32. Tactic 1: SEO
Long-term influence
and growth. Great effort
with great effect.
@precedentau #PrecSem
33. SEO
SEO missions
“People know us for x but not y.”
“Certain people don’t know us.”
“People go to competitors.”
“No one knows us. We’re so alone.”
@precedentau #PrecSem
34. Audience SEO missions
Tactic 1:we drive more traffic to
“How do SEO
the website?”
“How do we raise the profile of our
podcasts on iTunes U?”
@precedentau #PrecSem
42. SEO results
Tactic 1: SEO for all top
Top search result
animal related key phrases
Nearly 13 million views for
the cost of one email
@precedentau #PrecSem
43. Audience SEO missions
Tactic 1:we drive more traffic to
“How do SEO
the website?”
@precedentau #PrecSem
44. Audience SEO missions
Tactic 1:we raise the profile of our
“How do SEO
podcasts on iTunes U?”
@precedentau #PrecSem
45. Tactic 2: Social Media
Win hearts and minds.
Small effort for short
lived effects.
@precedentau #PrecSem
46. Social media missions
“People don’t know us enough.”
Tactic 1: SEO
“People don’t use us enough.”
“Our audiences need to meet.”
“Our audience don’t work for us.”
@precedentau #PrecSem
47. Audience Social media missions
Tactic 1:we raise money using
“How do SEO
digital marketing?”
@precedentau #PrecSem
48. Audience Social media missions
“We have a well-resourced Comms
Tactic 1: no-one that can write
Team but SEO
social media strategy. Help!”
@precedentau #PrecSem
59. Social media result
Tactic 1: SEO
Lloyds: Better security, customer
satisfaction & efficiency
ASOS: 1.7 million VERY
active ambassadors
@precedentau #PrecSem
60. Social media result
Tactic 1: SEO
Lloyds: Better security, customer
satisfaction & efficiency
ASOS: 1.7 million VERY
active ambassadors
@precedentau #PrecSem
61. Tactic 3: PPC advertising
Needed for aggressive SEO
invasions. Targeted for
focused, short-term wins.
@precedentau #PrecSem
62. PPC missions
“We’re about to do a launch.”
Tactic 1: SEO
“We’ve got a market to fill.”
“We need aggressive SEO.”
“We have a specific problem.”
@precedentau #PrecSem
63. Audience PPC missions
“How do we recruit new members?”
Tactic 1: SEO
“How do we increase our
fundraising with paid advertising?”
@precedentau #PrecSem
72. PPC results
Tactic 1: SEO sites
415 participating
36 million impressions
300% increase in donations
compared to same period
@precedentau #PrecSem
73. PPC results
Tactic 1: SEO sites
415 participating
36 million impressions
300% increase in donations
compared to same period
@precedentau #PrecSem
74. Tactic 4: Email marketing
Squeeze existing users.
So targeted you can see
the whites of their eyes.
@precedentau #PrecSem
75. Email missions
“There are so many things
Tactic 1: SEO
our customers could be doing!”
“There are so many things
our customers should know!”
@precedentau #PrecSem
76. Audience Email missions
“How do we get people to renew
Tactic 1: SEO
their subscription?”
“Our email CTR is really low. How
do we make them more interesting?”
@precedentau #PrecSem
81. Email results
Tacticincrease in site
400% 1: SEO
visits during Alzheimer’s
Awareness Month.
@precedentau #PrecSem
82. Email results
Tacticincrease in site
400% 1: SEO
visits during Alzheimer’s
Awareness Month.
@precedentau #PrecSem
83. Audience Digital Marketing mission
“We’re not being very imaginative in how
we present seasonal marketing campaigns.
Separate micro sites are created for each of
them instead of integrating them
Tactic 1:main website. It’s not very
with our SEO
effective.”
@precedentau #PrecSem
97. Cardiff University had to change
its strategy and fast, or risk
the greatest losses.
@precedentau #PrecSem
98. Strategy without tactics is
the slowest route to victory.
Tactics without strategy is
the noise before defeat.
Sun Tzu, Art of War
@precedentau #PrecSem
99. The Mission
The Climate
The Ground
The Leadership
The Method
@precedentau #PrecSem
100. The Mission
The Climate
The Ground
The Leadership
The Method
@precedentau #PrecSem
101. The Mission:
Who is your target
and what is your
objective?
@precedentau #PrecSem
131. UK application decline: 7 per cent
Cardiff University: 4 per cent
(despite predictions we’d be hit
harder than any other institute)
@precedentau #PrecSem
132. THRIVE is now the permanent
UG recruitment brand (and the
Schools are all on-board!)
@precedentau #PrecSem
133. The Method:
Which tactics will be used?
How will they be planned
and implemented?
@precedentau #PrecSem
135. campaigns are the only way to market
digitally because without targeting
you’re just paying to spam.
@precedentau #PrecSem
136. campaigns are the only way to market
digitally because with targeting you
can target and adapt.
@precedentau #PrecSem
137. So, what is user experience (UX)?
How a person feels about using a product, system or service
@precedentau #PrecSem
138. UX is not ...
Just about interface design
Just about usability
Just about your users
Just about technology
Just about content
@precedentau #PrecSem
142. digital marketing must match your
individual problems and culture
because without a custom fit, you are
missing the point.
@precedentau #PrecSem
143. digital marketing must match your
individual problems and culture
because without a custom fit, you are
missing the point.
@precedentau #PrecSem
144. digital marketing must match your
individual problems and culture
because without a custom fit, you are
missing the point.
@precedentau #PrecSem
145. digital marketing must match your
individual problems and culture
because without a custom fit, you are
missing the point.
@precedentau #PrecSem
146. digital marketing must match your
individual problems and culture
because without a custom fit, you are
missing the point.
@precedentau #PrecSem
147. digital marketing must match your
individual problems and culture
because without a custom fit, you are
missing the point.
@precedentau #PrecSem
148. digital marketing must match your
individual problems and culture
because without a custom fit, you are
missing the point.
