Online Advertising Campaign Management

1. Internet Advertising Campaign Objectives

How clearly you define your campaign objectives and goals often determine the success of the entire campaign. An advertising campaign is often born out of the need to address an overarching problem or goal. Advertising will have communication goals which will have to align and contribute to the commercial interests of the marketer.

Since, advertising is a as much a creative process as it is managerial, experts from these domains have to collaborate during the conceptualization and incubation stage. Also, if it is a part of a bigger marketing policy or campaign and if different marketing channels and types of media are utilized, domain experts will need to brainstorm together to contribute meaningfully to the end goal. Goal from individual campaigns, media or channels will have to be integrated carefully into the larger goal and each will have to lend support and strength to the other forms of communication and marketing.

In order to be successful with your advertising campaigns, you will have to decide beforehand on the buyer personas, the demographic and psychographic markets you want to serve, the influencer programs you want to run or the digital personas you want to target, the advocacy groups you want to associate your campaign with, the timeframe you want to set for the campaign, the metrics you would use for measuring the success of the campaign, the resources and staff you would utilize for the program and of course set a realistic budget.

You need to also lay down a clear blue print that would indicate the research sources you would use, who could help you with that, how to associate the external marketing agencies (if at all), whether to involve them fully or partially, other professionals you would need and who or which teams would be in charge of which tasks. Everything needs to be documented properly and put in the archive so that the creative and planning process can be consulted when the need for another campaign comes up.

One of the best ways to go about the task is to lay down a ‘SMART objective’.

Specific- Are your campaign objectives specific and clearly defined?
Measurable- Are your campaign objectives measurable? While traditional advertising requires one set of metrics, digital marketing requires quite another. The planning stage should define which metrics are going to be used to note/ observe which specific parameters or aspects of the campaign.
Achievable- There is no point in setting objectives that lies beyond your reach for whatsoever reason. Also decide if each of the objectives can be achieved or only a few can be achieved under your plan. Either tweak it to achieve as many objectives as possible or change your objectives.
Realistic- Are your objectives achievable, given the constraints you have? Can you manage to pull off every one of your objectives with the resources and skills at your disposal?
Time bound- Your campaign objectives need to be achieved within a certain period, failing which your campaign would be considered to be unsuccessful.

With years of experience under our belt, we at Globibo Media understand the immense importance of setting the objectives and campaign parameters in place properly. We can handle the planning and execution part of your campaign and will get our actions endorsed at every step by you and your team of executives.

2. Internet Advertising Customer Segmentation

There is no doubt that customer acquisition is important at the start of a campaign. But, in order to induce customers and to retain them, you will have to provide the best options and offers to the right persons. Personalizing your offers will increase the chance of conversion. The same strategy, message and products won’t work for every market or individual.

Hence, you need to understand and implement winning customer segmentation strategies to retain and keep all your contacts in your CRM engaged, interested and emotionally and monetarily invested in your products, services and company activities. Customer segmentation is done on the basis of predefined parameters and based on data collected painstakingly through market research and surveys.

You not only have to reach the right customers but send across the right message at the right time, especially in a dynamic and highly competitive market where margins of error are small. Opportunities would come and go, new players would try to replace you with even more enticing offers and schemes and you need to be on your guard always.

Reaching out to everybody at the same time and with the same offers won’t bode well for anyone. Hence, segmenting the market into small, homogenous groups is essential.

One of the ways to segment a market is through demographic segmentation. These are often tangible or intangible characteristics that help create a clear persona or identity for a group of individuals that you want to target with the same message, product or service that you are currently offering. Some of the common parameters under this kind of segmentation are as follows:

