Practical Guide to Digital Marketing
From The Yaffe Center
Acknowledgements
Most content on this page comes from a report written by Aarti Gopal
Introduction
“Brand is not owned by the people who manufacture it, it is owned by the people who think about it”
The adoption of various digital tools has led to a seismic shift in the methods of marketing. Although the Internet has presented marketers with many new tools for reaching consumers, it has not replaced the overall objectives of marketing and advertising: to generate sales through influence and cultivate brand loyalty. The Internet has, however, caused a change in the way consumers make purchasing decisions, thus requiring marketers to rethink the way they approach marketing their brands. No longer able to push messages onto consumers, brands and marketers are now challenged to remain relevant and engage with consumers in a two-way conversation. Consumers now drive their marketing experience by pulling information they find relevant and filtering those messages pushed at them. Increasingly, consumers want to connect with brands on a personal level. Consumers are quickly becoming de-facto collaborators in brand building and product development as transparence between marketers and consumers increases through deeper engagement between the two parties. Additionally, consumers have become channel indifferent. They choose how and when they want to interact with a brand.
The reasons for digital marketing are many. Not only has modern consumer behavior come to make it a necessity, but digital marketing offers brand managers the ability to gain stronger consumer insights through data on actual consumer behavior, relevant and accurate information on cost effective methods for broad reach, and the ability to create highly targeted/individual marketing messages, which in turn lead to more effective campaigns.
This paper will address the changing landscape and benefits of digital marketing, assess how consumer trends in decision-making and their role in the marketing process impact campaign strategies, and finally propose a framework for approaching digital marketing plans.
Benefits of Digital Marketing
“I’ve got a lot of passion for digital. It really is such an incredible way to connect with consumers and really have much deeper ongoing relationship with them…” ~ Marc Pritchard, P&G Global CMO
The ease of Internet adoption was fueled by the convenience it afforded users. From email to paying bills to quickly disseminating breaking news, the internet provides consumers with more efficient ways to complete everyday tasks. The same relationship can be applied to marketing. Digital marketing does not replace traditional marketing; rather it is an essential complement that has driven changes in the approach marketers take to promote products/brands given emerging consumer trends. Before delving into these changes, an exploration of what digital marketing is, as well as its strategic place within marketing plans are needed.
Strategic Reasons for Utilizing and Investing in Digital Marketing Initiatives
There are many strategic reasons for investing in digital marketing initiatives. First and foremost, changes in the way consumers are influenced have made digital marketing a strategic necessity. Second, digital marketing offers companies the ability to gain superior consumer insights through data gathered on actual, observed consumer behavior rather than on consumer reported behaviors. This in turn allows marketers to create tailored messages for individual consumers, while also offering companies the opportunity to adjust products based on observed needs. Additionally, marketers can make real-time decisions and changes to campaign based on consumer feedback and performance results. Finally, digital marketing also presents a cost effective method to reach the broadest audience.
Changes in the way consumers are influenced can be directly attributed to the Internet, enabling a significant amount of information sharing. Today’s consumers are in the driver’s seat of the marketing experience. While consumers were once regarded as recipients of a marketing message, consumers now directly interact with brands and companies in a dialogue. This interaction allows deeper insights into actual consumer behavior (instead of what consumers say they do), as well as a method for marketers to gain immediate insight into consumer needs, wants and opinions. Given the trend of consumers wanting authentic relationships with brands, digital marketing offers tools that allow marketers to cost effectively connect their brands with individual consumers.
To understand the power of this transformation, it is imperative to first understand the pre-Internet relationship between consumers and marketers. Historically, pushed messages to targeted consumer groups. Examples of Push Marketing include 30-second TV spots, radio ads, billboards, and print ads, all strategically placed in various media outlets. The messages were generally formed by the marketers based on self-reported consumer preferences, as well as available demographic information. Upon receiving these messages, consumers would decide whether there was sufficient information to make a purchase decision. Since the messages were well-crafted statements conveyed through television, print, or radio advertisements, consumers would seek additional information if they considered the marketing message biased, after all these were generally well crafted company-sponsored statements conveyed through television, print, or radio advertisements. Consumers would look to experts or authority figures in their network, including not only friends and family, but also ratings by publications like Consumer Reports. In this ecosystem, the influencers were limited to mostly the company messages and immediate networks.
In today’s pull environment of digital marketing, not only do consumers have access to the traditional push marketing ecosystem, but also to an endless number of online information hubs. Consumers are able to seek out information, broaden their consideration set (the product options available to them), and prioritize which sources are most relevant and influential to their decision (which includes push marketing messages). Consumers are no longer passive recipients, but are now active members of the information gathering and dissemination process. Increasingly, marketing messages from a company are just one input to a 24-hours, 7-days a week online conversation that occurs through various global digital forums, social networking sites, Internet videos and posts, mobile phone messages, etc. Not only are consumers receiving messages from marketers, they are also voicing and sharing their thoughts and opinions with marketers and other consumers. Consumers are now media producers, researchers, content creators, advocates, promoters and distributors. In this ecosystem, the influencers include the company messages and immediate networks, but also encompass any other consumer who decided to become a media producer or advocate him or herself. The traditional role played by the company and family and friends is still relevant, but their message has been diluted and others now fill this ‘influencer’ role as well.
Additionally, the ease and cost effectiveness of digital marketing has led to a deluge of new product launches and heightened level of marketing messages. Consumers have consequently become adept at ignoring or tuning-out marketing messages, as well as often multi-tasking between various communication tools that reduce his or her attention to marketing messages. Imagine a consumer watching television, surfing the Internet, and chatting with a friend on his or her mobile phone. In this environment, marketers are constantly challenged to break through the clutter to gain consumer attention.
Gaining Stronger Consumer Insights based on Observed Behavior
In a study conducted by Booz & Co., 80% of marketers surveyed indicated that consumer insights (pieces of information that provide marketers with data regarding consumer preferences, behaviors, demographics, etc. that they can use to better target a segment) are more important now than they were five years ago. Digital marketing enables marketers to easily listen and observe consumers: simply put, digital platforms are everywhere consumers are, from ballparks, to mobile phones, to coffee shops and gyms. This allows marketers to develop new insights into their consumers’ needs, not only for the immediate product experience, but also for how that product is or can be utilized as a component of consumers’ lives. In the past, consumer insights were derived from self-reported needs and preferences. With digital tools, marketers are now able to balance those self-reported insights against how consumers actually behave. These behavioral insights are derived from observing simple tools such as search queries, pages viewed, and time spent in different media mix vehicles. More sophisticated companies are able to glean in-depth consumer insights from observing social networking sites, reading blogs that consumers find relevant, and interacting directly with the consumer through online product communities. Consumers’ observed behaviors of online, along with traditional product usage, demographics, and psychographics information, give a company more robust information regarding their consumers. The increased transparency of consumer needs and behavior is invaluable because it improves a company’s ability to create relevant content and messaging, as well as strengthens the company’s placement, timing and context of advertisements.
