e-Marketing Basics: Pro and Cons of Hour Targeting

One of the main advantages of advanced internet technologies is the possibility of hour targeting for ads served to web sites.
Exactly how such targeting is done, that is a tech issue far beyond our e-Marketing topic. What is important to us, e-Marketers, is to be aware of this facility web servers have and use it towards making online campaigns more efficient.

Hour targeting is especially useful when:
- we already know the online buying habits of our target;
- we want to create an association between our products and a certain time of the day when interest might be higher;
- we try to avoid a certain category of customers that are known to be more active at a certain hour interval;
- we know from previous researches that sites where we're advertising have different categories of visitors, with different interests and behaviour, active at certain hours.

Let us try imagining some examples of justified hour targeting:

- Premium IT products (such as laptops) could probably use a business hours targeting, on the premises that active, working professionals have more buying power. Similarly, off-hours and weekend targeting could be used when promoting basic desktop systems with a lower price to a more younger audience with less buying power and/or buying decision.

- FMCG products might benefit from targeting ads within hour intervals when these products are more likely to be utilized. We would probably want to place ads for coffee on news-delivering web sites during the morning hours; and advertising creams and gels for muscular pains later in the afternoon or evening, when such pains are more likely to occur.

- It is widely known that surfers using a dial-up connexion get online in the evening and at night. Therefore, if we are to promote products or services destined to dial-up users (modems, access cards, offers to switch to a superior connexion) it only makes more business sense to target late hours.

Interesting enough, such hour targeting is not always successful. A media planner might be blinded by the revelation of a cool method to raise efficiency of online campaigns like an adserver, only to realise at a later time that it can be more of a bother. For example, a banner for a banking product placed on a business portal would not need hour targeting, as professionals visiting such portals usually have permanent internet connection whether it is at office, at home, or is using a mobile solution. A regular reader of Financial Times online might opt to access the site in the evening, from the comfort of his home, long after the regular "business hours", and would be a missed target if we employ hour targeting.

To conclude, hour targeting for online campaigns makes a very powerful and efficient tool, but needs to be performed after carefully assessing surfing and buying behaviours of the visitors on web sites where we advertise.

(c) 2006 Otilia Otlacan

Small Biz Marketing Stategy: When to Launch a New Product

The first question an entrepreneur should ask himself when contemplating whether to extend his product range is "why would I do that?"

A good share of the entrepreneurs I know have a tendency to extend their product range in a very curious, oportunistic way. Whenever the market has more opportunities than suppliers, I see entrepreneurs deciding "Let's do this, too. We can do this, why not doing it?"

For this reason, they end up developing unrelated products that eventually lead to parallel businesses, very time and effort-consuming for the small business. An entrepreneur should first be able to address the following two questions:

- why does he feel the need to take such step, launching a new product or service?

- will the product contribute towards a better strategic positioning of the company?

- will the product help sustain the company's message for the target market?

Some other issues should be considered and answered too, before deciding to add a product to the company's range:

- will the new product cannibalize the existing products?

- if a new product is launched, will customers still purchase the previous products?

- the new product's market is a new one, or is it the same market as for the older products (is the business truly extending, or it is just being updated?). A business update is surely not a bad idea, but not if it comes as an unexpected result: the entrepreneur invests to extend the business and in return he only succeeds to replace older products with new ones.

Extending a product range should occur only when the target market is ready to buy something new. This is especially true on emerging markets, growing markets that need time to assimilate and learn new products, according to existing needs. If a product is launched too early in the market's development stage, one should brace himself for failure, or at least for a costly adventure: marketing the new product can require more time and money than planned and expected. Extending the products range for a small business is actually a matter of inspiration rather than perspiration (read: "research") since market research is often too costly for the small biz entrepreneur - thus extending the products range is a pretty difficult task: what products can you offer to people who are already buying?

When adding new products to the business, focus become the crucial aspect, and not the number of products being launched. If several new products are to be added to the range, they should be positioned for different targets and must be taken care by different teams. You can't give the market two products at one and you can't have one single team in charge of launching two products. Multiple products should be launched simultaneously only if the target market is large enough and there's an equally large team to manage it.

Two frequent mistakes made by small biz entrepreneurs are lack of innovation and focus. More exactly, they might launch products that are too "down to earth" (read: "boring") for an expanding market, or products that don't comply with the overall business strategy and direction. If the launch of a new product was successfull, sales should get a boost, but if the launch failed withdrawing the product is probably the best option. A frequent syndrome when it comes of small businesses stretegy is that of buried costs: the entrepreneur insists on keeping a failed product thinking "something" can be done with it or else the money spent on development and launch are lost.

If the new product was a failure, it is theoretically possible to try a re-launch, a re-branding or a different communication campaign; though, most of the times it's simply the wiser to just eliminate the product and cut the possible further losses.

To conclude, here are some major question a small business entrepreneur should ask himself before launching a new product:

- will the product contribute towards a better strategic positioning of the company?

- will the product help sustain the company's message for the target market?

- will the new product cannibalize the existing products?

- if a new product is launched, will customers still purchase the previous products?

- the new product's market is a new one, or is it the same market as for the older products (is the business truly extending, or it is just being updated?).

(c) 2005 Otilia Otlacan