Five Things You Should Know!!!!!

Stop Here and Read! It is all about your Digital Marketing Strategy!

1. Learn your market

This is definitely the first step for the whole campaign. Try to learn more about your market, not only demographically but also psychographically! Sometimes, psychographic can impact your market better.  These data would determine how you are going to reach your customers and how effective can you impact the market. Only when you understand your target market well, you can start moving on to the next steps.

2. Make it engaging!

Since you have known well of your target. It is time to tell a good story and make it engaging for the audience. A good story can make people delighted, moved and even crying. It is all depending on the style of your products and services. The best example would be Dove natural beauty campaign. It tells a story to all women. The campaign itself does not push the products to the audience, but sell the emotion and the concept, which is more acceptable for the target.

3. Stand in the boots of your customers!

Try to provide an awesome UX to your customers. Modern people are getting less and less patient. Never, ever try to test their patience! You might have to make a big payment for that. In my blog, I have written a post about the UX by using the example of Southwest Airline. Take a look at it  and you will learn more about UX. Click here to see the article. 

4. Be alert to the latest event!

Stay alert at every moment! When there is a big issue happening, your brand should always be there. Take Oreo as an example. When 2013 super bowl game blacked out, Oreo quickly posted a picture on Twitter and said”You can still dunk in the dark”. Even though the picture itself does not promote Oreo cookies, it has successfully increase awareness from a ton of Twitter users around the world.

5. Unquantifiable Results

Not everything on the social media is measurable. Yes, things on Facebook or Twitter are trackable. There is a term named Dark Social, which means that some content is not trackable when the content is sent via email or other untrackalbe media. For readers want to learn more about dark social, Futurebook blog has quite a detailed article talks about Dark Social (Click here to see the article)

In sum, five points above are the things that you should before you want to launch a digital campaign, which I believe would be really helpful for you and your company! 

Dying QR Code and Thriving NFC?

“QR Code is dying?” “QR Code will be replaced by NFC soon!”  With the advance of technology, it is said that QR Code would be replaced by NFC, the modern technology that can help users hold data in their mobile devices and utilize it in many different domains, including paying bills and retrieving information.  Many people nowadays start to complain about the complicated process to use QR Codes.  Take out the phone, download the app, scan and wait, finally the link pops up.

However, I personally think that QR code won’t be replaced by NFC based on some reasons.

Comparison

Below are some basic comparison of QR Code and NFC.

	QR Code	NFC
Infrastructure	QR codes use the camera already in the phone and only need a small “QR reader” app to enable the device to support the technology	NFC technology requires special “initiator” hardware that creates an NFC field searching for a “target”, a NFC chip that holds data for the device to pick up.
Reach	There are still very few phones that support NFC on the market	Frequently used in modern market by companies.
Production & Implementation	Generating QR codes is simple once you have a generator. The barriers to adding QR codes are really very low	To implement NFC a publisher must embed a NFC chip into every target
Price	Low (nearly zero)	High
Resource:  http://getqrky.com/blog/why-nfc-won%E2%80%99t-kill-qr-codes/

For me, I think QR Code is alike website URL, a way for users to retrieve information more easily. It is not a new technology for people anymore, but it is indispensable for internet users. NFC is undoubtedly a technology that will bring convenience to human’s life. However, the usage of NFC requires high support from technology for users, which is the reason why it still needs some time to reach a high popularity of people using NFC chips.   

Price

Generally speaking, adapting NFC is more costly than using QR Code. A QR Code can be printed with nearly no extra cost for a company. However, to support NFC, a company has to invest high amount of money on hardware updating. For some relatively small- scale companies, NFC wouldn’t be best choice for them due to their limited budget.   

Different Usage

Finally, one of the most important reasons that convince me that QR Code will not be replaced is because QR Code and NFC can actually work perfectly and separately in deferent media. QR Code would works good in some small printed medium, such as cookie packages or magazine.  On the other hand, NFC would work perfectly in the outdoor advertisement.

In sum, based on the reasons of price and usages, QR Code is not going to be replaced by NFC in the future. I think they would work coherently in different mediums. 

