PART I: FUNDAMENTALS OF SUCCESS IN THE NEW DIGITAL ECONOMY
Chapter One: Targets and Opportunities
Internet marketing is still here and mobile engagement is the red-hot and rising trend. Internet companies, television, radio, newspapers, magazines, major advertising agencies and major advertisers who once fought the tide are being forced now to re-define how they reach consumers and remain relevant. A new breed of mergers and acquisitions is underway in the online space. This time the value is on engagement with smaller audiences than during the previous Internet-Web era.
If you missed the last Internet revolution, got burned, or came late to the party that is the integration of mobile, search and social media, this book is for you.
In 1999 Darcy DiNucci coined the term ‘Web 2.0’ and it was popularized by Tim O’Reilly in 2004 ( see )
‘Web 2.0’ brought us social networking, wikis, virtual worlds where people shop for body parts, text message advertising, mobile video search, blog pundits that can make or break your reputation and your business.
But Web 2.0 also brought us information overload and overwhelm.
A recent study by Microsoft showed that the average attention span is now only 8 seconds compared to the ‘30 second spot’ that advertisers had been accustomed to during the boom of the television advertising age last century. This book will show you how to aggressively employ these technologies while keeping sight of your goals, using best practices.
This book contains practices and case studies that have worked for us, and for companies such as YOU! Yes, YOU! This is a living manuscript. As you read on you’ll have the opportunity to share your story in this book and possibly get published into print!
What Does “Digital Engagement” really mean?
When we speak of managing digital engagement in the online space, we don’t mean transferring portions of your ad dollars or marketing budgets to the web, social media or mobile marketing. Most of you are already doing that. Chances are, most of you may be quite adept at juggling marketing resources to take advantage of online opportunities to grow your business – and we can help you do this more successfully, and with more confidence and insight.
But successful digital engagement is much more. It is moving not just your content online but your entire organization’s mission into a global economy that has no borders. It’s a twist to the entire corporate mindset. And a shift towards allowing your customers to tell you what they want to buy from you. This book itself is an example of this paradigm shift.
Imagine:
●letting your customers design your next product – and fund the product’s advertising campaign
●introducing your nonprofit agenda to millions of minds in China and the rest of Asia
●becoming a household name – globally – through the power of viral online video, music, and text.
●inventing the next killer ‘mobile app’ that gets bought by one of the major players in the on space ( example )
●building a passive online income through your own membership site that eventually replaces your day-job
●speaking at conferences and panels about what you’ve created and developed and the service it has provided to the world
This is your guidebook beyond the theoretical nuts and bolts, to tangible creative executive strategies you can use right now, with real world examples.
Online Media Advertising: WE are SO There
By the end of this 2016, US digital ad spending reached $72.09 billion, while TV spending grew to $71.29 billion. That means digital will represent 36.8% of US total media ad spending, while TV will represent 36.4%. - See more at:
According to this research group, the amount of online ad spending per internet user in 2008 would reach $100 per person if not more. They severely underestimated the volume of ad spending per person. Here are their updated numbers.
“The strong performance of the digital ad market is being driven by several factors, including, not surprisingly, mobile and video. Mobile ad spending will grow 45.0% this year to reach $45.95 billion. As it grows, it will represent an increasing share of overall ad spending. By 2019, mobile will represent more than a third of total media ad spending in the US. Google is the undisputed king of mobile and will remain so for the foreseeable future. Google will capture 32.0% of the mobile ad market—its closest rival Facebook capturing 22.1% in 2016. “
The trend for major advertisers is to pull money away from traditional media (TV, radio, magazines, newspapers) to spend more online and specifically on mobile.
“Not only will video ad spending continue to grow by double-digit percentages, its share of total digital spending will increase as well. This year, video ad spending will reach $10.30 billion, representing 14.3% of total digital spending. That figure will climb to 15.1% by next year. “
Search and Display ads both increased in popularity since the earlier publication of this book. In the first edition we reported, that paid search accounted for about 40 percent of current online ad spending, while online display banner ads accounted for about 20%.
Currently, display ads are the top format for digital ad spending and accounted for a whopping 48% of current online spending and will continue to be so through 2020. Search Ads 46%. Together they account for 94% of the total online spend.
“Display will continue to be the top format for digital ad spending through 2020. Display spending will reach $34.56 billion this year, slightly ahead of search’s $33.28 billion. Facebook will capture the vast majority of display spending, taking in $11.93 billion this year, 34.5% of total display spending in the US. Google is a distant second, with $4.79 billion or a 13.8% share.”
Classified ads, including some newspaper sites will continue to be explored as will social networking sites. Ad spending in these other niches accounts for less than 4%.
