Salmat Pre-Shop®
News | April 2009
| Welcome to the April 2009 issue of Salmat Digital Pre-Shop News.
Easter is almost upon us and the volume of online Pre-Shopping is increasing rapidly as people turn to online as a credible medium to help decide what to buy and from where. Social media continues to increase its influence, with Twitter now on an incredible 1350% growth curve and being incorporated into the marketing tactics of businesses around the world. We give you a very brief overview below. Join the fun and follow Lasoo here. I am also tweeting here.
Kind regards
Paul Marshall
Executive Director
Salmat Digital
Sneak peak: the three As of digital marketing
There are three important digital marketing principles, which will become more important over time. They are Marketing Accessibility, Availability and Applicability. In my regular piece in Inside Retailing, I will be exploring each in some detail over the coming month. However, briefly, they are as follows.
Accessibility. This refers to having your product and marketing information easily available; at the place (and time, which falls into Availability) where someone is looking. Accessibility well beyond your own website’s search and navigation. More important is the need to be discovered and available where people are looking, including search engines, industry portals, social sites, RSS readers, desktop tools, mobile phones etc.
Availability. People are not making buying decisions only when you have your marketing campaign running or your stores open. Digital media changes the paradigm of retail marking in that people are now seeking information and purchasing from anywhere in the world, at any time of the day or night. How do you respond to that? How can you ensure the availability of your information when people are looking for it?
Applicability. Digital media is by its very nature interactive, selective and user-controlled. It is a media-optimised and individual experience and therefore difficult to use as a marketer. Replicating mass media marketing (untargeted display advertising) does not work. Relevance is the key to marketing in the digital media; ensuring your brand and your messages are applicable to each recipient is essential for both the health of your brand and the success of your campaigns. Applicability all starts with understanding each customer. If your advertising is relevant, it is indistinguishable from information.
Each of these will be explored in further detail in Inside Retailing and also in my blog over April/May.
Twitter: sending Tweet nothings
Twitter currently seems to be the word on everyone’s lips. Around the Salmat Digital office, we’ve heard more than one person declaring that “Twitter is the new Facebook”. But what exactly is this new technology, and how can you use it in your online marketing arsenal?
Loosely defined, Twitter is a social networking service that allows you to create updates of 140 characters at a time, called tweets – similar to Facebook status updates. Your tweets appear on your profile page as a feed and other users can also elect to “follow” you. This means that your tweets will appear on their homepage feed along with the tweets of other users they are following. You can read more about it on Wikipedia.
The opportunities offered by Twitter for building and marketing your brand are great, and are still being explored as the technology moves beyond early adopters and into the Internet mainstream. Encouraging your brand’s customers to follow you on Twitter offers a personal, instantaneous way to interact with them. The most successful brands on this platform aren’t just pushing out their marketing messages in 140 characters or less – they are also offering followers personal insights, interesting links and other entertaining and informative snippets. The toughest thing for most brands looking to use Twitter as a marketing channel is that it almost forces authenticity, and for some companies, that may be a scary thought.
One interesting use of Twitter in brand marketing occurred in early March. Candy manufacturer Skittles redirected its homepage to a Twitter search for the brand term for the day. All visitors to the site could see exactly what people were saying (tweeting) about Skittles for that day. Luckily for Skittles, most of the comments were positive, but obviously this kind of strategy would need to be considered carefully in terms of consumer loyalty to an individual brand.
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| Sound bites…
Online ad spending will rise 8.9% in 2009.
- eMarketer
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