Remember the days when you’d have to use an encyclopaedia to finish off your history report? Or when you’d buy a DIY book for inspiration for your next craft project? What about the days when you’d send a letter or a postcard?
Coming back from a holiday meant inviting everyone over to flip through vacation photos, and taking a photo of yourself involved using the timer on the camera then quickly running across the room, getting into position while hoping your hair didn’t mess up and your smile looks good and you’re not squinting and- BOOM! picture taken.

You might have a (slight) problem

Do you still remember all of your friends’ phone numbers by heart- do you even call them anymore?
Do you feel an incessant need to snap a photo of everything and share it with the world?
Do your Facebook ‘friends’ really care about your cat’s face when it’s sleeping, or how many reps you did at the gym, or about the romantic meal you just had with your better half, or the amazingly yummy ham and cheese toast resting on a bed of lettuce you had at 3am because you couldn’t sleep because your neighbour’s cocker spaniel wouldn’t stop barking after a cat ran across the road and climbed up a tree and…..
Yeah. No.

O is for online. And oh are we online!

Let’s start here – we love the digital world. We find it fascinating, the things that can be managed through the internet are amazing. For example, this week Mark Zuckerberg announced that 1 Billion people were on Facebook at the same time- that’s 1 out of every 7 people in the world! The ALS foundation raised about $100 million through the ALS ice bucket challenge last Summer while creating huge global awareness. Families who might be separated by distance can speak to each other in real time through Skype, WhatsApp, Messenger, Viber… or anything else.
However there is a big but (and we cannot lie).
The ‘but’ is that we, as a digital marketing agency know what it’s like to be logged in almost all day long. Whether it’s reading up on the latest news, monitoring different social media accounts, or analysing the latest trends, we’re more or less connected all day long. The e-mails and notifications don’t really stop, but we don’t mind because it’s what we do. Then when work’s over our computers might be off, but we’re not. We’re connecting with friends and family, discussing the evening’s plans, taking photos of our mouth watering meals, or curating our Pinterest boards – we’re always there…. 24/7, tapping away.

So when does it get too much?

Everyone has their own limits, some can be ‘logged in’ longer than others, but the reality is that everyone needs a break. That’s where our activities come in – we eat together as often as we can, we’ve moved into an open plan space, and we have our weekly brainstorming sessions and occasional nights out. Why? Because we understand the value in disconnecting and enjoying each other’s company the good old fashioned way. We enjoy walking to the supermarket in the scorching heat – just because it gets us away from our desk and lets us stretch our legs. We enjoy making tea for the whole office just so that we can visit everyone’s desk and say hi. We leave sticky notes instead of sending e-mails, and we occasionally give a stressed out colleague a high five as we pass them in the corridor, or surprise them with hot chocolate on their desk as their deadline fast approaches.
These are simple things – but they make a huge difference.

A small request

So we have a small request… or even a task. Call your friends and have a chat, get up off your chair and say hi to your colleague the good old fashioned way, organise a day out with your staff.
The digital world is a beautiful one, but it’s not the only one. So, as advocates of the beauty of going online, we’re asking you to take the time to switch off and connect the good old fashioned way.
What do you think?

The post O is for online appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

So is there scope for marketing higher value items online? Of course there is, you just need to keep a few things in mind when planning your digital strategy. Some best practices simply extend into the realm of high-value items, gaining more importance.

Look & feel

First impressions count, and in this market, first impressions really make or break your campaigns. High net worth individuals are usually very busy people. Anything that caters for them should feel immediately familiar. There is a very distinct set of aesthetic values that sets luxury brands apart, make sure your brand follows these while being communicative and evoking intellectual intrigue. Functionality should also be seamless, no fiddly controls or long and roundabout procedures.

Targeting

Unfortunately you cannot really target people by net worth or income levels, but there is still a lot of scope for more of a pin-point approach to marketing luxury items. With careful planning and execution you should be able to get to the right sites to place your ads on. If you advertise on the Google Adwords network, then take the time to research which sites you want to limit your ads to. It might also be worth your while to connect with a few top sites in your sector and purchasing advertising placement manually or working with them on lead generation campaigns.

Quality over quantity

In general you have to accept that the higher the value of the product, the higher your cost per acquisition is. This, however, works out well anyway, to a certain extent, because we are usually looking for a smaller number of clients. The problem this brings along with it, however, is that you can’t rely on numbers alone. You should concentrate much more on analysing the quality of your leads than the raw quantity, because even if you’re paying a lot for them, they might not necessarily be the kind of leads that you need. It is much better to be attracting ten high net-worth individuals than a thousand droolers.

Superior deliverables and service

If you’re charging more for your products because they offer something better than your competitors, then you have to make sure that the whole customer experience matches this. Set SLAs that will determine how long your customer service takes to answer customer queries online, prescribe a tone of voice, and offer something extra. Use social media to extend your service, and if you can afford it, also use social media to solve your customers’ problems, even if you’re not the cause of the problems in the first place. Being nice to people online is a sure-fire way of gaining respect, but going the extra mile for a select group of customers can build the kind of brand loyalty that money just can’t buy.

