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Online Promotions: What Works (And What Doesn’t!) |
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Advertising on the Web is on the rise, but so is the number of mistakes that marketers are making. Here are the 15 essential do’s and don’ts to consider before launching your next campaign.
Thirty-six billion dollars. That’s how much U.S. advertisers are expected to spend online in the year 2011, per eMarketer, New York. That’s a pretty penny for a medium that once promised it all, but delivered very little. After the hype regarding the World Wide Web died down, marketers began to accept the medium. At first they spent modestly for paid search placement, rich media ads and the like.
But, today, spending on the Web has taken off. In 2005, marketers spent $12.5 billion. Then last year it increased to $16.4 billion. Next year the number is expected to hit a whopping $23.8 billion. The problem is, with the abundance of online efforts comes an abundance of mistakes. That’s why Successful Promotions contacted more than a dozen experts in the field to not only uncover best practices, but to also let us know absolutely what not to do. Read on for their essential list of do’s and don’ts.
Do: Use logoed merchandise to encourage online registration.
To motivate consumers to register their information at Petstyle.com after it launched in November, the site offered a free T-shirt that read “I like it ruff.” While a T-shirt might seem somewhat inconsequential, the offer was so successful that tens of thousands of pet owners signed up. “Never underestimate the power of a free T-shirt,” warns Mark Valva, president and founder of DataPositive, a firm that was hired to create the promotion. “A fairly high percentage of users are more than happy to give you personal registration information if they get something that has high perceived value in return.” After two weeks, Petstyle.com pulled the offer because the supply of shirts ran out. Next they offered duffel bags and now they are dangling free reversible bandanas (one side shows dog bones, the other fish bones, so it’s doubly useful, depending if you want to put it on your dog or cat).
Don’t: Assume your offer will stay regional when you’re using the World Wide Web.
Master marketers Starbucks offered a textbook example of what not to do last August. The coffee chain sent out an e-mail offer for a free iced grande coffee to friends and family in the Southeast. After a few people blasted the offer to their entire address books, soon everyone in the country was trying to redeem the coupon. Within a week, Starbucks was forced to post signs in its stores saying that the coupon was invalid. This created even more issues. “I didn’t have a problem with their mistake,” says Richard Laermer, co-author of Punk Marketing. “It was the signs they put up in their stores that said these coupons were only for ‘friends and family.’ What am I, the enemy?” This kind of mistake could also apply to a travel mug offer or any other type of free giveaway.
Do: Capitalize on your competitors’ mistakes.
Smaller competitor Caribou Coffee seized the opportunity to make Starbucks look bad. The chain welcomed the free coffee coupons at its locations for a limited time. In the end, it successfully lured away droves of scorned customers as well as generated some positive press for its efforts.
Do: Try geocaching.
Set up GPS coordinates that lead to 20 different parking lots around the country and have your teams there giving out free stuff, suggests Peter Shankman, CEO of The Geek Factory, Inc., a marketing and public relations firm, and author of Can We Do That?!: Outrageous PR Stunts That Work And Why Your Company Needs Them. “Word will spread. Make it something worth having, and people will line up by the millions to get it. Remember: Good swag is still just a free ad for you, it just happens to be on a T-shirt or a shot glass. But if it’s really good, people will kill for it. My ‘I love the smell of Jet Fuel in the morning’ T-shirt from Go Fast Sports is a treasure to me, because it shows people I’m a skydiver and makes me different than the masses. The T-shirt that says ‘XYZ Company’ on it, not so much.”
Do: Make your promotion interactive.
Companies are not leveraging the inherent strength of the Internet if they are merely replicating online what you can do in a store, say Ines Heinrich and Jason Katz of Catapult Marketing. The secret is to make your promotion compelling enough and the tools easy enough that they’ll want to participate. Catapult did this with its “New Faces of Timex” promotion by inviting consumers to upload their photo onto a promotional Web site for their 15 minutes of fame. Consumers then were prompted to vote for their favorite faces. The top eight vote getters (each representing one of the eight new colors of Indiglo) won. Winners received $10,000 and were featured in the 2006 Timex Color Indiglo ad campaign. “One thing we did to be sensitive to consumers was to add a tool so they could lower the resolution of their photos to manageable megabytes, which ensured that neither their Internet connection nor Timex’s help desk got bogged down.”
Do: Tap into people’s passions and they will engage.
When Fossil wanted to target college alumni and sports fans last year, it launched the “Fossil 2006 NCAA Are U Fan Enough,” online trivia game. Consumers were invited to show off their knowledge in exchange for a Fossil watch bearing their favorite university’s logo. “We were tapping into school affinity and tying into a target audience’s pride in wanting to show their school colors,” says James Hering, executive vice president and director of integrated marketing for TM Advertising, which created the campaign for Fossil. “It’s good to have an incentive for people to get really engaged. We got a lot of game plays.” More than 202,000 trivia games were played by 13,000 unique users. Contest losers just had to buy their own logoed watches. Apparently there were no hard feelings, as the company registered $9 million in sales during the two-month promotional period.
Don’t: Violate consumers’ privacy.
