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January 31, 2009
January 30, 2009
Branding
I haven't talked a lot about "branding" - a concept important to effective marketing.
You see the golden arches, you know there's a McDonald's there. But you also know a bunch of other things. You know what is going to be on the menu (mostly; in Europe they serve beer), that it will be low priced. You know with minor variations what things are going to taste like (the McDonald's in Sweden use more ketchup on the burgers).
That's branding.
If you are going to build a brand you have to decide what your company or product is and what it means, and you then have to be consistent in communicating that.
BMW has been "the ultimate driving machine" for over 30 years.
There are several elements to effective branding. We'll take them up in some detail over the next couple of days.
January 29, 2009
Website Contact Emails
Every website needs to encourage the visitor to contact the company or otherwise take action.
You want to make it easy on the visitor to contact you by whatever means they are most comfortable with.
One of those methods is normally by email. However, this is a potential vulnerability for you and your site:
If your email addresses are visible on the site to visitors, "harvesters" will collect them and you'll over time get buried with spam.
The solution is to have "contact forms" which the visitor can fill out, that then automatically send you an email, like this: C&N Contact Form,
There are still issues of spam and hacker attacks. "Robots" - automated programs that scour the net for vulnerabilities - can bury you in hundreds of emails, even so many as to crash your site.
There are two good ways of dealing with this issue. One is to have a field that must be a number (by dividing the phone number into area code, exchange and number fields, for example). Code can detect if a number is entered into the field or not and reject it if not. The robots aren't smart enough to recognize a field that must be a number.
The other method is to use a "CAPTCHA" - image with letters and numbers that robots can't read, person has to fill in by hand. Example: UNS contact form.
Personally I prefer the "required number" solution. Sometimes the CAPTCHA's are just hard to read and people get annoyed and you miss contacts as a result.
This has become an increasingly important issue, and we are now going through all our client websites to install such protection.
January 28, 2009
My Website Leaks!
If you think of every visitor to your website as a drop of water, and the whole website as a hose, then water coming out the end of the hose is prospects calling, emailing, buying online or walking into your store.
Every drop that doesn't make it out the end of the hose is a leak. And every place where your hose (website) leaks is something to be isolated and the leaks plugged!
Of course, you can never convert 100% of your website visitors to customers. But every step you take to reduce the leaks means that many more visitors who DO become customers.
How do you do it? I'm glad you asked....
FIRST, you have to have a way of detecting where the leaks are!
Rather obvious but it means having a good PAID web analytics (stats) program. There is no free program - including Google Analytics - that provides enough, accurate information for this.
If you have a good program, you can for each page in your website, isolate how visitors arrived there (whether entering the site or coming from another page), how many times the page was viewed, and how many people exited the site from that page.
If you are losing half or more of the visitors to a page, by having them exit the site - rather than click through to another page - THAT is a leak.
Then you can take action to improve the percentage. That can be by improving copy or visual imagery, adding links or re-routing traffic.
A good website - to launch into a completely different metaphor - is like a pinball machine. It just keeps bouncing pinballs (visitors) around the site and flips them back up into it if they think about leaving.
Byrd's Law #18: The longer someone stays on your website, the more likely they are to turn into a customer.
January 27, 2009
The Sweet Spot
In tennis, the "sweet spot" is the spot on the racket that has the greatest bounce to it.
Internet Marketing has its "sweet spots" as well.
There may be a lot of search terms which relate to your products or services.
Some of these may have hundreds or thousands of times as many searches as others. For example, in hardwood flooring, searches for "Armstrong Floors" as opposed to a small, lesser known brand.
BUT some terms which get a lot of searches may be not be relevant to your business. Something like 99% of all searches for "Amstrong floors" are NOT for hardwood but for tile or other Armstrong products.
This combination of search volume and relevance determines the value of a search term to you.
Finally, the amount of competition for some valuable terms may be intense, to a point where getting high search engine rankings is very difficult. This isn't true in every industry and situation by any means. It's far more common where you are fighting over national rankings than when you are selling local goods or services.
