5 Digital Marketing Tips To Steal Today

After purchasing two pairs of Robert Rauschenberg inspired frames from WarbyParker.com we came away with admiration and five digital marketing tips other online merchants should steal. 

• Create Limited Editions
• Keep Content After Events
• Have and Share VALUES
• Start with WHY not HOW
• Tie Purchases To A Related Cause

Learn more about why we love our Rauschenberg frames and other ideas to steal from WarbyParker.com at Curagami: http://www.curagami.com/warby-parker-5-digital-marketing-tips-to-steal-today/ 

Dumping WooCommerce
The DIY don't need to know code to build a great and scaleable online store may be mostly myth. Like all bell curves there may be one or two highly profitable Shopify, Volusion or Big Commerce sites but those few "rich getting richer" sites stand on the shoulders of many little guys just scaping by.

If that sound like a rigged game we agree. We shared all the reasons we dumped WooCommerce including our own idiocy in this mythbusting Curagami post:

 

http://www.curagami.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/curagami-logowide.png

Curagami Customer Hunt on LinkedIn
Curagami is half app development company and half search marketing agency. We've helped e-commerce and B2B relationship sellers create content, strategies and tactics to win hearts, minds and loyalty online.

We manage content, social media and strategy for 2 to 4 customers a year. We currently have one possibly two openings. We say one possibly two because we never know how much time a client will need to achieve their online marketing goals.

If you need help or know someone who does use our Curagami Customer Hunt form at the bottom of this post to share your story:

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/curagami-customer-hunt-martin-marty-smith

Crossing Ecommerce Rubicon
We are making progress on adding Woocommerce to Curagami. The goal is to cross the content / commerce rubicon. The gulf between effective content and commerce is large. The promise of Woocommerce, an ecommerce shopping cart and database appended to Wordpress, is elimination of the artificial and rapidly useless separation between content and commerce. 

The Social / Mobile / Connected times we inhibit require a new approach to online commerce. We plan to relaunch Curagami.com next week.  Stay tuned, join us for coffee (subscribe http://www.curagami.com/signup/?v=7516fd43adaa ) and we will journey across the rubicon together :). Marty & team Curagami

 

5 TIps To Cross Ecom's Rubicon
Smart merchants are beginning to cross the ecommerce rubicon between content and commerce. Discover 5 Tips to cross your online store's ecommerce rubicon.

5 TIps

* “Magazine” your content
* Curate from brands
* Curate from customers
* Lean & Visual Win
* Tie In Email, Social & Mobile

Going to incorporate @Guillaume Decugis and Scoop.it's ideas on Lean Content on this not very lean post too. I set aside some content to keep the post pinging with fresh content.

Evergreen means our team will refresh the content (or ask for help from our Ambassadors to do so) regularly. Not all content is equal. Places in our "evergreen" regularly scheduled updates category must be earned (lol).

So help 5 Tips to Cross the Ecom Rubicon earn evergreen status, or better yet contribute your thoughts and we will curate in.

Crossing the Rubicon between content and commerce is the BIG ISSUE in online retailing today. Discover our tips to cross and add yorus.  

Magento is a great system for building e-commerce websites; it’s not bad for marketing them either. Out of the box there are no truly bad default settings for SEO and it offers handy functions to m…

Ecommerce is changing fast. This Scenttrail Marketing post shares and explains 30 "must master" to win ecommerce strategies and tatics.

30 Ecom Strategies & Tactics To Master
No wonder most ecommerce teams feel overwhelmed. Off the top of our heads we came up with 30 complex "mini-systems" that must be mastered to create greatness in online commerce.

Gone are the days when a little of this and that could win the day in online retail. Today all 30 of these tactics and strategies dance together requiring sophisticated understanding of individual trends, tools and ideas to win.

Things change too fast to really KNOW anything. Instead teams must surf waves, learn and fail fast and then wax up their boards for another wild ride.

Did we miss any BIG IDEAS your ecommerce team is managing. Soon we will support this infographic with a http://www.Curagami.com post to further explain each strategy and tactic. In the meantime let us know what we missed in comments or email martin(at)Curagami.com.

Thanks and remember DEEP SLOW BREATHES and if you aren't having FUN your visitors will know. They will feel it.

