The Central Problem in Web Marketing… and Its Solution

The Web is supposed to be a wonderful, powerful, exciting new marketing medium. But many businesses simply do not get the return from their websites that they want. What’s going on?

From every size of company, from downtown corporations to home-based businesses, we hear the questions, “Why don’t we get more visitors to our site?” and “Why don’t more of them buy?” There are many problems, challenges and concerns in web marketing, but there is ONE thread that runs through them all — not enough sales.
A signpost to the cause, and, therefore, to the solution, is indicated by what people say to each other about their websites; “Who designed your site?”, “Do you know a good web designer?”, “I like this design.” and (maybe), “Do you use an open-source CMS?” In other words, most companies, most of the time, are focusing on design and technology.
You rarely hear people say, “Who wrote your site copy?”, “Who helped you decide what information to include?”, or “Who helped you market your site?”
Attractive, professional design and appropriate technology are certainly critical for a successful business site. But not to the extent of investing 95-100 percent of the thought, time and money in only these two aspects of the website’s construction and use!
The potential of a well-developed website is enormous. Indeed, building an effective website may be regarded as much more than simply important; it may very well be essential to the future viability of your business. At the very least, it can be a major marketing channel, bringing you new clients and reinforcing your relationships with current clients.
So what can you do to make your site more effective? The fix is not in design. Nor does it lie in technology. Doing more of the same is not the answer.
To find a more useful direction, consider the critical tasks your site needs to accomplish — bring people to the site, make the sale, and develop relationships with prospective and current clients. When thought of in these terms, it is clear that design and technology do not actually do any of these things. Yes, absolutely they can enhance, but they don’t actually DO.
The solution to lower-than-desired sales is to remember what a business website actually is — a marketing tool. What needs to be improved is marketing. A business website must, therefore, be based upon, permeated by and used according to the most profound and powerful marketing principles. Does that sound like your current site? For the business strength and profitability you want, you may need to improve three areas:

1. Strategic Planning to make every component of the site, and tactic for its use, as powerful as possible, and to integrate the use of the site most effectively within your current business and marketing plan.

2. Content development: Crafting the site as a marketing and service/product delivery tool.

3. Effective promotion to bring high-quality prospects.
So in summary, we have FIVE key components for an effective website: Strategic Planning, Content Development, Design, Technology, and Promotion. Strategic planning is arguably the most “supercharging” component, and is frequently the most neglected. But “strategic” is a word often misused. It is not just a big tactic, or a collection of tactics, or the latest “cool and sexy” tactic. Truly strategic planning can make a difference to the power of everything you do that is like the difference between a handful of flashlights and a laser.
Something I like to remind clients of: You are not WEB marketing; you are MARKETING on the Web. In other words, the key word is not “web”, it’s “marketing”. The effectiveness of almost ANY website will be enormously improved by the inclusion and ongoing implementation of proven, powerful marketing principles. The potential return, in terms of business building and profitability, is staggering.

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by Michael Linehan is the founder of Marketing Alchemy.

The Newbie Guide to Online Marketing Terms

In all forms of business, and even hobbies, the people who have been involved in a particular activity for awhile will start to use different slang terms. When someone new comes along these slang terms can be very confusing. As all businesses depend on customers, you need to be careful and educate yourself on these terms so you don’t lose any sales.

It recently came to my attention that online marketing has more than its share of slang for the newbie to learn. Since marketing is all about getting and keeping customers, I could see that seasoned online marketers may start have an image problem. Online marketing slang was pointed out to me by an associate who was interested in an Internet business I was marketing. While I was talking to him he asked for an explanation of what the heck I was talking about and said “Speak English Boy!”

That conversation allowed the light to click on for me and I decided to write this short guide to online marketing slang. This should help anyone who is new to the online marketing arena understand some basic terms.

1. Online Marketing - Is the selling of any product or service on the Internet. Marketing is just the act of promoting and selling something. Selling on the Internet costs much less than having a real world, bricks and mortar business. It’s this low cost of entry which is attractive in starting your own online business.

