Make Digital Marketing Work

In discussion with prospects and clients, there seems to be one question that keeps returning no matter how many years go by and that is whether to sell directly online with eCommerce or to support existing sales channels.  Rather than deciding on how your sales channel is to be fed.  I think a better way of approaching this is whether your campaign is transactional (ie I can buy it more easily online) or non transactional (I want them to go and buy it somewhere else because that is easier for them and me).  It fits quite neatly into direct response and brand building.

If I sell music from my store of vintage vinyl, it will help me a lot if I offer this as an online order service and therefore provide direct response media that tells me what albums to wrap up and send where all across the world.  Direct response is perfect for me.  It is also playing to one of the Web’s strengths where time and place do not matter.  It means that me as a tiny little store in the middle of nowhere can compete as if I was an international company with a presence on every street corner.  I can be open 24 hours a day, every day and everybody in the world can access my store front.  This is why tiny niche offers can do so well online.  There may only be a million people in the entre world who need my product but through the web I can access every single one of them just as easily as I can access the three who live in my area.

If I am selling chocolate that can be bought on every street corner, direct response isn’t a lot of use to me because every customer can cross the street and buy my product a lot faster than I can send it by mail or courier.  I’ve also got this huge infrastructure in place that makes it available across the world.  Why would I want to compete with such a well established sales channel?  My task here is to support and strengthen my existing sales channels through all the means at my disposal of which online is one.

In this scenario conducting brand building marketing activity is a lot more beneficial.  I might try promoting why my chocolate is better than everybody else’s or give a special promotion code online so that customers can take it into their store to get added value.  I might ask my customers which of my chocolate they prefer at a given time and ask them for examples.  Do they cook with it, show me.  Is there some way I can make it better, tell me.  All these things combine to help me and my customer know each other better and help my distribution partners sell more of my product.

This is only scratching the surface though because I have assumed that simply advertising the fact that I have a product to sell is enough to get customers to buy it, when  organisations are starting to recognise the importance of an end to end online marketing strategy, which engages and builds trust to maximise the chances of a prospect becoming a customer.

This morning I received an email from a company selling an online service that enables virtual meetings to take place.  The title of the email was

“When travel halts, online meetings keep business running”

It began with the an emboldened heading Iceland Volcano Cloud: The Economic Impact and a link to the BBC news article with the same title.

The general gist was a standard sales structure where a problem is highlighted (travel plans disrupted), the effects of this problem are explored (people cannot get business done due to lack of mobility and face to face meetings), and then a solution offered (virtual meetings online).  The technique is called SPIN (Situation, Problem, Implication, and Needs), and is as old as the hills.

My issues with this email are pretty comprehensive and go beyond the ambulance chasing nature of its “Oh look, natural disaster, buy my product” cynical premise.

The Link on the BBC site concentrates on the businesses hardest hit by the volcano, namely airlines and travel companies.  No mention of this is made in the email.  Their losses are enormous compared to the fairly minimal losses that are expected to hit other sectors such as those targeted in the email.

We live in a world where voice and video are available on technology in our pockets and where email enables instant exchange of information.  There is nothing ground breaking about virtual meetings in 2010, and I hope that their ill conceived attempts at using email marketing to take advantage of a crisis situation fails, with resultant loss of reputation.  I am not frightened to name them.  I simply do not want to give them any publicity.

Email marketing has a bad reputation amongst a lot of people.  My argument has always been that it isn’t email advertising that is bad, it is clueless marketers who use it badly, and this is a perfect (and very sad) example of this.  Email is an incredibly powerful tool and an essential part of the Interactive Marketing Mix, but it should be treated with more respect than my inbox was treated to this morning.

We have written before about how the word strategy is abused within the world of digital marketing and the temptation to rely on tactics, but one of the biggest casualties is often the Marketing Process.  To explain it I need to define terms.

