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Executing Online Campaigns – Paid Media

Our last lever falls under Paid. As we’ve undoubtedly seen, online marketing is a diverse and daunting field. It is best to leave Paid as the last lever to pull on the Execution checklist due to its complexity and high cost of failure. A full treatment of the tactics and methodology is beyond the scope of this text but plenty of resources exist online for the truly vested reader.

For now, let’s understand how Paid can be an overwhelming experience because of the diversity of skillsets and technology involved.

• You’re buying traffic from other digital properties – usually in an auction type transaction based on keywords, profile details, or a digital fingerprint trail. This means a user can be on a variety of platforms (search engines, social media, media) and then get ripped out of that experience and plopped down on your digital property. At this point, the stakes are incredible high to get them to engage and not hit the back button.
• User Experience (UX) and User Interface (UI) become critical to make sure that ad buy performs. Many companies simply dump a user from a Pay Per Click (PPC) campaign to a generic homepage with no thought to what that experience should be. Remember if people have to think and concentrate in a digital experience, they almost always abandon the path. All of which means, the page the user lands on has to be simple, intuitive and ask for only one action.
• Unfolding a user scenario to earn a conversion is tough work. You might be able to get them to click past the landing page (the page they “land” on from an online ad) but quickly discover you lose them on the 2^nd or 3^rd click into the site. This could be for a variety of reasons from the UI to the copy to a poor value proposition.
• Effective online campaigns require constant care and attention. Tweaking and adjusting based on data can be time consuming and is usually outsourced to PPC experts who can manage the budget efficiently.
• Finally, to ensure a solid return on investment (ROI) the digital marketer has to be fluent with testing technologies and online analytics. Knowing cost-per-acquisition (CPA) is critical to backing out the ad buys and ensuring they make sense for the business. Much like our shoe example where we calculated CPA, this is important to ensuring money is not wasted.

So, obviously the digital marketer has quite a bit of swirling complexity to ensure Paid delivers paying customers across design, technology, and analytics.

For those that consider undertaking such an initiative the following needs to be considered.

1. Expect to fail at first but be sure to know your CPA and KPI’s. If you have to spend $100 and earn one customer for $10 in profit, you now have some very valuable but expensive customer data. If you can drive that acquisition cost down where it’s in your favor, PPC might be a good option for acquisition.
2. Think experience. How does the landing page coming out of Facebook differ from someone clicking on an ad in the New York Times? Where do you want them by the 3^rd or 4^th click on the site?
3. Test. Test. Test. Effective Paid is not about setting it and forgetting it. You want to be looking at buys on a daily or even hourly basis and optimizing around the data you’re getting back. We’ll cover what those metrics should be here in the Measurement section coming up next.

Key Takeaway: Paid can be a great way to instantly turn up traffic. However, buying a click requires a diverse skillset across UX, UI, technology and analytics to ensure that investment returns the desired action.

Managing Online Campaigns – Earned Media

Our next execution lever consists of Earned and is the most influential but also the category with the least amount of control.

Examples of Earned could include things like User Generated Content (UGC) where a user adds content such as on website forum. Social media shares of your content can also fall under this umbrella. Finally, PR such as blog posts (and comments) or traditional press mentions can help you here as well.

The advantage of these actions is people tend to place a high value of trust in these channels. If users look favorably upon you, tremendous amounts of engagement and incredible traffic can follow.

Let’s take a look at how to execute on Earned:

1. Develop great content – sorry to beat a dead horse but a brand that ignores this will get zero traction on Earned.
2. Learn to search for clues on what your target market wants. Consider asking for shares and engagement after you’ve earned the opportunity to be a part of the conversation. We’ve all seen sub-par content with the plea of  “please share this on Facebook”. That’s okay, I don’t want to expose my network to something lame.
3. Approach influential press in a way that coincides with their readership. Bonus points to identify bloggers and review their tweets and articles to find out what their interests may be. Write a thoughtful email and include a link or two back to your website on why they might be interested. Plenty of resources exist online to coach you into how to pitch for public relations.
4. Use technology to listen to the online conversation. Simple tools like Google Alerts can be set up and email you immediately when a keyword around your industry or brand is mentioned. This let’s you hop into the conversation and stay up to date on what others are saying.
5. Say thank you. When someone retweets, shares, mentions, or otherwise gives you free exposure be sure to express some gratitude. Not only does this show up in your online stream but it greatly increases the likelihood of building relationships with trusted influencers whether they be customers, leads, or the press.

