About DCCC
In today’s digital world, a large amount of content is available on the internet. One can get any content easily on the internet. People deal with music, movies and various other digital content daily. They do not understand it is unethical for downloading digital content without knowing if they are authorized to access the content. It has become very difficult for content owners to get their due credit for their content since most of it is pirated and available for free download. Due to this, Microsoft developed a Digital Citizenship and Creative Content program to create awareness of the ill effects of piracy. This program was made to educate people on intellectual property rights and about other rights related to creative content.
The Digital Citizenship and Creative Content program developed by Microsoft is free instructional program. It aims to spread information on the digital rights linked to creative content. They realized that creating awareness is the only way one make people respect digital rights and its relevance in today’s world. With a vision to create awareness among people of the rights linked to digital content, Microsoft developed this program which could be taken by anyone as the same was free.
DCCC’s Business Objectives
With a view to create awareness among people of the rights linked to digital content, Microsoft developed this program which could be taken by anyone as the same was free. Teachers and other educators would need to be provided with the required material to teach students about the content of the program. The curriculum included comprehensive lesson plans, downloadable materials and classroom based exercises. But the issue was to make the teachers and educators aware that such a program existed and make them adopt it to impart the same to the students.
DCCC’s objective was to market the program to various faculties through the online medium and also meet the targets set by the DCCC group. Teachers and other educators would need to be provided with the required material to teach students about the content of the program. Till now some level of marketing was done by DCCC through email and direct marketing campaigns to bring visitors to DigitalCitizenshipEd.com site. Since the target audience was very niche, it was just relying on email and direct marketing was not sufficient. They had to look for other ways to market the program so as to get more traffic. They also chose to seek help from a digital marketing agency, Point It, to get acquisitions through the paid search media. Point It is a marketing agency which provided services like pay per Click, SEO, Social Media marketing, website design, display advertising, etc. They claimed to make advertising on digital media simple and hassle free for organizations seeking help on the same. They have a sufficiently large clientele and have served some prominent organizations in digital marketing.
Approach / Strategy Adopted By DCCC / Point It
The approach adopted by Point It was to first target a wide set of keywords on Google’s search network. Since the target audience was very narrow, it was difficult to get clicks on the advertisement. Hence, it was felt that the program’s reach will have to be increased in order to generate more number of clicks.
Point It also conducted tests to find out which network can produce the desired results. Was it the Google network, Yahoo or Bing network? After conducting extensive tests it was found that Yahoo’s customer base was not able to produce the desired result as compared to Google and Bing’s consumer base. Hence, Point It now started to give more focus on Google and Bing networks to get more traffic.
Also, since the target audience was small or rather niche, Point It also included content network of contextual advertising, in addition to just relying on Google campaign. Another step taken by Point It was to aim at targeting certain sites which were visited by teachers who were researching on lesson planning. Hence, once they visit such sites, they are more likely to see the advertisement of the DCCC program and generate clicks.
Results Achieved By DCCC
With the above mentioned procedure, DCCC was able to capture over 2000 teachers and educators to deliver the said program to the youth. With continued efforts, Point It team was able to scale the program from a text only format to a fully blown multi-channel and multimedia marketing campaign. They were able to do this by continuously monitoring and tracking the steps taken by them and the outcome achieved by taking these steps.
It was seen that over a period of 6 months, the following results were observed:
- An improvement in the Conversion rate from 3.41% to 13.14%, which was a difference of 285.3%.
- A decrease was seen in the Cost per conversion from $31.80 to $8.19, which was a difference of -74.2%.
- Over the week, the total number of conversions improved from 3 to 137, which was a difference of 4600%.
Learning
In this case study, we can observe that there are a number of ways in which one expands one’s business traffic. In order to arrive at solutions to make such expansion of one’s business traffic, one will need to conduct in-depth analysis of the complete data and take informed decisions basis the results achieved from such analysis. Here, Point It chose to check which network brings relevant traffic and basis the same, they decided to let go of the user base of a big network like Yahoo. This decision helped them to get optimum results and maximize their relevant target base.
Image credit: PointIt, Microsoft
Online piracy is a major problem and as indicated in this case study that people do not really care or understand about this. The initiative by Microsoft is really commendable but generating awareness is not easy. Not many would be aware of such group. So, adopting the strategy of paid advertisements over other methods was a good decision which has resulted in such remarkable achievement.