What's New in Marketing - Issue 68, April 2008

http://www.wnim.com

Digital advertising - cashing in on success

Sarah Christmas, Senior Marketing Manager at ATM:ad, discusses why the ubiquitous cash machine is fast becoming a marketer's new best friend

Digital advertising is the future, according to recent research by media agency Carat. Their research shows that digital spending will continue to grow in the next year, up 23.3 per cent in 2008 (making up nearly 10 per cent of all advertising spend), and set to grow by a further 17.8 per cent in 2009.

However, the range of digital options available to media buyers is growing in both size and variety. These include online and mobile digital opportunities such as social networking sites, rich media ads, Bluetooth and SMS, through to outdoor digital media ranging from retail store billboards and tube displays to in-taxi screens and large format posters. The rapid growth in outdoor digital opportunities is clear, but the biggest challenge facing this bright new world is that it must prove its worth in terms of effectiveness in reaching intended audiences.

We now find ourselves operating in a much tougher and cautious economic climate, bringing more pressure on marketers to select the most effective mediums. The days of throwing money at media and hoping that the message sticks are long gone. As consumers pull the purse strings tight, advertisers are clamouring for a share of a smaller pie. Scattergun advertising must give way to smarter, more targeted campaigns, which cut through competing adverts, while delivering accountability through consumer engagement. Easier said than done. Or is it?

ATM advertising the answer?

One digital medium, which is becoming increasingly popular, is the ATM. Cash machines are an essential part of most consumer's daily lives. The ATM celebrated its 40th year last year and 75 per cent of all cash in the UK is dispensed to consumers via ATMs.

Traditionally banks have used the cash machine to promote their own offers to customers. However, unique technology now enables banks to offer third party organisations the chance to reach out to the 21 million users a week.

The concept is simple, but effective. As customers approach the ATM and while their transaction is in process, a digital and dynamic advertisement is shown. This minute-long process is engaging; consumers give the screen their undivided attention, delivering a very personal one-on-one digital experience. Any branded content appears during the ATM's 'thinking' time, as the transaction is processed. The transaction time is not lengthened by branded content and consumer feedback demonstrates that it is preferable for waiting time to be filled with something engaging rather than a revolving egg timer.

Using ATMs as an out-of-home media platform ensures a unique one-on-one message delivery, and importantly, a very high level of targeting. For example, advertisements can easily be varied according to regionality or proximity to key locations. Messages can be broadcast during specific weekly time-slots to reach people in a particular frame of mind, such as evening and weekend entertainment-seekers or weekday business people during their commute.

Measurability

It would be easy to assume that because ATMs are a ubiquitous and vital part of everyday life, they are forgotten the moment you pocket your cash. However, campaign research suggests otherwise, with unprompted post-campaign brand recall of 80%. Once a record of how much money you spent at the weekend, the receipt has been transformed into a branded, take-home element of an ATM advertising campaign. It can act as a bar-coded discount voucher, sampling offer, proximity prompt for a high street retailer, or simply as a proven method of communicating additional brand messages.

Creative and tactical opportunities aside, campaign accountability is key. The unique software built into the ATM:ad media solution records how many millions of receipts have been dispensed and how many people have made a transaction and viewed the advertisement one-on-one. This offers a level of measurability not available through other outdoor digital media, ensures those managing brands can continually assess, adjust and develop their ATM advertising strategy.

A growing number of organisations are using ATMs. Most recently the Central Office of Information used ATM:ad to deliver financial advice through dynamic, onscreen advertising for Directgov, the UK Government's flagship digital service. This included tax credit advice and money saving tips, at a relevant time, when customers have money matters front of mind. A printed reminder on the front of every customer receipt was added to the campaign mix, acting as a take-home reminder. The campaign ran for four weeks, delivering over five million one-to-one transactions and 1.25 million take-away receipts.

Mobile phone provider Orange ran a proximity campaign, showing ads on ATMs within a certain distance of retail outlets. To drive people to their nearest Orange store, a bar-coded money-off voucher was included at the bottom of every receipt.

Conclusion

The ATM, part of our everyday life, is already a prolific out-of-home digital advertising medium and promises to grow significantly by 2010, when as much as £32.9 billion will be withdrawn via cash machines.

Delivering 100% guaranteed one-on-one engagement with such a huge audience, whilst ensuring complete impact accountability, it is unsurprising that the cash machine is fast becoming a marketer's new best friend.

Making the most of online marketing opportunities

Luke Pursey, Managing Director of Online Lead Generation company Clash-Media UK, shares his thoughts on how best to go about creating a digital marketing strategy.

Significant investment will go into digital marketing this year, and next, but without a properly targeted approach, will companies make the most of their investments?