Key Takeaway: Earned is powerful influencer online. Yet, brands have very little control over the message. The best approach is to be humble, transparent, and do your best to put your brand in service to others. Don’t forget to be listening as the conversation unfolds for things good or bad.

Executing Online Campaigns – Owned Media

Using our framework of Owned, Earned, and Paid Media, we have a couple different ways to organize how we think about executing an online marketing campaign.

Let’s start with Owned:

As we’ve seen, we want to always strive to drive traffic back to a digital property that we own. Once on an app or website, we have the tools to measure the interaction in great detail and control the experience much better than on a rented property like a social media platform. While social platforms cannot be beat for scaling up word of mouth and sharing content in a frictionless way, they can be tough to earn deep engagement depending on the conversion needed, as users are on to the next shiny object.

However, once a user is pulled onsite we have great control over how we unfold that digital experience. We can adjust the site architecture using a content management system (CMS). We can change copy, headings, calls to action based on our user persona. Swap out videos and photo galleries. Or change up the flow within a native app.

This can all seem a little ephemeral, so let’s dig in on how we tackle this in a day to day scenario.

Suggested workflow for managing online campaigns for Owned:

1. Starting with our User Persona, we work backwards on creating great content that our target market will want to engage with. Think about outeducating your competiton and not outspending them with ad buys.
2. We build a user-friendly sitemap and design that allows users to efficiently move through our website. Remember most digital properties have less than five minutes for time on site for their visitors. What do you want them to experience in under five minutes? This brutal simple fact forces you to really focus your messaging.
3. Review your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). What are we striving to achieve for engagement with this audience? For example, in a B2B situation it might be we want users to sign up for an email newsletter to get helpful tips for better running their company.
4. As we saw with our SEO section, search engines love fresh content. We want to set up an editorial calendar for our blog and guided by our keyword research be assembling and releasing content on a consistent basis under the categories we defined in our sitemap. This content should follow best-practices for on-page optimization.
5. These blog posts can be assembled into an email marketing campaign and sent out to an opted-in list (meaning users have agreed to receive communication). Don’t forget to include links on your social feeds as well.
6. Over time, these online marketing functions develop a weekly or daily cadence that is striving to bring users to the website and reward them with value.

Key Takeaway: Developing a great experience on your own digital property means you can control and ultimately reap the rewards of that engagement. To earn this, you have to be consistently executing against KPIs, content creation, and staying close to your users.

In this Execution section, we’ve covered how to build a website, ways to deal with mobile, and why brands still need to own the experience end to end on their digital property to ensure a conversion.

At this point in the marketing lifecycle, the digital marketer has survived a website launch or redesign and is now tasked with proving the return on investment (ROI) for the digital property.

Here is where the real work begins because usually within a few weeks it’s discovered:

1. Hardly anyone visits the website.
2. Nobody is engaging on social media.
3. Conversions are depressingly few and far between.

Every website faces the challenge of getting people to take time off Facebook, or email, or Twitter, or Pinterest to spend time on their website. Despite what the press might say about sites and apps launching and having millions of users in a few weeks these are almost always the extreme statistical outliers.

For the beginning digital marketer this can be overwhelming to know where to start. A thousand different levers exist to pull. A Google search reveals an endless stream of blog articles touting sure-fire ways to grow traffic overnight.

Don’t believe it.

Building an engaged audience and growing unique visitors to your website is mind-numbingly hard work. This gets infinitely harder if a user-first approach for the digital brand experience has not been adopted from the beginning. It’s much easier to pull in people from social, search, and paid online advertising if we can identify with their desires and needs and then get them to engage emotionally.

A useful framework for considering how website traffic can originate is to consider the Paid, Earned, and Owned media model first put forth by agencies and brands starting around 2009. There can be some confusion as to what each of these might mean.

