August 4, 2010 | No Comments »
Clarinova will be presenting at the BRA Survival Of The Fittest program on August 12 in San Diego on the subject of Manufacturer and Retailer collaboration. We’ll be talking about how retailers are working with their manufacturers to:
Please join us if you can. Or, you can download the presentation materials:
July 15, 2010 | No Comments »
Over on the Understanding Google Maps and Local Search blog some startling information on the volume of searches with local intent. For June Google had over 2.187 billion! For all search engines the number is 3.187 billion!
May 24, 2010 | No Comments »
The guys from Clarinova jumping off the Stratosphere in Sanuk gear.
April 8, 2010 | No Comments »
For many retailers, particularly those with a long history of retailing in the physical world, the Internet is an ominous dark cloud, and even thinking about websites brings a sense of dread. Are e-commerce websites going to steal your business? Will your customers desert you for Swell.com?
Not likely. Internet sales are still a small part of total US sales: E-commerce is less than 4% of US retail sales. Some market segments have much smaller percentages: 1% in Apparel, and 2% in sporting goods. E-commerce is important, but, despite years of hype, online purchasing is not how people buy products. As analyst Greg Sterling says,
The dominant paradigm has emerged: online “shopping,” offline buying.
Nearly all consumers use the Internet for research, and then nearly all of them buy in physical, real-world, brick-and-mortar stores. Yahoo calls it ROBO: Research Online, Buy Offline.
So, don’t be worried about other e-commerce retailers. Don’t worry about not having an e-commerce website. But, you should be concerned if you don’t have any web presence. Retailers don’t need to maintain their own websites, but they do need to make it easy for consumers to find and connect with them. Fortunately, this is getting easier every day, particularly with directories like Yahoo Local, Google Local Business or CitySearch and business-capable social networks like Facebook Fan Pages.
March 25, 2010 | No Comments »
On a recent trip to the mall, I noticed the URL in the window of a Levi’s store. It wasn’t levis.com, as you’d probably guess, but facebook.com/levis, the URL of their Facebook page. Facebook is becoming the center of many company’s promotion efforts, and may eventually become the center of the typical user’s web experience.
It isn’t hard to understand why. Levi’s has 360,000 fans of their Facebook page, and if 4% of those fans follow a posting on this page, each posting to their page could generate 14,000 hits on the main Levis.com website, a substantial fraction of Levi’s total traffic. Many other sits report that Facebook is the largest referer of traffic to their sites. At Foursquare, Facebook refers 50% more traffic than Google, although other sites that don’t have a strong application-level connection to Facebook report that Facebook has a more modest edge.
Even more surprising, last week Hitwise reported that Facebook gets more US traffic than Google, indicating that we may be seeing another fundamental shift in how people use the web, away from searching across the entire web to finding a community and discovering the information that other community members publish, a shift that was predicted by social bookmarking sites and discovery sites like digg.com, reddit.com and stumbleupon.com.
For independent retailers, this may seem like a scary new world, but it is actually an improvement, because retailers can get online with Facebook in a matter of a few minutes, without having to spend a lot of time and effort on creating a store website. It is also easy to link Facebook to other websites, either by posting links to Facebook, or including links from traditional websites back to Facebook, as Clarinova’s microsites do on the Home and Contact pages.
If you are a retailer, and are not on Facebook, you owe it to your business to create a profile for your self and a fan page for your business.
March 2, 2010 | No Comments »
Bird Rock Surf Shop
If you have a website for your small brick-and-mortar business ( and we hope you do ) you’d probably like to have your customers be able to find you online. You want customers to get a link to your site in a search engine when they do web searches that are related to business, and to do that, you need to optimize the content of your website for those searches. While there is a lot of good advice about optimizing for local searches at places like Local SEO Guide there is one tip that is both important and incomplete.
If a customer is doing a local search on a search engine, the customer is likely to use the name of a city, neighborhood or zip code, and that local term may not be the one in your address. Including your address on your web site is not good enough.
Suppose you have surf shop in the Pacific Beach neighborhood of San Diego, but you also serve people from Mission Beach, Bird Rock and La Jolla. You customer might be doing any of these searches:
There are probably several dozen searches that the customer might use, so in addition to your address, your website should also include the zip codes and neighborhood names that you serve.
Also consider that your customers might be searching for a particular product, such as Sanuk sandals. Your customer might be searching for:
So, you’ll want to have your zip-codes and neighborhood names on the same page as your top brand names.
Clarinova’s Front Window microsites do this automatically when the retailer enters the zip code and brand names for their stores. For instance, the Sanuk microsite for Mitch’s Surf Shop includes this text at the bottom of the pages:
Mitch’s Surf Shop serves the communities of North City, Cardiff by the Sea, Del mar, Rancho Santa Fe and Solana Beach. Mitch’s Surf Shop is conveniently near the zip codes 92075, 92091, 92007, 92014 and 92130.
Here is the text for the microsite for the Sanuk microsite for Pacific Beach Surf Shop:
Pacific Beach Surf Shop serves the communities of Pacific Beach, Bay Ho and San Diego. Pacific Beach Surf Shop is conveniently near the zip codes 92109, 92169, 92167, 92037 and 92138.
Text like this helps ensure that what every your customer’s search for, they will find your website.
“We need customers to find us no matter how they search on the web. Whether they type in a city, zip code or a neighborhood along with our company name — we need our retailers to pop up in the search, and the Front Window microsites are making this happen.”John HarbinBrand Manager of West Wetsuits