Marketing is complex. Our client laughed as she explained that every year that she has given speeches and presentations about marketing, it gets more and more complex.  And yes, CONTENT is king – and consumers are in control. She talked about driving consumer-generated content with which her company wants to be associated and how the consumer has become his/ her own channel.

The big question for her marketing team is, “How do they communicate to each individual consumer with an overarching concept?”

She continued and talked about how her department is structured to find synergies between paid and earned media using the G.R.O.W. construct: Grassroots – Results – Organize – Widespread. One of the goals of this construct is finding ways to make social media programmatic.

In terms of trying to measure the increased complexity of marketing, she commented that people are looking at all the usual metrics and data, but that it is not integrated. Only by pulling metrics together can one create a clearer picture.

In order to do this with products that are not sold to the consumer but are instead important components of end products, our client explained how her organization has created a Value Point System to measure the effectiveness of online media.  And by tracking digital activity in this way, now allows for fair comparisons across product lines, geographies, business units, etc.

The analogy used to explain the system was “a party”. Knowing how many people attended “the party” versus how many were invited constituted the traditional way of measuring success. With the Value Point System, her team can now see how many people showed up for “the party”, stayed, with whom they spoke, and whether they ate, drank, and/or danced. This way, her organization can measure ENGAGEMENT across different types of “parties”.

Using this system, her organization has managed to increase ROI by several 100%. The company is now working to extend the system to other media.
Wrapping up, our client state that successful digital marketers must be strategists, publishers, aggregator, analyst and innovator – all at the same time.

You are reading a post from: Covario Actionable Insights
For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Covario INFLECTIONPoint 2011 Recap: Day #2 Keynote – Cross Media Optimization, Join the Party!

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The fact that each movie has the goal to make a large brand impact in such a short amount of time makes using social media campaigns even more challenging.  But they found a way.

Our client said that social media campaigns for every picture get seeded before any traditional or digital advertising flight. The three core components for every social media campaign are Community, Conversations and Currency.

What this means is that they build a community, which enables conversations. And the people who have joined these communities are rewarded (e.g., more content is released as certain milestones are achieved).

Our client explained the seven “Rules of Engagement” for his studio’s social media campaigns.

1.    Strong Calls-to-Action
The movie example our client gave of this rule was for a science fiction film. The social media campaign started four months before the movie opened. Using “out-of-home” media outlets, like billboards and bus stop seats, the campaign promoted a toll-free number that people could call. A fictitious organization had been set-up which kept track of the aliens from the film. After calling a dedicated hotline and leaving a message, people could go to a website, created especially for the campaign, to see where a call came from (i.e.: San Diego). Visitors of the website  could hear the messages that other participants left. This was an example of a geo-social campaign.

2.    Use Social Plug-Ins
The example our client gave was from a website for another upcoming film. At the top of the homepage is a social media “widget” that allows for easy access to all of your social media outlets.  This allows visitors to easily interact with the brand and recommend the film to his or her social network.  This widget is shared across each of the client’s film micro-sites, providing a familiar interface for their fans across their various properties.

3.    Build a Robust Profile
For a recent superhero film, the studio worked with a company that understood the limitations of each social network platform. This vendor’s technology allowed for a consistent look and feel, providing full functionality of every feature designed into the profile, regardless of the limitation of the social network.

4.    Speak to Consumers in an Organic Way
The example here was from a recent romantic film. Personalized messages from the film’s heart throb were sent directly to fans’ inboxes from the actor’s Twitter account. This was done through a technology that had the capacity to send out 10,000 personalized tweets per day.  The message was crafted in such a way that it leveraged Twitter users to make the film into a Trending Topic on Twitter.

5.    Produce Custom Content
Using the same romantic film, our client explained how each cast member recorded personalized videos to their fans. Equally, for a recent romantic-comedy release, the social media campaign included a “Making of…” video that was available only on the film’s Facebook fan page.

6.    Draft off Others’ Success
In the superhero film, the social media campaign leveraged a well-known social game that aligned with the movie’s genre. Rewards within the social game were branded in such a way that associated them with the film.