@precedentau #PrecSem
149. digital marketing must match your
individual problems and culture
because without a custom fit, you are
missing the point.
@precedentau #PrecSem
150. digital marketing must match your
individual problems and culture
because without a custom fit, you are
missing the point.
@precedentau #PrecSem
151. 80 experts
strategy & research
branding & communications
digital marketing must match your
user centred design
development & hosting
individual problems and culture digital marketing
because without a custom fit, you are
missing the point.
@precedentau #PrecSem
152. 6 sectors
membership
digital marketing must match your
government
education
individual problems and culture health
not for profit
because without a custom fit, you are
destinations
missing the point.
@precedentau #PrecSem
153. 5 offices
Melbourne
Perth
digital marketing must match your
London
Edinburgh
individual problems and culture
Cardiff
because without a custom, you are
missing the point.
@precedentau #PrecSem
154. 22 years
experience
quality
digital marketing must match your
stability
loyalty
individual problems and culture
results
because without a custom fit, you are
missing the point.
@precedentau #PrecSem
156. Find our Precedent group @Precedentau for industry
on LinkedIn to find out trends, tips, seminar info
more about our and other insider stuff and
digital marketing must match your
seminars, share ideas and
quiz the Precedent team.
tweet today with #PrecSem.
individual problems and culture
because without a custom fit, you are
missing the point.
@precedentau #PrecSem
Editor's Notes
MarkGood morning ladies and gentlemen, thanks very much for joining us at the State Library of Victoria this morningWe appreciate it might be a little earlier than normal but hopefully you’ve snaffled some nice nibbly bits to get you goingJust a few housekeeping bits before we get startedBathrooms are located on this floor on the other side of the liftsPlease could you check your mobile phones to make sure they’re on silentFeel free to tweet as you listen, the hashtag is PrecSem just like on the screenAnd finally, enjoy!
Thanks Mark (introduce myself)Good morning ladies and gentlemen, I hope everyone’s taken on enough caffeine to get us through the first half of this morning’s seminar.Thank you for emailing us through some of your digital marketing problems last week – we’re going to address those a bit later on.Now, we know that in this room today there’s probably a mix of people who are not doing anything with DM yet but know they should be, people who are doing bits & pieces here & there and a few of you who are doing LOTS and may consider yourselves pros.Today is not so much about walking you through the detail of how to set up a PPC campaign in Adwords or how to set up an analytics dashboard – its more about how to establish a solid strategy for all your DM activities and learning how to pick and choose the methods that will work the hardest for your organisation.
Why is it important to do it right? Well, crucially it offers betterreturn on the price you pay over print, direct, display – any other form of marketing. And that’s because it’s instant, and trackable.
The custom fit is key. And by individual problems we mean not just the marketing challenges but also the challenges caused by your company’s culture.So today we’re going to firstly look at the impact of culture in your DM strategy & decision-making, and secondly at how to match that up with your individual problems And rather than trying to do it all – choose a few DM things to do really well that match both your problems and your culture.
Hi everyone, I’m Rachel Hunter and I’m head of business development for Precedent Australia as well as a digital consultantStory about culture: working at an agency tends to get you behind the scenes a lotwe have a client at a big law firm, traditional management, under resourced team, under-skilled marketing manager, knows the sector and the users but not the techniques. His problem was he didn’t know how to put together a strategy or business case and so had to deal with requests ad hoc. For example….
This is what he got from his boss on the Monday following his boss’ birthday weekend...
And even though the request was ridiculous strategically speaking (that same boss had yet to approve their plan to make the site mobile accessible) he didn’t have a strategy or plan to offer instead.And that made it quite difficult for him to respond effectively to this unreasonable request from his boss, without sounding petulant about the boss’s delay in approving the mobility planSo if you’re one of the lucky people who has a boss like this, having a strategy will arm you against this sort of culture.
In this vein, we often encounter public sector clients who are jealous of the marketing teams in private corporations…like our client Tesco who everyone perceives to have unlimited budget and restraints on what they can do online
But in reality, those big brands are often just as held back by head offices and management still used to thinking in old fashioned frameworks.
I think we all know how to expand our businesses in real life: get more buildings, more staff, and our whitest, oldest executives to hold a pair of giant scissors at the ribbon cutting ceremony.
But how do we expand our business online wherehaving massive influence and power over users has nothing to do with the physical size of your website?
Welcome to the internet (as represented by Google for the web 2.0 summit). Where growing in power and influence over users requires military-like tactics to put yourself on the map, grow your presence, expand into new territories and fight to maintain position.
So continuing on with the military theme, we have four tactics to do just that.Does anyone know what they are? (raise hand)No?They are SEO, Social Media, PPC, and Email
Tactics like SEO: optimising your online presence so that users you want to target come to you – via search and other websites. This covers things like:Re-writing your website content to make the pages easier for users searching the web to find – using language and key phrases that your audiences will be familiar with and use themselves e.g. whilst searching, plain textHaving stable or consistent URLs, and building links between your site and other relevant sites (in a legitimate, white hat manner of course – not randomly emailing hundreds of webmasters and trying to get anyone & everyone to linkto your site)Building your website templates in an SEO-friendly manner e.g. Using the standard 1-6 heading styles in your HTML, populating meta data fields with relevant keywords & phrases that relate to content ON THE PAGE (not the whole site), not using Flash (its invisible to search engines even with recent improvements)Considering SEO when choosing your website or campaign site URLs – does your URL contain abbreviations or acronyms that won’t be recognisable to a search engine or person? does your URL contain your top keywords or phrase?
Like launching an invasion across the internet!
Now this tiny castle in the PLAINS OF CONTENT over here represents your website
(Made it bigger so you can see it)POINT TO THE CASTLE
This is what SEO looks like. Sending word of your kingdom to other lands to entice those people to come to your kingdom.(Also kind of reminds me of Game of Thrones – if anyone has watched it ;-)
It won’t last but it can be life or death in that specific moment.Like giving medicine and supplies to the villagers of a jungle in exchange for them showing you safe passage to the river.
