© oO < e © lab: ® ‘A Look into the beginnings of... Interactive Digital Marketing By Jessica Dunning Advertising & Integrated Marketing Communications March 2014 St. Lawrence CollegeIntegrated and Interactive Digital Marketing can comprise of many aspects; display advertising, video advertising, content marketing and native (promoted or sponsored advertorials) advertising, mobile devices, classified/ directories, SEO, email, social media, ad campaigns and targeting along with programmatic media buying... and I’m sure there is much more. Marketing can be categorized into three ecosystems; paid ‘advertising,’ owned & eared. Paid marketing (or native advertising) is publicity that is bought in order to encourage, persuade, or manipulate an audience to continue brand loyalty or take some new action. This can be PR public relations tactics, videos, photos and articles written to sound like they came from an outside or consumer source but are strictly content-based. Owned marketing (also referred to as content marketing) refers to any media channel, website, blog, Youtube, Twitter...etc. that the owner uses to publish content in order to attract, acquire and engage with its consumers. Earned marketing is favorable publicity gained through promotional efforts and word of mouth customer loyalty. Marketing can be divided easiest into three types of campaigns; awareness, persuasion and direct response. Branding campaigns that seek awareness usually consist of large ad takeovers, high impact and a lot of video. Their main focus is to create an impression to massive audiences to retain in the long-run. Engagement campaigns that look to persuade consumers focus on tracking their behaviour and interactions with the ad. They want to create brand experience which will turn into brandpreference quickly. Direct response campaigns are always focussed on return on investment for the brand. They are more aggressive in order to see a specific result(s) from the campaign (e.g. more foot traffic, more subscriptions, and more sales of a specific item.) When focussing on your creative (no matter what advertising or marketing platform you are using,) it is always important to remember some best practises. Use big type so that it is easy to read and keep your style to only 1-2 different fonts. Few, simple and short words are always a must when writing headlines and small copy. Call to action buttons must be simple and to the point. Your offer(s) must be compelling and always feature the benefit(s) as it encourages persuasion. Make your creative different; consider that awareness has always been achieved if your viewers are engaging and interacting with it already - so make it personally and emotionally relevant to your consumers. A new rising star in the industry today are dynamically assembled (time saving optimized) campaigns. These ads use geo-targeting to determine which variation of the ad to show a specific viewer based on their current demographics and location. Think of it as a template with different equations and algorithms that change its features for you, instead of having to sit at a desk and make 20 different versions by hand of the same ad for the 20 different consumers you think may view and interact with it. Dynamic interactive pre-rolls are also gaining popularity. These advertisements, games and/or videos are floating layers that pop up on yourscreen (pausing the current layer if you're on Youtube for example) so there is no rush for the viewer or consumer to skip through the advertisement to get back to their previous page. Speaking of advertising, one of the most important questions to a campaign is whether to repurpose or recycle? Many consumers will retain their brand loyalty or remember their brand preferences after viewing a repurposed ad than a brand new one. Think about how you talk about brands everyday... you barely remember the entire ad except for the beginning and end anyways right? “Oh you do remember that funny looking character? Wasn’t he from that Tide commercial? How did you remember that, it was months ago? | just saw that character on the new larger sized of Tide bottles in the store last week!” And so forth... If awareness is what you're looking for than you should always try to reuse your older content to put it back into your consumers mind fresh. If you're looking to repurpose pieces or aspects of your best marketing than your focus should be on persuasion. A good way to test your content (video-wise at least) is to post it on Youtube, its free and whichever variations or campaigns result with the most views (and positive comments if you choose to view them) should be used for your campaign. Then you also gain added awareness and exposure early before even broadcasting.