Out with the old, in with the New!

The last year has been an amazing one for us at Magnetise - with award wins, company growth and lots of exciting new technologies and features being developed. Seeing as we're a social bunch at heart, we made sure to take a little time out to celebrate the festive season with our colleagues too though!

In true Magnetise style, Secret Santa came to town with a rather entertaining set of gifts. Each year we set a theme for gifts, and a really challenging price point to acquire them for, then sit back and watch the fun as people see what they've got. This year, as you can perhaps glean from the photo below, was all about wearable items….

Just looking at this photo shows just how fast we're growing - despite the fact a few team members couldn't be there (or perhaps were pre-warned about the outfits they'd be called on to wear?!?) Magnetise is fast becoming a rather big family.

We're starting 2012 with lots more growth and success to share with you - but in the meantime, we'd like to say a very Happy New Year to all our clients, partners and friends, and we're looking forward to working with you more this year.

The Conversion Quandary

During our online travels, we came across a really interesting post on Bryan Eisenberg’s brilliant online marketing blog. He raises the question of ‘Who Owns Conversion?’ and discusses how it has been a topic of debate he’s covered for over a decade. Having been in this business since 2007, we’ve also been watching with interest as this vital element of digital marketing has shifted and shaped itself in line with the advance of technology.

As Brian says, in the offline world, ‘Sales’ owns conversion, but online it seems to be a less concrete facet. We’ve never had the pleasure of working with someone with the official title of Conversion Rate Optimisation (CRO), but we regularly work with myriad personnel and suppliers for the campaigns we do, from affiliate marketing to media agencies to fulfilment houses, direct marketers, Marketing Directors, CEOs, Online Marketing Managers, Channel Managers and more! It can be confusing to navigate and understand the myriad ways in which conversion is catered for, but from experience we know that conversion is a central aspect of digital marketing efforts, even if it is not clearly demarcated within a particular role or supplier relationship.

This, in part, is due to the rise of data and the flexibility of today’s technology. They are now, or should be, part of everyone’s work, making them a shared rather than owned resource. From staged email marketing campaigns to prospects, to real-time transfer of data to call centres, to managing, optimising and attributing leads across many different channels both on and off line, we traverse the online marketing universe and ensure that we can generate, harness and capture interest in our clients’ products and services regardless of the route this conversion takes.

Because we work with so many different types of company and personnel, making our technology both very sophisticated and incredibly easy to use is paramount. Our clients can dip into our Ad Centre management console, add messages, creative assets and campaign requirements, and get a campaign up and running in minutes regardless of their technical or marketing know-how. We take up the strain of ensuring everything fits together, complies with all industry guidelines and requirements, and utilises the very best form functionality, validation and data management enabling clients to optimise campaigns quickly, easily and effectively.

It is because of this approach that our technology and services can be adopted by so many different types of user and we are actively developing across the suite to ensure Magnetise clients, regardless of their job title, role, division or business, can continue to optimise the conversion of interest into sales.

Everyone in digital marketing therefore ‘owns conversion’, us included.

All Roads Lead to Lead Generation

With the evolution of Google+ already forging ahead, we’re actively digging into its features and functionality to assess it for our clients. Google itself has already mentioned its applicability and value for lead generation, and that, in time, it may allow brands to conduct commerce on the service too.

Lead generation is a natural element of the social marketing mix. We are already incorporating a number of social channels into our reach and remit, and Google+ will become relevant possible sooner than previously thought. The company has generated a fantastic level of demand by tightly controlling user sign ups in the early stages, but quickly then rolled out the ability for brands to also sign up and make use of the service via the recently launched Pages, safe in the knowledge that there was already a consumer audience in place. Whether this was always the plan, or a response to the uproar about brands not being allowed through the gates, we will never know.

Currently, both promotions and advertising are absent from the service, but it is highly likely, given Google’s excellent focus on monetisation through advertising and its range of complementary services, that Google+ will become ‘all things to all brands’ as it were.

Just as Magnetise works to cover and cater for all valid lead generation channels and techniques, brands should also ensure that they are present and active in key channels their customers or indeed prospects are to be found in. And from the little we have gleaned so far, the story and rollout of Google+ has only just begun.

