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One problem that applies across a wide range of marketing design work is:
How will this actually look?
Some examples:
1. Print design depends on the quality of the print job. Your beautiful black and white photo can suddenly develop a sickly greenish cast.
2. Print ads appear in a context. How will it look against the backdrop of the other ads or copy on that page or in that periodical? Will your ad disappear because it looks like all the rest?
3. How a web page looks depends heavily on the monitor on which it is being viewed.
4. Signage and packaging aren't going to look the same lit by sunlight as by indoor fluorescents.
This is not a new problem - marketers have been struggling with this for ages, as this photo from 1955 illustrates.
Search is down 16% from a year ago.
Now isn't THAT interesting?
There's lots of speculation on why that is. My own guess, it's a combination of factors:
1. People have less time for aimless wandering around the Net.
2. People have found sites that work for a lot of things, and have them bookmarked.
3. Google has gotten smarter so people are taking fewer searches to find what they are looking for.
4. People have gotten smarter in their searches so take fewer searches to find what they are looking for.
5. Alternatives to search are rising (such as mobile apps).
I've put them in order of what I think are the biggest to smallest factor.
In any case, pat yourself on the back, if your website is getting found as much or more through searches as it was a year ago.
Google has been making changes.
More and more, they are tending to show a wider variety of results.
It's all about ensuring they hit what you are looking for - even when your search may mean several things.
If you are searching for "mister" are you looking for a male person, or for a device for spraying little droplets of water?
If you search for plumber, are you looking for a plumber in your local area (probably), or maybe you just want to know more about the profession?
Are you looking for a web page, video or images? Information? A site where you can buy something online?
One way Google has dealt with this: It has been a firm rule for about a year, they will not serve up more than two pages from the same website.
That way there are eight other chances (not counting Places and Sponsored listings) to hit a home run with the searcher.
You see this where the second listing is indented slightly indicating it is another page from the same domain. Usually one is the home page.
Now Google has announced another tweak. Under certain circumstances, they will again show more than two pages for a domain.
For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we’ll now show more results from the relevant site:
Note that in the example given, they still show only 7 results from the amnh.org website. This puts three other listings on the first page of results. Google still hedges their bets.
Smart. Very smart.
For the last two days it's looked like Bing started powering Yahoo Search, and, what-do-you-know. We were right.
Officially announced yesterday.
(Link is to a good article about the change and what it means, on Search Engine Watch.)
"MicroHoo" = Microsoft + Yahoo, and yes it is a bit derogatory. The combined market share is now somewhere around 25% of all U.S. search, compared to pushing 70% for Google. Will this change make them a viable challenger? No.
But one big change will be not having to run Bing and Yahoo click ad campaigns separately (starting probably in about a month). Possibly, it will drive Ask and the other miscellaneous search engines even further down into the weeds.
Most advertising is classified by Ad Agencies as for branding purposes, or to create a response.
More and more though, ads are expected to do both.
Time-Life infomercials get people to call up and order their music CD collections. They also get people to know the brand Time-Life as a source for really good themed music collections.
A lot of advertising is what is called "TOMA" = Top of Mind Awareness. But not exclusively so. In short, some people will have an immediate need for what you are selling. Most people will not, but through repetition will come to remember you so that when they DO have a need, they call you or go into your store or buy your product.
Notice the difference. Some things (CD music collections) are not need based. No one NEEDS one of these. Whereas some people NEED their teeth fixed. Or a new car.
You do get some pure Direct Response advertising, where there is no effort whatsoever (nor any reason) to create a brand awareness. That is rare.
And you get some pure Branding advertising, but that is mostly baloney. If you aren't trying to sell something, why are you advertising?
I know I dump on Big Agency marketing all the time. It's not that they do a worse job than a lot of small marketing companies. It's that most of what they turn out is crap, and there's no excuse for it.
At the same time, they do produce brilliant work. Current reading is "Hey Whipple, Squeeze This", by Luke Sullivan, a copywriter at one of the Bigs. He has a lot of good things to say about the creative process.
