“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” (Sun Tzu)

You can learn a lot about what not to do from people who do things badly. You can learn a lot about what to do from people who do things well. Welcome competitive analysis.

Competitive analysis is a process used when formulating a digital strategy; it enables your business to understand its market position and what competitors are up to. So how do you approach it?

A good place to start lies in one of the most fundamentals of digital marketing – know your target audience. Usually, competitive analysis is written for business analysts so, your data should be quantifiable to inform your audience what your competitors are doing and how you could do it better.

But, what is it that is actually analysed?

A clue about the first stage in setting the criteria for competitive analysis is in its name – know your competitors. Make a hit list of the competitors you want to beat. Once you have this in place, you can start to analyse them.

Competitive analysis criteria can be categorised to ensure that your analysis is thorough. A good way to structure is to form a table which has labelled rows of the criteria and labelled columns of the companies so that it’s easy to make comparisons. Don’t forget to include design, functionality, navigation, user experience and call to action in your review. These are the major criteria to analyse, some will be detailed below.

Start with what the customers see first – the homepage. Design is one of the first things that will catch your eye; you should then consider the use of the ‘real estate space’ and of layout. One other question you should ask yourself when reviewing a website is content quality and quantity: are the messages and objectives of the website clear? User experience shouldn’t be disregarded and the website should present ways to engage visitors and areas to make call to action.

Most websites have a search facility and you need to analyse how well it performs. Does it have advanced options? How accurate are the results?

There is more to providing a great user experience than functionality so, the next thing to analyse is its usability. Are the fonts and colour schemes easy on the eye? Is text formatted so that it’s easy to scan through?

You can present the results in detail but returning back to your target audience, it is useful to gather quantifiable data for example, a rating system between 1 and 5.

As part of your digital strategy, competitive analysis will be used to inform usability based decisions as well as, aiding strategic goal setting and planning. It is therefore crucial to digital marketing. At Boss Digital, leading digital marketing agency Hong Kong, we can provide a complete marketing solution. Our rigorous competitive analysis is completed with SWOT analysis so that you have an excellent level of visibility into your competitors and know how to differentiate yourself.

As far as a digital marketing agency Hong Kong goes, we are leaders in this field. Unlike companies who specialise in individual aspects of marketing, we cover the entire lifecycle which for you, means having piece of mind that your marketing needs are in the hands of a company who will get to know your business inside out.

“There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.” (Ken Olson, Digital Equipment Corp., 1977)
I suppose he would have found no use for people to carry mobile phones with them either.

Coming from a past of many false predictions, we can be certain of one thing. Going forward, if you want your business to be successful, you need a brilliant website. But with so many factors contributing to your business’s success, how do you know whether the time has come for your website to get a facelift?

The main thing to ask is, do people know we exist? It is all very well to have a slick website but, what’s the point if no one can find it? If you are not making as much money as you thought you could, it could be because if its poor web presence and this, is a very good indication that your website needs a facelift.

SEO is the hot word here. It is a means by which websites are designed and marketed so that they appear high in search engine results. The techniques to achieve this are vast and in plenty and it is a worthwhile investment employing a professional to do the job.

Another factor that might be contributing to why your website is not generating enough business is your ‘bounce rate’. This refers to the rate at which visitors leave your website – usually within a few seconds. It is a sure sign that your website needs a facelift because, if you encourage visitors to stay for longer, they are more likely to spend money. So what can promote this?

Feedback has shown that a website with slow loading time is a real pet peeve. We have been liberated with online activity having almost instantaneous response times which results in quite an impatient audience. Another is navigation. It is amazing how many websites have weak navigation facilities despite it being one of the fundamental principles of web design. And, if it were ever important, it is definitely important in this age. This is because users are increasingly accessing online content through mediums like smartphones which means that websites, need to be compatible across various platforms.

While you are evaluating your website, it is worth doing the same for your CMS. As it goes hand in hand with much of what has already been discussed, a CMS that is right for your business is a powerful tool. Here at Boss Digital we are proudly, experts in website development Hong Kong. Our fully serviced design agency houses a team of accredited experts who deliver an end to end solution. Because we have specialised teams, you could have your own web designer Hong Kong who will review your website and help you give it that facelift.

In addition to being leaders in website development Hong Kong, we can also provide a CMS solution that helps you create a website that is unique and dynamic. We also work with a wide range of open-source CMS, such as Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, etc. that can provide tailored solutions for your company. This means that you are receiving support for the entire lifecycle of website design Hong Kong so that you can start using your website for what it was created – to make money. Please check out http://goo.gl/BBYXn for more details on our CMS solutions.

