FutureNow's GrokDotCom / Marketing Optimization Blog » Branding and Advertising Rants

All Aces: Overlapping your Marketing Efforts for Better Results

Melissa Burdon — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:00:46 +0000

Generating targeted traffic and conducting website optimization are critical to increasing online sales. Ok, yeah, you already know that

But did you know that traffic generation and website optimization aren’t mutually exclusive? There are tactics that will help you accomplish both goals at the same time, and one FutureNow Partner recently spoke to me about a tactic that’s working well.

Our Partner is a software development firm that specializes in web-based applications and good old web development and design. They are currently gaining leads and sales by being very active with their marketing mix: radio, billboards, PPC, SEO, etc. They identified that there is a clear separation between their leads based on the lead’s motivations and, more importantly, their budgets. Some leads are looking for a small and simple web site with a custom design, with an approximate $500 budget. Other leads are looking for very complex web sites with a lot of tools and capabilities with a much higher budget in the $5000+ range.

The marketing team recognizes the difficulty in trying to effectively speak to these very different segments on a single site. Even using landing pages, there is the possibility that one type of visitor may be turned off by content they read that was written for another type. (FutureNow has a whole methodology for writing copy and mapping out buying paths for different types of visitors on a single site, but this takes a focused expertise and experience.) On top of trying to speak to all types on their main web site, this company creates completely different buying experiences on separate micro-sites for each segment. This drives more targeted and qualified traffic to these micro-sites. The micro-sites speak more directly to the segment and therefore move them through their buying process more effectively, without possible distractions from content that doesn’t speak to their motivations and needs.

They generate the smaller budget leads via radio ads. These radio listeners are driven to a micro-site in order to follow through on the messaging from the radio ad.

They also generate leads who are primarily interested in finding a web design/development firm in Utah via PPC ads with keywords such as “cheap web sites utah.” They send these visitors to a different micro-site and speak to their interests of a local company that can meet their web design needs.

As you can see, they send these very different prospects down customized buying persuasion paths based on the buyer’s motivation and need. By doing this, they are driving more targeted traffic to sites that have been more effectively optimized for a particular segment.

You can segment your traffic by the different products or services that they are searching for. Or, you can segment your traffic by the different problems they are experiencing, or solutions they are looking for. Are you driving all traffic to specific landing pages, or simply a single homepage on a single web site? Are you optimizing your site based on different motivations? These are good questions to ask yourself in order to get started optimizing your primary web site.

On top of optimizing your primary website, you should consider the micro-site tactic in order to drive more targeted traffic to your company and quickly turn this traffic into leads or sales. This tactic is applicable to multiple online business models; whether you’re e-commerce, lead generation, or a brochure site.

Note: Micro-sites are entities that can become part of your overall marketing strategy and shouldn’t be created and then forgotten about. Along with your other marketing efforts, micro-sites need to be continuously optimized and improved.

Are you ready for the challenge?

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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

BusinessWeek: Are Big Ad Agencies Clueless?

Robert Gorell — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 13:30:52 +0000

BusinessWeek’s Bruce Nussbaum asks: “Are Big Ad Agencies So Clueless That Corporations Should Avoid Them?”

It’s not this bad, is it?

(Video may not be work-safe… If you work in an ad agency.)
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Monkey See, Monkey Do Marketing

Jeffrey Eisenberg — Wed, 30 May 2007 01:44:58 +0000

Kevin Hillstrom’s post “Give Me Someone To Believe In” provides an interesting analysis of some of the recent news on Dell, Best Buy & Circuit City.

I especially liked this part:

Each week, the punditocracy tells us who we should emulate, and why. All too often, their logic is flawed. We shouldn’t copy Dell and their direct-to-consumer model. We shouldn’t copy Circuit City and their “Buy Online, Pickup In Stores” program. We shouldn’t copy Best Buy and their “Customer Centric” approach.

Could it be that companies are so scared about marketing to today’s customers that they want the punditocracy to tell them what to do?

P.S. After posting this, I read Michele Miller’s blog. She describes the slippery slope of Dell’s attempts to sell through Wal-Mart. I’m so glad we switched the entire company to Apple.
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Touchdown! GoDaddy Discovers Online Conversion

Robert Gorell — Tue, 06 Feb 2007 21:14:09 +0000

According to GoDaddy.com’s recent Super Bowl ad, “Everybody wants to work in marketing.”