Magnetise takes a break with ITV Daybreak!

We’ve had the opportunity to work with ITV for the last 3 years now and have a brilliant relationship with the team there. So when they invited us to visit the Daybreak London studios recently, we jumped at the chance to hang out for a while. Such was the popularity of the trip, Magnetise conducted its very own ‘prize draw’ and the lucky winners were duly waved off to The London Studios on South Bank.

The visit was a very inspirational (not to mention fun!) experience, with a full tour of the news and production rooms as well as the chance to get up close and personal with some of the stars of the show that day, including Carol Vorderman, Martin Lewis and Christine Bleakley. Coming from the relatively small and nimble new media world, the team were enthralled by the size of the operation, the complexity of the production and the dedication and effort that goes into making each individual programme.

After watching some of the action on set, we couldn’t resist the chance to act like popstars and have a go at ‘performing’ on the on-set stage. Luckily this was not, and never should be, televised – but we certainly enjoyed it nonetheless! After that it was up to the hospitality suite for a champagne breakfast with stunning views over London as our backdrop.

Once back in our (considerably smaller) offices, the team shared their insights with the rest of the office and immediately set about using that ‘insider knowledge’ to support the work we do with the company. ITV uses services including our white label competition platform to generate additional revenue and provide engaging content for its visitors, as well as our widgets and basket ads that make excellent use of previously wasted real estate to carry relevant adverts and offers for the ITV online audience. As a creative bunch, we had lots of new ideas too and look forward to telling you more about them in the future.

In the meantime, we’d just like to say a big THANKS to all the team at ITV – it’s a pleasure to be working with you!

Social Media – have you jumped on the bandwagon?!

Social media has been hitting the headlines increasingly in recent months, with Tweeting being a widespread hobby of the rich and famous to vent their frustration / anger / excitement / love / whatever else happens to pop into their heads. However, we have also recently seen the arrival of Google+ and amendments to the ever-changing face of Facebook leaves marketing professionals all over the world debating on the implications that social media has on online marketing and branding.

One noticeable change to Facebook in the past few weeks is that they have added the ‘Ticker’ bar to the right hand side of the page, just above the chat box. According to Mark Zuckerberg, this is a new way of providing ‘frictionless sharing’. But what does this mean? Well, put simply it means that whatever you are doing is automatically posted to the Ticker bar, and your friends can all see what you’re up to including now what websites you visit, what music you listen to and what you are saying to friends that they may not even know! Aside from the fact that this has its flaws, which are being discussed in detail on many online forums, including invasion of privacy (see here for an interesting write-up by the Washington Post), apathy towards what other people are up to and it just being annoying and intrusive it’s also clear to see the value this free publicity can offer marketers and advertisers as long as Facebook, in time, finds a way to up the relevance to its users, and therefore optimise conversion for brands.

We could dwell on many aspects of these recent debates, but we’d rather focus instead on how social media enables us to qualify and gather more appropriate leads and how we can tie this into the work we do at Magnetise.

We always make sure we understand and integrate the best channels for our clients and have therefore been looking into the integration of our services with Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus. Right now, Google Plus is still unproven regarding the platform it can provide marketing and advertising campaigns. It is an exciting time as the network is growing rapidly though and we’ll be keeping a watch on things as they evolve. In the meantime, we’ve assessed and started to integrate ‘like’, ‘tweet’ and ‘plus 1’ buttons to TopFox, our white label competitions platform, to enable increased viral propagation of our clients’ campaigns through consumers’ social network profiles. This will be extended so that people can sign up to, and sign in to, TopFox directly from their social network account, making it quicker and easier for them to enter competitions, and for our clients to collect invaluable prospect data.

We’re taking this careful approach to social media for a very good reason. We’ve found that many in our market rush into new channels in a ‘land grab’ manoeuvre, and while they may collect a good volume of leads, these are not converting into sales. And isn’t that why we’re here?!? We believe that quality is just as, if not more, important than quantity, and with all the noise out there about social media, it’s easy to lose sight of this central premise, something that was referenced eloquently in a recent article on Tech Crunch. Another interesting viewpoint is the danger of over-monetisation talked about by Sir Martin Sorrell in The Guardian article linked above. There is no doubt that social media’s potential pool is immense, yet without context and relevance you won’t hook many fishes!

