Admen dream about Silvia Medina.

She’s part of a highly coveted demographic group, 18-34 year olds, that companies from Coca-Cola to Apple just can’t get enough of. Though her parents came from the Dominican Republic, she was born and grew up in the United States. She’s a fully bilingual, fully bicultural Latina, just about to finish her MBA. If you want to find her, you’ve got to go online.

Silvia has been on the internet since 1996, and uses it constantly for school, work, and at home. She communicates by e-mail, pays bills online, and prefers to shop at Amazon than go to the mall. Silvia catches up with friends on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. She follows the news on AOL Latino and keeps up with chisme on Terra. When she misses an episode of a telenovela, she downloads it on Univision.com.

But her favorite spot in cyberspace is the Miami-based portal Batanga. Last year, the company received a shot with a $30 million dollar investment. It’s paid off, since that’s where Silvia spends about 80% of her online time.

That comes as no surprise to Batanga’s CEO Rafael Urbina: “It makes her feel good that her music is being played there, that her language is spoken there,” he says.

Critical Mass

Silvia is not alone. In fact, she’s part of a growing trend among Latinos of growing internet usage. According to November 2007 figures from comScore’s Media Metrix, 18.1 million or 41% of Hispanics are online. These numbers make marketers salivate, though there may be even more. According to Dr. Felipe Korzenny, Professor and Director of the Center for Hispanic Marketing Communication at Florida State University, who has been researching Latinos online since 2000, usage may be significantly greater. He would raise the ante to 28.8 million, or 65% of the Hispanic population.

Anyway you look at it, the number of Latinos going online has reached critical mass. But to understand these numbers, you need to segment the market. The first to go online were acculturated Latinos with a higher socio-economic level, according to Danny Allen from Admixture, an online ad network with about 75% to 80% of websites in Spanish. This is echoed by David Morse of New American Dimensions, one of the top multicultural market research firms. He explains that online Latinos are better educated and have a higher household income. The longer that they are in the United States and especially when they have school-age children, the more time they spend online. But this isn’t necessarily the case for all Latinos.

“We need to keep in mind,” says Morse, “that there is still a digital divide among the less acculturated immigrants that tend to be poor.”

Many recent immigrants lack the education to realize the importance of the internet. When you go to their houses you are more likely to find a huge stereo system or a big screen TV before a computer. But as penetration in the Hispanic market gets deeper, the lower socio-economic levels and the less acculturated Hispanics will start to get online in larger numbers. This segmentation is demonstrated by a 2007 eMarketer report which reveals 78% of English-dominant adult Hispanics are using the internet, compared to 71% of non-Hispanic whites. At the same time, only 32% of Spanish-dominant adult Hispanics were online.

Allen notes that the broad availability of cheap broadband and cheap computers has helped getting Latinos online. The ability to get online through mobile phones has also has been an influence, since Latinos generally over-index in the use of mobile phone’s advanced features. One theory is that this is because they don’t have a computer at home so they do most of their interacting through cellular phones. With the advent of the iPhone and its ability to cruise the “real internet” it’s becoming less of an issue that websites have to be mobile-friendly.

Viva Batanga

Where are all these Latino internauts going? When analyzing the top 10 sites visited by Latinos in comScore’s Media Metrix, one notices that the most popular are those from Yahoo and Google, followed a bit down the list by Amazon and Ebay. The most popular Latino-themed site, Univision.com, gets a lot of traffic but is barely within the top 30 properties.

Yet there are several very successful sites that have caught the attention of the Latino consumer, garnering loyalty as well as eyeballs. Todobebé.com has been around since 1999, evolving into a full-fledged multimedia company serving Spanish-speaking mothers not just online but via television, radio, print, and event marketing. Terra is the portal of Spanish telephone giant Telefonica. Its CEO, Fernando Rodriguez, shares that one of the most visited areas in Terra is music, and there the most popular are the artists’ own pages, in both Spanish and English. He emphasizes that what is most important is content, not language.

Then there is also Silvia Medina’s favorite, Batanga. She certainly is not alone regarding her preferences. Rick Marroquin, Batanga’s chief marketing officer, joyfully shared that in comScore’s, November 2007 Media Metrix, Batanga was at 3.5 million unique visitors a month inside the U.S., 1.1 million of those identified as Latinos.

