During our Digital Marketing Futures series earlier this year, we gave a conceptual view of the marketing trends those in our industry need to keep their eyes firmly trained upon.
Following on from this, we’ve picked out seven specific trends that we’ve seen change or accelerate during the recent lockdown, and that we think you should watch out for over the next 12-24 months. So here’s our list of seven post-pandemic trends to look out for in 2021 – and beyond.
This trend is easy to predict and is one that – hopefully – you have already begun implementing in your campaigns. It’s reported that by 2022, 82% of global internet traffic will come from video streaming and downloads. What’s more, 72% of businesses have reported that video increased their conversion rates.
Video covers such a huge range of mediums, including live streaming, one-to-one videos, long format, short format – the list goes on.
In lockdown, we’ve seen huge gains in people using over-the-top media. The most mainstream example of this is YouTube, but it also encompasses all the paid searches such as Netflix, Amazon, Disney+ and HBO.
It’s no surprise this has increased over lockdown, however what is surprising is why people are doing it. More than half of 13-39 year-olds planned to watch TV series and films on these streaming services as a way to maintain their mental health in lockdown.
Now even TV remotes have buttons installed for Netflix and other streaming services. We can now programmatically get at users with video on these connected TVs through different over-the-top media outlets – and this is pushing forwards the decline we are seeing in linear TV.
This again isn’t a trend that’s new to us, but it’s something that has become much more mainstream. Nowadays, 62% of gen Z and millennial consumers want visual search more than any other technology.
We are fundamentally getting much lazier in how we do day-to-day activities, and users now are choosing to search for information through pictures. Google, Pinterest and Microsoft are all leading the way with their various technology features that allow you to find similar products based on things that you upload.
These days, it’s not uncommon for you to take a photo of clothing, furniture or kitchenware at home and then use available systems to find similar products that are available to purchase. Or you can use your camera to take a picture of a barcode and then use a system to find that product online and where you can buy it from.
It’s going to grow as consumers become more familiar with these systems post-lockdown, and it will likely be used by many on a daily basis. You will need to start thinking about how this will play into your marketing strategy over the coming months. To start with you should ensure your structured data is sound and you have high-quality imagery, and make sure your site is optimized for speed.
This is a trend that has crept up on us; it’s really everywhere now and demand for it is going to accelerate beyond lockdown. Research shows people are now more comfortable chatting away to Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa or Cortana. Predictions now are suggesting that 50% of searches are expected to be carried out through voice activation over the next few years.
Voice commerce is also expected to drastically increase as these types of sales are expected to hit the $45bn mark by 2022 in the UK and US. Another recently-released survey from YouGov showed that one in four Britons reported owning some sort of smart speaker.
When implementing voice search into your strategy, you need to consider the types of searches that are most common among users – for example, ‘near me’-type searches are huge. In this instance, you should make sure that you’re a local entity and you’ve used localized keywords in your web copy.
From a technical perspective, over 50% of these searches are going to be on mobile, so your mobile site needs to be up to date. With the Core Web Vitals update just around the corner, they become much more important.
AI has gone from being a buzzword to very much a reality, and marketers’ use of AI soared to 190% between 2018 and 2020. With the likes of Microsoft Azure’s cognitive services, it’s very much now something that’s within reach of every website and every developer.
The API is there and designed to make it accessible, and from a pure marketing perspective AI is baked into the platforms that we’re using. It’s used to collect data, generate insights and anticipate customer trends and moves.
Until now, we’ve taken this kind of automation for granted. Bidding strategies and responsive ads all use forms of AI and machine learning to adapt to the signals that are coming in to improve results in real-time.
One of the other interesting areas where AI will play a huge part is how it’s currently being explored as an alternative to cookies and other third-party trackers as we transition into this cookie-less world over the coming years.
