TalkTalk

Making the right calls

TalkTalk had done very little digital marketing activity before we came along. For an organisation right at the heart of a highly competitive telecoms industry, that had to change. It also had to work.

Brief

Introduce and develop truly integrated strategies across all of Talk Talk’s channels. Grow sales volume. Significantly improve ROI.
 

Our insight

There were three main challenges facing us. Site optimisation was poor. Cost Per Acquisition was rising and ROI was declining. TalkTalk needed a holistic digital strategy that would address this. It would mean developing new tools, new techniques and new partnerships. So that's what we did.
 

Solution

We built a customised tracking system called Grapevine™. It’s a proprietary platform that allows us to analyse path to conversion data. With Grapevine™ we could evaluate the impact of TalkTalk's display advertising on subsequent clicks across all channels. We could also test the behavioural impact of clicks during the different phases of the consumer lifecycle. There were two points in the lifecycle that interested us. The first was the 'early research' phase. During this period we made sure there was high display exposure across all major portals. We used a variety of targeting techniques across everything from socio-demographic data to connection speed targeting. The second phase where we concentrated activity was the 'final consideration' stage of the lifecycle. Here we relied heavily on key comparison sites, major affiliates and of course pay per click search. We led an aggressive push for key generic terms. We adopted automated keyword bidding using complex optimisation algorithms. We tested AdText extensively. Finally, we broke new ground on comparison sites like uSwitch and Moneysupermarket, even brokering an exclusive three month deal for the first ever third party advertising on uSwitch.com

Results

The campaign totally transformed TalkTalk's approach to digital marketing. Sales volume driven by online activity went up 55% year on year and return on Investment based on TalkTalk's internal customer lifetime value metric was 182%.