Convince and Convert Blog: Where Social Media and Email Collide

The National Hockey League has rolled out a series of compelling TV spots featuring some of the game’s biggest stars.

And while the new commercials - with a theme of “Is This The Year?” will run nationally on Canadian broadcast and U.S. cable television, like so many campaigns, it’s being forced to go it alone.

How About Some Synergy?

Instead of launching an integrated effort, it appears that this is a TV-only exercise (created in-house by the NHL with creative consulting from Y&R).

- A search for “NHL” on Google finds no mention of the campaign in either paid or organic listing.

- The official NHL Facebook page doesn’t mention the campaign, and doesn’t link to the ads.

- The spots are not on YouTube (although they are on the NHL.com site).

- The ads are not specifically touted even on the Web sites of the featured players’ teams.

A Huge Social Media Opportunity

If there’s one sports league that could and should capitalize on social media marketing, it’s the NHL. It’s downright cultish, and very few people are ambivalent toward it. So many easy social media programs could be launched.

Contests to make your own “Is This The Year?” commercial. Contests to describe why this is indeed the year for your team. Guest blog posts from the players in the commercials. Uploading the spots to YouTube, including a “Making Of” video that shows how the innovative commercials were produced. Linking the spots from players’ Facebook pages.

And in the digital marketing realm, campaign elements might include: buying banner ads that include the commercials using rich media, video ads on Hulu.com and other sites, buying PPC ads that link to the spots, and having each team email links to the commercials to their season ticket holders.

The geo-targeted possibilities are enormous, because the NHL actually cut 2 local versions (featuring local stars) for every team in the league, and these spots will roll out soon after the national effort launches.

It’s amazing that the NHL would create what appears to be something like 70 TV commercials, and not back them up with anything in the digital marketing or social media marketing universe except for putting them on their own site.

Do you agree, or am I being too hard on the ice gang? Other examples of missed social media opportunities?

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From Dot Bomb to Dot Boom

Let’s face it. The economy is taking on the distinctive, sickly pallor of a post Mardi Gras Keith Richards.

Generally, recessions hit the advertising business with the ferocity of a rabid wolverine, and the last one trimmed overall ad spending by 9% according to market researchers Veronis Suhler Stevenson. The wolverine in question mauled and devoured online advertising, which plummeted 27% over two years during the last recession.

This time it will be different. Not only will online marketing survive, it may actually thrive during the lean times, continuing its inexorable theft of ad spend from traditional media tactics. Online is far more mature and proven now, and there are five specific reasons why it will be the go-to tactic among increasingly budget-conscious marketers.

Money Talks

First, online is typically less expensive than many other marketing tactics, and a sizable and impactful online effort can be undertaken more quickly and cost-effectively than can an offline campaign.

Wiggle Room

Like an Elizabeth Taylor marriage, online doesn’t require much long-term commitment. PPC ads can go up and down on a day-to-day basis. Email can be sent (or not sent) based on financial considerations. Even banner ads can usually be negotiated with an advantageous cancellation clause of 72 hours or so. Try that with your local TV station or newspaper. Other than keeping your Web site up to date, the only core online tactics that require substantial ongoing effort are organic search optimization, and Web site analytics and testing.

More Juice for the Squeeze

With diminished outbound marketing budgets, companies will shift focus toward increasing revenue from current customers, either through more frequent purchases, or larger ones. Email marketing is the perfect vehicle for communicating with customers and incentivizing additional purchases. Customer lifecycle marketing (persuasively combining email with direct mail, voice mail and text messaging) will gain favor as companies strive to close a higher percentage of a reduced flow of leads.

Waste Not

There is meaningful financial waste associated with advertising to people who have no interest in your product or service. The superior targeting ability of online marketing will enable companies to focus their reduced marketing dollars solely on likely prospects. This will accelerate the trend toward use of behavioral targeting and retargeting in online ad placement.

Behavioral targeting mines a person’s Web page visits and search terms to serve relevant ads. If a prospect reads several pages on Yahoo! about Nissan Altimas and does a search on Yahoo! using a related term, an ad for Valley Nissan dealers can be served up just in time.

Retargeting (a nascent industry led by local company Fetchback) takes the concept one step further, enabling companies to advertise only to people who have visited their Web site previously without making a purchase. With average conversion rates hovering around 2%, this is an ideal way to reach the other 98% that have taken the time to visit your site but haven’t yet converted.

