B2B/B2C online strategy and enterprise eBusiness blog

I was floored when I saw the following article in a recent MarketingVOX daily newsletter:

Frustrated by Difficulty, Half of Marketers Forgo Analytics

Marketers will continue to invest significantly in online marketing this year, but less than half (47%) actually use analytics to measure their campaigns, and one-fifth only have a ‘basic’ website, according to the sixth annual marketing survey from Alterian (via MarketingCharts).

A marketing department can be a competitive advantage, but only if marketers understand how to measure campaign effectiveness.

Marketing budgets are usually the first to get trimmed in difficult economic times and it’s no surprise with over half of marketers not being able to tie a return (in revenue, customer satisfaction, brand awareness, etc.) to marketing dollars invested. A CFO at any company is going to quickly zero-in on this spending and cut what they don’t understand and certainly what isn’t being measured.

Are you measuring the effectiveness of your website with web analytics?

Free analytics tools readily available from Google and Yahoo! allow you to jump right in. But, it’s not just the access to the technology that will help derive value from marketing investments; ultimately, it’s accountability and the desire to continually improve your campaigns. Without either of these two characteristics, then you’re just viewed as an “expense” that can eventually be cut.

Target is doing a nice job of creating consistent creative and messaging across channels (online and television). Here’s a screen shot of an ad from the homepage of CNN.com advertising the upcoming 2-day sale for Thanksgiving weekend:

Click on it and you see this page:

Target ads still recognizable even when fast forwarding on DVR

And while fast-forwarding through DVR’d TV shows tonight, the familiar red background and white stick figure running with the shopping cart flew by on a few frames. How often do you recognize an ad and/or brand name in just a few frames of DVR fast forwarding? I’ve been paying more attention to this lately and it’s difficult to recall anything…particularly in anticipation of getting back to your DVR’d show.

Here’s a clip of similar animation which it looks like Target is recycling from this 2007 campaign (found on YouTube):

Consistency is key with integrated, multi-channel marketing

The consistency of the creative of these ads enabled me to recall the Target campaign with HIGHLY passive viewing (browsing for news on CNN.com — which I do several times per day) and fast-forwarding through commercials on our DIRECTV DVR. I can’t think of any other ways where I’m less engaged than quickly scanning for the latest news on a website or sitting on the couch watching TV.

As marketers grow to accept a world where consumers can easily ignore their ads, it’s really interesting to see how Target is able to penetrate the barrier to recalling an ad. It begs the question: how does one test the “recall” and “effectiveness” of multi-channel marketing prior to executing the full media spend?

Traditionally, consumer panels are shown various ads and asked follow-up questions. The problem is this doesn’t simulate a real-world environment of cross-channel entertainment & news consumption.

Think big, start small, deliver quickly

Incremental releases of ads combined with analysis of ad performance in each channel are really the only way to truly optimize a campaign — especially across multiple channels. I’m still not quite sure if Target is at the level of being able to measure or test the effectiveness or recall of their ads if only a few frames of them are seen. In any case, this current campaign of theirs has worked on me to generate awareness. Now the question is: will I make it to Target for the sale and purchase something?

MediaBuyerPlanner reports ”Only about 55 percent of search marketers integrate their search efforts with offline marketing efforts; the other 45 percent make no effort at integrating SEM (Search Engine Marketing) with offline initiatives, according to a new study by iProspect and JupiterResearch.”

You may have an SEM management gap

The above article claims budgetary and resource concerns. I think the bigger picture is one of the following scenarios that many marketing organizations face:

1. Marketing, being resourced constrained, probably pawns this off as an “IT project” because it involves technology.
2. Marketing has assigned SEM efforts to a vendor specializing in SEM and no other marketing initiatives.

Scenario #1: SEM lives in IT

I can understand why SEM has traditionally been an “IT responsibility” because SEM in large part, is still a rather large mystery to marketers. They don’t understand the rules of the game and the execution of your organization’s SEM campaigns requires a fundamental knowledge of your website and the visitors of your website. It’s commonplace that a marketing communications department, who handles traditional print and television advertising, may not be the resident experts on web strategy and design. It’s easy to pass SEM off to IT — because they handle “the technical stuff.”

Scenario #2: SEM execution lives with an outside firm

There are many companies providing SEM services and not surprisingly, these companies are technical in nature and not traditional direct-marketers. Those that are direct marketers are generally small and have a localized client base, making it hard for them to penetrate the mold of Fortune 500 companies. Those that are technical may have a great technology to sell, but lack the marketing savviness of a direct marketing firm to truly bring SEM the return on investment it demands — resulting in poorly performing SEM campaigns. This leads to the disconnect in online and offline marketing mentioned in the above MediaBuyerPlanner report.

How do you close the SEM knowledge gap? Who should manage SEM?

SEM “belongs” in marketing and should be on the radar of anyone executing any outbound marketing and awareness campaigns (email, direct mail, or otherwise). “Belonging in marketing” and “being executed by marketing” are two different things. From marketing communications, to product marketing managers, to channel marketing, each group has their own functional needs/goals for SEM. Establishing a governing body to ensure the proper SEM techniques and optimization are in place is recommended — but simultaneously avoiding the bureaucracy that’s often accompanied by “governing committees.”