Why’s that? At GoDaddy, marketing these days means parties, champagne, t-shirts, and… transparency. And so we say, “you’re welcome.” (I’ll explain later. In the meantime, we should congratulate GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons for getting his metrics straight. The Magic Kingdom awaits your arrival, sir.)

In a guest piece on AdFreak’s Super Bowl blog, Parsons responded to critics of GoDaddy’s not-so-shocking-for-the-00’s ad–replayed no less than three times, mind you–with some equally lukewarm (but sober) revelations:

GoDaddy.com makes money by selling URL’s

Even if it stinks [and it did], the ad drove over 100% more revenue than last year’s ad

This doesn’t add up, since traffic was down 48% compared to last year’s Super Bowl bump

But, hey… Money is better than traffic

Now, back to why GoDaddy should thank us. Last February, we blogged about GoDaddy’s failure to create a cross-channel experience that lived up to the hype. “I hope it’s not like last year,” indeed. As you’ll see in our ‘06 video analysis, a simple change to the GoDaddy.com homepage would’ve made all the difference. (Note: for those familiar with multi-channel marketing, you may want to skip to the 2:20 mark.)

Future Now co-founders Bryan & Jeffrey Eisenberg even used GoDaddy’s 2006 Super Bowl fumble as an example of what not to do throughout last year’s Waiting for Your Cat to Bark tour.

So, what gives? Was the GoDaddy “Girl” spying on us between catcalls and brainstorming sessions? If not, then someone else in their marketing department had the good sense to put her on the homepage before popping the sparkling white.

Exhibit D:

Exhibit Double-D:

David Ogilvy needn’t return from the dead to remind us that Monday-morning quarterbacking doesn’t win Super Bowl rings for one’s clients–but who can blame GoDaddy’s ad critics? Hopefully, GoDaddy’s marketing department, and not their agency, really was behind the campaign’s stale creative.

But it worked! Just not for the reasons Parsons outlined for AdFreak:

“At first this anomaly had us scratching our heads. How could sales and new customers be up so drastically, while visitors to the site are down so sharply? Then we figured it out – at least we think we did.

“With the advent of online video, most of those who simply wanted to see our ads went to familiar sites like iFilm.com and break.com. Those with a serious interest in GoDaddy.com came to our Web site. After thinking about it: That’s just fine with us.”

Well, um… not exactly. What happened here–unlike last year–is what often happens when multi-channel planning leads the charge. The end zone is reached when a customer buys a website URL and/or hosting package from GoDaddy; not when fearless bloggers praise the brand for its vision.

Sure, a spike in traffic does wonders for a company’s ego–and is no doubt a relief for its agency–but where’s the beef? The fact is that this year’s GoDaddy ad was so stupid, so utterly cheesy, so dot bomb-era vapid that it was only half as effective as last year’s spot. That’s right, ad-ranters! 48% less traffic means it was 48% less effective! That’s not even a field goal, it’s a punt. And still (STILL!) they managed to double (DOUBLE!) their revenue.

That, sports fans, is a conversion rate touchdown.

How’d they do it? They followed our advice and put the GoDaddy Girl on the homepage, the commercials were easy to find, and they played good defense by buying relevant keywords. (Sorry, Bob. We’d like to think it was the YouTubes and the iFilms that did it, but that stuff was around last year. Speaking of which, you might want to take down those access codes to view the too-hot-for-TV clips. They’re all over the intertron and nobody needs to give you any info to see them. Nor do we need to see your analytics to know it’s hurting conversion. It is.)

Now, the real question is, “How much revenue did GoDaddy leave on the table last year?” It’s a safe bet those figures won’t be available anytime soon but, whatever the number is, it’s staggering (especially since, aside from these few changes, the site looks exactly the same as it did in ‘06). You see, doubling online conversion has an exponential effect on revenue once you double the traffic that feeds it.

And they’ve only tapped half the market!

Ask just about any woman aged 25-50 which Super Bowl moment stuck; Prince’s performance, or the GoDaddy commercial. My initial research suggests both made an impact–the only difference is the look on their faces when you ask. Believe it or not, women everywhere buy domain names and/or “work in marketing.” Amazing, isn’t it?

