Top 3 Things I Learned in my Digital and Interactive Marketing Class

Since this is my last post for my digital marketing class through DePaul, I thought a recap post was in order.  Without further ado, here are the top 3 things I learned in my digital marketing class. 

1. I am paranoid.  I think half of my posts were about how companies are spying on me on the internet. The truth is though, I’m not actually paranoid.  I’ve known through working in digital marketing that we lay a pretty easily followed trail.  Marketers have to be careful, because this trail can be used to help, but can get creepy fast. This Big Data vs. Privacy debate isn’t going away any time soon.  
2. Search strategies need to be thought of at the start of a business.  I’ve always known that organic search was incredibly important—but this class made me realize that strategies to improve organic search results can be initiated
   
   from the very start of building a web presence.  With mobile search on the rise, Facebook trying to improve its paid search business and Google ever-evolving its core product—staying on top of these trends will be essential to a business’ success.   
3. Any choice a business makes needs to come back to who their audience is, what their goals are and how they can measure their success.  There will always be trends to chase that will be ‘proven’ to work for other companies and business owners must select carefully—there’s probably not a need to start developing content for Google Glass right this second.  

I enjoyed this class and hope you enjoyed some of my weekly musings.  Thanks for reading! 

Reviews and the Wedding

After this week’s class discussion on reviews, I reflected a lot on just how much reviews influenced my selection of wedding vendors.  My now husband (!) and I used Wedding Wire, Yelp and The Knot to widdle down our list of who we were considering and many times didn’t even visit a few we initially searched for due to bad reviews.  Additionally, we selected one caterer over another because of such poor service reviews for one we were considering.  
This is a personal example of the power of positive and negative reviews, but several recent studies validate the impact of reviews, especially their impact on local businesses.  BrightLocal’s 2013 Local Consumer Review Survey was particularly interesting, as it outlined just how much people are using reviews in their decision-making as well as how use of reviews has grown over the past few years.   One stat that was particularly interesting was that consumers are increasingly trusting online reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and families.  

With so much potential impact, I’m surprised that more companies aren’t going to greater lengths to generate more positive reviews.  A recent Inc. article outlines the 7 Secrets to Getting Positive Online Reviews. These tips are helpful, but need to be backed up by a good product or service. 

For our wedding, our research paid off with a great day due in large part to careful selection of vendors based on online reviews.  

Ever-Changing Marketing

In this week’s class, we learned about email marketing and had a discussion about whether or not this tactic is dying.   This discussion made me think about how clever marketers have to be to keep reaching their target.  

Part of marketing has always been about reaching people at the right place, at the right time, with the right message.  This place, time, message trio has to come together for marketing to be effective.  That place isn’t always about where the consumer is at the moment, but also about the actual communication vehicle being used to reach them.  This Guardian article outlines the need for marketing and technology to be better connected.  Good marketers will stay on top of trends and try new things (sometimes anything) if it seems like it has a shot at reaching the right person.  

The recent McDonalds campaign ‘Our Food. Your questions.’  is a valiant attempt to attract the Millennial audience that they’re losing.  McDs launched a major Q&A social campaign to try and convince the world its food is not unhealthy.  Overall, it was a pretty clever try.  They used the right channels to reach Millennials (YouTube, Facebook) and great talent (Grant Imahara from Mythbusters).  The message was certainly what their audience wants to hear—that their food is real and can be healthy.  

Unfortunately, McDonalds has a believability issue because their timing might have been off—it’s possible the campaign is too late to really change perception and Millennials don’t seem to be buying the message.  For McDonald’s their plan for these three (place, time, message) looks great on paper, but wasn’t able to come together (at least yet) to be effective in the marketplace.   

The Lengths to Retain

In this week’s class, we touched on how a company spends more to acquire new customers than to retain current ones.  In fact, information management provider Attivo states that it costs 5x the amount to attract a new customer than retain a current one.  If you need more proof, according to Gartner Group, 80% of most company’s future revenues comes from 20% of existing customers. Both of these statistics highlight just how important retention is to a business’ bottom line. 

The first thing I thought after learning these facts about retention, was whether or not all these stats were still true.  They’re not that old, but with the changing economy and job market, I immediately thought it likely that people are now most concerned with chasing a deal.  In fact, this Forbes articles asks ‘is brand loyalty dying a slow and painful death?’ 

I’m not sure brand loyalty is completely dead, but I do think that retailers have started and will continue to woo their targets with more and more free special treatment and have to reset their expectations.  A few retailers I think are doing this specifically well right now include Zappos and Bloomingdales.  

Both companies offer free shipping, impeccable customer service and other special offers for their most loyal members.  In fact, as a Bloomingdale’s loyalist, I will always check there first when I need an outfit for a special occasion.  While in the past shoppers might have ONLY gone to one store, maybe now going to a certain store first will have to be the best most companies can expect.    

Reporting, Analytics and Big Data Oh My!

