The death of a marketing cliche

Here it comes:

Half of my advertising works, I just don’t know which half!

I’ve heard it used as a joke and I’ve heard it used in a completely serious manner – I’m just happy I focus primarily on Internet marketing. Here’s why this phrase is dead to me:

• With $1,000 you employ me to launch a Facebook campaign for your brand which directs visitors to your website where you sell [insert product here]. For the sake of this article, I’ll use handmade chocolate gift packages which are sold through your website.
• Targeting just a single city, I segment your audience into groups. Males of three specific age ranges and females of three specific age ranges.
• 10 different ads are created for each segment – a total of 60 ads are launched for the campaign (60 may seem like a lot – more on that later)
• After the campaign is live, I review the statistics and learn:
  • Males age 24-30 don’t respond to ads with heart related pictures
  • Females 30-35 respond strongly to “catch your man off guard this valentines”
  • Males & females both seem to like the “surprise that special someone this Valentine’s” message

So at this point we have a leg up on print and other traditional means of advertising. We were able to run 60 ads simultaneously targeting specific demographics, but it doesn’t stop there – now the visitor is on your website:

• You have 4 packages ready for sale, each at different price points:
  • A variety of chocolates plus a teddy bear
  • Heart shaped chocolates with chocolate body paint (my favorite)
  • Dark chocolate package (the healthy choice)
  • The highest of high end product for those chocolate aficionados out there
• With proper tracking, you can learn which of the above groups are most likely to purchase the teddy bear package versus the heart shaped package.

So in the end we’ve learned that 25-30 year old males have a tendency to opt for the teddy bear package, while the females aged 35-40 spring for the dark chocolate package. These are purely speculative results, I don’t have any clients in the chocolate business.

So we’ve proven this cliche wrong and more. At the Facebook Ad level we’ve learned which advertisements grab our audiences attention – yes we had to create 60 ads instead of one or two print ads but it was well worth it. Then we’ve also followed the visitor from Facebook along with his or her information straight through the purchase phase. We’ve learned what messages work, what imagery works, and what demographics are interested in which products. This is part advertising, part market research – pass this information on to your sales representatives to help them suggest the right products on the floor. There’s a legitimate reason to double the advertising budget you had in mind!

I have one critically important addition to this fabricated campaign – let them sign up for your email newsletter after they’ve made the purchase! Let them tell you special dates so you can send email reminders in time for their anniversary. They’ve taken the time to make a purchase, now grab a quick chunk of information from them so you can generate future sales.

Graphic Design Crowdsourcing

I was reading the local newspaper the other day and discovered a local start-up website called DesignTourney.com. While this is probably the first time a local newspaper article inspired a blog post for me, it reminded me about something I often bring up while working with clients looking for certain design work.

The process is fairly simple. For example, if you need business cards or a logo you simply fill out a form to post your project. You come up with a prize ($250 cash will do) and you post your project with whatever specific requirements you might have. The design community will then submit their creations and the owner can then choose the preferred design, awarding that designer the $250 cash. With this process, DesignTourney.com has entered the world of crowd-sourced graphic design which already has big players like crowdspring.com and 99designs.com.

I see crowd-sourced graphics as both good and bad for the graphic design industry. If you operate a small business and you need a logo, stationary or website, crowd-sourced graphic design is a great option. You’ll be able to set a fixed budget and hopefully you will receive a number of designs to choose from. It’s a serious contender if you’re looking for a quick, appealing design within a strict budget. However, there is a very legitimate reason why crowd-sourced graphic design won’t be turning the entire graphic design industry on it’s head. Chances are you’re looking for design work because you’re not a designer yourself – as soon as you enlist the creative abilities of a crowd you loose the knowledge and experience a design agency brings to the table. You might receive 60 different logo variations and fall in love with one, opting to use that logo for your new business or for your re-branding effort, but there’s no professional advice from an experienced agency helping you see that just because you like a certain design doesn’t mean it’s the right fit for your company. There’s no way to place a finite value on experience and knowledge within a field – but when it comes to your brand you want to be careful and make sure you can live with the decision you make for quite some time to come.

My opinion on crowd-sourced graphic design is let the crowds do the fun stuff – perhaps it’s a postcard for your clients on a holiday, or a new version of your business card. Just leave the brand sensitive stuff to the professionals that pull from years of experience. If you’re looking for that experience locally here in Kelowna, I’m consistently impressed by Touchpoint Agency – someone to consider!

