proof, put a name and face to your offer! Scarcity is a huge factor as well, show that only a few products are left and people will be compelled to buy now, before it’s gone!

That wraps it up for now. Overall it was a good presentation and was a good fit for the crowd here. I feel like most of the audience found value. There were not many advanced SEOs in the room, at least that is the vibe that I got. But there were many people that employ SEOs in the room and they seemed to glean a ton of value. I will embed Rand’s presentation once I can get my hands on it.

Best Nike Soccer Ad?

They seem to think so. Nike claims this is its best ad to date. I think its really great, and I love the social media plug. I am not sure if I would go as far as to say it’s be best ever, but you be the judge.

Social Media Revolution Part 2

This video is just as good as the first one. It shows the undeniable impact of social media on user behavior.

Diesel Facebook Integration

We can’t take credit for the latest social media addition (and very clever marketing tactic) that now adorns the Diesel dressing rooms in the form of a “Diesel Cam,” but we have been anticipating the integration of digital and the physical for a while now.

The Diesel Cam allows shoppers to automatically post photos taken as they’re shopping to their Facebook profiles, granting customers the opportunity for immediate feedback on their potential purchases from everyone in their social networks. Images from the Diesel Cam include a Diesel logo, supplying the brand with free advertising when users share the photos.

Shopping is inherently social—the first thing that most people do before purchasing clothes is seek the opinions of their friends (or the person in the next stall) so sharing prospective fashion choices on Facebook is bound to be a successful campaign. We predict that this form of social integration will soon be available in many other shapes and sizes, from automatic updates when you check into hotels to photo -ops when you visit popular tourism destinations or dine in destination restaurants.

The video is pretty cool, too:

Keeping Google Interested In Your Content

An important question was posed to Matt Cutts at Google Webmaster Help today…

“Say your index page has been cached by Google and you then you change the meta description. How long does it take for a Google bot to recrawl that page? Or must your request it via Webmaster Tools?”

So this is addressing caching of pages by Google, which is a very important determinant of how authoritative Google views your domain or specific pages. A higher frequency of caching means that your site is important enough for Google come back and crawl it more often than not. If it takes six weeks between cache dates on a page then you can safely say that Google finds the page stale and possibly not relevant anymore (time/freshness factor) or that the page is not as valuable to visitors. Eventually cache dates will get further and further apart, and then the page will fall into a supplemental index which is like being a second class citizen in Google’s world.

How does one avoid falling into supplemental oblivion? Well, let’s first examine Mr. Cutts response…

“There are a few cases where if we haven’t seen the content change the last eighteen times that we visited then maybe the nineteenth time we’ll wait even longer (between caches/indexing). But in general when there’s regular content, and in our opinion that’s important content…”

Now what constitutes “important” content in the eyes of Google?

“…we’ll generally try to revisit that page often to see whether it’s changed or whether there is any new information on it.”

A good blog post with a high level of engagement (comments) is a great example of new information being added to a page. This should attract Google to cache the post more often. This is why getting your constituents to engage with your content is critical in establishing authority within Google.

“But if the page hasn’t changed in a while (no fresh content/ discussions), or the page doesn’t have a high Page Rank, then it can take longer to cache.”

And there it is, Page Rank! Page Rank is not the end all be all measure of authority by any means (at least not the Page Rank we see). This is proven in many instances where a page with a lower Page Rank will rank above a page with a higher Page Rank. A truer metric of rankings is Google’s internal, secret Page Rank that no one can or ever will see. Google uses it to calculate authority of a given page, and this calculation is almost entirely based on linking, or the various sites that are linking to YOUR page(s).

SUMMARRY

There are two things that can increase the caching/indexing of your pages; fresh content and links.

Now when Google says fresh content this doesn’t necessarily mean that the content has to update every day or even every week. But if Google crawls a page a bunch of times, over a few months probably, and sees no changes to content, it will stop crawling the page as often to focus on other relevant pages with newer content. So adding new content or tweaking the existing content on your pages every so often is a good idea, especially to keep the content updated with the times. Google is placing a great deal of emphasis on time and dates of pages lately too. There is just no need to obsess over it on a weekly basis. I suggest refreshing your most important pages every few months to keep them current. Ultimately this should please your visitors and the search engines. And after all, that is what search engine optimization is all about!

