Search engine optimization (SEO) can be defined as the process of affecting the visibility of a website  in a search engine’s un-paid search results to drive more organic traffic to content. But how does this work with digital content like a magazine, lookbook, catalog, annual report, brand guide etc…?  These types of digital experiences are likely to be embedded into one HTML page, which means tagging the content for SEO is very important and differs somewhat vs. tagging a page to find something very specific.

A potential consumer or reader is looking for something you offer and SEO helps connect the right content (or best optimized webpage) to that customer.  In general, there are two types of search:

1. Narrow

The search is very specific and will often lead to an exact page that yields a quick result or return.  For example, I want to buy a specific brand’s running shoes so I Google “brand name”, “running”, “trainers” and possibly a website name.  I find the top search, click, the product and price point meet my expectation and I buy the shoes.

2. Open

The search is more open with an underlying need for education, research, inspiration, and more.  This is where more curated digital content like Zmags comes into play.  For example, I need to shed a few pounds and think a pair of running shoes would be a good place to start.  With anaerobic exercise being alien to me, I need to do a little bit of research on what to buy and I start to Google terms like “decent running shoes”, “running, trainers, sale”, and “new season running shoes”.  I don’t want to view a grid of products but want to find some material that I can journey through to gain the education and inspiration needed to make a sensible purchase.

The key SEO distinction between the two is the keywords.   When optimizing digital catalogs or magazines for search engines, don’t try and tag all the content within it but think more about what your potential audience will be searching for when looking for it – as the search term could potentially differ from the text within your content.

Chances are your content or product is online somewhere else and would be tagged correctly for a narrow search. It is that open search opportunity that can convert potential consumers to new and loyal consumers.  The key here is to frame up and tag your digital content like Zmags catalogs and magazines for a search engine. This ensures that more inquisitive and inquiring search words are used to drive those curious, researching and potential new consumers to your most relevant content.

At Zmags we have worked with a variety of clients and have a collection of deployment best practices, depending on the strategy and use case.  Our Customer Success Program is tailored to work and partner with clients to ensure success with digital content.  The bottom line is you could have the most amazing online Publication, but if no-one knows about it or finds it, is it really there at all? (a philosophical thought for the day!)

Zmags is a very versatile digital publishing platform and can be used to drive revenue in several ways. The most obvious way would be by using Zmags’ Commerce solution to facilitate the product purchase directly from the page in the catalog/brochure online. This will seamlessly synchronize with the existing ecommerce infrastructure and allow products to be added to cart in the same way it would from any other product page.

What might not be so obvious is how an online flyer or catalog can help a marketing team to generate footfall to their stores.

I came across this fantastic example from Costco UK today, who present their coupon books 16 times a year through Zmags.

Encouraging Results:

The results we can see from these campaigns are very encouraging. Costco promotes these wholesale offers to its  members via email and print distribution. 40% of the visitors spend 2-5 minutes just going through these pages, and the very nature of the content means that around 80% of the visitors view every single page in the Zmag – this is incredible engagement for something which users can then print or save to use in-store. As the offers are only available to the wholesale trade, the aim is that the user takes these offers and buys in-store.

By using specific codes which track the source of the coupon, Costco is able to attribute the source of the revenue to the various campaigns, which along with the comprehensive Zmags analytics allow them the get a full view of how this is working to achieve business objectives.

Do you have similar goals from your online marketing efforts? Are you looking for new ways to generate footfall from online efforts? Get in touch today to get a demo, or speak with a consultant about how this might fit strategically for your business.

It’s that time of year again for what marketers and retailers call “Dads and Grads”. With Father’s Day on June 16^th and college and high school graduations happening throughout May and June, this is of course a big time for celebrating and gift-giving . And that means marketers and retailers will be competing to capitalize on these occasions by promoting relevant content and products during this time.  Think not only presents for Fathers and graduates, but also food and beverages, party supplies, apparel and new outfits for these celebrations (suits, dresses, etc.).

