Dave Chaffey is an excellent resource for this topic. The following information is derived from the 4th Edition of Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice.

Online campaigns are fun. No…they are a blast. And we can’t even begin to talk about online campaigns without a little taste from the most recent successful (maybe ever?) online campaign by Old Spice.

I’ve bookmarked several items on my Delicious page so take a look at those first before diving into the theoretical content below.

Fist pumping fun, right? Ok, buckle in, now theory time.

Goals of Interactive Marketing Communications

Planning for how digital media are used include both short-term campaigns to support a particular goal such as launching a new product, promoting a sale or encouraging prospects to attend an event, and longer-term continuous e-communications activities which review the best mix of communications to use to drive visitors to a site to achieve the main outcomes for the site such as product sales, lead generation, engagement with a brand or subscriptions or ad revenue. It’s all about traffic building…

Four typical objectives & tactics of developing an interactive or digital marketing communications program are:

1. Traffic building goals. Use online digital media and offline promotion to drive quality visitors or traffic to a website which convert to the outcomes required (sales, lead, newsletter, sign-up) at an acceptable cost.
2. Conversion and engagement goals. Use on-site communications to deliver an effective, relevant message to the visitor which helps shape customer perceptions or achieve a required marketing outcome.
3. Third-party site reach goals. Reach, influence and engage with prospective customers on third-party media sites such as online news and magazines sites, portals, and social networks.
4. Multichannel marketing goals. Integrate all communications channels to help achieve multichannel marketing objectives by supporting mixed-mode buying.

Main Categories of Digital Media

• Search Engine Marketing
• Online PR
• Online Partnerships
• Interactive Advertising
• Opt-in Email Marketing
• Viral and Social Marketing

Characteristics of Digital Media

1. From push to pull
2. From monologue to dialogue to trialogue (!!)…the interaction between company, customers and other customers faciliated through online community, socialnetworks, reviews and comments
3. From one:many to one:some to one:one (mass customization & personalization)
4. From one:many to many:many communications
5. From lean-back to lean-forward
6. Increase in communications intermediaries

Integration Main measures: for setting campaign objectives or assessing campaign success

• Step 0: Volume = unique visitors/reach (%)
• Step 1: Quality = conversion rate
• Step 2: Cost = cost-per-click (CPC)
• Step 3: Cost-per-acquisition (CPA)
• Step 4: Campaign ROI (%)
• Step 5: Branding metrics
• Step 6: Lifetime value

Conversion Marketing Value Objectives

Traffic quality trumps traffic quantity… Traffic quality is determined by whether the visitors are within the target audience for the website and whether they have a current need or propensity for the services or content on the site…it follows that digital media channels that have the best capability to target users who are currently seeking products, for example search engine marketing, will be most effective in converting visitors.

***It is useful to set goals based on conversion models for individual media channels such as online advertising and SEM, which will have different conversion rates