2. Joint Ventures - A joint venture is a partnership. Simply put 2 or more people work together to increase their sales, or to complete a product or service. Sometimes shortened to JV, joint ventures are often very profitable.

3. Subscriber List - This is sometimes known as an email list, or an ezine list (ezine is short for electronic magazine). It’s also a list of people who have given permission for the marketer to send them emails, which may contain advertising. This is also known as an opt-in list, because subscribers opt-in to receive the emails. This prevents people from complaining that an email is Spam as there will be a record of them agreeing to receive the emails. Another snippet of slang is double opt-in, which just means after filling out a form, the potential subscriber will receive an email asking them to verify that they agree to accept future emails before they are actually added to the email list to receive them.

4. Viral Marketing - This little phrase is used to describe a way of increasing your business, or website reach, by using a “viral technique.” In real life a virus spreads out by people contacting one another, and computer viruses are spread by computers contacting other computers. Some clever Internet gurus realized they could use the power of people to send each other information, and then watched that information spread in the same way as a virus. Giving away a free gift, which contains a link to your business, and allowing others to give it away too will work like a virus spreading the word to others as people send it on to their friends. This works long as your freebie was something people would give away anyway in the first place.

5. Niche Marketing - This is the act of selling to a particular group of people. There are lots of untapped niches (small groups interested in a specific subject) who are willing to pay for information. Online, it’s easy to target these small markets by monitoring search engine results and then finding a specific word or phrase which is being searched for but not near the top of the list of popular searches. An example of a niche market is poodle owners, they are dog owners, but will specifically search for information about poodles. These markets can be profitable because they are not targeted directly by many people, so if you have a product tailored to a niche market you may have little or no competition.

6. EBook - Although getting more popular this term still causes some confusion. An ebook is an electronic book, it can be a .pdf file, plain text file or an executable file (one which is actually a self contained program to run on your computer). Ebooks sell well online, as there is no shipping, and delivery is instant.

7. MLM - These are the initials of one of the least understood, and most maligned of business models, Multi Level Marketing. Sometimes known as network marketing or referral marketing, MLM is an ideal business model for online marketers because of the ease of getting out the message about a new business and the low cost of advertising online. The problem with MLM is that it is also easy to mistake MLM for a pyramid scheme (also called a Ponzi). Many unscrupulous people will sell pyramid schemes as an MLM opportunity. What they are selling is basically just a money game. The big difference is that a genuine Multi-Level Marketing program has a worthwhile product that you are selling and money is made by referring other members to sell the same product. Pyramid schemes will usually have a worthless product or no product at all, and pays current members from new members joining. There are many legit MLM companies out there where millions have been made.

If you are new to the world of online marketing, I hope these short explanations will help you understand some of the terms the seasoned online marketer says or writes. If you’re a seasoned marketer, maybe you will try to introduce your business to the newbie with less of the jargon we seasoned marketers take for granted.

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by Chad William Hershey of ManifestYourFortune is founder of his own home based business,

How to Make Boring Businesses Exciting

Wouldn’t it be nice if everyone got as excited about your company as you are?

