As a hobby blogger in the "mom" realm, I often get swamped at conferences by companies looking to market their products to women. These companies have figured out that women are online en masse and they're communicating their likes, dislikes and daily lives with friends and strangers. I applaud their initiative in trying to reach out to women on the web, but sometimes I wish they'd take a step back and think a little harder about how they approach these women.
There's no doubt word of mouth works well with women; after all, we're social creatures. None the less, there are a few subtle differences in how marketers should push word of mouth to us if they'd like us to pass things on to our friends. Jackie shares some insight and a handful of tips from Michelle Miller, co-author of "The Soccer Mom Myth: Today's Female Consumer: Who She Really Is, Why She Really Buys."
Huba starts with some stats on how women spread the word.
Women are three times more likely to share personal stories with a friend than men. Ask any woman how she found her hairdresser, doctor, or favorite wine, and she is likely to tell you that it was from a friend. Women are natural word of mouth spreaders. They are wired that way - with four times as many connections between the left and right hemispheres of the brain, women tap deeply into that area that is responsible for bonding and connecting with others.
Most marketers read a paragraph like the one above and rejoice; they've finally found the key to getting their product in front of legions of buyers. They just need to convince some mom to blog about it.
Except...that's not quite right.
See, one of the points I push home hard when I teach about viral marketing is the need to create a campaign or offer that someone is willing to stake their own reputation on. After all, if you want them to tell their friends, you're asking them to evangelize your product. If they are evangelizing your product to someone who ends up disliking it, they risk losing credibility. While you've got to look at things from the "will they risk their reputation on it" angle for all forms of viral marketing, you have to give it extra consideration when you're trying to work via women.
Huba writes:
If you are doing business with her, and she values your relationship, it may seem perfectly acceptable to ask her for a list of friends who might benefit from your services. But that may not be a good idea, even if she thinks you're the best thing since Starbuck's drive-thru. She is the gatekeeper of her relationships. She's not being stingy, she's being protective. A better idea might be to give her a few of your business cards and say, "if you know of anyone who might benefit from my service, feel free to give them my card."
In other words...
Don't expect women to spread the word for you, enable their ability to do so.
Don't ask them for access to their friends and family, give them access to YOU so they can share that access.
Don't tell them what to offer or what to say, make them happy and let them create the offer or pitch themselves.
After all, women know their friends better than you do. If you impress them enough to make them want to tell their friends, they'll find a far better way to spread the word than you would have.
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The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has issued four new rules pertaining to the Can Spam Act of 2003.
DirectMag.com says marketers will not be given safe harbor if their affiliates violate Can Spam...
SurfCanyon is a Firefox plugin that claims mind reading capabilities. Even though there's no actual magic involved, this nifty little app does a great job of digging though the search results for the hits you need, even though Google buried them on page 12.
SurfCanyon is a Firefox plug-in that claims mind reading capabilities. Even though there’s no actual magic involved, this nifty little app does a great job of digging though the search results for the hits you need, even though Google buried them on page 12.
SurfCanyon accelerates the search process by re-ranking the search results based on your behaviour. This way, the browser extension applies a layer of real-time implicit personalization. The software is transforming static lists of links into dynamic search results pages that work with the you as you explore the search results.
How does it work?
Once the plug-in is installed, you go to one of the three search engines supported (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) and enter your search term as usual. In the search results, you’ll notice the difference: A little bulls eye icon appears next to each search result. If one strikes you as particularly useful, click the bulls eye and SurfCanyon suggests more hits like it, retrieved from deep within the search results.
If none of SurfCanyon’s suggestions are exactly what you want, click the bulls eye by the best one and drill down a layer. This way you can keep refining your search until you get what you want.
Is it any good?
Many plug-ins that are supposed to help you do the exact opposite by being a nuisance. SurfCanyon isn’t intrusive. All it adds are the little bulls eye icons.
So you can forget all about it until next time you get annoyed at the enormous amount of search results presented by Google and the total absence of any tools for refining your search. I’ve never understood why Google doesn’t offer suggestions for refining your search like Live Search and Yahoo. With SurfCanyon, you can add a handy tool for improving your search results.
Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: Don't Hire a Butcher to do a Baker's Job; Small Business Owners Need Twitter and LinkedIn; Syndicated Versus Pure Search Referrals; and more.
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Web usability is about making your website in such a way that your site users can find what they’re looking for quickly and efficiently. A usable website can reap huge benefits on to your website and your business.
· Every £1 invested in improving your website’s usability returns £10 to £100 (source: IBM)
· A web usability redesign can increase the sales/conversion rate by 100% (source: Jakob Nielson)
Links are important to Google, Yahoo and MSN in determining where your site is placed within the search results. As you probably know, the more links, the better you will place.
