Category Archives: Marketing

Facebook’s Brand Collabs Manager Platform Embraces Influencer Marketing

Marketing

In today’s hyper-connected world, consumers are looking to top workout gurus, beauty vloggers, foodie fanatics, mom blogs, and everyone in between, for advice, stories, and product suggestions. The resurgence of word-of-mouth marketing in the form of digital “influencers” wields significant power, motivating consumer purchasing decisions and brand engagement.

According to MarketingProfs, 94% of marketers who use influencer marketing find it an effective practice, with results that generate up to 11 times the ROI of traditional advertising.

Social media mavens and digital superstars serve as an extended tribe for product recommendations, brand loyalty, and more authentic online interaction. As a result, these content creators—from celebrities and bloggers, to niche-market personalities—continue to be a driving force for exponentially increasing brand following and audience reach.

Marketers and technology giants alike are taking notice of the power-of-the-pack digital strategy. The world’s largest social network is staking its own claim on the world of influencer marketing. Facebook’s recently released Brand Collabs Manager is connecting brands and influencers, and redefining how brands conceptualize and create branded content on the popular platform.

Facebook Brand Collabs Manager
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2018 Holiday Digital Ads Toolkit

Marketing, SEO + PPC

It’s beginning to look a lot like….the busiest shopping season of the year! Is your paid search plan in place to develop successful holiday ads and increase conversions this season?

Don’t skip this hugely profitable channel! Adobe reported that organic and paid search brought in the most revenue during the 2017 holiday season.

Holiday PPC Tips

We’re here to help you maximize paid search for holiday shoppers. Our 2018 Holiday Digital Ads Toolkit includes a guide to help you optimize your PPC strategy, a how-to for creating a Facebook ad, and a quick case study of a successful holiday ads campaign that generated a 954% return on ad spend (ROAS).

Get the Resources:



 

 

Getting the Most Out of Your CRM

Marketing

Whether you’re looking to maintain relationships with existing customers or engage prospects throughout the sales cycle, it’s impossible for even the most talented sales rep to remember every customer interaction, so they can follow up at the right time with the right message.CRM

As businesses strive to give a personal and genuine touch to every customer, tracking sales activity and follow up is critical. Yet, customers interact with businesses across multiple channels and at fleeting moments – how can a rep effectively monitor and keep track of it all? Including interactions with others, such as customer service.

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Piggyback Your Promotions with Amazon Prime Day

Marketing, News + Culture

Set your alarms! Amazon Prime day begins July 16, 2018.

Are you ready? Amazon Prime Day is the “Black Friday” of the Summer. If you’re a retailer with a presence on Amazon, Prime Day could be your busiest shopping day of the Summer. It’s time to get all your ducks in a row! Last year, we shared tips to boost sales on Amazon – check it out here.

Think you’re off the hook, because you don’t sell on Amazon? Think again. According to Criteo, brands sales on sites other than Amazon jumped 30% on Prime Day 2017 too! With about 2 weeks left until the big day, follow our three ideas to piggyback the Amazon Prime shopping event.

Daily Deals

Prime Day runs just over one full day, so why not extend your shopping deals over multiple days? Daily deals or customer appreciation weeks are a fun way to engage and show your appreciation for your loyal base. Tap multiple channels, such as email, website banners, and social media, to generate excitement in the weeks leading up to and during the shopping event.

Here is a customer appreciation email example from Gathre last month:

Gathre - Appreciation Week

Survey + Win

So… tell me what you want, what you really, really want! Have you been kicking around the idea of surveying your customers (and now, singing this song on repeat)? Surveys are a great way to gauge what your customers like and dislike and hear what they want from your company in the future. Surveys help customers feel a personal connection to your company, like their voice matters (which it should!).

Dovetail your survey release around Prime Day, by offering the chance to win an Amazon gift card for submitting feedback.

UrbanStems did a great job of this recently:

UrbanStems - Survey

Amazon-centric Content

Content is king! Take advantage of Amazon-centric content to increase readership and lead generation.

Everyone’s setting up their game plans for Prime Day, why not help them out? Create product round-ups, highlights, or gift guides. Think up what you would normally do for the Fall and Winter holidays, and shift the focus to Amazon.

Here are some examples we love from Apartment Therapy and Brit + Co:

Apartment TherapyBrit+Co

 

Takeaways

This global shopping day is one of the biggest of the season, if not the year, so don’t miss out! Build on the frenzy around Amazon Prime Day, whether you sell products on Amazon or not.

What ideas has your team come up with to take advantage of Prime Day? Share with us in the comments below!

2018 IRCE B2B Workshop Recap

Marketing, News + Culture

If you missed our B2B workshop session or need a refresher, get the persona worksheet and session slides below!

