Google made an announcement recently that they will be changing their policy with regards to trademarked keywords bidding. Beginning 4th June 2009, Google will no longer monitor or restrict previously trademarked keywords for ads served to users in South Africa.

Up until now trademark owners could enjoy a monopoly on trademark terms in South Africa by asking Google not to let any other party target its trademarks as keywords. The new bidding policy will impact the costs and strategies of advertising a trademarked brand through Google's AdWords program. 

For some brands this may result in significant increases in costs. What this effectively means, is on previously trademarked brand keyword terms, there will now be an equal opportunity for all advertisers to bid on these terms. Brands, thereby, no longer have exclusivity on trademarked terms on Google.

Acceleration Media has developed an approach to counter these affects. To read more on this approach, download Acceleration Media’s strategy in combating these changes below. 

Acceleration_Media_Google_TradeMark_Policy_Changes_May 2009.pdf (264.52 kb)

Here's an example of a website banner that interacts one to one with the user - http://www.dallassthlm.com/playground/playground.html. This banner, when displayed determines your location via IP address, matches this to your local weather information and recommends personally what type of clothing you should be wearing, jacket or no jacket.

Now this kind of functionality could be very useful to companies within the travel & tourism sector in attracting traffic through engagement. We think that if it’s possible to do this with weather, why can’t we do this with Soccer too. Imagine if you could attract potential Soccer visitors by displaying your flights, hotel or car hire relative to the stadium or city they are booking.

Google is showing personal profile results. These results offer abbreviated information from user-created Google profiles and a link to the full profiles. They’ve added links so it's easy to search for the same name on MySpace, Facebook, Classmates and LinkedIn. Check out Google Profiles and add yours.

From time to time people may search for you or your organization via a search engine. We think it’s a good idea to therefore watch your online profile, employ good search engine optimization (SEO) services and make sure people are able to find you. Once you get this right, here’s a novel new design for your business card…

For the past few years, mobile has been positioned as the next big thing in interactive marketing and advertising. In reality, however, global mobile ad spend is small compared to most other channels, although rapid growth is expected over the next few years.

According to Strategy Analytics, global mobile ad spending was worth US$1.4-billion in 2007, a number that is forecast to climb to $14.4-billion in 2011. While it's fair to say that mobile advertising hasn't yet delivered on some of the loftier promises, it's equally true that mobile has matured into a medium that can play a vital role in nearly any company's marketing mix.

For South African marketers, the mobile channel has the obvious attraction of reach. With cellular penetration in the country estimated to be more than 80%, mobile is an ideal way to reach many of the customers you cannot reach through the fixed-line internet.

Many of the obstacles to mobile marketing are falling away as even entry-level phones become equipped with multimedia functions and internet connectivity, and as prices for mobile data continue to fall. South Africa has some of the world's lowest mobile data tariffs, with local users paying about a tenth of what their counterparts in most Western European countries do to access the mobile internet.

About 62% of phones currently in the market and 90% of all new phones entering the market are internet ready. And the user experience of the mobile internet has improved dramatically, thanks to interface improvements and larger displays on smartphones.

Benefits of mobile marketing

Apart from its reach, mobile marketing in its many forms offers advertisers a wide range of benefits. It's a cost-effective flexible medium that offers marketers a range of tools and tactics to reach their audiences. From opt-in SMS and MMS campaigns, through to mobile internet search, mobile pay-per-click campaigns and mobile ad networks, marketers can choose an appropriate mechanism for every campaign and audience.

Like online advertising, mobile advertising delivers highly measurable results, allowing marketers to constantly optimise their campaigns and achieve the maximum return on investment. It also allows advertisers to target consumers with messages tailored to their needs and interests, with potential in future even to deliver location-based messaging.

The mobile phone is a personal device, which means that marketers also need to take great care to ensure that their messages are not experienced as intrusive by the user. Mobile campaigns must be opt-in and they must deliver a good experience to the user - rich media ads that takes too long to load on a mobile phone, for example, are definitely out.

Integrated strategy

Of course, the potential of mobile advertising doesn't mean that companies should neglect the other online and offline channels they have at their disposal.

