If you’re an employee, you know that any innovation or change to business processes that you might want to implement will need to be approved by your boss first. If you’re sold on digital marketing, you need to sell it to them too, and that’s not always easy.
The Problem: To a person who isn’t on board with digital, many digital methods can seem abstract, which translates as unreliable and risky.
by Tracy Mu Sung
When undertaking an online marketing campaign for your business it’s important to understand that your online and offline customers are not necessarily the same group of people. They will likely want different things, have different questions and prioritise things very differently from your traditional customers.
Below are just some of the ways your online and offline customers may differ (although it will depend a lot on the industry).
This is the most obvious one. Depending on where you can ship to, your customers may no longer be restricted by geographic location. If you are targeting new areas, you need to consider whether customers in those new areas need different information? Different payment methods or languages are the obvious ones, but it could also be something as simple as – people in some towns preferring certain styles or products to others. People living in different areas may have different concerns. One obvious example is that your northern hemisphere customers won’t be looking for swimwear at the same time as your southern hemisphere ones.
Online customers are time-poor. Recreating your store experience online – with flash or video to create ambience – might not work for people who don’t have a lot of time on their hands. For example, the Alannah Hill site used to have a very whimsical flash site which suited their brand, but didn’t suit online shopping. They have since updated their site to focus more on what online shoppers are looking for.
Before
After
Online customers are price-savvy. Comparing prices is a lot easier to do online versus in store, so make sure your prices are easy to find. If your prices aren’t your strongest point, make sure your product specs/details outline clearly why this higher price is still a good purchase. e.g. Free Shipping? Longer warranty? Extra care or free gifts?
Although different to offline customers, your online customers are not a homogeneous group themselves. Some of them aren’t on their desktop or laptop, many of them are out and about when they find your site on their smartphone. Is your website able to handle that? How does your website look on a smartphone right now?
While the ‘essentials’ for a website will differ by industry, there are always going to be a few key pieces of information that a customer wants to know. For example, in online retail they are;
– Secure payment gateways
– Easy access to help/contact or at least lots of FAQ’s
– Delivery & Returns policies clearly stated
– Clear prices, images and specs for all products.
While I’m not going to go through a big list of industries, I do want to call out restaurant websites here because, until recently, I found them to be some of the worst offenders when it comes to building a website for users.
The menu’s are often only viewable as a downloadable PDF, the sites are often slow and in flash and they often haven’t been updated in a long time. The Oatmeal has written a great basic list of essentials for this industry (even if it is a joke, I consider it good advice).
By Nicolas Vargas
Google’s new Data Highlighter tool uses browser experience which makes it easy for non-programmers to use because you don’t have to change the HTML. The aim of this new Google Webmaster tools feature is to make it easier to add structured data markup on your web pages. It is currently available in English at the moment but Google are planning to add more languages in the future
The process is pretty simple and I’ll explain it in detail later, but broadly it works in this way:
Getting Started
1) Go to your Google Webmaster Tools Account and choose ‘Optimisation’
2) Click on Data Highlighter Option
3) Click on Start Highlighting
4) Write the Url of the page where your events are listed
5) In this example I chose a page on MooMu Media’s blog, even though it is currently only available for events, just for an example.
Select the data on your page that you want to highlight, keeping in mind that there are some required spots . Choose the appropriate tag from the drop down.
Here there is a table with all the data you can include
6) Click on the done Button once you’re highlight all the data you want
7) You can add pages that you want Google to Auto-tag, by choosing ones yourself (Custom) or the ones Google considers related.
8) Once you create the set, you have to repeat the process on at least 5 pages, and then Google can understand the data you are highlighting and can make the rest for you.
9) Finally, you can check if the information on your events is correct before you publish them.
What is it? How to get started? By Nicolas Vargas Google Tag Manager is a new tool (launched in October) which aims to help marketers with the digital marketing process, by making Google (and other) tags quick and easy to embed and update. 
With this new Tag manager you can easily add, update and test tags on your sites without the help of a web developer. This removes the long waiting times many marketers have to deal with, when waiting for websites code updates to get their tags updated. This will greatly improve productivity for online marketers who want to spend less time working on tag updates(Technical stuff). Special Features of Google Tag Manager
Getting started
I think it’s a pretty useful tool to help online marketers, especially the ones who usually have to rely on developers to help them with their marketing tags.
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