Cherry Wong's Blog

Forbes gathered a list of predictions made by the most influential people in the digital marketing world in year 2013. Now that 2014 is coming to an end, wouldn’t it be interesting to have a look and find out if their predictions are true?

The above picture shows that Intel’s VP Marketing predicted a location-based marketing and SAP’s VP Marketing predicted customer-centric information with brands picking up the producer role.

Thinking back what has happened this year — they are both right in their predictions.

Within this year, there were a lot more images and videos used as part of a viral marketing strategy and companies have been using more visuals to interact with the customers. This is strongly evident if you have been reading my other posts and in specifically the post related to Viral marketing.

I will be using “Thursday Market” as the example to analyze the importance of location based marketing. It is a new online referral network that connects customers with local businesses through the recommendations of friends and neighbors. It is a brilliant idea and this company has been kicking off their service with rapid growth!

The company attracted 1.1million users and 3,000 businesses around one year, which is very impressive.

I think this company is the perfect example of location based marketing and brings out the importance of more entrepreneurs capitalizing the fact that customers value convenience highly and filter out irrelevant information that is not within their geographic reach immediately.

Visit this link and watch the Youtube video for more information about location based marketing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pd7pu6Upe9M.

(This post is slightly related to my previous post for Google Analytics, and is an extension of information related to the in class activity  or assignment for Google Adwords. )

From Marketing Land, I found out some information for the latest features added to Google Analytics, and is aimed to enhance e-commerce activities for small businesses!

There is a new feature called the “Shopping Campaigns Report” within the Ad Words section of Google Analytics within recent months. It helps advertisers to link their Ad Words and Analytics accounts, and offers unique indepth insights about how visitors navigate through the purchasing funnel. This report helps identify what feature on company website is driving site engagement and linking that to the Ad Word services, therefore maximizing bid optimization for companies.

While working on your advword assignment, I strongly recommend a quick tutorial for this new feature!

Personally, I think this enhanced e-commerce is very useful for companies to gain the ability to identify specific customer segments who are losing interest of certain company products and this report helps companies focus on the customers who are more likely to follow through with their purchase intention, therefore a clear link between Google Ad Word and the Analytics.

Additional information can be found here: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/enhanced-ecommerce.

In class we discussed about user experience and usability, and I figured I should do some self studying before jumping into the website audit. This blog is related to my personal findings (mostly on user experience) and some interesting websites that I stumbled upon on the way.

User experience (UX) focuses on what users need, value, abilities and limitations. UX aims to enhance interactions from companies to its website users, and some key factors are shown in the image below.

The website should be user friendly (usable), desirable (customers want to use the website), accessible (can be accessed easily by users), credible (aligns with companies’ professionalism).

There are few methods related to enhancing user’s UX, including improving user interface design, visual design, and content strategy.

For the website audit, we are responsible for having to find out how effectively companies have been communicating through to their customers and I believe I will be using the above criterias to evaluate the companies.

I hope my findings can help you all for the website audit!

Additional links:

-related to user experience and difference between usability and user experience 

Google, topping the charts for being the world’s most used search engine. It is user friendly, and well, everyone else is using it.

Google processes over 40,000 search queries every second, which translates to over 3.5 billion searches per day and 1.2 trillion searches per year worldwide.

All these big data gathered by Google are then further analyzed (#datamining) and translated into information for companies.

What is interesting though, is the free analytical software offered by Google. By far, the most popular analytical tool is Google Analytics, and there is definitely a reason for it.

Firstly, this analytical software is integrated with the internet’s largest paid search platform: Google Adwords. It is highly important for social marketers to track landing page activities and understand what their customers are behaving like on their website.

I tried using the software with my colleagues and we were able to understand the traffic patterns, traffic sources, paid search statistics and even what pages people are clicking to view into. It is absolutely amazing!

Although I had to spend a bit of time watching the tutorials to find out how to use it, I find it very useful in helping me understand what changes to recommend to my client. Also I find it interesting being able to influence the numbers on the reports but using social media platforms to direct traffic.

For those who needs some help on setting things up on Google Analytics, my group used Marketing Land‘s step by step guide.

Good luck trying to figure it out!

I came across this article with some interesting predictions of digital marketing trends, and here are the few that really stood out:

1)      More focus on location based digital marketing

A lot of us are aware of how Facebook manipulates what shows up on our Newsfeed to keep up their user engagements (as mentioned in class). The number of times you comment on person A’s posts, the number of clicks on specific page you are following…all these affects what shows up on your newsfeed.

The use of location based digital marketing are becoming more important, the companies know need if you have relocated to another location since their services might not be as attractive to you as before.

