Digital Media Buzz > Find Out Where Your Audience ‘Lives’ Before Allocating Marketing Dollars

Find Out Where Your Audience ‘Lives’ Before Allocating Marketing Dollars

By Adam Berlinger

I was talking to a friend of mine who happens to be a program director for a very large advertising agency here in Chicago. We were swapping notes on Web analytics vs. TV advertising when she made a very important statement: “I can’t stand it when I’m on a site and all these banner ads keep popping up on my screen.” Let’s think about that for a moment. How can we get the right message out to our targeted audience without burdening them? Have marketing campaigns turned into white noise that our end users are starting to ignore? The short answer is yes. We can compare this to the phenomenon of a car alarm going off. Since no one pays attention, the alarm serves no purpose.

In order to execute a successful Web campaign, we need to break things into some high-level components:

• What is the goal of the campaign?
• Who are we targeting?
• How are we going to measure success vs. failure?
• What do we want the campaign to accomplish?

Driving more traffic to our site vs. selling products on sale poses two completely different concepts and will require different types of campaigns. Perhaps an email marketing initiative would be more appropriate for driving closeout sales vs. an aggressive paid search on Google to drive more traffic to the site. See the difference? The important point is to have a well thought out goal with baselines/benchmarks to compare the incoming data to.

Who are the end users that you are trying to target? Are they male runners? Fire arm owners? Teenagers? Visitor segmentation seems to be the most-ignored aspect of online marketing campaigns. Either that or it’s just not done correctly. The more we know about our intended audience, the more successful our campaign will be. Once you have defined your segment, research where your targeted audience “lives” and, thus, where best to launch your campaign.

How are you going to measure the click-throughs from your campaign? Your Web analytics package will need to be configured so that you can track each visit session from your campaign. In other words, are your visitors doing what you intended them to do once they landed on your site and is the content relevant to what they are looking for? Bringing visitors to your home page where they’ll have to hunt for the product/theme of your campaign is not strategically sound. Also remember that a landing page has a unique query parameter that identifies it as the “front door” to your site via your marketing campaign. Below is an example when I Googled “Hotels” and clicked on the paid search ad. This is an example of a URL with the query parameters that make the content a landing page and trackable within Webtrends.

/App/ViewHotelSearch?

gcid=S11287×431&keyword=hotels_e&WT.mc_id=

e2530&WT.mc_ev=click&WT.srch=1&DCSext.mc_kw=hotels

Lastly, some business analysis needs to be conducted before the campaign is pushed live that will determine the ROI of the campaign. In other words, constitute success or failure from a business perspective, not a technical one. All of my points will need to be answered in an ongoing manner. As such, make sure you have data that is easily accessible to you and your business stakeholders.