Online Marketing - The Smart Way of Promoting

Online marketing is one of the rising types of marketing segment to promote products and services in stunning way.  There are many smart ways online media is catching up the audience using different kind of technology to promote the commodities also it has enormous accessibility and reach it is easy to reach millions of users at one go.

Being the modern and hottest field online media advertising has become focus of attention in all the trading and service firms. According to the media experts online marketing mode carries a lot of prospected audience to make business. Also experts think that online media advertising is in game change period and soon it will beat other traditional media of advertising with its reach and sustainability.

The Smart ways of promoting

The sharpen technology discovering many more new systems to make strengthen of online marketing segment. Below are recent trends which are talk of the town in this industry.

1. Real Time Bidding
2. Behavioral Targeting
3. Make the audience busy through Interactive Creatives
4. Mobile App marketing
5. Games on social media channel

Real Time Bidding: This is one of the booming technologies which enable high return of investment to the advertiser. Real time bidding will be a significant factor that can fulfill the promise of online marketing.

As defined by Parks Associates, the automated process of buying and selling online display advertising in real time, and it incorporates enhanced solutions in targeting algorithms and data analytics in order to deliver better targeting, greater control and more granular campaigns.

In general words we can easily compare real time bidding with stocks market and its operations, but whatever transactions happed in RTB is approximately o.6 seconds.  Once advertisement wins the bid for desired inventory it will start serving to the right audience at the right time. Even still lot more improvements are going on to develop this system and track the accurate data at real time. As predicted in 2012, by this yearend real time bidding is most game changing segment in online marketing.

Using Real Time Bidding, Facebook advertising exchange is assuring the conversions within 2 days to its advertisers and it is working in that advertising exchange with abundance of audience, targeting based on geographical, demographical and behavioral factors.

Behavioral Targeting: This is one of the major parameter that online media used to target the right advertisement to the right customer to get business done within estimated time.  These technologies assess user behavior through user’s activity on World Wide Web.  This technology tracking through user’s IP address and personal information which user has submitted while transacting something else on the web.  Through this user data, various types of the advertisement will target to the respective customers based on their behavior and demographical factors.

Through behavior targeting most of the online media networks retargeting the interested customers through a variety of offers and discounts. Also many data management companies will analyze this data and segmenting the data as per the behavior of a particular customer.

Make the audience busy through Interactive Creatives:  As technology develops, online media is also implementing new techniques to attract the customers towards its products or services. Now most of the displayed creatives which have eye catchy look, color, articles on ads, videos, offers, discounts and many more to attract the customer’s attention from its first impression.

These interactive creatives have all the features in single creatives and this leads customer busy with one of their pages or its services. Also through this kind of the creative we can track user’s activity in each and every second and over again using this data, advertiser can target those audiences for their new products or services.

Mobile App Marketing: Now a day’s most of all are using smart phones and through mobiles we are engaged on many social networks, e commerce services, personal email conversations and chats applications.  These applications will capture potential data of the respective customer and track their activities on web.  Through these kinds of the interactive applications, marketers will target their desired audience to promote the services to its desired pool of customers.

Advertisers are following their own strategies to stay at the top of the game using these mobile apps.  Few are listed as these are recent trends in 2013.

• Retargeting and Real time bidding using mobile apps - Every successful mobile marketing campaign starts with successfully targeting those who will prove most beneficial towards the product or services.  The recent introduction of Apple's Advertising Identifier is helping to develop more complicated real-time bidding and retargeting technology, including the ability to exclusively target the inactive users in an effort to reengage through mobile apps and making other marketers jealous in the process.

Real-time bidding is truly a win-win for the mobile advertising industry, giving buyers more access and transparency while concurrently giving sellers a market-driven fair price.

Frequency of tracking -   This is one of the high debated topics across the industry and still it is going on in this year with lot of facts and figures. Using Unique Device Identifier (UDID) advertiser can track the activities of user. It is one or the other way helpful to understand the user behavior and expectations to optimize the app for stand on the top of the market. AdTruth is also announced a partnership with OpenX Softwares on their new venture to develop Unique Device Identifier technology in Jan 2013.