This - harnessing creativity - is the toughest part of the marketing game, because you can't bottle it.
The difficulties are legendary. "Writer's block" immortalizes the idea, but it applies to all the arts.
Ultimately, it's the artist closeted alone with his soul, pleading for an Idea.
Any successful marketing company, to be successful, has to find a way to make this process work.
Paul Kaye:
How to write an interesting ad? Try this: "Hello. I want to tell you something important or interesting or useful or funny. It's about you. I won't take very long and there's a prize if you stay till the very end."
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First there was Scientific Advertising. Then Image Ads ("The Man in the Hathaway Shirt", or to cite a modern example, "The Most Interesting Man in The World").
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Then Unique Selling Proposition. Positioning. Creativity versus Metrics. Permission Marketing. The Long Tail.
All concepts of how to market effectively.
And each was (and is) presented as though it were The Whole Story. And replaced or is in opposition to another or others.
The fallacy in all this is each of them is a valid aspect of marketing. None of them is complete.
Irritating ads work because people remember them? Yes, marketing has to be noticed and remembered to work.
Your marketing can be much more effective if you actually test and measure results. A no-brainer!
It takes a bright idea to sell? You betcha! Unless, that is, you have an unlimited stream of dollars to spend without concern for return on investment!
You know what is really going on here? Each new marketing theory tries to present itself as better than ____ (fill in blank with last Big Thing in Marketing). So what is that? Positioning!
And each one presents itself as having some special benefit different than other ideas. Oh yes! They have a USP.
And each one has a cute name and presented cleverly (oh yes, creativity in advertising)!
You get the idea.
I gotta laugh.
Well, they do sell books and get accounts that way.
But we don't have to be dumb.
Just because these guys are presenting some piece of the elephant as though it were the whole, doesn't mean we can't know and use the whole Beast.
THAT'S how to succeed in marketing.
The secret is out. It's a myth that the AdWords keyword tool suggests keywords to use. (I'm being sarcastic... it's been no secret at all in the Internet Marketing community.)
As Google puts it:
Fact: The keyword tool doesn’t make any kind of recommendations about which keywords you should be using. The keyword tool just analyzes related queries that might be of benefit to you and displays them. It's up to you to decide which keywords you want to include in your account.
Oh yes, the numbers it puts up also need to be taken with a VERY large grain of salt.
There's a new version of the tool coming out. It's nicer. That doesn't make it more accurate.
The only thing we use it for is to suggest POSSIBLE areas of search terms we might otherwise miss.
Really, you can't.
If everything isn't coming from a consistent viewpoint and reality, something will strike a false note.
Much better to just BE authentic.
Eric Clapton didn''t start playing the blues because it was popular or he could make a living at it. Actually, when he was a boy getting his first guitar in jolly old England, no white men were. He and his teenage buddies grew up on the likes of Robert Johnson. They were just REALLY into blues.
Marketing starts with deciding what you are going to sell and how you are going to package it.
You'll be a lot more successful if you start by finding something you CAN be authentic about.
Oh yes, and it'll be more fun too.
If someone can't get you high rankings, volume traffic to your website and increased business from the Internet - or any marketing for that matter - then they are either incompetent, con artists, or both.
If someone promises to achieve these overnight, then they are either ignorant, con artists, or both.
Sometimes it goes quickly, when all the pieces are already in place. Usually it takes time. But someone who knows what they are doing and has nothing to hide, should be able to show you regular (monthly) progress.
There is one other point: You need to do what the expert says, or let them do their work. Why decide someone is an expert, pay them for their expertise, then second-guess them or fail to help them do their job?
We told one client it would take six months to a year to achieve what they wanted. They hired and paid us monthly, but wouldn't let us do what we said needed to be done, failed to provide us material we needed, and gave us specific instructions on what to do. At the end of five months they pulled the plug for lack of results.
Why didn't they just take the money and run it through a shredder?
Battles over the use of trademarks in click ads have been fought in the courts for years now.
Is there any problem with you running click ads against search terms, or even using the name of a competitor in your ad?
