We’ve been slightly behind with our blog posting efforts but have hopes of getting back on track with some lighter posts (such as this one).  Our lack of posting is not because we’ve been slow or lazy but actually because we’ve been too busy (hopefully executing what we talk about on this blog).  We’ve got some exciting things in the works for 2009 and hope to use this as a venue to share our learnings for the good of all marketers.   For today’s post I’m just going to share a few examples I’ve seen in the last week of using the web to reach customers, develop brands, and build companies.

Reaching customers - We all know that there’s nothing like being bombarded with banners on websites.  Most of us have probably at this point tuned our eyes to not even take notice of banners - or any ads for that matter.  This past week Apple ran an incredibly unique ad on yahoo gaming page.  When I saw it earlier this week I probably loaded it about 5 times because it was so cool.  Unfortunately it’s down now but you can get the idea here (watch in high res for best results). 

Developing brands -  Seth Godin (marketing guru, author) hosted an event sponsored by American Express where they discussed several marketing topics with the founders of Facebook and Wikipedia.  The site in and of itself is a great example of a company (Amex) creating content in a way that strengthens their position as the preferred brand by business leaders and entrepreneurs.  That’s example #1.  Example #2 has to do with a hot new word in the web world: crowd-sourcing.  Jimmy Wales (of Wikipedia) shares the important point that crowd-sourcing is not all about getting FREE or cheap work out of people although many view it that way.  The real point is that there are a lot of people who enjoy being contributors on wikipedia, or submitting ads for a fast food burger, or designing a logo for a company and are willing to do so for free or cheap.  One of my friends recently used www.99designs.com to design their company logo.  He had nearly 100 designers submit logos in hopes of winning the $300 prize, and in the end he had a really great logo.  

Building their company - Wait, who is building their company in a recession?  Some business experts argue a downturn is a great time for solid companies to shore up and recruit the top talent (supply is greater than demand).  That’s exactly what Johnson Controls is seeking to do by launching a site called “ingenuity welcome” and creating a series of engineering puzzles that are actually quite fun (at least to the type of person they’re trying to recruit).

It encourages me to see that in the midst of an economic downturn we are seeing excellent examples of ingenuity.   While many pundits are predicting this to be the worst recession since the great depression I argue that a key difference in this recession will be an incredibly efficient and powerful medium (the web) that can continue to push markets to be efficient, companies to innovate, and ultimately drive us towards the upward trending part of the business cycle.

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Blogs seem to be all the rage these days.  Tens of thousands of new ones launch daily and the latest count from Technorati was at somewhere close to 70 Million blogs.  The bigger story, however, is the increasing influence blogs are starting to have on consumer behavior.  According to a recent study  while TV, e-mail, and radio continue to be major drivers of consumer buying behavior, blogging actually had an influence on 6.1% of purchasers (of electronics).

A conclusion from the researcher was as follows:

Marketers need to better understand the changing dynamics of the consumer media market and develop new marketing plans that integrate new media to replace the erosion of traditional media for influence to purchase. Marketers who can’t tap new media options for their influence to purchase will suffer a decline in advertising ROI.

So most marketers of course will read this information…and go start a blog!  DirecTv has recently released a set of ads featuring fictitious cable company executives in the board room discussing strategies to grow sales. If you haven’t caught them you can find the full series of ads here (all of which are funny) but my all time favorite pertains to this particular topic:

The sad part of the whole thing is that I bet there are a LOT of presentations very similar to this ad based on some executive reading the above quote and telling his team that they need to”go viral.”  I have actually sat through one or two of them.  But on the other end of the spectrum from the marketers who are trying to “blog it out” there does sit a good, effective, and time tested way of connecting with your customers via the web.  If you look back at the study I reference earlier you’ll notice that the single highest influence on consumer purchasing behavior was not TV, coupons, web ads, or retail promotion - it was word of mouth (with 42% saying it influenced their purchase). What does this mean for marketers?  Make a good product, communicate with your customers, build a relationship with your customers, and over time you can harness the most powerful marketing tool out there -your customers.

