How Amazon is Disrupting the Product Restocking Market

 

In 2015, Amazon launched a Dash Replacement Service. The service offered with home appliances with built in connected API’s with the option of reordering dish soap and detergent. Since early 2015 brands such as Brother International, General Electric, Gmate have partnered with the online retailer. Even Samsung has partnered up with Amazon to allow it’s printer customers to reorder directly from the connected printer API on certain models.

In its latest move, Amazon has partnered with Brita to come up with connected water filter. Brita decided to partner with Amazon in an effort to combat an increase in Bottle water sales which threatens to take away market share from the company.

What this means for brick and mortar retail

As Amazon continues to offer more and more services where customers don’t need to leave their homes, many retailers will have to deal with declining sales and market share from their physical stores. Retailers will be forced to canalize  their own business through E commerce or go out of business.

The only way brick and mortar retail can keep their existing stores is by repurposing and branding them. In other words, retailers will need to make in store shopping an experience.

Examples of  Brands that have made in store shopping an experience are:

Barnes & Noble including Starbucks in its stores allowing customers to sit and read books while enjoying Coffee. The Starbucks allow for an additional stream of revenue for the company.

Macy’s has included Starbucks in its flagship store in New York City.

Integrating Technology into Retail & Supermarket Spaces

Many stores have integrated digital technologies with mobile devices making it easier for customers to pay with phones.

Tesla has opened a retail store in Toronto where users can use the touch screens to design their own car.

Amazon also has a grocery delivery service but  technology can also be integrated into grocery stores as well. From mobile technology taking payments to digital signage, Tesco a multinational grocery chain is doing just that.

The bottom line is that Amazon is here to stay & retail stores need to be combined with e commerce to make in store shopping better for customers.

How has Amazon changed the way you buy & shop for products?

Comment and share below.

Article Sources:

Amazon is ready to Start Restocking your Home for you by Lauren Goode & The Verge

Amazon Dash will now reorder ink by Lauren Goode & The Verge

Amazon Team up with Brita team up for Wi-Fi water pitchers by Lauren Goode & The Verge

Building  a Better Shopping Experience by Nurum

About the Author

Dan is passionate about using Marketing to help businesses drive sales. He has worked on various marketing assignments that include a Start Up, Political Campaign & a Digital Marketing Conference.

Prior to Teaching, Dan served customers as an Outside Sales & Marketing Representative in the Dental industry. In this role, he taught and trained Dentists on the company’s products and services using a consultative selling approach. He also supported the company’s marketing efforts at industry trade shows & in the field through lead generation of Digital Technology along with large Dental Equipment.

He writes and publishes a business blog on the topics of Sales, Marketing & Social Media entitled Sales, Marketing & Social Media Today.

Dan is seeking a full time marketing role in New York City. He is interested in roles in Direct, Digital, Content & Social Media Marketing. If your company is hiring for roles in these areas, contact him directly via a free LinkedIn Message or email him at Dan@DanGalante.com to set up interviews.

 

 

WordPress & Tumblr 101: Writing & Publishing an Engaging Blog Article

WordPress & Tumblr are great publishing platforms where users can create customized & branded content which includes domain names. For tips on setting up a blog click here.

Today I am going to focus on how to write & publish a killer blog article on these platforms.

When writing a blog article, your goals are to:

1. Educate & inform readers about your products & expertise

2. Engage your readers & build an audience

Let’s examine the features of a WordPress & Tumblr blog.

The Structure of the Blog Article 

 Title

The platform provides a place for a title.

Tool Bar

Underneath the title, there is a tool bar similar to one you would see in Microsoft word that allows writers to use headings, Bold, Italics, underline, center, bullet pints and numerical lists. Users can also use the tool bar to insert links, images, and videos. (tumblr users need to click the button on the side of the blog platform for the tool bar to appear.)

Body

Next, is the body of the platform where users can write the body of their content and lastly there is the SEO tags.

Pictures/Images

Users can also upload an image at through out their article, Bloggers should  credit their image source whenever possible.

Writing on WordPress & tumblr

Now that we have described the inner workings of the the WordPress & tumblr blog, let’s describe how to write compelling posts.

Now you might be asking what topics should write about?

Popular topics are as follows:

1. Your insights on trends in your industry.

2. Case Studies

3. Topics in the News

4. How to articles that teach readers how to do something.

5. How you learned from failures and adversities.

6. Questions & Answers

The Body of your Post

Once you have chosen your topic you are ready to start writing. You must create a thesis which is the claims that you are making. This should be followed up with three to four paragraphs that prove your thesis, claim and assertion. Paragraphs should be 4 to 6 sentences when possible.

