Currently in the UK,  total ad spend is £20bn, with 23% of the total spent online. However, there’s a bit of a disconnect when it comes to Brand Marketing –  offline, the split is around 50% on brand marketing; and 50% on direct response. Whereas online, just 5% is spent on brand marketing and the remaining 95% is on direct response.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the primary purpose of the session was to grab some more of that brand marketing budget… well there’s no such thing as a free lunch, right?

However, the session managed to avoid being entirely pitch, and some pretty interesting stuff was shared – so in the interests of share and share alike, I thought I’d share some of it with you.

Undoubtedly digital has profoundly changed both how companies reach their target audience, and indeed the ways in which they communicate with them. Traditionally marketing has been very much about the ”push’ – i.e. transmitting messages from the brand to the consumer. However, increasingly brands are electing to utilise ‘push’ techniques in a slightly different way – rather than simply ‘pushing’ their advertising messages, they are using ‘push’ techniques to encourage consumers to engage with their brands. This stimulates ‘pull’ – i.e. where consumers actively choose to view a brand’s content. ‘Pull’ is essentially about consumer engagement – and of course, here content is king.

The challenge for brands today is to create content which ‘pulls’ consumers in – they actively want to engage with the brand, and perhaps even participate.

Doritos were highlighted as a case study see http://www.youtube.com/user/DoritosYouMakeIt – a campaign (NB this was heavily supported offline too) encouraging consumers to create their own TV ad.

Incidentally – did you know…

1. Video accounts for one third of web traffic, and by 2013 they’re predicting this will reach 90%
2. 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
3. 2bn videos are streamed every day – or in other words, everyone on the planet watches 10 videos per month
4. YouTube is the second largest search engine – proof further (if indeed it were needed) that Bing/Yahoo have a long way to go

Bruce Daisley also highlighted that of course, YouTube is not just for brands… Check out this kid – well it is Friday:

I’ll spare you the rest of the YouTube sales pitch… and instead highlight some free, fun tools which you should definitely go play with:

Google Insights for Search – check out search trends over time.

Google Ad Planner – know what your customers look like? (I mean demographically – not literally) Check out which sites they frequent here.

Twittr Ratr – see whether people are responding to your brand positively or negatively on Twitter (NB this isn’t particularly reliable, but quite fun nonetheless)

Brand Tags – a collective experiment in brand perception. See what people think of famous brands here – tons of fun…

Well that’s all for today folks, hope you have a fabulous weekend

If you can’t make it along to our Online Marketing for Profit knowledge session fear not – you can still view the presentation right here

The goal is always to persuade visitors onto your site, but more importantly to convert those visitors into clients or customers. Engaging content can bolster your reputation and increase a potential customers’ trust in your brand, and ultimately leads to increasing conversion rates.

Many websites remain static for years, and it may be difficult to justify the expense to pay an agency to produce, upload and distribute content for a business. But if you’re considering handling the process in-house, knowing where to start, knowing what constitutes valuable content, knowing where to source it and knowing how to then distribute it can also be daunting.

The truth is businesses have been producing content potential customers are likely to find both relevant and interesting for years - they just haven’t realised how it may be leveraged online.

I’m going to take a look at some of the content you’ve probably already produced offline, consider some of the activities your company already undertakes which have the opportunity to yield valuable content and also look at how all this content may be housed online.

Re-purposing Old Content…

Newsletters

Whether sent by email or on good old paper, content from previous newsletters, with a few tweaks, is likely to still be relevant today and suitable for distributing online. Future newsletter content should find a place on your site within a news or articles section.

Corporate videos or photos

Upload them onto your site. Better still upload them onto You Tube or flickr.

Presentation Slideshows

Presentations made at seminars or industry events are often great additions to a website or can add value to your brand when uploaded to online content sharing sites like scribd.

Case Studies & Collateral

You may have case studies or pieces of research that have formed part of your printed marketing collateral or have had internal purposes. Consider how they may have value on your website or distributed off-site.

Leverage Existing Activities…

Also consider existing activities that may also have the potential to spawn relevant content.

Philanthropy

If you sponsor a charity tell everyone about it with an article on your website. If you’re raising some money or doing some work in your community shout about it and keep your visitors up to date with it all.

Industry News

Chances are you know exactly what’s going on the industry in which you work and the markets in which you operate. Have a dedicated news section on your site and, in addition to adding your new newsletter content, regularly add some industry commentary.

White Papers

Heavier weight content such as technical or business benefit white papers can be leveraged further to build contact databases by requesting an email address prior to providing access to the resource. Well written white papers not only reach your target market, they may also have the ability to influence them.

Trade Shows & Seminars

If you attend a trade show or conference make an effort to do some ‘live blogging’ – that is use your company blog as a platform to report and comment on what is happening.

Think about your staff

It’s likely that there are some amazingly talented people sat nearby with some expert subject knowledge. Utilise skill sets and get staff involved in all your content generation activities. If you have subject experts have them writing the occasional article for your website or guest blog posts for other sites.

Where am I going to put all this content?

