Direct Marketing: Operation Smile
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Operation Smile How to Launch a Marketing Campaign Online Mathieu DEGAND Claudia GALEANA Maxime GRIMARD Therese LARROZA Charlotte MARY Anna RELLAMA Camille THIḖBAUT Direct Marketing, Fall Semester Tim Lyons 21 October 2011
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Transcript of Direct Marketing: Operation Smile
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Operation Smile How to Launch a Marketing Campaign Online
Mathieu DEGAND Claudia GALEANA Maxime GRIMARD Therese LARROZA Charlotte MARY Anna RELLAMA Camille THIḖBAUT
Direct Marketing, Fall Semester Tim Lyons 21 October 2011
Operation Smile
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Abstract
With the increasing trend of online marketing and the current shift to the online world, it is crucial that even non-profit organizations such as Operation Smile adapt to the changing tides and begin establishing a solid online presence that would hopefully generate more volunteers and donations for the benefit of the organization’s charitable programs. One way to maximize Operation Smile’s online presence is through search engine optimization (SEO), which focuses mainly on on-page tools such as keywords and off-page tools such as Google Adwords. Another way would be through largely populated social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Delicious and some blog sites such as Blogspot or Wordpress.
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Table of Contents
Abstract ...................................................................................................................... ii
Operation Smile .......................................................................................................... 1
Objectives ................................................................................................................... 2
Search Engine Optimization ........................................................................................ 2
On-page Marketing Tools ........................................................................................ 2
On-site Factors .............................................................................................................................. 4
Off-page Marketing Tools ........................................................................................ 6
Other Potential Online Tools ....................................................................................... 7
Facebook ................................................................................................................ 7
Twitter .................................................................................................................... 7
Delicious ................................................................................................................. 8
Youtube .................................................................................................................. 8
Foursquare .............................................................................................................. 9
Sample Campaigns .................................................................................................... 10
The Facebook Campaign ........................................................................................ 10
The Delicious Campaign ........................................................................................ 11
The Foursquare Campaign ..................................................................................... 13
Conclusion and Recommendations ............................................................................ 14
1
Operation Smile Operation Smile, although internationally acclaimed for its generous acts of
charity especially in the cleft palate sector, still experiences problems when it comes to the acquisition of not only funds and donations, but also volunteers especially since their projects have been increasing every year. As a response, the group believes that it is best to make use of a tool that encompasses and reaches out to the most individuals in the world at a low cost, and that is, the Internet. The Internet has proven to be a powerful tool nowadays and is actually still growing at a very big rate. Not making use of such would be a mistake as the move towards the online world is becoming more and more evident each day.
Table 1: Internet Usage Statistics – The Internet Big Picture (World Internet Usage and Population Statistics)1
Throughout the study, the group will try to be in the aid of Operation Smile as it tries to expand it’s online presence through tools such as Google Adwords, on-page and off-page marketing tools, social networking sites, blogs and other famous sites such as Youtube.
1 From http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm 2 T. Singh (2008), Blogging: A new play in your marketing game plan, Business Horizons,
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Objectives For this study, objectives had to be established by the group so as to guide them in the formulation of all the other marketing ideas that they had for Operation Smile. In this case, the company aims:
1. To increase the numbers of volunteers, medical ones and community ones of Operation Smile by 20% within two years;
2. To increase collected donations, both financial and material, by 30% within a year; and
3. To double the number of visitors of the website who not only sign up for the site, but also stay involved in Operation Smile’s activities.
These objectives were kept in mind as the group tried to optimize Operation Smile’s online presence through tools such as blogs, email blasts and social networking sites. The group made sure that these are aligned with the company’s corporate objectives, mission and vision so as to show consistency, thereby preventing any misunderstandings that may result from such.
Search Engine Optimization One way to increase Operation Smile’s online presence is through the use of on-page marketing tools such as keywords and off-page marketing tools such as Google Adwords. Such tools, when used properly, can reach out to more individuals—that is, more potential donors and volunteers. As to how, however, this will be discussed further as we go on with the study.
On-page Marketing Tools
Considering that our target is made up for doctors and medical students who may not have much time but they have great interest in social responsibility focused on volunteer work, we decided to build a website that has a simple but attractive structure to ensure that users remain on the site and remain interested in joining Operation Smile’s projects.