Session: A Wholesaler’s Winning Formula for Year-After-Year E-commerce Growth.

Mud Pie

Abstract: As a successful B2B wholesaler for 30+ years, how do you consistently up your marketing game? You combine new tactics and technologies, while staying flexible to respond to evolving customer expectations, trends, and requirements.

In this session, retailer and digital personalization veteran Mud Pie will walk through how it reaches customers at each stage of the journey. It builds on simple email personalization with persona-driven website personalization, and then with more sophisticated email campaigns triggered by real-time events.

Predictive analytics identify “at-risk-to-churn” customers, and automated email marketing plus the field sales force work to intercept and retain these customers. Together, these examples demonstrate how to build on successful marketing tactics in sequence to achieve a seamless multi-channel customer journey.

B2B Workshop Presentation Slides

Persona Worksheet

2018 IRCE Roundup

Marketing

This year’s Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition (IRCE 2018) in Chicago did not disappoint! We enjoyed awesome speakers, informative sessions, fun networking opportunities, and ate a ton of fresh popcorn at our booth.

2018 IRCE Roundup

The four-day conference featured two days of workshops and two days of general sessions, with an all-star cast of keynote speakers: Warby-Parker, Seth Godin, Houzz.com, and Eloquii. We had a great session in the B2B workshop on Friday speaking with our client Mud Pie, A Wholesaler’s Winning Formula for Year-After-Year E-commerce Growth. (Did you miss our B2B workshop session? Get our slides and the persona worksheet here.)

Continue reading 2018 IRCE Roundup →

Business Intelligence vs. Predictive Analytics

Analytics, Marketing

This month, we welcome a guest blog post from our Business Analyst, Bryan Sauka.

BryaBryan manages Whereoware’s business intelligence tools, develops predictive models, analyzes data, and identifies trends to help Whereoware clients make data-driven decisions.

If last year’s buzzword “big data” is about capturing and understanding data, intelligence is about achieving big-picture insights and making data actionable.

Today, we’re breaking down business intelligence (BI) and predictive analytics to help you understand how each can impact your business.

Continue reading Business Intelligence vs. Predictive Analytics →

Email Tip: Re-engagement Emails 101

Email Automation, Marketing

This month, we welcome a guest blog post from our Digital Strategist, Allison Cutsinger.  Allison is responsible for the overall email strategy, production, scheduling, delivery, and reporting of behavior-based, targeted email, website, mobile, and search campaigns for B2B and B2C e-commerce clients.

Allison

In the age of personalized content at your customers’ fingertips, email marketing campaigns are a must. After all, it’s a simple algorithm. You send engaging emails, make millions of dollars, and skip off into the sunset to live happily ever after.

While this may be your story, it’s often not that simple. Estimates suggest that by 2021, we could reach an all-time high of 320 billion emails sent daily around the globe. Competition for inbox placement and your customers’ attention is a universal challenge.

Every savvy email marketer struggles with subscriber disengagement. Broadly defined, email contacts are considered disengaged if they do not open any of your emails within the past 6 months.

It’s not uncommon for contacts to become disengaged. In fact, you can expect to lose roughly 22% of your subscribers on an annual basis (either from disengagement or from opting-out).

With heightened competition, even the best subject lines might not save disengaged customers. Today, we’ll cover engagement basics and how to re-engage at-risk subscribers.

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Zara Augmented Reality Enhances Customer Shopping Experience

Marketing

Imagine this: you walk into your favorite store, point your phone’s camera toward the display window, and see a real-life model posing and speaking, instead of a motionless mannequin. Or, you point your phone’s camera at a delivery package and see a model posing on top of your box.

ZaraAR

This sounds like futuristic fiction, but it’s exactly what Spanish retailer Zara revealed on April 12.

Yesterday, Zara rolled out an augmented reality (AR) campaign on their mobile app, ZaraAR to coincide with the release of their new collection. It is available in 120 Zara stores globally for two weeks. They’re not alone either. AR is picking up speed; according to Digital Bridge, 74% of consumers expect retailers to offer some type of AR experience.

Intrigued? Us too. Check out how Zara is using AR to enhance the customer shopping experience.

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Gmail Accelerated Mobile Pages Coming Soon

Email Automation, Marketing

Wouldn’t it be cool to interact with website content, answer a survey, RSVP to an event, or schedule an appointment without ever leaving your Gmail inbox? Imagine the opportunities for increased interactions with your audience, if they could convert directly within an email. Well, it’s your lucky day. Google announced Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) will be released for Gmail later this year.

Today, we’ll talk through how email marketers can prepare for Gmail AMP.

Google Accelerated Mobile Pages

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