Brands, Bandwagons & Bullsh*t Chapter 3 / Marketing Channels

A brief summary of which channels serve what purpose

“A bullet may have your name on it, but a grenade is addressed ‘to

whom it may concern”. Anon

?

With respect to this unattributable quote, Above the Line (ATL) covers channels that act more like the grenade – paid and unpaid media that you hurl out into the ether, relying on certain customer segments to see the campaigns, find them interesting and respond to them. Below the Line (BTL) acts like the bullet – targeted media through which you can more accurately seek out your target audience with specific, more personalized creative, messaging and call to action.

Per eyeball, BTL is more expensive but being so highly targeted, it converts better. ATL allows you to gain a more substantial reach to a wider audience and is therefore essential as you try and get brand fame and trust in the line of sight of the largest number of consumers.

Research, Data, Insight and Analysis?

There’s a trope in the marketing world that you’re either a data person or a ‘gut’ person. This is horseshit. The two are as co-dependent as Katie Price and the paparazzi. All good decision making has its foundations in data analysis to some degree so if, like me, you naturally sway towards the creative/ gut end of the spectrum, you’ll want to find the best talent in the Business Intelligence (B.I.) and Research departments and stick to them like chewing gum on a shoe.

Research comes in many forms so warrants several hundred cerebral books on the subject alone. The same goes for BI, data, and analytics. In short, they’re all about learning more on a subject, be it customers, competitors, media performance, creative, offers or simply what the world’s population are thinking and doing at any given moment in time.

Suffice to say, before you go galivanting off to write a brief, strategy, or tactical plan, you’ll do a far, far more effective job if you’re well informed about the subject at hand (thanks to reams of customer and market research). Then, as your campaigns are running, you’ll want results to be analysed in as near to real time as possible thus giving you insights that can be plugged into your next, highly optimized version. Post campaign it’s time for the evaluation – often glossed over in the rush to move on to bigger and better things but really, truly essential in measuring where you could’ve done better and what you’ll learn for next time.

Sometimes, the data either isn’t available, is not fit for purpose or the path you’re taking is so new and original, you can’t rely on looking backwards to move forwards. There are some people who spend their careers challenging every strategic problem or tactical roadblock with:

“What does the data say?”

…as if no decision could ever be made correctly without the support of numbers, research, and analysis. Data doesn’t always have the answers

–? at which point you’ll remember why you trained your gut to show the way.

As media and creative becomes more attributable the ability to have granular visibility of the what’s, why’s, when’s, how’s and what ifs? will only be more essential. If you want to remain competitive, polishing your data and analytical credentials as soon as you can (and committing the necessary time to collaborate with the pros in these fields) will pay back tenfold. But don’t forget this goes hand in hand with developing your natural instincts.?

A Word from the Pros – Matt Kowaleczko, co-founder, BlueMachina

Data has been a very hot topic in recent years. Apart from traditional applications like Dashboards, Reports and Analyses to support marketing strategy, the rise of AI and Machine Learning opens a whole new world of opportunities.

How to use data in Marketing? Measure

Make sure you create measurable KPIs for all campaigns you execute that can be easily accessed by your analysts. This will help them in generating valuable dashboards, reports, and insights for you. Monitor how your KPIs compare between different channels, campaigns, and segments to identify areas of greatest opportunity.

Learn

Data can help you in your decision-making process immensely. Run controlled experiments (when applicable, apply control groups to your

campaigns) and A/B tests to validate your knowledge, and to learn what works and what doesn’t. Statistical testing is a powerful tool enabling marketers to make unbiased decisions. Question your convictions and look for evidence in data.

Predict

In customer acquisition, predictive modelling can help in projecting Lifetime Value of new customers at the early stages, this allows for dynamic adjustment of target CPAs and strategizing.

In upsell or cross sell, predictive modelling can help with understanding which products or offers to use in your campaigns.

In retention, data and modelling can help you in identifying and engaging customers who are likely to churn.

Optimise

Evaluate all your campaigns. Use data and analysis to choose which campaigns to keep and which to change. Adjust your marketing budgets accordingly. Advanced tools like Marketing Mix Modelling and Multi Touch Attribution can help you to understand how particular campaigns or channels contribute to the total revenue generated by marketing.

