Online Marketing Planning

I recently organised and attended our Interactive Minds internet marketing seminar on the topic of Planning Your Digital Marketing Strategy for 2010. We had some great speakers along: Rob Hudson of GPYR, Matt Varley of Wotif Group and Yvette Adams of The Creative Collective. You can take a look at the presentations from the day on the Interactive Minds website.

I also wanted to contribute to this topic by sharing my overarching approach to planning a digital strategy.  I would summarise my approach in the following steps:

1. Identify & define your objectives, target audience and competitors.
2. Define your budget.
3. Identify the tactics which are most suitable to the organisation/brand/budget/audience and map out which months they will be undertaken in.
4. Calculate a reasonable budget for each tactic per month.
5. Using industry standards and previous experience refine the ROI for each tactic for each month based on the allocated budget. This may involve calculating the numbers of unique website visitors,  revenue forecast or subscribers. (Relate it back to your marketing and website objectives and make sure it is tangible and meaningful).
6. As I plug in the budgets, timing and ROI it is often valuable to do a bit of juggling at this point to make sure it fits within the budget and that the overall ROI is where it needs to be.
7. Keep the plan fluid. Things change and you may need to redirect funds quickly based on response rates, market changes or technology innovation.

I often implement steps 4, 5 & 6 using an excel spreadsheet which has a few worksheets sharing relevant numbers. If you are interested in a starting template for this, please have a look at my sample online marketing spreadsheet, available as a PDF download. It shows a few sample tactics together with some assumptions and calculations. Please note some of the data has been removed however some sample data is still shown.

I hope that you find this useful. If you have any questions, please leave a comment and I’ll get back to you.

One way to generate clicks

Have you seen this campaign recently run by Last Minute Travel? Their World for $1 campaign allows people to book hotel accommodation for only $1 a night for 15 minutes a day. The catch is that they don’t tell you which 15 minutes so users have to keep checking back and then racing the clock!

Pretty clever and a fairly neat way to raise awareness and get people visiting the site. Apparently they had 955 registrations in the first 6 days and obviously their visits would have been quite significant.

Unfortunately this sale is no longer available but a good strategy to keep in mind…

Credit: I heard about this campaign from emitch.

Protecting your Social Identity

The rapid growth in uptake and adoption of Twitter has been well documented of late, with the UK’s Telegraph.co.uk reporting a year on year increase of 974% in traffic to Twitter in the UK, according to the latest figures from Hitwise.

Once the domain of tech-enthusiasts and early adopters, Twitter has started to hit the mainstream, as evidenced by Jonathon Ross’s (@wossy) introduction of the service to the masses in an interview with Steven Fry (@stevenfry) on this week’s “Friday Night with Jonathon Ross” (BBC1) – Fry boasting a current following of 63,634.

So when Ross finally convinced comedian Russell Brand (@rustyrockets) to jump on the bandwagon on his radio show, its no surprise that with the push from live listenership, Brand could boast over 3000 followers within the hour (and 9000 within 24 hours). What was surprising though, was that no sooner had brand set up @rustyrockets, a member of the general public had set up @rustyrocket with the same profile picture and initial tweets. Furthermore, this profile has managed to siphon 731 followers from the real Russell Brand in under 24 hours.

Cyber-squatting you see is no longer limited to domain names. With the social networking revolution comes an ever increasing ability for impersonators to create havoc. Hopefully by now, you have cemented yourself www.yourname.com, whether you intend to use it or not – it’s a small price to pay for needing it at a later date. But have you considered the social world? What about Twitter? Flickr? MySpace? Linked In? or Del.icio.us?

Having these properties available to you, at least on the most popular of social sites could save you a lot of trouble in the long term, should someone wish to impersonate you – not to mention the effectiveness of having a consistent username across all. Thankfully, the arduous task of a manual check is not needed, thanks to tools like Username Check.

Maybe its time you considered protecting your social identity?

This article was kindly contibuted by Nathan McKean (Twitter:@nmkean)

Social Media Club Brisbane

Some of you may of heard about a new networking group in Brisbane – the Social Media Club. The group is meeting up tomorrow so if you are interested the details are as follows:

5:30 pm on Jan 20, 2009
The Melbourne Hotel.

Unfortunately I won’t be able to make the event but it looks very interesting and if you are interested you can find out more about this group on Facebook.

Downloading TV Shows

You may have seen the recent SmartCompany article regarding iiNet being in trouble for letting customers illegally download TV shows and movies. I have to say this topic is something that really frustrates me.

Here in Australia it is virtually impossible to download a TV show legally, regardless of whether you pay for it or not. Some TV stations are starting to have videos on their websites, but often it is only a summary snippet and not the full episode. Last week I missed the season finale of a show I watch and now I have no possible way to see it. I would be happy to pay a few dollars to download it online but the networks are so backwards in allowing this.

So what is the answer here? I first blogged about this in April 2007 and no progression has been made by the powers that be. It’s illegal to download shows online and yet there is no legal way for Australians to access this content. I’m sure there are licensing issues at play here but is it really this hard? Any of your thoughts on this topic would be appreciated…

A necessary break

Apologies for the lack of articles for the last month or so. I do have a good excuse though! In late October I welcomed my first child, Oliver.

So whilst I have had lots of thoughts of content to blog about (and have had lots of reading time in the wee hours of the morning), I have been a little time poor to get it down.

I’ll endevour to keep the updates coming though!

What Do You Want From Your Digital Strategist?

Being a Digital Strategist comes with a certain amount of responsibility. In a fast moving industry there is a lot to keep up to date with. Every day new websites are being launched, new advertising methods are introduced, new trends evolve and there are plenty of new things to keep abreast of.

For me personally, the internet isnt just about work, it’s also a something I enjoy being part of. I’m interested in how things evolve, what the new sites, gadets and ideas are and how technology is being used. For me the lines between work and a hobby can sometimes become blurry.

A few years ago there weren’t many Digital Strategists around, but these days there seem to be a lot more people working in this area. When finding a strategist to work with, their experience level is one thing, but what ‘interest level’ do you want from the person working on your company’s digital direction?

How important is it for your strategist to have experience in some of the “newer” web elements. Things like blogging, promoting a blog, using microblogging, participating in user generated content, knowing what people do on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or SlideShare? And what about mobile? Do you want them to have a working knowledge of phone applications, bluetooth, WAP elements etc?

Or perhaps it is enough for them to know about the more “traditional” online marketing elements only. Things like online ads, email marketing and search. How to build a website and hopefully get traffic to it using these other techniques.

I know for me personally, my preference would be to work with someone who is passionate about all the different, new and old things online. Someone who can make informed decisions about which direction is best for my business. Or maybe I’m just biased.

Food for thought…

Online Shopping Expectations

Is it just me? Do I have particularly high expectations regarding timely online shopping? I don’t think so, which is why I wrote this complaint email to Coles Online after my experience today:

Hi,

After hearing that Coles Online is now available in Brisbane and given that I’m due to have my first baby in approx a week I was quite excited about the convenience online shopping would offer.

Over the last few days I have invested quite a bit of time building up a standard shopping list on the website. This afternoon I decided to place an order of items that I need to buy.

After spending more time getting this setup and filling my online shopping cart today I am very disappointed to find out that after all that I cant actually get my order delivered before 6pm on Friday night – 4 days away and even then only one time slot is available for the rest of this week.

What a let down! This experience will really make me think twice about shopping with Coles Online again as if I cant get a timely service, what is the point?

Kind regards,

Louisa.