Last year the charity sector’s marketing practices came under close scrutiny as the marketing industry singled it out for its vast waste in direct mail. These communications were so untargeted that sometimes they were undeliverable to the intended recipient; others were simply being thrown away unopened. Since then much work has been invested in stemming this wasteful approach and the industry shows signs of improving. Really positive results are also currently being achieved from high impact above the line advertising.
Although these adverts are expensive they do have a massive reach and create a great deal of discussion. This year alone adverts from organisations such as Barnardo's, Talk to FRANK and Action for Children, have commanded endless pages of blogs and news items. The excellent design of interactive websites is another feather in the cap of the sector. At the moment then, there are a number of marketing “silos” of excellence. The problem is that search marketing, above the line advertising and direct marketing are still not integrated.
Obviously the interrelation of media, particularly the impact of internet, has a massive impact on the way consumers interact with brands. How and when people access the internet is, however, an area that still requires exploration by marketers particularly as activities such as browsing the internet are often carried out while people sit in front of the telly, or have their radio on. Research earlier this year in fact revealed that 70% of Britons go online while watching TV and 27% search in relation to the commercial advertisements. (Harris Interactive, March 2008) These findings tell us that donors can be driven onto a search engine by other media so why is it that even advertising agencies struggle to regard search as an advertising channel?
The idea that online media is more likely to drive donors online is thus in part disproved: online display advertising, Facebook ads or email marketing are not the best way to drive benefactors to make an online donation after all, but direct mail and above-the-line advertising are more effective. This indicates that the benefactor’s journey to making an online donation is not as straight-forward as hoped and is likely to involve a number of channels.
To carefully guide donors along this journey, the current “silo” approach to advertising media urgently needs to be replaced with a more joined up approach. It is far too common to find that the search marketing team and the direct marketing teams are entirely separated. With each part of the campaign running independently only a few elements such as email and direct mail, or follow up direct mail on display advertising are ever integrated.
Integration of search with other media requires inclusion of this medium at the planning stage. However, it is felt that as search engine marketing is particularly trackable, other media will lose budget share to it if they are not equally traceable. In fact when a cookie is laid onto the landing page informing the system that the potential donor has landed on the company website via a specific search engine, search is regarded as accountable for that acquisition. It is of course evident that more channels may have had an impact on the donor’s decision to search for key terms, including for example television advertising and direct mail. As a result traditional media fear that all uplift derived from the whole campaign, composed by a series of items of direct mail, emails and television and out-door advertising will be attributed to search which is usually the last tracked medium.
Quite the opposite from attributing all sales conversions to itself, however search is an ideal medium to measure the volumes of traffic to the site generated by different media. As each medium is launched into the campaign it is possible to track the uplift in traffic generated. The uplift in key word searches on the day a television advert is aired or the uplift caused by a follow up mail out or email send out can thus be efficiently tracked. The success of different combinations can be measured more simply and the learnings used to inform future campaigns.
To achieve optimal results all marketing and advertising, online or offline, should reflect key search terms. Equally, marketing tag lines (for instance, “Date an Elephant” by Elephant Family) need to be optimised on search, so that the cause, and indeed the specific initiative being promoted, can be easily looked up on the Web without necessarily remembering the jump page address.
Although it is positive that search is almost always optimised for the company website, it is still all too rare for individual campaigns. So, while finding a website based on its core message is usually taken care of scrupulously, the same is not provided for each campaign. When 16.46 million households (ONS) are potentially online at the time of airing a television advert and the investment has been significant, charities are really letting themselves down by not bidding on the featured terms. By echoing messages, integrating timing and analysing response it has been proven that the combined effect of all these media produces a better uplift than their use in isolation. At a time when more and more people are tightening their belts charities need to ensure that every penny is working.