7.    Get in the Zeitgeist
This is about getting people talking about the film’s brand. Using the science fiction movie referenced earlier, the film became a Trending Topic on Twitter in one week, had more than 140,000 Facebook fans by opening day, and had numerous videos on YouTube spoofing the aliens from the film.

So how does this major motion picture producer measure the contribution that social media – as well as other forms of media, both paid and earned – have on the success of every film released? Through the CMO (cross-media optimization) Dashboard that Covario developed specifically for this client. For this company, the CMO Dashboard pulls in data from disparate sources to track website traffic, buzz level, viral video views, online awareness, and search volume. It allows our client to track the synergies among various media types, to see which media channels merit more resource allocation, and to communicate performance results to his management team. (The dashboard is set up to be instantly repurposed as an executive summary.)

You are reading a post from: Covario Actionable Insights
For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Covario INFLECTIONPoint 2011 Recap: Guest Speaker #3 – Now Showing: Movie Studio Flies High At Box Office With Social Media

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Because of the rapid migration from print to online and mobile media, traditional publishers need to create new marketing strategies and tactics, as well as new business models in order to survive and thrive.

Most effective for this challenge is to have an integrated marketing approach.

An integrated campaign ensures that news media organizations provide a consistent message to their target audiences and reinforces their value proposition across consumer touch points.

Our client’s integrated marketing campaigns contain some or all of the following components:  house media (print, online, e-mail), SEM and SEO, social media, online display, e-mail, and mobile. Tagging via site analytics tools is used to track performance, including the creation of a cross-media dashboard in order to see channel data side by side. Along the way, social media monitoring helps to indicate its effectiveness relative to other media channels.

Our client leverages social media in various forms to engage readers. Integration is achieved both on-site and within social media platforms. Our client’s organization created a tool that combines feeds from users’ Facebook friends and a variety of Twitter feeds mixed with the publication’s own RSS feeds. More than 200,000 people have opted-in to share their personal information through the tool and millions have interacted with it.

Within the Sports section of the newspaper, our client gave the example of a daily call out to fans on Twitter to rate the way the local pro football team is playing, as well as to respond to an article or current issue. Tweets are displayed contextually on the web pages.

For the iPad, our client’s organization created an app that offers a single destination for news, commentary, aggregated social media conversations, photos and user engagement around the top issues of the day. They include original stories from the newspaper, selected headlines from sources across the Web, Facebook comments, and Twitter feeds from leading voices that add context to the story.

Our client then went into a case study of an integrated marketing campaign around the 2010 elections…

Tactics

• House advertising, consisting of a banner ad on the homepage of the newspaper’s website, brought people to a landing page where they could sign up to receive “breaking alerts” about Campaign 2010.
• A hash tag about Campaign 2010 news coverage was promoted on Twitter as a Trend.
• They optimized the web pages containing the stories about each state’s senate campaign for search phrases that included the name of the state.

Results

• Doubled the number of follows and mentions.
• More than doubled the number of referrals.
• Essentially replicated the traffic that a story could get from being on the homepage.

You are reading a post from: Covario Actionable Insights
For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Covario INFLECTIONPoint 2011 Recap: Guest Speaker # 2 – Breaking News: Publisher Grows Online Subscriptions With Digital Media

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Search has reached maturity – both paid and organic. It is no longer a matter of whether to invest in search, but rather a matter of how much and which ones – paid, organic and/or social. Three large advertisers got together on stage to discuss how they aligning spending with opportunity to allocate and/or gain budgets.

Lionel, our senior director of client services, posed the first question to the three panelists, “How do you get budget for search programs?”

The technologist explained that search is a little shy of 10% of his company’s total media spend. He didn’t use the qualifier “only” because this percentage has grown exponentially over the years.

His company, doesn’t do attribution management as was discussed in the first panel, primarily because its product is more of an “ingredient” brand. So depth of engagement is the metric they use to evaluate the effectiveness of search marketing, which is the same one they use in display.  However, in order to secure funding for search, our client and his global team uses data to show the delta of funding vs. total opportunity.

