Digital Media - A Double Sided Blade

Hi guys. Let's have a talk about trends today. We have trends in fashion, music, news, climate, and almost everything we do. The current trend in marketing is of Digital & Social Media Marketing. Every company has an interest in this area and many are already investing heavily on this. And the number of additions are increasing daily.

Although there are many advantages such as low cost, ease of use, etc which were discussed in the earlier blogs, digital marketing is not smooth sailing all the way. One often forgets the main aspect of digital marketing. That is,

• It is open for every one freely.
• The customer dialogs are more important than the brand announcements.

Sometimes companies just start on digital marketing activities & get some one to post a picture or an update like every month, & call it digital marketing. It is digital. But it is calling for dissaster. This can be from many different ways.

For example this is a video that got very famous regarding United Airlines. While on a tour with the "Sons of Maxwell" band the musicians found out that the baggage handlers have rough handled the luggage so that one of their expensive guitars was broken. Even though they complained to various levels no action was taken to compensate them. And finally they produced this song and it become very popular and although it looks entertaining, the negative sentiment created would have been a nightmare for the Airline. This is how social media reacted to a bad customer service.

As explained in this blog by Jessica Farrelly the layoff of employees at HMV became a major issue. The reason behind was that the employee responsible for handling the corporate Twitter account also got fired. And the company had no idea who was doing what. He simply tweeted "We are tweeting live from HR where we're all being fired! Exiting !!" And this tweet started trending & created an instant uproar. Although the company sent a few tweets later to rectify the "Firing Everyone" image, the damage was already done. So you should always know who is handling your digital campaigns & check that they are up to the task.

This below video is what the outcome was of a prank video done by 2 Domino's Pizza employees  some time back. Although they insisted this was only a prank and no real harm was done, the posted video went viral & created waves of complaints. In the video they show to put the cheese used in the sandwiches in their nose, clean themselves with the material used to clean the kitchen equipment, sneeze on the food, etc. Both of them lost their jobs as a result and the company was under a lot of fire as well.

So it may be a simple prank, or a missed/delayed customer complaint, or even the access given to the wrong person. But the outcome can be devastating for the company. Digital media is not something one can control 100%. But regularly monitoring & moderating the customer dialogues is very very important in order to protect your company's reputation in such instances as explained above. 

Your comments are much appreciated.. :)

Use of Display Banner Ads in Sri Lanka

The modern world is a world based on Digital. The customers, companies, politicians, votes, terrorists, & every other kind is online today.

With this fact in mind many global companies have allocated a considerable amount of money for advertising on the web. This is done through Google Display Network. It is an easy access tool available for anyone to design and post their Banner Advertisements.

In a global scale many organization try to add something different to their banner ads, or target them so precisely that they do eventually get a better return from this investment. This is mainly because the effectiveness of simple banner ads are very low. When was the last time you clicked on a banner on a web site?

So what does Google Display Network do? Mainly it helps to develop & target advertisements on websites to create awareness, repeatedly remind the product and generate more sales. But all this depends on how and what you do as your campaign.

Re-targeting is a very useful tool provided by this system. What it does is, it observes consumer behavior through the websites they visit & once they visit a specific web site it drops a cookie on their machines. Then in future Google is able to display your advertisement on every website that person visits. This helps to constantly remind a potential customer with your product to create an actual sale.

Below shown is a part of the advertising space of a popular local website.

As you can see, although there are some colorful and attractive ads the whole space is cluttered and you will need a few minutes to separately understand the Ads even. But how many of you would spend time to separate Ads when you are not even looking at them.

This is the easier to do way of banner Ads. True it takes some skill to make the creative, but you can create an interesting banner Ad by being totally creative. Not just some attractive colors & modles.

Below is an amazing banner Ad campaign carried out by a Cruise Company. Watch the video & you will see the extent to which you can bend the reality to give a novel & memorable experience to users & create a lasting name for the company.

This is the level is should be. But we are still in the above mentioned basic stage. It doesn't take a genius to develop this. All it takes is the willingness to be creative & unique.

