2016

All posts from 2016

Email capture of critical potential customer segments with Facebook advertising

by Kelly Kubrick on December 1, 2016

Campaign Objectives

MyLiberty.life, a Canadian online retailer, wanted to increase the number of email subscribers interested in a particular category of products.

The Plan:

In advance of its Facebook media buy, MyLiberty.life developed an informative, long format blog post that spoke directly to the needs of the particular customer segment.

In addition to the relevant content provided in the post, MyLiberty.life created a highly-value downloadable product comparison chart – a lead magnet – which they offered to readers in exchange for signing up for their email newsletter.

The blog post acted as the paid traffic campaign landing page, with calls to download the comparison chart incorporated repeatedly throughout the text.

Where digital fit:

Given the profile of the customer segment, MyLiberty.life elected to focus its paid media efforts on Facebook. In addition to researching potential audiences on Facebook, Online Authority undertook the necessary technical implementation, including:

  1. Creating and configuring the client’s Facebook Business Manager Account;
  2. Creating the client’s Facebook ad account;
  3. Creating the client’s Facebook Pixel and installing it the ecommerce platform; and
  4. Setting up Website Custom Audiences (WCA) within the client’s Facebook Ad account, including a) Traffic to unique content sections of the website, b) An audience unique to its email subscriber list;
  5. Developing naming conventions for Google Analytics UTM tracking codes for use later in the campaign.

As the landing page evolved and the lead magnet was finalized, Online Authority developed the paid media creative with MyLiberty.life. This included identifying a theme, which in turn drove the copy treatment and three possible approaches to the imagery.

The campaign launched with alternative creative tested in weekly rotation:

Results:

As the most responsive target and custom audiences were identified, Online Authority expanded MyLiberty’s ad sets to include ‘lookalike’ audiences.

“A lookalike audience is where you give Facebook a seed audience and then it uses this to match people with very similar characteristics.” Source: AdEspresso

This service is offered to Facebook advertisers, and uses technology to ‘look for’ Facebook users who exhibit similar profile characteristics of your already-know-to-be-ideal users. This allows you to access a uniquely qualified audience that you might not otherwise be able to uncover.

The approached proved so successful for email capture that to this day, MyLiberty runs periodic flights of the campaign so as to continually boost subscriptions of this segment to its list.

Updated: MyLiberty has replicated the approach for additional customer segments and intends to continue rolling out new ones as they are identified:

Examples of Facebook creative for Digital Advertising campaign

 

To learn more about Facebook advertising, contact Online Authority today.

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Kelly KubrickEmail capture of critical potential customer segments with Facebook advertising

Activate Your Silent Salesperson with Digital Retargeting

by Kelly Kubrick on October 31, 2016

Have you ever been tempted to taste a new wine because the offer of wine overcomes your resistance to trying something new? Then gleefully bought a case of said wine?  Me too. That’s what this is about: offering your prospects content that is so irresistible that you can entice them further into your conversion funnel, willingly.

First published through the Canadian Home Builder’s Association (CHBA)

Now that we’re well past the era of questioning the value of including a website in the marketing toolkit, today’s business concern is ensuring the digital content produced, actually contributes to the larger sales funnel.

Once a business has put its contact and product information online, the challenge becomes justification for continued investment in driving awareness and usage of the website. To date, low-hanging fruit included launching additional digital channels such as a blog, an email list and social media.

What happens when sources to stagnate?

Digitally, it used to be good enough to make sure you’d sorta-kinda made your website search engine friendly and populated your company’s social media account(s) profile pages with updates. But, if asked, your marketing team will likely admit that your website reach has stalled or that Facebook’s “people-reached” update performance indicator is declining. Now what?

As lead generation sources dry up, where will sales come from?

It’s no longer enough to merely hope that digital reach will continue to grow as it has in the past. What if you could efficiently reach new people likely to be interested in your business because they’re similar to customers you’ve had success with previously?

More importantly, what if you could reach that audience in a way that both personalizes your interactions, while automating them, so there’s efficiency of effort? The concept is called a ‘lookalike’ audience and is available through a combination of advertising networks – like Facebook – and your existing website.

Activating your silent salesperson

The consumer packaged goods industry talks about a product’s packaging as a brand’s “silent salesman”. When a consumer buys a product and places it on a household shelf, the packaging dutifully reminds buyers its presence.

There’s a similar concept in digital, called re-targeting, also referred to as re-marketing. Digital publishers provide their advertisers with a small piece of computer code, often called a “pixel” – similar to a cookie – that won’t affect your visitors’ experience or your website performance, but is unique to you as an advertiser. By publishing your pixel on your website, you activate your silent salesperson.