Within these paragraphs, you should use headings and  sub headings along with bullet points so your text is easy to read. The text should be visually appealing  to the reader.

In terms, of how long your post should be it is up to you. There is no set length, rather your post should be long enough to prove out your thesis, assertion and claim.

Title

Your title should reflect what the topic that you are writing about while being engaging to readers. Most people just skim the headlines as they are bombarded with content, in other words you have just seconds to catch their attention.

Popular titles include:

1. How to’s,

2. lists ex 7 ways to _______

3 A question.

4. Why ________

SEO tags Keywords

Make sure to pick keywords that reflect your topic and match the title and content

Images

Make sure when you upload images that reflect what your post is about.

Video’s/embeds

To enhance your text, you can embed videos and presentations from Slideshare & YouTube. This can be a strategy to re-purpose existing content.

Calls to action

Make sure that your posts have a call to action at the end. In other words, what action do you want your reader to take as a result of reading your post.

Sharing

You can share your post in the following ways:

1. On LinkedIn through a status update, your LinkedIn groups & messages.

2. Through the Social Sharing buttons that include LinkedIn, Facebook, Google+ & Twitter.

3. Through links

4. Ask questions of the reader that encourage them to comment and start a discussion.

This is how to write a blog post on WordPress & tumblr that engages readers & builds an audience.

What strategies do you use to write a blog post?

About the Author

Dan is passionate about using Marketing to help businesses drive sales. He has worked on various marketing assignments that include a Start Up, Political Campaign & a Digital Marketing Conference.

Prior to Teaching, Dan served customers as an Outside Sales & Marketing Representative in the Dental industry. In this role, he taught and trained Dentists on the company’s products and services using a consultative selling approach. He also supported the company’s marketing efforts at industry trade shows & in the field through lead generation of Digital Technology along with large Dental Equipment.

He writes and publishes a business blog on the topics of Sales, Marketing & Social Media entitled Sales, Marketing & Social Media Today.

Dan is seeking a full time marketing role in New York City. He is interested in roles in Direct, Digital, Content & Social Media Marketing. If your company is hiring for roles in these areas, contact him directly via a free LinkedIn Message or email him at Dan@DanGalante.com to set up interviews.

AAEAAQAAAAAAAATWAAAAJDg3MWM4YWM0LWMyMWYtNDQwOC04OGU0LTg0NDVhYWQ3MzE1Mw

5 Ways Marketers Can Use Web Analytics for Free

There are plenty of ways for marketers to measure the reach of their content and track customer behavior with marketing analytics. Many of these resources can prove to be quite expensive but in some cases make sense to purchase. However, there are plenty of free sources for marketing analytics.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics offers users free access to analytics for their website and tumblr blog. Users can track where the traffic is coming from and identify potential customers. Customer behavior on websites can also be tracked. Here is how to install it on a website.

2. LinkedIn

LinkedIn offers free analytics on its publishing platform that allow users to see the geographic area and industry of their readers. Along with eyeball count, comment count, users can see who shared and liked their content. 

LinkedIn members can also see statistics on status updates that are popular in their network.

3. SlideShare 

SlideShare now offers users free analytics  on content that is uploaded to the site. This is a great way to track where traffic is coming from and how users engage with content. Users can track social and email sharing  along with downloads.

4. Twitter 

Twitter users can track the impacts of their tweets. Twitter provides users access to track social sharing which include retweets and likes. Users can also track tweet impressions and clicks tweets that include URLs.

5. WordPress

WordPress users can see how many people have viewed their content, shared their content and what country viewers are from. Traffic sources such as referrers and search terms are included as well.

These are 5 ways that marketers can access analytics for free.

How have you used free analytics to measure your content and track customer behavior on your site? Comment below.

About the Author

Dan is passionate about using Marketing to help businesses drive sales. He has worked on various marketing assignments that include a Start Up, Political Campaign & a Digital Marketing Conference.

Prior to Teaching, Dan served customers as an Outside Sales & Marketing Representative in the Dental industry. In this role, he taught and trained Dentists on the company’s products and services using a consultative selling approach. He also supported the company’s marketing efforts at industry trade shows & in the field through lead generation of Digital Technology along with large Dental Equipment.

He writes and publishes a business blog on the topics of Sales, Marketing & Social Media entitled Sales, Marketing & Social Media Today.

Dan is seeking a full time marketing role in New York City. He is interested in roles in Direct, Digital, Content & Social Media Marketing. If your company is hiring for roles in these areas, contact him directly via a free LinkedIn Message or email him at Dan@DanGalante.com to set up interviews.

