Trust the agency’s expertise, but share all of yours

It seems terribly self-serving to start with this point, but it’s true. The reason a client comes to an agency should not be solely about knowledge in implementation, but about our expertise in delivering a sound strategy too. We can’t stress this point enough. No matter whether you were a digital marketing expert 6 months ago or whether you’ve never run a digital campaign in your life – trust the experts with the strategy, but have blind faith in their tactics.
The online marketing scenario changes daily, and a good digital marketing agency reads up about the industry obsessively. If you want to be ahead of the curve, then trust their knowledge, but make sure you brief them well. We might know a hell of a lot about online marketing, but you need to teach us all there is to know about your industry, your audience and your objectives.

Always “start with why”

Simon Sinek coined the term globally, but we’ve been saying it (in a slightly different context) before we heard of him (yeah, we’re hipsters that way). Hubspot have a great article about applying “Start with why” to marketing but we also like to apply starting with why to our briefing process.
So ask yourself (and tell us): Why do I want to run this campaign? What is it that is driving you to come to an agency to run a digital campaign? This is different to defining the campaign goals – we’re not after whether you want more leads or more impressions, we’re after the reason that drove you to start working on a brief and put money behind the campaign, specifically online.
Also ask yourself why you’re going to an agency, and what you hope to achieve by working with one.

Define goals

Once you’ve understood why you’re going to start an online project, be it a campaign or a solution, then it’s time to start defining your goals. Painting a clear picture of what you hope to achieve from the exercise will help the agency understand better what you will be judging their performance on.
Goals can vary greatly based on the type of job you’ll be giving your agency, but make sure you take the time to sit down and discuss whether your targets are realistic and whether they make business sense at the end of the day. It might be very fancy to say I want to reach 1,000 Facebook likes by the end of the month – but if you’re marketing a product that is bought by enterprise-level CEOs, then that might not be the right goal to be aiming for at this point in time.

Define audience

Which brings us to the audience. As I stated earlier, we know our stuff, but you know your stuff better. So tell us who your ideal target audience is, and we’ll go after them like a heat-seeking missile.
Be very clear when communicating this though, and let us know whether this audience is the one that will naturally be attracted to your product or service, or whether it is a new market that you would like to tap into. Both goals can be achieved, but they need very different approaches.

Be clear about budgets

“Online marketing is free, though, right?” Erm. No. “But I know how to boost posts on Facebook, so I can handle it myself, right?” Erm. No. We usually point our customers in the direction of my micro introduction to online advertising (and part 2) at this Online marketing, when managed correctly, offers a phenomenal return on investment, but it’s far from free.
So next time you’re looking for a digital marketing provider, set a budget for your campaigns. If you’re lost, get in touch with one and you can get a list of suggestions. Don’t make one mistake, however. Don’t come to an agency like ours and define the amount of “airtime” spend vs agency fees (we’ve had this happen to us, really). Any self-respecting agency will show you the door. If you’re used to spending 10% of your “airtime” on production fees for something like TV or print, then think again.
A TV ad is filmed once and shown repeatedly, so whether you show it once or a 100 times, there is only one contract to be negotiated and signed. You’re done in a few hours and you see the commission rolling in every time the ad is shown.
Digital ad campaigns are very different. They take constant monitoring and tweaking and need to be reported on regularly. And that’s just advertising. If you want to see your ROI shoot up you should be working on an inbound marketing strategy – ratios there would usually be closer to 80:20 (fees:ad spend), but your return on investment will usually go up by about 60%. Remember, it’s not who you spend your money with that counts, it’s what you get out of it.

Tell us what you love

Okay, so I already said you should not dictate strategy, but hey, this does not mean I don’t want to hear your side of the story. Digital marketing is human after all, and we need to communicate your story in a way that reflects your (and your brand’s) personality.
If you’re after a development project, then it is far more important for you to tell us what other sites you like using and what the market leaders in your field are doing. If you can, also tell us why you love what you love – tell us why you think a particular site is working.

Tell us what you hate

This is just as important. We don’t want to offend anyone with our efforts, and we sure as hell don’t want to have an irate customer on our hands because we designed a site in a way that does not work for them.
Just as crucially, you should be in a perfect position to tell us what your customers hate. So tell us, and tell us at this not after we’ve spent three weeks coming up with a creative concept. Remember, at this stage marketing transcends political correctness. So if you have an audience that would go better with a particular minority or would have a great problem with another one, let us know now and we’ll keep it in mind.

Tell us what to keep in mind

Sometimes clients also have wild-cards. They have agreements with personalities, they have brands they can’t compete with or others they have to compete with, suppliers they have to use (or avoid) etc. Let us know about these as early as possible.
This can change the way a campaign or project goes drastically, so it is imperative that we know before we work on it. So if your e-commerce site needs to plug into your cash register – give us the brand at brief stage so we can look into the technology that will join them together now, not a week before we launch the site.

Finally

Remember: “If you fail to communicate, you’re communicating failure”, goes the oft-quoted mantra. Which is why there is no surer road to creative failure than a miscommunicated and subsequently misunderstood job.
Take your time to come up with the best brief possible and you will be sure to reap the rewards at the end of the campaign. You’ll also have a happier agency – and hey, we’re human too 🙂

The post Your Guide to Writing a Digital Brief – The Intro Series appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

Doing things digitally

Before we started promoting the brand, we needed to lay the groundwork for the campaign. The brand had zero online presence in the local market, and we needed to fix that. We first built a responsive, one-page microsite for Duo Délice – a flexible modular platform that can easily shift around to house the different campaigns we had planned for the months, and potentially years, to come.
Once the site was live, we turned our attention to building a local Facebook community. The new page provided an ideal platform for customers and competition participants to post any questions or comments about the site, the contests or the products themselves. Once everything was in place, it was time for the first campaign to kick off.

