MarketingSherpa Blog

As the mobile market continues to grow, mobile advertising opportunities are growing right along with it. The capabilities of the ads, too, are quickly expanding.

This week the Mobile Marketing Association released a Rich Media Mobile Advertising whitepaper. You can take a look at the free six-page guide to get a quick introduction to the types of rich mobile ads in the market (not including apps or games).

While mobile display advertising mimics some aspects of online display advertising, there is one key difference I noticed from the whitepaper’s examples. Mobile ads are more likely to expand into a full-screen experience—which is not a common feature in online display ads.

“As highly interactive and feature-rich smartphones continue to dominate new mobile device sales, rich media mobile ad units will comprise an ever-growing portion of the mobile advertisement display market in the U.S. and around the world,” according to the MMA’s whitepaper.

In the fourth quarter of 2009, an average of 19% of mobile advertisers used rich media mobile ad units, according to the whitepaper. These ads include:
o Ads with video, sound or interactive features
o Expandable ads
o Animated ads
o Floating ads

Take a look at the report for great examples from promotions involving The Weather Channel, Alice in Wonderland and Lincoln. The examples include high-quality screenshots and brief descriptions of the ads’ functionality.

If you’re interested in rich mobile advertising, the report can give you a few examples for inspiration, and a few guidelines around sizing, functionality, and why you should give users “close” and “skip” buttons in the ads.

Are you buying these types of ads? If so, let us know what you think of them in the comments…

Natural search marketers have been in a precarious position for the last few years. Much of the data they’re using is supplied by search engines, and some of that data is fuzzy at best.

Adam Audette, in a Search Engine Land post today, goes as far as calling some of the data unreliable and “downright misleading.” However, Audette astutely notes that marketers need the data even if they don’t completely trust it.

What’s a marketer to do? Here are Audette’s suggestions for the SEO metrics you should track:
o Percentage of overall site traffic from search
o Percentage share of each engine
o Free search traffic at the keyword level, clustering related terms
o Difference between branded and non-branded search traffic

Metrics that he implies are far less reliable:
o Ranking reports
o Indexed page counts
o Backlink counts
o Toolbar PageRank

For marketers, I would add conversion data to Audette’s list of primary metrics to measure — especially conversion data for non-branded keywords. If you’re a natural search marketer, any conversions you can prove came through non-branded keyword searches point directly to money you are bringing the company.

Branded search conversions are great, but they show that the searcher already knew your brand. The searcher has likely been reached by another marketing channel. A non-branded conversion implies that someone chose you over the competitors also listed in the results.

Which metrics do you consider vital? And how reliable are they?

Measuring your marketing is the only way to know which efforts are working and which are wasting money. Even if you can’t measure every impact, you should track as much as possible.

After looking at some data from MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report, I wonder how many campaigns are only half-measured, with half their impact open to anyone’s guess.

When asked ‘What is your organization monitoring and measuring to quantify social media impact?’ 50% or more respondents said they were tracking:
o Visitors and traffic sources
o Followers, fans and members numbers
o Commentary about brand or product
o Sentiment around brand or product.

Fewer than 50% of respondents said they were tracking:
o Search engine rank
o Lead generation
o Progress toward social media objectives
o Engagement with influential bloggers, journalists, Twitterers, etc.
o Sales conversion and other ROI metrics
o Competitive share of social media coverage
o Criteria to identify and profile audiences

Astoundingly, only 35% of respondents said they were tracking sales conversion and other ROI metrics related to social media.

Getting more website traffic, Facebook fans and comments is very good. But if you’re not sure whether that’s having an effect on lead generation or sales, many executives will ask: what’s the point?

Marketers across the globe are finding use with social media. But if you want the rest of your organization to take it seriously and to invest more in the channel, you should learn as much about its impact as possible. The data talks.

If social media is helping you learn more about your audience, get data on how that knowledge is improving your marketing. If it’s helping your brand’s image, find a way to quantify it. Hypothetical evidence is as solid as a wet paper towel compared to hard data.

Is your team measuring its social media impact? If not, what’s holding you back? Let us know in the comments…

A well-timed and well-crafted message always has a chance to generate buzz through social media. If people like your message enough, they’ll send it to their friends. But they have to see it first.

During a call with Gary Wohlfeill, Creative Director, Moosejaw Mountaineering, I realized that getting attention is easier through some channels than others. Wohlfeill and I discussed his team’s recent holiday promotion (keep an eye on our free newsletters for the article). They ran the effort mostly through Facebook and Twitter.

Leading up to launch, the team sent messages through the social channels to build anticipation. They got some attention through Facebook, but it was harder to gain traction in Twitter, Wohlfeill says.

“Twitter is much more like a river. You drop a pebble in the river and you have to be standing there to see it go by. So you have to drop a lot of pebbles to reach a lot of people.”

Wherever you send a message, it’s going to have to compete for attention. Whether it’s a billboard competing with highway traffic, or an email competing with an inbox, competition is there.

