Now that we've settled what "smart marketing" means in 2009, let's talk about what "aggressive marketing" means.

First of all, don't be shy. Don't be subtle. People are way too busy, too frantic, assaulted by too many messages to get subtleties.

Tell people what you have to offer that need or want. Tell them in plain English. Show them with layout and imagery that communicates the same message you are trying to get across in words.

Secondly, put your message out in a way that will be noticed. If you can only afford a little tiny ad - don't bother. Use a different medium that you can impinge with. If you can't afford to do 10000 11x6 postcards, don't do 4x6 postcards. Do fewer cards but do them big. And make sure the imagery on the face of the cards is really eyeball grabbing.

Finally, get the word out regularly and in volume. In 2010, a little bit of marketing doesn't go a long way. Make sure you are promoting in enough volume to bring in the amount of new business or leads you need or want to accomplish your goals. It's primary. If you don't do this, you may as well not get out of bed in the morning.

So there you have it. My predictions and business survival guide for 2010.

You're welcome. And have a great, best ever new year.

In the current economic scene, you DEFINITELY need to market. But you need to market SMART and AGGRESSIVELY.

What does it mean to market smartly in times like these?

Traditional methods of marketing for your industry may no longer be cost effective. The drift away from the Yellow Pages and from Direct Mail has only accelerated in most industries. But if you can get a very targeted list, Direct Mail can be incredibly effective.

Smart marketing means, more than ever, if your marketing isn't working, you need to do RESEARCH. Every marketing great from Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, etc. has written at length about the importance of research. Yet it is so neglected, especially in the small business world.

Research is about the most expensive thing you can do in marketing.... other than spending money on a campaign doomed to failure because you don't understand something critical about your target market (like who they are or what they want).

If you can't afford to hire a professional research firm, get creative and do it yourself. There are ways.

Smart marketing means don't commit all your eggs until your campaign has been tested and verified it works. THEN put the pedal to the metal. All marketing is experimental until it is proved out. Smart marketers test.

So like the man said.... GET SMART.

Part 2, Wherein I again drag out my trusty Crystal Ball.

What can we predict for marketing in 2010? Assume (as I expect) a slow recovery continuing pretty much throughout the year.

First of all, we can expect that marketing will be king. In short, the companies that market smartly and agressively, IF they also have good products and services that people DO need and want, AND if they have really sharp customer service and/or tech support, THOSE are the companies that will thrive.

Really, all of these factors will be necessary. People still want to buy things. But in an economy such as this they don't feel like they have to settle for anything less than great service.

People will spend money on frills, luxuries, wants rather than needs. Don't think that isn't the case.

But you've GOT to marketing sharply and agressively if you don't want to just hang on by a thread - or maybe go down with the ship.

We aren't done "culling the flock" so to speak. Many, many more weak businesses that made it to 2010 will be gone before 2011.

Companies that aren't willing to change, adapt, take advantage of the different scene and its opportunities, will continue to be in trouble in 2010. It is NOT business as usual in the marketing world. And it won't be again soon.

So what does it mean to market sharply and agressively? Stay tuned.

I was looking at common household items and commercial equipment, and I felt like ranting.

Look at them. Thermostats. Doorknobs. Coffee pots. Sure, they WORK. But they could look GOOD too.

There is no excuse in the world for Hideous Industrial Design (hereinafter known as HID, because it spreads from person to person and has no known cure). I can only think it's laziness or lack of talent.

In most cases, an aesthetic design would cost no more to manufacture than a cheap ugly design. And guess what, manufacturers. They would sell better! Who wouldn't rather purchase a sexy looking Heart Rate Monitor?

Apparently in most cases industrial designers are art school rejects.

Sigh.

First of several posts wherein I look in my crystal ball and tell you what to expect in the coming year.

First of all, economics.

There are two possibilities as to the recession. The first, and likeliest, is that we are now into what is called an "L" shaped recovery. That means things are going to continue to improve, but slowly. It'll be a few years before the economy gets back to where it was before the recession started. Unemployment will rise somewhat higher before it starts to come down. No catastrophe, but no great boom either.

