Never Ending Thoughts…

In the article “Smarketing – The Perfect Blend Of Sales And Marketing“, I briefly touched upon the concept of smarketing and took it further in the article “Top Three Things To Watch Out When Combining Your Sales And Marketing Efforts“. Lately the term Marketing Automation has started picking up some steam. Many marketing companies have started using this term extensively in their product and service offerings. And there’s a very valid reason why. Besides many benefits of marketing automation, one key reason that I can think of is that it’s one of the ways to solve the challenges posed in implementing an effective and an efficient Smarketing Solution. In this article, I’ll explain how.

There is a ton of material available on the Internet that explains what Marketing Automation is; If you’d like a simple, unbiased and a quick 5 minutes overview of Marketing Automation, I strongly suggest looking at these two videos posted by Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of Annuitas Group and Executive Director of the Marketing Automation Institute.

What’s the Difference Between Demand Generation and Lead Management?

How Marketing Automation Support Demand Generation & Lead Management

Thanks Lauren for sharing these great videos! Now let’s see how Marketing Automation can help in making your Smarketing Solution more efficient and effective.

Better Integration Between Marketing Campaigns and Sales CRM Systems

One of the main advantages of a good Marketing Automation Implementation is that it bridges the gap between marketing and sales. For instance, good Marketing Automation can help you seamlessly push leads generated via a marketing campaign into your sales CRM system. It can help you set up more targeted campaigns by picking up data from your sales CRM and see which leads are at which step on the sales cycle and push relevant targeted marketing content to them.

Better And Holistic Monitoring of Marketing & Sales Efforts

Another big advantage of implementing Marketing Automation in your company would be that it will help you get a better and a holistic snapshot of your marketing and sales efforts. This means you’ll not only know exactly how much you are spending on each of your campaign, but also which campaign is generating how much sales, and how your campaigns are helping up-sell your products.

Better Marketing & Sales Process Change Management

Making any Marketing & Sales Process effective is a continuous activity that often involves making changes to existing processes, business rules and sometimes even the technology and core infrastructure of the company. Marketing Automation will help you streamline your marketing and sales processes so that they can be easily changed and made more in line with the the changing needs of both the marketing and the sales teams. For instance, imagine asking your sales team to run a campaign where-in you’d like to offer a deal to your existing customers if they gave you some referrals. Many times such campaigns are hard to implement and even harder to track without making significant changes in existing marketing and sales processes. Marketing Automation can help in aligning your existing marketing and sales processes so that such marketing, sales, and lead generation efforts would be easily implementable, track-able, and easily changed as needed.

And so, as you can see, marketing automation helps bringing marketing and sales team closer to each other in a much more efficient and scalable manner; something that’s one of the key goals of smarketing.

It’s not new to see Sex and Nudity in Marketing Campaigns. Sometimes it works, sometimes it works very well! But sometimes it just terribly fails because the audience felt that the company “crossed the line”. In this article I will share with you some practical scenarios that have worked in the the past in favor of companies and the ones that have terribly failed. In the end we will draw conclusion and try to find where to draw the line when it comes to using Sex and Nudity in Marketing.

Zappos – More Than Shoes!

Around six months back, Zappos, one of the leading online shoe retailers (now owned by Amazon), started this campaign that really turned every-body’s heads and eyebrows. They had their models wear tiny bikinis and thongs and took their pictures at various key locations in Manhattan. Later on the bikinis and thongs were digitally edited to be replaced by censor bars with the text “More Than Shoes!”.

Source: http://blogs.zappos.com

The pictures caught attention and went viral on the Internet. But the story doesn’t end there. The Ad was run both in print media and online. In the online version, when the viewer clicked on the picture (perhaps in the hope to see its larger version or read more about the Ad), he/she was taken to Zappos where the “actual picture” was shown in which the models were wearing bikinis and thongs. The print media also tried to give similar experience by using QR Codes. When the visitor liked the Ad and wanted to learn more, he/she could simply scan the QR Code using their smart phone and was instantly taken to Zappos’s mobile website where the actual picture with relevant deals and promotion message was shown.

Source: http://blogs.zappos.com

I believe Zappos did a great job by identifying how far they should go with sex and nudity in advertising. Their Ad Campaign caught instant attention, it didn’t spoil the company’s image, and helped change their overall image as just an online shoe retailer.

