MarketStar Blog

In the case of retail, the customer is king. With today’s digital and social outlets, customers influence, motivate, and sway other customers based on personal experience and opinion more than ever before. This infographic pulls out key stats from our Transforming Retail in the Age of the Customer eBook, highlighting what matters most in a world of educated customers.

CES is the land of dreams for early adopters, geeks and of course consumer electronics companies looking to ply their wares.  On a side note, we learned it isn’t a comfortable environment for movie directors.

In 2013, Google unveiled its new search algorithm called Hummingbird, revolutionizing how search queries are interpreted. Unlike traditional algorithms that matched keywords to websites, Hummingbird focuses on understanding the intent behind a search query. For example, if you type “Which is the place closest to me where I can watch gravity,” a traditional search engine might focus on the keyword “gravity.” 

Marketing Automation has seen the highest growth rate in the past five years, and it has changed from being a system to automate emails to being a sophisticated system for attracting, nurturing, engaging and retaining customers. In the year 2014, the most noteworthy development is how the focus of Marketing Automation has now drifted from the power and speed of automation to the necessity of personalization and relationship-building. 

We’re getting social on whole new level at MarketStar. It’s been a full month since the Grand Opening of our social intranet for all our employees in the U.S. and Canada. More than 2,000 employees now use MarketStar Connect daily as a way to collaborate, connect, and communicate. As the Social Community Manager, it’s exciting to see the innovative ways our teams are using social technology to be more efficient and effective for our clients.

Google’s most recent Panda update sent shockwaves across the web-o-sphere with popular sites such as eBay, ask.com and yellowpages.com taking huge dips in traffic. The Panda 4.0 mirrors Google’s previous updates and is an effort by Google to ensure that it’s users only get access to the best content, which means sites (whether big or small) duplicating content or not providing value to their users will take a hit and see a drop in rankings. Although this update is said to have affected large companies and sites more than the small enterprises, it has also ended up providing an opportunity for small sites to rank well if they possess high quality and genuine content. 

The Panda update is not just a warning for sites with poor content strategy, it is a clear reminder for companies to re-visit and revamp their SEO strategies in order to acquire and maintain search engine visibility and rankings. Here are some steps that marketers can take to deal with this update: 

Consumers are using mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, connected devices (iPods, smartwatches) etc. to enhance their shopping experience. With technology that allows them to make purchase decisions on the go, shopping behaviors have altered indefinitely. Especially mobile technology is gradually substituting human interactions as a study shows that 73% of shoppers with smartphones prefer to reference their mobile device in-store rather than ask a sales associate for help (Source: Accenture, reported by Internet Retailer, 2010). Changes such as these have altered today’s shopper’s purchase journey indefinitely. 

Introduction

Back in the days of mainframe computers, no one could have fathomed these huge devices fitting in the laps of users in only a few years. Technologies, just like everything else in the universe, follow a curve of evolution, with the lesser weaker ones eventually dying out. Some foresee it happening to the less-mobile personal computers of today, which the tablets and smartphones of the world will replace. This is evident from the increasing adoption rates of these devices worldwide. Currently there are 5 times as many mobiles as PCs in the world, with this number expected to double, maybe triple, over the years. This trend has huge implications for marketers and consumers alike. Mobile is driving a second, more profound internet revolution by changing how consumers interact with brands, disrupting traditional business models with their ubiquity. The mobile’s omnipresence now calls for marketers to not only include mobile in their marketing mix but instead have mobile-focused marketing strategies to capture the attention of today’s on-the-go consumers.