Additionally, search marketing will continue to expand since it is the only tactic (other than Yellow Pages) that puts the marketer in the middle of the consumer’s purchase psychology funnel. I expect heavier bidding on specific, “long tail” search terms that often correlate with greater intent to purchase.

Numbers Don’t Lie

Online marketing of all types offers superior measurability and trackability in comparison to traditional tactics. This is of course due to the Orwellian nature of the Web, where every mouse click is tracked, usually anonymously. While the availability of this data may give you the same creepy feeling you get when gazing upon Joan Rivers, it makes for effective marketing.

When implemented correctly, banner ads, organic search, paid search, blogs and social media, email, lifecycle marketing and all other online marketing tactics provide a user by user scoreboard that can be utilized to ascertain precise return on investment metrics for each campaign.

In this way, online marketing provides companies the ability to test a wide array of tactics, evaluate which generates the best response, and then adjust the marketing program accordingly.

The old saying is “I know half my marketing dollars are wasted. I just don’t know which half.” This problem is even more acute and painful in a down economy when advertising dollars are curtailed. The inherent cost, targeting, and tracking advantages of online marketing make it more likely to succeed (or at least able to minimize losses from a failed campaign). And when a wolverine is at your door, that’s the type of assurance you want from your marketing strategy.

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I am of a vintage that was shaped by Van Halen’s album (actually a cassette for me) 1984. With Jump, Panama, and Hot for Teacher (a video that joins “Hungry Like the Wolf” in my early teen pantheon), this was a truly epic record - highlighted by David Lee Roth’s bad boy caterwauling. 

And then, he screwed it up. Went solo. Recorded novelty hits like Just a Gigolo and California Girls, which were only slightly more legit than Weird Al Yankovic shlock. 

From 1985 until the inevitable bittersweet reunion tour in 2007, both Roth and his former band mates suffered, never recapturing their former glory (despite the yeoman efforts of Sammy Hagar). 

Internet Marketing is Not a Solo Act

Ultimately, it was proven that David Lee Roth was better as part of a group, than he was a solo artist. And the same is true of your Internet marketing efforts.

Many (and perhaps even most) agencies I talk to are trying to add digital marketing services to their capabilities by hiring their own David Lee Roth. A guru. A turtle-necked Web geek that can do it all. Don’t make that mistake.

Here are 3 reasons why the one man show routine doesn’t work.

1. It’s Unknowable

Digital marketing is a paradigm and a platform, not a job function. You can’t hire somebody who does “digital marketing” the same way you hire a copywriter or an account executive, or an art director. The field of Internet marketing is now far too broad and the nuances too numerous for one person to be able to cover all the bases on a practitioner level.

There is no way I could actually execute on the full array of tactics the way I did in 1995-2002 when the variety of tactics was semi-graspable.

The biggest mistake agencies (and clients) make is believing that the same guru that is designing and/or programming Web sites on your behalf can also handle the marketing of those Web sites. They cannot. The two skill sets are almost opposites.

Web design is a project-based, creative, inward-facing, technology-driven process. Internet marketing is an ongoing, methodical, outward-facing, relationship and message-driven process. Other than a little initial search optimization on recently completed sites, Web designers are not doing Internet marketing.

2. Knowledge in a Silo Cannot Expand

I very much believe that eventually we won’t have digital marketing departments or even digital marketing agencies. As digital (Web, mobile, digital outdoor, etc.) becomes fully integrated into the lives of a majority of the developed world, “digital marketing” will be a component of every campaign.

This convergence is already happening. Public relations and search engine optimization are blending. The growing use of video advertising online. Direct mail campaigns that use personal URLs that lead to individualized landing pages - are those “traditional” tactics, or “digital” tactics?

Eventually, digital won’t be given the special treatment the way it is today. You wouldn’t have a “radio department” and eventually you won’t have a “digital department” either.

If digital will be a part of everything, isn’t it imperative that everyone in your agency (or in-house marketing department) understand digital marketing to some degree?

If you have a guru, it gives EVERY other member of your team a built-in excuse (that you provided) to not have to get up to speed on digital marketing.

