Top Digital Marketing Strategies for 2013

Mar 5, 2013

POSTED BY Neil Krishnan FILED UNDER Email Marketing, Interactive, Marketing, Media, Uncategorized, Web Design.

Given the tools and technologies available today, there has never been a better time to launch a high ROI-producing digital marketing campaign. Take a look at three of the top digital marketing strategies for success in 2013.

Remarketing

What it is: Remarketing is a form of advertising that targets users who have previously visited a website in an effort to bring them back. Advertisers can choose different types of media with which to retarget—text, images or video—while controlling other variables (e.g., retargeting only those visitors who saw a certain page or those who spent a certain amount of time on the site). The most common application of remarketing is targeting visitors who came to the website but did not convert.

Image credit: http://www.impactradius.com/blog/industry/what-is-remarketing.html

Why it’s important: Traditional display advertising targets large audiences across the web in the hopes of receiving clicks or raising brand awareness. On the other hand, remarketing targets visitors who have already demonstrated an interest in your product, service or business. That’s why remarketing is a solid addition to any holistic marketing mix—it stretches the dollars spent on other channels, such as email, search and display, by bringing visitors back to your website. Here at Dana, we have consistently seen remarketing efforts lower cost-per-acquisition and improve ROI.

Real-Time Personalization

What it is: This is a way to serve visitors customized content based on their behavior or attributes. For example, a website could serve one homepage slider to visitors that arrived with the word “resort” in their query, and another to visitors with the word “wedding venue” in their query. Other examples of segmentation variables include device type, location, visit count, time of day and referring website.

Image credit: http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/features.php

Why it’s important: If your PPC ad, organic search listing or referring page does not match the content on your landing page, visitors are more likely to bounce. Conversely, the better your landing page matches the user’s expectations, the better the user experience and the likelihood for conversion. That’s why companies like Amazon, eBay and Google invest in personalization—it works. But personalization technology is no longer limited to large companies. Today, many affordable solutions exist to enhance websites with powerful personalization features, with little to no coding required. At Dana, one of our favorite personalization tools is Visual Website Optimizer.

User-Centric Analytics

What it is: This type of analytics tracks users across devices and sales funnels. Currently, Google Analytics uses cookies to track visitors. But cookies are cleared or, more commonly, lost between visitors who use multiple devices. In an effort to solve some of these tracking issues, Google recently launched Universal Analytics (beta), which is a major upgrade to the current cookie-based system. Instead of relying on cookies to collect session-based data, Universal Analytics will use IDs to collect user-based data.

Why it’s important: Not all conversions happen online, making it difficult for companies to track offline conversions that were originally driven by digital efforts. With Universal Analytics, companies can integrate their offline data (CRM, phone, etc.) with online data to get a more complete, accurate picture of digital’s ROI.

Image credit: http://www.jeffalytics.com/introducing-universal-analytics-google-analytics/

Moreover, visitors are assigned user IDs, making their behavior traceable across multiple devices. This technology is not only a shift from session-based analytics to user-based analytics, but also a fundamental shift from web analytics to business analytics. Universal Analytics is already available in beta, and we are looking forward to implementing it where possible after its full release later this year.

If you’re ready to boost conversions with remarketing, engage in personalization or implement the next generation of analytics, be sure to contact Mark D’Amico at mdamico@danacommunications.com to get started.

Benefits of Hybrid Meetings

Feb 27, 2013

POSTED BY Lynn Kaniper FILED UNDER Meetings, Red Hot Topics, Technology, Trends.

The buzz about hybrid meetings is that they’re mixing things up—in a good way. Combining online, streaming components with the ever-important face-to-face element, planners of meeting events can foster greater attendee engagement and achieve more successful and wider-reaching results.

According to a recent research project supported by Sonic Foundry and the Meeting Professionals International Foundation (MPI), 93% of planners say they meet or exceed their objectives when organizing a hybrid event. Which makes this medium a mega-opportunity. Read more about the benefits of hybrid meetings and take away these tips for making the most of them.

Planning is paramount.
Decide to go hybrid from the beginning. It’s much more efficient and effective to strategize a hybrid event from the outset, as opposed to adding on the technology component later in the plans. Hybrids require a great deal of effort with things like formulating formats, coordinating vendors, ensuring quality audio, purchasing bandwidth and testing functionality.

Format follows function.
With various formats available for hybrid events, choosing the best one is contingent on a number of factors. Whether broadcasting a live occasion, streaming guest speakers into an onsite meeting or connecting remote office locations to one another, let the function of the event dictate the appropriate format.

Tech takes a back seat.
It’s easy to get caught up in the bells and whistles of tech-savvy mediums. But it’s important to remember that the technology itself is not the message; it is merely a vehicle of communication. Ultimately, the content you’re trying to deliver should be the focus. Utilize technology to your best advantage in making that content easy to reach and follow.

Don’t leave anyone out.
In a hybrid event setting, your audience is twofold, and the experience for attendees will vary from in-person to online. It’s necessary to use different strategies to keep each one involved. Make the remote audience feel as close as possible. And remember that while you can often keep a live audience engaged for hours at a time, there will be far less attention afforded by those streaming from their remote devices.

Don’t sweat the online effect.
If you’re worried that providing the option of online streaming will deter future participants from being present attendees, rest assured. Statistics from the Sonic Foundry-MPI study show that the hybrid does not reduce or eliminate face-to-face participation. People do not typically prefer the online experience. In fact, a majority of them only engage in it due to limitations on time and resources. A hybrid meeting is simply a better way to reach those individuals who would not be able to make it anyway.