Advanced data capture about users – From past few years, many industries have squeezed the power of data and now the mobile marketing industry is taking notice and recognizing its value. The possibilities of discoveries using data are endless. Thousands, millions, and billions of data points provide mobile app marketers with a wealth of knowledge on user behavior that was not previously available.

New mobile user behavior: As we discussed above mobile marketing is also booming with other form of online marketing and we can also easily track the behavior of the particular user and potential of customer to promote feasible product.

In TradeMob, we are predicting a change in user structure and behavior in 2013. Due to competition in the tablet and smart phone market increases, service providers inevitably become more accessible and affordable to a larger cross-section of demographics, including less affluent and increasingly younger users.

According to eMarketer, introduction of new tablets like iPad Mini, the number of tablet users is expected to see explosive growth and it is reaching nearly 34 million (in 2011) to 70 million in this year.

Games on Social media channel: Social gaming started in middle of 2007 and officially introduced on Facebook platform.  Since then, Facebook grown from 27 million to 500 million unique visitors and over 70% visitors are engaging with social gaming on various social media networks.

Through these gaming apps advertisers can attract the premium customer especially they will target youth segment of customers to promote their lifestyle, entertainment, sports related merchandise and accessories to the targeted audience. Social media has implemented three methods for driving social games, such as premium placements, ongoing promotions, and viral notification channels from these three methods social media networks attracts daily active users to make revenue out of these games.

Conclusion: Online marketing segment is one of the terrifically growing domains for many uses. As fast as technology develops this domain is also developing in its own sizzling way.  This is the major reason that we all can see online advertising inventories on each and every piece of the web page and it’s just like a popular marketing place put any product or services in front of the right audience at right time also there is no geographical barriers to promote any of the services at any time without any hassles.

Source: http://goo.gl/hXA4s 

Creating a Social Media Marketing Plan

Online display advertising ecosystem

The biggest divide in the online advertising world is search advertising v/s display advertising. Search sounds exactly like what it is: the ads next to search results on Google, Yahoo, Bing, and competitors. Search is bigger than display by revenues, and much more concentrated. 

The benefit of search to advertisers is it corresponds much better than display advertising to intent.  A searcher for “hotels in Palm Springs” is most likely in the market for a hotel in Palm Springs. The other thing search has going for it is its easy and quantifiable — you can sign into Google Adwords with nothing more than your credit card, type up some text ads, and be running campaigns with impression and click reporting within hours.

The display advertising world is structured differently. Display ads are obviously those pictures you see plastered all over the sites you visit. There’s less intent so individual impressions earn a lot less money. Typically the prices are measured as CPM, Cost Per Mille, i.e. cost per 1k impressions. It’s also important to understand the structure of the market a bit. 

In the beginning (90s), advertisers pretty naively bought ad impressions millions at a time on popular sites. Performance was often evaluated based on pure impressions or CTR, click through rates. Ads were often sold on the basis of quantifiability — you could, for the first time, measure how many ads were seen, who clicked, how often, where he or she went, etc. As search advertising evolved, I think a lot of the people chasing quantifiable advertising moved to that, while display became more about branding. This, btw, is the value of facebook — brand advertisers want to be able to precisely target age, gender, income, and other demographics; on facebook, users freely and generally accurately share this information.

The display ecosystem has a bunch of moving pieces. If you look at the display advertising tech landscape graphic from Luma Partners, you’ll see:

Agencies 

These are the big advertising agencies that run most large advertising accounts go through. Companies like Toyota, GM, General Mills, etc, will give these companies tend to hundreds of millions of dollars to run ad campaigns on their behalf.