How not to use data?

Don’t think about Analytics and Data like a nice-to-have. Put data at the

forefront of your marketing strategy. Don’t leave your decision making to chance. Spending large marketing budget without being able to measure how efficiently the resources were allocated guarantees failure. Testing different approaches and learning from the outcome of the tests, on the other hand is the approach practiced by leading marketing specialists.

Avoid cherry-picking of results and recommendations. Don’t take campaigns that don’t work personally. You won’t know the success of your campaign until it’s analysed. You learn from every campaign regardless of whether they succeed or fail.

Finally, it is imperative that you collaborate with your analytics department. Brief them on your campaigns and ask them for their suggestions. Work as a team. This will make planning, executing and evaluating/analysing campaigns easier and ran more smoothly. Collaboration will contribute to the success of your company and team.

ATL Channels?

TV & Radio Advertising

‘Les Grandes Fromages’ channels of the marketing world (thanks to their cost as much as their effectiveness), we see and hear ads every day and as fame generating devices, very few successful brands have achieved global fame without TV advertising. Tesla is a notable exception, but if a client or boss ever challenges you to follow their strategic marketing model, take the advice of @GroupThink and tell them you’ll get started when they deliver a weed smoking, Mars rocket owning, Billionaire CEO with fifty million Twitter followers.

For everyone else, there’s television.

To get under the skin of what makes great advertising work, read the likes of Bob Hoffman and Dave Trott, and follow the work of famed creative agencies like BBH, VCCP, Adam&EveDDB and Uncommon.

Print Advertising

Advertising’s aging cousin, sadly less prevalent with the demise of print media. Some of the most intuitive and insightful creative of all time came via printed media, but it’s notoriously difficult to hold accountable for even the broadest brand KPIs so unless you’re a luxury brand with budget to burn it’s less likely to be a priority.

Out of Home (OOH)

See those giant billboards by the side of the motorway? And the ads at bus stops? And the video screens in town centres? These are OOH sites and like print advertising, are designed to spread a brand message to a large, indiscriminate swathe of the population. Good for launching a new flavour of crisps, less effective at selling left-handed golf clubs, so if you need to target your campaigns to certain demographics, whether by age, sex, or user preference then this isn’t the channel for you.

A Word from the Pros – Jamie Elliott, CEO, The Gate

Good advertising makes your brand come to mind faster and more favourably than your competitors, increasing the chances that people will choose it and that your sales/ margins will be increased or maintained.

For the biggest effect aim for fame, because fame campaigns are four times more efficient than the rest and outperform on all business metrics:-

·???????? Be creatively surprising to gain attention and inspire your audience to share their enthusiasm on and off-line

·???????? Have distinctive elements like a brand character, strong design elements, a sonic mnemonic or signature music that will ensure your ads are remembered as yours and not your competitors

·???????? Answer the question “what’s in it for me?” in every ad - what’s the key emotional or rational benefit of your product/service that you should feature because it will overcome the biggest barrier to your audience buying or using it

·???????? Balance broad reach ads creating fame for your brand with targeted activity that is relevant and useful and will tip people into a sale

·???????? Get some expert help, don’t do it yourself

For the least effect, here are the things to avoid when building an ad campaign:-

·???????? Pack your ads full of messages. Messages are like tennis balls – throw

people more than one they’re likely to drop them all

·???????? Be boring – people don’t watch boring films or read boring articles,

why expect them to engage with your animated PowerPoint slide?

·???????? Don’t use all of the data you can to understand your audience: what they feel about your brand, what media (social or otherwise) they are engaged with or what their other interests are

·???????? Don’t consider how smart media choices can increase the relevance and impact of your ads

·???????? Don’t set objectives or put in place the right methods of measurement to establish that you have hit them – also ensuring you can’t optimise as you go or take forward any learnings

(Read ‘The Long and the Short of it by Les Binet and Peter Field for more on the benefits of brand building and fame)

Public Relations (PR)

While advertising is a direct transaction through which you pay a media owner to display your creative message to their audience, PR is slightly more nuanced. Good PR professionals will take your brand communications messages and craft a newsworthy story of such value that journalists shudder in their haste to publish it. Being unpaid or ‘earned’ communications, PR is about a fair value exchange – delivering a story that tiptoes the line between brand message and public interest story.