Unfortunately some businesses just aren’t very sexy; in fact, some businesses are downright boring. As a consequence, companies that sell commodity products and routine services tend to rely on presentations that load-up on features, specifications, and statistics that may be relevant to anal-retentive types, but hardly compelling to the vast majority of your audience.
There is no reason why every company can’t deliver an exciting image to its audience; one that generates the kind of buzz and excitement usually associated with companies like Apple, Victoria’s Secret, Benetton, Absolut Vodka, and Sony.
It may seem impossible to produce a whole lot of steam for things like sand paper, accounting services, and facial tissue, but thanks to the Web and it’s extraordinary ability to deliver multimedia content, even the most mundane offerings can get hearts racing and the blogosphere blogging.
Emotional Experiences Connect
Let’s take facial tissue as an example; it is one of the most common, boring everyday products you can imagine. There is just not much you can do to sell this stuff other than telling people yours is softer and cheaper than the other guys, but then the other guy is saying the same thing; the result, consumers buy whatever is on sale. But wait, the clever fellows at Kimberly-Clark instituted a brilliant website campaign for their facial tissue, called “Kleenex - let it out.”
The campaign zeros in on the emotional experience associated with why people use facial tissue: to wipe away tears of joy or sadness or maybe to clean-up cute little runny noses - in each case the result of some moving event.
Tapping into this emotional association is key to the Kleenex campaign and key to your new thinking on how to make your boring stuff, exciting.
Video - The Best Way To Tell A Story
The Kleenex campaign features prominent videos of articulate people telling their personal stories, all resulting in the need to use a facial tissue.
A pregnant woman discusses the emotional impact of having a child and as her eyes begin to tear, the interviewer hands her a Kleenex. A second video features another well-spoken woman talking about her return to New Orleans after the devastation of hurricane Katrina. Again as the woman becomes emotional and begins to cry, the interviewer hands her a tissue. Nothing more needs to be said, this is very powerful story telling that connects to the audience and delivers an image of the brand as caring and sensitive; the exact kind of impression the company wants to portray.

Even companies that aren’t exactly dead-from-the-neck-up boring can benefit from this approach. The Home Depot ran a series of advertisements with a husband showing his wife a series of power tools that he wanted. Rather than try to convince his wife, and by association all the wives in the audience, that he needs another expensive toy, the husband points to each tool and states, “this is your new shelving unit” and “this one is your new kitchen” - a far more dramatic and effective way to make the case for a new purchase.
You can deliver the same kind of powerful marketing messages for your own company by presenting Web-based videos that follow a few very simple guidelines.
Six Steps To Turn Boring Into Exciting
1. Use People to Sell People
There is no substitute for people. Human beings are capable of communicating with an enormous degree of nuance and subtlety, using voice, expression, body language, and gesture; no animation, avatar, or artificial substitute can take the place of a real person for communicating meaningful, memorable marketing messages.
With relatively easy-to-use production tools anyone can create a video, but not necessarily one that delivers the message or image that your company wants to present. We have seen far too many poor quality efforts both on the Web and even on local television, where company presidents with bad haircuts and ill-fitting suits, uttering nonsense-riddled scripts in zombie-like performances expose themselves to audiences expecting more, much more.
Skilled performers communicate in very subtle ways to an audience, and only the well-practiced professional has the experience and capability to deliver the intended experience. The cost of saving monëy by doing-it-yourself or with amateurs can result in delivering an unintended message that may undermine the impression and image you are trying to create.
