“Content is King, but Context is the Kingdom” - Gary Vaynerchuk  Content marketing has always been a mixed bag of art and science. We see the evidence of artistry across the breadth of our digital and analog landscape in masterful storytelling, catchy jingles and unbelievable visual creatives. One can almost hear the collective thumb scroll of memes, videos and other digital objects d'art on social media channels. Overconsumption issues aside, we glean daily inspiration for new products, services, hobbies, professional pursuits, and travel destinations from the content we consume. We also absorb a healthy amount of brand awareness along our journey through a seemingly mystical form of psychological osmosis. So where is the science in all of this? Well, behind the scenes companies are amassing armies of data-driven marketers with limited paid-media budgets and aggressive goals to monetize their content. Everything is being measured, monitored and analyzed to optimize media spend across strategic communication channels. Whether you are trying to milk the hundreds of influencer blog posts your brand ambassadors wrote, or get the most out of your expert product review videos, it’s critical that you get your content science right so that you get everything you can out of it. The first thing we have to let go of is the notion that customers move in a strictly linear fashion along the customer engagement cycle. It’s just not realistic. We aren’t robots and we don’t simply move from brand awareness, to consideration to purchase, to loyalty like in the days of yore. We buy things while walking down the street without barely a second’s thought. Retailers lure us into showrooms with sophisticated geotargeting techniques as we drive by without any premeditation in mind. We have simply become more opportunistic and impulsive. Our purchases aren’t always as thoughtful as they...

We’ve all been there. You’re shopping online for something you need – that perfect gift for Mother’s Day, or even something as mundane as your groceries, and something goes wrong. Search is taking forever, the pick-up calendar isn’t working right on your phone, or maybe it’s just a big fat error message. So irritating, right? And what do you do when you get fed up with all the problems? You abandon and probably don’t go back! Now flip it around. You’re running an eCommerce site and now you’re the one causing problems! At least, that’s how your customers see it. So, what do you do to help them? What do you do to make sure that everyone is getting the best possible experience? Simple, you go back to your kindergarten lessons and follow the Golden Rule. Remember your own bad experiences as a shopper and make sure your customers don’t run into the same ones. “Think of shopping cart abandonment as the flip side of the customer engagement coin” Once you’ve committed to “what” you need to do, now you just need to learn “how” to do it. This is the challenging part but think of it like a game and you can have fun turning all of those frowns upside down! First, think of shopping cart abandonment as the flip side of the customer engagement coin. Everything you do to optimize engagement reduces abandonment and everything you do that contributes to abandonment will ultimately reduce your customer engagement (and loyalty). One solid tactic is to implement tooling that provides both quantitative and qualitative insights across the customer journey on each of your digital shopping touchpoints. It’s like x-ray glasses for your apps. Similar to the visibility that a business analytics platform provides, a customer experience analytics solution can give...

HCL Commerce team new approach towards Elasticsearch and depth on the newest HCL Search capabilities!