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!

Do you want to be microfamous?

There is an excellent article in Wired’s February issue addressing social media and how it can evolve into, well, something quite introverted. The article uses an example of a Ms. Evans. She started using Twitter as a grad student – with an interest in poetry her updates were topical to what she was interested in. As such, her following grew slowly with people who were interested in similar things. Interaction is frequent, people comment on posts, ask questions, Ms. Evans replies – it’s a tight little community.

Then Ms. Evans gets the idea to post a short, 140 character recipe. Next thing you know she has 13,000 followers interested in food – a slight diversion from her original use for Twitter. As the following grows, something interesting happens. When you see a person with 100 followers on Twitter they seem more approachable. You see a person with 20,000 followers, if you do in fact have a question, you tend to presume the person wouldn’t reply to your question if you did happen to ask it. So you don’t…and social media just becomes, well, media.

The concept applies to Facebook as well. Amass a group of 500 ski enthusiasts and you can talk about the best mountains, the best days, post photos, share stories, etc. Let the group grow to 15,000 and suddenly people are selling ski equipment, posting “lost and found” information, etc. Ironically enough, the Facebook group starts to take the form of a dynamic newspaper! The founder of the group questions how he or she should interact with this new organism – there’s no way to cater to everybody!

Take a good look at your social media presence and ask yourself what direction you want to go in. Is it really that valuable to reach 10,000 Twitter followers if you no longer receive feedback? Do you really want to be “microfamous”? After all, celebrities are constantly complaining about all the attention they receive. Popular Twitter users might not make the television news, but one consistency remains,  the larger audience will always be the less forgiving audience.

iPhone applications

Among the clients I work with, iPhone applications seem to be pitched on a weekly basis. I’m not going to argue the “cool factor” of some of the things that are possible on the iPhone and newer mobile phones in general, especially with the involvement of GPS – have you heard about foursquare? But the question is, does your business need an iPhone application?

A quick way to get an idea of how many of your customers/clients are using an iPhone to engage with your products is to check your website statistics. Most traffic analytics tools, including the free Google Analytics tool, will tell you how many visitors you are receiving from the iPhone/iPod devices. This number doesn’t necessarily represent what percentage of your customers have an iPhone, but it does give you a solid understanding about how many of those customers are actually visiting your website on their iPhone.

If you have a high percentage of iPhone visitors to your website, chances are the decision to develop an iPhone application for your business should be an easy one. The next problem becomes what features to build and who to build with – which I can help with if need be. On the other hand, if you don’t see a high percentage of iPhone traffic to your website, that doesn’t mean you can’t benefit from an iPhone app.

There isn’t any golden formula that will tell you if an iPhone application will be successful for your business or not. But as more mobile networks start supporting the iPhone, it can be safe to assume that the iPhone will become an increasingly common way for your customers to engage with your brand. The possibilities are endless, but they’re effectiveness is limited by how many of your customers will actually use the application, and remember to use it on an ongoing basis. I’ve heard daunting stats claiming that over 50% of iPhone apps are only used once or twice, then uninstalled or forgotten.

I think the safest way for businesses to approach iPhone application development at the present time is in groups. A restaurant shouldn’t build their own app, they should unite with a dozen other restaurants and build one app to serve everyone’s purpose. Remember, to benefit your business it must be useful to the user, and that user doesn’t want to install six separate applications for his six favorite restaurants. Keep it functional and useful, and considering current iPhone trends, more and more people will come knocking…

Online media planning in a small market

The tools available to the online marketer are plentiful, and with a broad topic or a fairly general target market, the possibilities are literally endless. There’s online video, social media, good old display advertising, mobile marketing with ads or text messages, email marketing, website optimization, rss advertising, search engine marketing, podcasts, blogging…well, my goal here isn’t to list them all. The point is that when marketing to a broad group an online marketing consultant or firm has endless options and can spend an eternity optimizing and improving over time. But what does a business do when trying to reach a smaller community? A number of smaller communities, let’s say communities with a population of less than 250,000 people, are in an awkward spot. Newspapers and local television are struggling or closing their doors, and for many businesses those mediums are where the bulk of the marketing budget is spent.

So with newspaper circulation dwindling and the future of local television undetermined in many smaller communities, now is an important time for businesses to start considering online marketing. In the past one could argue that a business can remain competitive using traditional marketing tactics – chances are that if you’ve spent a number of years marketing with newspapers, you’ve learned a thing or two about what works and what doesn’t. But as marketing budgets adapt to take advantage of new online marketing opportunities, these already struggling traditional mediums are going to be pulling in smaller percentages of their advertiser’s budgets.

A common excuse used to avoid using online marketing is that the company website isn’t up to par, and the good news is web development costs aren’t as high as they used to be. The bottom line is online marketing is becoming less of an optional marketing tactic and more of an obligatory tactic – but after a business gets that first taste of the new opportunity, measurably and flexibility online marketing offers, I just know the investment will be worth it.

The best part is you don’t have to jump into the deep end. I can work with your business to create an online marketing strategy that fits your budget and makes sense for your brand. Just drop me a note with any questions or thoughts and we’ll go from there!