Responsive design

We’ve already gone over the importance of having clear and concise messages that are well-presented, but we cannot really emphasise how essential it is to have responsive designs and coding for all your online material. Responsive design adapts itself to different devices, so that the content on your website appears differently based on the screen size and type it is being displayed on. You might really love the look of that navigation bar which is small and sleek on a desktop where you’re using a mouse to navigate, but try hitting them with pudgy fingers on a small mobile phone screen and you’ll be pressing the back button to leave the site after your second attempt at hitting the store button. Chances are you’ll never return.

Gated communities

The internet has made the possibility of virtual gated communities a reality, and if you have the budget for it, creating your own community and keeping your customers engaged on it is the ultimate way to build brand loyalty. Even if you do not have the time or resources to build your own, there are quite a few of them out there that are just waiting to be tapped into. A Small World (www.asmallworld.com) is a classic example of a community of affluent (mainly) young adults who are interested in networking with other similar people.

At the end of the day, if you carry the values that made your luxury product a success into the digital world, you should have no problems building the right audience for your brand. Once you have the audience sorted, the rest will follow.
Below we’ve collected some of the sites we admire, and why we love them:

Gucci.com

Gucci’s site follows in the footsteps of its products: it is well-designed, works well, and developed to impress. It is also great at showing off offers and/or new products. Gucci also have an impressive following on social media: 12 million likes on Facebook, 2.5 million on Google+, and around a million each on Twitter and Instagram. Not too shabby. Oh, and they even have their own app on iTunes.

RalphLauren.com

Ralph Lauren’s site is beautiful and easy to use. It also offers loads of content, designed to keep you stuck on the site for ages. Their Style Guide is a virtual magazine which helps devoted buyers keep up to date with all the latest trends while RL Magazine is an online roundup of feature articles about luxury living. The brand has over 7 million Facebook likes and posts very regularly.

Hermes.com

I’m meant to tell you to steer clear of Flash. I’m meant to tell you that you should not even dream of having a site that won’t work on mobile. I’m meant to tell you a whole lot of things. But instead I’m here, pressing another box, exploring another corner, magnifying another picture and watching another video clip. The Hermes site takes all the things you should not do about a site, does them all and comes up with a magical result that will suck you in (as long as you’re at your computer or at your iPad).

Rolex.com

Rolex understood a long time ago that collaborations with major upmarket events can help boost their brand. Their site acts as a perfect extension to this belief and covers all the international sporting events that they associate themselves with. Rolex’s site is a joy to behold, easy to navigate, mobile friendly and highly shareable. The fact that they have well-written articles and stunning photography does not hurt, either.
(A shorter version of this article first appeared in Money Magazine – www.moneymag.me)

The post Promoting luxury goods online appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Does this mean there’s no room for creativity and skill? On the contrary, driving online sales and leads is pretty far from marketing by numbers.

Each campaign needs new creative, new copy, new design and new coding. Every time you wish to test, you need to come up with two (or more) variants of one of the elements and test it accordingly, and you’d have to go through thousands of iterations before you arrived where you need to.

The different iterations are usually slight tweaks to a great and well-thought out campaign: change the colour of a button here, add a word there or remove a field in this form here. Then test, measure, change and move on to the next element.

Any decent online marketer should be obsessed with one thing: conversions. How many people out there can we convert into relationships? How many relationships can we convert into leads? How many leads are we converting into sales?

So what goes into the perfect online campaign? What are the elements top web designers look out for when building a campaign that will convert?

Stunning visuals

First impressions count wherever you are, but online they make or break campaigns. It is so easy to dismiss a mailer that you don’t like that unless the design is immediately captivating, there is a very high chance that it will be closed away and forgotten in seconds.

With online designs, you can’t rely on the physical aspect of your design – there is no expensive paper to woo prospects, no fancy cutter to intrigue them, it all boils down to the quality of the artwork you (or your agency) can come up with.

Clear message

Beautiful design is nothing without strong copy. You can’t afford to have copy that is not aimed at converting with such a short attention span at your disposal. The only way to convert is to have a message that is clear, concise and to the point.

Show your product or service’s benefits. Make it seem like an obvious choice for punters. Do not lose them in long and winding descriptions and long words. This is not a literary competition – if you like long and complicated words, keep them for when you play scrabble with your friends.

Fewer calls to action

Even if you nail the copy, things can still go awry. Keep it simple, do not try to sell all your products and services at once. It is good to show people that you have variety, but you have to make their next step a no-brainer, and in order to achieve this you should minimise the number of calls to action you have in any online campaign.

This should be a direct consequence of your campaign planning process, during which you should have decided what it is you want your online effort to achieve. If you set out to increase the sales of tablets, don’t confuse your customers by telling them that you also sell computers, laptops, keyboards, mice, printers, consumables, oh – and we also sell mice mats.

Ease of use

You have a perfect campaign, people like it as soon as they land on the page or open the email. They read the copy and seem interested in your product. They click through the strong call to action to buy your product but then boom, they are faced with a form that has 30 fields in it.

You’re asking them to give you their ID card number. You want to know what their grandmother earned in 1936. Once you’ve convinced people to take action you have to make it as easy as possible, so keep forms and steps needed to an absolute minimum. You can always gather more data after you’ve converted the client.

At the end of the day, the perfect online marketing campaign boils down to one thing – how compelling you make it for people out there to take the action you want them to. Put yourself in their shoes and see what they’d want, not what you’d like to flaunt. Online marketing campaigns can be scary at first, but get in there, aim at converting well and you will see your return on investment soar.

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