Integrated Marketing
Just as you can track the results in paid search (pay-per-click or PPC), you can use analytics to track search engine optimization (SEO), PPC, link building, and bulk e-mail. And just like you can track PPC, you canUse analytics to track marketing campaigns in other media, such as radio, TV, newspaper ads, printed coupons, direct mail, and so on. The customer response to all these forms of marketing can be captured by digital tools, which allow you to compare and manage those media.
We will also show you how to manage those campaigns by using key performance indicators (KPIs). With a few simple numbers, you can compare campaigns against each other; you can drop the unprofitable campaigns, and you can increase the ones that produce profits.
Digitized media give the consumer a high degree of choice, which creates thousands of channels. Digital tools also allow the marketer to create and manage thousands of campaigns, each tailored and personalized to those channels.
Digitization of marketing presents opportunities for marketers. With analytics for better decision-making, marketers can grow a company’s sales. They can also use analytics to prove their work. This moves the emphasis from branding-based marketing to performance-based marketing—namely, sales-based marketing. This means marketers can demand additional compensation such as bonus and commissions, similar to sales people.
What We Can Learn from Offline Marketing
Dollars, advertisement placement, inventory count, amount of shelf space, pricing, order placement, and product delivery. By combining scanner data with consumer interviews, supermarkets could calculate customer lifetime value (LTV).
In contrast, web marketing, which started with the dot-comes in the mid-90s, was often done by young computer people without experience in traditional Marketing. In furious (and often destructive) evolution, web designers and web marketers tried many new things, such as banner ads, bulk e-mail, portals, advertising in search engines, and so on. Phases and fads were often measured in months. At the time, traditional marketing and web marketing didn’t seem related because the underlying technologies were so different.
In the last few years, offline and online marketing have begun to converge. Tools for online marketing are being applied to offline marketing. Ideas and processes from offline marketing are being added to the online market. With analytics, we can now track marketing down to the individual customer and sale, which means marketing is turning into sales. Digitized marketing is changing the nature of marketing.
In the 1960s, a U.S. An advertiser could show four TV ads on two nights to reach 90% of the U.S. Audience. Advertisers quickly learned they could show a TV commercial simultaneously on the three networks, so no matter where the viewer turned, they had to see the commercial. Every consumer had to pass through this TV road block.
To get the same 90% reach of the 1960s, it now takes 85 TV ads. There are now thousands of cable TV channels, newspapers, radio stations, billboards, and other ad formats, plus some ten billion pages on the Web.
Digitization changes both sides of a medium:
- Digital technology offers consumers countless choices, so they consume media in literally thousands of forms. For example, when music is digitized, it can be heard on MP3 or iPod players. They can create their personal radio stations at Pandora.com. By digitizing news and using an RSS reader, they can easily scan dozens of newspapers each day. The Web allows them to visit companies anonymously, which puts them in charge of the media. Because there are thousands of free alternatives, media channels can’t charge the customers (they can always find it free elsewhere). So the only way to monetize media is through advertising.
- On the other side of the coin, marketers can use digital tools to manage ad campaigns into those myriad channels. Digital tools allow segmentation, so the markets can target specific audiences. Campaign management tools let the marketer create ads and manage dozens of placements. These tools also contain rules that trigger on certain conditions, which means marketing goes from a few campaigns per year to literally thousands of campaigns simultaneously.
The biggest benefit of digital media delivery is in advertising. Most media earn their money by displaying advertising. The bulk of newspaper and magazine revenues is based on advertising, not subscriptions. TV and radio are based entirely on advertising. By improving the ability to display advertising, the media channels can either earn more money or simply stay in business.
Web marketing itself is evolving. Several years ago, SEO and PPC were the main issues in search marketing. Tracking was done with web stats packages that simply read the server log files to report the total number
of visitors, number of viewed pages, time-on-page, and other basic data. PPC was trackable because Google included simple reporting tools. SEO for the most part was untraceable, and many assumed it was a form of public relations (PR).
Today, this model has flipped around. Analytics is now the main issue. Digital media send data to the analytics. This includes PPC (Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft), SEO, banner ads, bulk e-mail, and so on. The traditional media (radio, TV, and print) have been digitized and added into the data stream. All of these marketing channel feed data into analytics.
