Category Archives: Advertising

Great campaign…. did it work?

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So the digital campaign launched with great fanfare, the marketing team was delighted and your boss has a smile on her face. Then someone has the cheek to ask if the campaign was a success and you’re not sure how to answer. So what exactly does constitute success and how is this different from traditional media advertising?

In the past advertising could be hit and miss and the old saying ‘half of all advertising is wasted, only nobody knows which half’ summed up the general approach but in this digital age does this still hold true?

Before measuring success it is of course necessary to define the goals of any digital marketing campaign and these may include adapted from Demers (2014) and Chaffey and Ellis-Chadwick (2012):

  • Traffic building goals – total visits and specifically new visitors v’s repeat visitors
  • Bounce rates – do web visitors go beyond the home page or bounce way?
  • Conversion or interaction goals – are sales achieved or other desired interactions?
  • Are marketing emails opened by the recipient?
  • Third-party site reach and branding goals
  • Customer retention – do your new found customers ever come back?
  • Longer-term brand engagement goals
  • Return of investment and cost of each lead

But, I hear you ask, isn’t all this measurable? Don’t you just go on google analytics to find all this out? Well, yes it is true that much of the above is measurable on Google Analytics and this should help provide some of the indicators that may be used in the measurement of success.

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Google Analytics Dashboard, Kaushik (2012)

A further advantage of digital marketing campaigns is their immediacy, a campaign may have a shorter lead time than in traditional print media and analytics may be used to give early impressions of what works and what doesn’t. This allows a degree of trial and error or even the ability to modify a live campaign to obtain better consumer responsiveness.

So have advertisers found the answer to the question posed at the start of this blog ‘which half of the adverting budget is wasted?’ Unfortunately no, or at least not yet, as a recent survey by Econsultancy and Oracle Marketing Cloud (2015) into marketers’ ability to measure ROI from a range of digital channels found. It would appear therefore that there is still a degree of uncertainty over how best to obtain reliable measurements of return on investment.

How do you rate your ability to measure ROI from the following digital channels or disciplines?

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Survey, Econsultancy (2015)

Identifying the strategies that work best at reaching the target audience and converting them into profit generating customers remains the ultimate aim. As more sophisticated systems develop to measure the relevant metrics the advertiser moves closer to this goal.

REFERENCES

 

Now here’s a product I really love…..

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With the never ending rise in celebrity driven social media where status is measured in the number of likes, favourites or retweets then it was perhaps inevitable that commercial exploitation would follow with the placement of products in tweets, Instagram photo’s or on Facebook. This new form of digital marketing blurs the line between traditional paid-for celebrity advertising, where all parties understood the sales concept, and the genuine endorsement of a product.

The repeated endorsement of specific product lines, with photo’s (as below) may suggest a clear commercial advertisement but the distinction is not always so obvious, the mentioning of a tour company who arranged a holiday or a restaurant visited is less glaring.

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We now have a generation of celebrities who are famous for their social media presence and almost nothing else (Meldrum, 2014) so it would seem highly appropriate they exploit the opportunities that present themselves. The Kardashians, Zoella or the cast of Made in Chelsea have perhaps little in the way of an alternative career to jeopardise through their product placement, and they may feel it is almost impossible for them to lose credibility with their audience.

For the product seller the celebrity endorsement offers a quick access to the market, it takes minutes to Instagram a picture, and attachment to a cool celebrity, (Meldrum, 2014) once a fee is agreed then pictures, hashtags and links are provided to the Celebrity all to make the subsequent placement as easy as possible. Need it be expensive? Possibly not with lower level celebs accepting free product rather than a cash fee. In an age of diversified media where targeting specific groups is more difficult (Liu et al, 2014) these types of campaigns offer access to young and socially media savvy customers.

Monitoring the success of product placements campaigns may be more opaque but not impossible, the number of likes and retweets offer some evidence of interest in specific picture placements. Products advertised through more interesting and engaging formats have been found to have better recognition and customer reactions (Van Reijmersdal et al. (2010) citied by Liu et al. (2014) and interacting with a celebrity you admire on social media is clearly an engaging exercise for many.

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In other instances the placement may be less overt, when Natalie Portman wore Tiffany jewellery to the Golden Globes in 2011. This was followed up by Tiffany with a social media campaign highlighting the tie-up (Zelesny, 2011). As with any celebrity endorsement the challenge for the advertiser is to find the right celebrity, that is one with a reputation and image that fits the product, is not prone to behaviour that would embarrass the Company and has the right demographic fan base.

In the future will Instagram, Tumblr or Twitter want a piece of the action? They provide the platforms and yet the revenues pass them bye. However with number of users driving social media company values this may be one revenue stream they can afford to live without.

REFERENCES

Topshop digitises Fashion Week

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Topshop is taking London Fashion week around the Country when they take over large digital advertising billboards in Manchester, Leeds, London, Birmingham, Liverpool and Glasgow to highlight the latest fashions straight from the catwalk. Working with twitter they will identify the trending topics from the Capitals Fashionistas before updating the Topshop cloud with hashtag identifiers such as #colourblocking and #floral. The fashion conscience may then tweet @topshop with the hashtag of their choice to receive a virtual wardrobe straight to their mobile.

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The visual impact of digital billboards has much greater potential than the traditional billboard. Static images are a thing of the past, images can change in seconds, colours change according to the time of day, products not generating tweets can be dropped or how about weather dependent content – started raining, no problem lets advertise rain coats! Ocean Outdoors who provided the screens for the Topshop campaign clearly believe they are on to a winner as they http://www.oceanoutdoor.com/ expand across the Country.

Of course Topshop is primarily motivated in this venture by the sales it generates, respondents who receive individualised tweets are able to make immediate purchases but is there more to be gained? With its potential for personalised communication with individuals who have chosen to follow an organisation’s Twitter feed, Twitter clearly increases the scope for interactive communication by organisations with their customers (Burton and Soboleva, 2011).

For the marketing team at Topshop could there be a better way of assessing the effectiveness of their advertising spend, customer reaction is immediate and the resulting sales are quantifiable which is not something that may be said about an advertising campaign in print media.

So is the future of fashion advertising now in digital? For those shoppers in the Cities with large digital billboards the opportunity to feel a part of a major fashion event through social commerce is an attractive one but the rest of the Country may have to wait a little longer. The traditional advertising platforms will argue that tie-ins with Fashion Week allow relatively short-term windows of opportunity to push sales, build customer relationships and show the latest styles. However studies show that increased customer interactivity can lead to high source credibility (Fogg, 2003) and the public is keen to participate. So it would appear that digital billboards are here to stay and those retailers looking to innovate and open communications direct with their customers will surely look for impactful campaigns that grab the interest of the public in a highly visual medium.

 

REFERENCES

  • Burton,S., Soboleva, A. (2011) Interactive or reactive? Marketing with Twitter. The Journal of Consumer Marketing. Vol 28. Iss 7 PP. 491-499
  • Mortimer, N. (2015) Topshop and Hunter to leverage digital OOH ads during London Fashion Week. The Drum. (Online) Acessed: 18th March 2015 Available at: http://www.thedrum.com/news/2015/02/18/topshop-and-hunter-leverage-digital-ooh-ads-during-london-fashion-week
  • Fogg, B.J. (2003) Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do. Boston: Morgan Kaufmann.