Over the next three articles I will cover three ‘A’s of digital retail marketing; Accessibility, Availability, and Applicability. These three key principles are a prescription to follow for success at using digital media to reach and influence your customers.
This week we start with Accessibility. This refers to the ease with which consumers can discover, access and interact with your brand, your consumer information, your product offers and your marketing messages. It may seem self evident, but your information needs to appear in the locations where the customer attention is.
The challenge with digital media is that the definition of ‘place’ is now vast. Traditional media is still limited in its number of ‘places’ to put your messages; be that TV stations, radio stations, magazines, or newspapers. That scarcity means high prices –despite the fact that consumer attention is shifting, and much more fragmented. The letterbox still maintains a good amount of attention, even among ‘netizens’ who still check their mail, and continues to be a powerful and effective place for retailers to put their marketing messages; hence it continues to be a dominant marketing channel for retailers.
In all of the traditional channels above, accessing the information is straight forward, ubiquitous and easy. Passive consumption tends to have that advantage.
Digital media on the other hand is different, and comes with its own challenges and complexities. People could be in one of any number of ‘places’ when they are making purchasing decisions, and be somewhere else seconds later. Quickly jumping from place to place is the underlying heart of the Internet. Adapting to active consumption, and acknowledging the power shift to the consumer, is paramount if you are to succeed online. How do you catch the attention of the freedom loving information junkie? The challenge becomes more complex when we look at the many different devices now used to access digital media.
Accessible marketing therefore refers to your marketing messages being:
1. Where the consumer is
2. Able to be ‘consumed’ through multiple devices and media types
3. Able to be to be shared, forwarded, printed, saved etc
1. Be where the consumer is.
Fundamentally this means you must be in more places than your own web site. Regardless of the strength your brand and marketing, only a minority of people who are making buying decisions on the products you sell, will come straight to your website. These people are already loyal to your brand. You need to have a strategy to reach new people, either through some sort of paid online marketing, or as a vector of those people already at your website.
So where are they? They are of course in many places. Search engines are the first place to start – as the majority of Australians start their research journey here. Then there are vertical search engines, comparison sites, shopping sites, blogs, social media, industry portals etc. All of which form a very important part of accessible marketing.
To be across the spectrum there is a balance of paid and unpaid media. For example search engines can give you consumers through advertising (paid search marketing) and through being found naturally or organically in the search results. Appearing organically remains a big challenge for Australian retailers, a topic this series will cover in July.
Being in many of the other places requires you to advertise, targeting your marketing messages selectively based on performance. Again this is also a challenge for many retailers who do not have their marketing messages in a suitable digital format for online distribution. Finding the right format is more than the end result that ends up on a consumers screen far away, it is tightly baked into the process of how that information gets to its destination.
2. Be accessible through different devices/media
In addition to your marketing messages being available to you as defined data, suitable for distribution; your distribution vehicles should be optimised for the various browsers, device types and applications which people will choose to access your information through.
Starting with the basics, web sites need to be optimised for a range of browsers now and not just IE. Mobile devices, particularly smartphones are increasingly being used to access the internet via WAP, web-browsers or purpose built applications which optimise the experience. People will also want to access what you have to tell them through other means such as RSS readers, desktop applications or widgets, and applications in their favourite online social networks. It is important to plan campaigns to be truly multichannel and be able to be found through all of the above, and to be prepared for what is coming around the corner.
3. Be easily shared and talked about
You need different web pages (or landing pages) for each of your marketing messages, each product offer, every product you sell. Why? Because this is what people link to, what Google indexes, what people share, print, email onto a friend etc. If you take out paid search advertising you need relevant pages to land people on. Behind this is the need to have structured or defined data. For it is only with defined data that you have the flexibility to build pages for multiple devices and can be effectively, shared, printed etc.
For example, a common mistake retailers make with their catalogues, is not having landing pages for each of the products they are advertising. This means there is of very little benefit to the retailer in attracting new customers to their site. It reduces “shareability”, “discoverability”, and “mashability”.
Making your marketing accessible is clearly important, and your own web site is the essential starting point. The next step is making that website, its content and pages, easily and well indexed by search engines, and easily shared and consumed by customers. Finally, comes pushing out your information to the many sites, tools, applications and devices that people are interrogating to find out what to buy and from where. Surely you would rather be in the search results when the alternative is to be invisible?
Stay tuned for part two, when I explore the second “A” of digital retail marketing, Availability.
This article appeared in Inside Retailing Online
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