AF870. 2am Montreal time. Vacation time. Also time to look back on all the things I read over the last few hectic weeks. I wrote down what has inspired me lately:
Following my previous post on banner ads as traditional advertising, I decided to share some of the tools I use to have this conversation with clients. Creating a digital campaign is about mixing strategies and tools within the medium itself. It’s also about integrating the medium from the various call-to-actions and media set offline. The magic of the Web is that it allows you to address and answer those who are actually receptive to your message offline, those who are the more likely to respond to your advertising.
Below are 2 things I would recommend to look at while establishing your web mix: ie. how to drive traffic to a certain web destination. This could be a promotional website, a corporate website or an online store. I’m really going back to the basics that innevitably come with working on the Web and the value you can use to allocate them a % of the mix, and by doing so, a % in your budget.
1 – Values to evaluate each mean: time (months), budget, impact on traffic. First two are really easy, third one is tricky because we’re all asked for short-term, quarterly results, where the web is actually driving better results if you seed and let it grow… and that takes months. This is the long tail story I’m sure you already heard about. So based on your destination and the type of marketing piece you can also select one or the other.
2 – Means:
- 360 degrees advertising (including banners)
- Referring sites (blog seeding and external linking strategies)
- Organic search
- Paid search (and affiliates programs)
- Web PR (this is where I include social media)
- Sharing (allowing your existing consumers to share your content among their peers)
- CRM (a big word just to mention that you should know and have a relationship with the people who care about your brand)
- Email (paid data bases)
3- How to be a marketing surgeon?
Draw the paths for each target between their needs, your objectives and the media used. Never leave your message generic. Be sure to allow interested people to find you either in a click or through one phone call.
In a nutshell, for those who are comfortable with Google AdWords, I would say that you should have the same approach with any media.
Change the rules, instead of having your bigger budget in media buy, shift a part of your “banner ad buys” for content creation (unique+useful). Don’t go with bigger, bolder banners to trigger more clicks. Instead, create an interesting piece; something spreadable among communities. You’ll see a huge difference in your results.
Test it, measure and learn. At least once on a small project so you can see the benefits.
Post by Isabelle Quevilly, Jul 10th
Tags: planning web campaign, web mix