The other thing that can keep your pages popular with Google are links, the equity of Page Rank and ultimately rankings. Links, like fresh content, send a signal to Google that other people find your page(s) useful, fresh, and relevant. Google figures that if other pages are still linking to your content then it must be of some use or importance. A steady growth of new links to your most important pages will help ensure that they stay at the forefront. It does not have to a large amount of links, and it can even come in the form of blog comments from relevant sites or social media sites.

THE FUTURE

A few things have not been specifically addressed here. Is social media a factor? So for instance if a page is referenced in Twitter, will that increase Google perception of authority, relevance, and freshness?

And are engagement stats like CTR (click-thru rate), time on site, and/or bounce rate being factored into Google’s perceived authority of a page?

I would love to hear everyone chime in with comments on these two things and let me know what you think of social media and engagements stats and their role in page authority, if any, at the moment!

Why Facebook Creeps Me Out Sometimes

Facebook is my favorite social media platform. I have had an account since I was in college, back when you needed a school email address to sign up. Since then, Facebook has had a few advertising blunders, but bless its heart, it’s still trying.

Changes–

Friends’ profile pictures show up when I call from my cell phone, and now, it’s syncing with my Pandora stations. Apparently my friends and I have similar taste in music…or at least that is what Pandora/ Facebook tells me. With each new song, I get a note saying “So and So likes this song/ artist too.” Pandora is great because it’s personalized, but what do they get out of telling me what songs my friends like too? Is my music going to be further personalized based on the music I have listed on my profile?

Facebook believes in opt-out changes, which goes against the opt-in standard. They continue to integrate their platform, which granted is a marketing gold mine. But without getting permission first, they perpetuate the user perception that privacy is being invaded. Yes, we post pictures. Yes, we note our likes and dislikes and engage with brands. This is worlds a part from granting permission to have online user behavior tracked across multiple platforms and packaged for advertisers.

The future of CDMA iphones and QR usage

A story published in Fast Company today, discussed the rumor that Apple is producing CDMA compatible iPhones. If these rumors pan out, this means that Apple is planning to work with carriers like Verizon that use this technology. This recent wave of rumors, sparked by a Wall Street Journal report, is just one of many that keep Verizon fans hopes of owning an iPhone alive.

The Wall Street Journal has a history of being the first to break Apple news, which lends credibility to this story. Will Apple end its exclusive contract with AT&T? We cannot be sure, but with these rumors and Apple’s tradition of launching new products/ upgrades every year, there is a chance (if only a slight one).

This particular Fast Company story also features a QR bar code at the end of the article–something I haven’t seen before. While QR is still in its infancy, the use of these 2-d bar codes in magazines and on product packaging is starting to surface. The QR bar code in this article directs users to the author’s Twitter page. SXSW also used this technology to embed attendees contact information–kind of brilliant.

I think QR technology can be an efficient way to engage users in typically non-participatory activities (like reading a magazine). It is also a nice bridge to support mobile marketing adoption. They might be a flash in the pan, but for now, I contend that QR might find a nook in marketing.

Should tweets be copyrightable?

First amendment law was one of my favorite classes in college–copyrights were a particularly fascinating topic. Copyrights protect original works, owners of which control the right to reproduce, license and distribute said works. A while back there was some talk about whether or not Tweets are copyrightable content. Some tweets are catchy, clever and worthy of admiration, but this does not mean they are copyrightable.

In my humble opinion, Tweets do not meet the threshold for attaining copyrights for the following reasons:

• They are largely fact (i.e.–I’m at Starbucks drinking a latte or I think the Padres will win the World Series) . Facts are not copyrightable content.
• Tweets are property of the public domain at the time of dissemination. A foundational goal of Twitter is to get your messages re-tweeted, so claiming rights over their distribution is futile to say the least.
• They are only 140 characters. Copyrights were created to protect substantial works of art like books, movies, songs, paintings and a whole spectrum of artistic mediums. The truncated nature of Tweets do not lend themselves to display artistic brilliance worthy of legal protection. (Not that some aren’t hilarious and quite brilliant.)