My 15 Minutes of Fame: eBay

Showing posts with label eBay. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 19, 2014

How to attain Paid search success

Many people miss is digging into the search phrase report that shows what other queries are being matched to these keywords.

Remarketing List for Search Ads (RLSAs) is possibly the biggest innovation and opportunity in search in a long time.

No longer do you have to show the same ad to a customer who comes back every week as you do to a brand-new customer.

Now you can show the customer that you know them, welcome them back, or create specific ad copy that directs that customer to your customer service section vs.

Anyone who feels like they have reached the limit of their campaign to dig just a little bit deeper and take that extra cut of data or extra step to target to see what can be squeezed out.

Friday, August 8, 2014

4 Tips to Ease Top 4 Content Marketing Challenges

The Emergence and Power of UGC

UGC is loosely defined as media produced in an open collaboration, often between a brand and its audience. Emerging onto the tech scene in 2005 with the likes of eBay and into the news cycle with the BBC, UGC has arguably become the most prominent form of content on the web. Today UGC is present on literally every ecommerce website to some degree, every news website and entire industries have been built based on user content (social networks would be nothing without UGC). Every review you read on Amazon and eBay, the t-shirts you see designed on CafePress, every video you see on YouTube and Vimeo, all of Facebook, every Tweet, all of it is UGC. Its power is undeniable.

In addition to the prominence of UGC across the Internet, the world has also begun to recognize it as a truly unbiased and authentic form of media. Similar to how brands employ PR to seek unbiased 3^rd party validation from journalists and news media, UGC is trusted as unbiased because it is created by the masses, not brands or governments. While one individual piece of UGC content may not represent the entire story or trend, in aggregate UGC can point to trends and sentiments across the globe, change opinions and provide the people with a collective voice.

What does this mean for your brand? Does it mean you should employ customer comments on your website this minute? Should you run out and ask your customers to help you design your new t-shirt? Maybe, but that isn’t the point. The point is two fold:

There is so much content in the digital world that you have an endless supply of relevant information, right at your finger tips, you just need to know where to look and how to use it for your business.
Your customers/fans love to create content, and if approached in the right way, they just may create amazing content for your brand.

Brands who recognize the power of UGC and harness it for their programs are developing the most authentic and effective marketing. Instead of preaching their story to customers (advertising), brands allow their fans to join in creating and narrating their story. At Thismoment we call it collaborative storytelling, and the best brand marketers are taking it to the next level.

How UGC Can Ease Content Marketing Challenges

If we look at the list of content marketing challenges identified above, we can quickly identify how to employ UGC to settle some concerns, quickly opening the doors to successful content marketing programs.

Content Marketing Challenge Tip #1: Use UGC to Help With Time Challenges

When looking at a content marketing program most marketers get hung up on the time it will take to create great content. The assumption is that for a content marketing program to work you need to create 100% unique content. This simply isn’t true. With hundreds of millions of pieces of content being uploaded to the Internet everyday there are likely a few hundred YouTube videos, Tweets, blog posts and news articles that will help you with your content project. Look to existing content on the web and learn how to repurpose or curate it for your own use. And best of all, content marketing SaaS (specifically Thismoment) has taken steps to help you secure rights clearance.

Content Marketing Challenge Tip #2: Use UGC to Help With Engagement

Marketers know that the most engaging content on the Interest is genuine, entertaining and often comes from the minds of their own customers. How many times have you laughed at a video on YouTube that was created by a clever kid with a video camera? How any times have you marveled at how amazing it is for that very video clip to receive millions of views and comments? The video works because it is genuine and came into the world without obvious commercial intent. That same video, with equal potential for engagement, can be harnessed for your marketing program (assuming it fits your business model). Or better yet, you can engage with your audience to create content on your behalf by requesting videos or other media as part of a promotion or contest. You have customers and fans, put them to work in your marketing campaigns.