Batanga was born in 1999 in Greensboro, North Carolina as a Hispanic online radio station. Around the same time, Venezuelan native Rafael Urbina started a company by the name of Planeta Networks, offering internet video on demand. In 2005, both companies merged, with headquarters in Miami, and Urbina now serves as CEO. In August 2007, Batanga raised $30 million for the expansion of its marketing efforts and online content. The lead investors, Tudor Ventures and H.I.G. Ventures, both manage multi-billion dollar manage large portfolios, and have funded a wide variety of enterprises. What’s the secret of Batanga’s success?

“In the past, the value proposition offered by Hispanic media companies was primarily the language,” says Urbina. “We believe that Batanga is one of the first media companies to break this barrier. From the start, it began with a bilingual interface, giving visitors the option of accessing our content in their language of choice. We focus in offering culturally relevant content for users. That is why music was the logical first step. Independent of your heritage, or where were you born, or your language preference, there will be one Latino music genre that will touch your heart.”

Urbina emphasizes that Batanga is living proof that Hispanics are online. The fact that most of them are late adopters compared to the general market has resulted in them connecting to the web directly through broadband, rather than a dialup connection. This creates an interesting situation given that Latinos basically leapfrogged an entire technology. Currently, less than 50% of the entire Latino market is online and the Batanga team believes this number will continue to grow in a much faster pace than the general market for many years to come.

English or Spanish?

Despite the success of Batanga and its rivals, the debate continues. Yet marketers agree that the important thing is to define who you are trying to reach and then devise strategies that are meaningful and relevant to them.

Matias Perel, the founder of Latin3, a Hispanic interactive agency, catering to Hispanic divisions of global corporations, takes a step further on the segmentation of the Latino online market. According to the 2006 AOL Roper Study, he sees the Hispanic online market divided into three: Mostly Acculturated 15%; Partially Acculturated 66%; and Relatively Unacculturated 19%.

The mostly acculturated Hispanics are achievement oriented. 74% of them prefer to read online content mostly in English, 4% in both languages, and 22% don’t have any preference. Partially acculturated are more into social and fan oriented. 34% of them prefer to read online content mostly in English, 12% in Spanish , 27% in both languages, and 22% don’t have any preference. The relatively unacculturated are mostly oriented to family and home. 9% of them prefer to read online content mostly in English, 31% in Spanish, 41% in both languages, and 19% don’t have any preference.

Curiously, research has shown that English-dominant Hispanics have more blogs than any other group in the U.S. while Spanish-dominant Hispanics have more websites than any other. The latter is due to the cultural tendency of trying to be connected, to try to have relationships and connections. Dr. Korzenny has heard reports that many immigrants build their personal websites to show loved ones back in their home countries how they live.

But by far the greatest controversy is which language to use.

Fernando Espuelas, CEO of Voy, a leading Latino social entertainment network, quoted a recent study by the Pew Hispanic Center showing that 75% of the growth among Hispanic consumers will come from U.S. born persons as opposed to immigrants. The vast majority of the market place is American-born and the future of the growth will come from them. Also, Espuelas says, referencing another Pew study, English language adoption among Latinos is happening at a much faster rate. Therefore, he says, we can see that the U.S. Latino population is becoming predominantly English-dominant. Yet he is aware that Spanish language, culturally, is very important for the Hispanic community.

Some argue that English language sites should develop content in Spanish, since many users prefer reading in that language. But exactly the opposite has been happening with traditionally Spanish language websites. To reach a larger percentage of the Latino market, they have been producing bilingual content. Terra has been producing bilingual content, particularly to cover specific events like soccer’s Gold Cup and World Cup, as well as The Oscars. Terra executives have noticed that more and more bilingual and even English-dominant users are coming to their site looking for relevant content. Their conclusion is that language is secondary to the content’s appeal.

Keeping Pace

Have advertisers kept up with this growth?

Hispanic advertising agencies are starting to develop more and more interactive advertising capabilities and as they do they are looking for quality websites, declares Allen. In the last 18 months he has seen the agencies’ attitudes evolve from believing that Latinos weren’t online and they were going to reach them through print, television, and radio to now starting to realize that indeed they need to reach them on the internet. They are realizing that they are far behind the general market agencies regarding their online capabilities and are working really hard to catch up. Of course, there are some exceptions — several Hispanic shops have been doing interactive for a while.

