William Exchange

While summer can be a slower season for some retailers, the large success with massive summer shopping events like Amazon’s Prime Day for brands not named Amazon show there is an opportunity in every season. Most importantly, it doesn’t have to be a grand gesture or event. Small changes and tweaks can make a world of difference to ensure you gain a competitive edge. As we approach the end summer, it’s never been a better time to refresh your marketing strategy through testing as you gear up for the holiday season. Here are a few ways to refresh your tactics to gain valuable customer data and drive sales to close   out summer. 1. Change up the little things:- If you’re a savvy marketer, you’re likely used to constant testing of your tactics as A/B testing in email marketing is a given. It’s easy to focus on the main creative pieces – headline copy, imagery, featured products – as they can increase ROI on your email marketing program. At the same time, you only hav...

For over a decade, nearly 70,000 marketers have trusted SMX to deliver actionable, brand-safe tactics that generate more traffic, leads, conversions, and sales. This year’s agenda is bigger and better than ever… a firehose of 70+ presentations covering all aspects of an integrated search marketing strategy (including two new content concentrations on agency operations & management and local search marketing for multi-location brands!). More sessions and speakers mean you will leave SMX with more actionable tactics that you’ll implement immediately. We guarantee it. Need more reasons to attend? Here’s 11: Unbiased, trustworthy content.  SMX isn’t produced by a vendor or digital agency. It’s programmed exclusively by the editorial team at Search Engine Land, the publication of record for search marketers. That means the content you get will be unbiased, trustworthy, and hot off the press. Form matches function . Sessions are constructed so the for...

It’s not exactly news that programmatic advertising, automation  and  agency consolidation have upended the media industry. Such changes have been well documented (as well as felt personally by many of our colleagues). But change, like time, marches on, and these trends continue to turn the media world upside down. Exhibit A: the sales organizations of media and digital ad tech companies that sell to agencies. Programmatic and consolidation have imposed a new sales team structure, though many not quite realize it yet. Any organization that sells to agencies, and seek that all-important master services agreement (MSA) with any of the holding companies, will need to adapt their organizations to the new reality. In the old days (by which I mean just a few years ago), the sales organization inside of a media company, ad network or any other entity that sold into an agency needed to be vertically aligned with the agency. For instance, GroupM has many agencies under its um...

Pinterest continues to push e-commerce initiatives, introducing a personalized “shopping hub” last week that displays at the top of users’ feeds with product recommendations pulled from retailers’ organic Product Pins and Catalog feeds. According to a Pinterest spokesperson, retailers can upload Pins via Catalogs and their products will be distributed across Pinterest’s shopping surfaces which include this new “shopping hub” feature, as well as other recommendation spaces and shopping feeds. Pinterest also rolled out an updated shopping section that will display below Product Pins, highlighting Catalog content from the respective brand. “Making it easy to browse into the catalogs of brands of all sizes, like Target, Birdies Slippers, Joybird, The Tie Bar and Parachute,” Pinterest wrote on its business blog. Why we should care? Pinterest is continuing to build out e-commerce features for its discovery platform to connect users to more branded product recommendatio...

Google Ad Manager and AdMob, Google’s mobile ad network, now support app-ads.txt, the anti-ad fraud protocol for app publishers. An extension of IAB Tech Lab’s ads.txt standard, app-ads.txt is designed to address the specific needs of apps distributed through mobile and connected TV app stores. Publishers publish the text file listing the open exchanges that are authorized to sell their inventory to the root directory of their websites and link their app store listings to their websites. Programmatic buyers can then inspect the files to ensure they are buying from authorized sellers and not domains or apps set up to spoof publishers and steal their ad revenue. Why we should care? Google said in April that its DSP Display & Video 360 would stop buying unauthorized in-app inventory starting in August. Given its market leadership position, Google’s support for app-ads.txt from both the buy and sell sides will help propel the  adoption  of the st...

Emerging and growth stage companies take as fact that “if you’re not growing, you’re in the process of dying.” For mid-tier and small businesses the wisdom of this statement also applies. Why is it so important that your business grows its revenue? Let’s consider what is behind this truism.  Here are the four primary reasons that revenue growth is critically important to your business.  1.   Profitability:- The purpose of business is to make a profit. The more profit you make, the more opportunity you and your business have to reap the benefits and rewards of running the business. You invest your time, energy, and money to make profit.  The primary driver of profitability is revenue. The more you grow revenue the more likely you are to grow profits. If you achieve higher levels of revenue and manage costs so they rise at a lower rate, then you maximize profits. By accelerating the rate of revenue growth you generate more profits faster which ena...

Since launching in 2018, Amazon’s Prime Day sale has claimed its place as an industry-wide shopping holiday, generating record-breaking revenues year-over-year, and eclipsing even Black Friday. This year, the 48-hour Prime Day mega-sale kicks off Monday, July 15 and is shaping up to be the biggest online shopping day to date. Amazon may have been the frontrunner of “Christmas in July” but big-box retail rivals have accordingly followed suit. Contenders like Walmart, Best Buy, Target and others have taken to sharing in the cyber frenzy, launching competing sales in tandem with Amazon’s event. The Prime Day phenomenon has transformed the days during and surrounding the event into a profitable sales window for retailers in nearly every market. During last year’s Prime Day, brands ran cutthroat promotions, including Target touting a year of free same-day delivery with a purchase minimum, eBay suspending its membership paywall for a 36-hour period, Walmart peddling sales low...

Great innovations have contributed to making our lives longer and shrinking the world as we know it. User experience has played a great part in it, making online content accessible to most. To reach full accessibility though, UX should go the extra mile and focus on an age group often overlooked: the users over 65.  For this purpose, I’ve analyzed the shift in demographics and crafted a few recommendations to future-proof your UX, making online content accessible to a comprehensive audience. Internet penetration grew by 371% for the over 65 It’s no secret that internet penetration is close to reaching its full potential, especially considering the population under 50. What’s interesting though, is that the age group with the highest growth rate is 65-plus, which rose from 14% to 66% between 2000 to 2018 – a staggering +371% (see image below from Statista.com). But what does it mean? That the users that are consuming our content online are more diverse than we thi...

As a CMO, you see your C-suite colleagues as smart people with lots of common sense. That’s especially true when it comes to business or finance. But C-suite business savvy doesn’t always translate into digital smarts. And it’s why your colleagues can sometimes do things that place the company’s reputation on the line. Consider these examples: 1. When a video of a passenger being dragged off a United Airlines plane by security because he wouldn’t give up his seat to airline maintenance workers went viral, you’d expect the company to issue a heartfelt apology. Instead, CEO Oscar Munoz praised employees in an email for following proper procedures. 2. Fashion designer Kenneth Cole’s tweet during the political upheaval in Egypt in 2011 may have been intended to be tongue-in-cheek, but the backlash was anything but. When he Tweeted, “Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is available online at ….”, the Twitterverse responded with a rag...

Once a primary differentiator, reliable customer service has now become a mandatory commodity. With rising consumer expectations and automated technologies, experience has replaced this long-heralded advantage. Brands positioned with a customer-first, always-on experience optimization approach and those who build for personalization are poised to be market leaders. Becoming an experience-focus brand has been painted as more difficult than it is. The answers and truth are right in front of us. Your consumers have those answers, you just need to ask – and pay attention. In working with more than 30 brands on their experience strategies, I’ve found four critical steps to helping brands successfully migrate to become customer experience leaders in their market. The simple formula is to identify, measure, build and test. Identify audiences and journeys Identify your audience Let’s start with an exercise. Suppose money is no object, and you get to pick out a new vehicle. Take...