Calvin Klein – Secret Obsession Perfume Ad

Around two years back Calvin Klein launched a new steamy Ad showing actress Eva Mendes writhing topless in bed. While Calvin Klein’s aim was to promote their perfume, the Ad nearly killed their product as many viewers found the Ad too sexual and vulgar for the most audience. What did Calvin Klein do wrong? I think the biggest mistake that Calvin Klein did in that campaign is not being able to focus on their real goal – that is conveying to the audience why they should buy the Secret Obsession Perfume.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

The Conclusion

1. It’s OK to use Sex and Nudity in Marketing as long as you keep your focus on the message, not the model.
2. Understand your target audience before using Sex and Nudity when marketing your product.
3. Remember that many people would just know you by your advertisements. They might not ever buy anything from you, but they’ll create an image of your company based on the kind of Ads they see. That’s called “building a brand”. If you choose to use Sex and Nudity in your Marketing, make it absolutely sure that it wouldn’t in any way impact your brand.

Where to draw the line when using Sex and Nudity in Marketing

Before I start this section, let me be frank. If it were that easy, then there wouldn’t have been any marketing blunders related to usage of Sex and Nudity in Marketing. The reason this happens is because it’s really hard to find that fine line. Your best bet would be to focus on your audience and your brand; start with a small focus group and get feedback from your close customers before you run the campaign. That will give you and idea where to draw the line. What do you think?

Google DFP, as we all (well… most of us) know, is the “Self Service” Ad platform by Google. It was originally called DART and was part of the suite of products by DoubleClick (the company that Google bought… uh… Of Course!). Unlike the Google AdSense service, with DFP, you as a publisher get full control over when, where and how your various Ads would be displayed. DFP comes as a hosted solution for small businesses and a fully in-house deploy-able solution for big corporations.

In this article, I’d like to share my thoughts on the basic essence of a product like Google DFP, and see if it’d make sense have something similar in Facebook. I’m very new to DFP though; so if you have some great thoughts, please feel free to pitch in!

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The Need For A “Self Service Ad Server”

There are several reasons why someone would want to host an in-house server and manage all his/her Ads through that instead of going with a hosted solution. One of the main reasons that come to my mind is the ability to store all the traffic data in-house. Many companies for example would be paranoid about Google acting as a middle man and storing all their website analytics on their cloud. While ellipsis AdNet does the same too, but the difference is that we give the traffic history back to the publisher.

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Another main reason why I think someone would want to host an in-house Ad Server is that when the traffic processed by the publisher is large enough to the point that it makes no sense for a third party like Google to route and manage it. Personally I feel that it isn’t true and the only justification I can see is that after all Google needs to make some money to keep the product running and keep themselves profitable. And after some point there is just not enough ROI and Google would rather have the publisher themselves take care of all the traffic in their data center. So this is another reason, which is perhaps imposed by the Ad Solution Provider and not the publisher.

Advertising on Facebook

Now let’s talk about advertising on Facebook. I think to better understand the philosophy of how advertising works on Facebook we’ll have to step back a little from our current discussion of DFP and Self Service Advertising and understand the concept of Internet Marketing in general. Let me start with this: The one thing that people forget when using Facebook or Google is that they “just another website” on the Internet. In other words, they are a “private property” on the Internet – and so is just about any other website. And thus, if you are “advertising on Facebook”, or for example “advertising on Google”, you are really advertising on “a website” – not really on the Internet!

Having said that how is Advertising on Facebook different from say Self Service Advertising? It’s pretty different. As you can imagine that when you Advertise on Facebook, Facebook owns the rights of all the artifacts. It’s their website, it’s their area. Yes, they do allows “loaning/leasing” portions of their website for advertising, but that doesn’t mean that the area is yours for ever.

I think this is the basic essence that many website publishers forget when using Facebook for monetizing via advertisements. For example, imagine a fan page on facebook that you have started and have been really successful building a good fan base. Now you’d want to “advertise” there and would like to monetize from it. But guess what. It’s not “your domain”. It’s still Facebook’s domain. Facebook is paying for all the servers and maintenance to make sure that your fan page remains live. And so they have all the right to control what kind of advertisements show up on your fan page (if any).

So the best model for advertising on Facebook that would work will be perhaps the one where in Facebook would collaborate with high traffic fan page owners and perhaps let them have share of the pie. I don’t think such a solution exists right now but that’s something that Facebook should think about (if they aren’t right now). Won’t that be pretty much similar to the “Google Content Network”? I believe so; perhaps its smaller version in some sense because Google Content Network pretty much spreads all over the Internet and allows third party domains to leverage Google and host Ads using their AdSense technology. I don’t think that is relevant to Facebook, because Facebook.com is Facebook’s property. The only way Facebook can perhaps make a “true Content Network” is probably by partnering up with other Social Media companies, but that’s a totally separate discussion.

