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I received a piece of stupid-tising (short for stupid advertising) in the mail today.
It was promoting a commercial real estate company and the face of the card was covered with little thumbnails showing the wide variety of property the company had available for lease.
Phooey.
How are all those little thumbnails supposed to capture people's attention? They won't!
This is just one manifestation of the idea that "to get more business, offer a larger variety of things. Spread out. Diversify."
Nope.
To get more business, focus.
There is far more joy in being a big fish in a small pond than a small fish in a big pond.
Niche companies prosper.
The other day, the band broke on my nice old Seiko watch. I went to my local jeweler. That jeweler sells watches, diamonds, sterling, crystal. Do you know how many 17mm watch bands they had in stock (let alone one that matched my watch)?
None.
Where did I go to find a replacement?
Watchbands.com. They had an exact match, proven by model number and four photographs.
Byrd's Law #14: To increase your business, FOCUS.
A few years ago, Jay Levinson published a book, "Guerilla Marketing." It was a great name because it expresses the idea of marketing on limited resources.
Marketing is very different if you are a Proctor and Gamble with billion dollar marketing budgets and household name products.
For the rest of us, effective marketing is about how to get enough new business to survive or expand - without going broke doing so.
It is about being smart and it is about ROI - Return on Investment.
Fortune 500 companies will spend tens of millions of dollars on a marketing campaign, not to bring in business but simply to ward off competition.
Most of us can't afford that luxury.
And yet, we do have to market. Unless you are getting all the business you want and need through repeat customers, word-of-mouth and referral, you have to market.
For most of us, the question is not "To Market or Not To Market." It is how to market effectively.
Your available marketing budget is always a factor in answering that question.
You've heard of them.
What are they and what do they have to do with search engine rankings?
Websites are written in a programming language called HTML. Basically, these are instructions to browsers for how to display a page. HTML is written in the form of "tags" which start with a < and end with a >. For example a "b" enclosed in <> means display the text that comes after in bold.
Metatags are tags which instead of telling the browser how to display the website, provide information ABOUT the website. For example, the title tag says what the title of the page is.
There are many metatags but only a handful of them are of importance. The title tag is one of these, it actually does display on the screen when you view a page - all the way at the very top of the screen.
The description metatag let's you write a description of the page which will usually be picked up by Google and displayed when the page shows up in a search.
The keywords metatag lets you tell the search engines what the page is about. However, these days, Google and other search engines all but ignore this tag as it is too subject to abuse.
Other metatags tend to be rather technical and of much less importance.
The fastest changing environment in the history of marketing - the Internet - is also the one most loaded with B.S., smoke-and-mirrors, and overblown promises.
There's a saying that goes all the way back to Roman times: "Caveat Emptor" - "Let the Buyer Beware."
In these tough economic times, many people are desperately searching for solutions to preserve their living standards or to manage at all.
If you're in that category, don't let desperation or hope overcome your common sense:
1. If it sounds too good to be true, it is.
2. If it involves getting rich without hard work, smarts, and time, it's a scam.
3. If you can reasonably ask the question "If this is true, how come everyone isn't rich"? it's a hustle.
4. If it doesn't involve actual production of something valuable which is then sold for a fair price, stay away.
5. If it is a ground floor opportunity you need to get in on right now.... it probably won't bear up to close inspection.
I'm not trying to burst your balloon. It is very possible to get rich on the Internet. Many thousands of people are doing so.
Unfortunately, some of them are getting rich by taking advantage of others' gullibility.
There's another famous saying (attributed to P.T. Barnum): "There's a sucker born every minute."
Don't be one of them.
This is a little technical, but I like to let you know when Google does something important.
Actually, this is Google, Yahoo and Msn - the three largest search engines, responsible for close to 90% of all searches - agreeing on a new "tag". A metatag is a behind-the-scenes piece of information ABOUT the website or a page in it, such as its title, description, keywords, etc.
Tags are usually invisible to someone viewing the site. They are communications or instructions to search engines or web browsers.
One issue the search engines have is that the same page may be reachable in a number of different ways, actually resulting in different page names. Search engines hate this because they don't want to clutter up their indexes. But they have (until now) had no way of knowing which is the preferred page name.
The canonical tag provides a way to tell the search engines what name a page should be indexed under.
To learn more about the canonical tag.
