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In News

How to Build a Predictable and Profitable Website

November 24, 2017 No Comments

Know the basics before even setting foot on the internet.

We are well aware of the need to have a website developed for our business. Website design, aesthetics, usability, and user and search engine friendliness have been discussed time and time again by various experts. These things are important in discussions about website design. Today, we will delve into the heaviest part of website design, the elements that have to do with usability for web visitors and giving them a reason to stay on your website.

The first thing that we think of when we start building our website is what will be the chosen design? When we configure our designs, we think of things that could attract web visitors, and entice them to stay on for a longer period of time. Images, graphics, colour, white spaces, navigation settings, calls to action, buttons, and content placement are included in the list of website design elements that impact why visitors may stay on the site, subscribe to an offer, leave a trail or possibly become your next customer.

We want our web visitors to concentrate on our web pages. If your web space is crowded and people experience a difficult time navigating it, or encounter difficulty in finding information, they will walk away quickly. Therefore, in selecting our design preferences, the following should be considered:

Simple Design

Keep your design simple and to the point. Choose the right set of colours, but make use of white spaces efficiently and remove unnecessary elements that are not serving any real purpose except that of occupying usable spaced on the web page.

See The World Through Customer Eyes

Take a look at your web page like a web visitor would. What are elements that your website visitor would like to learn about? What are the elements that could confuse them? Which content is most enticing? If you put yourself in the shoes of the web visitors, you could possibly make effective web pages that could help you sell your products and disseminate information.

Use of Images in Website Design

Choose images wisely. High resolution, purposeful images. If you are trying to sell sweets, but display pictures of puppies, this won’t help you sell your product. You likely won’t be able to retain web visitors for more than 2 seconds. Pick images that relate to your business, products and services. Do not create false alerts. Such efforts simply go to waste.

Use of Fonts in Website Design

Typography is another highly important element to focus on when you design your web page. The font type, font size, and font colours must be chosen with care. Readable text makes a difference. Faded text or small fonts can make reading difficult for some audiences.

Larger fonts and bold text work well with H1 (heading or headlines). The text that you want to emphasise must be written in these types of fonts. Overcrowding the content area with bold text in other areas could force visitors to lose focus and wander off to other places on the net.

Call to Actions

The web page that you create must carry a clear call to action. Don’t hide behind words; tell your web visitors what they need to do, whether they are eager to learn more, or wanting to take you up on a discount offer. Put your call to action in catchy words to make users want to quickly grab the offer that you are presenting to them in exchange for the information they leave for you to catch up with them later.

The development of web pages isn’t as simple as it appears. However, a customer-focused approach and attractive design can help you garner the interest your products deserve.

Author: Qamar Zaman – KISS PR – Dallas Web Site Design & SEO Company

In News

Strategies Most Marketers Misunderstood In Influencer Marketing

November 24, 2017 No Comments

By avita dcosta.

Many brands are also switching from celebrity endorsements to influencers, as it becomes and increasingly powerful marketing channel for marketers. But it’s easy to make mistakes, so how do you avoid them?

Influencer Marketing has become one of the most powerful tools in a marketing teams’ toolkit today. In 2016 Salesforce’s Paradot claimed thay 86% of marketers are already using some form of influencer marketing to reach consumers. And research shows that is probably going to continue, why?

People no longer trust the brands. A lot of us are no longer influenced by these traditional marketing techniques and increasingly we are more likely to turn to people we trust and respect – our peers. Truth be told, 74% of consumers identify word-of-mouth as a key influencer in their purchasing decisions, and influencer marketing can be a highly effective way to drive sales. It is no wonder that marketers are increasingly embracing it to achieve their business’ goals and objectives.

I’ve outlined the most common influencer marketing mistakes I’ve seen that you should steer clear of in order to be successful:

Fail to understand the audience

Your audience is your critic, if they want your product, they will be your customers. You will never be able to create a long-term and effective influencer marketing strategy if you don’t know your audience/customer. Marketers who have not yet flourished a genuine marketing personality are suggested to place their programs on hold until they understand who are their customers and what are their interests in order to achieve and interaction with the brand. It is to be noted that marketers need to understand purchasing habits, demographic information, pinpoints and psychographic information in order to create a marketing persona and conventionally, all of these statistics can be gathered through customers’ reviews.