• A marketing strategy is the big picture plan that looks at the resources available to you.  That can include the budget, available channels, your skill set, the prevailing market conditions, distribution, your customers themselves and of course all of the 4 Ps from the marketing Mix.  Collectively these  form a battle plan of how to create customer satisfaction, product sales, and secure revenue for the organisation.
• A Marketing process is the application of this strategy as a turnkey solution.  It consists of a series of tactics.  Imagine a machine that you turn the handle and it produces results out the other end, so that whenever the process is activated, you can predict the results of what will happen each time.

As an example, a process could consist of writing a blog post about your products and then promoting the blog post on Twitter and Facebook.  Each time you do that, you can expect a number of people to click on the promotional links and read your blog post.

This is definitely a process, but it isn’t a strategy and nor is it strategic because it only gets people reading your blog post.  It delivers nothing in product sales and it can’t legitimately claim to have secured any profit for the organisation.  If it has a bill attached to the activity it has in fact cost you money.  The best you can say is that a few people have now heard of you.

That kind of process can only be considered tactical and the sad fact is that tactics are what an awful lot of digital agencies offer to clients.  The results can be hugely disappointing.  As a strategic digital agency, we appreciates the need for bottom line results  and work across the various digital channels such as Search, Social Media, User experience, Web Design, Email, eCRM, analytics, and advertising.  Because of this we have a different proposition to make to clients than traditional tactical digital agencies.  That can be a little difficult to appreciate because the focus for us is on customers and the bottom line rather than technical disciplines.

An awful lot of online activity results in a lot of noise that ultimately achieves very little.  To avoid this. your online marketing strategy must place a focus on the commercial needs of the organisation and engages prospects, It should also plan the route through to a point where customers are created nurtured and retained.  That is why an online marketing strategy should be the basis for online marketing processes, and should also be a priority for all organisations.

The first commercial use of the internet was by business looking to expand their marketplace.  It stands to reason that a local company looking to expand their business into national and global markets could find a fantastic medium online.  Anyone who could ship their products to the customer had a wealth of opportunity open to them and this is how eCommerce was born.

On the other hand, a traditional bricks and mortar local business that relies on local custom, can find the internet to be a baffling place. Dentists, hair salons, doctors, guitar teachers, mechanics and a whole host of other business types all fall into this bracket where their location is an important part of their appeal. Similarly their customers often make decisions based on location in tandem with their reputation and perceived value.  Location therefore becomes a hugely important factor.  Correlating this to an environment where time and place do not matter was a perplexing problem for a very long time.

I’ve heard advice given to local hairdressers to get involved in eCommerce operations which effectively meant they should abandon a business they knew for one they had no idea about.  That kind of advice is thankfully consigned to history now but some very big companies served up that kind of rubbish for a very long time.

The problem is that nobody is going to drive the length of the country to visit a dentist regularly, and the concept of the visiting dentist to London that comes to you from the Outer Hebrides didn’t catch on as far as I am aware.

For business such as these the online marketing strategy should include Google Local Search.  Other search engines also offer local search inclusion but Google is by far and away the simplest to set up in my view. By adding your details to the mapping anyone that uses location as a search term will see your information. There is still the need for it to be entered correctly and a marketer who is experienced in these things will be able to help you.  The results can be significantly better (and the costs significantly lower) using this method rather than trying to get to the top of Google’s rankings for the term “dentist”.  When you think about it, that is a pretty pointless goal to begin with.

All local businesses should be looking at Local Search as a promotional tactic.

As part of our daily briefing we go through as much industry news as we possibly can.  Today we heard about the new Facebook group that had been opened up called Democracy UK.  You can find it at

http://www.facebook.com/democracyuk?ref=search&sid=560491968.4276199144..1&v=wall#!/democracyuk?v=wall&ref=search

The one piece of information given about the group is listed on the wall page as:

“Facebook UK has created this page to show some of the ways people are using Facebook in political campaigns.”

Now we made a blog post the last week concerning the Digital Economy Bill and promoted it on our own Facebook page so we thought that this is definitely political and that we were definitely using Facebook and that it was definitely part of a campaign (many other people are writing to their MPs as a result of it), so there would be nothing wrong with posting this on the Facebook Page which we did, We were a bit shocked a few minutes later to see that the post had been removed from the wall of UK Democracy (hardly democracy in action) and so we assumed that either we or Facebook had made a mistake and posted it again as the following screen grab demonstrates.