3. Asking for Trouble

If you hire a guru to handle all of your digital marketing and centralize that understanding, it creates an operational bottleneck in your organization. It’s not even a hub and spoke model. It’s just hub. Every brainstorm that requires digital thinking requires the guru. Every client meeting. Every pitch. When the guru is sick, the digital effort is grounded.

Plus, how many accounts can the guru work on competently?

It’s an extremely inefficient way to manage your personnel.

Further, since the guru gets to work on all the big accounts (because all the big accounts will want digital marketing), the guru develops quite a resume. Consequently, the guru will be endlessly recruited (perhaps even by your own clients). Eventually, the guru will leave for another opportunity that doesn’t require the ball juggling of an agency, and may include free lunch, stock options, and a big office.

Trust me. The guru will leave.

And then what? When the sum total of your organization’s digital marketing expertise walks out the door, how do you keep providing services to current clients, much less attract new ones? Typically, agencies faced with this scenario try to find Guru 2.0 which of course just perpetuates the problem.

Don’t Be Seduced by the Guru

I know fully embracing and integrating digital marketing is hard. If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have started a consulting company to assist. The pull of hiring one person to make the pain go away is strong. But don’t fall for it.

Make a plan to distribute responsibility for digital marketing tactics to multiple members of your team. One person handles SEO. One person handles Email. One person handles online media buying. Clearly, once you have a concentration of clients that need digital marketing services from you, you may want to add staff to work on tactical execution. But until then, remember one critical fact:

Internet Marketing is Complicated, But It’s Not Hard

If your staff is bright enough to work for you, they’re bright enough to figure out part of the digital marketing arsenal.

Do you agree? What are your cautionary tales or success stories about Internet marketing gurus? I’d love to hear your comments. Let’s discuss.

AdWeek announced today that security software maker McAfee has hired Tribal DDB as their agency of record. In addition to digital marketing, the assignment includes TV, print, and outdoor. 

Note that Tribal DDB is the excellent digital marketing sister of DDB. These guys know their stuff. I’ve met a few Tribal DDB folks via my work with ExactTarget. But historically, Tribal DDB has been a large but “regular” digital marketing shop. 

Warning. This is just the beginning

Tribal didn’t just beat out a bunch of other digital firms for this account. They were selected as AOR over big league integrated shops including Young & Rubicam and Dentsu. Wow.

As I’ve been saying (especially in my post “Agencies Wake Up - Digital Shops = Trojan Horse“) digital marketers have a much better handle on ROI, testing and optimization, and audience segmentation than do most of their traditional counterparts. Clients increasingly want to minimize ad risk and are willing to engage in several targeted tactics rather than one huge TV campaign.

If the traditional advertising agency community doesn’t see this win by Tribal DDB as a clear sign that the game is changing, I don’t know what will.

What is your agency doing to be able to compete with digital specialists?

How long will it be before digital agencies being agency of record becomes commonplace, rather than an exception? Leave a comment and let me know what you think. 

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My 5 Workshops that train agencies on Internet marketing

A One Legged Stool

There’s no question the Internet has been good to me. The last two jobs I had before getting involved in Internet marketing in 1994 were spokesman for the Arizona Department of Juvenile Corrections (prison tours), and marketing director for Waste Management (landfill tours). I prefer this gig as it is smell and horror-free.

I’ve been doing the Internet thing long enough, however, that my hype detector is finely honed (when I hear the words “designer dog” my nose runs). And lately, the more I read about this new online boom, the more Kleenex I grab.

No question, online marketing has many enticing characteristics like trackability, ease of implementation, and targeting (all of which I’ve chronicled in these pages). But I’ve witnessed more than a handful of conversations recently where clients and even agencies have pondered “maybe we should only do online?”

The Internet Isn’t Magic

That chalk mark on the ground? That’s the line between enthusiasm and crazy, and you just crossed it. People are being lured into an illusory sense that just because it’s digital, it defies the laws of marketing. That just because a trial campaign was boffo, a 400% increase in budget should yield a commensurate increase in results.

There are a few, highly targeted businesses – especially those that operate only online – that can succeed with a purely digital marketing approach. But for most real world companies, online-only (or even online dominant) marketing will not succeed.