The IAB is expected to release some guidelines and best practices for the use of machine learning at all the different levels of digital advertising production. In a post-pandemic world, leveraging AI becomes even more important as we see these trends shifting all the time as lockdowns come and go. It’s about them being able to react to those changes in real-time.
The need to lean into AI more means this sector will continue to grow to the point where we’re not talking about AI because it’s something we all expect.
Conversational marketing is a way of moving buyers or customers through a marketing or sales funnel by using real-time conversations. It’s about fast, real-time interactions, and a lot of businesses are now turning to chatbots.
Over 50% of customer queries may be managed today via AI chatbots. These bots are not necessarily new, but the uptake has accelerated the technology behind them and it’s helping marketers to establish and maintain relationships during the pandemic.
More and more brands are turning to chatbots and conversational marketing to do some of the heavy lifting exercises around support inquiries or sales, and a great example of this is Facebook’s Messenger bots.
However, these bots can be used for more than just support inquiries. Lidl’s wine bot called Margot informs you of the different types of grapes that are used in their wine and will give you wine pairings based on what you are planning to eat. You’re invited to have fun with these chatbots and use it all the way through the funnel, from sales activation to more of a brand-building exercise. We will soon get to the point where it’s hard to determine whether or not you’re talking to a chatbot.
This may be a new term to you, but it’s actually an umbrella term for three immersive technologies that you certainly know. Those terms are:
This is a trend that’s growing at lightning speed, as the global market size of extended reality is estimated to increase 7772% to over $3.7bn by 2025.
These may not seem applicable to the marketing world, but in reality it’s a technology that has been thrust forward in the past 12 months by the reduction in the hardware costs, the availability of them, and the increased demand from people trapped at home looking for some alternative ways of engaging.
It’s not just big, heavy headsets now. It’s using YouTube’s 360-degree videos or the augmented reality filters that come with Snapchat, Instagram and TikTok, all the way through to DIY VR equipment. These are changing the conception of this immersive experience so that it is available to all.
Marketers need to meet this demand quickly by upping their game in terms of engagement, interactive content and the personal experiences they produce. Users can now connect with a brand with the kind of intensity and emotional response that hasn’t been possible with one-way traditional media.
For those who are unfamiliar with this term, neuromarketing is a strategy that analyzes and measures people’s brain activity and reactions from their nervous systems to determine which types of content they find engaging.
Essentially, you’re checking when a user has an emotional response to something. Thanks to the advances in tech over the last few years, it’s becoming much more of a reality that these types of tests can be accessible to all.
A good example of this is eye-tracking. This is where you use technology to track eye movements to understand where someone fixates on a particular point of a website, or to count the number of blinks that are occurring, which can be an indicator of how much attention someone is paying to your ad. You can also use emotional response analysis, which is where you use technology to identify whether there has been an emotional response to an ad.
A successful neuromarketing campaign that used emotional response analysis was created by Always in 2014. The brand took the phrase ‘like a girl’, flipped it on its head and turned an insult into a movement of confidence. This brought the emotional response that you would expect, it generated revenue and popularity and even won the Brandon Emmy for their campaign.
Advances mean that this kind of marketing has gone from being a more sci-fi way of marketing to something that’s very much mainstream.
If you’re looking to get ahead of your competitors in 2021 and beyond, then you should definitely consider implementing these trends into your marketing campaigns where possible.
While these trends have emerged as the ones to watch in recent months, we do have to bear in mind the circumstances in which they have appeared.
One of the key things we will have to do over the next 12 months is to identify which of these trends are actual trends and which are just passing fads born out of necessity from lockdown.
We’re all different, aren’t we? Some of us need a tight deadline to focus the mind. Some of us just need a clear ‘to do’ list to work our way through and feel good about as we start to tick things off. Whatever it is that gives you the boost you need to get stuff done, be aware of it so you can try to harness it on the days the motivation isn’t coming quite so naturally.
