Is your company ready for Christmas? Our free retail guide is full of helpful tips and tricks to make sure that you have your marketing covered from A-Z.

1. S N A P S H O T
ThinkWorks

2. A high percentage of retail brands are
now extending their digital activities
with mobile and tablet apps, engaging
users on their commute and at home.
ASOS and River Island are two fashion
brands that are doing this really well,
with their wishlist and save for later
options encouraging brand loyalty.
Top Tip:
You can use specific ‘App-Install’ ads to promote your app through paid search. You can target
mobile/tablet users who have not previously installed your app and the ads will take searchers to
the relevant App Store to download your app. Finally, the keyword tool will suggest keywords for
your campaign based on search queries in the Google Play store. Easy as pie! Don’t forget that
you can also use Facebook to target users that might potentially download your app - we have
seen great success with our Facebook App Install campaigns.
Apps

3. Retailers can gain insight into how
people research different types
of products or services before
purchasing them through Google’s
free interactive tool, The Consumer
Barometer.
Top Tip:
You can also find information on what your audience looks like or the path from researching
(online/offline) to purchasing (online/offline) through the tool.
(The Consumer) Barometer

4. Cash on Delivery
Cash on Delivery (COD) is a
popular E-commerce payment
option in the Middle East. Many
consumers in the region do not
use credit cards, so this method
of payment has become a very
popular way to purchase online.
Top Tip:
In addition to the Middle East, retailers in many other countries, such as India and even Germany to
an extent, are offering cash on delivery as an option for their customers. If you are expanding to a new
market, ensure you have fully research the online purchasing habits within your chosen market, in
order to compete with local brands.

5. DS3
DS3 is fantastic web-based
PPC management tool with
some excellent benefits for
retail, including inventory
management and detailed
tracking which can show
which of your items of
stock are selling the best
through PPC.
Top Tip:
If you are not using it start as soon as possible. DS3 can save your production team valuable
time and that time can be reinvested into other parts of your campaign. Currently DS3 can
make 4 bid changes per day which is more than any other tool.

6. A great way for retail companies to grow
brand awareness, endorsements involve
celebrities who command a high degree
of recognition, trust and respect amongst
the general population. Brands often use
endorsements to try and sell a lifestyle to a
target audience.
Top Tip:
Ensure you are fully up to speed with laws and regulations around
endorsement adverts at each country you’re advertising in. In
the UK, all endorsements must adhere to the ASA guidelines.
Read more around regulations here: http://www.brandwatch.
com/2013/10/celebrity-twitter-endorsements-regulations-
allegations-and-selling-out/
Endorsements

7. Facebook Custom Audiences is a great
feature from Facebook that allows you to
target ads to users based on their email
address. This means you can upload a list
of your customers’ email addresses and
Facebook will match up the addresses with
current Facebook users to serve your ads
to only those people.
Top Tip:
Use Facebook Customer Audiences to upsell or cross-sell other
products to customers who have already bought from you or even
upload a list of your highest value customers and reward them
with a loyalty scheme. You can also target customers who haven’t
bought from you in quite some time with a discount to try and
encourage them to return.
Facebook Custom Audiences

8. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a great service offered
by Google generating detailed statistics
about retail website’s traffic, traffic sources
and measuring conversions and sales. It’s
the most widely used website statistics
service. Google Analytics is completely free
with a premium version available for a fee.
Top Tip:
If you don’t use Google Analytics start now - there is really no
excuse to not have GA set up even if you have other tracking
platforms in place. Google Analytics has great attribution and
demographic data analysis capabilities which can give you great
insights and help your campaign reach the next level.

9. Hashtag
Hashtags are a great way to
group ideas, concepts and
conversations together and are a
fantastic way to make it easy for a
customer to find others who are
posting about similar topics they
are interested in.
Top Tip:
Why not use hastags to bridge the gap between brick-and-mortar
and online. For example, Ted Baker encourages in-store selfies
using the hashtag #KissTed. These selfies are then posted on the
windows of Ted Bakers stores by filtering the hashtag.

10. Incremental sales
Top Tip:
Are you using search and display retargeting lists for customers who successfully checked out? Are your
messages and recommendations related to what each individual customer purchased? If ‘no’ then you
have an opportunity to boost your revenue with incremental sales.
Incremental sales, which is what
you get when you keep the
customer conversation going.