Start with your company’s website. A company blog is a great place to present and archive content. Wordpress can seamlessly integrate with your existing site and provide all the functionality you could need. In addition to a blog, try to incorporate a news section and article or video archive.

There is also a wealth of opportunities to expose your content to an even wider audience by distributing online. Videos can be posted to You Tube, slideshows to scribd, photos to flickr, good article and news content to free article sites.

While I’m not suggesting that content creation and distribution strategies should be central to all your employees daily schedules, consideration of how you can increase your interaction with potential customers online by providing them with engaging content both on and off your website should certainly be given some thought, especially if you don’t want those potential customers drifting off to your competitors site where they do.

There are just two things I would suggest bearing in mind. The first is to not duplicate your content all over the internet; it will only devalue it. The second, more importantly, is to carefully consider what content you do place online – one way or another it is likely to be there for a long time.

image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nightthree

Welcome to our new feature. Each week we’ll be bringing you a round up of some of the best blog posts/articles we’ve read relating to Search Marketing – so here goes!

SEO

Stephan Spencer (via Search Engine Land) rants about a site which despite being ‘unfriendly’ to search engines, still ranks well.

Small Business SEO

Sugarrae (Rae Hoffman) wrote an excellent post on how small businesses might increase their online presence. She’s used lawn care to illustrate her example, but the ideas can easily be applied to any business.

Search Engines

Google Searchology 2009, saw the launch of some new developments – Google Search Options, Wonder Wheel, Google Squared and Rich Snippets - see Matt Cutts’ thoughts and Danny Sullivan’s Live Blogging coverage.

Blogging

Preparing to launch your blog? Or maybe just considering your options? Don’t miss Lucy Langdon’s fantastic blog launch checklist on SEOmoz.

Social Media

There’s been a whole lot of noise about Twitter, but I couldn’t agree more with Dr Pete’s post about the real power of Twitter on SEOmoz.

Jennifer Horowitz talks us through the seven deadly sins of social media - check yourselves boys and girls :)

Web Design & Usability

OK, so this post wasn’t written this week, but I think it’s fantastic. Dr Pete’s created a really rather marvellous cheat sheet to designing a usable website. The man’s a genius.

PPC

Joe of PPC Hero wrote a great post about broadening exposure on the Google Content Network - now many advertisers elect not to run on the content network, but for some clients we’ve seen some really good results – if you’re thinking about trying it yourself, it’s a must read.

Aaaannnnd Finally, Friday’s Funny

Well there;’s not much point in doing this if we can’t make you smile. 1000 Awesome Things is a blog – where in, as the name suggests they count down 1000 awesome things. Kinda like a daily reason to be cheerful – enjoy and have a lovely weekend.

Is there something I’ve missed? Hit up the comments

A friend recently asked for some advice on how to go about creating an online store. There are a lot of e-commerce solutions out there, which can make choosing the right one difficult. 

However, before you rush off and research a load of options, make sure you can answer the following questions - 

1. How many products is the site going to sell? How will these products be organised?

It’s important to have a clear idea of how you want to organise the products on your site, and indeed how many products you want to sell; as many e-commerce solutions are priced based on the number of products you want the solution to handle.

Ordinarily, we’d recommend creating a wireframe for the site, prior to selecting an e-commerce solution. A wireframe is a simple visual representation of the site and how the pages relate to one another.

For example, lets imagine that we are planning to launch a website selling socks. It’s conceivable that you’d have four top level categories:

Men’s

Women’s

Children’s

Baby’s

Then within each of these top categories you will have further sub-categories – e.g.

Children’s – Boys

Children’s – Girls

Again, from here you may have further categories e.g.

Children’s – Girls – Knee Socks

or

Children’s – Girls – Ankle Socks

Clearly it will take time to get all of this down on paper, but once you’ve planned your site out, it will be much easier to implement, and of course, you will have a much clearer idea about the sort of e-commerce system you are going to need.

2. Are the number of products for sale likely to change frequently? How regularly are you going to have to edit and update the site?

If you are going to regularly add and/or delete products, then you’ll be well advised to look for a solution will allow you to update yourself, rather than a fixed solution which can only be amended by the e-commerce provider.

3. What expertise is available to you? Do you have or know anyone  with the technical abillity to help out? Do you need a system that can be used with little or no trainning?

Any e-commerce solution will require some training to use . However, work to your strengths – if the person who will be responsible for managing the system is not particularly technical, make sure you select a user friendly, intuitive solution.

4. How much control do you want over the look and feel of the site?

Some e-commerce solutions allow only very limited customisation – as such you may find that you do have as much say in how your site and the products you sell are presented. If you have a particular look and feel in mind – make sure the solution which you select is fully-customisable.

 5. What payment methods do you want to use?

There are many different payment options available – these are often referred to as Payment Gateways. Your choice of payment method is very important, because you are asking your users to submit sensitive financial information – they need to be able to trust the payment gateway. Therefore using well known, trusted and established companies can be of benefit. As such we would also recommend offering more than one payment method, so your customers have a choice. 