A few minutes later we checked (because by now our suspicions were aroused).  Low and behold it had been removed again.  What’s the point of opening a Facebook group about Democracy using social media and then randomly removing posts when you don’t clearly have a usage policy about what you will and will not tolerate.

If you are going to censor it then for goodness sake put up a policy so that users know what they can and cannot do.  At the very least notify people when they do so that they can take appropriate action themselves.  Otherwise you simply lead to another PR fail.

Also as I write this I notice that I have strangely been removed from the group and I know I didn’t do it.

Presumably I have to put up or shut up about this and with no explanation, except that I don’t, because I can write it up here and hope that everyone notices that this has the potential to be a huge PR Fail.

Democracy in action eh lads?

Update 1 : I have now been mysteriously added back to the group but my post is still missing.  Other users are starting to notice that their comments are being removed as well.  The page is now only able to have posts added to the wall by the page admins but users can now make comments on the entries.  All in all this looks like a case of people not thinking through what they would allow users to do before promoting the page.  Not a great demonstration of either democracy or how to handle social media.

Update 2: A few minutes ago (15:50) I received an email from Richard Allen, Director of Policy Facebook.  It reads:

Hey Aaron,
Thanks for posting to the Democracy UK page. I spotted your comment re censorship. Your post on the DEB should not have been deleted. There was some confusion with the team we have been developing to moderate this. If you can repost the DEB campaign item then it will be left up as it is a legitimate campaign story – sorry to cause extra work but I hope you will allow us a little leeway for teething troubles. I also have to get the moderation policy posted during today.
Richard.

It looks like my suspicions were correct, and the page’s promotion took off before a full list of actual policies were agreed with the result that those providing admin to the site made mistakes due to lack of direction.  It seems that this has been escalated to the point where board members had to get involved, but that now they are, a firm policy has been decided upon and calm is restored.  That is a good sign but it does prove that social media (especially social media involving topics that focus firmly held opinions) needs to be well thougt through with clear olicies before they are launcehd, not during and not after.

Thanks Richard for your letter it is greatly appreciated.

In general I don’t think it’s an agency’s place to get involved in lawmaking.  We are a business who undertakes to act within the law and whilst we all have our own political opinions, the office is not a place for them.

The Digital Economy Bill makes this a bit difficult because it seeks to effect the environment in which we work.  Now I am not advocating piracy and copyright theft in any shape or form, I simply think that the bill as it stands is badly thought out and rushed.  I also think that rushed legislation makes bad law.

It stems from a group of copyright owners who do not really understand that technology has moved on and it is they that need to move on with it to produce legal ways for people to consume media, not for them to scream at government to legislate against digital media.  For a start it will make no difference whatsoever.  If a college kid can create a piece of software that enables the people of Iran to access banned sites then how long do you expect it will take another college kid to enable people to access download sites undetected?

Banning Napster only resulted in the creation of a multitude of other more complex download programs so the law is unlikely to be able to prevent committed pirates in any case.

What I am concerned about though is the effect that this could have when it is applied with a broad brush stroke on the Internet audience.  It is conceivable that a person could quite innocently trip an alarm at an ISP and have their Internet access taken away.  What if that Internet access was in a corporation or a university and the entire pipe was blocked?  The only result I see is that access to the internet is likely to be stifled and with it the development of the internet in this country.   That would be a great shame as we Brits tend to be rather good at this internet lark despite the comparative lack of funds available to startup companies.  I can see that a lot of Internet professionals will reach for their credit cards and quickly book plane tickets to go and work in an environment where a greater level of sanity persists.  I fear that the brain drain of the seventies will look like a quick trip to the shops at lunchtime compared to what could happen with the Internet industry.

Given that we have a wonderfully buoyant Internet industry here, surely we should be doing everything we can to enable it to grow and flourish not placing barriers on it.

