Tags

Lars Silberbauer on LEGO and being the human voice of your company

LEGO is one of the most beloved brands on the planet and its social strategy is one of the most richly engaging and rewarding.

The company puts a strong emphasis on encouraging and inspiring the different communities it has created throughout its many active digital channels.

Lars Silberbauer is LEGO’s global director of social media and this morning he gave a talk at our Festival of Marketing about the finer aspects of Lego’s social strategy.

Christmas email marketing has begun: four examples from fashion brands

It’s November, which means it’s time for retailers to start ramping up their Christmas marketing efforts.

US brands still have Thanksgiving and the whole Black Friday/Cyber Monday shopping bonanza to get out of the way first, but in the UK marketers have a clear two-month run up to Christmas Day.

The avalanche of seasonal joy kicked off in earnest last week with the unveiling of John Lewis’ penguin TV ad, followed by less-popular efforts from it rivals.

But alongside the big TV reveals, digital marketers have also begun dropping in mentions of Christmas.

I’ve started to receive emails promoting various offers and sales, though it hasn’t yet been the torrent of Christmas-related messages that I was expecting.

Introducing the handy Festival of Marketing mobile app

The Festival of Marketing begins in just two days time, so it’s probably about time you downloaded the official app.

That’s assuming you’re coming of course, because if you’re not then it might not be all that useful for you…

Available on iPhone, Android and Windows Phone, the festival app acts as a hub for all event information – from a comprehensive agenda of the event’s 10 content streams and interactive maps, to transportation, speaker and sponsor details, and insight into what’s happening at the event’s Festival Village and the Digitals Awards.

Here I’ll give a totally impartial run through of the main features and how it will help improve the festival experience for all attendees…

Is Google UK giving too much preference to US sites?

Recently there seems to have been a greater proliferation of US results for searches which should return more localised listings. 

One such example is supermarkets. If people search for this and related terms, they should be seeing retailers that actually trade in the UK. 

However, we’re seeing Walmart, kmart and others appearing in what should be localised search results…

An insight into the Chinese ecommerce market for Singles Day

China is set to become the world’s largest online retail market, having enjoyed explosive growth in the last few years. The market is mainly powered by China’s 302m online shoppers, incidentally the world’s most active online purchasers.

Much of the Chinese ecommerce industry’s explosive growth is attributed to the unique landscape in itself. The market value of ecommerce is largely derived from the weak offline retail sector, and online retail has provided consumers with a much needed alternative way of shopping.

Econsultancy’s new State of Ecommerce in China report, published in partnership with hybris, an SAP company, looks in more detail at this market.

To focus on the potential the Chinese ecommerce industry has, I’ve decided to share a few snippets from the report. Not to forget it’s Singles Day, the largest online shopping day in the world. Enough said.

Why global retailers are taking a multichannel approach

Costco and Zara are two of the latest Western brands to open online stores in China via Alibaba’s Tmall marketplace.

They’re hoping to follow the success of companies such as Apple, Burberry and Marks & Spencer which have used this route to reach millions of consumers. 

With ecommerce growing fast around the world, more British and American companies are shifting their focus overseas. And often marketplaces and other sales channels are the key to reaching a global audience.

International SEO: A beginner’s skills guide

Or… how to attract the attention of global search audiences in territories that aren’t your own?

So you’ve successfully adopted a brilliant tactical SEO strategy, your business is achieving high organic rankings for all your most desired search terms, traffic is flooding in and life is good. 

You’ve also triumphed with your local SEO and now your business is regularly providing search results that are relevant to searchers based on their current location and creating huge amounts of footfall through your high street doors.

Heck you’ve even smashed through the roof with your off-page SEO efforts, thanks to some stellar social media work, relevant white-hatted link-building and thankless devotion to Google+.

However, if you look closely at your analytics platform, you may see that your audience isn’t just coming from your own country. A small portion could well be accessing your site from anywhere else in the world.

It’s possible to not only make you site more accessible to your global audience, but also with a few processes and techniques, grow that audience substantially.

Why trust is vital if brands are to make the most of consumer data

Anyone who has ever watched Spider-Man will know that with great power comes great responsibility.

Digital technology has given marketers access to an unfathomable amount of customer data, however it should be used in a responsible manner for risk of destroying consumer trust.

This is particularly important in our world of freemium products that rely on a value exchange of digital services in return for access to personal data.

A new Econsultancy/Acxiom report investigates consumer attitudes towards sharing their data with companies, revealing that opinion is split on whether brands can be trusted.

Only 6% of respondents in the Delivering Value in the Data Exchange Survey indicated that they had ‘a great deal of trust’ in companies to whom they provided data. 

hummingbird

How does Google judge quality content?

Everybody talks about the need to provide quality content on your site if you want to rank well in searches. But how do search engines identify quality content?

Successive Google algorithm updates (culminating in the recent Panda 4.1) aim to refine results so that they match the intent of the search query and deliver the most comprehensive, accessible and well-written answer.

Why Christmas begins early for online retailers

There used to be an unspoken rule about the Christmas retail season that any ads would only begin after Bonfire Night was over. After that, the deluge began.

Unusually for today’s society, this particular season is getting longer not shorter, as advertisers and retailers inculcate in consumers the idea that Halloween is now the time when the floodwaters are unleashed.

Christmas now begins on November 1st, Hark the Herald Angels Sing! But for online retailers it comes even earlier because of the seasonal gravity of that time of year.

A bad Christmas in the age of algorithms and customer acquisition extends beyond revenues and margins; it probably spells the end.

Recent research from Ometria bears this out on data it accumulated from comparing last year’s Christmas with the first ten months of this year.

1 … 287 288 289 290 291 292 293 294 295 … 397