We like to think of these as good will outpostsWho knows if Facebook is going to stick around much longer or if its going to be superseded by the next big thing. All the more reason to go in light and agile – curry favour without spending too much money.
So up here we have our ‘Union of Social Networks’ (point to it)
And we have our wooden forts in the UNION OF SOCIAL NETWORKS – you don’t build them to last because that landscape changes quicklyWhen we write social media strategy for our clients we always try to avoid referring to specific platforms in the core, high level strategy, and instead talk in terms of what we want to achieve and with which audience instead of specifically whether it will be achieved with Twitter, Pinterest etc. The idea is that if this is done correctly, no matter which amazing new platform bursts onto the scene the core strategy will still apply to it, and all we have to do is add a new section within the detail of strategy explaining what objectives & audiences we’re going to target with the new platform, and how.(it also means less work down the track because the strategy won’t have to be re-written in entirety )
Works best when targeted and when used either:to support other Digital Marketing efforts i.e. As a supplementWhen you have a very specific objective and need a quick turnaroundA good example of the latter is when you have a brand new site go live, or perhaps new pages on your existing site, and even with the best SEO efforts its going to take months for it to start ranking in organic search results. Using paid advertising in the meantime can be a great way to drive traffic to your site from search results on the web, and you may even find that once your site is ranking in organic search that you still reap dividends from retaining your paid ads, and simply making them more campaign-based.
Heat seeking missiles!
If you use Google search (and who doesn’t), you may have noticed that sponsored results (pay-per-click, or PPC, ads) have been taking over more and more of the search engine results page. This is what the above-the-fold results look like for a ‘bicycles melbourne’ search. (point to ads)
There’s also a lot more options available to you with PPC advertising then ever before, such as: Product listing: In May this year, Google transitioned the previously free Google Product Search into a "Purely Commercial Model." Product listing ads include large images and are automatically triggered if someone searches for a product that’s in your Merchant Centre account. Click to call: Lets users call a business phone number with the click of a button.- Bottom of Page Ads: Catch people’s attention before they click to page 2 or refine their search.- Mega Site Links: This huge ad format offers up to 10 additional places to click, greatly increasing your chances of presenting a relevant link.- Social Ad Extensions: Show who has +1'd your site, which lends credibility and potential name recognition.Remarketing: Allows you to track site visitors with a cookie and chase them around the Web, displaying relevant banner ads until they click and convert.- Map/Location Ad Extensions: Display your address and phone number to local searchers, enticing them to visit you faster. Advertise only to customers in your vicinity.- Chat Ads: Prompt users to open a chat window with one of your staff members – get those leads while they're hot!- Email Ads: Prompt users to provide an email address right from the search result page.
Works well ONLY WHEN TARGETED. The difference between a sniper and shooting a shotgun into the air hoping it’ll hit something.
Segment within an inch of your database’s life!AgeGenderGeographical locationInterestsEducationEmploymentRecent interactions with you/on your digital presences (Amazon is great at this)
Those are the tactics at your disposal to grow your power and effectiveness online
– but what about customisation? Rather than try to do it all, I’ll talk you through the specific marketing problems each of the four tactics are best suited to solve and we’ll also look at the problems that were sent in by some of you and see if we can solve them!
This section will form the first part of a DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY that at the end of the seminar, you can go back to your offices and fill out for your own organisation and then start to action.
These are some of the more common ‘seo missions’ our clients come to us with
And some of you have kindly emailed us in your own SEO missions, which include (READ SLIDE)We’ll check back in with how you could undertake these missions in just a minute after a quick case study that’s very relevant to the first mission
The RSPCA is a client of ours both here in Australia and in the UK – we’ve done many projects for each of them but this particular case study is from a project we didn’t run.However it is very relevant!The RSPCA in the UK was known for animal shelters but wanted to be known for training and pet care services
If you have a similar problem, start by using the Google Ad Words keyword tool to test key phrases – then use popular key phrases to identify what terms to search for. As an aside, there are other keyword tools you can use – some free, some with a cost e.g.WordTrackerKeyword DiscoverySearch Google with those terms to find other, relevant websites suitable for you to link build and syndicate content to. (if you can’t beat em, join em!)Bear in mind that if we were doing a similar task at Precedent, we’d probably do some original research with a sample of YOUR specific audience members first - to see what they’re searching for, and then take that list to the Adwords tool as a starting point. More accurate.
These are some examples of where the RSPCA syndicates content A dog training organisation
A social landlord for council housing
...and a travel company specialising in holidays focussed on wildlife and natureYou may not necessarily have to pay to syndicate content, especially if it is relevant to the audiences of that website. You could consider doing a service swap for example.
Simon's Cat is an animated cartoon series by the British animator Simon Tofield featuring a hungry house cat who uses increasingly heavy-handed tactics to get its owner to feed it.To build a larger profile for pet care tips, rspca sent an email to simon’s cat creator and he made a little cartoon for them for their holiday campaign
Result was over 12 million views – for the cost of one email (lesson here is to find ambassadors who already have an audience)
So going back to the first audience mission of driving more traffic to your website – for you guys we’d suggest doing some research with current members on how they use the internet day to day – do they google topics on patient care or referrals for example? If so, sites they use with that sort of information would be logical places to syndicate your content on, and provide links to your site There’s an opportunity there to start putting messages in places where your current & prospective members are looking – also for you create natural alliances with other organisations in the sectorAs a membership org you’re bound to offer benefits & resources to members – so ask some members and use a tool like Adwords to see if these relate to topics people are searching for in Victoria – your target audience may not realise you provide them Final thing is that because this involves a very specific audience segment it is worth your while doing the research – it doesn’t need to be long or expensive, just a sanity check, what are your mems & potential mems doing online & how can you take advantage of it
And for the second mission of raising the profile of your podcasts on Itunes UWe had a quick look on your site to see how you promote the podcasts – there’s some generalised promotion of the fact that some of your lectures are available on podcast, along with some slightly more specific promotion of technology and design-related lectures.We’ve also looked in iTunes U and although some of the lectures are named with the specific topic, others just have the lecturer’s name or there’s a whole set of lectures simply named ‘talking design’ or ‘talking business’. And unfortunately not only does it make them less attractive to the people who have clicked through to iTunes U from your site (you have to play the lecture to find out what its about), but it also makes it a lot more difficult for you to generate interest in them outside of iTunes.What we’d recommend is promoting your lectures based upon the specific topics they cover i.e. Not just lecture podcasts in general or design lectures in general.Find out what specific lecture topics are coming up. Do some Googling & find out where people are talking about those specific topics – forums, student websites, Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups etc – and on those sites seed links to the podcasts – hey we’ve just uploaded a new lecture from Professor McGonagall on the History of the Pixel etc.Don’t forget that non-students might be interested too – prospective post grad or short course audiences – check out where these people are talking about those topics – LinkedIn groups or industry membership websites are great for that If you need to convince management of the ROI of doing this in a month – supplement with PPC to boost numbers and make it more impactful Clearly this will take more work – you’ll need to do work for both organic and paid search BUT when you’ve done it you should see the number of people downloading them increase.
