In case it had somehow escaped your notice, the Covid-19 pandemic has had a dramatic effect on e-commerce sales worldwide. Beginning in 2020, online was practically the only way to shop in safety, and global e-commerce sales doubled during the first three months of lockdown.

A survey of around 3,700 consumers in nine emerging and developed economies by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has shown how these consumers have made the greatest shift to online shopping during the pandemic.

How the world shops now.

Over half those surveyed in countries that include Brazil, China, Germany, Italy, the Republic of Korea, Russian Federation, South Africa, Switzerland and Turkey, shop online more frequently and rely on the internet more for news, health-related information and digital entertainment since the pandemic started.

The UNCTAD survey also shows that online purchases have risen by 6-10% across most product categories, with the biggest increase seen across sectors such as IT and electronics, gardening and DIY, pharmaceuticals, education, household products and personal care products.

US digital spending up 44%.

In the US, consumers spent $861.12 billion online with retailers in 2020, up 44.0% from $598.02 billion in 2019, according to the latest Digital Commerce 360 analysis. Online spending represented 21.3% of total retail sales last year, compared with 15.8% the year prior.

For the record, 24% of men were found to be shopping online more frequently during the pandemic, compared to 18% of women. One third of men, compared to 25% of women, said that Covid-19 was impacting how much they spend on products.

A survey of US and UK consumers found that 96% of Millennials and Gen Zs are concerned about the pandemic and its effects on the economy. 30% of millennials now shop more frequently online, with 24% of Gen Z, 20% of Gen X and just 8% of Baby Boomers.

A change for the better?

The shift in consumer behaviour has found some industries much better prepared to ramp up their digital offering than others, with the result that many businesses are lagging behind, often working with outdated systems and processes that have left them struggling to cope with increased demand.

It looks certain that the changes forced by the pandemic in shopping behaviour will continue in the post-Covid world, which makes this the time when all industries should focus their efforts on creating a first class digital experience for their customers. It’s an e-commerce world now.

Looking to overhaul your e-commerce?

We offer a comprehensive e-commerce web design package to give your products the best platform for sales. Using tried and tested WooCommerce technology, we use a combination UX/UI and digital marketing techniques to help boost sales and keep your customers happy. Get in touch with the team and see what we can do for you!

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WordPress is easy to use.      

As the ultimate content management system (CMS), the user-friendly WordPress interface makes it easy to manage, modify, and publish content (images, text, videos, etc.) At the same time it’s so powerful and versatile that it can be used to build a complex bespoke website to fit your business needs perfectly.

WordPress is open source.

That means its software is free to download, install, use and modify to create any kind of website. As such the platform has a huge community of followers constantly working to improve its functionality. Though while the WordPress software itself is free, you need a domain name, theme and web hosting to install it.

WordPress has thousands of functional plugins.

Due to its popularity, WordPress has become the go-to platform developers to write their own add-ons, or plugins. Plugins are like apps for your WordPress site, and can be used to install add new features to a website. There are over 58,000 plugins available in the WordPress directory, so whether you want an online store via the WooCommerce addon or a private WordPress blog, the platform can expand your site’s overall functionality so it looks and performs exactly as you’d like.

WordPress is secure.

Despite having a bad rep in the past, the WordPress platform is audited regularly by hundreds of developers to overcome security vulnerabilities and ensure their security measures stay ahead of hacker tactics. With on-going website maintenance, your WordPress site can keep up-to-speed with the latest in design, functionality and security, ensuring it’s always online and open for business.

Why WordPress is our platform of choice.

At Harrison Carloss, we’ve used WordPress for years and have a portfolio of websites from the most simple, to those with complex integrations to ensure that the client has the website that they need to build and grow their business effectively. We use WordPress as the foundation and build a bespoke website on top including the design and functionality.

You can use templates for WordPress sites but it’s something that we avoid – templates tend to limit your site including restrictions on what changes you can make, implementing new functionality, tracking marketing activity and of course, the design is not unique. Your brand and business is unique so why would you not make your website unique?

We find WordPress sites are fit for purpose for most businesses, clients find it easy to make basic updates to their own websites without being tied in or the age-old agency model of charging clients for every little change – it’s something we like to avoid at Harrison Carloss! We like to equip clients with the knowledge and understanding to enable clients to manage their own content on their websites.

If you’re looking for a new website, a refresh or need some advice, get in touch with the team.

