A Guide to Digital Marketing Part 2 – What Constitutes DM

9 July 2008
Part 2 of a three part guide to digital marketing. An invaluable guide for anyone looking to initiate an online marketing campaign or those who wish to improve their current online offering.

Digital Marketing Part 2 -What constitutes Digital Marketing?

E- mail

Email Campaigns in a variety of formats –Newsletter, Text only, HTML based are probably most associated with Digital Marketing in the minds of most people. Correspondingly SPAM emails likewise. There are over 1.5 billion emails sent every day in the US. That’s more than 3 times the daily surface mail. Legislation is now beginning to take hold within the UK and opt-in (rather than opt-out) is becoming prevalent. Consumers now indicate that while 75% of emails are deleted without reading them if the email comes from a trusted source; a known supplier, brand they will open and read the content. This has given rise to the requirement of legitimate list building rather than mass mailing. The website itself is important here, as I will demonstrate under Websites.

Email marketing executed correctly works! To execute correctly time is required and the most important word here is RELEVANCE. If email is used to enhance a personal relationship why oh why do so many reputable companies still send mass message emails! Supermarkets such as Tesco are particularly good examples of where correct emailing works. Tesco is now the largest online grocer in the UK with over 66% of the market. Its nearest rival is Asda on 16% followed by Sainsbury on 14%. Its biggest selling items over the net are bananas and loo paper (no I don’t see any correlation either) - emailed newsletters have played a large part in this success.

Viral

The term “viral marketing” refers to the idea that people will pass on or share interesting or entertaining content. This is often sponsored by a brand, which is looking to build awareness of a product or service. These viral commercials often take the format of an amusing video clip or interactive game, images or even text.
YouTube being sold to Goggle for an incredible £800m is the poster child! This can backfire if not used properly. Volkswagen Audi recently disassociated itself from a viral ad purportedly commissioned by the company – but most definitely not – in which to show the robust nature of the car build had a terrorist detonate a bomb from within the car – he blew himself up but the car remained intact.

Pay Per Click/ Pay Per Call

Google were the pioneers here and it made their fortune! While many companies exist in this space, Google AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing, which was formerly Overture, are the largest network operators as of 2006. MSN has started beta testing with their own PPC services MSN adCenter. Depending on the search engine, minimum prices per click start at a few pence going up to over £30. Very popular search terms can cost much more on popular engines.

The Financial Sector have been the most ambitious users of this model. Leads generated average at some £30 per lead. This is actually good compared with traditional model lead generation for this sector, which is over 3 times that! It’s interesting that many companies don’t actually appreciate the current cost of their lead generation for comparison purposes!

Similar to pay per click, pay per call is a business model for ad listings in search engines and directories that allows publishers to charge local advertisers on a per-call basis for each lead (call) they generate. A number is printed beside the ad 0870 000000 and the client only pays for each call received. According to the MIVA Group the conversion rate is higher than pay per click due to the interaction with the company. MIVA were the first to introduce the model to the market in September 2004.

Blogs

A blog is a website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order. The term "blog" is a contraction of "Web log."
Though often seen as partisan gossips, bloggers sometimes lead the way in bringing key information (or trends) to public light, with mainstream media having to follow their lead. More often, however, news blogs tend to react to material already published by the mainstream media. In other words Blogs can be used to disseminate information about your brand or campaign. In addition updating of site content encourages visits from the search engines so many websites encourage blogging or round table discussions.

It must be said that many blogs are personal blogs and to be frank unless the blogger is a personality (or at least has one!) who on earth wants to read the rants of an unknown individual!

Wikis

Wiki is a piece of server software that allows users to freely create and edit Web page content using any Web browser. Wiki supports hyperlinks and has simple text syntax for creating new pages and crosslinks between internal pages on the fly.
Wiki is unusual among group of digital communication mechanisms in that it allows the organisation of contributions to be edited in addition to the content itself.
Like many simple concepts, "open editing" has some profound and subtle effects on Wiki usage. Allowing everyday users to create and edit any page in a website is exciting in that it encourages democratic use of the Web and promotes content composition by non-technical users.

