How Digital Catalogs Help to Boost A Business's Growth

Online shopping has proven to be more than just a fad as it has become a way of life for many consumers. As more hardware and software products for mobile devices hit the market shopping on the go is only going to be more in demand. Additionally, with more sites and companies offering an online way to shop it is becoming increasingly important for businesses to provide customers with that option. With that in mind, more and more companies are turning towards an online catalog. This helps increase sales and reaches consumers more effectively. However in order for online catalogs to be truly effective it is important the customers can actually interact and purchase from them without much effort. This is where PDF catalogs miss the mark and companies turn to the growing market of catalog builder software to make their catalogs engaging and user friendly. This ever growing trend is something that is helping increase sales and revenue, boosting page views, and increasing orders values. Catalog builder software is quickly gaining the reputation of being the future of e commerce.

Let's travel back a little in time. Online marketers used email as a primary tool for client retention and new customer acquisition. The simplicity of this form of direct marketing is easy to understand, but not as effective as catalogs have proven to be. Catalogs have many advantages that only multiply when you make that catalog digital. Digital catalogs are incredibly cost effective and you don't have geographical boundaries. They provide your business with a greater reach potential for new customers and give those customers an easy 24/7 way to shop. E-commerce also allows you (as a business) to track your sales efficiently and monitor your conversion rates. These are benefits that can only be found in a digital catalog.

The most important thing is to find catalog builder software that makes it easy for you to create the catalog and create a simple shopping experience for you customers. This should include some sort of simple linking ability and should be able to integrate directly with any e-commerce platform. Your customers should be able to add products to their cart without ever leaving the publication so that they can maintain their engagement. Additional things you should keep and eye out for are cross platform publishing, easy integration, and social media sharing abilities.

The solution for businesses who are trying to provide an e commerce solution that engages and allows their customers to interact has arrived. The opportunity to convert your already existing PDFs into digital catalogs is here. All you have to do is take advantage of it!

5 Emerging Trends That Will Drive Content Marketing in 2014

With the advent of eCommerce and online business opportunities, the need for digital content marketing is in higher demand when compared to traditional marketing methods. Every time a new technology surfaces, more opportunities are made available to the digital marketer to reach their target audience in a highly effective manner.

These strategies were created by people who have gone through the digital content marketing process and made mistakes. They developed ways to avoid making the same mistakes in the future. All the tricks of the trade have been learned through practical experience. You need to constantly evaluate the technological resources that are available for coming up with the best mix which allows you to deliver great results.

Here are 5 emerging trends that have the potential of driving content marketing in 2014.

Evaluating Multichannel Performance with Integrated Analytics

One of the biggest challenges that marketers face today is to track the outcomes of integrated marketing strategies which comprise digital as well as traditional channels. These multi channel strategies help a business reach its target audience in an effective manner by securing a place in all platforms and digital channels of promotion. The recently developed partnership between Yahoo and comScore will offer better analytical capabilities by allowing users (marketers) to access the validated Campaign Essentials metrics (a product of comScore). This tool will prove to be extremely valuable as it calculates the statistics for video, display, and mobile performance in terms of TV metrics. The rising trend of cross-media measurement would allow content markets to monitor their ROI more accurately.

Measuring the Effectiveness of Content in Real Time

Digital communication technologies are capable of providing dynamic real time interactions and these interactions are being used by content marketers to target their audience in an effective manner. While this may be efficient feature, it can also be rather challenging to measure the performance of the content in such real time interactions.

Tech-experts are coming up with tools that are capable of providing comparative performance information not only from within the industry in which the brand operates, but also sourced from the web. This helps achieve a comprehensive understanding of the performance of the contents. With such tools it is also possible to get real time analytics as well as historical stats.

A good example of this can be found in a new feature introduced by YouTube that gives brands the power to evaluate the performance of contents based on real time searches. This is just one example of integrated performance measurements which are becoming quite popular with marketers.

Creating Content with Increased Targeting

Gone are the days when content used to be prepared by keeping general preferences in mind. The current trend indicates a significant shift towards “interest targeting” where digital content is prepared by focusing on the specific needs of a target group. Such focused strategies not only ensure greater engagement with optimized reach, but they also increase the viral activity of the content.

Google Preferred, a service announced by YouTube, lets brands target pre-roll ads to the top 5 percent of the most popular content within specific topics. This is a new technology which is meant to enhance targeting efforts. With this service, brands can align their content so that their channels contain information that is highly targeted and is of value to the audience.

Ensuring the Existence of “Value” in Content

Over the past few months, Google has made several changes to its search algorithms and this has caused a lot of content to lose their rankings in the search results. This has sparked a dire need for content, to be endowed with sufficient value such that it is able to stand the test of time.

It is difficult to come up with a standard definition of the value of digital content, but you can get a pretty good idea by analyzing the current trends and monitoring the preferences of the target audience. However, you should never stick to one approach. You need to change your approach with time so that you add value to your brand and prevent it from stagnating.

Enhancing the Interactivity of Content

Animations, videos, and a clickable interface used to be the basic requirements for making interactive content. But with the advent of technology, interactivity is being taken to a whole new level. Touch screens and mobile technologies have not only revolutionized the way users interact with content, but it has also generated considerable possibilities for coming up with innovative ideas.

You can zoom into the content, share it at the touch of an icon, initiate video / audio streaming without leaving the page, flip pages over like a real book or magazine, and much more. Such inclusions can make even the simplest of content highly engaging and interactive.