The financial crisis is here. It’s not a matter of if it will affect you and your company, only a matter of when and how much. Clients and friends are checking in with varying reports, some are watching their growth plateau, others are watching sales trend downward.

Overall, conversion rates are starting to trend downward.

Almost everyone I speak with is looking for areas to cut expenses in and approaching spending from a more frugal mindset. Some are beginning to make drastic…

...continue to read "Online Marketers Can Weather the Financial Crisis"

Jenny Craig has just announced their new celebrity spokesperson, and they haven’t disappointed me. But they did throw me for a loop.

Remember a few weeks back, when I wrote about the perceived marketing strategy for the Jenny Craig weight loss centers? At the time, I ruminated over the possibility that the marketing and advertising execs at Jenny Craig were either consciously or unconsciously using personas to drive the success of their celebrity spokespeople campaigns. (To read the original post, traverse…

...continue to read "Jenny Craig Does Me Proud… and Throws Me a Curveball"

Yesterday Susan Greene wrote this comment to my previous post:

Great video, great message.  Now imagine that the guy in the suit worked for a corporation, and his boss asked him to come up with the words for the beggar’s sign. 
 His sentence would have been made into a paragraph by Corporate, watered down by Legal, and politically corrected by Human Resources.  I’m thinking it would be a completely different message by then. 
 Uh…

...continue to read "Do you share Susan’s Cynicism?"

Several of my recent columns have dealt with testing and optimization. Today, I’ll focus on the other half of the online marketing world, those who must drive leads through their site.

1. Review Your Lead Generation Forms

Typically lead-gen site forms fail in two major areas:

Many lead-gen sites simply copy forms from a site they like, giving little thought to the nuances and the difference between their business goals and the site they copied. The result can lead to a slew of unqualified…

...continue to read "5 Simple Tips for Lead-Generation Sites"

“Information Architecture involves the design of organization and navigation systems to help people find and manage information more successfully.”

Basically, Information Architecture (IA) views websites as libraries in need of the right kind of card catalogue set-up to facilitate information access by visitors.

But most websites aren’t libraries, or merely stores of information. In fact, most commercial websites are more interested in persuading visitors to take certain actions (i.e. converting) than they are in providing access to information.

In this sense, the interactivity enabled…

...continue to read "When Information Architecture Can Fall Short"

With annual revenues for the weight-loss industry estimated at $60 billion a year, competition is fierce. Food-based programs like Nutri-System and Weight Watchers account for hundreds of millions of dollars, so getting the right message across to potential customers is critical.

While other companies have featured real-life success stories in their advertising, Jenny Craig has chosen another route: the celebrity spokesperson. While I’m not a big proponent of celebrities as an effective marketing tool, Jenny Craig has applied the use of…

...continue to read "How Jenny Craig Uses Personas for Successful Marketing"

If you were to walk through the offices of FutureNow, you would get a sense that while we were in college any one of us could have been cast in the movie Revenge of the Nerds. A few of us got made fun of for being socially-awkward “bookworms.”

While it may not make you popular with cool kids, fancy book reading does have its benefits. So I couldn’t help but laugh when I read about a new study published in the…

...continue to read "Harry Potter and the Secret of Conversion"

Want your website to sound open, uncontrived, and authentic? Keep reading! In our previous compendiums on copywriting advice, most of the links to Roy Williams’ Monday Morning Memos never made it into the post due to some kind of technical glitch. So to fix that, I started compiling most of my all-time favorite MMM’s that dealt specifically with writing.

Yet as I was compiling these links and re-reading the Memos, a central theme seemed to emerged: many of the Roy’s memos dealt with…

...continue to read "Learn Web 2.0 Copywriting Strategies in an Evening of Enjoyable Reading"

What’s hot and exciting in customer research? A neurological breakthrough? A fancy new psychological tool? Nope – Analyzing text. That’s right – analyzing what people say.

A recent Advertising Age article, What All That Chatter Is Really Saying, talks about how text analytics can turn customer feedback into more meaningful insight.

Today it is marketers who are increasingly turning to text analytics to mine information from the mountains of customer data they’ve accrued from customer-service surveys, e-mails, online forums, hosted feedback sites…

...continue to read "New Customer Insight Using Oldest Form of Communication"

If you’re already an insider, this won’t be easy. Once you’re “inside the bottle,” reading the label on the outside requires serious mental contortions.

Or an outsider to come and open the bottle for you. In fact, their outsider perspective is a huge part of any consultant’s or outside copywriter’s value – so long as they’re willing to call you to the carpet over your unseen assumptions and un-named elephants.

But if you can’t bring in an actual outsider, any attempt you…

...continue to read "See Like An Outsider In 3 Not-So-Easy (But Worth It) Steps"