Digital Strategy: Week Five

Copyright © 2011 by IQ Agency

DIGITAL STRATEGYWEEK FIVEFrom Big Ideas to Campaign StrategyMay 8, 2011


GOOD MORNING, QUENCH!

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AGENDA

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It’s a full morning!

• Discuss campaign strategy - 40 minutes

• Present your BIG ideas and brainstorm possible creative executions - (3 @ 20 minutes = 1 hour)

• Break - 10 minutes

• Finish big idea presentations - (3 @ 20 minutes = 1 hour)

• Homework - 10 minutes


CAMPAIGN STRATEGY

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Digital campaign strategy is taking your great, customer-focused Big Idea, and applying it to the right digital tactics at the right time to get the results your client wants.

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WHEN THE CAMPAIGN MODEL WAS SIMPLE, THE DIGITAL STRATEGIST’S JOB WAS EASIER

• Come up with the big idea (okay, this part is never easy)

• Decide how to apply it to a handful of tactics you’ve used countless times

• Buy media (not easy, but it’s owned by the media planner )

• Execute those tactics exceptionally well (not easy, but it’s tactical, not strategic)

• Measure, refine, improve

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THE OLD SCHOOL DIGITAL PLAYBOOK

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A few years ago, a digital campaign meant very basic things:

• Banner Ads

• Search Engine Marketing

• E-mail

• Landing Pages and Microsites


BASIC DIGITAL CAMPAIGN ELEMENTS

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Microsite moves the customer toward conversion.

Banner ads, search ads, and email all drive to a landing page or microsite*.

*This UPS campaign has more elements, but I knew they’d have all the basics.

drive to


NOW CAMPAIGNS LOOK MORE LIKE THIS

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PURCHASE LOYALTYAWARENESS CONSIDERATION

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t

AT HOME

ON-THE-GO

IN STORE

USE

Search advertising

Social Media& blogs

Brand site Retailer website

Mobile website

Mobile couponing

Location-basedadvertising offers

Retailer/ productfinder

Retailer CRM email

In-store media

e-Circular

In-store comparisonand research

Mobile Utilitiesfor in-use scenarios

Mobile CRM

Brand CRM or loyaltyprogram

Social Mediaand brand sites (feedback)

Kiosks

Digital word of mouth

Digital enhancementsto packaging (QR, etc)


DIGITAL > INTERNET > WEB

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We tend to use “digital,” “Internet,” and “web” interchangeably, but they mean different things.

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JUST TO REVIEW

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“Digital” from Techterms.comDigital information is stored using a series of ones and zeros.Unlike computers, humans perceive information in analog. We capture auditory and visual signals as a continuous stream. Digital devices, on the other hand, estimate this information using ones and zeros. The rate of this estimation, called the "sampling rate," combined with how much information is included in each sample (the bit depth), determines how accurate the digital estimation is.

“Internet” from Webopedia.comThe Internet is a massive network of networks, a networking infrastructure. It connects millions of computers together globally, forming a network in which any computer can communicate with any other computer as long as they are both connected to the Internet.

“Web” from WebopediaThe Web is just one of the ways that information can be disseminated over the Internet. The Internet, not the Web, is also used for e-mail, which relies on SMTP, Usenet news groups, instant messaging and FTP. So the Web is just a portion of the Internet, albeit a large portion, but the two terms are not synonymous and should not be confused.


Non-Internet Internet

Devices

Search

CONNECTEDNESS OF DIGITAL CHANNELS

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Mobile

Apps and Widgets

Digital Signage

Kiosks

In-store Experiences

Group Buying

Social

GamesOwnedWeb

MicrositesLanding Pages

Content Syndication

Video Hubs

Email

TVIn-store

TV

Radio


THE DIGITAL MARKETING PLAYBOOKAn overview of when and how to use digital tactics.


BASIC MANEUVERSTHESE ARE THE BASICS BUILDING BLOCKS DIGITAL MARKETING AND ADVERTISING.

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WEB BANNERS AD (DIGITAL DISPLAY)

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Use For: Driving traffic from a location with an known audience to your preferred destination. Today it is possible to design banners where conversion occurs within the banner.

The Basics:Most banner ads are placed through ad networks that have inventory of sites they can match to your audience.There are a few types we use most often: static, rich media, video, and site takeover. All banners need attract attention (typically called an attract frame) and induce a click (in non-static banners during interaction.) That can be accomplished through clever copywriting and visuals, game-like interactivity, interesting video content, compelling offers, teasing content or utility, etc. If possible, use a PPC (pay per click) not a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) model.