Using Influencer Marketing in the wrong influencers/channel

Your marketing would not work unless you are working with the right influencer for your campaign. Influencer marketing is not identically effective across all channel, niche, and the target audience. If you are promoting a beauty product, much recommended working with YouTube Influencers since it is much effective in videos than a plain picture of your product and a post on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

Expecting results in a short period of time

If you have just started doing the influencer marketing, you cannot just expect a good result in just one snap. In some cases, for a powerful influencer, marketing campaigns can produce results overnight. But mostly and especially for brands and companies that are not using E-commerce, Influencer Marketing should take time to effect. Trust and patience are advisable. It is to be noted that effective influencer campaigns help the improvement of brand awareness. When a candidate is aware of your brand, they will still need to undergo the process of your marketing funnel, the consideration and decision making stages before performing the purchase. So yes, it takes time to get the results.

Forgot to use the Analytics

Using analytics is one of the most accurate ways to get updated and determine whether your influencer marketing is effective or sat to say, ineffective. Monitoring and measuring the performance of your campaign is required in all types of platforms, from there, you will be able to know which part of your marketing campaign needs to be improved. You can find lots of platforms online that can help you measure your campaign insights and progress.

Failure in conveying expectations with your influencers

Upon working with influencers, it is much important to construct your expectations clearly. You should give your influencers a summary that includes the goals and objectives of your campaign. Collecting and including the marketing personal you have collected will help your influencers to become more successful. You may also want to include analytics information that you find valuable when marketing to the target audience.

Focused on the wrong KPIs

Influencer marketing is a powerful marketing method, but everything in this world has its own limits. Marketers need to ensure that they are using influencer marketing the right way. It is advised to focus on the KPIs which fits your brand, product, and activity, don’t just focus on getting sales, start being genuine! An influencer marketing campaign designed to influence KPIs related to bottom-of-the-funnel behaviors is not generally perfect.

Avoided this strategy because you failed “once”

Just because you failed once in this marketing strategy doesn’t mean you should give up. Marketers don’t just quit marketing because one of their marketing campaigns was not successful. Instead of quitting, if you have failed, use that failure to improve your marketing. You must understand why did the campaign fail so that you could implement better strategies and ideas the next time you set an influencer marketing campaign. Remember: Failures are one of the challenges you will face upon entering Influencer Marketing and learning from it is the key to success.

Neglected the call to action

Before you launch your campaign, make sure you have considered this question: Where should my audience click to take action upon engaging with my I.M. content?

If you planned to drive traffic to your website using I.M, make sure to construct a webpage that will allow your visitors to utilize the next action. Importantly, make sure to test the constructed web page if it is perfectly working and responsive both on mobile and PCs. Associating the call to action with an I.M. campaign and securing that it is optimized for your target are keys to success with I.M.

Chosen an inappropriate agency to manage influencer relationship

Influencer marketing has become affected and is on top of the line. Marketing agencies are also crawling and offer I.M. services. But guess what, not all of these agencies have valuable experience with I.M. strategies, I mean they do have a bit, but not on its deep understanding. Therefore, they can not make your marketing successful. Be sure to choose an agency that has experience working with influencer marketing methods that are related to your business.

Misapprehension of Influencer Marketing process

If you wanted to start influencer marketing, make sure to learn what is the process and activities involve on this strategy. This will guide you to your success.

On creating a successful influencer marketing campaign, it is important that you understand your audience. Make sure that you have properly given your influencers a summary of your expectations and think carefully on which steps to choose for your marketing campaign. Note: Success cannot be achieved immediately, hard work, perseverance is needed to taste the born fruit of your hard work.

By avita dcosta

Sourced from Digital Doughnut

In News

Mobile Scroll Ads More Effective Than Pop-Up And Static Banner Ads

November 23, 2017 No Comments

A new experiment suggests that pop-up ads can have an adverse effect on consumers’ perceptions of the content.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

Scrolls ads, a newer style of advertisement designed for mobile screens, show signs of being more effective than older forms of digital advertising. This is according to a new experimental study conducted by The Media Insight Project, a collaboration between the American Press Institute and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. This new research has significant implications for a news industry that is constantly searching for new revenue models to finance journalism.

