Monday
5 Strategies to Get Immediate Results
When a client screams, “I need it yesterday,” don’t panic. Here are some online programs you can execute to create buzz immediately and produce results in 24 hours.
By Underscore Marketing
One of the most wonderful things about online media is its flexibility in scheduling. That is, barring any technical glitches, an online campaign can be launched almost instantaneously and taken down just as quickly.
Good for us agency folks, who are frequently put in the position of having to achieve results literally overnight. One lasting effect of the dot-com boom was the accelerated timetables for almost every marketing-related activity: three-hour media plans, two-day communications strategies and all-nighters spent “tweaking” online creative to meet a publisher’s draconian ad specs. While there is much less of a sense of urgency in the sputtering economy of 2003, we still haven’t completely reverted back to spending entire summers planning for next year’s media spend. Sometimes, we still get requests for marketing programs that were needed yesterday, and we have to fulfill on them.
It would be a shame to have participated in the dot-com media frenzy of 1996 – 2000 without having picked up a few tactical nuggets that can result in a quick surge in brand awareness, online purchasing or product trial. Thankfully, we paid attention and made note of them, even as things were moving at such a frenzied pace. Read on, fair Spotlight reader, and we’ll show you some online programs you can execute to create buzz immediately.
Kicking Things Off with a Bang
In traditional media, it takes time for reach to cume across any given schedule. In other words, it takes time for the entire readership of a monthly magazine to get their issues in the mail or pick the magazine up at the newsstand and read it. It takes time before a billboard’s message reaches most of the people who might drive by it in a given month. Online, this effect is much less pronounced and it is possible to make a huge impact with highly trafficked sites by launching a home-page sponsorship or promotion.
The classic example is the Pepsi promotion featuring Britney Spears on the home page of Yahoo!. Visitors to the site during the promotion could “peel back” the corner of the page and interact with special content, including an exclusive Britney Spears MP3. The ad unit, called a “Back Page Corner Tear,” allowed anyone who visited Yahoo’s home page during the duration of the program to be drawn in by the content.
Not only do such promotions impact the audience of the sponsored site, but they create a huge PR splash as well. There is an expectation that home-page sponsorships don’t typically last more than a day or two, so a flurry of Britney fans (and other curiosity-seekers) were driven by “Hey, check this out!” e-mails, word of mouth, and other media outlets to interact with the promotion. While such promotions generally require a sizeable online spend, they can create a huge buzz within a short period of time, and they garner quite a bang for the buck if PR opportunities can be leveraged in accordance with the promotion.
Your Customers as Brand Advocates
When trying to make maximum and immediate impact, never forget the media assets you have at hand – especially that database of e-mail names. Often, the folks who sign up at your Website to receive information about your products are fans of your brand. When there’s no time to plan and execute a standard online media campaign, consider giving these fans the first look at your new product launch, new ad campaign, or whatever you’re attempting to communicate with urgency.
This will accomplish several things. First of all, it gives fans of your brand the opportunity to wear it as a badge. If they are first to receive information about goings-on at your company, it’s likely they’ll swell up with pride at the “insider” status you’ve granted them. It’s also likely they’ll want to show several of their friends that they’re an insider. Send them something that is easily passed along to others in their address book. A “Send to a Friend” button can not only generate additional exposure for your brand, but it can also garner additional names for your next marketing blitz, so be sure to make it easy for recipients of a promotional e-mail to propagate the message.
Sure, we would all like the magic formula for turning viral marketing campaigns into the next “Hamster Dance” or “All Your Base…” but no such formula exists. What is certain, however, is that the content within a viral e-mail must be compelling enough to stand on its own, lest the first group of exposed recipients consider it not worthy enough to send to the next.
Don’t Forget Paid Search
Any new campaign or promotion will prompt folks to seek you out. Be sure they’re able to find you easily. Paid search listings will help you do the job, and they have some great advantages over online banner campaigns and such.
First, they make immediate impact. Google’s AdWords product can get sponsored listings live almost immediately. Overture typically takes three to five days.
Secondly, creative is a snap, so no waiting for banner designers to whittle down a skyscraper to the size of an 88x31 button. Simply write some short copy and you’re ready to go.