With all this in mind, we have so far researched and identified the core aspects that drive our client's businesses forwards - including signing in with Facebook to reduce the steps a consumer needs to take, and 'liking' comps to drive viral propagation - and will roll in others as they become a true value-adds for our client base. We are already using these features with a Lead Intelligence campaign for ‘The Week’ magazine and on our competitions on Gumtree. Click the links to see these live, or see below.

What we at Magnetise would like to know is whether you have been collecting leads via social media, and if so, have they been as valuable as those gathered through other channels? Do let us know in the comments section...

Magnetise’s In-Video Test Campaign with Nokia's Ovi Music Store

The audience for online video advertising is maturing fast, with 63.1% of online video viewers in the UK being exposed to advertising in June 2011 according to ComScore, and now offers increasingly interactive experiences for consumers, allowing them to engage with brands and take ‘control’ over the information and advertiser activities they want to view and learn about. Figures for April 2011 show 32.6m people in the UK watched a total of 5.4bn online videos, meaning there is a huge potential audience if 2 out of 3 of them are being exposed to video advertising! When you consider that online video consumption grew by 37% in the UK last year the prospects and opportunities become even more exciting.

The Magnetise team has been working with a few carefully selected brands to showcase its new video advertising product, In-Video, which enables mass market adoption of online video advertising via the fast, effective creation of complex, dynamic and interactive overlays.

In partnership with Nokia and Go Direct Marketing, we ran a test campaign using our In-Video solution and thought you might be interested in finding out more about what it can do for brands looking to capture this growing audience.

The test campaign focused on driving exposure, engagement, registration and downloads for Nokia’s Ovi Music Store using a Michael Bublé concert in Sydney as a promotional incentive. We worked with media partner Muzu, the music social network, to host the campaign, exposing it to a tightly targeted audience demographic offering them an exciting range of engagement opportunities perfectly fitting with the Ovi Music Store brand and business.

The advert encouraged consumers to take various routes including entering a competition to win 2 tickets to the Michael Bublé concert and 7 nights stay in Sydney, downloading free music, watching a video, discovering more about Ovi music and exploring the website. See below.

To record findings as accurately as possible only proactive clicks on the video were counted as a true interaction; it is easy for a user to simply move their mouse over the advert accidentally and Magnetise will never count this behaviour as a ‘result’. Despite this, the unique interaction rate was a very healthy 1.1%.

Looking deeper into the engagement possibilities provided by In-Video, it is clear that the interactivity encourages users to become much more involved in the brand and the advert itself. 39% of users who clicked through to event level engagement activities, such as downloading free music or registering for a competition entry, went on to complete the action. We think it is noteworthy that within such a busy, fast-paced channel with so many brands competing, almost 2 out of 5 users were following through.

The Ovi Music Store test for Nokia has ultimately provided strong validation and useful intelligence before the roll-out of Magnetise’s In-Video capabilities, and the engagement levels recorded were a testament to the simplicity and richness of the creative presentation combined with the complexity of the technology. In-Video is proving itself to be an excellent platform for encouraging consumers to truly become actively involved with a brand and to use intrigue to push the potential customer’s desire to learn more.

To read more about the Nokia In-Video campaign please click here.

If you are interested in finding out how Magnetise in-video solutions can help to generate better results for you advertising, click through to our website or contact the sales team via products@magnetisemedia.com.

Magnetise Wins New Media Age Award!

The New Media Age Effectiveness Awards are designed to reward and celebrate great work in digital. It gives us great pleasure to let you know that Magnetise is the winner of the Best Media Campaign category in 2011 for our work with Dennis Publishing.

Dennis has been a client of ours for a while now, and licenses the Lead Intelligence platform to run wide-ranging subscription acquisition activity for a number of their brands. You can read more about the subscription acquisition campaign that was deemed “a brilliant optimisation of media” by the judges here.

We'd like to take this opportunity to thank all the team at Dennis for working with us to deliver such a superb example of contemporary, high quality lead generation and if you'd like to find out what we could do for you, please do get in touch with our team.