Tag: Marketing
Be Rebellious
In order to get consumers (whether they are retail or service customers or business-to-business audiences) to notice an advertising message, many companies resort to loudness and one-upmanship. Neither of these tactics works in the long run.
If your competition is talking loudly and you decide to yell louder, what do you think they will do? Yep. Theyíll start to scream. Nobody wins a shouting match when it comes to advertising. And usually youíll find you even lose a few customers in the process because they canít stand the noise.
Itís the same with one-upmanship. If you have to compete on more and better coupons or more and better discounts, giveaways or incentives unrelated to your core product, your revenue per sale decreases as well as your number of sales.
Customers see these types of games as gimmicky, fake and disingenuous; and they leave. The ones who do stay now view you and your competitors as commodities with no difference except your price. That is a dangerous place for a company to find itself.
The answer to clutter is not more clutter; itís finding who wants to hear you and speaking to them. So how do you compete if you canít out shout or out discount your competition? You get rebellious and radical with your advertising.
Do those words scare you? Thatís okay. Remember, youíre being courageous now. You can handle it. Besides, rebellious and radical arenít dirty words. They will help you draw attention away from your competition without resorting to screaming and insulting your customers.
Itís not about being outrageous just to get attention; itís about being remarkable. An advertising campaign with a strong rebellious strategy is, by its very nature, different from anything your audience will find from your competitorsí marketing efforts. Itís unexpected. Itís surprising. Itís effective.
There are two keys to creating a successfully rebellious advertising campaign. The first is the big idea. This idea comes from a strategy that is derived directly from your customers and their relationship with your brand. You arrive at this idea through a discipline called account planning. Weíll get into the details of both the big idea and account planning in later articles.
The second key to a successfully rebellious advertising campaign is attention. You canít gain attention if you donít learn to identify and then steer clear of the norm. It doesnít matter how great your product or service is or how large your potential market, if your target audience doesnít pay attention to your message, your ad budget has been wasted.
Think about these two keys while you flip through the newspaper or a magazine. Ponder them while you watch TV. You should notice something almost immediately. Most ads today donít seem to be based on any big idea. Many are so boring that you flip right past them without noticing them. Others get your attention but the ads donít have much to do with the product so you quickly forget the brand the ad was supposed to sell you. What an opportunity for your brand!
Now, there is a caveat to being rebellious. Your ads should never be different just for difference sake. The difference should be derived from your brandís uniqueness
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Be Courageous
For such a simple statement, this is one of the hardest things for people to do. It goes back to that damn survival instinct each of us is born with. If an animal draws attention to itself in the wild, it might soon find itself the main course of a larger animalís next meal. That fear of being chewed up and spit out has survived all our millions of years of evolution and is alive and well in todayís business environment.
Fight or flight is another instinct many of us havenít yet learned to manipulate. Itís easier to run away from a new idea than it is to stay and fight for it. With todayís leadership-by-committee mentality and intense public scrutiny, the easiest solution is unfortunately the most popular. Companies today often miss the forest through the trees. They tend to concentrate so much on short-term profit that they fail to make investments or take advantages of opportunities that promise long-term profit simply because they require a short-term loss.
It may also be argued that fighting for a new ideaówhether that means pushing for the development of a new product, staving off competitors or supporting a slumping brand rather than letting it dieóis usually undesirable because of such costs.
Certainly that might be true in the short term, but in the long run, giving up too soon my actually cost your company far more in lost revenues, public outrage or shrinking market share. It requires a different way of thinking. Advertising and promoting your business is an investment in your businessí future. Investments are not mere costs. They come with a benefit.
Letís get one thing straight from the very beginning. No company ever dominated its industry by operating with a philosophy of fear. And, ultimately, no company can survive if it doesnít learn to conquer its fear and take chances, make changes.
It is the ability to see past any short-term problems to the bigger, long-term picture that has fueled the meteoric rise of the worldís most successful companies. Nobody knew what Apple was before its history making 1985 Super Bowl commercial.
