Tag: Digital Marketing

We’ve all heard the saying, “jack of all trades, master of none.” This might be used to describe your neighborhood handyman who is often helping people out with various home improvement projects.

When you have a serious home renovation, however, you don’t call Bill from next door. You need specialists who can get the job done right. My wife and I recently had the pleasure of having our kitchen ripped apart and put back together over what turned into weeks on end. There were problems around every corner, like the duct work running up and down the middle of the wall we wanted removed. Each time we were faced with a challenge, we brought in a specialist to help us solve it. Our house became a popular hangout for HVAC, plumbing, flooring and electricity professionals.

Everyone understands that the plumber is not the person they want hooking up the electric or installing the countertops. These are all specialized skills that take years of practice and learning to understand and perfect. Specialists are important because they can find ways to solve complex problems. They can do this because they have a deep understanding of their area of expertise. Unfortunately for my wife and me, the HVAC specialist’s expertise meant our kitchen remodeling project would be on hold during his extended vacation.

As digital marketing continues to evolve, we find that there are many different areas in which individuals are gaining deep expertise.

At the heart of any digital marketing initiative is a company’s website. In order to create and maintain an effective site, there are different skillsets that need to be tapped. Designers and user-experience experts will make sure the site is visually appealing and easy to use. Programmers are needed to make sure that it functions correctly and consistently across various platforms and devices. IT professionals are needed to set-up hosting, maintain security and make you feel inferior. A really good one can do all three simultaneously.

Digital advertising introduces a whole different set of needed skills and expertise. At the core there needs to be an understanding of media planning and buying. Then, within each channel, there are several technical and functional challenges. Google advertising requires a combination of keyword research, bidding strategies, ad copy development, landing page best practices, and account structure know-how. Social media sites each have their own platforms buyers can use to set up and run advertisements. Display advertising and video ads are often purchased through ad technology platforms that allow programmatic buying. Programmatic buying is vastly complex. Many large agencies have created whole departments or subsidiaries containing programmers, buyers and data scientists in order to effectively target and engage prospects with advertising.

Content marketing has grown considerably over the past few years. The advent of Google and other (lesser) search engines has shifted the balance of power from the seller to the buyer. As a result, marketers are now developing content to draw potential customers to their web properties to engage with articles, videos, whitepapers, infographics and more. The marketer can drive leads and establish thought leadership, while the buyer is armed with the information they need to make an informed buying decision. This is a tricky area, because to be effective content needs to be good and easy to find. Achieving both is a challenge. Because of this, content marketing requires design, search engine optimization, research, copywriting and video editing skills, to name a few.

Once content has been developed and begins to capture leads, marketing automation campaigns can be developed to nurture prospects and effectively generate sales-qualified leads. The process of marketing automation can be extremely effective because it connects specific pieces of content with prospects who have shown an interest in related information. It’s also complex. Platforms such as HubSpot, Marketo and Pardot are powerful marketing automation tools that require months and years of training and practice to master.

The analytics that are generated from each of these digital marketing activities ties everything together and is yet another specialty within digital marketing. Transforming data into actionable insights requires data science and business intelligence skills, not to mention database management, data visualization and coding capabilities.

At Mason Digital, we’ve set up separate departments for development, advertising, content marketing and analytics. This allows us to staff our company to provide clients with deep knowledge and expertise in digital marketing, whether they just need a website or require an integrated digital marketing campaign. Whether your company is looking to accomplish your marketing objectives with internal staff or an outsourced firm, make sure that you’re tapping resources with deep expertise and not generalists with limited knowledge. Even if this requires tearing everything apart and rebuilding it, it might be worth it. Take it from me, our new kitchen is awesome!

Karl Heberger is chief strategy officer at Mason Digital, a full-service digital marketing firm. He can be reached at [email protected].

In recent years, the largest digital advertising companies have made a push to attract more small businesses. If you’re a business owner, you’ve probably received postcards in the mail with a $25 credit for Google advertising or been advised to “boost” your Facebook post to maximize performance. The adtech giants have made advertising on their sites and within their networks extremely accessible. Advertisers can set up and purchase advertising with self-serve platforms available for Google, Bing, Facebook, SnapChat, Twitter, LinkedIn and others.

These platforms have become powerful systems for advertising. From the Fortune 500 to the dry cleaners on Main Street, Google and Facebook give companies an opportunity to directly reach and engage current and prospective customers.