Yesterday at the Digital Summit in Charlotte, NC we ran into a familiar problem. "Marty we don't have any content," an growing ecommerce website shared.

I shared the good and bad news. The bad news is developing an effective content strategy takes time, focus and money. The good news is there are things to do in parallel that bring all pieces together such as:

* Create an Ask.

* Begin to CURATE content.

* Curate 90%, Create about 10%.
* Listen and set up Key Performance Indicators to LISTEN better.
* Develop a testing culture.
* Begin the journey to sustainable online community.

Added video notes to explain all of this to our Ecommerce Questions Haiku Deck: http://shar.es/1guIF1

Find video notes on platforms, content curation and community on Curagami's YouTube channel here: https://youtu.be/tSHeIxtrs4g

There's some great data out there on marketing channel ROI. This infographic pulls together industry studies and surveys on how marketing channels compare.

Marty Note
Somewhat disingenuous to separate channels like this. Everything is everything now and that means results in one channel are influencd in many ways by other channels. That is an important caveat for the "all or nothing" crowd who may read these results thinking they can reduce or eliminate commitment to social or PPC.

Yeah we wouldn't do that.  Your site is MODELED and substantial changes to any part of your current model could take down all the dominoes. That doesn't mean this knowledge isn't important though your results may be different. Knowing what channel is contributing profit and what channel is contributing traffic allows you to invest in the blend. Remember it is the blend that wins so don't go cutting off your nose to spite your website.

Here are 5 tips to increase e-commerce sales through quality customer service and relevant content, targeting the 2nd step of the consumer conversion funnel

WaNeLo.com
WaNeLo.com understands something you don't. They understand there is NO WAY to compete head-to-head with Amazon. Better to shift to a "blue ocean" by creating a highly social, mobile and gamified environment.

As a "mashup artist" WaNeLo.com can create pages that cost pennies, pages that may generate dollars. Are there bumps with this "new age" affiliate marketing? Of course, but, as the pagespread chart illustrates, you don't beat the giant YOU CO-OPT him :).

There is a new invisible giant, a giant using 5 "tricks" so the "new seo" is hard and harder to see and understand. This Haiku Deck and Curatti blog post is about how to see the invisible giant. How to win hearts, minds and loyalty online.

Bad links can kill your website's hard-won authority, reputation & traffic. Use Google's disavow tool to protect your site's traffic from SEO bandits.

Crowdfunding is a new powerful marketing channel similar to what email marketing used to be - high profit, low cost with big social and UGC benefits.

This holiday selling season (2014) will happen as close to real time as any thanks to the social / mobile web. Listening and curating are going to be important, but so is tapping the nostalgia and spirit of the season in creative and collaborative ways.

Designing Tomorrow's Ecommerce Today
Added artist Sara Havey's magical knitting gnome to the fastest "views" Haiku Deck I've ever created (300+ in 24 hours) because it is a perfect example of the New Ecommerce's crowdsourcing and DIY future.

The deck is divided into three sections:
* Current Ecommerce Best Practices.
* Rise of the Social / Mobile Web & Social Shopping.
* Crowdfunding, Crowdsourcing and DIY.

Is it possible to create tomorrow's ecommerce website TODAY? Is Sara's gnome knitting? You bet!

Ecom's New  Best Practices
Better have all of these if you expect to make money online these days:
* Easy To Get Free Shipping.
* Easy To Find Sale Section.
* Deal of the Day (once Woot.com only now becoming ubiquitous).
* What's New.
* Best Sellers.
* For Him, Her, Kids navigation (if applies).
* An ASK for User Generated Content.
* Clear "WE VALUE UGC" signals.
* Exciting "Magazine-like" content.

Via Tomorrow's Ecommerce: How To Design Tomorrow's Ecommerce Today on Haiku Deck http://shar.es/1nkirc

Content Curation is the "new marketing" & this post shares 6 reasons curating content should be your online marketing's elephant.

Finding the need to curate content acute as we develop HackHeadphones on Shopify. Why create new content when everything we need can be curated from sources such branded websites (using videos from Shure.com), Amazon and other "portal" sites.

We are making sure to give credit where it is due and someone might throw a flag, but bet we can negotiate mutually beneficial terms since using content with attribution is closest thing we have to advertising these days.