For instance, look at Uber – it is a taxi company valued at morethan US$15 billion. Its success was all based upon its launch of real-time marketing strategy. This company enables customers to connect to taxi drivers through a phone application to request or track their rides. The CEO once said, Uber can even predict when and where customers will be requesting rides.

#perfectexample of #locationbasedmarketing

2)      Mobile marketing will have greater influence on consumer buying decisions

Did you know Business Insider revealed that by end of 2013, there will be two smartphones for every nine people on Earth? In fact, global smart phones penetration exploded from 5% in 2009 to 22% by end of 2013.

For every single viewer of this blog now, I can predict that perhaps 99% of your friends owns or has access to a smart device, may it be a tablet, a smartphone or a computer.

Of course this will make mobile marketing a super influential tool on consumer buyer decisions!

Hong Kong Umbrella Revolution; I believe all of us has probably heard of it either through the news or word-of-mouth. As a Hong Kong citizen, I have been following the news minute-by-minute through different social media platforms and news channels.

Until I came upon this article and found out facts such as the spike of twitter hashtag #occupycentral has over 259,000 mentions at end of September with 2,859 tweets per day, and #umbrellarevolution has 54,000 mentions over last 30days with 591 tweets per day.

This makes me consider how technology plays a part within this revolution, because in comparison the last time a similar rebellion happened in China was in Tiananmen Square in 1976, when Chinese government used excessive military power to force protestors out – the key difference is, the real time technology updates causes restrictions in the choice of actions taken by Hong Kong Government.

Social media platforms enable the incident to be spread around the world minutes as events unfold and more and more protestors around the world are gathering near Chinese Embassy to join the #umbrellarevolution.

This incident is a true indicator of how #technologychangesourlives.

If it wasn’t for online youtube videos of the tear gas attack from the Hong Kong Police Forces that generated over hundred thousands of views, I personally believe that the resistance and support for the “Umbrella Revolution” might be significantly lower. Here is an example of the many videos available on different social media platforms:

I have never been forevermore grateful that we have twitter and facebook and instragram, because it prevented many injuries. Because it prevented Tiananmen incident again.

This is the #powerofsocialmedia.

Cost per thousand has been a popular ad strategy, or should I say – it used to be. There are many uncertainties with this strategy and the most important one is when one can simply just hire few staff and constantly click on specific ads and earn some easy money, which we recently discussed in class with Julio.

Another issue is the decreasing number of click-through- rates, which according to Marketing Land, on average there is 71% of clicks in the first page of a Google organic search, but only 14% in page two — ultimately meaning that despite clients paying for Google cost per thousand clicks ad strategy, they might not be receiving desired results if for instance their competitor’s search results are displayed in page one of search results whereas their company results are in page two.

This is where Economist’s new ad guarantee comes in – they promise advertisers more audience engagement by measuring the time spent with ads instead of clicking through rates.

You have to agree with me, it is quite a smart idea.

If they are looking for some quick cash, all they need to do is open the pages and let it sit, instead of hiring people to click onto the ads!

Concern is, how does this strategy actually works?

Apparently they promise a 75% of impressions elapsed in one complete campaign will be viewed by at least one second, which actually is means that every 100 people that opens a certain webpage with your company ad on it, there will be 75 people that spent one second looking at it. On side note, I think it is absolutely ridiculous, because I’ve got no clue how this can be calculated.

Any ideas?

On Exacttarget (click to read the ranking list!), Biltwell has been named the most brilliant social media campaigns of 2014 on Facebook.  As a small company who provides motorcycle customization services with one location with over 60,000 likes on Facebook — that’s very impressive.

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I had a look on its posts and found out their strategy included posting stunning moments related to motorcycle user’s experience. It seems that they interact with their customers and collect pictures that either is a) an amazing moment taking by literally anyone in the world such as movie posters, national geographic pictures b) funny jokes related to motorcycles.

Also, this company uses real-time marketing strategy and they post things that generate interests such as motorcycle contests information, users selling motorcycle on craigslist, new trending youtube video about motorcyclists…and there is always people interested on their posts, leading to hundreds of likes, shares and comments.

I’m super surprised on how they have built such a great customer base and their strategic posts generate an average of 300 engagement per post — there must be an amazing social media marketer working behind this.

I actually think that this engagement strategy is quite simple to duplicate but hard to achieve such a large customer base so, credits given and appraisals to the social media marketer behind this company page!

Additional Links and Information:

-Click to see: Biltwell’s FB page, I strongly recommend checking out their video posts which are the type of content that generates most attention with thousands of likes per post!

-Have a look at the video below that generated over 42,000 views on Youtube, maybe you can help me find out why Biltwell got such high customer engagements!