I’m writing this blog on the back of a productive session – one more tick on the list before I finish for the day. I know I’m affected to a degree by the weather. It’s not warm but the sun is shining today and that in itself helps my productivity. Admittedly that’s a tough one to control but there are other things I know I can control that helps me to do what I need to do.
Make a list
I’ve always found lists helpful. I have a list for everything and if I don’t have my list handy when something pops into my head, I write it down or even e-mail it to myself, so I find it when I next log in. We can all hold a certain amount of information in our heads but when it starts to get overloaded it’s only natural that things start to slip.
Delegate
Sometimes we have to admit that we can’t do it all ourselves, so we have to delegate. This can be hard for some people but there are lots of tools that can help you hand over control gradually and in a way that you are comfortable with. Whether you are delegating to in-house members of your team or outsourced freelancers you can maintain full visibility of delegated tasks via regular communication, or via tools that are dedicated to precisely such visibility. Trello (www.trello.com) or Asana (www.asana.com) are just two examples of the kind of software that is available to help you manage your projects in the most efficient way.
Track your time
If you’re not yet sure which areas you need to delegate, it might be useful to track your time for a week or a two. We all think we know where we spend our time, but often our perceptions are wildly out of kilter with reality. It’s also very easy to focus on the jobs we enjoy and leave the tasks we don’t by convincing ourselves that what we are doing is important. By tracking your time, you might find that you are spending too much time in areas that are no longer adding value. And perhaps there are more important areas of the business that are being neglected.
Increase productivity
To increase productivity, it may simply be a case of being more mindful of what motivates us, how we spend our time and which behaviours we can adjust to become more productive without burning ourselves out. Or it might be time to delegate. If you are spending too much time on an aspect of the business that could be handed over to someone else, or if you don’t have time to do the things you know you need to do to drive the business forward, it is probably time to delegate.
Once you have identified the areas you need to delegate, you can set about delegating them. This could be to various in-house fractions, or perhaps to an outside resource. A company’s marketing is one area that often gets left when things get busy and top of the list of things to get forgotten, is your business blog. Smart businesses know they need to blog but getting around to doing it regularly is another matter. By delegating this and any other aspects of the business that you know you are simply not giving the attention they deserve, will free up more time to boost your productivity in other areas of the business.
This was a really exciting web development project for a record label with a whole lot of history.
Blue Raincoat Music have been representing musicians and releasing music for decades and their back catalogue is a variety of genres and disciplines.
That mix of artists was part of the enjoyment of this project as I ended up listening to a huge range of music – from Laura Marling to Phoebe Bridgers …via Chesney Hawkes.
The build of this website involved a custom WordPress theme built to display all of their artists from decades past, to the present day.
I used Advanced Custom Fields in order to make the site completely customisable by the client.
The site gives each artist their own page where their videos, music and contact details are all displayed. This required integration with the YouTube and Spotify APIs to deliver the video and audio content.
Animation is subtle throughout the site and includes small transitions on content to make the site feel alive. I also added some animations on the page load so that each page transition feels smooth.
This site also has a particular emphasis on accessibility. Google have increased the importance of accessibility in their algorithm, and rightly so, and this site scores in the mid-to-high nineties on Lighthouse in regards to accessibility.
This means that it is user-friendly and easy to use for site users with any kind of impairment.
In particular, for users with visual impairment, the site is easily navigable using a screen reader. I stuck to some of the base principles of accessible web design, some of which are laid out by the The Accessibility Project, including:
– Titles for navigation and <a> tags
– Image alt tags
– Labelling of Primary and Mobile navigation
– Using appropriate page headers
Do you have a small business that you are trying to grow? There are a lot of balls to keep in the air when you’re just starting out, or when you are in the first couple of years of running a business. You need to market yourself, get the leads coming in, keep existing customers happy, have an eye on the finances, and of course try to enjoy yourself! After all, that’s probably the reason you set up a small business in the first place! But as the business grows, it can become more and more difficult to keep all those balls in the air.
