I-Marketing Interview: Intel - Part 2

In Part 2 of this interview, Intel (Nasdaq: INTC) director of corporate Internet marketing Shawn Conly continues his discussion with the E-Commerce Times of i-marketing strategies and pitfalls.

Click here to return to Part 1.

ECT: What advantages have you gained through marketing in e-mail newsletters?

Conly: The great thing about e-mail is it's somebody who's raised their hand and said, 'I'm interested in your company, and I want to find out more.' It's a great permission to be able to go back and contact these people more. Unfortunately, its effectiveness has been impaired by the tremendous amount of spamming that's going on right now. This has tainted a lot of e-mail marketing.

But we still have millions of people who have signed up for our e-mail newsletter and are excited to get it. We find it to be a great way to get a deeper message across to people and give them opportunities to drive down deeper within our site to find out more information or to actually purchase a product.

ECT: Have the new larger ad sizes had an impact on your advertising campaigns?

Conly: The plus of the different ad formats is that it creates a standard across different sites. So from a distribution and production standpoint, we don't have to reinvent the wheel for every site you're advertising on. The standards are still not as widely adopted as I'd like. But I'm afraid we may eventually end up in the same situation we're in now with banners, where if we get too standardized on certain ads, they will start becoming invisible again.

Part of a Mix

ECT: What are some successful strategies for online advertising?

Conly: No. 1: Experiment. Every company has a different mission on the Web, so you need to figure out what combination of different activities is going to work best for you.

No. 2: Think about the role that your online advertising is playing in your total marketing mix. A lot of our internal constituents come to us and want to build awareness for a particular product and want to do it exclusively with the Web. But it's not necessarily the best medium to get broad-based awareness out there. You need to think about your objectives, and how does the Web play, versus your other media tools.

ECT: What pitfalls should an online advertiser try to avoid?

Conly: Be careful about what your success criteria are, and really think about this before going into a campaign. Focus the data that you get back on those success criteria, and make sure the data is actionable. Because you can get completely overwhelmed with the amount of data you get back from a campaign.

Compelling for Tech

ECT: Are there products or services that are not suited for promotion through online advertising?

Conly: As a technology company, we find the Internet to be a tremendous medium for getting our messages across, and I think any other technology company would probably agree with me. Because we have a built-in constituent base that in most cases is accessing the Internet using one of our products. We find that to be a very compelling proposition. As you start drifting away from technology products, there are probably ways to get your message across that may be as compelling as using the Internet.

ECT: How do you measure the effectiveness of your Internet marketing campaign? What factors come into play?

Conly: It goes back to the objective of a particular campaign, whether it's to generate a conversion to an e-mail list, or to get a deeper interaction with some key content that we have. So we look at it very much on a conversion basis, but conversion can have different definitions.

A conversion can be signing up for a newsletter or purchasing a product. We look not just at the click-through rate, viewing rate, or interaction rate, but at whether we converted prospects to the action we were looking for.

Farewell, Cloud Nine

ECT: Based on your experience with Web marketing thus far, what does the future hold for online advertising -- both in terms of strategy and technology trends?

Conly: The industry is going through some big growing pains right now, with what's been going on with the economy, and what's been happening with the Internet industry in general. But I think marketers are going to come back to the medium for what it does best, which is getting this deeper interaction with customers, and will start leveraging that even more than we have before. I think that's the future of this medium and where it can play a tremendous role in the marketing mix.

At first, there was a lot of overly optimistic hope for the Web, in terms of being able to eclipse everything else out there in universe. And I think it's just coming down to earth in terms of where does it play, and how does it fit with the other tried-and-true marketing activities.

Scientific Method

ECT: What advice do you have for a company starting to plan a new online advertising campaign?

Conly: Be disciplined about what you want to get out of it. It's not a panacea for all marketing needs. But it does some things really well, so make the campaign focused on those things that the Web does well.

And don't be afraid to experiment. We learn as much from our unsuccessful efforts as we do from our successful ones. As soon as you've launched a campaign, pay attention to it, learn from it, and adjust on the fly. That's one of the best things about the medium: its ability to be iterative in terms of how your campaigns look.