With this power comes an increasing level of sophistication. With every update, new features are added, furthering the complexity and the level of understanding needed to create optimal advertising programs. Google’s advertising platform is one of the most sophisticated systems ever developed. The real-time bidding mechanism has been expertly developed and refined over the past two decades.

Every time a search is performed on Google, there is an auction to determine which ads appear and where they appear on the search engine results page. Which advertisers will appear is first determined by factors involving the search query itself. What keywords were typed into the search box? Where is the person who is searching located? What type of device is she using? What time of day is it? What has she searched for and clicked on in the past?

After these and many other factors are determined, Google makes the ad space available to every advertiser interested in appearing for that search query. Which ads show up and where they show up are a result of two factors – the amount the advertiser is willing to pay for the click (the bid) and the quality score the advertiser has been given for that specific search query. These two numbers are multiplied together; the ads are placed in order of highest to lowest (with the eighth ad representing the cut-off for appearing on the first page).

Quality score is a number between 1 and 10 that is assigned to each keyword an advertiser chooses to bid on. This score is determined by analyzing three key factors – the quality of the ad copy, the quality of the landing page, and the historic click-through rate for that keyword. Advertisers who don’t understand how this bidding system works are susceptible to over-paying for clicks. Google will call out how much you need to bid to appear on the first page, but it doesn’t call out the role that quality score plays in this.

Facebook has a similar scoring system that determines how much an advertiser will pay for advertising. Ads with low scores are charged a premium or might not run at all. While the system is set up similarly, the way the quality score is calculated is completely different.

How quality scores are calculated and how they factor into the cost of advertising in these systems is just one example of the complexity involved. Both platforms have been evolving for years to increase the functionality and opportunities available to advertisers. With each update, another level of complexity is added to the system.

Even advertisers who are highly skilled and experienced setting up and running ad campaigns likely don’t have the ability to effectively analyze the data that these systems provide. Statistical analysis is a highly technical skill, and analyzing marketing data is a specialty within this skillset. The biggest problem is that there’s too much data. Advertisers who lack digital marketing experience and sophistication will often focus on metrics that aren’t important in achieving their marketing and business objectives. In a previous column, I examined the misguided practice of optimizing digital marketing campaigns based on click-through rate (CTR). Also, measuring metrics that matter (like conversion rate or cost per conversion) requires technical set-up that in many cases isn’t available “out of the box.”

While small businesses control a growing percentage of the dollars spent on digital advertising, the major adtech companies are doing their customers a disservice by promoting their self-serve options. I’ve had numerous conversations with new clients who have told me that they tried paid search or social media advertising and that it “didn’t work.” Not all digital advertising campaigns are created equal. Companies interested in taking full advantage of the opportunities to reach and engage prospective customers online should either commit to extensive training or work with a partner well versed in the strategy and technical know-how needed to be successful. Even with the $25 credit, trying to run your own free advertising could prove costly.

Karl Heberger is chief strategy officer at Mason Digital, a full-service digital marketing firm. He can be reached at [email protected].

We live in a world that is overcrowded and frankly cluttered with advertising and marketing messages. Yankelovich, a market research firm, has estimated that a person living in a modern U.S. city is exposed to over 5,000 advertising messages per day. A few of those exposures take place during the rare occurrence that someone looks up from their smartphone. Add in the conventional wisdom that the average attention span is declining and you’ll find that we, as marketers, have our work cut out for us.

Reaching the right person with your marketing message is still important, but that alone will not be effective. Our brains are wired to retain a limited amount of information. Thankfully, we no longer need to remember our friends’ phone numbers. That fact, coupled with the ability to Google state capitals, has freed up over 70 percent of my brain’s hard drive space.

Still, getting onto the short list of messages a person will remember can be difficult. To break through the clutter, marketers need to craft a message or story that’s provocative. By provocative, I mean it makes a person in the target audience stop and think. It shouldn’t be offensive, but it should elicit a reaction.

Think about some of the recent advertising campaigns that have stuck with you. A few years back, in the midst of a massive sales decline, Domino’s Pizza decided to reinvent themselves. I’d be willing to bet there were a few executives who weren’t on board with implementing a self-deprecating marketing strategy that admitted their product wasn’t very good. However, it was honest, it was different, it was provocative and it really resonated with consumers. After all, their pizza crust shared an unsettling number of characteristics with cardboard. Since the new campaign launched, Domino’s has opened hundreds of new locations and profits are soaring.

