Digital Marketing Agency

Inbound Marketing V Outbound Marketing. Whats it all about?

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 12:47:30 +0000

One of the areas that I consistently get asked about from clients is the difference between inbound and outbound marketing. Marketers and communicators have difficulties differentiating between the two concepts and how to take advantage of inbound marketing .

So lets start with outbound. Essentially outbound marketing is based on on what we know and understand as traditional media. Marketers create carefully crafted messages and communications that they then distribute to an ‘audience’ through media channels. Think TV, Radio, Outdoor but also direct response physical mail or online mediums such as Display advertising. Its characterised by one-way communications, little interaction with the media itself, in the case of broadcast the message is ‘broad’ by its nature as the media is expensive therefore making niche messaging not affordable or feasible.

An example of outbound for instance, might be a company who buys up a contact list, then creates a physical print pack to distribute through physical mail to these contacts, with a direct response hook that will hopefully be triggered by the receiver. Think of a new chain of restaurants in a city sending out a marketing pack to a bought list of HR managers, notifying them of the launch of the restaurants and the running of a competition or aimed at employees. The hope is that the HR manager will distribute the offer/competition to the employees and they can voluntarily respond to the stated offer – win a meal for your work group – that type of thing. The problem with this outbound marketing is that there are a lot of points of friction along the way. The marketers have to buy the list, create the print pack, send it out via physical mail and then, fingers crossed, the HR manager distributes to the work colleagues and then they go and respond to the specific offer. Way too many potential points of failure. I’ve seen this type of marketing fail spectacularly.

Whereas Inbound marketing is characterised by businesses understanding that these days they need to produce rich content on a range of different digital platforms where their prospects are active, and then use this content to attract these prospects’ attention inwards to their business. At the heart of inbound is content marketing. And by content we are not talking ads, we’re talking content that prospects find useful, helpful, amusing, engaging to some degree. So when a business thinks of inbound they need to understand in order to gain the benefits of it, they must be producing regularly updated content on platforms such as their website, blog, social media, regular useful emails, webinars etc… The idea is that this content is being seen and shared by prospects and customers on platforms of their preference (think Twitter, Facebook, Slideshare.net, Website, Blog, etc..) , its useful to them (not always in a massively significant way – but they are happy to receive the information) think Lidl Facebook post – with this weeks special offers – people want this information and they have an affinity with it. And it also keeps the company top of mind and hopefully the customer engages and purchases at some point. Inbound distribution platforms are essentially controlled by the companies themselves – website, blog, social – there can be a paid media element but not 100% necessary – the main cost is the resources required to produce the content. This is where we see this model of owned media coming to the fore.

So lets take an example, imagine you are a health food expert and nutritionist. And you are thinking what kind of content can you produce online that will demonstrate your expertise in your area but also be very helpful to potential client base. If they become exposed to your ideas there is a strong chance that a percentage of these will at some point contact you and convert to a patient etc.. . What would the health nutritionist produce online to achieve both ends? Well, they could regularly provide online information on topics such as family diet plans, celiac dietary considerations, how to manage diabetes in young children, behavioural spectrum dietary responses, realistic healthy diets for working professionals etc. This information is being published on the blog or website , and snippets are being shared on the likes Facebook and Twitter. They could also produce self-interviews on specific topics that they share on Youtube (topical issues of the week, reports that have been released in the media and make comment on these etc.) – then take the video form YouTube and publish on their blog or other social channels. Maybe they do a talk at a conference on managing child obesity and then share the slides on Slideshare.net and again share the link with some small comment on twitter and Facebook. They could possibly release the audio recording that went with the talk as an audio file on their blog or upload to iTunes for download – the scope is endless.

The idea with all this information is that your prospects are seeing your content online, they feel they know you and trust you as they read your work, and then when if necessary they require your services, they think of you first, or refer you to someone they know (word of mouth). Google is also indexing all this content and hopefully the keywords you are trying to be found for on search engines are being used in this content, so when someone searches for your services online using these anticipated words – you come up number 1 and reap the benefits of this. Also, by producing content online and being active in conversations and forums you are building your platform as a professional, which means that you maybe asked to speak at conferences, engage in media debates – all of which generates more awareness of you.

The scope of opportunities for inbound marketing are great. The advantage for the business is that they can control this content and produce as much or as little as they want. The most important thing is quality. As long as the content being produced is of quality and your prospects find it so, that will be the measure of your success. Because if prospects like what you are producing, business will flow Inbound as a result. We are all inbound marketers today whether we know it or not. We are all going to have embrace it because Customers Find Businesses Online Today (but the reality is they don’t, the good businesses Make themselves Findable online, the bad ones don’t and don’t even realise it).

Planning for Success with Your Digital Marketing

Thu, 06 Sep 2012 08:51:59 +0000

Planning Your Digital Marketing Programme?