It is almost guaranteed that any target segment will cite search as a key resource for navigating the Internet to get to where and what they want.  Plus, they use it in all stages of the purchase funnel, from initial research to vendor selection, from pricing to retail options.

The great thing about being on the digital side is that we have more data to present to the accounting team then the offline side has to demonstrate its media effectiveness.

The next panelist, our financial client, uses his organization’s overriding success metric ‘Return on Equity’ to show how well their division’s search channel works.  This naturally helps justify more budget. The metric is based on how well an asset, or loan, performs over time. Internet loans perform better (i.e., fewer bad loans and more paid loans), than the loans garnered through offline channels.

When justifying budget for SEO, the financial services digital marketer positions it differently from paid search, because it is not just chasing the last click – the content created for SEO purposes actually becomes a brand asset.

Another way he justifies search budget is that he is able to better target the prospects that will generate the most return on equity. Contrary to popular belief, while traditional mass media may stimulate more demand, it can have the adverse affect of stimulating more bad-performing customers – at least in the financial sector.

Our multi-national professional services client said that his organization is so big and there are so many different types of combinations of media that they are challenged by metrics.

So he uses a missed opportunity matrix to justify more search marketing budget by showing his management that although they may be cornering the market on a key search phrase in a low volume market, they are missing the opportunity presented by similar but higher volume key search phrases.

This client uses SEO to support the paid media side, especially with keyword discovery to identify missed opportunities.

Trying to spend money at the end of quarter and throwing it at paid media does not work. By then it is too late to do the research and planning to set up the campaign for success. But building assets that can generate engagement through SEO and social media often yields the highest return.

Lionel jokingly summed things up by making the poignant observation that both the professional services and technology clients shame management into giving them more money.  All in the room laughed.   Then he got serious and turned to the three panelists and asked them, “How do you traverse politics once you have the data?”

For professional services, we need to “steal money from the right person (department).  And once you know who has the power, what their pain is and know how to present a case to alleviate that pain, you win.” He uses this approach because search does not have a high enough seat at the table to influence things.

The technologist said that he works hard to rise above the politics because his team works closely with the Finance team – providing them with transparent data that is generated by search.  This gives the accountants a window into marketing, which they don’t usually have. When he can show them data integrating offline and online media, Finance acts as his BFF.

The financial services marketer explained that his team is able to get the return that the organization needs, so budgeting is an somewhat of a easy exercise. What stops him from spending even more money is that the organization does not have the capacity to process the increased bank loans that the search channel would generate.

You are reading a post from: Covario Actionable Insights
For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Covario INFLECTIONPoint 2011 Recap: Panel Session # 2 – Budgeting for Search in 2011

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Craig Macdonald, Covario’s CMO, moderated the sessions and asked the overarching question, “How can accurately place credit to various media types?”

The Panel Session #1 participants included Covario clients in Luxury Toys, Consumer Electronics and Media Mix Modeling.

Bigger questions definitely erupt quickly from this one question, such as “What influences consumers the most?” and “Which media will drive consumers into the sales and shopping cart purchase funnel?”

In order to begin answering these questions, we must first work to understand the customer journey – what media impacts their lives, and how and when they consume our product, and where the journey leads them.  It is then that we’ll be able to determine the media mix, and only then can we add statistical rigor.

We can look to search and social as harvesters of brand interest.

Our client, who markets for a luxury toy brand, explains how her company starts with the consumer.  As a consumer marketer, her team wants to interact with their consumers, rather than just looking at data to attribute credit.

The once-familiar purchase funnel, which was clean and linear, has become an entirely connected consumer experience, which traverses, spirals and backtracks. Today, these consumer retailers recognize they need to connect with consumers differently than they have traditionally in the past. In making purchase decisions, our client has seen women use websites, referrals, search and mobile more than TV. They use social media as much as they read magazines or their own e-mail. Her consumers’ time online has shifted from portals to social networks, entertainment and gaming. As shopping and media behavior shift to digital, our client sees a growing opportunity to influence consumers before they reach the store.

