I have owed this post for quite some time and this week’s industry news around Edgerank and Facebook’s algorithm reminded me that I had this one in the pipeline. I figured given recent events marketers and businesses either already using Facebook or planning to do so will find the post useful.

Be warned that this post is specifically targeted at ecommerce business that may already have Facebook fan pages, however the approach is very much useful to any other businesses with online presence that may want to consider targeting multiple territories without necessarily over complicating their existing site. With that said and with no further ado, I shall explain the concept in hand.

So we have established that you may be a successful retailer with growing sales and you have noticed an increasing number of sales and enquiries from overseas. Perhaps you have distributors or resellers in these territories, in that instance you have already considered expansion and spoken to your web development company. If you got that far I would have expected you to get a quote which might have made you fall off your chair. At this point you have probably decided not to proceed and, had you not, you would still need to consider other costs such as SEO, hosting, translation of your content and possibly PPC to get it off the ground.

With all that in mind why dive directly into a multilingual site?  Why not test the water and evaluate what the audience response to your product, service and brand on the designated territory might be?

So why not use a platform with existing global capabilities like Facebook? If you don’t already have presence this may be a daunting task, however Facebook can be a good entry point into the multilingual arena. A great example is Clarin’s Facebook page there you can see on the bottom left hand corner they have links to other Facebook pages specific to territories. On each regional page, as one would have expected, the content served is targeted to the native language of that territory, improving the overall local user experience. To encourage some more interaction without having to go down the road of immediate interaction (which would be required in the long term) with your localised page, you could also try using Facebook shopping. For those who are not aware of what  Facebook Shopping is, it may be worth a quick recap. Earlier this year Facebook began rolling out its ecommerce functionality onto Facebook pages, allowing fans of a given group/page to purchase products without having to leave Facebook. Some good examples include:

Livescribe (the only niggle here is that this one actually takes you to an external site)

ASOS (obviously the fashion giant has enabled the feature to buy straight from Facebook on the proviso that you become a fan first!)

The combination of these two techniques may make a very appealing business case towards multi-territorial expansion, especially when all you need to do once you have the product feeds is to structure the copy and tone to appeal to the local market. If that market doesn’t work you can take the learnings and try again. You can probably recycle the same templates and product feed; all you need to do is produce the localised version.

It may well be that we can say good bye to overly complicated multi-territorial projects and instead embrace the 2.0 technology to deliver the same result at half the cost.

Are you engaging on Facebook on other territories? Or are you using Facebook shopping? If so,  tell us what you like or dislike.

What were you doing on Saturday April 9^th 2011? Yes, last Saturday. “I was using my internet-enabled mobile device to browse the internet, Paul,” you say? Well I didn’t expect that to be the first answer I got, admittedly, but it does help to conveniently underline the message of this post, so I thank you. Mobile internet traffic is increasing rapidly, particularly in the UK. On top of that, there are a series of external factors that are influencing the volumes on any given day. Looking at our client’s analytics data, as I do, I have been seeing several new patterns and rules emerging for marketers to deal with.

Mobile users by the tens of thousands. Photo by Carlhiett.co.uk

Mobile traffic behaves differently to desktop traffic. The details of that are perhaps left to another post but take a look at your own web traffic and you’ll probably see shorter visits, fewer pageviews and if your site is well designed for mobile, possibly higher conversion rates. But I only bring that up to emphasise the fact that we all need to adapt our sites and marketing quickly to the mobile visitor.

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For years we at Mediarun have been aware of the relationship between an increase in non-brand organic search visits and a direct correlation increase in brand search visits. Using standard tools such as Google Analytics this relationship in terms of traffic is relatively easy to establish and to get a handle on. Often convincing clients of this relationship has proved challenging but on the whole most informed client side marketers are happy to take this on board.

Yes, another not-too-subtle visual pun. It was late on a Thursday, okay.

Attributing a value on conversions however has traditionally proved a lot trickier. Writing on Econsultancy last week Paul Cook founder of Tag Man highlights some interesting points. The thesis of the article was that organic SEO and social media channels are being chronically undervalued. Based on ‘attributed conversions’  he identified that SEO should be credited with 14 times more value in terms of conversions and that social media is being undervalued by eight times.

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Boutiques.com homepage, the new fashion catalog by Google

Our fashionista experts flagged this to us and I have to say I had no idea this was going on. It’s very interesting to see Google expanding to such a niche market like fashion were the giant had never revealed any experience or involvement in the past.  What are we talking about? Well Boutiques.com, a platform for all fashionable clothes to be listed and categorised by designer, style or type.  The purpose of this platform is to change the way users shop for fashionable clothes online.

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Compared to travel, FMCG and electronics the bulk of the UK fashion industry stumbled out of the ecommerce starting blocks back in the early noughties. Today however, the sector is in rude health with a growing market and many thriving online brands. With ecommerce set to grow in the UK by 36% in the next 18 months and increasing online competition, the spoils are there for the retailers that get it right.

Shopping Mall, Kuala Lumpur by NeilsPhotography

The internet, of course, is not the high street and there are many new things to learn. There are many good companies helping retailers but stories of egregious claims and inflated fees from unscrupulous SEO agencies persist even today.  Here then, are 4 of the biggest challenges a fashion retailer must consider when launching their business online.

1.      Communicating your offering – Having a website that successfully translates the brand and clothes to the visitor. Placing visitors as close to the clothes as possible is vital but so is showing them the reason to buy into your brand in the first place (or reminding your loyal fans why they love you). The website can’t just look good either. It’s got to convert and be easy to use for you and your visitors.

2.      Stock management – Having items in stock seems obvious but the website is often treated by retailers as secondary to the shop. As such, a vicious circle is created where website sales are held back by unavailable stock and it never gets the chance to grow and exceed the offline presence.

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