Below is a copy of a post that I recently did for the Digital Marketing Institute, covering How to Plan Your Digital Marketing Programme. I find, when working with a lot of organisations, that they do not know how to approach Planning For Digital Marketing. They feel they do not have the skills, competency and knowledge of how to construct a coherent and cogent plan. Often times they will just list out the specific channels that they are utilising such as PPC, Display, Email etc…, but these are never framed within a defined business cycle (which they need to be). All of these digital channels need to work together to a common and predetermined course – and that’s the purpose of creating a clear digital plan for any organisation. It also helps convince and proves to decision makers within the organisation that digital is a revenue generator when clearly tied to business outcomes.

Here’s the post, any comments leave below:

One of the areas that I consistently come across where marketers require training and mentoring is with the process of developing a digital marketing plan.

The goal of this post is to give those of you who are tasked with producing a coherent plan a tried and tested working structure for doing so.

What you often find when dealing with companies, both large and small, is that do not actually have a written plan that they can put their hand to and say ‘this is our digital marketing plan’.

The purpose of a digital marketing plan for any organisation is to force you through the process of researching and clearly articulating the aims and goals of your digital initiatives, along with clearly targeting digital personas, and methodically choosing which channels to go after them on and how.

So what are the most important aspects of a digital marketing plan? I have read 100s of these and to my mind the following structure works best.

1. Initial Market Place Analysis for your product or service (overview of your market, realistic assessment of your performance in this space and competitive analysis)

2. Articulation of clear Business Objectives of your digital marketing programme – such as Increase brand awareness, increase sales, increase customer retention, reduce cost per lead, reduce cost per acquisition of customers – these are all standard business objectives but on their own they do not give you a pathway to implement them digitally – that’s why you have to dig down and go beyond these in a digital sense.

3. Next step is to deconstruct these business objectives down into digital goals. So for example lets choose ‘increase sales’ – if you want to translate that into a coherent digital goal – it would look something like: increase the conversion rate on my website, reduce cart abandonments on my checkout process, increase average order size on the site etc. – digital goals give your plan a clear direction – you can then start to adopt tactics that will deliver these ‘Digital Goals’.

4. Once you know what your digital goals are, then you can define what your main Key Performance Indicators are which map on to these Digital Goals – e.g. for reducing cart abandonment rates – the Digital KPI should be the abandonment rate goal tracked in your analytics software that tracks how many users enter the funnel (proceed to checkout) and ultimately get to the end of it (complete checkout and payment).

5. At this stage, you can then start projecting some nominal KPI targets – for instance, increase conversion rate from 1 to 1.5% – increase average order size from €45 to €55 – the digital plan then becomes how you are ACTUALLY going to deliver these goals and projections through digital channels.

6. Once you have the objectives, digital goals, KPIs, and targets set – then you can start fleshing out your strategy and the main part of this will be clearly defined audience segmentation: i.e. you develop rich personas (target audience). By rich I mean that they are fully fleshed out – you should articulate the problems that you as a business solve for specific types of persona, their needs (emotional, lifestyle, informational) where they digitally coalesce, media preferences, perceptions they have of you as business/brand etc. When defining your target audience give them as much detail as possible – it will be worth its weight in gold when you start trying to communicate with them.

7. For each of these Personas then develop a clear Value Proposition for your business and how it relates to them – and by that I mean, clearly articulate and answer the question, “If I am your ideal customer, why should I purchase from you over one of your competitors?”

8. Once you’ve identified your personas, then you can research, based on their informational and locational needs as well as their digital behaviours, the correct and most appropriate digital channels to target them on

9. This is where you then go into great detail on your digital channel strategy – be that SEO, PPC, Display, Email, Social, Affiliate, Mobile etc. I recommend strongly in this section that you break up your tactical solutions into: Customer Reach, Customer Acquisition, Customer Retention or some variation of this – essentially map the Digital channels on to the Sales/Buyer Cycle.

10. And finally, define how you will measure all of this – for each of the channels you should have a clear measurement framework in place where you can measure the effectiveness of each of the channels and produce a matrix of core metrics that indicate whether you are on track to meet targets or not (and have a plan to take remedial action when not meeting targets).

There’s a lot more detail to cover on this topic, but this should be enough for anyone to get started on their digital marketing strategy and plan. The basic structure is:

Market Research and Competitor Analysis
Objectives and Goals
Audience Setting and Value Propositions
Channel Strategy
Implementation
Measurement

Contact me at keith.feighery@digitalinsights.ie for more information.

Recent Website Launches and Digital Marketing Work

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 15:28:41 +0000

Quick update on some recent work complete – we have just launched a new site for our client Finol Oils. The site is built using the Django Framework – which offers a highly robust set of backend functionality. The site elegantly handles 1000s of Finol products. The site is search engine optimised natively from go live – we have implemented a SEO template for all content on the site – be it product or static content related. It offers non-invasive lead generation functionality on form downloads, and product and contact enquiry functionality is baked seamlessly into all aspects of the site, to ensure the customer is only a click away when they need more information. The site is fully content managed by the client themselves. They have tried out in the past various others CMS systems, but Django for them is the perfect solution.

