Yesterday, for the first time ever, I ordered Domino’s pizza online. I know, I know, it’s probably been around for at least seven or eight years now, but as a consumer who’s generally very traditional about her shopping, it was quite an unique (and I have to admit, exciting) experience.

I was really impressed to see a real-time order pipeline tracker built into my order confirmation page. From placing the order, to prepping the pizza, to baking in the oven, to quality check, and finally delivery, you can actually track your order as it is being processed, and know who was in charge of which stage. For example, I know that Solomon put my pizza in the oven, and Matthew delivered it to my doorstep. Quite a neat personal touch to a seemingly mechanical and detached online ordering system.

Five to ten years ago, Domino’s certainly wasn’t my go-to brand of pizza delivery. Why? Honestly, because it didn’t taste that great, and community word-of-mouth was consistent with that. So how did Domino’s reinvent itself, its menu, and its branding to bounce back? We talked a lot about companies “going digital” in class, and after doing a little research, I discovered that Domino’s did exactly that. Dennis Maloney, Chief Digital Officer of Domino’s Pizza, stated in an article that along with technology, transparency and value were critical to brand reinvention. Domino’s fundamentally changed its recipe, revamped its entire menu, and embraced technology and social media to amplify its marketing efforts. One of its greatest and transformative technological achievements is its Anyware platform, which allows customers to order via text, Tweet, Smart TV, car, Smart Watch, and Voice. Today, Domino’s makes $22 billion in revenues – 50% of which are generated through digital sales – in the U.S., and has experienced a growth rate of 33% over the last five years. Job well done!

Main article: http://loyalty360.org/resources/article/dominos-pizza-reinvents-itself-customer-engagement

I must admit that I am no expert when it comes to hashtagging, online personal branding, or social media for that matter (heck, I only just joined Twitter and Instagram this year). But this course has forced me to hop on that train and learn, because the reality is: This is the digital era, and social is a vital part of it. If you are not connected online, your business is missing out on a lot of opportunity. So perhaps this post is more of a beginner’s guide for myself, and hey, reader, maybe it’ll help you too!

I came across an interesting article that studied engagement levels of hashtagging on Twitter and Instagram. Turns out, more hashtags on Twitter don’t necessarily mean more engagement. In fact, Tweets that did not include hashtags actually outperformed those that did. For Instagram, the story is a little bit different. Posts that yielded the highest engagement score (3.03) used exactly 3 hashtags. Posts that used zero hashtags were barely behind, with an engagement score of 3.02.

So what have I learned? Don’t spam hashtags, because engagement rates do drop off (for Instagram, after about 3 hashtags)! When you choose to hashtag, make sure they are relevant, and avoid spammy behaviour that will make viewers avert their eyes. Practice quality tweeting and caption-writing, because those are what will ultimately capture and retain customer engagement.

Main article: http://www.adweek.com/socialtimes/locowise-hashtags-engagement-twitter-instagram/629995

http://www.justforthis.com/

#LastSelfie, spearheaded by the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature), won the Webby Award for Best Social Media Campaign of 2015. Moreover, it demonstrated the perfect example of the idea of “medium is message.” Its goal was first and foremost to increase awareness of endangered species among Millennials, and then increase donations towards the conservation and protection of those endangered species. The WWF knew that its campaign’s selected platform would be crucial to the campaign’s overall success in effectively reaching its target audience. Snapchat, a popular photo and video sharing app among Millennials across the globe, gains its uniqueness from the feature that is: that photos sent to friends will disappear after a maximum of 10 seconds (unless a screenshot is taken). 

How did #LastSelfie use this to achieve its message? Two ways: 1. the WWF effectively juxtaposes the triviality of our goofy selfies with the grave issue of endangered species and their imminent extinction, and 2. the WWF emphasizes the alarming rate at which endangered species are disappearing (within seconds), and that time is running out. #LastSelfie is extremely successful because it captures and grabs onto attention, forces itself into our awareness, and inspires urgency to act.

Website: http://www.justforthis.com/

Main article: http://webbyawards.com/winners/2015/advertising-media/campaign-categories/social-media-campaigns/lastselfie/

In a previous COMM 464 class, we brainstormed the effects of disruptive technologies on conventional forms of doing business. One example was the concept of “showrooming,” the practice of physically visiting your traditional brick-and-mortar store to examine a product, then purchasing that product online (often times at a lower price). This has challenged businesses to compete beyond the storefront and into larger online markets, urging them to price-match with more digital-savvy retailers. 

