Make Digital Marketing Work

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.

The year was 19 days old when the digital marketing industry reported what we think is the first properly significant story of the new decade.

YouTube (owned by Google) has apparently won the rights to stream live cricket matches from the Indian Premier League.  This marks a significant stepping up of Youtube’s activities in an area which has become dominated by Rupert Murdoch’s Sky Broadcasting channels.

Given the amount of bad feeling and mudslinging that has been going on between the two companies, this is unlikely to extract a pleasant response from Sky.

The tail end of last year was dominated on the one hand by Murdoch claiming that Google was a parasite and on the other by Google saying that if Murdoch’s organisations didn’t know how to make money out of the traffic they receive from Google then it wasn’t their fault.  I think many could be forgiven for thinking that Google is teaching a lesson with Youtube on how to make money in a new media world and that the intended recipient of learning is indeed Mr Murdoch.

If Google is therefore interested in broadcast media and has ideas of how to make money, is there anything to stop it from deciding to do the same thing with news media?  Their entire argument is that money can be made, it’s simply that News Corporation doesn’t know how to do it, and whilst Murdoch’s empire has its friends and supporters in high places it is a brave person indeed who could stand up to the weight of Google’s coffers, it’s global reach and it’s board’s unashamed intellectual prowess.

If battle lines are being drawn and warning shots sent across boughs then this going to be a year to watch in earnest  and one that at the end of which media will be unrecognisable from how it is today.

There was a lot of talk this week concerning the Pay Per Click Campaign that iCrossing ran for Ann Summers with apparent strong feeling on both sides.  The BA air strike is an emotive issue but I don’t want to linger on the morals of using it as a marketing technique (others have done that already), I am more interested in the technique itself.

The campaign revolved around the British Airways strike by cabin staff, and was executed so that anyone looking for keywords about the strike was greeted with a Google ad that.  The PPC campaign made statements such as “Your plane may be grounded but you can still take off with our toys”.  According to the picture below showing the google results it performed quite well and was rewarded with a top position.

I would be interested to learn exactly how this performed in a case study.  The power of PPC is that it gives you an ad for what you want at the time you are looking for it.  So is the rationale here, “I am interested in finding out about the British airways strike, Oh look I nearly forgot I need to buy a dildo, some anal beads and a tube of lube?”  Did the ad produce significant click through or was the intention to use a direct response media for brand building purposes and not expect to produce click through? How do you measure that?  Was it measured?

It’s certainly a cheeky and inventive creative idea but is it one that we can simply look at and say it was cheeky and inventive or did it actually work and produce sales for the client?  Anyone care to comment?  My feeling is that unless you take that traffic and do something with it then it is wasted traffic

There is a lot in the press at the moment regaling the story that is gradually unfolding regarding Print news media and Online Search.  It has even reached prime coverage on BBC Newsnight.

On the one hand Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp states that Search engines index their content and make it available free and on the other hand Google states that they deliver many millions of reader s every day to News Corp websites and if they cant figure out how to make money from that audience then it isn’t their fault.

If the scenario continues to play out as it has been then it is completely conceivable that News Corp and other print media owners will remove their content from Google’s index.

Search engines rank their content based on a series of criteria and one of those criteria concerns backlinks.  The goal for any site owner is to get relevant backlinks from sites which have e high authority, and the highest authority has often been from journalist sites such as the ones that News Corp and the other print media owners.

If News Corp actually manages this and (along with otter print media news owners) removes their content completely then a lot of index listings are suddenly going to have the corresponding backlinks removed.  This could have some serious repercussions for Google.  Their calculations will not have the print titles to count links from and so a new ranking will be produced.  Will it look anything like the old one?  It could also mean that social media backlinks from Blogs and social bookmarkeing sites could take on even higher importance than they currently do.

Can we expect Google to make significant changes to the way that it indexes sites if this all comes to light?

Our SEO techniques use social media a lot and these techniques could become very important if thing play out as they have been.  Google has implemented the 5 clicks for free rule but is that going to convince the media owners to stay with Google and keep their backlinks available?  I am not sure, but am absolutely fascinated to see how this is going to play out.