Recent research from WPP's GroupM predicts that online advertising will grow by six per cent this year and that it will come close to overtaking television advertising (internet spending will reach £3.4 billion compared to £3.5 billion for television), showing how fast the new medium has become a mainstream means of promotion.

Internet shoppers love the ability to compare prices, search for reviews and make instant purchases. The internet is so expansive and diverse that it can offer more opportunity than traditional campaigns - but by its very nature it needs to be managed and integrated into an overall marketing strategy.

Creating a strategy for digital marketing

There are distinct merits to every form of digital marketing, from Adwords through to Affiliate Marketing and the newest arrival, Online Lead Generation, and they all work very effectively when combined. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) helps increase a company's visibility, affiliate networks help to nurture leads, while Online Lead Generation helps boost conversion rates. If marketers do not go about digital marketing with a strategic approach, knowing what and to whom they are marketing, then they will only dip their toes into the commercial ocean that is the internet.

The many techniques within digital marketing allow companies to create a unique strategy to address their precise needs, enabling them to achieve a cohesive formula for success. Digital marketing campaigns are highly flexible and can target specific demographics, so marketers must be clear on exactly what they want - in terms of geography, age, lifestyles and interests. A proper strategy is needed so that organisations can define the most suitable approaches to digital marketing.

The traditional marketing mix has been successful in the past by combining television advertisements with poster campaigns on billboards, in magazines and in niche locations such as tube stations - plus some direct marketing activity. It would be regressive for marketers that are moving online to start to focus purely on one aspect or method of advertising such as Google Adwords. Digital marketing provides compatible services, which together can create a strong online mix.

Google and SEO - a starter

Google Adwords and SEO are proven tools that achieve advertising goals within a campaign. Virtually all internet users will have exposure to Google, so it is something that has to be harnessed. Visibility on Google search pages can be extremely valuable, because not only is it good advertising, but it is also highly effective at driving users to a sales page on a company's website, and encouraging repeat visits. However, for the vendor, there is no direct control of the sales process.

Affiliate Marketing and Online Lead Generation

There is now a new generation of more advanced and targeted methods of digital marketing - Affiliate Marketing and Online Lead Generation. These can help to more directly generate online sales.

Online decisions are often made very quickly, so if immediate conversions do not happen, the customer may be lost. The second the customer moves onto another website, he or she could be gone forever.

Affiliate marketing creates a network that helps to drive customers towards a point of sale. Whether through online advertising, reference pages or review sites, affiliate networks can capture a customer, and channel them towards a company's website, where a sale can be completed.

Online Lead Generation is a valuable tool to sit alongside other digital activities, such as Google Adwords or affiliate marketing.

It pro-actively takes charge of the sales process by capturing customer information at the point of interest, so that prospects can be contacted immediately by the company's sales agents.

Online Lead Generation uses a Lead and Data Network of thousands of website publishers to host a campaign. They will capture leads and pass them back through the host's central system for cleansing, verification and forwarding to the client. Instead of a database sitting at the back of a company's own website, collecting the data submitted by visitors, Online Lead Generation goes out into the web and proactively captures consumer details. The lead is very hot when contacted because of the speed of turnaround, which enables businesses to increase their conversion rates.

Another benefit of Online Lead Generation campaigns is that they can be set up quicker than other elements of the digital marketing mix, enabling organisations to be more flexible and reactive to changing business goals and requirements.

Measurability

Any online activity has the benefit of being more traceable than poster or television advertising, because it is easier to monitor how many people, and who, has actually seen the campaign.

Adwords are calculated on a pay-per-click basis, so it is possible to match how many people click through to the website together with the number of sales made - making it easier to calculate a return on investment. Similarly, with affiliate marketing, it is straight-forward to see whether a sale has come from the affiliate network or not.

Online Lead Generation is even easier to measure. Companies pay for each new lead that they are given. This way every single 'purchase' is a hot lead - rather than with other methods, where mistaken identity or internet surfers can skew statistics. Conversion rates can therefore give a direct return on investment.

Create a digital marketing portfolio

Every form of digital marketing has distinct merits, but they all work most effectively when combined. Much like traditional TV, poster, cold call and door-to-door methods, which all fit together offline, an effective digital marketing mix provides a total and fully-measurable online strategy.

PR in the digital age

Daryl Willcox, Chairman of Daryl Willcox Publishing, looks at how the internet is transforming traditional PR.

The past few years have seen a fundamental shift in the way people research and purchase products and services. Where before people read specialist magazines or looked in sector-specific directories, they now go straight to the internet. While the traditional media, such as print magazines and TV, grapple with this challenge, for marketers it represents a huge opportunity. The digital world is now a rich hunting ground for new customers. The question for marketers is how do you hunt them effectively?