Thirdly, paid listings are very targeted, so although you might not have time to execute a full-blown media plan, at least your paid listings campaign will show up only under keywords that are relevant to your product or service. People searching under those keywords will be treated to your message. This is probably the most rudimentary form of behavioral marketing available on the Web.
Launch in Waves
Remember earlier, when we talked about online media’s flexibility in scheduling? That can be a distinct advantage when your ads need to go up quickly. In print, if you miss a material closing date, you have to wait for the next issue. Thankfully, Web advertising tends to have great flexibility in this regard. Your first step after scheduling short-term media solutions is to find out how quickly sales reps and their traffic departments can get a campaign live after you send them creative.
Assuming you’re not launching with the latest rich media prototype, you’ll find that many media reps are willing to work with you and will accelerate the quality assurance phase for new creative, expedite contract and rate approvals, stay late to upload tags to the adserver – anything they can do to get you up and running quickly. Granted, you may not have the resources to launch a monster ad campaign tomorrow, with the latest in streaming 3-D page takeovers, but you may be able to get some of your basic banner ads running quickly. Buy some time by doing this, and then launch the more complicated stuff at a later date. There are no set dates or times for campaign launches in the online realm. Use this to your advantage.
Gauging the Impact
Okay, so in the confusion, you didn’t have time to implement a brand survey from Dynamic Logic. Don’t fret. One way to gauge impact is through the use of Yahoo’s Buzz Index. If you’ve made significant impact with your short-term tactics, the Buzz Index can help you gauge how far you’ve moved the needle.
The index measures the number of searches on a given topic within a given day, and shows a trend report of that information over the course of several days. If you’ve created significant buzz, you will see an uptick in the number of searches for your product or category. Compare this to the baseline number of searches performed when no advertising is live and you’ll get an informal gauge of the impact your campaign is having.
Take a Deep Breath…
Once you’ve executed some of these tactics, take a breather. You’ve once again helped your company out of a jam. The best next step is to take measures to ensure you have a bit more advance warning next time. We’ve found the best way to do this is to put together an informal comparison between the makeup of your campaign and what it could have looked like, had you not been constrained by time. And do the medium a favor by bragging to your co-workers about how quickly you were able to execute a compelling online program. The online industry could use the positive buzz.
When a client screams, “I need it yesterday,” don’t panic. Here are some online programs you can execute to create buzz immediately and produce results in 24 hours.
By Underscore Marketing
One of the most wonderful things about online media is its flexibility in scheduling. That is, barring any technical glitches, an online campaign can be launched almost instantaneously and taken down just as quickly.
Good for us agency folks, who are frequently put in the position of having to achieve results literally overnight. One lasting effect of the dot-com boom was the accelerated timetables for almost every marketing-related activity: three-hour media plans, two-day communications strategies and all-nighters spent “tweaking” online creative to meet a publisher’s draconian ad specs. While there is much less of a sense of urgency in the sputtering economy of 2003, we still haven’t completely reverted back to spending entire summers planning for next year’s media spend. Sometimes, we still get requests for marketing programs that were needed yesterday, and we have to fulfill on them.
It would be a shame to have participated in the dot-com media frenzy of 1996 – 2000 without having picked up a few tactical nuggets that can result in a quick surge in brand awareness, online purchasing or product trial. Thankfully, we paid attention and made note of them, even as things were moving at such a frenzied pace. Read on, fair Spotlight reader, and we’ll show you some online programs you can execute to create buzz immediately.
Kicking Things Off with a Bang
In traditional media, it takes time for reach to cume across any given schedule. In other words, it takes time for the entire readership of a monthly magazine to get their issues in the mail or pick the magazine up at the newsstand and read it. It takes time before a billboard’s message reaches most of the people who might drive by it in a given month. Online, this effect is much less pronounced and it is possible to make a huge impact with highly trafficked sites by launching a home-page sponsorship or promotion.
The classic example is the Pepsi promotion featuring Britney Spears on the home page of Yahoo!. Visitors to the site during the promotion could “peel back” the corner of the page and interact with special content, including an exclusive Britney Spears MP3. The ad unit, called a “Back Page Corner Tear,” allowed anyone who visited Yahoo’s home page during the duration of the program to be drawn in by the content.
