Dan Spellman ( My Two Cents )

Are You Talking To Me?

   

That is the question our customers are asking us.  Are we talking to them?  Are we relevant?  Too often we answer that question from yesterday’s perspective.  As we communicate with our customers we follow the traditional path.

    

But the path has changed.  Using yesterday’s marketing techniques is becoming less and less effective.  Certainly there are still a large number of customers who respond to this type of communication.  However, each new customer who enters the market place is a digital native.  They do not respond to the established marketing messages the same way.  They require a dialog.  Sometimes it is a dialog with us and other times it is a dialog with their peer group.  “They don’t care about your ad,” writes Sarah Perez, “they care about what their friends think.”

    

    

    

    

With the dramatic growth in social media, change is required to remain relevant.  Not only are the Generation Y customers utilizing blogs, message boards and RSS feeds, it is becoming more and more common for Boomers to join the online community.

    

So the question remains, are you shifting toward the new media in a meaningful way?  Or are you simply repackaging your message and running the risk of becoming obsolete?

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

    

    

    

Get Off The Dime

    

As a consumer, you are exposed to massive amounts of advertising every day.  You hear it on the radio as you drive to work.  You see it on billboards, on busses and on T-shirts.  You receive it in the mail, in your email and on your favorite websites.

      

      

Do you remember any of it?

      

      

Odds are that a majority of the marketing materials you see go unnoticed.  In the old economy, this equated to wasted marketing dollars by the companies who were trying to get your attention – trying to change your buying habits.  Some would argue that these costs are still present in the new (ecommerce) economy.

      

      

But I disagree.

      

      

In the old economy it took a substantial investment in time and money to create and place a billboard advertisement.  It is not easy (but it is definitely expensive) creating a television commercial.  Let’s face it, in the old economy you had to be careful and judicious with your marketing dollars.  Now, as marketers transition from the old economy to the new economy they bring with them these same practices.  They believe that taking measured and deliberate steps to create an online marketing campaign (on their site and in their emails) is a “best practice”.

      

      

But I disagree.

     

      

Online, life moves at a different speed.  If the people who view your web messaging don’t “hear it” they remain only consumers to you . . . and potentially become customers to your competition.

      

      

Change your message.  Change it often.  Use your web analytics tools to quickly identify which messages are being heard and which are not.  You now have the opportunity to refine your marketing strategy in real time.  Don’t wait to make a change.  Get off the dime.  Online, you must adapt in order to survive. 

      

      

“Learning is not compulsory . . . neither is survival.”

      

      

Until next time,

      

      

Dan

      

      

      

      

One Clear Voice

    

Being able to establish your place in the market is imperative for survival – but being able to define a brand that resonates with your customers is imperative for success.

    

“Corporate branding is a serious undertaking which entails more skills and activities than just an updated glossy marketing facade with empty jargon” explains Martin Roll from Venture Republic.  Brands must be able to create a “dialogue with an authentic voice.”

    

This ‘authentic voice’ is transmitted through your website.  Not only are you having daily conversations with your customers, but they, in turn, are having conversations about you.  Therefore, your brand messaging must be clear, consistent and relevant. 

    

         

    

    

Keeping a consistent message over time has proven to be difficult for many companies.  The Blake Project, a strategy consulting group, describes successful companies as those businesses that have a “rigorous attention to the brand’s position.”  Over time, however, that attention can wane and companies can stray from having a single, focused brand position.  “The next thing you know, you’re about to come down with a bad case of brand schizophrenia.” 

    

Once your brand lacks focus, you lose your ‘authentic voice’ and then, you lose your customer’s loyalty.

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

    

    

    

Unplugged

Ever been “off the grid”?  Sometimes it’s healthy to get a little R&R from the day to day activity on the net.

This last weekend I had the opportunity to “unplug”. Being the father of two Boy Scouts, I’ve spent a number of nights camping. Today, for instance, I just got back from an annual trip to Galena, IL.

For the last 54 years, on the last full weekend in April, over a thousand Boy Scouts make an annual trip take part in the Grant’s Pilgrimage Parade.  My kids have been in the parade a number of times and they have always had a great time.