I have many reasons for believing this is what is going to happen. Under this scenario, there are many opportunities for prosperity, doing pretty much the kinds of things that have worked for years. However, it is going to be more work. Not the least because of increased taxes and government regulation, a less optimistic outlook on the part of the population, and a continuing tight credit scene that will undoubtedly be accompanied by higher inflation than we've seen in a while.

The other possibility, which I consider less likely but can't rule out, is what is called a "W" - meaning the improving scene we are currently experiencing is temporary and we are going in the next few months to fall off an economic cliff. I don't expect it, but if it is coming, we should have a month or two warning. If it does occur, it will mean we really are in the worst economy since the Great Depression. If it happens, it will mean radical adjustments for many businesses and businessmen. If and when I see that coming I'll talk about what it means for marketing.

In the meantime, given the way it looks to me, let me talk in Part 2 about Marketing in 2010.

I just did an analysis of Bing (Microsoft's third and no-doubt final effort to make it in the world of Search).

Accompanied by tens of millions of dollars of advertising, and massive efforts to build strategic alliances, Bing has increased the MS market share considerably in the months since its release. So, a success?

Actually, looked at closely, the biggest reason for the increase in market share is Microsoft's massive push to get users of older versions of Internet Explorer onto version 8.

MS has pushed IE8 out twice via automatic updates. If you avoid that, every time you install a patch, the first time you run Internet Explorer, they take you to a page to explain why you should download IE8 and to make it easy for you to do so. Just click.

That has resulted in some 10% of Internet Users switching from IE6 to IE8. And when they do that, MS of course wants to use Bing as your default search engine. You have to go out of your way to switch to anything else.

You'd expect Bing to increase their market share by 10% from that alone. Yet the MS share of the search market has increased by less than that.

So people in massive numbers are taking the time and effort to go back to using Google.

In a word, fail.

Merry Christmas to You and Yours.

(The Milky Way. Mount Lassen on the left, Mount Shasta on the right. Click on image to see full size picture.)

I'm not talking about highways. I'm using traffic in the sense of visitors to your website.

If you're going to make Internet Marketing work for you, it is critical to identify who is coming to your website, how they are finding you, and what they are doing once they get there.

A conversation with a prospect yesterday pointed out one of the pitfalls. He was running an ad with a coupon in a local paper. It seemed to be generating business - but no one ever brought in the coupon. Yet when he ran the ad he got more visitors from the area where that paper was distributed. When he stopped running the ad, he got less business from that area.

My point is it takes more than a guess-and-by-golly (using a combination of guesswork and reliance on luck) to understand what is going on. Sometimes you have to really dig. And it is VERY worth it.

I've spoken before of the marketing chain. In short, there are many steps from someone who has never even heard of you, to a loyal, repeat customer who refers others.

Now, unless you are starting out brand new, you've got something going on already.

Let's also assume you DON'T have an unlimited budget.

Where do you spend your dollars?

That's what I mean by the sweet spot. What is going to get you the best return on your $.

There are two ways to approach this:

1. What is working right? IF you have something that is working well, if you can double that part of the chain, you'll double what comes out the other end of the pipeline - meaning customers. So find out - is it POSSIBLE to double that, and what would it cost. Since you have something already working, you can make a pretty good estimate of time and costs.

2. What is the WORST point in the chain? If you are getting lots of people to your web site, and you've verified they are qualified prospects, but from there they disappear, then your website is leaking like a sieve and chances are improving that will get a BIG improvement in leads and customers.

Estimating costs, time and return approaching from this direction is more of a question mark. Even though it may be wildly obvious what is wrong with the website (or whatever it is), how good it has to be to function well may be an educated guess.

So you see, this is not an area where you can have certainty in advance. But look at it both ways, see what looks like the easiest, cheapest, most productive fix - and if you only have the $ to do one thing, do that.

If you have the $ to do more than one, go for it. The alternative is trying a number of things one after the other, until one really works. REALLY works.

Crystal balls in marketing are in short supply, so better if you can try multiple approaches at once rather than perhaps lose months, even years trying different approaches until your marketing really takes off.