Ability to Tailor Messaging and Advertising Campaigns, Instantly
From the beginning, the Internet and digital marketing have presented a way for marketers to experiment over and again, constantly refining their messages to be more effective based on response. Click-thru rates, key word searches, video downloads, pages viewed, and queries are examples of how marketers can instantly measure the effectiveness of digital marketing tools. These metrics indicate how consumers are using various digital tools to learn more or interact with products and/or services. Given the usability and availability of real-time data, marketers are able to instantly adjust marketing campaign strategies to maximize returns. For example, Dove’s Real Beauty campaign included a video depicting the transition of an ordinary woman into a supermodel on a billboard. The video was originally meant as an internal tool, but given consumers’ reactions to other Real Beauty campaign material, Dove decided to post the video on YouTube. The reaction from consumers to the video was swift and immediate. Although it seems fairly easy to post a video to YouTube.com, prior to digital marketing, it would have taken substantial resources to purchase media time (TV) and would have involved a significant time lag (media purchases are on average at least one month in advance). With digital marketing tools, Dove was able to immediately release the video after the decision was made to do so. In addition, digital marketing tools allow marketers to address concerns, misrepresentations, or in extreme cases, when warranted, to remove messages or content that elicit a negative consumer response.
On a more individual consumer level, digital marketing provides companies with methods to communicate specific messages and product benefits to different consumer types. Marketers can send direct communication through email and mobile to particular users that are interested in certain benefits of their product. They are also able to utilize these digital mechanisms to incent brand loyalty or retention. For example, if a consumer is interested in purchasing a flight from Los Angeles to New York City and uses Priceline.com to compare prices, times, and availability across various airlines, Priceline can target that consumer with offers for the itinerary previously searched (but not purchased) or send suggestions for future flights from the consumer’s indicated home airport to a region that the consumer indicated in a previous search. By utilizing observed consumer behavior, marketers are able to create content and messages that are relevant to that specific consumer, in a specific location (placement) or media type (banner ads v. blogs/interactive communities).
Efficient and Cost Effective Method for Targeted Reach
The advent of the Internet and digital communication space presented marketers with an immense opportunity to communicate messages and product information quickly and cost effectively. It is important to reach the right audience at the time they are most receptive to marketing messages for a specific product or service. Digital marketing allows marketers to reach consumers throughout their busy day, thus no longer restricted to traditional television, print, and radio timeslots. By including this capability in a marketing campaign, digital advertising enables marketing campaigns to leverage content and messages across various advertising vehicles (traditional and digital) in a cost effective, highly targeted manner.
Prior to digital options, marketers were not able to gain national reach with a single marketing campaign. However, digital marketing allows companies to develop algorithms that make it easy to aggregate individual networks of target consumers and to plan, create, and optimize advertising to reach a national audience that transcends geography and is tied to consumer preferences and interests. For example, results have shown that an aggregated network approach can deliver more than 50 million weekly gross impressions across nearly 30,000 locations around the country — all from one network. Given the consumer need for two-way conversations with marketers and communities, web applications like Facebook, blogs, and other Social Networking Sites (SNS) are cost effective tools to reach consumers (the majority of these tools are free, only requiring maintenance and observation from a company).
Changes in consumer behavior and interaction with marketing messages have made digital marketing a necessity to any marketing campaign. Increased research by consumers for purchase decisions, heightened word-of-mouth among consumers, and consumer preference for pull v. push marketing have elevated the importance of digital marketing and made it a necessary component of today’s competitive marketing plans. However, digital marketing also offers several strategic benefits for companies. Savvy marketers utilize digital marketing to gain deeper consumer insights and as a method to create tailored and adaptable consumer targeting. An additional appeal is that digital marketing allows companies to be more efficient and cost effective in their marketing efforts, with the ability to measure campaign effectiveness and success.
So what is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing encompasses all digital channels for communicating or receiving information, and is not limited just to Internet vehicles. This includes the Internet, mobile phones, SMS messaging, digital outdoor displays (Times Square billboards), and other digital forms of media . Each tool can be classified into either Paid Media or Earned/Buzz Media. Paid Media is publicity gained through advertisements that the brand/product undertakes and controls to communicate information or appeal to consumers. Earned/Buzz Media, one of the most powerful tools, refers to favorable publicity gained through promotion efforts from others outside of the brand and advertising team (i.e. the brand and advertising team does not have direct control). A component of Earned Media, Social Media encompasses publicity gained through grassroots efforts specifically on the Internet. Simply put, Earned/Buzz Media is your content or message, shared by your customers through email, blogs, social networking sites, and other word-of-mouth tools . Figure 1 below broadly categorizes various digital tools, predominantly online tools, into Earned and Paid Media. Additionally, these tools are broken into the five most commonly discussed categories of Word-of-Mouth (WOM), User Generated Content, Search Optimization, Owned Content, and Communication.
Figure 1: Digital Marketing tools Categorized by Type and Function
Traditional marketers spend about 60% of their media budget on paid media, 20% on content creation, and the rest on overhead expenses (such as agencies and employees). Digital marketers spend approximately 30% on paid media and 50% on content . This is in part attributable to digital marketers relying on users to disseminate information through Earned/Buzz media, which places more emphasis on creating buzz worthy content material. Additionally, creative content has grown in importance as a means for breaking through the abundance of marketing messages aimed at consumers. Further discussion of these trends will follow.
Paid Media
Paid Media is one of the oldest forms of advertising and is exactly what it says it is; It is a company or brand buying advertising space or paying someone (television, radio, print, product websites, banner ads, etc.) to communicate their product benefits and influence a consumers’ purchase decision. Paid media within the digital marketing space encompasses Search Optimization, Owned Content, and Communication tools. Marketers have direct influence and control of these tools, often utilizing a mix of them to achieve marketing objectives.
Search Optimization
Today, search has become second nature to many consumers. The term “googling” is no longer applicable just to the Google search engine, but serves as verb for online information gathering activities. Often associated with the quest for information, search is a powerful tool for companies. Search includes Paid and Organic search results. How does Search work? For demonstration, Google is the market leader and a great illustration of today’s search environment. Google ‘crawls’ and catalogues hundreds of thousands of websites to create an index of various factors. When a consumer uses Google to start a search, they type in their search query. Utilizing an algorithm based on over 200 factors (includes factors like most viewed, similar searches conducted by other users, keywords, most recently updated, etc), Google will provide a ranked list of possible websites that contain the desired information. The first two links on the search page are paid advertisements (ie. a company has paid to have their website appear first). The remaining links in the results are organic search results, meaning these are websites that match the keywords or search query terms inputted by the consumer. Statistically, it has been shown that many consumers do not go beyond the first page of search results. Thus, it is important to have a website appear on the first page and preferably at the top of the listed sites. Ultimately, search engines are committed to providing relevant information to consumers, as easily as possible. This ensures that the searchers continuously return to their search engine, thus building a base or audience that the search engine can then use to gain advertising dollars from companies and brands.
Paid Search
During the nascent phases of Internet marketing simple paid search, also known as sponsored links, tactics ruled the landscape. Paid search are web site links that a company or individual pays to be placed at the top of search engine results or as a search ad that appears in the side bar area of the search results page. The appeal of paid search, especially for those companies paying to have their link as the first two results, is that consumers do not look beyond the first page of search query results. As does every tool, paid search has benefits and disadvantages. Benefits include higher purchase intent/interest from consumers (they are already searching for the product/service) due to searchers already being predisposed, thus a prime consumer, to a specific product or service. Paid search also allows companies to instantly be placed in prime search result position, as opposed to organic search that can require months to gain credibility for higher search result position (preferably on the first page of results). Paid search also allows marketers access to data that can be used to enhance websites, messages, and content to increase relevancy to visitors. Finally, paid search is versatile and can be used by any size business and content/messages can be easily developed, adjusted and implemented based on click thru rates by consumers.