Measure with: Ad network analytics and destination site analytics. You don’t just want to see lots of clicks, you want clicks that turn into conversions (sales, signups, etc.)

Learn more: The IAB governs sizes and other guidelines for most sites and ad networks. There are many ad networks each with different inventory (some overlap.


RETARGETING (DIGITAL DISPLAY)

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Use For: Rekindling/maintaining interest from customers who have visited your destination but who did not buy, sign up, etc.

The Basics:Code on your destination site drops a cookie on the customer’s computer that tags them as someone who has visited your site. when that customer visits sites on which you have placed retargeted ads, they see your ad. Retargeted ads are usually placed using remnant inventory (the inventory the ad network hasn’t sold for banner advertising for a given period of time) and is generally less expensive. If paired with social or search, more expensive paid placements may not be necessary.

Measure with: Ad network analytics and destination site analytics. You don’t just want to see lots of clicks, you want clicks that turn into conversions (sales, signups, etc.)

Learn more: Consumers can be turned off if you do it too much. It’s like stalking.


SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION (SEO)

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Use For: Finding customers who have needs related to your product/service/brand.

The Basics:Even when you give customers a URL, 60% of them still search. Search engines are trying to serve their customers the most relevant content for their search terms and have developed algorithms and policies to enforce quality. Creating great content is the best way to rank highly, but you can also request related sites link to you (but not pay them), add keywords to your copy and metadata (but only if you have appropriate content/products.)Words in the URL and file name as well as tagged as <title> or <h1> get more weight in the algorithm. Videos can’t be crawled, so title is vital!

Measure with: Google PageRank checkers, your destination analytics referring keywords report, and site/page traffic.

Learn more: Do not try to game Google or you will be penalized. SEO practitioners can be sleazy snake oil salesmen or super knowledgeable professionals.


SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING (SEM)

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Category

Need State

Use For: Finding customers who have needs related to your product/service/brand and you don’t have time to wait for SEO.

The Basics:It’s important to make sure people find your product when they search for it by name (even if they misspell it), but more often, people are searching or a need (hangover cure), category (coconut water.) If you ads have a girl on a bike, buy “girl on bike water commercial” to catch people who want to see your ad again or buy your product. We usually just mean Google. (Sorry, Bing and Yahoo!)SEM works on a bid+relevance model, so it’s important to know how much competition there is and make sure you have relevant content for the words you’re buying.

Measure with: Google Ad words and referring traffic in your destination site analytics. Stop buying keywords if they are expensive and not resulting in sales (or other conversions).

Learn more: SEM has changes as the search engine market has changes. Copywriting for SEM is highly-specialized and there are time-tested techniques.


EMAIL

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Use For: Creating a lower commitment conversion for prospects and staying in contact with your current customers.

The Basics:Only e-mail people who have given you explicit permission to do. SPAM isn’t effective in the short-term and damages your brand in the long-term. Be relevant. People will open your email if the subject line indicates that there will be great content, special savings, limited-time deals, something unique for them. Use images and HTML but offer a plain-text version for people who want it. Include a strong, easy to see call-to-action.

Measure with: Your email platform will give you statistics like open rates, click throughs, and forwards.

Learn more: MailChimp has a guide for everything.


LANDING PAGES

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Use For: Fulfill the promise of the ad/experience the customer interacted with. In Direct Response (DR) campaigns, they also are specifically designed to measure effectiveness of specific executions.

The Basics:You landing page can be specifically designed for a campaign execution, but just as often the landing page is an existing page of a site. In either case, it MUST make sense based on the ad the customer saw (i.e., answer the question, provide the entry form, show the product, etc.)To get to the landing page, customers may clickthrough from a banner ad or a text message, type in a URL from an ad, arrive through paid or organic search, scan a QR code. The landing page should make sense in the customer’s context (i.e., have content appropriate for a smart phone if the customer came from a mobile ad.)Visits to your landing page are probably not your end goal, so your landing page must persuade the customer to take the next step. It may be purchase a product, give you their e-mail address, watch you video and respond.

Measure with: If the landing page is owned web, your site analytics can tell you who’s coming, from where, and what they do next. If this is social (e.g, Facebook), analytics come from that site.

Learn more: A great set of recommendations for landing pages.