Hope to see us developed to this level in near future. Do share your thoughts.

Power of Video - Power of Youtube

In media there are several forms such as print, Radio, TV, Digital & each of them are able to deliver one or more forms as images, sound, video. But today Digital has been able to deliver all these forms including word of mouth.

Many of you would simply search online for any of the day to day information requirement. Most are used to resorting to sites such as Wikipedia. But still the fact remains that we like to watch a video much more than we prefer to read an article. The sounds, colors, motions combined give a very unique and memorable experience. Therefore we retain more memories in this format as well. Most of you may not remember the date Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon. But everyone of you will remember that video, the saying "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind".

So you can see the power of this combined media against others.

Youtube is very popular among the web communities today. There are many who depend on Youtube for daily news and updates around the world. There are various companies and people who became world renowned purely through Youtube. A very good example would be Psy and his Gangnam style video.

But the most popular videos are not only expensive music videos and commercials. As you can see there are many kinds of videos in the top list.

Home movies, amateur videography has a raw entertainment that can not be expresses in any other kind of format. In Youtube you can see the videos of mistakes become hits. A single persons words changing entire nations.

Many companies today have identified this power and are correctly utilizing this facility. What you need to understand is that Youtube is a free service and with just a camera phone and an internet connection one person can change the world of billions.

Below are some popular and successful Youtube video campaigns done by several organizations.

True that there is a very strong & long thought process behind these campaigns. But these are not done by spending millions & the effect it creates is worth much much more than that.

Below is a campaign done by Google & this shows the power of search in a very nice way that would normally take pages to write.

The following is a video you all may remember. It created great consumer interest with its innovation & simplisity.

Although these are campaigns done by various companies, you don't need that to make a popular video. All you need is a good idea and the innovativeness.  Youtube is a place where popularity depends on what you do & not how much you spend. This is a great tool for small organizations to create awareness as well as for large organizations to be innovative.

Here is a small video taken by an individual that went viral.

 

Do share your views on Youtube. Thanks. :)

Facebook Advertising for Effective Targeting

Hi again guys. Lets have a look at Facebook & Facebook Advertising today.

When it comes to social media, Facebook is among the top names that pop to our mind. Millions of people use Facebook to connect & interact with their friends all over the world on a daily basis. As marketers we see this as access to a wide market with better communications. You may have seen that many organizations & brands, big or small have a presence in Facebook.

If you take a Facebook page of a company, their are 3 important items. They are,

• Content - The pictures, statuses, company information, etc. you share on your page to interest your fans.
• Applications - The various applications that are used to encourage fans to engage with the page.
• Sponsored Ads - Advertising the page & the brand through Facebook.

Content plays a major role in this. If the page does not have good & valued content, the mere number of likes or paid advertisements will be of very little use. You must plan ahead as to what content & what categories you will upload & when you will do so. Also you should identify what you will avoid from sharing on your page.

As for an example we have created a Facebook page for the local business of Salon LIYO in order to promote their business & create a loyal fan base.

Today we see many pages promote some kind of a promotion on & off. This is most of the time a contest. It is important to identify "do we need to do a contest just because everyone is doing so?". There are several things you need to know before you embark on a promotional activity on your Facebook page. Also you should go through the terms & conditions of Facebook well too. For example according to Facebook guidelines (https://www.facebook.com/page_guidelines.php) you should not promote to like a picture on your page as the competition.

Facebook Ads

It is said that usually the reach of a page post on Facebook is below 20% of the total fan base. But with a proper advertising campaign you can almost triple this reach.

There are basically two types of Ads on Facebook. One is the small advertisements that come up on the right hand side bar of the browser when you are in Facebook. The other is the sponsored stories that come in the news feed in your home page. This happens mainly when your friends like the sponsored pages or share their content.

To create a Facebook Ad, you can go to facebook.com/ads & select create an Ad. You can promote either an external website URL, a Facebook page or an Facebbo App through the advertisement.