Have a flick through any newspaper and after the headlines a significant proportion of the content will have been fed to the journalists by PR agencies (the clue is in the branded mention). To give fewer interesting stories and added ‘umph’ PRs will often tie in celebrities in a triangle of value:- The brand gets a confirmed mention in a piece people might actually read, the newspaper gets rich content without having to pay for it and the celebrity gets relevance and a bag of money.

On the less frivolous side is crisis PR and corporate communications – and if you ever find yourself in an utter shit storm of bad press, you’ll hope to have a credible PR professional in your corner to advise you as you try and mitigate the damage.?

A Word from the Pros - Jo Carr, Co-Founder and Chief Client Officer, Hopeamp;Glory PR

Want to be a future PR guru? Then here’s how to do PR well:

·???????? Always be the cynic in the room. The one asking the difficult questions. Is this really new? While it’s never nice to prick someone’s balloon, in PR you need to otherwise you’ll end up with a dud story and no coverage.

·???????? Be ready to act as your client’s moral compass. They want to do a campaign around female empowerment but don’t have any women on their Board. Then tell them to steer clear. Or more importantly do more to empower woman as deeds are more powerful than words

·???????? Stay curious. Always be a step ahead on trends, on issues, on the national conversation

·???????? Think laterally. You’ll often need to think beyond the product or service you’ve been tasked to promote in order to make it interesting. Be prepared to take your thinking to new places

·???????? Know your media. What works, and in what format – across print, broadcast, online and social

·???????? Be tenacious. If at first your story doesn’t land. Try, try again.?

How to do PR badly

·???????? If you go native and lose the ‘punters’ perspective’ you’ll also lose

the ability to truly judge whether something is news-worthy

·???????? Never exaggerate, or lie, or bend the truth. You’ll get found

out. As simple as that.

·???????? Never reach out to a journalist or influencer without first getting familiar with the type of content they write. You will look foolish

·???????? Never assume. Anything. Whether that’s prepping for an event or crafting a story. Second guess constantly, and ask Why? A lot.

·???????? Don’t be flaky. Do what you say you’re going to do – for your client, for a journalist, for an influencer and do it when you said you would. Much about PR is being able to “make shit happen”. If you can’t meet a deadline or follow up on a request, you’ll never cut it.

·???????? Don’t believe the hype. Especially as nine times out of ten you’re the one who’s created it

Sponsorship

Sponsorship is all about building brand credibility through a relationship with a loved entity, frequently a sports team, TV show or professional body. Getting your logo on the front of a football shirt is going to get your name out there to millions of people and may even generate clicks to your website but the key with successful sponsorship is the exploitation – what you do with the partnership beyond logo placement.

Expert advice suggests your sponsorship budget should be shared between the deal and making the most of the deal, with as much as 50% being attributed to each. This might be excessive especially if, like Chevrolet with Manchester United, you spooned ￡70 million per year on the deal. If you’re looking at a more realistic sponsorship deal the keys to success lie in finding a good ‘fit’ between the entity and your brand, and good deal on the commercials.

A long tail of further media ops that will allow you to hit other KPIs beyond brand awareness, including social media access, player access, advertising at the stadia, sampling opportunities and access to their fan database.

Organic Social Media

Tweets, Posts, Retweets, Follows. Insta, Snap, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok. If you’re not a twelve year old, I’d firmly advocate employing a professional to lead your social media activity (the ‘organic’ bit means you’re creating social content, engagement, and relationships, not paying for it – which is known, fittingly, as ‘Paid Social’ - see below).

The problem with organic social is that it seems so easy. Post stuff, collect likes and followers, sell them stuff and voila! In real life, this approach will fail, as proven by 100% of brands who have stumbled in without reading the room over the past decade.

Good social media is about delivering compelling content that engages and entertains the audience. That’s it. The moment you try and force feed sales messages into your social feed, the audience will clock it for what it is (i.e., not remotely interesting) and dislike you (or worse, ignore you) faster than a Kardashian divorce hearing.

