Setting an online marketing budget

(Originally published in late 2009, still true...)

It’s that time of year… everyone’s planning their budgets for 2010. We all hope and pray that the recession will be over by then, but in the meantime most organizations are lean and mean. Just today eMarketer reported that in order to improve overall marketing effectiveness, 70% of marketers are moving budget from traditional to digital media.

So is it time for you to create a high impact online marketing program? You know that your targets are online, but where do I start?

Two primary ways come to mind – targeted media buys and search marketing.

Online Advertising

A broad host of media models have been developed to assist virtually any organization in reaching online targets. Demographic, psychographic and re-messaging platforms are all very common. If your target is online, they can be found.

In a recent panel study, comScore also found that visits to an advertiser’s site increased by an average of 46% over the four weeks following first exposure to a campaign. And this interest in the advertiser is valuable – they’ve documented a 27% increase in online sales and 17% increase offline by comparing test and control consumer behaviors.

Studies dating back to the earliest days of the Internet have noted lifts in brand awareness and perceptions based on online advertising. And a few progressive organizations have largely reinvented themselves through online campaigns.

Search Marketing

But let’s not put all our eggs in one online basket! While we can hunt and find many consumers, some make it really easy by typing in our ‘buying terms’ in a search engine. A well-crafted SEM campaign can and should produce a very good return for any marketer.

Further, comScore has just released a report quantifying the lift resulting from a combination of display advertising and search running concurrently. This lift – 155% with the two combined over search alone – is seen on both paid and organic searches and clicks. It appears that it’s not just the search copy that gets a user to act, but the brand message the user has recently seen.

There are proven techniques to improve response

Many advertisers understand that traditional static online ads are hardly seen and have taken steps to break through the limits of traditional static graphical online advertising. Larger placements, rich media, highly tailored message, and video are all becoming a part of the typical online advertising tool kit.

The ad serving powerhouse DoubleClick has consistently shown that larger standard units (300×250pxl) receive more user attention and clicks. Even larger ads, when available, are even more powerful. This may be because users notice the larger placements much more readily than smaller ones which tend to blend together.

Rich media ads – those with significant motion – also generate more responses and awareness metrics than static graphical ads. Pointroll, a major rich media provider, generates a 116% lift rate over standard banners, and average 10.6 seconds of engagement with its ad units that expand or change as users interact with them. Even as the novelty of the placements has waned, the positive lift remains.

This past summer Forrester found that marketers believe they are segmenting and targeting with a high degree of exactness. Unfortunately, their targets do not agree. Of 800 respondents to a broad based survey, 58% said that very few of the ads and offers they’ve seen match their interest, and another 29% said none do. Yet 39% will occasionally respond to online advertising in general, suggesting that is if the offer or message is compelling they’ll participate.

DoubleClick has reported that online video ads see interaction rates twice to four times higher than graphical ads – typically ranging from .4 to .74%. Although more expensive to produce and traffic, this lift is further enhanced by both the ability to measure the length of the brand engagement and the average amount of time spent with the ad unit – 19.1 seconds for 30 second placements.

Higher Ed Web 3009

(Originally posted in November 2009)

I just returned from the annual HighEdWeb conference in Milwaukee. You may have caught the online buzz around the conference as both ‘harsh tagging’ and ‘tweckling’ became new verbs thanks to a rather unfortunate key note speaker. Key take away from that experience is that you need to really analyze your audience and figure out a way to incorporate your audience’s social tendencies. That said, this conference is a tremendous grassroots gathering organized by a board of volunteers from a broad range of colleges and universities. About 400 people attended, the vast majority of whom work in an academic setting, supporting and building a broad range of online tools, applications and sites.

Three critical themes came up consistently across presentations, conversations, and hallway chats:

• Students and prospective students have increasingly sophisticated technology expectations; yet colleges are well behind meeting the needs of five years ago.
• A large percentage of faculty members are retiring, opening up slots for younger and more tech savvy replacements. This is creating further strain on limited resources.
• Because of the transparency of the online space, much more brand development work is being done.

A few colleges and universities shared some really exciting concepts and thoughts around each of these themes.

Student Expectations
Many presenters and participants were very passionate in saying that they’re trying to serve 21st century expectations at institutions that really don’t get it. One presenter mentioned that the head of his development office was concerned that students were spending more time social networking with people off campus than relating to their peer students and wondered what the future held for their loyalty. A few great examples of schools that ‘get it’ and have reaped tremendous results:

• Carleton College – they went through a huge discovery process and built a whole new admissions site on a Reason.com platform. It’s like a virtual tour in that you get to really know about 12 – 15 students, get the real story about their campus and environment, etc. It includes videos, pictures, text, audio, etc. They spent six months in discovery including wireframe testing with perspective students… and a month building.
• Ithaca College – built out a ‘private Facebook’ for the class of 2013 on social engine. They knew that if they could get classmates introduced and feeling comfortable they were more likely to enroll. Facebook itself was an issue because it is so public and you don’t know if people are really part of a group or not. And faculty would NOT participate in Facebook. This interaction resulted in a much higher matriculation rate from admitted students than in recent years.

Faculty Needs
Generally speaking, the faculty is aging rather rapidly and the old boomer guard is retiring. The younger ones have very different expectations for their online tools:

• Blackboard, or the open source Moodle, is simply not optional. Every college has a system for faculty to publish notes and assignments, prepare lectures, students to submit papers, discussion threads, etc. Occasionally this system is linked to email and calendaring and general campus news as a Portal, but often not. Ithaca College mentioned that their biggest challenge with their ‘Facebook’ app was transitioning ‘friends’ to the everyone’s MyIthaca portal. Others were amazed that they even had that…
• Stanford is rebuilding many of their department pages to allow faculty to blog, post articles and symposium notes, and interact more with other faculty around the world.
• There is also a small liberal arts college in Maine that is starting to build a huge interactive presence to continue blackboard / course conversations over multiple years if not decades. This would include pulling in what we’d think of as alumni newsletters to an ongoing dialog.

Branding
Any number of presenters made fun of the ‘sameness’ that permeates most college home pages and admissions sites. The first day key note speaker really hit home with dozens of home pages that show a girl under a tree. Schools in warm climates even use palm trees!
The internal group at the University of Chicago gave an excellent presentation on how their creative group and web services groups work together. They described how

hey selected their color palate and fonts to reflect their color (red), their campus architecture (gothic limestone, lots of trees), and Lake Michigan (blue green). They then showed how this plays out across many many different sites which have unique designs but are cohesive.