Here we go:

Goal

Goals should be the first thing created for a marketing project. A goal is what you are trying to achieve. Goals often break down into two groups: business goals and marketing goals.

Business Goal

A business goal is typically (but by no means always) associated with money. So a business goal might look like this:

• Increase revenue by 5% this fiscal year

Marketing Goal

A marketing goal typically exists to support some business goal. So a marketing goal that supports a business goal about revenue, might look like this:

• Increase product awareness by 25%

Notice that neither goal gives you something specific to do. Goals are focused on the outcomes that you want, not how you want to get to them.

Metric

A metric tells how you’ll know when you’ve reached a goal as well as how the goal will be measured. So a metric for the marketing goal above might be:

• The number of potential clients responding that they are “somewhat aware” or higher on our annual prospect survey will increase from the previous year by 25% or more.

In both of the goals above, the target was given (“5% revenue increase”, “25% awareness increase”). Goals won’t always have these targets right in them, but metrics should ALWAYS include the target.

Strategy

A strategy describes the approach that will be taken to accomplish the goals and should include as much relevant information as possible about why you are taking this approach. The strategy provides the guidance for the individual actions taken on a project. When evaluating what tactics to use, you should be able to look at the strategy to determine what is “on strategy” and what is not. A supporting strategy for the marketing goal might be:

• Since our prospects spend a large amount of time online, conduct high-volume advertising on the online properties where they spend most of their time

Tactic

A tactic is each thing that you do in support of a strategy. There may be only one tactic, or there may be hundreds depending on such things as budget and timing. Some possible tactics for the sample strategy above:

• Buy run-of-site ads on ESPN
• Advertise on Facebook
• Test response to Twitter advertising

So there you go, a quick and dirty overview. Toss your questions in the comments if you have any, and let me know if there are other marketing issues that are causing you (or others) confusion.

When we work on campaigns for clients, our aim is to understand one thing in particular: how much did it cost to get a desired outcome from the campaign? That is, how much did it cost to get a sign-up, a purchase, or the like. This is true even if the primary goal is to create awareness about something, or to create a shift in some key brand perception metric.

Knowing how much it cost you to achieve a goal allows you to compare various ways of getting to that goal to see what the most efficient way to achieve it is.

With that in mind, let’s explore how the Naked Campaign worked for us.

One of the things that we were interested in knowing for this campaign, was how much it cost to get a targeted person to our site. Here’s how that broke down:
“Spend”
Google (after filtering click fraud): $53.22
LinkedIn: $199.24

Site Visits
Google: 30
LinkedIn: 14

Bounce Rate (% of visits that saw just one page; we don’t count these people as interested for our purposes)
Google: 96.67%
LinkedIn: 92.86%

“Engaged” Visits
Google: 1
LinkedIn: 1

Cost per Engaged Visit (Cost/Engaged Visits)
Google: $53.22
LinkedIn: $199.24

As you can see, ultimately there was not enough “engaged” traffic for us to get a solid sense of how much it would cost for each engaged visitor that came through each of these sites.

If there had been enough traffic to have solid numbers, then clearly Google would be the better candidate for further investment. We could also have used these numbers to establish a success threshold for other acquisition campaigns. We know it cost us $53 to get an engaged visit to the site. All other things equal, activities that had a higher cost per engaged visitor would not warrant further investment.

Ever since July 22nd, about the time the Old Spice campaign ended, I’ve been tracking their twitter stats. How many people they follow, how many people follow them, tweets, and so on. Why track this? I’m not really sure other than that I found the campaigns transition from T.V. to the web unique and I wanted to see what the tail looked like. While I think things like ROI are critical, without continuous access to sales numbers all the industry talk about the role this campaign played in that regard is really just blog fodder. It’s fun, but sort of pointless. What really interested me was the nature of the campaign – how it existed in the context of contemporary advertising.

I’m not an analyst of any sort, and until I heard about Dean’s presentation, I hadn’t done anything other than keep a daily (or nearly daily) tally of a handful of numbers. Hearing about the PAF event though, I decided to dump them into a spreadsheet and see what, if anything, was there. Here’s what I got:

From 07.23.2010 through 08.29.2010 the Old Spice Twitter account looked like this
They followed 719 people
They had 116,848 people following them
They were on 3,669 lists
They tweeted 1859 times
Note: that tweet number is slightly odd though because on 08.26 they had 1909 tweets.

