Macy’s Explores the Lure of Themed Content
Macy's has reached into the annals of department store history with a recent promotion. Their Brazil-themed marketing push, which officially debuted April 22, mirrors decades-old department store promotions that sought to pull customers in with food, music, and a select set of products tied to a distant land. In Macy's case, that means store-in-store areas dubbed "O Mercado, The Market at Macy's" and a themed landing page on their site. (You can...read more >>
Too Many Cooks: The Perils of Content by Committee
Over at Econsultancy today, Catherine Toole addresses one of the more lamented perils of creating effective, expertly written content: too-large groups of too-involved stakeholders. It's hard for stakeholders to step back from something as crucial as content, especially if they're acknowledged experts in the subject. However, if you're a content creator, you're an acknowledged expert in combining voice, tone, and accuracy--and possibly SEO, CTAs,...read more >>
Avoid the Telephone Game with Content Blueprinting
Remember the childhood game "Telephone"? You come up with a sentence and whisper it to your neighbor, who whispers it to her neighbor, and so on? By the time the sentence reaches the end of the line, it barely resembles its former self. In my day, Telephone was a fun excuse to say wacky, nonsensical, and sometimes unspeakable things, like curse words or obvious hints about someone's secret crush. Telephone was also instructive--it showed how easily...read more >>
Compelling Descriptions for Mundane Products
Many products are easy to make sound exciting: a DSLR camera, a high-tech mountain bike, or an iPad has no shortage of awesome features. However, some consumer products present more of a challenge to a marketer or merchandiser hoping to make sales. A pair of SmartWool long undies, no matter how divine, might be harder to talk up. With that challenge in mind, I offer you a helpful perspective on the subject from Copyblogger. Contributor Sean D'Souza...read more >>
Finding Your Audience Beyond Demographics
I think we're all guilty of occasionally writing for a target demographic instead of for real human beings. James Chartrand has a great article on Copyblogger in which he talks about the importance of knowing your audience when writing persuasive copy. The biggest problem is that we see people of a specific demographic in an entirely different way than the people themselves do. We see a collection of statistics about ages and genders while they see...read more >>
Smart SEO for the Year of Content
"Good, honest content to which other sites link impresses the hell out of Google," says Thad Rueter, Senior Editor at Internet Retailer. We at Content Ping have been evangelizing about the import of quality content since Donald Trump wore short pants. Not only does it offer the best strategy for higher conversion, it's also increasingly crucial to SEO success with every passing Panda update. Every time Google tweaks its algorithm, an angel gets...read more >>
Spelling Mistakes Harm E-Commerce Conversion Rates
As we've written before, good spelling and grammar are essential to product merchandising and to selling products online. But don't take our word for it. Charles Nicholls at Practical eCommerce recently caught up with Charles Duncombe, CEO of JustSayPlease, a U.K.-based e-commerce company with annual revenues of $20 million across multiple websites. Duncombe reports that just one misspelled word (in the case of their hosiery Web site, the all-important...read more >>
Cashing in on Effective Multi-Tiered Content Merchandising
We've previously explored how a multi-tiered approach to content merchandising can help retailers boost online sales. But apparently some merchandisers were too distracted by those Occupy Wall Street drum circles to follow our advice. At content26, we recently got a front row seat on how not to approach multi-channel content creation. We would like to share what we learned in order to help your company plan a cost-effective, headache-free content...read more >>
Calvin Klein Enhances Stores, and a Copywriting Tip
A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece on the growing overlap between smartphone use and brick-and-mortar shopping. We can add Calvin Klein to the list of retailers who are recognizing and trying to capitalize on the phenomenon. In time for holiday shopping madness, the jeans and undies leader is allying with Shazam, creator of the fun, semi-useful app that recognizes snippets of music like an acoustic fingerprint and generates song information. Now,...read more >>
Marketing With a Story
"Scientists believe that we are hard-wired to pay attention to stories," Dooley notes. Dooley says that rather than just listing out facts and figures about your product or service, you should "tell the first-hand story of a customer who used your product to save money and get promoted." Sounds easier said than done, especially when you have less space and fewer words to work with. A few ways to get past those roadblocks are to tell a story using...read more >>