11. Jobs
Top Tip:
Are you bidding on your own / a competitor’s brand keywords? Have you added “jobs” as a negative
keyword (also “careers”, “vacancies”, “positions vacant”)? Save PPC budget and improve ROI by limiting
your PPC Ads to show only for keywords with a commercial intent.
Jobs - the wrong type of traffic
(unless you are a recruiter).

12. Key Season
Top Tip:
Prepare, prepare, prepare. Make sure you stay one step ahead of your competitors and have some
budget behind November in order to capture the search queries on SERPs ahead of the Christmas
period as many customers plan on snapping up a bargain during Black Friday and Cyber Monday! You
can target people through GSP and increase CTR on shopping campaigns by implementing voucher
codes to your feed!
Without a doubt, Q4 is the
most profitable time of year
for retailers. In 2014, Latitude’s
retailer clients reported
higher sales in November than
December, no doubt influenced
by the increased popularity of
Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

13. Lifetime Value of a Customer
Top Tip:
It’s not only essential to understand who your most valued customers are, but it’s also important to
understand their habits and how you can apply this information to your campaigns to find lookalikes.
You can do this for example with the help of companies like Callcredit, who can analyse your data
sets and tell you who look similar to your existing customers - this data can then be plugged into your
marketing campaigns to help you drive more revenue and hopefully loyal customers as well.
Retailers are starting to wisen up to
the value of retaining a customer for
life, not just a single purchase. We’re
observing more and more retention
marketing tactics these days with VIP
customer offers, store cards and loyalty
points all playing their part.

14. Mobile
Top Tip:
Make sure your website is mobile optimised - if the site does not display a mobile friendly tag you will
see huge traffic losses on your organic traffic. This is not the only reason however to get your site up to
scratch, as 41% of consumers use mobile in the beginning stages of their research process and follow up
on other devices.
For many retailers, mobile has already overtaken
desktop as a method of online shopping, making it
more important than ever to make sure the mobile
version of your site is optimised.

15. November
Top Tip:
Start planning your strategy in the summer and analyse the customers that came to your site last year:
tailor specific offers to that audience but also identify where you have potentially lost out - can you
create new targeting buckets with different messaging? Is your whole marketing strategy aligned? The
sooner you can plan the more money you can make.
November has taken over
December for many retailers
as the biggest month of the
year. Black Friday sales hit the
UK in a big way last year, and it
looks like they are here to stay.

16. Occam’s Razor
Top Tip:
Do your customers get all of the necessary information they need to make a purchase, or do you flood
them with distracting jargon, clauses and conditions? Keep it simple and help your customers to make
good decisions; the reward is higher conversion rates and more repeat business.
A byword for cutting away unnecessary information
(and also a very useful blog for online retailers).

17. Personalisation
Top Tip:
Don’t let your audience fall into a filter bubble, which can occur when we only get exposed to information
on the Internet that a company or website has deemed is relevant to us. This therefore means there is a lot
of information that we may want to view, but are not being exposed to.
Is it possible in retail that by suggesting certain items to our customers, we are limiting their choice and
perhaps even discouraging them from purchasing?
It can’t be denied that some level of personalisation is a positive thing, but it can be difficult to decide
where to draw the line. As with anything in marketing, the solution will probably come down to testing to
understand where the ‘sweet spot’ for your audience is.
Personalisation is the process
of altering the content a user
sees on site to make it more
relevant to them. This could
be recommended items,
previously viewed items,
specific offers based on the
geographical location and
much more.

18. QR codes
Top Tip:
Facebook started rolling out the Place Tips feature in June 2015 which provides tips at the top of
the News Feed for Facebook users when they enter a business or landmark. You can request a free
Bluetooth beacon from Facebook to enable this for your business
Truly out of vogue in 2015. Clever alternatives
to QR codes include applications such as Blippar,
iBeacons and SnapTag amongst many more.

19. Retargeting
Top Tip:
Remarketing can work incredibly well. It gives marketers the power to interact with the customers who
have already shown an interest in your brand. Now you just need to reconnect with them in order to
encourage them to place an order on your website. Make sure you have an AdWords or GA tag placed
on your site ASAP, as you need to get at least 100 people in your list before you can start. Make sure your
creative is eye catching and enticing in order to give the customer the best possible reason to revisit your
site and place an order – ensure your CTA is visible and clear.
Retargeting is the process
of trying to get customers
who have been on your site
previously back to the site to
make a purchase. This can be
done through email, display,
Facebook, Twitter and more.
Ad formats for retargeting are
also becoming increasingly
dynamic, hence more
engaging for the user.