Thus, the need for an expert - however not every brand’s tone of voice is suited to zany, intriguing, highly sharable snippets of brain fodder. So, you need to find your niche, invest in creating rich, relevant, and entertaining content in bite sized, snackable formats (video is always well received).

Oh, and as a reminder, employing a young graduate with oodles of social skills to run your social channels might look cost effective but at some point, their lack of experience may be revealed in a huge, credibility damaging mistake, for which you’d have to shoulder the blame.

It’s inevitable, but sacking the person responsible would be hugely unfair, so before deploying a super cool social playbook, work on the rules of engagement with everyone from the legal department to the CEO, thus mitigating the danger of apocalyptic screw ups. The trick is a balance of fun, entertaining and reciprocal content that sits, if not directly under your brand guidelines, then certainly complementary to them.

That said, no company is ever entirely safe when working in such an immediate channel as social. In 2017, adidas Tweeted the following:

“Congrats! You survived the Boston Marathon”.

…three years after a fatal bombing on the home straight of that very

same race.

You’re never more accountable than with a channel that goes from zero to global in one click.

Twinned with the outbound content most people focus on with social, it acts as a very open barometer of public opinion, too. Plugging customer service into social channels is now pretty much standard, as anyone who’s ever complained about poor customer service can attest. Bitch via email and you’re in for a long and usually fruitless wait. Gripe via Twitter and things tend to happen, as flagged by a man who has cornered the market in driving positive customer experience to generate revenue, Jeff Bezos:

“If you make customers unhappy in the physical world, they might each tell six friends. If you make customers unhappy on the Internet, they can each tell six thousand friends”.

Experiential Marketing

The swanky word for ‘events marketing’, experiential and customer experience are any activities that require you to set up a live event specifically to bring your audience and your brand closer together. It might be a party, trade show, VIP trip somewhere, point of sale, product sampling or just a dinner – the point of experiential is that in some guise the guests leave with a stronger emotional affinity for the brand than they had when they arrived.

A Word from the Pros – Nicole Goodwin – Marketing Director (Big Drop Brew Company, formerly at J?germeister)

How to do experiential marketing well

Make sure there is an authentic fit between your brand and the event Make sure your target consumers are going to the event

Set smart KPIs for evaluation later

Be sure to have a wish list extra asks – not just about the sponsorship fee

– free tickets, tagged social posts, logos on all assets etc Be sure to negotiate category exclusivity (where possible)

Always do a site visit before agreeing to anything (you don’t want to be

near the toilets!)

Remember you are creating a memory – give your consumer something to talk about above & beyond the product itself

Maximise your reach by always making sure there is an amplification plan across all your other channels (helps with the ROI)

Make sure your sales team know about the event asap & encourage them to host clients at the event – nothing beats experiencing the brand

Always make sure to carry out a full review and take any learnings to the next event (making it bigger & better!)

How to do events marketing badly

Assume anything …There is a good chance what you assume hasn’t

been thought about by others

Pay 100% upfront for the sponsorship – both parties have to have skin in the partnership

Use event agency staff – no one knows or lives your brand better than your own staff / agency

Forget to tell everyone internally & externally including your PR agency that you are there

Over complicate the social posts – those that aren’t there don’t want to see the event they could have been at….more use the budget to spread the word you are there & cement the association leveraging the halo effect on the brand

Evaluate the event purely based on physical people to stand as you won’t do events otherwise…it is the Opportunity to see / Reach via the other channels as well

Viral Marketing

Fairly self-descriptive, this one. ‘Viral’ campaigns are those videos, games, memes or snippets that are so funny/ engaging/ topical/ controversial/ shocking that they’re shared by viewers organically (usually by email, mobile messenger or social channels) thus nullifying the need for a media spend. The problems here are twofold.

First, it’s impossible to predict whether a campaign will be picked up by masses in advance. It either happens or it doesn’t and achieving branded viral success these days is difficult with so much rich content freely available and a general antipathy towards subversive marketing tactics.