In response to this media engagement shift, brands are evolving their marketing strategies to add to impressions with engagement(s) and relationships. Retailers are taking more of a “store back” focus to insights and developing programs that are integrated throughout the entire purchase process. As a result, advertising spend is shifting towards multichannel-related marketing efforts.

For this luxury consumer marketer, the key elements in attributing value to the myriad of media types deployed in today’s marketing strategies include the following:

• Start simple – Master two channels first and then add more.
• Develop an attribution plan – Consider differences between products and brands.
• Create a tracking system – Have an integrated tracking system (easy to say, hard to do).
• Collect data and maintain history – Keep enough data from the initial impression or click to the conversion.
• Clean data, get focused – Set up business rules ahead of time for data that’s not appropriate to analyze.
• Align CRM data – Marry your internal CRM data with your engine and conversion data.

The next speaker, our client in consumer electronics, illustrated the problem with attribution management with the following scenario. One of his channel partners is Best Buy. Let’s say someone sees an ad for his CE product on Best Buy’s website or even in a local printed circular. Then the person sees a Best Buy TV ad. While researching the product on CNET, the prospective buyer sees a Best Buy banner ad. Then the individual goes into the local Best Buy store and buys the device. In the traditional last-click attribution model used by many search marketers, the cashier at Best Buy would get credit for the sale.

For someone responsible for digital marketing, his natural defense might be – “Maybe it was the first click that drove the sale?” and “The last click captured the sales directly at the cash register.” By considering these as answers to hisquestions, he would naturally put ad dollars toward both. So his company employs two dashboards to track conversions.

For this CE client and his team, it comes down to balancing online modeling with offline-to-online influence.

The next panel speaker, a media mix modeler and business partner of Covario, understands the similarities and difference between attribution modeling and media mix optimization.

The  similarities? Both are methods for understanding ROI, leverage empirical data from inductive reasoning, and are heavily enabled by work done to collect and manage data. However, attribution modelers think that media mix optimizers are not tactical enough, whereas media mix optimizers cannot understand where attribution modelers come up with the systems they employ to assign weights to each customer touch point.

Hence, he suggests both are valuable. Where attribution modeling is about accuracy, media mix optimization is about precision.

Still, what’s the difference? Accuracy really means “How close to true values can you get?” Precision means “Can you create the same experience over and over again and see the same results?”

Imagine a dart board and we’re 10 feet away.

If we are only accurate, we hit the target most of the time – we know how to line up and make a good shot, but not great.  And we make it somewhere on the board, but we make it.

If we are only precise, we may miss the target completely, but continue to hit in and around the same spot off the board in a tighter more accurate cluster.. Therefore, we need to both accurate to get on the board, and precise to have create a cluster of darts… preferably in the center two rings of the dart board.

Attribution modeling or similar empirical technique is best used to determine how to accurately execute at a tactical level.

Media mix is best used to understand media relationships, to build and optimize as precise as possible a media strategy and to budget.

So it’s good to have both.

You are reading a post from: Covario Actionable Insights
For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Covario INFLECTIONPoint 2011 Recap: Panel Session # 1 – Credit Crunch

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Mark believes the Internet is going to be big one day… (wink, wink, nudge, nudge)

In all seriousness, Mark shared that all the claims of a slowdown or maturity of the Internet are unfounded – Google is still growing, Groupon was valued in the billions of dollars, Twitter has turned tweeting into a verb, and Facebook is where Google was eight years ago.

Further evidence of this includes the following:

• Although growth in the search space will probably not get back to pre-recession 70% Y-o-Y levels, it may get to 30%.  That’s closer than most people think!
• Amazon reported that on the peak order day in the 4th quarter of 2010 (during the holiday season), revenues grew 44%. This increase proved to be greater than any other year.
• Online advertising in the U.S. experienced a 14% increase in spend, with video advertising experiencing the highest growth; compare this to total U.S. ad spend growing at a mere 1%.