While I had planned on blogging about building a powerful online brand, I’ve run out of time - perhaps next week.   Instead, I’ve seen the stars on a cold clear night, heard a wild turkey in the pre-dawn hours and eaten food cooked over an open fire . . . food prepared by boys that have been playing in the mud and haven’t properly washed their hands (this is why Moms don’t come on Boy Scout campouts).

Until next time,

Dan

Spreading The Word - Corporate Blogging

It is becoming more apparent that in order to manage the brand, companies need to be actively involved in social networking.  People are out on the net and they are talking about you.  The trick is to get your advocates (customers) talking about you.

   

One way to help facilitate this type of discussion is to start a corporate blog.  “More and more companies”, writes Mitch Joel, “are looking at the power of corporate blogs”.  In Joel’s latest post, he does a great job outlining the seven basic types of corporate blogs: 

   

·        Industry

·        Idea Storm

·        Individual

·        CEO

·        Departmental

·        Parody

·        Customer Service

   

But, as with anything you do, even this type of customer contact needs to serve a purpose.  If your readers (customers) don’t find your blog interesting, what good have you done?

    

Did you see Jake McGee’s post about the Graco blog?  In this post he outlined several key components of a successful corporate blog.  First and foremost it must have good content.  “The Graco blogging team clearly understands that they’re here to connect with parents,” writes McGee, “and what better way than to talk about parenting?”  Along with the content, the Graco blog  makes it easy for customers to interact and become involved in the conversation.  They keep the content fresh by enlisting a number of bloggers rather than relying upon a single individual.

    

Spreading the work load among several people certainly has its advantages.  However you need to enlist volunteers rather than draftees.  Otherwise you run the risk of being exposed as shown in this news excerpt from Barely Political.

    

    

    

         

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

    

    

    

Keeping It Simple (RSS)

Because of the nature of my work, I run across a large number of websites that I want to keep track of for future reference.  In fact, I have well over 100 site addresses tucked away in various folders in my “Favorites” file.  Within this collection of sites, there are a few that I reference on a regular basis.  But even with this smaller list, I still have a hard time keeping up with all the content posted each week.

    

By setting up an RSS feed for this smaller collection of sites, I can quickly scan the contents to see which blog posts I need to read.  RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and is a method for collecting and organizing web content from blogs, newspapers and websites.

   

In this edition of My Two Cents – 60 Second Web Update, I give a brief overview of RSS.  While you may or may not be familiar with these feeds, they are offered on a number of web sites that you visit regularly.  In fact, look to the right of this post and just below the daily cartoon you will see a square orange icon.  This is the RSS symbol.

    

    

    

Using an RSS feed to syndicate information is not just for blogs and podcasts – it is quickly becoming a standard ecommerce marketing tool.  “If you are interested in great electronics deals”, explains the Wal*Mart website, “you could subscribe to our Rollbacks feed for electronics.  Then whenever we roll back the price of an item, it is automatically added to the feed and it will show up when you view the feed, or it can show up as a short headline in your RSS reader that will link to the appropriate Walmart.com page.”

      

Take a look around your favorite sites and check for the RSS icon.  You’ll be surprised how often you’ll see it.  Best of all – it’s FREE. 

      

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

    

Return to Sender

After my last blog post ( How High Can You Bounce? ), I had a couple of people comment on the difference between a Landing Page Bounce and an Email Bounce. 

    

An email bounce is when your outbound marketing message is returned undeliverable.  The Email Experience Council (EEC) explains that “emails can bounce for more than 30 reasons:  the email address is incorrect or has been closed; the recipient’s mailbox is full, the mail server is down, or the system detects spam or offensive content.”

    

All of these “30 reasons” fall into two categories – a hard bounce and a soft bounce.  “A hard bounce” explains Brian Anderson, Director of Web Marketing for Staples’ Quill.com business division, “can be defined as anything to the right of the [at] sign and a soft bounce is to the left of the [at] sign.” 