A good place? The web experience/usability group within your organization. SEM may be funded by marketing while the governing body and “gatekeeper” for SEM can be facilitated through the people who know your site inside and out and intimately understand the experience an end-user desires when arriving at the landing pages on your site via an ad. After all, not much ends up on the site that doesn’t pass the approval of this group. Any campaigns directing traffic to the site are right up the alley of a usability professional.

Sigh. This post claims that branding is irrelevant/dead thanks to search engines and how search is transforming the way in which people research and buy products.

Huh?

I couldn’t disagree more. You can’t honestly tell me that Lamborghini, BMW, Lincoln, and Hyundai (just to name a few random automotive brands) are all on equal playing fields when a consumer searches for “car” on Google. 

The post goes on to talk about the power of SEO and why SEO is not dead. SEO is most certainly not dead and should make for a critical component in your online strategy. His point in trying to prove why SEO is not dead is muddied by the claims of “branding being dead.” Brands don’t matter in certain categories (probably because there’s no clear category leader), but certainly not across the board.

Proper SEO can elevate your brand to the top of the listing for non-branded searches.

They key is creating brand awareness (through advertising, promotion, PR, etc. outside of search engines) and dominating on branded AND non-branded searches for your category. This is done by juggling your SEO work with your SEM campaigns to find the “sweet spot” so SEM can pick up the slack where you lag behind in SEO. Branding then goes onto heavily influence clicks on search engine results.

This type of tunnel-vision thinking is why “online” is still broadly viewed as an IT function.

Flat-out comments like this show the still “techy” and misguided view of some Internet strategists and how marketing and “tech” still quite aren’t aligned — even on established sites such as searchenginewatch.com. Any marketer worth their salt should understand that brands can drive search results. When industry publications and commentary throw out claims like this, it’s difficult to create alignment with a marketing department — especially when marketing should “own” (or at least have visibility to) SEO and SEM strategy.

In a tough economy, advertising dollars are typically the first to go. On the flip side, in a flourishing economy, advertising dollars seem to be readily available without needing much justification or proof that the advertising will pay off. Why is this?

Many advertisers have no methodology for measuring the effectiveness of their ad campaigns. In a flourishing economy, taking risks with a low probability for success is often encouraged in hopes of the big pay-off. In a tough economy, investing in anything (advertising, R&D, etc.) will require a great deal of scrutiny.

At SES NY in ‘06 I attended an invite-only dinner with WebTrends with a group of about a dozen online marketers — some existing clients of WebTrends and some were potential clients they were wining and dining. One of the dinner guests I sat next to was Rex Briggs, co-author of What Sticks.

For anyone who thinks “advertising cannot be measured,” I would recommend reading this book. It covers concepts that online marketers should hold close to their hearts: Test, Learn, Deploy, Repeat. Many traditional marketers are used to deploying large budgets on print and TV advertising with no plan or budget to measure the effectiveness of the ad spend. They excel at developing the creative, but fail miserably when it comes to answering the simple question of “Did it work?” 

In the online world, measuring ad spend becomes somewhat easier with the various tracking technologies (particularly if you sell online). If you can definitively prove how advertising positively impacts sales (directly or indirectly), then you’ll most likely see your ad budgets remain flat in a tough economy, but not entirely eliminated like some marketers are experiencing this year.

In a discussion with a friend/coworker this week on our way to lunch, we were chatting about the annual review process and merit increases at our company. He had made the comment that his parents jokingly compare his salary to his sister’s salary (who evidently makes considerably more than him). I then went off on a tangent and wondered what it would be like if parents treated their kids like product managers treated their products? It made for an amusing conversation and poked fun at the day-to-day marketing world we live in:

ROI of parenting (evaluating “performance” of a son/daughter)
Like product managers, parents could look at the time they were investing in their children and begin measuring their return on investment (ROI). If their daughter was outperforming their son in grades, relationships, etc., like a product manager, the parents would focus additional efforts in their son in an effort to boost performance. At some point however, the son does risk being cast aside as a “laggard.” The daughter also risks attention and her performance could suffer due to the extra attention being paid to their son. It’s a constant balance of determining where time is maximized on your products (children)!

Correlating performance to self esteem (like correlating product sales to consumer confidence)
With the economy heading south like it has been, we begin to see more product managers correlate consumer confidence to purchases of their products to help explain a downturn in top-line sales.

What if parents measured their son or daughter’s self esteem and correlated it with their performance?

If self esteem has a direct correlation to performance, then how can you “move the needle” like a product manager “moves the needle” in a down economy? A trip to Disney World, of course (sort of like a discount or rebate on a product)! Take a look:

Other market conditions may be influencing performance
Some parents may be quick to jump to conclusions like many product managers, however. One may look at this and say “If we take more trips to Disney World, I can create consistent lift in performance regardless of self esteem conditions.” This would be the equivalent to always offering a discount on your product — the risk is the behavior of the consumer becomes one of not purchasing unless a discount is offered.

The last thing a parent wants to do is have their son or daughter get in the mindset of only performing well shortly after a Disney World vacation. Product marketing and parenting is a tricky balance of priorities and market conditions.

Sometimes we just have to sit back and laugh at ourselves and the marketing world we live in.