Target audience analysis is an integral step in developing an effective digital marketing strategy, but assumption making or having a narrow focus on limited data often plagues the process. Because brands can easily assume a target demographic based solely on raw data such as demographics and psychographics, little value is seen in spending the time to understand a deeper layer of behavior analytics which give insight to the triggers and motivations of potential customers. Capitalizing on a comprehensive set of data about online behaviors and informational needs can ultimately lead potential customers through the conversion funnel.

It’s not just straight data or numerical analysis that drives a digital marketing strategy. While metrics and previously determined KPIs can deliver guidance, the strategy must be relatable on the personal level. For this reason, it is important that due diligence is done when it comes to defining and understanding the target audience beyond the demographic or data-driven analysis.

How does your audience behave? 

Our process towards better understanding a target audience starts by identifying the behavior – both offline and online – of the primary and secondary audiences.

We investigate the how and why of decision-making through qualitative research that is validated quantitatively where possible. Through market research, usability testing and behavioral analysis among other research tools, we identify the trends in expectations and motivations accountable for driving potential customers towards conversion.

Said research indicates how and why your audience will act, click and convert. Outlining these patterns in attitude and performance ultimately enables us to map and give value to the customer life cycle which in turn informs us where and when we need to insert content in front of the customer.

The amount of time spent effectively identifying audience needs and objectives is dependent on where you are in your brand life cycle. If you are new to market and no previous benchmarks have been established, more time is needed to understand your audience as well as that of your competition. For those with an established brand, time is needed to effectively audit analysis against assumptions.

The combined data and behavior targeting process would be void, however, without analyzing the most quality metrics. R2i uses a combination of analytical, social and behavior tools both online and offline for gathering data. Below is a small snapshot of what’s in our toolbox:

• Google Analytics: To understand current visitor actions such as what they’re doing over time and whether or not current efforts are paying off.
• Keyword-rich Research: Standard tools like Google Adwords’ Keyword Tool, Google Trends or Google Insights help us understand various searches and search volume.
• Social Listening: We use Radian6 and Sysomos among other social listening techniques to understand where conversations are happenings and to identify trends and chatter by subject or influencer

It is important when developing a comprehensive audience analysis to not think in a silo; look further than raw numbers and previous assumptions. With a detailed understanding of your target audience, their needs and online behaviors, you can  begin shaping a digital marketing strategy that will achieve your business goals.

For a summary of what to do in identifying your target audience, watch our audience analysis video.

One big mistake many PR and marketing professionals make is trying to take a blanket-approach to blogger outreach. They send mass emails changing nothing but the name at the top of the email and URL within the message. In order to be successful using blogger outreach as a PR or digital marketing tactic, marketers should understand that it is a one-on-one relationship building process. Attempting to have a greatly influential blogger drink and advertise your Kool-Aid is no quick or easy feat. However, if you are able to successfully get a few brand advocates in your network, the benefits are endless and will significantly expand the reach beyond what you and your marketing team could achieve alone.

How to Maximize Your Email Pitch

Think you are ready to jump into blogger outreach? The first big step is sending your first pitch email. The pitch email is your brand’s first impression with a blogger. You wouldn’t show up to an important media dinner in pajamas, would you? You should take the same care and attention to detail as you would for a real life editorial meeting to writing and sending your pitch email.

Here are 8 things that matter most to bloggers when receiving a pitch email (from me – a blogger-marketer):

1. You actually read my blog. Nothing is worse than the feeling that you are mass BCC’d on an email and the person doesn’t even know who you are besides being a name on a list of bloggers. Good emails will include a personalized note on what they enjoy about my blog, a recent post they liked, or reference a popular comment thread.
2. Your brand and/or representative follows me on social channels. This is another small detail that makes a big difference. If I’m interested in engaging with a pitch email, I almost always check the sender or brand out on Twitter, Facebook and other social channels. I will notice if you took the time to follow me or not – and it matters.
3. The product is relevant to my readers and to me. I’m not going to post about something totally off topic. This means you should target your bloggers well and make sure you state why your product/company is relevant to their readers.
4. You value my time. It needs to be clear that this isn’t a mass email—you at least customized the intro paragraph.
5. The pitch is formatted, readable, and concise. You’d be surprised at the number of crazy-long-unprofessionally formatted emails I receive. Make it short, simple and easy to digest.
6. You are offering me and/or my readers something of value. So many times I get emails in which the pitch is for me to give my time and audience to the brand – with nothing in return. There needs to be a value exchange – whether that’s product, compensation, audience sharing, etc.
7. There’s a clear call-to-action at the end that I can directly respond to. Clearly state how you want to work with me – do you want to send me product, do a give-away with me, advertise on my blog, etc? The worst pitch is an email left open or with a closing line saying something like “hopefully we can work together.” Figure out your ask before you email a blogger.
8. You provide clear information on who you are and in what way you are representing the brand. I get so many pitch emails that are signed with a simple name and come from a non-descript email address. In my opinion, those are spam. Clearly state who you are, how you are affiliated with the brand you are emailing me about, and be transparent on all fronts. Also, provide a link to your agency or company website in the signature.