If you’re curious what that looks like – here you go:

Interesting.

Much of the conventional wisdom around brands on the web these days centers on the notions of communication and reciprocity. The idea here is that if a brand wants to be successful within the context of the “social web” they’ll need to act a lot more like people and a lot less like companies. But looking at the Old Spice campaign – I have to question some of that.

It’s worth noting that the Old Spice account follows back less 1% of the people that followed them. Also, their rate of communication is about .8 tweets per day. At the same they have about 1% daily increase in followers – about 1,000 per day. Basically – @oldspice was looking a lot like a celebrity account: lots of followers, very little following. This had me wondering if people were following Old Spice the brand, or Isaiah Mustafa, the spokesman? Further confusing the issue though is that unlike those accounts, there isn’t much human connection coming through the account. It’s mostly humorous non-sequitors, and even then, there’s not much of that being produced.

In fact – nearly the entire catalog of bi-directional communication, supposedly the point of brands in the social space, happened in a very short window right before the end of the campaign. This was the time when Wieden was staged their famous video twitter responses.

And here is where I get to the confusing nature of this campaign. For a campaign that’s been regarded as the best social media campaign of the year, and even the best web campaign of the year – it doesn’t look a lot like what we’ve assumed social media and the web look like: It’s not interactive, it’s not communicative, and the one technical boundary it pushed – the video twitter responses – was a boundary of traditional media, not digital. To the extent that there was engagement at all, it was limited to the terms of the brand: they choose a tiny fraction of the communication directed at them to respond to, and then retained absolute control over the tone and length of the “conversation.”

In the end, this all sounds a lot like a different medium: T.V.

Now, it seems like lately, “T.V.” or “broadcast” has become a sort of dirty word in digitally minded circles, but that’s not at all how I mean it here. But everything I’ve written to this point raised a big question for me: was the Old Spice campaign one of the best social media/web/interactive campaigns ever, or, was it actually the perfect example of what a post-web T.V./broadcast/traditional campaign should be?

If it’s the former, than I think we in this industry need to reexamine our canon of what makes great digital advertising – because we seem to have gotten a lot wrong.

If it’s the later, than I wonder if this isn’t an accidental (or intentional?) example of just how effective the internet and the web have been in totally blurring the lines where content lives and instead leaving us to focus entirely on the nature of the content – in this case, traditional “lean-back” content using Twitter as a distribution channel.

this article was originally published on thisisviolence.net

The advertising portion of the Naked Campaign has now drawn to a close.

We divide the execution of a project (versus the strategizing portion) into 5 stages: Execution Planning, Running the Project, Analysis, and Adjustment.

Since we’ve finished running the project, it’s time for some analysis. Here’s a quick it on the base metrics that we were tracking, with more to follow.

Unfortunately, we ultimately had to throw out all of the Google AdWords data from before 20th as it looks like the click fraud that we were experiencing went all the way back to the beginning of the campaign So here’s the adjusted data starting at the 9th of July for LinkedIn’s DirectAds, and the 20th for Google’s AdWords:

DirectAds Spend: $199.24
DirectAds Impressions: 104,229
DirectAds Clicks: 38 (0.036% Click Rate)

AdWords Impressions: 116,092
AdWords Clicks: 78 (0.067% Click Rate)

Twitter Followers (current, all types): 295 (+14% since start)
RSS Followers (7 day avg): 15 (-17%)
Unique Visitors (30 days): 547 (+2.4%)
Comments (campaign, total): 0

I’ll do a deeper dive into the numbers over the next few days, and then we’ll go into the Adjustment stage and see what this all means for Fight moving forward.

(Yes, we fixed the “Z” after this photo

Here’s a movie of this going up:

After 9 days of running ads on LinkedIn’s DirectAds, we’d seen a total of one click. This despite the fact that more than 16,000 impressions had been run, the fact that we took our top-performing ad from Google’s AdWords and put it into rotation on DirectAds, and the fact that we wrote the most pragmatic ad that we could think of.

Here we had free money, and we couldn’t spend any of it.

So we did what we do here at Fight. We looked to see what we could do differently.