MICROSITES

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Use For: Fulfill the promise of the ad/experience the customer interacted with and provide more content, utility, and branding that is either different from what’s appropriate for, or possible from, your main dot com. Different from a landing page in that it is multiple pages/screenviews instead of a single page.

The Basics:Microsites are often built to house marketing content and brand elements to match an advertising campaign with little long-term thought about the content and overall Internet experience for customers of the brand. Brands feel cornered into these scenarios because their dot com isn’t flexible and internal IT resources aren’t responsive enough to meet ever-changing demands of digital marketing. Brands are beginning to take a longer-term view of the assets they create for campaigns and build platforms for content delivery into their main site presence. But even then, there may be instances where a microsite is the best choice. Sometimes, you don’t want customer to know who’s behind the content for a period of time or you have a really unique audience or goal.

Measure with: These should be measured with the same system as your main dot com analytics for combined reporting, but core site metrics such as visits, unique visits, referrers, conversions, video completions should be available.

Learn more: Some observations about the “new microsite.”


DOT COM

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Use For: Selling your product or service 24 hrs a day, 7 days a week to anyone, anywhere. Either directly through ecommerce or indirectly by directing customers to other channels such as retail (prospects) or customer service (current customers.)

The Basics:The dot com can be a brand’s most important marketing hub on the Internet serving as the standard for brand’s digital identity. Complications occur because it often serves multiple audiences -- current customers, prospects, internal sales people, investors, media, and job seekers -- but detailed audience analysis and content strategy can define site, section, and page-level goals that bring focus to the experience architecture and design. Governance plays a crucial role in determining not only what content to create but prevent organization politics from being made visible to the customer.

Measure with: Core site metrics such as visits, unique visits, referrers, conversions, video completions should be available from your analytics program.

Learn more: Learn the basics starting here. And here. After you get all the basics right, there are things people often overlook that need to be accounted for before launch.


ADVANCED TECHNIQUESTHINGS THAT ARE EMERGING AS NEW TACTICS OR ARE TRANSITIONING FROM TRADITIONAL-LED TO DIGITAL-LED.

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CONTENT SYNDICATION

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Use For: Spreading the values, assets, and insights of your brand through non-owned-web -- where there are established audiences. This raises awareness of your brand, begins to affect consideration/selection, and aids in loyalty.

The Basics:Content is king on the Internet. People come to the Internet to read articles, watch videos, and use tools. If you’ve created great content you can increase it’s reach by syndicating it out to other websites. Put your images on Flickr, your video on YouTube, your slides on SlideShare, your infographics in social, your articles on CNN.com, etc. If you don’t have great content, you should make some. You may not get views to your owned-web or direct sales, but often these are assets you already have, so it costs very little and increases brand impressions. For SEO, having RSS feed of your blog or news section allows other websites to easily incorporate your content.

Measure with: Measurement is more difficult, but there are new systems that begin to measure across the web. Without these tools, the brand collects analytics from each site where they have syndicated content and an analyst hand-compiles a report.

Learn more: Appropriately, here is a great presentation from SlideShare.


VIDEO HUBS

Use For: Reaching the large and growing audiences of sites like Hulu, Vimeo, and YouTube.

The Basics:Syndicating your video content to Vimeo or YouTube is one tactic and related is the placement of advertising before and during video plays for other videos. Social video sites like YouTube make it easy for customers to share videos with each other and the better the content, the more likely it is to be shared which increases the reach of your message. Another great use of video hubs is to obtain video reviews of your product to help you understand your audience.

Measure with: Lots of new companies are helping to measure video views, but basic analytics are available from the hubs both for content creators and advertisers.

Learn more: I’ve blogged about the importance of creating online video for brands.And this is some great information about advertising in videos.

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SOCIAL

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Use For: Creating one-to-one relationships with your customers -- not every customer -- but especially your most influential customers. This builds loyalty and increases brand advocacy.

The Basics:Social is a broad term and encompasses everything from blogger outreach to Facebook; Twitter to Quora; and Groupon to Foursquare. On these sites, customers create and share content. The content could mention your brand in a positive or negative manner, link to content you’ve created, or share one of your locations. Monitoring and being aware of what is being said is the most basic way to be involved in social. For brands who want to participate in social, it is important to 1) understand the culture and norms of the networks you’re joining, 2) talk like a human being with a personality, 3) respond when spoken to, and 4) listen to and engage with fans and critics, and 5) give customers what they want -- deals, content, etc.

Measure with: There are an array of social monitoring tools, but like video hubs, most social sites provide some basic analytics. Remember number of engaged followers is always more important than number of followers.

