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Archive for the ‘For Advertisers’ Category
Monday, August 30th, 2010
By Adam Ward 
Whether working for a network or an advertiser, affiliate managers spend a lot of their time trying to recruit quality affiliates for their programs. Since recruiting is a two-way street, they also spend a lot of time vetting affiliates who want to join their programs, making sure they don’t accept the less-than-desirable publishers.
If you are an affiliate manager, here are some simple steps you can follow to ensure you’re accepting quality publishers into your program.
- Look at the email address. Does it look legitimate? If the affiliate site is www.companyx.com, you would expect an email address to look like soandso@companyx.com. Many affiliates use gmail for their email, though, since they often manage many domains. In that case, you would expect that an email address including part of their name would be more legitimate than something like 49grd36@gmail.com. If the email looks questionable, move onto the next step.
- Call the phone number. If you reach a business directory corroborating the company name, you should be fine. If you reach the person, ask questions to confirm the information they provided on the sign-up form. If they have trouble answering them, don’t accept them. If you get sent to voice mail, what type of a message is it? Is it a business message or a personal message? If it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t. To confirm your suspicions, move to the next step.
- Check out the business address on Google Maps. Using Street View, you’ll be able to see whether the business is a building, a home, or an empty field.
Although there are many publishers that like to work under the shroud of secrecy for fear other publishers will steal their money-making ideas, more legitimate publishers realize they have nothing to hide. And since your affiliates will essentially be your business partners, wouldn’t you rather know who you’re dealing with and err on the side of caution?
Tags: Best Practices, Prospecting
Posted in For Advertisers | 4 Comments »
Friday, August 6th, 2010
By Adam Ward
“And it’s so easy, it’s so easy, it’s just so easy, to do the goat dance. Yeah, but it’s so hard, it’s so hard, to love somebody, really love somebody.” -Greg Brown, So Hard
If affiliate marketing is the goat dance (whatever that is), then tracking statistics is loving somebody. In Feeling the Pain, I mentioned that one of the top frustrations for affiliate marketers is having to log into every network to access the tracking statistics from their affiliate programs. Everyone we talk to that runs on more than one affiliate network tells us what a hassle that is.
So that begs the question of why it is so hard to aggregate those statistics. Certainly, companies have built databases for personal use that aggregate statistics across multiple networks, and some have even done it for commercial use. But they will tell you it is hard, and not a panacea. When you understand what they have to do, you begin to understand why.
First, there are only so many ways you can pull data from a database. If you have direct access to the database and know what report to run (or write), it is easy. But no network is going to give a publisher or advertiser direct access to their database. Instead, your access is either going to come from an Application Programming Interface (API) that was written and authorized by the network, viewing the reports through a Web browser (which you may or may not be able to export to your hard drive), or from the network pushing the report to you via FTP or email.
APIs
Let’s look at APIs first. APIs are great if you can get them. By writing an API, a network essentially tells developers what parts of their database they can access, and provides the vocabulary for them to pull the data they are looking for. So if every network had an API, a developer could easily use those APIs to pull all the tracking statistics into your own database, which you could then run consolidated reports from.
Here are the problems, though. First, not all networks have APIs. Even if they aren’t opposed to having you get your information that way (it is your data, after all), they have to take the time and effort to write the APIs. That includes documentation on what APIs are available, and what the data structures, object classes, protocols, etc. are used in them. Second, if they do have APIs (yes, there will most likely be multiple APIs), they may not be written using the same protocol. The same network can have some APIs that use Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) and others that use Representational State Transfer (REST). That drives developers nuts. Third, even if they have some APIs, they may not have them for everything you are looking for in your consolidated report. That means you either have to forego that desired information, or you pull it in with a scrape.
Scrapes
A scrape refers to creating a program that will go to a website, log in as a user with a username and password, go to a particular page on the site, run any necessary reports, and harvest the results of those reports into a database outside the site. This happens automatically, perhaps on a daily basis. This sounds fine, considering you ostensibly should be able to pull all the information you have access to as a real user logging in.