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Paid social media on each platform differs depending on the campaign and audience, but each platform has the ad tools to help you create, schedule, and post ads that effectively target your audience.

Facebook

Facebook Targeted Ads let you show ads to your customers based on their behaviour. This is useful in that you can keep advertising to your existing Facebook customers based on what Facebook tells you about their use of the app.

The analytics Facebook gives you lets you experiment by trying different ad formats to see what your audience engages with. Facebook will automatically show your ads to people who are most likely to find your ads relevant. Other tools allow you to define an audience based on criteria such as age, interests, geography and more.

Twitter

Twitter paid ads aren’t as obvious as ads on other social channels because they look like regular tweets. That’s probably why Twitter reports that 41% of users purchase a product after seeing an ad within a month.

Twitter has various types of ad for you to choose based on your goals, with software built into the platform to let you target a specific demographic. And with ad settings based on your budget, you can choose how frequently your ad will be seen, and the kind of ad to run.

Instagram

Instagram has over a billion users and is built around sharing images and videos. As their website says, people come to Instagram to be inspired and discover things they care about, including content from brands and businesses like yours.

A Instagram business account lets you run ads from your Instagram account. Your budget is then tied to the length of the ad run. And with so many different visual styles running on Instagram, there are different ways to leverage paid social media, such as Image or Video.

LinkedIn

Most people know LinkedIn as a highly valuable tool to network with like-minded professionals. But LinkedIn also has the potential to reach 60 million decision-makers, making it by far the most popular social media platform for lead generation.

On LinkedIn you can run campaigns around clearly defined goals such as brand awareness, lead generation, or social engagement.

LinkedIn’s targeted ads let you set keywords and select audiences by category. You can also play around with ad formats to discover which is most effective. You can even engage prospects with dynamic ads automatically personalised to them.

Paid social media works for any size of business

Once you know how to use them (and which ones are best for your audience) you can soon begin reaping the benefits for your brand and get the highest ROI.

Looking to get social? Talk to our expert team today to see how we can help your business use paid social to reach your marketing goals.

The post It pays to socialise: Why paid social media is definitely worth the investment appeared first on Harrison Carloss.

Core Web Vitals are factors that Google takes into account when judging the overall quality of user experience on a webpage. They’re designed to measure how users experience the speed, responsiveness, and visual stability of a page.

Simply put, Google will look at how your website is built and maintained from a technical standpoint, and considers areas where this could impact how could impact a user’s experience on your site. For example, if your website is slow then the user is more likely to bounce off the page or, if they do stay, have a worse, more frustrating time when on your site.

Are Core Web Vitals important?

You bet. From June, Google are introducing an algorithm update that will turn Core Web Vitals into ranking signals. This means that your site’s rank in Google will now be influenced by these factors, alongside more traditional points such as the site’s relevancy and backlink profile.

The new ‘page experience’ signal will combine Core Web Vitals with signals for mobile-friendliness, safe-browsing, HTTPS-security and intrusive interstitial guidelines. A lot of these factors have been part of best practice for SEO before now, so it’ll come as no surprise that Google are looking to include these within their algorithm.

According to Google, “These signals measure how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page, and contribute to our ongoing work to ensure people get the most helpful and enjoyable experience from the web.”

Google released this information to provide some guidance on improving website quality and user experience, so each Core Web Vitals component should be carefully considered. All in all, if you’re looking to get ahead in the Google ranks, looking at your site’s Core Web Vitals is a great place to start! We’d recommend using Google Search Console to keep track of your site’s Core Web Vitals and help make improvements.

The three main Core Web Vitals categories are:

Largest Contentful Paint (LPC) 

LCP measures the loading performance of your website. For Google to see your website as successful in this area, the largest elements of content on the page should be fully loaded in 2.5 seconds or less. (This might not happen if your website contains render-blocking Javascript and CSS, for example.) So, work on reducing this load time to an absolute minimum.

First Input Delay (FID)

FID measures how interactive your website is by measuring the time between when a user first interacts with a page and when the browser processes the interaction. Google considers a FID of less than 100 milliseconds strong. Minimising the main thread blocking time is one way to reduce first input delay, as well as reducing or delaying the impact of third-party code that isn’t critical.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

CLS measures how visually stable the website is by looking at any visual elements on the page that change position or size and affect the surrounding content. (For example, motion graphics might be great visually, but not ideal if this causes a button to move so a user can’t easily click it.) An ideal measurement of layout shift is less than 0.1.

What it all means.  