The tipping point
There is often a tipping point that is reached and sometimes breached, before we accept we need help. Sometimes because we want to keep every aspect of the business under our own control, or sometimes because we don’t realise how much we’re struggling, until it gets so bad our body or mind give us away.
Perhaps you’ve realised you need help, but you can’t really afford to take someone else on a sustained full-time salary just yet. Perhaps it just feels like too big a task to let anything go. If this sounds like you, this is where outsourcing to freelancers can allow you to have your cake and eat it!
Changing priorities
Marketing is a common outsourced discipline. Some larger companies use big agencies to take care of all their marketing needs, but a lot of smaller businesses retain control of managing the overall strategy, while outsourcing some of the ‘doing’ to a freelance writer, social media expert or marketeer.
Company blogs are a good example of how things can start to slip as business gets busier. A new start-up sets up a blog to gain new business. They grow awareness, position themselves, and achieve their search engine ranking and then as the leads start coming in, the blog diminishes. It’s not a criticism, it’s a time-consuming aspect of any marketing campaign that can be incredibly hard to stay on top of once the business is doing well. And your priority must be focussing on the customers that need something from you day to day. However, it doesn’t have to be all or nothing. If you have a business blog that was bringing you inbound leads and improving your SEO, you don’t have to let it go.
The business blog you want, without the work
The aim of the Blog Write Blog is to be a source of tips and advice for small to medium businesses who want to build and maintain a blog. However, I completely acknowledge that once your blog is up and running and doing what you wanted it to do, it can be difficult to stay on top of it for the long term. Particularly as your venture grows. Small businesses or start-up companies that want to grow an online presence, but don’t have the time to do it themselves may be able to find an affordable helping hand from a local freelance copywriter.
Find the best fit
Different copywriters will work with you in different ways, so take the time up front to find the best fit for your business. For example, you may be ready to hand everything over from the beginning, in which case you’ll need someone who once briefed, can come up with topics and write the blog for you to sign off. Or, if you would like to keep a little more control, plenty of freelancers will happily take a list of topics you would like to cover and a brief for each one and work their way through the list.
A good copywriter won’t be precious about their writing either, so just because they’ve submitted a blog post to you doesn’t mean you’re obligated to post it immediately with no changes. Particularly in the beginning you should expect to make a few changes while your new copywriter learns your voice. But, if you are prepared to build a working relationship with one person, they will soon be producing content that you would have been proud to write yourself.
If you have a small business that’s gathering pace to the point you don’t know which way to turn, drop me an e-mail today at [email protected] for more information about my blog copywriting services.
Advertising in 2030 will be fundamentally different to how it has been for the past 10 years.
Of course, we accept that for the most part, the same tried and tested methods will continue to work for a while yet – entrenched approaches don’t change overnight.
But individuals and organizations that fail to adapt over time will gradually fade out of relevance. They will slowly become less equipped to support and grow their employees, to help them in their careers and, therefore, the business they are part of.
As customers increasingly embrace digital platforms, the challenge is on.
The challenge is on for business owners to embrace the changes in advertising over the coming years. Doing so enables us to remain relevant and able to foster enduring relationships with customers in cost-efficient ways.
“All failure is failure to adapt, all success is successful adaptation” – Max McKeown
The one thing I will say before I get into these trends is that they are exactly that…
It is critical we monitor how advertising evolves, but a lot of these topics are fueled by folklore.
These topics change as the facts become clearer. We are in danger, as an industry, of creating that folklore through loud herd debate, which then becomes misunderstood fact.
It is our job as an agency to monitor these topics, contribute positively to the conversation, establish our own stance through investments and ensure we can support our clients as the future becomes clearer.
But be in no doubt – these trends and topics are driving the future of advertising and we need to embrace the conversation.
Marketing clouds will become indispensable elements in the advertising processes of the future. They control the creation and management of marketing relationships with your customers and manage campaigns.