Is “Self Service Advertising” possible in Facebook?

Now that we have understood the fact that when you are advertising on Facebook, you are really advertising on a private domain, and so Facebook has all the right to own every thing that is displayed there; the question is: Is “Self Service Advertising” possible in Facebook? I think the answer (based on the solution and the infrastructure that Facebook has right now) is No. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong! but I think that the only reason “Self Service Advertising” was introduced in this World was when there was a need to move the Ad hosting infrastructure to the publisher. This is typically done when the publisher is processing enormous amount of traffic (as discussed earlier). However, as we know, in case of Facebook, it doesn’t even make sense because you are not really moving out of the Facebook.com domain. What do you think?

A true “Google DFP Like Solution” for Facebok: How would it look?

While this discussion needs a whole lot of time, I think in a nutshell, if Facebook opens up its channels and provides APIs to easily integrate the World outside their domain (and I’m not talking about the OAuth Integration), there are several ways by which Facebook should be able to off load the enormous bandwidth that some of their fan pages must be eating up today, and provide some sort of “Self Service Platform” to their “premium publishers”. Of course such a technology solution doesn’t exist as of now and at the same time when it comes it’s going to change the way people look at “Self Service Ad Platforms”. Until then we’ll have to live with what we have!

There are over 100 social media networks in the World. Let's forget the bottom 97; and you are left with the two main networks that pretty much define the current social media landscape. Yes I'm talking about facebook and twitter. And now we have Google with the Google+ creeping into this landscape.

In this article I will show some of the examples of how the growing number of Social Media Networks is causing headache, confusion and (for lack of better terms) lot of wastage of money in marketing.

While I have some ideas of how this can be minimized, but hey, I'm no "guru" here. So if you have a better idea, please do share!

The "What Message Goes Where" Problem

The biggest problem that marketing managers face is that how do you figure out what message goes on which Social Media Network. Simply copying and pasting the same message on all the networks might not be the best idea. The reason is that all Social Networks have their own "theme" and if your actions are not in sync with that "theme", you are bound to fail on that network. Starbucks for example does a wonderful job in managing their facebook and twitter pages. They use facebook for mainly having their fans share their thoughts about the company and their coffee. While they use twitter to mainly spread information about various company promotions and events. This works perfectly because they fall in line with the basic them of these Social Networks. For example, facebook is perfect for sharing ideas between friends while twitter is perfect for sharing quick information and running viral campaigns. Starbucks surely understands this and uses both the Social Media Networks accordingly.

The Problem Of Finding The "Non-Followers"

Managing hundreds of thousands of comments in various Social Networks can become an involving activity. Due to this many companies end up just barely managing their own company pages and Social Media accounts. There are hardly any good solutions available right now that allow companies look around in other forums and groups in various Social Networks where people might be talking about anything negative about the company. In essence, the problem of managing the followers is so involving to solve that companies hardly get a chance to follow what the "non-followers" are saying about them. Unfortunately, there are no good solutions available to solve this problem. My best advise to solve this problem is to perhaps provide incentives to your "followers" so that if they find something negative going on about your company, they can be rewarded to inform you about such instances.

The Problem Of "Consolidated Reporting"

Twitter sends out a notification whenever a new person starts following you. facebook sends out weekly statistics about your Ad spending. Every Social Media Network has its own reporting mechanism. This creates a very annoying problem of reconciling and consolidating all these reports. As per my knowledge there are no good solutions to solve this problem. Most companies have their own home grown methods to reconcile and consolidate reports. Obviously this comes with its own associated costs and the problem of keeping up with ever changing reporting formats. Perhaps all Social Media Networks should come up with a common reporting format so that consolidated reporting solutions can be built on top of that.

These are obviously some of the problems of Social Media Marketing. What are your thoughts?

What do you see in the picture above? The article is about “Excess Skin After Weight Loss. The Ad on the header is from WeightWatchers. While the Ad on the side if from Febreze! While WeightWatchers Ad still makes sense to me, I can’t think of any reason why Febreze would want to advertise on this page!

In this article I’d like to take this above picture as an example and show how context sensitive advertising is great but when mixed with bid based advertising, it can go a little ugly.