Simply put, there’s no question that in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace, it’s more important than ever to have a website that provides a fantastic user experience. And as user experience can significantly impact your SEO and how your website ranks, implementing the principles of Core Web Vitals should definitely be an integral part of your SEO strategy.

Looking to get ahead on Google?

We offer comprehensive SEO services to help your site to perform at its best – good for your users and Google. Get in touch with one of our team today or learn more about our work at our website.

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It would be hard to imagine a clearer and cleverer graphic device to get over the message that your McDonald’s food delivery could take off from a local McDonald’s and beam straight into your home.

It was simple and instantly recognisable, and deserved the applause it received for communicating its message most succinctly, with a simple ‘we deliver’ message and not a logo in sight.

Then there were the equally minimalist Leo Burnett ads for McDonald’s that featured just lists of ingredients.

Again there was no mention of the brand name. Instead we had some of the brand’s most popular food items, such as the Big Mac, the Sausage & Egg McMuffin and the Filet-O-Fish, reduced to a word list of their main components.

The Sausage & Egg McMuffin, for instance, becomes ‘Muffin, Egg, Sausage, Cheese, Muffin’. Each word is stacked on top of the other, mimicking the arrangement of the food itself, and is coloured in a shade reminiscent of the ingredient it names.

London-based agency Leo Burnett teamed up with Minneapolis-based designer David Schwen to create the Iconic Stacks campaign for outdoor billboards.

Said Pete Heyes, creative director at Leo Burnett, “McDonald’s is a leader. Only a handful of global brands can communicate like this. The redacted and graphic nature of this latest campaign exudes the confidence McDonald’s and its iconic products deserve.

“David Schwem’s graphical style helps the viewer literally build the product in their mind,” said Heyes. “The colour palette is gentle, not forced. It uses the visual truth of the products and the packaging. The type doesn’t shout. It’s humble. It’s confident.”

Minimalism in the name of design is all well and good, and while it works so well for McDelivery, much of the pleasure to be derived from the fare McDonald’s serves up is in the actual look of it.

Call me old fashioned, but you can’t eat coloured words, even when they’re pretending to be food. And no way do they get your mouth watering like the sight of a juicy burger with cheese running down it.

Follow our blog to keep up to date with the latest news and happenings from the world of marketing and more. If you’re inspired, why not get in touch with the team and see what we can do for you.

The post The minimalist approach to McDonald’s? It’s a matter of taste. appeared first on Harrison Carloss.

33% percent of people find direct mail the most effective way to remember a product. 79% of consumers are known to act on direct mail immediately. 73% of direct mail recipients can’t wait to get their hands on what’s in their mailbox. And direct mail can often be more cost-effective.

Direct mail gets your business directly into your customers’ home.

Your message lands right there in your customer’s mailbox, so it feels more personal. As if someone took the trouble to mail it, rather than shooting off a load of emails.

Direct mail also feels better. It has a tactile, tangible crispness that recipients just don’t get when they’re bombarded with emails or ads on social media. And they can read it whenever they want.

What else does print have that’s unique?  

Backed up by intelligent creative ideas, a piece of printed direct mail can create more positive feelings towards a brand, and achieve more brand recall than upstart digital trickery.

Studies show that millennials who spend more time with a physical piece of print in their hands have a stronger emotional response, so they’re more likely to remember it. It’s also well worth bearing in mind that if you’re aiming to reach an older audience, more than 40% of over 65s still don’t use the internet.

Printed mail is easier to read.

It’s not only an older audience who’d rather receive a mailer they can hold in their hand. Most people would prefer to get your marketing message that way. In one survey 81% of people said they’d rather read a piece of printed mail than a version on a screen.

Research shows that when you add a personalised message, your printed mailing will be remembered long after its momentary online counterpart has gone.

What’s more, people are more inclined to trust a piece of printed material than a message that sprang up on their screen unbidden.

Print and digital work well together.

The smart strategy is to use print and digital to complement each other. A first push with a clever printed mailshot whose message is subsequently repeated digitally and via social media can give your brand extra credibility That way you can reach potential customers both on- and offline.

One last thought: The internet is overflowing with marketing messages. Mailboxes aren’t.

Disorientated by direct mail?

Discover our most recent direct mail projects and get in touch with the experts at Harrison Carloss and see how we can get your message out to the masses.

The post Direct mail does the business appeared first on Harrison Carloss.

The rebrand serves up a complete new visual identity right across the fast food brand’s packaging, menu design, merchandise, décor and social media with elements focused on replicating the shapes of BK’s menu items.