These are some of the social media problems our clients have come to us with – I’m sure some of them will resonate with some of you
The first mission here is from a health services provider, and they also let us know that they have a well-known Australian celebrity as a patron, a core fundraising topic of cancer & wellness which is well supported, and an engaged audience/data base with past patients and interested people in the cause.In which case, our advice would be that If you need a big surge of donations then a campaign is definitely the way to go, but a good creative idea that fits with the objective & targets the right kind of audiences on the most appropriate platforms will be critical to its success(this is really where you need professional help from an agency)a SM campaign could be quite fun and effective – come up with a great creative concept using the celebrity and their existing fan baseas well as their personal reasons for being a patron of the charity make sure the concept has the legs to take it into regular media as wellHelp spread word through a PPC campaignTo know what keyword searches you should display your PPC ads for, once again do some keyword research just like we talked about earlier with SEOget professionals like us to seed campaign content on relevant sites around the web like cancer & wellness-related forums, blogs, sites etc – will give you a bigger profile, get in touch with more people you’re trying to helpFinally, make sure your site has lots of CTA’s for donate, volunteer etc esp on pages related to that celebrity(relevant for everyone – don’t put in lots of DM effort if your website isn’t up to scratch and can’t convert those leads – its like abandoning them on the door step – use same wording as PPC campaign as website CTA, key landing pages etc, give ppl a really obvious next step, no distractionsHealth-related member org- Get someone to write them a strategy – sounds like it will have to be outsourced – someone who can understand their audiences, and also has the skill to integrate it with their current marketing strategy
This one was from a Health-related member orgThis one is pretty simple- Get an expert to write you a SM strategy – sounds like it will have to be outsourced – someone who can understand your audiences, and also has the skill to integrate it with your current marketing strategy
Lloyd’s is a big banking group in the UK, and this case study actually comes from a round table we ran at one of our recent seminars which they attended, and told us about. They now have a presence on Facebook, Twitter & YouTube but they use them very differently. Users can’t post updates on their Facebook page and their YouTube channel is focussed on promotion.Lloyds made a conscious decision to use Twitter for customer service – which was contentious at first especially within Lloyds itselfPeople were worried about what would happen if people were silly enough to post their account details on Lloyds’ Twitter page – the security risk that would present.So the biggest change was getting internal buy-in and working with compliance to set-up the rules around it.
But once they got through that process, they were able to be really quick and agile about responding to customer questions and problems, and the small number of people who did post sensitive information were pounced on immediately and the data removed by Lloyds staff.One of the great results from this strategy was a reduction in fraud because people are able to report phishing scams and be told about protecting their details before it gets out of controlAnd because its mandatory for them to record all customer service activity, they built an API that pulled all the tweets from their account & stored them – which also means they have all that data which they can analyse for planning purposes e.g. Most common complaints etc
Who here has heard of As Seen on Screen?They’re know in the industry as the ‘king of facebook brands’ because they’ve cracked how to use Facebook properly
They have an Army of actively engaged fans – both male and femaleBut what’s interesting is that they only ever target young women – all of their marketing is precisely targeted towards that demographic and it works very well for them. I don’t think we have any retail organisations in the audience today, but the lesson here is that even if you have multiple audience types, if you think about it carefully you may realise that actually only a specific segment/s of them are likely to use SM and to want to engage with you on it.And if that’s the case, it makes it much easier to market using SM as you can pick 1 or 2 audiences and focus your efforts on them.
Now, ASOS don’t just post content from the shop…
They reward veryactive facebook fans by letting themaudition to become fashion bloggers who then create enhanced content about the products…They have hundreds of these bloggers who are avidly engaged with the brand, and they’ll jump through all the hoops ASOS throws at them for the status of becoming a blogger.
And the blogs they write,receive comments powered by Facebook! So there’s a couple of lessons here – the first is if you’re trying to build a community in SM, make the incentives or prizes relevant for the people you’re targetingAnd the second (which is really true for any digital product whether a website, SM presence or email) – try to make sure your users never run into dead-ends – keep the journey going whether its integrating SM comments into your site like ASOS does, or simply thinking about what extra, relevant information you can give your audiences regardless of whether they’re looking at a web page, app screen, marketing email, PPC ad etc – could just be some clear contextual links or calls to action for related info
Another nice example is what to do when social media hates you? Cairn is an Energy company and a client of ours – they’re actually one of Europe’s largest independent oil and gas exploration and development companies – they supply oil to BP etc and are incredibly wealthy BUT NOT PUBLIC FACING – most people have never heard of them.They were the first company to drill in a particular area of the ocean that GREENPEACE took offence to…
So greenpeace filled their offices with polar bears and launched a full-scale protest against cairn on all comms channels I don’t know if anyone here follows Greenpeace on Facebook, but I do and I have to say their communications are actually incredibly organised and sophisticated – they have a big team of people who coordinate campaigns like these and in particular the digital channels – and they’re very good at it – we’ve often used them as examples of social media best practice in previous seminars
We did a quick analysis of the situation which revealed the best course of action was to target responses only to Cairns’ actual audiences & stakeholders (who are limited) and to wait for the Greenpeace pressure to switch to the next company to start drilling. Was particularly good advice because Cairn only had a handful of people on its comms team but to respond directly to Greenpeace would have looked like the big bad corporation lashing out (david and goliath) even though greenpeace actually has thousands of active supporters to rage full scale comms war.And it worked – Cairn reassured it’s small number of audiences & stakeholders and it wasn’t long before Greenpeace switched their focus to a new target.