Except for these problems. First, companies don’t particularly like non-humans logging into their sites. They may employ software tools to thwart hackers, which could restrict access. Just because an application can scrape the site today doesn’t mean it will have access tomorrow. And even if it does, it relies on everything staying the same on the site. If the website changes to where the report shows up in a different place, or with a different name, the data pulled from the scrape could be missing, or worse, replaced with incorrect data. That means your developer has to constantly be tweaking your report. And third, unlike APIs, networks don’t have any control over what information you’re pulling from their databases. Besides not liking that, it may be in violation of their terms of service.
The Good News
As we’ve talked to networks about data aggregation, we have yet to have one tell us they are opposed to it.
The Bad News
Just because they aren’t opposed to it, networks don’t seem to have a big enough incentive yet to help out with the effort, short of some of them providing APIs. Even though their customers are all clamoring for it, they aren’t leaving the network over it. After all, where would they go?
Tags: Ad Tracking, Affiliate Networks, Data Aggregation
Posted in For Advertisers, For Publishers | 4 Comments »
Monday, July 26th, 2010
By Adam Ward
The term “affiliate marketing” conjures up a lot of images for different people. To some, it conjures up a work-from-home-in-your-undies picture. To others, it is synonymous with online fraud. Even to those who know it is used by legitimate businesses to make legitimate sales, they often think it somehow doesn’t have to follow the same discipline as traditional marketing.
Affiliate marketing is, after all, marketing. It is just a different flavor, just like TV ads and print ads are different flavors of advertising. Sure, one may use a different medium, and have different terminology, but both try to build brands and drive sales.
Sales don’t just happen. Businesses spend a lot of time and money figuring out who their customers are, how to most efficiently convince those customers they should be buying their products, and what the proper triggers are that will get them to actually buy. They then develop well-trained sales teams to implement their proven sales strategies.
So it strikes me as more than a little reckless when these same companies, thinking that an affiliate program can increase their online sales, decide to dabble in affiliate marketing without giving it the same consideration as their other marketing efforts. They might think that because they only pay when they see results, there is little harm if nothing comes of their testing the waters.
However, there is always a cost. Advertisers have to hire an affiliate manager to run their programs, re-task an existing employee to do it, or hire an outsourced program manager to run it for them. They need to buy tracking software, develop it in-house, or join an affiliate network. None of those options is cheap.
Based on the number of new advertisers joining networks (AffiliateTip reported that LinkShare has added nearly 200 advertisers so far this year), we’re going to see more and more advertisers jumping into affiliate marketing. So for those advertisers, here’s some advice: treat your affiliate marketing efforts the same as your other marketing efforts.
- Do your research. If you already know who your customers are, figure out where they are online. Just like you would be more likely to place print ads in magazines that cover your desired demographic, there will be some websites that are frequented by more of your customers than other sites. Do those sites run affiliate ads on their sites? If so, what networks do they belong to?
- If you don’t already know, figure out your margins. Online publishers (your affiliates), will not only want to run your ads if they think they’ll see a high conversion rate, but also if they think you’re generous in your commissions. Since you can’t be profitable paying more commissions than you can afford, figure out how much you can pay before you start your affiliate program.
- If your competitors are running affiliate programs, figure out what they are paying in commissions. Can you beat that? Are there websites running your competitors’ ads? If so, those websites might be more eager to run your ads than if you’re pushing an untested program.
- Be prepared to treat your affiliates well. You can think of them as special customers, crucial business partners, indispensible distributors, or whatever. But the fact is they will be pushing sales your way. They may even pay money out of their own pockets to drive traffic on behalf of your program. If you communicate well with them, are open and honest in your dealings, and take care of them, they will want to work with you, even if you may not pay as much as others. Remember that they have limited ad space on their sites, and possibly hundreds of advertisers wanting their ads in that space.
- Transfer the best practices you’ve established in your offline marketing to your online marketing efforts. Give your affiliate marketing team the tools they need to be successful in their jobs.
Although there is certainly a learning curve with affiliate marketing, if you view it as a legitimate source for new revenue, you’re much more likely to be satisfied with your results than if you just jump in to test the water.
Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Best Practices
Posted in For Advertisers | 8 Comments »
Thursday, July 8th, 2010
By Adam Ward
If you are a business toying with advertising your products online through an affiliate program, you should know what an affiliate manager does, since you (or whoever manages that program in your company) will soon assume that title.
Getting Started
First, you’ll need to decide what your “program” is. This is basically taking a product you sell online, deciding how much commission (and for how long) you can afford to pay to affiliates that refer people who buy that product, and making sure you’ve got banner or text ads that those affiliates will place on their sites.
Second, you’ll need to get your program listed on an affiliate network (see An Advertiser’s Guide to Placing Ads in Traditional and Online Media). If you plan on running your program “in-house” (i.e. you won’t list it on a network), you’ll first need to have your own tracking system in place (see Newspaper Ad-Tracking Systems vs. Online Ad-Tracking Systems).
Once you have your program up and running, you’ll now need to attract affiliates to your program, make sure they actually run your ads on their sites, and then monitor the traffic they send you. This is broken down into three “ings,” which are Recruiting, Implementing, and Optimizing.
Recruiting (i.e. getting affiliates to join your program)
If your program is listed on an affiliate network, you can log into the network and browse the list of publishers in that network. Publishers will list the market verticals most compatible with their content, and include a description of their sites. If you see any publishers that you think would be a good fit for running your ads, you can contact them to introduce your program. Some networks want all such communications to take place within their software. Others provide contact information that you can use to communicate with prospective affiliates outside of their software.
You will also recruit by trolling websites you think would be good fits, and scrubbing them for contact information. Most contact information you’ll find consists of an email address, rather than phone number, so sending emails to prospects will be the primary means for recruiting. Once an affiliate joins your program, that publisher is no longer a prospect, but an affiliate.
Implementing (i.e. getting affiliates to actually run your ads)
Just because affiliates join your program doesn’t mean they will run your ads on their sites. In fact, roughly 90 percent of affiliates who join programs don’t end up running ads for those programs. Publishers have limited real estate for ad placement on their sites, and they want to make sure they fill those spots with the ads that will make them the most money. It is now up to you to convince them that your ad will convert better and be more lucrative to them than ads from the other programs they have joined. So you will need to continue following up with your affiliates. If they haven’t implemented your program, ask them why, and see if you can solve their concerns.
Optimizing (i.e. getting results from your ads)
Once affiliates start running your ads, you’ll want to make sure they are converting well. If publishers see ads that don’t make them money, you can’t blame them for replacing them with ads they think will convert better. Also, you may have two affiliates with similar websites and traffic, and yet one sends you much more traffic than the other. You’ll want to figure out why that is. Does your creative need tweaking? Is placement on the site an issue? Could someone else be stealing your traffic? Regardless, you need to continue to communicate with your affiliates to make sure both you and they are happy with your relationship.
If you make any changes to your program, such as payouts, specials that are time-sensitive, etc., make sure you let your affiliates know. They will appreciate your efforts to not only make their websites look good, but also make them the most money possible.
Additional Exposure
In affiliate marketing, where even large companies can have just a few people managing their affiliate programs, marketing yourself is almost as important as marketing your brand or program. As such, you will probably be blogging, be an active participant on online forums, and attend trade shows.
Tags: Affiliate Manager, Affiliate Program
Posted in For Advertisers | 5 Comments »
Friday, June 25th, 2010
By Adam Ward
I’ve written previously about using affiliate networks to advertise online. Although running ads through multiple networks can compound problems for advertisers, online publishers have more of an incentive to join multiple networks.
So the question of which networks to join comes up frequently. And that question is often followed by, “Wouldn’t it be great if there was a list somewhere of all the affiliate networks out there?” Well, yes it would be great. And I’m working on building that list. Since putting a list like that on this blog would be too static, I’ve built the list on Squidoo. The Affiliate Networks Directory there allows anyone to add a network that isn’t already on the list. My hope is that Squidoo visitors (which are a lot more than this site gets) will help keep the list current.
