Archive for February, 2008
Who Clicks on Banner and Display Ads? And Do They Matter for Direct-Response Marketing? How About Brand?
Monday, February 18th, 2008Well, a variety of research and pseudo-scholarly articles have been published of late on this topic.
One of the most interesting blog posts we recently discovered, though, actually covers a variety of related topics: yahoo vs google audience profiling, whether or not ad clicking=ecomm buying, etc. There is even a cool graph, reproduced here:
Don’t forget to check out the comment thread — some great add-on commentary, in particular a link to a study of eye-and-mouse movement over webpages that seems to suggest that banner ads are becoming like the unheard/unnoticed “white noise” of the internet.
Look to More Than Just ROI to Measure Marketing Campaigns Efficacy, Says Kellogg Profs
Monday, February 11th, 2008A good article and interesting read here on AdAge by two Kellogg profs (full disclosure: alma mater of two Spring Creek Group Principals…). The short version is that ROI is a great metric to measure performance marketing (CPC campaigns, for example) on the Web, but it falls short of appropriately measuring the brand equity investments of longer term, more broad reach marketing and brand campaigns.
If you are driving online sales, then evaluating campaign effectiveness and gauging appropriate levels of future spend through ROI metrics can be quite powerful. However, many companies and organizations make marketing investments across numerous channels which are difficult or impossible to fully tie back to ecommerce or that-quarter sales (including PR and social media marketing investments, which are notoriously difficult to tie together with relevant sales information to accurately measure ROI… and which frankly may not be appropriate to try to evaluate using ROI since these investments are principally about creating brand awareness, not instant sales leads).
Multi-channel marketing effectiveness is about creating a mutually-reinforcing ecosystem of brand coverage, in the channels and in front of the consumers who matter most to your brand and business. Some of those investments are made to drive sales in the short-term: search engine marketing, direct mail, email marketing, tele-sales, etc. However, some marketing investments are made to create pervasive brand awareness, future sales interest, word-of-mouth referrals and leads, in short “brand equity”: social media marketing, PR, most display advertising, radio, billboard and local market, much of the print advertising, even most television ads.
Savvy CMO’s and marketing budget management leads should work to correlate business growth with overall – and individual, where possible – marketing investments over time. But not every dollar spent on activities classified as “marketing” will be able to be tied back and evaluated according to ROI — consumer psychology, data sources, and the multi-channel mechanics of consumer purchasing and decision-making are just too complicated in today’s markets. And wholesale businesses, who have retail or distribution partners which sit in between their products and the end-consumer, face even more significant information access and sales latency issues. (Just ask anyone who distributes their products through Wal-Mart… even with one of the most holistic, integrated operating and sales tracking systems in place among retailers today, I’m sure there are marketing leads for those products who can’t perfectly measure the ROI of their brand marketing efforts even with access to Sir Sam’s uber-system.)
A good read and good reminder that even though the Web has enabled a new kind of ROI-based “performance marketing” opportunity (most prominently embodied in CPC search advertising), not every successfully-spent marketing dollar can ultimately be tied back to a grand ROI number in a giant spreadsheet. Targeting potential customers based on proxies for “intent to purchase” across numerous, mutually-reinforcing channels, will always be a little bit of “science” and a little bit of “art”.
Anyway, they say it better than we do… read on.
Attention Web Marketers: March 11, 2008 SVC Workshop “Beyond the Blog”
Monday, February 11th, 2008Spring Creek Group Principal Clay McDaniel and SCG Associate Andy Boyer are pleased to be leading a one-day class at Seattle’s School of Visual Concepts (SVC) focused on practical, effective, innovative social media marketing strategies for growing businesses. Whether you are an in-house marketing lead or an agency member looking for creative new ways to complement your existing Web marketing programs, this class is a great way to learn, network, and move forward in your marketing toolset.
Class fees are $265 for the day.
Registration in advance, please, at:
http://www.cmiregistration.com/user/org/program.jxp?org=108&id=3039091&refresh=1198282944953
or via http://www.svcseattle.com.
Join us if you can — it will be an instructive, productive day, and we’re sure that the class participants will learn as much from each other as they do from us.
More information, address, contact info, and registration links available via our Facebook SCG Page and linked Event here.