All change!

As the internet has evolved, it has become as much a platform for ordinary people to share information as it was a place for 'conventional' publishing. All the major media outlets, including the B2B trade press, have content-rich websites, plus there are now many web-only community sites like WNIM. We also now have User Generated Content, often referred to as Web 2.0 or social media, of which the most talked about tool is blogging. Of course, there's nothing really new about Web 2.0 - it's just that it has really taken off and now for every business sector there are probably several quite influential bloggers out there.

A significant shift in power is taking place. The internet is not like 'old' media, where media proprietors would decide on the agenda and dictate what people read, watched or listened to and when it was published or broadcast. Now, readers can add comments to stories and publish their own content - be it text, audio or video - and do this all in 'real time'.

In the old world, one of the only ways to reach media audiences would be to plan far ahead and invest in hefty advertising campaigns. But in the new world, this technique is no longer so appropriate.

Internet users get information from multiple sources, and are choosy about its tone and how it is delivered. However, advertising gets in the way - at best we become blind to it and at worst we avoid it. We distrust information that is dictatorial or one-sided, but trust comments made by other consumers or from an independent community.

What all this means is that the best way to 'hunt' customers online is to get into their communities, engage with the influencers and commentators and win their trust.

The role of PR

Whilst advertising has become less relevant, the opposite is true for Public Relations (PR).

Many PR techniques translate to the digital world with only minor adjustments, and the fundamental characteristic running through all good PR people - good communications skills - is an absolute must in the online world. So PR has found itself at the heart of digital marketing. For proof of this just ask anyone who works in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). They understand the power PR has to drive traffic to websites, so much so that many SEO agencies now offer 'online PR' services or work routinely with client PR departments or agencies.

Unfortunately, some PR agencies have been slow to adjust to the importance of the internet and still focus too much on traditional media. Their days are numbered. They will either need to alter their focus or they will become obsolete.

If you decide to use an agency for digital PR, check their understanding of digital media and ask them to give examples of the online work they've done for other clients. Many are now saying they do digital PR, but actually have little real experience.

The great thing about digital PR is that it isn't that hard to do in-house. For many B2B companies working in a relatively small sector it can be very effective.

The first thing you need to do is to understand your online universe. This means getting to grips with what the important content websites are out there and who the influential bloggers are. And you need to understand how social media works.

Set up some Google Alerts based on relevant key words - this will give you an idea of relevant content as it appears on the internet. Start blogging. While you may not become the most successful self-publisher, blogging is the best way to learn the nuances of social media. By having your own blog you will learn how to communicate effectively with other social media authors.

The next thing to do is to create some content. This helps draw people in and gives them confidence in your products or services. White Papers, videos, podcasts are all examples of rich content for your own site. Don't forget that the quality of this material should be appropriate to your brand, and should be informative rather than hard selling. You also need to start looking at getting your content on third party sites. What you've produced for your own site is very useful for this - community websites often like to publish shortened versions of White Papers.

News releases may seem a very old fashioned way of doing PR, but the digital world has given the news release a new lease of life. Posted on a quality online news release wire, plus sent directly to a list of the most relevant content websites in your sector, the news release becomes a powerful tool for generating online content and links back to your own site.

These are just a few basic tips, but once you get into it you'll soon learn other techniques. Key to digital PR is engaging with your online community. It takes a bit of effort, but in time your online visibility will improve, and the better your online visibility, the more customers you'll catch.

Getting to grips with the social side of brands

Giles Palmer, CEO of Magpie, the company behind social media analytics tool Brandwatch, gives the inside track on what marketing professionals should be doing to capitalise on the rise and rise of social media

Anybody with a brand to promote or protect will be aware of the impact that online and social media are having on traditional news delivery and on the way that individuals communicate and spread information.

One in every five internet page impressions in the UK is now on a networking site like Facebook, Bebo or MySpace, according to Experian. Another recent study found that nearly 70 percent of all reporters check a blog on a regular basis, one in four reporters have their own blog, and about one in five have their own social networking page (Brodeur and Marketwire).

From a marketing perspective this is further proof - if we needed it - that businesses need to engage bloggers and other social media participants with their messages. The challenge then is to keep these influencers on side, whether they are journalists, bloggers, wiki maniacs, parents writing on internet forums, or teenagers 'Facebooking' each other.

Chances are your business will already have in place strategies designed to reach these influencers, or at least to communicate news and messages online. However, to really capitalise on the millions of online conversations that take place everyday requires an informed approach.

