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We have officially entered the phase of m-commerce in which consumers not only use it as a shopping tool but also as a search portal, a personal advisor and a 24/7 shopping partner. Why is shopping through mobile becoming a norm?

Perhaps because the users of mobile outweigh the users of a toothbrush. Or because we have actually becomes cyborgs that store part of their memory in an extended device. As a result majority of the shoppers today are using their smartphones to buy clothing and other fashion accessories. This is not a real surprise. M-commerce already enjoys one-third of e-commerce sales (34 percent). In the past few years we have witnessed a fundamental shift in purchase behavior of consumer. 87% of millennials admit that a cellphone never leaves their side. Their choices and purchase preferences are shaped through the searches they come across. Of course this opens up a window of opportunity for marketers.

So, without further ado let’s delve into some ways to leverage mobile marketing for fashion industry.

Build a personalized experience

It all started from Amazon when it started recommending products to its customers based on their past purchases and search history. That is how they raised the bar for personalization. Today retailers compete with each other to offer better personalized experience for its consumer. For instance EyeFitU is a fashion sizing platform that suggests to its users sizing recommendations, based on their personal measurements.

Appeal to generation Z

The tech-driven generation that consumes snapchat and Instagram at breakfast is fast in catching latest fashion trends. In order to appeal to them, marketers need to know where to find them and how to connect with them. Also value their opinion when they share a review about a product or service. The live video experiences that they share tend to resonate among post millennials. The bottom line is in order to make sense to generation Z, the marketing messages must be directed to the platforms that they are addicted to.

Make mobile app experience augmented

Sephora is a leading fashion and cosmetics brand that did a fine job by aiding customers in their in-store shopping. The app includes some beacon powered features that offers a digital experience by offering augmented reality features. Sephora has indeed considered their digital-savvy customers to create options of scanning products and the makeup application tips the app suggests when you take a selfie. It is indeed an experience that promotes customer engagement and turns them into brand loyal.

Scan-to-shop directly from mobile

Loreal introduced an app that used the scan-to-shop technology. In order to promote consumers to use this feature, they were allowed to scan products in magazine ads or in-store. This simplified shopping through mobile employs image recognition technology that various retailers can implement for better engagement.

Despite being user engaging, not every mobile application has the tendency to get viral. It’s no longer a matter of luck. These days, you have to put your heart and soul in promoting the app as well. It has become more of a necessity to stay ahead in business.

Before moving on to the science, let’s first observe the typical way of sharing an app.

This iteration or sharing pattern would continue and will give a good start to promotion efforts. In case, there is a weak link, the chain breaks. It usually happens if the user did not find the promised value in the app.

Plan for virality

For starters, every app should be well designed and easily sharable for all users. In some cases, sharing of an app has to be coupled to certain rewards. It has been tested through gaming apps that when you share your actions across social networks, there is a higher likelihood of friends catching up with the trend. Upon inviting other friends to play, the user gets rewarded with some bonus points.

A similar approach can be used whereby users can be rewarded upon sharing app in their circles. However, app store optimization is the foundation of user acquisition strategy. It involves selecting the right keywords, creating app screenshots for user previews and providing the relevant description of the app to target the relevant audience. The next stage is to introduce paid and viral tactics in order to boost the app acquisition.

Another integral part of promoting an app requires development of web presence outside the app store as well. This is achieved by creating a landing page optimized for mobile.

App virality in a nutshell

But hold on, is your app passing these 4 criteria

It has value to share

It allows users to share and for friends to join

The users should be rewarded for sharing and incentives must be provided for coming back

As more people use the app, more value should be created for them

With that known, its also important to note that it takes some time for the customer to try the app and share it in their circle. The challenge is to reduce this time and hence comes the science.

Optimize to make it effortless

An ideal app never confuses the user with complicated design but facilitates them with easy functionality. Also, the steps to get the app downloaded should be simple and not time consuming. In order to create a flow in your app, make its sharing effortless. Allow users to have one-click sign in option so that they can get registered effortlessly. A dedicated login, on the other hand is time-consuming and makes the user lose interest.

