Brilliant Thinking

I’m not going to beat around the bush with lots of theory, background, references and all that jazz - just get straight to the point. There is a simple model which can help you plan your next pay-per-click campaign (or for that matter approach any of your online marketing campaigns) which is completely business focused.

All businesses exist for a reason, and, as time passes, become more focused on a particular niche. I say as time passes because some businesses start out generalists only to later specialise in one area based on demand. However, many successful businesses start out with a clear focus to shorten the “experimentation” time. Let’s assume you’re at the point where you know your business and can write down a few key things about it. Here’s what you need to write down (for B2B):

• Your Vertical Markets (What most of your clients do)
• You Horizontal Disciplines (How you help most of your clients)
• The Benefits you offer, or the Pains that they experience

or for B2C:

• The types of customers you want to sell to (age, incomes, etc - demographics)
• What area of their lives you can affect (health, lifestyle, affluence, etc)
• How your product or service helps them in these areas

Now, this provides us with a great cube/matrix - the verticals are on one axis, the horizontals on another, and the benefits on the third. When you join them up in 3D space, each intersection point, or cell, equates to a specific campaign you can run. You don’t have to run them all, but at least you can assess which ones you should run - you can perform keyword analysis on each cell and determine a return for that cell. Armed with this knowledge you can move forward and plan the campaigns you should run instead of a scattergun approach that many people adopt.

This might sound like Marketing 101 to some, but it helps you define your core messages that allow you to reach your ideal prospects. And then you need to stick to them religiously throughout everything you do - and that includes online marketing.

I haven’t seen such a simple model used anywhere else as this one that we use at Emissary, but I would recommend it to help in generating effective results. If you decide to adopt it, I’d also like to hear your feedback too.

There is an interesting article on The Register today about Utility Data Centres and the area of Utility Computing. Although they suggest on the first page that it will be larger organisations who start to embrace the trend, about half way down page 2, they say:

“Long term, or so the theory goes, the majority of users will gradually shift towards utility-based service provision for all their IT needs. They will specify their basic resource and service requirements and be able to add short-term services and resources, at a cost, when required. This will be particularly important for small companies, for they would be able to pay as they use the platform resources and applications licences that otherwise they would not be able to afford to buy outright. That way, they could compete on level terms with much bigger rivals. And for any company aiming at the maximum in agility to meet changing market demands they could, so long as they could pay for its use, simply “open the tap” and there the necessary resources would be. A marketing campaign that generates more business than even the most wildly optimistic marketroid’s forecasts? Just open the tap and get the resources you need.”

In our modest view, smaller companies have more easily justifiable resturn on investment for utility computing and will also find the shift easier to make as there are less legacy issues and embedded processes. Expect to see more use of utility computing this year …

Marketers from 110 organizations contributed test results and lessons-learned stories for this fourth annual Wisdom Report, including: American Red Cross, CompUSA, Cox Communications, Deloitte & Touche, Palo Alto Software, and The Motley Fool. What is covered:

• Email campaign segmentation test results
• Search marketing lessons (especially combining PPC and SEO)
• Offline advertising and marketing lessons
• Web site design and landing page lessons
• Business-to-Business marketing campaign lessons
• Office politics and job searching tips for a successful marketing career

Plus, practical tips from ad agency executives and consultants on how to run a healthier business and land new clients. Click here to get your free 2006 Wisdom PDF� (1.5Mb).

Marketing Sherpa quizzed 680 marketers who spend an average of 44% of their total ad and marketing budgets on the Web. The key results show that:

• More budget is spent on search than anything else (even email)
• Search spending averages 34% of online budgets
• Behavioral ads have lost some of their luster
• RSS feeds and in-house blogs are favorite ‘emerging tactics’

What works:

Until now, in-house email marketing lists have performed better than any other online tactic. However, 52% of survey respondants� concur that [paid] search now outperforms in-house (i.e. your own rather than bought) email lists (47% of respondants). It is interesting to note that organic search (optimisation) comes in with 33% of respondants agreeing it is a great tactic.

What doesn’t:

Similarly, 52% of respondants agreed that bought email lists generated poorer results than other online tactics (although this is US-based, so UK figures will be different - so don’t exclude bought-in email lists just yet). Part of the reason for this is that email filtering has reduced the number of emails that get through or marked as spam. (In a separate question asking marketers what they’d invest in if they had some extra budget, email lists score well.) The next swathe of tactics getting poor results include pop-up, pop-under, banner ads, ads in newsletters, rich media ads and text link ads - basically, ads!

What to spend money on in 2006?

Just in the lead is the “website revamp and/or update” with 39%, pipping search engine marketing with 38%. Ads still feature highly, and a good few people are looking at branded desktop applications like the Google toolbar - 14%. The ‘average’ online marketing budget for 2006 sees� just over a third� going to search.

Of course, marketing is nothing without measurement, and over 60% of those surveyed said they would be investing in better analytics software for their sites. Google Analytics recently launched a free online version of the former Urchin software and it’s excellent. However, due to oversubscription you’ll have to join a waiting list to use the service. There are numerous other free and paid systems on the market and you should choose the one that’s right for your business.

What’s best in emerging tactics?

RSS and in-house blogs featured as the top two best emerging tactics, although some respondants thought that they might take a year or so to develop fully. Other responses� included ads on other peoples blogs, as well as video and mobile. Longer term, product placement in video games (already underway) would become more prevalent.

Marketing Sherpa ad:tech survey (open access to 26th January).
ad:tech

As the technology world moves rapidly forward, are we approaching a place of “pay for access” or do devices such as MP3 players (solid state or otherwise), etc, have a future?

As bandwidth increases, and companies like Telewest mooting a 100Mb service by the end of 2006, will we need to carry our own personal stores of media, or will we simply be able to just pay a flat monthly fee and access anything we choose, whenever we want? Now that’s a goal worth pursuing methinks.

I could simply access my online account and choose my personal library of tunes, movies, content, etc. This library could be accessed wirelessly from any mobile device I may happen to be carrying around - dedicated MP3 player, mobile phone, portable media player, laptop, etc - and I could play, skip, shuffle, pause as I feel fit. Sure, in the early days there would be “premium content” that I could access for a small fee on top of my access charge (that’s how it works), but I would not be restricted by formats, DRM, etc, etc, and just be able to access and explore a world of media “channels” at my leisure - even in my own home.

But what about “pause live TV”? Surely we’d need a hard disk for that? Ultimately, no. With much more capable infrastructures at key content providers (Network TV Stations), they would have the infrastructure in place that tagged the programme you were watching and paused it on their system (they would run their own hard disks or equivalent) so you could resume whenver you liked - even from another device in another place since you just need to log in to your account from your current location and pick up where you left off.

Sounds like a far-fetched future?

Not so … Sky announced yesterday that they were launching a Sky-by-Mobile service. According to stuffmag.co.uk: Sky By Mobile is available on all networks, but you’ll need a compatible GPRS or 3G handset - you’ll find model details on the Sky By Mobile website. While Sky makes no charge for the service, you will have to pay standard data fees to your network.