Amazon is the perfect example of this (see full article on Amazon showrooming here). Target and Best Buy are among the many retail giants facing the threat of showrooming, being forced to respond to more and more consumers using mobile apps to scan product barcodes for cheaper deals elsewhere, and having their profit margins squeezed as a result. Large retailers have been coping with price-matching policies and apps of their own to combat Amazon, but smaller businesses with far fewer resources and capacity may find themselves driven out of the market.

In recent years however, we are seeing a new trend emerge that may even disrupt the disruptor. “Reverse-showrooming” is exactly as its name implies: consumers are increasingly viewing and researching products online, and then heading to traditional brick-and-mortar stores to actually make the purchase. It will be extremely interesting to see how the online business landscape changes and influences business and marketing strategies over the next few years.

Photo: http://www.aaronweiche.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/mobile-showrooming-amazon800.jpg

Main article: http://www.businessinsider.com/reverse-showrooming-bricks-and-mortar-retailers-fight-back-2-2014-2

http://www.businessesgrow.com/2015/01/06/what-will-replace-facebook/

“Why will the next generation not be on Facebook?” my e-marketing instructor, Meena, asks the class, “Does anyone know?” It seemed like the whole class was stumped – for the majority of us, Facebook has always been there as a means of social connection, as an extension of how we communicate and access information. It would be hard to picture our day-to-day routine without it. The answer, to our amusement, was a simple and rational one, “Because their parents are on it!”

This should have been no surprise to us, and it really got me thinking about about what the next platform will be in ten, twenty years or so. What will replace Facebook? An interesting article that I stumbled across attempted to answer just that. According to this article , there are six factors that can determine whether Facebook can stay competitive, or get shoved out of the way by something bigger:

1. The “cool” factor
2. The switching costs
3. The technology investment
4. The psychology of choice
5. The leadership
6. The future

The article makes a good point that Facebook has dominated in all of these categories, and has demonstrated control of its future by a commitment to constant innovation. However, consumer needs are ever-changing, ever-evolving. Furthermore, as Facebook grows, it requires more revenue, and this means more ads – something we as consumers tire of. In fact, scrolling through my newsfeed today, it’s not uncommon to see an advertisement or other spam-like content every other post. Facebook will have to work hard if it wants to retain its “cool” factor, especially if it is slowly becoming saturated with ads.

Main article: http://www.businessesgrow.com/2015/01/06/what-will-replace-facebook/

According to PhD web psychologist Liraz Margalit, the answer is yes. I came across a rather interesting article on the distinctive cognitive styles of women and men when it comes to searching for and perceiving information on a given website. In a ClickTale study, Margalit used heat-mapping as a way to graphically observe how women and men interacted with a recipe website. What she found was that women interacted (via click) significantly more than men with recommended side-bar recipes as well as top-menu bar categories. Men on the other hand, showed minimal click activity, seemed to focus more narrowly on recipe information, and then left the website immediately after the desired information was acquired. The two cognitive styles highlighted by Margalit’s study are systematic, mission-oriented (male) and empathizing, experience-oriented (female).

What are the implications of different website-user interactive styles on businesses? Well, if you own a yoga studio, it may be valuable to recognize that female students make up a large segment of your market, and therefore, you may wish to adjust your website experience to accommodate for potentially increased browsing behaviour. If you are in the business of selling men’s suits, perhaps your website should consider having fewer sidebar and exploratory tabs to accommodate for the lower likelihood of men lingering on a website if information cannot be efficiently found.

Article: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/251315

Photo: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2313138/Ever-think-halfs-brain-wired-differently-New-research-reveals-youre-right.html

Most of us millennials have used Facebook for a solid chunk of our teenage years in high school, and now well into our present university lives. But somewhere within those weekly status updates, funny cat video shares, new friend requests, “poking” wars, and incessant Candy Crush invitations, Facebook became the largest, most influential and effective market research organization in the world. The line between private and public information has been blurred, if not completely erased, by a social media platform so expansive and so fundamental to how we connect and communicate in society today, that we would feel isolated from our culture without it. Facebook tapped into the fundamental human need for social belonging, and digitized it. And what is the business in which a social media platform like Facebook operates? The business of information sharing.

Anyone with a valid Facebook Ads account can use the Audience Insights tool. This tool allows marketers to pull information like age, gender, location, religion, political views, relationship statuses, number of friends, and more, and use that information for whatever purpose – like, perhaps, conducting a preliminary target market needs assessment before designing a social media campaign. Furthermore, as we explored in class, Audience Insights allows you to monitor “likes,” clicks, conversions, and other analytics to gain a rich understanding of consumer lifestyles, behaviours, personalities, trends, and spending habits. 