We first put together an internal list of networks last year. When I was recently adding it to Squidoo, I checked each website to see whether the network was still in existence. I found 34 that weren’t in business anymore. There are probably at least that many new ones that have started up since then, which are not on the Squidoo list.
With such high turnover, it is wise for any advertiser or publisher to do their due diligence before joining a network. Ask around to find out how long they have been in business, whether people on the network have complained about fraud or lack of payments, etc. At the very least, do a Web search for that company name, to see if anything comes up. The last thing you want to deal with is a network owing you money, but shutting down before you have a chance to get any of it.
Tags: Affiliate Networks, Directories
Posted in For Advertisers, For Publishers | 2 Comments »
Monday, June 21st, 2010
By Adam Ward
Businesses that sell products online live and die by the number of consumers they get to their sites. They spend lots of money on SEO, paid keyword searches and affiliate marketing to attract eyeballs. They speak of “driving traffic” to their sites, as though it flows in a single direction.
Traffic flows both ways, though, and by failing to think of the traffic leaving their sites, they may not be using their online marketing dollars as effectively as they could be.
A couple of months ago I attended a panel discussion where Tony Zito, CEO of MediaForge, said merchant webpage abandonment is 98 percent (i.e. only 2 percent of visitors buy anything) and shopping cart abandonment is 80 percent (which means only 20 percent of visitors who started pulling out their wallets finished the transaction). He said most of the people who get to a merchant’s website (the traffic that their SEO and keyword purchases bought) leave product pages to go out to blogs and social media sites to find reviews on those products. Can you imagine 80 percent of customers in a Target shopping center wheeling their carts to the checkout line, only to leave them there and walk out of the store to ask whoever is standing outside whether they should buy such-and-such a product? Crazy. And yet that is exactly what happens online.
Savvy merchants allow reviews of their products on their own sites, but people are naturally distrusting of those comments, even when written by consumers who probably have no financial tie to the company. The irony is that the “independent” bloggers who review that company’s products on an external site (the very blogs where potential customers land after leaving a product site looking for “unbiased” reviews) are probably getting compensated for writing those reviews. Although federal regulations now require bloggers to disclose financial compensation for products they review (see Jeremy Shoemaker’s disclaimer where he says he benefits “financially or otherwise from everything [readers] click on, read, or look at” on his site), many readers ignore those disclaimers.
I’m not saying it is wrong for bloggers to benefit financially from pushing merchants and products. Quite the contrary: right or wrong, consumers trust the bloggers, so the bloggers should be compensated for the value they bring. In fact, I am saying that online businesses should allocate even more money and resources to these bloggers and review sites. Since that usually comes in the form of affiliate marketing (i.e. the merchant creates an affiliate program for a product, a blogger joins the program by running trackable ads for that merchant on his or her blog, and gets compensated for each sale made thanks to the consumer clicking through the ad prior to the sale), these businesses should increase their affiliate-marketing efforts.
Merchants engaged in affiliate marketing often lump those dollars with expenses used for SEO and paid searches. Although affiliate marketing is great for driving new eyeballs to the merchant’s site (like SEO and searches), it is also a great tool for capitalizing on lost traffic. Regardless of how potential customers got to a merchant’s site, once they leave, it isn’t the SEO that is going to get them back. They’ll come back 1) if they find what they are looking for (i.e. a favorable review on the blog) and 2) if the blog they’re on makes it easy for them to get back. By merchants making sure they have an ad on that blog, they are increasing the chances that the consumer will get back to their site and finish their purchases.
To do this, merchants should put themselves in the shoes of their consumers. For each product they sell, they should do a search for that product and see what the top blogs or reviews for that product are. If there are negative reviews, that’s a separate product issue that they’ll need to deal with. But if there are favorable reviews, the merchant needs to make sure they have an ad on that site, ready to redirect the consumer back to their own site. By doing this, merchants are essentially using affiliate marketing programs to cast a wide safety net to catch potential consumers who stray from their site. Getting back to the Target example, that’s like anyone in the store’s parking lot telling the wayward shopper that not only are the items in the abandoned cart good, but also walking the shopper back to the front of the checkout line to finish buying the goods.
