7 things you must check before starting an Online Banner Campaign

by admin on January 24, 2012

in Online Marketing Strategies

Anyone involved in marketing knows very well that the preparation involved at the prelaunch stage of a marketing campaign is ultimately the most important ingredient for success . Simply put, you need to get the prelaunch right. Banner campaigns are certainly not exempt from this maxim.

 

A lot of businesses do the mistake of overlooking the prelaunch stage of their banner campaigns or simply don’t get all the steps right. This is the reason why serious marketers always follow a check list of items they would need to tick off before a marketing campaign begins. These items are critical and determine whether a campaign will effectively work and bring about the desired outcome. It will certainly determine the degree of success – whether it will be a barely successful banner campaign or one that is highly targeted, bringing tonnes of high quality traffic and conversions.

 

I will show you a simple but powerful check-list you can use before starting off your banner campaign. The list is ridiculously simple but it will change any lame campaign to a rock-star one that will guarantee your bonus check and a solid ROI to your business.

 

Here it goes:

 

1. Ask the obvious question: Is a banner campaign the ideal marketing channel for my product or service? Yeah I know it’s pretty obvious…but is it? You might be surprised how we fail to see the obvious. I am a great advocate of ‘ask the obvious questions first’ because I know that we often get unconsciously ‘locked-in’ certain preconceptions without ever asking the obvious. Biggest failures usely arise from this and the smartest choices are the result of challenging established ideas.

 

Banner advertisement is not always the ideal marketing channel for a particular business. Many think that banner advertisement always works to some degree. This very much depends on the buying and decision-making pattern of your product’s customer base. If you are selling B2C a fast-moving product then a banner campaign is definitely your thing. If on the other hand you are selling B2B some specialized or high-cost product or service then display advertisement might not be the perfect candidate. There again it depends where you are displaying your banner and what is your expected outcome. It could be you are after leads and you are displaying a free webinar, report or white paper on a highly related site. In that case a banner campaign would suit fine.

 

 

2. Set your goals for outcomes before setting the budget: Quite often marketing executives start off by allocating a budget to a particular campaign without fully defining the goals or the expected outcomes. The process should be made in reverse. You first need to define what is expected from the banner campaign. Is it simply more traffic? leads? sales? brand awareness? dowloading a trial version of your software? And what is the context in which these outcomes fit? off-season promotions? product launch? pushing a slow moving inventory?

 

You get the idea but why is it important? Because knowing the quality and quantity of what you are expecting will allow you to set realistic budgets and realistic budgets are often accompanied by better planned tactics. By having your goals and expected outcomes defined you can clearly filter out the noise and be focused and specific about the right steps to take for your banner campaign – for example which niche or online source to place your ads on or which banner format, design or creative content to use. Unsuccessful banner campaigns are usually the result of unfocused and half thought plans because of poorly defined goals. [click to continue…]

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Why understanding your audience is the #1 ingredient for Online Success

by admin on January 24, 2012

in Marketing Analytics,Online Marketing Strategies

 

So you have your online marketing thing rolling on or perhaps you are still setting things up as you go along. You learned a few things about SEO, you setup a pay per click campaign on adwords and your website traffic is building up steady.

You are also gaining some momentum on Facebook and Twitter and have recently thrown in a competition to gain some likes and following. You might even have someone look into Google analytics for you to monitor how things are patching up. That’s all great stuff and you know that you are following popular online marketing strategies by the book.

 

But allow me to be a little bit of a wet blanket here….how much do you know of the people you are trying to reach through your online efforts? Or rephrased in another way…do you know who your target audience is? And if you sell a mixed line of products and services…do you know which product or service matches which target audience?

 

Forgive me for perhaps being a little bit provocative but from my experience I know that this is by far the most common mistake and biggest oversight that companies do when doing online marketing. Big money and opportunities are wasted down this path. Unfortunately it happens even in large enterprises who have a whole e-commerce department with a staff complement of clever online marketers.

 

But why is it so important?

 

Online marketing, and traditional marketing for that matter, is in its crudest and simplest form the art of matching or aligning customer needs with how, when and where you place your products.

Now, the more you know about your customers and their needs, the more you are able to match those needs by, for example, knowing WHICH online channels to focus on (example which combination of blog posts, PPC, Display, SEO, Social, Mobile channels?). Or you might get to know better HOW to address your customers (which type of content and language? Personal, corporate, visual, schematic, etc?). If you are launching products or event campaigns then knowing the mass behaviour of your audience can give you information on WHEN to launch it (holiday, events, mobility trends, etc). You get the idea.

 

Now the most important point is this: You can press all the right buttons in online marketing and throw in hard cash but unless you know who your audience is, your efforts and spending will not be optimized. On the other hand the better the knowledge you have of your online audience, the more effective your online targeting is going to be and the higher your return on investment (ROI).

 

 

Start simple. look for the data in your own home turf first:

 

Customer insight is more about synthesizing rather than analyzing. What this means is that you collect small pieces of data and build the big picture out of it. This is good news since it means that even small pieces of evidence can lead us to a better understanding of our audience.

 

For example, if you have some sort of sales reports available you can use them to get a better understanding of how and when your product is sold. The more detailed the information is the better since you can extract more insights out of it – such as how product sales varies by region, area, sales channel, day of the week, season, etc. These can be little gold nuggets that help you start getting a better idea of how your product sells (even through offline channels) and how it responds to price, time and market.

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