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Strategic Online Marketing
UK-Netmarketing Weekly Round-up - October 13, 2000

Despite some trends for heavyweight marketing campaigns using traditional media, a well planned and executed strategy for online marketing can achieve an awful lot of bang for your buck.

Chris Lascelles asked the list, "We are currently reviewing our online marketing strategy and I would be very grateful if someone can quickly give me a few pointers. What factors should I consider in an online marketing strategy apart from:

Banner ads
Affiliate programs
Search engine optimisation and how should I measure response?

Glen Collins provided a comprehensive answer, writing, "The obvious first answer is that it depends upon your goals/objectives/product/service type, but in the main, I would say you should also at least consider, amongst others:

Online PR
Online Promotions
Email marketing
Viral marketing
Word of Mouth / Guerrilla / Community Marketing
Non-banner-ad paid for Media (e.g. sponsorship, advertorial, pay-per-click models etc etc)"

Measuring banner adverts and more traditional media is pretty straightforward, with detailed reports usually provided by the media owners or their sales agency. For other online marketing techniques, Glen suggested, "The other techniques are slightly harder - particularly the guerrilla/community work as by definition you cannot put in targeted links. However, you can still use 'traditional' techniques such as surveys to give you post campaign feedback for these mechanics. The online PR, promotions etc you can measure response from both obtaining 'media values' from media owners via them estimating what value your 'column inches' are worth (not strictly speaking response measurement, but does give you a good indication of the value of brand awareness that you have generated) and also by putting in targeted links to measure the traffic in a similar way to the paid for media. The key thing that we always preach, is to ensure that you have a 'marketing strategy' and not an 'online marketing strategy' and 'offline marketing strategy' - i.e. it is one overall strategy."

Jonathan Phillips emailed, "add to that:

newsgroup promotion (can be very successful)
email lists (your own and sponsoring/appearing in others' - consistently the best response rates of any promotion)
contra-deals (dead easy)

'Viral marketing' has been bandied about a great deal over the last few months; unsurprisingly it crops up on the list from time-to-time. Tia Norris asked, "do you - or does anyone else have any opinions of articles about the effectiveness of the various means of viral employed? For example, sending around games, 'messages from a friend', free prize draws (the more people you pass the message to, the more entries you get), etc etc."

Jonathan Phillips responded, "... we ran a viral add-on to our recent competition for videos of The Sixth Sense. Entrants to the competition were given 1 extra entry per friend they told about the competition. Each friend was then sent a brief email (with the referrer's name in the 'from:' field) with an invitation to visit the competition. A dead simple system. Result: 7 times the average number of entries for the competition - enough said!"

Jason highlighted the downside of using viral marketing to boost competition entries. He wrote, "But how many of the 'friends' were just people using one of their many other email addresses to boost their chances of winning? I've seen on Loquax the same person enter a competition using at least 30 different addresses. I also know someone entered a Pyramid Prize competition using every name they could make up @theirdomainname.co.uk just to build up their entries. That kind of thing makes a mockery of the 'viral' system - and personally I still think it's a case of encouraging people to spam their 'friends' - just because there's a prize involved doesn't change it from being unsolicited, and because there's the chance of winning it often appeals to people's baser instincts and makes them email anyone and everyone regardless."

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