Using the World Cup to Market Your Brand

I am a big sports fan. I love the athleticism, the competition, the narratives. Recently, I have seen major sports competitions for what they really are though – a money grab for corporate sponsorship. No matter what country wins the World Cup, Nike, Adidas, Budweiser, and Coke are sure to come out the real victors.

Now that we have accepted this reality, it’s time to capitalize. Nike proved in London 2012 that you don’t need to be an official sponsor to use the games to promote your brand.  But you do not even need to be on TV to do this.

For example, I work with all kinds of brands where the World Cup provides a creative moment to market and sell product packages. The easiest to think about in my opinion is email campaigns, so let’s focus on that, though social media, display, and other kinds of marketing could certainly be utilized here.

On Saturday June 14, England plays Italy. Though I am not in either country, we could use this game to market our own product. Imagine that we are an online shoe etailer. Let’s get some creative going with shoes in the color and design of the England flag on one side “going toe to toe” with shoes in the color and design of the Italian flag. Perhaps an even more direct example is if we were now a men’s suits etailer, since those two specific countries happen to be capitals of men’s fashion. Let’s have a “match” in our email between British suit makers and Italian suit makers. You could even say that, based whomever wins that game, suits from the winning country are X% discounted for 24 hours. The idea here is to use this huge current event to connect your brand to it. In doing this, your brand is contemporary and hip, while also seeming playful. Most people on the planet take an interest in the World Cup and are rooting for at least one country to win, so why shouldn’t your brand?

I used that game as an example, but clearly you could adjust to specific games with teams or products you want to focus on. This is easy in the first part of the tournament when we already know all the matchups. Once the next round comes, you will have to be on it and turn around the creative very quickly. It is worth it though because that quick response time just adds to the cool factor of your brand.

The final step here is to go into uber-patriot mode. If you champion Americanism, then every day America has a game, send a patriotic email to your customers with “support our boys in Brazil” messaging, while including some related products. Invite people to watch the game with your brand by using social media during the game to connect the events of the game to your audience and brand. Be creative. Be playful. It is my understanding that you can’t actually say World Cup, but there are ways of obviously referencing it without blatantly saying it. The easiest might just be to include a soccer ball somewhere in the email! Poof! Now everyone knows what you are talking about.

On that note, though I have my doubts about how far they will get, but Go US Men’s National Team!

10 Ways to Improve Your eCommerce Site

Where’s the ANY KEY!?

1. One thing I have seen time and time again is that people like buying in their own languages! Do you offer a Spanish language version of your site? How about a French version for our Canadian friends? And by now, it should be obvious that any site that wants to make money needs a Chinese language site! Alternatively, if these language populations are your target audience, make sure to always have an English alternative. There are English speaking expats all over the world.
2. Identify your specialty and then provide insightful articles and reports on it. While articles are great to increase your visibility and name, reports are opportunities to get potential customers contact information. Rather than making the report a free link, put a landing page where visitors have to give name and email address (at minimum) to download. This really could be used for anything. I see it all the time in web analytics and marketing service providers, but why not extend the concept to putting together looks in cosmetics, grow guides for organic gardens, or any other products?
3. Always run A/B tests. PERIOD. Wisdom is the key to success but discovering wisdom should always be a constant challenge. Where possible, whether using email, display ads, or any other content, come up with different things to show different audiences. Testing is an endless process so be sure to think creatively by identifying areas where you can improve. Maybe it is just an email landing page or subject line or maybe something even more intensive like showing Firefox users a different experience than Chrome users. Google Analytics campaigns offers a good way to track all kinds of different tests and for more intensive segmented tests Adobe Test & Target is a fun rabbit hole to throw yourself down.
4. Offer a full mobile experience. This is the wave of the future, except the future arrived at least two years ago (and probably more like five). Each month, I see more and more visitors from iPads and iPhones. We have all been too sites on our phones that need insane zooming in to be read or used. And then there are also gorgeous sites that just appear like they were designed for any device. As desktops become mobile, this is the space where you cannot afford to be cheap. I created a site on Wix and shortly after they came out with a mobile optimization design tool that let my site go from a desktop feeling site on a mobile device to a mobile specific site. Brilliant. But don’t make the mistake of treating phones and tablets as they same thing.
5. Resell. This one should be fairly obvious but I am always surprised to learn of what some companies don’t do after they receive a sale. For that matter, I am shocked when I don’t receive marketing emails from a company after I buy a product on their site. The most obvious area where conversion can occur is with time-sensitive products. If you sell anything that needs topping up, be sure to set up (automated if possible) an email campaign for the number of days the product lasts minus X amount of time. For example, if I know that the average person goes through a tube of tooth paste every 75 days and they bought their toothpaste on my website, then at 65 days I should send them an email reminding it may be time to buy more toothpaste! If they do, then do it again in another 75 days. If not, on day 70, send them another email with slightly different content. Keep these coming but be creative and test everything.
6. And for that matter, offer users a chance to see what they have purchased in a ‘My Profile’ or ‘My Purchase History’ on your site. If this page is interactive, then you are giving your customers an easy way to buy the same products over and over again, rather than requiring them to search every time they want to buy something.
7. Abandoned cart emails. There is so much about this on the Internet to read if you need to learn more about the value and ROI of Abandoned Cart emails. If you are able to automate an abandoned cart email series, develop a series of emails reminding your customer that he/she has left items in the cart. Use the CTA directly to the view cart and checkout process. I would develop three emails over thirty days.

