There is little value in designing a highly convenient website, app, or store if your media effort to drive people to these environments is not on par. As consumers have more choices than ever, if at any point they encounter friction, they will abandon their current engagement and move elsewhere. Thus, maintaining convenience at every point of interaction, from first contact to conversion, is critical to succeed.
CONTEXTUAL SOLUTIONS
Designing convenient solutions through media requires leveraging context efficiently, whether it be by query, specific location or mobility situation such as commuting. Successful brands know how to harness contextual intent to bring value when it matters the most.
Brands can leverage media platforms’ unique features to support their proposition in the eyes of specific audiences, organically or through paid tactics. For instance, in India, a country with more than 350 all-news TV channels, BloombergQuint used WhatsApp to cement its position as the go-to platform for curated business news. Recognising that business news readers were always strapped for time, BloombergQuint delivers snippets of its daily coverage through WhatsApp. WhatsApp features being perfectly aligned with BloombergQuint’s promise of speed and efficiency, the service generated more than 350,000 organic subscribers and accounted for 26.5% of visits on BQ.com within 8 months of launch.
USING FEEDS AS CONNECTORS OF CONVENIENCE
It’s much more difficult to deliver a consistent experience with inconsistent data. Product data is one of the few things a brand can completely control, and any investment in improving the quality and accuracy of that data will pay off across multiple channels. There are three primary components to well-structured data:
Accuracy
Ensuring there are no mistakes and that inventory and price are frequently updated.
Detail
The more robust the data, the more it will stand out in a crowded field or connect with a consumer looking for a specific attribute. Marketers need to enrich their feed beyond a standard description and picture, and think about rich imagery and connectivity with other data sources such as weather, location, news, their own CRM system, etc. For example, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines includes in its feeds attributes such as origin and destination airports information, city codes, fares, number of flights per day, popularity of the route, or the language of the cabin crew for specific destinations.
Marketers can use the power of AI solutions like Google Cloud Vision to enrich their visual database with new image attributes, increasing their ability to match images in ads with the interest, affinity and in-market behaviour of a specific user. Other tools, like Grip by INDG, enable marketers to create a large set of images or 360° videos presented in various contexts from their entire product portfolios. By combining AI and automation, marketers can create truly granular feeds.
Portability
Brands that use the same data to populate their website, their ads, their partnerships, and other connection points ensure a consistent consumer experience wherever the customer chooses to interact with them.
Well optimised data unlocks more proactive direct opportunities to provide convenience, such as with Google’s Local Inventory Ads and Shopping Actions. Moreover, robust data can be incorporated directly into multiple marketing channels to reduce the friction between awareness, interaction, and conversion.
FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE: HOW ELGIGANTEN INCREASED CONVENIENCE THROUGH AUTOMATION
Maintaining convenience can turn out to be very challenging for marketers when they scale up their brand’s product offerings. This is where automation can help.
With 165 stores, Elgiganten is one of Sweden’s leading consumer electronics and household appliances retailer. Elgiganten is growing fast, very fast; within a year, they more than doubled their inventory. As a result, their large ever- growing product assortment and frequent price changes made it challenging to present consumers with search engine results reflecting the correct product availability or price tag.
To avoid advertising on sold-out products and to consistenly present accurate information to consumers, iProspect implemented its proprietary tool iActivate to create ads that truly mirror Elgiganten’s website.
iActivate automatically creates full advertising accounts from the client’s inventory data, in a way that wouldn’t be possible with third party tools. Instead of creating ads and keywords manually, iActivate uses personalised templates and rules. The parameters in the templates are automatically replaced with the information from Elgiganten’s feed. It means ads are always up to date. When a stock level is low, or a product is sold out, the system pauses all advertisement for that product and reactivates it when the product is back in stock. When Elgiganten’s inventory increases, new ads and keywords are created automatically. Therefore, ads are always highly relevant and drive users directly to the right product or category page, preventing unnecessary expenses and dissatisfied customers. All without the constraint of repetitive manual work.
iProspect and Elgiganten case study
Through automation, we made Elgiganten’s advertisement more convenient for users, making the most of both the users’ and the Elgiganten marketing team’s time.
“We’re very happy with the results: 10% lower CPCs, 36% higher conversion rates, 177% more transactions, and a 61% higher ROI. With iActivate, we have more time to focus on things that truly matter, like strategy.”
- Niko Niva, Digital Marketing Manager, Elgiganten
This article is excerpted from Future Focus 2019: Searching for Trust. Download Future Focus 2019 for key insights and success stories on navigating truth and authenticity in 2019.
