How do you envision the future of digital marketing for retailers? In the blockbuster movie “Minority Report,” Tom Cruise’s character, Chief John Anderton, lives in a world where personal, dynamic digital advertising is the norm. Even as he walks through a crowd, he’s constantly singled out and presented with digital signage targeted directly at him—they even address him by name. The technology uses his eyes to identify him, and the ads he is shown are, one assumes, determined by data on his interests and previous purchases.
How close are retailers to this digital future? In the here and now, most retailers know that data helps them gain insights into the behaviors of their web visitors. In fact, in a recent survey by Experian Data Quality, cited in Retail Online Integration, nearly 100 percent of retailers said they feel driven to turn data into insight, and all said some form of data is essential to marketing success.
While the technology in “Minority Report” is years away, today’s analytics applications, such as Google Analytics, can help retailers glean similar kinds of information for their digital marketing. These applications give retailers a better understanding of whether their paid-search and digital marketing efforts are bringing the right prospects to their e-commerce sites.
But they’re not just for e-commerce retailers. A Forbes article declares that by 2020, analytics will be widely used by brick-and-mortar stores.
Seeing Beyond the Obvious
A popular digital advertising tool, Google AdWords is great for quantifying the basic performance of retailers’ digital marketing programs. It provides a variety of valuable performance indicators—opens, impressions, clicks, conversion rates and more—so retailers can see how effectively their digital marketing efforts are driving traffic to their websites.
While getting people to your website is important, to be as effective and cost-efficient as possible, you need to drive the right people to your site. Do you know now if you are finding the right prospects? Are you reaching as many of them as you could?
One retailer struggled with these challenges before turning to True Interactive. This retailer’s search engine marketing program was underperforming, especially in attracting new customers. We worked with this client to develop and implement new digital marketing strategies and programs. The result? Their revenue increased by nearly 40%, year over year, fueled by a 45% jump in orders.
The retailer also was able to stretch its search engine marketing budget farther with a more effective SEM program, improving Return on Spend by more than 10%. Read the case study to learn more.
In our next post, we will look at how tracking visitor behavior on your e-commerce site can improve paid-search campaigns, which, in turn, can help drive more people to your website.
