Integrate The Online Marketing Experience

palauSearch will remain the core structure, feeding data to all other media. It is the highest-converting medium, but only 2% of the conversions occur from engines. Optimizing and integrating "the experience" will become a focus for online marketing in 2011.

Joshua Palau, vice president of marketing at Comcast, finds it ironic that 86% of consumers skip through commercials, but many of today's television shows talk about advertising. Since very few consumers convert online, how do marketers market to the 98% of consumers who won't click on an online ad? Maybe it's not the click that needs optimization, but rather the metrics behind the media.

"We don't count a conversion until the truck shows up at the house," Palau said. He estimates Comcast loses conversions because it doesn't have the ability to serve customers on mobile. For those companies in a similar situation, he suggests enabling a mobile click-to-call strategy, or something similar, allowing marketers to optimize conversions.

Marketers should not allow an inability to measure everything to stop them from capitalizing on the experience. How do they connect with consumers and gain an integrated view of the market? Olivier Lemaignen, director of head of consumer marketing, Invisalign, says it's easy if the company has an integrated marketing strategy backed by data.

For Invisalign, which manufactures medical devices, it wasn't that easy. Medical products fall under the HIPAA privacy rules, so doctors don't typically tell Invisalign who clicks on the ads. This makes it more important for the company to remain focused on marketing media and not "dabble" in all "because it's a new shiny toy."

It has become incredibly important for marketers to pick a focus by putting themselves in the customer's shoes. For example, through internal studies, Invisalign discovered that adult woman don't tend to put on rich colors of lipstick if they're not comfortable with their teeth. Because the finding was based on a customer insight, the ad did very well. Customers pick what really matters.

Lemaignen suggests marketers should focus on the most important metrics. Look at the big picture -- and look for correlations not previously seen without the metrics.

It's no longer good enough to be a stand-alone agency just focused on search. Search is the biggest benefactor of all other channels, says Rob Griffin, executive vice president and global director of product development at Havas Digital. Integration will allow search and the entire media mix to perform better, he said.

1 comment about "Integrate The Online Marketing Experience".
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  1. John Grono from GAP Research, May 9, 2011 at 9:23 a.m.

    86% of people skip through commercials. Where is the empirical evidence for that claim.

    For example, if you look at the 2009 Video Consumer Mapping study (a 7am-10pm ethnographic study of real-time viewing habits) conducted by the Council for Research Excellence it had among its findings:

    * the average TV viewer is exposed to and average of 61 minutes of live-viewing commercials/promos every day

    * viewers 'left the room' at about the same rate in the four minutes before (19% left) and after (21%) the commercial pod as they did during that commercial pod (20%)

    * channel switching showed a similar pattern - 11% before, 13% after and 14% during

    While it may be true that 86% of people have skipped through commercials at some stage within their lifetime usage of television (and I reckon that figure would be 100% anyway), or maybe in the last year, last week, or even the past day, the clear implication of the article is that 86% is the average figure which flies in the face of both CRE's emporical study and common sense.

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