Chapter 12. E-Marketing Communication: Owned Media
E-MARKETING COMMUNICATION
Internet marketing is a powerful way to build brands and start and strengthen relationships with customers. However, online marketers must be increasingly clever to design and deliver brand messages that capture and hold audience attention–because on the internet, users are in control. Also, the internet allows consumers to widely disseminate their own views and brand experiences via e-mail and social media, shifting the balance of control over brand images from companies to consumers.
Marketing communication (MarCom) tools that use technology to build brands, in conjunction with value-added product experiences, are important in capturing attention and winning long-term customer relationships. Advertising online still works for building brands, but there are many other innovative techniques that are often more successful—discussed here and in Chapters 13 and 14. And as a bonus, technology lowers the costs of communicating with customers and prospects.
Integrated Marketing Communication (IMC)
Integrated marketing communication (IMC) is a cross-functional process for planning, executing, and monitoring brand communications designed to profitably acquire, retain, and grow customers. IMC is cross-functional because every touch point that a customer has with a firm or its agents helps to form brand images. In addition, the product experience, its pricing level, and its distribution channels enhance the firm’s marketing communication in a variety of online and offline media to present a strong brand image. The bestmarketing communication can be undermined if these online and offline contact experiences do not communicate in a unified way to create and support positive brand relationships with customers.
Profitable customer relationships are key to a firm’s existence. Successful firms recognize that not all customers are equally valuable—some, such as frequent flyers or buyers, are more important than others. Using technology, firms can monitor profits customer by customer and, based on this analysis, pay more attention to high-value customers both online and offline.
IMC strategy begins with a thorough understanding of target markets, the brand, its competition, and many other internal and externalfactors. The Interactive Advertising Bureau suggests a four-step process, good for any marketing communication campaign:
1. Set clear and measurable objectives and Strategies.
2. Understand your audience motivations and behavior, especially in social media.
3. Develop a creative approach appropriate for the brand in one or more platforms (earned, paid, or owned media).
4. Define success metrics.
IMC Goals and Strategies
Marketers create marketing communication objectives based on overall marketing goals and the desired effects within selected target markets.
The traditional AIDA model (awareness, interest, desire, and action) or the “think, feel, do” hierarchy of effects model is part of what guides marketers’ selection of online and offline MarCom tools to meet their goals. Consequently, e-marketers must select the appropriate IMC tools, which may vary depending on the desired results.
Traditional Marketing Communication Tools
Marketers have specific definitions of the five key marketing communication tools they use (often called the “promotion mix”). These definitions help when selecting the appropriate tool(s) to create the desired effect in the target market. Following are marketing tool definitions, along with social media platform examples that the company controls (versus user-generated content [UGC]):
· Advertising: Advertising is defined as “Any paid form of non-personal presentation and promotion of ideas, goods, or services by an identified sponsor” (Kotler and Armstrong, 2011).
· Public relations: Public relations involves “Building good relations withthe company’s various publics by obtainingfavorable publicity, building up a goodcorporate image, and handling or headingoff unfavorable rumors, stories, andevents” (Kotler and Armstrong, 2011).
· Sales promotion: Sales promotion consistsof “Short-term incentives toencourage the purchase or sale of a productor service” (Kotler and Armstrong, 2011).
· Direct marketing: “Direct marketing is an interactive process of addressable communication that uses one or more. . . media to effect, at any location, a measurable sale, lead, retail purchase, or charitable donation, with this activity analyzed on a database for the development of ongoing mutually beneficial relationships between marketers and customers, prospects, or donors” (“The Power of. . .,” 2011–2012).
· Personal selling: Personal selling is defined as “Personal interactions between a customer’s and the firm’s sales force for the purpose of making sales and building customer relationships” (Kotler and Armstrong, 2011). We extend this definition to the internet by noting that the 1:1 interaction can also be done online and not only in person.
Also, note that marketers combine many of these tools for increased e-marketing effectiveness, such as when an advertisement carries a sales promotion discount offer or link to a public relations content (such as a video).