If just a small portion of the 80 percent of abandoned shopping carts come back to buy, that’s money well spent on bloggers.
Tags: Affiliate Marketing, Bloggers, Jeremy Shoemaker, Lost Traffic, MediaForge, Shopping Cart Abondonment
Posted in Blogging, For Advertisers, Selling | 3 Comments »
Monday, May 17th, 2010
By Adam Ward
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is one of those tools that, once you start using it, you can’t imagine how you got along without it for so long.
So often we get wrapped up in the idea of making money for us or our business that we forget to focus on the specific steps we have to follow to bring the money in. Often, our success is impeded by our lack of (or dread of) organization skills. It is common for us to feel like we have too much to do and not enough time or people to do it. We don’t know whether we’re working efficiently because we don’t have time to evaluate our efficiency.
Using a CRM system is one way to offload some of the day-to-day tasks that we have to do (but don’t necessarily enjoy) in order for us to work more efficiently at the parts of our jobs we like best.
Growing sales and new business contacts without CRM is kind of like building a car from scratch. It is going to take longer, have more gotchas, and be harder to replicate than cars built on an assembly line. Whereas a good CRM tool becomes the assembly line.
We have a business advisor at eSilverBullet who has a PhD in engineering. He worked for IBM and started Iomega. He views sales the same as he does product development: as a process of small, replicable steps that, if followed the same way, will produce predictable and favorable results.
By putting each of those steps into a CRM system, the CRM’s workflow can then walk you through them, or walk a new employee you bring in off the street, so that either way, you’re going to get the same results: more customers, more money, and more time.
Tags: CRM
Posted in For Advertisers | Comments Off
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
By Adam Ward
Even for veteran online merchants (the advertisers), marketing products in the affiliate space (also referred to as performance-based marketing) is no walk in the park. Here are the top ten headaches nearly all online advertisers deal with.
Running ad campaigns (or programs) on multiple ad networks (also called affiliate networks)
Online merchants expose their products to more consumers by running ad campaigns on other websites. Ostensibly, the more publisher websites the ads run on, the more traffic they push to the merchant’s site, which increases sales. Since ad networks provide an easy way for merchants to find publishers, it makes sense that a merchant would want to join as many ad networks as possible.
However, running on multiple networks creates new problems. First, there is the extra cost of getting set up and funding an account balance on each network. Second, the merchant needs to have a way of determining which network to attribute the sale to, if traffic came from multiple networks. Third, the chance of fraud increases dramatically, especially if the merchant isn’t actively managing the campaign.
Having to use different tracking software for each network on which they run ads
Every network has its own software for tracking ad campaigns. The networks expect merchants and publishers to use the tracking numbers from its own software to determine who should receive commissions on sales. So even if a merchant has its own tracking software, it still has to log into a tracking system for every network it belongs to and pull campaign statistics from it.
Having to develop proprietary tracking software (or buy third-party software) to manage in-house campaigns
Although a merchant can use the tracking software of whatever network it joins, that only works if the merchant doesn’t run ad campaigns in-house or on multiple networks. For example, if the merchant has the same campaign running on two networks, it is possible for a single publisher to grab that ad from both networks. If the publisher refers a consumer who ends up buying on the merchant’s site, each network will attribute that single publisher with a sale. So if the merchant doesn’t have its own tracking software to police that situation, it will end up paying a double commission for a single referral.
Also, because merchants contract directly with publishers (off network) to run a campaign, those merchants will need to have their own software to track the campaign results.
Dealing with publisher and network disputes over tracking numbers
Because everyone uses the tracking statistics to know what commissions to pay, this inevitably leads to squabbling over “which” statistics to use. Publishers would prefer to use their own tracking numbers. Networks would prefer to use their own tracking numbers. And advertisers would prefer to use their own tracking numbers. Since all these numbers are rarely the same, you get a lot of back-and-forth between advertisers and publishers over how much the advertiser really owes.