One of the most interesting topics we covered in my Internet Marketing class this week was the difference between Reporting and Analytics as well as what to do with data.  Reporting is very important—building good dashboards, identifying the right numbers to track, establishing the right regularity to monitor are all big decisions that every organization needs to make and they need to find the right people or systems to pull all this information together.  From my perspective though, the real ‘magic’ happens through analytics.  

‘Big Data’ is everyone’s favorite marketing phrase to throw around right now.  We can personalize!  We can be even more relevant!  But big data is extremely lost without the support of strong analytics to help rein it in.  All the numbers for every measure in the world at face value won’t help to make business decisions.  Analyzing why something is up or down, why something is flat, what some number might do in the next 3 months based on this 3 months for the past 4 years is why data can be so powerful for business.  We can make logical predictions and adjust budgets, promotions and expectations to increase performance.  

In fact, this data isn’t just powerful for business. A recent article on BBC News outlined how big data analytics might even be able to help contain the spread of Ebola.  Specifically, mobile phone data is being looked at to see and predict how people in West Africa might move around the country and further spread the virus.

 Knowing the next ‘at-risk’ zone might help to better prepare and contain the virus’ spread. This is powerful and amazing work, all through really strong data gathering and analytics.  

Big Data can also, of course, be super, super creepy.  This article from CMS Wire does a great job of describing the difference.  One of my favorite parts of the article talks about how creepiness is in the eye of the consumer, not in the eye of the company.   Having access to so much data is powerful and there’s a lot of temptation to use it and use it and use it to really close a sale.  This is dangerous stuff for a marketer to have access to and good ones need to know how to walk that line.  

Facebook is Spying On Me

This week my Internet & Interactive Marketing Course left me thinking about how marketing can be both amazing and terrifying. In this week’s class we touched a little on innovation and interactive displays and I immediately thought of the bus display from Pepsi Max.  This creative execution was extremely engaging for those interacting with the display, who no doubt were left with a pretty positive brand experience.  Furthermore, their YouTube video has over 6.5 million views and they grabbed coverage in many marketing publications, including Mashable.  

Pepsi was able to extend an experiential display and go somewhat ‘viral,’ while also attracting media attention—not an easy feat for an out-of-home marketing tactic. Peapod did something similar, with a virtual ‘grocery store’ at different subway stops in 2012.  Both, in my opinion, are exciting examples of how companies used innovative technologies to market their products.   

Marketing has also never been more relevant to target audiences.  I got engaged this past year and almost immediate my Facebook ads were wedding-themed (and weight-loss which was awfully PRESUMPTUOUS of you Facebook!). These ads of course got my attention—happy couples with that photographer! I actually found some incredibly useful.  

On the other hand, when I reflected on this, it really made me think about how much information I’m giving to Facebook about myself.   1. 3 billion people are registered on Facebook and freely hand over their relationship status, interests and sometimes even location.  According to recent reports, Facebook’s new Atlas platform will allow advertisers to granularly target and reach consumers outside of Facebook.  The advertising industry is particularly excited about the mobile targeting the new platform will allow.  

As a marketer, I will admit that I am excited about these targeting opportunities through Facebook and really across the industry. However, as a consumer, it definitely makes me think twice about who I give my information to freely.  Time for another privacy settings update for me!

The Journey to the Top of the SERP

I currently work in the marketing department at my company and focus on our digital brand building efforts.  The part I like best about my role is looking at our results and figuring out what could be tweaked to improve performance.  Should we try a different banner for that audience?  Should we have the rich media ad play automatically?  We can make all those changes and then monitor without having to wait months for the results, which ultimately improves the performance of our overall program.    

Since I like this part of my job so much, I was especially excited to learn more about paid search in my Internet and Interactive Marketing Class.  With digital brand building, we make optimizations and run tests every few months.  With paid search, there are test and learn opportunities almost daily.  A recent article from ClickZ outlines just a few tactics to improving return on investment with paid search.  Many of these tactics can be implemented almost immediately and results follow soon after, which is very appealing for marketers.

Another thought I had after reading the content this week is how a company selects its keywords. A few obvious considerations include knowing your brand strategy as a marketer, choosing keywords that are necessary to compete in your category and buying your brand terms. A few other thoughts I had were using social listening tools to find how consumers describe your brand and your competitors in blogs and on forums. Another way might be to listen to consumers in focus groups and how they describe the brand and its functionality in their lives.  

Also regarding keywords, I found this infographic from WordStream on the most expensive keywords that I thought was extremely interesting.  I was surprised that the top 3 were all financial services industries, although it does make sense that consumers would want to do a lot of research before making a decision on insurance and loans.  I was also surprised that automotive didn't make the top 20 given how much they spend on advertising overall.

I am looking forward to being able to more intelligently discuss paid search in some of my future meetings.  After this week, I am more certain than before that paid search is definitely an area I'd like to learn more about as a digital marketer.