John Straw, chief executive of Netrank, gives advice on
taking your brand online and making it a success. It involves a
little more than just setting up a website.
David Ogilvy's quote that half of his marketing budget was
wasted - he just didn't know which half - is testimony to the
reason why performance-based online marketing is growing at 56% per
year.
Online's success is down to the fact that you can understand,
very precisely, which part of your online campaigns are working and
which aren't.
For marketeers and business owners, having this kind of
accountability is a dream come true. Many businesses have, by now,
taken their first steps in this compelling arena through banner
advertising and paid for search listings provided by Overture,
Espotting and Google AdWords. Now's the time to adopt a specific
online strategy and make it work.
A cornerstone of any online strategy has to be the sourcing of a
tracking solution that will allow you to track visitors from ad to
sale.
There are many solutions available and you need not spend a
fortune. Clicktracks tracks visitors and provides a beautiful
rendition of the way your site is navigated - very useful in
identifying the most and least popular pages on your site. Or type
"online ad tracking solutions" into Yahoo's new search engine and
you'll be spoilt for choice!
Once you have your tracking solution in place, you can then
decide which type of marketing style will fit with your brand -
active or passive marketing.
Active marketing techniques are banner ads and direct e-mail.
Think carefully before you adopt an active strategy - fresh
research from the US indicates that consumers are becoming
resistant to and irritated by overt marketing. If you do adopt this
approach try to move towards a performance-based purchasing model -
pay for click through and not brand exposure, a service offered by
Valueclick.
In my view, direct e-mail is one of the more controversial
marketing tactics. It needs careful consideration and even more
careful execution - just one e-mail out of context to one
prospective customer and you may well have lost that prospect for
life.
Passive marketing is where my own company is seeing strong
success. Broadly speaking we have a two-pronged strategy that
combines search marketing and virtual distribution.
There are two kinds of search marketing - paid for (as provided
by Google Adwords and Overture) and natural (getting high natural
listings for your site which are, essentially, free). Paid for
listings are tactically excellent, but watch out for your
competitors buying keywords that have your brand name in them. All
the paid-for listing providers claim to monitor this and take down
offending listings, but they're not always successful.
Natural search has long-term benefits, but often needs upfront
investment - and watch out for cowboy operators! If you're
approached by any natural search suppliers make sure they conform
to Google's advice for webmasters.
With virtual distribution, think of having 100,000 retailers out
there for whom you don't have to provide stock, account management
or support. Even better, think of only paying them on results. This
is virtual distribution, otherwise known as affiliate networking.
It's easy to setup and works like this… you provide your creatives
to one of the "affiliate concentrators" (such as TradeDoubler), who
then add tracking code via their server farms. The affiliate
concentrator then offers your creatives to its virtual network of
dealer websites (called "publishers"). Every time a sale is made
from your site as a direct result of a click through from a
publisher you pay the publisher a commission.
Once you have campaigns up and running, good statistical
analysis is vital to ensuring ongoing success. You may find that
the best sales conversion rate comes from a highly specialist term
purchased on Overture, but that term - while providing ROI - does
not produce scale. Equally, a highly used term produces good scale
but poor conversion. Like everything else, it's a balance.