Transcript Lecture 27x

Lecture 27
E-Marketing
Social Media
Online Partnerships
Instructor: Hanniya Abid
Assistant Professor
COMSATS Institutue of Information Technology
Objectives
In today’s lecture we will,
 Summarize Social Media Marketing
 After this lecture you will be able to know about
 Online partnerships
 Types of online partnerships
Increase sales to existing customers
Applying social media to increase sales to existing customers
centres on developing your customer communications strategy to
encourage more social interactions on your site and on your social
outposts.
As with all communications strategies this will cover:
 Your objectives
 Your target audiences
 Value to be offered through content and offers
 Integration of communications
Enhance customer service
Through improving customer service social media is not a major
focus of this guide since we focus on communications that
directly increase sales through reaching or converting more of
an audience.
 Social listening to identify customers requiring service
 Outreach to answer customer questions or resolve problems
 Using service to improve product and service offerings
 Management of a company’s own service forums or other
service platforms like Get Satisfaction
Harness insights to develop the brand
using SMO
This is optimization! Thinking from the customer
perspective, SMO is about making brand interactions easier.
That’s easier to:
 Discover
 Interact
 Share
 Return to through time
 Lead to purchase
Transforming your business
How you will make the change needed happen. ?
To help manage change, these are some key areas of
delivering this transformation we have seen in companies
we have worked with and advised:
1. Set scope for social media activities to communicate
to staff.
2. Review social media capabilities and priorities.
3. Governance: define who is responsible for social
media.
4. Review brand personality and vision.
Transforming your business
 Governance - who is responsible for our social media
 Strategy – We have this covered through.
 Structure - is a separate team (or resource) in a smaller
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company needed?
Shared Values - how are cultural shifts shared?
Skills - Are new team skills required?
Style - Change to organization culture?
Staff - Change in roles?
Systems - are new ways of working, new processes
required?
Transforming your business
 Having the right evaluation and monitoring tools and using
them is also a key transformation success factor which relates
to systems, skills and staff.
 US-based social media consultant Olivier Blanchard (The
Brand Builder) recommends that social media management
must be designed to plug into all business functions from
market research to customer service so that they each have a
role.
Transforming your business
There does need to be a single point of control of the
strategy and resources for managing activities, but there
should be clear goals and responsibilities for social media
marketing for each team:
 Sales
 Customer Support
 Human Resources
 Public Relations
 Marketing
Other Social Media Governance Policies
Key areas to ensure are covered as part of your Social Media
Governance policy:
1.Training & Education
2. Do’s & Don’ts
3. Brand Guidelines
4. Reviewing brand personality and vision
Summary
 We reviewed these social media marketing activities
which will together for strategy for social media
marketing
 Listen and manage reputation
 Transform the brand through social media
 Approaches to acquire new customers
 Approaches to increase sales to existing customers
 Approaches to deliver customer service
Online Partnerships
Partnerships are an important part of today ’s
marketing mix.
 The same is true online. Resources must be devoted
to managing your online partners.
 Many large organizations have specific staff to
manage these relationships. In smaller organizations
it is often neglected – a big missed opportunity.
Types Of Online Partnerships
 There are three key types of online partnerships that
need to be managed:
 Link-building,
 Affiliate marketing and
 Online sponsorship.
 All should involve a structured approach to
managing links through to your site
Link-building
 Link building is a key activity for search engine
optimization. It ’s simple logic! More quality links
from relevant sites mean more quality visitors and
more marketing outcomes.
 Checklist of six best practice approaches to link-
building:
Link-building
1 Achieve natural link-building through quality
content – Through creating ‘ must-have ’
resources and guides and using social bookmark tools
such as www.addthis.com to encourage visitors to
bookmark these documents creates inbound links from
sources such as Delicious.
2 Request inbound-only or one-way links from
partners or through running a link-building
campaign.
Link-building
3 Reciprocal linking – Reciprocal links are agreed
between yourself and another organization.
These are less valuable than one-way links, but from
trusted sources are usually better than no links at all. Use
the Yahoo Site Explorer (
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com ) to identify
potential link partners by assessing your own or rival
sites.
Link-building
4 Buying links – Directories and link
purchase exchanges (these are not
recommended
since such sites are widely believed to be
penalized by Google when identified). However,
Google is unlikely to be able to identify
agreements between site owners . . .
Link-building
5 Creating your own external links – On blogs and
in community forums – not typically successful
since many forums have introduced an attribute tag on
outbound links known as rel ‘nofollow ’ which means
that the search engine can potentially ignore these links.
6 Generating buzz through PR – Optimize and
distribute your press releases or create articles
which contain links back to your site which can be
syndicated to third-party sites.
Link-building
5 Creating your own external links – On blogs and
in community forums – not typically successful
since many forums have introduced an attribute tag on
outbound links known as rel ‘nofollow ’ which means
that the search engine can potentially ignore these links.
6 Generating buzz through PR – Optimize and
distribute your press releases or create articles
which contain links back to your site which can be
syndicated to third-party sites.
Affiliate Marketing
 Affiliate marketing is the ultimate form of
marketing communications since it ’s payperperformance – it ’s a commission-based
arrangement where the merchant only pays when
they make the sale or get a lead.