The web provides an incredible set of tools for connecting with and influencing potential buyers but as this ad points out, it must be part of an overall strategy to build long-term relationships with your customers.  Over the next few months we’ll be sharing what some of those strategies look like (including a discussion of paid blogging services and the power of youtube) but it will all be viewed in the context of an overall brand building strategy.  In the meantime, start to plot your next move for reaching the “suburban tweens”

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Forrester is projecting that internet sales will reach $204 Billion this year.  That’s a big number and growing in large part because the web has taken accountable, direct-to-consumer advertising to a new level.  While we previously used TV, radio, and print advertising to target general demographics (say 25-45 year old females) we are now able to use the web to target extremely specific demographics (someone doing a key word search for “weight loss supplement”).  Practically that means you may pay more money per impression BUT due to the fact that the advertising is specific and targeted (and efficient), you theoretically have the potential for higher ROI on your marketing dollars.

Sounds like the holy grail of advertising right?  Well, not exactly.  Just as we struggle to accurately measure and account for TV response calls (and consider unique callers, CS calls, junk calls, etc.) the web has also had its own difficulties.  You’d think that the powerful internet would at least be able to tell us how many people visited a site but as reported in the New York Times that is not always the case:

How many people visited Style.com, the online home of Vogue and W magazines, last month? Was it 421,000, or, more optimistically, 497,000? Or was the real number more than three times higher, perhaps 1.8 million?
The answer — which may be any, or none, of the above — is a critical one for Condé Nast, which owns the site, and for companies like Ralph Lauren, which pay to advertise there. Condé Nast’s internal count (1.8 million) was much higher than the tally by ComScore (421,000) or Nielsen/NetRatings (497,000), whose numbers are used to help set advertising rates, and the discrepancies have created a good deal of friction.

As a marketer, this may leave you befuddled but take heart.  As we’ve discussed on this blog before, the key to metrics based management is to define the metrics and then consistently track and manage to those metrics.  Here’s what that means for the web:

Get consistent and get accountable. As highlighted by the NYT you could run metrics reports for a website from three different platforms and get three different numbers for unique visitors.  How do you deal with this?  Get consistent by having a single tracking platform and get accountable by requiring your web providers to operate on your standards.  There are some excellent free options for this (Google Analytics, Index Tools) and even better paid alternatives (Omniture).  Figure out what meets your needs and then deploy it across your websites.  The beauty of these metrics platforms is that they can be deployed on both INTERNAL and EXTERNAL sites.  This is the only way to create a consistent, level, and accountable playing field so you really know what’s occurring on your websites.

Know what to track.  The first time you log into a platform like Google Analytics you might feel overwhelmed.  Visits, sources, keywords, adwords, pageviews…the list goes on.  Now if the goal for your site is to simply build brand awareness, then you’ll be looking at an entirely different set of criteria.  If your goal is commerce (which we assume it is) then figure out both your core metrics and supporting metrics.  One example of a good core metric is Revenue/Visit.  This takes both conversion (orders/visits) and AOV (average order value) into account and allows you to quickly see your overall trend for the web.

Tracking by media acquisition channel.  In the early days of the web there was a lot of easy money for DR Marketers.  Paid search and banner advertising were the hot new mediums and TV driven campaigns enjoyed exceptional performance as they already had great brand awareness.  Many marketers (including myself), didn’t know or didn’t care to really understand the full intricacies of their web business, so they’d rely on a service provider who would charge very low, or free, setup fees (DR marketers, often times to their demise, are really attracted to FREE),  in exchange for a percentage (sometimes as high as 30-50%) of every order.  This model works great if you have insanely high margins but it fundamentally doesn’t consider the internet as both an order taking medium and a customer acquisition channel.  The customer who comes to your website (or finds it via google) because they saw your product on TV should be completely separated from the customer who found your product advertised on a weight loss forum and clicked through to your site.  While paying 30% for the customer coming from the weight loss forum, it does NOT make sense to pay 30% for the customer who came to your site because they saw your TV ad which you already spent a lot of money on.  This may seem like a trivial point but it is absolutely critical that you distinguish your customers by media acquisition channel and not only by ordering channel. Pay close attention to your metrics but be sure to do so in a way that allows you to make this important distinction.

Test, Test, and then Test Again.  The internet provides quite possibly one of the inexpensive and accurate ways to conduct true A/B tests. When you test an A/B script at a call center you’re confronted with many potential variables (agent mix, training, compliance) but on the web you have the opportunity to normalize many of these variables and use consistent metrics to make comparisons.  Take advantage of it!  Don’t be afraid to test new offers, new creative, A/B site splits or e-mail splits and in the end roll those learning into your overall marketing strategy.

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