Put your digital content to work

Next – instead of merely launching a sales-oriented advertising campaign, you use that pixel to build a new prospect list through irresistible content. Using Facebook as an example, here’s a big picture visual of how re-targeting works:

Activate your silence salesperson - digital re-targeting cycle

With that cycle in mind, it’s time to get granular. An effort like this has a lot of moving parts, but done right, your marketing team gets access to a rich source of digital leads.

Ten Steps of Digital Re-targeting

Using Facebook as an example, here’s what your marketing team will need to do:

  1. Create a Facebook Ads account for your organization and generate your Facebook pixel from within it. Publish that pixel to all pages of your website.

2. Define a specific buyer persona, with unique interests, such as ‘eco-friendly living’, or ‘vintage motorcycles’ that your company wants to pursue. Research and quantify those interest groups on Facebook – called Audiences – and then narrow that audience further by geographic – all of Canada? Or only one province / territory? and demographic ( age and gender) targeting.

3. Create a unique piece of irresistibly good content, written purely for that persona’s concerns, and publish it on your website. Provide enormous amounts of added-value information – imagine content that answers every question unique to that buyer persona, without the pressure of any kind of a sales pitch. Establish your subject authority while assuring the reader of your goodwill.

4. In parallel, create a digital advertisement that promotes the educational nature of your irresistible content, and run it on Facebook – but only show it to the unique interest groups identified in step 2.

5. As your advertisement is shown on Facebook, interested individuals will engage and click through to read your irresistible content, causing your Facebook pixel to activate.

6. However, in advance, you will have made your initial content even more irresistible by offering another piece of even higher added value information – enticing information (perhaps by providing a critical check list, a list of unique resources, a countdown calendar, or how-to instructions?) unavailable anywhere else.

7. That additional, enticing content will only be accessible in exchange for the visitor’s willing, forward movement into the sales funnel – say, in exchange for an email address. However, since most first-time visitors will shy away from giving you that information on the spot, because of the pixel, you can let them go without worry.

8. After an appropriate interval, your marketing team runs a second advertisement on Facebook, only shown to (or ‘re-targeting’) those who visited your irresistible content but didn’t convert to a lead by giving up their email. The second ad will offer a gentle reminder of the fabulous extra content they have missed out on, enticing them back to your content, this time with a higher likelihood to convert to access your higher value content.

9. As you identify the right audiences and use the right creative to entice them towards consideration, the automated – yet more personalized than a mass-media ad buy – process repeats until a lead converts. This allows you to engage with the lead on an ongoing basis through your existing qualification process.

10. As you identify the audiences most likely to convert, Facebook is able to give you access to ‘lookalike’ audiences – other people with profiles and behaviour that match those you’ve successfully converted – that you can now offer your irresistible content to. And the cycle repeats…

To access a lookalike audience on Facebook, organizations need to have a Facebook Ad Account, which provides tools to create your pixel, advertising campaigns, and Audiences, including lookalikes. In Facebook, lookalike audiences can be modelled from ‘source’ audiences including specific on Facebook, people who’ve liked your Facebook page or your own customer lists.

To create these lookalike audiences, Facebook looks at the common qualities of the people in your source audience and then finds people who “look like” your source audience on Facebook for a country. Organizations can choose the size of the Lookalike Audience during the creation process.

This combination of using technology to target the interests of buyer personas you can uniquely help, without even knowing who they are – while using automation to re-target them later – can be a powerful tool to help drive your lead generation efforts.

Although tactically, this ‘silent salesperson aka pixel’ approach may feel very far from how you’ve sourced leads in the past, my hope is that you will consider adding re-targeting as an arrow to your marketing quiver.

Questions? Ask away!

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Kelly KubrickActivate Your Silent Salesperson with Digital Retargeting

Six Dimensions of Digital maturity podcast episode with Mr Marketology

by Kelly Kubrick on October 11, 2016

What are the Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity?

Recently, I had the pleasure of chattting with Jeff Beale, aka Mr. Marketology as part of his Marketing Strategy Sessions podcast and YouTube channel. Jeff and I discussed the Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity, the business planning model we first proposed at Digital Strategy Conference.

Watch our conversation on YouTube (20 minutes, 47 seconds) by clicking the video embedded below:

In this episode, Jeff and I discuss how the digital maturity model came about and how organizations can use it to their advantage. In particular, we talked about:Image of the Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity - the dStrategy Digital Maturity Model

My thanks to Jeff Beale for his interest in sharing the Six Dimensions of Digital Maturity the larger Mr Marketology community! Learn more at the Mr Marketology website, on Facebook, @mrmarketology on Twitter or Google Plus.

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Kelly KubrickSix Dimensions of Digital maturity podcast episode with Mr Marketology

Measuring digital diplomacy and digital advocacy

by Kelly Kubrick on April 6, 2016
Updated April 15, 2016

On April 20-21, 2016, Global Affairs Canada in partnership with the University of Southern California’s Center on Public Diplomacy is hosting a conversation between foreign governments, academics and industry experts.