Age: Age of the target market or group is a common characteristic that is used to break down the market into small groups. Often a product is created for a small age group i.e. it is assumed (market research is used to support it) people within the bracket x-y will find the product appealing and useful. It doesn’t make sense to target a hearing aid machine to people who are less than 45-50 years old, in general.
Gender: Gender is again an important determiner. Certain products are gender-specific and it doesn’t make sense to target everyone with the message or the service (product).
Affluence: Demographic segmentation could also be done on the basis of affluence or socio-economic classification. Certain luxury products which involve discretionary spending are usually targeted at the more affluent i.e. the upper middle class and the rich. Some products which represent certain aspirations may be targeted to the lower income groups or young professionals who want to move to the higher income group or want to emulate their lifestyle to a certain extent. It constitutes one of the most important segments.
Educational: Education acts as a barrier for some products as well as target groups. An e-book reader can’t be promoted within a group which perceptibly doesn’t have reading habits or high literacy rates where even guided reading won’t be appreciated.
Geographic segmentation: Especially useful for SMEs, segmentation based on geographic areas is a major segmentation parameter. Geography can’t always be separated from the local cultures, beliefs and even ethnic identity. Hence, marketers often combine these to create messages and target groups which fulfill a combination of criteria.
“Browser” vs “searcher”: One interesting way of segmenting the customers is to understand the intention or motive of a particular query. Is the searcher asking for a specific product or service because they are genuinely interested and want to convert immediately or is it a casual query where the chances of conversion are less? Is he simply looking for information because he wants to compare between different brands and then buy at a later date or is he interested in making the purchase right now? Browsers are not always important from the point of view of advertisers since the conversion rates are low or the sales cycle is too long while searchers graduate through each of the levels inside a sales funnel quickly and also take favorable actions, which is the ultimate aim of advertising.

Traditional Internet Marketing Segmentation

Psychographic segmentation and behavioral segmentation of markets are also important although they are less tangible than demographic segmentation. These involve lifestyle, preferred time of purchase and other purchase patterns, loyalties, awareness about a product or in general, personality, etc. For some products, especially luxury goods and lifestyle products, demographic segmentation is insufficient and requires other forms of segmentation also.

Also individual segmentations are often meaningless. A marketer will need to combine different parameters to create small but highly targeted groups that match the ideal buyer persona definitions perfectly.

At Globibo Media, we try to understand the aims and objectives of your business, with your help we try to segment the markets you serve or aim to penetrate after carrying out thorough research or using credible analytics and reports. Our aim is to provide you target groups which are amenable and willing to engage and convert.

3. Internet Advertising Target Platforms Vs Demographics

As a marketing executive or honcho in a reputable firm, you may often have to stare at the perplexing question of whether to target a market based on demographic parameters or to target those present on a certain platforms like a social media website or to combine both and create a comprehensive and often overlapping list of prospects.

Target platforms could be websites like Google Plus, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, Instagram and similar platforms. Your target market may be present on Weibo in China or Mixi in Japan. Instead of just looking at the age, gender, affluence, you are looking at specific platforms and then if needed, you can break down the markets farther.

If you are a marketer who promotes designer outfits, Pinterest or Instagram may be the most suitable for you. You can now look for women in the age group of 28 to 35 working in San Jose or Milpitas and within the income group of >$90,000 and <= $1,50,000. A festive chocolate hamper may be targeted towards all Facebook users in a certain region because people from every age group love to share and exchange gifts during a festive season.

Due to different tastes and media fragmentation, careful media targeting has become imperative and require careful planning and gathering vital data and statistics that allows narrow segmentation, be it depending on demographics or targeted platforms.

We understand the need to use resources efficiently. Hence, at Globibo Media, we only provide suggestions that help you to lower your total cost of ownership of a plan while also making you reach your target groups effectively. We will help you to create and serve market segments that convert and generate steady revenue.

4. Internet Advertising Campaign Budgeting

Advertising budget will be a subset of your marketing budget. Appropriating a budget won’t be possible without a basis or a reference point. Hence, a few scientific methods are adopted by companies to decide on the advertising budget for a particular quarter or year. Common methods used are as follows:

Fixed guideline method

Percentage of sales: According to this method, the advertising budget is decided as a percentage of total sales. The sales volume could be last year’s or the estimated value for this year.
Unit of sales: Similar to the percentage of sales approach, here the budget is decided by allocating a certain amount per unit of sales. The sales figure could be last year’s or the one that is expected this year. In order to arrive at the total budget, one needs to multiply the per unit budget allocation with the number of units projected to be sold.
Competitors’ parity approach: In this method, you can decide to spend a percentage of your nearest competitor’s ad budget or what the market leader expends on advertising.