After a brief brainstorm, we decided to open up the audience target. We had been targeting people in Marketing job functions at medium-to-large companies and were likely to have control of a budget. Since we had to spend the money or lose it, we decided to go wider; much wider.

We blew away all of the audience targeting options; anyone at on on LinkedIn could see our ads, moving us from about 500,000 potential audience members, to over 70,000,000. Our justification for this (aside from having to spend money by July 31st) was that it’s possible that marketing professionals just don’t use LinkedIn that much (seems unlikely, but our low number of overall impressions is suggestive), and that if we reach beyond the primary network of the people that we’re directly targeting, into the secondary network of people in a company who might refer us along, and the tertiary network of influencers outside of a company, then DirectAds could still be a benefit to the Naked Campaign.

Here’s what happened:

There was an immediate uptick in both impressions and clicks. The click through rate is modest, and the bounce rate for people arriving at the Naked landing page from DirectAds is about 67%, which means that there are likely SOME visitors who have a legitimate interest in what Fight does.

And what ads are getting all of these new clicks?

Maybe it’s no surprise to you, but it’s the top performing ad from the AdWords campaign and the pragmatic ad written specifically for the LinkedIn audience.

Amazon has seen more than $1 billion in sales from mobile devices over the last year, the company said during its second-quarter earnings announcement.

So what about all of you? Are you making Amazon purchases from your smartphone?

Source

Last Friday I checked in on the performance of our AdWords ads and things seemed to be going well. There was even a gentle increase in the total number of clicks. When I checked back in on AdWords this Monday the number of daily clicks had more than doubled!

Hooray, right?

Not so fast.

Driving traffic to your site is not just an issue of quantity. Even people casting the widest nets still want to know (or SHOULD want to know) how the traffic is performing. So I went to Google Analytics to start with the Bounce Rate. The Bounce Rate tells you how many people made it past the first page of your site. It is a good first indicator that the traffic that you’re getting to your site is valuable.

And this is where the mystery began.

The traffic wasn’t there. AdWords showed 20 clicks on July 17th, and 25 on the 18th. Google Analytics? 7 and 12 visits respectively. Clearly something was wrong here.

It turns out that most of our clicks were coming from Google’s Display Network, and mostly through what shows up in the reporting as “AdSenseForMobileApps.com”, which is how Google reports ads that were displayed on mobile devices inside of apps. Sadly for us, the apps that were the biggest click generators (by far) have all been suspected of click fraud in one forum or another. Click fraud is when a site (or app in this case) generates clicks as Google AdWords would define them, but doesn’t actually send real traffic to the site that paid for the ad.

Fortunately, Google tries to keep on top of this, and there’s even a report (if you dig for it) that will show you how many clicks Google thinks were invalid and that it didn’t charge you for. They also seem pretty open to you reporting times when you think there is fraud, and crediting you back for disputed clicks.

For our campaign, however, the problem is more than a monetary one (since we’re working on free ads in the first place); they’ve destroyed our data. This issue calls into question much of the data that we’ve been gathering, since we can’t tell for certain how long we’ve been getting fake clicks. Since there’s no easy way to see what ads were served because of which keywords onto which placements, it makes it near impossible for us to determine if ads that we thought were high performing actually were, or were just lost into the honey pot.

So, what to do?

In AdWords, you can exclude sites from carrying your ads. You can even do this on an individual app or URL basis. For us, we excluded the entire AdSenseForMobileApps.com category, because not only do we have a data problem, but we also now have a trust issue. We can’t be sure what is a valid source of traffic from apps, so we’re shutting them all down. It means starting over with our data, but it may at least mean we have clean data.

It’s been a couple of days since we shut down the apps (we put a halt to it on Monday the 19th). What was the effect?

Clearly we have some work to do.

One of the benefits that we factored in when we considered doing a campaign of this sort is search engine optimization. Doing the Naked Campaign meant that we could write about a lot of the things that we talk about internally in a public-facing way. Naturally that means that words that we care about would show up related to us in search engines.

There is, of course, no guarantee that we will show up high enough in any particular search to make it worth the effort from that point of view alone (and certainly there’s more to ranking high than just having particular words in your content), but the potential side effect was definitely worth factoring in.

So, is it working?

