Online Marketing Suite Creativity

Lately I started thinking if the “Online Marketing Suite” (OMS) offered by Sitecore was really offering enough. According to analysts we’re doing pretty good in this area already, but there’s always room for improvement ;-)

So I wondered, what else could the package offer.

What first came to mind, is actually very simple and will require a mix of the already existing features. Basically OMS could deliver a banner control system for targeted advertising. Obviously this would only be interesting for portals which are running ads on their site, or offers sponsorship in the shape of advertisement.

I realize that 3rd party systems which delivers such functionality already exist, but this option, like everything else in OMS would excel in the fact that we can base it very accurately on the visitors and the type of content they are interested in.

Facebook is doing this to an almost criminal point, by offering advertisers to display their messages to a selected crowd based on interest, demographics and so on.

So what makes a good targeted advertising control?!?

• Ability to segment visitors based on demographics/GeoIP: Check.
• Ability to explicitely personalize content for identified users: Check.
• Ability to deliver campaign and conversion data: Check
• Ability to deliver multivariate ads for the same ad campaign: Check.

What else do we need, well that depends on how detailed we want to be. To deliver a great service to whoever wants to sponsor a site, we need to sell them accurate valuable exposures, eg 1000 exposures to potential clients for $100. So we need to control how many times an ad is displayed. Not too difficult, but lets make it interesting. Perhaps the sponsor would like to try 3 exposures per visitor before giving up on getting a conversion from that individual, and instead display the ad to others. It is all about targeting your message to an interested audience. Once you do that, the number of conversions per thousand exposures will go up. Obviously sponsors would most likely want to receive some kind of reporting as well, but I will skip that part for now.

That brings me to the desired process in Sitecore:

• Sponsor requests to advertise their services. E.g. 5.000 exposures to a target audience of “Engineers/technically savvy visitors in German speaking countries”.
• Creation of a new ‘Targeted Advertising’ item and any number of ‘spots’ (in case the sponsor desires to try a multivariate approach), in the shape of image(s), or small flashfile(s).
• Definition of segmentation and other personalization properties.
• Ad goes live.
• Reports of clickthru’s (and multivariate successrate, if applicable) is delivered to the sponsor.

Obviously this conceptual idea needs some polishing, as well as minor coding (in order to limit the number of exposures etc), before it could become a module. As mentioned in the beginning, this sort of functionality is mostly interesting for portals who already have sponsored advertising such as beliefnet.com or kino.dk.

If you have other ideas for extending what is already in the OMS package, I would be glad to hear about them.

 

As this is probably my last post in 2009, I wish you a Happy new year!