How can online magazines and catalogs like Zmags helps your brand stand out?

Answer: By making it easy for kids, spouses, parents, friends and party planners to get inspired, and/or buy everything they need in one convenient place.

This type of immersive shopping experience lends itself nicely to shoppers that know they need a gift for Father’s Day or Graduation, but don’t yet know what that gift is.

Grant Coleman says it well in his post, Search is Not  Shopping. Expecting that online shoppers will stumble upon the right products, or ones they didn’t even know they wanted (!), is  like telling your brick & mortar customers to go in the back room and look for an item themselves.

These digital publications open up new merchandising opportunities for retailers as well. Via creative design and intelligent analytics, online catalog layouts can be tested and adjusted over time – in a way that’s not so easy for print catalogs or in-store merchandising displays.

Ecommerce brands and online publishers can take one of at least two routes for making the most of “Dads & Grads season”:

1.  Start From Scratch

Retailers can capitalize on the Dads & Grads period by quickly preparing and publishing new assets online.  Brochures, lookbooks, or flyers make sense for this seasonal content and promotion.  Any pdfs designed for print can be embellished online, with interactive elements like videos, widgets, quizzes, etc. added on top – to make the shopping experience that much more fun.

2.  Reuse or Re-Purpose

Tweak an existing catalog, magazine or collection of digital assets. This might mean pulling out relevant pages and products from a bigger digital publication, or combining imagery taken for other areas of the website and putting a holiday spin on it. This is a great option for those of you who are pressed for time or have limited resources to create new content.

For instance, even if you didn’t overhaul an editorial spread to say “Give Dad a Gift He’ll Love” (though that might be a nice idea), you could still feature products that skew towards males more prominently during the weeks leading up to Father’s Day.

A season so closely associated with gifts, such as Dads & Grads, offers tremendous opportunity for online retailers and merchandisers.  Zmags makes either project  possible and ensures that your brand comes out on top during this celebratory season.

Have you already put together a guide for Dads or Grads?  Please share your examples with us; we’ll post the best ones across our social networks!

Here at Zmags, we are an organization built around teamwork. It’s no secret that we collaborate every day to help our clients win, but it might be lesser known that our teamwork also extends outside of the office as part of our commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility.

When our Boston team began thinking of ways that we could make a social impact, we decided that the best place to start was in our own back yard. According to the Greater Boston Food Bank (GBFB), one in nine people in eastern Massachusetts is food insecure, meaning that they have had to choose between buying food or paying for heat, rent or even medical care.

With that heartbreaking statistic in mind, our Boston office held a canned food drive for the GBFB to help them meet their goal of providing one meal each day to those who need it in eastern Massachusetts. This week, Zmags delivered our collected canned goods to the GBFB, which provided 482 meals for those in need.  While this is only a drop in the bucket, every contribution counts.  We are proud that our employees support local charities.

The Greater Boston Food Bank depends on food drives, financial contributions, and volunteers. To find out how you can help, please visit their website at www.gbfb.org.

As part of our continued Corporate Social Responsibility efforts, our Boston office will be running the 2013 Boston J.P Morgan Corporate Challenge in June which benefits the City Spotlights Summer Leadership Program and The Emerald Necklace Conservancy.   In addition, we are planning corporate volunteer days for each of our offices to participate in local community service projects.

Stay tuned!

Marketing teams are spending an increasing percentage of their marketing budgets on creating bespoke, or reusing existing, marketing assets to enhance the overall experience their websites can provide. It is inevitable to expect this trend to continue as traffic to these retail sites increases and mobile WiFi and 4G connectivity is becoming more accessible to consumers. Further pressure is coming from the share of tablet devices accessing retail sites.

