advertising Archives – Joni Salminen

How to reach B2B audiences online? That’s the question.

Published by Joni on July 7, 2017

Introduction It *is* indeed the question – most often focus of B2B digital marketing is on lead generation and marketing automation. Much less has been written about targeting. Yet, B2B targeting is far from having been solved. The typical conversation between decision makers and agencies goes something like this. Client: “All this online advertising is great – but I don’t…

Defining SMQs: Strategic Marketing Questions

Published by Joni on March 30, 2017

Introduction Too often, marketing is thought of being advertising and nothing more. However, already Levitt (1960) and Kotler (1970) established that marketing is a strategic priority. Many organizations, perhaps due to lack of marketers in their executive boards, have since forgotten this imperative. Another reason for decreased importance of marketing is due to marketing scholars pushing the idea that “everything…

Meaningless marketing

Meaningless marketing

Published by Joni on March 30, 2017

I’d say 70% of marketing campaigns have little to no real effect. Most certainly they don’t have a positive return in hard currency. Yet, most marketers spend their time running around, planning all sorts of campaigns and competitions people couldn’t care less of. They are professional producers of spam, where in fact they should be focusing on core of the…

Facebook Ads: too high performance might turn on you (theoretically)

Published by Joni on March 30, 2017

Introduction Now, earlier I wrote a post arguing that Facebook has an incentive to lower the CPC of well-targeting advertisers because better targeting improves user experience (in two-sided market terms, relevance through more precise targeting reduces the negative indirect network effects perceived by ad targets). You can read that post here. However, consider the point from another perspective: the well-targeting advertiser is…

Why human services are needed for world peace

Published by Joni on March 30, 2017

The bot can be boss, as long as we have jobs. Why are human services the future of our economy? (And, therefore, an absolute requirement for world peace [1].) For three reasons: They do not pollute or waste material resources (or tend to do so with significantly less degree than material consumption) Exponential growth of population absolutely requires more human labor…

The Digital Marketing Brief – four things to ask your client

Published by Joni on March 29, 2017

Recently I had an email correspondence with one my brightest digital marketing students. He asked for advice on creating an AdWords campaign plan. I told him the plan should include certain elements, and only them (it’s easy to make a long and useless plan, and difficult to do it short and useful). Anyway, in the process I also told him…

Startup syndromes: “The Iznogoud Syndrome”

Published by Joni on March 29, 2017

1. Definition The Iznogoud Syndrome can be defined as follows: A startup strives to disrupt existing market structures instead of adapting to them. In most industries, existing relationships are strong, cemented and will not change due to one startup. Therefore, a better strategy is to find ways of providing utility in the existing ecosystem. 2. Origins The name of this startup…

A simple formula for assessing the feasibility of AdWords cases

Published by Joni on March 29, 2017

Update [24th March, 2017]: In addition to the formula explained in the post, I would add the following general criteria for a good AdWords case: 1) Low-Medium competition (high CPCs force to look for alternative channels), 2) Good website/landing pages (i.e., load fast, easy to navigate, have text information relevant to the keywords. Introduction Google AdWords is a form of…

How to calculate metrics for an AdWords campaign plan

Published by Joni on March 29, 2017

I teach this very simple formula to my students when they are required to write a pre-campaign report for the Google Online Marketing Challenge (GOMC). You want to report metrics in a table like this: budget ctr cpc clicks impressions 250 0,05 0,2 1250 25000 (The numbers…

Bugs and problems in Facebook Ads [UPDATED 10/08/2016]

Published by Joni on March 29, 2017

Introduction I’ve been doing a lot of Facebook advertising. Compared to Google AdWords, Facebook Ads is missing a lot of features, and has annoying bugs. I’m listing these problems here, in case anyone working at Facebook would like to have an advertiser’s opinion, and that people working with programmatic ad platforms see how difficult it is to create — if…

Tag: advertising