Mark stated that he expects to see similar growth and even more ad spend shifting from offline to online. The drivers fueling Internet growth include:

Mobile Internet — > $1 Billion Revenue Run Rate

• 200% YoY growth in mobile advertising – It’s a matter of IF not WHEN mobile search will parallel desktop search.

Video Advertising – Budgets Are (Finally) Shifting

• $700 million has shifted from traditional TV to video advertising. – The number is miniscule compared to traditional TV ad spend, but it is significant.
• Within three or four quarters, Netflix saw the majority of people stream videos rather than DVDs.

Facebook – Disruptive Impact of Social Networks

• Huge growth and reach.  However, Facebook is not a verb – which is why Google has not been detrimentally impacted by Facebook’s rise.

Digital Goods – Apps, Micro-Transactions…

• Today there are approximately 300,000 apps on the iPhone and 105,000 apps on the Android Platform.
• Zynga generates hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for digital goods.

Local Net Advertising Market – M&A Focus

• Generated $12 billion in 2010.
• Groupon is ValuPak with e-mail and socialized with gaming.

Dema Zlotin, Covario’s co-founder and vice president of strategy, asked why companies like Groupon could be valued so highly within such a relatively short amount of time.

Mark believes that unlike 10 years ago, the billion dollar revenue target is so much easier now for new companies to get to because there is such a huge Internet base. On top of that, Groupon could grow so big with an established idea (ValuPak) that was successfully translated online.

Moreover, the management teams for today’s wildly successful start-ups have been around the block a few times already (Zynga – third startup for its founders; Groupon – fourth startup for its founders).

You are reading a post from: Covario Actionable Insights
For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Covario INFLECTIONPoint 2011 Recap: Second Presenter – Mark Mahaney from Citi Group

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Covario’s annual INFLECTIONPoint Conference was held February 1st through 3rd in downtown San Diego, CA. The theme of this year’s event was Top Guns of Digital Marketing, as this year is also 25th anniversary of the movie Top Gun. Plus, the Navy’s Top Gun Academy, based in San Diego, was an invite-only academy for the best Navy fighters — similar to Covario’s INFLECTIONPoint Conference was an invite-only for the best digital marketers.

Russ Mann, CEO of Covario, jumped onto the stage, which was designed as a miniature aircraft carrier, following an uplifting video of flight and business success.  Russ wore a leather pilot jacket, white t-shirt and Ray-Ban sunglasses…fitting the image of Maverick. The opening video clip’s song “Get Higher and Higher” — although not the original version from Van Halen — aligned perfectly with Covario’s “Get More Lift” campaign.  It provided a lift for clients and special guests in the audience; much like 2010 provided a lift for the marketers in the room in terms of revenue, brand awareness and even their careers.

A few of the year-over-year measures of Covario’s success that Russ talked about immediately following the clip included:

• 50% client growth;
• 30% employee growth around the world;
• Sponsorship of Arizona Humane Society, Helen Woodward Animal Center, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, International Mental Health Research Organization;
• Industry awards that Covario won together with clients from  IAB/ MIXX, OMMA, DPAC;
• Business rankings Covario secured in the Inc. 500, the Software 500, Advertising Age’s Top 25 Search Agencies, and Lead 411′s Technology 500; and
• Covario’s Net Promoter Score, which saw an increase of 20 points.

In addition, Russ referenced new products and services offer by Covario in 2010.  New services encompassed paid-social media advertising on Facebook and Twitter, as well as online video placements and video SEO on Google TV and YouTube.

Russ introduced the concept of Algorithmic SEO through the recently obtained patent behind Covario Audit Score v3.  He also announced Covario Broadcast Media Insight solution as part of the Cross-Media Optimization (CMO) Dashboard.