What we call the "sweet spot" consists of the search terms with the most volume and relevance with the least amount of competition.
This is why research should be a part of every search engine project. Otherwise you can end up with #1 rankings for search terms that result in no visits or no sales.
That, after all, is why you are trying to get high rankings in the first place.
January 26, 2009
Web Analytics
"Web Analytics" is the fancy name for statistics programs.
If you're serious about making the Web work for you, a good analytics program is essential. One great advantage of Internet Marketing is measurability. However that is only as true as you have accurate statistics.
Nearly every hosting plan comes with a free statistics program, usualy AWStats or Webalyzer. These are very rudimentary. They aren't very accurate and they provide a limited amount of information.
The best of the free programs is Google Analytics. It provides a lot of information, but has serious inadequacies.
Some important things are hard to do with it. A major problem is that it does a lousy job of detecting and not counting robot visits.
A typical website may get hundreds of visits during the course of a month from automated computer programs - called robots. Some of these are legitimate - like Google and other search engines "spidering" your site in order to update their indexes with any changes.
Many of them are hackers or spammers searching your site for vulnerabilities.
If these robot visits aren't detected and ignored, it'll seriously distort the statistics and may result in incorrect analysis on your part.
There's also no easy way in Google Analytics to set the program to ignore visits by yourself and your staff. Again, that can distort statistics.
All paid web analytics programs solve these problems. There is a considerable range of sophistication (and cost) amongst them. Some programs are designed for the big business site getting tens of thousands or millions of visits per month, with a hefty fee for each site tracked.
Others, like Hitslink, the program we use, are moderately priced subscription services with a fee based on number of websites and number of pages viewed per month. There are limitations on its capabilities but it is well-suited to sites getting hundreds to several thousand visits per month.
January 25, 2009
Inflation
Anyone in business needs to have at least an ear to the ground on the economic scene - not just what it is now but expectations for the future. That requires some basic economic literacy.
Inflation is the result of more money chasing too few goods and services. Recently, the productivity of the US economy has been pretty flat. So any increase in money supply is going to result in an increase in prices.
Here's a chart of the increase in the US money supply over the last few years (Courtesy of ShadowStats.com):
The recent huge spike in the gray line shows the Federal Reserve pumping cash into the economy. The soaring M3 from 2006 until early last year shows the craze in credit being extended on poor-bet loans. The crash in M3 since shows the "credit crunch". M2 is the net result and the best indicator of future inflation. You can see it soaring through 10% now.
Plan accordingly.
January 24, 2009
Online Sales Process
There are many options in the online store sales process, such as how (or if) you charge for shipping, whether it takes one or several screens to checkout, etc. etc.
The optimum process is not the same for all stores, it is going to depend on what you are selling, who you are selling to, and so on.
You can't necessarily get the right answer to every question in advance.
Part of making an online store successful is testing. Plan on making changes and then seeing how that affects the visitor experience.
To evaluate this you have to have a good "web analytics" (stats) program.
January 23, 2009
Marketing Channels and Noise
One marketing topic little known outside the marketing world is the subject of marketing channels.
We are talking about what medium is used to get your message out. Yellow Pages is a marketing channel. Direct mail is one. Magazine ads. And so on.
Choice of marketing channel is partially dictated by budget since, as I've talked about a bit, some channels require a big budget to make any impact at all. A $3,000 per month budget for TV won't cause 1/10th the effect of a $30,000 TV budget. It probably won't generate any leads at all.
But that is not the main point of this post.
Innovative choice of marketing channels can greatly multiply the effectiveness of a marketing effort.
The reason has to do with a term "noise" which refers to the amount of competing messages you are trying to make yourself heard through.
Some marketing channels have a lot more going on than others. Think TV commercials or junk mail.
This is why, for example, we love door hangers. You are usually competing only with pizza flyers! And while there are limitations in use, they also cost less per piece, delivered, than direct mail.
We've seen these be very effective even in situations where you wouldn't necessarily expect it.
The moral of the story is, think not only about what your message is, design and so forth, but HOW you are going to get your message delivered.