The convenience and comfort such devices offer compared to laptops means that there has been an increase in so called “couch commerce” – those people browsing and buying online whilst sitting on the sofa after work in front of the TV. These people are spending longer on the site on average per visit than through other devices, and are more demanding of “experiences” as opposed to traditional online category based shopping. These consumers are also normally “dual screening”, using their tablet at the same time as they watch a TV show putting them in a better place to respond to advertisements during commercial breaks.

A recent article in “Internet Retailing” magazine dealt with technology and experience retailing, and was summarized well by the last paragraph:

“Gone are the days of the one size fits all approach to retail where the retailers themselves held the power. Today, it is the consumer that is in control. The evolution of experience retailing is being driven by consumers and retailers have no choice but to acknowledge the erosion of the traditional experience in order to compete effectively, achieve profitable growth and transform the customer experience”

Marketers and Ecommerce professionals are turning to Zmags in order to assist in the development of experience retail across digital touch points. In many conversations I’ve had with prospective clients, they’ve told me the investment is easy to justify to their bosses. Beyond the potential reach and engagement this can provide, Zmags allows for fully transactional content experiences by integrating with the website shopping cart and product data feeds. This ensures that the ROI is completely tangible and attributable to this channel, making for a very attractive proposition.

Still, we all know that marketing and ecommerce budgets can be tight; spending needs to be prioritized and justified.  There are both subjective and objective arguments to help with the internal pitch for an investment in a new digital publishing solution: the “hearts” pitch and the “minds” pitch:

The ‘Hearts’ Pitch

Marketers’ core goals are to create awareness around products and services, and to create a brand that targets demographics that make sense. Traditional tactics to achieve these goals have been catalogs, look books, brochures, flyers, gift guides, magazines, circulars, radio, TV, sales promotions, shop design/layout, merchandising, etc etc.

The internet broke the gates wide open, however, and created a new channel for retailers, and the ecommerce website has become the single largest store for omni-channel retailers. It has also become the source of new competition for pure play online retailers, who with smaller teams and low overheads, seem to be springing up everyday. Relatively new tactics include search engine optimization, mobile websites, responsive design, and social media. more recently, video and other rich media content have become major players.

The main focus of all these efforts should be:

• Drive brand awareness
• Inspire brand engagement
• Build brand loyalty
• Deliver a great customer experience
• Ease of navigation
• Ease of search

We are helping marketers achieve these goals and more via the Zmags platform. Marketers can create online shopping experiences that harness previously offline resources like catalogs, brochures, and lookbooks. In this way, the marketer is able to properly merchandise his/her website rather than relying purely on ‘search’-based ecommerce. Some of our clients are creating truly stunning, highly visual and interactive experiences that present inspiration to the consumer. These are aimed at those that love your brand but do not always know what they are looking for, a sentiment and behavior often shared by shoppers in retail stores. Take a look at how these brands have used Zmags:

Selfridges
Dick’s Sporting Goods
Harpers Bazaar

These results represent the average, but we see even better results once clients enhance the experience with rich media, clear calls to action, or design specifically for the channel rather than re-using existing assets.

The ‘Minds’ Pitch

If what has been written so far still seems a bit fluffy, I hope that this section will really focus the business value creating by using Zmags Commerce Digital Publishing Software.

If your goals are primarily to create revenue through ecommerce, to increase the conversion rate of the traffic that comes to your site, and to improve average order value, then you may feel that increasing the site content simply creates a barrier to ecommerce. Well the data says otherwise! Zmags Commerce software allows consumers to access product information, make master variant selections and add to cart directly from the pages of the Zmags and critically without breaking away from the experience itself. In essence the content is used to creating inspiration using lifestyle images, product videos, 360 degree views, ability to see alternative images or reviews and at the highest point of inspiration the consumer can take action.

