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

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

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.

It’s a given that a segment of the middle-class will frequent the international sites like Google/Yahoo/MSN. But, then PPC campaigns on these search engines can be geo-targeted but not culturally or demographically targeted. That’s where social networks (Facebook/MySpace PPC)come into play. Note that Facebook’s fastest growing segment is the 35+ age group not not the 17-22 year old as is believed. I would earmark 25% of my ad budget on these platforms. Now, let’s look at some of the local search platforms :

- China : a) Baidu, being the leading search engine also has a collaborative encyclopedia (like Wikipedia) as well as a strong discussion platform. They have over 800mil web pages indexed and have more than 20 mil visitors annually. Plus, they have over 70% of the Chinese search engine market. The process for Baidu is similar to setting up a Google PPC i.e., you open your Baidu Ad account, you choose your keywords and create your Ad copy, You set up a daily budget and individual CPCs and you run reports as desired.
b) Zhanzuo : China very own Facebook or at least it’s hoping to be called that. Not surprisingly, Facebook did try to buy them out last November for $85M. Not bad for a localized social network.
c) Friendster/MySpace : Both these companies have localized Chinese versions of their social platforms.

-India : a) Yahoo’s definitely ahead here with Alta Vista and Google in the game too. I’d do PPC on them for sure.
b) Local players : Rediff.com (Like the Indian yahoo.com), Jadoo.com (India’s supposedly first search engine), WebIndia.com and Kohj.com are more focused on business. Also, try Cricinfo as cricket in big in that part of the world. You’ll have to run banner CPM ads on these web properties since their PPC is a bit lacking.

- Japan : Market share is as follows- Yahoo Japan has 65%. Google Japan has 22%, Google US has 6%, MSN has 2.5% and BiGlobe has 2%. Google just partnered with Docomo one of Japan’s leading mobile providers and this could help them increase share. Earlier this year, in Jan, Baidu just launched its Japanese version with web search, image search, blog search and video search. So, go ahead and PPC on these platforms freely. Yahoo directory interestingly has a onetime listing fee only as opposed to the annual fee model in the US. Also, advertising for the adult segment costs 2 or 3 times more. Interestingly, according to the big brains at SEOmoz, Google now has higher market share in Japan and is ahead of Yahoo by a few points.

- Korea : We’ve just started playing in the Korean market and it’s interesting, to say the least. From what I’ve seen, SK with its dense clusters of populations and it’s strongly wired society (70% of the total population use the Internet) is extremely appealing to marketers interested in micro-targeting. The number one player Naver works differently from Google and relies on user generated content, (like Yahoo Answers) though its algorithm is much more sophisticated. Market share for Naver is 75%, Daum is 11%, Yahoo Korea is 4.5% and Google has a miniscule share of 2%. I’ve included some sites below for you to

check out.

http://kr.yahoo.com/
http://www.chol.com/
http://www.naver.com/
http://www.empas.com/
http://www.nate.com/
http://www.hanmir.co.kr/
http://www.daum.net/

Well, that’s a long post. Pardon my rumblings. But, the information above describes the search landscape in China, India, Japan and Korea. It’s a blast working one’s way through all the cultures. Hope the above helped in some way.

According to the IAB, the US advertising spend was $256 billion in 2006 with 25% of that expenditure going into direct mail. Let me try to figure out Google’s spend:
Breakdown for costs of a single mailing (Note that these are approximate figures) :
$ 0.30 in postage
$ 0.10 in printing and paper (Assuming a monthly mailing average of 20000 pieces per month)
$ 0.05 for direct mail sorting, address verification services, staff time
$ 0.05 for additional expenses

Total cost of a single glossy postcard mailer = $0.50 (I did get a recommendation that $0.40 was par for the course as a baseline, but I’m still going to plug in a slightly higher estimate).

Now, according to the US Small Business Administration, In 2004, there were an estimated 23,974,500 businesses in the U.S. Of the 5,683,700 firms with employees, 5,666,600 were small firms.

Assuming that Google wants to focus on businesses with 5-9, 10-19 and 20-99 employees, then they would send mailer to 2.2 million businesses. If they just want to focus on the firms that employ 100-499 employees than, they be sending mailers to 90000 firms. Assuming Google will employ an 80-20 rule and market to 20% of the small business segment that will avail of Google’s services and give them 80% of the revenue from that segment, then they’d probably mail to firms employing 20-99 folks (525,000 firms) and those employing 100-499 folks (90000 firms). That would be a total of 615,000 firms.

With the above cost breakdown, we could guesstimate that Google spends about $308K approximately.

If they decide to go for something more snazzy and send in a full-fledged mailer (envelope, inserts, magnet etc), assume a cost of $2 per mailer, we’re looking at $1.2 million direct mail spend by Google on small businesses.

I bet very few folks actually know that Google does direct mail since the assumption is that they would just leverage their reach online. Hope the above helped…

Since you’re working with the search engines on this, you have to understand which search queries or keywords related to your business bring visitors to your site. Once those keywords are determined, then y

ou have to bid on them to get a position with that search engine results. When someone searching on the Internet enters one of your keywords, your PPC ads appear alongside the ‘natural’ search results (usually the highlighted ads on the top of the results or on the right. If the searcher is intrigued by your ad and clicks on it, you are charged for that click. Of course, what you’re charged is based on a couple of factors that Google uses to calculate your cost-per-click (CPC).

Where do you start?

SEO’s younger brother : Beginning PPC is pretty much like SEO where one of the first steps involve analyzing the relevant keywords for your website. Use tools like Google keyword tool or Wordtracker to get a sense of how many keywords are in play in the big bad search results game out there. Start with 5 keywords which are most representative of your business – move on to variations and long-tail keywords. For e.g. if you’re selling teas. Naturally, tea is a hot keyword for you – variations would be black tea, green tea etc. Long tail keywords would be black tea with orange rinds or white green tea lemon.