Use referrals

Even in the digital world, the one thing that remains constant is the general trust in recommendations. 92% of people say they trust recommendations from friends and family, and word of mouth still influences 50% of all purchase decisions. To date, referrals remain the most powerful form of app marketing.

Emerging and established brands have a special advantage to influence consumers via mobile. Yet mobile advertising appears to be in its infancy. While there are various obstacles to overcome before mobile marketing goes mainstream, there are certain brands that have taken a leap.

Participating in offline using QR codes

One of top tactics reinforced by retailers aim to bridge the gap between offline retail store and the online available digital content. The adoption for QR codes is rapidly improving for smartphone owners as it commands less commitment from the customers in comparison to SMS.

Nike free ID

An interesting collaboration between Nike and WeChat resulted in a QR campaign. This campaign invites the user to scan a QR code to begin following Nike via an app. They have share a colorful image via the app and then the user gets a reply with the customized shoe that closely matches the color of the photo they shared. It was an interesting engagement campaign that generated 30,000 submissions in one month.

Check-in and location-based marketing

Location based marketing tactics are key elements for people who like to brag about their brand loyalty to their friends and in social networking circles. The central idea here is to drive customers who are brands loyals. The brand can reward them in return for check-ins. Some customers like tagging other friends under it increasing a brand’s chances of exposure.

Zarraffa’s Coffee complimentary upsize

It was a smart way to motivate customer who weren’t necessarily aiming for an upsize. All you had to do was show a staff member a check- in into their location from their device to get a complimentary upsized coffee.

Augmented reality

AR combines real landscape with virtual objects via your cell phone camera and GPS systems. With the help of software generated graphics blended with real time background, a whole new augmented experience can be created. Not surprisingly, marketers are keen keep to leverage augmented reality to presented engagement opportunities for the brand. Let’s explore how McDonalds applied this arsenal of mobile marketing.

When it comes to good on-page SEO practices, you might have heard about a lot of stuff that might boggle your mind and leaves you confused. But we have listed some really simple and effective SEO on-page practices that are simple and will surely give you a good heads-up in the search results.

So, there are several on-page factors that greatly affects search engine rankings and below we have mentioned the 5 best on-page SEO practices that you need to know. So, let’s get started:

1: Meta Title Tags

Now, before you start writing your Meta Tags, make sure that your keyword research is complete, because keyword research is the most important part in on-page optimization, and you have to make sure that you are targeting the right audience through your keywords. So, if you have done your keyword research, then you can proceed further.

Title tags are the second most important factor in on-page SEO as it tells search engine and visitors what the page is all about. Title tag must be unique for every page.

Code Sample

<head>
<title>Example Title</title>
</head>

Best Practices:

• Suggested format: Your Keyword Base Title | Brand Name
• Use dash or pipe at the end before your brand name
• Keep title tags length between 55 to 60 including spaces
• Do not Repeat Words
• Avoid using duplicate title tags
• Avoid using stop words

Example of a title tag in SERP:

2: Meta Description

Meta Description is the short paragraph or summary of your page.  Its content is placed in the head tag of your website. The Meta Description appears under your page’s URL in the search engine results page (SERP).

Example of a Meta Description tag in SERP:

Code Sample

<head>
<meta name="description" content="This is an example of a meta description. That show up in search results.">
</head>

Best Practices:

• Use your most important keywords in the Meta description. Often search engines will highlight in bold where it finds the search query on SERP
• 300 characters is the recommended length, including spaces
• Avoid using duplicate meta descriptions
• Do not use quotes or non-alphanumeric characters (Google cuts off the description)

3: URL

URL or Uniform Resource Locator is human-readable text that was designed to replace the numbers (IP addresses).

Example of a URL in SERP:

Best Practices:

• Recommended Format: http://www.example.com/category-keyword/subcategory-keyword/primary-keyword
• Use Keyword in URL
• Use 80 to 90 characters or try to keep them as short as possible, because research shows that shorter URLs have a higher click-through-rate (CTR)

4: Content with Targeted Keywords

Your page’s content must follow the guidelines laid down by Google. It’s essential that your content is unique and informative for the users and you have to make sure that your content must not repeat in your other pages or is copied from other websites because plagiarism can lead to a serious penalty by Google.