Espuelas predicts that there will be a very rapid evolution of advertisers; those who never advertised in English to Latinos starting to do so and those who traditionally only used television will now broaden their buys to include digital. He foresees a very significant growth in the overall marketing and communications investment pie, and happening disproportionately in digital media as opposed to traditional media.

Media Economics Group tracks advertising activity targeted to multicultural markets. They have been tracking online Hispanic advertising for more than 5 years. Their president, Carlos Pelay, has seen a notable increase in activity in terms of the number of active brands advertising to Latinos online. The major advertisers are present on the major portals. In terms of campaigns, Univision.com ranks number one, then AOL Latino, MSN Latino, Que Pasa, Batanga,Yahoo Telemundo, and StarMedia. For major campaigns the big advertisers are buying several portals at once.

For example, Batanga currently has over 100 advertisers, and Marroquin believes there are still a lot more advertisers that should be opening their eyes to Latinos online. There is a lot of economic action amongst Latino consumers that is making the cost barrier to enter the web significantly lower than what it was even two or three years ago. The numbers don’t lie. When asked about advertising success stories on Batanga’s site, Marroquin said, “At the risk of sounding very arrogant, there are too many to count. Our advertisers have been doing unbelievably well.”

That’s good news for Silvia Medina, and for all Latinos online.

[Editor’s Note: Each month, Juan Tornoe joins us on GrokDotCom to share his insights on Hispanic marketing trends. This article is the debut cover story for LATINO magazine, now available in limited edition print format. To learn more about how to receive LATINO magazine, contact Juan at Hispanic Trending.]

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In case you missed the live webinar or had technical difficulties while watching it last week, you can watch it on YouTube now.

The presentation is 63 minutes, and the sound on the YouTube version isn’t the best. If you prefer, you can watch it full-screen and with better sound via WebEx.

The webinar starts with an introduction to Website Optimizer by Google’s Tom Leung. Then I share some of what we have learned at FutureNow over the the past decade of optimizing websites, in order to show some of the most important things you should test. We then go into Q & A, but since there were additional questions that weren’t answered on the call, we will gladly answer them for you in the comments below.

As always, if you need help figuring out the specifics of what to test on your site, we can help.

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Everyone’s using the “r” word. Just a month or two ago, online marketers were whispering the word for fear of contagion. Now it’s spoken out in the open. We all seem to sense that we’re in a recession or that one’s stalking us and tapping on our shoulder.

Some sites are experiencing slight sales declines; others are prepping for the recession by trimming marketing budgets and tightening their belts in other areas. Online marketers are being asked to do more with less. It seems it’s going to get worse.

It’s interesting to watch how different companies respond to tough times. Traditionally during a recession, most will cut their marketing spend and ask the sales staff to squeeze more from what marketing delivers. In the online world, most decrease ad budgets, but the first cuts are aimed at any sort of marketing optimization (like analytics or testing). This bunker-type approach often leads to stagnation. Optimization is the last line item you can afford to cut.

Others will pour more money into traffic acquisition and flashy advertising or gimmicks. This kitchen-sink approach is highly inefficient and risky.

Effective Optimization Is a Scientific Process

I prefer a more scientific approach.

The “r” word doesn’t mean failure or certain doom. While we don’t control the factors that cause a recession, we can optimize the factors we do have control over and do our best to build and continually improve a recession-proof Web site.

A site that converts better will decrease cost per acquisition and, in turn, will increase ad spend efficiency. A site being continually improved for conversion can withstand the storms of finicky economic times. Optimizing your site should be a scientific process that gives customer insight and is accountable, efficient, and measurable.

In the midst of the dot-com boom, we took on our very first conversion optimization client and helped the company build an internal process to continually optimize its conversion rate. Everyone else was talking about eyeballs and, to their detriment, got spanked by the mother of bursting bubbles. Site after site went into the trash heap, while our client’s continued to grow and thrive through the worst of it. During that time, the client enjoyed an aggregated 400 percent increase in conversion. Its advertising spend was potent, each dollar spent on advertising was worth four times more in top-line sales. Its competitors could spend the same and a lot more on advertising and couldn’t get similar traction. Some went under.

