OTO One to One Interactive

Objective:

One of Comcast’s areas of service is providing Cable TV, High-speed Internet and Phone service to Small Businesses. The Comcast Business Services team tasked OTOi with developing an online media campaign to drive customer acquisition during their 2008 spring promotional pricing offer.

The client had very limited budget and looked to the online channel as the primary media channel with the hopes of efficient targeting and conversion metrics. The target audience was Small Business Owners age 35-64 of companies with less than 15 employees.

The main competitors were AT&T, Verizon and Qwest which were also putting focus on their business services offerings during this time.  Additionally, Verizon FiOS and AT&T U-Verse business services were being deployed and aggressively marketed.

A key challenge facing all providers of business services is that the sales cycle is longer and usually requires a sales representative to either visit the business or work with the potential customer over multiple phone calls. Some of the challenges for this particular campaign were that the success metrics were aggressive and the media budget was a fixed amount, the time to market was extremely fast and the Spring Promotion offer was only live for a short period of time.

Approach:
OTOi knew that in order to make the limited budget succeed all components of the campaign needed work to drive efficiency. The strategic approach was to use a balance of targeted online display placements to raise awareness of the offer and support an aggressive SEM component.

Equally as critical to the strategy was the need to convert as many of the users who reached the website. Therefore OTOi designed a multivariate testing strategy that utilized a modular website structure and testing engine. The landing page was built of modular content areas that could display each call-to-action being tested along with multiple versions of headlines, body copy and feature lists.  This multivariate test strategy was developed so that the content in each module rotated based on how the user was directed to the landing page.

Four different Paid Search keyword clusters (awareness terms, research terms, acquisition terms and competitive terms) as well as two different Display creative banners drove users to 28 unique combinations of landing page elements.  In addition to testing the calls-to-actions, headlines, body copy and features lists, OTOi incorporated technology to analyze the effect of online Display banner ad impressions on acquisition methods other than direct clickthrough, e.g., lift in Paid Search volume.

Results:

OTOi used targeted online display tactics to efficiently reach Small Business owners and drive efficient click volume to the campaign landing pages. The paid search SEM component was heavily focused on acquisition and driving efficient response to Comcast sales representatives. OTOi included Pay per Call tactics to drive additional call volume to the Comcast sales staff.

Critical to the execution was the implementation of the multivariate landing page engine. OTOi designed and built a Paid Search and Display campaign landing page engine to facilitate this test.  Once the landing page was deployed, OTOi used Interwoven’s Optimost Multivariate Testing solution which rapidly generates statistically relevant findings on which site content is most effective in generating clickthroughs to subsequent pages or higher net conversions.  In addition to coding the landing page for Optimost testing, OTOi used Omniture for site tracking data.

Finally, OTOi used MediaPlex’s proprietary “Path To Conversion” technology to analyze Display advertising’s impact on Paid Search.  The Path to Conversion technology tracks user behavior within multiple different advertising channels on the web (i.e. display, natural search, etc.) and reports on how each advertising tactic contributes to a conversion.

The combination of the media tactics deployed, combined with the Optimost landing page engine and the MediaPlex path to conversion data allowed for a full view of what combination of media exposure (tactic & frequency) along with what combination of landing page content provided the optimal experience to drive customer conversion. This allowed OTOi to make a small media budget go a long way in driving customer response for Comcast. The online campaign for the Spring Promotion eclipsed the forecasted goals by driving 5 times the anticipated results.