The results for Zmags are impressive, as captured by Hilary Dionne in our recent Q4 2012 Benchmark Whitepaper:

• In Q4 2012 consumers who viewed Zmags commerce enabled catalogs had 173% higher conversion rate relative to other visits to brands websites

• 3% of all website traffic visited a Zmag, but this traffic generated 5% of all ecommerce revenues for our Zmags Commerce clients

• The average order value from consumers who visited a Zmags were 18% higher on average than other site traffic

• Visit duration and page views increased by circa 140% when the visit included viewing a Zmag

This is compelling data which proves that consumers want to be inspired, and will buy more when presented with ideas and products that are merchandised well and have an intuitive path to purchase.

Here are some more examples of clients that are using Zmags Commerce Digital Publishing Software:

Joules
Tesco
Magasin

If you are interested in finding out how using Zmags Commerce could help your brand develop an ecommerce content strategy, please get in touch today through this page:http://zmags.com/contact/

Building a brand that is unique, consistent and powerful across all channels and at every point of engagement is imperative to your customer experience as well as your company strategy.

Delivering that brand representation online often requires a suite of web assets that provide the same look and feel online as if you are in store or interacting directly with the brand offline.

At Zmags, we recognize how powerful these web assets are. The release of our Commerce solution opens up the possibilities of bringing those directly to your online publication.

An online magazine, catalog, lookbook or other publication is an engaging linear way to drive consumers though an interactive shopping experience that can leverage your rich media assets and commerce suite.  If a consumer knows what they want, they will ultimately use Google to find the product and buy it.  That’s not shopping, it’s buying.  Your shoppers want to feel like they are interacting directly with your brand as they seek for ideas and inspiration.  That branded experience that your consumers know, love and believe in is what then encourages purchase.

The Zmags Commerce Advantage

Your website will already have the vehicles to drive those conversions that occur when a customer knows what they want.  An online Publication or Catalog is the vehicle to drive your “shoppers” through an experience to inspire purchase and it’s at this point you want to bring your commerce infrastructure to the forefront for transaction.  A branded journey, from click to conversion.

Hello Zmags Commerce.  Using either Zmags Plugins or new ecommerce platform integrations, Zmags enables existing ecommerce functionality to be layered onto your online catalog – ensuring shopping carts can be filled and customers can continue to shop. Shopping behavior translates from in-store to the online catalog: a shopper will walk around the store selection items, making sure he/she has seen everything to make the best available purchase decisions.

Zmags is a self-service platform that is designed integrate seamlessly with your existing infrastructure.  Zmags Commerce layers can be married with other powerful rich media assets to drive a fluid shopping experience that delivers true ROI.

In essence, your Zmags-driven online content is “talking” happily to your web infrastructure, so when a customer clicks on a product in your Publication it calls up the product information from your website.  This seamless integration utilizes the quick view and product information you have already designed to be in-line with your brand.   You can add clear call to actions, product videos and other rich media to entice and encourage clicks and embed the Zmags content directly into your site.  Being a self-service tool, it’s quick and easy to build commerce-enabled online catalogs and requires no development, coding or anything “tech-y”.  As our product evolves, additional features become available and as your product views or information changes it is automatically represented across all online content (past, present or future).

I can write with confidence that Zmags have both the product and the service team available to ensure success with the new Zmags Commerce solution.

When evaluating your mobile strategy, the options can overwhelm. What should I be offering my users? How should they be interacting with us on different devices? Do I need to be in the app store?

Once the initial panic slows down, it’s easier to focus on a few key points. Most importantly – a lot like the chicken and egg the egg conundrum – what comes first? The web-based solution or the app?

FUN FACT: A lot of other digital solutions like Zmags, social platforms and email offerings are already Omni-channel optimized and a lot of them even have app options. This can aid in expanding your brand without doing a full technical overhaul.

It’s important to understand the purpose of an app versus web-based solution and how they fit into your digital strategy. Some companies find they only need one or the other, while some brands become heavily dependent on both.

Why Web-Based?