Content Marketing Challenge Tip #3: Use UGC to Help With Budget Challenges

Best of all UGC is free, or relatively inexpensive. One of the main concerns with content creation is that it is extremely expensive to create content, especially in the scale that is needed for a substantial program. By employing UGC you can tap into endless existing pieces of content across the Internet or tap into your fan/customer base to create content as needed based on campaign specifics.

Content Marketing Challenge Tip #4: Use UGC to Help With Content Quantity Concerns

I imagine this paragraph is unnecessary. If you have been following along you know that UGC, like the universe, is ever expanding and infinite. There are zero limitations on quantity. If you need a video of a baby monkey riding backwards on a pig to promote your Monkey Kibble campaign, you’ll find it. Entice the creator to grant permission to use it by offering major exposure to their content, once granted you have an amazing piece of relevant and credible content.

No, UGC is not a magic bullet, it will not solve every content marketing challenge and I don’t intend to over simplify the issue. I do hope that considering UGC offers a new way to think about your own content marketing challenges. Remember, you do not need to create every piece of content from scratch, you do not need to pay a lot for content, and if done right it will be remarkably engaging. Better yet, today you can easily tap into amazing content marketing software specifically designed to help you blend both branded content and UGC into engaging playlists for your campaigns. It’s the best of both worlds.

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Monday, July 7, 2014

Evaluate Your Surrounding Community to Spark Fresh Ideas

During the course of human events - well, at least when engaging your community - it becomes necessary from time to time to step back and take a look at the network of communities that surround your brand. A quick surface evaluation of the ecosystem you operate in can provide insights into your community and how you can serve them better.

This kind of evaluation is not a deep dive into competitive intelligence, however. This is something a community manager can easily accomplish in a few hours. It is designed to spark fresh ideas and gain perspective on what might be happening in the brand echo chamber.

First, consider what things your community might be passionate about outside your own brand.

Generally, our brand taps into the passion for saving money when shopping online. Naturally, our community shops online…A LOT. Sure, some of them are probably connected to direct competitors that offer similar services to ours, but most likely they are also part of the communities surrounding Amazon, eBay, and tons of other brands that offer online shopping.

What if you own a French restaurant that specializes in regional cuisine and authentic provincial atmosphere? Most likely your community is into all sorts of things related not only to food but travel. When you start to choose what brands beyond your competitors to take a peek at, you should consider looking at travel sites large and small.

By considering what other passions your community shares, you can then choose other social brands to evaluate and gain fresh insight.

Next, choose a mix of competitors, big brands, and niche brands to evaluate.

To really get a feel of what is going on in the network you’re connected to through your community, you should pull together a varied mix of other Facebook, Twitter, G+, and Pinterest accounts to survey. Then, you need to decide what you’re evaluating them for. Since you have no idea what KPIs they use to determine success, you have to judge them on how their friends, fans, and followers interact with them.

Here are a few questions to get you started:

Do your competitors have the same mix of content you do?
Are there untapped content types like chats or hangouts?
How do those communities engage with photos, links, videos, and humor?
What seems to get the most attention and does it really serve the brand purpose?
Do the big brands you chose get any better engagement than you or your competitors?
What kinds of content get shared by any of the communities you’re evaluating?
What do the very niche brands do differently to engage their communities?
How do these brands express identity with visuals?

Questions like these help you to evaluate public perceptions in the social space.

Finally, take a look at your own brand with fresh eyes.

Once you’ve gone through this exercise with several other brands, go back and do the same for your own brand channels. Try to see the overall story your brand tells through the eyes of your community.

Where are you missing the mark? Are there opportunities to grow popular content and give your community more of what they love?

Testing the waters around your brand can be informative without being a major chore. A quick survey like this does not replace a serious competitive evaluation, however. Keep taking that deep dive on a regular basis, but use this quick look to keep your own day-to-day social efforts fresh and relevant.

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Monday, September 30, 2013

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads: 4 Smart Strategies

Remarketing Lists for Search Ads (RLSA) have been available to all AdWords advertisers for several months now. RLSAs are really flexible. As a feature it opens up a lot of potential strategies.