(For the unitiated, a scroll ad is an interactive ad format which is adapted to the reading behavior of your visitors. The ad opens at the bottom right only when the visitor scrolls down. This ad format will close automatically or can closed directly from the visitor.)

An example is here:

“Banner and pop-up ads have been the standard way to advertise online for decades, though they have met consumer resistance, especially in mobile,” said Tom Rosenstiel, executive director of the American Press Institute. “Our research into online advertisements finds that formats designed more recently, and with mobile in mind, strike users as less intrusive and more pleasing. To our surprise, compared with ad formats designed for other web environments, scroll ads can also improve recall of the product being advertised and enhance trust in the article where the ad appears.”

These are some of the results of the online survey experiment conducted with 1,489 participants between November 9 and December 6, 2016, using AmeriSpeak, NORC’s nationally representative survey panel. The online panel interface allows respondents to see and respond to content presented to them digitally, something that is not possible with traditional phone surveys.

Key findings:

The experiment finds that people are more likely to recall the product accurately if it appears in a scroll ad than if it appears in either a pop-up or static ad. Indeed, 34 percent of users accurately recalled the product from the scroll ad versus 26 percent in static ads and 25 percent in pop-up ads. The differences were even more pronounced if you take just those people who say they noticed the ad at all. The majority of all respondents, 57 percent, fell into this group.
People are no more likely to notice pop-up ads than they are scroll ads (61 percent vs. 62 percent for scroll) and are less likely to recall the product in pop-up ads, just 41 percent versus 55 percent in scroll ads and 53 percent in static ads. Pop-up ads also have several negative effects. For instance, 61 percent of people say pop-up ads make the article more difficult to read (vs. 37 percent for scroll ads and 19 percent for static ads).
When readers are interested in the topic of the ad, they are more likely to express some positive evaluations of the article and engage with that article. Overall, people who are interested in the topic of the ad provide more positive evaluations of the article, including that it provides diverse points of view (28 percent vs. 19 percent) and that it is entertaining (32 percent vs. 25 percent). However, those interested in the subject of the ad are no more likely to say the article got the facts right, had a professional appearance, that it was easy to find important information, or that the information was trustworthy.

“Scroll ads should play an even bigger role in online advertising because they appear to be more effective on a range of metrics than pop-up ads and static banners,” said Trevor Tompson, director of The AP-NORC Center. “These ads optimised for mobile produce benefits to the advertiser and the news outlet compared to older styles of digital advertising.”

In News

The Most Exciting Social Media Platforms Among Teens

November 22, 2017 No Comments

Musical.ly is currently the place for your influencer marketing money.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A new survey of teenagers age 13-17 finds that teens have shifted their favoured social media platforms to Instagram and Snapchat. But the most exciting breakthrough is that of Musical.ly.

A survey taken by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research in the USA found that:

76 percent of teens age 13-17 use Instagram.
75 percent of teens use Snapchat.
66 percent of teens use Facebook, down from 71 percent of teens using the site in 2015.
47 percent of teens use Twitter.
Fewer than 30 percent of teens use Tumblr, Twitch, or LinkedIn.

Strangely, however, there is one contender that fails to be mentioned: Musical.ly, which is roaring into popularity, especially in Europe. And there are great opportunities for marketers to reach that ever-elusive teen and tween market.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pjf8tvnaIQs

Musical.ly was founded by friends Alex Zhu and Luyu Yang. They decided to target the US teenage market, as this market is characterised for being an early adopter of new trends. The main idea was to create a platform that incorporates music and video in a social network. The first version of musical.ly was officially launched in August 2014.

In 2015, the app began to attract millions of users and in July 2015, musical.ly climbed up to the number 1 position in the iOS App Store, becoming the most-downloaded free app in over 30 countries, including the US, Canada, UK, Germany, Brazil, Philippines, and Japan. In July 2016, musical.ly reached 90 million downloads, with over 12 million new videos posted every day.

So how does it work? To put it simply, “musers” lip-sync to their favourite tunes, by themselves or with a friend, and share it. That’s actually the main thrust of it. But the opportunities for marketers are strong. In June 2016, Coca-Cola launched its #ShareACoke campaign on musical.ly, which introduced musical.ly’s “User-Generated Ads” model.