In short, yes. Since the Naked Campaign started, keywords that show up exclusively in articles related to the campaign have accounted for 20% of our organic search traffic.

Here are the phrases that have sent us traffic so far:
Adwords
madebyfight.com/naked
invalid http response code adwords
free $250 dollar google adwords
keyword suggestion tool
linkedin directads coupon

Especially interesting is the fact that the most popular keyword (AdWords) also had the lowest bounce rate at 40%. This means that 6 out of every 10 visitors from this search term went on to read further into the site, which is extraordinary for our site generally speaking, much less for search terms. This isn’t particularly surprising as our program is built around AdWords (and the lesser-searched-for DirectAds), but it is encouraging to know that the targeting appears to be effective.

Perhaps you’ve come to this page via a search? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below. What caught your interest enough to click, and did you find what you expected to find?

It’s time to check in on how our ads are performing. Let’s take a look.

LinkedIn has served 8,095 impressions and delivered 0 clicks. We pay only for clicks, so this would be ok if we saw an uptick in traffic that we could attribute to LinkedIn. But we don’t. So this is a problem. The problem here is that we may not be being pragmatic enough with our ads. The closest one to speaking directly to what we do in the most straightforward sense is “We Are Fight”.

DirectAds only lets you run 10 ads as part of the same campaign and we’re using all of them, so we’re going to take the ad that seems the farthest from the mark and replace it with one is trying to be as on the mark as possible: “Marketing Strategy. We do this every day. Follow the Naked Campaign to see how.”. The ad that seems like it would be the least effective is: “Do you read these ads?”. Nowhere in the ad does it say what we do, so it can easily come off as a research panel.

Of course, DirectAds has no easy way to retire an existing ad (you can turn it off and hide it, but it still takes up one of your 10 buckets), so we’re going to have to edit the ad that we want to get rid of to have the copy for the new ad we want to put in. We’ll see how that effects the stats for the ad (we updated the ad when it had 871 impressions and no clicks), but it’s too bad their tool wasn’t a bit more capable. I’d love to have the option of turning the old ad back on if the new ad doesn’t perform.

Also, since the ads have gotten no clicks, we’ve spent none of our credit, so we’re raising our daily spend from $10 ($250/25 days) to $13.38 ($250/18 days). We’re well above the suggested CPC bid range at $5, so we’ll hold steady there and see what happens.

By contrast, AdWords is ticking along steadily, serving slightly fewer impressions but garnering 11 clicks (for a click through rate of 0.14%). It’s too early to say what ads are performing well as we’ve had clicks across 9 of the 22 ads in rotation. Of those 11 clicks, 8 of them came from Google’s Display Network, which is comprised of all of the sites that use AdSense. If you are letting AdWords manage which sites get to see your ads (as we are), then you need to have a minimum level of volume before Google will tell you what sites got how many impressions. We’re not yet to that point, but when we see where they’re going, we’ll let you know.

Of the 3 clicks that came from the SEM proper, somewhat surprisingly they came from some of the simplest, broadest terms that we’re using (we’re currently running 87 search phrases): “analytics”, “campaign”, and “AdWords”. In some senses, based on the content of our ads, this is not surprising, and Google agrees sending these terms substantially more impressions than most of the rest of them.

For AdWords, we’re going to let things sit for a while longer until more obvious trends emerge, but here are some early returns on the best performing AdWords ads sorted by CTR:

The top performer will probably jump out at you right away as it took only 13 impressions to get a click! It will be interesting to see how that one continues to perform. Worth noting is that the reason that it has received so few impressions relative to anything else, was that it originally had “Google” in the title, and was rejected for it, so it didn’t start running until very recently.

Goal Stats

DirectAds Impressions: 8,095
DirectAds Clicks: 0

AdWords Impressions: 8,013
AdWords Clicks: 11

Twitter Followers (current, all types): 255 (-1.2% since start)
RSS Followers (7 day avg): 17 (-5.6%)
Unique Visitors (30 days): 541 (+1.3%)
Comments (campaign, total): 0

In this post I thought I’d share the ads that we ran on both LinkedIn’s DirectAds and Google’s AdWords, but a couple of unexpected things happened that I thought I’d talk about first.