Now that top executives are warming up to conversion rates and revenue as the true measures of online success, maybe next year’s cross-channel players will stop trying to party like it’s 1999.

A note to Bob Parsons: You’ve got an amazing story. You’re a gentleman, a soldier, and a hero among entrepreneurs (those who don’t know you by now don’t deserve a Wikipedia link). If anyone can handle some tough love, it’s you. So please, Bob, don’t be just a cut above SalesGenie.com. Any Willy Loman-esque geek with 2.6 mil can do that. We know everyone wants to be on your marketing team. It’s just that maybe next year you should outsource. It might not be a bad move.

Oh, and no need to visit FutureNowInc.com to see where to send us a check for finding the key to your mysterious revenue boost. It’s our pleasure.
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

AdAge on Viral Campaigns…

Howard Kaplan — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 14:34:32 +0000

Scott Donaton’s latest article over at AdAge touches on something I wrote a while back, after the Agency.com fiasco. He astutely writes (emphasis is added):

As with ads in any medium, those that work are those that start with an insight, show an understanding of their target audience, and have an authentic, relevant connection to the brand. Those that don’t smack of having been produced because someone wanted to do a viral video to please himself, his boss or his board. They’re the commercial equivalent of YouTube videos of kids falling off skateboards.

I couldn’t agree more. Too bad the insight part is the key, and plucking those off trees isn’t exactly a viable strategy in 2007.
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Utterings of the Truly Desperate

Anthony Garcia — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 18:41:20 +0000

From USA Today "Product Placement – You Can’t Escape It"….

"Marketers are saying, ‘We must be more innovative — to zig when others zag,’ " says Richard Notarianni, executive creative director of media at ad firm Euro RSCG.

"The industry is desperate to find clever ways to reach people, whether or not it has any legitimate value. … When someone says, ‘Let’s put advertising in bathroom stalls,’ another says ‘That’s great. It’s a captive audience.’ "

More…

No space is too odd. US Airways (LCC) is in talks to sell ads on airsickness bags, spokeswoman Valerie Wunder says. It already makes about $10 million a year from ads on tray tables and napkins, she says.

"The game has become one of finding the next blank space that hasn’t been covered," says Yankelovich’s Smith.

And more…

"I’ve never seen things changing as much as they are now," says Rance Crain, editor-in-chief of trade magazine Advertising Age and a 40-plus-year observer of marketing. "Advertisers will not be satisfied until they put their mark on every blade of grass."

And finally…

The more consumers ignore ads, the more ads marketers spew back at them, says Max Kalehoff of marketing research firm Nielsen BuzzMetrics. "It’s like a drug addiction. Advertisers just keep buying more and more just to try to achieve prior levels of impact. In other words, they’re hooked."

This year, marketers will spend a record $175 billion on ads in major media, such as TV, radio, print, outdoor, movie theaters and the Internet, says ad-buying firm ZenithOptimedia. That’s up 5% over 2005. Add direct mail and other direct-response ads, and the total will hit $269 billion.

Advertisers are becoming that loud mouth annoying guy at the bar who’s flashing his expensive watch, bragging about his job, and buying every prospective girl a drink. Sorry bud, buying even more drinks, or putting your picture up in a lady’s stall isn’t gonna increase your chances, you are probably going home alone…again.

$269 billion can buy you alot of stuff, but it can no longer buy you a desirable magnetic personality that people want to buy. It won’t buy you a barking cat. If you think it will, then I have a 41,723 blades of grass in my front lawn that I will be happy to whore out to a desperate advertiser.

Buy one blade get one free, captive audience for canines and occasional jack rabbits, 25% more traffic in growing subdivision, this offer won’t last long, call now.

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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

The Future of Consumer Research

Anthony Garcia — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 03:12:25 +0000

No sooner than Jeffrey Eisenberg posts his rant about the state of consumer surveys do we get another authorative glimpse into the future of research from our brilliant strategic partner Michele Miller. Check out what she writes over at Inc.

Companies like Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO), Pepsi (NYSE:PBG), and Best Buy (NYSE:BBY) now realize the methods they used to mine for information in the past were often unproductive and inefficient. The pressure-cooker atmosphere of a group of strangers in an unfamiliar setting, combined with questions skewed to obtain answers favorable toward a product, is often a dangerous (if not deadly) concoction. Over the years, countless products that should never have been introduced made it to market, and vice-versa.