Mouthwatering, big and bold.

Burger King describes its new designs as ‘mouthwatering, big and bold, playfully irreverent and proudly true’. Like its pre-1999 logo design, the new logo has the Burger King name once again sandwiched between the two halves of the burger bun.

The big difference with this new design is the introduction of a plumply juicy new typeface – called Flame – that you could almost bite into, in colours that are ‘rich and bold’. Apparently the font is inspired by the shapes of the brand’s food in being ‘rounded, bold and yummy’.

A logo evolution.

JKR executive creative director Lisa Smith said, “The new minimalist logo seamlessly meets the brand evolution of the times”. In fact inspiration for the typeface came from looking into Burger King’s archives.

“Over the years the brand often used typefaces like Cooper Black,” she said. “We wanted to do a modern take on those kinds of type, making it digital-friendly for the future.”

The striking simplicity of the new logo’s flat design, block colours and bold shapes works well across all platforms, including digitally.

Inspired by burgers.

While these combine to give the new look a decidedly retro feel, they were inspired by the food itself and Burger King’s trademark flame-grilling process: Firey Red, Flaming Orange and Barbeque Brown.

Burger King’s redesigned packaging also features ‘playful illustrations of ingredients’ emblazoned with adjectives that describe the food, like ‘crispy’ and ‘tasty’.

The rebrand uses the warm colours and pictures of ingredients to redesign uniforms for staff with a deep brown as their base colour. This  is paired with the new logo and trim in red, orange and white.

Merchandising, menu boards, restaurant signage and marketing assets will also include the font and revised colour palette.

As part of a design trend towards simplicity and fun that communicates more readily across a wide range of digital and printed media, Burger King’s new rebranding scores pretty high. Expect to see more of the same from other brands.

Follow our blog to keep up to date with the latest news and happenings from the world of marketing and more. If you’re inspired, why not get in touch with the team and see what we can do for you.

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Shopping by post.

Rather than direct customers from your Instagram account to your website, shoppable posts let them select and buy products direct from an app without having to navigate away from your posts. Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook have all introduced ways for e-commerce stores to create shoppable posts. For online retailers, it’s a great way to drive traffic to product pages.

Influencers get more personal.

Rather than use ‘celebrities’ with lots of followers, companies now seek out influencers with a smaller social media following to reach a more carefully targeted audience. Having a small but dedicated audience is more beneficial for marketing purposes than having a large but disconnected audience, and creates content that feels personal and authentic, because that’s what builds trust.

Video comes on-stream. 

One in five videos on Facebook Live is now streamed, with similar features on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Linkedin. Live videos on Facebook and Instagram are watched 3 times longer than non-live videos. 5G technology and advances in AI and voice tech will mean more personalisation and product placement within digital video as users interact with ads from connected TV and mobile devices.

An interactive future.

Interactive content will be one of 2021’s top marketing trends. Interactive content is any type of content such as calculators, quizzes, polls, surveys, contests, infographics and videos that encourage users to actively engage with your website rather than passively consume it. It’s a great way to add value for visitors, capture their engagement and learn more about them.

Keeping it real.

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are both top marketing trends. In 2021, AR is expected to surpass VR in popularity. Already, many major companies are making use of AR, like Ikea’s ap that allows users to see what a piece of furniture would look like in their home before buying. With access to VR and AR technology, brands are offering tours of facilities and interactive 3D models so they can examine products.

Tech is listening. 

Voice-activated digital assistants continue to be huge sellers. 72% of people with a voice-activated speaker say they often use it as part of their daily routine. More than just a voice that responds to your verbal requests to play a song or check the weather, this tech is communication between you and all your connected devices, so in 2021 expect to see more of it as the technology improves.

Tell me a story.

Snapchat was first with these sharable 15 second glimpses of people’s lives. Then Instagram and Facebook got in on the act, and YouTube came up with a version called Reels. Even Twitter has done their own version! Instagram Stories have picked up 250 million users since launch in August 2016, and are used by 500 million people daily. Stories could become the next best way to share on social media.

Websites go mobile.

As more of us use smartphones and tablets for internet browsing, more websites are being created with a mobile-first design, with more features to deliver the best experience to mobile users. So we’ll see touchscreen-friendly navigation, streamlined navigation menus, less text-heavy content, and functions like collapsible menus.

Rise of the chatbots. 