There are several objectives you can achieve through these Ads. You can use the Facebook Ads to Gain more likes to your page, get more clicks or impressions. Or to promote a specific post. So you need to select your objective well for better results from your Ads.

 

And now you can design your Ad. You can add a picture to increase the attractiveness of your Ad. And also you can select the sponsored stories option alongside your Ads. This is provided free of charge by Facebook.

Then you need to define your target audience. This is very important. Facebook allows you to define the target audience based on country, city, age, gender, and even the relationship status. The below given picture will give you an understanding about this. For example for a small gents clothing store in a small geographic area, they can ensure that their Ad will only be displayed to the males with in the age category and in the immediate vicinity of the store. This will help to gain more fruitful results from the Ad cost spent.

 

Also we can ensure the Ad will not be displayed to those who have already liked our page etc. This helps to reduce the wastage of money talking to the same person again & again.

Now you can set the budget for your Ads. You can allow Facebook to bid by just setting a daily budget limit or you can bid yourself for greater results.This will help you to keep track of your Ad cost and to ensure you do not exceed your limit.

So you can see that Facebook Ads can be customized to be more targeted to the specific needs & characteristics of the individual viewer (for example you can design separate Ads for males & females who are single, in a relationship, married, divorced and target those properly & get much better results at a very low cost) & this will help to extract sales from small niches in the market.

Hope this was of some use to you. Do leave a comment.

A Dip in to Social Media Marketing

Today, let us dip our toes in to social media marketing for a bit.

When ever some one says social media what everyone thinks is that it is about advertising on Facebook. Or a youtube video. But social media refers to all the conversations people have online.

Social Media Marketing refers to the marketing effort in order to securing a place for your brand in the online conversations that are happening on social media web. The objective is to increase the likability of your brand.

Now as you can see social media marketing is not about publishing your Ad in some social networking site. Also it is not about controlling the content about your brand that is online. What I mean is the objective is not to delete all bad & negative comments & posts from the web. If you plan to control every single post about your brand you will have to be able to control every single person in the world who has access to internet.

So this is not a one way communication too. As I said earlier, it is about associating your brand in a conversation the public is having. So if your brand is really not doing too well, better think again about going in to social media marketing.

In carrying out social media marketing,

• 1st you have to listen to what the current conversations are about your brand,
• Then analyze your current position with respect to your competitors
• Identify where you need to improve
• & set plans to achieve those improvements.
• Finally you need to support this with paid advertising & promotions to amplify the effect.

Let's now see how to analyze your current social media standing with that of your main competitors. We can use a tool named Social Media Brand Health Check to carry out this analysis.

Below is an analysis I did as an example for the brand Mobitel Sri Lanka & I have taken Dialog Axiata as their competitor for it. You can take several competitors for this analysis.

The criteria used in this analysis are,

• Reach - The number of people you reach through your social media profiles.
• Quality of audience - How relevant is your reach is to your actual target group.
• Engagement - How deeply people engage with your brand.
• Share of voice - How often do people talk about your brand in social media.
• Sentiment - Is the conversation about your brand positive or negative.

The levels of satisfaction given to each criteria is as follows.

0 - Totally Dissatisfied

1 - Somewhat Dissatisfied

2 - Neutral

3 - Somewhat Satisfied

4 - Very Satisfied

And let's see how to interpret the score gained from the analysis.

• Below 25 - You are seriously lagging behind in social media. You need to put much more effort in to developing your brand's social media marketing.
• 26-50 - You have a few areas where you are strong on social media. Make them stronger. Specially find out your weak areas, & address the issues
• 51-80 -You are comparatively a successful brand on Social Media. But do try & improve on the few areas you are week.
• Above 81 - Your brand is doing great on social media. Try to maintain it & improve with time.

Overall, Mobitel brand seems to be doing well on social media marketing with an overall score of 77. But they do have several areas where they can improve.

 

Based on the example I have taken we can see that, Mobitel has almost double the number of fans in Facebook compared to Dialog. But only 50% of that are local fans. Since this is a local brand this suggests that their Facebook page is only half effective in tapping to the real target audience. Therefore Mobitel needs to put more effort in to attracting more local visitors to their fan page.

