Online Marketing Primer

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) - Natural /Organic Search

What is it?

This online marketing technique optimises websites to adhere to the relevancy algorithm criteria of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN). The aim is to get your web pages to appear in the top positions on the search engine results pages (SERPs) for search queries. This mechanism is designed to drive targeted and qualified traffic to your website using relevant content that is attractive and useful to the consumer.

Advantages

Targeted Audience

Self-selecting targeted audience that is actively looking for something you have on your website. Well structured website information architecture, content and inbound linking allow you to refine the targeting process.

Traffic Volumes

Natural search will generally provide large volumes of traffic at low cost (no direct cost-per-click with natural search) and a natural longer-tail (increase keyword visibility).

Optimised natural search provides very high levels of low cost traffic - it should be your main traffic source in a balanced online marketing strategy

Low Cost

Natural search uses your website’s own structure, its content and its inbound linking (links that point to your website) to determine its position in the results set of any search query. There are no costs other than the time involved in optimising the website, creating its content and acquiring relevant links - making this one of the cheapest forms of marketing/advertising there is.

That is not to say that link development or content provision are cheap, but they are activities that should be in place already, and the SEO benefits should be a free by-product of running your customer focused online business and marketing efforts.

Always On

Natural search is free; so if the website is relevant for a search it will be returned in the results 100% 24/7.

There are no budget restrictions limiting the number of times your listing is displayed (impression) so you get better visibility with SEO for the keyword positions your website holds.

Scalable

Because the volume of traffic has no relationship to cost/budget it is easy to roll out new products and offerings without having to increase costs - you merely publish enticing and engaging content on your website.

Far Reaching (Long Tail)

More obscure keyword phrases can be returned in the search result without too much effort - therefore keyword combinations available from your content create a ‘long-tail’ of low volume entry points, ensuring a far reaching marketing solution and excellent search visibility.

Long Term

The basic principles of search engine optimisation have not changed since the pre-Google era - information retrieval remains focused on well structured, content rich, useful websites with good linking and regularly-updated content. So you can expect SEO to provide your website with traffic for many years ahead without significant changes being made.

Disadvantages

It Takes Time

It is difficult to take-on established websites straight away; link building takes time as does great content and regular contributions - also, circumventing things like Google’s ’sandbox’ quarantine period for new domain names could slow your SEO solution down (unless you inject a large dose of high link velocity activity as provided by the likes of online PR).

Commitment

Requires resource to establish content and link reputation. However, any decent web strategy should make user experience and information supply a key aim - so this should dove-tail nicely with SEO requirements.

Paid Search Marketing - Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

What is it?

This online marketing channel allows advertisers to pay for listings adverts that appear on the search engine result pages (SERPs) and across the search engines’ content network. Pay-Per-Click (PPC) is an advertising model in which advertisers pay a fee only when their advert is clicked. There are varying methods of determining the fee payable, but most search models have moved towards modifying the bid price with a “quality” quotient to determine the final cost-per-click (CPC).

Advantages

Immediacy

PPC campaigns can be setup very quickly and your adverts will appear as part of the paid search results as long as there is budget and they are relevant.

Control

Paid search allows you to control you marketing campaign with ease. Whether using management tools or a web interface, controlling the keywords, bid price, advert copy, landing page URL, operational geography (geo-location), day parting (scheduling) and flight dates for your campaign is straightforward and responsive.

PPC confers the ability to adjust budgets, bid strategies or ad groups, and respond to commercial imperatives in minutes

Flexibility

Control of bid prices, keyword matching (both positive and negative), advert copy variation and dynamic keyword insertion all provide a great degree of flexibility. The ability to adjust budgets, bid strategies, to pause or resume campaigns/ad groups and respond to commercial imperatives in minutes further bolster the litheness and responsiveness of PPC.

Reporting

The search networks provide full reporting packages that allow you to closely monitor all marketing activity through their channel. Additional tracking programmes allow you to tie revenue/goal tracking directly into these campaigns in a seamless fashion.

Measurability

With revenue and goal tracking tied into the reporting package, paid search performance becomes very transparent. Calculating ROI and the cost per acquisition is therefore a simple measurement. Other KPIs are also easily tracked and the campaign can be optimised on-the-fly to meet any objectives where priorities change.