Affiliate Marketing
 Compare this to the wastage with traditional advertising
or direct mail!
 It can also drive a volume of business in a range of
sectors – many banks, travel companies or online
retailers get more than 10% of their sales from a wellrun affiliate marketing programme. It ’s not so suitable
though for business products or lower priced consumer
products since it won ’ t be sufficiently profitable for the
affiliates.
Affiliate Marketing
 The affiliate marketing model (note that the tracking
software and fee payment may be managed through an
independent affiliate network manager)
Affiliate Marketing
 To manage the process of finding affiliates, updating
product information, tracking clicks and making
payments, many companies use an affiliate network
or affiliate manager such as Commission
Junction ( www.cj.com )
Affiliate Marketing
 Since the affiliate network takes a cut on each sale, many
merchants also try to set up separate relationships with
preferred affiliates often known as ‘ super affiliates ’ .
 Many of the benefits of affiliate marketing are closely
related to search engine marketing since affiliates are
often expert at deploying SEO or PPC to gain visibility
in the natural search results. The main benefits of affiliate
marketing are:
Affiliate Marketing
● Gain more visibility in the paid and natural listings of the
SERPs (increase ‘ share of search ’ ).
● Can use different affiliates to target different audiences,
product categories and related phrases.
● Affiliates may be more responsive than your in-house or
agency terms in terms of algorithm changes for SEO or
changes in bidding approaches for PPC.
For example, they may be quicker at advertising on new
products, or may use keyphrase variants that you haven’ t
considered.
Affiliate Marketing
● Enables you to reach customers on generic phrases (e.g. ‘
clothing ’ ) at a relatively low cost if the affiliates secure
better positions in natural listings.
● Increase the reach of your brand or campaign since
affiliate ads and links featuring you will be displayed on
third-party sites.
Affiliate Marketing
● Can be used to generate awareness of brand or new
products for which a company isn’ t well known.
● Use of affiliates reduces the risk caused by temporary or
more fundamental problems with your SEM
management.
● Pay per performance – the costs of acquisition can be
controlled well.
Affiliate Marketing
 But there are substantial disadvanrages to an affiliate
marketing programme which arise from the fact that
your affiliates are mainly motivated by money.
 It follows that some of them may use unethical
techniques to increase their revenue. Potential
disadvantages are:
Affiliate Marketing
● Incremental profit or sales may be limited.
●Affiliates may exploit your brand name.This is particularly the
case where affiliates exploit brand names by bidding on
variations of it (for example ‘ Dell ’ , ‘Dell Computers ’
or ‘ Dell laptop ’ ) or by gaining a presence in the natural
listings.
Here there is already awareness. It is important to
prevent this and many affiliate programmes exclude
brand bidding although affiliates can have a role in
displacing competitors from the listings for brand terms.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliates may exploit your brand name.
 This is particularly the case where affiliates exploit brand
names by bidding on variations of it (for example ‘ Dell ’
, ‘Dell Computers ’ or ‘ Dell laptop ’ ) or by gaining a
presence in the natural listings.
 Here there is already awareness. It is important to
prevent this and many affiliate programmes exclude
brand bidding although affiliates can have a role in
displacing competitors from the listings for brand terms.
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Affiliate Marketing
● May damage brand reputation.Your ads may be displayed
on sites inconsistent
● Programme management fees. If using an affiliate
network to manage your campaigns they may take up to
30% of each agreed affiliate commission as additional
‘network overridge ’ .
● Programme management time. Affiliate marketing is
found on forming and maintaining good relationships.
This cannot be done through the agency alone –
marketers within a company need to speak to their top
affiliates.
Affiliate Marketing
 Online marketers also need to be selective in choosing
the right forms of affiliate marketing – not all may be
desirable. These are the options of affiliate marketing
models for you to consider.
1 Aggregators – These are the big comparison, sites
like Kelkoo, Shopzilla and MoneySupermarket. These
aren ’t strictly affiliates since most charge per click, but
Google, Product Search (formerly Froogle) is a free
option and you should definitely consider creating a
product feed for some of these comparison sites.
Affiliate Marketing
2 Review sites –You ’ll know the CNet reviews or maybe
startups like Reevoo or Review Centre. These all link to
merchants based on cost per click or cost per acquisition
deals.
3 Rewards sites –With names like GreasyPalm or QuidCo
you get the idea. These split the commission between the
reward site and their visitors.
Affiliate Marketing
4 Voucher code sites – MyVoucherCodes or Hot UK Deals
are typical. If you have some great deals to entice first
time shoppers you should generate business, although
many search by well-known brand.
5 Uber-bloggers – Martin Lewis ’s MoneySavingExpert.com is an
incredibly popular site due to his PR efforts and great
content. Although he has no ads, he is an affiliate for
many sites he recommends
Affiliate Marketing
6 Everyone else – They don ’t tend to be high
volume super-affiliates like all the above, but
they ’ re collectively important and you can work them
via affiliate networks like Commission
Junction or Tradedoubler. They often specialize in SEO
or PPC. Don ’t expect this option to be easy since
affiliates often only promote a few well-known
merchants who maximize their Earnings Per 1000 Clicks
(EPC).