Twitter, it seems, thrives on limited attention. Being seen can be a challenge. And once you’re seen, you can only hold attention for 140 characters–unless you get a click.

Two good ways to increase your chances at capturing more attention:
1. Be interesting enough to entice people to share with friends
2. Link to relevant content

Super Bowl XLIV is just around the corner, and one marketing team is hoping to repeat last year’s game day win.

Denny’s is inviting America to visit its restaurants on Tuesday, Feb. 9, from 6 a.m. to 2 p.m. for a free Original Grand Slam Breakfast. The team will announce the offer with a funny television commercial during the Super Bowl’s third quarter. Check out this teaser commercial.

The team ran a similar effort last year, using a Super Bowl ad to help pull in more than 2 million hungry customers for free Grand Slams during the single-day event.

We reported their strategy after the results were in. Denny’s realized a 39% net brand improvement score, the third highest of all of Super Bowl XLIII’s advertisers, according to a comScore post-Super-Bowl survey. They also captured more than 50,000 website hits, and a ton of free press.

“We hit a chord with people and resonated with people on a sort of warmth and kindness perspective. We had literally thousands of emails and phone calls from consumers, even some that didn’t go to the event, thanking Denny’s for giving a free breakfast,” said Mark Chmiel, EVP, Chief Marketing and Innovation Officer, Denny’s, when we spoke with him last year.

Minor problems are inevitable when 2 million people show up for a free meal. Here are two snags the team hit last year and how they handled them:

1. Cold feet

At the last minute, one franchisee started charging customers $1.99 for a Grand Slam. The team sent people to the store to prevent customer backlash and bad PR. They stood at the door and handed out coupons for free Grand Slams, redeemable at any Denny’s. They also mentioned that the franchisee was violating an agreement.

2. Long lines

“We did have a free coupon in case some people felt the lines were too long or that they had to get to work…They could come back within the next two weeks to have a free Grand Slam,” Chmiel said.

As you can see, Denny’s effort is focused on building brand affinity. They do not want anyone turned away and disappointed. Last year, they leveraged their good will to capture a massive amount of free press–and you can expect the same this year. This will not be the last time you hear about Denny’s feeding America.

This week we’re looking back on MarketingSherpa’s fifth annual Email Marketing Summit and what we learned from the over 600 marketers who came to Miami.

Take a look at our full wrap-up report with seven takeaways. It’s perfect for attendees who want to revisit key themes, and for those who couldn’t make it this year. We also published an article featuring Summit keynote speaker Joseph Jaffe, Chief Interrupter, Powered Inc. Jaffe launched his new book, “Flip the Funnel,” at the Summit.

Personally, I thought the Summit was a fantastic event loaded with cutting edge thought leadership and advice for running outstanding email marketing campaigns.

One interesting bit I noticed came from two back-to-back consumer marketing sessions where speakers mentioned the dreaded “list blasting” tactic. The broadcast tactic of sending a single email to an un-segmented list is thought to be an ineffective approach left behind years ago.

“Blast does horrible things to our industry in perception,” said Loren McDonald, VP, Industry Relations, Silverpop in a panel discussion. “But no matter how sophisticated you are, there is still some broadcasting.”

Although segmenting and sending targeted messages is a superior strategy, sending an occasional blast email to subscribers is acceptable — but it must be very occasional. The superiority of segmenting and targeting over broadcasting was emphasized by a session immediately following McDonald’s panel.

Joy Cropper, Director, Internet Strategy, Williams Randall Marketing described how her team transformed a blast-based email program for the Indiana Office of Tourism Development into a successful segmented program, dramatically improving results.

Cropper’s team surveyed their list with a $100 gas card contest as an incentive and used the responses to find segmentation opportunities. They then created three new newsletters and asked everyone on the list to re-opt-in.

They went from sending one email 10 times a year to three emails 12 times a year — increasing frequency. The result? The cut their list in half and increased their number of clickthroughs 10-fold.

Two of the latest marketing trends–social networking and SMS messaging–are becoming routine for some marketers, and their roles are becoming more clearly defined.

Chad Hallert, Director, Ecommerce, Eldorado Hotel Casino, and his team have experimented with building and promoting to a list of SMS subscribers since early 2009. In some ways, the team uses SMS similarly to how they use Facebook and Twitter. However, they’ve found SMS messages attract more immediate attention to promotions.

The team’s tried sending channel-specific promotions to SMS subscribers and social followers, but without fantastic results, Hallert says.

“We tried stand alone offers with mobile, social and email…when you break them up to pieces, nothing really competes with email, and the other two don’t look as valuable as they are.”

Instead, the real value of SMS and social are their ability to improve the results of an integrated campaign, Hallert says. He’s seen results improved by 5% to 8% by adding an SMS alert and Facebook updates to campaigns that already included website, paid search and email promotion.

This is due in part, Hallert says, to customers subscribing to more than one promotional outlet. A person who receives a text message and email about an offer is more likely to convert than a person who receives only one of the two.