2. Perception Is Reality - Use Scripted Professionals
You will notice that I described the women in the facial tissue videos as articulate. Now I cannot tell you if these women were actors or not, or that their powerful presentations were scripted, but if I had to guess, I would say these very effective videos were about as carefully produced and constructed as the latest episode of ‘Survivor’ that by no means makes them any less effective.
The point here is that perception is reality, and the professional filmmaker knows how to tell a story and communicate a message; and that is not the same thing as being able to turn on a video camera.
3. Tell A Memorable Story
When we talk about companies telling their story, it is important to distinguish between the company’s history and the emotional experiences generated by the product or service.
Company histories can make for interesting videos and can produce a sense of trust associated with being in business for a considerable length of time, but that sort of presentation does not speak to the underlying emotional and psychological factors that actually trigger a sale.
It is difficult but imperative that businesses understand that marketing is not about you, or even the product or service, it’s about the audience.
Like the Kleenex videos and the Home Depot commercials, every product and service that is purchased from your company represents an experience, a story that relates to your audience’s aspirations and needs. It is the audience’s story that demonstrates credibility, clarifies purpose, penetrates memory, and makes the message compelling.
4. Create An Emotional Experience
The vast majority of decisions we make are colored by the emotional relevance associated with those decisions. No doubt rational factors figure into our decision-making process, but the pivotal factors that attract the use of one product over another are emotional.
If you’re not connecting to your audience on an emotional level, then you are left with a commodity that can only be sold on price and features, and unless you’re a monopoly, there will always be some competitor willing to offër your customers more for less.
When presenting your product or service it is important to tap into an emotional element that your audience can relate to as its key purchasing decision factor. When people purchase boring accounting services and software, what they’re really buying is an improved life style for their families. It really doesn’t matter what you sell, if you look hard enough, you can find the emotional benefit that should be the central element of your marketing message.
5. Create a Believable Relevant Personality
Part of the process of connecting with your audience is creating an appropriate personality for your company. Many corporations today believe in the cult of management personality but this is a dangerous game. Your company needs a personality of it’s own, one that is distinctive and that will stand alone and not be dependent on senior management’s ego and self-promotion.
Web-video marketing campaigns provide a vehicle that allows companies to create appropriate personalities that engage, inform and entertain your audience in ways that establish your identity and create the basis for a prosperous business relationship.
Clever marketing can create a corporate personality but it is imperative that you follow through and deliver that personality in all aspects of your relationship with your audience. Producing a campaign that promises one thing and a website, staff, and product that delivers another is one of the easiest ways to alienate customers.
6. Deliver A Critical Hot Button Moment
Web-video presentations need to focus on single issues that are driven home by the addition of a hot button moment or punch line. Remember you are telling your audience a story that needs a beginning, middle and end. That story should build to climax and deliver the point in a single memorable moment.
The era of point förm slide presentations is dead, along with the laundry líst of benefits approach.
Creativity, personality, and the ability to communication and develop an emotional connection to your audience through the use of Web-video campaigns has the potential to turn even the most lackluster company into a vibrant and exciting marketing business.