Second, the triggers that tend to fuel viral success (funny, engaging, topical etc.) are not freely available in the brand guidelines of many businesses. For example, if HSBC tried to flog a pithy meme if would be briefly chastised by Reddit before being ignominiously shat out. Likewise, should IBM try and culture a TikTok dance craze it would be rightfully scorned with derision. Find the channels that fit, and if you throw enough mud, something might virally stick.

As with any channel, viral media needs to deliver a positive ROI, whether via brand awareness or even better (and significantly more difficult), direct sales.

“Going viral is not an outcome; it’s a happening. Sometimes it happens; sometimes it doesn’t. Just remember, fans are vanity and sales are sanity.” Lori Taylor

Retail Marketing

If you’re planning to sell a product in a shop – any shop – then you need to draw on some tried and tested tactics, most of which are founded in the ‘Four Ps’ of Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Whether you’re looking to place a line of clothing in a department store, ready-made chicken dinners in a supermarket, vape juice at the point of sale of a newsagents or hand woven hemp knickers on Etsy, the four Ps will be your tick list of your strategic approach.

As the second part of the process, you need to think extremely hard on behalf of the customer. What do they want, what is their budget, what price are your competitors selling equivalent products for and where in the shop is the optimum location to sell (for example, putting crisps next to the booze aisle is a key trick to attracting impulse snackers as they pick up a six pack).

Finally, the last rule – ‘retail is detail’. Thanks to advertising, Google and social media, consumers are incredibly well educated about what’s on the market, especially when compared to days of yore, when a cartoon tiger was more than enough to sell breakfast cereal. Understanding customer characteristics, their behaviours, cerebral functions, purchasing habits, payday cycles and the deep seated emotions that influence their buying decision are all critical – it’s in this detail that you can go from ‘consideration’ to the end game - ‘sale’.

A Word from the Pros – Guy Wootton, Director of Business at Moy Park

Research to understand how shoppers are interacting with your category:

Having a market structure (decision tree) helps guide what products you place next to each other and understand which are more incremental. Which decisions are pre planned and which are made in store? Placing more substitutable products next to each other in “subcategories” optimises sales and makes the category more logical to shop.

Be clear on what role your category and your product plays for the retailer

If your product is there to drive footfall for the retailer, it will have a very different role than if it is there to drive profitability, or basket size. This in turn will impact your placement in store, on shelf, facings etc… Ensure your view on the role and the retailers’ view are aligned.

Make it really easy to navigate

Sounds obvious, but there are more good examples than bad. The faster shoppers make decisions, the more they spend, so make it simple, and use colour/shape to help navigate over words where possible. Use the most well-known ‘signpost’ brands to assist, even if they’re not yours.

And here are some classic mistakes you can make when making merchandising recommendations

Bias

If your recommendations aren’t made with the total category sales in mind, you will have zero credibility when making merchandising recommendations. Resist internal pressure to push for your products to be placed onto the eye level shelf or have unnecessary facings.

Trying to interrupt / slow shoppers down

Most shoppers know at least broadly what they want to buy before they arrive at a store and have a goal for how much time they would like to spend there. Helping them navigate to their desired purchase/decision quicker, then gives you permission to offer them trade up or offer incremental options. Of course in some stores, shoppers are there to browse and spend time, but the principle still stands.

Cram too many messages on pack

The brutal reality is that you care an awful lot more about your brand messages than a shopper does, especially when they get to a store. In behavioural economics speak, they are operating in “system 1” where decisions are made in split seconds, so rationalise messaging to the most important.

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BTL Channels

Pay Per Click (PPC)

The daddy of accountable media, PPC is used by almost every serious marketing department to some extent (often to a major extent). In simple terms, you analyse your target customer’s browsing behaviours, seek out key words and phrases that they’re using to seek your product category in their browser then bid to the amount you’re prepared to pay for one click on these words via your text ad at the top of their search results page (using ‘AdWords’ for Google – other search engines are available).

PPC’s accountability is also its Achilles Heel – popular keywords (such as ‘casino’ can cost more than ￡50 per click (I’m not kidding) and whilst less valuable phrases go for considerably less, good PPC media buying is a cat and mouse game operated at an incredible granular level. You can get an algorithm to do your bidding for you (known as ‘programmatic’ marketing or ‘auto-bidding’), but this remains unproven as a universal solution, mostly due to the high volume of fraudulent or overpriced clicks you can end up saddled with.