Kids were making some seriously cool little ads for Coke.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LgMzMl9OFA

The hashtags that are popular on this social network usually make reference to bits of pop culture and trends among the internet world.

So, marketers, if you want to reach tweens and teens, it is definitely worth your while to check out Musical.ly. It has fast become a Go-To destination for influencer marketing. The app is still finding a way to monetise its platform.This means that they are a little more loose with restrictions or requirements in place for branded content, advertising, and influencer marketing campaigns. You never know, it might just be the perfect spot to place your influencer-marketing budget.

In News

Paying Online Community Members to Write Product Reviews Backfires Badly

November 21, 2017 No Comments

Just let people do their thing, you’ll have more success.

Online user reviews have become an essential tool for consumers who increasingly rely on them to evaluate products and services before purchase. The business models of online review platforms such as Yelp and TripAdvisor, and e-commerce sites such as Amazon and Expedia critically depend on them. Should such sites pay users to encourage them to write reviews?

According to a forthcoming study in the INFORMS journal Marketing Science, a leading academic marketing journal, that is a bad idea. Paying users suppresses the number of reviews on social platforms, especially among those users who are socially well-connected and likely to be more influential.

The study is authored by Yacheng Sun of University of Colorado, and Xiaojing Dong and Shelby McIntyre of Santa Clara University. The authors examine user response from a sample of customers following the introduction of a monetary payment program for user reviews by a social shopping platform in China.

The payment was roughly the equivalent of 25 cents per review in credit for purchases from sellers affiliated with the platform. To the company’s surprise, the number of user reviews declined by over 30 percent in the month after the payment program was introduced, relative to the month before. “The familiar “Law of Supply,” that implies supply increases in response to higher prices, does not seem to hold true when it comes to paying for reviews on a social platform,” said Sun.

The paper explores why reviews drop in response to the monetary payments. The authors conjecture that the drop in reviews could be the result of community members’ concerns that their honest reviews – motivated by an intrinsic motive to either help others with relevant information or to present themselves as knowledgeable about the product or service – may now be interpreted by the community as simply driven by the less honourable extrinsic motivation of making money. If this were true, the drop in user reviews would be greater among users who had more friends on the social network, who could potentially misinterpret the user’s motivation for writing reviews.

The authors empirically test their conjecture by comparing the change in reviewing behaviour among “socialites” (more than five friends on network) against “loners” (no friends on network) after the introduction of the payment scheme. Indeed, the reviews from socialites drop 85 percent, from just over 0.4 reviews a month to just under 0.06 reviews a month. In contrast, the loners who had little to lose in terms of social capital increase their reviews from close to zero to about 0.03 per month. The increase in reviews from the loners however does little to offset the massive drop among the socialites, who are the heavy contributors overall. Hence the aggregate drop of 30 percent.

“Nobody wants to be seen as a paid shill for brands, so the users with more friends and followers, who were likely more influential and wrote more originally, are the ones who stop writing. A real double-whammy,” said Dong.

“Our results support the approach of industry leaders like Yelp or Amazon, who do not compensate for reviews. In fact, they tap into the intrinsic motive for social recognition through status badges for frequent contributors,” said McIntyre. “There may be still ‘under the radar’ ways to pay only the less socially active users for their reviews, but such targeting can be risky as the heavy reviewers may perceive it to be unfair and therefore stop writing reviews, if and when they learn about it.”

The complete paper is available here.

In News

A Big Smile May Not be Effective in Online Marketing Ads

November 20, 2017 No Comments

Be careful with the size of your smile.

By MediaStreet Staff Writers

A new study that includes a University of Kansas researcher has found that the level of smile intensity in marketing photos influences how consumers perceive the marketer’s competence and warmth, which can lead to different results depending on the context.

“We found that broad smiles lead people to be perceived as warmer but less competent,” said Jessica Li, a KU assistant professor of marketing in the School of Business. “We ask how that can influence consumer behaviour and in what situations might marketers want to smile more broadly.”

The study by Li and her co-authors was published online recently and will be in the January issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, one of the leading journals on marketing academic research.

Participants in the study viewed images of marketing photos that depicted the marketer either smiling broadly or only slightly. The researchers found that in advertisements for services that carry higher risk, consumers were more likely to assign competence to marketers that smiled only slightly rather than more broadly, which was associated with warmth but not necessarily competence.
Credit :Journal of Consumer Research

The researchers conducted experiments in which respondents viewed marketing images that included marketers with either broad or slight smiles. Also, they conducted a content analysis of postings on a crowdfunding website, Kickstarter.com, where people commonly seek donations for causes or business ventures.

