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Our next speaker is Ned Poulter from PoleStar Digital
and he's going to talk to us about personalisation so please welcome Ned.
Thanks those of you who have stuck around, sorry that took a bit of a while to
figure out, it is always the last one of the day isn't it? Anyway I'm Ned Poulter
I work well, I own and work at PoleStar Digital. We are a digital
marketing consultancy.
I blog in these places and you can find me on social if you have got any questions, these
are some of the clients that I've worked with, a very egotistical, self-indulgent
slide so we can skip over that. Ok so why am I here? I'm here because there's a
massive change going on in the online marketing landscape one that actually
beyond just individuals that reaches right through to marketers and consumers
and we're moving away from a
top-level understanding into a richer more personalized experiences and as I
said, that's both from a marketer's perspective and also from a consumer's
perspective as well. Now there's a few ways that this is happening, two in
particular that I've noticed are in terms of usability, how we interact and
technology itself. So I predominantly work in search marketing and one of the
things that happened about three weeks ago which is a massive change which I don't
know if everyone will know here, is that they got rid of the right hand side
paid ads in the Google search results now this is actually really really big
because it means not only have they shifted four ads up to to the top there but it's changed what they
look like when you're searching for something and, you'll see here
actually I mean a mobile cut-off point is probably gonna be around Expedia there.
So all you're seeing is paid ads, and this is quite interesting because other than
a money-grabbing move by Google which, working in search, I do think it is very
much towards that. It's not like it used to be and you have to ask, why have they
changed that user experience and the reason is that we're using these a lot more mobile
and searching on mobile has changed dramatically in the last two to three
years such that actually when you look at the search results on a desktop
compared to a mobile they are completely different now, a lot of them will have
kind of richer snippets that they're pulling in, whether they're from reviews
whether they're click to maps, to locations based on what you're searching for
whether they're actually clicking to call as well, a
business, if I'm in Manchester and I'm searching for BrewDog in Manchester I'm
obviously gonna be showed the BrewDog in Manchester. It might even pick that up without me
putting Manchester in the search term but it's going to return things that suit
my usability on that device so maps, how to call them and such like. Now this is quite
interesting, when you search for Xero accounting software we use, you're
probably familiar with it. This is the entire first page of mobile search for it.
And, if you look at this, there's almost no organic listings on there. There are
very specific things which are focused on action which are based around being
on your mobile such as installing the app that they have which is actually part
of the paid listing they're obviously bringing through tweets that they are sharing from
their Twitter account.
You've got this knowledge box here which says what their stock price is doing,
How to get their social profiles which you will click and it will take you straight through
there and it's a real big change based on how that experience is for the customer,
because they've got all of these various different things which aren't actually
really directly their website in an
organic listing, it's also related to what people might be doing when they're using that
type of device. Another thing which a lot of people skip over but I think
it's one of the technologically, one of the most amazing things that we pretty
much all now walk around with in our pocket, is Siri, Siri is something which, I have got
a bit of a funny story. When it first came out,
not great I personally don't like talking to my phone unless there's
someone else on the other end of it. I find it quite weird. But, the technology
behind this is pretty amazing. When it first came out we were sat at a house
party and one of my friends was talking to it, it was refusing to answer me
because apparently it doesn't like my accent but, it was happy to talk to my
friend, so much so we actually renamed what it referred to me as Charlie my
friend's name and I think it actually still refers to me as Charlie but really again
this is a different form, other than a text based input, this is another form of input
that we have with technology that we interact with on a daily basis which is
completely changed the way we interact with technology. Similar is Google Now.
Google Now obviously strings those data points together as well to give you an
even richer experience it may know from where you travel when you have your GPS
switched on if it is just redundantly on anyway. It will know where is home for
you, where's the office so you can ask things like take me home, show me how to
get home, and it will dial into all of these different data points and actually
present that to you on your mobile. Another thing which I think is really
quite interesting and it's a great debate to have is, why Microsoft
invested in the gameing market and the answer to that's fairly obvious, it's because they
wanted to be here. Someone mentioned earlier on in their talks that, PC used to be based in
the study, they used to sit out in the corner in a dusty room which people would go
and work on and that was it. But gaming consoles are just PCs and actually the
user experience with a console such as the Xbox One
I had a real moment when I saw my friends, when I first saw his console because it has
the Kinect, this thing at the top which is a camera which a lot of people were
quite controversial about because people thought that it
spies on you in your sleep when you are sitting in your pants watching the football but,
actually, the amazing thing about it was that I saw my friend, first off it turned on
when he walked into the room without any sort of pressing a button and also we
could switch between programs by him just waving his hand and I was like
we've got to that level of interaction with technology that it's actually making
it so much easier for us, it's making the experience very different
from even pressing a button on a remote control like this and another thing which
I'm particularly excited about is VR and my best friend's actually quite
heavily disabled but he is a big computer gamer. We've had massive conversations about
how awesome it is that these things that we saw when we were kids in movies is now a
real thing. It's an actuality this is Oculus Rift, obviously PlayStation are doing their
own version but what we gotta look at here is, it's all about the
experience, us as users, first and foremost but then also us as marketers.
