Effective Online Marketing - Leveraging Best Practices from Offline Advertising

Adarsh Kulshrestha, CFO, Regalix
As measurability goes, online marketing is hard to beat but advertisers can often get too caught up in the alphabet soup of CPC (cost per click), CPL (cost per lead), CTR (click through rate), etc, sometimes forgetting the basics behind good campaigns. Online marketing offers true convergence of text, relevant banners, videos, interactive games and more, and can build consumer loyalty and awareness like no other marketing medium can. Unfortunately, many online campaigns focus on just bits and pieces of the puzzle. The few online agencies worth their salt invest well in strategy, design, execution, tracking and analytics - for the ROI (return on investment) and to better engage consumers. Let’s forget ROI for a moment and focus on how the best agencies do it:

1. Get educated – get to know your client’s business landscape, product, target consumer, competing or replacement choices, competitive positioning, advertising, pricing etc. – stuff they teach you in B-School.

2. Get strategic – talk to your client about where he is today, where he wants to be in one year, how he plans to get there – have an open discussion with him about his business landscape, gently argue with him if need be – intelligent clients like that.

3. Get honest – is online marketing really a good option for your client? If yes, to what extent and with what channels? Clients want online marketing but can’t justify the investment and mostly end up throwing a few peanuts at the monkey, not enough to get him to perform. Tight budgets restrict creative options and self-fulfillingly cause performance angst within a few months. If your client’s budget is too low, have the courage to tell him so and walk away from the project. Don’t take on projects for short-term revenue goals – the project won’t succeed, your client will be unhappy, your employees will be unhappy – most importantly, your agency will be on the painful path of sustained failure – not worth it!

4. Educate – online marketing is no magic bullet, results take time but the investment pays handsomely over the long haul. A well-integrated and executed online marketing program can effectively build lasting relationships through consumers’ lifecycles. Three month pilot projects rarely give satisfactory results; advertisers need to invest in at least six month pilots to see results, and even then they will only see the tip of the iceberg. Over sustained periods of time, well run programs deliver solid competitive advantages.

5. Get cerebral – if you get the project with the right budget, think of compelling ways to build integrated programs that engage your client’s online audience over the long term, come up with creative strategies and back them up with careful planning, design, execution, tracking and analytics. This step will make or break your project so invest your time well on this one.

6. Failure is a great option – provided you are geared to recognize it and immediately take action. In fact, this is where online marketing scores. Once your analytical engine is in place, have the courage to accept that one (or all) of your bright campaign ideas just isn’t catching fire and quickly move to experiment with changes – text, image, positioning, messaging, usability – don’t just dump it but figure out what’s not working, share your learnings with advertisers, gutsily experiment then track your results – you might just have a superb winner that needed a little nudge in the right direction. If not, have the courage to move to something else. If your advertiser is cool, he will thank you for stemming the money flow down the drain and the learnings will surely be worth the money spent.

7. Get ROI – if you have executed well on the steps above, the ROI will come. When it does, figure out what channels are working, accordingly increase your budget on channels that are working and improve your ROI.

8. Freshen up – if something is working, great! Energize and freshen up your content so folks associate dynamism with your client’s brand, get bolder, experiment more and revel in the results. (Now is also a good time to ask your client for a testimonial.)

9. Build case studies – there is a lot to be learnt from success and failure. Document your findings, iron out your processes, glean interesting trends and understand patterns.

10. Let’s do it again – invest your learnings into improving future campaigns, strengthen your weaknesses. Present your successes and failures, educate the world and leverage online marketing for what it’s worth and no more (don’t push something that’s not going to deliver results for your clients just so you can book some extra revenue).

Online marketing is wildly exciting but is often incorrectly used and under-funded to be an effective marketing channel. Companies that have the courage to leverage this channel well will see tremendous returns on this investment, and now is a great time to start.