Advertising
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Wednesday, 29 October 2008 06:58 |
So your latest advertising campaign worked wonders for you, but is losing its effectiveness over time. It's probably time for your customers to hear a new message.
You need to create a new promotion and it needs to reap better responses than the latest campaign (grow ROI). But how do you keep refining your marketing promotions?
To do this, you must study the effectiveness of your previous and current campaigns, and learn lessons from them in terms what works and what doesn't.
To do this, you need to create criteria that your campaigns need to live up to and then measure what type of promotions live up to the criteria, which fail and which succeed expectations. Armed with the knowledge this will generate, you will better understand the messages and promotions that your customers react to, how to drive them from interest to sale and ultimately achieve higher sales at lower costs. Remember, nobody knows what works best for their company and product, and
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Tuesday, 23 September 2008 07:49 |
Advertising is not an exact science, but there are a few things you can do to measure the effectiveness of your advertising campaign:
- Track retail traffic by counting the number of people that visit your store. Monitor traffic both before, during and after the ad campaign. If your campaign only runs in designated regions, compare the data by regions where you advertised vs regions where no ads ran.
- Incentivise your customers to tell you when they have responded to an ad: "Mention this ad and get a 10 percent discount on your first order." Include the discount in your marketing expenditure to better calculate ROI.
- Compare sales before, during and after an ad campaign. Keep in mind that advertising often has a cumulative or delayed effect, so ad-driven sales may not materialize immediately.
- Use different phone numbers for each advert and each region. Create script for your call-centre staff making sure that you capture all the questions you need answering (keep it short). Consider setting up a separate phone number for your Yellow Pages ad
- Compare pre- and post-advertising traffic on your Web site.
- If you advertise online, track the clickthrough rate. This is easy to do: create a banner ad (or any other ad), designate a specific landing page for it (a page you normally couldn't visit through your website) and see how many people land on that page.
- Ask all new customers how they heard about your business.
Soon you will find out what media seems to work for your company. However, some campaigns fail, not because of the media, but because of a poorly thought true strategy or lousy creative.
Make sure that your ads have clear calls to action. Powerful branding and a catchy brand name will further increase the effectiveness of your adverts, regardless of the media you use, as targeted consumers now can recall the brand, and perform a search for the brand.
Identify particular types of customers you want to attract, and speak in their language, communicate with their needs, identify where they work / play.
Also keep in mind that you can't measure success if you don't know what you are trying to achieve. Set a clear, focused goal - keep it specific! Yes, we all want to boost revenue overall, but your objective should be far clearer: e.g. increase sales for one product, or building awareness of your company, to increase the volume during a certain time period or to expand your business in a particular market. All these different goals need their own, tailored evaluation method.
As always, if any of this wasn't clear and you need me to clarify, leave a comment.
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Friday, 19 September 2008 11:47 |
 Adblock Plus now has 2.5 million users, who surf the net without being interrupted by advertising. Marketers have been pushing ads, and now it seems their audience is pushing back.
Adblock Plus only works with the Firefox browser, and ties you in with an organization that logs all advertising out there, and prevents them from being served.
Although one could not call this a problem that is getting out of hand for online marketers, it does indicate a dangerous trend. Ad blockers for Internet explorer already exist and the number of people who block ads will only increase.
This poses several problems for the industry:
1. Advertisers are calling for full disclosure on the methodology of Ad Servers. How does it measure the impressions that we are paying for? Are we paying for advertising that a large portion of users have never seen?
2. How does the industry deal with this behavior?
When the VCR was launched in 1979, advertisers sued en mass, claiming that the ability to fast forward through commercials deprived them of income. They lost the court case, but many advertisers are considering a similar response (remember the court case against ReplayTV?)
Sites like MySpace already clearly stipulate in their T&C's prohibiting
covering or obscuring the banner advertisements on your personal profile page, or any MySpace.com page via HTML/CSS or any other means.
Ad Servers like Microsoft try to remain neutral, but are biased towards their consumers, as clearly laid out in their press release on the subject:
It would not be appropriate for Microsoft to comment on the merits or demerits of a specific add-on, or group of add-ons,
Microsoft said.
Provided they have not been designed with malicious intent and do not compromise a user's privacy or security, Microsoft is pleased to see new add-ons that add to the range of options that users have for customizing their browsing experience.
Some sites block users with ad blockers to view their sites. Danny Carlton, owner of over 50 sites, is one of them:
I know it's seen as overkill, but sometime overkill is necessary to expose something that is a growing threat,
3. A 'new deal' with the consumer.
All this outrage misses the main point of this trend: ads enable our audience to consume content for free, yet still they are blocking the adverts. There is a clear communication from the consumer that they want to renegotiate 'the deal we made with them' without really ever consulting our audience. It is up to marketers to negotiate a new deal, or to communicate clearly the value of the ads they are serving.
One well-known blogger, Markos Moulitsas, the "Kos" in DailyKos, has found a more balanced response to this growing trend by created a voluntary subscription to his popular political blog.
We won't stop you from using ad blocking software, but if you do use it we ask you to support Daily Kos another way: by purchasing a site subscription,
Moulitsas wrote on his blog.
Wladimir Palant, the man who started the controversy by inventing Adblock Plus, also sees the issue as one of respect.
There is only one reliable way to make sure your ads aren't blocked -- make sure the users don't want to block them,
Palant wrote on his blog.
Don't forget about the users. Use ads in a way that doesn't degrade their experience.
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