How can we look at this and how can we own this experience or at least inject
what we're going to have to do in the future
on this type of experience because, people are moving away from the things
that we've been so comfortable with. So that's usability and technology but
then also in terms of personalisation we've really changed the way that we
expect the web and web related websites or apps or whatever it may be.
How we react with them and I won't get into the interesting conversation, the
ethics behind it that we can speak about at the bar after because that came up with the
dinner last night, but
I mean there's this really cool company, has anyone heard of Birch Box? A few people,
a small amount so I went to a conference down in Birmingham in October last year
it's a really good conference call Canvas Conference and it really inspired me
actually to go away and do this talk. Birchbox is fairly straightforward, there's a lot
of companies like it at the moment. They deliver beauty products to consumers on
a monthly basis and they're like samplers so people will try out a certain
face cream, moisturiser or whatever it may be.
What was really interesting is while this could be fairly rudimentary, this is
built with technology at the core, and I think it was the CIO or the CTO that was
speaking at this event but she was talking about the level of intelligence
that actually goes behind the mechanisms that select when people actively say I
liked this, I didn't like this, that it crafts that experience to obviously make
this a better and more longstanding product for someone who will continually
invest in it. Another one, I'm a big craft beer fan, Flavourly is similar. Flavourly delivers I
think it's eight bottles of beer to my doorstep for twenty quid or something a
month. They do the same, they give us the ability to personalise their service
we're seeing this more and more.
One that you're probably be most familiar with is Graze boxes, these guys also
spoke actually at Canvas Conference and what was really interesting is, it was
the CTO there who's been there since its beginnings one of the founders, he was
talking about how much intelligence they now put into, not only selecting it
for the individuals but actually what food types they're going to try and put
in these boxes based on what people like and what people don't like, their injecting
that kind of level of user understanding throughout the experience because it's
so vital, because that means that they have a longer, higher customer lifetime value
and they can invest more up front to win those customers. Another one is quite
interesting I was actually unaware of the term cake topper I was asked, by
my mother to go and purchase a cake topper which I promptly put into Google
and was served up Etsy, I started looking at Etsy and it was after
that, that again I read up on the fact that Etsy have taken an awful amount
of time,
first off taxonomising, what products they have on their site. Is everyone familiar
with Etsy?
Yes, quite a lot of nodding heads there, so, taxonomizing, what is quite strange because,
how do you put a lot of creative items that are developed by creatives that are as weird
and wonderful as cake toppers which I didn't know existed until I searched it. How do
you put them in a taxonomy so that when people are searching for it you can
recommend similar products to them and what's great as well is that they
they claim to, one of the USP's being that they have the
first personalized home feed, obviously I've only bought one product from it. It's
all cake toppers that's what I was shown but the more I shopped
around on that, obviously that would adapt to me as a user and of course
there's Amazon.That is a really obvious example so I won't go into that, I was
obviously shopping for really cool stuff like hard drives recently, and so I got into
a conversation recently, the outcome of which has kind of stuck with me, and
that was what's the best home page on the Internet? It's kind of related to this
theme of personalisation but I thought, we went back and forth and some
people said this because of these reasons,
and some people said that. I said well mines quite simple, it's Facebook and
yes, Facebook they change kind of some of the structure of the layout every now
and again but why is Facebook so compelling as a home page or a landing
page to me it's because it's effectively all about me or people that I know and
it's laid out in front of me. James Crawford, I think he is here today. He's
obviously talking about a bottle of wine he was enjoying on Mother's Day. Facebook are really interesting in this
whole personalisation thing because, we overlook Facebook most of us use it so
frequently now we overlook it when we talk about these examples and some of
the cool things actually you can spot them doing, there are some fairly obvious
things I mean, today was Mother's Day a couple of weeks ago it told me that and
then it's trying to get action off me is trying to personalise my experience. A
friend of mine Dennis as well he shared that. I thought I was particularly cool, he
is based out in the States and it was reminding him based on his likes, a
football team he likes
are playing today. Prompting something that's very personal to him
it's very individual and they have the data to do this. Now what was particularly, I was