Apple paid to run that commercial only once, but it ran again hundreds of times around the country and the world during local and national news broadcasts. Stories about Apple and its commercial were front-page news for weeks.
When it comes to advertising, you might wonder what kinds of changes are needed. After all, itís just advertising. If your ads look like your competitorsí ads, if your messages are strikingly similar, if you talk to yourself instead of your customers, if you worry more about your logo being large enough than the message being attention-getting enough, you need to change.
Now this is just the first step, so we wonít get into any more detail here. The object of this step is to let you know that you need to screw up your courage and prepare to make some changes in your advertising that will have a profound effect on your bottom line.
Fear is the greatest motivator. However, instead of motivating people to act, it usually causes people to freeze or retreat. It takes courage to make the kinds of changes that are needed to survive in todayís crowded, complicated and competitive business environment.
Conquer your fear. Be courageous.
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Best Internet Marketing Strategies ñ Success Is Yours
Do you have a list of words that you like? I used to have a pretty extensive list. I had lots of words on there, but unfortunately I have forgotten many of them because I wasnít thinking about them enough. This is depressing because that list was such a simple little pick me up to maintain. I also liked that I liked the words for absolutely no logical reason. For example, the word ìfusiaî was on there and Iím not even one hundred percent sure what color that is, but I like the sound. Incidentally, Iím thinking fusia is a burgundy-ish color.
I once was out to eat with a girlfriend named Kit (actually her name was Katrina and for some reason it was shortened to Kit rather than Kat). The relationship was clearly coming to a close, but we still had a few dinners and drinks in us before the official end. Anyways, that night she told me that she liked the word ìperpendicularî and although I was mentally tainted in my thinking about her, because I knew that we were going to break up, at the moment that she said that, she seemed to me the most beautiful woman in the world. I like words and I like people who like words.
Anyways, I just realized that I also like the word ìstrategyî. Iím not sure why. I like it and moreover, just thinking about it makes me wish I had a strategyÖfor anythingÖexcept marketing. I donít want a marketing strategy and I definitely donít want an internet marketing strategy. Much like my feelings towards Kit in a positive way, I think that I would be negatively influenced by someone who had an internet marketing strategy. I donít even want to think about what Iíd feel towards someone who claimed to have the best internet marketing strategy. So in conclusion, I feel that the word strategy is cool and I also feel that actual strategies are cool, but a marketing strategy to me reeks of exploitative intentions and to me that is just not cool.
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Adwords Keyword Research for Beginners
When you embark on your first PPC journey, you need to keep a small number of keywords at first. Keyword lists that are thousands of words long should be left to the more experienced PPC marketer. Ideally, a beginner should use around 100 targeted keywords, anything more will probably prove too cumbersome for you to manipulate. If you can’t harness the power of large keyword campaigns, they will suck your bank accounts dry. There are some very simple free techniques that you can use to find targeted keys words with low competition. One process of finding low competition niche keywords utilizes Google and excel. More specifically you want to use Google’s keyword tool, just type this into Google, and it will appear in the search results.
Upon landing on the main Google keyword tool page, you will find a white box(field) where you want to enter your particular keyword(s). Enter one keyword for now to get an idea of how this works, and press enter. After pressing enter, you will be directed to a page of keywords that will be closely related to the keyword that you entered. For the purposes of what we want to do, you will need to scroll to the middle of the page where the text Add all 150 is highlighted in blue bold text. Below these words you will see the words download all keywords with text,.csv(for excel) and .csv. You want to click on .csv(for excel). By doing this, you will export this data into an excel spreadsheet. The data, which only appears as green bars on the main Google page, will be transformed into numeric data that has much more value for you.