One subject that doesn't get enough attention in marketing is readability.

There's not much point in using cool looking fonts or design if the copy ends up being hard to read. People will just skip it.

A few basic rules:

1. Serif fonts are easier to read than sans serif, unless you are dealing with very tiny print or low resolution (as in non-HD TV).

2. Standard capitalization is easier to read than ALL IN CAPS or other non-standard capitalization.

3. Black on white or dark on light is easier to read than reversed lettering such as white on black.

4. Regardless of color, low contrast of text to background makes it hard to read. A medium Blue against a medium Red shade for example.

5. Older people need more contrast and larger type sizes than younger folk! If you are younger, the fact that it is easy for you to read doesn't mean it is going to be so for a lot of your viewers / readers.

6. Anything other than standard left-to-right text is going to be harder to read (such as vertical or following a curve).

There's more to readability, but this will help avoid the worst errors.

The two biggest reasons for unhappy clients are delays in getting the project done, and a design which the client doesn't like. The second can lead to the first since you might end up having to redo a design several times.

Marketing companies have several ways of dealing with this. One is to offer the client several "looks" at the start to choose from, hoping one will hit a home run. Another is to charge the client extra if it takes more than a certain number of tries or revisions before the client will sign off on it.

I had another idea. It's actually one of the things that separates us from most design firms.

I took problems in getting the client to sign off on a look, as an indictment of the development process. As a result, we've worked hard to refine the development process to make it as efficient as possible. We found, for example, that a conference call or meeting with the client and our designer was essential. That way, the designer had an opportunity to get a feel for what the client was looking for, straight from the horse's mouth.

Studying articles on marketing by L. Ron Hubbard, I found flaws in our design sequence. There is a natural sequence of development that if not followed can cause you to have to backup and redo steps, or end up with something the client spits at. We straightened it out.

The net result was a design development process that is relatively rapid and efficient, and almost sure to develop a "look" that is going to please the client, first time. Typically, there are some adjustments needed. It is rare for us to have to start over.

As a consequence we can offer as many versions or revisions of the look as necessary, at no extra charge.

Clients like that.

When you see grocery store coupons, when your receive a direct mail promotion, when anyway talks about measuring results in marketing, the promotion of benefits over features, the use of preemptive positioning - homage is being paid to Claude C. Hopkins. He either invented or developed to a science each of these.

Born in 1866, he got his start in advertising in the 1880's when stamps were a penny and brands were few.

Over the next 40 years, he helped establish many now famous brands, even products. At a time when brooms were the universal tool for cleaning floor, he single-handedly popularized carpet sweepers, working for Bissell.

He was proud of being a man of the people, asserting that most purchases were made by humble people, not the elite, and that you had to be and live with them to understand them, their needs and wants.

He was a strong advocate for simple, clear language in advertising. While he asserted that advertising is salesmanship in print, he also said he never tried to sell anything. His approach was simply to offer people something they wanted, to make clear with his copy that it WAS something they wanted, and to offer it in a way people would be comfortable in getting it.

Almost everything he layed out as principles of advertising, in his books My Life in Advertising and Scientific Advertising, still applies, 80 years later.

Truly a giant of advertising.

If you've been wondering what happened to some recent posts and why there have been no posts in the last few days:

We moved our website to another server. There were quite a few changes that had to be made in order for the blog to work.

Anyway, we're back!

I try not to post on politically charged topics. However, sometimes I can't resist....

"Climategate" is the name being used for the emails hacked from a major Climate Change science center.

In case you haven't read the actual emails from the East Anglia Climate Center, but are simply listening to the assessment that they do not throw any doubt on the reality of Global Warming:

Read from the actual emails.

Marketing has a history.

I mean, it wasn't suddenly invented in 1997. Or 1957.

Over the last 150 years, there have been great marketers. Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, Al Ries, many others. Some of them are even still alive.

My point is that great marketing is not just a matter of a great idea. There ARE truths in marketing. The people who discovered, developed or promoted new truths and effective methods laid the foundation for all that goes on today.

It is NOT true that every new piece of technology Totally Changes Everything. All they do is provide a new way of manifesting the eternal truths.