Keyword Ranking and Keyword Bidding in Context Sensitive Advertising

Context Sensitive Advertising is heavily based on the the relevance of keywords associated with the Ad and the content on the page where the Ad is being shown. There are lot of algorithms to make this happen. But in essence, the logic is pretty much based on coming up with some way to rank the keywords associated with the Ad against the content on the page. So for example the keywords of a given Ad might rank higher on one page and lower on some other page.

But what happens when there are two advertisers with almost similar products and almost similar keywords? That’s where things become hard. The only way to decide whose Ad should show up is based on who would be willing to pay more for the Ad! And that’s when bidding comes handy.

Is Bidding the only justified method to resolve whose Ad should show up?

In my opinion, the answer is No. To me bid based advertising looks like a “short cut hack” to the actual problem. Instead of the system deciding which Ad should show up based on who is paying more, it should really be left to the content provider as to whose Ad should show up. Of course, the content provider might choose to pick the highest bidder, but in my experience most content providers are very protective about their content and what kind of Ad shows up on their blog or website. And so it would make more sense for the content provider to pick the right Ad.

How Content Provider can be given more control in Context Sensitive Advertising?

Unfortunately, there’s no easy method available right now. One method that comes to my mind is perhaps an open and transparent network of merchants and publishers who come together to collaborate with each other for the purpose of advertising.

OK so you have put together a brilliant team of techie folks who have huddled together and turned your great idea into reality. But when it comes to going out there and selling it, you realize how hard it is to make even a single sale. You think that the idea is so cool that it should sell all by itself! As every day passes by you start to realize how difficult it is to sell even the most brilliant idea; and you start envying those crappy products that make no sense to you but are supposedly selling just great!

That’s when you sit back and think what’s missing. Yes if you have been there, or are there, you know what I am talking about. I am talking about “The Marketing Plan”. OK, so now you know what’s missing. What have you done to solve this problem? Perhaps start coming up with a marketing plan; talk with few marketing agencies in your area? Or check out what has worked in the past.

But here’s the interesting problem. A marketing plan that worked in the past for some company that’s doing something similar to what you are doing, might not, and most probably will not work for you! What will make you crazy is the outrageous money you are going to spend in coming up with “that perfect marketing plan”; and to your surprise it won’t give the kind of results you were looking for! As long as your marketing efforts don’t recoil back and hit your image (God that would be a mess), you should take it positively and learn from it.

So how do you solve this problem? Well, the real answer to be frank is that you don’t solve it! You just don’t take it as a problem and don’t try to solve it! In other words, think outside the box. Think about who is going to use your product and how. Remember that story of a boy who, when asked about the benefits of a news paper, told that you can make a boat, a hat and a frog out of it?

A marketing plan doesn’t have to make sense to start with. Many great marketing plans evolve just like a great solution does. A great marketing plan is one that changes with time and morphs itself into what clings on in people’s minds. It might not make sense to start with, but eventually it will.

That doesn’t mean that if your plan it completely outrageous and bold it is going to be a definite hit! What it means is that dare to think outside the box. And try it out on a small scale to test the waters so to say. Don’t throw your current idea down the drain. A great marketing plan always morphs. If you completely change it you are throwing out a message “I messed up” or even worst “I didn’t know what the heck I was doing”. That’s one message you shouldn’t be conveying. A morphing message would convey “Hey what I wanted to say means this too!”.

Have you tried to go out of the box and came up with a marketing plan that didn’t make sense but then eventually took off and everyone said “I kind of knew it’s going to rock the first time you told me…”.

Happy Marketing!

After three attempts, and self learning, I seemed to have found the Twitter Recipe that works for me. And I am going to share some of it with you today. I could have shared it all but then, to be frank, most of it is philosophy; and will perhaps take lot of time and wine sessions to fully throw over the table.

Twitter has definitely proven to be a true viral news platform. The 140 characters limitation enforces the originator of the news to be precise and concise. Sharing the information is as simple as a “one click” re-tweet! I don’t think it can get simpler than that! Anyways; This article is not about what Twitter can and cannot do. It’s about the people who use twitter. It’s about the people like you and me who either follow or have followers and are using Twitter mainly as a channel to spread and share knowledge.

One of the main things that I found on Twitter is that many people just blindly follow. Heck, many “people” on Twitter aren’t even “real people”! Many are just apps and bots that are constantly sniffing for material that their “masters” have programmed them for! When you see 10,000 followers in your Twitter profile and realize that 8000 of them are just apps and bots, believe me the “social” angle just goes down the drain.

