Right after Thailand declared a state of emergency and the unrest in Bangkok increases, I received this mailer from Booking.com yesterday:
Did it caught my attention?
Yes.
Did it make me want to book flights or hotel to Bangkok.
No, not really.
I have partied before in Bangkok, but the current party is not really something I would consider right now.
Lesson for the marketer: Targeting your message is not enough, you have to remember the timing of the message as well.
Accidentally I stumbled upon two Burger King campaigns this week which were on totally opposite side of the spectrum. Whopper Sellout was a disaster, but this pre-roll campaign is great:
Insight: People hate pre-roll videos. Ironically, you probably have to watch one to see the case study above. There is nothing more annoying than seeing boring ads, when you just want to see Japanese diarrhea dance. I pretty much always skip the pre-roll, expect if it really captures my attention immediately. Kobe & Messi Selfie Shootout was probably one of the latest pre-rolls I watched from beginning to end. But what if you tailor your pre-roll message to the content your audience is going to watch?
Really simple and effective idea also tied to promotional message. It would be interesting to see some stats from the campaign as well and to compare the finishing rates to regular Burger King promotional pre-roll. My hunch is that this execution did quite well. This is also a great example that nowadays you really cannot separate creative and channel planning. They go hand in hand.
Content is king, but context is king kong.
Speaking of retargeting, this creepy ad popped in my screen today:
No, I do not remember that one time I visited your weird site. And even if I would remember, I would surely want to forget that time. Why I would want to visit sites with bald guys with glasses with weird look on them? Was I drunk? Is there something else I should remember? Or try to forget?
I did not click the ad, although I googled the company. Apparently they are company offering retargeting services. Go figure. Probably visited their site when I was writing the post about retargeting last week.
They continued bombarding me with that scary dude later on:
No shit, Sherlock.
Catching the attention is one thing.
Catching relevant attention which converts to engagement is other.
The latter requires more finesse.
During the last year the amount of behavioral retargeting has exploded. In layman´s terms retargeting means:
1) You visit brand site for the reason X.
2) They attach cookie to you, which enables them to detect you when you are surfing on other sites.
3) The brand starts stalking you and populates majority of the sites you are visiting with their ads (as majority of sites sell at least part of their ad inventory through ad networks).
4) Retargeting has usually quite high ROI as it usually employs RTB (another media buzzword). Real-time bidding is explained in the video below:
How Real-Time Bidding (RTB) Works (in 30 Seconds) from Dr. SiteScout on Vimeo.
5) Eventually you break and buy something from the brand.
6) Or you are just super annoyed and block all the ads.
Don´t get me wrong. I think retargeting is a great asset in your digital toolbox like programmatic marketing in general. However, it is not the silver bullet that some vendors make it out to be. The hype around programmatic buying resembles little bit the over-excitement around SEO/SEM few years back. Too often retargeting is done too sloppily and you are harassed by irrelevant brand message because you almost accidentally happened to visit brand site. Visit is quite often too weak metric for retargeting especially if combined with a generic message.
Recently I visited these two retail websites (Dodocase, Mutewatch) and got served these retargeted ads:
Guess which one I clicked and also bought from?
I have had great experience every time I have flown TigerAir. I like the new look and the booking process has been pleasant on their site. When I was booking a flight to Kuala Lumpur, my user experience was this:
Did I try again later?
Hell no, I booked my flight elsewhere. Planning the holiday is fun and you can spend hours and hours for that dreaming phase. After that dreamy planning, the actual booking of the holiday (especially from budget airline) is just a fast transaction. You want to those chores as fast as possible.
All the nice branding and positive experiences won´t help you if you fail in the basics. It is totally ridiculous that airlines (Tigerair is not the only one) seem to buy their most business-critical functions from wholesale. There should never be a situation of heavy traffic in airline site, if you really think about it. You should not be cheapskate in all the things, even though you are budget brand. Because in that category being effective always trumps brand loyalty.
In certain categories, your moment-of-truth is always.
Tiger failed when they should have performed and also missed sure sale as well. Actually I had to buy the flights from other airline, which has less friendly UI and far more ugly logo as well. Their site just was not down when it was the moment-of-truth for my transaction.
I have never been specialized in search. I have many times worked with search specialists in various projects and I appreciate the work they do. Understanding the meaning of Google in consumer life is crucial, but SEO (or SEM for that matter) is just a part of a bigger picture. Remembering the time when clients believed that SEO is a silver bullet, I have always had my firm principals on how I approach the search:
1) SEO is competitiveness, not competitive advantage.
Making your website search engine optimized is easy for your competitors to do as well. How do you differ from them when they have are optimizing same way as you do as well? This is apparent in highly competed fields of traffic. Tabloids or online travel portals compete head-to-head and the number one search position changes hourly. Of course if you have not made sure of the basic hygiene issues, you have most likely lost the game already. Doing search well is something that is not enough to differentiate anymore.
2) You should create your content for people not for the search engines.