To ensure effective navigation, we have identified five bases. Firstly, don’t make your user guess. We classified the information found on the website in four areas, which contains the main points of interest to our target as follows:
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Taking into account the second base that is quality, not quantity, we included more information only in the areas that need to be clarified, for example:
VOLUNTEER n Medical volunteers
n Community volunteers
DONATION n Financial
n Material
Similarly, to facilitate the navigation of the pages, we took into account our third and fourth bases, which are “consistency is key” and “don’t be adventurous.” Making the website structure similar to others found on internet gives the user an easy understanding of the format. Also, the structure of the pages (titles, subtitles, navigation buttons, placement of information, etc.) were made similar, thus providing consistency and easy usage of the website.
Finally, considering that the main information is on the Home page, the option of Back to “Home” (this is the 5th base) is always visible to allow effective navigation.
Figure 2 The Header for Operation Give-A-Smile must contain shortcuts to all parts of the site including Home.
Figure 1 The links for the subparts of the site need to stand out.
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On-site Factors A recent report from DoubleClick.com (2005) reveals that about half of all
purchases in the business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce category are preceded by a web search (Ross A. Malaga, 2007). In line with this, we decided to implement search engine optimization so as to increase our chances of being the first one selected for the search engines and users, thereby increasing donations and volunteers for Operation Smile. Some of the elements used by the major search engines to determine relevance include, but are not limited to: age of the site, how often new content is added, the ratio of keywords or terms to the total amount of content on the site, and the quality and number of external sites linking to the site (Sullivan, 2003).
(Ross A. Malaga, 2007)
Although more complex searches are possible, most web users conduct simple searches based on a keyword or key phrase (Ross A. Malaga, 2007). For this reason, we performed an analysis of the on-site factors of our competition and the official website of Operation Smile to determine the title, description and keywords best suited for our website. The results are as follows:
Figure 3 How on-site factors fit in the generation of site profits.
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Figure 4 The title, meta description and keywords that are most appropriate for Operation Smile.
Looking at these results, we decided that the title to our website should be simple and must refer to Operation Smile, because a more extensive selection would not be practical since it would not be visible in the tab.
With regards to the description, since we are looking for volunteers and donations, we have decided to focus on the emotional appeal to the users. For the keywords, we took some of the proposed bases for Operation Smile, but added more general terms such as children world organization, free for children, operation and operations help, to attract more users
when they are looking to support an association. Figure 5 The resulting details for Operation Give-A-Smile.
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Off-page Marketing Tools
In order to achieve effectively our objectives, we cannot just use on-page strategies. We need to combine them with off-page strategies to optimize even more the performance of our website.
The most strategic tool for us is Google Adsense, which permits us to raise awareness and encourage donations by orienting our advertisements towards users who are keying in words related to Operation Smile’s actions on Google. We chose to pay only when users click on our ad, thereby reducing significantly our promotion budget. The main advantage is that we can easily control and regulate our costs thanks to Google Analytics, a tool that generates graphs and charts showing the evolution of our campaign day after day.
The second most appropriate way to promote our actions out of our website is the use of social networks. As of the moment, approximately 8,544 people “like” Operation Smile’s page on Facebook but the plan is to be more present on these networks by subscribing to more platforms and posting news as often as possible. This will be detailed more later in the paper.
Blogging is another key way to reach more people, but since around 60,000 blogs are launched every day, it is crucial to know how to blog. With this in mind, it is essential that we only post the most important information, both to make the navigation easier and gain more credit from a search engine viewpoint.2
The blog also aims to build relationships between us and visitors, making visitors discuss about Operation Smile and then redirecting them on our website if they are interested.
Generally, careful attention needs to be paid to what is being said about Operation Smile on the web even if we cannot control everything. The least we can do is balance it by building a large enough network to monitor all these. We can also make use of forums where posts or topics that are linked to Operation Smile’s website can be found, which will then be crawled by search engines.
2 T. Singh (2008), Blogging: A new play in your marketing game plan, Business Horizons, 51, 281-292
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Other Potential Online Tools Besides on-site and off-site marketing tools, certain sites that can be used as marketing playgrounds already exist. These sites can range from social networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter to blogs such as Blogspot or Wordpress. With a well-defined marketing plan, these sites can add up significantly to Operation Smile’s online traffic.
Business owners are "friends" with Facebook. With 800 million users around the world and with more than 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day (Facebook, 2011), Facebook is one of today's leading destinations influencing online identity, entertainment, and content distribution. A growing number of businesses are making Facebook an indispensible part of their marketing plans. In line with this, the rules of the marketing game have changed. The command and control television era, where big brands were built by heavyweight messaging to the nation every night, is drawing to an end (Ward, 2010).
