Digital Marketing - How to use it to sell more

Suddenly, (perhaps to the surprise of nerdy economists), behavioral economics has become the buzziest term in marketing. It makes sense – aren’t we ultimately all about getting people to make non-rational decisions? Isn’t it great to finally apply real academic learnings to a field where so much is ruled by instinct?

The problem is, widely applying economic theory to real life doesn’t always work. Most behavioral economics experiments are done in lab-like settings, where the researcher has control over the subjects, scenario, and transactions.

However, there is one area of digital marketing that represents a great opportunity for digital agencies to leverage behavioral economics: eCommerce. Why? In many ways eCommerce sites resemble a controlled experimental setting:

1.     eCommerce sites tend to exist in highly competitive markets (for example, retail or travel), so there’s a strong incentive for consumers to shop around, with lots of tools that can aid product comparison More… »

By now it’s clear that mobile apps – if executed well – can help brands sell more. Target’s mCommerce app helps the retailer generate revenue from on-the-go shoppers. Popular gaming app Draw Something generates revenue through micro-purchases and upgrades. And Time Warner Cable has seen large increases in positive brand sentiment after launching their TWCable TV iPad App – a metric that’s particularly important in an industry with such high churn and a large focus on customer retention.

But how do you go about selling the apps themselves (whether the app is free or paid)?

How do you maximize app downloads on a modest budget?

It’s worth noting that launching apps is a relatively new discipline, one with a scattered set of learnings and best practices. At OgilvyOne, we’ve combined a scan of various successful approaches used by apps in the past with our knowledge of digital campaign launches to create a composite of tactics we believe would be successful for the launch of any mobile app.  In this post, we will provide a few examples of these tactics.

Let’s first explore how people discover apps. Generally, there are five different ways they do so: More… »

Visitors to OgilvyAction London’s Westbourne Terrace headquarters on a wet and windy Thursday a couple of weeks ago were stopped by a newly installed, cake-dispensing bus stop, courtesy of JC Decaux. This was no random stunt, but an indication of how the shopper’s path to purchase has been revolutionized over the past 18 months.

Shoppers have become digitally liberated, embracing and assimilating technology so that there is now no distinction between their digital and physical existences. There’s no question this has changed the shopper journey – thanks particularly to mobile, we can purchase pretty much anything, anywhere.

Yet brands and retailers still have a tendency to focus primarily on a linear path to purchase, designed to drive footfall in store. And in doing so, they’re bypassing the new sweet spot. More… »

Traditionally, social media has always been considered a platform for engagement. If we look at the top social brands in the world and the gap between the proportion of investments made on creating engagement over driving – commerce, loyalty, service/utility is enormous

Hence, the approach we at OgilvyOne Mumbai took for ICICI Bank (India’s largest private sector bank) was the reverse from what a traditional social media brand would take. With nearly 45 million Facebook users in India, our strategy focused on value exchange, customer service & social banking.

To position itself as a bank, which provides superior value to its Facebook fans, ICICI Bank offers avenues to buy movie tickets/gifts/lifestyle products by tying up with online retailers to drive the usage of its credit & debit cards. Their recent offers on movie tickets created quite a stir by clocking over 1,000 tickets in sales making it the star product in the offers category. Unlike other banks and other financial institutes on Facebook in India, ICICI Bank took the lead in unlocking the full value of its fans.

Apart from online offers, content played a major role, the Education & Information series on Facebook gives fans knowledge on various products, services & smart banking to drive utility solely through content. More… »

A new campaign from Ogilvy UK, currently running in Australia and Brazil, the Dove® Ad Makeover, passes the power of advertising to women by displacing negative ads with empowering, positive messages sent through a Facebook application, found at facebook.com/dove.

“Dove has always listened to women, and we are giving them a new way to be heard through this first-of-its-kind Facebook app,” said Fernando Machado for Dove. “We chose to use Facebook because of its power and reach in social media, which would propel these positive beauty messages to be seen by as many women as possible.”

App not yet available in the US

There are many challenges we as marketers face in today’s digital age, such as the constant evolution of technology, changes in the consumer landscape, social innovation, collaboration, environmental sustainability and transparency to name a few biggies. But what about the next generation of Ogilvy employees? How do we ensure that Ogilvy’s values of originality and pervasive creativity are carried forward into the time-conscious leaders of tomorrow? Generation Y are growing up in the information-intensive age where social media platforms are as every-day as the sun and the moon. They have a comfort level with new technologies that allows them to easily adapt to the accelerating level of innovation, which is redefining the workplace.

