Level of investment in digital assets

 Level of investment in digital assets

The digital assets are the creative that support a campaign such as that they include:

● display ad or affiliate marketing creative such as banners and skyscrapers;

● microsites;

● email templates;

● video, audio and other interactive media such as Flash animations, games or screensavers which form a microsite.

As with traditional media, there is a tension between spend on the advertising creative and the media space purchased to run the executions. There is a danger that if spend on media is too high, then the quality of the execution and the volume of digital assets produced will be too low.

Integration into overall media schedule or plan

In common with other communications media, digital media are most effective when they are deployed as part of an integrated marketing communications approach. 

Describe integrated marketing communications as: 

The concept under which a company carefully integrates and coordinates its many communications channels to deliver a clear, consistent message about the organisation and its products.

The characteristics of integrated marketing communications have been summarised by Pickton and Broderick s the 4Cs of: 

1.Coherence – different communications are logically connected.

2.Consistency – multiple messages support and reinforce, and are not contradictory. 

3.Continuity – communications are connected and consistent through time.

5.Complementary – synergistic, or the sum of the parts is greater than the whole! The 4Cs also act as guidelines for how communications should be integrated. 

Further guidelines on integrated marketing communications from Pickton and Broderick that can be usefully applied to digital marketing are the following. 

● Integrated communications planning is based on clearly identified marketing communications objectives (see later section). 

● Digital marketing should involve management of all forms of contact , which includes management of both outbound communications, such as banner advertising or direct email, and inbound communications such as email enquiries. 

● Internet marketing should utilise a range of promotional tools . These are the digital media channels. 

● A range of media should be used to communicate consistent messages about opportunities for customers to interact with a brand online. Marketing managers need to consider the most effective mix of online and offline media channels to encourage interactions and drive traffic to their online presence. 

● The communications plan should involve careful selection of the most effective promotional and media mix.

Additionally, we can say that integrated marketing communications should be used to support customers through the entire buying process, across different media.

Planning integrated marketing communications 

The Account Planning Group ( www.apg.org.uk ), in its definition of media planning, high lights the importance of the role of media planning when they say that the planner:

 Needs to understand the customer and the brand to unearth a key insight for the communication/solution Relevance.

As media channels have mushroomed and communication channels have multiplied, it has become increasingly important for communication to cut through the cynicism and connect with its audience Distinctiveness. The planner can provide the edge needed to ensure the solution reaches out through the clutter to its intended audience Targeted reach.

Attributing influence on sales to digital media channel

Attributing influence on sales to digital media channel

It is seldom the case that a customer will go straight to a site and purchase, or that they will perform a single search and then purchase. Instead, they will commonly perform multiple searches and will be referred to the ultimate purchase site by different types. This consumer behaviour is indicated by This shows that someone looking to purchase a car may be referred to a site several times via different digital communications channels.

A common approach to attributing the influence of different online media a customer consumes before purchase has been the last-click method of digital media channel attribution introduced well by Lee. Gives an example of using a social media marketing tool to assess effectiveness on a last click basis.

 It shows that when a business shares content across different social networks they can review how many clicks and conversion to leads are generated. In this example, Facebook is most effective by volume.

However, Lee explains that this can give a misleading picture of which marketing channels are effective

In an analysis of visitors to an airline site for non-brand terms and PPC for brand terms are more significant when looking at the contribution of all sources. Referring to you can see this has the benefit that we don’t credit multiple affiliates with sale for affiliate marketing only Affiliate 2 is credited with the sale, a process known as digital media deduplication. But it has the disadvantage that it simplifies the reality of previous influence or digital media ‘assists’ and previous referrals influenced by other customer touchpoints on other sites are ignored, such as the natural search or display ad.

So, for the most accurate interpretation of the contribution of different media, the online marketer needs to use tagging and analysis tools to try to build the best picture of which channels are influencing sales and then weight the media accordingly. For example, a more sophisticated approach is to weight the responsibility for sale across several different referrers according to a model so just considering the affiliates, Affiliate 1 might be credited with 30 per cent of the sales value and Affiliate 2 with 70 per cent, for example.

This approach is useful since it indicates the value of display advertising a common phenomenon is the halo effect where display ads indirectly influence sales by creating awareness and stimulating sale at a later point in time.These are sometimes known as ‘viewthrough’ or post-impression effects.