Keyword tests : Once you have your keyword list and have them sorted in terms of relevance and traffic – relevance meaning how closely related they are to your business and traffic meaning how many people are searching those terms on the internet- start testing them yourself. Type in those keywords and see what comes up. You’ll see ads that are competing with each other on that keyword displayed. Note the ‘relevance’ part again as you’ll view these results and accordingly decide if they work for you. You don’t have to do this for all your keywords just the highest trafficked ones.

Be as negative as possible : With keywords, that is! You’ll find that there are typically broad terms, phrase terms and exact terms that are used in PPC campaigns. Broad terms get you the most traffic and exact terms get you limited traffic since the search results will only correspond to the ‘exact’ search query typed in as opposed to broad terms which show up if they’re a part of a search query. For e.g. if you have the broad keyword ‘tea’ in your list and someone is looking for Tea Leoni and your ad is displayed, they might click on your ad and though they might leave right away, you’re still paying for that click. In such cases, just take the words that are not essential to your business and add them to a negative keyword list. This will let search engines filter out your results and only show your ad when it matters.

Set a daily budget : How much are you willing to spend to get visitors to your site? If this is your first foray into PPC, set a low daily budget until you learn the ins and outs of how this works. I always start with $50 per day. I know, it’s small potatoes but I’d rather experiment with a small budget than a large one, and only when I’ll convinced will I open up the floodgates.

Bidding on keywords : Google has a great traffic estimator tool that helps you determine how much potential traffic a keyword receives and how much that keywords typically costs on average. I usually begin my PPC bidding at the low-end and let the ads run for a day or two on a limited budget. Then, based on the search results, I modify the bids and increase them accordingly so as to get the optimum traffic. Note, this exercise is to manage my CPC and my CTR (click through rate) to improve my ad ranking. (there are other things that I’ll do to help improve the rank – see part 2 of this article for details)

Displaying your ad : Where do you want your Ad to run? With geo-targeting, most PPC ads can be shown all over the world or just in the city of St. Louis, Missouri or around a 30 mile radius around the university of Michigan. Select your appropriate location.

Finally, hit the ‘start’ button and let your campaign begin. Results do not occur overnight. CTR’s are abysmal to begin with – folks don’t trust those sponsored link things. I’ll have more on this on part 2 of this article. Till then, adios!

- Lowell D’Souza

That being said, there are a couple of ways to spread the word about a cool Facebook application :

1. Create Groups : Create a group highlighting the benefits of your app. Seed the group by inviting folks from your friends list. Try to begin a network effect by asking your friends to invite their pals in turn to join this group and install the app.
2. Identify similar groups : Find other groups whose members have strong commonalties with your target demographic. Join those groups and post messages on their walls describing your app and link back to your app description page.
3. Use Events : Have a virtual web event launching the app on FB. Like the groups seed the same using your friends and ask them to invite their friends in turn.
4.Identify Livewire members : If you know someone who has more than 1000 friends, send them a message asking them to plug your app for you to their network. Negotiate a fee depending on how many times you want ‘em to message their friends. Again, this is dependent on which demographic you’re going after to install this app (I checked out the app briefly and saw that it’ s a utility to help kids/parents/teachers manage their school activities, right?)
5. Email blast : If you have a permission-based list, send out a cool email blast highlighting the benefits of your app. Use a tool like Constant Contact or Exact Target – it’ll help you see stats of who’s viewed your app. Have a call-to-action button somewhere on the email – something like : ‘Install now’. Don’t forget the color scheme of the promo, have it match the colors of Facebook and your app.
6. Simply ask : Ask your close friends to install it and ask them to forward the app to other folks in their friends list.
7. Other avenues : Use other platforms to advertise your application – I’d do Stumble upon, Furl, Digg maybe. Do more however. Go onto Squidoo and create a page for your app. Do the same on Mahalo. And do more on other platforms.

Start with the above…hopefully, the application will gain traction and you’ll have signups. A caveat however, till date, only 45 apps have more than 1 mil installs and close to 100 have more than 100K installs. It’s a challenging game. But, kudos to the guy for taking the leap and all the best to him for his efforts.

The above sentence is inspiring. When Jeremy and I pondered about setting up a platform like this to disseminate our knowledge on all things ‘web’, the big question we asked ourselves was what would we provide to all of you. True, we had sufficient experience in the web marketing arena where we had worked on various projects with different exciting companies to market their products online in the B2B and B2C spaces, apply metrics to those efforts to ensure that ROI objectives were being met, explore new incarnations of marketing to web communities (social networks facebook, bebo etc etc) and advertise someone’s products on the web. but, what would we offer you?

Well, here’s the deal : We will provide you with information, opinions and thoughts on current trends, best practices, research and categorize them as follows :

1. Website trends
2. Web 2.0
3. SEO/SEM
4. Web Analytics
5. Social Network marketing
6. Online advertising
7. SMO
8. Email Marketing

We shall not be :
1. Boring or Dull
2. Over analytic or overOpinionated (Is that even a word?)
3. Disrespectful
4. Repetitive (Except for some common sense suggestions because as we all know people always listen to common sense)
5. Biased

Be on the lookout for some awesome stuff. We’ll have statistics and resultant analyzes on what works best for marketing yourself or your products online. We’ll discuss the various tools available online that you could use to evaluate the success of your marketing efforts. We’ll talk about social trends on the web and how you could use the same to promote your products. We’ll talk about how to structure your email marketing effectively so that you can get the most benefit. We’ll get guest writers on her to write about what they perceive are relevant trends but most importantly, we’ll have tons of fun doing so.

So, sit back, relax and let this journey begin…

- Lowell & Jeremy