All posts in Marketing

Everyday Awesomeness: WooCommerce 2.0 released into the wild

by on March 13, 2013 in Industry News, Marketing with 1 Comment

WooCommerce is “a WordPress eCommerce toolkit that helps you sell anything.” Basically, it’s a powerful plugin that has the ability to turn your WordPress install into a potent online shop. The new, improved WooCommerce (2.0) was released on March 4th.

The company that created WooCommerce is called WooThemes. WooThemes is a well-known and highly popular WordPress theme developer. They have thousands of users, and their online theme shop uses WooCommerce. That gives an indication of how useful and scalable the plugin is. It can be used to sell anything from a few downloadable ebooks to hundreds of original dvds to custom-designed artwork, and just about anything else you can imagine.

Watch the video to get a better idea of what WooCommerce can do.

Features include:

  • High security
  • Sales reporting
  • Tax and shipping options
  • Comprehensive store management
  • Marketing and promotion
  • SEO

You can also extend WooCommerce with extensions such as payment gateways, shipping services, Pinterest buttons for product pages, Gravity Forms add-ons and plenty more.

While your hosting and WordPress theme may cost you something, WooCommerce is free. You can learn more about it here.

Everyday Awesomeness: Ceres (Apple) vs Liqui-Fruit (BlackBerry)

by on March 6, 2013 in Marketing with No comments

This is fun.

Liqui-Fruit recently brought out a new, limited edition juice called BlackBerry with a novel advertising idea.

This image is from the Liqui-Fruit Facebook page. The post under the picture says, “Sip on this while you play our awesome game to stand the chance to win 1 of 3 BlackBerry smartphones: http://on.fb.me/XRsgSE.”

In response, Ceres has launched its own limited edition: an Apple flavour. Please enjoy the styling of the advert and juice box.

Touché, Ceres.

It gets better. They’ve also also come up with a game. An Angry Birds-style game of apples vs blackberries. It’s called Apple Mania.

You can play the game on Facebook and possibly win one of seven Apple iPhone 5s.

Go forth and play here: Apple Mania

Roast a friend online with Nandos!

by Chris M on November 27, 2012 in Cuisine and Beverages, Marketing with No comments

Once again Nandos are being innovative with their new campaign that allows you to roast a friend! We’ve watched Nando’s roast celebrity after celebrity, but now it’s time for the power to be in our hands and let us get creative and roast someone.

I don’t want to give too much away as the video is great and the campaign website is wicked: http://nonhleroast.co.za/

Take a watch of the video first:

I love how the Internet is allowing advertising and marketing to be so much more engaged than ever before. Campaigns like this, are in my opinion, the way the Internet is moving and the sooner companies realise this, the sooner companies will experience growth. Big up to Nandos for being on the bleeding edge!

Go on, roast someone, hell, roast me!

Interactive Window Shopping by Adidas

by Chris M on November 8, 2012 in Marketing, Shops with 2 Comments

Christmas is just several weeks away and what great timing for the launch of an interactive window shopping experience experiment by Adidas. This isn’t a brand new concept, the idea of interactive window shopping has been done before, but this is certainly one of the best activations that I’ve seen:

I’m amazed that this hasn’t become more popular – not necessarily as advanced, but the concept of allowing people to flip through product catalogue’s could certainly be implemented without too much hassle.

Perhaps we’ll see some locally towards the end of the year!

Live Tile Experiment

by Chris M on November 8, 2012 in Marketing, Mobile with 3 Comments

With the recent launch of Windows Phone 8, Microsoft are experimenting with some awesome marketing campaigns, one of which involves a live tile. I really don’t want to spoil it by explaining it to you, but rather take a watch of the video which is rather short and you’ll get a real feeling for what the campaign is all about – pretty wicked idea if you ask me!

In other news, Microsoft are coming under legal fire for this and you can read about that here.

Promoted Posts for your Facebook Page – How To

by Chris M on November 7, 2012 in Marketing, Networking with No comments

I’ve received a few messages from people asking me about promoted posts on Facebook and how to go about setting them up. Further to this, a number of people have made remarks about not being able to find the option to promote a story and this is something I’d like to explain too as it’s not entirely clear upfront.

Promoted posts are a way of ensuring that more people see a post that you made on your Facebook Page. When you post a status update on your Facebook Page, those people who have liked your page will see the update, but what if they’re not signed in at the time when you made the update, if that’s the case, they’ll probably miss it and that’s where promoted posts help.

Promoted posts are a paid-for service for Facebook Page owners that remain visible to “members” of a Facebook Page for longer than the usual process. By promoting a story, you are effectively buying more time at the top of the news feed, thus increasing your chances for your “members” to see it.

As a Facebook Page owner, when do make a status update, you will see the Promote link at the bottom right of the shared story, clicking this will reveal the options available to you. I’ve taken a screenshot for you to see the various options:

As you can see in the screenshot above, you have a number of useful options, such as determining who you want to see the status update and what budget you want to  assign to it. So, this story I could assign a budget of $5.00 which will show it to roughly 3000-5600 people (estimated reach), aposed to just the 1,066 people who potentially saw it – that’s a small price to pay for a large number of eye balls. Research shows that an average page’s status update is only seen by 16% of the fans.

Promoted posts are still underused in digital marketing and I’m only seeing a few brands making use of them, so there’s still a lot of opportunity to capitalize on this technology and I’d recommend everyone give it a go – remember, only promote a story that you truly feel people will be interested in or  I fear that you’ll lose your money quite quickly.

Now, this is important: Promoted posts are available to Pages with 400 to 100,000 likes.

So there you have it – promoted posts, another way to push your content out to more people!

PS. You can read more about promoted posts on Facebook.