The numbers are important because major advertisers have signaled they anticipate a boom in the U.S. economy, as evidenced by the highest yields in the stock markets. This means that all aggressive marketing in the next few years will be in the display ads and search space. If you are not there, you may be assured that your competitors will be.
see
Let’s face it: newspapers, magazines, and television went down in flames in 2007 – all these traditional media sector suffered horribly. Newspapers saw print readership decline, watched their online page views increase, and somehow failed to connect the dots and re-align their advertising revenue models. The magazine industry hemorrhaged and bled through drastic staffing cuts even as they took desperate measures to shore up declining subscriptions. The 2007 television writer’s strike, which crippled American network television, had traditional advertising running for the exits and into the arms of online marketing partners. Most will not go back.
Best Practice: Start with the Basics
The Web is effective for the following tasks and ROI models:
· Brand Building
· Lead Generation
· Online Sales (eCommerce)
· Customer Support
· Market Research
· Word of Mouth, Word of Web, Buzz Marketing
· Content Services
· Web Publishing
Your enterprise may require one of these ROI models, or several. Before you start spending another dime on an email campaign or a retooled website, you need to be clear as to your objectives and the expected return for your investment online. We had thought the days of throwing dollars blindly at Internet campaigns were over. But the same large companies make the same mistakes, it seems, again and again in the mobile online world.
2007 saw Anheuser-Busch sink $15 million into a sponsored entertainment website whose traffic levels were so low the couldn’t even qualify to be measured on comScore.com, a net ratings service. Its main error may have been quite basic – overestimating the appeal of the site’s main talent, ESPN sportscaster Joe Buck, as compared to the millions of available pageviews of unclothed females that also attract this demographic.
Fast forward to 2017:
Joe Buck’s Superbowl coverage and FOX made history
Back in 2007 Wal-Mart tried to get hip with a blog (fronted by its agency) as well as two ventures on Facebook, a popular social network site. The efforts were noted for the speed they were co-opted by consumers who used the forums to castigate Wal-Mart for some of its more controversial business practices. McDonalds, who you’d think would know something about the young people it hires, posted a recruitment page, MacCareers, on Facebook but wound up disabling the discussions after too much venting by the kids.
Those early investments paid off.
So let’s take another look at the most appropriate web tools for each model, from a ROI perspective:
Brand Building
An early study funded by Yahoo showed that online web exposure doesn’t just give a lift to internet purchasing; it gives considerable lift to offline, real-world, bricks-and-mortar purchasing of consumer products. Done properly, the increase can nearly double off-line purchasing.[Source: Yahoo 2007]
Major marketers know this, and have been aggressively building up their web sites and their web presence over the past year.
An early study by comScore, Inc. looked at the top consumer packaged goods brand sites and found that they attracted a total of 66.4 million U.S. visitors in 2007, and that was a increase in 10 percent over the previous year. According to the study, the average customer visited a site four times, viewing about ten web pages per visit, and spent an average of 9 minutes on the site on each visit.
Recently Microsoft conducted a study and found that the attention span is 8 seconds!
Your most important tool here is your organization’s mobile-optimized website, marketing automation funnel and engagement follow-up campaign. Your domain presence is both the starting point for the brand-loyal and the destination for new audiences. This is the time to beef up both domain branding (See Chapter 3) and website optimization using automated analytical tools available to all, (See Chapter 4) and a whole new host of ‘marketing automation’ tools that are popular today. Last year we saw that the industry of ‘marketing automation software’ hit #1. Companies such as SalesForce, Infusionsoft, Aweber and others re-focused their efforts towards providing tools for ‘digital engagement’ that went way beyond the traditional e-mail newsletter that was popular in the last decade.
It is a brave new world out there, attention spans are at their lowest, and despite popular opinions, consumers are smarter than ever. In the early days of marketing there was a saying that you want to always write your sales copy to the mindset of a 12 year old. Those days are over. Today, you have to identify exactly who you are speaking to and write exclusively to that avatar. If you switch your voice, you’ll lose their attention faster than you can blink an eye.
In an age where the attention span equals the acceleration from 0-60 of most consumer cars, you have to think in a different way if you’re going to reach anyone online AT ALL!
This revised edition of Digital Engagement is all about that shift in mindset. It is a shift that we will all be taking as a digitally connected society, whether we like it or not.
For example, when we discovered that our 100,000+ mailing list that we’ve been building for the past ten years no longer responds to our emails, we knew had to make a change!
Every business has to change to meet the new consumer, the new market: The new ‘Rules of Engagement’ have been written by a social web of several billion people.
There is nothing you or I can do about it. It is ‘just so’.
What we can do, however is align with those rules, and ride the wave of change to success.
This book is your interactive “digital engagement” roadmap.
Gentlemen and Ladies. Start your engines.
Get ready to press the accelerator on your fancy new electric car and step into the future.
Note: Every Reference in this book and its associated search query was found using Earthgrid Search and the new SearchTriggers 4.0 Suggestion Engine. A complete list of queries and search terms will be included at the end of each chapter so you can perform your own research beyond the scope of this book.
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Content Distribution
References
US ONLINE ADVERTISING SPENDING BY FORMAT
eMarketer report, U.S. Advertising Spending
Microsoft 8 second attention span study
Joe Buck Super Bowl
Web 2.0 wikipedia