The Difference Between Demand Creation, and Demand Fulfillment

Why? Because at its very core, digital marketing fulfills demand much better than it creates it. The digital tactics that work best (email to current customers, search marketing, highly targeted banners, social media) work because they reach an audience that is either already aware of your company, or susceptible to your charms based on their needs and lifestyle.

At any moment in time, there are a finite number of prospective customers that are aware of your service, interested in your service, and online. Thus, there is a ceiling on the effectiveness and size of any winning digital campaign. Approximately 100 people will search today for “RV rentals.” And not much can be done online to increase that number. You can do everything possible to maximize your exposure to those 100 searchers, but that’s the size of the potential customer pool via search at present.

To grow the pool of people who are clearly interested in RV rentals (as evidenced by their search query), you have to use the much maligned and uncool world of traditional marketing. By using print, broadcast, direct mail, event sponsorship, and public relations you can grow the awareness and demand for your product or service, and PRESTO that demand will show up online.

Learn From Cupcakes

For example, an examination of historical search volume for “cupcakes” shows a consistent, slightly increasing number of daily searches from 2004 through 2006. Beginning in 2007, when the media began running frequent stories about the new gourmet cupcake trend (no doubt prodded by professional PR practitioners), search volume for “cupcakes” spiked, with a 300% increase.

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1+1=3

At Off Madison Ave, (where I handle strategic planning) we often engage in a tactic called “Media Isolation” to measure this effect and produce efficient media plans. Try it for yourself.

Take a two to four week period and run only PPC and SEO. No other outbound efforts. Then, keep the search campaign up, and add offline tactics. Reexamine results of the search program. Then, take down the traditional campaign, and continue running the search campaign.

What you’ll find in essentially every case is that the initial online campaign produces results that increase by 50-100% when traditional media is added. But most interestingly, the search campaign continues to perform better than it did initially, even when traditional media ceases. Why? Because the traditional program increased demand, and then the online tactics fulfill that demand.

This concept that offline marketing improves online marketing is powerful, but it can sometimes take a while to prove, when you consider that search latency (the time lag between when a consumer first searches for you and when they buy) can be as long as 90 days. Look at your reports in three and six month increments, not just monthly intervals, to help identify these relationships and trends.

From a marketing strategy standpoint, maximizing the effectiveness of your online efforts is a great first step, as the available data and feedback immediacy produce ROI faster than other tactics. But if you want to seriously grow your customer base, you have to put down the black turtleneck and Red Bull and employ a true mix of marketing approaches that work together to increase the number of people that care enough about your product to bother looking for it.

What do you think? Am I being too hard on Internet marketing? Leave a comment

More posts about using a true media mix>>

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AdWeek ran an interesting story a few days ago about Google’s foray into television advertising. As I’ve been saying for years, Google’s ultimate plan is to be the middle-man for all advertising, everywhere. 

There are clearly inefficiencies in the buying and selling of traditional media. It requires multiple phone calls and emails and spread sheets. Why? Because sellers of media will not make their inventory and their pricing transparent, believing (perhaps correctly) that to do so will result in lower prices.

The Internet Puts People Out of Business

Let’s see if there are other industries that were based in large measure on a slow, inefficient buying process with a lack of transparency. How about travel agents, financial agents, and insurance agents?

The Web does a lot of things well, but its long-term legacies will be instant knowledge and the creation of efficient markets in either broad (amazon, ebay) or targeted (expedia, eTrade, Geico) categories.

Google Has Chosen Advertising as Its Market

To me, the agency community seems frighteningly slow to realize that Google is looking to take away all agency services that are not strategic and creative, and replace them with Google-owned software. Google Ad Planner. Google Analytics. Google Web Optimizer. And now Google Radio, Print, and TV ad insertions. ALL of these are services that agencies could charge for as recently as 30 days ago in some cases. 

TV is the Final Frontier for Google

There are 2 components to Google’s TV strategy that if successful, will put a ton of broadcast media reps (buyers and sellers) on the street.

First, Google wants to deliver their menagerie of hundreds of thousands of advertisers directly to TV networks - and especially local stations. Imagine if your local CBS affiliate only needed 1 salesperson instead of 7 because most ads were bought direct through a Google interface. That’s the plan. 

Second, Google wants to deliver precise, real-time results tracking for television. They want to do away with Nielsen and all forms of panel and meter measurement. Already, Google is serving ads in the EchoStar satellite network, and providing second by second data on which ads are watched, skipped, paused, etc. They then combine data from online marketing and print and radio campaigns to provide advertisers with a comprehensive report on which media tactics and which creative executions are driving sales. 