Market Research

The data offered from a paid search advertising campaign will often offer significant insight into a market and its characteristics - this data is both immediate and free, and an asset that should not be overlooked when planning the entire online marketing strategy and mix.

Disadvantages

Dynamic Competition

Bid prices compete to determine positioning - so constant monitoring is required.

Big Budgets Prevail

Big purses tend to prevail as they can out-bid the minnows.

Quality Score algorithm

Google’s Quality Score algorithm calculates the relevancy of the landing assets to the ad group and trigger keywords, then factors this into the final cost-per-click (CPC). This means to get the full benefit and lowest costs in your campaigns relevant landing assets with matching keywords are needed score highly on the “quality” index - negating some of the immediacy/responsiveness of PPC.

On-going cost

To match traffic month-by-month, what you spend this month you must also spend next month.

Therefore, to maximise your return it is highly desirable to implement a programme of landing page optimisation and sales funnel optimisation (or any transactional architecture) to increase conversion rates and get more out of your paid search budget.

Display Advertising

What is it?

Display advertising uses banners, leader boards, skyscrapers and MPU display panels to deliver a creative message to the audience by appearing on targeted websites. The display units can deliver multimedia and streaming content, and interact with the user.

Advantages

Cost Effective

Well-targeted campaigns can be very cost effective in sales and lead generation.

The flexibility of the creative and interactive capability offer great branding power to the advertiser

Awareness

The volumes of eyeballs and flexibility of the creative in the visual display offer great branding power to the advertiser. This is the main function of display advertising - to raise brand awareness and feed more users into consideration mode.

Market Research

Display also offers excellent reporting and feedback that can be used to hone the marketing message; post-click and post-impression data can be used in conjunction with other channels to assess exposure to conversion and user responsiveness to creative and offerings.

Guaranteed Sales Price

The advent of cost-per-acquisition (CPA) deals present advertisers with a fantastic sales and marketing opportunity to acquire sales/leads at a known fixed cost. Generally these type of arrangements are based on previous CPC or CPM campaign metrics so predictable sales projections can be calculated by the network or publisher.

Interactivity

A significant advantage of certain display units is the interactivity, allowing you to interact with the consumer directly, allowing data capture and sales opportunities that other channels cannot match.

Disadvantages

Campaign Management

Coordinating the creative process, media buying and network analytics for best outcomes is complex. Quite often these three elements are handled by different bodies, meaning a high degree of account management and liaison is required to achieve the right outcome. We suggest engaging a single party that takes a unified approach, so you get joined-up thinking for the campaign’s lifecycle.

Banner Blindness

Although display is a great mechanism for branding, advertisers should be aware of “banner blindness”; so just because 1 million eyeballs have seen your creative does not mean it has reached them all.

Email Marketing (Emarketing)

What is it?

This is the broadcast of a marketing message to an audience on a list in an email format. This can be to a known customer base that have opted-in, or to a purchased or rented list of people willing to receive info from third parties. As the former are targeted and more responsive to your message the idea is to actively build-up your opt-in list through broadcasts and other marketing and sales activity.

Advantages

Universality

Email is almost universally used by all Internet users and cited by 98% as a reason to go online.

Low Cost

Email marketing also represents a fraction of the cost of traditional DM mailers.

Well-executed email marketing to an opt-in audience can produce some of the highest response rates seen in any online channel

High Conversions

Well-executed email marketing is shown to give a significant boost to sales and marketing activity, with response rates of the opt-in audience being one of the highest seen in any online channel.

Message Segmentation

Electronic Customer Relationship Management (eCRM) tools can improve conversion rates by helping segment email lists to target recipients; personalising emails with elements relevant to known behaviour and buying patterns.

Conversion Tracking

Broadcast delivery, user response, sales and marketing activity occurring over the reporting window can all be measured, and campaigns fine tuned and optimised to improve user interaction and conversions.

Regular Contact (Outreaching)

Email provides a cheap and versatile channel for maintaining contact with customers; a ubiquitous format for regular communication and dialogue. Email marketing’s characteristics make it the perfect mechanism for providing touchpoints throughout the purchase decision cycle and Customer Relationship Management process.

