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Posts Tagged ‘digital marketing’

Know your digital marketing

Friday, December 17th, 2010

Digital marketing
The future of marketing is undeniably digital – as other marketing and advertising budgets are hit by economic dips, digital marketing shows a continually healthy growth.

We’re also discovering new trends around digital marketing every day; for example, we’re seeing that the old rules based around ratecards and readership are fast becoming obsolete. In cyberspace, the only thing that counts is your imagination – and your grasp of technology. The bread and butter of digital advertising is the banner, or display advert. There are three ways of paying for your banner: per page impression, per click or per action – such as a sale or brochure order. In our opinion banner adverts should be given a wide-birth. Most consumers are banner-blind. Eyeball tracking tests by legendary internet marketer Jakob Nielsen do indeed suggest that surfers rarely glance at banner adverts. The problem with banner advertising comes when defining reach, even worse if you’re paying by ‘potential’ viewers. The issue is that reach is a number born out of the television advertising ere where there was a limited spectrum. As a result, people were forced to watch one of a small number of channels. The internet doesn’t live by the same rules because the digital spectrum is infinite. As an advertiser who should always be seeking maximum impact, you can extract much more value by offering a specific message to a small group, rather than a general message to a large one. So the real value on the internet becomes the ability to segment and target, rather than a ‘broad-brush’ approach, with a hope to reach massive numbers.

Social sites
If boring banner adverts don’t float your boat there are other options, some more established than others. Social media sites offer dozens of possibilities, not forgetting to mention your ability to get quality backlinks.

Wikipedia is a must. More than one in 200 visits on the entire internet are to Wikipedia, so make sure your company’s page is up to scratch. LinkedIn has also recently expanded the company pages section to enable you to upload specific products and services and get real-time recommendations from within your network.

In-game adverts, mobiles, barcodes
In-game advertising is one of the newest forms of digital marketing. If you play ‘Pro Evolution Soccer’ on a PlayStation, you’ll see adverts around the animated pitch for Reebok, Canon and the Daily Mirror.

Mobile marketing is booming too. The Sun has now added the word ‘mobile’ into its strapline – ‘Paper, online, mobile’ – and has agreed to show Premier League goal clips on its mobile site for 50p a time

Barcodes
Barcodes are the latest development. Marketers can text a barcode to smartphones, which are then scanned by laser readers. Supermarkets accept mobile barcodes instead of paper discount vouchers.

Blogging
If these new technologies seem daunting – and expensive – then try the most frugal form of communication: a blog. OK, so there are 106 million blogs in cyberspace, but a good blog can create an emotional tie between your brand and the consumer and certainly helps your SEO rankings.

Also, forum posting can be effective. We post regularly to UKbusinessForums.co.uk – the busiest entrepreneur-focused site in the UK. Phil Williams, founder of Open Mind Commerce, says he gets 90 per cent of new leads by answering queries on UKbusinessforums.co.uk site alone. Whatever digital marketing strategies you choose: – know them, understand them and keep your eyes open as new technologies are developed every month.

Tags: digital marketing, direct marketing
Posted in General Marketing, How To Do... | No Comments »

B2B digital marketing stills lags B2C

Tuesday, February 9th, 2010

Written by: Carl Da-Costa-Greaves

It’s often a given that business-to-business (B2B) marketing is the less glamorous and less sophisticated sister in the marketing family. But why is this assumption quite often being made when B2B marketers are also embracing the latest digital innovations in marketing practices?

Digital is central and top of most agendas for B2B, being favoured over more traditional channels such as direct mail, but while the technologies being used in digital are at a similar level of development across B2B and Business to Consumer (B2C) marketing, it’s WHY they are being used, and what is deemed a satisfactory return on investment, that differs between the two sectors.

For example, traditional B2B clients would see the potential for digital media as a ‘tactical’ way to influence a campaign, in order to help build awareness or to promote the campaign itself; if more people are aware, or ‘click through’ because of a viral message, then the click rate goes up and the target is achieved.

Where I think it differs between consumer and business marketing, is how that same tool is being used in B2C to strategically engage with the brand over the long term, using rich media and microsites, consequently increasing lead generation as a result.

It is exactly here; the focus of ‘measurement on activity’ instead of ‘measurement on return’ where B2B campaigns need to play catch up against B2C. Consumer marketing has been successfully ‘measuring on return’ using a range of different metrics to gauge the impact of efforts on areas such as brand building.

In order to close this gap we have a responsibility as marketers to demonstrate that much more sophisticated digital metrics can be engaged in B2B to enable measurement on total return by considering the longer term impact of what takes place say, after an email is opened, rather than how many times users ‘clicked through’.

Tags: branding, business marketing, consumer marketing, digital marketing
Posted in Marketing | 2 Comments »