Display Advertising amp; Paid Social

PPC’s older sibling, digital display ads are the ‘proper’ visual media you see on the top, sides, middle, bottom and behind websites (the latter known, jauntily, as ‘pop-unders’). You can buy the media space via individual sites or, more commonly, via ad networks.

Paid social ads look like display but within social networks – so any of the sidebar ads in Twitter, Insta, TikTok, Facebook or Linked In.

You need eye catching creative, a great call to action (CTA) and the perfect media plan to find the best websites to park the best ad formats on at the best time. the ability to test, test, test so you can find the sweet spot of all three.

Display is often a wallflower channel – it doesn’t get the credit it deserves for driving new traffic. Someone sees a banner, has their interest piqued then searches for more info, ultimately clicking through to your site via PPC or coming direct. This is where attribution modelling comes in – via tags and tracking you can see where the customer has come from on their way to you, then assign (or ‘attribute’) values to each channel. Display ads may not have been the last thing they clicked on, but they’re often the first thing they saw that got them interested, which is invaluable.

A Word from the Pros – Dave Gilbert, Global Gaming Lead, Facebook.com

Advertising on Facebook

While there are several ways to purchase ads on Facebook, most advertisers use the auction buying type - ads are ranked by an algorithm based on their total estimated value for both the advertiser and the target audience, and the ‘winning’ ad is served to the chosen individual.

Facebook is a complex advertising platform, with many different options that marketers can adopt in order to grow their business.

Below are some basic tips to get you started:

Leverage data sources to improve campaign success

The Facebook pixel allows you to direct your ad at people based on specific actions they have taken on your website. One of the most powerful steps you can take is to implement the Facebook pixel on your site, and then optimize for conversions (“conversion optimization”).

This can include anything from visiting a page to completing a purchase. When creating an ad set, you have to choose an optimization event (a pixel event to optimize towards). This choice tells Facebook’s delivery system what result to try to get for you.

Choose the right audiences to target

On Facebook, you can use a number of different audience targeting options to find out what works best for your business. These generally fall into 3 categories:

·???????? With the Core Audience option, information is pulled from what people share in their profiles and the behaviors they exhibit on our platform. By identifying your Core Audience, you can help more accurately market your campaign to the right people. You can refine this target audience with information such as additional demographics, interests, and behaviours.

·???????? With the Custom Audience option, advertisers reach people across devices based on the information they already have access to in a privacy-safe way. You can generate Custom Audiences by using your own sources, such as a customer list, or using Facebook sources, such as Facebook pixel data (website traffic).

·???????? The Lookalike Audience option is based on sophisticated modeling which identifies people who share similar likes, interests, or characteristics to your current audience. You can target a Lookalike?

Audience if you want to reach new people who are likely to be interested in your business because they're similar to your best existing customers.

While there are a lot of different placements where you can advertise across Facebook, Instagram, Audience Network and Messenger, the easiest option is to choose Automatic Placements: that way, your ad is deliverable through all eligible placements to elicit efficiencies in your ad delivery, helping you get more results for your budget.

Adopt creative best practices

Having creative images with one focal point versus many in product and lifestyle contexts can impact lower funnel attributes such as purchase intent or attributed view content events positively. Similarly, using context type images with one focal point can impact brand awareness positively.

Video prompts both brand and direct response outcomes. Today's video ads are interactive, shorter, and mobile. You can prompt action from videos, when paired with the right targeting, optimization, and call-to- action, which makes it a more functional medium for direct response than it has been in the past.

Based on how people view content on mobile, the following tips for creative design are recommended:

·?????????? Create short videos (15 seconds or less) that are designed to capture attention quickly

·?????????? Incorporate your brand into the ad early

·?????????? Design the ad so it makes sense to people, regardless of whether their sound is turned on or off

·?????????? Build for vertical viewing

Static images and video work better together. Direct response campaigns that combine video and static image ads have the highest conversion lift outcomes compared to static-only campaigns. This implies that the two formats may complement each other in messaging and/or attract different audiences.