    

In other words, a hard bounce is undeliverable due to an incorrect address or a mail box that no longer exists.    A soft bounce is a temporary problem usually due to either the mail server being down or the mail box being full.  Either way, you can resend a soft bounce but should not resend a hard bounce. 

    

Reagan Taylor, email marketing consultant, gives some guidance on how to address bounces and other email issues as a regular contributor to Sundeep Kapur’s blog, Email Yogi.  She has some good advice – you should check it out. 

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

    

    

How High Can You Bounce?

There are a number of web metrics you need to track in order to run a profitable web site - one of these is your Bounce Rate.  Avinash Kaushik has written about this metric a number of times and explains that “it is easy to understand, hard to mis-understand and can be applied to any of your efforts.”

    

In this post I’m launching my first edition of my "60 Second Update" video blog.  Here I’ll give a quick look at understanding your bounce rate and how to calculate it.

    

    

    

    

    

    

While you will definitely want to focus on your highest trafficked landing pages, Kaushik suggests also measuring this metric as it relates to your Referring URLs and Paid Search Terms.  By doing so, you will be able to identify “where you are wasting money and what content on your site needs revisiting.”

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

   

    

    

Turn Out The Lights

I don’t know if the lights went out in your house last Saturday night, but they went out in mine.  My wife had told me about Earth Hour earlier in the week.  I actually forgot about it until around 7:15 p.m. when I happened to be checking my Linkedin account and saw a question posted asking why Google had gone “black” for a period of time.  Conrad Warre posted an answer stating “Google turned black today as a gesture to raise awareness of a worldwide energy conservation [effort]”.

    

While Google acknowledges that simply turning their screen black does not actually save any energy, they “believe in doing [their] part to help combat climate change”.  “Further”, their web site states, “we think the ‘lights out’ idea’s individual-centered nature is something that millions of people worldwide can participate in.  In short, we really like it.  So we did something about it.”

    

It started last year when the World Wildlife Fund worked with the city of Sydney, Australia and convinced the Harbour Bridge and Opera House (along with millions of Sydney’s citizens) to go dark for an hour. 

     

Well, we turned out the lights and, to the initial complaints of our children, played board games by candle light. It turned out that everyone had a great time.  I won’t tell you that I’m the most environmentally conscientious person in Chicagoland, but I’m trying.

      

You can visit www.WorldWildlife.org/Climat to find out how you can make a difference throughout the year to fight climate change.

    

Until next time,

    

Dan

    

    

    

Driving Sales In Our Own Backyard

“The Internet”, says Kerry Miller, “has made it easier for even the smallest companies to go global by reaching new markets all over the world. But many companies continue to overlook the opportunities that the Web creates right in their own backyards.”

    

Last week, my blog post (¿Cómo se escribe “more sales”?) dealt with the opportunities available to web sites that choose to market to the Hispanic community.  A recent report from The Media Audit, a Houston based media survey firm, stated that the number of Hispanics shopping online has moved from only 27% five years ago, to over 41% today.  In fact, their data shows that over 23% of these shoppers make five or more purchases in a year and over 12% of them make an average of one purchase per month.

    

Knowing that Hispanics are the fastest growing group in the U.S. and that their online penetration is quickly increasing, you would think more companies would refine their messaging to target this group.  However, a study done last year by Common Sense Advisory, a Massachusetts based research firm, found that of 102 top U.S. retail web sites, only 18 of them contained Spanish-language content.  When contacted in Spanish regarding customer service issues, only half of these 18 sites responded in the same language.

    

If you’re concerned about your companies ability to handle translating your entire site into Spanish, don’t worry.  As long as you set appropriate expectations with these customers, you can translate your customer service pages and select emails first.  As your Spanish speaking customer base grows, you can increase the investment. 

    

You should take advantage of the fact that this segment of potential customers is extremely brand loyal and you have the opportunity to distinguish yourself from your competition by marketing to them in a culturally relevant way.  With a small investment in translation services and a select group of bi-lingual customer service representatives, you can establish yourself as the company of choice.

    

Until next time,

    

Dan