Today, major advancements in science, technology, and human-behavior studies offer new tools for studying consumers that are more natural and provide greater insight into what a customer wants. What techniques should you consider? Read the entire article.

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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Survey Takers: Do They Have An Agenda Or Just Too Much Time?

Jeffrey Eisenberg — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 02:27:42 +0000

We’re not usually big fans of marketing data collected from surveys. We’ve written about it several times. We often find the methodologies flawed, the questions suspect and the respondents even more suspect.

AdAge just published an article that confirms what we’ve been saying. Jack Neff wrote about it in “Consumers Rebel Against Marketers’ Endless Surveys: 30 Top Industry Execs Gather to Discuss ‘Opinion Fatigue’ Crisis“. The article is disturbing especially the following:

“VNU’s Nielsen Media Research has actually seen respondent rates rise
from 36% to 45% the past five years, said Paul Donato, chief research
officer. That’s largely because it pays respondents handsomely for
their two-year commitments — so handsomely that Mr. Donato
acknowledged that some on the Media Research Council think it may bias
results — allowing panelists to buy cable subscriptions and DVRs.

Ironically, no one in a roomful of market researchers
suggested researching what might best persuade nonrespondents to
participate, though Dennis Murphy, VP of the technology practice at
Directions Research, said it’s time to find out how different
nonresponders really are from responders — something largely neglected
since the 1970s.”

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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Large Agencies Take It On The Chin

Jeffrey Eisenberg — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 18:09:42 +0000

Persuasion Architect Holly Buchanan wrote a post titled "Do We Need More Women and Minority Hiring in Advertising?" on her blog. She takes on the subject without regard to political correctness. I’ll give you an excerpt below. You decide if it is worth reading the rest.

"One – if you’re talented, you’re in advertising, and you’re a minority – go the big agency route if you want – but also look at the smaller shops that are doing amazing things and blowing away the competition with their insight and successful track records.

Two – I want to hear from you – what do you think about the whole minority in advertising debate? Good or bad – bring it on. Do you think the whole thing is just a misguided "affirmative action" for advertising that will force agencies to lower their standards in order to hire minorities? Is the attitude of Neil French one that is actually held by many advertising executives – that women are too busy with mommy responsibilities to work as hard as their midnight oil burning male counterparts – is this a view that is more widely held than we think? Is the glass ceiling still firmly in place for women and minorities? Is that why so much advertising aimed at women doesn’t work? because too many white men are making the decisions and doing the creative – creating ads that they like?

Or is this just more political posturing by those damn minorities and feminists with nothing better to do than whine and complain.

Speak up!"

I’m not a big fan of large agencies. They’re not competitors, they’re mostly in a parallel business to Future Now. The ones who do online marketing are usually good for a laugh. Take a look at Jonah Bloom’s column in AdAge if you want his take on large agencies and why they have become caricatures of themselves.
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Is Your Service In The Toilet?

Jeffrey Eisenberg — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 23:43:32 +0000

Seth Godin took a couple of pictures that tell a bigger story about customer service, customer expectations and customer experience. Read his post and think about how you can improve your customer’s experience.
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Quotes to Ponder: Best Practices

Bryan Eisenberg — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 16:50:52 +0000

"Imitation is the sincerest form of collective stupidity."
—W. Carroll (Bill) Munro, marketing director, PepsiCo

"Don’t give me best practices, they are yesterday’s news. Give me emerging practices, they are tomorrow’s news."
— paraphrased from Barry Diller (I believe).

Can anyone help validate who said the second one?
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

3 simple steps to create a viral campaign…

Howard Kaplan — Wed, 09 Aug 2006 05:37:44 +0000

Get yourself a YouTube, Digg, Flikr, del.icio.us, furl.net, or __________ (insert your favorite online popularity tool here) account.

Get out your handicam, pen, digital camera, blogging software, word processor, or __________ (insert your favorite communication tool here)

Find something to say that’s relevant, salient, and transparent to such a mass audience, it overcomes each visitor, infects them (er, eh, like a virus in such a way they can’t quite articulate, at their core they just have to pay it forward.

