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.

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.