Want your marketing to sell? Get focused

This blog post was originally published by me on the Hot Tomali website, on November 30, 2010.

If Social Media’s “brand chat” is at one end of marketing, hike all the way across the spectrum to the hyper targeted, call-to-action space called local marketing. This is where you can dial up the specifics of your customer targeting and approach them with focused, action-oriented sales messaging. These days it’s direct marketing on steroids and it’s being enabled by some big, new-school media companies.

Google reports that 20% of all searches are from people looking for local places: plumbers, restaurants, and — for those of us living in the Vancouver suburbs last week — snow tire shops. Over the past couple years, Google AdWords has offered the ability to get closer in with our ads, almost down to neighbourhood levels, to ensure we’re only advertising to people that matter to our businesses. It also provides a local business directory, Google Places. Google really believes in local targeting for its advertisers: rumour is that Google is about to buy local deals site Groupon, and is willing to spend in excess of 2.5 Billion dollars to bring a single-offer, geo-targeted, selling tool to its customers.

Targeting is not new; companies like Environics Analytics have being developing lifestyle-based segmentation models for years to help businesses identify the needs, attitudes and behaviours of customers, and overlay that on geography. Some of this is based on the simple adage “birds of a feather, flock together”, meaning consumers tend to live in micro regions where other consumers behave like them. What is new is how this is being transported into self-serve advertising tools, for example Facebook Advertising.

FB supports demographic filtering, but also behavioural filtering in its advertising. The social networking giant has integrated a tag-like filter that allows advertisers to type keywords that are part of users’ collective profile data. Want to target single men in British Columbia, age 25–34, who love to play the Monopoly board game? There’s 420 of them on Facebook waiting to act on your advertisement!

When you put together your next marketing plan, make sure you consider your local prospects and how you can use the new tools to cost-effectively get your sales message in front of your most receptive audience — and them only.

E-commerce is Key

This blog post was originally published by me on the Hot Tomali website, on September 20, 2010.

It was a simple task: get a spare door key cut for my boat. However, after being turned away by four locksmiths because they didn’t have blanks for my “crazy Swedish key”, I knew I was in trouble. Plan B: the Internet. I searched on the Swedish brand along with a number imprinted on the key, and was surprised by the result. There were only two exact matches, but one of them was a product order page with a picture of my key! The online retailer was an unknown key company in Florida and the e-commerce site was bare bones, but being an e-commerce adventurer I banged in my credit card. Eleven days later, five blanks exactly matching my boat key arrived in the mail: $6.95, plus $12 for the international shipping.

With all the excitement swirling around social media’s new paradigm of brand engagement, it feels like focus has been lost on “closing the deal.” So many organizations are bent on building their online fan base, but how many are then being moved into a seamless online purchasing opportunity? E-commerce has always appeared to be complicated, technical, and expensive. It is a business channel and therefore has implications across multiple company divisions including marketing, IT, customer service, finance, and inventory mangement. This can make it tough for one area of the company to champion an e-commerce deployment. The fact is though, online transactional systems should be a central part of any company’s long-term strategy.

In the past few years, e-commerce has found its home in some unexpected but successful places. As The Economist reported in July, Oscar de la Renta launched a transactional Website some years ago expecting to sell small accessory items. To their great surprise, online customers have been pulling $4,000 cocktail dresses off the virtual shelves, and they recently sold online an $80,000 sable coat! In the same fashion vein, Prada forecasts that within 5 years, 40% of its revenues in America will come from the internet. At the other end of the business spectrum, small companies are also finding online is their goldmine. Thanks to the incredible power of search engines, if you put up a great SEO’d e-commerce system, buyers from every corner of the globe will find you without you spending a dime on advertising. Buyers like me and my crazy Swedish Key.

Dare to Stare Your Online Customers in the Eyes

This blog post was originally published by me on the Hot Tomali website, on June 06, 2010

Website measurement is now firmly planted in the business lexicon, thanks to Google. “Google Analytics” has become a generic term among companies, meaning that lots of stuff on a website is trackable. It’s true: I was told by Omniture that its premium analytics toolkit, Site Catalyst, has over 100,000 report variations! So, the problem is not measuring your customers’ site engagement, it’s understanding that measurement data to create improvement in the experience. Technologies continue to emerge and evolve that are intended to help us understand what web customers are doing, but sometimes you just have to look them in the eyes and ask them.

Online usability testing is just starting to gain a greater appreciation despite being around from the late ’’90s, and with decades-old off-line roots in advertising focus group testing. Where Web analytics can tell you the, “what people are doing” on the site, it lacks the intuition of the, “why people are doing that” on your site. For example, analytics tools can report that 32% of visitors to a product page are returning to the homepage rather than purchasing, but it’s a darned mystery in that data of why they go that direction. If you want to know, why not ask them?