I’m sorry, did my title lead you to believe this would be easy? (Ya, fancy little lists give that impression. It’s no wonder why the business section of your local Barnes & Noble is littered with them.) Not only is it not easy, but more to the point (and sarcasm aside now), it’s also not possible to create a viral campaign in advance. A campaign becomes viral due to the energy the campaign consumes in the wild. It becomes viral due to factors outside of its control. You simply don’t set out to create a viral campaign. I’ll say it again, only louder (and with the sarcasm switch turned on again):

You don’t create a viral campaign, simply because you wish your campaign would be viral.

Likewise, you don’t ascend to the homepage of Digg, simply because you’ve written something you wrote simply to get there.

If you swing for the fences, you’re much more likely to strikeout than you are to hit a homerun. But if you aim to make contact, you just may hit one out of the park. When planning your marketing communication strategy, please do remember to keep your eye on the ball.

Care to share your thoughts on the topic?

PS – Care to know what the driving point for this little rant was? Contrast the following links from AdAge.

The first, being yet another story around the Agency.com Subway pitch (the irony here is that the industry at large created the viral effects, not the campaign itself. Had this video been a campaign for a mom and pop shop, trying to win the business of the largest car dealer in Bismarck, North Dakota, the blogosphere would have never heard of it).

The second, being yet another story around the pure viral steamroller that is Snakes On A Plane. Never will a movie make more with less, and they’ve all but acknowledged publicly, they certainly didn’t greenlight the film with this in mind. Have they capitalized on the CGM efforts- absolutely (and all indications are, they’ll continue doing so) but to suggest they planned it this way is laughable. Enjoy, and safe flying
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

The Transparency Imperative: Moving Beyond the Suggestion Box

Robert Gorell — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 08:23:25 +0000

Your business can use transparency to its advantage, turning ordinary customers into tireless advocates for your brand

Do you ever get annoyed when a business’s online communications are as poor, if not worse, than their offline customer service? One of the most sacred promises of the Internet is that we have the power to chat with total strangers, regardless of how fragmented the information or disproportionately strong the opinion, to piece together the bigger picture about a given experience anytime, anywhere. Access to third-party information is always a good thing for any current or would-be customer; it’s the quickest way of saving ourselves the time, money, and opportunity cost of a bad decision. Besides, most customers take information from peers with a grain of salt. So why should business be afraid of online transparency?

Read the rest of this article.
Read the entire newsletter: Volume 136
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Do no evil, Google?

Howard Kaplan — Thu, 22 Jun 2006 09:24:39 +0000

It’s not every day a client sends a FW: my way which causes me to literally laugh out loud (and clog other’s inbox as well), but today’s the day. Apparently, our constant ranting about technology rarely being the solution to a Marketer’s problem is seeping into to those who listen to us most often (and who’s the worst offender of the "world domination through technology). Take a look at what had me rolling, the official See-no-evil-hear-no-evil-and-certainly-do-no-evil Monkeys:

For the record, our exact quote is what Sergey and Larry have done best is create a technological solution so easy, any monkey could use it. That does not, however, explain why people play their game. Why, in the wake of ever present traffic cost inflation, do business owners look to continually blame Google for their own marketing ineptness (ineptness is likely to harsh, poor strategy and poorer execution is more likely) ?

Despite the recent brewhaha over Google and Relevance the key to seemless contextual advertising is just that: relevance- providing consistent scent of information, from the search term to the adword (driving point), and the adword to the landing page (funnel point). It’s about understanding that search terms are laden with intent, and intent is an action based on a motivation. Recall the third question we continually ask and answer during Persuasion Architecture engagements- what information would our audience need to feel comfortable and confident taking the action you’ve laid out for them- search terms hold your first clue.

We joke about Google around the office, because their notion of "doing no evil" is comical when with the advent of Gbuy they’ll now potentially know every piece of personally identifiable information about you, save two (Driver’s license and passport). But truth be told, Eric Schmidt’s quote about charging advertisers more for PPC ads is not evil, it’s capitalism. It’s not Google’s fault many Marketer’s take the lazy way out. It’s not their fault Conversion Rates industry wide continue to fall.

