Creating success
Andrew Antoniou, marketing consultant with digital services company, Spike, says all of the successful online brands such as Amazon.com, eBay, and others have used a combination of media to promote their sites.
They have used offline promotions which have ranged from displaying their URL on all merchandising, to television commercials, press advertisements and product promotions. Online marketing initiatives have included search engine optimisation, online media, promotions, viral marketing, and affiliate marketingâ€"all aimed at giving the widest possible spread. Antoniou says users respond to different mediums and all have their pros and cons.
-The main benefit of search engine optimisation is that 85 percent of Web users use search engines to seek information, he says. -However, the engines are time-consuming and constantly evolving." Other examples Antoniou uses are online media, which has the advantage of providing users with the opportunity to interact immediately, but it has a limited users. Viral marketing offers exponential growth, but it is difficult to track past first dispatch.
Affiliate marketing harnesses the user base of other sites, but presents a potential compromise of a brand, while loyalty/reward programs provide increased -stickiness" and loyalty but they can be costly to administer.
What about ITV?
Another option some businesses are assessing is interactive television.
Hot House's van Wyck is excited about the prospects it provides as an advertising medium of the future, particularly for driving traffic to Web sites. Interactive television will use various types of set-top boxes, many of which will be capable of linking to the Internet through the television set.
-I think that the whole interactive television idea brings advertising and promotions into a very familiar environment," he suggests. -Television is much more immediate than anything else." He believes interactive TV is going to answer a lot of problems, but there is a long way to go. -The free-to-air networks have yet to decide on a platform for interactive television and it is late in the year, so we will definitely not see set top boxes this year, but I am very optimistic about ITV."
Experimenting
Businesses also sometimes find that the key to determining the approach that best works for them comes through experimenting with different approaches.
Perpetual experimented with direct response advertising in newspapers around the country and tested different media and different executions to try to get people to respond.
-We even tried an online promotion giving away a free offer to use Market Eyeâ€"an online market investment tool," Perpetual's Young says. -We have used the Internet a lot by linking from other sites using banner ads or joint promotions."
Young uses the example of a joint promotion Perpetual did with ComTech where it had banners and links on its site pointing to a promotion it was running to give away free funds.
-Now we are starting to experiment with viral marketing, but rather than offering micropayments as a reward, we plan to use a game mechanism that links to an online newsletter," he says. -The game challenges participants to beat a benchmark and then they do the test on a friend to get them to have a go. Afterwards they will be able to go into a draw to win a trip to New York."
Young says that because the idea of using the Internet as a media is so new Perpetual has done a lot of experimentation.
-We try something and get quite a finely tuned mechanism by measuring the results. The aim is to get it down to an acceptable cost per leadâ€"and that depends on the dynamics of the business. But throughout the finance industry the talk is that between $50 and $100 is an acceptable cost per acquisition."