The discipline of online usability testing involves selecting a representative sample of customers, bringing them into a face-to-face test environment (this can be as simple as a computer and an activity-recording device in a boardroom), and moderating them through a user scenario with a set of associated tasks. The process can be both simple and challenging. As the guru of web usability Jacob Nielsen stated a decade ago, you only need five testers to determine 80% of the usability problems in a particular scenario. This means learning can occur very rapidly, to provide the foundation for some very significant improvements in your site architecture. The challenge comes in recruiting a representative sample of your customers, in effectively moderating sessions to minimize bias and maximize insights, and in collating the opinions into actionable documentation that roadmaps both business and technology improvements for the site.

Technology is even trying to simplify the online usability testing discipline. Usertesting.com is a service where you can just throw in your own site scenarios, define a tester group by selecting ready-and-waiting web surfers with some basic demographics filtering, and ta-da… instant insight! There’s just no substitute, however, for a trained expert to work with you on defining and executing a successful, strategic, testing program that works in concert with your web analytics insights, and can even guide much more effectiveGoogle Optimizer multi-variant test programs.

Social Media: Rule #1

This blog post was originally published by me on the Hot Tomali website, on January 20, 2010.

Almost every integrated marketing strategy we’re developing right now at Hot Tomali involves Social Media components. However it’s a steep, new, learning curve for many clients as they absorb the changing marketing landscape. It’s difficult jumping into the deep end of a Facebook Fan Page strategy, when someone hasn’t used Facebook.

Our recommendation at the early stages of social media planning is to go out on the Web and see where customers are talking about your brand. Rule #1: Look, Listen and Touch. Work your way across the social media platforms, search on your brand and category terms, and see what people are saying. As an example I recently encountered a company that is participating at a simple level of social media, but already demonstrating great brand expression in a very connected way.

Two months ago I posted a YouTube  video of the trial of a bilge pump I’d installed in my sailboat: an obscure piece of content to say the least! I did take the time to keyword the video with relevant terms including the brand of the pump. A week ago the following comment was posted on my video:

(Simon) I am the designer of the Supersub Smart from Whale Pumps in Northern Ireland. The video is fantastic we are all very pleased. Can I recommend you add a Non-return valve to stop the water flowing back into the bilge. Whale part number is LV1219.

I was shocked! It looks like a company employee had been searching their product terms and came across my video. They then decided to provide some valuable advice. The power of the platform is now the radius effect that’s occurring: I posted this story and link on my Facebook Wall, so my boating friends are telling their boating friends about this great product and support from the company. In the last 10 days this video has garnered 58 views and seems to be gathering 4 new views a day. (And, I’ve purchased the recommended valve.)

As marketers, it’s not until you get out there and look, listen, and touch, social media that you start to understand the reach and potential of your brand. The conversation is happening: go find it!

Goodbye, Sweet Microsite

This blog post was originally published by me on the Hot Tomali website, on December 17, 2009.

Microsites have been around for most of the Web years. They’ve been the pet of marketers who wanted to create a rich, immersive, consumer brand experience, that didn’t reside one navigation tab away from a corporation’s news releases and annual reports. The failure of the microsite has always been attributable to one enormous issue: lack of traffic. Companies that spent small fortunes on their microsites were not so pleased with their $/visit metric, and more chagrined to find they had to invest significantly more in $/advertisement metrics to generate some interest.

Enter Microsite 2.0: the Facebook Fan Page!

Brands are charging towards the platform that is irresistible with its many hundreds of millions of potential customers just waiting to be with you. Unlike those microsite islands, Facebook is in the middle of the party, and provides huge advantages for brand participation:

• Engagement and “radiused exposure” of brand messaging through the power of the Wall Post
• Automatic reach through its easy external push/pull of RSS, SMS, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr
• Developer control through FBML (Facebook Markup Language) that provides surprising openness to the look and feel of the Fan Page, and hooks into a Facebook user’s profile, and feed data
• Built-in Analytics that break down the walls of anonymity with access to fan data including demographics, habits, and contacts

Ironically, along with all the new faculties and connected potential of the Facebook Fan Page, comes the old challenge of how to create a truly engaging brand experience. The toy maker Hasbro has launched a large-scale broadcast campaign driving people to Facebook.com/cranium, but the experience rings hollow with what might be staged videos and Tweets. What looks easy, usually never is. Goodbye sweet microsite; hello, same, old, marketing challenge.

Been bloggin' elsewhere

Hello old friend. Over the last year I've been blogging at my agency's website, but I want to make sure some of the good stuff gets stored on 124people.com. So I'll post a few for posterity, here.

Bryan