If you need some additional reading on PR and communication best practices, check out:

• http://www.ragan.com/Main/Home.aspx
• http://contentmarketinginstitute.com/
• http://www.copyblogger.com/blog/

Today there is an ongoing debate over the value of display advertising as savvy marketers question click-through-rates and whether consumers are even paying attention to the clutter created by online display ads. Banner ads have never gone away, but are continually becoming more personalized and sophisticated as rich media features enhance the user experience rather than interrupt it.

In 2012, eMarketer reported that $15.51 billion was spent on display advertising in the US, demonstrating that display advertising is still an important and effective medium. Recently, a shift has occurred from the display of primarily flash banners to rich media units, a trend fueled in part by the modern marketer’s need to engage and captivate consumers. With interactive features such as videos, product carousels, data capture forms, and more, interactive rich media ads enable the engagement required by today’s consumers.

Rich media ad units have interactive features embedded within them, allowing consumers to engage with a brand and take action without leaving the website they are browsing.

Increase ROI & Website Traffic

Companies can simultaneously convey their brand message and prompt engagement with multiple interactive features. After digging into various metrics, we have uncovered the top five features that will help boost engagement, while ultimately increasing ROI:

• Video (45.32% average completion rate)
• Carousel (53.12% average completion rate)
• Geo-locator or mapping tools (11.48% average completion rate)
• Social media buttons (1.25% average completion rate)
• Data capture (0.5% – 2% average submission rate)

A 2012 study by Media Mind showed that people exposed to rich media ads are three times more likely to visit a company’s website than if they had been exposed to a standard banner ad. When video is incorporated in these ads, website traffic can increase six times, creating a positive effect on paid search and organic search performance.  This positive effect occurs because a user’s interaction with a rich media ad increases their brand recall when doing a later search.

The below infographic displays all the top metrics associated with Rich Media; click on the infographic below for the full size image.

Boost Customer Engagement with Rich Media

According to ClickZ, rich media ads can generate up to a 1,000% increase in ad interactions, making engagement rates 6 times higher than static display ads. One of the most valuable benefits of running rich media ads is that they offer more than 150 measurable elements so companies can understand and optimize the consumer experience. For example, rich media ads allow companies to track important elements in real-time such as engagement rates and times, interaction rates, video initiations and completions, CTRs, mouseovers, and user data that is uploaded within the banner.

Rich Media Works with Mobile 

In the second half of 2012, eMarketer reported that iOS devices accounted for 50.52% of the US mobile internet traffic share which makes rich media units even more necessary today because iOS devices don’t serve flash ads. Rich media plays an even more important role in the effectiveness of mobile campaigns as brands have the ability to take advantage of features like store locators when a user is in close proximity to a retail location. A recent study by Celtra on mobile rich media ads showed that video is the most popular feature appearing in 45% of all mobile rich media ad campaigns, while location-based features are the most engaging (18.8% engagement rate).

As the internet becomes more and more cluttered, brands will need to continually find innovative ways to stand out by creating more engaging ad experiences that are personalized and actionable. Over the past few years, rich media ads have continued to transform across various platforms showing that the key to a successful ad campaign is through rich and compelling content.

Article Sources:

• Celtra’s infographic for rich media mobile ads: http://www.celtra.com/infographic/?v=11
• ClickZ “Display Advertising: Going Through an Awkward Stage, but Here to Stay (and Prevail)”: http://www.clickz.com/clickz/column/2217598/display-advertising-going-through-an-awkward-stage-but-here-to-stay-and-prevail
• MediaMind “The Rich and The Powerful:” http://www.mediamind.com/resource/rich-and-powerful
• Rich Media benchmarks are sourced from Spongecell’s overall average benchmarks

The panel fielded questions from Geoff as well as the audience and key areas of focus were on the type and frequency of content that should be created for social communities; how and why to use Google+; the possibility of Facebook as a search engine; how to engage with communities of interest; and the critical use of analytics to optimize mobile campaigns.