Chatbots provide shoppers with personalized, accessible customer service, so have become an invaluable means of connecting with customers using the same kind of AI that’s found in voice search and smart assistants. They also help small and medium businesses offer a better experience by providing 24-hour service, vital information, and instant answers to customers’ questions.

Get the media message.

Facebook Messenger has 1.3 billion active users every month, and around 10 billion messages are sent between people and businesses via the app. Social media messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, and WeChat combine the convenience of shopping from home, with the quick service that comes with face-to-face interaction, and are an inexpensive and easy way to improve customer experience.

If you’re interested in kickstarting your digital marketing in 2021, get in touch with the Harrison Carloss team. We’ve got a team of experts to help boost your business online – from ecommerce to social media- we’re the agency for you. Did we mention we also make a mean website?

The post Digital Marketing Trends 2021: Making it more personal. appeared first on Harrison Carloss.

Great, but what exactly are backlinks?

Backlinks are what they sound like – links that point from a page on one website to a page on another.

A backlink from a page on someone else’s website to yours is like a recommendation that says your webpage has some importance. It’s worth a look.

Google and other search engines use the number of backlinks on a website to determine the authority of a page and so decide that website’s ranking.

The more backlinks the better?

It’s not quite that simple. Just as you’d trust a recommendation from someone you knew and respected over someone you never met before, Google trusts backlinks from authoritative websites with the right cred over those that it decides are either less trustworthy or unknown.

PageRank, a Google algorithm, judges a page’s ‘value’ and determines its relative importance by looking at the quantity, quality and relevance of other pages that link back to it.

So essentially it’s all about the quality of your backlinks.

You should aim to gain backlinks from websites that are relevant to your website, eg: the same industry, have a good domain authority score, and come from a website that’s not simply trying to manipulate search engine rankings.

When to ‘no-follow’.

Speaking of manipulation, you might want to link to a website but don’t want search engines to follow that link. (Maybe you don’t want to endorse that site because it’s a paid link, or known to be a low-quality site.) So you set the status of your links to ‘no follow’ to prevent sharing your website authority with others.

…and finally, watch out for Google’s Penguin.

Penguin is a Google algorithm that helps their search engine filter out websites trying to increase their ranking by using the charmingly named spamdexing SEO techniques to deliberately manipulate search engine indexes. When Penguin finds bad links, it ignores them so they no longer count toward the website’s ranking. Clever Penguin.

If you need help with keeping up with Google’s ever changing algorithms get in touch to see how our expert team can help.

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After the multitude of miseries brought about by Coronavirus, Christmas is proving to be more important than ever to over half of UK adults this time around. A survey by Kinetic Worldwide research shows that we’re already hitting the stores in anticipation.

28% of us have begun the Christmas shopping rush, 58% have expressed an intention not to hold back on what we spend, and 16% of us are planning to spend more than we would usually.

Shopping online lacks the jingle.

This is despite an increase in online shopping, though a spike in lockdown online spending may prove to be short-lived, as Kinetic’s survey indicated that just 31% of us will spend more online compared to the pre-pandemic norm. By contrast, 56% of adults go out of their way to shop in-store wherever possible, while 63% of 18-34-year-olds report missing the outdoor shopping experience.

Stocking up for the festivities.

None of us need reminding that Christmas presents us with a great incentive to go a bit mad, sure. But this time the worsening pandemic has given everyone the perfect excuse to embrace the festivities extra early. 25% of us are expected to mount our seasonal raid on the shops before we even get Halloween out of the way.

Lockdown notwithstanding, shoppers in Greater Manchester and parts of Lancashire aren’t deterred; footfall has dropped just 1-2% since the ’rule of six’ was imposed. And though we’d naturally expect to see a surge in online shopping thanks to the virus, 37% of us plan to do our Christmas shopping in store the traditional way.

Christmas is more real in-store.

So it would appear that even the perils of a pandemic won’t stop the die-hards. Covid-19 hotspots in Wales saw footfall increase by 1-2%, while In areas such as Caerphilly, Glamorgan, footfall rebounded 5% week-on-week despite the imposition of even stricter restrictions.

Nor were 80% of in-store shoppers put off by the minor inconvenience of having to wear a face mask, and only 21% were reducing the time they spent on the high street as a result.

So this year’s Christmas message is clear.

Despite limits on social gatherings, the numbers of family we can see – if any – and the watered-down spirit of our traditional Christmas parties, all the signs say we’re determined not to let Covid put the humbug on our Christmas!

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