There are many situations where you need to or want to be able to make changes to your website.
As I said in my earlier post on Content Management Systems (CMS) there are also many solutions to this.
First of all, making changes to your website is a GOOD thing. A website that never gets changed gets stale, dead, out-of-date. Since we have web designers on staff, that makes it easy for us to make changes. In fact, we re-design our website about twice a year.
But what's the typical business to do?
That depends on the type and frequency of changes needed.
1. If you need occasional changes, minor changes monthly such as adding testimonials or updating personnel, the best solution is to have a competent company that will promptly make the changes needed at a reasonable cost. That's one of the reasons our premium hosting services include a half hour's work on the site per month. Your site doesn't get messed up, and if search engine optimization is important it can be taken care of at the same time, by professionals.
2. For online stores, the store part of the site should be a CMS, so you can change prices, add items, change shipping charges, put items on sale and offer discount coupons, for example. But don't make the entire site a CMS.
3. If you need to have a calendar on your website and to be able to make changes to it frequently, there are lots of inexpensive software programs that will do this. Similarly, software exists for many other specific functions that might require frequent changes. These include scrollers where the pictures and links need to be changed from time to time, photo galleries, location search and site search functions, to name a few.
4. If you need to make changes rather often, such as text changes or adding pages similar to ones already existing, you can use a program called Contribute if your site was built using Dreamweaver (the most widely used professional web design software). Contribute is a sort of word processor for websites. It isn't for the creation of websites. It is for non-professionals, clients to be able to make minor updates themselves while preserving the look of the site and pages. It's inexpensive and easy to use. It does not, however, handle search engine optimization if that is a major issue.
5. If you have one page or a couple of pages that are going to need frequent updates, posting of news or announcements, tips or the like, a blog is a perfect solution. Good quality blogging software such as Movable Type can be fully integrated with your site, the pages optimize well and it is easy to use.
I was pretty critical in my blog posting about CMS as a solution to an entire site. The fact is, with the above range of options, I have never yet found a situation where a client couldn't have their cake and eat it too. That is, to be able to easily and inexpensively get the changes they needed done, and still have a professional site.
Really, the only reason to build a site entirely in a CMS is where you just can't afford professional services. And the only other reason is being sold a bill of goods by one of the many people out there insisting that their CMS websites are "just as good as custom designed sites at a fraction of the cost." I'm sorry, but it doesn't pass the smell test. And in most cases, the customer lives to regret it.
Like the Latin says, "Caveat Emptor" (Let the Buyer Beware).
A nice tool we've been including into all our larger sites, is a site search function.
This is like Google for your site only.
It provides one more way for someone to navigate a site.
If it is prominent on every page, it provides a kind of "safety valve" for visitors. Getting frustrated trying to find something, instead of giving up, they search.
A couple of our sites with this feature:
Midstate Graphics
Through The Woods Fine Wood Floors"
There's a principle for writing press releases that applies to a great many forms of writing.
You write in a sort of a pyramid with the point at the top or beginning.
At the start of the article, press release or whatever it is, you state all the most important points, briefly.
You then expand on these.
You get the most important things in first, least important towards the end.
That way, if someone doesn't read the whole thing (or, in the case of a press release, if they only publish the first part of it), they at least get the most important points you were trying to get across.
I was at a meeting today and another business person was telling me how horrible the economy is and it is all doom and gloom. I cut her off and walked away.
There are MANY examples of businesses that are doing well. Here's one - a giant corporation, General Mills:
Advertising Age - General Mills Thrives on Increased Marketing Spending.
If you want to give up and shut down your business, okay, but don't pretend you have no choice about it.
Video shows all commercial flights worldwide over a 24 hour period.
High resolution Windows Media Player.
Low resolution YouTube.
I've said before that clarity and simplicity in copywriting are important.
Just to pound the point home.
AFTER I've finished writing something, I go back through it and look for ways to make it shorter without losing the idea.
Take out words that don't contribute.
Use shorter, Anglo-Saxon words in preference to Latin and Greek. "Walk" don't "perambulate."
Rephrase to shorten.
Break sentences up into shorter sentences. Make paragraphs short.
If you have a lot to say, you can say it at length. You can repeat yourself to drive a point home. But the fewer and shorter words to deliver the same idea, the punchier it will be - and the more people will get the message.