The first step is to conduct an audit of your online (including social media) marketing. This of course would include the dark art of search engine optimisation (SEO), and the darker (and newer) art of social media optimisation (SMO), ie, generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites.

The latter should be of greatest interest to marketers. This is for the simple reason that SMO is an excellent starting point for working out how you positively influence what is said in conversations across social media about your business or brand.

Technology and metrics

Fortunately, technology now exists that allows you to identify the various online communities that are relevant to your business, pinpoint the major influencers or advocates, and analyse the impact they might have on your business or brand's equity. All of this needs to be done by automated systems, which are obviously much faster, remove human bias, and operate 24/7.

This sort of technology or 'tool' comes under the banner term 'social media analytics'. It is a relatively new, automated technology that constantly crawls the internet for conversations taking place in blogs, news sites, forums and other social media.

The technology then analyses all the information it finds and delivers a set of tangible, meaningful data that has been distilled from the noise of the internet. With actionable information to hand, you can then set about fine-tuning your e-marketing strategies.

For example, this type of information helped Sony uncover some negative sentiment about one of its 'Colour Like No Other' TV adverts for the Sony Bravia. Sony was then able to act to reassure viewers about the environmental impact of exploding 70,000 litres of paint over a Glasgow high rise building, by communicating to vocal critics that it had used non-toxic paint for the stunt.

Other companies, like Orange, have benefited from more straightforward comparison with their competitors. A Brandwatch analysis of the public's perception of Orange, commissioned by their agency, found the company had a significantly less clear brand position than its rivals T Mobile and Vodafone - something their marketing team can then begin to address.

Finally, there are companies like Alliance & Leicester and the The Post Office Ltd/ Royal Mail Group (two linked and often confused brands) that have used social media analytics to help them conduct a social media audit, giving them crucial data concerning the public's perception of their brand.

This is an evolving area, and we are likely to see social media analytics tools growing rapidly in sophistication over the next two years. But the best of today's offerings will help you measure the volume of conversations taking place that concern your brand, products and services, and around your industry more generally; record what is being said about you, whether it is positive, negative or neutral; where it is being said and by whom; and compare what is being said about you with what is being said about your competitors.

Today, there are only a handful of social media analytics players with technology advanced enough to yield accurate data. These companies combine advanced search technology and human input in the form of Natural Language Processing (not to be confused with Neuro-Lingustic Programming).

Whatever your industry, whether you are B2C, B2B or public sector, it is important that you take time to understand how important these tools are in helping you harness the immense collective energy that is being poured into social media, and to sort the wheat from the chaff in terms of which people - and which pages - are influencing how your business or brand is perceived. This is the only way that businesses can hope to have some control over the millions of online conversations happening every day.

Geeks or gold dust?

Paul Nadin is the founder of Review Centre, the UK’s largest consumer review site. Here, he looks at the impact of consumer-generated-media on marketing strategies.

Consumer control

The explosion in consumer-generated-content on the internet presents many challenges and opportunities for marketing professionals.

The shift in power from producer to consumer has never been more evident than today. Consumer power, created by well known sites like Review Centre, Facebook or YouTube, means brand reputation needs to be carefully managed.

Previously, when consumers had a bad experience their negative reviews about a product or service in the press could be smoothed over with some clever PR or an advertising campaign. If you were unlucky, you'd be hauled on to Watchdog to explain yourself.  

However, it’s not all negative. For instance, 40% of the postings on Review Centre are overwhelming positive and there is clearly an appetite for consumers to communicate good news about a brand as well as bad. It is these loyal consumers that are like gold dust to marketers.

When Review Centre launched in 1999, with just a small number of items for review on the site, it was surprising how quickly it grew. Previously, the only place UK consumers could have a gripe about a product or service was by posting a letter to the BBC's Watchdog and hoping it would generate a stir. Now opinions can be broadcast to the world at the click of a mouse.  

Geeks or gold dust?

It’s a misconception that visitors to online forums, discussions and review sites are simply internet geeks or specialists in the field.

In general, there are three types of people who are creating content to share their experiences of goods or services they have paid for.

Firstly, the 'enthusiast'. These people are arguably the most powerful advocates a brand can have. Specialists in their field, they will spend hours informing people of their experiences with a particular gadget or service.
  
Secondly, there is the disgruntled or happy customer. The assumption that all reviews are negative is wrong as statistics prove. People are happy to talk about positive experiences as well as negative.

Thirdly, the person who uses such sites to research a product, compare prices and then buy online. The more likely a person is to spend time researching a product before buying, the more likely they are to contribute to the online debate.

