I-Marketing Interview: Cisco Systems - Part 2

In Part 2 of this interview, Cisco Systems vice president of worldwide marketing communications Jere King continues her discussion with the E-Commerce Times about how Internet advertising fits in with Cisco's overall marketing strategy.

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

King: On some of our recent campaigns we used the new skyscraper-sized units, and they outperformed all other executions. They give enough real estate to the ad so people pay attention. And you can add some good content to it.

We had one that allowed people to calculate ROI statistics for a particular network purchase. Beyond the simplistic few words on a banner ad, this gives us an opportunity to sell a message or offer a tool or service, and customers appreciate that.

ECT: What are some successful strategies for online advertising?

King: Ensure you are doing an integrated campaign. Think through the program, from building initial awareness to creating relevance and preference to the final purchase. At the end of the day, those are the most effective marketing campaigns. Those campaigns are more complex and multifaceted, so think it through well in advance, and think it through relative to the purchase cycle.

Offer tools, services and activities that will make a customer continue to work with you and give you more permission to send information that is most targeted and relevant to them. If you just blanket the world with a message without a good follow-through program, that usually disappoints the customer.

Net Not All

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

King: Do not assume the online world is just like print or broadcast, but optimize your program for the medium. Understand its immediacy, global reach and highly interactive nature. But do not assume that the Internet will replace everything else you do. A large component of how we market is "high touch" -- personal interactions, face-to-face meetings, demonstrations, seminars. Assume that the Internet is there to enhance, to help you do things more cost-effectively, but understand its place in the marketing mix.

Also, many people think that if you build an online presence, they will come, and that is not necessarily true. You have to be consistent, provide customers with services and tools, and make it worth their while to interact with you in an online environment. If you do, it pays off tremendously in customer loyalty and retention.

If there are too many abandoned shopping carts, if you never refresh your Web site, or if you do not have a reliable network that ensures your site is always up and online advertising is always viewable, those things will turn a customer off.

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

King: For more sophisticated, large-investment purchases, there will be limitations on what you can do online. If you are purchasing a jet engine, it is very different from purchasing a book. The marketer has to get a feel for what its customers are willing to do online, and at what point it needs to go back into the hands of a salesperson or call center.

Most things cannot be done 100 percent online. This is where you need to do testing. Find out how far you can go online, what type of interaction customers prefer to see online and how you can establish a good relationship, not simply a communication link.

Staying on Track

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

King: We use many metrics. We look at how many people responded, new visitors versus repeat visitors, what their interest areas were and which media produced the highest clickthrough rate for a particular cost. We also look at how much time they spend on the site, which is an interesting indicator of interest and the validity of information. And the ultimate metric is: What did it cost you, and did you get any benefits out of it?

If it is a very specific promotion -- like upgrading your Catalyst 5000 switch to a Catalyst 4000 -- you can track resultant sales very easily. But most campaigns result in multifaceted network installations, and in that case, a multitude of programs and touch points built up to that final sale.

Also, given sales results for a quarter, we can "reverse engineer" the results. If company X had a network purchase this quarter, we can look at all the marketing programs in which it participated.

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

King: The Internet has been viewed as a serious medium for only seven years or so. In the next five years, it will be an expected element of every marketing mix. From a technology standpoint, there are so many exciting things happening quickly. Most exciting for marketers will be the comfort factor of customers using the technologies. I can now push my message out to the customer's mobile device -- a cell phone, BlackBerry or personal device.

As marketers, we ultimately want to send the right message to the right person at the right time. Internet technology presents that opportunity much more than other media, as the technology is beginning to deliver on an immediate, personalized basis.

Act Now

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

King: Seek best practices and benchmark with other companies if you are not familiar with the medium, just to get some baseline experience and familiarity. Do not be afraid. Get out there and try it. Test some media sources. Analyze your results, and you will constantly optimize your programs and get better at it. Sometimes you do not know what will be most effective for your program until you get out there and test it.

Make sure you have the appropriate network infrastructure that ensures you will have a successful online marketing experience with your customers. Make sure they can always reach you, that your network is available. Make sure the response time and performance are good.

Make sure that you can offer new and exciting ways of communicating with customers, going beyond HTML text -- such as streaming video, online surveys or tools the customers can use to make themselves more successful.