Here’s some paid advertising missions sent in by youRecruit new membersBack to RSPCA example – engage with current members, find out what they’re searching for online, use Adwords tool to find other similar, popular phrases, then:1. Create PPC ads to be shown whenever users search for those phrasesCopywriting must be targeted, succinct and have clear CTA’s – give ppl a reason to click on the adsincorporate the keyword/phrase in the ad if you can – makes it more likely ppl will click on ittry to take advantage of the new suite of ads available e.g. If you can only take Victorian members, only show the ads for users in Victoria who search for those key phrasesConsider using the live chat ads, email ads or click to call ads – you could even go all out and look at creating your membership product as a Product Listing ad, or a Mega Site Link ad where the links are all member benefits/resources, preferably related to your top keyphrases2. Google those key phrases and find relevant organisations that you could try to partner up with (because your offering is relevant to their audiences) and enlist them to help you recruit3. Google those key phrases and find websites suitable for you to build links to & from, and syndicate content to – WHICH HAS CTA’s that take people into the membership registration processAnd as for the Fundraising problem – have a look at this example
StockholmsStadsmission helps the homeless of Stockholm. They need to get their message out without media spending.
Website is purposefully ugly (and they had no budget!). To inspire blogs and sites to supply free media space, they created a collection of homeless banners in need of shelter, available on hemlosabanners.se (they’re still live if you want to go have a look – grab the URL off us after the seminar
Once embedded, banners would display how long they had been hosted, and by whom. They also developed a warmer color the more clicks they received and the longer they were hosted. All clicks led to StockholmsStadsmission's donation page.
Word was spread only through existing supporters and staff through email and social media
Here’s an example banner
Here’s one that has had a few clicks and is started to get warm
And here’s another that’s had LOADS of clicks and is nice and hot!
* 415 participating sites * 36 million impressions* 300% increase in donations compared to the same period last year.
Renew subscription Tailored content – we’re dealing with existing members, so we should know quite a lot of info about them – if you can, use the data you have already e.g. Age, job, what they’ve looked at on your site, interestsClear CTA’s in the email – stripped down, no news, purely focussed on WHY they should renew – what benefits they will get or what they’ll miss out on (tailored to their profile) – nice big bold CTA buttons/linksConsider device they will likely read the email on – smartphone, tablet, laptop – if you’re using an email campaign tool that gives you that sort of data from previous mail shots use it – also look at your web stats to see how many people are viewing your site on mobile devices and if you can work out whether they’re existing members or not – use that info to tailor the email layout & format to the most likely deviceThis links into email format – consider mail client – plain text version essentialEmail CTRFirstly, segment your audiencesThen work out best times of year to contact them and what they’d be the most interested in at that timeLEAVE THEM ALONE REST OF TIMEIf you can, allow users to personalise their email settings on your site (maybe even conduct an email campaign around getting them to do so or use an incentivised CTA in your registration process to encourage people to do it them)Be realistic about the amount of personalised content you can produce and how many times a year – it takes time & effortFinally same advice as above – stripped down emails containing ONLY content you know that audience is interested, clear CTA’s, news only if relevant, consider device etcAlso – try to use images & video – relevant, interesting, ppl often more likely to click on them than textFinally consider integrating comments from social presences (if you have them) into your email – encourage people to click through to those conversations & give their opinion
The Alzheimers Association in the US decided to target the Spanish-speaking demographic during Alzheimer’s Awareness Month but had no Hispanic/Latin people in its existing member base, despite it being one of the biggest demographics in the US population
Wanted to approach Univision – largest spanish network online – but needed a hook. When would users on Univision be most sympathetic and open to supporting Alzheimers??
…when they’ve forgotten their own password!
Alzheimer’s had Univision add this piece of text to the automatically generated password reset emails
(Without any media spend whatsoever)Segmentation really importantA uni we’ve been working with recently doesn’t have sophisticated email campaign software or database segmentation softwareThought they couldn’t do anything other than send out mass emailsWe advised them to do it manually with the data they do have e.g. Postcode tells you where they live geographicallyWhat subjects they’d said they were interested in in any previous interactions with the uniHow old they were e.g. Likely to be prospective UG vs PGThese influenced CTA’s, so for example persuading people who live close to come to info sessions, but sending people who live a long way away to a recruitment site and suggesting they come to the annual open day
This one is from someone in the government sector, and to be fair they’ve already identified one of the solutions to the problem themselvesMore thought is needed about:Who these seasonal campaigns are aimed at – a micro site is not always going to be the most effective channel to reach them on, especially if you don’t have a massive budget to promote the URL heavily and drive people to itA site that’s only around for 2-3 months isn’t going to rank highly in organic search results – if you MUST have a temporary micro site, consider the user of PPC ads to drive people to it short termCreating some quick audience personas for each of the campaigns would help hereWhether more people would actually be reached by creating the campaign content within your existing site and cross promoting it from the homepage and other areas on the site where you know the target audiences visit
This mission is definitely one to be solved by strategy first.What we’re looking at here is a visualisation of a campaign ecosystem that I suspect looks very similar to that of this government organisationIts actually from Aviva which is a global insurance group, and as you can see they had a very similar problem with lots of disparate presences on various channelsbut if you follow the arrows you can see that the main CTA’s on each channel were pushing the user to another channel but never taking them to the main focus of the campaign (the main or campaign website) or MORE IMPORTANTLY to a clear action to take.