The engines place a weighting factor on each link. That is, a link from an important site like CNN.com would count for a lot more than Jimmy Bob’s personal homepage.
Google calls its importance-scoring system “PageRank,” and it’s been a fundamental building block of Google’s ranking algorithm since day one. Tactically improving the PageRank—or, more generically, your “link gain” across all the major engines—of your homepage and of key internal pages of your site is critical to being well-ranked and thus getting traffic.
Behavioral targeting has been one of the most discussed (and arguably the most controversial) elements of online advertising this year. This is visibly validated by recent conferences (ad:tech, iMedia Summit, etc.) in which the topic played a crucial role. It’s even been making splashes internationally, as it was in one of the most popular sessions at the recent ad:tech London.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been looking at the variety of sources, in addition to the data that comes from your site, available for evaluating e-business performance. These additional sources include audience panels, surveys, and focus groups. I’ve also been making the point that purely focusing on Web analytics data rarely provides the full picture.
Let’s talk about this on a practical level. Multiple data sources can be used together to examine a specific business issue, such as optimizing site conversion rates. The simple premise is if you know who’s coming to your site, why they’re there, and what they’re trying to do, you can develop the site to optimize these key customer journeys.
To help digital property owners understand how visitors interact with their site, my company uses the Customer Journey Framework. This is an approach to understanding which visitors are trying to use the site, how they’re using it, and whether they’re successful in their goals. There isn’t a single data source that can answer all these questions. You must draw the answers from several different places.
The Customer Journey Framework has three key components:
* Understanding the different types of visitors (audience segments)
* Understanding why people visit the site (intentions)
* Understanding site use and the consumption of different content
People come to your site for different reasons; there are bound to be different visitor segments. The challenge is to work out the most meaningful business segments, then use them for your marketing and site development activities. This is something we’ll take a look at in the future.
Working out who’s coming to your site is where you might use audience panel data, surveys, or internal data from customer registration databases. You may need all three to build a true profile of the different user types you may have. Audience panels can provide a demographic profile (if your site is large enough), but they may not help you segment your audience in a meaningful way.
Surveys can help you understand if different types of visitors come to your site for different reasons. We call these “intention modes.” What’s the visitor’s intention when she arrives on the site? What’s her goal? To use an e-commerce example, a visitor may come to a site in one of these modes:
* To browse for something and buy if she likes it
* To do research for price comparison purposes
* To buy a specific product she already researched
* To browse with no intention of buying
Visitors in each mode have different goals and exhibit different site behaviors. link
Creating and preserving intentional scent trails on your site translates to improved ROI for your paid and organic search terms.
Hot on a Scent
Every scent trail starts with a search.
A prospect types into the search box the search term she believes will give her the desired result. Then, she willfully follows the scent trail of that specific term from the starting point, usually the search results page, seeking a specific answer. She frequently returns to the starting point for orientation. If she doesn’t find the answer after several clicks, she starts a new scent trail. She repeats this process until she finds her answer.
People hunting for online data behave remarkably like animals sniffing out prey. It’s the most effective means of finding a teensy-weensy squirrel in awfully big forest.
Understanding this process allows you to measure and optimize the scent trails people follow, both on your site and in marketing campaigns. Losing the trail is one reason 80 percent of visitors leave a site after three pages.
Most SEM (define) is about getting found. Problem is, most SEM does little more than put signs on every tree that read, “Squirrels in the forest.” Though true, the signs don’t help the hunter a lot in the quest to actually find the squirrels in the forest.
Worse is the marketer who doesn’t have squirrels but nevertheless lures squirrel hunters. Then, tofu is served on the landing pages.
The search terms a user keys in then follows reveal her intent. The more specific the term, the more transparent the intent. Your site must serve the content, pages, and path that match the intent if you want to convert her.
Measuring Scent Quality
How do you measure your site’s effectiveness at this? It’s a simple matter of using metrics to follow user scent trails and see where they drop off (special thanks to Steve Jackson for helping to outline this):
Start with a fresh spreadsheet.
In the first column, list your top 100 search terms/phrases (both paid-placement and organic).
In the next column, place the number from one to five (five being highest), indicating the relevance with which the AdWords or listing term matches the landing page.
In the third column, list the single-page-access or bounce/reject rate from the landing page.
In the fourth column, list every conversion goal (call to action) from that page for each term.
Calculate the bounce rate from each step in the scent trail, from landing page to call-to-action pages.
At just about any large corporation, a brand manager’s responsibilities usually include developing a brand’s long-term strategic goals based on volume and profit objectives. A brand manager is usually the lead for preparing the brand’s annual marketing plan, including budget and strategy development for the brand’s entire marketing mix.