It is their fault however that people are misled into believing technology holds the cure to that which hasn’t been planned properly in the first place (and proper planning of a contextual visitor experiece my friends, is a Persuasion challenge not a technological one). It’s also one of the reasons we asked Yahoo, and specifically brand marketing legend Murray Gaylord to partner with us and write the forward for Waiting for Your Cat to Bark.

Digg it?
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Stray cats barking throughout the office!

Howard Kaplan — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 19:54:51 +0000

Well forgive the shameless plug, but we’re finally 100% publicly shipping our latest book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark: Persuading Customers When They Ignore Marketing. Amazon, BN and Sam’s Club jumped the gun a bit, but we forgive their exhuberance. After all, there’s probably no better time to start shipping than when a book is recommended in the Sunday edition of the New York Times. We couldn’t be more proud of it, and the reception we’ve received thus far. There’s been far too much feedback to share here, but a random sampling shows podcasts, newspapers, tv & radio stations, and online reviews getting into the mix. Here’s a few of our personal fav’s: (feel free to add your own

Craig Danuloff from Commerce360, leads an insightful chapter by chapter discussion of the book.

Mike Grehan recently podcasted his fireside chat with Jeffrey & Bryan, and wrote about it on ClickZ

The good folks behind 800-CEO-READ offer their thoughts (and free books)

WonderBranding’s own Michele Miller donating her own charitable dollars to inspire future readers

Chuck McKay, of Advertising Made Simple, offers the Small Biz take on the value of Cat

There’s been plenty of pub for the release, I gave you five, and in a variety of formats. I hope there’s something in there for everyone. Our heartfelt thanks to everyone who’s enjoyed the Waiting for Your Cat to Bark experience, and to those of you who haven’t… what are you waiting for?!
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Practice What You Preach!

Melissa Burdon — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 08:12:22 +0000

In an experience economy, customer experience is the brand – you are in control of how you shape that experience

I purchased my round trip ticket for a Continental business flight online. I even got a confirmation email the day before departure that let me check in right online. That was wonderful! With my confirmation print-out, I managed to forego the large lineup at the airport. I thought I was off to a great start.

But then the brown stuff hit the fan! What was supposed to be a 1 hour and 35 minute flight from NYC to Ottawa, turned into 12 hours of too much coffee, a couple of beers and an unhappy customer! My tally of blacklisted airlines just grows longer.

Any more, online conversion rarely happens in a vacuum. And that precious loyalty you want to build is going out with this week’s garbage if you overlook the fact that what happens offline influences whether customers ever return to do business with you again online. Some of what happens offline – like your customer service – is in your control. Botch that, and you set in motion an out-of-your-control avalanche of word-of-mouth that requires serious attention on your part.

Read the rest of this article.
Read the entire newsletter: Volume 131
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Your agency sucks!

Howard Kaplan — Sat, 13 May 2006 01:05:52 +0000

“Push your agency out of the way,” insisted John Nardone, chief client officer at MMA, in the day’s most controversial statement.

“They’re your single biggest barrier to measurement.”

And I thought we were harsh in our Ad:tech 1mpact presentations! Talk about impactful quotes. How about this one as well:

“I don’t need to hear from you,” snapped Dr. Don E. Schultz, professor emeritus-in-service of Integrated Communications at Northwestern University.

Speaking in an ad-barraged consumer’s voice, Dr. Schultz continued, “If I need something, I’ll go get it.”

“It’s a radically different marketplace,” Schultz continued. “The supply chain has changed to a demand chain.”

It’s no surprise to hear these stories coming from yesterday’s Yahoo Summit- we’ve spent a lot of time with Yahoo over the last year, as they’ve been very involved in promoting Waiting For Your Cat to Bark (not to mention supplying a $50 incentive to search marketers who purchase the book). They definitely have a clearer vision of the new consumer landscape. It was perhaps a tad surprising to hear so many voices echoing the sentiments we’ve offered in this space, and at conferences all over the world, this past year. What can I say, it’s a good time to be a Persuasion Architect.

These stories were just a few of the many though. I’d highly recommend popping over to ClickZ and letting the fabulous Rebecca Lieb tell you more about it.

Of course, it being Friday, you may want to read this while you’re there too…
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Sex in the city?