The marketing power of the team’s SMS subscribers and social followers is likely to improve as the lists grow in size in relation to the team’s email subscribers. Currently, their SMS list is about 10% of their email list in size, Hallert says.

For now, the team is seeing social and mobile marketing add more value to integrated campaigns than the channels could generate by themselves. Watch our consumer marketing newsletter for a case study describing how Hallert’s team leveraged the immediacy of SMS to take advantage of the weather’s impact on hotel bookings.

When shoppers visit supermarkets and large retailers, they’re bound to see branded in-store displays. The stores add revenue while helping brands stand out. Why not apply this idea to ecommerce?

That’s just what Doug Miller, Global VP, Media Solutions, Expedia Inc., and his team have done with several Expedia Inc. properties including Expedia.com, Hotels.com and Hotewire.com.

The team started leveraging their reach into the consumer travel market when Miller joined about five years ago. Miller says about 61% of visits to travel websites are to Expedia properties.

“They are very few places, probably nowhere else, where you’re going to be able to reach an online travel audience in such a concentrated way.”

This qualified high-volume travel audience presents a great opportunity to sell media. Expedia’s world-wide media business, a which encompasses more than Miller’s team’s work, accounts for about 10% of their total business and growing fast, Miller says.

Take a look at these four media options. They might give you ideas for leveraging your own audience:

StorePoint Ads

The team’s first program offered display ads that reached several Expedia Inc. sites. The banners are shown:
o Adjacent to search results
o On the homepage
o On browsing pages
o On content pages for various destinations

“This is where Hawaii or Mexico or American Airlines will call out to you and say they have a special opportunity for you at the point of sale,” Miller says.

Expandable StorePoint Ads

The team later updated the StorePoint technology to offer marketers the option to integrate interactive rich-media ads. The Flash-based ads expand over site content when clicked, and retract to their normal size when visitors move away.

Once expanded, the ads can offer a range of functionality, including:
o Audio and video
o Data capture fields
o Interactive animation
o Send to a friend

TravelAds

The team offers marketers a bid-for-placement, sponsored listings program specifically designed for hotels. The ads are featured at the top of search results pages on Expedia.com and Hotels.com for location-based searches bid on by marketers. These marketers can bid on specific locations and time periods, and set a maximum budget to control their spending.

PassportAds

This year, the team launched a behaviorally-targeted ad format that reaches Web surfers after they’ve left an Expedia site. For example, an Expedia.com visitor might search for and browse for hotels in Venice, leave the site, and later see ads elsewhere for Italian vacations.

The team works with several ad networks and sister companies to make the program work across a wide range websites, some in the comScore top 100, Miller says.

One great thing about social media networks is they’re cost-free. Sure, they can be time consuming. You might even need to hire a manager. But you won’t have to write checks to Facebook, MySpace or Twitter to be there.

Also, social networks are showing some marketers big returns. We ran a great article this week on how Threadless, an online community-based tee-shirt retailer, used Twitter to give more life to a promotion. Check out how they micro-blogged their way to a record sales day.

We spoke with Cam Balzer, VP, Marketing, Threadless.com, for the piece. Balzer mentioned that, apart from their main feed, they also experiment with different Twitter feeds. Hey, why not? Feeds are free to create. Here are two alternatives they’ve tried:

– Customer service

In November, they launched a Threadhelp feed to handle customer service inquiries through Twitter. The thread is managed by members of Threadless’ customer service team. Other companies have tried this strategy as well.

Separating customer service and community-oriented feeds helps keep the fun and useful messages apart from the frustrated customer messages. It also helps customers get the attention they need more directly.

– Single promotion feeds

For Halloween, the team set up an account alleging to be maintained by a zombie. The joke feed put some spin on a holiday promotion. Although it did not capture many followers, the feed was an inexpensive experiment that helped the team learn more about the channel.

Has your team experimented with multiple Twitter feeds? Or different Facebook groups perhaps? Let us know in the comments…

Marketing and sales teams should work together to achieve the best results possible. Dave Mossop, Interactive Media Specialist, Expedia CruiseShipCenters, is no stranger to this concept.

Mossop’s team handles much of the online marketing for the brick-and-click cruise agency’s 2,500+ sales agents. We published an article today describing the team’s effort to support agents with customized marketing via email, a website, and a customer relationship management system.

One interesting tactic we did not mention is the team’s “sell-sheet” emails. Ordinarily, Mossop’s team manage email sent to prospective customers. The emails are customized as if they were sent directly from cruise agents to clients.

However, agents can identify cruises that individual clients might be interested in and send them a sell-sheet email. These emails are integrated into the CRM system agents use regularly.

“With basically one click, type in an email address and they’ll get a copy of what the itinerary is, what the ship looks like, a little about the weather, and it’s personalized with [the agent’s] information as a contact,” Mossop says.

You’ll also notice that the emails are customized with the agent’s contact information. They are just one more way that Mossop’s team uses customized messaging and streamlined processes to help agents save time and sell more.

You can find out more about how Expedia CruiseShipCenters combines email, social media and mobile marketing at MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Summit in January.