Once the data is in the excel spread sheet, you can begin some simple analysis on it that will benefit your PPC campaign a great deal. In the excel spreadsheet, there are going to be columns of data, A-D. The columns are going to be, from A-D, Keywords, Advertiser competition, the previous month’s search volume, and the average search volume.The two columns we are interested in are the advertiser competition and the Average search volume. What we want to do is merge the data from these two columns to give us a number that we can work with. So what we need to do is take a generalized average of these two to get a number which we will compare to a predetermined benchmark. Sounds a little odd, let me explain a bit more completely, and hopefully you will understand. All of these numbers are in decimals on a scale ranging from .00 to 1. The higher the number, the more competition there is(as expressed by the advertiser competition numbers) and the higher the search volume(as expressed by the average search volume). Ideally, we want low competition with a decent search volume to target lower cost high converting keywords. So, to find these keywords we use a general benchmark number that will determine their competition and volume level. If the keywords exceed the benchmark, we leave them be, if they hit right around the benchmark, or fall below it, we want to capture them and include them in our PPC campaign.
To get our figures, which we are going to compare to a predetermined benchmark, we are going to take an average of the advertiser competition column and the average search volume column. We want to do this for all the keywords that have been exported to the excel file. And the way we do this is by typing in a simple command in excel and copying the command down throughout the related boxes. So to start, we find box E2 which should be blank, this is the first box to the right of the first value in the avg. search volume box. So, within this blank box you want to type=average(D2,B2). This will automatically give you an average of those two numbers in this E column row when you close that last ).Now, to get all the averages for every keyword you simply want to click on that box(E2) and pull down on the box while you hold in right click. The boxes should fill in with color when you drag down to the last box(nothing will be in them yet). Then, when you have filled in the boxes with color up to the last box you want to lift your finger off the right click. When you do this all the averages will appear in the boxes. You basically just copied the function down through the boxes. So now we have all these averages. What do we do with them, what do they tell us?
Well, a good benchmark average is around .50. This will give us a reasonable competition level with good search volume. So we compare these averages to anything that falls around .50 and below. Anything that goes above .60 we want to avoid to start out with, because it will probably be too expensive to bid on. So now compare all the averages in column E to the predetermined benchmark of .50. Whatever falls below .50 or, .55(to possibly get some more data) we want to keep. Take all the keywords that meet this criteria and copy them into a notepad .txt file. (There are faster ways to do this but they take some learning of excel functions that you may not know yet.)
So now we want to take these keywords that fell below or right around the benchmark and plug these back into the Google keyword tool and hit enter. Now go back through the entire process that we just did to get the keywords we just plugged into the Google keyword tool. You are going to want to take the average again of the two columns mentioned above, then get all the averages of all the keywords by draggin the first box down, and then compare again to a benchmark of .50 or .55. But now, because we found some more targeted keywords to work with(as a result of the first exporting of data to excel, and taking the averages to compare against the benchmark) we should have more keywords that hit right around the benchmark and below it. This is because we are working with more targeted and hopefully lower competition keywords. We are finding yet more targeted keywords related to the first set we found. This should produce a larger list of keywords that meet our benchmark. So now we can take the words that meet the benchmark here, and we can use these in our targeted PPC campaign. You will want to sort through this list of course, and make sure the keywords are well suited for the particular items that you are selling. This method will get you headed in the right direction for your PPC campaign.
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Branding – do you know who you are?
There is such a lot of talk going around about branding, but what exactly is your brand and how do you use it to help you reach more people and market your products or services?
Your brand is the core of your marketing, the central theme around your products and services.
Your brand is not your Logo or your Company Name, unless of course you are Microsoft or the Yellow Pages online directory.
For people to come and hire you, or buy from you in droves, your brand needs to be crystal clear, attractive, exciting and powerful. In fact your brand needs to be powerful enough to rouse your customers into action, and at the same time it needs to actively express you, what youíre about and your uniqueness.
Once you’re sure of your brand you also gain a tangible and easy way of talking to people about what you do. It makes it so much easier to do your marketing when you have it clear in your mind what it is youíre selling in the first place.