As our job roles and company structure change with consumer expectations and technological advances, so do the requirements of new talent. Generation Y’s technical ingenuity aside, they need to be multi-disciplined and be able to analyze data. Even with these skills, they will need to learn how to apply these new platforms commercially and as employers we need to ensure that we give them the best opportunity to get this work experience as early on as possible. Attracting the best of Gen Y is critical to the future of Ogilvy, and the Ogilvy Digital Labs in London have been looking into how we can nurture these future leaders. As an innovation hub, the Lab’s aim is to introduce its agency, clients and more recently students to new and emerging technologies. Ogilvy Labs has initiated a new model in partnership with educational establishments to help underpin their teaching by giving the students a hands-on experience called The Rough Diamond.

The Rough Diamond is a collaboration between educational disrupters and innovators in educational learning who have partnered to identify, develop and nurture new creative talent. The idea is to provide a new talent pool to fish in, across all creative industries including fashion/3D/broadcast/lighting/engineering ensuring that those we bring in are of a hunter and entrepreneurial mindset.

Below is a list of our partners and how they contribute to the model:

The Ideas Foundation works with secondary schools (14-18 year olds) in deprived areas to encourage a top-down approach to including creativity in the curriculum and harnessing young creative talent. Working with agencies they present real life briefs to the students. More… »

Silicon Roundabout, East London’s answer to California’s Silicon Valley, has received serious investment in recent years and a serious amount of press coverage, too. With the likes of Google set to host a 7-story space here this year, the Roundabout has become a hotbed of innovative, quirky and successful companies. So what’s the draw? For the majority of settlers it’s the chance to rub shoulders, and work with, a wealth of complementary businesses.

So many specialists in such a small space offered an opportunity too good to miss. With that in mind, we assembled a hit squad from OgilvyOne and the Digital Labs and hotfooted it round to the Roundabout to meet as many companies as was physically possible in just one day.

Our objective was twofold. Firstly, to see what we could learn from this successful, vibrant, and integrated business community and, secondly, to explore the potential for future partnerships. We spent the day engaging new friends in open conversation and the occasional heated debate. The experience proved invaluable.

What we took (from a vast array of companies with deeply different cultures and outlooks) were some brilliant ideas that could be integrated into our working lives with very little fuss.

Agile working with a war room mentality

When faced with a brief or business challenge, we discovered smart companies willingly forsook process to concentrate instead on getting the right minds in the right room at the right time. (Something, it seems, we typically reserve for pitches.)

Arguably, it’s an approach that could kill profit margins. However, with well-defined roles and goals, everyone knows implicitly what is required of them to keep the project/brief ticking over.

Another interesting point to note here is that several of those we spoke to saw it as a point of pride that no employee worked past 7pm.

More collaboration, more possibilities

With so many companies living in such tight proximity, there is a real sense of community at the Roundabout. It appears as though everyone knows everyone. It can be no surprise that if the experience is not available in-house to respond fully to a brief, companies look to their neighbours to fill the gap.

Too often we’re guilty of sitting in our silos. Collaborative working is not only healthy, but arguably essential, and we should actively seek to leverage our Shoreditch counterparts at any opportunity. Thankfully, it’s a practice we have already begun to preach.

Off the back of our day out, Nicole Yershon and Digital Labs, in association with It’s Nice That from the roundabout, have launched Rory Sutherland’s first publication Wiki Man.

Invest in possibility

Around 90% of the companies we spoke to invested heavily back in the future. Whether it was a percentage of revenue or dedicating time specifically for the generation of new ideas, there was a clear commitment to the future. And an open-mindedness too.

For instance, we are in the business of creating ideas but rarely do we cross the line to develop new products ourselves. There is less resistance to this notion in the Roundabout. If it’s a good enough idea, why not make it, too?

The whole experience has left my mind buzzing with new possibilities. Why couldn’t we evolve the Digital Labs to include hot-desk rental space for tech start-ups? One to ponder, perhaps.

Everyone we met was incredibly welcoming and keen to talk with us – not least because we are in business of creating big ideas, for big brands, and we do it well. The sentiment was truly reciprocated. It was a joy and a pleasure to meet such inspired and inspiring people at the Roundabout.

Let’s hope it’s the first of many encounters.

AJ Coyne is an Ogilvy Fellow at Ogilvy & Mather in London.

@just_coyne_it

I was lucky enough to be invited to participate in the keynote panel at the “Search Engine Strategies” conference recently held in New York City. I was joined by Brenda Fiala, VP of Strategy at Blast Radius; Mark Huffman, Integrated Production Manager, Procter & Gamble and Giovanni Rodriguez, Digital and Social Strategy, Deloitte Consulting LLP. We were moderated by Dana Todd, SVP, Marketing and Business Development at Performics and our topic was the real meaning behind “Integrated Marketing.”

As a team we addressed these four questions:

• What does integrated marketing mean to you?

• What comes first, the big idea or the big data?

• How should Search inform the planning cycle?

• What are the challenges in truly integrated marketing?