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by Jerry Bader is Senior Partner at MRPwebmedia,

The Three Worst Marketing Mistakes You Can Make

Marketing is what we do that puts us in a position to make a sale. Good marketing makes selling easier. Bad marketing may make selling impossible.

We market to strangers so some of them will raise their hand with at least potential interest in what we have on offer.
We market to our clients and customers in order to move them up to the next level of products or services.

(continued from front…)

Most of us put a lot of time, money, and effort into marketing. For must of us it is the key activity we use to differentiate ourselves from our competitors.
But when we don’t deliver on the promises we make in our marketing we unleash the deadly 3/33 viruses on ourselves.
The 3/33 virus will destroy the marketing we have done in the past and it will make it very difficult to successfully market - at least to some prospects - in the future. And for the most part the 3/33 virus is a do-it-to-yourself process.
The 3/33 virus is word of mouth marketing on steroids - in reverse. Here’s how it works.
When you fulfill a promise, deliver excellent service, come in under budget, and save your customer more money than you said you would - they might tell 3 people. And that usually is because you asked them for referrals.
But if you screw up, don’t do what you said you would do, or fail to deliver in any way - in your customer’s mind - they will tell at least 33 people. This can be disaster.
You know I am speaking the truth. Remember the last time you got poor service in a restaurant and how many people you went out of your way to tell about it?
Here are three ways to guarantee that all the marketing you’ve done will backfire on you.
Don’t Do What You Said You’d Do In 2006 I met the author of a marketing book at the Search Engine Strategies event in New York City. I had been receiving his email newsletter and had heard a few things about the book. A table where he could autograph books had been set up for him at the Search Engine Strategies meeting. When there was no one around I approached him and found him to be a very insightful person, someone whose book would probably be of value to our readers.
He offered to send me a review copy and I thanked him. After the event I emailed him a note with my mailing address. I never received the book. I received several emails to the address I had given him, but they were solicitations sent to everyone he’d come across at the search engine event.
I don’t know if he never intended to follow up with his promise, or if he turner it over to someone else, or what. The bottom line is that I will never have anything positive to say about him, his organization, or his book. That can’t be what this marketer had in mind when he went to the time, trouble, and energy to come to New York.
Disappear With Your Customer’s Money The Internet makes it possible to hire people you will never see to do something you can not do and really have no way of knowing it will work until it’s too late, and pay them via your PayPal account before they’ve even begun to do the work.
I have done this several times without incident. Recently however I hired someone, on the strength of another person’s recommendation, who kept my money and disappeared. He had promised to do the work within 48 hours of receiving my payment. But instead I heard nothing from him for six weeks, at which point he contacted me to see if there was some way to make up for his failure to follow through.
I was astounded, but since I’d already paid him I asked him to do something that was worth less than half of what he’d already been paid. Hey, we all deserve a second chance. What happened? Nothing, I never heard from him again.
It’s hard to say if I would have ever needed his services in the future anyway - so it was just a tedious time consuming event for me, getting someone else to do the job and so forth. But what did it do to the relationship I had had with the person who recommended him?
This was someone I trusted. Now I have to think twice about anything he has to sell me. And I am not going to tell my friends to do business with him in the future. Why would I take the chance he will recommend something or someone whose lack of performance comes back to bite me?
Embarrass Your Boss Everybody’s got to serve somebody was a line in one of Bob Dylan’s songs. So no matter who you are or the position you have in your outfit - you do have a boss, maybe many of them.
Prior to events where I am registered as part of the media horde, I receive a stream of emails from companies that are making presentations or have exhibits there. A week before the 2007 Search Engine Strategies meeting in New York I received an interview request from the PR firm representing an organization I wanted to learn more about.
Actually I received three emails from them, each with open time slots, so I could chose one of the remaining times for the interview.
This is the way it’s always done. By the time I get to the site I have several one on one interviews set up with people whose message, I think, will be of value to our readers. So I emailed my choice of day and time, from one of the remaining time slots.
In this case however, the PR person never go back to me. How was that possible, that was his job?
I was curious about the lack of follow up, from a PR person no less, so I printed out the email I’d sent and took it along with me to the meeting.
On the second day of the search engine conference I scoured the exhibit halls and eventually found the person I had wanted to interview. I still wanted to talk with him if we could work out the time.
You can imagine his response to my story and the copy of my email when I presented it to him.
You can also guess the fate of the PR firm who had mishandled their account. It seems I was not the only person affected by this - one of whom was an industry leader the boss really wanted to meet.
So, who’s your boss? Whose opinions are important to you? Who do you serve? Are you doing everything you can and more to make sure you aren’t disappointing or embarrassing them?
How can you be sure to avoid the three worst marketing mistakes? Only make promises you can keep, and keep the ones you make. It’s as simple as that.

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By Wayne Messick

How to Compete with the Big Boys

Every business needs to do everything it can to stand out from the crowd, to differentiate itself from the competition. This is a major challenge for companies that sell substantially the same thing as their competitors.

The average business does not have the resources of a multinational corporation that often uses its substantial marketing muscle to buy market share or to drive competition out of the marketplace. Big business also uses its deep pockets to flood various media with advertising, making them a pervasive presence.
The Web has always been an egalitarian environment where smaller companies could present themselves using the same techniques as the big boys, and if these companies did it well they could stand side-by-side with their competitive behemoths.
One thing that small and medium sized businesses should take some comfort in is that many large corporations are notoriously poorly run, relying on brawn rather than brain to get the job done. Many survive because over time they have acquired huge resources, become oligopolies, or they use predatory marketing practices to stifle competition.
As the Web becomes more and more a multimedia environment, corporations are starting to use their financial resources, and inventory of commercial assets and programming (not to be confused with computer programming), to deliver their marketing messages. The question is can smaller businesses compete, and if so, how?
Slipstream Marketing
Dr. Max Sutherland, a Marketing Psychologist and Professor at Bond University, has written about a concept he refers to as ’slipstreaming.’ Anyone who is familiar with motor racing or even bicycle racing understands that slipstreaming is a drafting method where a racer tucks behind a front-running rival reducing wind resistance and saving fuel and energy, and with a quick move, the challenger can slingshot past the race leader.
The clever implementation of slipstream style marketing campaigns can allow you to blow by your competition by using the momentum of well-known and instantly recognizable campaigns.

