Marketing comes in all shapes and forms. These days the shapes and forms can be intimidating if you didn’t grow up with a MySpace account. At Sir Speedy Centennial, we’ve been learning about all sorts of new marketing products and about how to measure the success of both the new electronic ideas and of the traditional options, like direct mail. Our new electronic marketing services include everything that you will read here, but we think that informed decisions are better decisions. If you have questions, we are eager to talk with you. Give us a call at 303 799 4383 or email our owner, Mike Booth.
Deconstruction
At first glance, this graphic can be intimidating, but a bit of deconstruction and you’ll have a great understanding of how direct mail, email, electronic messaging, landing pages, and your web site are combined to provide you with the best of both worlds. For a close-up view, click to enlarge the image.
Your web site
The foundation for today’s marketing will always be your home page. Even if you primarily send postcards or other direct-mail messages, it’s rare that any campaign will go out without a least a reference to your site. Your web site is a great way to give your customers more information than you could include in a mailing, or to provide links to downloads or multimedia. A well-developed web site will have a page that tells customers about the company, one page for each product, links to sites of companies who partner with you, and perhaps a shopping cart.
Measuring return on investment (ROI)
Did you know that you there is software to tell you every time you have a visitor to your site? It is so advanced that you can know every page that they visit, how long they stay on each page, if they found your site using a search engine, and if so, what word(s) they used to find you, and much more. The measuring, tracking, and reporting of visitor information is known as analytics.
So, think about this: if the most oft-visited page within your web site is a page about ACME widgets, wouldn’t it make sense to provide more pages about widgets? What if you are selling widgets on your site’s store and your analytics show you that 60% of all customers view the pages on green widgets. Your supplier has green widgets in four different sizes, but you sell only one. Armed with this new information, you would likely choose to offer more sizes. This is an easy example of how analytics can affect the content on your site.
In our multi-touch marketing graphic above, you can see each point in the marketing process where analytics can be measured. Using some or all of these points will give you unbelievable insight into your visitor’s habits, the effectiveness of individual pages, and the areas in which your customers are seeking more information.
Analytics and special web pages
Using our example above, let’s assume that you are going to send a postcard to your customers telling them that you have just added three new sizes of green widgets. On the postcard you proudly display your the URL of your web site. If you check the analytics of your site the day after the mailing hits, you might see a spike in the traffic to your home page. What you cannot see is how many of the visitors that make up that spike came there because they received the mailing. This is where custom landing pages come into play.
Instead of putting your home page on the direct-mail piece, try this: create a new page at your site called www.mywebsite.com/green-widgets/. (If you are not able to create pages at your site, check out Sir Speedy Centennial’s offer of a web makeover.) Do not promote that URL through any other method. Now when your analytics spike, you can see that your home page has had a few new visitors, but the real traffic came directly to that custom landing page. This is ROI. Your direct-mail piece cost you $X, but you had XX new visitors, and there were XXX new orders for green widgets of a size that you just began carrying.
Notice in our multi-touch marketing graphic, that nearly always we are using the URL of custom landing pages on our campaigns and marketing touches. This ensures that we are able to track our visitors’ habits whenever possible.
Sending electronic messaging
Emails are just one form of electronic messaging. You could also send newsletters, offers, white papers, or other resources that lead your customers back to your site or that cause your customers to come to rely on you for a type of information. There are special types of analytic software that enable you to track messages that you send via email addresses. These analytics are used in conjunction with web-site analytics to count the number of emails that were sent, the number opened, the number of times someone clicked on a link inside the email.
If your email is a newsletter, you might have story summaries in the email with links to the full story on your site. Here again, you would want to post special versions of the stories on custom landing pages so that you get an accurate count of the number of visitors that were generated by your email message as compared to those who may have learned about the story through other methods.
Traditional marketing methods
Traditional marketing encompasses projects such as direct mail, brochures, hand-outs, slide presentations, or the like. If you’ve been in marketing for more than a decade, you know that this type of marketing and the lack of effective tracking of success rates can be very frustrating. In some cases, the only visibility that you have is how many of your pieces were returned as undeliverable. Combining your traditional marketing with custom landing pages will empower you to create more effective pieces and deliver to a more targeted audience.
Using audio and video for a broader reach
Until YouTube® and other multimedia delivery sites became the norm, our options for providing audio and visual content to our customers was primarily through on-site presentations or the sharing of CDs or disks. Now when you add a new green widget to your site, you may post a demo of the widget within the story, post a video detailing exactly how the widget works and all its wonderful applications, or create a podcast (audio recording) for those times when a visual presentation is not needed. Be sure to create a landing page at your site with lots more information about the green widgets and that contains links to other multimedia information, downloads, and the product page within your shopping cart.
Alert the media
Now that you’ve added three new green widgets in varying sizes, don’t forget to tell the press. OK, so Time magazine might not be interested in your new product offering but chances are that there may be bloggers who are. Blogs are special web sites that are very easy to create and update. Bloggers are people who use this type of web site in order to make frequent story contributions (sometimes as several times a day or week). Blog stories are often reviews of products or services (like your new green widgets), so when you add a new widget to your site, this is generally news worthy. When you hire a new CEO, this is probably press worthy. Reserve press releases for the really big news and news releases for relevant information that you would like to share with people who may be interested in the topic.
The Sir Speedy Centennial web site is a blog. We write all of our stories and post them to our site without benefit of a web master. If you would like more information on a web makeover that makes you master of your domain, check out our offer.
Being social
Unless you live in a cave, you’ve heard of Twitter®, Facebook®, MySpace®, or LinkedIn®. As diverse as they sound, they are each a social-media web site. In other words, these sites are like coffee klatches (without the coffee and without the klatch). People of all ages come to these sites to connect, share, and promote. Many people do not believe or do not understand that a social-media site can be a great way to promote your business, but we do. We think that social media, in combination with the other opportunities we’ve outlined on this page, can be a critical component of a well-rounded campaign. We invite you to follow Sir Speedy Centennial on our social sites: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Mike’s blog.
Premium placement
Ensuring that your web site is well positioned in the search engines or in social media is called SEO and SMO, respectively. There are many theories and rules about how to get your site the attention it deserves. One thing on which all the experts agree: it’s not any one thing that you do and it’s something you do at any one time. What this means is that you need to work on your site continuously. Each story must be reviewed for its value and contribution to a search engine and each posting at your social-media sites must be carefully crafted.
Bringing it full circle
We’ve fully dismantled our multi-touch marketing graphic and it should be feeling mostly manageable at this point. Oh, sure, there’s lots of thing we didn’t cover (such as segmented mailing lists, one-to-one marketing, variable data, and more), but we can tackle those as we go along. If you’re ready to reach out to your customer across the web, give us a call. We’re ready, willing, and eager to help.
