Digital Lifescapes

When a buyer visits a company's website, will their visit result in a good user experience -- regardless of the device they're using at the time? More often than not, that experience is within a smaller screen on a mobile device -- such as a smartphone or media tablet. Savvy marketers are already starting to influence the adoption of mobile-first design strategies for their online properties.  Making it easier to buy something via a mobile device is a forward-thinking competitive advantage, because this activity will become more mainstream over time. eBusiness teams are working on rebuilding their legacy desktop site experiences to be responsive across all web-enabled touch-points, but it's a huge undertaking and few organizations have the budget or risk appetite to redesign all of their web assets in one fell swoop. Many teams start with the easy places on their website -- such as the home page, the category pages, the campaign landing pages -- after all, these pages...

Today, what's the primary purpose of the website for a major brand? Should content from social media drive traffic to the brand's website? Or should brand sites drive traffic to social sites? If a brand’s social media activity gets more traffic than its website, is it necessary to maintain both? These are the key questions that eMarketer attempted to answer during their latest market study. Perhaps 2013 is the time to rethink the inherent goal and objectives for maintaining a corporate branded website. Regardless, when potential customers search for online information during their buying cycle, they eventually arrive at a company's primary site. That being said, eMarketer believes that product marketers are typically spending more effort to engage with customers outside of their company website -- on Facebook and numerous other social media channels. Brand web pages are still a primary resource for people seeking information about products and the companies that m...

Today's technology-centric business success often hinges on the ability to inform and guide prospective customers who are entering the buying-cycle for complex products and services. However, few marketers have mastered this essential skill -- informing and guiding via digital multimedia content -- in a meaningful way. That said, eMarketer reports that findings from Focus Research indicate business-to-consumer (B2C) marketers are more likely to direct their attention to improving client understanding and retention this year than their business-to-business (B2B) counterparts, who are placing a higher emphasis on filling the sales pipeline. Among B2B marketers, lead acquisition was the top priority for 55 percent of respondents, followed by lead conversion (45 percent). Both B2B and B2C marketers were equally focused on building brand awareness. The inherent complexity of the B2B buying process often requires better sales support tools -- that facilitate and accelerate the ...

According to a recent eMarketer report, a study of the typical online buying process has uncovered the journey for most people, and the growing number of resources that buyers rely on -- as they make their informed purchase decisions. Research from GroupM Search and comScore highlights the increased use of another resource consumers are turning to in combination with their proven search engine usage -- that being, a variety social media content. Skeptical marketers that question the influence of independent product reviews on purchasing habits now have reason to rethink that skepticism. eMarketer says that buyers who will purchase are almost as likely to use a combination of search and social resources (48 percent) as they are to just use search alone (51 percent). Furthermore, when people were exposed to both brand-specific search results and social media, search click-through rates increased by 94 percent -- indicating how substantive product review content can help market...