Building a brand: Online marketing execution - Guest Lecturer

Today we had a lecture and seminar presented to us by an online marketing expert who has worked for brands such as PoundLand, creating their collaborated Gilette campaign with Lionel Messi. He introduced us into the attributes that we would need, in order to create a successful brand and campaign. Here are the significant areas that we found out about...

The Primary online channels:
- Web
- Email
- Social Media
- Mobile

The Primary types of online media:
- Owned: The website, email programme, Social media page
- Earned: SEO, Social media sharing, ratings & reviews

Bought Media:
- Paid advertising is prominent on most online channels
- Requires budget for production and media
- The saying that "Social media is free" is a myth

Most common bought media ads:
- Google PPC (Pay Per Click)
- Web display ads (including behavioral retargeting)
- Facebook and Twitter

Idea behind Cookies:
- Cookies allow people to find out your likes and interests online, in order for them to then be able to advertise through pop ups when you are using your PC on things that have been viewed in your previous online history.

Online marketing "cycle":
- Aquire > Content > Retain > Grow
- Reach > Relationships > Retention > Revenue




Online marketing "funnel":
- Problems may be that there will be dropouts along the way
- Packaging is used to get you talking and to attract you in order to keep you coming back and buying products from the brand



Engagement Pyramid:


Overview of online channels: Websites
- Most prominent online property for a brand

Important considerations for websites:
- Domain names (& Social media consistency)
- Software, platforms, hosting and support
- Desktop, mobile and tablet - & browser compatibility
- Design: responsive vs. templates
- Layout & usability
- SEO: Google is critical
- Internationalization
- Mobile: Web vs. apps

Email:
- Retention: reminding an earned audience
- Acquisition: bought email databases and prospects

Email example: Broadcast: eg. Net-A-Porter & American Apparel
- The "Welcome" email - generic broadcast
- Include early incentives to capture preferences and behavior of consumer
- Emails are tagged with analytics to measure clicks

Segmentation: 
- Same email with different creative, based on gender
- Age, Location, Interests from your sign up, account preferences
- Behavioral targeting

Personalised:
- Sent directly and specifically to individuals
- Happy Birthday, basket abandonment, addressing consumer by name

Email Measures:
- Most email marketing tools include analytics and reports
- Dispatches, delivery success or failure, unsubscribes
- Total opens, open rate, total clicks, click by individual content

Social Media and Mobile:
- Facebook
- Twitter

Video: Youtube, Vine, Facebook
Images: Instagram, Pinterest
Messaging: SMS, IM, Snapchat, Whatsapp

Facebook is the worlds largest social media platform.
- It is owned media
- No social media is free! Especially not Facebook!

Overall, I found the lecture to be extremely interesting as it helped me to better grasp the concept of what goes on behind the scenes of creating a brand, as well as learning about all of the different key elements to which need to be considered when deciding how to promote your brand to ensure that it is within the write context of the background and concept of the brand.