Article: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/small-business/sb-marketing/why-facebook-is-the-best-advertising-platform-ever-invented/article26850542/

Photo: http://rack.0.mshcdn.com/media/ZgkyMDE0LzExLzE5LzU2L2ZhY2Vib29raG9uLmQwN2M1LmpwZwpwCXRodW1iCTEyMDB4NjI3IwplCWpwZw/c9d27ff1/12b/facebook-honest-notifications.jpg

With the explosion of mobile and app technology, marketers are eager to adopt to new methods of measuring, analyzing, and managing  e-marketing campaigns across numerous media platforms, networks, and operating systems. At the forefront of internet advertising, of course, is Google. Towards the end of September this year, Google announced two new product launches that use automation and integration on mobile to enhance and complement its AdWords experience: Customer Match and Universal App Campaign. (in an earlier post, I discussed automation in an email marketing context, which you can read about here). 

The main benefit of Customer Match is its ability to identify and reach a company’s highest-value target audiences, and seize the optimal moment to display an advertisement – that is, when that audience is most receptive to a company’s ads. It can also categorize similar audiences across platforms such as Youtube, Gmail, and Google Search to reach new audiences who, based on their browsing behaviour, are more likely to be interested in a company’s products or services. Combined with Universal App Campaigns, which integrates  apps and app users across YouTube, Gmail, Google Search, Google Play, and Google Display Network (GDN), managing AdWords campaigns becomes a rich, flexible, convenient, and all-in-one marketing tool. 

Article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveolenski/2015/10/07/googles-new-universal-apps-campaign-for-adwords-and-what-it-means-for-marketers/

Photo: http://img01.thedrum.com/s3fs-public/news/tmp/1086/google-blog2.jpg

Nearly three-quarters of marketers agree that email marketing is fundamental to their business, and that email marketing produces significant ROI or will in the future (source: class 3 slides). What if there was a way to further capitalize on the effectiveness of traditional email marketing by tailoring it to specific, behaviour-based consumer segments? Software like Marketo and Drip have been developed to accomplish just that.

The idea behind automation is that the information received by the subscriber or user via email is unique and relevant to their past behaviour. For example, if a consumer had been browsing cheap deals on Whistler snowboarding passes three times in the last two days, Groupon (through automation software) would be able to pick up that lead by first marking, categorizing, and tracking that user. Then, it would generate and send a tailored email that included recommendations of different snowboard rental and pass packages available in Whistler as well as Cypress and Big White. In contrast, a consumer who had spent less than five minutes browsing snowboard gear before moving on to other tasks may not be responded to as immediately or in the same format. Email automation is a more effective approach to marketing to a variety of users based on their unique individual wants and needs. Identifying and responding to leads becomes quicker, thus speeding up conversion rates and ultimately boosting customer sales.

Article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/james-calder/why-marketing-automation-_b_8281832.html

Photo: http://blog.bigcommerce.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/ecommerce-email-marketing-guide.jpg

For every minute that you spend online, whether it’s adding a new pair of jeans to your shopping cart, browsing the web for good restaurant reviews, conducting online research for an assignment or paper, or casually scrolling through your Facebook newsfeed, you are in fact, constantly participating in an online social experiment. Perhaps you are aware of the fact that your online behaviour is being tracked and scrutinized by advertisers through the use of cookies, but how about the ability of companies to monitor things like where your mouse lingers, the time it took between clicking one photo and the next, and whether you tend to favour certain colours more than others when purchasing a product? In e-marketing and business intelligence, this is called A/B testing.

Knowledge is power, and the more you know about your customers, the more powerful your next marketing campaign will be. A/B testing can be a powerful tool to measure and compare the effectiveness of two different versions of the same variable, such as an advertisement or a call-to-action icon. Could the difference between a click, or a sale, be as simple as using a more appealing colour, shape, or word? As discussed in class, there are a variety of websites (ex. Optimizely) and software that can assist companies with conducting A/B testing on their own websites and users. Ultimately, this insightful marketing tool can help companies maximize their online presence, influence, and user experience, and by extension, contribute to increased sales and customer satisfaction.

From an online business owner’s perspective, A/B testing is a godsend. But how about for the consumer? Knowing that companies are getting into our heads, emotions, and behaviours through digital marketing and experimentation, I’m not sure I feel the same way.

Photo: http://www.wakefly.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/A-B-Testing-With-Google-Experiments-Blog-Graphic.png