Media Buying Desks 

The ad agencies weren’t really capable of managing digital campaigns. That is, when ad agencies came about, your media outlets were maybe 10 national TV networks, radio stations, local newspapers, and a couple national magazines. And the media buying process was pretty simple: the agencies would send out an RFP that said we want manly men in their 40s who buy outdoorsy cologne and the aforementioned publishers would respond and say how their audience matched that profile. Compared to the online world of today, where there are thousands of premier publishers such as the NYT, ESPN, online magazine versions, etc; this was much simpler. 

Today, trafficking ads is an order of magnitude more work and advertisers must decide what they want to buy, where, on which site, when, with what creative, etc. So the agencies built or bought companies that have the capability to build digital media, traffic campaigns, optimize the ads, and create the necessary reporting. Eg Vivaki is Publicis, b3 is WPP, etc.

Ad Exchanges 

These are, well, exchanges where publishers and advertisers come together to sell and buy remnant ad inventory. Basically, there is premier and remnant inventory. Premier inventory is something like display ads on high quality reporting on ESPN or ads on articles on ARS Technica. These are often sold by in house salespeople in a process remarkably similar to how everything used to work, though people mostly email PDFs instead of sending faxes. Every ad impression that isn’t sold as premier is referred to as remnant, and these remnant impressions are offered to ad exchanges such as Right Media — RMX, owned by Yahoo — in exchange for a cut.

So the way this works is I can buy, with some rules, 1MM impressions on RMX and RMX will put these impressions on their publishers such as ESPN in ad impressions that ESPN didn’t sell in house. These impressions go for an order of magnitude less money than premier. RMX is one of the more technically sophisticated. The benefit for publishers is they get some money for inventory they didn’t fill. Just to be clear, a good eCPM for premier might be $20-$40 and a good eCPM for remnant might be $3-$5.

Demand Site Platform

A DSP helps advertisers purchase remnant ads across multiple ad sources including exchanges, ad networks, and individual publishers. A good DSP will have sophisticated targeting and optimization algorithms that incorporate first and third party data on behalf of the advertisers. Typically, a DSP’s clients are advertisers that aren’t big enough to go to one of the big seven agencies. Often these advertisers spend $10 – $50k / month, for example a local Toyota dealership instead of the national dealer chain, etc.

Ad Servers 

These help publishers. See Exp: OpenX, DoubleClick Dart, etc. Particularly for larger publishers, coordinating all these ad purchases is complicated. Your advertisers want to give you rules, such as user bleaching rules (only so many impressions to a given user per some amount of time), time of day, what pages an ad can run on (few people want to run next to naked folks, etc). 

They also want to be able to update and optimize their creative or even change the creative or the landing page they go to. Advertisers, or their agencies, also demand reporting — how many times was an ad seen. On what pages did users click on the Ad etc., within publishers the ad sales or monetization folks don’t want to be releasing the site every time they tweak Ads. Ad servers are internal or external software that manages all this and can be quite complex.

Data optimization 

This requires some explanation. In the beginning, people basically bought broad swaths of display ads. The value to optimization is the more targeted you can make your ad, the more value it has. My favorite example is espn: assume 10% of their online audience is female. If you’re an advertiser that wants to sell female sports jerseys, your CTR amongst women is 5%, your conversion rate is 5%, and a conversion is worth $50, your value per 1k impressions is 1000 * .1 * .05 * .05 * 50 = $12.5, so your CPM has to be < $12.50. However, if espn could pick out the women and sell the publisher only that segment (with some error, obviously), but say espn can enrich the demos so that women are 50% of impressions in a segment. Suddenly advertising on espn is worth 5 times as much for the advertiser and hence espn can charge 5 times as much. This is the value of data optimization. It's performed many ways, from things as simple as geo targeting and day part to more sophisticated demographic estimation, retargeting, and varieties of behavioral retargeting.

Re-Targeters 

Re-targeting is a simple idea. Say that I see cookies going to a site like a bmw forum. I might reasonably intuit that these users are interested in bmws and choose to show bmw display ads to them as they browse the internet.