Banner Ads

There has been a debate about the effectiveness of banner ads ever since they first appeared on the Web in 1994. Indeed in 2001 a Forbes Report argued that they were largely ineffective and that prices were plummeting.

That said they still survive.

Advertisers generally hope a banner ad will do one of two things. Ideally, a visitor to the publisher site, the Web site that posts the banner ad, will click on the banner ad and go to the advertiser's website. In this case the banner ad has brought the advertiser a visitor they would not have had otherwise. The banner ad is a real success if the visitor not only comes to the site but also buys something.

With those who fail to click-through, advertisers hope that a publisher site visitor will see the banner ad and will somehow register it in their heads. This could mean the visitor consciously notes the content of a banner ad and decides to visit the advertiser's site at some time in the future, or it might mean that the visitor only peripherally picks up on the ad but is made aware of the advertiser's product or service.

This second effect of advertising is known as branding. In today’s media world, we are constantly exposed to brands attempting to influence your buying behaviour either in the short, medium or long term. Consumers often purchase products that they are aware of and feel comfortable with – this brand awareness can be achieved online with banner ads.

Interactive or Digital Banner ads how now become more common. This involves a degree of participation by the client for example it could be a simple game of skill. More and more companies are using such games to “involve” their prospective clients more intimately. Examples include The Royal Marines Banner Ads.

Location of Banner Ads has also has had extreme importance with a study from University of Michigan MBA section indicating that:

“Ads next to the right scroll bar (in the lower right-hand corner of the first screen*) generated a 228% higher click-through rate than ads at the top of the page.

Ads placed 1/3 down page, as opposed to the top, generated 77% higher click-through rates “

Micro Sites

As the name suggests micro sites are small websites usually built for a specific purpose - a special promotion or campaign. They can be part of the principal companies’ website but extend the impact of marketing and advertising messages.
Launched through display ads and other formats these micro sites allow advertisers to conduct real-time, interactive marketing effectively; reaching their target audience by delivering greater information in a simple, convenient way without in some instances leaving the pages of the central site.

The Times online is a good example enabling you to move to a micro site without leaving the principal one.

With Micro sites advertisers can:

Communicate multiple levels of detailed promotional messages such as product launches and corporate profiles; communicate multiple levels of detailed promotional messages such as product launches; host roundtable discussions – the BBC website is an extremely good example of this.

Search Engine Optimisation

If I build it they will come – well perhaps not! Building a web site is one thing; driving visitors or traffic to it is completely different. This is one of the key areas of digital marketing.

It is very noteworthy that 73% of new website visitors come from search engines Google, MSN Search, Yahoo! Search and Ask Jeeves currently account for a 94% UK market share of search marketing. Within this group Google dominate with a massive 70% of UK searches (59% in the US).

Further more, the volume of searches being carried out by Google has increased by 77% year-on-year.

Analysis & Reporting

Before starting any online marketing project, it’s important to build a good profile of the company and it’s current online activities.

A proper analysis of the site will look to determine the following:
• An evaluation of current site design
• An evaluation of current site accessibility
• Details of any current or previous strategies
• Details of any existing customer databases
• Geographical scope of project
• Definition of products & services
• Current focus of site (calls to action)

In addition to these factors other key elements include:

Site Traffic

It’s important to benchmark the existing site traffic and put in place a monitoring system that will allow for accurate monitoring of site traffic and user click paths through the site.

Traditionally log analysis software has been used for this. However, the reports produced by this software were often confusing and were not user friendly. Script based software is now viewed as being more user friendly and with the introduction of Google Analytics it’s also free.

Keyword Analysis

Most sites will have a set of keywords tagged within the HTML of their site pages. The main aim of these keywords and phrases is to provide a summary of the information that the site or page contains. It is important to note that these terms do not influence a site’s ranking on a search engine. They do however provide a structure for the page.

In simple terms, let’s say you were creating a page that was going to promote a new product called “Pogo Magic – A New Pogo Stick with a difference!” before you started to create the content for this page you would want to identify the search terms that you would want “Pogo Magic” to appear top for.

Whether you are creating a set of keywords from scratch, or assessing the existing keyword strategy for a website, it is important to carry out a good analysis of the keywords and key phrase you are going to use.

