The good news: The folks at TryPhone have done quite a good job at bringing the brand experience online for cellphone companies.
The bad news: since cellphone user interface design is incredibly bad (with the exception of iPhone), this type of online demonstration hurts many of the brands it demonstrates. (I’m not saying that’s their intent, nor am I saying it’s a bad thing.)
Notice how all the cellphone advertisements you see fail to show you even a single screen of the user interface for the device? (Microsoft, with outstanding chutzpah, chooses to create stylised — and totally fictional — visual interface designs for it’s Windows Mobile ads.)
Compare that with iPhone ads, which feature nothing but user experience.
Get it?
While digital marketers are inventive at reaching customers through search, e-mail, and other methods, it’s critical to conduct website modifications in to capitalize on that qualified traffic. Online marketing efforts should always balance traffic generation efforts with continuous creative improvement around product marketing, merchandising, and retailing on the website itself. It’s the website that converts browsers into buyers, not the advertisements.
Of course, make sure you’re covering the bases in your PPC management as well. Research keywords exhaustively and optimize them based on regular reporting. Look to rules based bidding, active bid management, and bid and campaign scheduling as additional mechanisms for campaign optimization. And don’t overlook the ad copy. David Ogilvy wrote the book on advertising copy; apply his ideas to PPC programs is not only appropriate, it’s rare.