We have been approached a lot of times by potential clients who do not have very much budget and our policy is to help wherever we can, and to be honest about where we can’t.  One of the biggest misconceptions that seems to come up is that you can perform parts of the overall mix and expect it to work.  You can’t, or at least you shouldn’t.  The interactive Mix works because it deals with a cause and effect basis that engages with consumers may not be aware of your products and services but are open to finding out more about them.  It does so using techniques that have been proven to work but which are never quite the same for each client but which rely on careful measurement and analysis throughout each stage to ensure that the results are kept optimum.  We can work across a number of budgets but the ROI we deliver is in terms of actual sales and revenue which we create demand for through the process

It isn’t enough to simply build up the database, it is what you then do with the database that makes our techniques deliver.  We build up trust and begin to test offers whilst segmenting the data based on a series of criteria.  Its all about building relationships between clients and customers, and to build on this through to first sale, repeat and regular sale and then referral.

When we have created the process you will then be able to see it working for you as an overall marketing process, so that for an agreed spend you will already have an idea of how much money you are going to make.

We do pride ourselves in being different and offering up a joined up digital marketing solution because we don’t actually see too many other agencies doing that.  At the same time there is an argument raging about whether digital agencies are grown up enough to act as lead agency for clients.  We think that the reason many digital agencies are not able to offer this is because they are still focused on providing tactical solutions rather than looking at the strategic marketing process that is needed for each client and offering a joined up solution to meet it.  I’ve been having a lot of discussions online about this very subject and the longer the conversations go on the more I am convinced that the solution is to look at all digital media as a strategic toolbox, and not focus on providing individual disciplines.

A lot of this isn’t necessarily the fault of the industry because most agencies started out as tactical suppliers of the shiny new thing, whether it was web design fifteen years ago, or display advertising twelve years ago, or search ten years ago, or email eight years ago, or analytics seven years ago  or social media five years ago.

That made a lot of sense then because the accepted sensible way to do things was get in bed with an offline brand or advertising agency and become the digital guys for them whilst getting introduced to a great client list and charging whatever the market would pay.   Digital Agencies were the remora fish to a bunch of sharks, cleaning off whatever needed to be done and some have grown extremely large doing it.  That symbiotic relationship now though is challenged because clients have heard that this digital media lark is cheaper and works better than the offline stuff.  Of course Ad and brand agencies are still telling the world not to panic and that they are still the top of the food chain.  More over they are still looking at the world in terms of the way that they have always done things, and therein lays the problem.  The world isn’t like that that anymore and it won’t work.

Clients want it and digital agencies have to stop thinking tactically if they are going to provide it.  Its taking the strategic approach that will give digital the showcase it deserves and deliver the benefits to clients.

Bing has finally launched in a full version in the UK today.  We started taking a look at it when it became available as a Beta and obviously did as much as we could to understand how it aggregates its searches so that we were able to make whatever changes were necessary without harming our Google optimisation.  It has enabled us to some high listings for a number of our key search terms which has obviously pleased us.  Our take on this so far is that Bing is a perfectly respectable search engine that does what it says on the tin.  That’s the problem really, it is absolutely fine but there is nothing there to make us immediately drop everything Google and switch to Bing.  We first saw traffic coming through to interactive-mix.com on une 11^th with terms such as “Interactive Marketing Agency” and variations of our company name featuring most regularly but since then Bing has produced 7.89% of our natural search traffic whilst Google has produced 89.47% of it.  There is a massive gap between these two and Yahoo which has produced 1.32% and Ask barely registers at all with less than 1%

Even if we skew the date range to take the best advantage of Bing, Google’s dominance is barely dented and Bing achieved 8.26% of our total natural search traffic.

We are not claiming that this is representative across the entire web or even for our industry but the message to us seems to be clear that Google is still the dominant force in Search by a very long way and whilst Bing is the second most important search engine it still produces only a fraction of the traffic for us that Google does.  This seems to show quite comprehensively that visitors to our site haven’t found a reason to switch their search to Bing.  Obviously we are going to keep an eye on this and it is only the first official day for the new search engine, so we will keep people informed of how we see things shaping up.

I have been finishing off my blog post about Magazine publishing and its proving to be too lengthy to post in one go but a couple of things appearing in the Guardian also caught my eye recently which ask some pretty important questions of the publishing industry in general.  The first one is the move by Murdoch to remove News Internationals content from Google once the paywalls have been implemented.