Once Operation Smile uses Facebook as a marketing tool to reach its marketing objectives and goals, it will enable the company to find and reach out to sponsors, volunteers and patients, build online communities of supporters and dig into gold mines of demographic information. However, relationship marketing for the Facebook generation demands both thinking and acting differently. In its place, a radically new structure is emerging that will dominate marketing, recasting the discipline and demanding a new direction in customer communication (Ward, 2010). Once a good marketing campaign is created and executed well through Facebook, this social media will play a critical part in driving Operation Smile’s target consumer intent as well as delivering brand engagement in the digital networked society.
In a globalized world like ours, when people think about Social Media Marketing, they do not just focus on Facebook but also twitter. In fact, it cannot be denied that some people have been tweeting much more than necessary. They tweet about their thoughts, reactions and actualities—those that happen either to their private lives or
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even the public. Because of the simplicity and the increasing trend in its usage, Twitter has been used by a lot of organizations and enterprises for advertising and customer services. As a matter of fact, “marketing professionals use Twitter extensively for communicating with and monitoring customers, for observing competitors, and for analyzing chatter concerning brands, products, and company image” (S. B. Rinaldo, S. Tapp, and D. A. Laverie, 2011).
In the case of Operation Smile, a Twitter account could be established so that their updates can be followed not only by potential partners and volunteers, members, but also those who can simply increase the brand image and add to Operation Smile’s online presence thanks to word-‐of-‐mouth. It could be an efficient way to provide timely feedbacks and updates relating to Operation Smile’s current operations and how its followers can be involved. The more the subscriptions, the more the followers, the better!
Delicious
When focusing on blogging, we tend to consider only the classic structure that offers you the possibility to post articles, and sometimes photos and videos online. Delicious goes further than that—it enables the user to post bookmarks on a single page to simplify its access to other users. We can assume that “a bookmark posted on a user’s Delicious account consists of the URL of a Web-‐available resource; a title for the resource […]; a brief comment, description, or analysis of the site as a note; and one or more tags, which serve to organize the bookmarks and take the place of the rigid folder structure common to browser-‐based bookmarking systems” (K. Stolley, 2009).
The use of such a tool for an Operation Smile’s marketing/communication campaign could be considered especially if we want to give a lot of information at once to potential partners. Press articles, video trailers, partners’ website, and so on could be accessed directly from the Operation Smile Delicious’ account.
Youtube
Youtube, being the biggest video platform on the Internet, can be quite advantageous for Operation Smile as well. People use Youtube for looking for advertisements, movies, video campaigns, music clips, etc. Its big network can be
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characterized by the 65,000 videos that are uploaded to it daily and the “75 million e-‐mails [that] are sent through posted commentary as well as forwarded video links” (Clark & Stewart, 2007; Kelly, 2007).
“By posting videos on YouTube, responding to content via posts, and sharing posted content, consumers have the ability to influence marketing and communication campaigns” (Owen & Humphries, 2009).
In our case, using Youtube to broadcast its videos, Operation Smile’s online presence would grow more rapidly. Moreover, these Youtube videos can directly be added to the organization’s website. Thus, whenever someone is looking at the videos on Youtube, a link to the website will be available under the video. An efficient Youtube campaign would help “Operation Smile” to broadcast its message and then to raise more funds.
Foursquare
Foursquare is a social media that emphasizes on the geo-localization of the users. It accounts for more than 10 million of users all-over the world and 500 000 businesses have already adopted it.
Foursquare allows its users to check-in in different places through their smartphones, and allows others to get access to such information. Similar to other social networking sites, you have “friends” who can see your activity and where you make your check-ins.
Using Foursquare for Operation Smile would be relevant because it will inform the followers of Operation Smile about its activities, like when they are currently doing a surgery operation, are making a special event3 in a certain place. By this geo-localization system, they can segment their followers, and address messages to people who are in a specific place.
3 Eleven Digital Trends to Watch In 2011, Maddie Grant, Jan. 13, 2011
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Sample Campaigns To give you a better picture of how these tools can be used as marketing tools for attaining our short-term objectives for Operation Smile, here are some examples:
The Facebook Campaign
Facebook has quickly moved from the periphery of marketing into the forefront with a large and growing portion of some of the most valuable demographics spending more of their time and attention on Facebook and less on other channels and media. This is a new and quickly evolving field and there are few established formulas for success (Ward, 2010).
With Facebook, Operation Smile can “start small.” For most businesses, Facebook pages (distinct from individual profiles and Facebook groups) are the best place to start where the organization can post updates, photos and videos about their activities. This will allow Operation Smile to collect “fans” the way celebrities, sports teams, musicians and politicians do (Pattison, 2009). Because Pages are more customizable than groups, Operation Smile can add HTML, Flash, or even Facebook applications to their page to extend their functionality and the depth of experience users can have with the organization.