It was fascinating for me to watch my fellow panelists, all drawing from a vast career of amazing experiences, find a wide range of ways to answer these questions. I’ll try to summarize a few of the quotes that stuck with me below.

Sometimes the best answers can simply be short and simple and to the point as Giovanni put it so well when he said, “Integrated marketing is the rise of the connected consumer. Marketing has become more strategic, in large part because of the access to data.” I was also a fan of the way Mark gave a very precise visual when he remarked what integrated marketing isn’t, “It’s not just ‘matching luggage’ – the same visual everywhere.” I like this statement because it cuts to the heart of what our panel was there to discuss. Integrating marketing teams should be about performance, driving the best return for our clients and looking at the entire ecosystem of marketing that is happening for a client to meet goals.

As we moved the discussion towards either the big idea or the big data driving integrated marketing, I found that the panel hit a perfect balance of pros and cons. Mark started the discussion with an anecdote about two creative staff members coming up with a big idea on the back of a cocktail napkin, no data input at all, just two great minds coming up with an idea that now drives a campaign for Febreeze air freshener.

I responded with a concept we here at Neo@Ogilvy like to call “of the moment data.” “Of the moment data” is simply the data points we find that are relevant to a client’s business and drive executionable insights for our clients, sometimes it’s as simple as a deep dive into the Google insights platform and sometimes we find rich first and third party data from our demand side platform buying that can help to drive a client’s goals. My point in bringing up this “of the moment” data is simply to say that while those two creative minds were working in a bar one night, they were drawing from years of audience insights, a deep rooted knowledge of their client’s business and a foundation of solid marketing expertise. Just because you’re not sitting in front of MRI looking at doublebase from 2009 doesn’t mean you can’t draw a data point or an audience insight into your big idea.

Brenda had one of the best lines on this topic in my opinion when she stated that you had to inspire both the analytics teams and the creative teams to get into a room together and bubble up the best ideas backed by the best insights, “popcorn logic” is how she put it. Another great visual of so many ideas bubbling up until the top two or three spilled over the edge into fruition.

I feel I have a unique approach to the question around search affecting the planning cycle. I spoke about how typically a search campaign is seen as the harvest of interest, our campaigns become the end result instead of the starting point. I challenged everyone in the room to flip that concept on its head by launching a new product, and launching a paid search campaign with 10-15 branded words for a product that has no awareness. Counter intuitive I know, you wouldn’t see much traffic, but it becomes a central piece of a campaign to watch how the interest surges in your product over time. It is a very tactical way to insert your search team into the strategy of planning an entire campaign.

On this point Brenda made a very important observation, come to the table early, as you start to engage with a new client, a new campaign or even a new planning team. Insert yourself into those meetings, make sure you have a seat when it comes to driving strategy, search is a major force behind performance in any campaign. At Neo I struggle with driving the performance for my clients on a daily basis, at our heart we are a performance marketing company, being in all conversations with key stakeholders from the very start is of tantamount importance.

Giovanni made an excellent point when we moved to our final topic regarding trends in our marketplace that are forcing integration. The convergence of tools and channels is driving this forced integration, he mentioned that social media folks have started to see every company as a media company, and I agree with him, every company has a story to tell and now has a vast toolset in which to tell that story. If you have a client who isn’t leveraging a social conversation, a video platform or even a search campaign, you have a client who is missing out on integrated marketing. Our integrated lives, and the technology upon which we rely so heavily in today’s world, is driving that integration. It may be painful but I think Giovanni is right and it will be for the best.

Lars Feely is the Group Search Director for Neo@Ogilvy in New York.

Yesterday at ad:tech San Francisco, Jeff Pontes, Executive Consultant at Leopard, an Ogilvy Company, shared a unique perspective on how B2B brands can utilized social media to transform businesses. In his presentation, “The Art of Social Content Distribution,” Jeff outlined his strategy to turn search into demand.

Click the following link to download via Slideshare or view the deck in the player below:

Why challenge a word that has become one of the most common terms in digital marketing? The reasons are plenty…

No word in the interactive marketing lexicon derails strategic thinking quite as effectively as “viral.” Everyone wants their video to go viral, but the fantasy of millions of people discovering a video for free (without media, PR and search strategies) leads to disappointment and disillusion.

Few videos ever go viral, and fewer actually need to. Good interactive video strategies don’t just rely upon massive numbers of views. From VSEO (video search engine optimization) to interactive engagement, video offers opportunities that go far beyond the limitations of viral TV2.0 strategies. Engagement and meaningful KPI’s increase the value of video to global companies as well as neighborhood cake shops – regardless of any viral impact. Optimizing your video strategy means pulling the levers that matter most… sometimes that is viral, but more often it is a whole different kind of planning.

The 5 Step Antiviral Program is designed to help marketers look past the hype of the viral world and take into account the many varied video strategies available to companies look to drive leads or demand. More… »