Information technology (IT) companies, most of them being b-to-b marketers, are more successful than others in using online advertising, according to a May 2001 study by Nielsen/NetRatings (www.netratings.com). Nevertheless, the study suggests that banner ads are run too frequently on sites with limited audiences, concluding that this causes click-through rates to plummet. Nielsen/NetRatings says that online advertising frequency rates are in the high teens versus 3 to 4% in offline advertising. The statistics in the 2001 eAdvertising Report published by eMarketer (www.emarketer.com) are even more sobering. The report says more than 99.7% of banner ads do not get clicked, and 74% of online advertising space is not sold.
An interesting benefit of such statistics, however, is that in a softer economy, advertisers willing to commit to even modest ongoing spending can get great deals and even stretch the boundaries of what can be done. Web site owners hungry for advertising revenue will heavily discount.
Sometimes they will also allow advertisers to go quite beyond the ordinary, permitting regular advertisers to even modify their sites’ home pages. That means you may be able to do some breakthrough
online advertising.
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Generating and Qualifying Leads with Online Advertising
You can’t cover the full spectrum of Internet marketing without addressing online advertising. When it comes to b-to-b lead generation and qualification, however, online advertising is losing its luster. Banner advertising in particular has been under attack because of dropping clickthrough rates. Yet there are effective ways to apply online advertising, as you will see in this chapter. Internet advertising continues to grow, even if at a slower pace than previously. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (www.iab.net) reported in April 2001 that online advertising in 2000 reached $8.2 billion, up from $4.6 billion the prior year. Although this was an increase of 78%, the IAB said it was lower than in past years. Banner advertising made up 47% of the year’s ad revenue, with sponsorships accounting for 28%. AdRelevance (www.adrelevance.com) says about 54% of b-to-b online ads are direct response ads, mostly to drive traffic to Web sites. Forrester Research (www.forrester.com) believes online advertising in the United States will reach over $25 billion by 2004, with online advertising in Europe expected to hit about $5.4 billion by 2005.
A Future Consideration for Your Web Site
As the Internet shrinks the world, it is useful to keep in mind that the world speaks more languages than English. Although English predominates across the Web, a b-to-b company marketing internationally needs to consider the implications of creating its Web site in different languages. According to Jupiter Media Metrix (www.jmm.com), within just a few years, two thirds of the world’s online audience will be non- English-speaking. Forrester Research (www.forrester.com) supports this with its own prediction that 50% of all online sales will be made outside the United States by 2004. Forrester says moving toward multilingual
Web sites will be an inevitable necessity.
Don’t overlook this trend if you anticipate doing serious business in non-English-speaking countries. A June 2000 survey of over 150,000 European Internet users across 15 countries by Pro Active indicated that 65% of the respondents preferred sites in their own language. In
fact, it seems that Europeans prefer online companies that use their own country’s suffix as opposed to .com.
At some point, if you have any interest at all in broadening your business beyond the United States, you will likely need to build mirror sites that accommodate both the languages and cultural differences of other nations. Already, leading global b-to-b marketers are recognizing
this important need. Take a look at the FedEx Web site (www.fedex.com) to see how a truly global company solves the problem. FedEx customizes its Web site for every country in which it delivers packages. Each country page is written in the appropriate language, carries appropriate
photography of people native to that country, and lists the delivery and rate information specific to that country.
Web sites will be an inevitable necessity.
Don’t overlook this trend if you anticipate doing serious business in non-English-speaking countries. A June 2000 survey of over 150,000 European Internet users across 15 countries by Pro Active indicated that 65% of the respondents preferred sites in their own language. In
fact, it seems that Europeans prefer online companies that use their own country’s suffix as opposed to .com.
At some point, if you have any interest at all in broadening your business beyond the United States, you will likely need to build mirror sites that accommodate both the languages and cultural differences of other nations. Already, leading global b-to-b marketers are recognizing
this important need. Take a look at the FedEx Web site (www.fedex.com) to see how a truly global company solves the problem. FedEx customizes its Web site for every country in which it delivers packages. Each country page is written in the appropriate language, carries appropriate
photography of people native to that country, and lists the delivery and rate information specific to that country.
Employing Web Site Links to Generate Leads
One of the unusual technological aspects of the Web is the ability visitors have to seamlessly link from not just one page to another within a single Web site, but from one Web site to another. As a result, a visitor to your site can instantly visit any other site with a quick click of the mouse, if you provide a live link. Similarly, a visitor on any other site can visit your site if there is a link to your site present on that other site. That is why employing Web site links is a whole separate uniquely Web way of generating response and, potentially, leads. There are both free and paid links available to Web direct marketers, and each kind of link has its trade-offs.