These allocation approaches won’t be possible if agencies are using different tracking tools and reporting separately on different media channels for example, the ad agency reports on display advertising, the search agency on pay-per-click, the affiliate manager on affiliate sales.

Instead it is important to use a unified tracking system which typically uses common tags across all media channels. Common unified tracking solutions that consider all media are available from the likes of Atlas, Doubleclick Dart and some of the larger media agencies.

Further sophistication of tracking will be worthwhile for companies investing millions in digital media in order to understand the customer journey and the contribution of media. 

A useful analysis to perform is in the formThis anonymised example shows the importance of display ads, for example, and how different channels support each other.

It can then be worthwhile understanding the role of individual channels better, and in particular paid search. Marketers need to understand how consumers use different types of terms. The repeated use of different types of search terms for a single customer (other digital channels such as affiliates are ignored here). 

The two columns on the right show how it is unrealistic to attribute the sale to the last search since the influence of the assists isn’t shown.

Achieving and measuring repeat visits is worthwhile since, according to on average, purchase intent sees a double digit increase after someone has been to a site more than once. For some promotional techniques, tagging of links on third-party sites will not be practical.

These will be grouped together as unattributed referrers. For word-of-mouth referrals, we have to estimate the amount of spend for these customers through traditional market research techniques such as questionnaires or asking at point of sale.

The use of tagging enables much better insights on the effectiveness of promotional techniques than is possible in traditional media, but due to its complexity it requires a large investment in staff time and tracking software to achieve it. It is also very dependent on cookie deletion rates. To see how a budget can be created for a digital campaign.

Selecting the right mix of digital media communications tools

 Selecting the right mix of digital media communications tools

When selecting the mix of digital media for a campaign or longer-term investments, marketers will determine the most appropriate mix based on their knowledge built up through experience of previous campaigns and taking input from their advisers such as experienced colleagues or agency partners.Mecri and Hafa 2022 have suggested that many online marketing failures have resulted from poor control of media spending. 

The communications mix should be optimised to minimise the cost of acquisition. If an online intermediary has a cost acquisition of £100 per customer while it is gaining an average commission on each sale of £5 then. Cleary , the company will not be profitable unless it can achieve a large number of repeat orders from the customer. Suggested that e-commerce sites should focus on narrow segments that have demonstrated their attraction to a business model. 

They believe that promotion techniques such as affiliate deals with narrowly targeted sites and email campaigns targeted at segments grouped by purchase histories and demographic traits are 10–15 times. more likely than banner ads on generic portals to attract prospects who click through to purchase.

Alternatively, pay-per-click ads on Google may have a higher success rate

 When this experience isn’t there, which is often the case with new digital media opportunities, it is important to do a more structured evaluation including factors such as the ability of each medium to influence perceptions, drive a response, the cost of response and the quality of response are respondents more likely to convert to the ultimate action such as sale? What is their likely lifetime value?

For example, some digital media channels such as affiliates are more likely to attract customers with a lower lifetime value who are more likely to switch suppliers. Media planning services and buying agency Zed Media has produced a useful summary of how a media mix might typically vary according to budget. 

The  blog shows that for a direct response campaign with limited budget, investment in controllable, targeted media which typically have a lower cost-per-acquisition such as affiliates and paid search should be the main focus. If more budget is available, it may not be possible to buy further keywords or there may be benefits from generating awareness of the offering through more display advertising.

• Cost effective and volume channels priority

• PPC search 60%

• Affiliates 30%

• Display 10%

• Test 2–4 weeks

• Affiliates maxed out, more networks

• PPC search 40%

• Affiliates 20%

• Display 40%

• 12 months

• Display more viable networks

• PPC search 50%

• Affiliates 30%

• Display 20%

• Up to 3 months

• More money available for display

• PPC search 50%

• Affiliates 25%

• Display 25%

• 6–8 months £100k £250k £500k

With a brand campaign where the focus is on generating awareness, the recommendations of Zed Media are reversed where they recommend that, even at lower budgets, more invest-ment should be made in display advertising.

Deciding on the optimal expenditure on different communication techniques will be an iterative approach since past results should be analysed and adjusted accordingly.

 Marketers can analyse the proportion of the promotional budget that is spent on different channels and then compare this with the contribution from purchasing customers who originated using the original channel. 

This type of analysis, reported by Hoffman and Novak (2000) and requires two different types of marketing research.

