MOBILE MARKETING with a catch...

Although I hate to push Nick's "Thank You" blog down the page, I wanted to share some thoughts on Mobile Marketing and how it translated to one of our most direct response clients. As a sidebar, Nick is right. Media Two gives all the avenues for personal and professional growth. But Nick, don't sell yourself short, you already possess the skill set foundation of a media strategist, but you just may not know it yet or give yourself enough credit.

Ok, back to Mobile Marketing. It seems like everyday I peruse the industry news and there's always an article on Mobile Marketing and how to best utilize it to reach your audience. So, after multiple exposures, I decided to take notice of this article in iMedia Connection called Top 5 things to know about SMS advertising. Obviously, Mobile offers several formats to advertising, but this article focuses on SMS (Short Message Service) or text messaging. As I'll always preface an article I reference by saying that most of these industry articles are written by an expert in the particular channel being discussed, as it should be; however, most of these articles, like this one, are written from the publisher side. So, take this agenda into consideration and I'll show you what I mean later on.

The first three points of the article of excellent and very true. The channel does offer mass reach, easy implementation and enough targeting to be "in the ballpark" with your target. From a direct marketing standpoint, this is all we need for a test (get an aggressive out clause first). And this is exactly what we did for one of our clients, and the results were mixed, hence the reason for the blog.

In the article, Zaw Thet's first point was "big reach, and audiences are already opted-in". Both are true, but... The reach is dictated by the cost model you negotiate with your mobile partner. In our case, we negotiated a Cost Per Call program, which offered a massive amount of reach, and to be honest, a little bit of spam too. However, the benefits of a performance cost model on our ROI outweighed this negative. The other part of the statement, "audiences are already opted-in" is loosely accurate, with the key word being loosely. Very loose, almost deceptively loose. This is what I mean. Let's say I'm watching an NFL draft special on TV and see something asking me to text a shortcode to a number to receive draft updates to my phone. I'm not going to be able to watch it live, so this is perfect for getting my fix. Well, some conditions apply in small print on the TV screen that I may or may not have seen. In our experience, the user does not see this and just focuses on the shortcode and number to text it to. So, what they don't know is they've "opted-in" to receive sports alerts AND ADVERTISING. Also, within this fine print is their OPT-OUT language, which I'm guessing, most of the time, the user isn't paying attention to that either. So to continue my example, I get my draft updates to my phone, but I also keep getting sports updates well past this event and pretty much whatever else the mobile partner wants to send to me, including ads. And unfortunately, I can't remember how to make them stop (opt-out). Listen, I understand and am fine with the process described, but that's because I'm in the industry. Think of the general public. Two months from now, they have forgotten that they signed up for draft updates, they are getting addition text messages which they think are random, advertising is included, and on top of all that, it is costing them money if they do not have unlimited texting. So, this is exactly what happened in our case when we thought that "audiences are already opted-in". Within our ads, we included our 800 number to call to schedule an appointment, and we had a number of these types of complaints where users didn't have any idea where or when they "opted in" to receive these messages, and unfortunately, the CSRs were not able to help them because of their lack of recollection. So, you, the advertiser, are left cleaning up the mess of a flawed sign-up process and a consumer that doesn't pay attention. Fortunately, we were able to put a process in place to combat these occurrances and still show strong results, so we would do the program again.

We all know that targeting is a key component of any media strategy, and mobile is no exception. Zaw offers two great ways to achieve this, content and messaging. In our case, we used a performance cost model, which made the content targeting less important, although we were able to choose some verticals to test. The copy or message targeting is an excellent point with him saying "one size fits all ad copy is one of the most common reasons for poor campaign performance." Now, I don't know if this is the "most" common reason, but it behooves any advertiser to heed his advice.

Lastly, I'm not disagreeing in the last two points, because I do think that the channel can be an excellent CRM tool to build a relationship with your consumer, but the idea of "participation media" goes against at least 2 of his first three points. These custom games and surveys to engage the audience does require legwork, lacks reach, and what Mr. Thet fails to mention, is expensive, meaning more commissions for him, which is part of the reason why it conveniently made it's way into the article.

My First Media Buy

A little over a week ago, I got to experience what it's like to be a media strategist/planner...for reals. I work closely with our strategists on a daily basis, but never had I been the main point of contact for a media buy. With some help and guidance from an AE, I was able to set-up and implement a CPM deal with a publisher. I even signed the IO, that's insertion order for you youngsters out there. I was told that your first online media buy is the equivalent of having your first child. I don't have children, but it was awesome. Although the campaign didn't produce as anticipated, no computers spontaneously burst into flames on my watch...that's a success in my book.

As I try to articulate this introspection, I realize the importance of that experience. Hold up...I'd like to give a shout-out to college for that last sentence, much love. But, truly, one of the advantages of being part of a small agency is that positions are not one dimensional. The size of Media Two allows for exposure to many different roles and in turn promotes diversity amongst employees. My experience is a case in point. I'm not a strategist by any means (yet), but I feel confident enough to talk to a sales rep without consulting Rosetta Stone. It's hard to imagine that I would have been trusted or even given the opportunity to make such a deal at a larger agency. So thanks Media Two!

Furthermore, such exposure makes me truly appreciate what my colleagues bring to the table. Not only for the development of the company, but for my professional development as well. I am very grateful to be surrounded by such a talented group. I also now understand why Jon and Amy are a few nuts shy of a trail mix (1) Tons of Emails (2) Tons of phone calls following-up on those emails. I kid, I kid, you guys are the coolest. If Amy were here she probably would have karate chopped me by now so I'm going to stop writing and pretend to get a band-aid from HR.

