Today’s lecture covered chapters 6 and 9 of the textbook, having to do with acquisition marketing (branding and online advertising). We talked about the advertising playbook, customer relationships, and the marketplace matrix.
With the Internet rapidly becoming one of the most (if not the most) used media and an increasing number of media formats (such as chats, blogs, podcasts, social networks, etc.), it makes it that much more important to successfully integrate multiple media in marketing programs and build a company’s brand image. Building a brand image (favorability, strength, uniqueness) begins with brand awareness (brand recognition and recall). It follows this pattern: awareness, familiarity, positive imagery, and completed transaction.
Interactive branding tools include personalization, co-creation of content, purchase-process streamlining, customization, dynamic-pricing, and brand community. Customer acquisition techniques include offline advertising and promotion, events and public relations, affiliate programs, portal deals, viral marketing, search engine marketing, online advertising, and e-mail promotions. The goal is to acquire new customers that can be made increasingly profitable over time (to develop the customer relationship, because retention is less expensive than acquisition).
Various research has shown that in regards to advertising, bigger is usually better. Using animation, rich media, video, audio, etc. improves brand metrics and lifts purchase intent when compared to standard banner ads. Ad serving is defined as the delivery of ads by a server to an end user’s computer on which the ads are then displayed by a browser and/or cached. Ad serving is normally performed either by a web publisher, or by a third-party ad server. Ads can be embedded in the page or served separately.
Ad targeting consists of contextual advertising (ads are served based on page content, such as keywords and the url) and behavioral advertising (the ability, through anonymous data to deliver ads to consumers based on their recent behavior; the web pages they views, keywords they typed into a search engine or products and services they shopped for online, or a combination of all these).
We also talked about The Online-Advertising Playbook. It presents three new models of media based on opt-ins (centered on engagement), consumer empowerment (messages and word of mouth), and services to the consumer. The challenge of change is relevance, empowerment, and authenticity. This becomes about engaging the right people at the right time, not cpm exposures (potential for a lot less waste of advertising dollars) fragmented consumer behavior and understanding that consumers want decisions to be guided by trusted and unbiased information (opportunity for more meaningful engagement). Friends and family don’t have an ulterior motive but advertisers do.