As my plane lands in Minneapolis – home of Best Buy and Target Corporation – I have retail on my mind.
I have loved retail for as long as I can remember. I loved watching the guys at Best Buy merchandise home theaters back in the mid-80s when I was the Retail Editor of Thomson’s Consumer Electronics magazine. My love for retail only grew when I became publisher of Reed Business Information’s retail magazines Video Business and Video Software in the early-90s. Target’s entry into home video certainly had a profound effect on that business. The thing I love most about retail is how retailers innovate… and e-tailers are no different from their brick and mortar brethren.
As I have been traveling the country and talking to merchants the past few weeks I have grown excited to learn that merchants are, as usual, on the cutting edge of things. Merchants, from Target to Best Buy, from Sears to Gilt Group, from RueLaLa to Toys ‘R’ Us, are in many ways leading the charge when it comes to many things digital – including social, mobile, video, data and analytics, and audience and ad targeting. This is exciting to me for two reasons: First and foremost, merchants will be looking to innovate across the Internet during the third quarter and into the critical fall/holiday sales season as the economy continues to improve. Second, as merchants continue to realize success online around social, mobile, video and other digital opportunities, that success will be talked about and analyzed by marketers in every business under our sun.
Here are some things to watch for from our Merchant friends over the next several months…
In Social – Merchants will start communicating. Merchants will move beyond listening mode and begin to use information gathered from Google Alerts, Social Mention and HootSuite to make their ad campaigns more relevant and interesting to their customers.
In Mobile – Merchants will begin to mine data exclusively from mobile shoppers, and the mobile shopping experience, and use that information to fine-tune their mobile offerings. More mobile-specific, customer information will further enhance the mobile shopping experience.
In Video – Merchants will create much more sophisticated SEO campaigns. More specifically, they will take YouTube marketing and video optimization to the next level. And they will strive to not only rank well on YouTube result pages but also in Google’s main web results via universal search.
In Data and Analytics – Merchants will take advantage of enhanced site analytics programs. These programs will continue to improve the shopping experience for consumers. In addition, merchants, especially multichannel retailers, will do a better job tracking customer behavior across all touch points.
Audience and Ad Targeting – Merchants will rely, quite heavily, on audience-targeting ad technologies as a means to get the right ad, in front of the right person, at the right time. Many will see audience targeting as a complement to more traditional targeting, while others find it to be an efficient and effective alternative.
Merchants are a most vital part of our digital ecosystem. Let’s not forget Pizza Hut sold the first pizza online in 1993 – a pepperoni and mushroom with extra cheese… and that was a full year before the Yahoo brand was born and 2 years before EBay was launched.
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