Stratcom Blog

Nielsen is one of the great companies that make TV profitable. They are moving into a lot of other aspects of advertising then just TV (across platforms) and are adopting to an ever changing society. Most of my blogs have been about digital analytics because that is what I am most interested in. Nielsen creates TV analytics that are necessary for understanding where a company should market. Everything from the ratings of the television show to the demographic information.

This is an awesome video of how they do their cross platform research http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=UizO9XjaHCA

Because TV is not just watched on the television anymore it is important that advertisers understand a wholistic view of how their target market is watching TV.

Blogging is a topic especially of interest to me. It is hard for me to understand how some companies would need a blog other than for SEO purposes. My main thought here is that in order to have a blog enhance your SEO it needs to be read and other bloggers and website need to link to it for it to have any authority. If you have a boring blog that no one is linking to let alone reading what is the purpose of the blog? My argument would be to save the time spent blogging an invest it elsewhere. The only companies that can have a successful blog, in my opinion and according to a lot of things I have read, are the ones that create content that is sought after by internet users. This will enhance their SEO as well as their social interactions with the people that are reading and commenting on their blogs.

Reach local is one of the largest SEM companies that I am aware of. They boast their technologically advanced algorithm that allows them to very narrowly target your audience so that you see the best ROI.

Reach Local is a third party lead generator that charges you a fee to have them run a SEM campaign (they do other campaigns but i'm focusing on SEM) with their advanced algorithm. They bid on key words in search engines such as Google so that your website will come up in the paid section of the search results. Something that I thought was interesting that we learned in class was that the highest bidder doesn't always get the number one spot on the search results.

Reach Local creates reports that will vary depending on your type of campaign. The report would include things such as impressions, visits, calls, emails and web events. Web events would be a metric that you set up such as reaching a certain page within your website. You can also view your spend side by side with the report so you can see exactly how much you are spending to receive the impressions visits, etc...

After hearing about this social media analytical tool I thought it would be interesting to look further into it. Here is an interesting video on their sales force marketing cloud http://www.radian6.com/see-demo/

Radian 6 is a tool that combines social media metrics so that it is comprehendible and easy to work with. According to their website they listen to all the conversations that are going on about your brand and your competitors brand. They they compile that information, determine if what is being said about your brand is positive or negative then they make it easy to transfer posts or campaigns over to a separate social media outlet. Being able to look larger scale at what people are saying about your brand gives you the opportunity for more connected social engagement and better targeted social ads.

This is really a neat tool and one of the most comprehensive in my mind for social media research and marketing on the market.

My sophomore year I worked as a University Dining Service marketing intern. One of our primary objectives as interns was to conduct primary research in the form of surveys at many of the sporting events such as Football and Basketball. These surveys asked respondents there feeling towards the food, the facility and the service that they received. The surveys were generally around 10 questions long and was rated on a 1 to 7 scale, 7 being the most satisfied.

As an intern I saw a lot of problems with these surveys. The response rate was definitely a big one because people just wanted to get back to their seats and didn't want to miss any of the game. Additionally some people would skip out early leaving several unanswered questions.

Another problem was the timing of the survey. Sometimes the surveys were being asked before the person even took a bite into their food. A believe a much better way to do this survey would be to conduct the surveys after the person had clearly consumed the food and had time to process his or her interaction with the food and staff.

http://cdn.polarisindustries.com/VIC/MY2013/videos/clips/vic_product_final.mp4

This is a video for the 2013 Victory Motorcycle line up. This is one of my favorite brands of all times and I thought this form of strategic communication hit the nail head on for motorcyclists. This is there best branding that I have seen out of this company. They have a new line up of bikes, a new logo and as they say "a new attitude." Check out the video and see if it makes you want to own one!

Facebook Insights has some interesting and somewhat useful information. It gives you analytics on your posts, likes, people talking about this and your total reach. Social media analytics can be very difficult to quantify by itself. Run alongside a separate campaign you could use this research tool more effectively.

For example, if you were running a non digital campaign to get people to like your facebook page you could test different methods and compare them to the amount of likes that you received in a given period.

Total reach can be some interesting data. This shows how many people saw your business or page in a given period of time. So if you posted and people saw it or people reposted you or tagged you, things of this nature.

researchnow.com is an interesting website that utilizes panels to answer research questions. They have many different specialized panels to meet the needs of different markets. Their panels include automotive, mobile phone users, expectant mothers, healthcare, video gamer, banking and financial services and many more.

They have over 8 million panelists and provide companies with services such as multi-country studies, tracking studies, surveys and online focus groups. As we learned in class one of the problems associated with panel studies is the retention rate of the panel. Panelists may drop out because they are not compensated well for their time, death, lack of interest and many other reasons. This specific website boasts that they have one of the best retention rates. I wonder how they are able to prove that compared to other similar companies.

I received an envelope containing a 28 page survey titled The American Community Survey. The main thing that comes to mind when I opened this was response rate error. I cannot think of a single person that would take the time to fill out this behemoth of a survey.

By far the most comprehensive digital research tool that I use is Google Analytics. The functions of this tool are many, but I will cover some of the ones that are important for my work. At the front page you see your very basic information such as visits, pageview, bounce rate etc..

Visits can be looked at over a period of time to determine how well you SEO or SEM campaign is doing to get visitors to your homepage. Ideally you would like to see a spike in the data when a SEM campaign is going on. To determine that it is in fact a SEM campaign you can view sources of traffic. This will split the data into search traffic, referral traffic, direct traffic and campaigns.

A visitor flow chart can function like the heat charts that we saw in class. You can view Where visitors start and what pages they travel to next. From the homepage of twincityinvisalign.com, a website I manage, the most common next page is the promotion page. So I can tell from looking at the flow chart that the advertisement that I have on the homepage which links to the promotion page is functioning well.

A relatively new feature to Google analytics is called experiment. I haven't tried this feature out yet but it ultimately is a tool to improve conversions on your website by testing 2 or more different versions of the landing page to see which one performs the best. There is significantly more information on Google Analytics but these are some of the functions I use and find cool!