Where are the beautiful e-commerce sites in SA?

by Chris M on November 2, 2012 in Business, Marketing with 7 Comments

I’ve wanted to write this post for a while now and have just not found a gap to sit down and collect all my thoughts. I’ve got service providers moving in and out today, so I’ve decided to take a break for an hour and do this instead of getting through my busy inbox. I’d like to, hopefully, encourage discussion and engagement through this piece as it’s a topic I’m very fond of and interested in.

For the past few years I’ve heard digital front-runners talk of e-commerce becoming hugely popular in South Africa and although I agreed completely, as the years went by I was waiting to see and feel the impact – I believe that that moment has arrived. To give you some insight into my experience – I’ve received around 11 requests for e-commerce websites in the past two months, from South Africans, of which iMod Digital has taken on a handful and referred a handful away to trusted colleagues. That’s a huge number of enquiries and with a closure rate of 80% out of those 11, that’s quite incredible if you ask me. iMod Digital is a boutique digital marketing agency, we don’t advertise much and we don’t have the same market penetration as some of the bigger agencies, so if we’re getting this many enquiries, imagine how many people/companies out there are looking for e-commerce solutions!

This leads me onto two points:

1. Design

I see a lot of South African e-commerce websites appearing on the Internet, through the news, through agencies bragging and so forth, but what I’m not seeing is e-commerce sites that are truly beautiful to look at and incredible to use. Most of them have either a template-feel to them or a smash together feel – it’s easy to identify a great e-commerce site, go look at the cart and the interactions thereof. The cart is probably the most intricate part to building an e-commerce website and is often one of the last things a designer/developer deals with and in many cases it is rushed, repurposes or the likes, this leaves an e-commerce website that isn’t truly beautiful. I was going to screenshot a few sites but decided against this for the sake of the agencies that built them – I’m not here to flame anyone, but rather just raise the point that I feel there’s a huge amount of room for e-commerce sites that are far more attractive and appealing. I think a lot (hopefully most) of people would agree with me when I say – a really well designed website with great user journey will add to the bottom line – we all know how powerful CRO can be.

I understand that beautiful and well thought out design takes time and that applying functionality to said design is time-consuming, which warrants a fairly large expense, but in a market space that is getting busier and busier, yet still uncrowded, it’s those great websites that are going to stand out and lead to the most business – a worthy investment.

So, my questions is, where are all the beautiful e-commerce websites in South Africa, or are we still not there yet?

2. Gap

The second point I want to discuss I’ve mentioned already and that is the whole market place getting busy and therefore the paradigm of getting a great website puts you above your competitors comes into effect. We’ve seen that with “normal” websites, where people have used these cookie-cutter prebuilt theme solutions and as time has moved on, it has been recognised that although these solutions can, and do, work, having a bespoke design aligned perfectly with your brand does result in more, and better, business. I believe that as the e-commerce market place builds in South Africa, so will the same shift occur – brands and companies will realise that having something that looks and functions better than their competitors will give them an edge in the digital marketing sphere and it’s this edge that is ripe for the picking right now! Those brands and companies that exploit the e-commerce market place with high quality and seamless user journey websites will stand themselves in excellent stead, they’ll be ahead of the curve and their model will be sustainable for a good amount of time before a new technology comes into play. I’m leaving m-commerce (mobile commerce) out of this discussion as that’s a topic for another day altogether, but it’s something to be remembered and definitely thought about carefully – the same applies, an m-commerce solution that is beautiful and functions in proportion will, again, put a brand or company ahead.

Both of these points work hand in hand and both of these points, when applied, could be the solution to an entirely new income stream for a company, an income stream that operates on a 24/7 basis and an income stream that could perplex day to day operations.

Now, I want to know what YOU think, where are all the beautiful e-commerce websites in South Africa?

Analysis of my Twitter followers

by Chris M on August 16, 2012 in Marketing, My Life, Networking with 3 Comments

Yesterday SEOmoz announced their acquisition of FollowerWonk, one of the most powerful Twitter analysis tools. The big thing here is that Pro SEOmoz members get full access to FollowerWonk, talk about an awesome addition to their suite of tools and yet another way that SEOmoz keeps their members happy.

I’ve used FollowerWonk a number of times and it’s partially how I grew my following to where it is now, it is a remarkable tool. I was playing around with it this evening and decided to share some insight into who follows me, just for fun and interest sake.

Here’s a look at where all my followers are based:

Here’s a look at the gender breakdown:

 

Here’s a look at when my followers are most active. Tie this information together with BufferApp and you’ll get the most bang for your buck with your tweets:

Incredibly useful software for analysing someone on Twitter, and there are many more features available such as:

  • Compare followers, track followers, sort followers and a comprehensive Twitter bio search.

If you’re not analysing who the influencers are in your industry/niche, you’re missing out on huge potential. After all, we all know that sometimes all that you need is one heavy hitting influencer to tweet about your product and the next minute you could be sitting in an acquisition meeting ;)

 

Interactive IKEA Product App

by Chris M on July 20, 2012 in Marketing with No comments

IKEA are known for their incredible marketing campaigns and this one falls no short. It’s best summarized and shown in the video so that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Enjoy:

Clever marketing from Klout

by Chris M on July 13, 2012 in Marketing, Networking with 2 Comments

I love social hubs that come up with clever ways of building their audiences without spending a single cent in marketing, but rather leveraging what they already have. Klout’s just done this through a really great idea of announcing that they have a new look and feel on the way as well as a list of exciting new features and in order to join the list of people to first see the updates, you have to invite 10 friends:

That to me is incredibly clever, and I have no doubt that they’ll get thousands and thousands of new users from this simple referral system.

Remember this idea when you’ve got a startup that’s gaining traction!

Join Klout here.

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