Additionally, paid search is fairly cost effective. Paid search, unlike organic search, has fees that can be easily controlled by a company. Budgets can be adjusted to set daily or monthly limits on how often to place an advertisement in specific locations, as well as how many pay per clicks to allow. Generally the popularity of keywords and the number of clicks on the web site link are the driving costs within Paid Search. Depending on the popularity of certain words, search engines like Google will charge a premium to place sponsored links at the top of the search results. Pay-per-click creates an environment where companies are paying for every click a consumer makes on their sponsored search links or advertisements located on the side of the search results display page, as well as the time of day the search was conducted (similar to prime time advertising on TV commanding a premium over off-peak times). To maximize return on paid search, marketers must have knowledge of consumer behavior and preferences to ensure that the messages and links appear when the key influential search words for a particular product/ service are entered and during periods when the target consumer is interacting on the digital platform.
Organic Search Results As consumers become increasingly savvy in their search queries, they often tune out paid search advertisements. This is not to say that paid search is not important, rather that consumers often seek alternate links to validate the information gathered from paid search. Consumers believe that organic search results are more relevant and offer more depth to their information gathering process . Organic search results, as mentioned, are those listings that match keywords a consumer has used in their search query. These results are listed based on many variables within an algorithm designed to present the searcher with the most relevant information for their needs. Because these are natural results, there are no costs associated with appearing as part of organic search results. Given that organic search results are free and often more credible to consumers, companies are interested in search engine optimization. Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to activities should increase the traffic and click thru rates from search results to the website, while also improving the quality of search results, by ensuring those key words most used by or relevant to consumers’ are built into the web site’s content.
Figure 2: Example of Search Results on Google with Paid and Organic Search Results highlighted
There are several ways to game the search process; however the easiest and most transparent to consumers is to develop content and messages that incorporates relevant keywords and phrases. By ensuring transparency between search queries and content on a website, found through search, a marketer can build credibility for the product and company. Another tactic to create stronger natural search results is to cross link web pages. By increasing the frequency of certain links, the algorithm considers the linked webpage as more relevant source of information. As consumers demand increased interaction with marketers and two-way conversations, many have predicted that paid advertising will become irrelevant . However, no other form of advertising offers the immediacy and scale that paid advertising offers. Thus, the role of paid advertising may shift from a single, transaction focused activity to one that drives further engagement and communication with target consumers. Given this, marketers can optimize search results to drive consumers who are actively seeking ways to interact with a brand to social communities and blogs that encourage consumers to engage for more information.
Owned Content
Although it has never been easier for consumers to access company content and receive marketing messages, the competition for consumer attention and consideration is fiercer now than ever before. This is primarily due to digital marketing lowering the barriers of entry for companies to advertise and launch new products. Given that consumers are inundated with information, content and creative executions have become very critical to gain consumer attentention. Content is increasingly just one component of a fragmented and interactive landscape, where content and word-of-mouth are dependant on each other . Ultimately, in today’s landscape, owned content should be designed to engage directly with consumers and create a holistic, simple brand message to serve as an anchor across that all media types (traditional and digital) . Owned content is disseminated across various vehicles that the company/brand maintains and controls. Owned content is generally created by the brand to reach a specific target consumer group. It is generally what search engines would index, thus should be optimized to ensure visibility and relevance in search queries. Owned content spans many platforms including product/brand websites, placed marketing messages, e-commerce stores, information shared in other forums (such as blogs), SNS product pages (a product’s Facebook page where consumers can become ‘fans’), etc. Additionally, owned content also is what appears in traditional marketing platforms, such as TV, print, and radio. These traditional platforms are exported by consumers to the digital space (often when they are buzz worthy).
The power of owned content rests with the development of a holistic message, which builds brand awareness across all media types that is relevant to your target consumer. Additionally, owned content should be poised to build long-term relationships with consumers. How have successful companies created appropriate content? To create relevant content, first establish who you are targeting and what you would like to convey to them. The message should be simple, that will transcend many advertising campaign iterations (timeless) and be applicable to various platforms (adaptable to both digital and traditional marketing vehicles). This simple idea should drive the marketing strategy, including the tactics employed in the digital space. The various marketing platforms need to utilize the same look, tone, and feel. All media forms should utilize this idea to create cohesion between platforms, thus increasing retention of the message in consumers’ minds. Ultimately, the goal should be to create content that is simple and sticks.
An example of cohesive owned content that is simple and sticks in consumer minds is GE’s “Imagination at Work, HBO’s “It’s not TV, its HBO”, and Burger King’s “Have it your way” campaign. To delve into how simple brand promise can be effectively translated into messages, Burger King serves as a good example. This simple brand promise of consumers controlling their experience allowed Burger King to set itself apart from competitors. The campaign, originally conceived in 1974, was rejuvenated in 2004 when Burger King launched a new chicken sandwich that met a developing need of its core consumers. This idea of individuality played well in the digital marketing space where consumers interact with brands and control their online experience. Burger King targeted their “super fans”, 18-34 year old males, who were busy and often ate meals outside of their homes. These consumers also spent a lot of time on the Internet and used it as a virtual playground. Based on these consumer insights, combined with the Burger King brand promise of “have it your way”, the company launched “The subservient chicken” campaign that became an instant hit. The campaign portrayed the new sandwich as the “your way” solution for the emerging desires regarding chicken sandwiches. Burger King also utilized an interactive website that had an individual impersonating a chicken. This impersonator would react to user commands to act out wild and weird things – headstands, singing, reciting Shakespeare, playing golf, moon-walking like Michael Jackson, etc. If asked to do something offensive, the impersonator would walk towards the camera and admonish the user. In the end what made this campaign so successful was that it spoke to the brand promise of “have it (chicken) your way” and leveraged consumer insights to ensure the initiative was relevant to the target audience. The campaign’s owned content was a success with audiences, spurring viewers to pass along links through YouTube and SNS sites, creating significant earned/buzz media. Burger King saw a 32% increase in stock price, as well as an increase in store year-over-year sales, during the period the campaign was executed.
Communication
For those consumers older than 25, remember all those direct mailers that would advertise products or services? Promotional offers, especially credit card offers, seemed to arrive daily. With digital marketing, brands are able to send direct offers to interested consumers through email, mobile, chat, etc. Marketers can send tailored messaging that incents consumers to interact with a brand, educates consumers on promotions, and influences consumers at point of sale. Generally more of a push method of marketing, direct communication offers marketers a method to drive “calls to action” by consumers. This type of consumer engagement allows marketers to reach consumers when they are not specifically searching for information. These tools can be used to re-introduce products or brands into the consumer minds, eventually leading to greater recall and inclusion in initial consideration set when consumers are thinking about related products/brands.
