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December 18, 2006
Forget focus groups
Test your marketing slogans with Pay-Per-Click advertising
By Kai Blum
Pay-Per-Click advertising is an extremely efficient and highly customizable way to directly target potential customers. Ads are triggered by certain keywords and the advertiser pays only if a customer clicks on the ad.
Both Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing let advertisers assign numerous ad variations to the same set of keywords. These ads can be displayed in rotation and it quickly becomes clear which ads generate the highest clickthrough rate. As a result, the low performing ads can be eliminated and successful ads can be refined through the introduction and rotation of subtle variations. This method will lead to the most effective tagline and ad text for the Pay-Per-Click advertising campaign.
But how many marketing professionals are aware that they can use Google’s and Yahoo’s rotating ad features to quickly and efficiently test different taglines, ad texts and incentives for their clients’ entire marketing campaigns? In my opinion, search engine users are the best focus group that marketing professionals can find in an instant, because they represent a random sample of potentially interested consumers and they are completely unaware that they are part of a test group.
The clickthrough rate for the ad variations will indicate which ad message resonates most with the public. The most successful tagline/text on Google or Yahoo! could then also be incorporated into print campaigns, press releases, etc.
I highly recommend that agencies test their clients’ potential taglines and ad texts through Pay-Per-Click advertising — pending client approval, of course — before they finalize all other forms of planned marketing. Needless to say, the test ads should direct users to a meaningful landing page on the clients’ web sites.
Posted by staff at 05:05 PM
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December 13, 2006
Making room for the next generation
By Charlie Kondek
I have been contacted three times in as many weeks by college students seeking information on the PR field and the role of Hass MS&L in it. I make it my policy to always talk to students in cases like these. I thought it was interesting that students were seeking information and insights like this in the first place, but then I thought I might share with you the kinds of questions I was being asked, and how I answered. I got the student's permission to post the following content (edited, so as to give a general rather than exact impression of the exchange). I'd like to hear what you think of her questions and my answers. The resourceful student was going to use this material in a paper she was writing for a PR class. She also, wisely, concluded our correspondence in a way that left an impression, leaving open the idea of her doing an internship or the like. (That's a lot savvier than I was at her age.)
Student: What is the medium you use the most in your work?
Kondek: PR professionals still prefer to get their clients' message out via print and broadcast, but online PR is becomingly increasingly important. I work in a part of MS&L that specializes in online outreach. Event-based PR is also important. Personally, I'd say that PR firms as a whole are still behind the times a bit, in that most prefer to place stories via print, broadcast and through event-based PR, saving only a small portion of their budgets for what could be beneficial online tactics.
My office specializes in those tactics: we conduct outreach on behalf of our clients to blogs and other web sites, podcasts and at message boards and the like. Often this takes the form of putting product into the hands of bloggers so that bloggers will try the product and tell their readers what they thought of it. We also call that Word of Mouth Marketing. The kinds of blogs we regularly do this with are mom/dad blogs, tech/gadget blogs, food blogs, and others. We also use YouTube and other resources in innovative, communicative ways. Some examples of stories we have placed or online things we have created are:
Student: What is your audience when using online tactics? Do you specialize in one field?
Kondek: MS&L has offices all over the U.S., so it actually has quite a few specialties. The Detroit office of MS&L, for instance, also specializes in automotive PR, and our New York office specializes in consumer products. We have used online PR for consumer products, health care, automotive, electronics and technology, and food, for the most part. We're usually trying to either affect a purchase decision or communicate a concept, so the audience varies.
Student: Is it easy to calculate the ROI with this medium?
Kondek: I hope they are teaching you this in school: ROI is highly subjective, and everybody has different ways of calculating it. (Tell your prof I said that, see if he/she agrees.) Further, many PR professionals use subjective ROI methods to justify what they are doing for their clients. However, it's an important question, and this is how we do it: we provide our clients with a number of impressions. By impressions we mean the number of people who potentially saw their message, the size of the audience. We also stress to our clients that online impressions differ from print, broadcast and event impressions. With a print impression estimate, you can't be sure that everyone saw your story. With an online impression, you can be more certain.
Let me explain: let's say you place a story in a newspaper. That newspaper is read by 30,000 people, so you tell your client that each of those 30,000 copies passed through three sets of hands, and ring up 90,000 hits. While that’s a safe way to return some ROI, nobody really thinks the story got read that many times. On the other hand, let's say you place a story at a BLOG with 8,000 readers. Chances are good that most of those 8,000 read your story, because blog readers function differently than print readers. And blog content is different, too. It can be linked out or accessed by search engines or it can morph in various directions. Take a look at that YouTube link above — it shows Philips Electronics prototypes, and has 50,000 views. That's 50,000 people who not only watched the video, but who were searching for info when they found it.
And the best part? Things on the internet don't go away, they turn up again and again as people search for them. The next time someone searches for info on a product or company, they may find a story we placed. We work with some of the same bloggers and web editors over and over again so we can give a good estimate in advance of the kinds of audiences we can create.
Student: What are some drawbacks to tools like blogs, webcasts, podcasts (i.e., content issues, lack of control...)?
Kondek: Bloggers are not professional journalists, normally, so they sometimes react to messages in unexpected ways. We always expect an honest review of something we send to someone, but sometimes a blogger will take something the wrong way and publicly — and personally — slam our client or us. Talk about "lack of control!" Also, we are dealing with lower numbers of readers with blogs, lower number of listeners with podcasts. Still, we feel it all adds up to a positive. But while there is a sense of new potential there, it doesn’t work for everything. For example, you may have a product or event that people just aren't interested in. No amount of cajoling is going to get them to talk about it.
Student: What trends are forming in the industry regarding tech and Internet technologies?
Kondek: People are doing very innovative things with cell phones and texting. Podcasts are growing - there are a small number of listeners now but that will change dramatically. The key is that people are no longer allowing themselves to passively receive information and entertainment. They go out and get it, or create it, or both. The challenge to PR firms and their clients is to join this landscape by giving people something they want, not disrupt it by giving them something they don't want. For example, people are able to watch an event on TV or in person and "liveblog" it (blog/message about it at the same time). Being a part of that is an important goal to PR professionals and their clients, both of which are still waking up to this kind of method.
Student: Are there language or culture barriers that disallow global use of these new mediums?
They don't disallow use of the medium but they can be a challenge! For us, though, this has meant conducting our tactics in multiple languages. In fact, we've had to learn how different countries use the Internet. Take blogging, for example. It’s very popular in North America, England, France and Japan. Growing in China. Central and South America, not so much.
Posted by staff at 02:18 PM
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December 05, 2006
Be careful at your next office party...
In case you haven't had the pleasure, and I mean that with the greatest of sarcasm, of watching the Bank of America rendition of U2's "One" to describe a bank merger, you're probably one of just a few. With more than 170,000 views so far, the video, shot by someone attending the merger celebration, has made its way around the Internet quickly. Take a look:
Advertising Age's Jonah Bloom had a great story today, worth bookmarking, on how companies can avoid embarrassing moments like this one. In a world of cell phone cameras, just about anything can make its way online. Our own Jud Branam weighs in on the subject as well.
- While this stuff has always gotten out, it will happen more quickly, systematically and with greater effect. Internal rallying-cry stuff should be looked at from the standpoint: 'How will we respond when this hits YouTube?
Posted by Alicia Dorset at 03:41 PM
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