When we consider Twitter we can see that @MobitelSriLanka is very behind on this front. Almost below 1/3 of what @dialoglk has achieved. Also considering the percentage of genuine Twitters, Mobitel is above Dialog with a 18% margin. But this is relatively low considering the small number of followers in the 1st place. Mobitel needs to put much more effort in to Twitter and improve their presence.

If you consider the Youtube channel activities, both Mobitel Sri Lanka & Dialog Axiata are almost at an equal footing. But the number of views seems to be half of the number of fans in the Facebook page. And both of them do seem to have a presence on Google+ & LinkedIn. For a local brand to cover the main channels of social media effectively is a considerable achievement.

When we consider the number of people who are talking about Mobitel on Facebook, they are at a much higher level compared to Dialog. Almost 10 times more than Dialog.

KLOUT score measures a brands online influence and converts to a scale from 0 - 100. And Mobitel has gained a value of 55. But Dialog had a score of 78. This suggests Mobitel needs to work on this area. Best way is to develop links between the different sites they have presence on. For example, you may have seen that they have not mentioned their Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn or the Youtube channel on their Facebook page. It would be a good idea to add those information as well.

Both brands seem to have a high amount of relevant search results appearing with respect to the blogs related to the brand. And have a similar number of Twitter mentionings with in the last 48 hours. But as mentioned above Mobitel has to improve on Twitter by a greater amount still.

As for the negative posts & comments on online media Mobitel seems to attract marginally less negatives than Dialog and the percentage is acceptable since we can not completely prohibit negative sentiments & even if we can, it would defeat the objective of social media marketing.

As explained above you can carryout an analysis to identify where your brand stand with respect to your competitors in social media & take necessary action to develop where you lack.

Hope you found this useful & please do leave a comment.

Key Word Research - Benefits of PPC Advertising

This blog post will be about how to do a simple Key Word Research on Google & how to use that information to better advertise on search engines. Advertising here refers to PPC which was explained in my earlier blog post.

Search Engine Marketing in Sri Lanka is still at an early stage. So one may argue that its an excuse for Sri Lankan web sites & digital activities to perform low in a global scale. But in this blog you can see that these activities are much simpler than we think & one can do most of it by them selves even.

I have done an Ad word research for the product "Hybrid Cars" in Sri Lanka and the results are shown below. You can simply run a key word research using Google AdWords (https://adwords.google.com/o/KeywordTool) which is a service provided free of charge. You can log in to AdWords using your Gmail Account. And for now you can skip the payment details page and go to Key Word Research Tool in the Tools and Analysis tab. You will get the following screen.

 

I have set my key word as Hybrid Cars in Sri Lanka - Sri Lanka & the language English as my audience. You can customize this to any product or country/ group of countries/ a specific city or even a specific radius from a location.

Now you can click on search and get the most common key words used in searches and the quantity. From this you can select a few key words to use in optimizing your advertisement. Just select the key words you like from the list and click download.

This is the list of key words I have selected for this example. And now you can create your advertising campaign and draft the advertisement.

You can preapare your campaign by clicking on the Campaigns tab & clicking on new campaign. Here you need to give a name for your campaign and the type of campaign we are now considering is "Search Networks Only". Either you can set your own bids for daily advertising and let Google do it automatically. And when you continue you come to the following screen. I Have selected the Toyota Sri Lanka company for this example.

Here you can draft your advertisement with in the given framework. I have designed a simple advertisement for Prius Cars as an example.

And at down below the example advertisement we can add all the key words we need to optimize this advertisement for. This is shown below.

You can try these basic steps and improve further. For example you can set the boundaries for your key words so that you can do more word specific advertising. Can use numbers, attentive words in the advertisement, etc.

Now Let's see why we need to carry out this process rather than just putting an advertisement or forgetting about PPC.

Considering the example this advertisement will be shown to any person who is searching for our selected key words or a phrase containing these key words. So it is a more targeted way of advertising to individuals who are actively searching for this information.