Slipstreaming references a collective audience memory, a kind of shared consciousness. Skillful execution draws ínstant recognition and an “Oh I Get It!” reaction without a lot of wasted setup or groundwork.
“Give Me The Same Thing, But Different!”
The key of course is how you make your version different. What’s the twist? Blake Snyder, a Hollywood screenwriter and author, writes about entertainment executives’ constant refrain, “Get me the same thing, but different.” What Snyder has learned and what he preaches is that movie moguls understand it’s easier to get people to go to a movie they understand and that was already a success, but the trick is making the new version different, that is different but the same.
If you think slipstreaming is an easy way to be creative you’re wrong. Being different but the same is not as simple as it sounds, but success can depend on it. Done poorly slipstreaming comes off as lame and imitative, but done correctly you appear clever and cutting-edge, and more importantly you deliver the marketing message in a way your audience will remember.
There are an endless variety of things you can slipstream: personalities, icons, slogans, music, advertisements, news events, pop culture phenomena, movies, television shows, commercials, and sporting events.
Personalities
One of our favorite personality slipstreaming techniques is the use of voice-over. It can be implemented as part of a video campaign or as a stand-alone feature. We have used sound-alike actors to portray Rod Serling, Sam Elliot, Steve Irwin, Paul Winfield, Tom Brokaw, and many others.
What makes this approach so valuable is that most people will relate to the voice as someone they know, or are familiar with, but not immediately recognize.
This method captures people’s attention with the familiar sound of a famous voice but without the cost of hiring the celebrity. Often the voice does not even have to be that close to the original, it’s the cadence, delivery, tone, and scrípt that makes people sit-up and take notice.
Cutting through the jungle of advertising noise is a challenge for everyone in business and this technique is a very effective method of getting heard and being remembered.
Television Shows
Another slipstream technique we’ve used is to play upon the audience’s knowledge and familiarity with certain television shows. We have created Web-videos, written scrípts, added dialogue and composed music that reminds people of the old ‘Twilight Zone’ series and the popular A&E show, ‘City Confidential.’
Commercials
One of our most successful Web-promotion campaigns was the ‘Multimedia Versus SEO Campaign’ where we took advantage of the well know Macintosh Versus PC television commercials. Nobödy needed an explanation or setup to understand what was going on in the commercials. We basically slipstreamed Apple’s television campaign.
Slogans
Slogans are another resource for slipstreaming and if you think only small companies slipstream, think again. The A&E Network used the slogan “Time Well Spent” for many years, while The Comedy Network slipstreamed it with their own twisted version “Time Well Wasted” - the same thing, but different.
Music
With the popularity of Hip Hop music, the milk marketing board developed a series of commercials with dairy farmers rapping to a catchy Hip Hop tune well prancing around their farm animals. Hip Hop was also slipstreamed by Smirnoff in their Raw Tea campaign and ‘Tea Partay’ viral video.
Pop Culture
With the popularity of poker and the World Poker Tour, we developed a Mike Sexton style character, host of the television show, for one of our projects. We’ve even created nostalgia radio-style audio pitches that hark back to the olden age of radio plays.
Movies
We created an entire campaign for a client based on the idea, “Life Deserves A Sound Track” where everyday situations were described in dramatic style with familiar voice-over announcers, which was our take on Will Ferrell’s hit movie ‘Stranger Than Fiction.’
Sports
We’ve created presentations using the personas of famous sports figures like Hall of Fame pitcher and broadcaster Dizzy Dean and Mel Allan. We created scenarios and scrípts using the voices and personas of World Champion racecar driver Jackie Stewart and one crazy scrípt fashioned in the style of college basketball analyst Dick Vitale.
Conclusion
As you can see from these examples, there are an endless number of ways to take advantage of the public’s shared experience. So the next time you need to come up with a new Web marketing campaign for your company, think like a Hollywood mogul: Come Up With Something That’s The Same, But Different.

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By Jerry Bader