Earned/Buzz Media
As Marc Pritchard said, digital marketing allows brands to connect on a personnel level with consumers. It is this personnel connection that drives earned media. Earned media includes any organic, viral, or natural promotion of a brand’s content without direct influence by the brand. In the digital marketing space, earned media has exponential grown in ability to influence consumer decisions making. What your consumers say will influence brand awareness, market shares, and overall sales performance. However, it is worthwhile to note that earned media is a direct reflection of a brand/product’s actions within the paid media space. Specifically, earned media is gained both by digital efforts, as well as any other type of marketing activity that drives awareness of a brand (i.e. Retail store displays and promotions).
The frightening part to marketers of earned media is that there is limited to no ability for them to control what consumers choose to share. This fear is compounded when trends in consumer behavior indicate that earned/buzz media carries more weight and credibility than paid media. This is in part due to perceptions of impartiality since the content is produced by third party sources. Although Earned/Buzz media can be intimidating for brand teams, there is significant opportunity to marketers to observe and engage in these conversations. Brands are able to participate in conversations, but not control them. To gain consumer trust, brands must be transparent in their participation (ie. disclose that comments and participation are on behalf of the brand) and let conversations remain authentic.
Word-of-Mouth (WOM)
"Instead of marketing at customers, our job in the digital age is to get customers working with us and for us. And you do that by working with them and for them. This is where the new marketing energy and breakthrough results are to be found." ~ Mark Beeching, Digitas - Chief Creataive Officer
Today, it seems everyone has some social networking platform they consistently use. Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and emerging sites like FourSquare allow consumers to connect with one and another easily through common interests and needs. Today, 68% of consumers are more likely to believe other consumers than to believe traditional media sources , demonstrating how critical it is for brands to fulfill their promise.
Consumers have always been powerful marketers. Previously, word of mouth conversations would occur across the back yard fence amongst neighbors, or among family and friends at gatherings. Now, digital tools available to consumers have evolved WOM from limited conversations with immediate, personal networks into many “Virtual Conversations” with multiple digital networks, where whispers can turn into a verbal tsunami . Consequently, WOM conversations in the digital space reach much larger audiences and have significantly more amplified voices .
Consumer-to-consumer conversations are occurring across various SNS, blogs, and message boards, to name a few. With 82% of US online adults utilizing SNS, social marketing is one of the key tools for marketers to monitor WOM conversations. WOM can instantly make a brand a success and just as quickly cause a brand to crash. As a result, brands must be able to ensure that consumer expectations of products, customer service, advertising claims, and even sales/store personnel are always met . Consequently, there is limited room for brands to not deliver on promises. Thus, it is important for brands to have a formal process to monitor online conversations regarding the brand. By gathering both the good and the negative consumer perception and experience information, brands can address rumors, identify product development opportunities, and evolve from good to great brands. In order to do this successfully, brands must actively listen to consumers, assess the situation, and deliver on any expectations or promise made during conversations. Given how ferociously guarded consumers are about their social forums and WOM tools , marketers should again be transparent and indicate that they represent the brand in all communications.
Although WOM marketing is not controlled by marketers/brands, it represents another significant opportunity for savvy marketers. Through monitoring online conversations, brands can identify advocates among consumers. These advocates, also referred to as brand evangelists or mavens, are those online community members that are perceived by consumers as knowledgeable and have authority for your category and product. Given the perception that advocates and other WOM agents do not have ulterior motives, consumers are willing to listen to their perspectives. By engaging these individuals in conversation, these brand ambassadors will be equipped with information by which to influence other consumers’ choices .
An example of effectively utilized WOM and influential bloggers as advocates was in Toyota Prius’s launch strategy. Prius had developed an active user community, where new or prospective users were mentored by current Prius owners and brand advocates. These advocates frequently educated users on current cars in the market, provided reviews of the Prius, and discussed desired product improvements for new models. When Prius was beginning to consider how to launch the new model, they hired MotiveQuest (a Chicago based company that monitors various social media platforms and digital conversations to gain consumer insights) to identify consumer insights. MotiveQuest identified that consumers and brand advocates were discussing product features that the new Prius would not provide. Prius agreed to engage their advocates, the most influential bloggers, by inviting them to experience the new Prius. These advocates were invited, in a top secret invitation, to the Detroit Auto Show, where they received VIP access to the new Prius Model before any other industry professionals or consumers. Additionally, Toyota’s chief engineer flew in from Japan to answer any questions about the product and decisions about development activity. Through this exclusive, full access event that brought together influential bloggers, Prius was able to communicate why the new model brought significant improvement for consumers and why current conversations about needs was not as immediately relevant. After their trip, the advocates returned and were able to freely blog about their experience. Soon, these advocates were informing consumers that the new Prius’s features were more important than the former consumer needs. This created excitement for the new Prius model and eliminated consumer perception barriers that had existed before the brand educated advocates.
By inviting consumers to interact with the brand and understand the product development decisions, Prius enabled advocates to blog, create Buzz and WOM recommendations for the new Prius model launch. Effectively, the brand utilized their strongest advocates to influence bloggers’ focus to support the new model, rather than discussing what the new model would not be offering. The strategy also leveraged key insights of the Prius community behavior and tapped key motivators of advocates (such as exclusive access to the car and chief engineer) for positive results.
User Generated Content
“It is imperative that a brand create quality content, but also nurture the source of content that will yield the most control over the brand – the customers!” - Rebecca Murtagh – Marketing Strategist
From blogs, to product reviews posted on Amazon.com, to YouTube videos Internet users generate an immense amount of content. User-generated content, also known as user-generated media or user-created content, are various digital tools where end-users control the creation and distribution of messages and media. These tools include digital videos, Podcasts, databases to answer questions, wiki’s, SNS, and blogs. These tools are used to publish information, ranging from the latest celebrity gossip/sighting, to news, product experiences, and research. User generated content exemplifies the two-way conversation that has emerged with the popularity of various digital tools and often uses collaboration and viewer reactions to increase credibility. These digital platforms, as well as advances in technology complements (digital cameras, music creation/ editing software, smart mobile phones etc) have created easy, user friendly ways for users to create content and share with online communities.
User generated content allows consumers to express opinions and share interests across various platforms, making it a powerful WOM tool. Although it is easy to understand a consumer’s benefits from user generated content, the benefit to the content producer is more ambiguous. Given the massive amount of content generated by users, there must be some benefit. Experts have speculated that motivation for creating content ranges from altruism, social, and materialistic desires. Many marketers, wanting to leverage the power of user generated content (which creates buzz and deepens consumer engagement), have started offering incentives to incent content producers to create relevant and quality content.
Incentives can be broadly categorized into two categories: Implicit and explicit . Implicit incentives are intangible benefits that a content creator would receive, such as social incentives that make the creator feel good. This incentive form could include increasing the number of relationships with other users (“I have over 1000 friends on Facebook!”), gaining credibility (other users rating and providing feedback to the content created), achieving exclusivity based on participation (bloggers being invited to interact in product development initiatives). Implicit incentives that motivate user engagement, leading to content creation, are ideal for brands because it costs very little to host and disburse viral content. However in order to gain the most impact, content creators must be part of a large, existing community.