Past marketing and psychological research has focused on smiles leading consumers to perceive people as being friendly and viewed in a more positive light. However, Li said the research team’s new study shows that is true but that there can be a trade-off in how a smile might elicit action from a consumer.

Li said one consideration is the context of the service the marketer is providing and whether or not there is potential risk associated with it.

The intensity of someone’s smile in a marketing image elicits two fundamental dimensions of social judgements – warmth and competence, the researchers found.

Li said broader smiles that tend to elicit more warmth seem to be more effective in promotional ads for a service that would carry less risk. But photos with a slight smile did better in marketing scenarios where services were higher risk, such as a medical procedure, legal representation or investment in a startup company.

“If I see an ad with a heart surgeon who smiles really broadly at me, I might think she is really warm, but not choose her to be my doctor because she seems less competent than a surgeon with a slight smile,” Li said. “If the risk is really low, such as going to the store to get a new shirt, then the competence of the salesperson isn’t as important and I respond more positively to the broad smile.”

In their analysis of Kickstarter.com, when the page creator’s profile photo exhibited a broad smile that tended to elicit perceptions of warmth, the total amount of money pledged decreased by more than 50 percent, and the average contribution per backer was 30 percent less than when the creator’s photo included only a slight smile.

“Project creators with a slight smile are perceived as more competent,” Li said. “More people wanted to donate to their project because they believe this competent person is able to deliver the product.”

However, a more intense smile does appear to elicit more buzz on social media or other low-cost behaviours. Profile photos with a broader smile received twice as many Facebook shares than someone with a slight smile.

“It’s intuitive that if you seem to be friendly but not competent, people will want to help you in low-cost ways but not necessarily be willing to give you a lot of money,” she said.

The study could be valuable for marketers as they strategise on how to best elicit a response for their products. “Warmth and competence are such important judgements,” Li said. “We want to make sure we are giving people the right signal.”

In News

Marketing to millennials: Should brands spend money?

November 17, 2017 No Comments

By Shawn Lim

As social media increasingly becomes the tool of choice for millennials, is it sensible for brands and marketers to base their marketing strategy around user-generated content on these platforms and not invest any money into their strategy?

According to Rohit Sharma, founder and chief executive of Pokkt, a mobile video advertising and app monetisation platform for game developers, he tells The Drum that even though the millennial generation is extremely plugged into social, many companies are plunging headfirst into social without understanding that social simply cannot function as a standalone strategy as it must be incorporated as part of an integrated strategy.

“It is akin to functioning with tunnel vision, or with blinkers on – you end up overlooking other channels that could deliver greater reach, engagement, and which ultimately drive the bottom line,” he adds.

Sharma believes that social is prized for how easily it lends itself to native and while there are channels that might do this just as well, or even better. For example, he says by engaging the user in a mini-game within a game, in-game advertising is the perfect example of native, with a far higher guarantee that the user will actually see and interact with content, instead of simply scrolling past as they might do on a social feed. “Furthermore, the nature of the games in question often allow for short, predictable breaks – easy spaces for advertisers to communicate their message without being annoying or interruptive,” he adds.

However, there are some brands who buck the trend by putting their trust into social media. Take GlampingCity for example, a company that combines glamour and camping for people who want a hotel-style accommodation, but with the feel of outdoor camping.

Its entry into Singapore was initially met with scepticism, but the trend slowly caught on when the company started posting picturesque photos on its Instagram page, taken by its staff and local social media influencers that it collaborates with.

Aside from its Instagram page and a website, GlampingCity does not have any budget allocated for ad spend and marketing strategy, according to founder Ryan Lam, adding that glamping caught on fast in Singapore through word of mouth and social media because people were posting about their experiences with it.

Lam, who was speaking to The Drum on the sidelines of the 2017 ACI Asia Business Summit in Singapore, also reveals that 50% of the photos on the company’s Instagram page is from his own team. “This business is very new, so we have not approached anyone (influencer) yet, all of our collaborations and partnerships, it all came naturally. I spent zero dollars on marketing. I only spent on logistics. The publicity came naturally.”