Optimization of creative can help improve results. Mobile advertisers can use information and insights to fuel marketing strategies. Testing of creative can help you optimize your campaign and can have a significant impact on performance. Optimization can also help to avoid creative fatigue.

Test, learn and reiterate on Paid Social Channels

Facebook reaches more people than any other medium on the planet today and boasts one of the world’s most sophisticated advertising platforms. This level of sophistication can be daunting for the uninitiated, but don’t be fazed - keep testing new ideas and combinations of data, targeting, creative and placement until you find success.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) and App Store Optimisation (ASO)

SEO is how you optimise your site to increase visibility for relevant searches. The higher up the page your site ranks for certain keyword searches, the more likely you’ll be to get customers clicking through to learn more about your business above and beyond your competitors.

Search engines (mainly Google) employ bots (imagine them as digital spiders crawling around the web looking for keywords to eat) to explore web pages, harvesting information and storing them in an index. Algorithms then analyse pages in the index to work out the optimum order the pages should appear when a customer is browsing for a particular product or service. It’s like a virtual beauty pageant for web pages.

The algorithm is pretty clever and designed with the customer in mind. So if you’re looking for a plumber in Cardiff to fix your ornamental fountain, the website of the Welsh plumber who has optimised their site for fountains and has case studies of all their successful fountain work will rank higher than that of their rival who specialises in bidets.?

Optimizing the words and images on your site with these factors in mind helps your pages rank higher in the search results. Add to that the benefit of having links from other credible websites (known as PR outreach or link building – see below) and you’ve scratched the surface of this fascinating channel – get it right and it’s the best value acquisition channel out there. It’s not a quick fix – it can take months to see the benefit of keyword optimisation or inbound link building campaigns, so you need a degree of patience.

SEO (and its sibling ASO which employs similar tactics to increase rankings

in the App store and Google’s Play Store) are lovely channels – they’re beautiful, really. Creativity, skill, and graft are rewarded with lower acquisition costs when compared to PPC, Display or TV but that’s the problem. Everyone else knows that, too – so it’s incredibly competitive.

A Word from the Pros – Paddy Moogan, Founder, Aira.net

“In order to do SEO well, you need to keep in mind the core pillars of the channel, which are: -

·???????? Technical

·???????? Content

·???????? Promotion

These are underpinned by SEO not being siloed away on its own away from other marketing channels and product teams, but as closely integrated as possible. This means that when decisions are made in marketing and with product, SEO has a seat at the table, making a key part of your job building relationships with other stakeholders.

Whilst not exhaustive, here are the key points to bear in mind with each pillar: -

Technical

Ensure that your website is crawlable and understood by search engines, whilst providing a great experience for your users, including it being fast and responsive.

Content

Produce the absolute best content that you can for your users, understanding and answering their pain points and connecting them directly to your product.

Promotion

Letting the world know about your content and products by building relationships with key contacts and publications in and around your industry, making them advocates for you and likely to promote you in the future.

To avoid doing SEO badly, you need avoid thinking about it as something that exists independently of other channels. This means that many of the things that you’ll do to improve SEO must be closely aligned with what you would do in order to deliver a great website experience and deliver a great product or service - you put your users first.

In the old days of SEO, most websites would win despite not offering the best experience for their users. They would put SEO first at the expense of the user, and it worked.

Now, Google is much, much better at understanding how users engage with a page. This means that the user needs to come first and SEO is a layer that gets factored into this and everything is balanced.

Focusing too much on SEO itself, at the expense of the user, may work in the short term but is a sure fire way to fail long term.

Online PR Outreach and Link Building

If the business face of SEO is on-site, then the party side is online PR and link building - also known as ‘outreach’. Google uses many variables in its algorithm to judge what makes a good site and what makes a bad one. Good ones will index higher in any particular keyword search and the onsite stuff (covered above) is what you can do internally to boost your rankings. Additionally, Google cares about what other, credible sites think of you.

If they link back to you, that’s a good think – so the link building industry was born.

