The Potent Mesh

This will be a watershed year for Online Marketers Experimenting with the Web as a Channel – Here’s how to reach Beyond the Banner Ad

By Jessica Sebor

The flash-fire speed of Web-tech development and the embracing of online activities have led to explosive growth in Web-marketing opportunities. However, the proliferation of online marketing materials presents a problem with clutter: How does a business reach through the noise to grab customers’ attention? So many choices are available for Web marketers today, making decisions about the right ones is overwhelming.

“The conventional must-buy banner ads have been displaced through a deeper idea of how you can interact with your customers,” says Shar VanBoskirk, senior analyst at Forrester Research. Marketers now have the opportunity—and duty—to target information to consumers’ specific needs and wants, listen to feedback more carefully, and create interactive relationships with individual customers online. Read on for 10 tried-and-true tips for targeted approaches.

1) MOVE MORE MARKETING DOLLARS ONLINE

In the past two years the emergence of Web 2.0 has upped spend possibilities exponentially. It is often difficult to find funding internally at the same rate at which technology is developing, but marketers must move money to the Web. The attention level given by companies does not always mirror this trend. Jason Palmer, vice president of marketing for WebTrends, says,“It is not an either/or proposition.” Web marketers “will look to integrate online initiatives across all marketing activities,” shifting funding to the campaigns proven to garner the most return.

2) FURTHER INTEGRATE ONLINE AND OFFLINE EFFORTS

The technological framework of online advertising forces Web marketing to operate as its own department, which can remove it from the larger corporate marketing mix. In a world where millions of people transition seamlessly between their on- and offline lives, marketers must tighten their on- and offline efforts. This idea goes beyond just delivering across all channels. “It’s not do we have the same logo and the same color? It’s figuring out what is the best medium for that message and how do we use it? It could be a print ad, but how do we grow that online?” says Jason Katz, executive vice president of Catapult Marketing Interactive.

Tying on- and offline efforts together creates the potential for increased customer interaction that neither channel could provide alone. Consider Catapult’s campaign for Timex.When the watch company wished to start selling to a younger market, Catapult helped it create a “faces of Timex” campaign that was pushed in retail stores. The campaign encouraged consumers to upload a picture of their face to the Timex Web site to win a role in a commercial. The upload was quickly followed by a text message containing a code that brought the consumer back to the site to enter the pin number for the chance of instant wins.

This was not an instance of a message being sent out both on and offline, but of a richer experience that mixed all channels together. Through the campaign, Timex created a database of more than 85,000 new customers who kept coming back, to the tune of 91,633 repeat visits in one month. It is important to remember that not only the message, but also the customer data, should transfer fluidly from both off- and online systems. If a customer shares a preference over the phone, this information should be taken into consideration while he is interacting with your Web site.

3) USE SOCIAL MEDIA TOOLS TO CREATE CONVERSATION

Social and media can often seem like dirty words for marketers. Many shy away from blogs, threads, and social networking sites, concerned about negative feedback and branding control, but marketers now have little choice but to engage this way. “Consumers are shifting the way they think about marketers and established firms in that the user is more interested in connecting with other individuals,”VanBoskirk says.

The most important thing to remember when going forward with a social media marketing initiative is to do what makes sense for your company and your customers. Just because you can’t picture your brand on MySpace doesn’t mean you can’t tap into a peer network. Social media comes in countless forms: brand-social sites, product-based blogs, user-interactive games, posted content on larger social media sites, and more. Getting customers to participate in brand or content creation will bolster both consumer attention and retention.

To create buzz or complex conversations surrounding a product, make sure that consumers have something to talk about. Akin Arikan, a senior segment manager for Internet marketing at Unica Corporation, says companies can do so through customer targeting. Take a camera seller, for example: “If you know a person who bought a camera in the past was unhappy with the zoom, put them in contact with others who ranked zoom as the most important feature.”

4) BE HONEST

In the era of social media and Web 2.0, customers truly are king—and they’re now grasping tightly to the scepter. Users have more power over a brand than ever before and more of a propensity for attrition. For companies this means not shying away from negative feedback. The more a company tries to bury a problem, the greater the risk of being tarred and feathered.

Alister Gillett, president of Catapult Interactive, says this is especially important for companies looking to create conversations in the social computing space. Although many companies have tried veiling their brand to make it a seemingly one-way dialogue, “if you’re going to talk about us and we’re part of the conversation, then we must show that it is our company and not try to hide this fact.”

5) FIND YOUR CUSTOMERS AND HEAR THEM

Once customers are talking, it is extremely important to listen and take notes.With any form of marketing, knowing one’s customer is a marker for all efforts, and online marketing is no exception.VanBoskirk says that monitoring content on large social networking sites and personal blogs can be a means that allows companies to dip their toes into Web 2.0 without doing so in a visibly public way. “These are easy, low-risk ways to start tapping into the social computing phenomenon without having to adopt a host of new technology.”

There are marked upsides of tracking brand mentions online.Conversations that might have occurred standing in line at the coffee shop and then forgotten an hour later are now published, at least semipermanently, on the Web. Instead of having to eavesdrop a company can simply run a search.A recent study conducted by Technorati found that approximately 75,000 new blogs are launched daily, with an accompanying 1.2 million posts. Peter Kim, senior analyst at Forrester Research, wrote in another recent study that “tactics such as clipping services, field agents, and ad hoc research simply can’t keep pace.”

