Media Planning

Make More Sense to Your Prospects in 2008
Using some of the latest and greatest technologies

The landscape of online marketing is adapting at a very deliberate and manageable pace. 

That’s right, I said it. 

Online media planners the world over should stop being cry-babies. This world isn’t moving too fast for you, you are simply moving too slow.

Media Planner Resolution 1: Learn to adapt to the communicative cues of your clients.

Every media planner dreams of an elaborate social media strategy that involves circus clowns, contests, exit surveys, trapeze artistry, and elephant size budgets.  The question is how to stimulate that dream with a third party that has undeniable direct response-iphilia.

This article outlines how you can engage the excitement of your clients. Let them share your whimsical marketing fantasies by outlining the key “here-and-now” technologies that you’re already employing. Show them how current strategies can be effectively integrated and what to expect.

Behavioral Targeting
The traditional ‘find them and grind them’ CPM (cost per thousand impressions) buys are dead. Media buyers have been requesting higher levels of inter-activity with their target groups, and alas, publishers have responded.

New online media opportunities should ebb and flow with consumer trends, follow your prospects’ activity, and allow new insight into shopping tendencies. Contextual targeting and post-visit retargeting offers such insights on a highly presumable level. 

Contextual behavioral targeting (BT) places a massive filter on your R.O.S. (Run of Site) CPM, so you can manipulate demand.  For instance, BT allows us to specify: “Only serve my ads to people who might already have an interest in my products.”  Through keyword targeting and channel cues, BT can deliver just that.  

How it can make sense to your clients

“You’re going to cut my impressions from 1 mil to 250,000 and charge me the same amount?”

Put simply from a sheer volume standpoint, it’s like comparing apples and oranges. 
But that’s a good thing!  Those other 750,000 shmoes are not in your target.  If the best you can arrange is the same net cost on a behavioral campaign as traditional placement, consider the additional adherent advantage of custom messaging. In other words, the ability to deliver variant ad messages is based on the behavior of the visitor. When managed properly, it’s not out of the question to see 1%-3% click-through.     

Impressions may be thinner, but it doesn’t mean your clicks necessarily have to be.

Behavioral Retargeting
It disturbs me to the very core to admit when the SEO and Paid Search chiefs in my agency have a leg up.  They are quite smug, and revel in the opportunity to defeat the mighty media wizard. 

Here it goes; my one admission about Paid Search and SEO.  Individually, the traffic generated from SEO and Paid Search are the best sources for quality clicks that you can ever get.  You should, in most cases, completely max out both elements, which have considerable ceilings, before experimenting aggressively with media. 

However, using behavioral retargeting, you can squeeze more out of both campaigns.     

On a good day, 98% of the traffic you generate from SEO and Paid Search will hang out on your website for a few minutes, consume a few pages of data, and leave just as quietly as they arrived; never to see you again. 

Retargeting says, ‘we miss you, come back and see us sometime…preferably when you are ready to buy.’  Serving impressions post-visit is a terrific way to drive a branding message and capture missed opportunities from a traffic base that you already know has some sort of interest in you. 

How to make sense of it to your clients

“You mean to tell me that we are going to try and market to people that have already said ‘no’ and stalk them around the Internet like a horny prom date?’

Yes! 

People don’t convert for any number of a thousand reasons, which could include that they were simply short on time or wanted to see a few other options before committing.  In fact, there are probably only a small percentage of visitors that could respond “I will absolutely never do business with this company.”  If you probe further using post-visit advertising, you could unfurl deep realizations about your own website. Perhaps people aren’t educated enough before making a buy decision on your website, or they could have difficulty with your shopping cart or lead form.  Whatever the case, non-conversion sometimes paves the path for greater long term success. 

Serve them clever, poignant, and highly personalized ads, and those post-visited cookie eaters will surprise you with their good will and click generosity. `Retargeting is fundamentally possible with the use of a browser cookie.  It’s not spyware or some crazy Trojan horse adware.  It’s an easily deletable mini-program that detects Internet whereabouts of the user.  Google uses them, amongst many other major ad publishers! 

Social Media
As of last year, a portion of the social media opportunity was encompassed by…

● More than 63 million blogs being tracked by Technorati, a specialist blog search engine. According to the same company, the number of blogs it tracked has doubled at least every six months for the past few years.
● More than 100 million videos a day being watched on the video sharing website, YouTube
●107 million members of the social network MySpace
Social media has allowed consumers to feel empowered and in charge of their Web experiences, but it can be far more than that for marketers. When marketers harness social media elements, they can use the “wisdom of the crowds” to great advantages in order to increase sales and generate goodwill amongst visitors.
Taking advantage of social media distribution channels is a way to allow visitors to influence what you show other visitors. When done correctly, it offloads the work of determining relevance. So rather than having to guess or use something like a recommendation engine to provide relevant content to visitors, other visitors essentially take care of that for you.
Social Media provides a means to attract the strongest brand ambassadors that have the greatest ability to influence the buying decisions of others.  In simpler terms, consider the value of 5 of your friends, in great detail, telling you that Pepsi is way better than Coca-Cola versus Pepsi serving you their own message: ‘Drink more Pepsi, please.”

The elements that can be most efficiently implemented to gain considerable return are Blogs, Bookmarking, Networking, and Online Contests.

How to make sense of it to your clients

“That sounds crazy, risky, and certainly not for me.”

The aforementioned isn’t suggesting you simply launch a blog and recklessly disseminate sales laden drivel.  The notion here is to strategically plant your message into the right hands.  Those in the blogosphere have the highest amount of influence for the least amount of out of pocket cost. There are several fall-out advantages from doing this on a regular basis. The inherent transfer of your branding by word of mouth is the most obvious, the exponential advancement of your SEO campaign as a result of the natural linking created, and the influence that you can have on driving search to your website if done properly.  The linking whirlwind you can create using blogging and bookmarking could end up so awesome that you’ll forget the other benefits.  A possible scenario:  One post is placed on a high page-ranked/trafficked blog.  Three loyal readers pick up the story, blog their opinion and give you link love.  One reader on any of the blogs ‘Diggs’ the story and bookmarks it to any one of the 50+ popular social bookmarking sites.  From the bookmark, any number of opportunities can arise.  People may bring the story back into their own blogs, and serve you a link.  Or bookmarkers may transmit the story across other social destinations, all of which may provide important SEO juice.           

Bookmarking can drive thousands of visitors to your website within a few hours time, but they will still spend no longer than a minute there. What is it worth?  Some will argue nothing.  I would argue that anytime you can expose your branding to potential prospects, even to the slightest degree of a simple logo placement, you have accomplished something. Numbers certainly don’t lie.  In September of 2007, a mid-level online Halloween costume retailer moved forward with a campaign that included social bookmarking, heavy blogging, Myspace networking, and an exclusive user generated costume contest.  Here’s what happened…

Campaign Flight: 9/02/07--10/31/07

MEDIUM    IMPRESSIONS
Online Contest    70,750
Retargeting    733,100
Myspace     11,000
Blogging    27,100
Bookmarking    1,000
Total    842,950

Monthly Increase in Branded Search Terms    507%
Transactions generated from branded search terms    222

Online Media Planning is a full contact sport.  If you are not taking advantage of current technologies, then someone else surely is.  If you haven’t educated your clients on the many benefits that are right at your fingertips, you are doing them a mighty disservice. 
Though it may be intimidating at first, we all win when the technique of the media strategist uses all of their resources to the utmost of their potential.