The mobile channel isn't likely to replace any other online or offline medium, but will complement them instead. It makes sense to treat mobile as part of the overall digital strategy. The way that it can be targeted and measured, and the technology that drives it means that it has much in common with online media.

In conclusion

Marketers should start off by defining clear campaign objectives and matching them to the multiple channels they will use to reach customers and prospects. It's all about reaching customers, wherever they are, with a consistent message that meets their needs as well as your business objectives, whether these are branding, customer conversion or creating customer loyalty.

Online marketing can be daunting for marketers and companies that haven't had much exposure to it in the past. It's a complex, fast-moving field, and it's easy to neglect some of the finer details when you're planning your strategy.

What follows is a list of questions that will help guide your online marketing campaign strategy. This is by no means a rigid and thorough checklist, but simply a few guidelines that may help you crystallise your online goals as well as the ways that they can be achieved.

You may find it useful to discuss these questions and their answers with your online media planning and buying agency; indeed, your agency may ask you many of these questions without being prompted.

Goals and benchmarks

• What are your aims for the campaign - branding or customer conversion? How do the aims of your campaign align with the broader marketing and business strategy in your organisation?

• What do you want customers to do once they've seen your ad? To click through to your website and read some information? To sign up for a newsletter, fill in an application or make a purchase? Or do you simply want customers to remember the name of your company the next time they're at the shopping mall? How are these outcomes aligned with the goals of your campaign?

• What benchmarks will help you to understand how successful you were in achieving these aims? Clickthroughs, cost, leads, purchases, customer registration, page views, or brand recognition? Do you have historical data to benchmark against?

• What systems and processes do you have in place for tracking and reporting online and offline customer activity such as sales and enquiries? Can you link online campaigns to offline activities such as sales through your call centres and branches?

Previous online experience

• Has your company conducted much online marketing in the past? If not, why not? What are your expectations from online marketing?

• How well developed is your company's web presence? Are you conducting transactions and interacting with your customers online, or do you only have a static informational website?

• If you have conducted online marketing and advertising, what worked before? What didn't deliver on your expectations and where do you believe it went wrong?

Human resources and vendors

• What do you need your external online media agency to do for you? What do you want to do in-house and what would be better left in the hands of a specialist service provider?

• If you are already in a partnership with an external media agency, which elements of the relationship are working for you and which aren't? What do you believe the role of your agency to be and what would you like the agency to do over and above the basics of planning and buying?

• How do you gauge the quality of your agency and the service it is delivering?

• What training and support will your internal staff need to help you achieve your online marketing goals?

Your audience

• Who is your target audience? Be as specific as possible about the demographics of your audience and link each product or service offering you wish to market online to a target market.

• Draw up profiles of your best customers, your worst customers and your average customer to understand what each of them has in common.

• What buying patterns do you see in your customer base? Is there a time of the week, month or year that your customers are particularly active?

The creative

• What are the benefits of your products to the target audience? What makes your products different from those your competitors offer? Craft a concise sentence or paragraph for each product to help design compelling creative.

• What sort of messaging and creative has worked for you in the past? If you haven't advertised online much to date, what messaging is effective in offline media?

The media

• What media do you use for offline advertising? Where are you seeing your best results? How do you see your online efforts complementing your offline marketing?

• Which online media do you believe to be appropriate for your brand, and why? Which media properties do you not want your brand to be associated with and why?

Closing words

Before you can arrive at the correct answers for your online marketing strategy, you need to be asking the right questions. We find it helpful to revisit these questions regularly - throughout the duration of a campaign or whenever a new campaign is launched - because the market is so fluid that the answers shouldn't be taken for granted.

Banner advertising can be a powerful tool in the right hands. However, many South African marketers are failing to follow best practices in banner advertising, with the result that their online advertising campaigns aren't working as well as they should be.

What follows is a few tips about how to get the best possible performance from your banner advertising campaigns.

A few simple principles lie at the heart of these tips:

• Engage and interact with your audience;

• Keep your message simple;

• Start off with clear objectives for your ad; and

• Be respectful of your audience's time.