This is already best practice, but it will become standard to integrate solutions for customer journey management, email, mobile, social, web personalization, advertising, content handling and analytics.
AI is ubiquitous in the advertising space. It supports our decision-making and analyzes consumer behaviour.
Enriched with data about how consumers interact with advertising, it substantially optimizes campaigns to perform better. Implemented consistently and to its full extent, AI understands consumers better than they do themselves.
This is very clearly tied to the performance improvements that we have seen in recent years by increasing our adoption of AI within campaigns.
The large tech vendors will continue to embrace artificial intelligence because of the opportunity to scale and, in the future, perform better than humans.
As an agency, we will spend less time in the future on the implementation of administration (eg search query reports) and more time on strategic conversations with our clients to support their business growth.
Programmatic will be standard for digital advertising. It is also the future of more traditional advertising methods.
Think first-party data collected through radio stations (like Sonos radio) and how that could be used over time for programmatic purchasing of audio.
It’s already used for TV and outdoor. Expect to see this more.
Digital advertising is predominantly contextual. This will grow – cohort advertising, for example, is still contextual.
Ads will be selected and placed by automated systems, based on ever more detailed user-profiles and the content displayed. There will be a continued increase in mobile and location-based advertising, which will strengthen this trend.
The fragmented supplier landscape within adtech will consolidate. Large adtech players will acquire almost all their smaller but highly specialized competitors that manage to evolve.
Alternatively – and more likely in my view – is that these smaller vendors will be rendered redundant through policy and legislation evolution.
The desire for improved services, additional scale and more first-party data will be the main driver behind any M&A activity.
The agency model is changing and the type of people we need in our agency will change over time too. Client-side, supplier-side, agency-side – everyone will be competing for the same kind of job profiles.
It will create a battle for the best talent and create a requirement to deliver the best training.
Employers will compete for experts with scarce, specialized skill sets.
As is the case now, agencies and vendors will be breeding grounds for some of the best talent and we have a responsibility to embrace that change and train people in their careers to create the best outcome for clients, but also the best opportunities for our colleagues in the future.
Demand for data scientists, analytics experts and creative minds is huge at present and will remain high or become more competitive in the future.
After print, traditional linear TV will lose its importance.
Large digital platform companies generate similar reach through video-on-demand, social or messaging functionalities.
This reach combined with first-party data and artificial intelligence will create incredibly efficient opportunities to reach audiences at scale through digital platforms.
Does this sound familiar? You are feeling pretty good about yourself because you know business blogs are a good thing to be doing and you have got a blog facility set up on your website. If you’re the organised sort you might have made a list of topics you want to write about. If you’re not perhaps you jumped straight in and started typing. Either way, if you knew exactly what you wanted to say there may have been steam pouring out of your computer while you downloaded every thought. If writing doesn’t come naturally, it may have taken you longer to pen the posts you knew you wanted to write.
However, once you’ve got that initial outpouring out of your head and your first posts are live, you relax a little. You return to the important day to day running of the business with every intention to come back to your blog, either at the scheduled time in your organised list, or when you have another hour or two to spare.
Shifting priorities
Before you know it, a few months have passed (where does the time go?!) and your business blog is out of date. You have the blogging tool ready to roll but it’s not being utilised, which means it won’t be generating the results you were hoping for. It’s so easy to do with blog updates and many other aspects of business. They are ‘nice to haves’ compared to looking after existing customers, dealing with new business enquiries or staying on top of your finances for example. There are often set deadlines with a lot of other aspects of running a company that can’t constantly be shifted forward in the same way marketing your offering can. However, just because it can be a moving target, doesn’t mean it should be. If you want results, consistency is key.
How often to blog?
