Direct Response and Brand Marketing in the New Media

I picked up the link to David Carter’s blog post from Twitter yesterday. Truth to tell, I followed it because it mentioned NEMOA, the New England Mail Order Association which numbers among its members some of the best catalogers on the planet, also a lot of old friends. I was interested to see what was going on, and David’s slideshow focuses on what he learned from them; you’ll find it interesting.

I had a major “wish I’d said that” moment when I saw this graphic. David is a hard-headed social media marketer, and his “not a replacement strategy” warning is a good one. But what really struck me is that this says it all. Social media is a creature of the web, although it simply enables some physical world phenomena like Word of Mouth. Direct response, the province of the people at NEMOA, has been around for quite awhile. So has branding. What’s fascinating is that direct marketing and brand marketing take place, in similar ways, on and off the web. This is what marketers do—it really does say it all!

This morning’s article by Augustine Fou in ClickZ takes it a step further. Dr. Fou is proposing a new definition of digital that blurs the nice neat lines in David’s graphic. It’s a broad definition; "the collection of habits and expectations of modern users." Here is a summary of his major points:

Branding Is Dead
However, consumer habits have also evolved. Many people actively search for things online. And the moment they type in a search term or phrase, we know exactly what they're looking for at that exact moment in time.

While it’s true that traditional brand marketing in mass media has decreasing relevance on an almost day-by-day basis, brand development is still hugely relevant. It’s just done differently

Targeting Is Dying
As consumer habits change to "pulling" for information when they want or need it, marketers' tactics must also change. Tactics that fall under the umbrella of "push" marketing become less relevant because fewer modern users will tolerate being beaten over the head with ad messages.

Dr. Fou’s point is that people almost always start with search when they’re looking for information on the web, and that’s absolutely true. However, think about the post about McKinsey content last week; they are using Web 2.0 techniques for distributing content. Is that push? I’d say it is, but it’s either permission-based or very polite or both. No beating over the head here!

Social Media Isn't Media
. . .trying to use social networks and social actions as media won't work. Conversations can't be bought. And if they are bought, the community will find out and retaliate.

He concludes that marketers who get it “will gravitate toward techniques that cultivate genuine and open dialogue with customers, where brands humbly listen and learn, and then respond with new features and innovations.”

I totally agree. But I’d add that marketers still need to understand, and properly use, the three disciplines of marketing in David’s bubble chart. Direct response, often PPC these days, can be used to bring people to your site—which had better give them the information they are looking for and allow them to efficiently conclude a transaction (direct response) if they desire. Brand marketing still has great relevance—think all the “who do you trust” discussions. People you know and other consumers come first on the trust list. Brands (I’d include the adjective “trusted”) follow closely. Creating a trusted brand should be the overriding goal of brand marketing these days.

Where the lines really blur is between brand marketing, still a necessity, and social media marketing—more and more the way savvy marketers are doing brand marketing—as Dr. Fou said.

The disciplines are still there; the way marketers execute has undergone a huge shift.

Testing To Make IM Fast and Simple

I’ve pointed out that testing is a time-honored direct marketing technique that has taken on greater capabilities on the Internet. Several important items have drifted into my inbox over the past couple of weeks and I’d like to bring them together. Marketers need to be testing and there are an increasing number of services to help them deal with the complexities of doing reliable tests.

Many of you are familiar with the work of Avinash Kaushik, his blog and his book on Internet metrics. Recently he was interviewed by Brian Eisenberg of FutureNow and Grok.com, who has just written a book on testing. It’s a 30-minute interview (access from this page) but worth playing in the background while you read your mail.

Let me give you a brief overview. Kaushik emphasizes how fast the web moves and how flexible marketers have to be to keep up with it. The weeks and months it took to read the old direct mail tests just don’t cut it on the web. What the marketer needs to be able to do is:

• Encourage a flow of ideas and validate the good ones
• Lower the risk of making marketing decisions
• Do it in a way that’s fast and simple.