Also, we have been running Display Ads for Harvey Norman – we have been designing and publishing their Display Ads that have been used to promote sales and offerings online over the past 12 months. See below for some of examples of the work.

Facebook Marketing For SMEs

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 12:31:30 +0000

Earlier this week, Digital Insights ran an introduction to Facebook Marketing for about 35 Businesses in conjunction with Dublin City Enterprise Board. Always very interesting to run these workshops you get such a mix of businesses from solicitors, architects, doctors, jewellery makers, health professionals, restaurant and bar owners for example, all looking to try and figure out how to use Facebook from a business perspective (along with all the other relevant social media tools). All these small businesses, have one thing in common, that they needed to use social media to develop meaningful warmed up leads with very little dispensable budget. Great session, lots of questions looking for tangible answers. The best way for small businesses to start leveraging social media is to seriously think about who and why it is they are targetting certain prospects (as well as existing customers) and what are they going to communicate and offer these prospects through these channels. Is there any value in what they are communicating – does anyone care? There are by all accounts 37 Million Facebook Business Pages as of them filing IPO – there’s going to be a lot more as more and more businesses are jumping in. Lots of noise. And its very easy to filter that noise out on Facebook. Some businesses will do a good job marketing and communicating on Facebook – most won’t – because they dont understand the medium, how people engage on these channels, and nor do they do the basics in thinking about what it is they are trying to communicate and making sure that someone cares – but thats the opportunity for those of us who make the effort and try very hard to understand why we are using these channels and who we’re looking to communicate with.

Have a read through the presentation – its meant as an overview and introduction – during the session we went through how easy it is to set up a page and landing page using a third party app and generally a walk through of the application. Whats easy is setting up a a page, whats hard is sustaining it with good and relevant content.

DI-Facebook-DCEB-Session

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Optimising Your Website Content

Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:19:09 +0000

One of the most important jobs of a Digital Marketer is to understand how to create engaging and smooth user experiences targeted at well understood personas. One of the skills that I find a lot of Digital Marketers don’t possess is the understanding that unless you know how to create optimised user journeys, driving all the traffic in the world to that destination will not improve conversion rates. It behoves all marketers to research and figure out what works for their audience – and the only way to do that is to test. Because your own personal biases when creating online pathways and information flows will not translate into the ‘best’ user experience. There’s a myriad of testing tools these days on offer – a free tool that anyone can use is Google Website Optimiser. Very straight forward to run tests on variations of your webpages.

Embedded is a presentation, based on the ab tests reported on by a site called ‘Which Test Won’. It presents a whole series of tests based on a hypothesis, two test versions and goes through the winning version. Have a look through, and start analysing your own site and ask yourself the question – is the site clearly understood to users, both new and returning, in terms of who you are as a business, what you do, what problems you solve, and if they are your ideal customers why would they choose to do business with you (clear value propositions), and if they want to do business with you what are the next steps involved and how easy is it to get to the endpoint (Calls to Actions etc.). Most website do not do a good job of addressing these questions. Then of course, there’s the whole science and trial/error of testing checkout processes, landing pages, subscription and registration forms etc… This slidedeck is a good pointer to even get you thinking about it, regardless of whether you are B2B or B2C.

GCD-WhichTestWon-OnlineOptimisation

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Social Media Slidedeck

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 15:47:05 +0000

We deliver a lot of social media training sessions direct to businesses and as part of wider digital marketing courses. Enclosed here is a social media slidedeck that walks through the importance of planning your social media strategy – looking before you leap. In the course of the presentation, we highlight the need to know what your business objectives are, exactly who it is you are targeting, what channels you are going using to engage with these audiences, what content you are going to use to get their interest (taking a cold hard look at your content and will anyone be really interested in it), is there customer/prospect activation points built into your content (its business after all, you need someone to take an action at some point). We go through case studies of businesses using certain platforms. Feel free to go through it or download it, and get back with comments. If you want to talk to us directly about any of the points covered, feel free to contact us.

Social Media – Strategy and Execution

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Digital Strategy and Planning Session

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 13:25:03 +0000

Digital Insights recently delivered a Digital Strategy and Planning Session for Dublin City Enterprise Board to a variety of businesses ranging from the travel industry, education sector, creative arts and retail. Embedded here is the slidedeck that we went through on the day. It goes through the key things to bear in mind when creating a digital strategy, it discusses some frameworks to conceptualise your digital strategy, and highlights the importance of content marketing and creating a mixed-ecosystem of owned, paid and earned media. It also goes through some of the tactical means available to marketers and how best to use them along with some case studies. Feel free to download and digest. If you want to discuss any of the points, feel free to contact us.

DCEB-DigitalMktgPlanningSession

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