Recruiting new publishers and maintaining relationships with current publishers
Having an ad campaign does an advertiser no good if the ad isn’t running anywhere. So advertisers need to constantly prospect for publishers. And just like any other sales environment, taking care of your existing business relationships is far cheaper and more productive than prospecting new relationships. So advertisers need to stay in touch with publishers that are running the ad campaigns. However, knowing that this needs to be done is not as easy as actually doing it. With all the other demands on an advertiser’s time, prospecting and relationship management often take a back seat, especially if the advertiser doesn’t have tools, such as customer relationship management (CRM) software, in place to help focus those efforts.
Dealing with parasiteware and unethical networks and publishers
Parasiteware is too complicated to delve into here (but you can go to this forum to learn all about it). Basically, there are some networks and publishers out there that use various technologies to divert search traffic that would have come directly to an advertiser’s site (so the networks and publishers get commissions they didn’t earn), that would prevent other publishers from receiving their legitimate commissions (which can create tension with the advertiser and those publishers), that would overwrite the tracking code, or would inflate tracking numbers so advertisers end up paying more than they should.
Not knowing how effective a campaign will be before it starts, and then not knowing the optimum time to discontinue a campaign that is no longer effective
Although advertisers can get a good sense of what campaigns work, they don’t have crystal balls. Since the look and content of an ad’s creative play a big role in attracting customers, a poor campaign can really hurt an advertiser. Advertisers can use analytics and persuasion consultants to help them optimize their campaigns, but that adds an extra cost to a campaign.
Having publishers refuse to join a particular ad network, or refuse to run an in-house campaign directly
Ideally, an advertiser should be able to work with any publisher it wants. Unfortunately, some publishers refuse to work with advertisers that don’t run campaigns on a specific network. If an advertiser wants to work with that publisher, but decides the benefits don’t outweigh the extra headaches of joining another network, it will have to not work with that publisher.
Having to continuously, actively manage an ad campaign
Running an ad campaign is not as simple as writing copy for the ad, designing the creative, giving it to a publisher to run, then forgetting about it. A campaign needs to be actively managed. Campaign managers need to monitor statistics to make sure the commissions they pay out are for valid leads. They need to monitor the effectiveness of the ad. They need to make changes to the campaign or creative if they aren’t getting the results they’d like.
Having to manage an ad campaign in-house as well as on affiliate networks
As a continuation of the previous point, an advertiser needs to multiply the effort of managing each campaign by the number of networks on which they run the campaigns.
Tags: Ad Campaigns, Affiliate Networks, CRM, Headaches, Parasiteware, Stealing Traffic
Posted in For Advertisers | 2 Comments »
Friday, November 20th, 2009
By Adam Ward
In today’s converged environment, simply diversifying your marketing campaigns across multiple platforms may not be enough. Beyond maintaining consistent branding across all media (which is always important), you need to tie the actual campaigns together. In other words, you need to use one medium to spur consumers to jump to another medium as quickly as possible. I call this cross-pollination. Here are some examples of how you can do that.
You’ve probably been in a retail store and seen a product display showing “as seen on TV.” That’s a simple way of tying a campaign together across two media. However, it is not a proactive tie. These campaigns could be a little more proactive if the television ad or infomercial mentioned the stores in which you could expect to see their products. But they don’t because it is easier for them to get a consumer to pick up the phone and order the product than it is for the customer to rush right out to the store.
One effective way of cross-pollinating is to use outdoor media to generate online traffic. Ad Hustler discovered this to be an effective, cheap way of getting people to his site. Although he couldn’t track directly which sales originated by people seeing his bus ads, he knew the number of people that would see his ad in a given month (billboard companies have this information for each location), he calculated that the cost per thousand (CPM) eyeballs was lower than what he could be paying to advertise online, and he noticed an uptick in his site impressions and sales during that month. So he had a pretty good idea of his ROI on running those billboards.
Billboards can be a wonderful way to promote your website. Depending on your niche, your website could be competing with thousands of similar sites. If you use only online sources for promoting your website, you will need to spend quite a bit of money for keyword searches, search engine optimization (SEO), or affiliate marketing. Even with that, you may still have difficulty standing out among the crowd. With billboards, however, you can stand out. Billboards get noticed, they have the advantage of repetition (people who pass them every day remember them), and because not every billboard is promoting a website, those that do are even more memorable.