When you’re creating your brand you are creating a memorable marketing message that will inspire people to take action and choose you over your competitors.
Here are five useful tips to help you find your brand:
Your Brand Tip 1
Your brand is the core of what you do. What feelings or emotions does your business inspire in you and in your customers? Did you know that peoplesí decision to buy is based on emotions, not facts?
Your Brand Tip 2
Think about how you present yourself, not just on your website but when people see you, talk to you on the phone, or read your email. Is your marketing consistently saying what you want it to? Are people getting confusing messages from you, or is it clear from the start what you do?
Your Brand Tip 3
Think like your potential customer, try to get inside their head and see your products or services from their point of view. How do they experience what you do, and how does it make them feel?
Your Brand Tip 4
What is it you do that makes you stand out from the crowd? If you don’t think you do, then you need to think of a way that you can, because your brand should be somehow different from everyone else’s, its not enough to be just the same as others but better.
Your Brand Tip 5
What are your best abilities, do you know your greatest strengths? Choose an unbiased person, who knows you well, to help you decide what your top attributes are; your brand should be based around your unique strengths and abilities.
Ultimately, creating a strong, memorable, compelling and meaningful brand is essential for successful marketing, and something you can do with a bit of thought, and may be a bit of help from your (unbiased) friends.
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Advertising on a budget — Part 3: Frequency, frequency, frequency
This is the third article of a three-part series. I’m illustrating the marketing challenges of PrescottWeddings.com, a small business.
If you don’t remember anything else about marketing, remember this: Frequency is king.
The more often you can get your name in front of your potential and current customers, the more likely you will make a sale.
Depending on what study you look at, people need to see your message anywhere from three to 27 times before they act upon it.
And, if you want to brand your business, then you need to get it in front of your customers as often as possible.
How do you think Ivory Soap, Campbell Soup and Tide all built their brands so deeply into our minds? Through years and years of repeatedly advertising. That’s why those brands pop into our head when we think about soap, soup or laundry detergent.
So if you want to build your brand, then you need to advertise frequently.
There’s another benefit to advertising frequently. It also helps your current customers.
People like to know they made the right decision after they purchased something. How much reassurance they need depends on how much they spend, but everyone needs some confirmation they made the right decision. Your advertising can help.
Studies have shown that people are more aware of car ads after they purchased a car — specifically car ads of the model they bought. And they’re more likely to both believe and approve of the message. Again, because they want to know they made the right decision.
So there are many good reasons to advertise frequently. Does that mean you have to spend a fortune? Not necessarily. There are a few tricks you can use to get the frequency you need at a low cost. (These are print tricks — other advertising outlets, such as radio and online, we’ll talk about in future issues.)
1. Make your ad as small as possible. Small ads cost less. See “Advertising on a Budget ñ Part 2: Thinking Small” for more information on shrinking your ad.
2. It’s better to schedule your ads to run all at once than spread them out. People will never remember when they don’t see your ad, only when they do. If they see your ad a lot in one week, they’re going to be under the impression you advertise all the time because they won’t remember NOT seeing your ad other weeks.
3. Take advantage of any frequency programs your newspaper offers. And definitely sign a contract — don’t run ads under the open rate.
Here’s how it worked for PWC.
The newspaper had a program called “3 For Free.” If you ran an ad three days in a row, you got the next three days for free (the paper was published six days a week).
We designed a tiny ad — a one by two inch ad — and we ran it six days in a row. Then we skipped the next three weeks and did the same thing again the next month.
After a year of doing this, PWC had people coming up to her telling her they saw her ad “all the time.” Business owners wanted to advertise on PWC because they could see the commitment PWC had to advertising. Brides and grooms were visiting PWC on a regular basis because they were being “reminded” monthly.
What did all this cost? About $100 a month.
But, a word of caution. It takes time to build a business and a brand. It won’t happen overnight. But it will happen, especially if you remember to keep getting your name in front of your customers and potential customers as often as you possibly can.
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