I’m personally impressed by Domino’s shift in messaging strategy because it was risky. Admitting their pizza was inferior could have fueled further backlash against the product if it hadn’t been executed so well. The risk here was calculated and important: If they had only said that they improved their pizza, it would have easily gone unnoticed.

Another example of a risky marketing campaign was launched by Dos Equis in 2006 when they introduced us to the most interesting man in the world. They were faced with declining beer sales coupled with low brand recognition. Rather than compete with bigger brands for a slice of the imported beer market, they chose to speak to another audience altogether. They targeted people who prefer cocktails to beer and positioned their product as a sophisticated cocktail alternative. Hence the catchphrase, “I don’t always drink beer, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis.”

Marketers can sometimes unwisely think that that the more people they target, the more success they will have. Dos Equis proved that success can be achieved by more narrowly defining the audience. According to the company, U.S. sales increased each year between 2006-2010 and it’s been estimated that sales increased 22 percent over a period when imported beer as a category fell 4 percent.

On the flip side, a recent initiative by Pepsi is using the opposite strategy. During the 2018 Super Bowl they unveiled their new campaign in which they declared that Pepsi is the soft drink for every generation. Talk about casting a wide net. It’s often said in marketing that when you try to speak to everyone, you speak to no one.

The only reason the Pepsi campaign stuck out to me is because I’m a marketing professional who was appalled that they spent millions of dollars to say that Pepsi is the drink for everyone ever. In my humble opinion it was even dumber than Mountain Dew’s puppy-monkey-baby spot from a previous Super Bowl. And that’s saying something.

Digital marketing provides the unique opportunity to test marketing communication strategies. Web pages can be changed instantly, and so can Google text ads. Facebook makes it easy to rotate different ad copy and images within the same campaign. Marketers should test provocative messaging to see if it cuts through the clutter and drives action.

This opportunity to test is a great counter to the detrimental practice of marketing by committee. The more people who are involved in the final decision, the less likely you are to create a truly risky and provocative marketing campaign. If you can’t get buy-in from key decision makers, you might be able to convince them to test. And if you can’t convince the powers that be to test provocative messaging, you might want to look for a marketing position at a different company.

Word of advice: I’d stay away from PepsiCo.

Karl Heberger is chief strategy officer at Mason Digital, a full-service digital marketing firm. He can be reached at [email protected].

Since its inception, digital advertising has been graded and evaluated by a metric known as click-through rate (CTR). This metric is calculated by the number of times your ad is clicked divided by the number of times your ad is seen.

Depending on the type of advertising you’re running online, CTRs can range anywhere from .05% to 10% or higher. It’s a pretty widespread. CTRs have more range than Adele—and because there are so many different rates in which users are clicking on ads, marketers often use CTRs to determine success. This is a mistake. Click-through rate is the wrong metric to use.

There are many different reasons that users click-on ads. If it’s a banner ad on a smartphone, the click might be a result of what is often referred to as a “fat finger.” This is a click that happens by mistake and is pervasive on small touchscreens. If the ad is in social media, the user might have been enticed by an image that they were drawn to. For paid search ads on Google, a user might click the link without knowing it’s an ad trying to sell them a product.

We’ve come a long way as an industry over the past 20-plus years. Digital marketers should no longer be concerned with whether someone clicks on their ad. What’s important is what the user does after they click. If 100% of the people who click on your ad leave your website after spending just a few seconds on a page, these clicks did not provide any value to your company. Seems obvious—and yet digital marketers are still evaluating performance using CTR as the key performance indicator.

While it’s tempting to associate a user clicking with their interest in your products or services, we’ve found that there’s often a negative correlation between CTR and conversion rate. Conversion rate is the percentage of users who take a specific action once they’ve landed on your website. This could be downloading a white paper, making a phone call, or purchasing a product. Really, it’s any action that converts to a sale or takes a step that could potentially lead to a sale.

It makes perfect sense. Optimizing for click-through rate is all about getting more people to click. Optimizing for conversion rate is all about getting the right people to the site, those most likely to act. These two concepts often work against each other. Unless the offer is something that appeals to most users, like a sweepstakes entry, only certain people will take the action a marketer is tracking as a conversion.

More than any other tactic, CTR is used as a success metric in paid search advertising (Google AdWords). This is misguided. When running paid advertising on search engines, advertisers only pay when someone clicks on their ad. Trying to get as many people to click as possible should not be the goal for this type of campaign. If anything, you want to qualify the people who click. Use ad copy that only entices people who are ready to take an action.