The hybrid is still evolving.
The concept of an event that offers an in-person experience AND the ability to connect with remote attendees is still in early stages. Based on the Sonic Foundry-MPI study, 50% of the surveyed participants never organized a hybrid event, and 25% never attended or helped to organize one. There is still a learning curve involved—and kinks to be ironed out. But the objective remains clear: to create a meaningful experience for attendees both present and afar.

Plugging into a hybrid event soon? Or simply want to learn more? Contact Lynn Kaniper at lkaniper@danacommunications.com to get the information you need.

Essential Media Buying Questions

Feb 19, 2013

POSTED BY David Giancola FILED UNDER Advertising, Marketing, Media, Trends, Uncategorized.

As you might remember from our last blog, “Super Bowl XLVII and Effective Commercial Strategies”, your game plan and the decisions you make can be the deciding factor between a successful campaign and one that gets lost among the monotony of advertising clutter. At Dana, we approach every media plan with a series of simple, yet essential media buying questions that help us determine the best buys to achieve the most successful results for our clients.

• Who? During a particular season of the year, who is your target market? Is the one you might try to target in December the same as that in, say, July? Sometimes, evaluating the seasonal behaviors of your target demographic can make media buying decisions a more exact science. By using the data at your fingertips, this analysis allows for more targeted decisions.

• What? While many of our hospitality clients can offer a comfy bed to sleep in and some recreation to keep the kids occupied, we want to know…what makes them different? And what about this unique characteristic can we highlight to make the most of a placement? Amid the craze to stand out around the holidays or other seasonal pushes, there must be one thing that is unique to your brand—something you own, something nobody else can compete with.

• When? And it’s not as easy as pointing to the time of year. By analyzing consumer trends (a continually evolving science), we can decide on a certain day that prospective vacationers tend to plan their trips, or even use a special holiday issue to improve circulation toward the target. The question of “when” can be drilled down further into months, weeks and days. The ultimate goal: using the tools at our disposal to get it down to the minute and second!

• Where? The ability to pinpoint target demographics by geographic region has been evolving since the introduction of email marketing and geo-targeting. So how can you get the best return on investment? The answer is not as easy as it seems. You can play it safe and focus on an existing hot spot, or you can use bargaining techniques and new media to get added value as well as spread the word to prospective markets. With a balance of common sense (hitting the existing target) and cavalier procedures (thinking outside the box or hitting a soon-to-be hot spot), you can balance your message and grow a larger base for it without wasting funds, time and ink.

• Why? You might have guessed this question was coming. Examples include: Why are we targeting these markets? Why are we using a given publication to get a hold of these consumers? Why are we not exploring a publication that may give us a better return? These scenarios could go on and on, and for the media team at Dana, they certainly do. Because with every client, every promotion and every buy, we ask ourselves these questions. The relationships we build with both our clients and various media outlets have given us the flexibility to continually improve, providing better answers with every advertisement we place.

For more information about how Dana can help your marketing efforts cut through the clutter with experienced media buying strategies, email dgiancola@danacommunications.com.

Take a Top-Down Approach to Your Email Creative

Feb 14, 2013

POSTED BY Stephen Sharp FILED UNDER Advertising, Design, Email Marketing, Interactive, Marketing, Media, Red Hot Topics, Web Design.

When it comes to email design best practices, it is imperative that artists review their creative from the user’s point of view. Since emails load into inboxes from the top down, the content you want users to see first should be placed at the top of the email to grab their attention and inspire interaction. This area of your email template is called the “above-the-fold” section and can make or break an email design.

Since you only have, on average, 420 pixels of vertical space, this area doesn’t give you much room to toy with the images and copy needed to truly feature your content. Factor in some additional space for a logo, main navigation bar and myriad of social networking icons, and the top of your email design is starting to get crowded.
With so much going on at the top, it’s easy to get caught up in the technical aspects of the “template,” rather than the creative, eye-catching promise of the “design.” To help gain some critical distance and assess the challenges properly, let’s review some examples of above-the-fold sections. Each sample below has been vertically measured at 420 pixels, which is a good average number of what users will see before they have to scroll:

Email sample from American Museum of Natural History

American Museum of Natural History does an excellent job of building an efficient and good-looking above-the-fold area. Not only is most of the main feature section displayed in the preview pane, but smaller sub-features make it in there as well. Utilizing a clean design with minimal copy and navigation, this template works harder than most at getting the user to interact from the start.

Email sample from Vente-Privee

This above-the-fold section from vente-privee presents the main message in a very clean and well-designed format. The best practice mandatories, such as the logo and pre-header text, are present, but since the email is more of a postcard type of communication, the navigation bar was left off. The user will appreciate this, since cleaner designs with less content in them have been shown to perform better.

Email sample from ShermansTravel

The above-the-fold area for this ShermansTravel design is dominated by an ad banner, which pushes the rest of the content down. In this scenario, it’s important to compensate for the banner with a clean, well-organized design that can visually work with any banner, regardless of its look and feel.

Pay attention to the above-the-fold section, and your users will appreciate it. It’s important to test out what’s working and to throw away what’s not. I can help—contact me at ssharp@danacommunications.com. Good luck and happy designing!