Marketing for Success - Mike Vilimek

2008 Word of the Year

Every year there seems to be a new buzz word that Marketers love to use. Often they are externally focused and used to describe products or entire companies. Throughout 2008, there was an internal word that I either read or heard or used myself virtually every single day (Okay…maybe not on Sundays, but certainly every other day).  That word was “Resonate”.

Definition provided by The Free Dictionary

1. To exhibit or produce resonance or resonant effects.

2. To evoke a feeling of shared emotion or belief.

3. To correspond closely or harmoniously

Ask youself, "Does our message RESONATE with our target market?" It's one of the most fundamental questions Marketers should ask themselves, or better yet, ask your market.

 

A Message Relevant for the Times

Companies spend countless hours refining and perfecting their marketing messaging. Sometimes these messages can be massaged or altered to reflect changes in products or business models. But for the most part, core marketing messages and value propositions remain constant. What would cause a shift in your marketing message? How about a global economic crisis?

In order to stay relevant and to have your marketing message resonate within your market, sometimes a slight shift is required. In times of economic uncertainty, companies as well as individuals want to know how you can help them save money, conserve resources, reduce risk and essentially weather the economic storm.

A good example of a company subscribing to this strategy is Elance.com. In a recent email campaign, Recession-Busting Tips for Small Businesses, they positioned there online outsourcing service as a way for small businesses to connect with inexpensive freelancers to help save money and increase efficiency. 

Often the best indicators of how to create appropriate messaging that will resonate with your market lie outside the walls of your company. Take a look around. What can your product do to help people deal with issues they’re facing today?

The Future of Print Advertising

It’s no secret that the print advertising business has been struggling for quite some time now. More and more advertising bucks are being shifted to digital mediums and the current economic crisis sure isn’t helping. Countless print publishing companies continue to announce layoffs such as Gannett, the US’s largest newspaper company recently announcing plans to lay off 10%, or 3000 of its newspaper staffers. Is this entire industry doomed?

I would say no, I think it will survive, but it will look much different than it has in previous years. High end magazines that cater to niche groups will survive as they have loyal followers who most likely will welcome ads that relate their niche interests.  On the other end of the value spectrum, free/give-away papers will also survive. These are the types of low cost production daily papers that you find at subway or transit stations and read during your daily commute. They are convenient, free and continue to have steady readerships. Ads in these dailys need to appeal to a broad market in order to be effective.

Do your products fit into either of these print mediums? Does your product have a niche group of followers with print publications that reach them? Does your product appeal to the mass market? If not, it probably makes sense to continue to divert ad dollars away from print if you have not already abandoned it completely.

Advertising on Mobile Devices

Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs estimates they will sell 10 million iPhones this year. While the iPhone craze is undeniable, it’s also important to note that the iPhone is not the only player in the smart phone market. Remember a little company called Research in Motion (RIM) and their Blackberry? And don’t forget Google’s new foray into the mobile operating system market with their Android platform. While these big titans duke it out, one thing is for sure, the mobile ad market, which is expected to grow to $12 billion by 2013 represents an exciting opportunity for marketers.  

 

With most new smart phones including built-in GPS, it allows advertisers the ability to serve up geographically relevant ads, such as a great new restaurant just around the corner (turn-by-turn directions included of course). Anne Bezancon, President of the mobile ad network 1020 says location-sensitive ads can yield 2 to 5 times the click-through rates of regular ads. Now imagine time/location-sensitive specials such as “Free appetizer for the next hour” at the new restaurant just around the corner. Seems like a great way to fill those empty tables.

The latest trend is ad-supported apps. More than 100 million apps have been downloaded to iPhones from Apple’s App store. While some consumers may argue they don’t want ads on the programs they download, the “free factor” has a way of making people accept them. Of the 3000 applications on the App store, only 20% are free, but those 20% make up 90% of the downloads. Look for developers of these smart phone applications to begin generating revenue through ads, thus creating a great opportunity for savvy marketers.

