Interview with Ollie Bath, co-founder of CloudTags

In our recent guide by Tery Spataro on integrating customer-facing digital technology into retail stores we looked at lots of examples of how retailers are planning to Wow customers with in-store digital tech. One of the most interesting technologies which combines customer engagement with linkages through to CRM and sales is CloudTags. Jill Quick, another of our Expert commentators had been telling me about the example of Made.com who had given customers at its London showroom tablets that they can use to read NFC / RFID tags to learn about each product, while giving the retailer access to data about shopper behaviour and preferences. It's one example of the Internet of Things being applied in retail today. So, I was interested to interview Ollie Bath, the co-founder of CloudTags to find out more about the technology, how different retailers…

How retailers can boost sales during off-peak times

What do seaside restaurants, ski resorts and lawn cutting services all have in common? They are ostensibly seasonal industries and generate the majority of their income during a relatively short period of time. Yet countless seasonal businesses make the cardinal sin of being content with their small window of opportunity and never look to branch out in a bid to extend their profit-making potential. If you run that seaside café, do you really want to spend 8-9 months of the year brushing cobwebs from your cash register? In the Internet age, you can be certain your competitors will be conjuring up ways to cope with the off-season so you better follow suit unless you enjoy being left in the dust. Keep reading to discover how to avoid the off-season slump and keep the cash flowing in.

Customer Engagement

This is arguably the most crucial strategy as…

YouTube overtakes Facebook to become the most visited social network

Not content with being the second largest search engine, earlier this year YouTube beat Facebook to become the most visited social media site in the US. Yes, you read that right. Research from Compete PRO, which operates one of the largest consumer panels in the US, indicated that unique visitors to YouTube edged ahead of Facebook by over 1.3m visitors in June 2014. While this may come as a surprise to many readers, it’s been on the cards for some time as this graph from Compete illustrates: You can see that YouTube and Facebook had been slogging it out over the previous few months but finally sometime between May and June this year YouTube got the better of them. This news mostly slipped under the radar at the time, mainly due to the way the major research…

What are the biggest challenges for enterprise SEO?

Today's consumer buying process for many consumers starts with on-line activity - often involving search to find the relevant reviews or price comparisons. Since research has shown that across industries 'organic traffic accounts for 94% of clickthroughs' on the search results, it's clearly important for larger businesses with a complex product portfolio to compete through SEO. In this research conducted by Conductor with Ascend2, ROI from Enterprise SEO and the challenges and tactics considered are reviewed. 72% of respondents were positive about their ROI from SEO strategies, and 54% contributed this to content creation. So the majority of respondents were positive, but here we pick out the challenges of Enterprise SEO. As the graph shows, companies who were not seeing the benefits, felt that their challenges were around a lack of in-house SEO skills, limited budget and difficulty in optimizing content with keywords. …

A review of technical SEO in the Cruise industry

ClickThrough Marketing conducted mini technical SEO audits on the top five cruise travel agent sites in Europe, and found that all five could boost their search performance with SEO tweaks. This isn't an industry-specific problem – it's an all-round epidemic. We have carried out countless SEO audits for companies of all sizes. And if we’ve learnt one thing, it’s that the size or position of a firm has little bearing on its technical SEO performance. We've seen huge, popular sites with critical SEO problems, superbly optimised sites from struggling brands, and vice versa. To demonstrate this, we conducted mini audits on Europe's top-five cruise travel agents (by reach according to Alexa), looking at 12 key factors that can affect search performance and usability.* We hope this research shows the type of checks that are relevant and worthwhile for businesses…

Creating a strategy for integrated in-store digital retail

'Consumers are 'center stage' in their relationships with retailers. The idea that a bricks and mortar store can simply 'pile it high and sell' are increasingly waning. The in-store experience needs to compliment and work with the ecommerce experience by adding a sense of magic and hyper personalization that is so perfect to each individual that it can't be found elsewhere. Retail needs to be the theater!'  Nelson Freitas, Chief Strategy Officer, Wunderman. Digital technologies inspired new visions for the future of stimulating engagement with retail customers while helping customers move along their purchasing journey. Initially Ecommerce left some retailers scratching their heads on what to do, with many questioning whether the Internet was just a fad. Although the growth of online retail ecommerce sales has been steady, it currently lies at just 8% of all retail sales in the US.…

7 mostly simple online services to hack your growth

Marketers have always relied on non-traditional tactics to make their startups grow rapidly. However, content marketing has remained a staple in their campaigns. The methods of online content marketing can almost guarantee a more successful, well-established business within a short period of time. There are many different strategies that marketers use to make their campaigns more effective, but their most recognizable approach involves creative, optimized online content that attracts relevant audiences, drives traffic to the main website, and generates actual income. From YouTube videos to Facebook posts, the method of content marketing are versatile enough to fit into everyone’s needs and preferences. The most important goal to have in mind is attracting new consumers to the services and products you offer. The following content marketing tools will help you do that! and Smart Insights new content distribution matrix gives…

Going Social - what does it do to your brain?

Gone are the days when we received advice from our friends and neighbours on a ocial media treet corner, or perhaps at the most recent neighbourhood block party because face-to-face conversations are becoming a thing of the past. I must admit that I have texted my friends from the next room on more than one occasion. Back when I was an adolescent, baby boomers like myself grew up with telephone conversations with a phone which was anchored to the kitchen wall, and further restricting us with a twisting and tangled cord. Now landlines are also becoming extinct with almost half of us ditching them completely for our wireless and hand-held devices.

Enter the world of Social Media

This is where social media comes into the picture, as now our dialogues have shifted to these platforms.…

5 things we can learn from the Santa brand

Now, if you’re looking for tips on marketing, the big man in red may not be the obvious place to start. But look behind the bushy beard and you’ll see an astute marketer who has some smart tips to share on making Christmas a roaring success 1. He plans ahead Those toys don’t all appear by magic on Christmas Eve. When the reindeer are all back in their stable, on Christmas Day, he and the elves have a confab about what worked and what they could do better next year. Now for marketers in the real world, this conversation probably needs to happen in January when everyone’s back in the office, and there are some stats to review. But the principle is still the same. 2. He knows his target audience Santa has a…

4 types of mobile app metrics that must be reported

A mobile app's raison d'être, just like any other product, is to generate more money for its creator than it costs to build. Use mobile app analytics to evaluate effectiveness of your mobile app marketing methods and to ensure ad spending leads to installations, and installations lead to app use and in-app purchasing. To review your approach to measuring app effectiveness, here are 4 types of measure we recommend.

1 Tracking the number of installs

One of the key metrics regardless of the app business model is the number of daily installs and their sources. Do your installs come from mobile ads or from app store directly? What is the split between paid and free sources of users and how does it change over time? Tracking paid and free installs are the basic metrics every mobile marketer should track from day one. Answering these questions is…