The next step is to create Facebook Events that Operation Smile can use to promote their events, sponsored parties, or even celebrity endorsements, launches,
transactions, or company milestones. Since Facebook Events is a fully featured page, much like a group, that includes a wall, discussion, photos, videos, and links, Operation Smile for can add as much media they can. They can invite all of their friends and fans to the event and with Facebook Events, it’s easy to get the word out to hundreds of people, manage the guest list, and build a community around Operation Smile’s upcoming events (Pattison, 2009). Moreover, with the Facebook Share application, the
Figure 6 This is how sharing a post on Facbook would look like.
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organization will be able to promote any Group, Event, Photo, Link, or Application that is relevant to the organization. By posting on its page, it can direct the consumers’ clicks to the shared item that will help the consumers understand more the organization’s mission.
Furthermore, Operation Smile should use Facebook Ads, which can give the organization the option to pay on a CPC or CPM basis, whichever they prefer. Facebook Ads are very cheap and offer very powerful targeting capabilities: when an ad is created, for example, one has the option to limit who sees your ad by age, sex, location, keywords, education level, workplaces, political views, and relationship status (Pattison, 2009). With this, Operation Smile will be provided with real time feedback on the size of the target audience and the suggested bid range to achieve impressions. Moreover, Facebook Ads offers placements in the News Feed, thus getting much better click through.
Lastly, participation through comments, posts and likes is key. Operation Smile’s page can grow exponentially by word of mouth especially since an average Facebook user has 130 friends on the site (Pattison, 2009). It’s all about delivery – giving the target audience a choice about where, when and how to consume the organization’s content.
The Delicious Campaign
Delicious, as it was mentioned before, is a useful tool for bookmarking. Operation Smile can make use of such tool in expanding the visibility of the webpages that involve the organization.
For the campaign, the group has decided to create a Delicious account for Operation Smile with “Operation Smile 2011” as our username and a password that only we know. We have prepared 4 URLs that directs to Operation Smile. People looking for keywords such as charity, donation, surgery, children, and smile will now able to find our links and stacks
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Figure 7 Operation Smile's Delicious account
For example, upon the keying in of “children surgery” in Delicious’ search toolbar, some results will definitely appear on the page. These are called “stacks”. One stack contains some links related to the stack subject.
Figure 8 Stacks in Operation Smile's Delicious account
With an account for Operation Smile ready, it will be in the first stacks. By clicking on our stack, the user will now discover the 4 links related to the association. Then the association is now more visible for the users.
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Figure 9 Sample links in Operation Smile's Delicious account
With the Delicious website, users looking for keywords such as charity, or donation, will now directly find our Operation Smile stack. Since all links are stacked together, it will be more convenient for both Operation Smile and its users. When looking for the association video campaign or for the association website to make a donation, for example, you just have to navigate easily between the different websites.
The Foursquare Campaign
Since the aim of this campaign is to gather together people interested in the Operation Smile Project, a page for Operation Smile needs to be created first. With this, every time a follower is doing something related to Operation Smile, they can signal it to their relatives on Foursquare.
Step 1: Attract people to our page
To generate more traffic on our page, it is important to be visible on other foursquare pages of similar nature. On the Red Cross’ page, for example, or on the pages of the French Doctors.
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Step 2: Find new medical volunteers
One of the objectives of our campaign is to increase the number of volunteers all around the world. For that, we can use hospital check-in points that would make our programs visible through the comments. When a doctor checks-in at the hospital, upon looking at these comments, there will be a link to our webpage about volunteering in its country or area. Even if he is not directly concerned, he could at least spread the world to his colleagues.
Step 3: Rise Donations
The motivational aspect of Foursquare is mainly to raise “badges” according to your check-in actions. By providing an Operation Smile’s partner badge, every person that makes a donation or volunteers to the association will get this particular badge. In order to make it more attractive as possible, we should be associated to a brand that will provide special offers to people that have earned this special badge. Because of the exclusivity of such offer, it will hopefully be very attractive.
Step 4: Keep informed of recent activities
Our third objective is to keep followers informed of our different activities, likes operations, talks. Through the foursquare page, which is linked to the twitter account, we can inform in real time what is currently happening thanks to the organization, and furthermore localize it.
Conclusion and Recommendations The Internet offers a wide range of tools that can be used for the benefit of all sorts of businesses including non-profit organizations such as Operation Smile. With the right strategy and the right timing, numerous online marketing campaigns can be launched and maintained successfully, thereby attaining Operation Smile’s objectives and reaching out to more children that are in need.
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