In the early days, this rapidly sank into a pit of depravity – paid links were purchased with alacrity, bags of cash changing hands under conference tables as sites earned credibility the easy but illicit way. Nowadays, Google tut tuts such behaviour, so you need to earn your inbound links by reaching out to credible sites and providing them with appealing content which they pay for with the aforementioned back link. It’s a neat and reciprocal process but one which has been turned into an artform of finely honed coverage by specialist online PR agencies and professionals.

Sure, the content may look ‘click baity’ but it’s bubblegum for the brain that websites gobble up as eagerly as their readers, and the reciprocal benefit of multiple high value links can send a website from zero to hero in a heartbeat.

A Word from the Pros – Carrie Rose, Founder, Rise at Seven?

To land high quality links we have to think of it in 3 steps: -

1.? What can we do to earn coverage?

2.? What can we do to turn that coverage into links?

3.? How do we get it in front of right fit publications?

The first step highlights the need for stories and forces you to think like a PR. Stories can be in the form of rich content, data/insight, expert comments, engaging campaigns, or reports. It's something "newsworthy" and relevant that writers, journalists, and editors WANT to talk about. To ensure that ... the data/stories/ content has to be either informative, resourceful, useful, or just completely different.

However, we need links. So how do we turn that coverage into links? By having something on site which adds value to the journalist's story. If they can write the story without linking, completely start again.

And then, selling that content/story to writers at quality sites/news publications in the hope that they cover it and link back. Selling a story is done through press releases, email outreach highlighting why this story would be of interest to readers but can also be done through social media, billboard ads or more. Getting people to see your content/stories is the hardest part, but the other two steps are just as important to ensure it lands and gets links.

How to avoid doing PR Outreach badly

Most people do outreach badly because they get step 1 wrong. The story isn't insightful enough, newsworthy, or relevant and therefore doesn’t earn the coverage.

Avoid the obvious, don't be too promotional about your product and think about what your customers are interested in over selling your service and product. Ultimately, we’re SEOs, marketers, content creators, creating stories to land links and thinking like a PR is often overlooked.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

In very basic terms, CRM is about managing your interactions with customers. In the digital environment your CRM team will pull in user data from everywhere – acquisition channels, the conversion funnel and customer journeys to better define the messages, offers and media with which to communicate with them more effectively.

CRM systems are designed to improve customer interaction and the control of marketing campaigns. They do this by improving efficiencies and interactions across the sales pipeline, often automating communications content, calls to actions and data analysis.

Affiliate Marketing

If you don’t fancy doing wide ranging display deals and are keen to be more targeted/ accountable in your digital media efforts, then affiliate marketing may be for you. By working directly with website owners in the sectors you’re focusing on you can negotiate tailored rates for every customer they send your way. Typical deals tend to fall in three buckets:

Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) - you pay them a pre-agreed amount for every confirmed (I.e., paying) customer they send you, usually at the end of the month.

Revenue Share - you pay them a % of the revenue generated by the customers they send you – better if you want less risk up front, but you’ll lose money on valuable long-term customers.

Hybrid Deals – a blend of CPA and Rev Share – you pay a little bit for each new customer and a smaller revenue share percentage.

A Word from the Pros – Ian Sims, founder of Rightlander.com and former affiliate network owner

As an affiliate, I was much more focused on the relationship than the financial reward. Of course, both are important, but I'd rather work with someone I could trust at 20% than someone I didn't know at 40%. My guess is the average was somewhere in the region of 15% after costs and deductions.

Additionally, it wasn't just about the affiliate program. The key to me was that the brand knew how to treat its customers. I was most impressed when an affiliate manager demonstrated their knowledge of the operation's retention tactics and what their product roadmap looked like.

It was also important to find an affiliate manager who understood my philosophy: I liked to spread my risk. I would rotate programs relatively evenly, I never offered ‘positions’ on my site because I ended up with an imbalance of customers and too much dependency on one program. A lot of affiliate managers couldn't understand why I wouldn't send customers to where I made the most money but ultimately, I wanted to create stability.

Finally, as a rev-share affiliate, I wasn't at all interested in any program that didn't offer lifetime revenue. I was OK with negative rev-share so long as it was clear, had a boundary and the program was solid. That said, if I got in a big hole that looked hard to climb out of, I would either look for a ring-fencing deal or remove traffic until it was clear.