My Takeaway from Yahoo OMS 2014

Posted on November 9, 2014 by iagegracefully

I’m getting old and forgetful so before I completely forget why I disappeared from my office for a whole day. Here’s a summary of my key takeaway from the Yahoo OMS 2014, Hong Kong.

Statics:
2014, Hong Kong people spend avg. 148 mins daily accessing to the internet through their mobile devices, which is a 12% increase compared to last year.

Surprising? Nope. Any new engaging ad format on Mobile? Not that I’ms aware of. Tough cookie to crack.

Tumblr:
Top 3 Tumblr countries in the world:
1. US
2. Brazil
3. Japan

56% of the users are aged 13-34 (opps, I barely make the cut, ;-p) with quite even gender distribution, 51% female and 49% male.

I’m so glad that one of the countries I look after is on the top 3. My colleague and I were discussing why Japan is so up high on Tumblr use?

My take?
1. Tumblr is similar to Twitter that you don’t have to know your followers or the people you follow. You can remain completely anonymous, which fits their overall culture of being private and shy.
2. Tumblr is a very visual appealing platform with amazing animated gifs. With the Menga culture so deeply rooted in the Japanese culture, Japanese audience is no doubt easily fascinated by the visual/animated appeals.

Your take?

Intent of Use – Facebook Vs Twitter Vs Tumblr

Finally came Entertainment –

“Put Brands into Popular Culture and Popular Culture into Brands”

This is a key way to make your brand up to date and appeal to the current social media savvy, content seeking generation. You have to be either very funny, very touching or completely incredible to be a social media/viral babe.

Words of wisdom
“Don’t tell stories for Digital.
Tells Stories. Take advantage of Digital.“

Many marketers, especially digital marketers, would fall into the trap that we have to create stories for digital. Viral campaign was such a buzz words a couple years ago. However, not all videos were made with the goals of getting viral would actually make it. Truth is, many just fail. Why? You have to have a GREAT story to begin with and the devil lives in the execution. It’s not that random low quality, flash of genius video don’t get viral, but these videos were usually not made to be viral.

I was responsible for a couple of semi-failure, myself. It’s hard to have a “brand-right” viral video unless your brand is embracing the risk. “Safe” can get you nowhere.

Speaking of successful campaign, here’s the tips:

“Think like a Marketer, Act like a Producer.”

Of course. It’s much easier said that done. Let’s see how it’s done well.

The QVC’s stunt with Miss Pissy & the Great late Joan Rivers is simply genius

Act 1:
At one of the red carpet after-party, Ms. Joan Rivers, stormed out from the party with whipped cream on her face. With such a controversy personality, this potential “assault” attracted media attention. All the entertainment news was picking this up.

Later, a “secret” clip was revealed in the internet. The “attacker” was actually Miss Piggy from the Muppet. At that moment, the public knew it’s not some common cat fights between celebrities. It’s indeed a stunt, but it’s interesting enough to keep you follow.

More juicy and scandalous photos here.

Act 2:
A video documenting of Ms. Rivers & Piggy’ decade-long hostility against each other came up with interviews of other celebrities, with their speculation on the fight. Of course, the celebrities were carefully chosen. My favourite has to be, the girl from “Precious”, she went like “Seeing the cake thing, just broke my heart”. Her face was priceless. – This is pure entertainment.

Act 3:
Finally, the devil was revealed – Ms. Rivers and Piggy is going to battle on who’s better by going on QVC, a traditional TV shopping channel and see who can sell more in a day. Yes, the devil is QVC. Even though at that point, you knew the stunt is for QVC, you still want to know who won. The winner, of course, is QVC, who finally can tab into the younger generation and had the most social day.

There’s even a Muppet Wiki Page dedicated to this campaign.

What else did I learn? Yes, something for fellow marketers. Listen to your audience before coming up with the idea for a campaign. It’s not something new but as a marker, sometimes, you simply get ahead of yourself and forget the basic.

Make your campaign goal as simple as possible.
Listen to your audience and analyze your product’s strength. Identify a topic worth the campaign
Work closely with your partners – trust them and be understanding

That’s about it. Hope it’s entertaining enough and it’s something you don’t know here. Got questions, please comment and let me know.

Digital Marketing Vs ECommerce 101

Posted on March 18, 2014 by iagegracefully

I’ve been asked this questions too many times “What’s the difference between digital marketing and ecommerce?”

Interesting enough, it usually came from head hunters.