There are different views about how many times a business should blog, but one thing everyone agrees on is that blogs should be consistent. One of the biggest deciding factors when it comes to frequency is what you want to achieve with your blog. Do you want to increase brand awareness? Do you want to increase inbound leads? Or do you want to position yourself as a market leader and a voice of authority in your field? Another factor to take into consideration is the size of your enterprise. Large, multi-faceted organisations can blog once or more every day, whereas smaller businesses might only blog once or twice a month.
Pace yourself
When deciding how often you are going to blog, try to pace yourself. This is where a plan comes in handy. You may feel like you have hundreds of ideas for blog posts, but you don’t want to use them all up in the first few months and be left with no new posts for the rest of the year. It’s the regular addition of content onto your website that helps with SEO rankings, so it’s important to spread your content out over time. Spending a few minutes listing down all your ideas for posts and thinking about when you would like to make each one live is a great way to manage this process.
As with so many things in life, spending a small amount of time planning up front, can really save you a lot of time in the long run. But most importantly, it can ensure your business blog achieves what you want it to achieve.
eCommerce sales in the UK have continued to rise over the years, growing from a market value of £513.5 billion in 2014 to £693 billion in 2019. The pandemic forcing more Britons to stay home has massively accelerated this growth, pushing retail eCommerce sales past 30% of total retail sales in 2020.
In the uncertain world that we all live in today, to say that promoting your online store is important would be an understatement. Capturing the attention of a digital audience, however, requires digital marketing know-how, and when it comes to getting a foothold in the search engine results pages (SERPs) there really are only two main marketing channels to explore: organic SEO and paid search or pay-per-click (PPC).
In this mini-guide, we’ll briefly explore the main tools at your disposal to help push your eCommerce sales and grow your brand online.
eCommerce SEO is the practice of improving the search rankings of your online store for a whole host of related search terms so that potential customers are more likely to find you whenever they use a search engine to look for relevant products. It includes tactics such as creating intuitive, navigable site architecture and using well-researched keywords in product and product category pages, as well as creating a whole host of informative supplementary content and guides to really demonstrate your industry expertise.
Whether it’s your home page or any of your product pages, all have a better chance of ranking high in the SERPs of search engines like Google if you apply eCommerce SEO.
eCommerce SEO is vital for any business with an online store, as it drives organic search traffic and is an investment in building a brand’s digital presence.
Google Ads is Google’s advertising platform which allows you to display advertisements on their platforms, including Google Search Network. You have to pay Google for every action users take such as clicking on your ad (hence pay-per-click), but only then and not before.
As with eCommerce SEO, your online store will benefit from Google Ads by appearing high on the SERPs, specifically in Google Search, with increased site traffic and potentially improved conversions and sales. The key difference is that paid ads are shown before organic search results, so they can get more immediate attention from people who use Google Search.
You get what you pay for with Google Ads, and you have to keep investing money into it if you want your ads to stay up. In this way, the ROI is very transient as it’s entirely dependent on you maintaining your click budget (unlike organic SEO where the investment takes longer to materialise but will give you longer-lasting results).
Google Shopping shows ads of products for sale on various Google channels, including Google Search, from online stores that take advantage of the service. People who click on a Google Shopping ad are directed to the product page of the seller’s online store where they can complete the purchase.
Convenience is one of Google Shopping’s major benefits, as you only have to submit product info and a picture for your ad. Google will take what you’ve provided and show your ad to the most relevant audience.
A Google Shopping ad shows the product’s price and aggregate user rating for products with reviews. Such info is useful for qualifying leads, as those who click on Google Shopping ads already have set expectations and are more willing to make purchases.
Google Shopping falls under Google Ads, so it’s PPC that you also have to budget for to keep your Shopping ads running.
SEO and PPC are good on their own, but when they are both done together, the results can be outstanding.
You can use Google Ads to test out keywords that you’re thinking of targeting for your eCommerce SEO efforts. Paid ads can quickly drive significant traffic to your site, which you can then check if that same traffic results in conversions for the keywords you targeted. Depending on the results, you can choose to use those keywords for your SEO or not.