Marketing matters

With more connected consumers, trust is an even more valuable part of the equation, and when that trust is broken by a sub-standard product or poor service, the floodgates of customer opinion are unleashed on the web. This stronger sense of connectedness among customers has a significant impact on buying decisions.

We have recognised a considerable consumer force; not something to be underestimated by marketers in today’s current climate where competition is fiercer than ever and brands are at the mercy of the consumer voice.

An important factor in the online review market is the credibility of the comment or blog and the independence of the review.

Review Centre currently employs a division of channel managers, who are the eagle eyes of the business and ensure content is censored for expletives and any offensive language.

The channel management role is to moderate and approve the consumer content with as little change to the original as possible, therefore keeping the original meaning of the message. It’s not in Review Centre’s interest to violate consumer trust by controlling content as this would undermine our raison d’être.

Impact on CRM  

The growth of consumer-generated-media will also see a change in the way that companies manage their customer relationships.

Much comment has been made about the demise of print and other one-way marketing channels as a result of the success of online communications. Gone are the days when marketers focused on customers one by one – the boom of online social networking and consumer forums means that customers are commenting in their multitudes, so a more sophisticated and immediate response is required.

If marketers want to really understand their customers they will need to interact more closely with the publishers of review websites and demonstrate they are taking on board what consumers are saying.

It is telling that lots of companies are recognising the credibility of consumer-generated-content by tapping into the networks and communicating with their customers in this way.

Pioneer, the technology company, is particularly good at engaging with their customers in this way. When there were issues surrounding the product launch of a new plasma television they set up an official blog to enable consumers to engage with technicians at the company to resolve the problems.

A force to be reckoned with?

In conclusion, it is evident that the growth in consumer-generated-content will have a radical impact on marketing strategies and industry professionals need to tap into this if they’re to keep in touch and engage with consumers. Online review forums have the potential to make or break a brand with the click of a mouse, and the sooner marketers recognise the implications of this the better.

The age of the "trialogue"

Andrew Walmsley, co-founder of digital agency i-level, talks about how the internet has created a three-way relationship between consumers talking to each other and brands, which are encouraged to listen

When the internet emerged in the mid-1990s, it was greeted with excitement by marketers. Brave new worlds were imagined, in which consumers would establish a dialogue with brands, replacing the flat monologue that had characterised media since its inception and opening up new vistas of rich relationships between brands and consumers.

The trouble was we quickly discovered that consumers didn't really want to have relationships with us. And when they did, we struggled to cope with the volume of queries generated. All in all, the much-vaunted dialogue we'd hoped for turned out to be a bit of a damp squib.

But over the past few years a new dynamic has emerged, infinitely more powerful than the dialogue ever promised to be - more threatening, more revolutionary and more valuable.

When we look back in another ten years, we will see that the true impact of digital media was not to find new ways to connect brands to consumers, but in connecting those consumers (or 'people' as they like to be called) to each other.

This simple fact has created a whole new environment in which the consumer is king.

Using the internet, people are collaborating to create software, which they release back onto the web, where it outperforms the 'commercial' competition. They are sharing information about medical conditions, challenging the authority of the medical establishment. They are co-operating to drive down fuel prices by publishing the cheapest price for your postcode. And they are joining forces to bring down brands that let them down, posting reviews and videos of underperforming products.

The age of the 'trialogue' has arrived.

The challenge this poses for brands is that they are no longer handing down the tablets. Their consumers have relegated them to the position of supplier, and are talking about them, not to them.

While this is a threat to those who adhere to the status quo, it's an opportunity for those brands that can reinterpret themselves as facilitators. They will recognise that the bulk of the discourse will take place between consumers, and their role in this is to enable, empower, listen and, just occasionally, talk.

This trialogue will influence every aspect of marketing, from product design through to product recommendation. There are already dozens of examples. Threadless.com, the online t-shirt store, only carries designs its users have uploaded - and manufactures only those that get a critical mass of votes. And tripadvisor.com is one of many websites that provide a forum for consumers to share reviews of hotels they have personally experienced.

The potency of trialogue derives from the opportunity brands now have not to talk at people, but to be a small part of billions of their conversations.

No aspect of brand management in future will remain untouched - the trialogue will fundamentally alter the underlying dynamic between consumers and brands. This is the point where user-generated content meets brands - an area fraught with difficulty for the unwary and rich with opportunity for the creative.

Key points

1. Marketers originally assumed the internet would facilitate dialogue between them and their consumers.

2. Instead, people have used the internet to talk and collaborate to influence markets and brands.

3. There is an opportunity for brands to reinterpret themselves as facilitators in the new age of 'trialogue'.

4. This trialogue will alter the underlying dynamic between consumers and brands.