Also when you consider the cost, creating this is free. and you only pay for the number of clicks you get for the advertisement on search engines. And the Ad will not appear when the daily credit limit is exceeded. So the expenditure is automatically controlled.

Any Sri Lankan or global company can use this PPC advertising in such an easy manner and do more and more targeted advertising to improve the sales and ROI.

Try this out friends. Give me your feedback. Thank you.

What is Search Engine Marketing - SEM

Let us see how search engines are used in marketing today.

Digital Marketing is associated with the 3 stages of,

• Marketing Communication
• Product/ Service Delivery
• Post Conversion Activities

There are many different tools used in these 3 stages regarding digital marketing. Search engine marketing is a very important tool used in marketing communication.

Search Engine Marketing involves all the activities involved in improving the visibility of a web site within search engines to improve the chance of attracting visitors to the web site. Any company would want their corporate web site to come at the top results for a search done regarding the particular category.

If you take the above screen shot of a google search done for "land sales" you can see 2 different types of results. One is at the very top in a light pink background & on to the right hand side corner. This is known as Paid Search Marketing. Where companies pay and purchase space for advertisements on search engines. Pay Per Click Advertising (PPC) is also a term used to identify this. This is where organizations will pay to bring their web sites to the top of the search results and will pay to google for each click they get.

The other search results are from organic growth. This falls under Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This means all the technical tasks that help search engines to read and index the web site information better & the marketing activities required enhance the authority & the relevance of the web site to make your website more highly placed in search engines.

Although many consider social media to be replacing search activities, the stats show that  the number of searches done per day on google is almost doubling every year.

Search has become a very important part of the buyer decision making process. Traditionally consumer get the exposure to the product at the market place and then buy and consume the product and give positive or negative feed back. This feed back has become the 1st impression for new customers even before coming to the market place. This is due to internet and telecommunication technologies. It is known as the Zero Moment of Truth. 

This refers to the online or offline searches a customer would do in today's environment before purchasing a product or a service. Looking at the stats we can see many people use different search sources. Friends, consumer groups, articles, etc. But among those, online search is at the very top. This is so important that many companies have taken steps to ensure that they pop up in the searches done by customers and the searches will show more positive content.

There are many ways to improve on search engine optimization. Most of these are based on how  search engines work. Let's look at a few general tips to improve your web site.

• Crawlability - Google has some system that crawls through your website and indexes the data in those pages. So in order to make your web site more relevant to the searches, you have to ensure that the crawlers have access to all the pages in your site. Also having simple meaningful URLs will help the crawlability further. You can find out how many pages the crawlers has access to by doing a search as "site:www.name of web site.com"

• Key Word Research - It is important to do a research to identify what are the key words actually used by customers in searching the products in your category. This will help you in making sure you optimize your page to the correct key words.

• Site Structure - It is important to have a proper site structure to make your web site more user friendly as well as to optimize the search quality. For example having a separate page for each category and brand and product will be more beneficial in terms of search engine optimization rather than having some drop down menus. Also it is important to have unique page names for each page in your web site.

• Content Building - It is very important to have a considerable amount of valued content in your web site because the content help build authority for your web site. This may include corporate info., blogs, customer reviews, integrated youtube channel, etc. You must use unique content rather than a copy from some where else, use the words found in the key word research more in your content to optimize the search more.

• Images & Videos - Having images & videos in the web site is believed to allow it to be included in search results more. But in including images and videos you have to ensure that the file names are appropriate to the content and that you provide alternate tags. Because search engines can not read images, the crawlers will view the image file name and include the web site on search results based on that image file name.

• Link Earning - Earning links is a very good way to optimize search. Here the quality of the links is what matters. Not the number of links. The best way to get good quality links is through developing the web site content. The links can be from blogs, related sites, articles, directories, social networks, etc.

These are just a few basics in search engine optimization and this content is based on the articles on digital marketing by Suranga Priyashantha, where you can visit www.SurangaPriyashantha.com for more information.

Do leave a comment...