AAEAAQAAAAAAAATWAAAAJDg3MWM4YWM0LWMyMWYtNDQwOC04OGU0LTg0NDVhYWQ3MzE1Mw

2015 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2015 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,200 times in 2015. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

How to use Marketing to gain customers for your Small Business

  • How to use Marketing to gain customers for your small business
  • Applying marketing strategies to engage with customers while driving product sales

About the Author

Dan is passionate about using Marketing to help businesses drive sales. He has worked on various marketing assignments that include a Start Up, Political Campaign & a Digital Marketing Conference.

Prior to Teaching, Dan served customers as an Outside Sales & Marketing Representative in the Dental industry. In this role, he taught and trained Dentists on the company’s products and services using a consultative selling approach. He also supported the company’s marketing efforts at industry trade shows & in the field through lead generation of Digital Technology along with large Dental Equipment.

He writes and publishes a business blog on the topics of Sales, Marketing & Social Media entitled Sales, Marketing & Social Media Today.

Dan is seeking a full time marketing role in New York City. He is interested in roles in Direct, Digital, Content & Social Media Marketing. If your company is hiring for roles in these areas, contact him directly via a free LinkedIn Message or email him at Dan@DanGalante.com to set up interviews.

AAEAAQAAAAAAAATWAAAAJDg3MWM4YWM0LWMyMWYtNDQwOC04OGU0LTg0NDVhYWQ3MzE1Mw

3 Questions Content & Digital Marketers should answer before Launching a Campaign

Launching a content marketing & digital marketing campaign is a big investment of time & resources. Before launching a campaign there are a lot of things to consider. Here are three questions that digital & content marketers should be able to answer before launching a campaign.

1.What are the best ways to market to my industry?

The best ways to market to your industry is through offerings such as whitepapers, industry events, Social Media/Content Marketing and through direct selling. As there is no single best way, all of these methods need to be integrated together and function as a synergy. The Sales and Marketing functions need to be aligned and support one other in order for any marketing effort to be successful.

Becoming a part of your industry community is one of the best ways to market to them. This can be achieved by becoming a trusted advisor. Earning the trust of the community can be achieved by demonstrating your value and becoming a resource they the turn to all of the time not just when they have a need. Understanding the pain points of this group is critical to creating and implementing the best solutions to solve their problems.

2. How you would repurpose/rewrite/market to increase readership?

In order to increase readership, I would create accounts on other social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube and Slideshare. Before content can be repurposed, you need to establish channels to share the content beyond a blog and LinkedIn in order for it to reach a broader audience.

Rewriting/Repurposing

The first thing I would do is to change the title in the form of a question. This way it invites the audience to weigh in. I would also ask a question at the end of the article.

A great call to action would be: feel free to comment, or asking a question of the reader at the end of the post. By having a call to action to comment, readers are more likely to start a discussion and share the content. It is important to talk with your audience and not at them.

Another, thing that I would add is an about the author section at the bottom of each post. This is another great way to showcase the author’s expertise and incorporate a call to action such as see how we can help or click here to sign up for a free demo.

Repurposing Formats

The contents of the article can be put into different formats such as a PowerPoint, a YouTube video all of which can be uploaded to Slideshare. The article can be published to LinkedIn’s publishing platform as well. The article can also be written and have presentations and videos embedded in the article itself. There are endless ways to repurpose content.

3. Imagine you could speak to a current customer. What would you want to ask them? How would you use their responses to market my product?
I would want to ask current customers the following questions:

1.Why did you chose my product?
2.What do you like about the product?
3.What do you dislike about the product?
4.Is it easy to use?
5.How long did it take to put the product to work?
6.Would you be willing to provide a testimonial in writing, on video about how the product helped your business, speak at an event?
(Questions may differ based on the user’s answers.)

I would take the information from questions to 1-5 and discuss them with the product manager and engineer to see how the product could be made better. Testimonials obtained would be uploaded to the website and integrated into product literature.

What questions are you asking before starting a content & digital marketing campaign?

About the Author

Dan is passionate about using Marketing to help businesses drive sales. He has worked on various marketing assignments that include a Start Up, Political Campaign & a Digital Marketing Conference.

Prior to Teaching, Dan served customers as an Outside Sales & Marketing Representative in the Dental industry. In this role, he taught and trained Dentists on the company’s products and services using a consultative selling approach. He also supported the company’s marketing efforts at industry trade shows & in the field through lead generation of Digital Technology along with large Dental Equipment.

He writes and publishes a business blog on the topics of Sales, Marketing & Social Media entitled Sales, Marketing & Social Media Today.

Dan is seeking a full time marketing role in New York City. He is interested in roles in Direct, Digital, Content & Social Media Marketing. If your company is hiring for roles in these areas, contact him directly via a free LinkedIn Message or email him at Dan@DanGalante.com to set up interviews.

image