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A newly released Datran Media survey of executives at Fortune 500 companies, publishing companies, media agencies and ad agencies finds e-mail and search regarded as the digital channels that worked best last year.
Conducted in December in conjunction with the Direct Marketing Association E-mail Experience Council “and other media partners,” the survey asked respondents to identify the digital channels that “performed the strongest for your company in 2009.” E-mail got the most mentions (cited by 39%), followed by search (24%), offline (9%), affiliate marketing (9%), display (7%), direct mail (6%), social media (5%) and mobile (1%).
Another part of the survey inquired into the objectives these executives have for their online efforts. “Reaching a target audience” topped the list (cited by 84%), followed by “generating high-quality leads” (74%). Smaller majorities said they’re using online efforts for “converting leads into sales” (63%), “measuring and understanding our audience” (60%), “retaining existing customers” (57%) and/or “digitally transacting with customers” (54%). Consistent with the interest in reaching a target audience, respondents put “targeting” atop the list of online “marketing tactics” they’ll be using this year as part of their online strategy.
When it comes to measuring consumer response to their digital efforts, what do the respondents’ companies currently look at? “Clicks” got the most mentions (72%), trailed by “conversions” (59%) and “impressions” (58%). Lagging farther behind were “transactions” and “audience” (43% apiece).
Elsewhere in the survey, 67 percent of respondents said they’ll be “leveraging online video this year.” As for social media, opinion was mixed on the question of whether it will “generate quantifiable results in 2010.” Fifty percent of respondents said they think it will, but 12 percent said it won’t and the rest were unsure.
To help hotels and resorts stay on top of mentions, chats or general dialogue that might be happening about their properties, Screen Pilot, a bleeding edge digital marketing firm, have compiled a Top 5 list of free tools that can be used right now to keep tabs on the social media-verse.
-Social Mention (socialmention.com) is a social media search and analysis platform that aggregates user generated content from across the social universe into a single stream of information. Social Mention monitors more than a hundred social media properties.
-WhosTalkin (WhosTalkin.com) is a social media search tool that allows users to search for conversations surrounding the topics cared about most such as property brand name. Search and sorting algorithms combine data taken from over 60 of the internet’s most popular social media gateways.
-Samepoint (samepoint.com) crawlers encompass every conceivable type of social media service. Categorization breaks out results by type of social media.
-Surchur (surchur.com) is the ultimate dashboard to right now. The surchmeter shows how popular a keyword is on different sources: surchur, blogs and twitter etc.
-Trendrr (trendrr.com) allows you to track the popularity and awareness of trends across a variety of inputs, ranging from social networks, to blog buzz and video views downloads, all in real time. Compare trends to one another, monitoring and evaluating across a variety of sources.
No matter what tool you use, interpretation of the data is a different ball game. Screen Pilot’s social media services can help you translate what all these results mean. Not only does Screen Pilot position hospitality brands in the social media space, but we help track the impact and revenues generated as a result of social media and other hotel internet marketing efforts. For results, best-practice advice and incremental revenues visit screenpilot.com
Google just introduced new features to their search results that brings a dynamic stream of real-time content from across the web. Now, immediately after conducting a search, you can see live updates from people on popular sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, as well as headlines from news and blog posts published just seconds before. When they are relevant, Google will show the most recent posts towards the top of the search results page.
Where do the feeds come from? Google announced official partnerships with the following web entities; Facebook, MySpace, FriendFeed, Jaiku and Identi.ca to power their aggregate real-time feeds.
Get a first look at the new search interface and some sample searches.
So the big, very big question is what does this mean? More spam unfortunately. More attempts by affiliate marketers to skew the system in their favor and more automated recycling of posts to always have a presence in real time results. It’s not going to be a bed of roses while the search engines get to grips with reputation management of the contributors that author content on these new partners. We know that Twitter’s user profile management is basic at best. Silly algorithms that weight banal factors as negatives or positives can easily be circumvented and before you know it you’re being stuffed with affiliate cookies and pimped malware for having clicked on what you thought was a legitimate real-time search result from your ‘trusted’, favorite search engine Google.
Moving away from the pessimistic side of what will happen, there will be advantages. More so for mobile search’s integration of real-time results. That’s another post however.
Anyway, real-time is rolling out over the next few days and when you have it, you’ll see it just happening withing your search results.
Charlotte, NC — Screen Pilot, a digital marketing and technology firm, has several simple steps for marketing professionals to realize the benefits of understanding what is occurring in their online marketing world. If you don’t have analysts to decipher your company’s Internet marketing results, there are five easy ways to add clout to your marketing budgets. You might just be surprised at how underutilized your existing web reporting tools are.
1. Uncover Hidden Potential:
Marketing professionals need to customize the way they track their digital marketing campaigns. They should take a look at what kind of measuring tools they currently use. Are the goals that have been set for a web reporting platform meeting the needs of the company? By creating a list of must-haves, it’ll be easier to narrow down what the needs are and how they can be fulfilled and by which products.
2. Add Tracking To Your E-mail Campaigns:
You can add tracking parameters to your e-mail marketing activity that enables marketers to start tracking visitors and their actions once in your web site that are driven by e-mail efforts. Setting up to measure conversions, from shopping carts or other areas of your site that are important to you, will enable you to see which e-mail campaigns have higher returns on investment (ROI) than others. With this tip, you can now test scientifically based on the ROI and not solely on the click-through rates and engagement factors.
3. Are Your PPC Campaigns Set-Up Correctly?
If you have potential customers click on your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads and immediately leave your site, your advertising money spent is wasted. You could be missing opportunities if your web statistics aren’t giving you the whole picture about the visitors you get from paid search channels like Google, Yahoo! and Bing. Reporting from search engines only goes halfway in educating you on how effective your PPC actually is. Set up your reporting to measure key performance indicators from paid channels. It can help you increase ROI and make intelligent decisions about how and where to spend your marketing dollars.
4. Don’t Rely on 3rd Party Reporting:
It is very common that the amount of clicks the advertisers say you have is different than what you receive. Countless times we are requested to create audit trails for costly marketing channels that report higher numbers of clicks from their networks than you actually receive. Using your web statistics platform correctly will tell you exactly what traffic you received from a specific campaign and the value of that traffic.
5. Track Calls from Campaigns:
If you sell product offline then you need to track the call volumes that are generated from each specific digital campaign and types. This will easily tell you how effective a campaign’s response is when people go online but don’t convert. Quickly what channels such as PPC, email, banner ads and other create calls and which don’t. By adding this new dimension it might make you adjust some efforts for best returns.
If your current tracking and measurement tools aren’t producing results, you may need to reconsider the platform.
There are also some interesting new integrated measuring tools, such as those available from CognoVision, which focus on out-of-home; Screen Pilot, which provides integrated measurement of mobile and online advertising effectiveness…; and ongoing efforts from the Advertising Research Foundation to figure out how to bridge the gap between media and measurement.