particularly impressed by as well by Facebook is regardless of getting into
the politics of a lot of the terrible things that we've seen happen over the
last six, twelve months in the world, they were very quick to turn
around something like when the shootings happened in Paris to turn this into a
tool for good and this is something which I know is running through the
theme of today and they quite simply just put a button that anyone that was in that
locality should just press it to say, when they get mobile data,
they're ok they're safe, and it would tell all of their friends. I thought that was a pretty
amazing kind of, example of how to use technology for good. So when we
take a step back and we look at this how we interact with technology the
for usability sake, whether it's actually typing something into a phone
or into a laptop, talking to our computers
or waving at our Xbox. Most of the effort to understand and target your
consumers up till now has been things like focus groups, like surveys,
demographic data, creating personas something I'm sure a lot of people here are
all very familiar with, but the problem is when we come to apply this online we
forget all the good bits, and that's for a lot of reasons, often a lack of
technology, tools to interpret it. An awareness across the organisation or
individually, a lack of creativity in applying it, or even desire and then we
end up undoing all of our hard work. You stand in Piccadilly Circus and you
look up and you go, but why are they advertising there? What do they gain?
You do things like you are matching broad keywords in your PPC campaign,
just shooting in the dark, you are going for brand placements, you are just sending out emails
to everyone's email address that you've got with absolutely no segmentation.
We're doing sponsorship deals just because we need to do sponsorship deals.
We're doing blanket media buys many years ago I worked at Warner Brothers and
that was when they were negotiating seven-figure sums to do homepage
takeovers of msn.com because
that was the home page of the internet. For like two days and you were like, surely
this money could be spent better, maybe not in such a personalised way but maybe
in a better way and then that's not to mention that the generation below us are
much quicker adapting to this technology that's around them, whether it's their
phones that they can speak to, the kind of interaction the feedback they get
from that device and they're very aware of all of this stuff so when we
look at some of the tried-and-tested kind of marketing type
things that we do, this was some data shared by Larry Kim at the end of last
year. We see that they're becoming more difficult to do or harder to do in a
certain way such as this is just the PPC rise across about 2,000 of their
clients sorry, the CPC rise when it comes to PPC campaigns and the fact that it's
just growing exponentially I think about 18 percent per year. So we have got to
look at this just say, we can't keep on doing the same thing. There is also things, this crops up,
you probably see this all over the internet I do as well. This
content promotion platforms like Outbrain where they are trying to serve good
content to me but actually, I have never clicked on anything like this, this is at the bottom of my
Sky Sports app. Its kind of, this is what 29 of Mr Bond's girls look like
today, really kind of shoot and hope
way of targeting, is doing it too much justice I think, well then things like
this, I mean kind of mass, mass buys, you think. What's that really doing? Other
than blatant visibility I suppose but it's kind of poorly executed to a lot. It's the equivalant to
standing on Market Street in my opinion with a sandwich board with your brand on
just screaming at everyone face while they are walking past. So this leads as to what
was targeting gonna be like in the future? I suppose we've got to really
tap into what the psychological traits that we can tap into here.
Targeting based on interest type this is something that Facebook ads is leaps and
bounds ahead of something like Google because you can actually start to
develop a profile using things like interest type, you can target better
based on action. What people are doing on your website, where they are on your website.
Targeting in non-obvoius areas, we've got to be a bit more creative about our
approach, things like push notifications using them there's been a lot of talk
a lot of company's out in the
Valley, using push notification purely for marketing purposes and that's
something that's very new. It can be quite annoying granted, but you can also, if you
stitch together this data that you have on your customers, you can make a really
personalised, really pertenant, call to action there and not just things
like Google ads. So we look at important things like changes in behavior or
changes in state and through them we can make efforts to personalise the user's
experience through our marketing or just through their interaction with us online.
Some of the brands I mentioned earlier on are differentiating themselves
from competitors by using this is their main USP. Birchbox has intelligence built
from the ground up. Etsy has their personalised feed, truly personalised,
feed and, Amazon are well, just Amazon.