The best metrics to determine success are conversion rate and cost per conversion. The latter is all about return on investment (ROI). I’ve worked with ecommerce sites that have very small margins. If the average profit from a sale is $8, we need a cost per conversion that is at minimum less than $8, if not significantly less. Otherwise we’re effectively draining cash.

When calculating the cost per conversion, the click-through rate is not a factor. The more important metric is the cost per click (CPC). Because clicks on Google AdWords are sold in an auction-based bidding system, digital marketers have a lot of control over how much they will pay for clicks. Once a predictive conversion rate has been established, the maximum CPC can easily be calculated to provide only profitable conversions.

Granted, there are times when CTR is an important metric and one that should be analyzed. Maybe you’re testing different offers or different messages. Google AdWords can be an extremely effective platform for testing taglines and incentives. When you want to see what gets people to respond, CTR is a metric that can and should be used to learn what works best.

For digital marketers like myself, the beginning of time only goes back as far as the 1990s. In our world, the click-through rate metric has been around for all of eternity. While I think we should continue to measure it and understand it, let’s all agree that the days of using this metric to determine success are in the past. Digital marketing success metrics should tie directly to business success.

Karl Heberger is chief strategy officer at Mason Digital, a full-service digital marketing firm. He can be reached at [email protected].

It’s that time of year. The time when columnists decide they should predict the future. They write a list of things that will happen in the next year with very little evidence or rationale. In the title of the column they use phrases like “bold predictions” or “trends to watch” in order to hedge their bet. The articles are great for columnists because they don’t need to expand very much on any one topic. All they need is a trace amount of knowledge on each subject.

Why should I be any different than all of those other columnists who use their December columns to wax poetic on predictions that may or may not come true? Besides, it’s a tried-and-true technique that’s evident by the fact that you are reading this right now. So let’s do it!

Bold Prediction No. 1: More of the same.

Are we in an industry that is reaching maturity? The year of mobile has come and gone. The year of ad blocking is behind us. We’ve now entered into the duopoly era. According to eMarketer, Facebook and Google command over 77 percent of all digital advertising dollars. This will continue into the foreseeable future.

I was recently researching mobile app usage while developing an advertising strategy for one of my clients. The target audience is men and women between the ages of 25 and 34. According to comScore, a company that measures consumer behavior on internet connected devices, six of the top eight mobile apps used by this audience are owned by either Facebook or Google. Furthermore, YouTube (owned by Google) and Facebook are the top two apps for all smartphone users under the age of 55.

Both companies continue to have impressive growth as many other companies in the digital marketing industry are flat or seeing declines. There’s no reason to believe this will change any time soon.

Bold Prediction No. 2: The rise of Amazon in the advertising industry.

Amazon is very well known as the largest ecommerce company in the United States. They are also a major player in streaming media with Amazon Prime Video and cloud computing, storage and networking with Amazon Web Services (AWS). They are lesser known for Amazon Advertising Platform, their proprietary demand-side platform (DSP). This DSP can be used to place ads programmatically across the web, mobile, and video using purchase behavior data only available to Amazon.

Thanks to the Amazon Advertising Platform and the paid search placements that are sold on amazon.com, the company is expected to increase their total ad sales 48 percent in 2017 to $1.65 billion according to a recent report by eMarketer.

Bold Prediction No. 3: Better online to offline attribution.

Thanks to the use of smartphones, there are companies that are now able to track where people are physically in the world using information from cellular, Wi-Fi, Global Positioning System (GPS) networks, and Bluetooth. This allows marketers to track whether a user visits a physical store location after engaging with an online advertisement.

Our agency is currently tracking store visits using Google Adwords for a client that has over 1,100 retail locations. After a user clicks on one of our paid search ads, they are tracked for 30 days to determine whether they visited a store. This online to offline attribution allows us to determine the true return on investment (ROI) from advertising. It also has helped us understand how to maximize ROI for our client, shifting dollars to keywords and ads that are most likely to result in a visit to the store.

Google’s tracking system is so sophisticated it can even track someone who performed the search on their computer or tablet. There are over one million opt-in subscribers that help them double check the system and continue to make improvements to the accuracy over time.

Google is not the only company that is able to track online to offline behavior. Facebook is rolling out a similar product that will allow marketers to track the social networks’ users in the physical world after they are exposed to an advertisement.