A brand is an abstract concept. It is really something in the minds of your buyers and potential buyers. How do they think of you? What is your reputation? What do they think you do?
It is communicated mainly by consistent words and visual elements (other senses can play a roll. Think the sound of a Harley motorcycle).
Many major brands are known by their logo - the McDonalds golden arches, Rolex's stylized crown. See the three pointed star and you know Mercedes is being referred to - and that is a prestige, well-engineered luxury automobile.
People often think the way you start to establish a brand is with a great logo or other design elements.
In fact, those logos meant nothing until the brands were established. FIRST you know that BMW means "the ultimate driving machine". THEN you know when you see the BMW logo you are looking at a vehicle that is going to have superior power and handling.
Nevertheless, if you are going to build a brand, you need to establish design elements that are appropriate and use them with consistency. Then over time, they can come to mean something:
1. Name.
2. Type style.
3. Logo.
4. Color scheme.
5. Any particular shapes.
Of all of these, name is most important. If your name isn't memorable, your branding isn't going to be salvaged by a fancy logo.
For clarity in your marketing, it is important to understand the various pieces of the marketing puzzle, where your weaknesses are, and what your immediate and longer term goals are in regards to these pieces.
When I say "pieces of the puzzle", I'm referring to the marketing chain - the various steps from "someone never heard of you" to "a confirmed repeat customer client or patient".
This is similar to what is often called the "promotional mix" - which misses the point that it is actually a sequence of actions, any one of which if sorely lacking can torpedo all your marketing efforts.
I was reminded of this, talking to a prospect whose marketing goals do not include lead generation. He sells to government agencies, who put projects out to bid. His problem is to make sure he is allowed to bid on a project and that the agencies are properly impressed by his qualifications and experience.
The usual classification of the "promotional mix" is advertising, sales promotion, personal sales, and public relations. I categorize things a bit differently:
1. Branding. This is marketing not designed to generate leads but simply to build awareness and reputation. It helps ready the potential market place for lead generation. Publicity and Public Relations activities fall into this territory as well (they are not strictly speaking part of marketing).
2. Advertising. Any type of marketing activity designed to generate leads, whether by search engine rankings, click ads, print ads, direct mail, trade shows, Yellow Pages ads, etc. etc. If it gets the word out, offers a product or service and makes someone want it, it is in this category. I include sales promotions (special offers, discounts, giveaways, etc.) in this category. Any action to generate word-of-mouth or referral business would also fit under this.
3. Educational Marketing. This would cover any materials or activities that are designed to take someone with some degree of interest, and build that interest level to a point where they are ready to buy or at least talk turkey. Most websites fall in this category. It is or should be its own category because it doesn't create awareness - it takes some degree of awareness and builds interest and credibility to a point where the person is a sales prospect.
4. Sales Materials. This can be anything from product packaging to the slickest sales presentation materials. They are there to seal the deal or help the salesman do so. In the case of an online store, or point-of-purchase in low-priced retail sales, there is no live sales person involved. So I don't categorize this as "personal sales" as that isn't inclusive enough as a term.
5. Sales Confirmation / Customer Satisfaction Marketing. "Thank you for your purchase of the special 100 ounce Guido's Preserves. We know you'll enjoy them, and as a token of our appreciation, here is a discount coupon worth 10% off your next purchase from the Guido Company Store." "Please fill out our survey and let us know what you think of our product." Its purpose is to prevent back-out and to help ensure you have a happy customer thus a prospect for further purchases. Make no mistake about it, this is a marketing function, completely separate from customer service / tech support.
6. Customer Base Marketing. Any material or activity addressed to current, inactive or past and lapsed customers, clients or patients - to maximize further sales to anyone who has purchased in the past.
I think this is a superior means of classification as each category applies in one way or another to every business. In the case of the prospect I mentioned above, "lead generation" consists of looking up "RFQ's" (Requests for Quote") from various governmental agencies.
Of course the emphasis varies. #6 is probably not big for Funeral Homes.
This provides a tool for examining your marketing and seeing your strengths, weaknesses AND OPPORTUNITIES.
| I posted a couple weeks ago about
choices of marketing channels.
A unique marketing channel and a clever image can make a marketing campaign all by themselves. |
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| It's worthwhile spending some time to come up with a bright idea.
The ordinary is the enemy of good marketing.