The June Campaign: Not your average Selfie Competition

You read that right – we hosted a selfie competition for dogs! Well, not actual selfies, but you knew that already. The idea stemmed from the Duo Délice brand itself – it’s a product that is luxurious, yet not exclusive.
Every dog can be a Duo Délice dog, and we wanted to drive that point home by encouraging loving dog owners to upload photos of their favourite pooch to the site for a chance to win the grand prize: a year’s supply of Duo Délice and the opportunity for their dog to star in the next brand campaign. Everyone had an equal shot at winning the grand prize – all you had to do was submit a photo and lobby for as many votes as possible through the microsite itself.

One thing’s for certain: We never thought we’d receive 219 entries within 2 weeks alone. Once the voting opened, engagement skyrocketed both on Facebook and on the website – 8,181 votes were cast on the site alone, which is significant when you consider that each user could only vote for each dog once. After a few weeks of tight competition and heated voting, Harley was announced as the clear winner.

The October Campaign: Grab your free bag of Duo Délice

The next step was to put a number of small sample bags that were available to good use. And what better way to promote pet food than to let the pets try it for themselves? A new section of the site was installed to allow interested pet owners to subscribe to the offer.
Before we knew it, there were over 700 hungry doggies that were one step closer to tasting deliciousness. To sweeten the deal, everyone who signed up to receive a free bag also received a surprise voucher for 10% off their next Duo Délice purchase!

Results

Practically every dog owner on the island was targeted with Duo Délice promotions at some point during 2014, so brand awareness has been firmly ticked off our to-do list.
Just over 1000 dog owners actively participated in the two campaigns, and a few thousand others engaged with the campaign to help their favourite pets win the grand prize over Summer.
Around 700 owners have sampled the product (or rather, their pets have), and that will definitely translate into increased sales from a number of new, happy customers over the coming months and years.
All in all, it was just the type of project we like to work on: An interesting blend of web development and digital marketing strategy, with a few furry friends thrown in to make us feel all warm and fuzzy as we go about our workday.
Many happy customers + many happy dogs + one very happy client = A very happy Switch!

The post Client Spotlight: Nestlé Purina Pro Plan Duo Délice appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.

How’s that for some serious PR?

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Does this mean there’s no room for creativity and skill? On the contrary, driving online sales and leads is pretty far from marketing by numbers.

Each campaign needs new creative, new copy, new design and new coding. Every time you wish to test, you need to come up with two (or more) variants of one of the elements and test it accordingly, and you’d have to go through thousands of iterations before you arrived where you need to.

The different iterations are usually slight tweaks to a great and well-thought out campaign: change the colour of a button here, add a word there or remove a field in this form here. Then test, measure, change and move on to the next element.

Any decent online marketer should be obsessed with one thing: conversions. How many people out there can we convert into relationships? How many relationships can we convert into leads? How many leads are we converting into sales?

So what goes into the perfect online campaign? What are the elements top web designers look out for when building a campaign that will convert?

Stunning visuals

First impressions count wherever you are, but online they make or break campaigns. It is so easy to dismiss a mailer that you don’t like that unless the design is immediately captivating, there is a very high chance that it will be closed away and forgotten in seconds.

With online designs, you can’t rely on the physical aspect of your design – there is no expensive paper to woo prospects, no fancy cutter to intrigue them, it all boils down to the quality of the artwork you (or your agency) can come up with.

Clear message

Beautiful design is nothing without strong copy. You can’t afford to have copy that is not aimed at converting with such a short attention span at your disposal. The only way to convert is to have a message that is clear, concise and to the point.

Show your product or service’s benefits. Make it seem like an obvious choice for punters. Do not lose them in long and winding descriptions and long words. This is not a literary competition – if you like long and complicated words, keep them for when you play scrabble with your friends.

Fewer calls to action

Even if you nail the copy, things can still go awry. Keep it simple, do not try to sell all your products and services at once. It is good to show people that you have variety, but you have to make their next step a no-brainer, and in order to achieve this you should minimise the number of calls to action you have in any online campaign.

This should be a direct consequence of your campaign planning process, during which you should have decided what it is you want your online effort to achieve. If you set out to increase the sales of tablets, don’t confuse your customers by telling them that you also sell computers, laptops, keyboards, mice, printers, consumables, oh – and we also sell mice mats.

Ease of use

You have a perfect campaign, people like it as soon as they land on the page or open the email. They read the copy and seem interested in your product. They click through the strong call to action to buy your product but then boom, they are faced with a form that has 30 fields in it.

You’re asking them to give you their ID card number. You want to know what their grandmother earned in 1936. Once you’ve convinced people to take action you have to make it as easy as possible, so keep forms and steps needed to an absolute minimum. You can always gather more data after you’ve converted the client.

At the end of the day, the perfect online marketing campaign boils down to one thing – how compelling you make it for people out there to take the action you want them to. Put yourself in their shoes and see what they’d want, not what you’d like to flaunt. Online marketing campaigns can be scary at first, but get in there, aim at converting well and you will see your return on investment soar.

The post Designing the ultimate online marketing campaign appeared first on Switch - Digital & Brand.