With mobile on the rise, the need for optimization is continuously growing. There are many reasons to make sure your website is prepared for visits from any type of device. Some benefits of web-based optimization are:

• Consistent branding across all platforms - Regardless of device, your brand is represented the same way.
• Less commitment - A user doesn’t have to download an app onto their device to interact with your brand.
• Website behavior is now inherent - Browsing is second nature and understood, so there is no confusion on what the user should be doing when they arrive at your site.
• Price - This solution tends to be less expensive and easy to get up and running if it’s your first step into the mobile channel.

The web-based offering tends to be the first choice when branching into this space since its really just an extension from your current website and branding. A user understands when they arrive at your site that it’s the same as if they were on a computer.

Why an App?

When apps first came to fruition they were said to be the future for all mobile. Although they have definitely dominated at times, they serve a slightly different purpose when reaching customers. Some benefits of the app are:

• Native Build - That means in an app environment the experience can be more custom and complex since its not dealing with the constraints of a mobile browser.
• Offline Capabilities - Content can be cached and viewed when a device does not have an Internet connection.
• Better Performance - Apps are just inherently faster, better functioning platforms since they are driven from the operating system of the device.
• Customer Engagement - You can reserve an app for special promotions, engagement or features to those who have downloaded it. This shows extra appreciation to the brand loyalists invested enough in your offering.
• Revenue Model - An app can cost money. Content inside the app has the option to only be viewable to those who pay to download it.

People who download an app tend to be more loyal to a brand. If they have taken the time to look it up in the app store and install it onto their device, then they are most likely going to interact on a regular basis as well as convert.  Having an app available for users like this ensures that they are getting the optimal experience every time they visit.

So What’s Best for Me?

It’s safe to say that in today’s society a brand’s website MUST be optimized for all devices. However, recent studies have shown that 85% of consumers tend to favor apps over mobile websites when interacting on a tablet or smartphone. Therefore, as broad as “digital offerings” can be it’s clear that for most people, offering both a web-based option and an app offers the best level of exposure.

At last week’s MITX Great Mobile Migration Summit, I spoke to an audience along with Joan Connor from PartyLite, a home fragrance direct selling company, on “Why Tablets Will Outpace Smartphones:  Trends And Tips To Optimize Every Customer Interaction“.

Our main objective?   To provide marketers and agencies with some creative ideas on how to capitalize on the distinctions between tablets and smartphone users – with the goal of helping them improve the digital experience for their customers.

Tablets are used more during leisure time (at night and during the weekends), while smartphone users tend to be on-the-go, looking for quick-hit website searches, directions, etc.  So, consumers are in a more relaxed mindset on tablets, often lingering on websites longer and viewing more content and pages – with up to 1.7x more pages viewed on tablets than on smartphones.  This multi-screen behavior of “couch commerce” while watching TV can lead to impulse buying and larger average order values among the tablet segment of shoppers.

Here are the Top 5 Tips we covered in detail

PartyLite has been a Zmags client for several years, but has been printing catalogs for nearly 4 decades!  At first, PartyLite’s Zmags were just digital replicas of its print catalogs.  Several pages, such as candle ordering grids, did not translate well on screen – forcing shoppers to spend extra time just zooming in on all of the details.   At Zmags, we noticed this in the data, and recommended designing for digital, using interactive elements and a streamlined layout to create a better user experience, especially on tablets.

Joan’s team at PartyLite took this advice, and have since had incredible success with new optimized digital catalogs that focus on key collections they want to promote in their assortment, instead of long, comprehensive books.  The response has been extremely positive among Consultants (direct sellers) and their customers.   The PartyLite creative team, seeing the clear benefits, now photographs and designs for digital FIRST and print SECOND!

Take a look at PartyLite’s latest Zmags catalog, a great example of the rich photography and crisp layout that works well to inspire purchases on tablets.

For a complimentary copy of the presentation, please contact us!

Online merchandising is a less-talked about part of ecommerce that, in theory, should achieve a similar goal as its in-store conterpart:  to “display products in such a way that stimulates interest and entices customers to make a purchase”.