Building a recession-proof online marketing campaign is common sense, but you must work on it. It’s well worth it. It’s not about getting the occasional gain from a test or analytics but about having a continual process for doing so.

The Cost of Not Improving Your Conversion Rate

Let’s suppose your site draws 100,000 unique visitors per month and you have an average conversion rate of 2.5 percent. If you average sale is $50, then you gross about $125,000 a month. Let’s also say that after some optimization work and a couple tests, you increase your overall conversion rate by just 10 percent (a very achievable goal), and your conversion rate is now 2.75 percent. Your monthly gross is now $137,500. The annualized revenue realized by the move of the needle is $150,000. With a minor conversion increase, you’ve earned a baker’s dozen: 13 months of revenue in 12 months’ time.

If you continue to optimize better every month throughout the year, that 13th doughnut gets bigger and bigger. Assuming traffic costs remain static, ad spend becomes stronger and your cost of acquisition goes down. Even in the likely scenario that your traffic costs inch up, you’re riding the curve instead of falling below it.If you don’t become recession-proof, your competitors will. There are simply no more excuses. A decade ago, putting together the resources for optimization was a challenge. Today, analytics and optimization software are much more easily available and affordable when you look at them in this light. Google even offers them both for free.

Steps to Recession-Proof Online Marketing

Here are three steps you can take to make your online marketing recession proof:

1. Turn your analytics into customer insight. It’s not enough to get reports. Each click is an action taken by a real person. Learn why your customers do what they do on your site.

2. Turn your insight into action. If customers leave your site or landing pages, theorize as to why, then test variations to confirm or refute your insight based on step one.

3. Rinse and repeat.

Don’t become a victim of a recession; instead use it as an opportunity to take control of the things you can and jack up your conversion rate. The dot-com bust would have been a blip had many focused more on the fundamentals of increasing conversion online.I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live through another bust. So I leave you with the wise words of Blackie Sherrod: “The reason history must repeat itself is because we pay so little attention to it the first time.”

What are your plans to recession proof yourself? Let us know if you need help.

. .

Originally posted on ClickZ.

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Here it is, the list of February’s top 10 converting retail sites*…

1. Snapfish - 17.4%
2. Vistaprint - 16.8%
3. Lands End - 15.2%
4. ProFlowers - 15.2%
5. Lane Bryant Catalog - 14.7%
6. LL Bean - 14.7%
7. HSN.com - 14.6%
8. 1800flowers.com - 14.2%
9. ebay - 14.0%
10. Blair.com - 13.8%

Last month, I wondered if we would see any Valentine’s day influence to this month’s list. What do you think?

This is the first time we are seeing Snapfish and Vistaprint. I wonder if they are being tracked for the first time ever or did they do something to move the needle. LL Bean dropped from a 23.6% conversion rate that they had in January and December.

Which one of our readers will make it to the list next?

*Source: Nielsen Online / Marketing Charts

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• Top 10 Online Retailers by Conversion Rate: 10/2007

Makeup is like deodorant to me. I would rather not think about it — ever — and I only wear it because I have to.

I don’t know makeup brands or colors, and I don’t care enough to research what makeup would be right for me. Usually, my need for makeup only results in a purchase if a friend recommends something specific, or when I run out of an essential piece, like mascara. Then I’m found sprinting to the local pharmacy to pick one that looks decent.

How do you look for people who aren’t looking for your product? Anticipate their need.

Search engine marketing is a great platform for gaining the attention of those who already have some kind of motivation, need or want for a particular solution. It’s much more difficult to get the attention of people who don’t currently need or want whatever it is you sell.

Historically, the most common forms of online marketing tactics used to gain the attention of potential customers have been pay-per-click advertising, banner ads and email marketing. But today’s customers are ignoring unwanted marketing efforts, so our tactics can easily fall flat. In order to get a higher return on investment, marketers need to find new ways to speak to customers and help them figure out what they want.

How do you speak to potential customers when they aren’t listening? Find out when and where they’re listening and provide an experience that fuels demand for your solution.

Social networking sites are growing by the second and people are looking for more interactivity and experiences online. TAAZ.com captured my attention by first offering me an interactive experience.