Below is a useful breakdown courtesy of Forrester Research.

Owned media:

This is in essence the properties the brand can control like an app or website and to some degree social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Earned media:

This represents the holy grail of marketing: positive word of mouth if things go well for the brand. As the chart points out virality and buzz can be extremely hard to spark and brands have little control on where the conversation may go online. For users things like PR and the conversation taking place online is where they put most of their trust, as we all inherently trust the crowd over the brand.

Paid media:

This is good old advertising in an online experience. Examples might include small text ads on the side in the SERPs or display ads on a site like the New York Times. Many companies will turn to these tactics to turn up volume and drive traffic to a site. It’s a pay to play model.

Where should I start?

Knowing where to dive into each of these buckets can again be overwhelming. Here’s a rough workflow to know where to start:

1. Owned. Ensure you have a great digital experience on Owned. If you’ve been following along in this text, you are well on your way by using an empathy-first approach.
2. Earned Media requires a solid dedication to listening to the conversation. Whether it’s earning shares on social media, in blog comments on a press site, or in user’s reviews on ecommerce sites, the digital marketer has to be ready to listen and then participate in the conversation. Remember consumers are in control today and transparency and authenticity are crucial. Large brands have struggled to adapt to this massive disruption and there is a trail of case studies of clumsy brand managers trying to impose their will and turn a deaf ear on the crowd.  As we saw with “Dell Hell” it can indeed be a painful lesson. Done right this can be tremendously powerful for generating great traffic.
3. Paid Media can be a dependable source for bumping traffic. As we’ll cover here in the next section, online paid campaigns can be turned up or down almost instantaneously. Yet, to get these campaigns to perform requires rigorous monitoring, testing, and tweaking with a solid understanding of online analytics.

Building traffic that grows month over month is the result of many factors: great user experience on the brand’s digital property, valuable content, constant monitoring, and a curious mindset to test. It’s best to have a solid workflow for executing against the strategy first. Next, focus on developing a solid brand voice on social media and in online conversations. Finally, add Paid Media to the online marketing mix once the measurement and conversion goals are in place. Depending on the size of the team and experience, this can be a tall order. Take it bite by bite and as everyone gets the hang of it scale up the complexity.

Key Takeaway: Earning engagement with users (attention is the true currency online) is a hard fought battle. There are no shortcuts to growing engagement month over month, despite the myriad of get rich quick schemes pitched online.

As the digital experience continues to splatter into a thousand pieces, we are presented with a conundrum. Social media represents a huge opportunity to engage directly with customers and carry on conversations in real-time.

Think about that for a second.

If you wanted to get Dell Computer’s attention a few years ago, what would have been the steps? Well, you could call customer support, navigate a mammoth website and fire off an email with little confidence it will ever be read.

Or you could start a blog called “Dell Hell” as we saw earlier.

Today, you fire off a tweet with a hashtag and most likely will have an answer almost instantaneously. Companies like Patagonia have even set up their own Twitter account for customer service and reading the stream you can observe a nice dialogue going back and forth between customers and the company.

The other advantage is the ability for word of mouth to spread incredibly efficiently across these networks. Going “viral” with a goofy video on YouTube with Facebook and Twitter throwing gas on the flame is something we see on an almost a daily basis.

But we’ve ducked the question so far on why a website still matters.

With social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest users are there for a ton of reasons. These companies have to produce revenue (or eventually they will) and so their entire goal is to coerce users to engage on their property for as long as possible. Most of these are using an advertising business model to monetize this engagement. So they collect massive streams of your digital fingerprints and use sophisticated algorithms to serve up ads they think you’ll like.

What happens next?

Well, a very small number of people will click on these ads. Given the absolute massive scale of the Internet even a very small number can represent huge dollars. It’s what has made Google, Facebook and Twitter very rich due to the size of their reach and why connected networks represent so much value.

But here’s why a website still matters.

When users click on an ad, or click a link in a tweet, or a photo on Facebook, or do a search they’re redirected to landing on a digital property. The marketer may have paid for this click or earned this engagement with remarkable content. At this point, they have pulled users onto their own site where they can control and tweak the experience.