Template Reuse

With great creative and well-designed templates, email broadcasts can be produced quickly and efficiently, making it a very agile and flexible communication channel.

Disadvantages

Requires List of “Opt-In” Recipients

Requires a list of opt-in users to be most effective, so list building and data harvesting are required to acquire opt-in users - this can mean buying and renting lists regularly to help build up your list data, and running targeted data acquisition/lead generation campaigns.

History of Spam Use

Given a long history of spam email, broadcasting can be a thorny area. Firstly your email templates need to reach the audience - so you need to known how to circumvent spam filters and display issues with web-mail and email-client applications, and secondly you should always use a third party for broadcast who know all the spam laws and best practice - to ensure you protect your domain and brand and don’t get blacklisted with the ISPs or other authorities.

Social Marketing (Web 2.0 Marketing)

What is it?

Applying online marketing activity to a host of different channels that fall under the banner of social media - these can be social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, community sites within the market sector, forums, blogs and user-generated-content (UGC), news, media and PR channels, and bookmarking websites. The idea is to seed debate, discussion, interest, and activity and raise product and brand awareness and talk to customers and potential customers directly. These channels can be integrated into your website making your activities and messaging appear both within your site and across the web where your potential customers actually are.

Advantages

Social marketing can substantially increase brand-recognition by capitalising on word-of-mouth marketing

Builds Brand and Product Awareness

When implemented correctly, social marketing can provide a very powerful method of building brand-awareness, using consumer resources to help build links and increase brand-recognition by capitalising on the potency of word-of-mouth marketing.

Low Cost

The very nature of this type of marketing often requires very little in the way of investment, apart from time and effort. The “snowball effect” seen in successful social marketing initiatives mean that once started, much of the work in communicating and proliferating the message is done by the audience themselves.

Highly Targeted

The factional nature of communities in social networks means that it is possible to ensure that you reach highly targeted audiences and market strata.

Real-Time Research

By monitoring and interacting with communities within social networks, it is possible engage in a dialogue with consumers and identify trends as they happen, enabling companies to react to current events or changing consumer requirements in real-time - with no lag caused by having to collate or analyse market research data.

Loyalty

The groups and communities in social networks often serve to increase brand advocacy and loyalty within their audience in a self-reinforcing cycle, occasionally leading to a point where they have an impact on brand direction, such as the “Bring back Wispa” campaign which prompted Cadburys to re-release the Wispa chocolate bar.

Disadvantages

Requires Finesse

It requires a deft touch - you don’t want to appear to be working on behalf of “The Man” or “Astroturfing” (fake grassroots behaviour) as it will shatter your credibility - so genuine friendships, acquaintances and networking are best routes to market.

Loss of Control

Once you enter this arena you no longer have control of the message - so you must try and shape the message within the context of dynamic human interaction - i.e. this is a political activity firstly - if you get the politics right the commercial benefits will take care of themselves.

Viral Marketing

What is it?

Any form of marketing that models the spread of a pathogen using a word-of-mouth social distribution model that is self-perpetuating. The message must be easy to distribute and pass on to your peers, and will need an incentive to trigger distribution - whether that is an offer, humorous content, or a call-to-arms. The trick of good viral is identifying a decent distribution trigger that falls within the brand message and objectives of the campaign.

Advantages

Viral marketing can deliver a big bang for your buck, and have huge impact on sales and brand awareness

Huge ROI

Viral marketing has the potential to deliver you a big bang for your buck if successful. Well executed offer-led campaigns such as Odd Bin’s famous “Special Offer” voucher that was “accidentally” able to be copied and distributed to anyone can have huge impact on sales and brand awareness.

Disadvantages

Difficult to “Manufacture” a Viral Success

Coming up with a decent distribution trigger is that is not beyond-the-pale is difficult and requires talent and fine judgment in the creative process. Everybodys idea of a viral email, product or video is different; and many attempts to manufacture viral creatives have failed, from the near-misses to the downright cringe-worthy…

Slipping Off-Brand

The ability to go too far or off brand is all too easy in the pursuit of humour, controversy or offer benefits. An example of this is the infamous VW Polo terrorist viral which, while unconnected to Volkswagon, prompted a categorically statement from them to the effect that it was an unrelated production - so as to avoid any potentially negative reaction.