In 2018 and beyond, more companies will roll out similar tracking systems. And Google is taking it one step farther. Back in May the company announced they will track how much money people spend in merchants’ bricks-and-mortar stores after interacting with an ad. Google has access to roughly 70 percent of U.S. credit and debit card transactions through partnerships with companies that track that data.

While I’m not normally a fan of predicting the future, these three predictions are almost certain to come true. Especially considering all of them are already happening. Oops, I guess I cheated.

Karl Heberger is chief strategy officer at Mason Digital, a full-service digital marketing firm. He can be reached at [email protected]

Procter and Gamble, a company whose brands include Crest, Tide, Pampers and more, has long been the largest advertiser in the world. According to Kantar Media, they spend about $10 billion on U.S. advertising each year. Needless to say, when P&G changes the types of advertising they purchase, people take notice.

Recently, P&G decided to significantly decrease their digital marketing budget. In July it was announced that between April and June they had cut $140 million in digital ad spend. That last sentence is likely to cause a lot of my colleagues in the industry to ruin their shirt collars. But wait, it gets worse.

Not only did they boldly reduce their spending on digital advertising, P&G found that there was very little impact on its business as a result. They made the move because they felt the money was being wasted and it appears they were proven correct.

This was potentially great news for TV networks who in recent years have watched millions of media dollars shift from 30-second commercials to a variety of digital ads. You might think that for someone like me, who makes his living in the digital marketing industry, learning of this would have me filling out applications to drive for both Uber and Lyft. Not a chance. To quote the great Alfred E. Neuman, “What, me worry?”

The fact is that they only cut one type of digital advertising—programmatic display—and I’m not surprised that they found it’s ineffective. Not all digital advertising is created equal. Programmatic display is a tactic our agency has been moving away from for some time.

First off, let’s define programmatic display advertising. A simplified definition is banner ads that are placed on web pages by computers. Specifically, ads are purchased using automated bidding on ad placement inventory in real time. When a user opens a web page, it takes less than a second to make that advertising inventory available to thousands of potential advertisers, sell it to the highest bidder, and then display the winner’s banner ad.

Programmatic advertising helps automate the decision-making process of media buying by targeting specific audiences and demographics. When used correctly, it can greatly reduce the amount of advertising that is shown to an audience the advertiser is not interested in reaching. This eliminates what marketing professionals often refer to as “waste.”

In the world of banner advertising, programmatic media buying has introduced marketers to a new type of waste. Robots. Just as the original “Terminator” movie predicted, it’s the 21st century and we’re battling robots. Granted, it’s not as dramatic or intense, but it’s definitely real.

According to an April eMarketer report, programmatic display spending will reach nearly $33 billion dollars in 2017. There’s a lot of money to be made in this business. Some people have figured out how to capitalize on the lack of transparency by running ads on pages that are being “viewed” by bot traffic. An internet bot, or web robot, is a software application that runs automated tasks on the Internet. For the most part bots serve very important purposes like indexing webpages for search engines. It’s important to note that they are not interested in world domination. Phew.

When bots are developed for malicious purposes, however, they can cause a great deal of harm. Not only can they load web pages and subsequently programmatic banner ads, they can even “click” on the ads. Because of this, the marketer is likely to increase the amount of fraudulent traffic they purchase, thinking that they’re reaching an audience that is responding to their advertising. This manipulation is effective. Some analysts have estimated that bot traffic is costing advertisers over $7 billion per year.

Even when ads do load for human beings, there are other issues that limit programmatic display’s effectiveness. Ads don’t always load properly, they appear on a page below the fold where they’re never viewed, or they appear on a page that is cluttered with other advertisements. The content that a person is viewing when an ad appears can also be an issue. P&G CFO Jon Moeller explained one of the other reasons for cutting their spending was that “ads were not being placed according to our standards.”

Programmatic display advertising involves multiple systems and thousands of publishers. Because of this, fraud is rampant. For our clients, we find that digital advertising is still extremely effective and reliable within closed networks such as Google AdWords, Facebook and YouTube.

Procter and Gamble is still spending billions of dollars in digital advertising despite the cut in programmatic display. They will continue to get smarter and refine their tactics, much like the robots did in the Terminator movie. Although I’m sure that’s just a coincidence.

Karl Heberger is chief strategy officer at Mason Digital, a full-service digital marketing firm. He can be reached at [email protected].