Owned, Paid and Earned Media
The term media formerly meant only traditional media. Now the definition is more general: Communications media are communication channels used to disseminate news, information, entertainment, and promotional messages. Digital media can take many different forms including text, images, audio, or video. Even word-of-mouth communication can be considered media (yes, your mouth or fingers on the keyboard). Social media are one media type with one differentiating characteristic: They blend technology and social interactions for the co-creation of content and value. That is, people use them for social interactions and conversations. In this definition, “people” collectively refers to organizations, their employees, customers and prospects, and the general population of internet users.
OWNED MEDIA
The primary goals are to (1) engage consumers with the positive brand content; (2) entice them to pass this content along to others (earned media); and (3) to exercise CRM (customer relationship management)— all of these goals attempt to increase commerce for brand-related companies (initial and repeat purchases). Marketers use all traditional IMC tools for owned media, except for advertising (paid media).
CONTENT MARKETING
Content marketing is a strategy involving creating and publishing content on Web sites and in social media. What is new is that marketers now use digital content as inbound marketing that attracts customers and prospects. It is about having content available to inform, entertain, and engage users when they seek the company—and most internet users in both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) markets do searches and come across this material when shopping.
All owned media can be considered content marketing. However, now many marketers see themselves as publishers online and organize internally to include a content manager and staff with journalism or multimedia production experience. This is important and the largest expense, because content needs to be fresh online. There are way too many companies with out-of-date Web sites, Facebook pages, and infrequent posts on blogs and Twitter.
As with all IMC, companies need to understand their goals and markets and decide whether their content needs to be entertaining, be educational, or provide some utility, such as an interest rate or shipping price calculator. Note that companies can monetize their owned media content in three important ways. First, they can sell digital content on their media properties, such as white papers, music, software, or online Webinars (or many other products). Second, they can accept Google’s Ad Sense or other types of ads and receive payment when users click on these ads. These ads can appear on a company’s own Web site or blog, and also in multimedia content it uploads elsewhere, such as ads shown in their own YouTube videos (in this case, the company shares revenue with the site owner, YouTube). The third way is to become an affiliate of another Web site, such as Amazon. Companies receive revenue when users click on a book or other product featured on its blog or other social media property and subsequently purchase it on Amazon. The business models discussed in previous chapters outline many other ways to monetize owned media.
Some of the most used owned media:
· Web Site
· Web Site Landing Pages
· Mobile Sites
· Web Site Chat
· Blogs
· Support Forums/Communities
· Podcasts
· Permission Marketing: Opt-In, Opt-Out
· Rules for Successful E-Mail Marketing
· Spam
· Privacy
· Text Messaging
· Online Events
SALES PROMOTION OFFERS
Online sales promotion tactics can build brands, build databases, and support increased online or offline sales, but like offline promotions, most do not help to build customer relationships in the long term. Online sales promotion works, especially to entice consumers to change their behavior in the short term (e.g., visit a Web site, register online, purchase in the next week). Marketers report three to five times higher response rates with online promotions than with direct postal mail. Whereas most offline sales promotion tactics are directed to businesses in the distribution channel, online tactics are directed primarily at consumers—with the exception of Webinars, as previously mentioned. As with offline consumer sales promotions, many are used in combination with advertising. Sales promotions are popular display ad content. Sales promotion activities include coupons, discounts, rebates, product sampling, contests, sweepstakes, and premiums (free or low-cost gifts). Of these promotion types, only coupons, sampling, discounts, and contests/sweepstakes are widely used on the internet.
COORDINATING INTERNET AND TRADITIONAL MEDIA IMC PLANS
The primary goal of marketers has always been to become monomaniacally customer driven and build long-term relationships that bring revenue to the company. Some owned and paid media don’t allow for social interactions, such as some traditional Web sites or online ads. Traditional marketing communication media only allow oneway communication, yet these are still important for building brand awareness (e.g., an ad in the Super Bowl that reaches 60 percent of the population), creating desire and interest, and moving prospects and customers to purchase (e.g., a coupon or calendar event listing in the Sunday print newspaper).