Entitled “#Diplometrics – Measuring up: Public Diplomacy & Advocacy 2.0 for Effective Results” the event is intended to explore results measurement for public diplomacy, advocacy and digital diplomacy efforts. As the event approaches, I found a handful of definitions for digital diplomacy:

  • “…the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and social media platforms in the conduct of Public Diplomacy (i.e. processes in which countries seek to accomplish their foreign policy goals by communicating with foreign publics)
  • “…the use of the Internet and new information communication technologies to help achieve diplomatic objectives”
  • “…more than a new tool in a used tool box…[it’s] a dialogue made possible by Digital Diplomacy which could replace the monologue of Public Diplomacy.”

I was intrigued as at Digital Strategy Conference, we defined social business strategy, one of the six definitions of digital maturity as: “the intent to facilitate interaction and collaboration in three directions: externally, with your community; internally, employee to employee; and between customers.” Immediately, I could see that being adapted for Digital Diplomacy –

In terms of advocacy or diplomacy campaign measurement, #diplometrics could be the “measurement, use, and impact of, social technologies to achieve diplomatic objectives”. Or is it broader than results measurement with social technologies, and needs to incorporate offline outcomes as well? To help answer my questions, I’m pleased to have the opportunity to moderate the Industry panel #Diplometrics. My panellists will be:

  1. William Carty – Manager, Public Policy for U.S. & Canada – Twitter Inc. and @WRDCarty;
  2. Kevin Chan – Head of Public Policy, Canada – Facebook Inc.;
  3. Colin McKay – Head of Public Policy & Government Relations, Canada – Google and @Canuckflack; and
  4. Donny Halliwell – Senior Strategist, Customer Success – Hootsuite and @DonnyHalliwell.

Given their backgrounds, I’m intrigued to learn more: William played a key role in the development and passage of US legislation in technology, telecommunications, cybersecurity, privacy, data security, public safety, energy and healthcare. Kevin has academic and Canadian federal government chops. Colin has been an advocate for both Open Government and privacy, which is quite the balancing act. Prior to his role at Hootsuite, Don operated the Twitter handle @BlackBerry with over 4 million followers and BlackBerry’s corporate Facebook pages with over 30 million fans.

Over the course of the day, we’ll hear from industry and policy experts all working to pin #Diplometrics down. Looking forward to it!

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Kelly KubrickMeasuring digital diplomacy and digital advocacy

Can we diversify Canada’s economy through digital policy?

by Kelly Kubrick on April 4, 2016

On Tuesday April 19, 2016, Canada’s Digital Policy Forum (CPDF) will host stakeholders and policy makers to discuss improving Canada’s performance in the development of its digital economy. The Forum proposes that “inevitably, any sound strategy for economic diversification must be a digital strategy.”

At Digital Strategy Conference, we defined digital strategy as “the process of identifying, articulating and executing on digital opportunities that will increase your organization’s competitive advantage.” If you expand ‘your organization’ to incorporate Canada, we can extrapolate that organizational-level thinking to economy-level thinking.

If digital enterprises empower and drive growth, the CPDF Diversifying Canada’s Economy Through Strong Digital Policy Forum asks what kinds of policies and institutions are needed to encourage and scale that growth. How can we best enable digital innovations? The day is set up to:

  • Establish the current cyber-security threats and attack environment (behold the recent hospital system held hostage);
  • Discuss the potential for user-generated data to impact us socially, politically, and economically;
  • Ask if data from our devices be brought out of the private domain and used to serve the public good, without compromising privacy or safety?
  • Learn from Sweden’s model for exploiting the opportunities of digitalisation
  • Debate if government and the private sector are capable of collaboration and cooperation at speed, or if our  competitive skills will merely erode further?

As co-author of the dStrategy Digital Maturity model, I’m looking forward to hearing from industry such as Google and Intuit – and from academics and policy makers such as the Information & Communications Technology Council (who recently released Digital Talent: Road to 2020 and Beyond), the Social Media Lab, a multi- and interdisciplinary research laboratory at Ryerson University and at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University and Sweden’s Digitalisation Commission.

If digital readiness interests you, consider participating in the dStrategy Digital Maturity Benchmark Survey. Intended to help organizations understand the dimensions needed for digital readiness, as with the Forum, understanding how we can build digital capacity at an organizational level can also serve to help us identify capabilities and gaps in advancing our national competitiveness.

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Kelly KubrickCan we diversify Canada’s economy through digital policy?

Communicators: take note of changes in digital analytics

by Kelly Kubrick on January 14, 2016

How have analytics changed?