Howard Kaplan — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 23:41:50 +0000

I awoke at 7:15 this morning, exhausted from yet another weekend juggling family & friends in town, squeezing out the last 15 hours of the work week that couldn’t be fit into 5 workdays, and barely sitting down long enough to catch the Sopranos. The first thing greeting me in my inbox was the same as it is each week, Roy’s Monday Morning Memo. Talk about salience:

"Men think about it every seven seconds or so. Women romanticize it. Teenagers yearn for the weekends, when they might get a little of it… Sleep is the new sex." – Susan A. Nielsen, journalist for The Oregonian

The National Sleep Foundation has confirmed what you’ve long suspected: Americans aren’t getting enough sleep.

The culprits are:

Email: It just won’t let us unplug from the grid. We stay up late, tapping out messages lest someone be offended by our lack of response.

Caffeine: Our shortage of sleep has deepened in lockstep with the rising popularity of gourmet coffee. Coffee goes up. Sleep goes down. Surprised?

Alcohol: A little wine may help put us to sleep, but it also keeps us from sleeping deeply. Alcohol robs us of much-needed rest during the night.

Lack of exercise: Our bodies need physical exertion. The more we sweat, the better we sleep. But few of us are getting any real
exercise.

Overcommitment: We’re taking care of our jobs, our children, and our parents, then trying to squeeze out a few droplets of me-time.
Too much to do in too few hours is keeping our motors revving at redline.

Instant Gratification: We want what we want and we want it now. We make purchases the moment we can qualify for the payments because
acquiring things is how we keep score, right? Then, Impending Financial Doom keeps us anxious and chases sleep from the room. So we take a pill. Doctors prescribed drugs to 42 million of us last year who said we couldn’t sleep. Two billion dollars is what we spent for sleeping pills in 2005. But the 300 million spent by pharmaceutical companies to advertise sleep-inducing drugs had nothing to do with that, right? You and I aren’t affected by advertising.

And I thought it was just New Yorkers who spent their days this crazy but apparently it’s an epidemic. If you’re not a subscriber, you can read the rest of the memo and see what returns 5 minutes a week can bring you. You won’t be disappointed.
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Montreal What Where Huh?

The Grok — Sat, 15 Apr 2006 08:06:28 +0000

In keywords searches, your customers identify the scent trail they want to follow – it’s up to you not to blow it off

Let’s say you live in Montreal, and you’re desperate to move up a rung or two on the apartment ladder. You open your search engine and type in some words that reflect what you hope to accomplish. Something like “rent montreal apartment.”That’s just what my friend Melissa Burdon, a Conversion Analyst with Future Now, Inc., did. In under a second, she was staring at over a million results and some pay-per-clicks.

What happened next should give you some serious food for thought when it comes to how you handle the concept of scent in your search engine marketing!

Read the rest of this article.
Read the entire newsletter: Volume 128
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Persuasive Online Hype in Action

The Grok — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 08:04:16 +0000

Hype-y online copy only persuades your visitors to say goodbye

As sound-bites and sight-bites rain down like those proverbial cats and dogs (maybe worse!), folks are becoming hypersensitive to hype. Collectively, we are just not buying it.1 Yep, our bullshit meters are meticulously calibrated to ring when messaging sounds over-the-top, and we stand only too ready to believe that if it sounds (or looks) too good to be true, it probably is.Hype lives in your copy, in words that beg comparison but never get substantiated: better, best, more, most, must-have, no comparison, greatest quantity, greatest variety. It lives in numbers that never get explained.

Hype is your enemy, and hype-y copy is like “friendly fire.” Shooting yourself in the foot? Heck, it’s more like committing seppuku!

Come see what I mean.

Read the rest of this article.
Read the entire newsletter: Volume 127
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Dishing Out What the Customer Really Wants

The Grok — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 08:03:11 +0000

Writing persuasive online copy begins with understanding the questions your customers want answered

The purpose of persuasive online copy is to present information that offers your customers relevant answers to the questions they are asking and motivates them to move forward in your conversion process. I can’t shout this loud enough: YOUR ONLINE COPY IS CRITICAL!

We’ve just been talking about Dish Network, a company that competes with cable for the high definition television audience (among others). Up against cable, Dish is kind of like Avis … they need to try harder.

So how could Dish do a better job persuading customers to buy into their HD programming lineup?

Read the rest of this article.
Read the entire newsletter: Volume 127
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

If you fail to plan success in advance, how do you know when you’ve arrived?