This article will look at some smart strategies evolving for different types of advertisers to give you an idea of what could work for each one. These aren't the only potential strategies for that client type, but hopefully it'll give you a start for how to apply these to your business.

What I want to avoid is telling you what will work. That's akin to telling you what keywords to choose: it'll be different for everybody.

1. High-End Retailer

High-end retailers rely on finding their demographics. If you're willing to spend $5,000 on a sofa, chances are you're also the right person to spend $800 on a lamp.

For these advertisers, repeat customers are key. The fact that they have purchased once is the best possible indicator that they will purchase again.

Use RLSA to bid much more aggressively for existing customers. If they're searching again for a different item you carry, you absolutely want to be present and you can expect a better conversion rate than from everybody else.

This strategy is a good starting point for almost any advertiser where repeat customers make up a large proportion of their sales.

2. Subscription Service

Subscription services are unlikely to sell a subscription twice. It can happen, but in reality conversion rates for those users will be much lower, even if they're searching again.

I have Lovefilm and Netflix subscriptions. After I found Lovefilm, I kept searching in the same market for the second, but I wasn't going to get a second Lovefilm subscription.

RLSA here takes the opposite form: reduce bids for people who have already subscribed. They (probably) don't need it again.

Some subscriptions are more complex. There may be multiple stages (e.g., 1. register for free; 2. pay to subscribe). In this case, as soon as somebody completes the first stage you have their information.

There's no need to spend money on search again. You can save that budget and use much more targeted emails instead.

3. Low-Margin Retailer

A low-margin retailer probably can't afford to spend much per click or bid on expensive head terms. These guys are likely to be competing against Amazon, eBay, major supermarkets, etc.

Once a user has visited the site however, a whole new world opens up. That's a user who recognizes your brand now. Somebody saw something compelling enough in your messaging before to click your ad or otherwise visit your site. Take advantage!

Create a new campaign with all the keywords you can't normally afford. There is traffic there. Lots!

It's super exciting if you can get it, and now you can limit yourself to just the subset of users who have engaged with you before. More affordable, better conversion rates. Great!

4. Comparison Shopping

Finance (and many other markets) involve a lot of comparison shopping. These users will visit your site as part of a longer journey including several of your big brand competitors.

Create a new campaign with competitor names as keywords, and bid on it only for users who have visited your site recently. Make sure you don't drop off their shortlist while they're comparison shopping!

4 Things You Can't do With RLSA

Due to certain limitations, there are a few things you can't do with RLSA that you might like to:

You can't tell the user you know them: There are some very real privacy and policy issues at play. If you know that user A just bought a sofa, you can't use your ads to say "Buy this side table, it goes great with your new sofa!" You can (and sometimes should) adjust your ad texts to be more compelling based on what you know about the user, but expect your ads to get disapproved if you start verging close to the line. Don't tell them what you know.
You can't remarket to people from a year previously: There is a limit of 180 days on these lists. That's a shame. A compelling case for remarketing on display is for services that renew once per year, like insurance. That's out of play for search, you simply can't hold people in your lists that long. Sorry.
You can't use them with Product Listing Ads: This is annoying. Several good use cases for RLSAs involve ecommerce websites. But the best ecommerce ad format is incompatible. I have no idea if we can expect this to change soon, but it seems an obvious connection to make. Keep your eyes peeled.
You can't see the stats separately: You can't segment search queries (or quite a lot of other helpful data, frankly) by audience. This is a problem because a negative keyword for one might not be appropriate for the other. This is an argument to keep your RLSA targeted ads in a separate campaign, so that you'll get entirely separate search query reports for each.

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Saturday, February 16, 2013

Mobiles and games consoles account for 12% of online video ad viewing

Well, it's that day again. Valentine's Day is here yet again to the delight of retailers everywhere. No wonder, when online sales in the US and the UK have continued to rise year-over-year in the run up to Valentine’s Day and retailers have had to learn to scale for seasonal surges.