Best Practices:

• Create unique and relevant content
• Use keywords in your content but make sure do not stuff keywords
• Use internal Linking
• Avoid repeating content

5: Internal Page Linking

Internal Links are hyperlinks that lead to other pages in the same domain. In simple words, internal linking is when you link your own website pages in your content.

Internal linking is an important part of on-page SEO because it provides your audience with further reading options and tells the search engines that the page is relevant for that keyword phrases too.

Best Practices:

• Select good anchor text (keywords) rather than Click here.
• Use links that are natural for the reader.

So, we hope that by optimizing your web pages on these parameters, you can surely boost your search engine rankings. If you have any questions, feedback or suggestions, you can comment in the comment sections below:

In essence, the human existence can be divided into 5 eras. The hunters and gatherers age that lasted for millions of years, the agricultural age lasted for thousands of years, the industrial age lasted for hundreds of years and then the information age lasted for a few decades. But today we are entering the augmented age – an epitome of human endeavor.

We don’t know if AI is going to scare us or prepare us for the future. But there are people who can give us a glimpse of how artificial intelligence is going to affect our lives and if there is any escape from it? Let’s sneak a look at some enlightening sessions in TED Talks covering the topic of Artificial Intelligence .

What AI is and isn’t

To be honest, we know very little about what AI is and what its not. This discussion brings clarity about artificial intelligence. It points out that computers can process more data than humans ever could, so they can be utilized for repetitive and tedious task. But that’s old news.  An interesting aspect under debate these days is possibility of these systems over-riding human smartness. Now the computers are super smart because they can find their own rules through deep learning. It is to say that the computer programs have a brain of their own and they learn through patterns which closely emulate human thinking. Get a glimpse of how systems learn and tend to exceed human agility and precision.

Machine intelligence makes human morals more important

The machines can now be programmed to judge human emotions from their expressions. We are in a world where software engineers are enabling all sorts of computations and decisions. They can build driverless cars that can decide who they can run over. Also, they are building machines and weapons that can kill people at war. This means we have more ethical concerns with artificial intelligence. She elaborates how machine learning is different from traditional programming and how the later needs to be fed a lot of structured data and the system learns by churning this data to identify patterns. Learn how she explains the importance of human morals in an era of post machine intelligence.

How I am fighting bias in algorithms

Joy Buolamwini takes us on an interesting journey of discovery she made while working with a facial recognition software. She points out that the software fails to detect her face because whoever coded that algorithm didn’t work with a diverse data set including a broad range of skin tones. The glitch wasn’t serious as long as it was used in studies but when facial recognition software is used in criminal investigations, this could be a serious problem. Find out how she highlights a crucial issue and gave suggestions to counter bias in algorithms.

How AI can bring on a second Industrial Revolution

“The actual path of a raindrop as it goes down the valley is unpredictable, but the general direction is inevitable,” – Kevin Kelly

Well yes the general direction is known and inevitable, and likewise the embracing of AI backed systems by humanity is bound to happen. However, we need to reason in order to understand how Artificial Intelligence must be developed and adopted. Again like other visionaries, he also agrees that our creation is going to outsmart us. Are we prepared to deal with it. Let’s explore what he says about the second Industrial Revolution.

The incredible inventions of intuitive AI

Maurice Conti begins by elaborating how humans are unconsciously living the life of a cyborg-machine in a human’s body. Think about it, we already use our cell phones for long-term memory and storage. So by the looks of it, the augmented age has already began. Take a tour of the Augmented Age with futurist Maurice Conti and preview a time when robots and humans will work side-by-side to accomplish things neither could do alone.

How computers can learn to be creative

Blaise Agüera Arcas is a principal scientist at Google who works with deep neural networks for machine perception and distributed learning. In this fascinating lecture, he displays how the function of neural networks can now be emulated by machines. The systems can recognize images like our ocular system and maps an image that it can reproduce in reality. As he rightly points out:

“Perception and creativity are very intimately connected, any creature, any being that is able to do perceptual acts is also able to create.”