Typically, brand managers don’t understand how search engines work. Why should they? SEO (define) is pretty far removed from their brand-based responsibilities. I’ve yet to met a brand manager who understands why a big brand name means nothing to search engines. Brand managers with distinguished brand name products assume it’s easy for their Web sites to rank highly in search engine results. In actuality, the situation is precisely the contrary.
The bigger the brand, the harder it is to attain and maintain highly ranked organic results in the major search engines. Competition for top search engine positioning among big brand names comes from rivals and resellers alike. The challenge is to get the brand manager to expend some of its resources on an organic search campaign. link
Only 17 percent of Internet Retailer’s top 100 sites are fully using search engine optimization and marketing, while 83 percent are not and so are missing profitable opportunities, according to a new study by Oneupweb titled “There’s Still Money on the Table: Internet Retailer Study 2005.” Oneupweb studied each site’s meta tags, site architecture, keywords, content and other tactics.
Among the top 100 sites, only 17 percent were well optimized, 25 percent moderately optimized, 35 percent nominally optimized, and 23 percent not optimized at all.
As any experienced SEO knows, getting a page 1 listing in SERPs is just the beginning. It is possible to rank as #1 and get 50 visitors a day, while #3 for the same keyword can get 250 visitors a day. Term SERP conversion is used to measure how well a specific page listing converts keyword searches to actual visits. The required formula to calculate SERP conversion is:
SERP conversion = (real traffic from Search engines / predicted traffic from search engines) x 100 %
An average figure is somewhere around 50%, but I have seen sites with SERP conversion as low as 10-15% (these were pure spam). The goal should be somewhere around 70-85% or higher depending on your business area and competition. And what’s best – working for better SERP conversion is totally safe and easy to do, and in many cases is attached to good and ethical SEO policies.
The trick to enhance SERP conversion is to make a listing more attractive to human user. If you have ever wondered why Adwords and similar perform so well compared to traditional listings, this is the reason. They are visually more attractive and yes, they are usually contextually more attractive.
In order to utilize this piece of information on your SEO process, you should:
a) Focus on quality – make your title and meta/directory descriptions samples of top quality copywriting. Titles like “widget widgets” are easy to make, but they are about as attractive as a pair of white sport socks.
b)Target your audience - provide only the necessary and interesting pieces of information in title and meta/directory description. Only then when a user pays a visit to your page can you (subtly) start selling / promoting other suitable products and services.
c) Observe and test - time and patience are of the essence in here. The better work you do, the more increased traffic and sales you should expect.
The best user experience you can provide to a searcher and the highest conversion rates on traffic probably don’t occur on your organic search traffic. That’s where the search engine selects what page to rank and what description to show.
This fact has created an evolution in the way marketers think of search engine traffic. When you first got involved in SEM and SEO, you likely tended to be very position-focused. It’s a natural reaction to a marketplace where top listings deliver scale, and listings below the fifth or sixth position in either paid or organic results achieve far less visibility and drive far less traffic. The point of SEM and SEO is, after all, not to communicate in the listings, but rather on your Web site.
As marketers gain experience in SEO and SEM, many realize the traffic they receive via organic listings may be different than traffic from paid results, particularly for longer search phrases. This in turn gets them thinking about landing page testing and analysis.
If you aren’t already testing landing pages, you’re likely at a disadvantage if your competitors have already completed some landing page tests. The conversion improvements that you (or your competition) achieve through landing page testing result in higher bids in the PPC markets, and more sales for organic traffic. So if you’ve been getting outbid lately, it could be because your competition has steadily improved conversion efficiency.
The Weblog world looks different today than it did at week’s beginning. More mainstream. More big media. More big money.
Through deals with the two most prominent blog networks, America Online and VNU have made it clear they want a piece of the audience — and ad revenue — that’s beginning to pour into the blog space. High-profile start-up Glam Media also launched a fashion blog network that allows the company to tap into existing communities (and additional ad inventory).
The blog news making the biggest stir is AOL’s agreement to acquire Jason Calacanis’ Weblogs Inc. Network (WIN) for a rumored $20 to $30 million. The deal will bring the portal a diverse passel of sites and authors, including the Peter Rojas-edited tech blog Engadget.
Online copywriting guru Nick Usborne chats with exec editor Brad Berens about the dos and don’ts for writing effective email marketing subject lines.
Last year, in a talk about online writing that I gave to a group of talented undergraduate writers at the University of Southern California, I argued that the most important genre of writing for them to master is the email subject line. I think a lot about subject lines: what makes them good and bad, effective and ineffective, but one thing that has long puzzled me is how little attention many companies pay to the lowly subject line.
The web’s increasingly collaborative and interactive nature makes it prime territory for a new breed of online advertising, like ads that are more closely tailored to a particular audience, panelists at a conference on Internet innovation said Wednesday.