The folks over at Rakuten, the online marketplace that's quickly catching up to Amazon and eBay, shared a few stats and a lovely infographic (don't say we didn't give you anything for Valentine's!) detailing the global spending trends surrounding this love-sick holiday.

According to Rakuten, US shoppers plan high end purchases in advance with a peak in jewelry sales on February 3rd compared to February 8th in the UK. Though this could be more of an indication of the speed of the US postal service, the top five purchases on Rakuten.com leading up to Valentine's were all pieces of jewelry, especially engagement rings. With 10% of proposals falling on Valentine's, this would make some sort of sense and is not an unusual trend.

What is interesting is how much US consumers spend on their pets for Valentine's. Some would estimate thousands but actually it's over $300 million that is spent on our furry friends. $367 million in fact. Also 15% of americans buy themselves flowers. I like that we're feeling the love for ourselves AND our pets.

With spending ranging from $271 per person in Asia down to $92 per person in Germany, there is a lot of money up for grabs for the crafty online retailer. Here are a few more stats for you. It's a gift that keeps on giving.

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Thursday, January 31, 2013

How to Drive Online Commerce in 2013

The world is quite different from the early days of eBay and Amazon. Reports and analysis from the past few years have all been pointing to the fact that commerce is being driven less and less by advertising, professional reviews and other biased sources of commercial messaging.This wreacks havoc on our traditional efforts because, as marketers, we now have less power and influence over our markets.

Our beautifully crafted messaging and creatives are becoming less impactful in this connected marketplace of ours. Reports keep validating that we tend to lack trust in commercial entities and if anything has validated this human behavior, it is the social web. In the world of $4 million dollar tv ad spots, this becomes a very hard pill to swallow. Don’t get me wrong, it still needs to be part of the overall marketing strategy but needs to be adjusted to accommodate the user behaviors of today.

Weber Shandwick and KRC research recently conducted a survey involving around 2000 consumers that outlines that peer reviews and social recommendations have grown beyond just friends advising each other on the new purchases.

Some of the findings include:

65% of consumers have bought a product they weren’t intending to buy after reading a positive review;
74% of consumers search for reviews online before making a decision;
Consumers read an average 11 reviews before making a decision;
Peer reviews are trusted by more consumers (77%) than professional ones (23%);

As Danny Brown states, “These figures, and some of the other ones in the full report, should act as a wake-up call to brands that are still investing in the traditional method of product review – buy advertorial or pitch the mass media – and ignoring search and social graph impact“.

In addition, let’s not ignore the fact that 70% of all content online is user generated. It also ranks higher than static corporate pages by search engines and trusted more by the average consumeras well. In 2013, all go-to-market planning and comms planning should be focused on strategically leveraging the potential of this medium.

And doing it right requires experience and understanding the context of the medium. Otherwise you end up with facebook and twitter accounts without any real social presence. Don’t believe me? Have a look at this hilarious Facebook Page of Corporate Social gone wrong.

Let’s avoid doing social in a pure check list manner. Mere likes and follows don’t translate to actual business. Time for experimentation is over.

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Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Facebook becomes Twitter. And vice-versa

They might not be announced as ‘major updates’, however the new versions of Facebook and Twitter for mobile devices say a lot about today’s social media strategy.

Indeed, this week Facebook and Twitter updated their mobile interfaces, 5.2 for Facebook for iOS, 5.1 for Twitter for iOS. Okay, nothing abnormal here, the two most known social networks release updates on a regular basis. However, you might have missed something when you updated to the new versions.

“You can now share your favorite news from your newsfeed with a simple touch”. That’s how Facebook announces it. What it means indeed, it’s that you can ‘repost’ someone else’s post on your newsfeed. Still don’t get it? See by yourself.