We were planning to kick everything off on Friday, July 9th, and let the ads run until the 31st.  Our landing page wasn’t ready to go until the campaign launched, but we preloaded all of the ads into both Google and LinkedIn so that everything would be ready to go (with Google, you could schedule the date – but not the time – that the ads would start running; with LinkedIn we’d have to kick it off manually).  AdWords complained that the landing page gave an “Invalid HTTP response code”, which is what happens when the page isn’t there yet.  We didn’t worry much about it since the campaign wasn’t scheduled to go for a couple more days, and surely AdWords would check back in at the time the program launched.

Sadly, no.  We got the landing page up and running, and when it was time for the ads to start circulating, the error status didn’t change.  Now, when you have an error on an AdWords ad (usually because something requires review), Google recommends that you edit the ad to make the recommended change.  Our ad didn’t need any change, but we still had to go into each one and put an extra space into them so that AdWords would recognize that a change had happened.  A minor irritation, but ultimately no big deal.

But then, the really unexpected: We got kicked into a manual review.  This meant that our ads would have to be looked at by actual people before launching.  I’ve seen that process take weeks (rarely, but it happens), so I wasn’t thrilled that the time to use our free credit (which expires at the end of the month) as running out.  In fact, it only (!) took until late Sunday to get approval, so we’re finally up and running.

But to the ads!

We plan to make adjustments to ads and keywords as we go, but here are the ads that we are starting with.  If you have any predictions as to what will perform the best (or worst), toss them into the comments.  We’ll update the stats as we go.

AdWords Ads:

DirectAds:

For the uninitiated, the Big Idea is what advertising companies (and, increasingly, all marketing companies) sell: The OMG moment, captured in a 30 second commercial, magazine spread, web site, or banner ad.

We’re big fans of the Big Idea, as a rule.  The problem is that it is typically the end of the conversation about reaching an audience, where as we believe that it’s really just the beginning.

Anyway, here’s me taking a shot at this unexpectedly after I drew it from the 60-odd other topics that we had to blindly draw from.

Goals

A key piece of information that you’ll want to know for our Naked Campaign is what our goals are (this is typically the first thing that we set up on a regular client engagement). Having goals is critical because that is what lets you know whether you have actually done good work or not (all of us at Fight have worked on award-winning projects that never actually accomplished what they should have).

Given that we’re a high-consideration good, and that windows of opportunity with the potential clients that we hope to reach are rare, our primary goal is to get people to subscribe to the ongoing content that Fight produces. This content comes primarily in the form of a blog (which you are currently reading), and our company Twitter account. So the primary goal can be stated as:

Goal #1: Increase the number of people subscribed to Fight content

As a secondary goal, if we can’t get people regularly engaged in our content, we at least want more people to have heard about Fight and know what it is that we do. That goal can be stated as:

Goal #2: Increase the number of people aware of Fight

Metrics

You may notice that for Goal #1 there is no specific amount that we’re trying to increase subscriptions by (which we would normally establish for a campaign like this). This is because this will have been the first real marketing push that we’ve done for Fight. As such, we will be looking to establish a baseline from which we can measure future campaigns. We’ll do this by both looking at what the total increases that we’ve gained through this program, and looking at the increases versus the cost to get those increases so that we can compare that with other approaches down the line.

Of course, we have a starting number of people subscribed to our RSS feed for the blog and our Twitter account, so this is what we’ll be building on.

For Twitter, as of the writing of this article, we have 176 direct followers. We are also on 16 lists which have 82 additional followers combined, for a total of 258 followers on Twitter.

We only recently started running our RSS feed through Feedburner, so it’s not clear how many people are actually following us this way, but a 7 day rolling average shows about 18 subscribers as of this writing (we use a 7 day average because Feedburner numbers vary heavily from day to day).

For Goal #2, we’re also setting a baseline, but things are a bit trickier. If we were operating from any kind of real budget, we’d do periodic surveying against our target audience to see what the uptick in awareness was, or we’d do surveys of people exposed versus not exposed to see what the lift was, but these are outside of the scope of our current budget, so we’re going to have to measure awareness by proxy.

For this goal our proxy metric will be unique site visitors during the campaign, averaged over 30 days. We could use ad impressions here, but for our purposes, they’re a pretty weak indicator of awareness, so we’ve opted to assume that if they actually click through to the site, they have a base level of awareness. Google Analytics tells us that our baseline is 534 unique visitors in the last 30 days.

