…and, is it relevant anyway?
We've all heard this term, integrated marketing communications or IMC (yes it has an acronym!). Yet is it relevant I wonder, shouldn't marketing be integrated by definition? Integrated states the obvious!
Marketing of old was relatively simple, from a marketer's perspective advertising was straightforward, retail wasn't complicated and the Internet didn’t exist. Integrating marketing communications was relatively easy to achieve. Today there are many more disciplines and channels than consumer attention can cope with, and we obsess over them.
From a consumer perspective, there's much more information to take in now than say pre 1995. There's more TV programming, radio choice, print options, and outdoor potential, not mentioning online and mobile platforms, of course! In turn, advertisers are quick to hit people with more marketing messages because of that choice, new communication channels are quickly exploited and as a…
How one creative agency got creative with its offline advertising
If you’ve ever travelled on the London Underground you’ll be well aware of the fact that virtually all space is for sale.
Over a billion passenger journeys are made every year which, coupled with an average platform wait of three minutes, gives brands an amazing opportunity to engage with a large number of people during their commute.
In fact, according to data from CBS Outdoor, 87% of consumers actually welcome tube advertising as it provides them with a distraction on their journey.
A 'London' voice and engagement measurement
With so many brands competing for space, there is a need to develop a tone of voice that speaks specifically to London commuters. Holiday or dating agency adverts are likely to focus on the convenience of London transport for selling their product.
And how do you measure…
Covering the 6 core components of a marketing campaign
We've created this new template to help marketers plan a campaign if they are managing it themeselves in a small business or are briefing colleagues and agencies in a larger business. Agencies may find it useful for reviewing their campaign processes. We also hope it will help prompt you to think of different ways of integrating new digital marketing approaches into your campaigns.
The marketing campaign planning template can be downloaded by Expert members in Word format so you can modify it to best suit your marketing campaigns:
Download planning template
Structure of campaign planning template
The stages of marketing campaigns and key issues covered are:
Campaign goals and tracking. What are we trying to achieve through our campaign and how will we know when we achieve it?
Target audience, customer insight and targeting.…
My experiences of using attribution as a social media marketer
Attribution modelling has certainly been a hot topic in 2011 and many brands have started to reap the rewards of optimising their online marketing budgets and reallocating marketing resources using it. Additionally, it can also provide incredible insight into customer behaviour and the touch points that they come into contact with up to and including the point of conversion.
To get an idea of the types of benefits brands can experience take a look at this post on the Econsultancy blog and see Dave's post giving this introduction to attribution modelling options.
Attribution modelling and social media
I’ve heard a lot recently about how the time of experimenting with social media without true measurement is coming to an end. And let’s hope that’s the case. Whilst attribution modelling certainly isn’t a panacea, using it does allow marketers to start to understand customers’…
Are we entering a 'post-digital world’?
I'm hearing more and more people saying we're heading into a post digital world. Although these ‘buzz-words’ tend to grab the headlines but I don't think digital is over yet.
In business, language is most useful when it communicates unambiguously. ‘Digital’ currently still means something distinct from ‘offline’. I certainly prefer ‘digital marketing’ to ‘interactive’ or ‘new media’ which never meant very much, even in the 1990s!
By the way, one term I really can’t get my head around is ‘inbound marketing’. Let’s agree never to use it!
[Editor's note: I think inbound marketing is here to stay as a term thanks to Hubspot Mike, since it's popular and helps distinguish between the benefits and approaches of digital marketing against online marketing. But I know what you mean, it essentially means the same as digital marketing!]
I believe we still need digital marketing as a way of…
Our summary of the IPA new models of marketing effectiveness report
As marketers, we use the expression “integrated campaign” often, but of course in practice, the degree to which campaigns are truly integrated across channels varies.
Recently the IPA released a new report models of marketing effectiveness which shows the popularity of alternative options for campaign integration.
It’s certainly an exhaustive study with analysis of over 250 IPA Effectiveness Awards case studies, entered over a seven-year period (2004-2010) including examples from Hovis, O2, Virgin Atlantic, HSBC, E4 Skins, Johnnie Walker and more.
I hope our writeup is useful in helping prompt ideas on how you can tackle integration.
4 Options for integrated campaign planning
The report defines 4 options for integration. Analysis of campaign effectiveness reviewed hard measures including sales gain, market share gain, reduction of price sensitivity, customer retention, customer acquisition, profit gain and market share defence. Soft measures reviewed include brand awareness,…
Creating a balance between sales optimisation and marketing
When did you last run a campaign that sought to engage a market, to really engage and inspire potential customers rather than focusing on selling to those already in buying mode?
We were discussing this several months ago and talked to Imran Farooq, another Smart Insights contributor who also trains marketers. We were saying it seems that many digital marketers today, and marketers more generally, don't seem to run campaigns so much outside of what is really day-to-day optimisation and sales promotion, so prompting the questions why is that? And, are we right?
When we think of campaign planning at Smart Insights, we consider campaigns to be platforms that sit on top of day-to-day marketing where the focus is sales and optimising marketing around generating sales today. The day-to-day activities are what we (and many others) call business as usual (BAU), where we're…
Integrating email marketing into a display ad campaign boosts recall by 13%
I'm sharing this recent research study since it offers some interesting results and insight for multi-channel marketers. It covers an area you don't see discussed so much - the intersection between email marketing and online ad campaigns.
Today email is mainly thought of as a customer communications tool for developing loyalty and sales to existing customers, but this study shows how using email as a media buy through ads in email newsletters and in rented lists can help in customer acquisition and conversion to sale.
You'll see that the results suggest that online advertising campaigns are enhanced when the email marketing channel is added. It's a classic case of the increasing reach and awareness through adding an additional channel.
Methodology / case study
The study, which analysed the advertising effectiveness of…
Facebook rated the most important marketing channel
With the increasing range of channels available to reach our audiences, it's increasingly difficult to know where to focus investment in marketing communications techniques.
Most marketers will rightly argue that the techniques that works best in their market is what really counts, so researching their audience adoption of new digital channels and running trials for these new marketing channels is most effective to get an idea on what's effective.
But it's also good to have a steer from what others have found before you implement trials, so I have created this post to share research published on what other marketers have found to be the most effective marketing approach.
1 Merchant Circle Small and Medium Business Marketing Survey
This is the recent research that prompted me to write this post, shockingly Facebook is rated more popular than Google - this wasn't the case a year ago! The…
Here's a free webinar I'm sharing, arranged through our partners MMC Learning. Thanks if you attended, and thanks for your feedback if you dialled-in.
I enjoyed the interactions through the chat box - at times it sounded like a fight - "Left-right-left" getting feedback on "Which Test One" type questions.
We were pleased that hundreds of you signed up for the lunch time listen, although with some attending from The Maldives and Kuala Lumpur it was more like a late night listen. Unfortunately, the webinar gremlins struck and there was a global outage in our webinar suppliers which affected all webinars at this time including the US and Europe. So if you were affected, we're sorry about that, it's the first time it's happens - difficult to have a fallback for this. Still, we hope you find these slides inspire some ideas for positive action. As always feel free to ask…
