Online Retailers
This morning I am going to talk about the online retail sector, in particular, methods used to inform consumers of special offers and discounts. Traditional retailers use tried and trusted methods of promoting their products, this can be done by In store advertisement Signage in the store windows Leaflet campaigns Newspaper adverts TV advertisements The vast majority of online retailers have small marketing budgets, therefore they need to adopt a savvy approach. If I owned a retail business, this is how I would promote my special offers
Website - I would have a designated block on my homepage displaying this months special offer
Video - I would produce a short video of the offer and upload it to You Tube
Newsletter - I would send out details of the offer to my mailing list
Social Media - This is where the process gets slightly complicated. To take advantage of social media, live search or the new interactive web, we need to allocate a small amount of time each day. My first step would be to set up a news section on my website, this will contain details of any offers. This part of the website needs to be RSS enabled. The next step is to set up an account with ping.fm, this is not a 2 min job, it can take a full day. I would concentrate my efforts on building up popularity in Twitter and Facebook, this can be achieved by networking with potential customers. With all this in place I am ready to write the details of this months special offer. The task is made easier as the details have already been published in the newsletter. I then produce a micro blog post (140 char) inclusive of a URL and fire it this through ping's network.
RSS - As the news page on my website contains an RSS feed I am also able to link it to other external sources, here are a few http://www.masternewmedia.org/rss/top55/part-2.htm
PPC - Depending on my budget I would run an adwords campaign, based around the special offer. As you can see, I have taken a solitary special offer and rather than restricting it to the visitors on my website, I have delivered it to millions of potential customers, without taking the viral marketing affect into account. If a website is structured correctly it should compliment social media, this will provide a perfect platform to target customers on various verticals.
Be under no illusion, times are changing and we need to move with them. The future is certainly not retrospective web pages but live interactive platforms that are able to say, this is what we are doing at this moment in time.
Pete Arkwright
This article is sponsored by Peoplevox the UK's leading supplier of warehouse software
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