20. Shopping Campaigns
Top Tip:
Google Shopping is taking over the search results. If you search for retail products these days, the
likelyhood that you are greeted with Shopping Ads as the first 3-6 results is huge. These lovely little
picture sales messages are much more persuading than text ads and are likely to increase sales. They
own most of the real estate and getting your feed oprimised to show as often as possible (sometimes
3-4 results in one go) is essential. Getting your feed optimised takes a lot of tweaking but once it’s right
your shopping campaign should turn into one of your strongest campaigns.
Shopping campaigns, previously called
“PLAs” or product listing ads, are
campaigns which allow you to display
the actual product you are offering on
the Google search results (rather than
in the typical ad format). They require a
feed which lists all of the products you
have in your site and can be managed
through Google AdWords. These have
become a huge focus for Google over
the past year and are continually
growing as they allow users a great
deal of choice as soon as they have
completed their search.

21. Tablet
Top Tip:
The user experience is key here - you have to make sure that you have a responsive site in place to give the
user the ultimate experience. This is important, as for example tablet PPC campaigns can’t be managed
seperately to desktop campaigns anymore so you dont want to waste any money on campaigns that you
can optimise as well.
According to a 2015 study that
looked at 40,000 Internet users
across 32 countries (Americas,
EMEA and Europe), the majority
of adults now personally own
a desktop or a laptop and a
smartphone with nearly half also
owning a tablet! This is why it is so
important for retailers to optimise
campaigns as each device has a
varying level of conversion rate.

22. User Experience (UX)
Top Tip:
Ensure you always have the consumer in mind when thinking about UX. In the retail sector, customers
want to check out and purchase their chosen products quickly and efficiently. Therefore you need to
ensure you have a clear login and check out as guest functionality. Another top tip would be to make
the key steps visible to the customer i.e. 4 steps to complete before you have purchased your product.
User Experience (UX) or Customer
Experience (CX) is the process of how
your user interacts with your site.

23. Video on Demand
Top Tip:
When you advertise on TV, are you also thinking about your online video audience? Are you creating
video ads especially for your online viewers or are you merely rehashing your TV ad? Your customers are
consuming more VOD than ever before, so be there to speak to them.
TV for the Internet age.

24. Website Outage
Top Tip:
Your approach should be considered with what you are trying to achieve as a brand. If you’ve got a
well-established offline operation, push customers to visit your stores as much as you think is right, or
balance it with keeping customers enticed enough to bear with you online through messages around
thanking customers for their patience. Likewise, if you’re worried about people feeling frustrated or
hard-done-by, consider implementing a virtual queuing system so this is no longer a problem.
While you should always prioritise
work on infrastructure to avoid website
outage happening in the first place,
it’s a good idea to prepare for such
occations during busy periods.

25. X-selling
Top Tip:
Amazon are legendary practitioners of the x-sell and up-sell – how effective is your service when it comes
to recommending related products and accessories?
An important tactic for closing
more sales and increasing your
profit margins.

26. Youtube
Top Tip:
While advertising on Youtube can be expensive, the platform does offer some more cost-effective ways
of advertising. Youtube TrueView allows brands to pay only when someone chooses to watch their
video ad, so you don’t waste money advertising to people who aren’t interested.
YouTube is gradually becoming an
online destination for consumers who
want to see products in action before
they purchase, such as electricals,
skincare and clothing.

27. Zoella
Top Tip:
While partnering with vloggers can be great for brand exposure, vloggers are still considered the least
effective source of product discovery according to GWI’s latest trend report. Only 4% of all internet users
find out about a new brand, products and services via vlogging. It’s always good to think about where your
marketing budget is best spent.
Zoella is YouTube vlogger with a
whopping 8 million subscribers.
She is a self made star with
beauty brands fighting over each
other to get her to showcase their
products on her latest video.

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www.latitudegroup.com
28
www.latitudegroup.com
Struggling to do all your digital
marketing by yourself?
We can help.
Get in touch:
W: www.latitudegroup.com
E: hello@latitudegroup.com
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