Читать книгу Marketing in the New Media - Holly Berkley - Страница 7

The first key to effective new media advertising is your website. Your website should be the center of all your advertising efforts. Sending users to your website to claim a coupon or take advantage of a promotion allows you, as the marketer, a direct way to track which advertising channel is most cost-effective and provides the best results. It also allows you to track your messages, promotions, and ad buys more accurately than in any other medium. This gives you the information you need to refine your media and messages as needed.

The design of your website is essential to the success of your marketing efforts, as this is often the final step to close the lead and capture a user’s information in some way. The feelings consumers have when they visit your website carry over to how they perceive your entire company or organization. It is essential that all of your marketing efforts, both traditional and new, are in sync and offer the same branding message across all platforms. No matter how effective your marketing campaign is, if you don’t have a well-designed, professional-looking website, people will not buy from you. (See Chapters 4 and 7 for more about ensuring your website is ready for a new media campaign.)

Using your website as the center of your marketing also allows you to interact with consumers on a much more personal level than other forms of marketing. The producers of the popular ABC television show Lost have set up a website not only to promote the show but also as a way for writers and marketers to essentially listen to what fans are saying about the show — and make changes accordingly. Allowing users to freely post comments on message boards is a great way to generate honest feedback about your product, so you can know what elements to tweak to make it even better.

On an interview posted on a fan website Lost-TV.com, creator and executive producer Damon Lindeloff said, “The fan reaction has a lot of influence … the biggest example is that we began to sense the real frustration from fans that we weren’t answering any questions and just asking new ones … [So we] gave the audience more answers than we were originally planning to” (Parker, April 2006).

Although opening up your product or service (or in this case a television show) to your audience’s honest feedback is a great market research tool, be careful. Make sure your message boards and chat rooms are monitored on a continual basis so you can keep some control over what is posted. After all, you don’t want visitors posting derogatory or negative things that may affect your public image. And while customer feedback from websites may encourage you to modify your product or service, don’t let visitors control your brand. (Even the writers of Lost allowed only certain staff members to see the viewer comments, to make sure the entire show didn’t get skewed in the wrong direction.)