In the early years of the 20th century, Claude Hopkins developed testing and measuring as key tools for creating effective campaigns.

The development of Web Analytics programs means we can apply those principles to websites and Internet Marketing.

To help remind of these facts, from time to time, I'm going to post an article about one of these Giants of Marketing, Greats of Marketing History - the gods of Marketing you might call them.

Claude Hopkins, pretty much the inventor of modern advertising, was a developer of and major exponent of testing and measuring. He wrote a whole book on the subject, "Scientific Advertising", first published in 1923.

Sensible, right? Not very controversial, right?

Yet in 1999, Sergio Zyman (former head of Marketing at Coca-Cola) titles a book "The End of Marketing as We Know It" which is in considerable part about testing and measuring.

Justifying marketing as producing results is STILL a big topic of discussion in industry rags like "Ad Age."

If you are purchasing marketing realize you may have a job on your hands trying to determine how to, and then actually succeeding in collecting, the numbers necessary to measure the results.

It's not a trivial exercise. Let's take Internet Marketing. Everyone knows "search engine rankings." You want to be on page one on Google searches.

Yet that is only one of about eight different factors that affect the bottom line, which is that your Internet Marketing should generate qualified prospects or (for online stores) sales.

Just to name a couple of really obvious ones, let's say you DO get on page one on a Google search for certain search terms.

Are they the most important terms, in terms of volume of searches and relevance to what you are selling?

And what happens if they DO go to your website. Does it blow them away or blow them off?

So think about it. You have to have statistics that can be accurately collected and in a timely enough fashion to be useful. And they have to actually measure what you are trying to accomplish.

It isn't surprising if this takes quite some work. After all, even in the last few years, better statistics for baseball players were developed (by an amateur!) than those that had been used for the last 100 years.

But it is worthwhile.

Hopkins asserts that IF you test and measure, success in advertising is virtually guaranteed.

Perhaps he exaggerates. But not by much.

Thanks to Astronomy Picture of the Day (click picture for link).

I've commented before on the chasm between marketing for small businesses versus marketing for Giant Corporations.

Most marketing texts are written for Fortune 500 companies and their vendors and agencies. Not that the material in them is wrong for small businesses, but a lot of it may not apply, and sometimes, it is hilarious.

Here's a perfect example, from "The Little Blue Book of Advertising":

"We all have a tendency to call the most expensive or most well-known vendors."

We do?

Just for the heck of it (click on image to view the clock in action)....

It would be difficult to overemphasize the importance of simplicity in marketing.

Claude Hopkins practically invented modern copywriting. In "Scientific Advertising", he uses short sentences and simple words to lay out his philosophy of copywriting.

Short sentences, simple words, direct communication.

You aren't trying to win a Pulitzer Prize.

(Actually, Hemingway wrote that way too.)

I've spoken repeatedly of what I like to call "the visitor experience" - what happens when someone visits a website, and most definitely from their viewpoint. How THEY experience the website.

That really breaks down into three key factors:

1. Interest

2. Trust

3. Usability

If a website doesn't build interest from the first moment, and on every page - your visitor is gone.

If it doesn't build trust in the visitor, he will never take action. And that, after all, is why the website is there, one way or another, to bring about or facilitate action.

But all that will come to nothing unless the site is designed, built, and adjusted to maximize USABILITY.

What is usability? It is anything and everything that make the site easy to use and easy for the visitor to do what the visitor wants to do. I've written many blog posts on this but now let's tie them all in a neat little bundle and put a label on it: Usability.

Clarity and simplicity in your main menu. Telling the visitor simply, directly and immediately on your home page what you are about. Provide alternate methods of navigating a website, including internal text links so visitors can follow their interest. Page layout that is basically the same throughout the site.

These and many other aspects of your site contribute to - or detract from - its usability.

To evaluate your site's usability, imagine yourself someone who has never been to your site, and (perhaps) is a bit of a novice on the Internet.

How easy will it be for them to use your site. USE your site. That's what you want the visitor to do, to use your site to accomplish THEIR purposes.

Only then will your site accomplish yours.