As for DesignTourney.com, they have their work cut out for them. I haven’t had a chance to meet the founders to learn about their goals, but the success of their website relies on the crowd itself. In this case, the crowd is graphic designers that already use CrowdSpring and 99Designs to generate some extra income. And with brands like LG and Nissan using CrowdSpring, DesignTourney is going to have to host some decent projects to gain the same momentum the other players already have. Personally, if DesignTourney was my project, I’d play the regional card. Running a small business myself, I prefer supporting local talent and if I’m going to award a random graphic designer $250 – $5000 for a graphic design project, I’d like to keep that local, or at least within the country.

Online advertising ingenuity

Electronic Arts is releasing a new game called Dante’s Inferno and an ad agency commissioned to promote the game came up with a very unique campaign. The agency, Wieden-Kennedy, starting off with a fairly traditional move – they bought banner ads on six different video game websites. The ingenuity came into play when Wieden-Kennedy communicated a rather strange request to the six gaming websites. These six gaming websites were to include text based art in the source code of their websites – something that wouldn’t be visible on the website itself, but instead would only be seen if someone looked at the actual source code of the website. In this text based art, or ASCII art, a URL was hidden along with a password. Each of the six websites had a different password. When you visited the secret URL you were asked to enter all 6 passwords which would then let you in to the website to download exclusive, pre-release content.

The campaign ran for nearly two weeks and generated 26,000 visits to the ‘secret’ website. While the typical person really has no reason to look at the source code of a website, Wieden-Kennedy was betting that the audience interested in Dante’s Inferno would not only know how to find the hidden messages, but that the concept alone would give the campaign more legs than the standard banner ads would have. And they were right, because here I sit as an online marketing consultant with relatively no interest in the game, admiring the creative of the online marketing campaign.

Kudos to Wieden-Kennedy!

An SEO Experiment

In early January 2010 HSTinCanada.com went live after some educated estimates and two weeks of design & testing with a single goal in mind – obtain visitors from search engines. After operating for two months with 50+ articles and a variety of links from other websites, the website has cracked the first page for a handful of key search phrases in Google. What is unique about HST in Canada as a topic in general is that it’s going to receive plenty of news coverage for an extended period of time. Back in the summer of 2009 I launched a quick website for a news topic that was in the news headlines for a week. With $15 dollars invested for hosting and the domain name, www.westkelownafires.com launched and recorded 7000 page views over the course of a few days, with 90% of the web traffic coming from search engines. Ever since that SEO Experiment, I’ve contemplated the potential for what might be called “opportunistic web development”. Then the next opportunity presented itself…

Starting from scratch with a brand new domain and using the wordpress platform, a website was born with the intention of being a neutral resource for a hot topic with varying opinions and feelings. The proposed Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) is coming to British Columbia and Ontario on July 1st 2010, and while it has a number of implications for businesses and citizens within these provinces, it presented a unique opportunity for a website. It was going to be on people’s minds over the next several months, and the media coverage it will receive will only intensify as groups, businesses and governments become more vocal.

For starters, any successful website must serve a valuable purpose. In the case of HSTinCanada.com there was a distinct gap in available information online. The provincial government’s in support of HST have the pros related to the HST explained on their websites. The anti-HST government websites & groups have all of the negative aspects of HST explained. There was no single source that talked about both the pros and cons of HST, so the content strategy for HST in Canada was easy to establish. Secondly, as the goal was to obtain search engine traffic, an assessment of the competing websites and an estimate of how much search volume exists was undertaken. Overtaking the competing websites isn’t insurmountable and the number of HST related search engine queries is promising.

After being live for nearly 2 months, HSTinCanada.com is on track to serve approximately 30,000 ad impressions in March 2010. With further improved search engine rankings, this topic has the legs to serve 1 million ad impressions from search engine traffic alone before July 1st, 2010.

The message here is two fold. For web publishers and businesses of all kinds, a niche website built around a current event or relevant topic optimized for search engines can gain a strong audience over the course of  a few months. Think outside the box – sometimes your current website isn’t ideal when reacting to an evolving situation. Web development is more accessible now than ever, and a ground-up website build might not cost as much as you think. Perhaps a tax advisory firm or an accounting office should have launched a website like HST in Canada – once you obtain the audience you can display whatever ads you want, even your own. Not only that, publishing web content around a certain topic solidifies your identity as an authority on the topic – trust = sales. Forgive me, but the second part of this message is blatant self-promotion – if you think there’s an angle you can use to amass an audience related to your business and want some advice on it’s potential and how to execute, please get in touch! I love doing this stuff!