First, I uploaded a picture of myself without makeup:

Then I proceeded to add different eye shadows, lip liners, mascaras, etc. Each shade or style that I chose was a real product color and brand. The quality of the widget impressed me, so I spent a good deal of time uploading the image of myself and messing around with different styles and colors.

Apparently, I was going for the Cindy Lauper look!

Not a bad look, I know, but I digress.

Eventually, I played around with some shades I would have never even thought of purchasing and realised that some of them actually didn’t look too bad on me. Not only could I interact with different colors and brands of makeup, I could actually see what they looked like on me without ever trying it on.

There are some things TAAZ still needs to work on. The hair portion of the widget doesn’t look as real as the makeup portion. They don’t yet offer hair dyes relating to the color of hair you choose to place on your image.

I could go on, but suffice it to say, the look I ended up with…

…didn’t exactly measure up to their best makeovers. Still, this is a smart way to attract ad dollars from cosmetics brands like Revlon (pictured) and Sephora (which currently has banners on the site).

There’s also a great opportunity here to push the business model further. For instance, TAAZ could create a Facebook widget so users could share their makeovers amongst friends. They could get one of their advertisers to sponsor a “best makeover” competition. You get the idea.

In case you haven’t heard us talk about “The ROI of Free,” here’s what we mean: If you want to gain the attention of potential customers who aren’t actively searching for the solutions you offer, don’t just tell them about your solution, give them a way to interact without having to commit to anything. Bring the visitor into the experience and let the experience sell itself.

What are some interactive marketing examples you’ve seen have turned you into a sale or lead?

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On our “Ask the Experts” post, one reader asked how to go about optimizing a low-traffic website.

We get this question a lot.

Marketers — particularly small business owners and do-it-yourself-ers — want to know if optimization is worth it. They’re short on time and they’re dealing with limited resources. They can’t wait six months to fix something that’s broken now. They don’t have the luxury.

If you’ve realized optimization can’t wait, and you don’t have the budget to hire a firm, consider these…

Tips for Optimizing Low-Traffic Websites

1.) Get a testing platform — Any testing platform will do, but if your budget is tight, we recommend using Google Website Optimizer. It’s free to use and FutureNow has developed several free resources to help you get started.

2.) Stick to A/B split testing — For a low-traffic site, you’ll want to stay away from multivariate tests and stick to simpler A/B split testing. Multivariate testing involves optimizing more than one page element at a time, often with more than one variation per element on a given page. For example, you might be testing four different headlines, three different pictures, and two variations of your body copy on a given landing page. That means you’ve just created 24 (4×3x2) different page combinations for your test. Getting enough traffic to come up with a statistically valid results could take a low-traffic site an exceedingly long time to do that. Assuming you had 50 visits per day and a brilliantly high current conversion rate of 10%, that still means it would still take more than two thousand days (about 6 years!) to get any data worth looking at. Meanwhile, A/B testing only a few combinations can give you statistically valid data within a month or two. Again, low-traffic sites should stick to A/B testing. (This white paper can help you determine whether it’s too little or too early to A/B test.)

3.) Don’t make hasty conclusions — Be patient. Wait for the tests to fully complete before jumping to conclusions. Once they do complete, take a deep breath. On any given test page, the “Chance to Beat Original” and “Chance to Beat All” percentages are crucial — and potentially misleading if you’re not up on your statistics. Basically, anything less than 90% is simply a trend that might be reversed from one week to the next. We’ve actually seen these kind of reversals happen, where a positive change (with 70% chance to beat original) flipped negative from one week to the next. Think of it this way: If you randomly flip a coin, you could get 3-4 heads in a row over 4 flips and conclude that heads was the clear “winner” over tails. Not smart. Only after many, many flips is it safe to assume you have a clear winner (or a very weird coin).

4.) Know what you’re looking for — Make sure you know how to get a hypothesis worth testing. In other words, you should know ahead of time how to interpret the results. Don’t randomly test this image or that headline. Do so because you have reason to believe the headline “should” better appeal to buyers with a given buying motivation, or because the picture “should” resolve a particular concern. That way, you have a basis for interpreting the results. That doesn’t mean the results will be absolutely conclusive (it’s possible that people really do have your hypothesized motivation but your headline was merely a bad execution of the concept), but you’ll have a way to interpret the results and do further analysis if needed. Intelligent testing essential, especially when you don’t have much traffic.