Explicit incentives are more easily understood and includes those tangible benefits where the creator would receive some kind of financial payment, contest entry, coupons, frequent flyer miles sweepstakes, etc. in return for their user generated content. Although explicit incentives provides strong motivation to content creators, it also can create an environment where consumers see the created-content as part of the “paid media” category and no longer believes it is impartial. FritoLay has successfully utilized both implicit and explicit incentives to engage consumers to create innovative customer-created ad campaigns such as “Crash the Super Bowl”, “Fight for the Flavor”, and “The Quest” . In the “Crash the Super Bowl” initiative, Doritos engaged consumers to create advertisements for the Doritos brand which would be aired during the Super Bowl. When the initiative first launched, it offered consumers an opportunity to submit self made TV ads that would be broadcasted during the 2006 Super Bowl. Due to the success of this initiative, Doritos has continued the initiative.
For the 2010 Super Bowl, Doritos had over 4000 entries from prospective copy writers, art directors, directors and producers. From these contestants, Doritos chose 6 finalists and then solicited consumers/public to vote on their favorites (Doritos leveraged YouTube, Vimeo, and their own website to allow consumers to view the finalists’ ads and create buzz to drive further engagement). Content creators received not only implicit incentives (bragging rights associated with having their ad aired during prime, Super Bowl advertising time), but also they had the opportunity to receive financial incentives based on how well their ad performed on the USA Today Ad Meter. For the ad that secured the #1 spot, the creator would receive $1 million. For the ad that secured the #2 spot, the creator would receive $600,000. And finally, for the ad that secured the #3 spot, the creator would receive $400,000. The largest payout for content creators would come if all three ads swept the top 3 Ad Meter positions, earning each creator an additional $1 Million. Given these explicit incentives, Doritos could have paid up to $5 million for the user-generated content . Doritos successfully leveraged its consumers to create relevant content by offering incentives that were integrated with online community preferences/consumer insights and marketing objectives.
Summary of Digital Marketing Tools and Benefits
In a research study published by Forrester, the following table was created to outline the three main types of media, the role they play in a marketing plan, and the benefits and challenges associated with each. In this table, owned media is broken out as a separate media type, but is still a media that is controlled and funded by a brand or company. A paid media offer brands the ability to target and reach specific consumers through paid advertising, direct communication, or information sites designed to build long term relationships. Earned media is conversations and information sharing that occurs between consumers, predominantly taking the form of word-of-mouth recommendations. Although both paid and earned media offer various benefits to reaching consumers, neither is capable of standing alone. Rather, both working in tandem create the optimal mix to influence the consumer decision making process.
Figure 3: Definition of each media type and their roles in Digital Marketing
Changing Landscape of Consumer Decision Making Process
Digital marketing presents various strategic benefits and tools to the marketing world. But these same benefits and tools have also heightened the role of the consumer in the marketing process. In the digital era, consumers can utilize the Internet and other digital tools to become aware of new products, search for information, compare prices, buy products and services, and seek after sales customer service .
Prior to digital tools, marketers relied on television, print, and radio advertisements, as well as in store promotions, to influence consumer decisions at points in time when they are the most receptive to influencing messages. These tactics of marketing were one-way communications, pushed to the consumer, which relied on influencing decisions at two distinct points in the purchase process: information gathering and at the point of purchase (at shelf). In a McKinsey Quarterly article, “the funnel” is a metaphor used to describe the linear consumer decision process that these marketing tactics utilized to identify points of influence. In the funnel analogy, consumers start with awareness of many brands available. They then receive marketing messages and limited WOM recommendations that allow them to reduce the consideration set until ultimately choosing to purchase a specific product. It is in this final moment that additional marketing tactics, in the form of in-store promotions, are deployed to influence the consumer towards a specific brand. This linear model gives marketers clear focus on the product/brands challenges by demonstrating a brand’s performance against competitors during each phase and demonstrating at what phase the consumer made a decision about the brand.
Figure 4: The Traditional Consumer Decision Funnel
However, today the consumer decision journey has morphed into a non-linear decision process that involves multiple information touch points, various influencers, and strong WOM and feedback culture. The journey now places consumers in the marketing driver’s seat that relies on a circular foundation, which involves four key phases that puts the consumer in the driver’s seat: Initial consideration set, active evaluation, moment of purchase, and post-purchase experience. Each phase provides marketers with an opportunity to interact with consumers to influence purchase decisions, build brand loyalty, and engage in two-way conversations.
Figure 5: The Consumer Decision Journey
Consideration Set and Active Evaluation
Unlike in the linear model, consumers are seeking, pulling, information into their decision making process, rather than relying on messages that are pushed by a brand. McKinsey found that two-thirds of the touch points during the consideration set evaluation involved consumer driven marketing activities. These touch points ranged from online product reviews, word-of-mouth recommendations from social networks, in-store interactions, and prior experiences with the brand. Although these influence channels existed prior to digital marketing, their significance has grown exponentially as consumers are able to gain information quickly and with significant amount of depth/comparison ability.
The circular decision journey also allows for consumers to constantly re-evaluate earlier decisions. Consider a consumer’s car buying process. Initially, consumers begin evaluating options with a specific set of models in mind. However, as they research, they expand their consideration set, thus increasing from approximately 4 to 6 cars under consideration. So, where the linear model focused on reducing brand/product choices, the circular journey allows consumer’s consideration set to fluctuate during the evaluation process. This translates into an opportunity for savvy marketers to gain consumer consideration (as well as potentially eliminate competitors from the set) with appropriate, relevant information.
As consumers move through the circular decision process, company-driven marketing decreases in influence and WOM/former user experiences with a product increase in influence (see Figure 6 below). Although concerning for marketers, who’s prime goal is to maximize reach and influence in the consumer decision process, this shift presents opportunities to leverage the 2-way conversation culture to influence consumers in alternate ways. As mentioned before, marketers can engage consumers in conversations through blogs, product sponsored user communities, and other forums where consumers seek information. Additionally, by observing what information consumers are seeking to make their decision, marketers can tailor paid media content so that it is relevant throughout the circular decision making process.
Figure 6: Where it Counts - Most Influential Touch Points
Moment of Purchase and Post-Purchase Experience Throughout the circular decision making process, consumers are bombarded with information from a variety of sources. Consequently, their actual decision is made at the point of purchase. This allows marketers an opportunity to influence a consumer at the point of purchase with promotions or purchase incentives. This tactic is most effective when the brand is already included in the consumers consideration set. In their article The Consumer Decision Journey, McKinsey found that brands in the initial consideration set are up to three times more likely to be purchased than those brands that are not in the consideration set.
Given the circular nature of the consumer decision making process, monitoring WOM and other digital conversations is essential to ensure the brand promise is being met throughout the consumer experiences, as well as protect brand equity. The strong and influential nature of feedback, through various digital tools, offers brands opportunities to provide timely, proactive post-purchase service that can position a brand more favorably in the consumers consideration set during future decision journeys.
As the Internet gains further in-home penetration and dependency, consumers will continue to evolve their decision making process, spurring two-way conversation between the consumer and brands. This new decision journey process challenges marketers to be consistent and relevant to their target consumer across all media channels. Additionally, marketers need build brand awareness to break through the proliferation of media and products to gain initial consideration. Finally, marketers must establish systematic ways and methods for managing consumer demands and word-of-mouth.