It can make a huge difference.
January 22, 2009
People Sell
A real basic of marketing is people sell.
What do I mean?
The eye is drawn to pictures of people.Testimonials and endorsements are vital to establishing credibility
A marketing piece that includes a first-person communication from the Owner or President will be more effective.
You'll be able to think of other ways to apply this principle.
January 21, 2009
More About Competitive Intelligence
The flip side of our last post is sometimes a competitor is doing something intelligent.
Look at your competition not only for what NOT to do, but for:
what is so accepted that you'd better imitate it, or you'll look weirdbright ideas you can copy or where you can do something similar
It is also common to do a complete imitation of a successful marketing campaign, not just to borrow on what they are doing right, but to try and capitalize on the brand awareness they've built. They see your ad and think, oh yeah, I've been seeing those ads, think I'll call them.
One hazard of that is instead, you may just end up reinforcing the competition branding and the prospects end up calling them not you. They never even notice it was you, not X-Y-Z company, running the ads.
January 20, 2009
Competitive Intelligence in Design
Before you can get your message across, you have to get noticed.
Part of getting noticed is standing out from the crowd. If your ad, mail piece, website or other marketing item looks like everyone else's in your industry, chances are no one will even notice it. It becomes just one more ho-hum.
When we design a website, we look at what others in the same industry are doing. Often there is a fad in designs which isn't necessarily a bright idea. So at the same time we can do something better and which is distinctive.
When we design a Yellow Pages, magazine or newspaper ad, we always try and see what other ads in the same publication or YP category look like. The same rule applies.
Again, sometimes it really opens the door. We were designing a Yellow Pages ad for a dentist client of ours. NOT ONE of their competitors ads showcased a large image of a person. You can guess what our design looked like.
January 19, 2009
Step Back and Look At It
| I've previously written about proofreading.
This is a slightly different point. It isn't just about catching typos. |  |
Sometimes your marketing piece creates a different effect than you had envisioned. You may not notice the branches seemingly growing out of someone's head or the accidental obscene reference. Other people will.
So: It is always a good idea to step back and take a fresh look at something before it goes online or is sent to the printer.
Embarrassment is not fun.
Password Security
There are bad people out there.
All passwords should be of sufficient strength so as to make it hard on hackers to crack into your website or email accounts.
Our recommendations:
8 or 9 characters long (can be longer but 8 or 9 is long enough, and some password systems don't allow anything longerat least one capital letter,
at least one lower-case letter
at least one numeral 0 to 9
no real words or names
Of course, you also have to keep your passwords secure so no one unauthorized can get their hands on them.
Also change relevant passwords in event of a suspected hacking or if personnel leave the company.
January 18, 2009
You Can't Please Everybody
A followup to my post about marketing being communication.
You always aim to reach as many people as possible with your marketing efforts, given budget and other constraints.
You are never going to reach everybody. In fact, you are never going to please everybody.
The effort to try and suit everyone can be destructive.
It doesn't matter how easy you make navigating your site, or how clear you make the checkout process in an online store. SOMEBODY is going to get confused and not be able to figure it out.
If you load up your site too much with instructions, notices, warnings, etc. etc. etc. you just end up annoying the average visitor.
I can't tell you how many times a client customer service has contacted me because someone had a problem with their site, only to find on investigating that the site was perfectly fine, but someone was so drunk or so illiterate they were unable to find the huge, flashing button that said "click here to check out."
It's like the famous story about the person calling tech support because they couldn't find the "any" key on their keyboard.
Give it up folks. Some people are idiots.
Savvy About the Economy
Here's a very good article about the economy.
Marketing Means Communication
To many people marketing is a mysterious thing. I think marketing professionals sometimes foster that idea. After all, if we are the keepers of secrets, you have to come to us for answers.
But the fundamental of marketing is very simple. It's all about communication.
That's all.
You are attempting to communicate in bulk, to potential buyers of your products or services, and you are doing so normally in a situation where you aren't talking live to them.