Billboards are also good fits because, by the very nature of billboards, their messages need to be short and memorable. Drivers zipping by at 70 miles an hour have just seconds to see what your product is, understand it, be enticed to visit your site, and remember how to get there. If you can do that in seven large words or less, you’ve got a winner.
Unless a driver immediately types in your website URL on a handheld device after passing your billboard (which is unlikely, not to mention dangerous), you’ll notice that although billboards can cross-pollinate websites, the effect isn’t exactly immediate, and not perfectly trackable.
For more immediacy and trackability, let’s look at some cross-pollination of print advertising and mobile. Mozes is one company that, among other things, allows newspaper or magazine readers to get offers sent to their mobile phones. A restaurant, for example, would sign up for a “mob” account at Mozes. The restaurant then runs a print ad in a newspaper. The ad contains a keyword for readers to text. When the readers text the keyword, they join the restaurant’s mob (essentially joining the restaurant’s mobile mailing list), and in return will get a discount or other special offers from the restaurant.
It is kind of like taking coupons to the next level. Only instead of having to tear out the coupon, carry it around, remember to use it and feel a bit sheepish when you do, you just show the restaurant your “coupon” on your phone. And since you are now on the restaurant’s mailing list, the restaurant can continue to send you additional offers, so your lead is much more valuable to the restaurant than a single purchase from a coupon would have been.
Another cross-pollination technique I’ve seen popping up is the use of mobile tags, such as Microsoft tags. Mobile tags are like bar codes in that they contain unique information about a product, only better. They can take readers (taggers?) to a website that gives whatever information the owner of that tag chooses to give.
For example, suppose you are a music company and know that a music critic is going to be reviewing one of your new albums. You can pay the critic’s publisher to include a mobile tag next to the review on the page. If readers want to listen to a song from that album, all they need to do is “scan” the tag with their mobile phone. They will need to have a free tag reader downloaded first. When they do that, their phones’ cameras will recognize the tag and take them directly to a website where they can listen to songs from the new album, see cover art, learn more, download the album, etc. So this gives your consumers the ability to read a review, listen to the music and buy from you, all within seconds of each other.
Because advertisers can easily create their own mobile tags, you can create a tag specific to one print campaign. That way you can track your “click-through” ratio and sales. This gives you a way of tracking the effectiveness of your print campaigns in a way you’ve never been able to do before.
Tags: Ad Campaigns, Ad Tracking, As Seen On TV, Billboards, Convergence, Coupons, Magazines, Mobile Tags, Mozes, Newspapers, Radio, TV
Posted in Cross-Pollination, For Advertisers, Traditional Media | 3 Comments »
Friday, November 6th, 2009
By Adam Ward
If you sell a good or service from a bricks-and-mortar store, you probably already realize there are seemingly endless vehicles with which you can advertise in the physical world. Adding the online world to that mix can create so many advertising opportunities that you might be overwhelmed to the point of not utilizing any of them. But since everyone with a product or service needs to do some form of marketing, I’m hoping this post will help.
Which advertising vehicle you use could be a calculated result of a sophisticated marketing strategy you’ve put together, or it may be as loose as caving to whatever sales person pushed hardest for your business. Whether you are a new advertiser or a veteran, you need to be informed of your options. I’ll try to cover the basics of some options in both the physical and online worlds.
Offline Advertising
Newspapers, radio, television and outdoor are probably the first types of offline advertising that come to mind. Even if you aren’t familiar with their rates and terminology, you at least recognize their media. Because I’ve written about these media here, I’ll leave it at that.
However, there are a lot more offline advertising sources than those. Here are a few.
Yellow pages: Yes, it seems strange to think of phone books in the digital age, but they are still around. In fact, I probably get phone books from four different companies delivered to my door each year. When I was a kid, I remember just a single phone book. The crazy thing is I keep each one until I replace it the following year. Even though yellow pages still get printed, they also have an online presence. It’s just as easy for them to put the information they have online as in print. And when you think about how important accurate data is, the phone books have a built-in reputation that is stronger than a listing site on the Internet that nobody has heard of.