So here’s my take on the differences:

Digital Marketing

It’s part of the overall marketing. It’s one of the many marketing means, like OOH, Print, TV etc. Digital marketing includes anything marketing means with digital media, which includes but not limited to:

– Your Own Website

– Search Engine Marketing

Paid Search
To put it on layman terms, you basically paid a few keywords/query related to your brand/products, when people type in these keywords, your ad appears on the search results as ad. It’s paid advertising
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
According to Wikipedia, SEO isis the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine’s “natural” or un-paid (“organic”) search results. In general, the earlier (or higher ranked on the search results page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine’s users. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search, academic search,[1] news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.
Again, Laymen terms, you user different strategy to make your website attractive to the search engine so they rank you higher when people search

– Display

Display includes banners and text links (this is more important for cultures that love to read, eg. China)

– eDM

Including sending emails to your own database and to the database of others – still one of the most cost-effective methods for driving quality traffic to your site especially in-house eDM
Social Media Marketing
For this I can go on and on… See 4Cs for Social Media Marketing and blog

A Shoppable online magazine

– Mobile Marketing – any marketing done on mobile or tablet platforms including advertising, website, app SOLOMO etc.

ECommerce

Ecommerce is according to Wikipedia, “commonly known as e-commerce or eCommerce, is a type of industry where the buying and selling of products or services is conducted over electronic systems such as the Internet and other computer networks. Electronic commerce draws on technologies such as mobile commerce, electronic funds transfer, supply chain management, Internet marketing, online transaction processing, electronic data interchange (EDI), inventory management systems, and automated data collection systems. Modern electronic commerce typically uses the World Wide Web at least at one point in the transaction’s life-cycle, although it may encompass a wider range of technologies such as e-mail, mobile devices, social media, and telephones as well.”

Laymen terms again, it’s the act of doing business on digital channels. For that you need marketing and operation.

For different industries, operation can be very different. Just to name a few:

– Hotels/Travels – Operation involves the payment gateway, booking engines on the site and how it links to the reservation system in the hotel or air ticketing system

– Online learning – Operation involves payment gateway, how the online subscription is manage. How you are billed monthly, when your subscription end etc

– Retail – This is very complicated. There’s a term called – Fulfillment. Basically, operation includes planning assortment and inventory for ECommerce, warehousing the products, packing the products, payment gateway, application integration middleware, ERP, shipping the product out, return & exchange and aftersales.

Of course, there’s the marketing side of Ecommerce which is quite overlapping with digital marketing. However, Ecommerce marketing is not just using digital means, you see OOH sides or print advertisement or even TVC promoting online sales. This is Ecommerce marketing too. So, it’s not purely digital.

Getting more confused? One Sentence, digital marketing is one of the marketing means; ecommerce refer to the whole process of doing transaction with digital media. Hope it helps.

Why I love ASOS – From the Eyes of an Ecom marketer and an online shoppaholic

Posted on March 10, 2014 by iagegracefully

I wouldn’t say it’s a confession of an online shoppaholic. It’s more like putting things into perspective from a target audience’s eyes who happens to be a semi insider.

My Favourite eCommerce site of all time is ASOS! No doubt about it. It’s THE eCommerce site that got me addicted to online shopping and abandon brick and mortar as a whole.

Why do I love ASOS? Cheap and stylish isn’t just the only factors. [All images below are screen cape

1. Appeal to your Audience

Most of the customers, including me are almost always attracted by its deals and offering. Much too often, I didn’t end up buying just the discounted products, but a lot more full price products.

They know their target audience well. What are they looking for? They are looking for affordable fashion that gives you your character and make you able to stay up with the trend without paying your whole salary.

Deals on Home Page:

What grabs your first attention is the key visual that showcase “what’s in?”.

And next – Deals! Prominent discount sign just beneath the top navigation:

What’s more? They appeal to both people who look for a percentage discount with image and also the people who look for a fixed amount off discount with plain text.

2. Basics

Free shipping to over 190 countries. Try beating that.
850 brands from fast fashion to high street fashion at outlet prices.
All prices are shown in my local currency.

3. User Friendliness

Easy Navigation

All you have to do on Home Page is to pick gender and what items you are looking for. To avoid cluster, you can filter by size, colors, price ranges and brands etc. The filters are all conveniently located on your left hand side that doesn’t distract you from the alluring products
After filtering, you can actually see what fits you. You can choose the viewing options to display more for your to you see at one time. I can further sort by price and what’s new
If there’s multiple colors available, there’s a sign showing ‘More Colors”. When mouse over the products, you have the options to save or quick view, which is pretty normal for all fashion ecommerce site. What really got me is their Runway video of almost all products that helps you the visualize how the piece of clothing looks like on human (They give you the size of the model and what size they are wearing too)
Fit Visualizer – that’s actually something new that I never tried. I personally just think it’s a good gimmick but not that friendly to use. Not that I will actually take out a dress and measure it according to the instruction and fill that in. – Nope, not for me. The size guide is actually more practical.
Enticing suggestion – they match a look for you that you can easily “buy the look” with a click and also the product suggestion are so accurate. The dresses they show are just what I also like.
The checkout is just smooth.

3. Way to get you

Abandon carted email – after you put in a few items in your cart and you didn’t check out with. You immediately get an email reminding you what you liked
Limited Time offers – You get it all the time with a count-down ticking on the animated email
Fans only offers – there are landing pages that are posted on Facebook that are only available for a limited of time that builds your urge

Enough for today. Now I have some serious shopping today. Stay Fab! Guess what I will buy? ;-p