So I think what matters on Twitter is not how many people are following you, but rather how many people are you following! When you follow someone or some feed, do you follow it because the material amuses you? gives you peace and harmony? makes you laugh? makes you think? I take Twitter just like any other channel of information. Just like today on my TV I have 100s of channels that I am subscribed to and I watch based on what I want to; I think the same philosophy goes for Twitter.

That brings the discussion to the point that when you follow someone on Twitter, are you really following them to increase your user base hoping that bots and other random people would see that and start following you? Or are you following them because you genuinely like what they say? It might not be the matter of whether or not you actually truly “believe” in what they say; However the question is really about the real reason behind your action of following other people on Twitter.

I believe that once you carefully start looking at it and selectively pick the people and feeds that you believe to some extent and think are useful sources of information, Twitter will be more beneficial for you. Twitter is not about increasing number of followers; It’s about enjoying the information that you love and believe in, and sharing that information with others who you think believe in you and love reading your material!

Or is it just the Friday / Weekend Fever kicking in me? What do you think?

Happy Friday!
GT

Online Advertising has become part of our lives. I say “our” by pointing to the people like you and me who make use of computer and the Internet for living. And so, we like it or not, we have to deal with the daily spams, the flashing pop ups, the ridiculous Google Ads and the many other forms of Ads that don’t stop to amaze me every now and then. Every time I think I have seen it all, a yet another form of online advertising amazes me! In this topic I wanted to cover how transparent these online advertising programs are.

What is Transparency in Online Advertising?

First let’s have a common definition about this so that there are no issues later on. To me, “transparency” in online advertising is a three fold matter. Because there are really three parties involved in any form of online advertising (well for that matter in any form of advertising).

a. The merchant – who wants to advertise a product or a service

The online advertising system should be transparent for the merchant. It should show where the merchant’s Ad is being displayed and who is viewing it etc. The system should be transparent for the merchant in all respects possible. After all the merchant is the one who is paying for all the advertising effort to start with.

b. The publisher – who displays the merchant’s Ad

The online advertising system should be transparent for the publisher too. It should show not only show what the publisher is earning from the merchant, but also what kind of visitors are clicking on the Ads. It should provide a mechanism for the publisher to negotiate better rates and advertising schedules for the benefit of both parties. It should also be flexible and simple for the publisher to get the maximum out of his/her online real estate (i.e. website, blog, forum, etc.).

c. The website visitor (last but not the least)

Last but not the least, the online advertising system should be transparent to the visitor. It should clearly help the visitor distinguish between a paid advertisement and a legitimate article or information. It should also be as non-intrusive as possible so that the visitor’s attention is not diverted from the actual task he/she is doing.

Now let’s look at some of the most successful online advertising platforms and put them to our “transparency” test.

Google AdWords + AdSense = Great Experience but Not Transparent Enough

The Google AdWords product creates a “near transparent” experience for the merchants by providing them as much visitor analytics as possible. However it’s no where close when it comes to providing information about who is displaying the Ad, etc. It doesn’t allow the merchant to directly talk with the publishers and build a relationship that w0uld benefit both parties. Well, in some sense it does provide some clarity by showing from which domain the hits are coming, but the payments and the contractual obligations are still pretty much controlled by Google.

Google AdSense is a great product for publishers who want to monetize from their online real estate by advertising. However, once again, Google does a terrible job in keeping the communication channel between the merchant and the publisher. To some extent, it seems that Google has done this deliberately so that they can secure the major portion of the pie (perhaps that’s how Google makes it’s billions in every quarter! – shame on the merchants and publishers who refuse to use Google even after being so opaque in providing information that both the parties deserve).

Talking about visitors, Google has done a decent job in showing the “Paid Ad” caption at most places. But that’s all that the visitors get. Google’s policies are still pretty much open and things like not displaying pop up Ads, etc. is totally out of Google’s hands. I don’t think Google is to blame in this case, but I do think that given the infrastructure and trust (and not to mention the least – the profit margins) that Google has built, if they can’t do this who else can!

Bing and Others

I feel sad to put “The Great Bing” (pun intended) along with all other search engines who are in the race against Google. To be frank, almost all of them suck. I have used five of them and I know why Google has been able to rule the online advertising market. The answer is very simple actually. And it is that others suck so big time! It’s unbelievable! Companies like Microsoft and Yahoo who already had the resources couldn’t come close! Not even now! And that’s just terrible to say the least.

So where are we headed? Will Online Advertising Ever Be Transparent?

To be frank, I am not sure. I think we at ellipsis AdNet, are trying to keep it as transparent as possible. Of course due to that we are not making that much money; hell, we are not making anything! But then isn’t “advertising” about letting new products grow? Isn’t it about sharing new ideas with the public? Or is it always about hiding the truth? And trying to fool the consumers?

