Current Issues in Marketing Strategy

Electronic direct mail (eDM) is an extremely powerful channel for generating demand in a product or service by offering a specific value offer to a chosen audience. The role of the third party provider is to deliver a highly targeted audience for that direct e-mail message. This is different to simply buying a list from one of the many 'shonky' data providers, but lets marketers strategically poll the audience and segments them into homogeneous groupings.

How does it work?

Retargeting follows individuals as they surf the Internet, by placing a tracking beacon (known as a cookie) on their Internet browser. To place this cookie, a specific code is placed within a webpage (on a specific or common page) and after users have viewed that page, the tracking beacon is automatically attached to their browser until cookies are cleared.

An example to help explain; a dog food company places a tracking cookie on the checkout page of their website. When the user surfs the net thereafter, every time they access a website that allows Google ads to be served, the tracking beacon recognises the user and allows the specific ads from the dog food company to be served. As we know that only people who were on the dog food checkout page (and code can be programmed to only target those that didn’t complete the process) have been exposed to this specific code, we can serve up text and banners ads that remind the customer to go back and complete their purchase. Thus closing the loop.

Surely if they didn’t buy first time, they won’t buy second time?

Although a logical assumption, the statistics and anecdotal evidence show that the Internet is a convenience store; consumers will leave what they are doing at the drop of a hat for a multitude of reasons, a phone call for example. Google retargeting allows marketers to get a second bite at the cherry for a mere couple dollar investment.

More advanced tactics:

The most important application of retargeting is to keep the brand front of mind. The dog food company for example could have separate tracking cookies on each of the separate pages for each of the dog food brands they sell. Ads specific to each of those brands can then be served up keeping the supplier top of mind. This serves two applications, firstly it reminds them to make an additional purchase, and secondly, it builds the brand through constant exposure to the customer, stimulating conversations and brand advocacy. If a user of the brand (even for very small companies) is constantly hounded by banner ads every time they use the Internet, they can’t help but be aware of the constant onslaught of brand messaging. From a data insights perspective as well, it allows advertisers to build up a clear picture of the Internet browsing habits of their cliental, providing unprecedented levels of consumer insight.

There are plenty more application for retargeting, but without doubt this is the most important product release of 2010, closing the loop in digital marketing strategy.

The ongoing but unwritten contract between advertisers and consumers has always been the delivery of value after advertising. That is to say, ads are seen as a form of compensation to cover the costs of producing a show/product/value. As an example of this, when watching free to air television we accept advertisements mixed into broadcasts as a form of compensation for watching a ‘free’ program, these advertising dollars are then reinvested in delivering additional content and thus the cycle continues. The Internet is no different and the acid test for advertisers is how their placements compensate or add value to the users Internet experience.

Search marketing (SEM) and the Google ranking algorithm (quality score) is a great example of where paid advertising ads value to a consumers Internet experience. Google quality score modifies the search results to rank advertisers in order of relevance to the given search query, thus allowing users to find what they are looking for quicker; improving their experience. As trends have shown, this is growing on consumers and sponsored link clicks are growing quickly (up to around 33% of internet users use SEM links regularly.)

The Google content network (websites that allow Google ads) has long been criticised for delivering a low ROI due to lack of targeting. Contextual matching was introduced to improve this by matching ad content to only relevant text, for example travel ads within news articles about travel or holidays. Although this was a step in the right direction, understanding a website in the right context across dialects, cultures & countries is very difficult for a mere computer. Addressing this problem Google retargeting offers the ability to serve up much more targeted advertising. Click the hyperlink to find out more about it.

Josh Strawczynski’s Opinion: I would not go as far as to suggest that poor placement of banner ads (for example) will do irreparable damage to a corporate identity, but advertising efficiency and the return on investment should certainly be taken into consideration. Where an ad placement is high targeted and relevant to the consumer, we will always see a better return than the less targeted alternative.

The key for beerblokes is going to be content development. Ask anyone about the internet and they will always quote "content is king" and for many reasons this is the most important factor bar none. The first thing I would do if I was you is write lots of blog posts. Even if you borrow from other beer articles and just change them a bit (content must be unique), I would aim to get about 100 articles up as fast as possible. There is another catch to content, and that is what you write about and why - The keywords.

Keywords are what the blog will be found for on Google, Yahoo, Bing etc. No doubt you can already see in your analytics people finding you for a few terms, but ideally we want to rank for thousands of different terms. Think of each article you write as the ability to rank for 2 terms. Google reads each article and looks for the words that you mention over and over and the general theme, then summerises it and say... "that articles was about timmothy taylor", then ranks you accordingly.

To start with, simply writing beer profiles would be a great way to get this up and going. To work out the priority, you can use the Google keyword tool. This free Google application shows you how many people are searching each month for a specific word or phrase. So obviously, if a certain beer has 10,000 searches a month, compared to another that is only 1,000, then try to work towards the phrases with high volume. You are focusing on niches in the market, so run with that and use terms that only people who are really beer savvy would use. For the more generic terms, work on phrases like "boutique beer samples" "beer sample packs" "beer lovers gifts" and this sort of thing.

Technically there are lots of small things we can do, but to start with, it is important to work on content and keywords. I can help with the Google language further down the track.