Free Links
Free links are typically provided either on a limited-time promotional basis or in return for a reciprocal link. The most obvious free link, one that you should certainly take advantage of, is the search engine link.
Getting your site and pages listed by major search engines such as AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, Lycos, WebCrawler, Yahoo!, and others is a prerequisite for any Web marketer.
Free Links
Free links are typically provided either on a limited-time promotional basis or in return for a reciprocal link. The most obvious free link, one that you should certainly take advantage of, is the search engine link.
Getting your site and pages listed by major search engines such as AltaVista, Excite, HotBot, Infoseek, Lycos, WebCrawler, Yahoo!, and others is a prerequisite for any Web marketer.
How Do You Measure the Direct Marketing Effectiveness of Your Web Site?
In the early days of the Internet, counting Web site hits may have been acceptable. Today, direct marketers realize that hits are irrelevant to overall result measurement. The gross number of hits a Web page gets simply represents the physical interactions performed by one or several individuals. Hits do not tell you anything about the level or quality of response, or the leads generated or qualified. A variety of Web analysis tools and service providers at both the low end and high end now go beyond counting hits. You can use these tools and services to track and analyze a visitor’s interactions with your Web pages—sometimes right down to how long someone stays on a certain page or even a certain item on the page. This kind of information can be very useful in improving your Web site and making general judgments about marketing efforts. There are second-generation tools and services that improve analysis considerably. Now you can learn
even more about the way a visitor interacts with your Web pages.
even more about the way a visitor interacts with your Web pages.
A Paradigm Shift of E-proportions
Before we head off into an exploration of marketing in cyberspace, I would like to put the subject of technology-driven marketing into historical perspective from my own vantage point. In 1974, I became employee number 51 at a small company called Epsilon Data Management.
Epsilon was in the business of helping fund-raising and membership organizations communicate with their constituents—past, current, and future donors or members.
Epsilon’s real business, though, was database marketing. The four Epsilon founders had helped pioneer the use of computer technology to take massive lists of donors’ names and addresses and “smarten” them with data. Each donor record was constructed with variable-length fields so that a lot of data could be stored and tracked. Because each donor could also be given a unique identification number, the data could drive fund-raising programs that recognized the individual donor’s unique characteristics.
Epsilon was one of the leaders in a technique called “variable upgrading.” When each donor received a computer-generated letter, the suggested donation amount could be varied, based on the donor’s previous contribution. A majority of donors would in fact upgrade their gifts to the new suggested amount. Even in mailings of several hundred thousand letters, the technique could be applied. I remember watching the line printers chunking out the letters on continuous form paper.
Epsilon was in the business of helping fund-raising and membership organizations communicate with their constituents—past, current, and future donors or members.
Epsilon’s real business, though, was database marketing. The four Epsilon founders had helped pioneer the use of computer technology to take massive lists of donors’ names and addresses and “smarten” them with data. Each donor record was constructed with variable-length fields so that a lot of data could be stored and tracked. Because each donor could also be given a unique identification number, the data could drive fund-raising programs that recognized the individual donor’s unique characteristics.
Epsilon was one of the leaders in a technique called “variable upgrading.” When each donor received a computer-generated letter, the suggested donation amount could be varied, based on the donor’s previous contribution. A majority of donors would in fact upgrade their gifts to the new suggested amount. Even in mailings of several hundred thousand letters, the technique could be applied. I remember watching the line printers chunking out the letters on continuous form paper.
The Wired World
Today the Internet is already a mature medium, despite its newcomer status. It is certainly the technology area with the most significant and explosive growth ever. In 1998 and 1999, the Internet’s economic impact on the U.S. economy was clearly proven just by the amount of venture capital invested in Internet companies and by the number of successful Internet company IPOs launched. By early 1999, Internet IPOs had dominated the stock market, creating another round of young bil4 BUSINESS-TO-BUSINESS INTERNET MARKETING lionaires, not unlike the software boom decades earlier. By late 1999, it was the dot-coms that moved “offline,” dominating the airwaves, feverishly snapping up television time, and grabbing national magazine and newspaper space to launch their fledgling brands. By 2000, the success of the dot-coms had started to dwindle. Many merged and many more failed, but not before the Internet had permanently become part of the fabric of American business.
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