Are there any clients out there that might want to know precisely how their TV fares versus their radio and print? Ummm, yes. 

Old Media is Denying Their Own Peril

What’s equally amazing and aggravating in the AdWeek article are the quotes from all manner of old guard TV folks and their hand maidens. They point to the newish effort by cable companies to join forces to provide the type of online marketplace and measurability for TV that Google is offering. The problem is, it doesn’t matter how great Project Canoe is (which is literally what it is code named - so much for futuristic nomenclature) - they have a grand total of zero advertisers on board. Whereas, Google has hundreds of thousands of marketers logging into their system every day. 

Ultimately, efficient markets will win. It’s as inexorable as water flowing to a point of least resistance. Even Forrester is ignoring the eventuality of Google getting a major foothold in the traditional media buying space, as analyst David Graves was quoted “It seems that the television establishment, both buyers and sellers, are likely to want to buy it person to person.” Not for long, and when Google opens up the billions of dollars in spot TV revenue pent up in the mouse clicks of their PPC user base, watch how fast those “face to face” advocates start learning how to buy and sell remotely.

Other posts about Google and its plan to squeeze out agencies>>

5 Great Workshops to Train Agencies on Digital Marketing>>

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A new report from Bernstein Research says online advertising in the U.S. will grow by 20% in 2008, despite weakness in travel, auto, and financials.

Top categories for online advertising spend include:

• Finance, insurance, real estate - 29.6% of overall spend
• Media and entertainment - 25.2%
• Retail - 13.8%
• Other - 12.9%
• Auto - 8.6%

The Question for Agencies…

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Google announced on Friday via one of their blogs that they have added 3 new features to Ad Planner. 

(note: for more about Ad Planner, and Google’s long-term plan to totally change the ad agency business, read this post from Convince & Convert’s greatest hits)

Impressive that Google has made pretty significant upgrades to Ad Planner only a month after launch, and the new features make it an even more useful tool for ad agency Internet advertising buyers.

• They’ve added more detail on sites, including a lot of stickiness metrics like time spent, total views, and average visits per visitor. This really helps understanding the potential engagement level of sie visitors.
• If you already have sites that you know you need to include in your plan (either they’re must buys, or you’re already running them, etc.) you can just type them in, rather than having to search for them in the Ad Planner interface. 
• Visual indicator that the site is in the plan. This is a helpful step, as it displays an icon next to sites you’ve already included so that you don’t add the same site multiple times. Nice usability touch.

Excellent post by Bart Cleveland on the AdAge Small Agency blog recently about Comfort Zones.

Bart made the point that if you get too careful and comfortable in your agency, you won’t attract clients that are looking for innovative work. There’s no question this is true. His post used “risky” or groundbreaking creative as the benchmark, but I’d say what services an agency provides is perhaps an even better measure of its Comfort Zone.

Digital marketing is NOT comfortable for most “traditional” advertising and PR firms. I get that. I’ve lived it. But, given the fact that digital marketing is growing extremely fast at the expense of other tactics, and given the fact that this will be even more acute in a down economy, agencies’ resistance to fully embrace digital is confusing.

The vast majority of agency principals are very smart folks. I know this to be true. They are good businesspeople, and great marketers. They clearly recognize that digital is taking a larger and larger share of the pie every year, and that digital-only shops are a growing threat.

Thus, if the awareness is there, I conclude that fear and uncertainty is the obstacle for most agencies to really get going on digital.

Digital Marketing is Like Learning French

In my experience, many agency leaders are immediately overwhelmed by the dizzying array of numbers, vendors, acronyms and general craziness inherent in digital marketing. I absolutely understand that coming at digital head on can be frustrating and baffling.

But, there’s an awful lot of jargon and insider knowledge in traditional advertising and PR too, and agency principals managed to pick that up somewhere.

True, digital marketing has a lot of specific terms. But if you can learn a foreign language, or learn how to write up a media plan, you certainly can figure out digital marketing basics.

It’s Not Different. It’s The Same.

The number one mistake that I see agencies make is to treat digital totally differently than other elements of their organization. In a lot of shops, it’s like Area 51. The digital guys are separated, quarantined and viewed with a mix of reverence and curiosity.