This, on the other hand, is what the ideal campaign structure looks like, and what we’d suggest the government org looks at creating(Its actually from a car insurance company)More like a wheel with the campaign or main public facing site at the centre Channels like SM, forums, blogs, ads, etc pushing ppl towards main site which contains some nice clear, persuasive CTA’s for the user to takeThis is the kind of thing we help with – the structure, framework, and of course creative idea that pulls it all together
Hi folks, in the second part we’re going to tackle the crafting of campaigns.
I’d like to begin by taking you through an example of a campaign done right.However, rather than talking through this as a case study, we’re going to go through it as a model that shows digital has the power to lead these campaigns, it has the flexibility and you can use the resources in your institution.The model I’m going to talk you through now is currently nominated for several awards, and is going to be presented at the American Marketing Symposium in a few weeks time.
As Rachel has mentioned in her first half, focus on a target market.
Campaigns are the only way to market digitally, because without targeting, you’re just paying to spam.
In 2011, we were invited in to pitch to Cardiff University, a top ranked university in the UK – part of the Russell Group, which is the equivalent to the ‘Group of 8’ here in Australia.Our task was to pitch a campaign for Cardiff’s UK undergraduate recruitment campaign.And one of the questions we had to answer, was how do you market to this?
Or this…
Because this was exactly what was happening the week before we went in to pitch.The sentiment in the education sector was one of fear, uncertainty. Universities and the marketers within were asking themselves how do we reach behind this mob to appeal to the good students, how do we market to them? How do we market to those who were in that crowd?
As I’m sure many of you may well be aware, that was the tuition fee rise for UK university education.There were various policy changes that included tripling tuition fees for students – met by huge backlash.This was exacerbated in Wales, where Cardiff is located, by the fact that there was a big reliance on UK students coming into Wales - which needed to be maintained.
Focusing in on Cardiff University, they knew that they were about to do what most other universities were about to do – which was to rise the tuition fees in line with new policy, making the landscape change even further.Cardiff had huge amount to lose, their Director of Strategic Development Louise Casella described it to us as their “now or never moment”.Attitudes within the university were beginning to separate between recruiting UK and Wales students in line with the difference in fees that both students paid, and Cardiff needed to change that.When we were brought on board, we felt like we weren’t gearing up for marketing campaign, it felt like a battle. Especially in regards to tactics, and we had to move fast as budgets were approved late by the stakeholders at Cardiff to give us the go-ahead.
For that reason, I want to use the Art of War as an analogy, as that’s how it really felt when we were putting the plans together.
So when we go through the campaign, we’ll be applying it to the 5 themes in the art of War – listed here.It helps to put the campaign in to context, and hopefully allow you to take that information and begin to apply it in your own institution and into your own campaigns, be it for recruitment or fundraising.
So, starting out with the mission.
The campaign objective that we set with Cardiff University at the campaign kick-off was to to maintain the recruitment levels of AAB grade students.Behind that sat another series of objectives for the university internally, which was to move away from corporate style comms to student comms, and to move towards digital. In addition to that, the campaign team at Cardiff really wanted to move away from disparate university comms from schools and faculties, to draw things more centrally – an issue that I’m sure many of you face in your own organisation
So, who was our target?Well, we wanted him.The Frederick of this world, with top marks.
However, we also wanted to attract people like this. These top students, from outside the top schools. As part of our targeting these AAB students, there were two subsets – the Frederick’s as we just saw then, and the Laura’s of the world, like we see here.This was part of the campaign brief, partly down to the strong social justice movement in the education sector that focused on not excluding people from certain demographic areas, Cardiff University were looking for that spread of students from more privileged, and less privileged backgrounds.What we did here at Precedent was look at what these two types of student had in common. They were both ambitious, bright, both creative, both studious, they have big ideas of what they wanted to do with themselves and the world. And those are the attributes that we had in mind when we started to build into our planning of the campaign and how they were going to participate in the various campaign activities.
So that was the Mission, and we now move on to the climate…
In terms of the competitive landscape, The university needed english students. However, Cardiff and other Welsh universities were seeing English universities poaching welsh students, as welsh students fees were subsidised by welsh government, this led to increased competition locally in the targeting of Cardiff’s market.
In terms of behaviour, we’ve seen them already.However, we also knew there were pockets of good students with their certificates.These pockets of students had their fill of marketing speak, of being talked down to by universities saying ‘if you’re lucky enough’ ‘if you’re privileged’‘We’re going to do very little to attract you, students, but we will
Show you pictures of nice glossy stock photos of happy students and we’ll pretend its them talking to you’ When in reality it was a bunch of 30 year old marketing folk talking to them.We knew this wouldn’t work when looking to target these audiences, and we knew that Cardiff’s website for instance
Wasn’t going to cut it if we needed to move away from that stale corporate marketing speak.So, thinking back a couple of slides to the stock imagery photos of students – if we realised these aren’t real students, then what do real students look like?
This.And this, is hard to put on a homepage like this…
Especially when it’s a Russell Group university with prestige.So the question was, how do you get this person
Who is talking to people on peer-to-peer forums, influencing them on sites like The Student Room
To be influenced by a university, without sounding like a bunch of 30 year olds talking to 17 year olds?So, that’s the climate…
Moving on now to The Ground
Cardiff University was a selective place – they had good outreach, if you’ve got good grades, you can come. Resourcing had been reduced over the last few years as it was doing a great job attracting it’s target audience with traditional marketing.However, that got turned upside down with the landscape changing, and this was coupled with social media becoming the key marketing channel that it now is.Traditional marketing at Cardiff and the need to go digital
So, Cardiff’s open days were great, their academic schools were doing a great job, but everything was a little bit all over the shop, and not very coherent
Jumping back to their site, they had a very restrictive web presence that was dominated by dense text on landing pages and a traditional brand.And that was The Ground
So, getting to the Leadership.
Cardiff Uni knew its audiences and had the resources, Precedent know the sector and the technologyWe took all of this information about the audiences and all the data that Cardiff had, and combined it with our knowledge of the sector
And we came in and we pitched an idea, and this is the front cover of the proposal document, that we titled ‘bait for smart people’ – so that was the behind the scenes titlebecause we knew if we wanted to capture the clever people and entice them and get them to join voluntarily, we needed bait.