Proposed Framework for Evaluating and Creating Digital Marketing Strategies
As a media agency expert stated, “Digital marketing is like Teen sex… everyone wants to do it, but no one knows how.” Although this paper by no means claims to be the end-all guide to how to effectively use digital marketing tools, it proposes a framework of how to approach the creation of marketing strategies that incorporates the new consumer dynamics attributable to digital tools.
Given the circular decision making process and the prominence of consumers in the marketing experience (desire for two-conversation and authenticity), developing a consumer based strategy for marketing is essential. Although this concept of the consumer at the center of a marketing plan is not divergent from current marketing practices, digital marketing requires that marketers gain deeper understanding of actual consumer behavior to develop engagement strategies that foster a two-way relationship, remain relevant during consumer ‘pull’ marketing activities, and engage consumers to collaborate and co-create the product experience. By creating a strategy that enables these three components, marketers will be able to identify brand advocates, gain insights for product development, and proactively participate in WOM conversations.
The proposed approach below has five key steps, each building on the previous step and with a feedback process that allows a brand to continuously improve marketing efforts. First, marketers should listen and observe consumer’s behavior to develop insights that go beyond product needs and delve into consumer lifestyles and how that subsequently shapes the way they interact with other consumers and products. Second, marketers should have clearly defined marketing objectives. Next, based on the gathered consumer insights and clear marketing objectives, marketers should determine which marketing methods are most effective for reaching the outlined goals. After understanding where to engage consumers, marketers should develop a relevant and simple brand promise that is timeless and applicable to various marketing vehicles. And finally, marketers should execute the message with relevant content and influential platforms. As the execution takes place, marketers should have systematic methods for monitoring impact, approving adjustments, and measuring effectiveness of marketing initiatives.
Figure 7: Below is a summary of the proposed approach for creating a digital marketing strategy
Step 1: Consumer Insights Critical First Step in Developing Digital Marketing Strategies
The basic tenant of brand management for companies like Procter & Gamble is that everything begins with the consumer. With the advent of digital marketing, understanding your consumer has exponentially grown in importance. Digital marketing heightens the need for understanding consumers’ behaviors and needs at a more microscopic level. By gaining deeper insights, not only can marketing plans be developed that have a simple brand message across all media vehicles, but also the message will be more relevant and influential. Ultimately, building internal intelligence regarding the consumer is essential to gain insights that highlight opportunities to increase relevance to and deepen relationships with consumers. In the digital media landscape, consumers want personal connections and relationships with brands. In a world where consumers listen at a gut level, brands need deep consumer insights to connect to that level .
Historically, most organizations would target consumers through print, radio, and television advertising based on aggregate demographics of audience. As mentioned before, consumers are constantly bombarded with messages and increasingly are multi-tasking, thus causing them to be fragmented across vehicles and easily distracted. In order to gain a consumer attention, brands are battling against other vehicles that demand attention, such as watching TV, surfing the Internet, and talking on their mobile phone simultaneously. In order to capture consumer attention, brands must convey relevance to consumers’ needs, as well as reach them when they are most receptive to messages/influence.
Figure 8: Overall online pursuits by generation in 2009
Based on consumer segment demographic and psychographic trends, there are different tools marketers would utilize to effectively engage consumers. Users engage with various platforms based on age, interests, needs, and activities. Consumer engagement spans from transactional (online purchases or coupon downloads) to social networking. Often consumer online, Internet behavior is correlated to the generation a user is classified within. Currently, teens utilize the Internet for SNS and entertainment activities. Compared this behavior to their parents, who are using the Internet for information gathering and online shopping, there is significant difference in how to target these consumers. Where teens would react well to buzz and conversations in forums such as Facebook or YouTube, their parents would find marketing messages more relevant when they are placed on websites where they are already searching for information or as suggestions during an online purchase decisions. By understanding how their target consumer utilizes the Internet, and digital media tools, marketers have the ability to place content on platforms and sites where consumers are most open to influence.
Marketers should be able to answer simple questions regarding their consumers. Where do they spend their time online? How much time are they spending online? What is their frame of mind when they are in the digital space? Are they interacting with digital media at home or work? Are they multi-tasking while receiving marketing messages, or are they specifically seeking information regarding products in their consideration set? How do they build their consideration set? How do the access the various digital tools, Internet/mobile/etc.? Are they predominantly spending their time blogging, utilizing SNS sites, searching for information? Do they use Google or Bing, and how does that translate into consumer preferences?
Ultimately, marketers should understand who, how, when, and frequency of consumers interaction with various digital tools. Additionally, insights should be gained regarding how that consumer is influenced (WOM, product communities, SNS, product reviews, etc). These insights will allow marketers to “be” where their target consumers “are” interacting. Below is a pyramid that outlines how consumers interacted in 2009 with various digital tools based on generation.
Figure 9: PEW Internet Project - Generations Online in 2009
Marketers can utilize this type of information to begin mining information about their target consumers. In their March 2010 Quarterly, McKinsey published an article that discussed how to derive more value from digital marketing. One of the key recommendations revolved around this concept of deeper consumer insights. Marketers must be able to explain what consumer’s are doing by analyzing their online behavior. Marketers must also interpret what consumers are saying online by monitoring discussions and soliciting feedback. By doing these two things effectively, marketers are better positioned to create that personalized experience that consumers crave in the digital space and that allows brand advocates to be born .
Figure 10: The Right Mix, McKinsey's method for gaining Consumer Insights
Gaining consumer insights requires marketers to listen to consumers conversations and observe their behaviors to ensure the brand message is relevant and placed where consumers are searching for information or receptive to messages. Marketers should focus on creating two-way conversations and deeper relationship with consumers to understand how consumer lifestyles and product use influences purchase decisions and brand perceptions. This enhanced transparency between marketers and consumers requires that brands to leverage consumer insights to remain involved with consumers and actively seek means to create brand advocates.
Step 2: Clearly Define the Objective & Goals of the Marketing Campaign
The appeal of digital marketing is alluring for any type of marketing campaign. After all, there is no other vehicle that can reach massive number of consumers and still remain relatively cost efficient. Companies utilize digital marketing for a variety of campaign objectives. In a survey conducted by McKinsey in 2007, 410 business executives shared how their companies marketing objectives and goals influenced the digital marketing tools employed. In this survey, respondents highlighted the use of many paid media communication tools and search as a method to incent direct response. If the marketing objective was to build brand awareness, companies relied more on banner ads, search, branded sponsorship, and rich media advertising to engage the consumer.
Figure 11: McKinsey Quarterly, 2007 Survey of business executives, revealed that the digital tools employed by marketers differ based on marketing objectives
To harness the true power of digital marketing tools, marketers must have clear business objectives for the marketing campaign to be designed around. This business objective can range from increasing the number of transactions (online sales) to non-transaction purposes, which include brand awareness, product launch, drive increase in trial and purchase intent, customer retention and loyalty, enhance customer service, or even simply reduce costs of marketing initiatives. Each of these campaign objectives, when combined with consumer insights, will present different options for how to develop an effective marketing campaign execution.
