Multichannel in a complex world

The proliferation of devices and channels has brought new challenges to just about every organisation in delivering consistently good customer experiences and effectively joining up service provision with marketing activity, data and content. A good multichannel strategy and execution is increasingly becoming essential to marketers and customer experience professionals from every sector. This report seeks to identify the key issues, challenges and opportunities that surround multichannel and provide some best practice insight and principles on the elements that are key to multichannel success. As part of the research for this report, we spoke to six experienced customer experience and marketing practitioners from large organisations across different sectors. In Multichannel Marketing: Metrics and Methods for On and Offline Success, Akin Arikan (2008) said: ‘Because customers are multichannel beings and demand relevant, consistent experiences across all channels, businesses need to adopt a multichannel mind-set when listening to their customers.’ It was clear from the companies interviewed for this report that it remains challenging for many organisations to maintain consistency across so many customer touchpoints. Not only that, but the ability to balance consistency with the capability to fully exploit the unique attributes of each channel remains an aspiration for many. The proliferation of devices and digital channels has added complexity to customer journeys, making issues around the joining up of customer experience and the attribution of value of key importance to many. Whilst senior leaders within the organisations spoken to seem to be bought in to multichannel, this buy-in was not always replicated across the rest of the organisation and did not always translate into a cohesive multichannel strategy. A number of companies were undertaking work around customer journey mapping and customer segmentation, using a variety of passive and actively collected data in order to identify specific areas of poor customer experience and create action plans for improvement. Others were undertaking projects using sophisticated tracking and tagging technologies to develop an understanding of the value and role of specific channels and to provide better intelligence to the business on attribution that might be used to inform future investment decisions. A consistent barrier to improving customer experience is the ability to join up many different legacy systems and data in order to provide a single customer view and form the basis for delivery of a more consistent and cohesive multichannel approach. Whilst there remain significant challenges around multichannel, there are some useful technologies allowing businesses to develop better insight into customer motivation and activity. Nonetheless, delivery of seamless multichannel experience remains a work-inprogress for many

Inefficiencies in Digital Advertising Markets

Digital advertising markets are growing and attracting increased scrutiny. This article explores four market inefficiencies that remain poorly understood: ad effect measurement, frictions between and within advertising channel members, ad blocking, and ad fraud. Although these topics are not unique to digital advertising, each manifests in unique ways in markets for digital ads. The authors identify relevant findings in the academic literature, recent developments in practice, and promising topics for future research

Digital marketing actions that achieve a better attraction and loyalty of users: an analytical study

Currently, the digital economy contributes decisively to an increase in competitiveness, especially as a digital transformation involves migrating to new technological models where digital marketing is a key part of growth and user loyalty strategies. Internet and Digital Marketing have become important factors in campaigns, which attract and retain Internet users. This study aims to identify the main ways in which users can be gained and retained by using Digital Marketing. The Delphi method with in-depth interviews was the methodology used in this study. The results of the research show the most important actions for achieving user recruitment and loyalty with Digital Marketing from the opinions of consulted experts. The limitations of this study are those related to the number of experts included in the study, and the number of research papers consulted in the literature review. The literature review and the results of this research are used to propose new solid research with a consolidated critical methodology. This research deals with a new approach that will optimize web technologies for the evolution of user trends, and therefore, will be of academic and professional use for marketing managers and web solution developers. The conclusions of the investigation show the key factors, discarding others that do not affect the optimization of conversions in B2C businesses such as the duration of the session and the rebound percentage. Likewise, the results of the research identify the specific actions that must be carried out to attract and retain users in B2C companies that use the Digital Marketing ecosystem on the Internet. The requirements for companies that wish to implement a model to optimize conversions using the current digital economy are also shown.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Managing Risk of Bidding in Display Advertising

In this paper, we deal with the uncertainty of bidding for display advertising. Similar to the financial market trading, real-time bidding (RTB) based display advertising employs an auction mechanism to automate the impression level media buying; and running a campaign is no different than an investment of acquiring new customers in return for obtaining additional converted sales. Thus, how to optimally bid on an ad impression to drive the profit and return-on-investment becomes essential. However, the large randomness of the user behaviors and the cost uncertainty caused by the auction competition may result in a significant risk from the campaign performance estimation. In this paper, we explicitly model the uncertainty of user click-through rate estimation and auction competition to capture the risk. We borrow an idea from finance and derive the value at risk for each ad display opportunity. Our formulation results in two risk-aware bidding strategies that penalize risky ad impressions and focus more on the ones with higher expected return and lower risk. The empirical study on real-world data demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed risk-aware bidding strategies: yielding profit gains of 15.4% in offline experiments and up to 17.5% in an online A/B test on a commercial RTB platform over the widely applied bidding strategies

What different types of Facebook marketing objectives are there, and what tactics can you use to reach those.