Your website sucks.I’m sorry that I have to be the bearer of bad news, but someone had to tell you the truth.Your website is a crime against humanity, an atrocious abomination, a target for Godwin’s

Discover the hashtag tracking tools you need to make it easy to create, manage, track and report on social media hashtag campaigns.

Marty Note
I've always felt the #hashtag is a vastly underexploited secret weapon. One reason hashtags have been under exploited for their intense #BI (Business Intelligence) value is tools to easily understand them were lacking.

Not so much anymore as this Social Media Examiner post shares.

Why are hasthags secret weapons? Hashtags are and will always be too "quanty" to become mainstream. No matter how good the tool set you still have to have a math / model geek to help marketers understand implications and form actions.

Imagine a model that understands existing benchmarks well enough to drive a push notification when a tag (and thereby the underlying content) is trending (i.e. its change delta is above some set number). What is the value of being first to surf that social wave?

Could be millions

Problem is wave knowledge rests with the Quants while surfing knowledge rests with marketers. You would think that is a needs based marriage made in heaven.

Not so much since marketers don't know what they don't know and so can't ask and wave smart quants know WAVES not how to merchandise the wave into MONEY.

Trust that our Startup Factory Funded startup Curagami is thinking about how to introduce wave smart quants to ecommerce surfing merchants ( http://www.curagami.com :). M

Creating a distributed content network with widgets is a vast blue ocean of low cost, high reward Internet marketing today. Won't be that way for long.

How do you build a website and marketplace to sell your products and services? Here are the 5 Best Companies for creating an eCommerce platform and marketplace.

Scenttrail Ratings
We've built stores with three of these five recommendations. Each has its good points and bad. Each is perfect for some and not so good for others. Here are our ratings:

ShopLocket
They don't mention this option, but we love the idea of being able to add a shopping cart to any piece of content without paying a big hosting operation like the 5 mentioned. If your ecommerce needs are small and located in social take a look at https://www.shoplocket.com/ .

Caveat
When you are camped on someone's ground THEY will always gain more benefit than you. The chance of a Shopify store outranking Shopify.com is zero. This issue is only a big deal for stores greater than 50,000 Stock Keeping Units and/or greater than $10M in sales. If you think you will eventually sell $10M+ you may want to create your own store / site. If you think it will take 10 years to reach $10M Shopify may be your best bet for ROI and speed. The PAIN comes when you transfer OFF of their platform, but we can discuss that at another time.

Shopify
Would be our first choice for most small to medium sized ecommerce implementations. The UI is clean and easy to understand. You can be up and running on Shopify in a matter of days. Inventory load is always the biggest pain and they have some ways around that.

Big Commerce
Sounds like Big Commerce fills the promotional hole we felt with Shopify. Most websites aren't very sophisticated in their coupons and promotions. If you are you will find Shopify limiting. Sounds like Big Commerce stepped in to fix the issue. And it can be a big issue since cross talk between offers and coupons can cause a train wreck. If you are sophisticated enough to make free shipping, % off and BOGO offers you may want to use Big Commerce.

Volusion
I wasn't wild about Volusion, but can't remember why. The security stuff the review mentions is marginally important. If you need highly secure ecommerce maybe they are better, but their inner-workings didn't seem as friendly as Shopify or as promotional savvy as Big Commerce.

Magento GO
I built our Story of Cancer store (now down) on Go and was impressed with the powerful business rules they include. Less than 10% of ecommerce sites need such power, but if you do Magento Go is probably your best bet. This is the power to say on a rainy Wednesday you want the price on yellow tops to be down10% when pared with shoes A, B or C. The cross-sale and up-sale wigets are powerful. The promotion, free shipping and coupons are powerful (once you figure out the convoluted logic and that problem is endemic).

Presta Shop
I don't know this option and am suspicious of FREE. Free is a risk because things go BUMP in the night on ecom sites. If you aren't a techie or don't have a techie working for you its good to have someone to call or email in an emergency like if you are bleeding personal information all over the web (say for an example lol). My concern here would be can the code keep up with needed changes (since how do they make money) and is it secure since security thanks to crazed hackers can be a real moveable feast (and I only meant "crazed hackers" in the nicest of ways so to do or say otherwise risks a "just because" attack, you know the attacks they launch just because they can).