My view is that the copyright owners who have persuaded Mr Mandelson to do this do not understand the media or the reality of the situation and are arguing from a position of ignorance.  They should be talking to Internet professionals to see how they can evolve their business to the digital economy not putting barriers up against it in order to protect traditional models which have the business equivalent of terminal cancer.

For those reasons we wrote a letter to our MP, and I would encourage everybody else to do the same thing.

Dear Emily Thornberry,

I’m writing to you today because I’m very worried that the Government is planning to rush the Digital Economy Bill into law without a full Parliamentary debate.

The law is controversial and contains many measures that concern me. I do not advocate copyright theft but the bill as it currently stands is extremely badly thought through in my view as an Internet professional.  Both my home and my company are in your constituency and therefore I feel compelled to write to you.  My experience is that legislation which is rushed and not debated properly leads to bad laws which cause more problems than they seek to address.

Other industry experts, internet service providers and huge internet companies like Google and Yahoo agree with me and are all opposing the bill – yet the Government seems intent on forcing it through without a real debate.

Any Bill deserves proper scrutiny let alone a controversial piece of legislation like this and so I urge you to do everything you can to prevent the government from rushing this through and deny us our democratic right to scrutiny and debate.

Many people think it will damage schools and businesses as well as innocent people who rely on the internet because it will allow the Government to disconnect people it suspects of copyright infringement. I believe it could also potentially stifle the internet industry in this country with a resultant loss of both talent and tax revenues.

Yours sincerely,

Aaron Savage

Managing Director

Interactive Mix Limited

The other day I saw a question online asking “How do you get click through in an email without a call to action.”

I couldn’t help but think that was like asking how you learn to swim without getting wet.  A fundamental of marketing is to put a call to action in because your call to action is what makes your consumer take … well, action.

One of the things wrong with an awful lot of email is that no call to action is made or is so weak and feeble that it simply doesn’t perform.  The industry average open rate is around 21% for emails, and the average click through rate is around 7%.  Most chimps can manage to achieve that but apparently a lot of marketers fall short.  For that reason here are our top 5 tips for email marketing

1)      The first thing that we explain to clients is that the email isn’t for them it is for their customer and so they and us need to think like a customer when we are appraising email artwork and composition to send out.  This can include things like the type of computer they are using, the language and vernacular they use, where they are and how much actual time they have to appraise the communication we want to tell them about.

2)      The second thing to realise is that nobody receives the same email.  There are a multitude of email clients.  Some of them are actual applications (like Outlook, Thunderbird and a whole host of others), and some of them are web based (like Gmail, Yahoo mail, Hotmail etc).  None of the applications display an email in exactly the same way as each other and neither do the web based clients.  Sometimes the differences are small and sometimes they are quite big.  This is why if you are using HTML emails your HTML code needs to be of a high standard and you need to understand the complexities of HTML readers in emails.  A few years ago Microsoft changed the HTML reader in their Outlook client and caused a lot of problems for the industry.  Your email marketer should know about these things and be aware of what is and is not acceptable.  As an aside a well crafted text email with HTML links embedded in it can often perform as well and sometimes better than the complex layout that ‘looks better’.

3)      Use the subject line as part of your creative.  So many people simply tag the subject line on at the end when for a lot of email clients (and all web based clients) this is the user’s first experience of your masterpiece.  There are techniques you can use that encourage more people to open it by paying care and attention to your subject line.  Keep it short, keep it timely, keep it relevant and keep it personal wherever possible.

4)      There is no fold.  It’s a common term in the industry and it refers to the part of the email that can be seen above the scroll line.  It gets its name from Direct Marketing where paper based communications were sent out and arrived through the letterbox.  Personally I hate the term and ban it from discussions.  The problem is that a fold is a very permanent thing and assumes that you have control over it.  You don’t, it’s the user that controls this through the size of their screen, their resolution settings, and the particular email client they are using.  Yes there are some base levels that can be assumed but out of every hundred people you send your email to probably forty of them are seeing it in completely different ways, so don’t get hung up on what is and isn’t above or below a certain point.  Instead think of your email as a target with rings going round it.  The upper most rings are worth more and this is where you should place your important information to grab a user’s attention and draw them further in.  It is also where your call to action should go.