Learn more: This is a great post for the basics. It’s over a year old which means it’s probably out of date.


GROUP BUYING

Use For: Encouraging trial of your product or service by offering a reduced prices. Some of this price reduction may be offset by volume by setting a minimum number of participants necessary to receive the discount.

The Basics:Group buying platforms like Groupon, Facebook Deals, LivingSocial and Scoutmob work directly with businesses (often small, local businesses) to create great deals. Customers share these deals with each other via social to increase the reach of the deal and the platform. Brands who sell through retail partners have not found great marketing utility in these platforms, but can learn from the model to create “buy one, give one” and “share this deal with a friend to get even more savings” programs.

Measure with: Ultimately, you’ll use the sales data from your cash registers, e-commerce system, or reports from your retail partners vs. the cost of the program to determine it’s effectiveness.

Learn more: Some are saying it’s the next big thing. Other’s say we’re already in the group buying boom.

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MOBILE

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Use For: Connecting to your customers when they are on-the-go. This may mean awareness/consideration, purchase, use and loyalty.

The Basics:Mobile is more than iPhone and iPad. Your audience and their unique technographics drive what you should do in mobile. Smart phones and tablets have changed the mobile landscape dramatically in the last 4 years. The mobile web experience used to be horrible and very little content was created specifically for mobile consumption. Now you have to consider mobile search, mobile display ads, mobile-friendly dot coms and microsites, QR and barcode readers, augmented reality, mobile payments, and location-based services. For many brands it makes sense to focus on mobile as, if not the first platform, one of the core. Consumer brands are out ahead and B2B brands are catching up. Research shows again and again that the number one thing customers want from brands in mobile is discounts.

Measure with: It depends on the specific mobile tactic, but seeing which devices are currently accessing your site can give you a great place to start.

Learn more: Here are 10 ways to find customers using mobile.


APPS AND WIDGETS

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Use For: Providing branded utility to your customers either to raise awareness of your brand, increase loyalty, or to support product use.

The Basics:Widgets were big a few years ago (pre-smartphone/tablet era) with customers. They seemed to like the idea of small, light-weight, single function software applications they could install and run on their computers. We don’t hear about them as much anymore because the idea of apps for devices like iPhone, iPad and Android phones and tablets have become much more important. Brands do need to make a distinction between the mobile version of their website (or website that is optimized for both web and mobile) and their apps which need a single, focused purpose -- like a game, utility, or content.

Measure with: It depends on the target devices and the app you build, downloads, active users, and average user rating are good basic measures.

Learn more: These are 11 trends in mobile apps for 2011.


IN-STORE

Use For: Influencing purchase at the point of purchase.

The Basics:Because digital is bigger than the Internet, there are lots of in-store tactics used by brands. Kiosks were big in the early 2000s before mass consumer adoption of mobile. Some stores like Walmart and Best Buy have in-store TV and radio which play commercial messages. Traditionally, shopper marketing agencies have owned this channel, but brands are beginning to see in-store as a component of their integrated marketing campaign, not just a sales channel. Trends such as location-based services (e.g., FourSquare) allowing marketers to send push notifications and mobile couponing indicate that this switch to digitally-led in-store tactics is here to stay.

Measure with: Ultimately, you’ll use the sales data reports from your retail partners vs. the cost of the program to determine it’s effectiveness.

Learn more: Best practices for digital in-store marketing.

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HOMEWORK FROM LAST WEEK

Write up 3 of the big ideas we came up with for your brand in class (or that you came up with later) by answering these questions:

• Title: Simple Statement (e.g., “A breed apart” or “Heroic achievement.”)

• How does your brand help the audience be the person they want to be?

• What unique qualities of your brand/product will you be focusing on?

• Why will this make your audience buy and become loyal to your product?

• When the big idea is applied to digital media executions, how will it feel?

Rank them 1, 2, and 3 or at the very least, have pros and cons of each.

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HOMEWORK FOR THIS WEEK

• Select the one Big Idea you feel has the best chance to meet the goals outlined in the Creative Brief and has the legs to lend itself to a variety of digital tactics.

• Determine which tactics you’ll use to reach your target audience at home, on-the-go, and in-store along the path to purchase like this:

• Write up how you’ll apply your big idea to your key tactics (at least 3) to present in class.

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HAVE A GREAT WEEK!

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Digital Strategy: Week Five

Business

search engine

core site

ad network

destination

group buying

ad networks

digital display

based services