Marketing: Holiday '09 Starts Now

One of the most valued aspects of online marketing is advertisers’ ability to nimbly direct their campaigns through a constantly evolving cyber landscape. Unfortunately, feeling nimble doesn’t mean you are nimble, which leaves the old adage echoing in the rafters: “Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”

Despite increasing resources budgeted to e-commerce, there’s a fading sense of planning and preparedness from online marketers. Like so many aspects of commerce, marketing is a data-driven process supplemented by elements of creative. In designing your prospecting program for the holiday season, do the due diligence now to prepare all your online channels for success.

Collect All Data and Test
Have you collected enough data this year to make educated decisions about the new applications available to online marketers? In just the past six months, new types of media have become a more important part of our everyday lives. Testing early will allow you to release an effective application, like an iPhone app for the holidays.

If leveraging iPhones, Twitter or Facebook leaves you scratching your head, ask your customers — they’re using them. There’s a good chance they’ll use them when making holiday purchases, too.

Set up tests to interact across all your channels, with a seamless passage for users to navigate between them.

Holistic Online Marketing
Too many mediums in online marketing are viewed as on-off, plug-in solutions. There’s a natural tendency to treat different mediums with a sense of autonomy from your Web site and from one another. If the increasing landscape of Web 2.0 users (soon to be Web 3.0 users) has taught us anything, it’s that no medium exists as an island. A funny YouTube video will be posted on a blog somewhere, and your nephew will link his Facebook profile to it.

Today’s prospect is any Web site user, blog reader, Facebook friend or Twitter follower somehow associated with your business or industry. By effectively leveraging these channels, your customer database could easily explode.

Your challenge is to parse out the most effective way to speak to these prospects via their preferred channels. Testing and preparing all your channels now will make holiday messaging efficient and empowering. Here are a few simple but effective steps to begin collecting data and refining your online marketing.

Paid Search
A solid paid search program can provide an immediate boost to online sales. Studies my firm has conducted have shown that 65 percent to 85 percent of visitors from search engine optimization (SEO)/pay-per-click ads are new visitors to the site, with very positive return on investment ranging from $2 to $7. That makes paid search a very viable prospecting channel.

But many companies treat paid search only as a profit center, and limit its use as a new customer generator. Managing paid search is a complex process, so here are some practical suggestions:

• Leverage site promotions in paid search ads with an expiration date. Include the date to prompt consumers to act immediately.
• Since paid search brings new visitors to your site, test different landing pages that showcase popular, lower-priced products.
• Introduce consumers to your brand by giving them a little background on your company, similar to a two-page spread in a catalog. Again, these are prospects; treat them as such.

Banner Ads
Many retailers take product photos and use them in banner ads. These kinds of ads let you test with very little cost. Once you’ve paid to create a banner ad, you can test on a cost-per-click basis using Google’s ad network with no minimum spend. Testing lets you develop the necessary elements of a successful banner ad, including offer, image and text.

Test variations in ad sizes; bigger doesn’t always mean better results.

Use Google’s ad planner to identify the sites your customers visit. Look at your referral traffic for additional sites.

Regardless of how you use or view it, you can’t afford to ignore the social media space this holiday season. A great example of incorporating social media into a marketing campaign comes from cosmetics provider Smashbox Cosmetics. Smashbox has been extremely effective using Facebook and YouTube to reach customers and prospects with contests, promotions and other offers that are delivered via e-mail and clearly communicated on its Web site.

Huge Reach
Smashbox has more than 15,000 Facebook friends. Facebook says that its average user has 120 friends, so do the math: Smashbox has access to 1.8 million prospects. This is huge reach for very little cost. Here are some holiday season pointers for working in the social media space:

• Have a candid internal discussion regarding how your company Facebook page can best be used to serve your customers.
• Code your Facebook page appropriately, and begin recording metrics from your site.
• Reach out to your customers to discuss how to improve your Facebook profile to service them.
• Ensure all your social media effectively allows users to navigate to your main Web site.
• Incorporate your SEO program into these social media plans, as Google indexes social media.

Conclusion
Although you can only “guide” conversations around the brands you sell, the control you do have presents a clear message and incorporates this message into a holistic marketing presence. So prepare to succeed by investing in online marketing to build your consumer database now.

Collecting not only customers, but also the data that defines them and the experiences that engage them, will keep your brand top-of-mind during this holiday season — and throughout the year.

Karen Crist is president of interactive ad agency Bright Cloud Marketing (karen@brightcloudmarketing.com or Facebook: http://bit.ly/Facebook_BrightCloud).