I recently caught the latest episode of the CMS Connected news show which happened last week. I found Gabe Sumner’s editorial on the rise of Social commerce and Mobile shopping trends especially informative. He discussed some very practical ideas when approaching the intimidating task of delivering content to the new wave of mobile based visitors. Starting slow, measuring and then making pragmatic decisions based on where your customers seem to be migrating to. And, while a ‘responsive design’ layout is okay as a stepping off point, you really need to commit a dedicated mobile solution to really engage the medium appropriately. However, you need to first determine whether you even have a mobile traffic channel. Don’t waste valuable resources on something fancy, trendy and new if it makes no practical sense for your organization.

Social Commerce and Mobile Shopping with CMS Connected

Anyway, check it out here: Mobile and Social Commerce with Gabe Sumner . You can scroll to the ‘segments’ and jump right to Gabe’s pieces (part 1 or 2), or bounce around to another section of the episode that interests you.

Are we Still Talking About This?

So, there was one instance during the industry news segment that caught my attention. I’ve been involved in some manner of Search Marketing (SEO), Content Optimization and Social Media for the better part of 10 years now (social media only recently of course) and apart from the first couple years of SEO, there has been a fundamental need to observe and measure visitor behaviour in order to better meet their needs. User Engagement and User Experience are entirely NOT new ideas. They’ve only just been made a bit sexier recently with ‘acronym soup’ marketing jargon like CXM, CEM, WEM, etc. So when I heard Tyler reading this Forrester headline: Marketers Need a Customer Journey Strategy, I thought to myself, ‘really’.

If there are ‘Marketers’ still around who still don’t devote most of their strategic research on analytics and customer ‘engagement’ based metrics, they need to read more of the internet. As I mentioned earlier, possibly the best marketers around are the top-shelf, ‘white-hat’ SEO’s who are required to stay ahead of the customer experience curve the whole time. Everything about their strategy is based on customer value and relevance. Every week or month, page data is examined and new strategies put into place explicitly related to the fine tuned metrics regarding the user experience and site usage.

Clearly this report is of great value (it better be for $499, heh). It will surely will help with comprehending the desperate need to look ‘inward’ towards the website instead of pretending to know what’s best for the customer without actually ‘asking’ them or researching how they interact with your website. But to be saying, in this day and age that Marketers should be ‘looking at the visitor journey’ is all fine and dandy, but really, if marketers are still scratching their heads about this, it’s time to get with the program and fast. J

Check out the back and forth from Scott and Tyler (click on the #5 segment), on the show and share your thoughts on what you feel are the priority issues here. They do bring up some great points about return visitors and how the technology is able to preserve that data and consolidate it when this ‘guest’ decides to buy or uses a social connect feature to create a profile and so provide some personal information to the website. The website can now track this person indefinitely.

Also if you feel that this type of report can help your team and you have the ‘cake’ to splash out on it, the report can be found here: http://www.forrester.com/Fragmented+PathToPurchase+Demands+Everywhere+Marketing/fulltext/-/E-RES93061

As always, comments are heartily welcomed and if you’d like to contribute to our blog please get in touch!

Always, always, always put the customer value and experience first when strategizing anything to do with your website. Don’t agree? Let’s have it!