5)      Leave the user in no doubt as to what you want them to do.  Emails are rarely a good choice for acquiring new customers but are a great way to stay in touch with your existing customers and alert them to offers and new products that you have.  For that reason your call to action should be clear and concise.  ‘Click here’ is not a call to action, it’s a cliché that seldom performs and is only used by people with no imagination or a clue about what they are doing.  If you are informing them of a sale then create a landing page especially for them on your website, and place a link in your email to that page, which clearly lets people know there is a sale on.  Similarly if you have a new product create a landing page especially for it and make the call to action about the product to tease your customers into clicking.

There are more but that would require a book rather than a blog post.  These 5 though should help you increase your open and click through rates and help improve the effectiveness of your email communications.  In general though you should enlist the help of marketing professionals who genuinely understands the media they are dealing with, and not simply someone who has Direct Marketing experience.  It is only when the principals of Direct Marketing are mixed with an understanding of the media that you will start to really see a return on your investment.   It is possible to achieve open rates of over 50% and click through rates of over 25% if you understand these things.

We’ve been on a bit of a roll recently winning new clients, and are enjoying working with a diverse group of people such as SideWaysNews.com, British Egg Information Service, Quickvox, Cycle2job,  FAADA, Beyond Forestry and Worksnug.

We also experienced a pitch loss.  I am not in the habit of sour grapes but sometimes losing a pitch is a blessing in disguise.  Sometimes the whole experience just doesn’t feel right.  The client/agency relationship is a special one that requires respect, understanding and trust on all sides.  This is especially true if the agency is providing strategic services and not simply tactical solutions on an Ad Hoc basis.  It’s about listening to each other and not simply waxing lyrical or taking a brief.  Sometimes this can be hard for one party or the other to grasp.  On the one hand a client can take the attitude that this is their business and therefore what they say goes, and on the other the agency can become too prescriptive or arrogant, patting a client on the head whilst insisting how things should be done.

In both of these cases the chemistry is wrong.  If these scenarios were played out amongst an actual married couple, then the divorce courts would be beckoning soon enough.  Relationships between people work when they are equal and where respect and a duty of care is given on both sides.  It’s exactly the same in a client/agency relationship and listening is an important thing for both sides to master.

We are very fortunate that we experience exactly that with our clients and it is especially important given that we offer high end advice on Digital Marketing Strategy.  The fact that we do enjoy such a good relationship means that we can explore possibilities together and look at opportunities to make our clients even more money, which after all is what we are all about.   We do it though in an environment where both sides know and respect the other.

I can’t help feeling that a lot of online marketing agencies are too used to a prescriptive approach and simply take on whatever tactical task is given to them, whereas a lot of above the line agencies lack the in depth understanding of how to engage clients with customers online.  Both have things they could learn from the other, but for now we are extremely happy with the way that our clients are enjoying the best of both from us and our account managment team.

I recently wrote about social media and how the sudden rush to it needs to be placed in the context of an overall digital marketing strategy.

Another issue that a lot of campaigns and social media users are going to have to work out this year is whether, how and why to separate business and private identities.

This has only been an issue since the emergence of Facebook as such a dominant force in social media and social networking.  Prior to this, sites were aimed either at completely social interaction (such as Livejournal bebo and MySpace) or completely professional such as the services that LinkedIn provides.  It seemed to be perfectly logical and the old adage of not mixing business with pleasure was whole heartedly embraced by the web.  Then along came Facebook and everything changed.

This is going to be the first in a series of linked articles, and so in this one I want to look at why and whether it is important to separate identities.

Facebook grew out of college interaction originally at Harvard (For those who don’t know the idea was for a bunch of guys to rate every girl on campus in terms of hotness).  The point that I want to make is it began as a source of informal networking that gradually grew to include such chart topping functionality as status updates, and in this the concept of micro blogging was born.