The difficulties really come from these two factors. You're talking to more than one person, so you are trying to craft a communication that reaches as many people as possible. And when I say "reach" I don't just mean, they are in the same room as your communication. I mean they receive, understand, "get it."
Since you aren't talking to them live, you can't see their reaction, you can't receive their questions... .you have to anticipate what will happen at their end and deal with it so as to create the ultimate desired response - such as an interested phone call from a qualified prospect.
And that's marketing.
January 17, 2009
Logo Formats
| If we are using your logo in a design, whether website, brochure, trade show display or other materials, we need your logo in a usable file format. |
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We need to be able to place it into the design as large or small as it needs to be, and still have it remain crisp and sharp.
This requirement rarely applies to images other than logos and sometimes illustrations. Most images are supplied in .jpg format, which is a so-called "raster" or "pixel" format. Logos need to be in .eps or .ai which are "vector" formats. This enables us to scale the image up or down in size without any loss of clarity, without it becoming fuzzy or developing jagged edges.
Here's a short video that explains the difference.
January 16, 2009
Art Lives in Tampa Bay
The ADDY awards are given to outstanding work in the advertising / marketing industry. Awards are given locally and nationally in a number of categories. There are professional and student competitions.
We submitted for an award this year for our Crystal Lake Beverage website. We're crossing our fingers on that.
A sampling of submissions was on display last night at the R.K. Bailey Art Studios at the University of Tampa.
I was VERY impressed by the quality of the student work. Lots of just outstanding work.
Art does live in Tampa Bay.
January 15, 2009
Marketing and Psychology Don't Mix
Some marketers try to apply psychological principles to their marketing.
If you looked into it, you'd find that was behind some of the stupidest, most absurd marketing you've ever seen.
Interestingly this seems to be most used in the so-called "vice" industries - cigarettes, gambling, porn and hard liquor advertising.
I recall seeing a billboard advertising a brand of cigarettes that didn't have the name nor a picture of the package or logo of the brand on it. It showed an idyllic wintery scene. The colors matched the colors of the brand.
I guess you were supposed to look at the billboard and assocate their brand colors with peace and calm or something and therefore buy the brand the next time you went to buy smokes.
Right.
Don't try to use psychology in marketing. It doesn't work.
January 14, 2009
Fads and Trends
If you are going to do effective marketing you should be aware of fads and trends and the difference between them.
Marketing fads occur when people imitate other marketing efforts because they think they are working or just don't know what else to do. We see this where whole industries all have a similar look to their websites. When we first did an automotive parts industry website, we surveyed other sites. Almost all of them were done in hideously clashing primary colors. That's a fad.
The nice thing about a fad is that all you have to do to stand out from the crowd is to do something sensible instead.
That is very different from trends. The kind of thing that makes narrow ties look old-fashioned makes almost any website done 3 or more years ago look out-of-date. Technology does this as well as design ideas that catch hold.
A cell phone from the early 1990's looks out-of-date not only because technology has made them much smaller but because the kind of look that says "high tech" has changed.
Following a fad is like following the lemmings over the cliff and into the sea. Following the latest trends can make you look hip and can contribute to achieving the marketing result you seek.
January 13, 2009
Ugly Sells
There's a recent fad in marketing that uses ugly to sell.
The idea is that if you annoy people, you've got their attention. You can then get your message across, and they'll remember you.
It's not true.
January 12, 2009
Types of Websites
So you need a website.
Or maybe you have one.
It's worth considering what TYPE of website you have, or should have.
Not all websites are the same.
Following are the main types of websites according to the way we categorize them:
1. Online brochure.
The most basic type and use of a website is as a sort of online brochure, providing a prospective buyer with information about your business or product. It is a sales aid for someone who has heard of you and has some interest.
Such a site can be as small as 6 or 7 pages in size or can be much larger. It has to tell people who you are, what you do, include material such as testimonials to build credibility and provide a way to contact you.
2. Gallery site.
This type of site applies to situations where the company has a wide variety of products or samples of their work to show off. This works very well for highly visual products such as photographers or florists. It is the online equivalent of the artists' portfolio.