After the recap, Russ went into the audience to ask a few participants what they were hoping to get from the conference for help in 2011 and beyond…

• One client was looking forward to discussing common SEO pain-points and ways to address them with other Top Guns.
• A new conference attendee (even though her company is one of Covario first clients) was looking forward to discussing how fellow large, global companies develop efficient and effective organizational structures around search.
• A financial client was anticipating new thought-leadership and learning about new trends that would help him set up his search practice for continued success.

Stay tuned for more on Covario’s INFLECTIONPoint 2011 Event.

You are reading a post from: Covario Actionable Insights
For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Covario’s INFLECTIONPoint 2011 Recap: Welcome Top Guns of Digital Marketing

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“Recessionary Math for Marketers” is about identifying and capitalizing on the synergy between on- and off-line channels to drive better performance at a lower cost.  Three areas were discussed in detail during today’s session:  (1) Paid and Organic Search Interaction, (2) Branded Keywords and Affiliate Control, and (3) Search and Display Correlations

Here are some ACTIONABLE INSIGHTS from the session:

- Owning as much of the real estate on a given Search Engine Results Page (SERP) by ranking organically and buying paid search advertisements does not always make good business sense.

- Measuring the change of total click-thrus (on a given SERP for a specific keyword or phrase) by  altering the position for your paid search ad provides a solid measure of paid and organic synergy without requiring the advertiser to shut down or “go dark” on their paid search advertising program.

- There is often a marked difference in paid and organic synergies for keywords depending on how competitive they are, whether channel partners or affiliates are involved, and a number of other factors (cyclical patterns, economy, weather, geography, etc.).  Analysis must be done at the keyword level.

- A new measure of value, which Covario calls “Incremental ROI,” should be used to evaluate the contribution(s) of paid and organic listings.

- Managing channel and affiliate presence on SERPs for branded terms is critical.  A Covario case study of Lenovo was cited.  Results from restricting affiliate bidding on branded terms yielded (1) a 50% revenue increase, and (2) a 34% increase in conversion rates.

- Evaluating the synergy between paid search advertising and display advertising requires common metrics and the key to accuracy is employing the appropriate attribution model which in Covario’s experience is a model with configurable attribution rules.  An example is illustrated below:

E.g. 50% to last (N), 25% to N-1, 15% to N-2, 10% to N-3

To download the podcast and/or presentation from this session, please go to:  http://www.covario.com/podcasts_webinars/032009-MathforMarketers.shtml

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For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Recessionary Math: Making 1+1 Equal 3

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Now in its third year, INFLECTIONPoint appears to have hit its stride.  Covario has focused this year’s conference programming on how to use the synergies between digital media to drive out unnecessary costs associated with advertising.

With a lineup that looks like the Who’s Who directory of major brands and advertisers, this year’s INFLECTIONPoint conference features keynotes from Disney-ABC Television Group (Albert Cheng – EVP of Digital Media), Enquiro (Gord Hotckiss – President and CEO), and WebTrends (Barry Parshall – VP of Product Strategy) and a content-rich agenda with interactive advertising leaders (and Covario clients) from Adobe, Amgen, Cisco, IBM, Intel, Intuit, Lenovo, Microsoft, NetApp, P&G, T-Mobile and Washington Post Digital.

Published topics include a session on the Digital Center of Excellence, Leveraging SEO in a Market Downturn and Managing Paid and Organic Search Together.

INFLECTIONPoint 2009 is an exclusive, invitation-only event featuring industry experts in search marketing and interactive advertising. This year’s two-day agenda is packed with informative sessions and invaluable networking opportunities.

As in the past, INFLECTIONPoint is being held in conjunction with the PGA’s Buick Invitational Golf Tournament in Southern California, making this an outstanding opportunity to network with today’s interactive media thought leaders.

To find out more about Covario’s invitation-only INFLECTIONPoint 2009 conference, visit http://www.covario.com/inflectionpoint.

You are reading a post from: Covario Actionable Insights
For more information on Covario please visit our corporate site.
Copyright © 2012 Covario Inc. All rights reserved.

Major Advertisers to Gather at INFLECTIONPoint 2009

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