Offering a free iPod to consumers who register for a promotion is fair game. However, spamming them with messages for the ever after isn’t, says Josh Linkner, founder/CEO of ePrize. “Privacy should be cherished.” He says, when deciding what kind of promotion to run online, marketers “should look themselves in the mirror. If you wouldn’t want it done to you, don’t do it to your customers.”
Do: Plan for success.
“People spend way too much time for online promotions wondering what’s going to happen if it fails. People rarely sit down and say ‘what happens if we succeed?’ So the question becomes, have you prepared to succeed?” says Shankman. “Have you figured out what’s going to happen if you bring in 2 million new members to your site tomorrow?” Shankman experienced this firsthand when registerfree.com offered free domain names. The site was overwhelmed with visitors and crashed constantly, “but people got their names, registerfree.com got noticed and eventually bought.”
Don’t: Expect all of the entries to be good.
“People think you post viral videos and everyone will watch it. They think it’s like the Kevin Bacon game, where you can just tell a couple of people. The reality is if you don’t get good content, you’re in trouble,” says Jim McCafferty, president/CEO of JMP Creative. He recommends creating content that appears to be user-generated rather than depending on the masses to actually create it. JMP created a video showing disco dancing shadow puppets for Coca-Cola and Albertson’s. Two million people ended up downloading the clip. His latest project is creating “Decoder glasses” that allow consumers to read special content on the Web.
Do: Host your site with a commercial-grade hosting provider.
Choosing a cheap Web host to save a few bucks can results in slow download times, which drives away your visitors, says Thomas Harpointner, CEO of AIS Media. Also, “go easy on fancy graphics, Flash and multimedia. Fancy graphics may impress designers but not necessarily your customers. Keep your Web site design focused on your message.”
Don’t: Stick with a product that isn’t working.
Sonos, a maker of digital music systems that stream music wirelessly from PC or Mac to speakers in any room of the house, offered a free hat with purchase. “We were trying to add value to our product instead of discounting it. … Unfortunately the hat (which had nothing to do with the brand) offer didn’t move the needle the way we expected,” says Elise Arthurs, worldwide direct marketing manager for Sonos Inc. Considering the product costs a minimum of $999, Arthurs realized she needed to up the ante. Sonos began offering a free $50 cradle that holds the system’s remote control, and offers for free speakers have also proven successful. “When you’re talking about our price point, offering a logoed hat isn’t effective,” she says. “Live and learn.”
Do: Use targeted items to extend the life of your brand.
Using consumer registration data, you can tailor a promotion based on who a person is and where they are located, says Josh Linkner, founder/CEO, ePrize. “Five or 10 years ago everyone saw the same thing. Today promotions can really be one-to-one. The higher the relevancy, the better the results.” Offering desirable, logoed merchandise “extends the time horizon and emotional impact of the effort.”
Do: Leverage user-generated content.
Job search engine Simplyhired.com decided to have a little fun with the darker side of employment, so they relaunched sister site Simplyfired.com. To draw traffic to the April 2 launch, they created “The Prankies” – a contest that encourages employees to upload videos of some of their favorite office pranks. A team of comedians, including Andrew Dice Clay, judged the submissions. The winners received logoed T-shirts commemorating their accomplishments as office menaces. “We’re just trying to poke some fun at the serious nature of our business,” says Lucas Mast, director of marketing and communications for SimplyHired. “If you look on YouTube.com, you’ll see a ton of office pranks. … Asking people to upload video will make it a fun site that we won’t have to dump a lot of resources into.” Mast says the shirts will carry trophy value, plus getting a new addition to the wardrobe “makes for one less day of laundry.”
Do: Stretch the consumer.
Online sites are by their nature far more powerful than any aisle display. For example, response rates to gift-with-purchase programs online tend to be 10 to 30 times higher than those featured in a free standing insert (FSI), according to Heinrich and Katz of Catapult Marketing. “Online you can stretch consumers’ attention spans because you’ve got them by the eyeballs. Your site got them there through one key promotion, but now that they’re there, you can offer additional giveaways that will only marry them more closely to your site. You build brand loyalty not only by giving consumers what they want, but also by delivering the unexpected. Give them that opportunity to grow with your brand.”
Do: Be a punk.
When you’re promoting a book called Punk Marketing, you’d better back it up with something unusual. For Laermer, this meant creating viral videos of strippers reciting excerpts from his book. “They memorized the lines. We chose strippers with high IQs,” he jokes. “It’s all about creating word of mouth.” At punkmarketing.com, fans are also encouraged to enter contests for merchandise bearing the book’s “flame head” logo. Those submitting the best resignation letter, examples of the best use of punk promotion inside their own company and items for other categories get hats, cups, patches and even a commemorative 39-cent stamp.
Do: Create promotions that are relevant to the target audience.
PetStyle.com tapped into its consumers’ sense of humor by creating t-shirts that said “I like it ruff” in lieu of just slapping a logo on it. Sonos found success offering accessories that enhanced the experience of its product. And Fossil, knew enough to know sports fans would go crazy for a watch bearing their school of choice. Getting into the mindset of the consumer is not only key for creating an online promotion, it is especially crucial when deciding what item to give away. Picking the right logoed item could either enhance the life of the brand or just have it end up in the garbage.
Reprinted with permission of Successful Promotions, copyright 2007
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