3. Online store.
Any website where someone can make a purchase or order online.
4. Membership sites.
Any site which sells or enrolls memberships and has "membership only" parts of the site which require a login to access.
5. Portals.
Any site whose primary function is to organize and provide access to other sites in a geographical area, industry or otherwise.
6. News Sites.
Any site designed primarily to provide access to time-sensitive information.
7. Blogs.
Some sites combine more than one type. For example, Lincoln Land's website is an online store, a gallery site and an online brochure - because the company sells cars (gallery), sells parts (online store) and sells service (brochure) for classic Lincoln automobiles.
January 11, 2009
Marketing Slogan for Our Times
"When the Going Gets Tough, The Tough Go Marketing."
Gullible
Just how gullible are people anyway (found on eBay)?
Beauty Sells
People are attracted to aesthetics (beauty) regardless of any other factor in your marketing.
It's simple. People like beautiful things better than ugly, or even just plain things.
Beautiful women, starry skies, mountain vistas, a laughing child, a car that looks like it's ready to leap into the sky and pass light speed - people LIKE these things.
All by themselves, they create an attraction. That makes it more likely someone will read your piece and will have a favorable impression of it. They are more likely to hold on to the business card or brochure, to bookmark the website, to remember your message.
This may be "sensible" or not. But, like celebrity endorsements, it works.
A lot of times beauty is the only thing a marketing item has going for it. There's a lot more to marketing, but it's a good start.
January 10, 2009
Visual Impact
Visual impact is a huge factor in every form of marketing other than radio.
There's a fundamental at work here:
The first barrier every marketing piece has to overcome is getting noticed at all!
I know I've said this many times, but it remains a central factor in all marketing. If someone doesn't stop and look at your ad, website, mail piece or commercial, you never get a chance to get your message across. It doesn't matter how brilliant your pitch is if it is never heard or seen.
And it isn't words that make people stop and look. FIRST they have to stop. THEN they'll see your words.
It's the appearance of the ad - size, placement, colors, images and their arrangement - that impinges and make people stop.
This is the first consideration in design.
January 09, 2009
Snippets
"Snippets" is the term Google uses for the two lines of description about a website that it displays on a search engine results page (SERP).
This is one of the most neglected and most important aspects of Internet marketing. Everyone knows about the importance of high search engine rankings.
If you think of this in terms of traditional marketing, the title, snippet and URL listing - the complete display on the results page - that is your advertisement!
What would you say to someone who put all their effort into making sure their ad reached as many people as possible and just threw together the ad?
It is actually worse than that since if you don't make a conscious and competent effort to control your snippet as well as the title and also what page it is that shows up in the search results - then you aren't creating your ad at all!
The results are likely to be less than spectacular.
Your listing has to compete with as many as 9 other natural listings, 10 paid (click ad) listings and possibly several local search results.
Why should the searcher click on YOUR listing?
January 08, 2009
Web Safe Fonts
There are a very limited number of fonts that are "web safe."
When a web page (or formatted email) contains text, it is the visitor?€™s computer that is controlling the display. It is being told ?€?display the following text in the following font.?€? So it depends on the font being installed on the computer on which the visitor is trying to view the website or email.
The alternative is to display text in the form of a graphic (image), which provides exact control. There are liabilities to that which dictate limited use. It adds a lot of work. For web pages it adversely affects SEO (Search Engine Optimization). And for emails it means the text in question won?€™t be visible until or unless someone chooses to download pictures.
We use a variety of fonts in headlines, banners and the like to focus attention, fit the clients' logo, match the flavor of their business etc. The bulk of the text will then be in one or two of the few web safe fonts.
Since not all computers have the same fonts installed, we often specify a series of font choices, so that in most cases the copy will be displayed close to as intended. For example ?€?Arial, Helvetica, san-serif?€? meaning use Arial if installed on the computer, if not, Helvetica, if that fails, use any san-serif font you have. Arial and Helvetica are very similar fonts, but PCs have Arial and Mac?€™s Helvetica.