Q&A highlights from the session include:

What makes good content?

• Quality content is content that answers a question. Regardless if the content is copy being optimized for your site or if you are working on content for your social channels, make sure you have first listened to your audience and design your content so that it answers a question or need of the audience.
• Keywords in content are useful but make sure they’re relevant.
• Content, particularly content for social channels, should be written intentionally as shareable content.
• Write content that your customers will like.

How important is frequency with regard to content marketing?

• Fresh content will help you rank well but producing frequent content requires resources. You also need to know your audience and their comfort level for content frequency. It helps to define a rule of thumb for publishing consistency for your audience (twice a week, once every other week, three times a month). Regardless of frequency, it’s critical that you publish relevant, quality content.
• You can overcome resource challenges by creating one piece of content that you can leverage in different ways to show customers you are engaged (i.e., summarize a blog post in an email campaign that then drives your audience to a social channel where they can connect with you).

What should marketers do with Google+?

• Because Google+ is Google’s social network and Google isn’t’ going anywhere, you can’t ignore Google+. Without a Google+ profile you lose an opportunity to be indexed. In particular, make sure all authors of your content have a Google+ profile so that you can benefit from author rank.
• Author rank is based on credibility, the type of content, the author’s audience, who the author links to, and the response to the author’s content.

If you missed the Summit and still have questions on what marketers should know as it relates to search marketing in a world of social media, share your questions in the comments section or ask us directly at info@r2integrated.com and we’ll keep the conversation going.

You can listen to the complete radio show for all the insights and if you are a B2B marketer trying to engage with communities of interest (COIs), leverage social media, and successfully react to the word of mouth marketing taking place in a peer-to-peer setting online, this talk is worth it!

R2i has found that the B2B customer has a strategic method for making a buying decision:

• They will rely on independent online research to help reduce risk in their buying decision
• They will seek advice from like-minded professionals and experts in their area of interest in peer-to-peer online channels
• They will connect with COIs to continue to vet and confirm their buying decisions

Knowing that the B2B customer is interacting online before making a buying decision is a critical factor for a B2B brand’s marketing plan. B2B brands need to be able to react to the online conversations of advice seeking and giving which is a lot easier when marketers are identifying, monitoring and engaging with communities that matter most to the brand. In the interview, Matt and Kristina discuss common questions and challenges that B2B marketers face with regard to social media and customer engagement. Following is a sample of the Q&A but listen to the show for all the good stuff!

• How are social channels driving your B2B customer’s buying decisions and affecting your marketing efforts?
  • Your blog, Facebook page, Twitter profile, YouTube channel are all extensions of your brand website. They are also properties your brand ‘owns’ from a publishing perspective so it is important to seriously evaluate the content you are publishing and ensure that it is relevant to your customers. 
  • Unowned properties such as LinkedIn groups, forums and influencer blogs are areas in which you do not have control over published content but are places where you can engage with prospects and drive acquisitions.
•  How do you identify the most important communities of interest and engage and activate their audiences?
  • There are many ways to identify communities of interest and this step is essential to building a strategic engagement plan. Pay attention to the scale/reach, relevancy of content and connectedness of the COI to evaluate their potential for your brand.
  • For B2B marketers, the engagement and activation tactics will depend on a content marketing strategy that is built with relevant content and integrated across many channels. Remember that content is not just words on the screen; content can be a video, visual graphic, audio track, rich media, native advertising and social content.
•  What is the most important KPI a B2B marketer should measure?
  • The most important KPI is cost per lead. Other standard KPIs B2B marketers should consider include how much time a visitor spends on the website, their level of engagement, the visitor’s behavior on the site and of course whether or not they convert.

In the first post of this series , we started to explore the benefits of the new bidding features of enhanced campaigns. As a quick reminder, the recent update by Google brought large changes to the capabilities of AdWords campaigns, giving advertisers three primary capabilities: more powerful bidding, smarter ads and extensions, and improved reporting. In this post, we will take a closer look at the second feature of the release, Smarter Ads and Extensions.

Smarter Ads and Extensions

The second major change enhanced campaigns presents is the introduction of the “Device Preference” setting for ads. For all enhanced campaigns, advertisers will have the option to select which devices they would like each ad to show on. Now it is possible to create ads with device-specific messaging, extensions, calls-to-action, and landing pages, all within the same campaign.