When users engage on a social media property brands are effectively renting the real estate from a company like Facebook. Like a brutal landlord, Facebook can change anything they want at any time for any reason. Same thing goes for the Google search results.

But when the digital marketer gets that potential customer on their website they can start to control the interaction. They can dial down the noise in the design. Put in clean calls to action. Measure the engagement and adjust as needed.

This conversion is tough to take place on rented properties like Facebook or Twitter. But on a website a conversion can happen. While social media is a powerful force for word of mouth and maintaining top of mind awareness, the final conversion and profit for the majority of businesses still needs to take place back on site.

Key Takeaway: Social media is a wonderful and powerful tool. But don’t forget the brand experience is dictated by the rules of that platform. You’re just a renter on a social network. To earn a deep engagement, like closing a sale, this more than likely will have to happen back on a good old fashioned website where you own the property.

The Mobile Question

We’ve spent some time going over how to execute a successful website launch. However, in this day and age of mobile connectivity, you may be asking yourself “Do websites even matter anymore?”.

A good question indeed and with the absolute explosion of mobile devices it warrants a good debate.

The answer?

It depends on the business model.

But let’s start with what we can all agree on: mobile represents a radical shift in the consumer experience. When everyday users are empowered with the ability to record, tweet, post, research, and scan the machine that resides in their pocket is unlike anything in the history of humanity.

With the rapid rise of adoption of tablets and smartphones, brands are left trying to navigate this volatile technology landscape. Many in the C-Suite read the industry press and are knocking on marketing’s door with the question, “What’s our mobile strategy?”.

At this point, knowing your customers and how they want to engage with your business is critical. The iTunes and Google Play stores are littered with the bones of iOS and Android apps that have barely been downloaded. Producing these apps is not an insignificant cost or effort either. When the time for creative, development, deployment, and store approval is figured into the equation this represents a huge waste to build a native app that doesn’t get any traction. (A native app is an application you download and install directly on your smartphone or tablet versus using a browser like Safari or Chrome to navigate to a website).

Let’s take apart this native question with a quick example.

For a Business to Consumer (B2C) brand that requires a user to interact socially and get value via the user’s location, photos, and short bursts of content, a native app makes a lot of sense. Many companies in this space have launched purely on a mobile play. For example, Path and Instagram practically force all their users to download the mobile app before interacting with any of their technology.

As we’ve seen with Metcalfe’s Law, getting adoption and leveraging network effects is a real challenge. These companies absolutely must force users to be on mobile to experience their offerings in the best way. After all, who wants to take photos on their phone, sync with a laptop, apply a photo filter, upload to a digital property, and then geo-tag the location?

Obviously a smartphone removes almost all friction here (and we’re all lazy in the digital world). For companies like Path and Instagram this interaction is the whole basis of their value proposition.

Yet, these are very unique businesses. For a Business to Business (B2B) company selling industrial manufacturing equipment with a long sales cycle, a native mobile app might not make a lot of sense – at least right now.

Regardless, mobile is here to stay and has to be considered into the digital marketing mix.

One possible solution to leverage the gap across desktop and mobile is a framework called Responsive Design. First put forth by Ethan Marcotte while redesigning the Boston Globe website, Responsive Design selectively responds with content to the screen size of the device. This can simplify the management of a digital property, as only one code base needs to be maintained versus having a specific mobile site powered by a separate Content Management System.

Responsive Design shows opportunities for letting users pull up content on their phone that’s been carefully tailored for that experience and device size. After all, do they really want to see your company’s recent tweets when they’re looking for the location of your business standing on the corner of a busy street? However, when they return via a laptop, a more rich experience with multi-media and social feeds might be appropriate.

Tip: Be sure to review your site’s analytics to see what devices users are visiting your website on. Chart this over time. Is it growing? How fast? This can yield clues and help you justify a Responsive Design project redesign.

Key Takeaway: We are still in the early days of understanding the mobile revolution and what it means for brands. However, the digital marketer absolutely must consider what this experience should be for their users. Depending on the business model, a native app may or may not make sense. Responsive Design provides an option for curating the digital experience across all devices.