However, the layouts of most traditional ecommerce websites look more like image libraries (organized by item type, size, gender, etc.), rather than well-thought out displays or showcases!   Despite good intentions, even website features such as  ”You may also like”, “Recommended for you” and “Related products” just don’t have the same effect as in-store merchandising — where products often pack more punch in combinations than each would individually.

Why are websites so far behind?

And how can online catalogs help?   By enabling the creation of orchestrated e-commerce experiences.

In other words, if done well, online merchandising within digital catalogs blends tactics from both traditional offline and online sales channels — bridging the gap between stark websites and creative brick&mortar window displays.  While print catalogs allow for the same kind of curation, they don’t give you back the same kind of data to learn from!   Digital versions can be rearranged and segmented based on analyses of user behavior within the catalog, such as which pages are attracting the most attention, which products are clicked on most, etc.

Some ways to make the most of your digital storefront:

-Start with traditional merchandising tactics:  Product groups or displays used in stores can provide the basis for website layouts, before in-catalog web analytics comes into play.

-Experiment with creative combinations:  Look at recent sales data.  Which types of items are people often buying together?  How can you encourage them to purchase additional items?  One great example, below, from The Container Store, places shoe storage containers alongside mothballs and air fresheners.

-See what’s attracting attention:  Heat maps (or in-page analytics) show what your site visitors are clicking on most; shopping cart funnel data reveals which items are carted but for some reason not checked out.

-Look at other key performance metrics for your digital content:   Analyzing what works and what doesn’t work over time (test, adjust, retest!) can  paint a clearer picture of how to combine your online content and merchandise for optimal performance.

-Vary merchandise combinations by segment, such as website entry point:   Where a visitor came from can help predict what they’re looking for.  Product images or combinations shown could be served up differently for users who come from social networks vs. search engines vs. particular referral links (etc.).

The results will be better sales, higher conversion rates, and better engagement metrics for your catalog.  (Recently, a kids’ toys and apparel brand saw an increase of over 300% more dollar spent, and 250% more items carted, when they featured related items on the same online catalog pages!)

Yesterday, several of us from the Zmags team attended MITX’s Mobile Marketing Summit, The Great Mobile Migration, at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.

What a great event!  We made many new connections and returned to the office feeling much smarter about the future of mobile marketing and its challenges ahead.

Zmags and PartyLite at the MITX Mobile Summit

Ironically, I had forgotten my iPhone at home in a rush that morning, so was feeling very disconnected all day– a strange contrast that reinforced how dependent society (ok, how dependent I!) have become on smartphones.  I yearned for my phone on multiple occasions:

1.  Had my co-presenter, Joan from PartyLite, arrived?  Where should we meet to prep for our speaking session on “Why Tablets Will Outpace Smartphones:  Trends And Tips To Optimize Every Customer Interaction”?

2. It was a gorgeous spring day, and everyone enjoyed having lunch outside on the rooftop garden.  I found myself wanting to know the exact temperature, but resisted the urge to ask someone else to check for me…

Earlier in the day, Cameron Clayton, President of the Digital Division for Weather.com, shared an interesting stat:   that the Weather Channel is the #2 site/app checked on mobile, only coming in behind Facebook (beating out Google).  I believe it.

3.  Wanted to see and download the Dunkin’ Donuts mobile app during a great session led by Dave Tryder, DD’s Director of Digital Strategy.  It sounds like they’ve made the app extremely functional, with store locators, mobile payment capabilities and even digital gifting through the app.

A few speakers (including myself) talked about mobile commerce as an emerging trend that we’ll continue to see more of.  Right now, this has taken off more quickly on tablets vs. on smartphones.   However, well-designed apps that allow shoppers to easily browse and add items to their carts — even while offline! — should help make transacting easier on smartphones as well.

What activities are you and your target segments doing most on mobile devices?  Where do you think things are heading?