Social media is creating attractive business opportunities for brands and companies worldwide. It is because of the huge amount of businesses and costumers on Facebook, which reflects the importance of research on future marketing. The purpose of this dissertation is first to identify different types of marketing objectives on Facebook, and secondly to identify tactics to reach the different objectives. We conducted an inductive and a deductive approach based on a grounded theory method. Grounded theory differs from other qualitative methods because of the explicit guidelines that explain researchers how to proceed. We conduct eight in-depth interviews with four different communication agencies and four different businesses already integrated in social media marketing on Facebook. We built concepts and categories based on grounded theory and built a theory for our purpose of this dissertation. To get some more verification of our grounded theory we approached a Norwegian software agency that works with building platforms for creating Facebook applications. We analysed data given to us by the agency and compared their data with ours. Our findings suggest that sales, branding, customer service and conversions, are the overlying objectives businesses can achieve on Facebook. All of these objectives have more specified objectives underlying them, and to reach these objectives on Facebook our findings suggest four important success factors. It is important for businesses to define and gather their audience on Facebook in order to achieve any of the objectives, and they need to communicate their brand and create value on their Facebook page. It is a constant battle on Facebook to entertain your audience through engaging content. In order to know what your audience thinks is engaging, our data suggest that constant research on your audience is importuning. We create a model for engaging content based on our findings, and define tactical elements to achieve the different objectives. Our findings contribute to earlier research on social media objectives and create an overview of the objectives that can be achieved on Facebook. We believe that our findings will help businesses to make better decisions in their future marketing campaigns and strategies

Media mix modeling: a case study on optimizing television and digital media spend for a retailer

Project Work presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Marketing IntelligenceRetailers invest most of their advertising budget in traditional channels, namely Television, even though the percentage of budget allocated towards digital media has been increasing. Since the largest part of sales still happen in physical stores, marketers face the challenge of optimizing their media mix to maximize revenue. To address this challenge, media mix models were developed using the traditional modeling approach, based on linear regressions, with data from a retailer’s advertising campaign, specifically the online and offline investments per channel and online conversion metrics. The models were influenced by the selection bias regarding funnel effects, which was exacerbated by the use of the last-touch attribution model that tends to disproportionately skew marketer investment away from higher funnel channels to lower-funnel. Nonetheless, results from the models suggest that online channels were more effective in explaining the variance of the number of participations, which were a proxy to sales. To managers, this thesis highlights that there are factors specific to their own campaigns that influence the media mix models, which they must consider and, if possible, control for. One factor is the selection biases, such as ad targeting that may arise from using the paid search channel or remarketing tactics, seasonality or the purchase funnel effects bias that undermines the contribution of higher-funnel channels like TV, which generates awareness in the target audience. Therefore, companies should assess which of these biases might have a bigger influence on their results and design their models accordingly. Data limitations are the most common constraint for marketing mix modeling. In this case, we did not have access to sales and media spend historical data. Therefore, it was not possible to understand what the uplift in sales caused by the promotion was, as well as to verify the impact of the promotion on items that were eligible to participate in the promotion, versus the items that were not. Also, we were not able to reduce the bias from the paid search channel because we lacked the search query data necessary to control for it and improve the accuracy of the models. Moreover, this project is not the ultimate solution for the “company’s” marketing measurement challenges but rather informs its next initiatives. It describes the state of the art in marketing mix modeling, reveals the limitations of the models developed and suggests ways to improve future models. In turn, this is expected to provide more accurate marketing measurement, and as a result, a media budget allocation that improves business performance

Broadband Internet and Social Capital

We study how the diffusion of broadband Internet affects social capital using two data sets from the UK. Our empirical strategy exploits the fact that broadband access has long depended on customers' position in the voice telecommunication infrastructure that was designed in the 1930s. The actual speed of an Internet connection, in fact, rapidly decays with the distance of the dwelling from the specific node of the network serving its area. Merging unique information about the topology of the voice network with geocoded longitudinal data about individual social capital, we show that access to broadband Internet caused a significant decline in forms of offline interaction and civic engagement. Overall, our results suggest that broadband penetration substantially crowded out several aspects of social capital.Comment: Internet & Society; Economic