Online video has become increasingly popular on the Internet and video marketing is now more of a necessity for brands who want to engage their target markets more effectively. However, online video marketing is not what it used to be – simple video commercial placements, panel adverts and pop-ups are being replaced with more technologically advanced forms of video marketing i.e. breakout adverts, interactive video campaigns and dynamic viral video campaigns. Ad targeting and website analytics are becoming more of an integrated standard to planning and measuring these new technological forms of marketing.

Read more to find out the 5 emerging trends that you should know about to maximise your brand’s online presence.

Interactive Videos are the Future of Engagement

Customers are becoming more familiar with new technological advancements in the form of marketing and plain old web video marketing will not cut it anymore. Having a standard video on a sidebar with a cut and dry campaign is not going to impress customers as well as it used to. The key to the future of engagement is allowing your customers to interact with the rich media they are viewing. This is what we call Interactive Video. You can allow you customers to interact with the video playing they are viewing i.e. to click for more information, download vouchers, link to an online game and more. According to Earl Roberts, the CEO of www.unseentv.tv who I interviewed recently, interactive videos are becoming increasing popular in corporate advertising as it gives the audience more time to interact with the brand online and be more excited and engaged by the adverts. As internet users are becoming more famiar with new online advertising methods, they are not going to be as engaged by traditional plain old videos. Check out an example of interactive video advertising from Blentec below.

HTML 5 advertising campaigns bringing more creativity than ever!

HTML is a new version of online programming language that has allowed HTML video to move to the next level. We are at the early adoption stages of seeing the types of campaigns it can be used for. The Indie Bane Arcade Fire released an HTML5 music video on Google Chrome earlier this week. It is a brilliant video that gives a truly amazing experience to viewers allowing them the opportunity to enter their old childhood address, which will automatically take shots of their childhood neighbourhood and dynamically incorporate them into the video with choreographed pop-up video windows, sharing functionality and more. Literally after a few hours this video was released, it grew like a virus and spread dramatically across Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Delicious and the rest of the social Internet sites on web. It is becoming more widely evident that people love and enjoy seeing innovative campaigns. HTML5 is definitely a catalyst for opening up doors into more creativity and interactivity in online video marketing. Although the technology is still in its infancy, I am sure it will become a widespread standard as companies recognise the major benefits it will have on their advertising campaigns.

Brands will be the “Jack in the bean stalk” with YouTube breakout campaigns

YouTube is now becoming a channel that is fostering new trends in advertising with “breakout campaigns”. Companies can now completely re-design their personal YouTube pages that literally have an overhaul of the entire YouTube interface to complement the brand identity of their organisation. We have covered a variety of these campaigns where Boss Digital’s director was involved with the creation of EF Englishtown’s YouTube page, plus you can see how other top brands are bring interactive games completely overhauling the design of YouTube. Check out the first ever YouTube game done by SamSung; a campaign done by Cadbury with round YouTube video players; plus a campaign done for The Expendables where Sylvester Stallone literally blows YouTube to pieces. The sky is the limit with what you can do with YouTube breakout campaigns and we are only just hitting the tip of the iceberg for future creativity, it will become more widespread with what you can see with some worldwide brands already demonstrating. Check out the TipEx YouTube breakout campaign – simply brilliant!

Customers will be able to explore products from home with augmented reality and 3D technology

With new advances in technology once of the latest mechanisms available today is giving your customers the ability to explore your products in a dynamic world from the comfort of home. With 3D manipulation of images and augmented reality, customers can check out a brands products from all angles at their finger tips at home. Olympus has a fine example of this where they launched a stylish augmented reality campaign giving customers the opportunity to discover their PEN camera using a paper market that can be downloaded and printed from the website. If you hold up the PEN camera to the web cam, the marker turns into a 3D camera that customers can explore the functionality of the PEN camera. View the video below to see how it works!

More sophisticated analytics and targeting will dramatically improve the effectiveness of online video marketing.

Online video marketing is becoming more popular and the availability of sophisticated analytics tools are becoming more available and evident in video marketing campaigns. Online marketers can now find out where their adverts are being viewed around the world, how many people are viewing them, the demographics of the audience, what other types of websites the audience are viewing, the types of videos they watch and more. This is enabling online marketers to determine the success of their campaigns like never before. Advertisers also have the ability to target their camapigns like never before. With the available segmentation tools on YouTube, advertisers can target campaigns to specific viewer demographics, psychographics, channels and even particular videos. YouTube has also allow advertisers to put age restrictions on their videos to control the target demographics to which their videos will be viewed.

As video advertising becomes more mainstream, analytics are becoming more involved as well. Advertisers can find out not only how many people are viewing their ads, but what part of the world they are in, how old they are, whether they are male or female, and even data about what websites they are visiting, videos they are watching and more. This is allowing video advertisers to gauge the success of their campaigns like never before.

With the increase in technological advances across the Internet, we will see a greater trend of brands adopting more creative and innovative forms of online video advertising. What will be in store for us next in the world of online video marketing?