The update will provide advertisers with a significantly larger amount of control over the ads they show to their audience within one campaign. In addition to being able to craft tailored ad content, advertisers can alter the call–to-action, and landing page differently for mobile searchers than for desktop searchers.

Take a local hybrid online/ brick-and-mortar store for example. During store hours, they may be interested in giving mobile searchers who are within driving distance directions to their closest location to drive foot traffic, and a phone number to generate calls. Obviously they do not want to show the same ad to someone 200 miles away performing the same search on a computer. With the update, the store can now create different ads to be shown to the second visitor that prompts them to shop online, and sends them to an e-commerce portal—all within the same campaign!

Furthermore, the update allows advertisers to schedule separate ads to be shown at different times of day. In the example of the store above, they are able to stop showing the ad that gives directions to the store, and display the phone number during the hours it is closed. They can instead set a separate ad that will only be shown during closed hours which will send those searchers to the online store and remove the phone number. Without needing to make any changes, AdWords will automatically change the ad displaying directions and the phone number once the store opens.

The end result is an improved user experience for both types of searchers; the one searching on their mobile device gets directions to the physical location while the store is open, and the searcher on their computer is sent straight to the online store they need to use. BUT, unlike before, the advertising store does not need to split the audiences into separate campaigns. This increases the ease of understanding ad performance by device, and opens the door for advertisers to A/B test device-specific ad copy within one campaign.

The Value of Targeted Bidding and Customized Ad Copy

The bidding and ad copy improvements covered in the first two posts of this series provide advertisers with great opportunities to improve control over their campaigns. While these new settings and features increase the reach, it is the third feature, improved reporting, that unlocks the opportunity for advertisers to improve their understanding of performance, and make optimization decisions to boost ad performance to the next level. The last post of this series will take a closer look at the reporting advancements and how you can leverage them to improve your campaigns.

Cheryl Dickison, VP of Sales – East Region, sits on the leadership committee to assist in the region’s efforts. Along with financial support to the NFTE, r2i takes every opportunity to assist in the development of young minds in the area.

This past August, r2integrated was honored to host a group of students from the University of Jos in Nigeria. During their visit, the agenda included a discussion in current trends in Communications in the United States, compared to those in Western Africa . The experience was enlightening, and despite the geographical distances, advances in communication and technological is quickly gaining momentum.

R2integrated encourages other companies to invest time in the development of young people. Through getting involved in organizations like NFTE, or simply visiting local schools, there are countless ways to inspire and give new direction for life success.

In this example, the standard Google Analytics tracking code does not allow you to track data from one website to the next within one account. Without using cross domain tracking, you’re only alternative is to create a Google account for each web property individually, which will raise several issues:

-   On mydomain.com, you will only see how visitors engage with your website up until the point where they exit to buymyproduct.com. Although you can implement event tracking to capture the click to buymyproduct.com, you will not be able to associate any goal conversion activity on buymyproduct.com with visitor information from mydomain.com.

-   On buymyproduct.com, you will see performance within the purchase funnel; however, you will likely also see a large majority of your visits as referrals from mydomain.com. This can be problematic when trying to understand the effectiveness of a specific channel.

As a result, your online activity will be segmented as such:

With the inability to connect the organic search term to the ultimate purchase, the reports within your two accounts will be segmented as well:

In order to close the loop on your reporting, you will need to implement cross domain tracking. With this advanced tracking methodology, you are essentially treating mydomain.com and buymyproduct.com as one website so that you will be able to see visitor behavior from their initial visit through to goal conversion.

Disclaimer: The solution outlined identifies guidelines in implementing cross domain tracking but is not a plug and play solution for all websites. Be sure to contact your webmaster for specifics relating to implementation on your website.

Implementing Cross Domain Tracking

These are the steps needed to enable cross domain tracking and the code you need to do it. Be sure to include both pieces of code on every page of your site.

1.     Navigate to the Admin section of your Google Analytics account and update the Website tracking configuration to include Multiple top-level domains of your website.

*Note: this will also update the subdomain configurations as well which is perfectly fine.

This will generate two additional lines of code, highlighted below, which are imperative to cross domain tracking. You will need this snippet on every page of your site. With this configuration, you will now need to use the same UA tracking code across both sites.  You’ll also want to put the domain name without “www.” In the _setDomainName variable. For example, pages in www.mydomain.com will use ‘mydomain.com’, and pages in www.buymyproduct.com will use ‘buymyproduct.com’.