First, tagging of customers can be used. Here, we monitor, using specifically coded URLs or cookies, the numbers of customers who are referred to a website through different online techniques such as search ads, affiliate or banner ads, and then track the money they spend on purchases.

 Digital marketing  gives more details of how the Google Analytics system is used.

Budgeting and selecting the digital media

Budgeting and selecting the digital media

Traditional approaches such as those  can be used to set overall communications budgets. For example: 

● Affordable method – the communications budget is set after subtracting fixed and variable costs from anticipated revenues. 

● Percentage-of-sales methods – the communications budget is set as a percentage of forecast sales revenues. 

● Competitive parity methods – expenditure is based on estimates of competitor expenditure. 

For example, e-marketing spend is typically 10–15 per cent of the marketing budget. 

● Objective and task method – this is a logical approach where budget is built up from all the tasks required to achieve the objectives in the communications plan. This is a bottom-up approach that is often based on a model of the effectiveness of different digital media channels based on the measures of campaign effectiveness described in the objective setting section at the start of this blogger.

Complete to understand how these models are created

Digital marketing campaign plans require three important decisions to be made about investment for the online promotion or the online communications mix. These are: 

1 Level of investment in digital media as opposed to traditional media. 

2 Mix of investment in digital media channels or e-communications tools. 

3 Level of investment in digital assets. 

1 Level of investment in digital media 

Techniques in comparison to offline promotion a balance must be struck between online and offline communications techniques based on the strengths and weaknesses of the different media options. A useful framework for considering the media characteristics which influence decisions on which to invest in has been developed by Mecri and Eric (2022).

Offline media are often superior in generating attention, stimulating attention and gaining credibility. Online media tend to be better at engagement due to personalisation, interaction and support of word-of-mouth. The offer can also often be fulfilled online for products that can be bought online. However, there are limits to the number of people that can be reached through online media (a limit to number searching on particular terms) and the cost is not necessarily always lower in competitive markets.

Focus on content marketing

We introduced the growing role of content marketing within digital marketing communications. 

We believe that content marketing should be at the heart of digital marketing for all types of brands, because content fuels all the main digital marketing channels we use to communicate with our audiences.
Search, social media, conversion rate optimisation and email marketing all require content which helps a brand increase its visibility, engage its audience and drives leads and sales. Within a campaign, content is vital as the method of engaging the audience and generating demand, whether this is educational content as part of a business-to-business campaign or video content as part of a consumer campaign.

The only case where the role of content is diminished is where the main campaign offer is a price cut, discount or sale.

Given the importance of content marketing, many businesses now look to develop a content marketing strategy as part of their digital marketing tactics. As with all strategies, this will involve review of the current approach, setting specific objectives and developing strategies to create and share content.

To review how content can best support digital marketing, Dave Chaffey developed the Content Marketing Matrix with Dan Bosomworth of Smart Insights.

The activity explains how this can be used to identify the right content types. outlines typical options that companies have during a campaign, quarterly or annually.

Which do you think would be the best option for an established company as compared to a dot-com ‘pureplay’ company? It seems that in both cases, offline promotion investment often exceeds that for online promotion investment. However, some pure plays do invest the majority of their budget in paid search and affiliate marketing, although they are likely to find there are limits to growth that this will impose. There are also increases to buying digital media, as suggested which need to be considered. 

For existing companies, traditional media such as print are used to advertise the sites, while print and TV will also be widely used by dot-com companies to drive traffic to their sites.

Econometric modelling

Econometrics or econometric modelling is an established approach to understanding the contribution of different media in influencing consumers and ultimately generating sales and profit.

It can also be used in a predictive way to plan for future campaigns. It is increasingly used in integrated campaigns to assess the appropriate media for further explanation. One of its main benefits is its ability to separate the effects of a range of influences such as offline or online media usage or other variables such as price or promotions used and to quantify these individual effects.

A simple example might be for the sales of a drinks brand:

Sales = 100 + 2.5 × own TVRs (television ratings)– 1.4 × own price + 1.6 × competitor price + 1.0 × distribution – 0.8 × temperature– 1.2 × competitor TVRs

These relationships are typically identified using multiple linear regression models where a single dependent variable (typically sales) is a function of one or more explanatory or independent variables such as price, temperature, level of promotion.

Econometric models are developed from historic time-series data which record fluctuations dependent on different variables including seasonal variables, but most importantly, variations in media spend levels and the mix of media. In econometrics, sales fluctuations are expressed in terms of the factors causing them.