So text won't look exactly the same on a Mac as on a PC.
Following is our list of safe fonts:
The fact that we list a font doesn?€™t mean we recommend it. Comic Sans MS is way overused and recommended only in very special cases. Impact is only for headlines and in certain cases. Courier is a typewriter font, only for use if you are trying to look like typing.
The first group are almost always safe. Verdana for example should work unless they are running Unix or it's an ancient computer (small percentages).
Arial / Helvetica
Comic San MS
Courier New / Courier
Georgia
Times New Roman / Times
Tahoma
Verdana
The second group are less certain to be on a computer.
Impact
Lucida Sans
Trebuchet
This last group are even less certain of being available on any particular computer trying to display the web page or email.
Palatino
Garamond
January 07, 2009
Case Studies
One of our favorite confidence builders - somehow omitted from my general article on the subject - is case studies.
If you can provide case studies that illustrate the experiences of others with similar situations to your prospects, that becomes a tremendous selling point. It is no longer theoretical whether you can help them.
The two keys to making this work well are:
1. Specific details, including where possible, actual statistics, before and after pictures, images of products, etc. Make it real!
2. Enough different case studies so most visitors will find one similar to them - and well organized on your website or in your sales materials so it is easy to find.
January 06, 2009
Proofreading
| You would be amazed at the errors that don't get caught before a website goes up or an ad or promo piece goes to print. |
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It is common to catch typos in websites months later.
We try hard to catch any errors. We also ask you to look the site or print item over carefully. You may catch things we missed, especially where technical terms are involved that we may not be familiar with.
This is one more reason to try and avoid "rush" projects.
Before we print something, we require the client to sign off on it as being accurate. In particular, that website addresses, phone numbers and email addresses are correct.
Direct Mail
Direct mail is a traditional form of marketing that has become much less effective over the years, to a point where many companies have abandoned it.
Once people spoke confidently about getting a 1% response rate or more. Now in a lot of cases 1/10% - 1 in a thousand - is considered acceptable.
That doesn't mean give up on direct mail. But it needs to be intelligently assessed. With increases in postage costs, 50 cents per piece (including all costs) is a realistic estimate for postcard mailings, and it goes up from there for brochures, sales letters, broadsheets and so on. That adds up quickly.
Absolutely if you are going to do direct mail you'd better have an excellent website as that can easily double or triple your response rate. Also you need to have in place a slick process for handling leads, so you don't waste the response you do generate.
Other key factors to consider:
1. The list. Who do you send your piece to? This is hugely important, if you are spending 50 cents per piece or more, you want to minimize the waste and maximize the return.
Anything you can do to narrow down or select out the likeliest prospects is going to pay off.
2. The offer. I wrote a post on this subject. Offers are important in most marketing but they are hugely important in direct mail. Select an offer that will appeal to your potential buyers, and make sure they see it right away when you look at your piece.
The design, type of piece, how delivered, etc. - everything else having to do with your direct mail marketing - is less important than these two factors. A great design, excellent copy writing and so on, help. But they are not the deal breaker or maker that the list and the offer are.
January 05, 2009
Another Marketing Excuse
Another favorite excuse for marketing failure is "You can't measure the effectiveness of a marketing piece."
I love that. It justifies spending tons of client's money on stupid ideas, bad copy, poor placement, etc.
And it is a lie, lie, lie.
Anyone peddling this load of horse-pucky is trying to cover up their own incompetence.
Of course one of the great things about Internet Marketing is the ease with which effectiveness can be measured. Visits to a website either happen or they don't. Sophisticated web analytics programs can tell you who your visitors are, where they came from and what they did when they got there - just about anything short of Social Security number and location of birth marks.
The effectiveness of direct mail and other direct marketing efforts is just as measurable. Count the number of phone calls or business reply cards you got. Where's the mystery there?
It may not be as easy to measure the effectiveness of a new brochure or print ad, if there is other marketing going on. That doesn't mean it can't be done.
And it MUST be done. How else do you know if your marketing dollar is worth it?
