Tactical Marketing Tips from Ad:Tech
With the free time of Thanksgiving Weekend, I finally have a few minutes to write about a great session I saw at Ad:Tech earlier this month.
“Damn I Wish I Thought of That: 30 Great Ideas in 60 Minutes.” is described by the Ad:Tech website as “The culmination of 60 session’s worth of great advice. This is your final, fact-filled opportunity to glean one tidbit from ad:tech’s top tipmasters. Hear something unique and special from an assortment of speakers who bring to the marketplace a proven solution or innovative best practice. You will be scratching down notes as fast as you can when some of ad:tech’s best and brightest enjoy a bit of Warholian famousness and give you a tip in a minute! Enjoy!
Being the ever tactical marketer that I am, I wrote down a few items that were actionable and worth sharing.
Dana Todd, Agency Principal, SiteLab, President, SEMPO.
Dana made the point that with search campaigns, marketers are always looking at past data and adjusting accordingly. Then she pointed out you can ask for the editorial calendars of the print periodicals that cover your industry and plan your search campaign to work off the schedule of the editorial calendar. That way you are planning towards the future, as oppose of just adjusting to the past.
Russ Novy, Director of Marketing, WebShots (CNET property).
Russ pointed out that if you are checking out on an ecommerce site and you see the coupon code box, if you don’t have a coupon, you feel like a “loser”.So, the WebShots team added a little link underneath the coupon code box for new users that says “view current discounts” and then offers the users a 10% discount. (See screen shots below).
Russ found that 15% of new users applied the coupon and then 20% of those people after viewing the coupon actually continued to shop by going back to the store, adding items to their cart, and increasing the overall value of their shopping cart. (Can you say FREE MONEY!)
How is that for an upsell? The user does not feel like a loser and you increase your average order value. This was my favorite tip of the whole conference.
Young Bean Song, Director of Analytics, Atlas. Young said that 30% to 50% of all conversions occur from clicks from the first banner impression the user sees. This means after the first impression, you are bleeding impressions and driving your CPM costs up.
Peter Figueredo, CEO NETexponent
Peter said quite simply don’t let CPA Networks cannibalize your affiliate program. He had four reasons why it’s better to run your program directly with your partnerYou own the data about the partner’s results
You know who is running your offer Better tracking of lifetime value of the customer by partner You can pick out the top performers and move them up to biz dev deals. (OK, so this tip was not tactical, but I wanted to include it anyway. And, just so the CPA network guys don’t jump that much, I have said over and over again, there is a place for CPA Networks.
)
This was a wonderful panel, and I hope to see other panels like this at conferences. In case you are interested, here is a link to the Ad:Tech official blog on the panel with some more tips.