Yahoo Unveils Apt, a New Display Ad Platform

Yahoo has just launched their new much anticipated advertising platform called Apt. This is Yahoo’s latest attempt to grab a piece of the huge online advertising market that Google has dominated for so long.

While Google’s Adwords platform has focused on advertising based on search terms, Apt will focus more on display ads. Yahoo claims the platform will allow advertisers and publishers to buy and sell display ads while using the same type of easy self-service features that helped make Adwords so successful. Yahoo also hopes that by using data they already collect on user’s preferences, advertisers will be able to better target their campaigns.

Apt will only be open to a select group of newspaper companies initially, with availability to other publishers and advertisers to begin in early 2009.

I’m a huge fan of Adwords' do-it-yourself functionalities and the concept of being able to do something similar for display ads could be very powerful. Yahoo could certainly use the boost.

From TV to Internet and Back Again

It’s no secret that over the past few years a strong trend emerged of advertising dollars being shifted from traditional mainstream media such as TV and newspapers over to online advertising. This makes Google’s recent announcement all the more interesting.

Google and NBC Universal said they’re teaming up to allow Google to sell advertisements on some of NBC’s cable channels such as MSNBC, Oxygen, and the Sci Fi network. Both companies gain from the deal with Google wanting to sell ads someplace other than just beside their search results and NBC gaining access to advertisers who currently advertise online through Google.

Is this a sign of the future? Will marketers be able to setup a Google advertising account and select which portion gets displayed online and which portion goes to TV? Too early to tell, but the problem of quantifying traffic and ROI generated from TV ads will still be difficult compared to that of PPC models.

Landing Pages

Where do your PPC ads link to? They should link to a page specifically designed to function as an extension of your PPC ad campaign, often called a landing page. They are not generally part of your existing website and are not linked through the site map. Landing pages usually have 2 purposes:

1.       Reinforce the message of the PPC ad and encourage the visitor on to a goal conversion.

2.       Allow you to track how effectively your PPC ads are drawing qualified traffic and how well you are converting that traffic.

You should have a unique landing page that is tailored for each unique PPC ad campaign. The landing page must provide what your PPC ad promised or you risk having a large bounce rate.

Think like one of your buyers. What information do they need to reach their goal? That’s the information you should provide. But don’t overcrowd the page, you don’t want to the buyer to become distracted. Make the next step within your conversion process the most prominent feature. Eg. If your goal is for visitors to sign-up for a newsletter, then the sign-up form should be front and centre.

As with PPC ads themselves, you should be experimenting with different landing pages and testing to see which ones are the most effective. It should be an ongoing process that never really finishes.

Information Overload

Recently, the PFF Blog reported that Google CEO Eric Schmidt made the following 2 points during a speech at the Milken Conference:

1.       Users of Google's YouTube are uploading 10 hours of video to the site every minute. That's 14,400 hours worth of new video uploads each day.

2.       By 2019, your average iPod (or other personal digital device) will have enough capacity for 85 years worth of video. Start watching when you're born. Maybe you'll see the final credits in old-age.

With more and more content vying for attention, how will your marketing message break through the clutter? The key will be messages that are short, memorable and contain a visual component. Also try to offer something of value to consumers in addition to your marketing message, such as amazing footage within a video or hilarious content. This could help your message go viral.

Advertising on Social Networks

The amount of traffic that social network sites draw makes many marketers drool. Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and others all have large loyal user bases that often logon daily. The opportunity to get that many eyeballs seeing your ad has made advertising on social networks a hot topic.

Traffic aside, they also allow marketers the ability to specifically target which users see their ads. Users on these sites create detailed profiles that give marketers precise information on who fits within their target market and therefore who will see their ads.

So what’s the problem? To date, advertising on these sites has produced mixed results. Sure, some have found success, but it’s not the sure thing many had hoped. The problem may be the very reason for their popularity. Users visit these sites to interact with their friends and share content. They are so highly engaged with their network of friends, it makes it hard for them to be distracted by ads, resulting in very low click through rates.