You Decide! Do you want to join hands with us? Or still keep on giving the “middle man” your fair share of the pie?

If you own a blog or a website and are providing some space for advertisements you probably know Google AdSense very well (or at least to some extent). Google AdSense started creeping up into Facebook pages back in 2008. In around 2009 (or perhaps 2010) Facebook took several actions to stop that so that they could retain the “portion of the pie”. The end result was “Facebook Ads Promotion” – A “affiliate marketing” type solution from major affiliate marketing platforms Azoogle Ads and Neverblue Ads. Using these platforms users are able to advertise third party products on their Facebook owned pages (walls, apps, etc.).

It’s hard to compare both the advertising platforms because Google truly focuses on the “raw online traffic”, and Facebook is really all about “social traffic”. However, since the end goal of both the solutions is pretty much the same, I have tried here to compare both these models and see which model would make more sense where.

Google AdSense and Facebook Ads Promotion are Fundamentally Different Methods of Monetizing From Your Online Real Estate

Google AdSense makes the whole experience of monetizing from a website pretty much transparent for the user. You simply select the kind of area you’d like to use and throw in a javascript code where ever you want Google to do it’s magic and display the Ads and you are all set. From there on Google AdSense takes over and shows context sensitive Ads based on the content on the page. On the other hand, if you want to monetize from your Facebook pages, you’ll have to open a publisher account at Azoogle or Neverblue or any of the Facebook preferred affiliate partners. You then select the Ads you’d want to display. It’s a bit more involving and gives you a more of “simplified version” of “commission junction” or “click bank”.

Which Method Works Better Depends on Who You Are!

Which method works better really depends on You! If you have an established website with focused content and lot of visitors, you are probably using AdSense already and are reaping its benefits. If you are relatively new in the game and got introduced to the online world during the 2007-2008 time period (perhaps you just ventured into your first online business), and perhaps you focused more on building your footprint on social networks like Facebook, twitter, etc. then Facebook Ads Promotion might work great for you!

It’s not just about the timing. If your content is more interactive and social and you are very active on Facebook, you’d want to spend time to make that monetize rather than spending time and effort to make a website more popular, indexed, etc.

Another difference that I can think of is the whole “SEO planning” that you have to do in the “traditional” website development and marketing paradigm. With Facebook, it’s pretty much back to the “word of mouth” approach where in you try to get as many fans as possible. And the story doesn’t end just there. You need to have content and discussions that keep your wall live. Since people don’t go to Facebook to “search” things, the whole “SEO” thing doesn’t make much of a sense. That’s a big plus for people who are afraid of SEO and know how to do “word of mouth” better.

That’s all about for today. Was this article useful? Please don’t forget to share it with others!

Happy Friday!

GT

Article Marketing is one of the proven techniques of spreading the word about a product or a service. There are so many variants of this concept that are available that it can easily span into a full book. You can have someone write articles about a product, write reviews, feature comparisons and what not. At the end of the day, the technique is pretty much simple. You or someone writes articles about your product or service. Articles are circulated across to target readers. But wait. What about “effectiveness”?

What is “effectiveness” in Article Marketing?

The answer to this question pretty much differentiates the “pro” marketing managers from the “not so pro” ones. Everyone can run an article marketing campaign. But then how many campaigns actually help you track the effectiveness of your article marketing effort? For that matter how do you even measure it in the article marketing scenario? Here’s what I think can be measured:

A. How much traffic are the articles bringing to you?

You can measure the traffic coming from articles by checking your website analytics reports. But then what about the articles that were distributed in print format during a conferences? What about those pdf’s that you emailed your target audience? To be able to find the true effectiveness of any article marketing campaign, you need to take into account all the channels that you will be using to spread your articles and a closed loop mechanism that allows you to track exactly how much traffic you are able to generate from your article.

B. How much is it costing you to run the campaign?

Good article writing can cost you some good amount of money. Be it in-house, or out sourced, the articles you write need to be quantified in terms of how much is it costing you either on weekly or daily basis or on per article basis.

C. Is it all worth it?

Once you can clearly identify how much traffic your articles are generating and how much is it costing to write articles you can find the “true cost per click” that’s coming from the article you just spread to your target audience.

This simple case study shows how companies are already doing this using ellipsis AdNet: http://apps.ellipsissolutions.com/adnet/article-marketing.pdf

Comments and Thoughts are Welcome!