Testing is the key first step. Success comes from superb execution.

My last post on testing generated two comments that contribute to the discussion. They are from two marketing services firms that appear to serve different market segments with testing products. Both commenters basically agree that Google Website Optimizer may be a good way to get started in testing, but it doesn’t produce results that have a high level of statistical confidence.

Widemile is a service that targets agencies needing testing services for their clients. A lot of firms/a lot of agencies don’t have the in-house expertise. They need services and Widemile concentrates on the optimization of landing pages. They have a brief demo; check it out. Billy Shih has an informative blog that focuses on testing.


SiteSpec appears to serve clients directly with testing services that include A/B splits and multivariate tests. It has an interesting platform, well explained in a demo. There’s also a video on their home page.

Testing is important, but most of us need help. That includes knowing the right questions to ask and the kind of results to demand. Here are some good resources to help you upgrade your own knowledge about this key avenue to Internet marketing success.

Testing for Marketing ROI

Today seems to be testing day in marketing newsletters. I read an article in today’s SearchBuzz newsletter about multivariate tests and thought I should check out the tools. When I wrote about testing earlier I emphasized A/B splits (bivariate) because I think that’s an easier way to start. While I was working on that, along came this week’s chart from Marketing Sherpa that does a nice job of summarizing some of the strategy issues. But do you need a big budget to test?

In the earlier post I mentioned Offermatica (recently acquired by Omniture) as a testing tool. I really like their demos of both A/B splits and multivariate tests. They’re just a bit harder to find now. You have to look on Omniture’s product tours page and select Test & Target. But this is a hosted service, not DIY.

But the tools I wanted to take a look at are Google Website Optimizer and Widemile's Page Optimizer. Google’s is free. Google, of course, has a video.

Widemile’s business model is to provide technology to agencies and marketing services firms so they can offer testing services to their clients. They have a simple summary that describes the efficiency of A/B split testing against multivariate testing. You can test many variables at once when you use experimental designs (what we refer to as multivariate testing). That seems like stating the obvious. However, what may not be so obvious is that multivariate tests are much harder to “read.” The real question is, “Are these small differences statistically significant?” As the conceptual examples in my earlier post showed, that takes you right back to your statistics courses. And if you’re like me, you absorbed the fundamentals represented in the text box that starts “Choose the variables to be tested.” But you may share my reluctance to base serious marketing decisions on my personal statistical skills and my concern that the automated tools won't produce the right answers. Automated testing products need to take into account necessary sample sizes for statistical significance. They don’t want to burden users with that type of statistical detail (yes, I understand, it’s a bit scary), so you need to ask questions about statistical significance and confidence levels, even if it means you have to drag out an old stats textbook.

Since Google’s tool is DIY—and they don’t particularly want to talk about the significance issue either—I wondered how it was dealt with, if at all. They have a good blog that is well written and may help with some of your concerns. One of the entries I found was for a sample size estimation tool from one of their partners, a site called WebShare. If you followed my advice in the earlier post and read Paul Berger’s chapter on testing in our (free download) direct marketing text, you’ll find it follows the basic steps, although there are still issues. Specifically, it’s a one-tailed test; see the Improvement call-out on the tool page. It’s only looking for better results; not whether the results are either better or worse. That’s probably realistic for most marketing tests. They give you a nice comparison chart—various % improvement, various significance levels. Try it for yourself!

Most of us have a lot of questions about what will work best in our marketing programs. A/B splits will answer a few of these questions for us. Multivariate tests will answer many more questions in the same time period. Whether you are using marketing services of one kind or another, or whether you’re going to try it DIY, do it with care. I am reminded of the Mark Twain quote:

“It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.”

Don’t accept insignificant results. And remember the old direct marketing rule to keep testing. If it’s an important marketing decision one test, especially one with a small sample size, is just not enough.