Subjective method

Go-for-broke method: In this method, a marketer tries to spend whatever he can save on advertising. It is arbitrary and sometimes you can get carried away. As the power of advertising is over-rated, other important expenditures may be ignored in favor of appropriating a big advertising budget.
Affordable method: It is the exact opposite of the above mentioned method and although this doesn’t allow wastefulness, you can nonetheless spend too less and ignore market realities. You may stop promotions or campaigns when they are required and a sustained effort may be missing.

Objective and Task method

This method involves the following steps:

The marketer has to derive the advertising objective statement in terms of achievable and realistic parameters.
The creative strategy that would help you to achieve the creative objectives is decided
Finally, the media objective is decided and specific media channels and vehicles are decided to fulfill the specific objectives.

Also called the zero-base-budgeting method, it is considered to be the most pragmatic and by allocating money to each media activity, the budget slowly appears from a zero base.

When deciding on digital campaigns, you will have to create multiple campaigns and then relocate money depending on your market analysis, checking which specific campaigns have proved to be successful and which haven’t and seeing which campaigns have used up their full budget and which haven’t.

Globibo Media is one of the leading names when it comes to budget planning. We don’t just allocate money under different heads, media channels or specific vehicles or online campaigns arbitrarily. We use analytics, research reports, your own inputs and spend hours on strategizing and planning. We can create the most effective budget with best ROI for your company. That means cost reduction while simultaneously and concomitantly increasing reach and impact.

Campaign monitoring/ tracking/ metrics

Advertising campaigns will be ineffective or at least incomplete within measurement of their performance and ability to deliver results. As a responsible and experienced marketer, you surely understand the need to monitor and track the campaign performance arises from the fact that this can help minimize wastage of resources, increase customer centricity and build a close relationship and go beyond the over simplified ROI estimation from the point of view of revenue generation and also look at soft performance metrics.

Testing your creatives across multiple channels, demographic groups, with different parameters and objectives is also very important because an ad will be as successful as the conversion it can induce. Conversion may not be sales-related always. It could be brand promotion, app download, signing up for something, brand impression, ability to generate visitors to a website organically and also awareness about the brand that the advert can generate.

Some of the common metrics for digital adverts are as follows:

Mindshare- If an advert becomes the talk of the town, if the product, the characters or the storyline becomes relatable with the audience, then the advert can be considered to have a high mindshare value. Also, the comments, the frequency of discussions across multiple channels are all important indicators of the performance of an ad.
Brand awareness- Measuring an ad based on brand awareness will make you analyze metrics like the number of hits or views your advert got, the number of times a particular URL was typed, the number of times the brand or product was searched for, the number of times a hashtag promoted by you was used, the social indicators like shares, hits from referrals, etc. These may not all lead to direct revenue generation but definitely lays the groundwork for greater conversion in terms of revenue.
Accessibility- You will also have to see whether you have managed to place your ad in the right channels and across multiple devices (whether it is responsive) so that the maximum number of people can view your advertisement.
Purchase influence- Did your ad generate sales? Look at your sales figure and the traffic generated on your website before and after the launch of a particular campaign. Are they placing more items in the carts? Are they calling your displayed telephone number in greater numbers? Is the brick and mortar store seeing more footfalls after the campaign launch?
Customer acquisition- Are the ads bringing in more information that you can use to nurture the leads? Is greater number of people signing up for your blog posts, email newsletters or opening accounts on your website for performing particular tasks? This information is vital and can be used for customer acquisition.
Customer retention- Have you been successful in up-selling or cross-selling? Are more people signing up for loyalty programs or graduating to higher programs that would allow you to sale higher value products or greater number of products? Are they sharing their card details and letting you save them?
Brand reputation- Has the advert managed to get more queries, comments or visitors to your website? Are they considering you to be a thought leader or trusting your products, view points and stats that you share more after the ad?

Globibo Media uses its expertise to create and guide you on utilization of the most suitable metrics for particular situations and measurement of particular metrics. Tracking and measurement of advertisement in traditional media like CPP (Cost per thousand), reach, CPI (cost per impression) and other such parameters are still around but are being replaced by smarter metrics that not only measure the revenue but also impact and the effect an ad has on long-term relationship.

Your ideas are most welcome. Our collaboration can only be successful if you share your ideas, platforms and knowledge generously with us. Looking forward to a fruitful partnership!

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