Conversely, you can use the data from your eCommerce SEO keyword research to bolster your PPC campaigns by targeting keywords that you already know perform well.
There are other ways to synergise SEO and PPC, but the core principle when using both is to use the data gathered from one method to inform and optimise the strategies for the other.
For eCommerce SEO, the top three metrics to consider are the following:
All of these are available in Google Search Console.
Meanwhile, PPC campaigns measure:
Google Analytics lets you track all these metrics for your Google Ads campaigns.
Apart from on-site SEO and PPC campaigns, online businesses can also greatly benefit from being connected to a network of blogs and influencers within their industries.
There is the broad benefit of building awareness for your brand when other websites and thought leaders mention your company on their platforms. It also has a more specific and material benefit of getting links back to your eCommerce store, which is important to improve your ranking.
You can start by researching blogs and influencers that cover the kind of products you sell and talk to your target audience. Build a rapport with them by commenting on their posts and interacting with their social media accounts genuinely.
Over time and with an established professional relationship, you can then ask to contribute to their websites with a guest post and get a link back to your online store in return.
Bitcade is a Bristol-based retro arcade machine manufacturer that was lagging behind its competitors in online search before Superb Digital implemented PPC and SEO campaigns.
Superb Digital, an SEO agency in Bristol, started with a Google Ads campaign, putting up both text and shopping ads. Sales shot up by 181% at the end of the first month and another 30% after two more months with further improvements to the campaign such as reducing their CPA.
With the initial sales boost and confidence in their digital marketing, Bitcade greenlit a full eCommerce SEO campaign.
We implemented on-site optimisation based on thorough competitor and keyword research, created a blog with rich, insightful content, building links with lifestyle and gaming bloggers, and overhauled the site design to make it more visually appealing and easier to use.
There were consistent increases in rankings and revenue for the first six months. This groundwork prepared Bitcade for the rise of digital purchases during the pandemic, resulting in a massive 297% increase in leads and a 370% upturn in revenue 12 months into the campaign. Suffice to say, Bitcade’s founder, Jack England, has been over the moon about the results and is continuing to invest in his digital marketing with us.
If you’re hitting a brick wall with your search rankings or have seen a recent drop then it could be time you engage with a reputable and trusted SEO agency. At Superb Digital we can help with your organic SEO and PPC campaigns, as well as other elements of your digital strategy.
Get in touch with us today and we’ll be more than happy to look into your online store (or any type of website for that matter) and put together a no-strings-attached quote.
E-Commerce is one of the world’s most lucrative industries. More than ever, businesses need to have an online presence if they want to keep their customers loyal to their products, services and brand. COVID-19 has only accelerated this need for organisations to get digital, put their product data online and offer a completely virtual service.
Of course, it’s easier said than done whether you’re a multi-national organisation or part of a smaller, specialised industry. Your main challenge is getting your product data from its source to your end user, quickly and accurately. And when your end user has the ability to interact with your product data in multiple ways, across any number of different platforms, that challenge grows in complexity.
So how do you manage this data flow? Having an effective Product Information Management tool (PIM) is key.
A PIM centralises your product data information and assets, including product specification data and any associated media assets, before distributing that data to multiple sources. Put simply, a PIM ensures your data flow is as efficient as possible.
In manufacturing, for example, it’s typical for product data to originate from older, legacy systems, where it’s input at the factory during the production stage. Then, the marketing teams responsible for selling these products have the daunting task of translating this data – often manually – in order to get it online. This process then often requires manual intervention again, to keep it up to date.
Processing the data manually in this way creates a disconnect between the marketing data and the product data: they’re never in sync with one another. And that leaves room for error.
According to Ventana Research, 46% of companies that don’t have one single source of product information, and instead, use Excel spreadsheets to manage product data.
This can be a serious problem. 47% of the above companies admit they often find product-related errors and almost 20% of those errors have a major detrimental impact on sales performance. PIM is the solution.