Case Study: Importance of clear Business Objectives Quaker – “Go Humans Go” Campaign – Building Brand Equity Cohesion In 2009, PepsiCo’s Quaker’s portfolio of brands was faced with various business challenges. Over the previous two years, Quaker’s brands’ marketing initiatives had focused on increasing penetration across US homes. However, each brand’s marketing initiatives were executed in isolation from other brands within the portfolio. Quaker decided to focus on bringing all brands together under the same equity umbrella. Additionally, the campaign focused on reaching a wide audience of “Balance Seeker” consumers – individuals who was interested in healthy and convenient food options.
In 2009, Quaker launched its “Go Humans Go” campaign. The objective of the campaign was to drive business results by building the Quaker megabrand. The campaign shifted away from historically fragmented campaigns (one off initiatives by individual Quaker brands) that focused on driving trial, providing coupons to consumers, and/or increasing brand reach. In the “Go Humans Go” campaign, Quaker focused on building the Quaker brand equity across the entire Quaker portfolio to spur cross-category penetration. At a more tactical level, Quaker wanted to elevate the ‘oat’ in consumers’ minds, increase the overall awareness of Quaker’s portfolio, engage consumers, and establish Quaker as a nutritional leader. They wanted to achieve this through bold and unexpected media that established dialogue with consumers and was ubiquitous.
To achieve this business objective, the campaign leveraged several digital tools to create a cohesive digital campaign. Quaker invested a significant media budget amount for a Rich-media take over Yahoo’s home page, creating digital out-of-home experiences (Times Square billboards), building interactive online communities, and engaged influential bloggers. Quaker engaged influential bloggers by inviting them to participate in a one day seminar that educated them on Quaker products’ benefits and exposed them to various Health & Wellness speakers.
Quaker measured the campaign based on the following 3 metrics: double digit sales growth, share growth, increased perceptions of Quaker as a leader in nutrition.
Results: “Go Humans Go” was a very successful campaign With over 143 million impressions, the rich-media take over of Yahoo’s home page (which occurred over the course of two ½ day time slots) outperformed all of Yahoo’s benchmarks by 2-fold, resulting in click thru rates and impressions in excess of any previous Yahoo take over initiatives and CPG benchmarks (120%). Quakers’ click thru rates were .29%, which was 4 times greater than the industry average.
Search click thru rates were 1.26%, exceeding the industry benchmark for search (.07%). Additionally, by incorporating Spanish search terms, Quaker exceeded CPG benchmark of 1.28%.
Mom Power communities drove movement in awareness and message association, as well as purchase intent. Within 3 months of the campaign launch, Quaker had increased membership in online product communities by 12%. Additionally Quaker saw the brand being incorporated in earned media forums, with 20% of CaféMom threads relating to Quaker.
Lessons Learned: Although the “Go Humans Go” campaign successfully increased awareness of Quaker’s portfolio of products and brought Quaker to the forefront of consumers’ minds, it did not solve individual product’s business problems. Future initiatives should focus on driving business results, such as sales and share growth .
Digital media offers many opportunities for brands to interact with consumers and increase brand awareness. However, without a clear business objective to shape digital strategies, execution could result in brand awareness, but not in business objectives being met.
Step 3: Establish Appropriate Vehicles for Consumer Engagement
In marketing, the “right message” in the “right location” is critical for reaching consumers when they are most receptive to messaging. This is compounded in the digital space . By combining consumer insights and marketing objectives, marketers will have a deep understanding of how to reach and engage consumers to achieve business goals. Appropriate placement of advertisements and engage consumers in conversation should be determined based on consumer insights. These insights will help determine where the target consumer is most receptive to marketing messages that meet the business objective. In this phase, marketers should assess all tools at their disposal, not just digital tools. In this phase, marketers should have a clear understanding of their budget and determine how allocation across all media vehicles will deliver the largest return on marketing dollars. The return will be directly correlated to how well the brand leverages both traditional and digital marketing vehicles to meet consumer’s desired relevance and influential touch points.
Case Study: P&G - Cascade
P&G is known for its 20+ billion-dollar brands in product categories ranging from personal care, to beauty items, to commodities such as soap. In an environment where consumers’ do not actively cultivate relationships with commodity items (like soap) in digital space, they are indirectly still seeking engagement with these brands through their interest in topics like cooking, cleaning, and beauty tips. So, how can commodity brands reach consumers with relevant messages? By utilizing consumer behavior insights to strategically re-distribute banner ads, brands can increase ROI by double.
Procter & Gamble’s market leading dishwasher detergent brand Cascade reaped significant gains from combining consumer insights and business objectives to create a new strategic marketing plan. Cascade targets women, between the ages of 25 and 49, who are mothers, pet owners, private label users, and Home & Gardening consumers (to name a few characteristics). Initially Cascade would allocate a specific amount of the budget towards digital (a set amount that was unrelated to any specific campaign). Consequently, Cascade’s media agents would go and buy various digital media tools to utilize the allocated budget, without really tying the media buys to specific marketing or business objectives. Additionally, these digital media buys reflected the same strategy used for traditional media buys where demographic and self-reported consumer behavior determined placement. These preliminary insights were provided by Yahoo and Neilson panel data, which combined to provide methods to maximize reach (number of impressions) and relied mostly on static technology platforms (non-rich media).
Cascade brought on a Digital Brand Manager to develop a holistic approach for the brand’s digital marketing plans. Soon, Cascade’s approach to digital marketing began by evaluating the objective and consumer receptivity/preferences together to determine what the appropriate mix of media (includes both digital and traditional media vehicles) were to meet business objective. Cascade learned that their target consumers spent the majority of their online time in Home & Living genre of websites. They also identified that Flash technology was more engaging than their original, simple banner ads. Based on these consumer insights, Cascade altered their strategy by forming partnerships with websites their consumers found relevant and created more targeted placement of display ads. Simply put, the focused on optimizing their media mix online. This optimization shifted resources so that 33-50% was spent in high volume sites (portals like Yahoo.com) and another 50-67% was spent in niche sites (those in the Home & Living genre). This change in placement, based on observed consumer behavior, resulted in an ROI increase from the generic placement ROI of $1.90 to a targeted placement based on consumer preferences ROI of $2.87 .
Although consumers may not directly engage in discussion about toilet paper and dishwashing soap, they may discuss these low-consideration brands during other online conversations . These inadvertent discussions of low-consideration brands provide marketers with an opportunity to increase relevance. By listening to what consumers really want in terms of engagement, matching users’ interests with content and context that exemplify the brand’s values, utilizing consumer media mix and usage patterns, extending the digital conversations into traditional media vehicles, and staying committed to the two-way relationship, low-consideration brands can benefit from these opportunities and create an integrated marketing campaign .
Step 4: Create a Simple and Relevant Brand Promise
It is imperative that marketers design campaigns that are flexible, scalable, and sustainable in the digital world based on functionality and points of differentiation (driven by consumer insights) . In order to effectively engage with today’s empowered consumers, marketers must understand how to craft relevant content that would appeal to consumers. As previously discussed, simple brand promises that are timeless and deeply relevant reinforces to consumers how the brand is meaningful. This simple brand promise should be a result of careful observation of consumer behavior and expressed desires. The brand promise should characterize the brand and be incorporated in all media vehicles. Incorporating the brand promise in all content (both traditional and digital vehicles), which enables a consistent look, tone and feel to the brand image, is essential to break through the clutter of marketing messages that consumers are wrestling with on a constant basis. If the brand promise is not carefully crafted, then the digital community, with its WOM and user-generated content, will define the brand .