Which of course is the point of anyone who discounts the possibility of measuring marketing effecdtiveness.
January 04, 2009
The Market is Saturated
Over the years I've heard several excuses for failed marketing.
One of my favorites is "the market is saturated." That is supposed to mean that pretty much everyone who would need or want the product or service has heard of it or already owns it. So naturally the marketing is getting less and less effective.
But is it true?
The first time I heard this, it was for a company that had been spending more and more money on their advertising for less and less result. They had a bunch of sharp creative people in their marketing department, but for two years their ROI (return on investment) had been going down, down.
I was brought in as a consultant to try to solve it. After a fair amount of investigation I discovered the answer had been sitting on their shelf for over a year. They had a commissioned a market research study which found their potential buyers preferred to get their information online rather than through print magazines.
It was 85%, an astonishingly unanimous answer. The company had been spending more money on print ads, tweaking their ads, trying everything to get their leads generated back up to what it had been, while they were actually reaching fewer and fewer of their potential buyers.
They switched their emphasis to Internet Marketing and voila! Leads shot back up.
That's a good example. "The market is saturated" is almost never true.
January 03, 2009
The Marketing Chain
Effective marketing takes a prospective buyer through a series of small steps, links from "never heard of you" to "ready to talk seriously about buying." (Actually marketing begins with conceiving of a product or service that people will want or need... but that's a tale for another day.)
If you start out with 100% as the potential, at every step you are losing some portion of the potential buying public. Perhaps only 1/1000th of a percent are making it to the end. That's an awful lot of wasted prospects.
If you improve any link in the chain, you increase that percentage. If you then handle them well, you end up with more sales.
If you list out each of these steps for your business, you'll probably spot one or more places where your marketing is weak. If you improve the weakest link, you can get a huge improvement in your marketing.
Even if your marketing is already excellent, if you systematically improve EVERY link in the marketing chain, even by only 10% each, you'd probably double your leads.
January 02, 2009
Writing Copy
One of the great mysteries of effective marketing, to most people, is how to write copy that works.
It's true there is a great deal of skill and experience that goes into copywriting. There's a famous story in the marketing world, about one of the greatest ad writers of all time. A client, admiring an ad, asked him how long it took to write it? "Twenty years," he said. "Twenty years."
However, that doesn't mean there aren't some simple things you can learn to make your own marketing more effective. If you are going to write your own copy, or to assess the copy an agency or marketing copy creates for you, follow these rules:
1. Write your ads the same way you would speak them.
You are talking to real live people. In daily conversations, you keep things simple.
Do the same in your ads. Make them conversational. Hard-hitting, to the point, but conversational. Pretend you're talking to someone right across from you and read your ad out loud. Would you actually talk that way? If not, you probably need to rewrite it.
2. Use active phrases and sentences in your ads and promotional materials, not passive ones.
?€?Lightning struck the boy as he was crossing the bridge.?€? NOT: ?€?The boy was struck by lightning while crossing the bridge.?€??€?Buy 3 get one free!?€? NOT: ?€?You'll receive one free if you purchase three!?€?
3. Get to the point. Use simple sentences and phrases. Make your marketing punchy, not subtle. Take out the trite phrases that really don't help sell your product or service.
4. Use these key words in your ads and promo materials.
you, free, yours, easy, how, now, how to, people, money, save, new, who, why, announcing, gift, hurry, handy, useful, big, large, secret(s), want
Use them in your headlines and in the text of your ads. They are time-tested, proven ?€?hot?€? words. And they don't wear out with usage.
5. Finally, test your ad by having someone read it out loud to you. Imagine yourself as a typical prospect, the kind of person you are trying to reach with your ad or other marketing piece.
When you hear it coming back at you, you'll often hear things that obviously need to be changed.
Also, watch to see if the person who's reading it tunes out at a certain spot or ?€?doesn't get?€? something. Chances are, others won't get it either. Fix every spot where the reader could tune out.
New Year's Resolution
Welcome to 2009!
And a Happy New Year to you.