2.     In addition to this Google Analytics tracking, you will need to use jQuery and the magic of the Attribute Contains Selector to attach a click event handler to all links on the site that point to the other domain.

Understanding the Results

After enabling cross domain tracking, you will now be able to close the loop on your reporting in one unified  Google Analytics account – connecting the organic search, paid ads, or emails that are driving your visitors to conversion:

Bonus Points: When aggregating the data from both accounts, your content report will now include pages from both sites. If you have duplicate pages (i.e. mydomain.com/products and buymyproduct.com/products) this could present a problem when determining what pages visitors are viewing. To fix this, create a filter which appends the hostname to the Request URI field so that you can easily break these out in your reports. When completed, your content pages will now read mydomain.com/products and buymyproduct.com/products as opposed to just /products.

If you’re having trouble with cross domain tracking, reach out to us or find us on Twitter @mynameisarden and @rkamin1

R2i, a leading digital/social marketing and technology firm, built a custom SMASH page for The Naked Social to capture and display social media activity in real time throughout the evening.

SMASH is R2i’s propriety storytelling platform that drives engagement by aggregating conversations and content across social networks into one interactive display. SMASH allows brands to feed and track conversations before, during and after campaigns or events. Learn more about SMASH here.

Team members from the Baltimore and Seattle offices represented R2i at SXSW: Chief Technology Officer, Chris Chodnicki, Jody Stoehr, Executive Vice President and Managing Director – West Region, and Jenn Banday, Marketing Manager – West Region.

“Participating in this event at SXSW was a great experience for R2i. It was opportunity for our team to connect with clients, build new relationships, and generate awareness for the brand – all while having a great time,” said Chodnicki.

Visit out Facebook page for photos taken at the event, and if you made the trip down to Austin, tell us about your SXSW experience!

As nearly all ppc advertisers have recently been made aware, Google has rolled out one of their largest and most impactful product updates to date with the introduction of Enhanced AdWords Campaigns.  The new feature increases focus and control over targeting mobile devices, and also gives advertisers more opportunities to focus their bidding and ad copy strategy.  The new settings, when applied properly, will allow ppc advertisers to better reach their audience with more targeted messaging.  There are three separate and important facets of the Enhanced Campaign update: More Powerful Bidding, Smarter Ads & Extensions, and Improved Reporting.  Over the next several weeks, I will take a deep dive into each of these facets of Enhanced campaigns. This week we focus on More Powerful Bidding, and how your agency needs to optimize to it accordingly.

More Powerful Bidding

With enhanced campaigns, all devices will now be targeted from the same campaign.  Before the new release it was only possible to set one bid per keyword; however, new options will allow for separate bids to be set by device, location targets, and/or time of day.   The new settings, which will only exist at the campaign level, allow bids to be adjusted by a percentage based on these variables.  For example, you have a brick-and-mortar vintage record store.  You have a website where the majority of PPC purchases are made, but you would like to increase foot traffic to the store.  With enhanced campaigns, you could easily increase bids by 30% for visitors who are within 10 miles of the store, without creating a new campaign!   This means you will bid more for these visitors, show up higher in auctions, and ultimately shift more focus to these searchers.

By creating bidding adjustments similar to our record store example, advertisers can develop extremely complex bidding strategies based on their target audiences and goals, which should ultimately lead to higher conversions at a lower cost.

If you are following industry best practices by using separate campaigns to target mobile, it is time to start developing a strategy to migrate all campaigns to the new format.  Enhanced campaigns have been made available as an option for now, but in just a few months all campaigns will be automatically updated to the new format.

Keep This on Your Radar

With all the, new enhanced campaign features comes one major draw-back; all enhanced campaigns will automatically target ALL devices.  This means, there is no direct setting to exclude a device type from a campaigns targeting; however, there is a workaround.  To exclude mobile, for example, advertisers can adjust mobile bids by -100% to exclude all mobile device targeting. Furthermore, because the bid adjustments only exist at the campaign level, all keywords within a campaign will be subject to the same bid adjustments.  This may not be an issue for advertisers, who have used best practices in overall campaign structure, but advertisers with a large volume of keywords within a campaign need to carefully evaluate the effect those bid adjustments will have.

The more powerful bidding features are only one of the new enhanced campaign features that can help you improve your marketing strategy and return on PPC investment.  Come back next week, where I will dig into the expanded ad copy features of enhanced campaigns in part two of this series. I’ll also talk about how you can use them to show every searcher the perfect message based on their device, location, and more!