Make Digital Marketing Work

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.

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 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.

ust some useful reading about business and marketing that we recommend people read.  They informed a lot of our opinions and strategies and helped us develop the Interactive Mix model.

Survival is not enough, Shift Happens by Seth Godin

Permission Marketing by Seth Godin

The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott

Purple Cow by Seth Godin

The big Moo by Seth Godin

Search Engine Optimisation An Hour a day by Jennifer Grappone and Gradiva Couzin

Winning Results with Google Adwords by Andrew Goodman

The Big Red Fez, How to make any website bettr by Seth Godin

All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin

The Dip.  What Winners know about Quitting by Seth Godin

Social Media Marketing for Dummies by Shiv Singh