SEO

There are a few aspects of SEO that I tend to feel are either misunderstood or not communicated to clients properly:

There are more factors than keyword density that go into how realistic it is that a clients site can appear in the top 10 organic search results:

# of Competitors
Clients rarely look to see how many of their fellow competitors are vying for the same real estate…obviously, the more there are, the more difficult it is to rank highly.

# of Quality Links
Your site must link to and from quality partners relevant to your product/service
Some sites don’t want to divert traffic to another site because they “don’t want to lose traffic”. Trust me, if someone wants to bail, they’re going to bail. Just because you have an external link doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to lose sales. Quality links will always help you.

The client’s favorite keyword isn’t always the one to focus on. Often times, a clients primary keyword list are not the keywords actually searched by their consumers. That’s why we must research keywords and find those that have a balance between search volume and competitiveness: you want to focus on keywords that are moderately searched and don’t have a ton of competition. If you focus on just high volume keywords you will run into a lot of competition which will make it difficult to rank. So stuck with a moderate balance.

Size does NOT matter
Just because a company/website may be a huge leader in an industry does not mean that they’ll rank well organically. If a tiny advertiser has a site with lots of content, that small business owner will rank higher than the dominant company with Flash intro’s, lots of images, and even a better site experience. SEO doesn’t care about how flashy the site is…it’s just the nature of the beast. This actually leads to the next issue….you ALWAYS have to determine what the goal is. If the goal is the build a killer site with great design, imagery and an overall user experience, you are going to have to sacrifice organic listings….that’s just how it goes. So sometimes if a client wants great graphics and other interactive components, you have to put SEO aside and not worry about it.

Google Comes to Raleigh!!!

So Google was in town... well two representatives of Google to speak at today's TIMA lunch and learn, when Google is in town for TIMA I guess its kinda a big deal. The attendance was easily double normal TIMA attendance and everyone was excited to hear what the biggest company to hit the Internet had to say... so if you weren't there, your in luck... I was and I'll give you the low down. The first woman (Tania) to speak gave an overview of Google's capabilities and the importance of a search campaign, this was high level information but not everyone is as knowledgeable in the interactive world as me :) she discussed the importance of using at least 4 different variations of copy in your ads so that the best performing ones can be optimised into greater weight (or odds that they will appear). She also discussed your different options in placing spend caps on your campaign so that you do not over spend monthly and even daily, and the ability to "day part" which means running ads on certain days or at certain times depending on volume and when they will be most effective.... it is about this time that Jon created his new charictor "the angry media planner hand puppet" this was a genius move and successfully kept us entertained throughout the "review" parts of the lecture, see picture below...

The second speaker was a Woman named Hetal, she was entertaining in that she spoke a lot about YouTube and showed a few Videos including one by one of my favorite bands of all time Weezer... if you haven't seen the "Pork and Beans" video yet do yourself a favor and stop reading this and click this link... but then come back because my rambling are very important and insightful!!!...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muP9eH2p2PI
There now don't you feel better?... anyways Hetal went on to discuss YouTube and the ways that some companies use it to make money, I am still not convinced that it is a good medium for a ROI based campaign but her statistics were pretty interesting, for example there are 10 hours of media uploaded onto YouTube every Minute, and 22% of people who watch YouTube are older than 55. YouTube in my opinion can be great for branding, granted you create a entertaining video that gets itself a lot of attention otherwise I will be excited to see how Google uses this site to generate revenue in the future... that being said I will leave you with this... to quote the angry beer coozie media planner hand puppet "V'hare is my MEDIA PLAN!!!" (in thick German accent).... ha ha priceless!

Wild Week at Media Two

So just so everyone has it - we're now keeping score on our interactive marketing news page, but last week warrants a post of its own...

On Monday, CNN posted a story about Media Two's recent Microsoft win, and how more and more larger firms are choosing the nimble interactive firms to represent them.

On Tuesday, DM News posted a portion of a thought paper on "Driving search conversions with display advertising".

On Wednesday, I spoke to an audience of agency members and marketers alike at the DMA's DM Days conference in New York. The specific topic was on what defines a full service advertising agency - and the answer that the room delivered was a resound "they don't exist anymore". We followed the show up by an in-person meeting at the IAB to discuss the results of the UGC / Social Media event as well as outlining guidelines for the future.

On Thursday - we learned that great results don't always lead to great things, and the David's of the world can always be replaced by the Goliath's of the world's promises (apparently not everyone read the CNN article on Monday). That being said, you can see the roll Media Two is on, and we're excited to continue that roll and focus our efforts on other accounts. Growing a firm with no interactive department or spend to being one of the top 25 interactive advertisers speaks volumes for the talent in this office, and we're looking forward to our next challenge!

On Friday, we resumed our overall great week by being named the #1 internet marketing and design firm in the Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill area by the Triangle Business Journal. That's extremely exciting news - especially seeing as how all of our clients happen to be outside the state of North Carolina!

Not to be outdone of course - on Friday the offices of Media Two were also closed for a good cause... The Learning Together organization in Raleigh put on their annual Tees for Tots program - and it was a smashing success. Media Two was the title sponsor for the 2nd year in a row, and the team I played on destroyed everyone else, posting the highest score in the tournament of 79! P.S. As the title sponsor, we chose to change the rules and say that the high score wins. Thank goodness for interactive marketing!