1. Set up a clear upfront objective

    

This point may seem obvious, but a successful banner campaign starts off with a clear objective that can be benchmarked against metrics that will tell you whether your banner was successful or not.

You need to decide upfront what your goal is (customer conversions, email database registrations, and so on), ensure that you have metrics to gauge success, and create an appropriate message for the goal.

2. Get straight to the point

Brevity is a virtue in banner advertising. Don't make people go through several animated slides to get to your key message. Don't cram your banner ad full of dense text. A simple pay-off line will almost always work better.

A related point to keep in mind is that banner ads with more than one message and one call to action seldom work - keep focused on one point in each banner ad.

Simplicity is also an asset in visual design - it's best to limit the number of colours, fonts, and graphics that you use in your banner so that your key call to action will stand out in the viewer's mind.

3. Tailor your message to your audience

You can't get away with placing the same generic banner ad across different online environments. If your ad will appear on an Afrikaans site, it will be more successful if you speak to the viewer in his or her home language rather than re-using your English creative.

A message that might be appropriate for an entertainment site may fall flat on a business-to-business portal. Think about the audience you'll find in a particular environment and tailor your message to it.

4. Create a clear call to action

Tell the people seeing your ad exactly what you'd like them to do - whether you want them to register for a newsletter, get in touch with a sales rep, download a white paper, or visit your website to shop or view information.

Using power words that communicate a benefit - 'free,' 'affordable,' 'incredible,' and so on - will help to crystallise your call to action.

Make sure that your call to action appears clearly on every slide in your banner. Remember people read from left to right and top to bottom, so placing your call to action on the left and the top will ensure that it is seen. Large fonts and wise use of colour can also be used to highlight the call to action.

5. Variety is the spice of life

Don't settle for only one banner - create a series of ads with different sizes, text, graphical treatments and concepts. If your ads all look the same, a user will soon ignore them.

What's more, if you have only one look and message for your banner ads, chances are that they will all perform at the same level.

If one fails, then all will fail. Creating a range of banner ads will mitigate that risk.

6. Pay attention to your landing page

If your banner ad doesn't take the user straight to the offer outlined in your call to action, you may lose that viewer, especially if they need to search for the relevant content or click through a series of pages.

The landing page must deliver on the promise you made in your call to action.

7. Don't get carried away with large files

In South Africa, many of the people you are targeting will be on relatively slow internet connections. That means it's best to control your file sizes so that your ads download quickly. You won't endear yourself to the people viewing your banner if they need to wait for it to download before they can see the web content they're after.

Be respectful of dial-up users and use bandwidth-targeting to ensure that any rich media ads you place are served only to users with broadband connections.

8. Stand out from the crowd

Think of your banner ad as an online billboard. It should stand out against the clutter and communicate a clear message that the user would be pick up, even if he or she was speeding past it on a highway.

Understanding whether your goal is to build your company's brand, target specific audiences with a call to action, or both will help you to choose which websites are right for your ads as well as the form your creative, messaging and placement should take.

Taking aim at niche markets

The ability to target audiences according to a number of specific criteria - including demographics, psychographics, geographical location, context and behaviour - has long been regarded as one of the most powerful benefits that online media offer over traditional media.

Targeted advertising is usually used to drive direct response from the audience, whether the aim is to get a user to sign up for an online newsletter, buy something online or fill out an online application form.

The sites you advertise with will often have a wealth of information on tap about their visitors, including their geographical location, and declared interests, gender, age, etc. Such information can be inferred from users' IP addresses or gathered through registrations, and then used to target users with ads that are relevant to them.

Geo-targeting, for example, allows you to focus your ads on users from a certain country, region or city. Behavioural targeting uses information such as the sites that users recently visited, the ads they clicked on, and the searches they performed to infer which users might be interested in an ad.

Targeting your ads eliminates much of the wastage associated with advertising since you're paying only to reach people who may find relevance in your message. This means you can increase your clickthroughs and conversion rates by reaching users who are more likely to be interested in your product and service, while getting a lower cost per click than you might otherwise.