Owned-content should be tailored to incorporate consumer insights (which indicate what is relevant and influential to consumers), clear business objectives (determines what features content should include – “call to action” statements for transaction objectives or “engagement” features to build relationships), and what vehicle the marketing materials will be delivered through (where is the consumer most receptive to influence – teens receptive to brand awareness building through Facebook sites’ buzz marketing vs. their parents’ are receptive to awareness messages in blogs by impartial sources). This content should tie to the brand’s promise to consumers, and be streamlined across platforms to maximize the return on created content.
Figure 12: Disciplined Content Supply Chain from McKinsey
The content must be relevant and simple, easily speaking to consumer needs and desires. Essentially, marketers should ensure that their brand stands for something that is genuinely different and that the point of difference is relevant to the consumers it is targeting . And then they must deliver on that promise. Increased access to information means that consumers are validating claims and reading reviews in real-time. This drives additional layers of scrutiny regarding what a brand considers part their equity/promise, as well as how that influences the emotional connection a brand pursues with consumers. For example, iPod could have gone to market with a brand message that emphasized functional superiority. However, this would have limited its ‘shelf life’ appeal (i.e. another product enters the market that imitates it or is equal, likely scenario given the pace of technology and advancement). Apple chose to use “cool” images (white ear buds, dancing silhouettes, subway jam sessions, jogging). This allowed it to sustain its brand difference and expand product line, stimulating ongoing demand, while still utilizing the same simple brand promise it originally launched with .
Case Study: Johnson & Johnson’s “Having a baby changes everything”
J&J’s simple, yet evocative statement “Having a baby changes everything” is a simple concept that no parent would disagree with. In this one statement, J&J effectively tapped into the consumer insight that new parents experience significant life changes after having a baby. J&J knew they were in unique position to align under this simple concept because of their legacy of being centrally associated with mothers and babies, and the overall company brand image of ‘caring’. This phrase captured the values of the brand, building a bridge between the emotional aspects of motherhood and the functional nature of J&J’s baby products.
J&J’s ruthless focus on easing the lives of new mothers led to the creation of two sponsored websites: BabyCenter.com and Baby.com. The latter is the company’s branded website that provides information about J&J’s baby products. However, BabyCenter.com has remained completely unbranded after J&J purchased it, thus retaining its image as a respected, independent source of baby related information. The site serves as a hub for all things baby that a new mother would need. They engage consumers to utilize the site as a community where mothers feel comfortable sharing information with other new mothers and with J&J. The lack of branding on the website creates an atmosphere that conveys a commitment by J&J to easing a new mother’s life, rather than having a commercial purpose. Advertisers, including J&J and competitors within the baby care category, purchase advertising space on BabyCenter.com. With 70% of new moms visiting the site, who are also aware that it is a sponsored community, J&J is able to live up to its brand promise of understanding that “having a baby changes everything”.
Overall, J&J company brand stands for caring of consumers above commercial profits. Thus, J&J’s baby category maintained this company brand through creating transparent, authentic consumer experiences that stressed concern for consumers’ lives. Even Baby.com does not overtly sell products. Rather it discusses how to use J&J baby products and the benefits the products deliver to both baby and mother. Both Baby.com and BabyCenter.com align to the overall brand image of J&J, thus enabling the baby product brands to leverage the simple idea that “Having a baby changes everything”.
Step 5: Execute, Monitor, and Adjust - Constantly Measure
Execute, Monitor, and Adjust
Now that the observation of the ‘who’ uncovered key consumer insights, which allowed the established business objective to be translated into tailored placement or utilization of media tools, which then lead to the creation of appropriate content united under a brand’s simple promise, marketers are positioned to execute their strategic marketing plan. As the marketing messages are published and consumers engaged in discussion, marketers should proactively monitor reactions to the content. Depending on reactions, marketers will have the ability to adjust messages so that they are more relevant and influential to consumers. Also, brands engaging in conversations have the ability to react to opinions and product experiences. In order to be effective, marketers must have a systematic approach for monitoring WOM and other earned media platforms.
Measure campaign success
“Lately, marketers have become less interest in the number of eyeballs that see a screen or hands that touch a page and more interested in the behavior of the owners of those hands and eyes, and how the ad message connects with them” ~ David Verklin, CEO of Carat Americas
From a high level, the traditional measures of audience exposure to a marketing message, also referred to as reach, is much less compelling in today’s fragmented, high volume media environment . Digital tools offer marketers the ability measure audience reactions to brand created messages, considered relevant and contextual, and product information targeted at specific consumer groups. Consumers’ actions throughout are recorded for marketers to track and analyze to further hone messages to increase influence and relevance of advertisements. However, as digital tools spur the wild west of marketing data analysis, it lacks the standardization that traditional media measurement tools have in place . Although lacking standardization, new measurement tools are essential for evaluating the success of marketing campaigns in the new two-way conversation landscape. Consumer engagement is an essential measure at a brand level. Engagement is defined as “the level of involvement, interaction, and influence an individual has with a brand over time.” The figure below outlines four components of engagement, what metrics to track, and how to track them. Each brand team should establish benchmarks prior to a campaign for these metrics, which then can be used to compare pre- and post-campaign consumer engagement levels.
Figure 13: The Four Components of Engagement
From an individual campaign level, marketers should track how their strategy performed against desired business objectives as outlined in Step 2. These objectives could include, but is not limited to, market share, sales/revenue growth, repeat purchases, click-thru rates, time spent viewing specific web sites or advertisements, earned media created, etc. By defining these business goals in Step 2, marketers have a clear benchmark (or goal) from which to evaluate a specific campaign’s effectiveness. As data is analyzed for business results, marketers should also leverage it as an opportunity to gain further insights into consumers’ observable behavior.
Conclusion
In today’s Internet and digital media savvy world, marketers are challenged to find innovative methods for remaining relevant and building engagement with consumers amidst the increased competition for consumer attention and plethora of new products being launched. Marketers can break through the clutter by listening and observing consumer behavior. This exercise will lead to the development of key insights that should be used to shape relevant content that is relevant for consumer’s needs and incorporates the brand’s simple, timeless promise. By understanding the consumer intimately and understanding what they find relevant and influential, marketers are able to create strategic plans that ensure the right message is placed in the right locations (which should be a mix of traditional and digital media tools). Additionally by utilizing the brand’s promise across all media platforms, marketers build consistency in consumers’ minds, which also allows messages to break through the deluge of marketing faced by consumers daily.
Once the marketing plan has been tailored to incorporate consumer insights and to interact with consumers where they naturally interact, marketers should constantly monitor WOM and other user-generated content to ensure that 1) the brand is delivering on its promise, 2) the messages are relevant and influential, and 3) engage with consumers to manage post-purchase experiences. Finally, marketers should measure the campaigns impact against the business objectives set forth initially. Ultimately, regardless of a campaign’s success or buzz worthiness, if business objectives are not met marketers need to address new consumer insights gained and adjust their strategy accordingly.