So there you have it. In upcoming entries, we’ll show you the ads that we are running, the keywords we chose for AdWords, and we’ll look at some A/B testing on the landing page. And, of course, we’ll update with stats as we get them in, and let you know what changes in approach (if any) we’ve taken based on that information.

We’d love for you to jump into the conversation below. I’m guessing no small number of you have suggestions for how we should proceed, or what we should have done to begin with. Let us have it! And if you have questions about how or why we’re doing something, we’re happy to provide that info as well.

Tune in next time!

With all of the considerations discussed in the previous articles in mind, we brainstormed.

We have always believed that having people experience our process is the best way to convince them to hire us, so we asked ourselves how we could incorporate this into our campaign. And then it hit us: The Naked Campaign.

We’d expose our process for what we thought about and what we did with respect to this free advertising, including the results. And we would talk about this in our advertising. We thought that by incorporating what we’re doing into the advertising itself, we could create content that more directly spoke to the people that we wanted to talk to than other ads on the page, and that the ads would do a better job of drawing people in to the project. They would click through to a landing page that described our challenge, and that linked to the parts of the story that had currently unfolded, with new parts being added as we went through the campaign to help create a story that people would want to come back and check in on. As they did that, we’d continue to update our blog with other content as well so that they could get other exposure to what Fight is all about.

At the same time, we would see if we could foster a conversation with folks who already regularly checked us out. We felt like this kind of program would be worth talking about. We’re going to expose as much as we can, so likely we’ll do something interesting, and probably we’ll screw something up, but we’ll definitely be exploring in a way that we hope invites collaboration.

The campaign officially kicks off on July 9th, but, as you can probably guess, this series of articles is already a part of the process. We hope that you’ll at least stay tuned to see how things go (the good, the bad, and the ugly) via RSS or Twitter, but, even better, we hope that you will chime in with best practices that you have used, questions about what we’re doing, what you think about the program and the like. You should leave us a comment below . So go ahead!

It’s worth taking another moment here to point out that a key factor in this opportunity is the very small number of people that are likely to be exposed to it.  $75 worth of AdWords and $250 worth of DirectAds is a good place to start, but it’s a very SMALL way to start.  We’re looking at getting a few 10s of thousands of impressions in the best possible case (and potentially much fewer than that).  Given likely click-through rates (we’re guessing well under 0.1%), we’re looking at driving about one hundred of potential prospects somewhere, so we need to make them count as much as possible. 

The first step for us is identifying our target audience.  This is important generally, because it allows you to start getting into the head-space of the people that you want to click through on your ads.  On Google’s AdWords, this is important because it can guide you towards which search phrases you want to place your ads next to.  On LinkedIn’s DirectAds, it will help you choose the kinds of jobs that your target is likely to be in.

So who are we targeting anyway?

Given the clients that we’ve worked with, our areas of expertise, and the cost of a full-blown engagement with Fight (though there are certainly a wide range of ways of engaging us) our target is a person in the marketing group who has control of a budget of $100,000 or more in a company with annual revenues of around $10 million or more.  Our target prospect should be considering a digital marketing project, but can be anywhere from looking to take the right first step into the space to looking for a progressive digital marketing company to help with a sophisticated online project.  They don’t have to believe in the power of a good strategy, but they do need to care about results.

If we were doing millions of impressions, then we could expect that some of the potential prospects were already in the window of opportunity for us and we would therefore have at least a few leads capable of immediate conversion (all other things being equal).  Since there will be very few people clicking through (because of the small number of impressions), we’ll have to make as much of them as possible.  Which suggests that a more appropriate approach than the “Big Ad” is a campaign that draws potential prospects into an ongoing interaction with Fight, giving us ongoing opportunities to keep our consideration high with them.

Targeting Options

With LinkedIn’s DirectAds, the targeting part is pretty straightforward: You choose the company size (in employees; we choose 201+ employees), the job function of the person that you want to show an ad to (for us, Marketing), and the seniority level of the person you want to target (Manager and Above for us). Done!