Clever imagery can make a marketing piece all by itself. |
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It is very common for people to misspell words.
One search engine strategy is to buy sponsored links for misspelled words, or to optimize the website for misspellings. Even though only a small percentage of searches may be misspelled, it also may be far easier to get top rankings for the misspelled version.
A client of ours accidentally misspelled a word "Cumaru" (a kind of wood) on their website and got visitors from searchers all over the world who misspelled it the same way they did, "Cumuru".
The White House website includes misspellings of President Obama's first and last name.
More examples for your amusement:
Graph of searches for "Khan" with different number of "A"s.
List of misspellings of Britney Spears and number of searches on each, from Google./a>
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Despite the way he was savaged for it, last year when one politician said the state of the economy was in part a matter of the mind - he was speaking truth.
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A recession is a slowdown in the economy. What does that mean? People (whether as individuals or businesses) are spending money less freely. Less is being spent, less is being bought.
People are laid off, they have less money to spend, businesses go under, less money is spent.
A vicious cycle but entirely a mental one to the degree that it is driven by confidence - the expectation that someone will obtain more money to replace what they have now, so it is okay to spend it.
The media and many politicians are doing such a wonderful job of driving down expectations. So what can we, the common people, do to thrive personally and to help turn the economy around?
Other than, that is, no longer reading newspapers or watching TV news, and recalling the elected officials who are so helpful to us ("I'm from the government and I'm here to help you")?
Marketing.
Marketing is all about creating desire to a point where someone acts.
You ever see a teenager who REALLY wanted something? A new bicycle or video game or his own cell phone? He all of a sudden gets very energetic and goes out and makes some money mowing lawns.
Really, a recession is a compound of the number of people who have given up.
I was talking to an employee of a company, about a major Internet marketing project. I called back the other day to follow up on it and was told he was no longer there. When I explained what I was calling about, I was told that they aren't likely to do any marketing - they were trying to get rid of people.
You might as well be told, seeking a bandage for a spurting artery, "Oh no, we need to save on bandages so we can afford to save more people."
Doesn't make much sense does it?
If you don't have enough business, you need to get smart and promote yourself more business.
In this economy, business owners are cleanly splitting into two sorts. Those who are hunkering down and hoping to ride out the recession. Many of those will be gone by the time the economy improves.
The other sort are businesses who are greatly increasing their marketing effots to not only make it, but to expand.
I know it can be said, "Sure, you're in the marketing business, of course you would say that is the answer."
That doesn't mean it isn't the answer.
In every recession - even in the Great Depression - there are people who became millionaires.
Which sort will you be?
When I capitalize a term, I'm pointing out that it IS a piece of terminology. "Visitor Experience" is one of these.
Visitor Experience means exactly that: what the visitor to your website experiences. Consider questions like these:
1. What kind of impression does the visitor get of your company, service or products?
2. Does he immediately know what, generally, you are selling or offerrng?
3. Is navigation confusing, or simple and clear with multiple ways of getting around the site for those with different expectations?
4. Can the visitor easily find out if you are offering or selling what he is looking for?
5. If so can he easily and rapidly FIND what he is looking for?
6. Does the website make it easy for the visitor to contact you (and provide multiple methods of doing so to service different needs and different levels of interest)?
7. Does the website build confidence, trust in you?
8. Does the website build interest and desire for your products or services?
9. If an online store, is the shopping process well-suited to the type of visitor and products/services you are selling?
I'm sure you can think of more questions. The main point is to realize that your website needs to be examined from the viewpoint of the prospective customer, client or patient. Only then will you know how to improve the Visitor Experience.
Some of the answers come from just imagining yourself a prospect and browsing your site as though you've never seen it before. And good web analytics (website statistics) provide invaluable objective information on how visitors navigate it.
Working on your site's Visitor Experience pays off.
Byrd's Law #28: A Better Visitor Experience Means More Leads or Sales.
If you have a website or are involved with Internet marketing in any way, you need to be aware of security issues.
Not really the business we are in but some simple advice is in order from time-to-time. So I set up a new category for Security postings.
Here's an excellent video from Google about security concerns if you have a website: Preventing Virtual Blight.
Content Management Systems (CMS) have become popular. These allow a person, without knowledge of HTML (web coding language), to build or make changes in a website themselves.