Behavioral retargeting is the next step of retargeting. Plain retargeting is nice, but it suffers from a couple flaws. First, it has limited reach, ie there are only so many cookies that go to a bmw forum. BMW probably wants to reach more purchasers than just those. Second, it doesn’t really help generate intent. If you’re going to a bmw forum, you’re probably already pretty interested in bmws, so that may not be the best person for bmw to advertise to. Behavioral retargeting means any of a variety of ways of trying to figure out cookies to advertise to to get broader reach or cheaper acquisitions than retargeting.

The other big movement going on in the display world is the evolution of how people buy ads. In the early days — 90s — people tended to buy online ads in a high touch process with salespeople. Ad networks started which brought more buyers and fewer salespeople. Companies like Right Media — which Yahoo bought — started and allowed you to create bidding rules that run on their servers so advertisers can buy ads. So I can say that I want to, across many websites, target cookies that have visited a site or set of sites (retargeting), or show them so many ads per day, etc, and based on a variety of characteristics of a cookie and the site which that cookie is visiting and the web page they are viewing, $X is my bid for that cookie. 

RTB or real time bidding 

This is the new - now, instead of giving limited rules to someone like RMX, you register with Google (the largest RTB platform) or Yahoo’s RTB, and their servers, for each impression, send you a bid request. Your computers located in a server farm near their servers are given typically 100ms to respond with a per impression bid for that cookie on that page and that impression. See. Also, this is obviously an enormous tech investment. DSPs also help with this; most companies aren’t capable nor is it worthwhile to build this out in house.
Source: blog.earlh.com

Mobile advertising – An Overview

Mobile advertising is a form of advertising via mobile (wireless) phones or other mobile devices. It is a subset of mobile marketing.

Overview

Some mobile advertising as closely related to online or internet advertising, though its reach is far greater - currently, most mobile advertising is targeted at mobile phones, that came estimably to a global total of 4.6 billion as of 2009. Notably computers, including desktops and laptops, are currently estimated at 1.1 billion globally.

It is probable that advertisers and media industry will increasingly take account of a bigger and fast-growing mobile market, though it remains at around 1% of global advertising spent. Mobile media is evolving rapidly and while mobile phones will continue to be the mainstay, it is not clear whether mobile phones based on cellular backhaul or smartphones based on WiFi hot spot or WiMAX hot zone will also strengthen. However, such is the emergence of this form of advertising, that there is now a dedicated global awards ceremony organized every year by Visiongain.

As mobile phones outnumber TV sets by over 3 to 1 and PC based internet users by over 4 to 1and the total laptop and desktop PC population by nearly 5 to 1advertisers in many markets have recently rushed to this media. In Spain 75% of mobile phone owners receive ads, in France 62%and in Japan 54%. More remarkably as mobile advertising matures, like in the most advanced markets, the user involvement also matures. In Japan today, already 44% of mobile phone owners click on ads they receive on their phones. Mobile advertising was worth 900 million dollars in Japan alone. According to the research firm Berg Insight the global mobile advertising market that was estimated to € 1 billion in 2008. 

Furthermore, Berg Insight forecasts the global mobile advertising market to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 43 percent to € 8.7 billion in 2014.

Types of mobile ads

In some markets, this type of advertising is most commonly seen as a Mobile Web Banner (top of page) or Mobile Web Poster (bottom of page banner), while in others, it is dominated by SMS advertising (which has been estimated at over 90% of mobile marketing revenue worldwide). Other forms include MMS advertising, advertising within mobile games and mobile videos, during mobile TV receipt, full-screen interstitials, which appear while a requested item of mobile content or mobile web page is loading up, and audio advertisements that can take the form of a jingle before a voicemail recording, or an audio recording played while interacting with a telephone-based service such as movie ticketing or directory assistance.

The Mobile Marketing Association and the IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) has published mobile advertising guidelines, but it is difficult to keep such guidelines current in such a fast-developing area.

