eMarketing: The black hole
Aug/18/2007 07:35 Filed in: Internet
& DTC Marketing
Your product website is a direct reflection of your brand and be a critical touch-point with your target audience and customers. When most marketers think of a website it is often in terms of "what do we want to say" rather in terms of "what do our customers want to see". This is the first mistake that marketers make. Remember the Web is a pull channel not a push channel. Repurpose brochures of marketing messages and your customers will turn off your message like a switch, or in this case a click.
Segmentation is a key component
You segment your audience off line so why not segment them online? Do you want to provide one message for everyone who is online? The Web can let you segment or subsegment your audience by psychographics or demographics. Not only can content be tailored to these segments but you can also customize navigation to address each audiences needs. You should be using something that I call intuitive navigation which is arranging navigation based upon the way customers think and go through their decision making process. By doing so you can address their needs and overcome their questions (barriers) as they determine if your product is right for them. Remember that the decision to take your product is not a rationale one, it is a an emotional decision in most cases and you need to address these emotional barriers as you take them down the path to product trial.
Working with IT
It departments can be a huge barrier to overcome when developing a web strategy. A lot of IT people like the power they have and often will say things like "we can't do that on our current platform". This is when you remind them that the strategy drives the platform the platform should NOT limit the execution. The best way to get around this is to bring IT people into the development phase of your interactive strategy and let them get comfortable with your interactive agency. If you continually run into roadblocks in this area you also should think about outside hosting. The economies of scale mean that hosting websites externally is not a big cost as long as you can have 24/7/365 access in case of changes to the website.
The buckets: The strategy drives the budget
This is where most eMarketers run into issues. It can cost $3-$5 million to successfully research, plan and launch a great product website. But launching the website is only half the story. Once it is up and running you should be optimizing the site as you learn more about how your customers are using the site. Pages with the strongest call to action should also be continually optimized to meet your marketing objectives.
Then there is search engine optimization; that black hole that can swallow up a lot of your budget dollars. This is where you truly need strategic eMarketing people. The questions you have to ask are ; where is my brand in its life cycle, how well is my brand known, is the disease condition understood by my target audience? You could easily spend millions on search engine optimization but remember to measure the ROI with cost per targeted action not cost per click. If your brand website comes up first in organic search then why spend thousands in paid search? Also remember that Google can sell your brand name to other sponsors. Yes that stinks but welcome to Googles monopoly.
Finally there is online advertising. A lot of eMarketing people skimp on online ads repurposing offline ads that don't work in the short attention span of Internet surfers. Again your goal here is NOT to pay for a click but pay for targeted click (cost per person coming to targeted pages within your website + cost per target audience). It never surprises me that marketers will spend millions to test and retest off line ads but when it comes to the development of online ads they want to do it for $4-$5K.
What all this means is that DTC eMarketing people have to spend a hell of a lot of time fighting for their share of the DTC budget. It requires sell-in and buy-in from multi layers of management who usually don't understand the Web's impact on consumers. In doing so marketers need to both tell a story but more importantly they need to generate consensus on the metrics that show success and what they mean. Yes it gets tiresome after a while but the Web is a new frontier an there is a lot of new territory to explore if one has the passion and the drive.
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