Today, marketers face a mashup of owned, paid, and earned media that can carry the promotional tools of advertising, sales promotion, direct marketing, public relations, and personal selling. The guiding force for selecting appropriate tools and media is the communication objectives in desired target markets. For example, if a company’s goal is to sell its new software package to accountants, it could do any of the following: (1) use PR by describing the software on its own Web site and with a social media press release, (2) use Twitter to talk about software needs in the industry and offer codes for free sample downloads (sales promotion), (3) include recommendations from current customers on a LinkedIn page, (4) upload a video demonstration with software tutorials, or (5) advertise in a traditional print accounting industry magazine and on the industry’s Website (including testimonials from the LinkedIn pages). All this could direct prospects to a Web site where they can download a free sample and purchase it after a 30-day trial. This would be much more effective than giving away free iPads on Facebook, because that tactic does not align with the campaign goals or target market.
There are many other tactical ways to integrate marketing communications media, and they primarily involve providing links to all the Web and social media sites in all promotional media and integrating positive conversation into various appropriate media.
The main thing to remember is that the traditional and some internet media carry corporate monologues, while social media contain dialogs with target markets: Both play a role, but the dialog is becoming much more important and is more true to the well-accepted company goal of customer-driven marketing.
OWNED MEDIA PERFORMANCE METRICS
If brand awareness is the goal, marketers will need a survey to determine if awareness improved (although site visits is one indicator). For company-owned Web sites and blogs, marketers use Web analytics, such as number of unique visitors, time on each page, conversion to sales, and so forth. Google Analytics is a free service that provides many metrics to determine the efficacy of these types of pages. For example, companies can learn the number of daily visitors to each page, where users visited immediately prior to landing on their site, and the country from which they are accessing the site (based on IP addresses). Other metrics for owned media follow:
• Podcasts: number of downloads and length of time listening.
• Online events: number in attendance, number of questions asked (if it is a Webinar).
• Virtual world: number visiting the company property, how long they stay, and whether or not they interact with the various features.
• Online games: number playing, length of time in the game, purchase of virtual properties, and clicks on game links.
• Branded mobile apps: number of downloads, updates, and number of actions that are built into the app (such as “checking in” with a location-based app or earned media “shares”). • QR codes: number of scans and actions taken at the site destination.
• Web landing pages: exit rate (view and leave the page), click-through rate, and conversion rate.
Social media metrics are different from standard Web site metrics because users interact with branded media in many different ways. Initially, companies want to know how many fans and followers they have, number of visits and return visits, and cost per fan (especially the staff time cost). As well there are engagement metrics, such as, when an internet user views an online video, he or she might spend 4 minutes viewing it, but another might stop it immediately. And if the user uploads, comments on, and likes or shares a branded video, this brand interaction is counted.
Next, we move to metrics for measuring sales promotion and direct marketing effectiveness.
Sales Promotion Metrics
Marketers want to know how their sales promotions contribute to the overall communication goals. For example, if the firm desires increased Web site traffic, how much came from the online contest? What was the conversion rate to sales at the site? As with all metrics, the selected measures depend on campaign goals. Software and music suppliers will want to measure the number of users who sampled their free online samples (e.g., 30-day trial for software or listen to a music sample), and how many subsequently purchased the product.
Direct Marketing Metrics
Response rate and ROI are the most appropriate metrics for any direct marketing campaign. Additionally, many firms use direct tactics to build databases and measure success in terms of customer information growth. E-mail marketers collect metrics on every mouse click, desiring to know which offers pull best (A/B testing), which message content brings the greatest response, when is the best time to send e-mail for maximum response (by the way, it is Monday between 6 a.m. and 10 a.m. Eastern time), and so forth.
E-mail receives a widely varied and generally low click-through to the sponsor’s Web site; however, as we’ve already said, the right list and offer can yield very high click-throughs. Interestingly, e-mail provides the highest ROI of any direct media, at $42.08 on average (“Print’s Place in . . . ,” 2010).
SMS marketers also study responses other than simple click-through. In a study of more than 200 SMS campaigns, the response performance was outstanding (enpocket.com):
• 94 percent of messages were read by recipients.
• 23 percent showed or forwarded messages to a friend.
• 15 percent to 27 percent of recipients responded to SMS campaigns.
• Cost per response was $1.92, returning a better ROI than direct postal mail.