For example, Google’s AdSense program, which places contextual ads on sites and shares revenue with bloggers, can be improved by engaging publishers and their audiences, blogger and media guru Jeff Jarvis said at the Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.
“Google is at the lower level of the value chain now. We can raise the value chain and get more money,” said Mr. Jarvis, who led a panel entitled “Web 2.0 Ad Models.”
Google’s Matt Cutts, one of the first engineers on the search engine’s advertising team, agreed.
“There’s a ton of room left for experimentation,” he said. “If someone comes up with something better than AdSense and kills it, the world will be a better place.”
Made up of representatives from advertising agencies and ad networks, the panel said the web has the potential to be vastly appealing to advertisers, a quality which could be mined to support bloggers and their communities.
In particular, metrics about the effectiveness of ads and the characteristics of an audience could result in more relevant ad placement. And for those viewing the ads, relevance could turn annoying ads into valuable resources.
The days may still be warm, but retailers are focused on the holiday shopping season. For online retailers the challenge may be even more pressing, because many believe that the first holiday shoppers began making their online purchases as far back as August.
The online holiday season kicks off before the offline season, according to a survey of e-retailers by LaGarde done in July 2005. Over 25 percent of respondents believed online shopping would start in August or September, and over 60 percent stated they believed the season would start before November 1.
eMarketer estimates that fourth-quarter online sales will reach $26.2 billion, up almost 22 percent from last year. That’s a strong gain, but it is the lowest annual growth rate in four years.
The brand experience cycle with the notion you can influence a customer through interactive marketing at any point along in the cycle. Interactive marketing can, and should, play a role in all stages of the brand experience cycle. Though online media is perhaps best suited to increase awareness, consideration, and preference, the experience part of the cycle should be closely tied to the Web site and loyalty to e-CRM (define) programs:
- Awareness. We’ve finally reached a point where brands want interactive media to play the lead role in a media plan. And we now have the ability to deliver the mass reach of a core target audience while pinpointing that target. With video capabilities, the Internet can play the role TV has traditionally played in generating awareness.
- Consideration. With interactive media, we can connect with people who have demonstrated an interest in our category. Through behavioral targeting, we can talk with people who may be considering a purchase, even when they’re not actively researching that purchase. We may find them in the sports section of a Web site, for example, but because we know they visited the auto section twice in the last week, we can engage them with more highly targeted messaging, affecting their consideration set.
- Preference. How do we get people to prefer our brand over another? This part of the brand experience cycle is a direct response phase. At this point, people are truly in market. Consider that for so many categories, the Internet is now the de facto product information resource. In this phase, customers perform searches, visit comparison shopping sites, and read product reviews. This is where interactive media enables us to target these customers with pinpoint precision and ultimately to sway them toward preferring our brand.
- Experience. In a traditional purchase funnel, this phase is called “purchase.” But for many brands, this phase has evolved into an experiential one. Sure, for a lot of products and services, “purchase” still makes sense: deodorant, office supplies, auto parts. For categories such as automotive, fashion, travel, and entertainment, however, this is truly an experience. What we drive and wear and watch, and where we go in our leisure time say a lot about who we are. People get excited about brands they use in these categories. A Web site has a role to play in generating that excitement and in delivering the information a customer needs to make the most of that brand experience.
- Loyalty. Loyalty is a function of a great brand experience. Interactive marketing can and should play a huge role in generating loyalty. Use your Web site to facilitate loyalty. Perhaps develop communities for brand loyalists, or maybe create a personalized site and newsletters.
What do companies like Nordstrom, Jet Blue, Amazon and Dell have in common?
They have built their brand value on providing a positive experience for their customers, online and offline. Successful companies match business objectives with customer needs. They combine ongoing testing, feedback and improvement cycles into their daily practices and invest in listening, learning and modifying the user experience to create positive returns in revenue and loyalty. This means user experience is not just a practice or a process—it is a philosophy.
Three seconds and 40 characters. That’s all you usually have to work with when trying to get and hold the attention of someone reading email. And, with user behavior changing so much in response to overwhelming amounts of spam, the attention spans of email readers are getting shorter. Needless to say, it’s vital to make the most of your introduction via the email subject line.
Email marketing powerhouse DoubleClick.com conducts annual surveys with regard to user behavior when it comes to email. A couple of the statistics from their latest findings are interesting. The second biggest motivator in opening email is the subject line. (The first is the “from” line.)
Because subject lines are often truncated at around 40 characters — and because email readers usually have their index fingers poised over the delete button — we’re left with about three seconds and approximately six words to make an impression.
Yahoo has acquired online event-planning and social networking site Upcoming.org, which is expected to provide Yahoo with more content about local communities and bolster its local search capabilities, reports the AP. Yahoo confirmed the acquisition but did not disclose the financial terms. The site provides tools for sharing observations about local events and identifying common areas of interests.