Not only do such promotions impact the audience of the sponsored site, but they create a huge PR splash as well. There is an expectation that home-page sponsorships don’t typically last more than a day or two, so a flurry of Britney fans (and other curiosity-seekers) were driven by “Hey, check this out!” e-mails, word of mouth, and other media outlets to interact with the promotion. While such promotions generally require a sizeable online spend, they can create a huge buzz within a short period of time, and they garner quite a bang for the buck if PR opportunities can be leveraged in accordance with the promotion.
Your Customers as Brand Advocates
When trying to make maximum and immediate impact, never forget the media assets you have at hand – especially that database of e-mail names. Often, the folks who sign up at your Website to receive information about your products are fans of your brand. When there’s no time to plan and execute a standard online media campaign, consider giving these fans the first look at your new product launch, new ad campaign, or whatever you’re attempting to communicate with urgency.
This will accomplish several things. First of all, it gives fans of your brand the opportunity to wear it as a badge. If they are first to receive information about goings-on at your company, it’s likely they’ll swell up with pride at the “insider” status you’ve granted them. It’s also likely they’ll want to show several of their friends that they’re an insider. Send them something that is easily passed along to others in their address book. A “Send to a Friend” button can not only generate additional exposure for your brand, but it can also garner additional names for your next marketing blitz, so be sure to make it easy for recipients of a promotional e-mail to propagate the message.
Sure, we would all like the magic formula for turning viral marketing campaigns into the next “Hamster Dance” or “All Your Base…” but no such formula exists. What is certain, however, is that the content within a viral e-mail must be compelling enough to stand on its own, lest the first group of exposed recipients consider it not worthy enough to send to the next.
Don’t Forget Paid Search
Any new campaign or promotion will prompt folks to seek you out. Be sure they’re able to find you easily. Paid search listings will help you do the job, and they have some great advantages over online banner campaigns and such.
First, they make immediate impact. Google’s AdWords product can get sponsored listings live almost immediately. Overture typically takes three to five days.
Secondly, creative is a snap, so no waiting for banner designers to whittle down a skyscraper to the size of an 88x31 button. Simply write some short copy and you’re ready to go.
Thirdly, paid listings are very targeted, so although you might not have time to execute a full-blown media plan, at least your paid listings campaign will show up only under keywords that are relevant to your product or service. People searching under those keywords will be treated to your message. This is probably the most rudimentary form of behavioral marketing available on the Web.
Launch in Waves
Remember earlier, when we talked about online media’s flexibility in scheduling? That can be a distinct advantage when your ads need to go up quickly. In print, if you miss a material closing date, you have to wait for the next issue. Thankfully, Web advertising tends to have great flexibility in this regard. Your first step after scheduling short-term media solutions is to find out how quickly sales reps and their traffic departments can get a campaign live after you send them creative.
Assuming you’re not launching with the latest rich media prototype, you’ll find that many media reps are willing to work with you and will accelerate the quality assurance phase for new creative, expedite contract and rate approvals, stay late to upload tags to the adserver – anything they can do to get you up and running quickly. Granted, you may not have the resources to launch a monster ad campaign tomorrow, with the latest in streaming 3-D page takeovers, but you may be able to get some of your basic banner ads running quickly. Buy some time by doing this, and then launch the more complicated stuff at a later date. There are no set dates or times for campaign launches in the online realm. Use this to your advantage.
Gauging the Impact
Okay, so in the confusion, you didn’t have time to implement a brand survey from Dynamic Logic. Don’t fret. One way to gauge impact is through the use of Yahoo’s Buzz Index. If you’ve made significant impact with your short-term tactics, the Buzz Index can help you gauge how far you’ve moved the needle.
The index measures the number of searches on a given topic within a given day, and shows a trend report of that information over the course of several days. If you’ve created significant buzz, you will see an uptick in the number of searches for your product or category. Compare this to the baseline number of searches performed when no advertising is live and you’ll get an informal gauge of the impact your campaign is having.
Take a Deep Breath…
Once you’ve executed some of these tactics, take a breather. You’ve once again helped your company out of a jam. The best next step is to take measures to ensure you have a bit more advance warning next time. We’ve found the best way to do this is to put together an informal comparison between the makeup of your campaign and what it could have looked like, had you not been constrained by time. And do the medium a favor by bragging to your co-workers about how quickly you were able to execute a compelling online program. The online industry could use the positive buzz.
Comments:
Post a Comment