Since Google’s platform doesn’t have direct access to a lot of the information that LinkedIn has, you have few characteristics to choose from: Location (US for us), gender (not relevant to us), and age (we excluded 24 and below since those in the 0-17 bracket aren’t likely to be useful to us, and while there is some possibility in the 18-24 category, we have few enough dollars not to take the risk).  From there you can decide to advertise on Google’s search, on their network of sites using AdSense (the “Display Network”) or both.  If you don’t chose specific sites in their Network to advertise on (which we won’t, at least in the early stages), they keywords that you choose do the rest of the targeting legwork for you.

Aside from Consideration, the other major factor for people who might be interested in working with Fight is their window of opportunity.    

Most people are not continually in the market for a new car.  They buy a car and they’re good for a while.  Similarly people aren’t always in the market for digital strategy.  They may not have a project coming up for a while.  On the other hand, you might always be in the market for a pack of gum.  When you are presented with an opportunity to buy some gum, you might take it every time.   

So the challenge for us (and any other company that has high consideration goods and relatively rare windows of opportunity) is to keep Fight’s level of consideration above potential clients’ minimum threshold long enough for a window of opportunity to come along.

So what does this mean for our advertising?  It means that it needs to be a gateway to creating enough of an interest for ad viewers in Fight for long enough for a window of opportunity to arrive for them.

To get a better handle on what Fight might use advertising for, it’s worth taking a brief side trip on the nature of how people buy Fight’s “product” versus how people buy other kinds of products.

As I mentioned previously, Fight’s “product” is a high consideration good. That means that people put relatively more time and effort into evaluating whether or not to buy that good, and generally have more and stronger criteria that the product has to meet for it to be considered among the various options to buy. Cars, vacation properties, and colleges are all other examples of high consideration goods.

If you are in the market for these things, the odds are that you will spend some time comparing one against the other, and that some products that you COULD consider won’t actually be products that you DO consider because they don’t meet your minimum criteria. Worth noting is the fact that it’s not just cost that makes something high consideration. A product might actually be cheap but difficult to get (e.g. a free piano), or may involve continued effort on your part in some way (e.g. a dog).

Examples of low consideration goods abound, but some quick examples might be gum, a deck of cards, or an umbrella hat (some things just sell themselves). These things are generally so cheap you don’t think about them, easy to get (except maybe for the umbrella hat), and have very little in the way of long-term repercussions (except, again, maybe for the hat).

• Digital strategy (our product) is not typically a low-consideration good. It can be expensive, which means that advertising is unlikely to lead directly to work for us.
• Our value proposition is potentially complex. Making any kind of point about why digital strategy is beneficial, and why Fight is the right company to do it, in just a few words and in a way that isn’t trivial is quite a challenge.
• The ad space is crammed with all kinds of companies screaming that their solution is the best, making it difficult to grab a person’s attention in the first place. These ads are focused primarily on low-cost tactics that promise quick ROI and use language that is very direct response-focused (which makes considerable sense for this medium), creating a large attention barrier for us to have to break.

 
This made it all the more important to have an answer to the question: What (if anything) can we do with these offers that will create actual value for Fight?  The next couple of articles will explore this question.

Here at Fight we have been very familiar with the program as we were the first company to be invited into it. Since then, the number of other companies in the program has increased and now groups like Switchyard and Marketing Intelligence share the floor with us.

Cubes, phones, wifi, conference rooms, meeting space, and full access The Webtrends platform, oh did I mention foosball and ping-pong?

Hard not to love the 101° program, thank you for letting us be a part of it.

At Fight we’ve been growing our following organically through Twitter and our blog, but we have also been keeping an eye out for opportunities to get in front of new people who haven’t yet ran into our online presence and might be interested in what we do.

So it was with no small amount of interest that I discovered that my copy of the June, 2010 Wired magazine arrived with a coupon for $75 worth of Google AdWords credit. Probably coincidentally, LinkedIn sent out a coupon on May 12th for $250 worth of advertising credit using their DirectAds product (LinkedIn’s Andrew Chang said that these offers have been going out since April to a subset of LinkedIn subscribers, so you may or may not have one sitting in your own inbox).

We love a good challenge, and this matched up well with an existing need, so we gave ourselves the task of putting these offers to good use in our favor. This is the first entry in a series of articles that we’ll do as we explore how to best take advantage of this very limited, but free, advertising opportunity.