8. 

   Not that kind of abandoned site…

   Site abandonment emails. These are Abandoned Carts creepier more secretive, less popular (except if you are in the NSA) step cousin. Capture your customers who are logged into your site and then develop (non-creepy) content to remind your customers what pages they were looking at and may be interested in buying, even though they did not add to cart. Amazon is great at doing this on their site, so you could even try to integrate this into some kind of feeder on your site.

9. Live tweet during live events. Everyone remembers the Oreo tweet from the Superbowl when the power went out? Gatorade got into some hot…urgh, Gatorade last week during Lebron James’ cramp game (another story), but the suggestion here is to make your brand visible during a high traffic time and engage with your followers (and get new ones) during a highly tweeted event. If your nervous and don’t want to do anything too controversial, award shows like the Oscars or Grammys are always a good place to start.
10. Never stop thinking. To be creative and successful, you always have to be reading and thinking. See what others are doing in your field and in totally different fields. You may be able to take an idea from a cheese lecture and convert it into an ecommerce tactic. Who knows?

Break Up With Your Device Categorization

According to Forrester the Wise, “In 2014 there will be more than 2 billion smartphones globally.” Roughly put, that’s one for every four people on the planet. Most likely, if you are reading this, you are one of those people. Perhaps you are even reading this on one of your incredibly helpful mobile devices.

But for some reason, we have created a binary world: one where sedentary devices exist, such as laptops and desktops, and a second in which mobile phones and tablets exist. Yet, this is a mistake.

Part of what has dominated my thoughts in the last year has been whether it is better to develop a mobile site (m.website.com), an app, or nothing different at all for your website’s visitors who may be using different kinds of devices.

We have three options and three trends, yet we act in the world as if we only have two.

We have to choose between a mobile site OR an app. And it goes without saying that for sedentary devices we have the ‘normal’ HTML website.

My friends, this is insane.

Rather than splitting time and money between phone and tablet vs sedentary, the three need to be thought of as three completely separate entities, rather than two. Right now, we imagine (and market) to tablet users like they are phone users. Yet, these technologies often serve completely different purposes. I would suggest that when it comes to ecommerce, we should think about tablets more as replacements to sedentary devices, rather than in competition with phone devices. Your phone is out there in the world with you, on the go. Your tablet sits on the couch and you use it as a second screen while inhaling the latest installment of HIMYM. These need to be thought of as separate ‘mobile’ devices.

For the same reason we know it is a bad UX to offer a desktop version of a site on an iPhone, we offer that as a solution when it comes to tablets. We say, ‘a tablet is mobile, so it should either get the mobile or the app version,’ really meaning whatever we are offering phone visitors we will offer tablet visitors.  But the Apple iPad could easily be more user friendly to the desktop site than the iPhone/iPad app. On the tablet, those easy to touch buttons just look too big. All I want to do is zoom out, pan down.

The issue here, in my opinion, all really comes down to size, when it comes to what kind of site to show to a visitor. Maybe one day, we will identify perfect size dimensions and the ability to pair down and cut away at endless points on a screen. But for now, if you applied the rule that:

• phone visitors look at the app (native or mobile)

• tablet visitors look at the m.website.com version.

• sedentary visitors look at the desktop version

What would happen? Is that a good standard?

In this, the early and formative days of this technology, I submit that it is. Good day, sir.

 

Full disclosure: I don’t have a tablet or watch HIMYM.