Forrester cites Nielsen BuzzMetrics and Cymphony as best in class brand monitoring tools; however, smaller companies can start buzz monitoring initiatives with tools like Google’s Blog Search, Alerts, and Trends, which are free but unautomated and devoid of analytical capabilities. VanBoskirk says that these tools act “similar to the way you might track PR mentions in a traditional environment.”

6) TARGETING: NOT JUST FOR EMAIL ANYMORE

Information gleaned from consumers on the Web can be used not only to shape future marketing campaigns, but also to target customers at an individual level. Due to flexibilities granted by online shopping, the buy cycle for customers is starting long before the sell cycle. Targeting has become even more important as companies must keep customers interested and engaged over many visits and an extended period of time. VanBoskirk defines behavioural targeting as “understanding the users who have demonstrated online behaviours which show that they are valuable targets for you.”

Through targeting, companies can pay the appropriate level of attention to customers depending on their value metrics and leverage behavioral and demographic data to inform the method of approach and the information delivered. When a customer clicks on a link she is more likely to stay on the Web page if there is information present that she is interested in. Solutions like interactive management tools can help analyse behavioral data on a site and then produce sites that are optimized for different customer profiles.

If a customer has visited the site in the past you know what he clicked on; the next time he is at the site these features will surface at the top of the page. This tactic can also be integrated with direct email efforts by embedding outreaches with personalized URLs dedicated solely to the person whose box the email enters. Targeting can extend as far as marketers’ imaginations. “The implications of being able to immediately act on individuals’ behavior are far-reaching,” Palmer says. “For example, target visitors that appear on the verge of defection due to their lack of recent activity.”

7) GUN FOR TRIGGER EVENTS

Trigger events represent a part of targeting in which customers are reached out to through the advent of an event that would mark the consumer ready to buy. This form of targeting is especially useful for B2B companies looking for firms to aim their marketing efforts toward. “There’s a boatload of information on the Internet today,” says Jim Dickie, a partner with CSO Insights and a CRM magazine contributing writer. “If there’s an announcement, the use of Web crawling technology that defines what trigger events are will lead me to what will give me a chance to sell to somebody.”

An increase in funding, a new product, a customer acquisition, or significant internal changes may indicate that a company should become a valuable target for your marketing efforts. Your marketing department may also choose to alert the sales team of the lead. Technorati watchlists, Google alerts, and Yahoo! RSS feeds are all free tools that may be used to do such crawling.

8) INVEST IN SEARCH ANALYTICS

As with any company activity, for Web marketing, accountability should be top of mind. Nathan Rudyk, president of Market2world, says, “It’s been around since 2003, but if marketers haven’t yet used Google Ad Words, they definitely should.” Tools like Google Ad Words (Yahoo also has a similar service), allow marketers to measure clicks and hits on your site, track where the clicks came from, and pipe the data into your CRM system to analyze its worth. This kind of analysis will aid in your understanding of customer needs and behaviors, as well as vouch for marketing spend and measuring yourself against competitors.

To get a full picture of your marketing efforts and customers, look in paid and unpaid search results, both branded and nonbranded terms. Emily Riley, an analyst at Jupiter Research, says that search marketing has come a long way from just counting paid search clicks. What should now be on marketers’ minds is “the idea of looking at the environment of search as a full cycle that a consumer goes through, not always driving them to buy.” Search analytics can give you a better idea of where a customer is in his purchasing life cycle and can help to replicate actions that work.

9) WATCH KEYWORD INVESTMENTS

As the demand for search engine marketing has increased over the past few years, the price of keyword cost-per-click has almost doubled, and this trend shows no signs of slowing. In the third quarter of 2006, the average keyword price rose 16.5 percent from the previous quarter to reach $1.48, according to the Keyword Price Index from search marketing services provider Fathom Online.With increasing price and competition, companies must be more careful about where their keyword investments go. Broad terms can be a killer for search marketing budgets. Marketers must look to invest in their most popular, more company-specific terms to increase conversion rates without inflating costs.

Palmer recommends using multivariate tests to see where marketing spend on search should be allocated.“This allows marketers to spend more time on strategic decisions that are best handled through their expertise, while technology provides the science and automation to continually optimize the results.” Marketers may also look to emerging vertical search engines that focus on media in their specific area to increase the relevance of the results.Additionally, social search engines that use peer-to-peer feedback should be considered for investment. VanBoskirk says, “The marketer today should try to figure out when and how to tap into those smaller search engines, while also leveraging sites like Google.”

10) EXPERIMENT

Even though it is important for marketers to have a numbers-driven mindset to measure, to analyze, to count, and to report,Web marketers must also sometimes step away from the spreadsheet and flex their creativity muscle. Duncan Avis, vice president of professional services firm MarketBridge, says, “The beauty of Internet marketing is it’s easy and cheap to create, launch, and manage a campaign.” The room for experimentation available online provides much opportunity for marketers to take risks they might not normally dare to in an expensive mailing or broadcast media campaign. This opportunity is best harnessed through careful measurement across all efforts to properly understand the impact of any activity your company creates or participates in on the Web.

Starting any effort with a small-scale test helps ensure that a large-scale campaign will have a positive impact. Experimentation can be especially valuable for Web 2.0 efforts, as companies often view these campaigns as more risky. Applying new kinds of media through viral efforts or social networking can allow you to interact with customers in a live environment, creating the same feedback as a focus group or a market research effort without the heavy investment. For more experimental campaigns, you can test what value resonates with your customer base and find where any pain points may be. Rudyk says that in 2007 marketers’ “overall resolution” should be to play with and test new media models. “It’s not so much about the technology, but the approach. This is the opportunity for marketers to write their own rules.”