| So much marketing opportunity, so little time... |
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Faced with no end of useful advice about what they should be doing, organisations often find it very hard to make the break from what they're already doing and to seize the opportunities that email marketing presents. They are sometimes intimidated by some of the other fantastic email marketing campaigns out there, but are equally often bemused as to why their "pay and spray" email broadcast activity is yielding poorer and poorer returns. And finding the time to make the change can be impossible. Even organisations with dedicated online marketing teams find it hard to develop the email marketing channel when the Web is already demanding 100% of their attention.
The research above is specifically about email marketing, however I'm pretty sure the same pattern would emerge if we were to ask the same questions about tri-messaging, or social media and mobile marketing campaigns. New ways of using online marketing communications technology are quite easy to understand. Many of my customers will attend trade shows, or industry events and come back to the office with lots of new ideas. Many people underestimate the amount of planning, coordination, integration and testing required to launch new marketing communications campaigns. This leads to a sense of frustration: so much opportunity, so little time... By taking a step-by-step approach, we work with our customers to develop objectives for email, mobile and social media marketing. We then agree on an implementation plan that is totally tailored to each customer’s circumstances, whilst at the same time taking advantage of our wealth of experience gleaned from our other customers, and from the wider world of email and online marketing communications. One of the most important phases of any marketing campaign strategy is to answer the question: How are we going to measure success? What is the return on investment we expect from this marketing campaign, and how are we going to keep tabs on that during the campaign and after? Too many times I've seen search engine marketing (SEM) campaigns set up without success metrics in place. After the campaign has been running for 2 months, and the marketing team has spent £5,000 on Google AdWords, then the CEO asks - "is it worth it?" For example, if you're going to be measuring inbound leads as phone calls to the sales team, you need to set up specific inbound phone numbers for your different ad groups and keep tabs on all the calls coming in, as seen here:
Our customer, PilotBean, is going to be in a much better position to understand the success of their SEM campaigns because we are thinking about measurement and return throughout the campaign planning and management process.
If you are measuring success, you can put a business case together to justify the investment in time and resources required to deliver your next online marketing campaign. That way the ideas and opportunities can be tested, measured and become realities in your organisation. ###
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The current marketing communications landscape is full of opportunity - social media, mobile and email marketing offer more versatility in communication than ever before, and every day more organisations are finding new ways to exploit tri-messaging communication techniques to forge closer relationships with their customers and stakeholders.
We also aim to put online marketing campaigns into context, and crucially understand the overlap in marketing campaign sources. A customer may have been touched by a number of your online marketing campaigns - SEM, social media, email - and you need to understand the different roles each medium is playing.
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