This causes two huge problems.

- Your digital guys have almost no oversight because nobody can speak their language
- You never really integrate digital into the fabric of the agency or even at a campaign level, because your “traditional” teams don’t understand or work closely with the digital teams.

There’s no other marketing tactic that gets treated this way. Would you hire a single radio expert and put them in a corner of the office and only deal with them when necessary and then say “okay radio guy, I don’t understand this very well, but do your stuff.” Of course not.

Ultimately, digital marketing is just that…..marketing. The same rules apply. Figure out the characteristics of prospective customers. Figure out how to most efficiently reach them. Craft messages that matter to them. Deliver those message. The main difference between traditional and digital marketing is the ability to measure success definitively, and that’s an advantage that should be embraced by agencies.

Many agencies are beginning to implement digital marketing tactics on their own behalf, using themselves as guinea pigs to develop greater digital prowess and confidence. This is an approach advocated by Michael Gass at Fueling Ad Agency New Business who works with agencies to set up their own blogs.

If you’re not fully embracing digital, why not? Leave a comment.

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AdAge reports that GM has moved approximately 25% of its total media budget online over the past three years. That’s 25% of a $2 billion+ annual media spend.

A current focus for GM’s online initiatives is the new Used Car Ambush program, a microsite and online campaign intended to convince used car shoppers to purchase certified GM used vehicles, rather than those sold by private parties.

The site is perhaps a bit too polished to pull off its desired “organic” vibe, and it requires a serious download commitment from the user. But, this type of online-only content and accompanying campaign demonstrates that car makers are trying to use the Web to make their overall media spend more efficient in these tough economic times.

Targeted Ads Are More Efficient

From an online advertising standpoint, moving dollars online (at the expense of TV) is a no-brainer for automotive and other highly considered purchases. Here are just a few of the way you could target your advertising online to reach only consumers with a demonstrated interest in making a vehicle purchase in the near future:

- Manufacturer Web site
- Dealer Web sites
- Paid search
- Organic search
- Behaviorally targeted banner ads
- Ads on auto aggregator sites like cars.com
- Ads on blogs and social networking sites devoted to vehicle research and reviews (However, we do not recommend ads on social networks. Here’s 3 reasons why:)

Conversely, here are the ways to isolate TV viewers so that you are only reaching folks that are currently in the market for a vehicle:

- Using demographics and psychographics and hoping for the best

Furthermore, reaching out to prospective buyers online enables automakers to presumably collect data from Web site visitors, allowing for ongoing, targeted follow up via email, postal mail, etc.

Broadcast Is Not a Research Medium

Of course it’s true that the Web doesn’t reach everybody. As Dan Gorrell from Autostrategem mentioned in the AdAge account of GM’s spend, 34% of U.S. new vehicle buyers do not use the Internet to shop for an auto. He states that this makes GM’s online strategy a “double-edged sword.”

This makes zero sense to me. First, if 66% of the country IS using the Web to research new vehicle purchases, that’s a colossal market segment. Second, I very much doubt that the other 34% are instead using television to research vehicles. How would that work exactly? You watch “24″ hoping commercials for cars you like appear at the breaks?

Comparing Internet and TV as opportunities for consumer pre-purchase research is like comparing apples and chihuahuas.

Broadcast Creates Demand. Online Fulfills It

Let’s don’t go crazy, however. There’s no question whatsoever that online advertising doesn’t have the reach or power to go it alone for a broad category like automotive. You need TV to generate initial interest and awareness (unless it’s just an under the radar program like Used Car Ambush). Once that awareness takes root via broadcast, the online components of the campaign pick up steam in a hurry.

I’ve seen this happen many times, and it’s an easy phenomenon to measure (and agencies should try it). Measure search volume for your key terms. Then run a broadcast campaign (alone) for a couple of weeks. Then remeasure your search volume. You’ll find it goes up considerably. The same thing happens with banner ad campaigns. Click through rate always goes up after the market has been “softened” by broadcast.

Automakers looking to market more efficiently should reduce their TV spend and use it in short bursts at the beginning of campaigns to introduce new models and programs, and then follow up with aggressive Internet advertising programs that are much more targeted and cost effective.

Do you agree? Leave a comment.