This is a bold move and in some of the discussions I have seen appearing on the web the following comment seemed to sum up a view that whilst harsh may have some truth in it if things continue to play out as they have been.

“ Everything he’s doing is looking increasingly petulant and misguided.  He’s a relic of a bygone age, lashing with what monetary clout he still has against his increasing irrelevance”.

As a self confessed intellectual snob I certainly won’t miss content from the tabloid arm of News International and removing it from the world’s search results to me is a bit like cleaning up the distorted noise on a 1940s swing recording, but that is not all that we are talking about here.  The full list of News International titles includes The Times, The Sunday Times.  Whilst these are absolute bastions of British journalism, it would be rare for a truly news worthy story to appear uniquely in these titles.  As I pointed out in my blog post about newspaper publishing on the one hand you have the BBC content and on the other you have a multitude of bloggers and citizen journalists who are all capable of writing their own story and gathering opinion from around the world that will all then be available across the web in seconds.

News International are never backward about coming forwards with their criticism of the BBC and the younger Mr Murdoch’s recent tirade against public funded news coverage demonstrates his beliefs very clearly.   Rupert Murdoch has pledged his support for the Conservative party at the next election and the Conservative Party has made a pledge to look at the BBC’s charter.  Shadow culture secretary Jeremy Hunt whilst speaking to the Financial Times was quoted as saying “We are looking into whether it would be appropriate to rip up the charter in the middle of it, or whether one should wait”.

You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to see what the master plan is.  Newspaper publishing is fighting for very big stakes at the moment and the BBC offers a free alternative to those plans.

This leaves citizen journalism though and we are yet to see how this thorn is addressed by the fourth estate.

Also in the Guardian was another article Foreign media count cost of UK libel laws in which it announced that titles form overseas are considering whether to continue to publish in the UK.  This content is protected by laws of Freedom of Speech abroad does n not enjoy the same protection here and as such title owners are considering whether to block access to their sites and withdraw the foreign titles from circulation in the UK due to the threat of libel.

These all seem to me to be a classic case of an old world meeting new technology with new conflicts seemingly appearing every other day.  The Internet is very good at asking questions of an industry, it did it first for software and is currently asking questions of the music industry. The rule of thumb the Internet has proved time and time again is that the advance of new technology is as unstoppable as a tidal wave.  It is up to industry to adapt to technology or become obsolete.

Personally I don’t think that removing your content from Google is a great move, because the alternatives will not stop the story appearing.  It will only stop your point of view appearing, and I think being included in the conversation is better than not being included in the conversation.

Whether it is business models or the diversity of domestic law pertaining to an industry, the Internet is causing a dramatic rethink and more than likely a few sleepless nights for existing media owners.  If they do not accept that the broadcast model as we knew it is morphing into something new then they will be the ones who will increasingly marginalise themselves and therefore become increasingly irrelevant to the conversation.

In my post yesterday I talked a lot about Digital Marketing strategy and how some Offline and integrated agencies could have problems adapting.  This world isn’t so removed though from the wisdom of the great men of advertising though.  One of David Ogilvy’s most well known sayings was:

“If you’re trying to persuade people to do something, or buy something, it seems to me you should use their language, the language they use every day, the language in which they think. We try to write in the vernacular. “

He was of course referring to the way that sentences were constructed but the key point here is that you should use a tone and style that is familiar to consumers.  For the point I am making I would suggest using the channels, language and grammar of the Internet.   Grammar in these terms refers to yuser experience, SEO awareness, viral and all the other buzzwords that populate our trade press.  Some of us have watched and helped these channels evolve (Digital Pioneers?), whilst other people discovered them when they became popular but there is another sort of person and that is the Digital Native.  These are people for whom online and a tweet are as familiar as a pint in a pub.  These are the people who talk in the ‘vernacular’ of digital media and whose creative minds are tuned to the available channels.  Consequently these were the people we decided to look at when we were assembling our creative offer.

There is always a risk when you bet on youth.  Sir Matt Busby with the Busby Babes and Arson Wenger with his dedication to the Arsenal Youth are parallels that have struck us as poignant.  One thing for sure though and that is consumers are not going to put up with, nor respond to the bolted on and shoe horned offline creative that has traditionally been appearing in digital media.  The acid test is whether the creative produces effective return on investment for the client, not whether a panel has decided it warrants a reward (of course both is a goal that everyone should strive for).