Four years ago I participated in IABC Ottawa’s “Networking in the New Year” event, where communications professionals can speak informally with specialists in different fields. In 2012, I spoke about web analytics. I’m returning this year, and I will do the same. Which begs the question, has anything changed? Most definitely.

The bar is higher on what can (and should) be tracked

By January 2012, our community was

  1. Articulating more complex tracking requirements – instead of merely tracking website visits, there was increasing demand to measure the impact of social media / earned media efforts; while
  2. On the paid media side, measurement of remarketing (or retargeting) campaigns were at the bleeding edge of reporting requirements; and
  3. Google Tag Manager didn’t exist.

Website tag management emerges

This last item is critical, and links directly to item 1 and 2. “Tags”, in the context of tag management systems are used on your website to help you measure traffic and optimize your online marcom efforts. Examples of these website tags include:

  • Your website’s digital analytics tracking code i.e. your Google Analytics or your Adobe Analytics tracking code;
  • Conversion tracking tags (Google AdWords conversion code or the Facebook pixel); or
  • Remarketing (or behavioural retargeting) tags to target previous visitors.

Website tags are different from campaign tracking tags

For those of you familiar with campaign tracking tags such as Google Analytics’ “utm” codes or Adobe Analytics campaign tracking codes, note that they are different from the website tags above. It’s unfortunate that the terms overlap, but each accomplishes different things.

Prior to website tag management solutions, inserting website tags was a messy, inefficient coding effort requiring information technology resources. Then the inevitable would occur – organizations lost track of which tags were where, whether they were up to date or not, and who actually ‘owned them’. Not good. Thus, tag management solutions proliferated, including solutions like Google Tag Manager, Adobe’s Dynamic Tag Manager, Ensighten, and Tealium.

Website tag management: imagine never losing your keys again

bowl-for-keys
Today, tag management solutions are much better known – they have gone from an outlier technology concept to a critical tool in organizations’ digital toolkit. It’s exactly what we all need – a better way to facilitate the business discussion around determining what should be measured, while reducing the need for technical involvement for implementation.

How? By storing all those tags in one container in your website code instead of scattering different tags all over the place. Imagine that glorious moment when you successfully organize scattered key sets into one bowl at the front door. No more frantic searching as you try and get out the door.

Now, the business owner(s) can manage their tags centrally, outside of your HTML using a friendly interface. Other benefits include simplified tracking of video, social buttons or other interactive elements on your website. If your organization hasn’t looked at tag management solutions, I’d add it to your 2016 measurement plans.

Vanquish referral spam

The second big change since 2012 is the acceleration of referral spam clogging all our analytics reports. Consider this the second item on your organization’s analytics to do list in 2016: tackling the deeply frustrating problem of referral spam or ghost spam. What is referral spam? It’s garbage traffic that’s inflating your website traffic reports.

Example of referral spam - notice the 100% bounce rate with zero session duration time?

Click to enlarge example of referral spam: notice the 100% bounce rate with zero session duration time?

To give you some sense of how bad the problem has gotten, I was involved in a website launch in late November 2015. Not quite two months later 32% of the visits are is spam – fake traffic that could inflate our numbers and impact our marcom decisions. How can do we know that?

Fortunately, we followed best practices and set our digital analytics up with multiple data views. We use our primary decision-making data view to measure net visitor traffic (excluding ourselves and referral spam) and we can contrast it to our unfiltered data view capturing gross visitor traffic. This gives us a much cleaner – and more reassuring – view of our real audience numbers and their activities on our site.

Be sure you’ve got the same set up at your organization so that you can better measure the real impact of your communications efforts. Speak with your digital analyst or analytics team to ask them if and how the issue is being addressed internally. Like you, they’ll want to ensure ongoing trust in your organization’s data.

Web analytics broadens to digital analytics

One last important analytics change occurred only two months after the 2012 Networking in the New Year event. To acknowledge the proliferation of digital data sources, the Web Analytics Association (WAA) formally changed its name to the Digital Analytics Association (DAA):

“As more digital data streams became available, the responsibilities of the analyst broadened and the term “web analytics” became known as the study of data collected exclusively on websites…account[ing] for the analyst’s changing role of weaving together data from multiple sources and channels.”

As a long-time member, I heartily agreed with the change. To truly leverage the opportunities of digital, we in marcom need to take advantage of all of the data on offer. Data is a critical output of your digital initiatives and is what differentiates them from their offline equivalent. Knowing that, have you got a handle on your data strategy for 2016?

What’s on your 2016 analytics list?

I look forward to seeing the IABC Ottawa crew on January 28th and to discussing analytics. Bring your questions and concerns or feel free to ask any advance questions in the comments below. See you soon!

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Kelly KubrickCommunicators: take note of changes in digital analytics