“I don’t plan to pay influencers, the genuine ones, maybe, not those that are looking to do it for their own benefit,” he adds.

Bart Mroz, co-founder and CEO of Sumo Heavy, a ecommerce consulting company, tells The Drum that he agrees with GlampingCity’s social media heavy strategy as he feels that social should be a main priority for the production, distribution and syndication of content when it comes to marketing to millennials as they are changing the ways brands market.

Brands like Sephora and Nike, have also been successful in marketing to millennials by using Instagram to post visually stunning photos that clearly reflects brand identity and draws users in, according to Mroz, noting that Nike has become the 19th most followed account and the fifth most used hashtag, while Sephora has increased its engagement rate and now boasts nearly 13 million followers.

Mroz however, adds that in order to effectively use social media, brands still need to put money into these platforms. “You won’t see the needle move much if you don’t invest. Marketers need to shift their spending from traditional channels like TV, print, and PPC to social media. For example, Facebook and Instagram are both strong channels because of their high engagement rates, robust targeting options, and popularity with this demographic.”

Noting that 41% of millennials use Facebook every day, which makes it still the number one marketing channel, and that Instagram and Snapchat are catching up because the platforms are very different in style and have features that attracting more millennials, Mroz says: “Therefore, brands should still focus on Facebook, but pay much more attention to platforms like Instagram and Snapchat to better engage with this target audience in the long-run.”

Feature Image: Ryan Lam, founder of GlampingCity. Photo by: Institute on Consumer Insights

By Shawn Lim

Shawn Lim is a reporter at The Drum, covering industry news around the Asia Pacific region with a focus on Singapore and Southeast Asia. Based in Singapore, he has worked across photography, video and online, covering a range of subjects including current affairs and sports.

Before Game of Thrones, he was a huge Breaking Bad fan. He does CrossFit and yoga to stay healthy.

Sourced from THEDRUM

In News

Millennial Chinese Become The Biggest Group of Online Shoppers for Luxury Brands

November 16, 2017 No Comments

By Nicole Buckler

Singles Day, held in China, is a day where Chinese shoppers go mental, buying themselves all sorts of nice stuff. This is all in aid of cheering themselves up while living the single life. The day is now the biggest day for e-commerce sales in the world.

The celebration for Singles Day held on 11/11 used to celebrate people who were proud to be single. So about those 1s in the date – obviously, single means “1.” But also, the four 1s evoke “bare branches,” the Chinese expression for the unattached. So the day became an anti-Valentine’s day of sorts. It was a self-love day. It was nice. Ahh.

But since the day started out, a lot has happened. There are now lots of single dudes in China. And, they are slowly getting richer. They have Yuan to burn and no one to spend it on but themselves. But let’s not forget the Chinese women too. They are now richer, taking their time to marry, and certainly love a good spend-up. And, if these women can afford it, it is the day where luxury brands get a solid burst of credit card love.

Even up until the Noughties, Singles Day used to be a small celebration. Then Billionaire Jack Ma of Alibaba came along (Alibaba is the Amazon.com of China.) Ma decided that he would do huge promotions around the day and plug it as an online shopping fiesta. And it worked. It is now the biggest online sales event in the world.

People who have gone on to marry have kept buying themselves stuff on Singles Day, jealous of singles and their self-spoiling. Singles Day is now a 24-hour-period where just about every demographic goes utterly mental with their credit cards. And if we don’t adopt it in Europe I was be very distressed. It sounds awesome.

While Alibaba was the first to link Singles’ Day to a shopping craze, plenty of rivals have joined in. Xiu.com is a Chinese luxury e-commerce platform. It just released its sales report for this year’s Singles Day.

Here are the sales stats generated via Xiu.com:

Online shoppers born after 1990 have become the leading consumer group in China

Online shoppers aged between 25 and 30 (born between 1987 and 1992) took up the biggest share of Xiu.com’s total sales on this year’s November 11. Purchasing behaviours vary significantly across age groups. Citing a few examples: the favourite fashion brand among women shoppers born in the 2000s was The Kooples, an emerging French street fashion brand featuring a Brit-pop style that, to date, had not yet proven popular in China.