Facebook was still a social tool but gradually the horny little acne ridden kids started to graduate and move into the world of business and took their tools with them to stay in touch with their college friends.

Facebook is simply a way to stay in touch and network.  It provided additional tools to users as they were needed and as such it evolved.  It also avoided the drama of long winded blogging communities through its minimalist approach to content.  A little and often became the watch word for Facebook.  People were using it in both a business and a social setting, and this meant that it evolved to fit the needs of both environments at once.

So as the Harvard kids moved into business, their new colleagues saw this great tool that the Harvard kids had, and they joined up too. Similarly word caught on in other colleges of this tool that the Harvard kids were using and so gradually it was spread through viral techniques until a tipping point was reached and suddenly the critical mass forced the sign up rate into overdrive using the age old calculation of the power of the network.  Now everybody had to have a Facebook account.

People were using it to contact colleagues, customers, prospects, clients, suppliers and friends.

Most of the non professional focused communities are based at a group of people who all know and hang out together.  Everybody knows who got drunk last night, who has slept with who and what dark little secrets need to be kept from the rest of the world.  This is the concept of a peer group and based around friendships and loyalties.

I know myself that there are certain drunken pursuits that I favour sometimes which are best shared only with my closest friends.   We all have these lifestyle choices because we are all human.  The level to which others consider those choices acceptable depends on personal values and can be poles apart.

My Facebook ‘Friends’ list consists not simply of actual friends but also of business contacts and it is a fact of human nature that human beings judge each other for their behaviour.  In a business sense this can be catastrophic if your best client makes a judgement on your particular lifestyle.

There is an antithesis to this which goes back to the web’s founding father’s Libertarian principals and political values and that is called Declarative Living.  I was first introduced to this over Christmas beers by james Governor in 2005 as an approach to programming but I can see its lessons in social media as well.

Declarative living takes the view that you share the best relationships with people who share your values and interests and so hiding them only leads to bad relationship choices.  It’s a natural choice to make in your social interaction but a tough choice to make in a business sense where money is involved.  There are those who completely embrace this, and others who feel that it carries too much risk.  At any rate it is a choice that should not be made lightly.

The currency of the social web is privacy where people are granted access to tools (such as Facebook) in return for a window into their private world.  How much of that private world you share is a personal choice but one which carries both consequences and responsibilities.  Sharing musical or hobby preferences can be a source of strength in building business relationships but can as easily be a cuase for concern.

The question to ask yourself is how many clients will hold you in higher, lesser or unchanged esteem if they read about how you woke up in a strange place with your Calvin klein’s on your head and an empty whiskey bottle lovingly cuddled in your arms.  If the answer to that question carries great risk then I would advise you to separate your business and social presence to a level where you are comfortable.  The level of comfort will be a personal choice and will be different in many cases.

Many people have opted for several identities in a number of communities. Some of these are completely personal and therefore hidden from anyone outside of their immediate peer group.  Others are completely professional and open to the world.  Another is a carefully balanced mix.

All of these provide opportunities to marketers and control remains with the audience.  It is for individuals to assert that control in a way that matches personal freedom with personal responsibility.

I am having  trouble believing my eyes at the moment.  Maybe I am just old and out of touch but the following article beggars my belief in intelligence of a company that seems increasingly to be in the news for the wrong reasons.

http://bit.ly/cQebKO

Marketers are sueing Facebook for click fraud activity on their campaign and Facebook is saying that they are not responsible for click fraud.  This sounds like utter stupidity to me.  So Facebook’s defence is to say that they want to be paid for their media but have no intention of guaranteeing its integrity.  Oh yes let me transfer my media budgets to Facebook immediately.. not!

If Facebook wins, surely no self respecting media buyer will ever consider buying space on Facebook again.    At the very least surely the value of their media is devalued?

Is it really too much to expect a media owner to assure some level of integrity of the media they are selling?

They don’t seem to have thought this through at all.