Despite the doom and gloom we are being pummeled with daily by newspapers, TV, magazines, radio, there is no reason why 2009 shouldn't be a great year for you.
Chances are good marketing is what will make the difference.
Here at Fast Forward we practice what we preach. We did very well in the last months of the year. How? When we saw the economy start to slide, we greatly increased our own marketing efforts. As a result, we had more leads in each of October, November and December than we did in any of the previous three months.
If you're making New Year's resolutions, how about this one:
IN 2009 I AM MARKETING MY WAY INTO MY BEST YEAR EVER.
Marketing Technical Products
Technical or professional marketing requires a different approach.
Technical buyers, professional buyers, engineers and the like, you can turn these types off by emphasizing benefits over specifications.
Professional technical buyers WANT specs. They want to compare your product's attributes with other competing products.
Do they still want benefits? Of course. But you need more emphasis on the technical specs and features if you want to win them over.
That doesn't mean emotion doesn't play a role in their purchases. And while the emotion is more likely to be connected to such things as on-time delivery, tech support, reliability and pricing, that doesn't mean aesthetics doesn't play a role.
All other things being equal, a portable heart-rate monitor with a slick looking case is going to sell better than one with a plain gray functional look to it.
January 01, 2009
The Offer
Marketing to be effective often includes an offer.
An offer is anything intended to get the potential buyer to act NOW, not postpone action. That is one of the major barriers to overcome in all marketing: to get immediate action.
If the prospect doesn't act now, when he has just finished reading, seeing or hearing your pitch, what are the chances he'll act later, after he's cooled off, objections come to mind, his wife yelled at him, the traffic cop gave him a ticket and he just found out what happened to his stock portfolio today?
Not good. Not good at all.
How many times has a prospect told you that they wanted to think about it? And how many of those deals did you close?
So you include an offer to give the prospect a reason to act now.
That is why so many ads and marketing pieces have "buy now" limited time offers. "Employee pricing won't last forever" "half off post-Christmas sale" "call in the next 5 minutes and also get a free tote bag", on and on.
It's not unusual for the entire marketing strategy of a company to be nothing more nor less than limited time discount offers. Of course you'd rather not give away part of your profit margin to get a sale, but it's way better than NOT getting the sale. And a lot of times the discounts are built into the pricing - they raised prices 25% so they could offer 20% off.
Discounts or other kinds of special deals are by far the most common type of offer, but they aren't the only ones. Another is the fact that the item may only be available for a limited time at any price. "Only 1000 of these commemorative Obama Inagural plates were made then the mold was destroyed."
Another one that works specifically for businesses and charities in the U.S., is to remind people that money spent before end-of-year means paying less taxes for the year.
Offers are far more important in consumer marketing than business-to-business but they often work in business marketing as well. Look at the specials the big office supply companies (Office Depot, Staples) have every week.
Offers are so important that direct mail experts rate the offer as 40% of what makes a direct mail campaign work or not.
How do offers fit into your marketing?
Archive of Historic Photographs
This website has millions of historic photos from the Life magazine archives.
Just great stuff.
Rush Projects
Any project that has to be completed by a deadline, when that means faster than usual delivery, is considered a rush project.
Usual time for completion of a project varies. If you have a deadline, let us know right away when we are first discussing the project. We'll let you know if it falls into rush territory.
We can when necessary complete projects amazingly fast. We've done an entire online store in 10 days, start to launch. A brochure, from initial concept to printed and in client's hands, in less than two weeks.
We do try to avoid them as they are disruptive and often mean delays to other clients' work.
Also, rush projects do carry additional charges.
Meeting rush deadlines makes for inefficiencies on our part, as well as extra costs to us such as rush charges to printers and courier fees.
Project rush charges start at 20% and can run higher.
Also, anyone needing a project done rush should be aware of the definition of a satisfactory result for a rush project:
A satisfactory rush project is one completed on-time with no major catastrophes. Not NO catastrophes, just no major ones.
So what I'm trying to tell you is, if you need a project done rush, we are set up to be able to accomodate you. Just try to plan ahead and avoid them!
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