I have blogged for almost 10 years in various instances. Sometimes I have done tests and wrote the content more with the keyword-glasses on. What I have noticed is that good content will always become popular no matter what words you use. Some of my most read posts have had actually really mundane titles and go against all the rules of the traditional “write for search engines” –rule. Of course I know that I am not Perez Hilton or Seth Godin (or do I?), and my blog post is only a tiny-tiny-tiny fraction of what is happening in Internet in general. But so is majority of the web content. Companies should first concentrate on how they can be useful & interesting, and then think about keywords. Not the other way around. Being useful & interesting is hard and there are not short cuts to it.
3) Real Popularity is the most important optimization
Google likes content, which is popular and which is shared. After Google Panda-algorithm change two years ago, the traffic to news sites and social media sites surged whereas “content farms” really slumped (and majorly have not been able to come back). We also now that Google has increased the weight to social sharing with its search algorithm. Social media shares are harder to fake. You really have to be useful & interesting to get those shares, because they are done by real people.
These principles are still valid, and with the recent algorithm changes (like above-mentioned Panda) more accurate than ever. Google is aiming to eventually stop gaming the system and also make search to emulate more human way of searching the information. With latest Google Hummingbird there has been maybe the biggest leap in search, and the following changes will change the search game totally:
1. Security Search is now the Default: Less visibility on why your visitors are visiting your site
In conjunction with Hummingbird-algorithm change, there was also other major change in September. All the Google searches are now secure by default. Basically this means that you do not know what keywords your site visitors have used when they arrive on your site. This change was eventually inevitable, but still makes traditional SEO harder. There are also certain workarounds to try to capture the traffic.
2. Enter the Semantic Search: Forget the keywords, give answers
More and more searches are currently made by mobile and in the future increasingly with your voice (Siri & Google Glass). Traditional “googling” is not a normal way for people to find what they are looking for. We have taught ourselves to use keywords, but what we really are trying to find is answers.
Giving right answers tailored to you is the direction where Google is going. It takes account your device, previous search history and location and gives tailored search results based on your existing and expected future behavior. Some of these developments we have already seen. Google corrects your misspelled words and proposes alternatives to what you are trying to search. Knowledge graph tries to guess what you are searching on the right side under the search bar.
The search game is totally different than it was couple of years ago.
Do we still need specialized SEO-agencies or is search business nowadays mainly SEM?
I am usually not a fan of writing how different brands “fail” on social media. Too often these fails are actually quite trivial and more driven by the urge of “social media experts” to nitpick on every thing. However sometimes you just stumble on things which are quite hard to believe that are still happening in 2013.
Today I noticed there was discussion from Lufthansa wall spreading in Facebook. I went to check it out. You can read the whole correspondence from here, but if post will be deleted, you can also see the highlights below:
Because this is all public correspondence from Lufthansa wall (part of the #fail-part), I have not censored any names or such because it is public post.
The start after the first post was a guidebook social media example answer from the company with no customer service capabilities within social media team:
Good answer. Now Lufthansa would just need to make the final reply and everything would be ok.
Further assurances are made that thing is progressed further, but nothing happens for a week:
During this part of the discussion the social media team actually shows that they only work as messengers within the company with no real access to customer service personnel. It also seems that customer service personnel does not really care what comes from social media team either. It also showcases well how the airline companies (not only Lufthansa) are making the access to customer service increasingly difficult. You cannot call anyone and the mails are not answered (or your mails are bounced back). In Facebook you get answered, but unfortunately the answers are not any good. And of course nothing happens on the customer service front:
After this something totally peculiar happens: Lufthansa Facebook team goes totally quiet. Maybe they counted that the situation will eventually die down. But as you can notice from this post, the discussion did not die down. It actually just got more vivid. People started to share this post in social media and now it has garnered almost 100 likes and 72 comments. The post has not been taken down (not that it would probably help in this situation) or not addressed in any way. If you decide to ignore someone in social media, you should make that decision first and not halfway through.
This discussion gives us three lessons:
1. You cannot have the cake and eat it too.
It is impossible to just get the “good” side of the social media such as likes and positive comments. Your Facebook page is also customer service channel whether you have customer service working in your social media team or not. This correspondence shows that the company treats social media as a nice sugarcoating and not really a part of the business. You have to also be accountable for your answers. If you say you are getting back, you really should get back. You do not really need social media expert to tell this. It is just common courtesy and common sense.
2. Handle the social media complaints first
All the customers are not equal. You should treat those better who pay more (your best customers) and you should also treat those first who can cause you the biggest damage (damage prevention). This post has been escalating for three weeks and I do not doubt that it will escalate further. How difficult it would just to get back to the guy?
3. If you answer the questions in Facebook, follow through
It is of course respectable to have open unsolicited discussion on your Facebook page. In this case, the situation just looks bad and shows more that you do not care about customers. Also although the discussion does not show in your FB front-page it does not mean that it is forgotten. Currently the whole discussion sends the message that anyone in the organization does not really care.
Airline industry is one of the most complained industries in the world and I have had my fair share of challenges with them. Nothing new under the sun in many ways you could say. This situation could have been saved easily on many occasions during this discussion (not to mention the thing has been boiling for three months before). The situation can of course be saved, but it is much harder now.
I am looking forward to how Lufthansa will respond. At least they have been pondering for the right comment for 1,5 weeks.
EDIT (Apparently now the situation has been sorted out):
Stand-Up Strategy 