There are cases where this is important. Usually online stores have a CMS so the owner of the store can add, delete and change items and categories, put items on sales, and so on.
A blog is a kind of CMS.
Beyond that, many people have bought into the idea of a CMS because it puts them in control of their website. They are also usually cheap.
Unfortunately, the result is very rarely professional or effective. One reason is - contrary to how they are often promoted - most CMS are at best mediocre for the search engines.
There are many solutions that don't require a CMS, and yet allow necessary updates to be done.
There are no cheap, easy solutions to getting a great website that's effective and has top search engine rankings.
Sorry.
KISS stands for "Keep It Simple Stupid."
As Albert Einstein put it, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."
The tech support "ID10T error" - the user is an idiot - won't wash in marketing.
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If your website loses visitors like a sieve; if people glance at your postcards, look momentarily puzzled, then throw them away, the problem is NOT that your prospects are too dumb.
Clarity, simplicity, directness.
Make them watchwords for your marketing.
Don't be sorry. Be successful.
I regularly get calls from people who are wasting time and money trying to sell something.
It's a waste because they are trying to sell something no one wants, because it isn't properly packaged, or they just don't have enough money to get sales off the ground.
Byrd's Law #44: You can't market something that can't be marketed.
Let's take these points up one at a time:
1. No one wants it. History (and bankruptcy courts) are littered with the bones of bad ideas. Huge corporations aren't immune to this. The Ford Edsel. Classic Coke. And so on. The FIRST step of marketing is making sure you are selling something that people want. How do you do that? Most of the time people test new product ideas by trying to sell the product. Two years and tens of thousands of dollars (or millions) later, they give up - and usually STILL don't know it was because no one wanted it.
If you don't have clear and convincing evidence that people want what you are planning on selling, you need marketing research. Is anyone else selling it? Does it fill an actual need or desire? And so on, are the questions to ask.
2. Packaging. It can be a great idea but that doesn't mean it is being offered in a form (or place) where people will buy it. We had a client with an idea for an insurance related product. It sounded good but it was brand-new, untested, so we recommended a survey. That survey found the product to be something that people really did want - BUT THEY WEREN'T WILLING TO PAY FOR IT. They thought it should be a free service provided by insurance agents. So that made it a useful value-added product which could perhaps be sold to insurance agents - but don't waste your time trying to sell it to the general public.
Maybe something won't fly on a pay-in-full up front basis but will work on "12 low monthly payments."
Maybe people in Detroit won't buy it but people in Jakarta will. Or it can be sold online but not in retail stores.
Again, if you don't know the answer, some homework is in order.
3. Marketing budget and resources. There are plenty of great ideas, products that people want, that are properly packaged for sale - but where the seller doesn't have the budget to get it off the ground. We find this regularly with online stores. A very rough rule of thum is one sale for every 100 visitors. If an online store is going to be successful, you have to get a LOT of visitors to the site.
How are you going to do that? You can put a lot of time into learning Internet Marketing and doing it yourself, or maybe you or a friend is a genius at publicity. Otherwise you are probably going to have to pay someone thousands, maybe tens of thousands of dollars, to get your site noticed.
I've seen a company on a shoe-string budget launch a good idea that would take a marketing budget MINIMALLY in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range to work. Game over.
Again the question is how do you know? This isn't rocket science. A lot of the time just asking the questions is enough - because the answers are obvious.
It is really common sense overcoming wishful thinking.
In an earlier post I talked about consistency as the hallmark of good branding.
But there are other characteristics of good branding and you need to pay attention to all of them:
1. Good branding is consistent.
2. Good branding is truthful.
3. Good branding paints a picture that is desirable.
4. Good branding is different - from competitors and ideally, from anything else out there.
5. Good branding is memorable.
The chief benefit of good branding is it multiplies the effectiveness of all of your marketing efforts.
This is primarily a matter of consistency.
That means the various elements of your branding must be consistent one with the other. A color scheme that communicates "excitement" doesn't go with a branding that is overall about bringing peace and comfort. (More about branding elements later.)
It also means that your branding must be brought to bear in all your marketing, so that you have consistency of image and message throughout your marketing efforts. All your marketing items must be consistent with each other and over time. Whether it is letterhead, on-hold messages, website, print ads, billboards, TV commercials, direct mail - only by consistency of one with the other do you get your various efforts reinforcing each other.
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