Shoppers born in the 1990s preferred Dolce & Gabbana. Burberry was the top-selling fashion brand among women born in the 1970s and 1980s.

Giuseppe Zanotti was the best-selling shoe brand among male shoppers born in the 1990s and 2000s, while men born in the 1980s preferred Gucci. Men born in the 1960s and 1970s opted overwhelmingly for Prada. Surprisingly, Chanel was the favoured brand among male shoppers born in the 1950s.

Burberry remains the country’s favourite brand

The top selling brands overall were Burberry, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada, Dolce & Gabbana and Chanel.

However, obvious differences existed between different cities. In Beijing, Moncler was the bestselling brand, while in Shanghai, Hermes, which was barely mentioned in other cities, proved to be the best seller. Philipp Plein was favored by Shenzhen buyers, while Emporio Armani sold best in Chongqing.

Male buyers spend more in fashion field

This year saw a huge increase in the average sale among men for fashion items, outspending the women. Male shoppers preferred the casual style of Armani Jeans and the avant-garde fashion style of Philipp Plein, while women remained with traditional luxury brands represented by Valentino, Dior and Chanel.

Beijing is where most of the shoppers are

Beijing ranked first on Xiu.com’s list of the top 20 Chinese cities in terms of sales during the one-day event, followed by Shanghai, Shenzhen and Chengdu.

The overall results showed that while there were more luxury-item shoppers in the bigger cities, people from smaller towns spent more per person, although there were fewer of them. So this seems to show that there is more money in bigger cities, which seems to be true of every country in the world.

If we can learn anything from this, it is that European luxury brands are killing it in China. And, that we must institute Singles Day here at once, people. Let’s get on it!

In News

How to Avoid the Biggest Digital Marketing Mistakes

November 15, 2017 No Comments

Mistakes are part of digital marketing. What’s important, however, is making sure you’re avoiding preventable mistakes that could kill your campaign.

When it comes to digital marketing, mistakes are all but guaranteed to happen. After all, marketing your company is very much a process of trial and error.

The key, however, is minimising the impact of these mistakes and avoiding those you shouldn’t be making in the first place. Of course, this is much easier said than done, especially for businesses, many of whom still practice and believe in many traditional marketing techniques.

Not that there’s anything wrong with keeping things classic, but there’s no denying that traditional marketing – even “traditional guerrilla marketing”– is sometimes completely different from internet marketing.

And this is where mistakes often happen. Writing for Inc., Neil Patel notes, “These mistakes cost money, traffic opportunity, and growth. Unfortunately, marketers make these mistakes because they fail to truly understand how to leverage their skills and improve their approach.”

Digital marketing requires a significant investment in terms of time and resources. The last thing you want to do is to waste your efforts doing things that are taking your online presence farther away from your goals.

Here are some of the most common digital marketing mistakes your company might be guilty of making.

Marketing Without any Goals

If you’re writing on your blog or posting on social media without any real goals, you might as well as be wandering around aimlessly on the internet. One of the most common mistakes many digital marketers make is not setting any goals before launching their campaign.

Goals are critical for evaluating the success of your digital marketing efforts, whether it’s in the context of sales, sign ups (for newsletters), messages, or phone calls.

“Goal setting is the backbone of marketing. Goals help us prove how effective we are, keep us focused and push us to succeed,” says Amber Klein of Hive Digital Strategy. “And while we know how important goals are to measure our success, more than 80% of small business owners do not keep track of their business goals.”

With no goals, you have no direction. With no direction, you have no way of knowing your campaign is successful. And if you don’t have benchmarks for success/failure, what’s the point of marketing your business?

You Don’t Know Who Your Audience Is

Marketing your small business on the internet is one thing, but all you are doing is wasting time and resources if you do not know whom you’re reaching out to.

It’s not enough to just say “potential clients,” because that could mean anyone.

Even if you’re creating insightful killer content, you’re only setting yourself up to fail if you’re not promoting your content to the right audience at the right time. Chances are your niche is already saturated with content, making it difficult to stand out.

The trick is figuring out just whom you want to market to.

“Identifying your target audience is the first step in any type of marketing endeavour,” says Neil Patel in a Forbes write-up. “Tragically, it’s also easy to overlook. Don’t make this mistake. Study your audience, and much of your marketing will take care of itself.”