From there, we started to flesh out ideas which grew into action plans for social media, the web, print, email, and events – all integrated as one campaign
So, moving onto The Method
We knew a key factor in the success of the campaign was to have student generated content – students talking to students, we wanted to give that feeling of the learning about the university from the insideWe wanted to be able to deliver this content across all channels digitally, as we knew, as I’m sure you do, that this is the most effective channel for that demographic
We began by creating a campaign microsite, designed responsively to scale automatically depending on whichever device you viewed it on.When we created the microsite, we didn’t just want another campaign site – it needed great content – so we created a content strategy, giving Cardiff article suggestions such as reviewing gigs, attractions, what’s on in Cardiff that weekend.As well as content, and the creation of the Thrive brand, we needed a reason for people to go to the site. We needed a hook.
Scholarship for life. One student would win at the end of the campaign, a free scholarship to study as many times as they wanted, for life. This was pushed out through press releases, email newsletters, seeded socially.Created an online scholarship competition, publically run, with different challenges – all academically focussed. We created loops for students who got cut at each round to push them back to the site to see how the competition was progressing and find other interesting information, until they started to realise that actually the content was great and they wanted to read more.There were 4 rounds of challenges:1 – was about the students who’d entered to find answers to academic questions located only on Cardiff’s websites, so they couldn’t just Google the answers2 – was about us connecting them to Cardiff’s social networks through questions set by the university, to then be able to keep them engaged across that medium3 – showcasing being a creative individual4 – was getting them to the university for a live final debate in which they had to presentOne of the keys to making sure that the challenges were academically rigorous enough to reflect the prize. Part of this meant we had to work extensively with the Cardiff campaign team to help bring the schools on board, overcoming internal stakeholder issues.
Social was integral to the campaign. Specifically Facebook, but we knew that for our target market that it wasn’t right to set up Thrive FB page to say hey ‘open day coming up’ ‘hey, what subjects do you like’ - as we knew that it would fall flat on its face like a lot of other corporate communications does. We knew we had to get actual students communicating them. Subscription functionality just introd by FB which allowed following content.So we helped Cardiff handpick 10 students who were to be ambassadors – gave them content advice, privacy training – key thing never told them what to post apart from specific questions as part of the challenge for the competitors to answer.We had no idea how it was going to go, didn’t know if people would subscribe, or ask inappropriate questions.It worked – on average each student had 200/250 followers – and they were engaged. People were asking appropriate questions about the experience of being a student there ‘whats the shopping like’? ‘whats the union like?’Although the prize was handed out back in May, and the competition is over, the insiders are still being asked questions and have followers – that screenshot there on the right was taken last month, and is actually Cat, the girl in the close up smiling picture we saw earlier.It then became a conversation between students and perspective students about Cardiff University and what it was like – creating a feeling of having an an older brother or sister already at Cardiff. We wanted this older brother / sister feeling, as when we ran a series of focus groups, engaging with students to find out their motivations and pain points during the recruitment process. One of the things we asked was why did they choose Cardiff? Most because they had someone already there that were able to give them inside information on courses, living, all the sorts of things that weren’t in the corporate information – and that’s exactly what we did with the Facebook students.
Jumping over social networks to twitter, we had a content strategy but also wanted to explore YouTube, so the third round of the competition was about the competitors explaining why they should win the scholarship for life. What was great about that was it gave us a huge amount of content, open and available on the Thrive YouTube channel.It surfaced some pretty average stuff, ‘hey this is me and my friends, we like to party’ – but this stuff sunk to the bottom, and we had some truly fantastic stuff. There was one girl who’s video included an amazing illustration. So good that she won the round, and although she didn’t win the overall competition, Cardiff University have now employed her to do commissioned illustration work
We saw these personalities coming through in content and when they came – people using music, all sorts of stuff.What was interesting was something we came to pick up on, especially when the finalists came into the university for the final, which was when they were asked why they wanted to come to Cardiff, the response was, ‘we want to meet like-minded people’. That like minded came up again – and this was from 6 final students who were all from very different backgrounds and subjects coming together and felt like they fitted, by speaking with each other.The key things to take from this method portion – this is what we needed to create to get the attention of the target audience amidst the public issues and policy changes. The lessons learnt from Thrive are in play across the university now. We’ve developed this with Cardiff so that each school now has an online hangout with perspective students to facilitate conversations between themselves and the school, all through the medium of Facebook.It’s easy to think ‘we can’t afford to give away a scholarship’ - but what’s needed, and this is the key, is an incentive that matches the action that you’re trying to get that person to do. And it has something to do with the unique qualities of that audience that you’re targeting.I know that schools within the university have done smaller version of that now, and the trick is not to use the awful marketers trick of giving away a free iPad, but to build engagement with the target audience – tell a stoary where they are the characters, and in doing so you’ll keep their curiosity to then convert then to do what you want them to do. Not by giving away free iPads!
One of the things you’re bound to ask us, was did it work?And the answer is, well, yes.
First of all we have some good headline media coverage and celebrity endorsement – as you saw Stephen Fry tweeted it and a number of celebrity honorary fellows.
It took some stick from some areas of the press but that wasn’t really the point – it wasn’t aimed at a 40 year old journalist in London, it was aimed at 17 year old students. And believe me, they loved it.Infact, there was a lady that responded to a leading education column in the UK by saying that she was sat in her Russell Group office sneering at this crass X-Factor style approach to university recruitment, her 17 year old daughters and her friends were texting eachother asking ‘are you going to go for it?’Who did we care more about? Yes, the 17 years old – our target audience.