 6. SEO considerations

Fortunately most e-commerce solutions generate search (and indeed user) friendly urls -  e.g. www.sockz.co.uk/childrens-socks/girls/knee-socks.html rather than www.sockz.co.uk/product3/category1/sub5.html – but make sure your chosen solution generates search friendly urls; you’ll be saving yourself a lot of heartache in the future.

Jeeves the Butler was dropped from the brand back in 2006 as the brand attempted to increase market share.

Jeeves explains his own absence as follows:

The search engine has been through a series of rebrands, including a TV advertising campaign portraying it as an underground alternative to Google.

Having struck major content deals with the likes of MGM, Lions Gate Entertainment and CBS, YouTube will offer thousands of TV shows and full-length films for US users. These shows and films will be shown with ad breaks – effectively allowing TV ads to be shown to viewers watching online.

In addition to receiving revenue from advertisers, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has also indicated that in the future YouTube may utilise a subscription model saying: “We do expect, over time, to see micro payments and other forms of subscription to come.”

Monetisation is without a doubt the holy grail of those who own and run social networking sites – but the trouble is, it tends to sit somewhat uneasily with the users of these sites.

YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim in 2005. The site quickly grew and by July 2006 the site was receiving 100 million views per day. YouTube was acquired by Google in November 2006 for the princely sum of US$1.65 billion in Google stock.

Clearly Google saw revenue opportunities in YouTube, but as yet these have failed to come to fruition. Google does not provide figures for YouTube’s running costs, and YouTube’s revenues in 2007 were noted as ‘not material’ in a regulatory filing. Not surprising when you consider that YoutTube’s bandwidth costs alone were estimated at US$1 million per day in 2008.

The end game is – social networking costs the owners of the sites a great deal of money. However, the owners of these sites feel strongly that with such a large user base, the opportunities to monetise these sites via advertising should be great.

But in reality, it doesn’t seem to work like that. The advertising funded business model struggles as users complain about the ads interrupting their experience, and advertisers have complained that social networking users are not responsive.

As such, perhaps the subscription model which YouTube are considering could be the way forward – particularly if they offer advert-free subscriptions. As Danielle Long points out – the move by Google to introduce subscriptions to YouTube could be the tipping point for subscription models across other sites – which rather puts paid to the ideal of online content, and perhaps indeed social networking being free.

Image credit Tracy O

1. Direct Response

This type of activity is primarily focused on driving the customer directly to purchase – examples include paid search advertising, email, direct mail etc

2. Brand

This type of activity is primarily focussed on increasing the visibility of the brand and ultimately increasing brand awareness amongst your target audience (i.e. the people who might be interested in purchasing from you / using your services.

Now clearly, it’s not as cut and dried as this, as inevitably direct response advertising may positively impact brand awareness, and brand advertising may indeed generate direct sales.

To understand the importance of brand v direct response it’s useful to consider how consumers might find you. 

1. Brand – they are looking specifically for you. In this instance the consumer spontaneously recalls your brand and are searching specifically for it. An example of this would be a consumer searching for ‘Compare the Market’ when they need car insurance, rather than searching for the more generic ‘car insurance’.
2. Specific Product or Service – here the reverse is true – the consumer searches for ‘car insurance’ rather than a specific brand.
3. Ambient – here the consumer isn’t looking at all. They may not be aware of the product or service which you offer, but you make them aware of it.
4. Existing Customer - an existing customer may decide to return to you
5. Recommendation - someone who comes to you because someone else has recommended your product or service

There are of course many other ways that consumers ‘find’ brands, but just using the five examples above we can begin to see the importance of both brand and direct response techniques.

Many companies elect simply to utilise direct response techniques – this is because broadly speaking, these techniques are easy to measure, and when executed well, offer an excellent return on investment. For example, many companies elect only to run SEO and Paid Search campaigns.

No bad thing, some might say, and indeed these campaigns are cost effective; however – ultimately these companies are only advertising to those who are already looking. Chances are, unless you actively search online for the particular product or service which these companies offer, you might never know they exist.

Which is a bit of a shame, because if you look at the list above they are only hitting 3 of the 5 possibilities – i.e. people searching for a specific product or service; existing customers (although, they’re really only hitting these customers by default – they aren’t actively marketing to them), and they may pick up some recommendations.

I’m not trying to infer that direct response marketing is inferior to brand marketing – it’s not. I think in fact, that a balance of direct response and brand marketing often yield the best overall results.

We recently saw just that with one of our clients who in addition to their existing SEO and PPC campaign decided to do some TV & radio advertising. As a result, month on month they saw a 10% uplift in online leads alone – not to mention an further increases in offline leads (via their call centre and in store). Very impressive – particularly given the current economic climate!

We also observed that customers who arrive on websites from branded search terms convert at a much higher rate than those from generic search terms.

Interesting stuff, huh? As with any marketing activity, we would of course recommend a test and learn approach – but we think it illustrates the strength of integrating brand and direct response marketing strategies within a single campaign.

Image credit Heideho