My personal feeling is that Mr Ogilvy would have relished the new media around today and would have been unafraid to learn the vernacular and bet on youth who understood all the grammatical points of the channel.

I spent a day at Ad Tech a few weeks ago in the company of one of my favourite New Media Age types.  We wandered around and caught presentations, discussed technologies and generally got a feel for the marketplace as it stands right now.  One of the big buzzes was about Ad Exchanges.  For those that do not know about them, you can read a good description of what an Ad Exchange is and what it does.

What it amounts to is that display ads are suddenly becoming a lot more targetable.  Ad exchanges let you target your ads based on a series of criteria such as geographical location and connection speeds.  The aim is to cut out the number of wasted impressions that are delivered, and only deliver ads to the marketplace that is geographically relevant and content which connection speeds can handle.  The claims being made are that response rates (click through) are increased by 50%.  Now colour me unimpressed but on a lot of sites I’ve seen this would increase click through from 0.02% to 0.03%.  Still not amazing.

Also I am yet to be convinced by media that still charges by the impression instead of the results it produces.  That’s the acid test and the one that I suspect will shut most Ad Exchange and media owners  up.  Are you prepared to charge on a CPC basis, and if you are how does the price you put on it compare to a Google Adword click?

Suddenly I hear silence across the void.  When the media is of suitable quality that media owners feel able to offer it on a CPC basis then we may have something to talk about.

The simple truth is that whilst this is a very good step forward by display advertising it doesn’t alter the fact that the ads themselves are invasive and distracting for users who are actually there to view the content.  The reason Google works is because it gives me an ad for the thing I am looking for at exactly the time I am looking for it.  Do display ads do that?  Are they spliced at the DNA level to the content they accompany?  Most of the time I don’t think so.  Display advertising still is yet to move beyond the realm of brand based advertising.  It isn’t direct response and despite this leap forward with Ad exchanges it isn’t likely to become direct response any time soon.  It will help your email produce better results and your eCRM campaign will love Ad Exchanges as part of a media multiplier but when it comes to getting clicks.  Our advice would be stick with Google.

Some 24 years ago I sat in a call centre taking credit card donations during a rock concert when an Irish chap suddenly announced “fuck the addresses” on primetime television.  The result was that the phone lines exploded.  This proved to me then that TV was a very significant direct response form of media.  The reality though is that largely advertising on TV doesn’t take advantage of this at all, and instead opts for brand building.  I’m not saying that brand building is bad of course and there are agencies in town who are quite simply superb at it.  What I am saying though is that brand building in general doesn’t seem to be flavour of the month with advertisers when they have a choice of putting their money into one of the most effective direct response mechanisms ever invented, in the form search.

Whether it is paid for or natural, search is the dream direct response media.  To my mind this isn’t an argument about whether tv or online is getting more dollars it is an argument about where smart money is going and it seems to be pretty obvious that it is going to direct response.  Given the economic conditions that isn’t surprising (apparently it always happens that way).  It is interesting that TV is having to rethink itself completely.  The ads that agencies dream up for a brand can just as easily find their way onto IP TV or online video ads but the opportunity to create interactive direct response ads for that medium is one that has yet to be properly taken advantage of.

Banner ad spend has suffered despite the increase in online spend and doesn’t give the same return as search.  This has taught us that because something can be clicked on doesn’t mean it will be clicked on.  Surely there can’t be that many people in the world that would claim that banner ads are anything other than brand building these days?

That’s not so say that brand building doesn’t have its place.  We all know that the media multiplier effect is as true online as it is offline.  So that your direct response media works a lot better when you are also running brand building activity.  Whether this is  TV supporting direct mail or banner ads supporting emails the effect is the same and response rates increase.

With the advent of 4OD i Player and the other various web based catch up channels we have an opportunity to rethink how we approach moving picture advertising and how consumers will want to interact with it.  On demand web based catch up TV sites all feature clickable ads but are they getting clicked on and how do they differ from the broadcast counterparts?

I think the opportunity is calling for direct response and brand building to be spliced together in a new format that will find its home in Online TV.  The biggest drawback to this will be if offline agencies (who have the brand building conceptual creatives needed for this), will persist in their view that the message is everything or if they will this time embrace the idea that building a relationship with the customer is their starting point and goal.