5.) Test one click at a time* — Shorten the distance between the Experiment Page (where you’re running the test) and the Goal Page (where you count conversions). This will yield conclusive results in less time. A quick e-commerce example: Use the shopping cart as a Goal Page for a test being run on a Product Page (as opposed to using the Order Confirmation Page as the Goal Page).

6.) Ensure success with Pay-Per-Click* — Purchasing traffic to validate changes to your site is like buying insurance on the effectiveness of your web design. If your PPC ads are well targeted and attract more (and more qualified) visitors, your test results will be more accurate. With enough visitors, testing is like letting visitors design your site for you.

7.) Prioritize your optimization efforts — Optimizing for usability and conversion is usually easier than optimizing for persuasion. Before a site can persuade, its basic elements must work. Go for the low-hanging fruit, then work your way up the Hierarchy of Optimization.

Got questions on how to optimize your site? Feel free to contact us or leave a comment below.

. .

*Indicates a tip that has been added to the list.

[Editor’s Note: Today is your last chance to register for the Persuasive Online Copywriting seminar, happening tomorrow, Friday the 28th, in San Francisco.We’re keeping class size small and there are only two or three tickets left, so hop to it!]

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The news that Borders is considering putting itself up for sale should come as no surprise.

Although the company used last week’s announcement that they’re seeking a buyout as an opportunity to blame a tight credit market and competition from discount chains like Wal-Mart, Borders‚ disappointing performance stems from a failure to take e-commerce seriously.

For Borders not to have an exclusive online presence in this day and age boggles the mind. The homepage is a drab catchall for store locations, gift cards, and company information. The coupons that Borders Rewards members receive via email are good for in-store purchases only. And if you do decide to shop Borders online, type in “Borders.com” and see where it takes you to an Amazon.com boutique, complete with “amazon.com” in the URL.

Why brand your biggest competitor (which, despite market conditions, grew by double digits last year)?

Borders does have a beta site that they’re testing and promoting on the current homepage (Bordersstores.com, not Borders.com), assuring visitors that “whole new Borders experience is coming.” The beta site is very attractive and conducive to buying — except for one minor detail. You can’t buy anything. There’s still no e-commerce attached to Borders, only the ability to “save” a book for pickup at the store nearest you.

To ignore the ways in which online shopping has permeated the lives of untold millions of customers is one of the biggest business failures of this decade.

. .

[About the author: Michele Miller is a guest contributor for GrokDotCom. Michele is co-author (with FutureNow’s Holly Buchanan) of The Soccer Mom Myth “Today’s Female Consumer: Who She Really Is, Why She Really Buys”. You can buy it online from Amazon.]

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Yes, it’s that time again!

Recessions are the economy’s little reminder that your marketing needs to be more efficient. Lots of our friends and clients are being asked to produce more sales with less resources. (And if you’re reading this post, that might sound familiar to you.)

Traditionally, in the offline world during recessions, marketers had their advertising budgets cut, then pressure was placed on sales teams to close more sales. But in the online world, marketers are expected to deliver both traffic from advertising and sales from the customer experience.

The math is simple. More sales with the same or less advertising means higher conversion rates. If your conversion rate is higher, not only will you be more profitable but you should also gain market share from competitors.

You may not always be able to control the cost of your advertising — except for when you cut it — but you can control your conversion rate.

In the interactive marketing world, many companies seem confused about what to do in a recession. Companies need to improve their online conversion rates. It seems obvious to most of us, but not everyone.

We want to ask you, our readers, for feedback. Have conversion rate improvements become a higher priority for your organization? If not, is it because you aren’t feeling the effects of the recession yet, or does your organization simply not believe it can control conversion? Or is it something else?

. .

Read the follow-up post, “3 Steps to Recession-Proof Your Online Marketing“

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Have you ever read a blog post that had so many interesting and profound ideas, you actually re-read it several times? That’s what happened to me when I read this fascinating article by Joseph Carrabis at iMedia Connections.

I originally read the article because it talks about gender and website design. But there’s much more to it than the title (”Website Marketing Across Genders”) suggests. For instance, the phenomenon he calls “Towards” and “AwayFrom” advertising.