Targeted advertising also makes the trackability and measurability of online advertising come to life. You can measure your success against your objectives easily and adjust your campaigns rapidly.

There are also pitfalls in targeted ads for the unwary. If the targeting is too specific one risks excluding potential customers from the campaign. Also, targeted ads are often more expensive (on a cost per impression basis) than untargeted ads. In many cases, the premium will be justified, but it might not always be.

The mass market isn't dead

The undeniable power of targeted advertising has led some commentators to question whether brand advertising is viable in the online environment.

They question whether the mass-market model that applied in the traditional media world can be viable in the fragmented online space.

However, the mass market isn't dead. Many companies have found the web to be a powerful branding channel, with the large portals serving as the equivalent to prime-time national television. A good online branding campaign can deliver excellent results at an affordable price.

Final thoughts

Whatever your goal is, you need to choose appropriate vehicles for your ads.

Niche sites catering to the demographics and psychographics of the audience you are aiming for are ideal for targeted ads, while the larger portals are better suited to branding ads.

Creative and messaging also need to be taken into account. A branding ad will often use rich media and other bold techniques to grab the viewer's attention while a targeted ad needs a strong call to action that is relevant to the viewer.

The boundaries between targeted ads and branding ads aren't always clear-cut. For example, we've often found niche sites to be good testing grounds for new ads and campaigns before they're rolled out to mass-market audiences on the larger portals. And contextual ads and behavioural targeting can often be as powerful tools for brand-building as they are for driving a direct response from viewers.

The number of choices that marketers have about where and how to spend their online marketing budgets has grown at a dizzying rate over the past decade.

From rich media and video ads to search engine marketing and advertising on social networking sites, marketers can today choose from a host of high-value environments and technologies that match their target markets and the needs of their campaigns.

Yet, even in the face of all of these glamorous choices, the humble display or banner ad remains the king of the online marketing world and looks set to retain an important position for years to come. Rumours about the demise of the banner ad are clearly greatly exaggerated.

Display ads currently account for about one-fifth of online ad spending, and should hold at least this much of the market until 2011, according to eMarketer. The market researcher says that nearly US$8.2-billion will be spent on display ads in the US in 2011, which is twice as much as was spent in 2007.

The major players in the online media space are certainly still treating banner advertising as an important and viable market. Most market talk about Microsoft's attempt to buy Yahoo! for more than US$40-billion centres on search marketing. But Yahoo! is also an attractive asset because of the high rates that it can charge for display ads placed on its portal. Despite the fact that display ads aren't glamorous, they're still bringing the money in for large online media portals.

Banners under fire

In recent years, banner advertising has come under fire for poor response rates from viewers who face a clutter of ads on most mainstream sites and portals. But the good news is that media companies have had to slice the cost of banner advertising to make it more attractive to advertisers.

Against this backdrop, marketers should still be looking at ways that they can effectively use banner ads as a part of their online advertising mix. Provided one has a sound campaign strategy, banner ads can deliver a great return at an affordable cost.

This is especially true in bandwidth-starved South Africa, where many users are on slower dial-up or wireless connections and do not always appreciate being bombarded by heavy rich media ads. Yet clutter on many websites and user indifference to banner ads mean one has to work harder to get the audience's attention.

So how does one get the best results from banner ads?

It's increasingly important to get design and messaging right to entice users to click your banner. Using the right colours and imagery for the environment where the ad will be placed, crafting a strong call to action, and creating clear messaging are all important parts of a good banner campaign.

Using geo-targeting and behavioural targeting can help a marketer to reach the right audience with its message rather than blanketing a mass-market at great expense. As long as the creative and messaging are well-crafted, display ads can still work well for both brand-building and direct response campaigns.

Closing words

In a fast-moving field such as online marketing, marketers find themselves under constant pressure to move ahead with the next big thing. As much potential as rich media and other recent innovations in the online advertising space offer, they don't make tried-and-tested techniques such as banner ads obsolete overnight.

It's important for advertisers to constantly explore the potential of new technologies, but this doesn't mean that they should stop using the tools that have delivered consistently good results for them in the years that have past.