Midwest Digital Marketing Conference – Day Two Recap

*Header image courtesy of UMSL Digital Twitter Feed

Mindstream Media Group’s Maggie Durnien and Chelsea Weidauer are checking out the Midwest Digital Marketing Conference  (MDMC) in St. Louis this week. The two-day event will cover all things digital marketing and feature speakers from Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Microsoft, Salesforce, Pinterest, Adobe, Pandora and more! Our digital marketing product specialists will be providing daily recaps of the most interesting sessions they attend. Check out their Day Two recaps below. Click here for coverage of Day One.

Session: 3 Keys to Digital Commerce Success

Speaker:

Julie Barile | Director, Digital Commerce | Sophelle

Recap by:

Chelsea Weidauer | Associate Product Specialist | Mindstream Media Group

The general store began the era of business owners knowing their consumers and their needs, according to Barile, Sophelle’s Director of Digital Commerce. For decades this was the norm until department stores came into prominence in the 1960s and personalization seemed to be a thing of the past. The emergence of the online store in the 2000s reintroduced the idea of anticipating customer needs based on purchases and using this data to predict purchases in the future. Below Barile offers her three keys to success in digital commerce.

#1) User experience and usability

User experience focuses on how a business fits the consumers’ needs and the emotions that the interaction is trying to conjure. It is important that your digital presence is representing your brand while also evoking the correct emotional interaction.

User experience should also be customer-friendly by making sure consumers have the tools they need in order to find the product they are searching for. This emphasizes the point of usability – which involves the features and functions used to build a website. The most crucial steps to usability include making sure:

• The items consumers search for appear properly.
• That customer service is easily accessible.
• That filters drill down results correctly to make products easier to find.

#2) Product findability

The second key to success, product findability, connects people with the correct product. According to Barile, some of the challenges that occur with product findability include mobile sites not offering thematic product browsing (an example is “comfortable women’s shoes”) or product hierarchies that are too shallow or too deep making it difficult to narrow down results.

On the other hand, successes in product findability include cross-functional collaboration, where customer service can use multiple platforms to engage with consumers to help them find what they are searching for. Another goal is system integration to enhance product data, make it accessible and have all departments work efficiently together.

#3) Data

The final key to success is company data. Having a successful data strategy involves knowing where it is stored, how it is collected and the trustworthiness of the data. The data needs to be accessible, and there needs to be a single source so employees throughout the company understand where the data is coming from.

Using the three keys of user experience and usability, product findability, and data will help a digital commerce company establish success. Using these steps will improve customer relations and keep digital commerce from similar pitfalls some department stores face today.

 

Session: Love at First Sight

Speakers:

Nina Mishkin | Content Strategy Lead | Twitter

Recap by:

Maggie Durnien | Associate Product Specialist | Mindstream Media Group

This session shared keys to creating effective and relevant content on Twitter while answering the following questions:

• How do you capture attention in a fast-moving feed?
• How do you take advantage of the real-time conversational platform?

Mishkin asserted brands can get consumers to fall in love at first sight by creating instant, emotional connections with great digital content. But this is no easy feat. Consumers are exposed to about 132,130 ads per year and have increasingly short attention spans  Mishkin revealed ways to stop the thumb and create love at first site through content:

#1) Stop them in their tracks

• Hook the viewer by grabbing their attention.
• Pull people forward by showing humans in your content that consumers can connect with.
• Be artful with your branding. Try adding animation to optimize your logo.
• Seek relevance (and timeliness) by publishing the right post at the right times.

#2) Speak without sound

• Have a sound-off strategy. Make sure consumers who usually don’t have volume up on their mobile devices are able to understand your message. You can do this by adding captions to your content.
• Be informative with your content. Teach your viewers the main point you want to come across in the content. It’s OK if it’s short and sweet.
• Get clever with your captions.

#3) Tell a short story

• Have a visual identity. Let the viewer know immediately who you are.
• Simplify your message.
• Focus on your products.
• Have fun with your short stories.
• Align to passion areas.

#4) Repeat brilliance

• Create consistent themes and become synonymous with the theme that works for your brand.

#5) Get personal

• Create content that allows consumers to feel a part of your brand’s community.
• Reply and engage with consumers in creative ways. By doing this they will feel connected to your brand.

Following these keys to successful content will make your audience fall in love one great tweet at a time.