So, the bottom line is did it work with the figures?Well national applications were down 7% and Cardiff was down 4% - it was above their competitors average
So, Thrive is now the permanent UG recruitment brand, allowing the seperateness of the student voice in that brand.Huge plus is we’ve helped bring the other schools on board, and that admission tutors and others understanding that marketing is a
One of the other things it’s done is inject a bit of humour into the day – we introduced the dragon mascot which people loved taking pictures and tagging themselves in it and sharing on FB – this was about driving offline activity online to create a lasting and powerful comms channel in the form of Facebook and twitter.One of the things we did was create a landing page for the Open Day to create a stream of activity pulling through from the photographs and events during the day from Facebook, creating a live feed for people who couldn’t make it on the day could still see what was happening.
To anyone who questions the value of social as a part of driving ROI is this screenshot we took of the open day who shared the photo they had taken with the dragon, exclaiming “Lovin Cardiff. Was ruddy ardderchog!’ – which I’m reliably informed is welsh for ‘excellent’ – I hope! 12 people liked, and all the comments. This created engagementSM is about getting people to share their content, not you share yours.
So, that brings me back to my point earlier about why campaigns are the only way to market digitally.Well, as I mentioned before, if you’re not targeting it’s spam, and...
With that targeting you can target and adapt, so if things aren’t working and need adjusting you can change quickly.
So that’s all well and good, but one important thing we haven’t touched on yet is User Experience, or UX.It ‘s something we consider with literally everything we do, and digital marketing is no exception.What we’ve got here is a simple definition of UX - how someone *feels* when they interact with your product, system or serviceOur context here is online – and most of you may already think about how your audiences *feel* when they interact with your website, your mobile site or your apps - but how about how they feel when interacting with your PPC ads, the SEO-optimised content on your site, your social media presence or your marketing emails?And of course how someone *feels* is pretty subjective, right? There’s a huge range of emotions at play, everything from delight to frustration and everything in between. Then throw in context of use, which is pretty much different for everyone – so we’re talking different characteristics, environments, technologies.A person, different people, with different backgrounds, using websites and apps from home on a desktop or an iPad, at work on a laptop, on a phone at the bus stop.Are they a first time user, frequent or infrequent repeat user, how are they influenced by others. So on the surface a pretty simple statement, but kind of mind boggling once you really start thinking about it
Sum of many partsAt Precedent we advocate a holistic approach to user experienceWe consider the user experience from end to end, and so should you when you’re planning & implementing your DM campaigns – because they don’t start and end JUST on that social presence, or that marketing email, or on that paid ad – generally people are being funneled through to your other digital products like websites or appsAnd one of the most common mistakes organisations make is they do All THAT WORK to get people to their website via DM – only for the process to fall down at that point because there’s no clear CTA or next step for them to take.Another common mistake people make is not knowing their audience, or trying to target all their audiences at once and usually failing miserably – this is where the creation of personas (or pen portraits that represent each of your audience groups – their background, motivations, tech ability, sites they use etc) comes in really handy – preferably created at the start of your campaign planning with input from actual audience members
So taking this slightly further, here’s a diagram of the UX cycle - its something that I’ve used over the years to help formalise my thinking about the user experience.I like this because you get a sense of progression, or journey around this virtuous circle The experience begins with Visibility, and this is where DM is at its strongest - social media channels, search (organic and paid), email blasts – grabbing people’s attention Orientation: enable users to rapidly build a model of the goals and tasks they can complete via the site, app, social media presence, email – so e.g. Clear contextual links, user-centred IA & design - is there a common thread between the CTA from your campaign & where they land on your digital product?Interaction: rich but easy, supports goals and tasks, delightful – designing for the inbetween moments – how do people complete a task? Must be as easy & persuasive as possible. Think about a conversion funnel – sign up for something, buy something, reduce opp to link out to other stuff, focus on task at hand. Get them into the funnel and reduce distractions – example here is a charity site that’s completely focussed on getting users to either donate money or register to volunteer their time – and makes the process to do those things as simple as persuasive as possible.Extension: once completed task at hand, what can you upsell, cross sell, lead the user into or integrate with an app – e.g. cross-selling from a DM campaign once you have gotten users to the site/app/social presence e.g. Red Cross ‘blood signal’ campaign encouraged us to not only sign up ourselves, but to share it with 50 of our friends & relatives & encourage them to as wellRetention: if we’re trying to capture data then is there some form of progressive engagement we can employ? Campaign is to get new customers/members/volunteers – how do we keep them engaged with us and learn more about them?Reputation: execute well on each of these = positive UX - social media very good with this, how do ppl share their pos experiences e.g. Water cooler etc, much easier to share online - conversely, if not doing well it has never been easier to share negative exps (my Dr Schwab example)And positive UX increases visibility for potential new customers …
For SEO…(Left to right) Techie to check code for spider traps, SEO specialist to figure out keyphrases and find opportunities to link build and syndicate, strategist to set business objectivesFoot soldiers to follow plans by building links, syndicating content, cleaning code, etc.
Now you can launch an invasion
For Social media your SEO specialist is replaced with a creative who’s good at thinking up fun, engaging ideas, andFoot soldiers replaced with ordinary staff who are conversational
Now you can build your outpost
For PPC and Emails…Techie to build the ads, Strategist to set goals and business objectivesDesigner to design the ads and a Specialist Copywriter (who’s wearing a clown nose because he also needs to be a bit creative and fun)
Now you can launch missiles at your targets
Or you can take out target a specific audience segment with sniper-like efficiency
And if you’re missing one of these roles in your organisation…
That’s where we come in!
We’re a team of nearly 90 now
These are the 6 sectors we focus on, giving a narrow and deeper approach rather than more broad and shallow
We’re based in 5 location across Aus and the UK
We started over 22 years ago by Paul, our Chairman and Founder who’s sat here somewhere
And here are some of the clients we work with
So we should now have a few minutes available for any more questions you’d like to throw at us, or if you’d prefer to have a private chat we can certainly do that afterwards.TAKE QUESTIONSAny more? No, well in that case, we just have one more small thing to ask of you before you head off for the day – on your seats there are some feedback forms and we’d really appreciate it if you’d take a few minutes to fill them in...We genuinely do review them after each seminar and use the feedback to improve future ones. So it’s immensely valuable.