I’ll dig into that in another post, but in the meantime, take a look at his description of using a visual on a page to draw visitors toward a specific action:

Let me give you an example of an automotive retailer site that also works in print. The goal is to have the visitor purchase a new vehicle. Place an image in the upper part of the screen or print piece. The left of the image is the owned vehicle, the right of the image is the desired or target vehicle. Just right of center is the couple or an individual facing the desired vehicle and walking towards it.

The web’s media capabilities allow the message to get across very well because the couple or individual can be seen actually moving towards the target vehicle. In a static image that implies walking have the right hand swinging towards the target vehicle, the left hand swinging towards the owned vehicle.

So simple. So powerful.

Speaking of simple and powerful, if you haven’t read Bryan Eisenberg’s award-winning article on images and eyetracking, you should. It definitely clarifies Joseph’s point.

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They say it’s better to be born lucky than rich. Guinness stout definitely has the rich part down (pun intended), but it seems they were a bit short on viral marketing luck this St. Patrick’s Day.

Guinness made a valiant attempt to make St. Patty’s a national U.S. holiday with their Petition 3-17 campaign. Their argument: Since there are nine times more Irish-Americans than there are people in all of Ireland, and since people of all ethnicities already miss work on March 17th in celebration of all things Irish, all citizens should be allowed to commemorate the day from the comfort of their favorite watering hole. With “a pint of Guinness stout or two,” of course.

To present it to Congress, Guinness needed 1 million signatures by the 16th. On March 17th, they had about 300,000 — a few parades-worth of revelers off their goal.

No worries. 300k signatures of loyal brand advocates is a huge achievement. And there’s always next year, right?

So, let’s take a look at how Guinness.com was feeding the campaign’s micro-site, Proposition317.com, and see what they might do to convert a million in 2009.

Guinness Means Business!

It’s evident that Guinness means business, as a Proposition 3-17 banner owns the Guinness.com homepage:

The banner is clean, simple, and straight to the point. Unfortunately, this falls slightly flat on this landing page:

Once here, visitors aren’t efficiently persuaded to follow through from the driving point (in this case, the homepage). The homepage was exciting and bold, but it didn’t say much about the campaign, which makes this landing page especially key. Since Guinness’s site exists to support its beloved brand, we can assume that most people who visit the site are already fans of the product.

They just need to keep visitors on track to sign the petition.

Testing is Good for You

If Guinness were a client, here are a few things we’d have them test:

• Tone — Rather than leading off with a “raise your pints!” attitude (not that there’s anything wrong with that) and party pictures, they may have benefited from speaking to personality temperaments other than Spontaneous (i.e., Humanistic, Methodical, and Competitive). Other parts of the site do speak to Humanistic visitors by explaining why it’s important to make St. Patrick’s Day an official holiday, but that sentiment isn’t clear on the landing page. Perhaps they could borrow a line or two from the other pages to make the why-you-should-sign argument stronger. (Is your site speaking to each temperament?)

• Better placement of content — Eyetracking studies also show that staring faces distract visitors. People immediately look to the center, then the flashing signature moves the eye to the right, then down to the quotes and pictures of other supporters. Meanwhile, the “Sign the petition” Call to Action is all the way on the opposite side of the page.

• Make the Call to Action eye-catching — The Call to Action needs to persuade and entice people to sign-up, but theirs is encased in a dark gray button and overpowered by the total signatures. Saying something less generic, like “Make it official,” might yield better results.

• Try counting down instead — This last one’s more of a hunch, so I’m curious to know whether any of you might find it more persuasive to sign the petition if they had it counting down from 1,000,000 (a pretty daunting number) rather than counting up. Example: “Only 650,048 signatures needed to make St. Patrick’s Day official. Don’t just sit there, tell your friends!”

Could Guinness have met their goal? I guess we’ll have to wait until next year to find out, but I’d be interested to hear your thoughts in the meantime.

Proposition 3-17 may have missed the mark, but it wasn’t a failure. Anyone else fancy a pint?

. .

[Editor’s Note: Anyone familiar with the so-called “luck of the Irish” knows that success requires hard work and dedication. Such is website optimization. You should test your luck.]

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