When looking at very simple search terms, you can begin to dig into the complexity behind why users search and what their purpose is. Below are some examples and the reasons why you would choose these:

“Pogo Magic” - You would want your brand to be easily found. If users see your brand in offline advertising, they will often look online to find out more information about the product.

“Pogo Stick” - As “Pogo Magic” is a type of Pogo Stick it’s important that anyone looking for a similar product finds your brand.

“Po-go” or “Poggo”- Search users will commonly misspell keywords and it pays to pick up on this and anticipate the mistakes. With Google however, the relevance of this is decreasing as the site now picks up on misspellings and presents the correct search term.

“Buy Pogo Stick” - This appeals to a user who is looking to complete their transaction (they’re often referred to as “Trackers”).

“Gift Ideas” - Although this is a very general term, it’s still an aim for the site to appeal to.

So you can see how a site with thousands of product might end up with a keyword/phrase list a mile long.

Once you have identified the keywords/phrases for your page and you want to perform some analysis on them, the three questions that you want to answer about any particular keyword are:

How often is this search term being used?

Calculating the amount of traffic that a search term currently generates can be a bit of a guessing game. As this information is incredibly valuable to Google (as well as to sites looking to market their products) the true figures for search terms can be difficult to find. Some sites such as www.wordtracker.com built up a database of popular search terms. Overture (now part of the Yahoo network) provide a tool that gives an estimate of the number of searches that have been carried out for a term over the last month. Although Overture’s tool is valuable (inventory.uk.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/), it can be both slow and it only gives results for their search engine.

Google offer a tool that provides and estimate of traffic for any given search term but it only offers a general indication of how popular the term is rather than an exact figure. Google do provide more details of search popularity to their Pay Per Click (PPC) customers and we’ll learn more about this in the PPC section of this document.

How much competition is there for this search term?

The competition for a search term is relatively easy to determine. When you enter any search term, Google will tell you how many pages it has found that relates to the term that you’ve chosen. The more detail that is put into a search term, the less pages it will return.

What intent does the keyword / key phrase signal?

When we talk about the “intent” of a keyword we are essentially asking, what is the intent of the user when they enter the term into the search engine? Are they looking for more information about the product or service, or are they ready to purchase the product or service. This should always be taken into account, as it will be a critical factor in converting clicks into qualified leads or sales. Although intent is not an exact science, it is important to assess the intent associated with each individual key phrase. A popular way of doing this is to simply rate each phrase with a score of 1-4, 1 will be “Purchase Mode”, 2 - “Strong Interest”, 3 - “Possible Interest”, 4 - “Little or no Interest”.

Using all of this information together, we can start to build a matrix of keywords against their popularity and their level of intent.

From this simple analysis we can begin to gather some conclusions about the search terms that we’ve come up with so far:

Our brand name is not currently being used as a search term but has significant competition in terms of page numbers.

Both “Adult Pogo Stick” and “Buy Pogo Stick” have a reasonable number of searches (for our market size), relatively low competition in terms of rival pages and most importantly a high intent on the part of the user. We’ve therefore established that achieving high positions for these terms will take the least amount of effort, with the highest chance of converting the searches into sales.
From looking at the table above it’s also apparent that optimising the site for the search term “Gift Ideas” might not be as effective. Although the site that appears top for this term will gain a large amount of traffic, the competition for the phrase is incredibly high and the intent level is very low.

A final point to remember when gathering keyword and key phrase information is the volume and complexity that current sites will operate on. A basic holiday site will optimise for around 3,000 key phrases and sites such as eBay will manage a keyword database of over 1,000,000.

Once a set of keywords and phrases has been decided upon there are a number of packages that will report on the site’s current index for each term on the search engine of your choice. These include: Web position ($323) and Advanced Web Ranking ($59 - $229). These software packages will provide information on current site rankings within the main search engines and they also provide a variety of keyword tools that will generate keywords and phrases for a site if required.
Generating reports on how well your site is indexed for a given keyword or phrase will in the first instance allow you to benchmark the site’s current performance. Future results can then be judged on how much the gap has narrowed over time (also known as Gap Analysis).