Welcome to part three of our eCommerce Marketing Hierarchy of Needs. This edition is all about tactics to gain brand awareness within a specific niche market. You may wish to check out the prerequisites outlined in the first and second parts of the series before reading this entry. The recommendations that follow assume that you’ve already proven your business concept and created a basic and functional website. If you’re at the stage where you find your…
This is part two of a five part series called the eCommerce Hierarchy of Needs. Part One discussed marketing tactics for very early stage start-ups trying to prove their business concept. This installment is for companies who have proven their concept and determined it worthwhile pursuing and investing in. The biggest need for entrepreneurs at this stage is the basic building block of every eCommerce company — a functional website. For each tier in the…
This is the first entry in a five-part series of blogs we’ve dubbed the ‘eCommerce Marketing Hierarchy of Needs’. The objective for these blogs is certainly audacious. We aim to provide a simple framework for eCommerce businesses that helps to identify which marketing activities should be prioritized based on a company’s growth stage. We will help answer questions like: “should we be investing to improve our website’s user experience or is that time/money better spent…
If you are talking to a marketing agency about new opportunities, they better ask how you’ll be measuring results. If they don’t, you should just turn and run, hang up the phone, click the red button on Skype, or whatever. Any honest marketer worth their salt knows that having a measurement plan is essential for success. Otherwise you are blind to the results of your marketing initiatives, and lacking the insight to keep your marketer…
World Hosting Days will be in Las Vegas next week. Having been to some hosting industry events before, I can only imagine the professionalism that will occur at the bars, nightclubs, and casinos of Sin City. It’s the latter sin that I’d like to focus on for this blog entry. Most readers will not be aware that I was once an avid poker player. So as the hosting industry descends upon the gambling capital of…
Anyone who works in the web hosting, cloud, or data center industries knows that network outages are unavoidable. No matter how many redundancies you have in place, “stuff” happens. No-one is immune, even Amazon has major outages. With that reality in mind, I am somewhat sympathetic to NeuLion Inc., who finds themselves in the midst of a public relations nightmare. NeuLion is a streaming video provider who works with major sports leagues like the NFL,…
One of the most challenging and overwhelming parts of marketing is figuring out exactly what to do and where to allocate your budget. You certainly can’t be everywhere and do everything, so you need to choose wisely. It comes down to so many factors, including your goals, your competencies, your budget, your competitive environment, and your internal resources. Marketing is a highly customized endeavour. One size does not fit all. With that said, there…
Online advertising and media buying is a huge topic. There are so many ins and outs, best practices and things to think about. In this post, I wanted to touch on a few key points that I find myself making again and again when discussing effective digital advertising with our clients. Tracking We’ve all heard the marketing cliché, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”…