The most basic way to understand your audience is by creating buyer personas – semi-fictional representations of your ideal customer/client, complete with personal descriptions as well as behaviours.

You’re Not Putting Your Customers First

Many marketing teams make the mistake of boxing themselves inside echo chambers, where all they do is strategise and plan about things they like, but not so much the things their customers actually do.

This rookie mistake is something you can easily avoid if you focus your entire campaign on putting your customers first.

At its core, digital marketing is about doing the following:

Attracting
Engaging
Educating
Nurturing
Converting
Retaining

And naturally, all these things involve your customers. The experience you provide must be tailored to their needs and preferences, which fortunately you can know through data analytics and engagement evaluation. To put it simply, the customer must always come first.

You’re Not Being Social on Social Media

While there are certainly many businesses building a presence on social media, many of them use platforms like Facebook and Twitter not so much to engage their audience, but as a way to simply promote their firms with ad-like content.

This is not what social media is about. Yes, you can broadcast information about yourself, but this should not be your priority. Social media is a way to be social—to interact and engage your audience with genuine dialogue.

In other words, you need to respond to your audience and not just post something and leave them alone in the comments section. Your community will come to respect you more if you genuinely want to build a relationship with them, which can only be a good thing for your firm in the long run.

Conclusion

In summary, the 4 most common mistakes digital marketers make are ignoring the importance of setting goals, failing to understand your audience, not putting your customers first, and misusing social media.

Although it would seem these are ‘no brainer’ mistakes, you would be surprised just how many marketers, even those with quite a bit of experience under their belt, are guilty of making them.

Author: Qamar Zaman a Dallas based website conversion expert.

In News

Want Your Band to be Famous? Then Get Your Music on Video Games

November 14, 2017 No Comments

There’s a whole genre of music that has grown inside the world of gaming. Many now-famous bands got their mainstream breakthrough thanks to this process. So if you have a band, you need to read this.

By Nicole Buckler

The symbiotic relationship between music and video games is now so established that a games studio called Bugbear Entertainment is searching for bands to submit music to them. The winning tunes will be played inside their latest racing game: Wreckfest.

Bugbear Entertainment specialises in action driving. They have been making car games for sixteen years, starting with Rally Trophy. They are best known for the critically acclaimed demolition racing series FlatOut (2004-2007, PC, PS2, Xbox, Xbox 360) and street racing title Ridge Racer Unbounded (2013, PC, PS3, Xbox 360).

As of yesterday, Bugbear are calling for bands everywhere to send in their tunes to accompany gamers while they race and smash the crap out of each other in their latest game. The winning prize is $3,500 and there are nine runner-up prizes of $1,000 per track. But it is not the money that’s the real prize: it is exposure to their gamers that is the real coup. There are hundreds and thousands of them.

The winning music will be featured on games released on Playstation 4, Xbox One and PC. Bands featured in previous Bugbear releases have included upcoming indie bands and household names like Megadeth, Rob Zombie, Fall Out Boy, Audioslave and Skrillex.

So if you have a band, get on it. You can apply here.

Want to check out the competition? You can listen to the other entries here.

This innovative approach to sourcing music is evidence of a growing realisation amongst game designers, that there are thousands of unheard of bands out there. According to Bugbear, “They just need the right chance to have their music heard internationally, and by the right demographic to get to that critical mass of fans to push them to the next level of popularity.”

For more established bands like Megadeth, putting their music inside high-selling video games offers a symbiotic relationship. Gaming studios can promote Megadeth music to their gamers, and Megadeth’s fans might be more open to buying games that have their favourite tunes in it. It’s a match made in cross-promotion heaven.

Bugbear is very interested in getting the sound right for their games, which is why they are letting their gamers cast their votes on the tracks they want to hear while playing the game. Happy customers, more sales. Well, in theory, anyway.

Music has always been a vital part of the gaming experience. The aim of Wreckfest is to create an immersive experience for the player, one where the in-game radio feeds the road rage in all of us. While you can blast your tunes out on your REAL car radio, you can’t smash the crap out of other drivers while doing so. But, in Wreckfest, you can. What’s not to like? Smashing other people up and decent tunes? It’s win-win.

The Wreckfest title will be published soon by THQ Nordic. While it is not yet for sale, you can have a little preview play of it here.

Drivers…start your engines.