On Featuring Your URL in Your Print Ads

In considering call-to-action print ads and other print promotions meant to generate specific sales leads, which method of contact should be featured more prominently as a method of getting in touch with your sales team? Historically, a phone number was sufficient. Toll-Free phone numbers then lifted the burden of long distance charges from the customer. But the Internet not only takes the monetary burden off of the customer, but it also allows the customer to buy on their own time.

 

Which direction are we taking our customers? I’ve started noticing that I often read periodicals with the laptop nearby. I want to be sure to check out Web sites associated with the articles or ads that get my attention. Is the conversion rate for the advertisers better if they direct the target to their Web sites? Or are they better off posting a toll-free number – an almost sure-fire conversion to sale. Where do we want the conversion to sale to take place?

 

There’s an obvious mile-long list of conveniences to providing an e-commerce option for your customers. In addition to a 24-7 marketplace, there’s the abundance of information. But there’s a major drawback. The conversion rate is much lower for those users who have to go from the print ad to the Internet. At that point, they might get lost in your Web site. They might decide to shufle through their RSS feeds halfway through reading your product description and completely navigate away from your site.

 

Compare this to a Toll-Free number on your ad. The conversion rate is much higher due to the urgency of sale. The customer has already committed to the sale by picking up the phone — a much higher-committment action than browsing the company’s Web site (not to mention the fact that they will be talking directly with a salesperson). The downside is that, depending on the ad and the product, the number of users actually picking up the phone and calling are less than the number of users who will go to the Internet to learn about the product. So you lose the immediate conversion by taking them to a Web site, but the higher response rate might be enough to make up for stalled sales.

 

I’ve seen print ads that feature a very specific URL. http://mycompany.com/thisparticularoffer. This is one way to further qualify sales leads as usually the advertiser is leading the customer to a page about a specific bit of information as opposed to letting them browse the products. This will enhance conversion, and has a chance of also diminishing response-rate (as the URL may not be as easily remembered, typed incorrectly, etc.).

Happy New Year: What’s So Different than Last Year?

As I look at my inbox today, I’m realizing how differently I’m treating Marketing than I did at this time last year. 2006 saw drastic changes in Marketing. By this point, you’ve already done most, if not all, of your 2007 media planning. What did you do differently? Here are some of the most notable differences I’ve found in my job since this time in 2006.

• The obvious one should be first: More dollars are moving to e-media. As the Internet becomes the #1 place to locate products and services, marketers are following by allocating more and more of their budgets toward things like Web site improvements, banner ads, pay-per-click campaigns and Internet Directory Services (ThomasNet, GlobalSpec, etc.).
• The implementation and importance of web video. 2006 was the year for YouTube. At this time last year, I might have asked someone the question, “What video format should I offer to my users? Quicktime? RealPlayer? Maybe Windows Media Player?” At that point there would be a discussion over which media player or operating system the marketer should try to appease. Now the answer is a no brainer: FLASH. Flash-based movies have standardized themselves in an extraordinarily short amount of time.
• The death of print directory books. When I have kids who are too short to see out of the window, I can no longer count on them standing on a stack of green Thomas Directory books. The directory service, along with many others, have decided to completely cease the printing of their directories in an effort to move 100% of their user base online.
• Many engineers, by the time they have cracked open the latest issue of their favorite trade publication, have already read much of the news between its covers. Blogs have made news and information available at such lightning-quick pace that trade publications seem to now be simply covering the latest gossip on the blogs.

Best and Worst Ads of 2006

The Wall Street Journal has compiled a list of the Best (and Worst) Ads of ’06.

Among their best are:

• Careerbuilder.com’s monkey campaign,
• KFC’s interactive video commercials,
• Philips Norelco’s Bodygroom Concept,
• Apple Computer’s “I’m a Mac” Commercials,
• Sprint Nextel’s “Crime Deterrent” Ad

My personal favorite out of these is the Sprint Nextel “Crime Deterrent” ad. I still laugh every time I see it.

SEO Writing Changes the Rules of Branding

Considering Generic Branding for Web Visibility

No one can argue against the fact that the information age has strongly affected the places and styles of our advertising. From the up and down successes of pay-per-click advetising to the almost surreal ease it takes to create a web banner, any marketer in today’s world has been forced to accept the reality that people are looking to the web to find what they’re looking for. Marketers are learning to thusly shift their advertising. But there’s something that must go along with this shift that many marketers are missing. Our branding may have to shift as well.

It’s been historically couth to separate your product by calling it something different that what the competitors call their comparable product. The use of euphemistic language in this way has brought such terms as “high-performance-gear” to replace “sportswear.”

There are as many ways to advertise your brand online as the mind can imagine. From banner ads to pay-per-click to message-board guerilla marketing, putting your message out there is not a problem. Getting a qualified audience to your site, however, may not be as easy as it has been historically with print ads.

Imagine a print ad for our example above of “X-Corp. High-Performance Gear.” X-Corp. has painstakingly held the standard to not brand their product as “sportswear” for what may be valid reasons. They’d like to differentiate themselves from the competition and connotate something different in the audience’s mind than the traditional “sportswear” image. The problem is that in SEO marketing, you must consider the greatest common denominator: the search term of the masses. While there’s never a problem with using those euphemistic keywords in your SEO writing, if your brand uses a generic term, there will be much more legitimate content with basic, general keywords on your site. So in naming our products, we must consider that “sports wear” will be searched for many more times than “high performance gear.” By calling your product “sports wear,” instead of succumbing to the temptation to name your product something new and different, then you’ll be cashing in on organic search results by having more relevant content.