Electronic Arts is releasing a new game called Dante’s Inferno and an ad agency commissioned to promote the game came up with a very unique campaign. The agency, Wieden-Kennedy, starting off with a fairly traditional move – they bought banner ads on six different video game websites. The ingenuity came into play when Wieden-Kennedy communicated a rather strange request to the six gaming websites. These six gaming websites were to include text based art in the source code of their websites – something that wouldn’t be visible on the website itself, but instead would only be seen if someone looked at the actual source code of the website. In this text based art, or ASCII art, a URL was hidden along with a password. Each of the six websites had a different password. When you visited the secret URL you were asked to enter all 6 passwords which would then let you in to the website to download exclusive, pre-release content.
The campaign ran for nearly two weeks and generated 26,000 visits to the ’secret’ website. While the typical person really has no reason to look at the source code of a website, Wieden-Kennedy was betting that the audience interested in Dante’s Inferno would not only know how to find the hidden messages, but that the concept alone would give the campaign more legs than the standard banner ads would have. And they were right, because here I sit as an online marketing consultant with relatively no interest in the game, admiring the creative of the online marketing campaign.
The tools available to the online marketer are plentiful, and with a broad topic or a fairly general target market, the possibilities are literally endless. There’s online video, social media, good old display advertising, mobile marketing with ads or text messages, email marketing, website optimization, rss advertising, search engine marketing, podcasts, blogging…well, my goal here isn’t to list them all. The point is that when marketing to a broad group an online marketing consultant or firm has endless options and can spend an eternity optimizing and improving over time. But what does a business do when trying to reach a smaller community? A number of smaller communities, let’s say communities with a population of less than 250,000 people, are in an awkward spot. Newspapers and local television are struggling or closing their doors, and for many businesses those mediums are where the bulk of the marketing budget is spent.
So with newspaper circulation dwindling and the future of local television undetermined in many smaller communities, now is an important time for businesses to start considering online marketing. In the past one could argue that a business can remain competitive using traditional marketing tactics – chances are that if you’ve spent a number of years marketing with newspapers, you’ve learned a thing or two about what works and what doesn’t. But as marketing budgets adapt to take advantage of new online marketing opportunities, these already struggling traditional mediums are going to be pulling in smaller percentages of their advertiser’s budgets.
A common excuse used to avoid using online marketing is that the company website isn’t up to par, and the good news is web development costs aren’t as high as they used to be. The bottom line is online marketing is becoming less of an optional marketing tactic and more of an obligatory tactic – but after a business gets that first taste of the new opportunity, measurably and flexibility online marketing offers, I just know the investment will be worth it.
The best part is you don’t have to jump into the deep end. I can work with your business to create an online marketing strategy that fits your budget and makes sense for your brand. Just drop me a note with any questions or thoughts and we’ll go from there!
Google has just announced that it will be including YouTube Promoted Videos within AdSense advertisements. This affects two different groups of people in two different ways. Quite simply, including YouTube videos within the network of AdSense sites may be the most powerful video promotion factor outside of YouTube itself. The other group affected is the website publishers. The immediate thought, which Google mentions in their release notes, is that YouTube Promoted Videos will increase the amount of ad competition, which should translate into publishers earning a higher cost per click.
But ask yourself this. Has someone ever sent you a link to a video and you find yourself watching that video, plus several more videos, and 30 minutes later you look back and wonder where the time went? YouTube has created a very intelligent “related videos” feature which entices visitors to watch more videos. I’m sure if you could put a dollar value into the work that YouTube has spent on optimizing this feature, we’d be talking about a serious figure. So thinking about AdSense ads on a website – a visitor clicks on a traditional ad, the publisher makes a few cents, the advertiser pays a few cents, and Google skims some off the top. The visitor is then brought to a website, and maybe the website is of decent quality and the visitor ends up spending some time on that advertised site, or maybe the visitor even makes a purchase or signs up for something. Thinking through YouTube Promoted Videos changes that scenario. The website visitor clicks on the AdSense ad and, financially, the process is similar. The publisher makes a few cents, the advertiser spends a few cents, and Google takes it’s fair share. But in this case, the advertiser is paying for that visitor to visit a Google owned website – YouTube. That Google owned website has spent millions of dollars making sure people get sucked into the endless entertainment possibilities that YouTube hosts.
Does this mean video creators are essentially paying Google to deliver more traffic to it’s own website? What a concept! Sure the video gets a viewer, but after that first video view chances are the visitor will watch a few more related videos, which may or may not be owned by the original video producer. This in turn helps YouTube serve even more ads.
For many YouTube content creators I’m sure this is an outstanding feature, but for the majority I just don’t see it being ideal. Unless your video content is consistently on message and you actually have a well designed YouTube channel, I’d think using a regular image ad within AdSense and linking to your own website remains the better option.
For those interested in promoting YouTube videos, here’s their introductory video:
On September 1st comScore released some information stating that social media websites, like Facebook and MySpace, are responsible for over 20% of online display advertising in the USA. As an online marketing consultant living in Kelowna, which is a relatively small town in British Columbia, Canada, social media sites are an extremely valuable tool to make use of when targeting ads to a small region. Smaller cities don’t always have that go to website. The newspapers that still exist often don’t grasp the strengths of the Internet entirely, or haven’t priced their ad rates according. For radio, a website is typically there to support the station, and in many cases, are often reiterating news based off of partnerships with newspapers. In a general sense, neither of these mediums have really stepped up to the plate to deliver a powerful online component. TV stations are improving as video becomes more feasible online, but, at least here in BC, local television is struggling.
So if you want to drive local visitors to your website, where can you turn? Facebook has a number of ad targeting features, such as target by connections, or target by birthday, to name some of the newer options. These targeting features can often provide insight into your business. For example, tracked properly, you might find that a specific age group tends to spend more time on a specific page than another age group. To speculate, let’s say you own a flower shop. You run ads targeted at men and women separately, and I can guarantee each group would treat your website differently. The men might be more inclined to look at pre-made bouquets, or may be interested in signing up for “important day reminders” as a safety net, just to prevent forgetting that special day two years in a row. Whereas the women might want to build a custom bouquet, because they already know exactly what they want.
Or maybe, as the flower shop owner, your website only has 1 of these functions. You built a great system to promote your pre-made bouquets, and you notice men from Facebook are converting at a higher rate than women. Not only are social media sites a great way to target your ads to a specific geographic area, but it’s easy to see how targeted advertising can drive sales as well as help your website progress and evolve over time (with the right insight).
I’m not much of a print guy. I can’t track how many times a person looks at a brochure, nor can I tell what pages interest a person the most. Most importantly, it’s hard to track if a lead came specifically from print collateral or not. I’m not arguing the importance of the various forms of print advertising, but in comparison with the web it can be hard to track the direct benefits a print campaign has.
But, that print material does have a rightful place online. Once it’s online, you get all the tracking benefits that come along with it. Convert that piece of print material into a PDF and link to it from your website. People love the portability of a PDF, and there are ways to track what pages of the PDF are viewed, or if the PDF is printed, etc. You can link back to specific parts of your website from within the PDF, and the best part, you can actually prompt the person viewing the PDF with a form, asking for contact information in order to follow up with the lead. So you can delete those tear-off sheets as you move online.
So if you have print materials just sitting there, get them online! Track their performance and generate some leads. And beyond those benefits, search engines are getting better at indexing PDF content, so bringing that PDF online might actually end up pulling more traffic to your website!