Your customers interact with your data on many different devices, through their desktop, mobiles, or even via their smart speaker. So, having an application with a modern Application Programming Interface (API) becomes essential in your data workflow.
By using a RESTful API your product data can be shared easily, as it’s exposed in a predictable, interactive format.
But not all organisations can commit the time, resource or budget to completely overhaul their systems, end-to-end, all the way to the factory level. Instead, there are other options.
To alleviate problems caused by disparate, legacy data, you can break the process down into smaller, more manageable applications. This is known as having a microservices architecture. Microservices are dedicated applications which focus on one dedicated function: in this case, in consuming your legacy data, transforming it into an end-user friendly format, then injecting that data into a PIM.
This approach ensures your original base data is kept up to date, and maintains data availability even if there’s a breakdown in one part of the workflow or chain.
Using cloud services, such as AWS, we can leverage tools like SQS and Lambda to support a decoupled architecture. Not only does decoupled microservices architecture prevent potential data loss, and preserve service in the event of application breakdown, it improves performance by offloading queue management and data flow into the Cloud.
A final but essential consideration, no matter what systems and applications you use: data security.
Experimental product data can be incredibly sensitive, so keeping it secure at both the point of origin and in-transit is important, as is ensuring pre-production data doesn’t accidentally end up publicly viewable. A PIM provides protection by implementing strict workflows for your data.
There are many applications and frameworks out there specifically designed as PIMs, and they range in price depending on the supplier and the size of your product data.
Likewise, every business has different workflows and product data structures. Once you include a legacy data issue you’re having, it’s rare that any off-the-shelf-solution will meet your requirements exactly. A custom solution is often the way forward. And this is where using a flexible framework, such as Drupal, has distinct advantages.
Drupal is an enterprise-level content framework with many applications. Traditionally it’s a content management system, but its latest version is much more than that.
Drupal has a powerful entity framework, allowing you to model almost any data. Its strong community – made up of real people struggling with the same challenges as you are – has developed countless modules and plug-ins to enhance functionality.
And what’s more, since Drupal is open source, there are no licence fees or user usage limits. So every penny of your investment goes where you need it: into solving your specific workflow and data modelling challenges.
No matter how large or technical your datasets, nor how specialised your business is, you deserve to get the most from your digital applications.
At Proctors, our team of technology experts have been solving problems for specialist businesses across the globe: from tech behemoths like Panasonic, to niche industry start-ups. When it comes to talking data, you’ll want to talk to Proctors.
We’re more than happy to put our heads together with yours and discover the best solution for your business.
Does your blog need a strategy? Yes! I write blogs for businesses, but whether you have a business blog or a personal blog, it needs a strategy.
I come from a marketing background and have worked for full-service agencies for my entire 20-year career. I’ve worked with businesses on a complete range of communications, from feature articles in trade publications to LinkedIn profile management, from entire suites of marketing materials to direct e-mail or postal campaigns. Working across so many channels it’s vital to have a coherent communications strategy that ties everything together. Messages need to be tailored to each channel, but all channels need to be portraying the same consistent company image. The same theory applies to blogging.
Consistency is key
Business blogs need an overriding strategy to ensure the messaging throughout remains consistent and on target. That’s not to say all blogs are saying the same thing, but while they all need to work by themselves as standalone posts, they also need to work as a series, for visitors who land on your blog, like what they see and want to find out more.
Here are some of my top tips for creating a strategy for your blog:
Business blogs with a clear strategy not only run more smoothly, but also garner better results. Do you already have a blogging strategy in place and if so, how closely do you stick to it blog by blog?
Blogging for business is a hugely valuable tool – here are what I consider to be the top 5 benefits. Let me know if you agree.
It’s not easy to build and maintain a business blog, it takes time and effort either from your in-house resources or external support, but with these benefits and more, it is a worthwhile investment.