There have been enough victories on this front that it is a pretty much settled question with Google. Yes, you can do that.
It is entirely another question whether this is a useful strategy. Our tests indicate that in most situations, it will generate very little traffic. People looking for a particular brand or company are looking for that brand or company. Even if they find themselves on your website, chances are they'll just think they made a mistake (or you did) and hit their back button.
It may help build awareness of your name amongst prospects who have heard of a competitor only. That is more of a long-term strategy, but it doesn't cost much to include it in your program. Just don't count on it as a major player.
Here I go repeating myself.
No matter how small your business, and how little marketing you do, you can have consistency in your items and materials.
This is a basic, a fundamental. Make everything look the same, no matter how simple it is.
Do you have letterhead, business cards, any sort of signage (even if only a magnetic car sign)? Do you have a website, a simple brochure? Is there a message on your voicemail or telephone system on-hold?
ALL of these MUST look the same.
If not, you are automatically wasting a large portion of your marketing efforts.
Period.
Is marketing about emotion or is it about reason?
Yes.
If you assume you can sell with reason alone - getting all the facts straight, explaining everything, answering all questions - you are deluding yourself. That has never been true in marketing, not in 1850, not in 1923, not now.
It is less true than it used to be. It is more about emotion and less about facts than it used to be, and you can see that in typical advertising, whether consumer or business-to-business marketing.
It is just as big an error to think it is all and ONLY about emotion. And that is the error that lots of marketing is making these days.
An amazing percentage of current consumer advertising is virtually fact free.
This is so bad that, as I've mentioned delightedly more than once, I listened to Blimpie ads for years before I found out what they were selling. Recently they changed their advertising to tell people they sell sub sandwichies. I guess Subway and Quiznos have been kicking their butts despite their 40 year head start. Someone got the message.
Emotion and Reason, Reason and Emotion.
Let's be smart Folks.
It's not Rocket Surgery.
Here are some great examples of logos. Some of them fail as Brand Candy (Unilever's just ends up looking frilly), many of them work, they are all clever.
"Brand Candy" is a nice turn of phrase for the stylish, aesthetic visuals of a brand that people find so appealing.
"Brand Theater" is the similar phrase to describe the active measures that fit the same territory. The inviting atmosphere in a Starbucks, for example, with their comfy chairs and (now) free wi-fi.
If you deliver an experience that appealing and different from the competition, you've got a winner.
Bad staffing can kill it. Your employees have to buy into the brand experience you are trying to create. It's worth thinking about who are you trying to be for your customers? Then make sure you deliver that or the promise of it at every touch point (any place your prospects or customers contact the company or brand).
There's another important angle on this. It's got to be DIFFERENT enough. You can't differentiate with minor differences. You get what the author of "Mind Your X's and Y's" calls "the mushy middle."
Can anyone really tell the difference between HP and Dell? No? How about HP/Dell and Apple?
And people flock to not just the stylishness of the Apple products but the distinctive differences in action (which Apple so smartly featured when they rolled out their iPhones, to a point where it overnight became a catch phrase "there's an app for that".
You'll never accomplish this by sticking to what is safe.
We've continued to work to improve the quality of our hosting services provided to our clients. We're almost complete moving all websites off of shared hosting plans with our old provider, which we have not been happy with. That will be completed in the next two weeks.
We now have a full dedicated server for our online stores and super-premium hosting. That is a Tampa Bay based company that specializes in the Miva Merchant shopping carts, and in an extremely high level of customer service and technical support. Our other servers are located in a data center in Phoenix.
Our premium hosting services include an independent monitoring service that checks them every five minutes and notifies us by email and text messages of any outages. So we are usually aware of outages before anyone else (including our hosting providers). Even if they occur in the middle of the night.
Our average up-time for our premium hosting website clients, for July was 99.98%, or an average of only 9 minutes outage for the entire month.
No website experienced more than 50 minutes downtime total. No super-premium or online store premium hosting service experienced more than 5 minutes outage for the entire month.
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