The effectiveness of a mobile media ad campaign can be measured in a variety of ways. The main measurements are impressions (views) and click-through rates. They are also sold to advertisers by views (Cost Per Impression) or by click-through (Cost Per Click). Additional measurements include conversion rates, such as click-to-call rates and other degrees of interactive measurement.

Mobile media can run on a mobile web page or within a mobile application, often referred to as in-App.

Mobile Rich Media

In addition to standard mobile display banners, a growing trend is to include rich media execution within the banner ads. This includes banners that would expand to a larger size, offering advertisers a larger display to communicate their message. Most of the Ads have games within the banner to make the experience of more interactive or a video within the banner space.

There are limitations rich media on mobile because all of the coding must be done in HTML5, since the iOS does not support flash.

Handsets display and corresponding ad images

There are hundreds of handsets in the market and they differ by screen size and supported technologies (e.g. MMS, WAP 2.0). For color images, formats such as PNG, JPEG, GIF and BMP are typically supported, along with the monochrome WBMP format. 

History of Mobile

Martin Cooper invented a portable handset in 1973, when he was a project manager at Motorola. It was almost three decades after the idea of cellular communications was introduced by Bell Laboratories. Two decades later, cellular phones made a commercial debut in the mass market in the early 1990s. In the early days of cellular handsets, phone functionality was limited to dialing, and voice input/output.

When the second generation of mobile telecoms (so-called 2G) was introduced in Finland by Radiolinja (now Elisa) on the GSM standard (now the world's most common mobile technology with over 2 billion users) in 1991, the digital technology introduced data services. SMS text messaging was the first such service. The first person-to-person SMS text message was sent in Finland in December 1994. SMS (Short Message Service) gradually began to grow, becoming the largest data service by number of users in the world, currently with 74% of all mobile subscribers or 2.4 billion people active users of SMS in 2007.

One advantage of SMS is that while even in conference, users are able to send and receive brief messages unobtrusively, while enjoying privacy. Even in such environments as in a restaurant, café, bank, travel agency office, and so on, the users can enjoy some privacy by sending/receiving brief text messages in an unobtrusive way.

It would take six years from the launch of SMS until the first case of advertising would appear on this new data media channel, when a Finnish news provider offered free news headlines via SMS, sponsored by advertising. This led to rapid experimentation in mobile advertising and mobile marketing, and the world's first conference to discuss mobile advertising was held in London in 2000, sponsored by the Wireless Marketing Association (which later merged into the Mobile Marketing Association). 

The first books to discuss mobile advertising were Ahonen's M-Profits and Haig's Mobile Marketing in 2002. Several major mobile operators around the world launched their own mobile advertising arms, like Aircross in South Korea, owned by the parents of SK Telecoms the biggest mobile operator, or like D2 Communications in Japan, the joint venture of Japan's largest mobile operator NTT DoCoMo and Dentsu, Japan's largest ad agency.

Mobile as Media

This unremarkable two-way communications caught the attention of media industry and advertisers as well as cellphone makers and telecom operators. Eventually, SMS became a new media - called the “seventh mass media channel” by several media and mobile experts - and even more, it is a two-way mobile media, as opposed to one-way immobile media like radios, newspapers and TV. Besides, the immediacy of responsiveness in this two-way media is a new territory found for media industry and advertisers, who are eager to measure up market response immediately. 

Additionally, the possibility of fast delivery of the messages and the ubiquity of the technology (it does not require any additional functionality from the mobile phone, all devices available today are capable of receiving SMS), make it ideal for time- and location-sensitive advertising, such as customer loyalty offers (ex. shopping centres, large brand stores), SMS promotions of events, etc. To leverage this strength of SMS advertising, timely and reliable delivery of messages is paramount, which is guaranteed by some SMS gateway providers.

