Applicable Marketing - the third 'A'
| 27 May 2009
| Following on from ensuring your retail marketing messages are both Accessible and Available (where and when people are looking), this article deals with the Applicability of that message to the recipient. Applicability, or relevance, is a key ingredient to effective digital marketing.
We all know that our messages are not applicable to everyone who gets them. The blunt instrument of mass media has meant that in order to get to those who we are targeting, we need to get to a lot more. Therefore there are many people out there getting irrelevant messages. It is all part of the famous advertising waste.
In the digital world, to be a successful marketer, you cannot have a mass audience message. It needs to be targeted. And more importantly, behind the veneer of a well-targeted message must be the substance (hereafter called content) to back it up - content that is relevant to each targeted consumer. Starting with search as an example, you can only appear high in search results if your messages and content are relevant to that search. It is even difficult (and more expensive) to pay to get into the search results if you do not have relevant information to take (link) the searcher to. If your advertising is completely relevant, then it magically transforms into information – rather than advertising.
So how do you build relevance into your message and your content for each target customer? It’s not easy, but there are tools and disciplines available today to achieve this. The key to these tools is scalability. If you need an individual message targeted for each consumer, then all of your costs will be eroded creating each of those uniquely crafted messages, unless you crate them dynamically.
Google allows for Dynamic Keyword insertion, which helps with the relevance of your creative, but not so much with your content. Some enterprise email targeting solutions allow for dynamic content insertion into specific email segments. There are advanced site tools to dynamically personalise the pages on your website as a user journeys through; based on what you know about them and how they are behaving.
Once you have a method of automatically generating messages you then need to match that up with how you target them. At your disposal are the current methods of keyword targeting, demographic targeting (network behavioural targeting), onsite behavioural targeting, day-parting (time targeting), technology targeting (eg – ads just for iPhones or Firefox) and geographic targeting. The important thing to understand is that this is now a well understood and mature business practice for online marketers. And it should be for your business also.
Now that I’ve finished with the three As, I’ve thought of a fourth. It’s one that should be close to your heart – Accountability. Next week I shall look at this new (and final) ‘A’ – Accountable marketing. This is something that the digital space makes easier. Until then, happy selling.
This article appeared in Inside Retailing Online
|
|
