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.

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