Marketing your brand interactively on the Internet or What’s up with Interactive Marketing?
Ladies and Gentlemen! The newest term in prominence – “Interactive Marketing”. Every Tom, Dick and Nerd is an expert on interactive marketing and yet, when I queried a couple of folks on what interactive marketing was, I received a couple of weak responses like “ Ummm, it’s about online marketing” or “It’s a new form of web marketing to customers” .
What twaddle!
A business professor from Harvard, John Deighton defined interactive marketing as the ability to address the customer, remember what the customer says and address the customer again in a way that illustrates that we remember what the customer has told us. Well put, Prof. Deighton! The Wikipedia entry for interactive marketing clarifies that this function is not synonymous with web marketing even though interactive marketing processes are facilitated by web technologies. So, how do we humble marketing folk use interactive marketing to get closer to our customers? Well, here’s how (with some caveats) :
Some examples of interactive marketing :
1. Social networks : It’s possible to create clusters of customers based on their preferences for a certain product, celebrity, cause, rant, point of pain and then send them messages propagating your brand. The problem with this is that Facebook might be jumping the shark and users are having to deal with application spam along with group invitations and notifications spam. MySpace is already passe and the other networks have yet to catch up in terms of membership and sophistication. Make sure that your communication is consistent and strong value-added else you’ll lose your credibility with your target.
2. The art of conversation emails : This is probably the easiest and probably the best form of interactive marketing that businesses can leverage to best effect and in a short period of time. It’s kind of like the Gmail concept. Imagine a string of conversations with a customer where you get an insight into the interests of the customers (i.e. which products did he click on within your email or which content did he read). Once you identify interest, ensure that you have a follow-up in place and keep the conversation going till a transaction takes place. Of course, you can capture the success of this initiative by using good analytics.
3. Website visits : Amazon does a great job of capturing the preferences of customers including their browsing history and showcasing products that match those preferences. Yahoo does that too with the weather and the local news feed. If you’re able to create a website that is able to tailor the customer experience to suit a customer’s likes and dislikes, you’re on your way.
4. Mobile marketing : Another interesting way to get interactive with your customer and perhaps SMS a product promotion. If a customer responds, you have a hot lead. I’d err on the side of caution and not use this mechanism as much since the spam tolerance factor of a cell phone user is much lower for his cell phone than say his email account.
Interactive marketing is getting to the point where one-on-one marketing will be essential trend to get higher conversions for businesses on the web. What would you rather do ? Target the mass market where you could get say, ten thousand visits from people all over the US resulting in a conversion rate of 0.1% or target multiple clusters of customers totaling about a thousand (say 10 clusters) or so probably resulting in a higher conversion rate (Assume that your budget for the two activities is the same but you’ll need to spend at least twice the time in terms of effort to make this work). Statistics have shown advertisers that traffic from social networks always comes with a cost and that’s high bounce rates.
The problem is that we’re used to having high traffic numbers as one of a website’s KPIs. Granted that conversion metrics are important, visitor traffic is still a key metric. Give me a low traffic number of highly relevant traffic to my business rather than a high traffic number of mixed unidentifiable traffic to my website. Benefits of highly relevant traffic are low exit rates, higher conversion rates, better understanding of customer behavior and better predictability. I’ll take this any day.
- Lowell D’Souza
How PapaJohns.com makes online ordering so easy
Not much to pen today. I’ve been assimilating the wealth of information that SEOMoz provides to all its gentle readers extolling them to understand thoroughly the virtues of good SEO, and with that understanding strive to save the online world.
One of the blog entries on SEOMoz caught my attention and I was impressed by the way it was penned and arranged. The entry was about how PapaJohns, the pizza company has managed to build an online presence and how sales from their online channel has increased immensely.
Read the article here
Tips on using Affiliate Marketing to build traffic to your website
At some point of time, you’ve built up your site, have awesome usability and are getting strong traffic and conversion numbers. Well, then you start thinking about getting more traffic. There’s a variety of ways to do that : PPC, SEO, Social networks advertising, inbound linking and Affiliate marketing. We’ll discuss how you can use affiliate marketing by placing ads to your website to your benefit. The big affiliate players include CJ.com and Performics. Online Ad networks include Advertising.com or Adbrite or Adify. Some of the big behavioral targeting players include Boomerang, Doubleclick and Criteo. Here are some tips on how to optimize your experience with those tools :
1) Relevant publishers : Ensure that you choose the most relevant publishers for your advertising. These should be web properties that are focused on your target audience. Publishers will vie for your attention and ask that you publish your ads on their web properties. Don’t ! Only choose publishers who have websites closely linked to your business in terms of the audience they’re aiming their message at, their demographics, how closely your ad blends with their website (you can develop your ad to match their site but at a possible cost of brand erosion!)
2) Reporting : Can use your own ad server? What kind of reporting features are available? How strong is the reporting? What benefits is this external tool bringing to the table?
3) Availabilty of Ad inventories & Positioning : This ties in with point one but I’d rather repeat a point to make sure it sticks! What kind of inventories are available? Are they the quality sites that you want or just plain junk? Positioning of the ads is key (Where on the publisher site will your ad be placed? Is it a common partner page or on their home page? This is important information that you need to find out.
4) Ad box sizes : Naturally, the bigger the box, the better is your attractiveness. Right? Wrong! In today’s Web 2.0 world in-your-face advertising is so passe and you insert huge banners and ridiculous skyscrapers at your own risk. Go for more compact sizes like 468 X 60 or at the most 300 X 250.
5) Contextual targeting of the ads : This is critical. If your ads are not being contextually placed then you could have a problem as the better is your ad placed in range of your target audence, the stronger is the relevant traffic to your site.
6) Behavioral targeting - Behavioral targeting uses information collected on an individual’s web-browsing behavior, such as the web pages they have visited or the searches they have made on a website, to display certain advertisements to the user. DoubleClick and Boomerang do this for sure. Ensure that you have something like this turned on as successful execution of the same will results in more qualified traffic to your site.