So if you have got to do better and apply this approach to our broader marketing efforts, but we've got
to be realistic while we're doing this. We're not gonna become Amazons, Etsys,
Birchboxs overnight, they've got a real vested interest in technology and the
ability to do these things, however, we do need to better utilise our customer data,
something that we've talked a lot today and I'm sure is high on all of our
agendas in our jobs every day, and there are ways which we can start applying
intelligence to our efforts today. They may not be true personalisation but
they're getting us towards there. So just to keep it
actionable as I like to do with some of my talks, here are some tactics I would
recommend trialing if you're not already, to personalise your marketing. First is using
Google tag manager, are people familiar with Google tag manager? A lot of people using it? Quite a
lot of nodding heads. That's good. The reason I say this is because you can actually
start to track on a much more specific level than just a blanket GA install on
a site. You can start to get intent so,
looking to beyond things like just website visitors but looking to
more specific actions on site. What they're actually doing. Build-up
custom and customer audiences so collecting email addresses an obvious
one but that's a starting point and then build that profile around the customer. You
can do things like offer content and it doesn't just need to be e-commerce where
you say here is 5% off your order. You can also offer, I'm working with a client at
the moment to offer their lookbook their latest lookbook. They are a fashion brand and
something that you can entice people in, so you can start to build up that
portfolio, things like Facebook lead gen ads, are actually really really
effective and actually about three four weeks ago they changed it so you don't
actually leave the Facebook experience now to hand a brand over your email address
they're really really worth while trying Google lead gen formats but then also
interestingly in video turnstiles, if you have got videos on your site, have an exchange
with your customers where you implement a turnstile which you can do
using Wistia. Where you say okay, to finish watching this, can you give
me your email address, now and this is a great case study which actually said
weirdly was where you would ask for that email address and actually it came out,
it was way earlier than you might think right upfront, people are quite happy to give
it over in the case studies link down
here if you wanna look at that. Once you have developed these, trial these uses of
these custom audiences, these ones that you understand more about on things
like Facebook Ads very easy to do Instagram ads, Twitter advertising is
particularly good if you're trying to leverage content. Google Customer Match is
still kind of in its early stages of adoption but it's quite effective
as well and then remarketing in general, these are the people that you
know something about them, so you can tailor your marketing efforts
towards them in a better way than we have been doing historically, and then
use this in just, in a basic intelligent way.
Think about setting up things like just website visitors to your site, showing a
different add to them, on Facebook maybe, individuals who visited the site but
haven't taken a specific action like signed up or purchased or exclude people that have
visited your site and have taken a specific action and then we whittled
down these groups of people into something that we know slightly more about. When it
comes to search as well, there are some really cool things as well you can do with
Jason, this is actually by Phil Pierce I recommend you read both this
presentation which is great he did it at Measure Camp a couple of weeks ago and
his Jason cheat sheets are a wicked resource to check in.
You can actually look at injecting these different formats like brand logos,
social profiles even telephone numbers into search, so when people are searching
for NatWest customer service you have your number right there in front of them.
To make it a much better experience for the individual, they might not hit your website but it's
very obvious to set up that way of doing things, you can also do cool
things like music event location which is quite strange, quite a lot music
related ones which will tell you if an artist that you're searching for is
playing nearby, you've probably seen it.
And then apply intelligence and a way like bid modifying your paid activity
based on this data, by cutting out these segments from the understanding of your
website to time of day, day of week, loyal customers, whether they're
particularly loyal and they come back again or new customers and they've never visited
you, maybe you could personalise the experience to them. I'm
kind of preaching to the choir, but yeah, so like screen recordings
great, really good to sit alongside your customer to understand what it's like
for them actually experiencing your website and then getting qualititive
feedback in the form of voice of customer, the Usabilla guys were speaking here
earlier on, or Hot Jar is a particular favorite of mine, it's really cheap in fact,
it is free to start doing it on a very limited basis but, it's really worthwhile
trialing out just to get some sort of insight that is more than just clicks, and
web loads and then finally if you're looking into PPC to go back to that, you
can use Unbounce and connect that up with your PPC campaigns such that you use dynamic
keyword insertion which is a somewhat fake way of personalising an experience,
but it means that when someone comes from your ad onto your website
you're actually shaping it based on what they've searched and, obviously that
has a dramatic influence on conversion rates because it's presenting them
something which is closer to what they actually input in the first place. So
with more attention to specific targeting on a broader scale puts us
back in the driving seat and it makes us a bit more intelligent when we come to
actually crafting the experience that we're going to have to do with all the
technological changes that are coming up I don't think we have any time for
questions do we? But thanks for sticking around guys, I
really appreciate it, you're awesome.