Yellow pages are more akin to search engines than banner ads. Chances are consumers will run across your ad only if they are searching for something you provide. You won’t get any impulse buyers.
Mailers: With the price of postage these days, direct mail is not cheap. But there is some comfort knowing that a consumer will at least look at your mailer and decide whether to toss it or keep it. And if you do it with consistency, consumers know to look for it. For example, I know that if I want anything from Bed, Bath and Beyond, I just need to wait a few weeks for a 20-percent-off coupon in the mail.
You can do mailers a few ways. You can send a stand-alone piece that you’ve produced (like the Bed, Bath and Beyond coupons). Or you can mix your ad with other advertisers, like inside a ValuePak envelope, the equivalent of mailed newspaper inserts, or coupon magazines. If you decide to go the ValuPak-type route, you’ll be working with a sales rep from whatever advertising company produces those coupons, inserts or magazines. You pay them, and they’ll handle the mailing costs, and probably do your creative work for you as well.
Other: There are also quite a few non-traditional offline ways to advertise. If your community has a bike-share program, you may be able to sponsor the program by having your company or product show up on all the bikes. You can advertise in playbills for orchestras, plays, dance concerts, etc. You can be a supporter of public radio or television. Your local dry cleaner may let you put your ad on the coat hangers they give out to all their customers. And remember that outdoor media includes sides of buses and bus-stop benches.
Online Advertising
Just like broadcast and newspaper ads come to mind with offline advertising, banner ads are probably the first that come to mind with online advertising. These ads often run through online ad networks, which I’ve written about here.
But online advertising doesn’t stop with banner ads.
Search: If you anticipate people looking for your company or product by going to an Internet search engine, think about the search terms they would most likely enter. Now search for those terms yourself and see what results you get. If you or your product don’t show up anywhere, you may want to pay for those search terms. You can actually buy your way to the top of sponsored search results on Google, Yahoo, etc.
Contextual: If you want your text or banner ad to show up in or around online stories, you can pay for contextual advertising. You can do this through online ad networks or Google. So if you sell snowmobiles and want to advertise on newspaper websites, but only if the story has something to do with outdoor activities, snowmobiling or winter sports, you can pay for those contextual ads.
Directories: Online directories are kind of like yellow pages. It is possible that you are already listed in some online directories, just like you’re listed in phone books, without your having paid to be there. The directory company adds as many businesses as they can for free, because the more accurate content they have, the more people will trust their listings. But if you want to show up more prominently, you’ll have to pay extra. That’s what the yellow pages and online directories hope for.
Although being listed in online directories may be good for you, they may actually be a hindrance. It is much easier for an entrepreneurial person to create a directory online. Once online, that person may then be using search engine optimization (SEO) or paying for keywords that would drive some customers who might have otherwise found your site to their own. For example, if you own a coffee shop, search for “coffee shop” and the name of your city. Chances are you’ll see a number of directories where you and your competitors may or may not be listed. If so, chances are you’ll be getting calls from the owners of those sites asking you to advertise in their directories.
If you just want people to know your address and phone number, showing up on multiple directories might be OK. But if you actually need people to come to your site, realize that you are now not only competing with other coffee shops in your area, but also competing with these online directories that will probably have their own interests above yours.
Social: By now you know you can advertise on Facebook and other social-media sites. Paying Facebook for clicks may or may not be the best use of your money. There are other ways that you can utilize social sites. Although technically you can do them for “free,” there will still be some cost in terms of hiring someone to do it for you, or for spending the time to do it yourself.
Social sites include blogs and forums. If you or someone you hire participate in forums, leave comments on blogs, or leave product reviews on sites that showcase your products, you are in essence engaging in viral marketing. If you have your own blog, potential customers will view you as an expert in your area, develop a level of trust with you, and feel better buying from you.
Tags: Contextual Ads, Directories, Mailers, Search Ads, Social Advertising, Yellow Pages
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