One of the Best! Singapore Airline

What pops into your mind when you hear the name of Singapore Airline? Probably is their super well-known high quality service. Named as number one in almost everyone categories, Singapore Airline is the biggest winner in the 2013 competition by Travel + Leisure, which is one of the most prestigious awards around the world. However, besides to its considerate and comprehensive services, I think the success of Singapore Airline can also be contributed to its great UX from the official website and apps. Below I am going to talk about Singapore Airline’s official website and its mobile apps.

Comprehensive Content & User-Centered

Believe it or not, Singapore Airline website has concluded everything that you need in its website. With well-organized categories, audiences can easily find the information they need through the website. The left side of the home page is a part that allows customers to search and book tickets in a more efficient and accurate way.  On the right side, it shows out all the discount information and flash news of the Airline Company. More surprisingly, even though the website language has been changed into the Chinese user page, all the content are correctly translated and remains its comprehensive information. Many other airline websites fail to make. Once their website language have been switched into Chinese, it would lose many content and some words might been even mis-translated. Thus, I think that is quite a huge achievement of Singapore Airline.

Elegant Style

I personally like the design of the website because it has infused with some Singapore local culture, which makes the website looked extraordinary and elegant. The whole website is composed mainly with blue and gray. At the background of the website, it also has Singapore’s traditional pattern that put more positive effect on the whole web design.  

Like us or Follow us

Under the website, there are two hyperlinks for users to like the airline company on Facebook or follow them on Twitter easily, which I think is one of the most important parts of the website. With the hyperlinks, the company can arise more awareness through social media. It also provides more opportunities to the company to have more interaction with their consumers, building stronger relationship and loyalty.   

Now I am going to talk about the mobile app named 

SQ Mobile.

The official App released by Singapore Airline has almost every function that a customer need. However, compared to its website, it seems like it still has a huge room to be improved. After being updated for many times, the app still fails to remember the user’s log in information even though it has been told to remember it. As for myself, I can totally understand how annoying it is to staring at a small screen and trying to type in the long password with the dumb fingers.  To achieve the great UX, SQ Mobile still has a long way to go! 

<-- Click the pic to see more comments of the app! 

Emotion Does Make for Great Web Design

Today, the whole story has to begin with this guy…..

In 1776, Thomas Jefferson has declared that “All men are created equal”. However it seems like he forgot to finish in his sentence that “but all men are created with differences!”  

As a marketer, to cater the need of the consumers, we have to identify the segmentation of the consumers who share the commons and differences.  Each of our customers has demographically different (no matter significant or subtle); including gender, income and age, even various psychographic conditions. Only expressing with the different and personalized information and technique can a marketer easily draw the attention and talk to the target audiences more accurately. Thus I totally agree with the Kare Aderson’s viewpoint that understanding the science behind human thought is crucial to designing an idyllic experience on the web.  Below I would like to illustrate my points of view through the example of the Southwest Airline.

What Exactly Does The Audience Want from Us?  

First of all, we have to identify some background of the target. People go to Southwest Airline website might expect to find some cheap –priced ticket with high quality plane service that is also attracted by the brand image “Luv Fun” of Southwest rather than Virgin Airline that emphasize the high technology devices they provide. Here is how the Southwest Airline looks like.

User Centered

What do people look for when they are searching on the southwest website? Airplane tickets, of course.    To help their consumers retrieve the information faster, the company place the discount promotion at the center of the page. Thus, on the time the customers open the web page, they can immediately acquire the info and click the hyperlink to get more further information. What’s more, Southwest also provides customer to do quick ticket search at the left column on their official site, which offer more efficiency for consumers to find suitable tickets to satisfy their need. Finally, all the information, including flights, cars and hotels, on the southwest website does match the traveling needs of their consumers.

Don’t Be Annoying!

One of the reasons why I pretty like the website is that they are not annoying at all! As for many other websites, once you open their pages, tones of pop-up advertisement would block your view from the original site that you want to see. So far, I have not meet this problem on the Southwest website, which is kind of relief to me!

Clean and Organized Layout

With blue and white colors, the webpage of Southwest Airline always make me think of sky. Their website is clean and organized. With clear categorizing system, the consumers would be able to find information within a short time. Moreover, the website leaves some blank spaces, which help the website to be seem more spacious than it actually is.

In sum, I do think that the website page of Southwest Airline does quite a good job on UX for their website that provide comprehensive organized information and clean layout to the audiences to satisfy their needs.