Analytics are used to study and manage these channels. The various digital campaigns feed data into the analytics tool. Analytics can show and compare the results of a campaign: where the converting traffic came from, how much it cost per lead, how much it cost per sale, the value per visitor, and so on. Because analytics can compare campaigns, analytics are turning into a business tool to manage channels on the basis of your business goals and results. We use analytics to answer two questions: What is going on? What can we do about it? You decrease (or shut down) the campaigns that don’t perform. You increase the campaigns that produce profits.
Google’s Role in the Digitization of Analog Media
The most significant driver of this revolution in digital marketing has been Google. Although other companies invented PPC and analytics, Google popularized these tools. Google AdWords was easy to use and it worked better than the other services, so hundreds of thousands of advertisers used it for their campaigns. The tool allowed advertisers to pay only if someone clicked on the ad, and the tool reported the cost-per-click down to the penny. As a result, advertisers learned to manage campaigns by the numbers. They learned marketing could be trackable.
By 2007, Google reached the limits of PPC. With close to 90% market share, there isn’t much more growth for Google in online marketing. So Google began to expand into other media markets. They developed tools
similar to AdWords that let you place advertising in AM/FM radio. You select a radio station in a city, you upload a sound clip, you place a bid, and your ad plays on AM radio. With Google’s bulk purchase of radio ad minutes, you can place ads on the radio for as little as $2.14 per ad play.
Through Google, you can also place ads in TV. This includes hundreds of video channels, such as CNN, MSNBC, and Animal Planet. You upload a video clip, select the markets, place the bids, and your ad campaign is on TV. Google is also going after the newspaper market. Through Google’s tools, you can place ads in hundreds of newspapers, including The New York Times and newspapers in smaller cities. Google is also rolling out tools for advertising on mobile devices, such as cell phones and PDAs. These new tools will change the old media.
Google has also added an analytics package to help advertisers study and manage the results. Marketing now wants more tools. They want to go further into the data. This includes enterprise-level analytics, automated marketing rules, business intelligence, data mining, predictive modeling, and so on. Other companies offer these advanced tools.
The Limits of Traditional Media in a Fragmented Marketing World
Analog media were unable to track sales with certainty. Radio, TV, and newspapers used polls, such as Nielsen rating services, to establish statistical models about their audience. By calling people or using viewer diaries, they could establish that on Monday afternoon, Channel 4 had 10,000 viewers. But this produced only aggregate numbers. The connection of views to sales couldn’t be tracked. Traditional medias had to guess at the viewer’s intent.
TV stations didn’t know if the show was being watched. They had no idea if the TVs were turned on or if people were sitting in front of them. Radio could broadcast music, but they didn’t know if people were listening at all. Newspapers could only track the sales and subscriptions. They knew they printed 100,000 copies and they knew 80,000 were delivered to homes and another 20,000 were sold at newsstands. But they had no idea if anyone actually read these. The same problem existed for magazines, mail order,
and billboards.
The best they could do was track sales by using coupons. An advertiser places a coupon in a newspaper and by Tuesday, they know 5000 coupons were redeemed. That’s about all they can know. Another 10,000 people could have clipped out the coupon, but never came to the store. Another 20,000 people could be interested, but also didn’t come to the store. The advertiser can only track coupons that are redeemed. They can’t track other information that could improve the campaign.
Using Unique URLs and Tracking Codes
To track traditional media such as radio or TV with digital tools, you send the visitor to a web page. In your radio or TV ad, you include a unique URL that is easy to remember and relevant to the campaign. Visitors go to their laptops or PDAs and use web browsers to reach the URL. At that web page, analytics and other tracking tools can record the visits, actions, conversions, and so on.
If your URL is difficult to spell or remember, you can register several URLs that are easier to spell. Use the names of seasons or months (such as KoiSummer.com or KoiJuly.com) or cities and states (KoiAtlanta.com). You can use these for various campaigns. You can also use unique URLs for each media. To track the results from TV and radio, send the TV views to KoiSummer.com and the radio listeners to KoiJuly.com.
You can use unique URLs with newspaper classified ads, TV commercials, radio commercials, billboards, direct mail, magazine coupons, bumper stickers, and so on. Any form of advertising can display a URL.
You can even use unique URLs on the Goodyear blimp and track the visits and sales at the website.
An additional step is to use 301-redirects, which redirect the visitor from a URL to another website. If you don’t want to build several websites, you can set up the unique URLs and use 301-redirects (a few lines of code at the server) to send the visitors to your main website.
0 comments:
Post a Comment
Thanks For Your Comment.