
Social Media Marketing

Good brands have followers, strong brands have advocates. Those advocates are gained through a relationship built outside of the typical transaction. To get to this level of relationship, brands must create an experience their customers can only get by interacting with the brand. By understanding its customers and what brings them back, brands can expand…
While retailers are doing plenty of creative things with organic (i.e., free) Instagram Stories already, on the paid side, Stories ads have officially taken off in a material way for the first time since their 2017 release. The Instagram business page about Stories ads states: “ … of the 500 million accounts using Instagram Stories,…
In an attempt to capitalize on the lucrative and competitive digital ad market, social platforms are positioning themselves as the answer for every marketer’s needs. In the early days of social media, advertisers flocked to Facebook and Twitter because of their huge numbers of daily active users and amount of time users spent on each…
Facebook and Instagram video ads are akin to street performers — they occupy a crowded, bustling space, and if they don’t capture attention quickly, potential audiences are fast to move along to the next, more exciting offering. Your brand deserves to be the main act, not the sideshow. From utilizing the relatively untapped "Stories" feature…
In this week's Retail Right Now, Total Retail's Kristina Stidham and Ashley Chiaradio talk about influencer marketing and why it’s essential for brands on social media, as written in a recently published article, “What Every Retailer Should Know About Influencer Marketing,” by Yuval Ben-Itzhak, CEO of Socialbakers. The author shares current influencer marketing data revealed…
For retailers that need to increase brand awareness on social media, the use of influencers is no longer just another option. It’s essential. Influencer marketing is projected to become a $5 billion to $10 billion market by 2020. That’s because when retailers and influencers team up, they create a more authentic connection with their target…
We recently visited some family friends who moved from New York City, where they lived for 35 years, to a village in rural Vermont. Knowing the business that I’m in, my friend complained about how the rugs she bought on SundanceCatalog.com follow her around the internet, as did the dish rack she purchased on Food52.com,…
Almost every social media platform has its own form of advertising, and not all of it is currently shoppable. However, the social shopping trend demands widespread shoppable ad functionality. Therefore, it’s imperative for e-commerce marketing leaders to become familiar with at least the heavy hitters in the shoppable ads game:
In episode 206 of Total Retail Talks, Executive Editor Joe Keenan speaks with Michael Prince, president and CEO of USPA Global Licensing Inc., the exclusive licensing arm and global broadcaster of the United States Polo Association. USPA Global Licensing manages U.S. Polo Assn., a nearly $2 billion-dollar brand with 1,100 retail stores, e-commerce, and thousands…
Furniture and home décor brand Wisteria is leveraging user-generated content (UGC) to drive customer interactions and sales. Wisteria has partnered with Curalate, a social commerce platform, to request rights to UGC images and then uses Curalate's platform to deploy those images in galleries on the retailer's website (e.g., homepage, product detail pages) as well as its social…