So, on Facebook, you could like or comment on a post. On Twitter you can ‘favorite’ a tweet or reply. But that’s not all. On Twitter, you can retweet. It’s why Twitter works. The ‘retweet’ button is the cause of Twitter’s success. Therefore Facebook had to do something. Of course you could already share content if you went to www.facebook.com. But what about mobiles? More than half of Facebook users check their notifications on a mobile device. Well now those users can ‘share’ a status, link, photo or video just like they would retweet a post on Twitter. It’s as simple. One click, it’s all it takes.

This is what we are facing today. Standardization. It started with design. Pinterest-like designs for everyone. Even eBay and LinkedIn got it.

Now it goes even further. The functions are alike. You can ‘retweet’ from Facebook. Oh and did I mention the new SoundCloud beta?

More, you can even see ‘top stories’ on Twitter 5.1: “Visualize popular topics from your network” and “Tweets picked just for you now appear in your feed” are two features now available in the new version of Twitter for iOS.

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Friday, August 31, 2012

Collaborative Consumption – Could Your Business Benefit from Crowd Power?

Collaborative consumption (CC) is not a new concept, but technology – and, in particular, social media – has given this age-old practice a method of delivery that has allowed it to expand on a global scale that, until now, has not been possible. This concept of peer-to-peer sharing and peer-driven redistribution using online platforms is quickly recreating an old-world village atmosphere of bartering, lending, swapping and renting; however, this time around, ‘village’ residents may live on an entirely different continent and not just down the street.

We all value access to the things we want and need, but are becoming less inclined to insist on individual ownership being part of the deal. And, of course, as families face the financial hardships brought about by the ‘Great Recession’, the cost of ownership is a price many can no longer afford to pay. Rather than purchasing toys that will quickly be outgrown, textbooks that have little value after the class, or ballgowns, movies and tools that will only be worn once, watched once or used once, collaborative consumption allows consumers to save money, while never having to go without.

Between the global economic crisis, the move towards greater environmental awareness, the generational shift away from excessive consumerism and the universal value placed on saving money, it was only a matter of time before an economic model like collaborative consumption would become a disruptive trend turning old business models on end. This is particularly true when CC is thought of as a type of new social welfare where people supporting one another are bridging some of the gap left by the erosion of traditional support systems on which communities once relied, such as social programmes, religious organisations and charities.

The phenomenal growth of eBay and craigslist, for example, shows us just how successful these online platforms can be, and it goes beyond that to further show that people do not need to be tech-savvy to take advantage of this growing trend. Sellers, buyers and bartering partners who may have little tech-related knowledge come together to do business based on their joint value of the concept of saving money and trading pre-owned goods they no longer want, often, for someone else’s pre-owned goods that meet their current needs.

In 2010, TIME magazine named collaborative consumption among its ‘10 Ideas that Will Change the World’, and CC proponent, Rachel Botsman deemed collaborative consumption “a new socio-economic ‘big idea’ promising a revolution in the way we consume”, and put forth that it allows community members to “create value out of shared and open resources in ways that balance personal self-interest with the good of the larger community”. It is publications and people like these that are increasing the social acceptance of collaborative consumption and promoting the benefits of this economic model that relies on trust, recommendation and reputation in a society where trust has become an increasingly rare commodity.

Companies that do not currently use collaborative consumption should be aware of this growing social trend and consider the opportunities it provides to build closer, stronger relationships with their customer base and the community. Much like social media has become an integral part of any successful promotional effort, the massive influence and momentum of collaborative consumption cannot be ignored and should be on the radar for inclusion in the ongoing marketing strategy of every business.

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Tuesday, August 19, 2014

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Friday, August 8, 2014

Top 4 Content Marketing Challenges

The Emergence and Power of UGC

How UGC Can Ease Content Marketing Challenges

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Monday, July 7, 2014

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Monday, September 30, 2013

1. High-End Retailer

2. Subscription Service

3. Low-Margin Retailer

4. Comparison Shopping

4 Things You Can't do With RLSA

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Saturday, February 16, 2013

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Thursday, January 31, 2013

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Friday, August 31, 2012

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