Howard Kaplan — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 01:18:36 +0000

Chief Marketer has an eye-opening for some, sad for others, (but hardly surprising from this corner) article on many CMOs utter lack of ability to measure what they must- marketing ROI, specifically that of the online variety. We’re getting tired of speaking over the dull roar of today’s online successes, regaling tales of traffic cost inflation (btw, Piper Jaffray reports Online Advertising to top $55 billion by 2010), but if the shoe fits…

Citing WebTrends 2006 CMO Web-Smart Report, they report 84% of the CMOs surveyed rated their organization’s ability to measure web marketing performance as having room for improvement, weak or non-existent.

“The challenge is due to a lack of consistent, goal-based metrics to
measure reach, frequency, and conversion across all online campaigns,”
said a spokesman for Web trends.

Another cause is
“the inability to target customers with relevant marketing and messages
due to siloed analysis; tools that only provide aggregated data such as
page views and visits,” he continued.

Uhh, sorry, no. Consistent, goal-based metrics? Who’s goals? Report jockeys going to start creating more canned reports that measure my goal-based metrics? Forgive me for being skeptical, but it’s not often good things are found in a can.

If that’s not enough, they go on to blame the… tools? Many web analytics vendors have created fabulous tools for reporting and measuring the data collected by the medium. What other medium provides such ready access to a wealth of statistics? Those who heard me speak last week at Ad:tech 1mpact heard the line often, clicks are people, links are decisions.

These fabulous tools we have at our disposal measure the decisions our people/visitors/customers make when they engage with our persuasive system, or rather, our advertising, marketing, and website. They’re limited in that by definition, they cannot come preloaded with our customers’ motivations included- after all, they’re our customers. We’re responsible (by we, of course, I mean marketing not simply IT) to plan the experience each of our customer segments would prefer to engage in online. What questions they would ask? What information they would require? How would they prefer to interact with our site?

In short, we’re planning what a successful scenario looks like because it’s amazing how much less of the problem these analysis tools magically become when we feed them the plan we built in advance.
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Overlooked Gem on Word of Mouth

Jeffrey Eisenberg — Sun, 05 Mar 2006 00:04:56 +0000

How To Buy Word Of Mouth is worth reading and then rereading if you are interested in WOM. This is not a throwaway, Roy Williams doesn’t do throwaways. Every instance of WOM that I can come up with falls into the three categories he defined. What can you do with this information in your business?
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Science of Stupidities

Persuasion Architects — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 02:37:41 +0000

Bryan Eisenberg just sent me a link to Eric Weaver’s blog Ad-Verse.

I immediately subscribed.

Today’s post, entitled Direct Marketing: A Science of Stupidities stole my little marketing heart. Here is just one tasty morsel.

It’s time to stop talking about relevance and start practicing it.
Time to stop intruding and start attracting. Time to spell out a clear
value proposition. Stop patting yourselves on the back that your
unwanted communication got maybe a 5% clickthrough rate. FIVE PERCENT.
And consider, just for a moment, the 95% that want you to go to hell.

Maybe direct marketers don’t get the whole relationship thing because they don’t really know what that word means. Read the whole post.

Warning: if you can’t handle raw, in your face, no holdin’ back truth then please don’t read the above post. It is not for the weak of mind and heart.
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.

Didn’t You Say This was on Sale?

The Grok — Wed, 01 Feb 2006 07:55:57 +0000

Breaking your promises and forcing customers to think like you makes for poor conversion practice

Sometimes you go to a website and you just know the business hasn’t got a clue. They’re doing everything so wrong, you don’t even know where to start. There are also those times you go to a site and think, on first inspection, that things look pretty good.Until you start dealing with the site’s process. In that moment you realize appearances can be deceiving. That’s why, through the use of personas and wireframed scenarios,� we always make sure� our clients are getting their processes squeaky clean first.� It’s basic Horse Before the Cart 101.

Our friend and colleague David Cross was trying to buy a long sleeved t-shirt from a company called C&C California. Here’s what happened.
Read the rest of this article.
Read the entire newsletter: Volume 124
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Starting as low as $1000 per month: FutureNow's OnTarget provides on-going expert analysis and prioritized recommendations to improve website conversion rates 40-80% or more. Lead generation and ecommerce versions available.