Mobile media has begun to draw more significant attention from media giants and advertising industry since the mid-2000s, based on a view that mobile media was to change the way advertisements were made, and that mobile devices can form a new media sector. Despite this, revenues are still a small fraction of the advertising industry as a whole but are most certainly on the rise. Informa reported that mobile advertising in 2007 was worth $2.2 billion. This is less than 0.5% of the approximately $450 billion global advertising industry.

Types of mobile advertising are expected to change rapidly. In other words, mobile technology will come up with a strong push for identifying newer and unheard-of mobile multimedia, with the result that subsequent media migration will greatly stimulate a consumer behavioral shift and establish a paradigm shift in mobile advertising. A major media migration is on, as desktop Internet evolves into mobile Internet. One typical case in point is Nielsen’s recent buyout of Telephia.

However it should be kept in mind that the rapid change in the technology used by mobile advertisers can also have adverse effect to the number of consumers being reached by the mobile advertisements, due to technical limitations of their mobile devices. Because of that, campaigns that aim to achieve wide response or are targeting lower income groups might be better off relying on older, more widespread mobile advertising technologies, such as SMS.

Viral marketing

As mobile is an interactive mass media similar to the internet, advertisers are eager to utilize and make use of viral marketing methods, by which one recipient of an advertisement on mobile, will forward that to a friend. This allows users to become part of the advertising experience. 

At the bare minimum mobile ads with viral abilities can become powerful interactive campaigns. At the extreme, they can become engagement marketing experiences. A key element of mobile marketing campaigns is the most influential member of any target audience or community, which is called the alpha user.

Interactivity

Mobile devices aim to outgrow the domain of voice-intensive cellphones and to enter a new world of multimedia mobile devices, like laptops, PDA phones and smartphones. Unlike the conventional one-way media like TV, radio and newspaper, web media has enabled two-way traffic, thereby introducing a new phase of interactive advertising, regardless of whether static or mobile. 

This user-centric approach was noted at the 96th annual conference of Association of National Advertisers in 2006, which described” a need to replace decade’s worth of top-down marketing tactics with bottom-up, grass-roots approaches”. Many use 2d bar codes to make offline print material more interactive with their mobile device. This has been proven to be successful in Japan, UK, and Philippines and has been catching on in Northern America.

List of mobile advertising networks

This is a list of notable global mobile advertising networks. Mobile advertising is a form of advertising via mobile (wireless) phones or other mobile devices. It is a subset of mobile marketing. An online advertising network or ad network is a company that connects advertisers to web sites that want to host advertisements.

admob (acquired by Google), Adfonic , Adwhirl, Airpush, Appington, AppLift, Buzz-City, Enpocket (acquired by Nokia), Greystripe (acquired by ValueClick), iAds (previously Quattro, acquired by Apple Inc.), inMobi, inneractive, JumpTap, LeadBolt, MadHouse, madvertise, Millennial Media, Mobclix (acquired by Velti), MobFox, Mobhero, Mojiva, MoPub, MSN Ad Network, Tapclix, Vserv, xAd

Mobile device issues

Coincidentally, however, mobile devices are encountering technological bottlenecks in terms of battery life, formats, and safety issue

In a broad sense, mobile devices are categorically broken down into portable and stationary equipment. Technically, mobile devices are categorized as below:

• Handheld [portable]
• Laptop, including ultraportable [portable]
• Dashtop, including GPS navigation, satellite radio, and WiMAX-enabled dashtop mobile payment platforms[fixed on dashboards]

The battery life and safety issues will perhaps combine to eventually push mobile equipment’s inroads into vehicle dashtops. However, satellite-based GPS navigation and satellite radio may already hit a snag because of their part-time usage and technological hierarchy. Put differently, people want more functions than GPS navigation and satellite radios. 

The trend indicates an ongoing convergence into all-in-one dashtop mobile devices incorporating GPS navigators, satellite radios, MP3 players, mobile TV, mobile Internet, MVDER (vehicle black box), driving safety monitors, smartphones and even video games.

Source: en.wikipedia.org