Online sponsorship
 Online sponsorship is not straightforward. It ’s
not just a case of mirroring existing ‘real world’
sponsorship arrangements in the ‘virtual world ’.
 There are many additional opportunities for
sponsorship online which can be sought out, even if
you don ’t have a big budget at your disposal.
Online Sponsorship
 Ryan and Whiteman (2000) define online
sponsorship as:
‘ the linking of a brand with related content or
context for the purpose of creating brand awareness
and strengthening brand appeal in a form that is
clearly distinguishable from a banner, button or other
standardized ad unit ’ .
Online Sponsorship
 For the advertiser, online sponsorship has the benefit that
their name is associated with an online brand that the site
visitor is already familiar with.
 So, for users of the ISP Wanadoo, with whom they are
familiar, sponsorship builds on this existing relationship
and trust. Closely related is online ‘ co-branding ’ where
there is an association between two brands.
Online Sponsorship
 Paid-for sponsorship of another site, or part of it,
especially a portal for an extended period, is another
way to develop permanent links. Co-branding is a lowercost method of sponsorship and can exploit synergies
between different companies.
 Sponsorship does not have to directly drive visitors to a
brand site – it may be more effective if interaction
occurs on the media owner’s microsite.
Summary
 We reviewed three key types of online partnerships:
1 Link-building; obtaining links from third-party sites
to a company site. This should be performed in a
structured manner to maximize visitors from third-party
sites and to help increase page rank within Google.
2 Affiliate marketing; a commission-based
arrangement where referring sites are paid a fee for
sales, leads or visitors. It is potentially a large source of
quality traffic for e-retailers.
3 Online sponsorship; a long-term arrangement to
associate a brand with a site, or part of a site.
The last thing for your to do…
 Explore:
 www.a4uforum.co.uk. Used by affiliates to discuss
appraoches and compare programmes.
 IAB’s Affiliate Marketing guide
Opt-in email
 Savvy e-marketers understand that opt-in e-mail is a powerful
online communications tool. As with direct mail it is most widely
used for direct response, but e-newsletters in particular can also achieve
branding objectives. It enables a targeted message to be pushed out to a
customer to inform and remind and they are certain to view at least the
subject line within
 their e-mail inbox, even if it is only to delete it. Contrast this with the
web – a pull medium where customers will only visit your site if there is
a reason or a prompt to do this. But there is a problem; in the minds of
many Internet users, e-mail is evil. It is SPAM, unsolicited e-mail sent
by unscrupulous traders. Some say SPAM stands for ‘Sending Persistent
 Annoying E-mail ’, but it actually originates from the Monty Python
sketch. Remember that SPAM is now outlawed in many countries
 To achieve the potential benefits of opt-in e-mail, marketers should take careful
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measures to
avoid SPAM. This section explains how to achieve this.
Opt-in is the key to successful e-mail marketing. Customer choice is the watchword.
Before
starting an e-mail dialogue with customers, companies must ask them to provide their
e-mail address and then give them the option of ‘opting into ’ further communications
and
selecting their communications preferences, for example the frequency of e-mail and
type of
content. Privacy law in many countries requires that they should proactively opt-in by
checking
a box (showing consent in some way). E-mail lists can also be rented where customers
have opted in to receive e-mail.
Opt-in e-mail options for customer
acquisition
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For acquiring new visitors and customers to a site, there are three main options for e-mail
marketing. From the point of view of the recipient, these are:
1 Cold e-mail campaign. In this case, the recipient receives an opt-in e-mail from an
organization
who has rented an e-mail list from a consumer e-mail list provider such as Experian
( www.experian.com ), Claritas ( www.claritas.com ), IPT Limited ( www.myoffers.co.uk ) or
a business e-mail list provider such as Mardev ( www.mardev.com ), Corpdata ( www.corpdata.
com) or trade publishers/event providers such as VNU. Although they have agreed
to receive offers by e-mail, the e-mail is effectively cold. For example, a credit card provider
could send a cold e-mail to a list member who is not currently their member. It is
important to use some form of ‘ statement of origination ’ otherwise the message may be
considered SPAM. Cold e-mails tend to have higher CPAs than other forms of online marketing,
but different lists should still be evaluated.
 Co-branded e-mail. Here, the recipient receives an e-mail with an offer from a company
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they
have a reasonably strong affinity with. For example, the same credit card
company could
partner with a mobile service provider such as Vodafone and send out the offer
to their
customer (who has opted-in to receive e-mails from third-parties). Although
this can be
considered a form of cold e-mail, it is warmer since there is a stronger
relationship with
one of the brands and the subject line and creative will refer to both brands.
Co-branded
e-mails tend to be more responsive than cold e-mails to rented lists since the
relationship
exists and fewer offers tend to be given.
Opt-in e-mail options for customer
retention
 For most organizations, e-mail marketing is most powerful
for developing relationships with
 customers as part of e-CRM. We explore options for using email marketing to build relationships
 with customers through Chapter 8 and specifically in Section
8.5.