Web Marketing: the Best of Both Worlds

Erik Aeyelts Averink explores how companies can use their Web sites to help maintain a consistent global brand, whilst simultaneously appealing to local audiences.

The debate over whether to standardise marketing content which is published across multiple formats and geographies or adapt it for local needs arises frequently in marketing circles. Those backing standardisation cite the concept of the ‘global village’ - with technology allowing us to interact with people on the other side of the world as if they were our neighbours - in defence of their case. The idea that a customer can be anywhere in the world and still be greeted by a familiar logo, layout and message appeals to many businesses who operate worldwide. Yet, audiences are also becoming increasingly fragmented as choice, both on- and offline, grows. This makes it increasingly difficult to grab their attention - in order to meet the individual needs of every audience member a degree of personalisation and adaptation is essential. This article explores how web content management can help organisations to harvest the benefits of implementing a degree of both standardisation and adaptation.

Brand Management

It’s widely acknowledged that a strong brand plays an invaluable role in a company’s success. The consistency and management of a brand is vital because these things ensure the company is recognisable and has a fixed, positive identity. But with so many marketing channels now available to companies, it is increasingly hard to maintain consistent and undiluted brands.

However, web content management can be used to ensure effective brand identity and a standardised image. Of course, at the most basic level this means that the company logo appears on every Web page, that the background and layout is consistent and that pages are ordered in a logical way. Yet more than this is needed to fully reinforce a brand online. Brand management becomes more complex for a large company with web presence in several different countries and languages. A logo is simple to reinforce, but the messaging behind the brand is more difficult to standardise. Web content management helps by ensuring that certain instances of text or messaging appear on the same part of the Web site, regardless of the locality targeted and what language it is written in – it is simply translated. What is more, with a content management system in place, when relevant text is changed in one location, this will filter down automatically to all localities, if required.

Such an approach has been implemented by Orient Express. The company used to have 30 disparate local Web sites, representing the brand in an inconsistent and confusing way. By centralising the management of these Web sites so that content is created at one source rather than many, Orient Express’ online presence now looks professional, the brand is standardised and bookings have increased ten-fold.   

Web Globalisation

This example underlines the need for consistency on a global scale. However, while it is essential to identify the brand, it is equally important to adapt marketing communications in order to meet the needs of different markets – essentially moving away from the idea of a ‘global village’ and towards the notion of targeted differentiation. Clearly, messages that may work in the UK, may not work in Spain or China or Iceland.

The impact of globalisation and the difference in cultures means that varied approaches are needed, not to mention different, country-specific information. Web content management operates to achieve this aim - content can be changed on a local Web site without influencing the core messages and branding. This allows for marketers to express their knowledge of a particular country’s audience without diverging from the overall company ethos. Emirates Airlines achieved Web site globalisation by developing 30 regional multilingual sites with different languages, local currencies and banners that would be attractive to a local audience, while still retaining its core branding.

Multi Channel Marketing

The benefits of mixing standardisation and adaptation also apply to outlets beyond the company Web site. Today, marketers have access to more channels of communication than ever before. Web content management can be used to bring order to other forms of digital marketing, such as direct email communication. Most  large companies now use email to market their products in some way, making it key that every one of these emails is consistently branded and recognisable to a customer who may otherwise delete it as spam. The same principles apply to email, or indeed to any digital communication, as to the Web site – consistency and standardisation will strengthen the brand value.

By using Web content management marketers can repurpose all content types including text, graphics and applications for more than one channel. This helps communicate the message to a target audience in their preferred medium, eliminates the need for high levels of IT involvement and lowers investment in new channels. Organon has used web content management to create mailing and PDA templates to push out multiple publications with the same message. These templates are reusable so that time to market becomes shorter second time around.

Yet, as before, multi channel marketing does also benefit from a degree of adaptation. While the brand needs to be reinforced, an email must appeal specifically to the customer or prospect it is targeting. To do this, emails should be personalised as much as possible, without detriment to the integral message. Web content management can fulfil this need – providing a template to keep some parts of an email standardised, while allowing for other sections to be adapted.

Target Audiences

This notion of personalisation and targeted audience marketing is so important when you consider a typical urbanite will be exposed to an average of between 3,000 and 5,000 advertising or communication stimuli daily[1]. Advertising is being threatened by its own growth as the proliferation of adverts is causing people to notice them less. This is where targeted audience marketing comes in, and the web offers unprecedented opportunity for creative engagement. Increasingly, appealing to a market means becoming interactive and allowing customers to provide feedback – in effect launching a sort of ‘mass customisation’. Web content management allows a company to fit interactive elements such as blogs to its Web site, without losing control of all online content.

Web content management can enable customers to build up a profile, with all their likes and dislikes considered – think about Amazon and the recommendations you receive as soon as you log-in. This has been done by keeping track of buying history, but this can also be done by tracking pages visited and click-throughs. The more a user feels a Web site is made just for them, the better marketing techniques will work and the more sales a company will make.

Another upside of using web content management to strike the right balance is when a company decides to target an emerging audience. Or course, this is a prime example where adaptation is called for – the same information will not appeal to all groups. Marketers can save time and money by reusing selected content, structure, layout and applications. This can be used for both external and internal communication. Renault used this method to deliver highly personalised intranet sites to serve different departments within the organisation. The fact that web content management allows both extranet and intranet management to be combined within one centralised system substantially reduces outlay while maintaining the correct degrees of standardisation and adaptation.

Micro Sites

This tactic of reusing content can be expanded even further when specific marketing campaigns or events require their own Web sites or ‘micro sites’. These micro sites provide group-specific communication. The problem is that these sites need to be up and running quickly to meet campaign deadlines, they need to fit in with the main company site, but they also need to be very specialised. Web content management helps address these issues so that the micro site feeds from the main site and that the appropriate content is used to standardise it. This means the basics of the site are quickly in place and then only the specific campaign details need be added. What is more, by using micro sites the impact of a campaign is far easier to measure; rather than trying to work out if the increase on a main site is due to the new content, or just due to external factors, a marketer knows with certainty that it is the new campaign drawing in users.

Balance

After looking at five different elements of Internet marketing – brand management, web globalisation, multi-channel marketing, target audience marketing and micro sites – it is clear that a successful marketer needs to use a mixture of standardisation and adaptation. Today’s audiences are increasingly saturated by different marketing techniques and are more selective than ever when choosing what they will respond to. The key is to personalise and adapt an organisation’s messaging as much as possible, while still retaining a strong and recognisable brand. The Internet is the perfect media to use for this because Web sites and other digital content can be easily controlled. Web content management gives marketers the ability to standardise some content while adapting other areas, and saves time and money by providing a platform for further campaigns and material.

[1] http://adbusters.org/the_magazine/71/Fevered_Pitch_What_Advertising_Has_In_Store_For_Us_All.html