Our thoughts and knowledge on all things Internet

The weaknesses of Tick Box online marketing

Thursday, August 10, 2006

A few of my recent posts have touched upon the subject of targeting and planning in internet marketing (see about E-Profiling, Site-Targeted Campaigns and MySpace).

As a traditional marketing consultant who has evolved into an online marketing professional, it’s my opinion that many simple marketing principles have been lost in the rush to adopt new online marketing methods.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m the biggest fan you’ll find of tools like Pay Per Click advertising, which have enabled me to help almost any client to promote themselves effectively for modest cost.

But my primary concern is that planning online marketing can all too easily be based on what I call the Tick Box approach. In other words, simply working down the list of online marketing tools; directory submissions, PPC advertising, email marketing and so on, rather than thinking which tools are actually going to be best for reaching your target market.

Which brings me neatly to my next point. Many online businesses seem to forget that they need to know who their target market is, just as much as an offline business (or even more so, because of the remoteness of the web).

Yet very seldom does an online marketing campaign truly segment its potential market. Often markets are defined as simply ‘Google traffic’ or ‘PPC traffic’, without reference to the actual people likely to use these channels themselves.

Which is ironic considering the relative ease with which bespoke web development and tracking could help analyse, segment and categorise customers obtained through different internet marketing streams. Such insight could then be applied to the choice of online promotional tools, and how each tool or message should be targeted.

Upon reflection, I suppose my concerns are nothing new. I’ve seen plenty of businesses waste money on poorly targeted offline marketing over the years, because they didn’t think about their customers first (if they even knew who their customers were).

However with the power, speed, sophistication and effectiveness of online marketing tools available to us now, poor customer targeting starts to looks more inexcusable than ever before.

How a new e-profiling tool could help your online marketing

Thursday, August 10, 2006

University researchers have launched a new tool that classifies every household in the UK into one of 23 “e-types”, based on their use of technology. Simply type in a postcode online at the Spacial Literacy E-Society Profiler to see how your neighbourhood uses technology.

But the new tool isn’t just an interesting way to see how tech-savvy the neighbours are! I believe the E-Society Profiler opens the door to a range of exciting applications to help improve online marketing…

Learn more about your existing online or e-commerce customers

I’ve been using general geodemograohic profiling tools like ACORN or MOSAIC for years, to help online clients understand more about their customers’ lifestyle, income, aspirations, interests and purchasing habits based on postcode. This information can then be used to inform promotional, product and pricing decisions. However the new E-Society Profiler is much more specific to online users.

Find more online or e-commerce customers

When you know more about your online customers, it makes it easier to find more. You can better predict what sort of sites they visit and how they use the internet. This can help you target your online marketing strategy, for example through the use of site-targeted PPC advertising.

We are now investigating the commercial use of the E-Society Profiler to see if we can provide access to the full dataset to our clients.

Don’t overlook the potential of Google Adwords Site-Targeted Campaigns

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Have you been guilty of overlooking site-targeted campaigns in Google Adwords? I know I’ve always rushed past the link in my haste to create a keywords-targeted campaign instead. But recently I’ve been exploring this aspect of Adwords in more detail and have found some interesting possibilities.

Whilst we’re not the greatest advocates of PPC advertising on Google’s content network, preferring to confine our client’s campaigns to the search network only, the site-targeted campaign function enables a far greater level of control over your content based advertising. You can choose to have your ads delivered on specific content sites (as we suggested in our recent MySpace post). Or you can browse sites suggested by a keyword search or Google’s lists of recommended sites for specific categories.

The concept of site-targeted also seems to be far more in line with traditional marketing thinking. Deciding which sites reminds us all that an online marketing campaign should really be led by the target market segments and their habits, and not just by the available advertising media or channels.

A few words of advice - I’ve found the recommended sites need some careful editing if you are just targeting the UK as many are US led. You’ll also need to create a whole new campaign for each set of content sites you want to target, as you can't target different sites for different AdGroups in the same campaign.