B2B/B2C online strategy and enterprise eBusiness blog

MediaBuyerPlanner reports ”Only about 55 percent of search marketers integrate their search efforts with offline marketing efforts; the other 45 percent make no effort at integrating SEM (Search Engine Marketing) with offline initiatives, according to a new study by iProspect and JupiterResearch.”

You may have an SEM management gap

The above article claims budgetary and resource concerns. I think the bigger picture is one of the following scenarios that many marketing organizations face:

1. Marketing, being resourced constrained, probably pawns this off as an “IT project” because it involves technology.
2. Marketing has assigned SEM efforts to a vendor specializing in SEM and no other marketing initiatives.

Scenario #1: SEM lives in IT

I can understand why SEM has traditionally been an “IT responsibility” because SEM in large part, is still a rather large mystery to marketers. They don’t understand the rules of the game and the execution of your organization’s SEM campaigns requires a fundamental knowledge of your website and the visitors of your website. It’s commonplace that a marketing communications department, who handles traditional print and television advertising, may not be the resident experts on web strategy and design. It’s easy to pass SEM off to IT — because they handle “the technical stuff.”

Scenario #2: SEM execution lives with an outside firm

There are many companies providing SEM services and not surprisingly, these companies are technical in nature and not traditional direct-marketers. Those that are direct marketers are generally small and have a localized client base, making it hard for them to penetrate the mold of Fortune 500 companies. Those that are technical may have a great technology to sell, but lack the marketing savviness of a direct marketing firm to truly bring SEM the return on investment it demands — resulting in poorly performing SEM campaigns. This leads to the disconnect in online and offline marketing mentioned in the above MediaBuyerPlanner report.

How do you close the SEM knowledge gap? Who should manage SEM?

SEM “belongs” in marketing and should be on the radar of anyone executing any outbound marketing and awareness campaigns (email, direct mail, or otherwise). “Belonging in marketing” and “being executed by marketing” are two different things. From marketing communications, to product marketing managers, to channel marketing, each group has their own functional needs/goals for SEM. Establishing a governing body to ensure the proper SEM techniques and optimization are in place is recommended — but simultaneously avoiding the bureaucracy that’s often accompanied by “governing committees.”

A good place? The web experience/usability group within your organization. SEM may be funded by marketing while the governing body and “gatekeeper” for SEM can be facilitated through the people who know your site inside and out and intimately understand the experience an end-user desires when arriving at the landing pages on your site via an ad. After all, not much ends up on the site that doesn’t pass the approval of this group. Any campaigns directing traffic to the site are right up the alley of a usability professional.

I came across IntenseDebate.com today and am extremely impressed as well as excited about this new service. The service provides blog owners the ability to install a plug-in on their blog which will centralize the storage of blog commenting, streamline comment threading, improve comment moderation, and encourage additional posting.

The problem I run into a lot when reading blogs is while I’d like to take the time to comment, I’m busy, and don’t often want to create a new account to post a simply reply. Plus, when posting in an established community and without “street cred”, it’s hard to feel like you’re adding value to a conversation if you’ve never posted before.

IntenseDebate.com changes this. As an end-user, I now have a centralized account and any blog that uses IntenseDebate.com for their commenting system, I can automatically comment and my profile on IntenseDebate.com will be shown, as well as other posts on other blogs I’ve made via my IntenseDebate.com account. It’s really quite impressive.

I’ll post a few quick comments below to display how it works.

Sigh. This post claims that branding is irrelevant/dead thanks to search engines and how search is transforming the way in which people research and buy products.

Huh?

I couldn’t disagree more. You can’t honestly tell me that Lamborghini, BMW, Lincoln, and Hyundai (just to name a few random automotive brands) are all on equal playing fields when a consumer searches for “car” on Google. 

The post goes on to talk about the power of SEO and why SEO is not dead. SEO is most certainly not dead and should make for a critical component in your online strategy. His point in trying to prove why SEO is not dead is muddied by the claims of “branding being dead.” Brands don’t matter in certain categories (probably because there’s no clear category leader), but certainly not across the board.

Proper SEO can elevate your brand to the top of the listing for non-branded searches.

They key is creating brand awareness (through advertising, promotion, PR, etc. outside of search engines) and dominating on branded AND non-branded searches for your category. This is done by juggling your SEO work with your SEM campaigns to find the “sweet spot” so SEM can pick up the slack where you lag behind in SEO. Branding then goes onto heavily influence clicks on search engine results.

This type of tunnel-vision thinking is why “online” is still broadly viewed as an IT function.

Flat-out comments like this show the still “techy” and misguided view of some Internet strategists and how marketing and “tech” still quite aren’t aligned — even on established sites such as searchenginewatch.com. Any marketer worth their salt should understand that brands can drive search results. When industry publications and commentary throw out claims like this, it’s difficult to create alignment with a marketing department — especially when marketing should “own” (or at least have visibility to) SEO and SEM strategy.

It’s fairly easy to cost-effectively monitor your brand names and trademarked terms (and anything else you’d like to keep tabs on) using Google’s Blog search RSS feeds (and several other aggregator service RSS feeds). When you don’t have the funds (or a low volume of online/blog conversations pertaining to your brand) for a service like BuzzLogic or BuzzMetrics, it’s about as “grass roots” as you can get.

But what if you want to automatically monitor changes to your competitors’ websites that don’t have feeds built into them?

Page2RSS is the answer.

Page2RSS is a free service which creates an RSS feed out of any URL you enter into the site. Their free service creates a cached version of the page every 4 hours. Simply subscribe to the RSS feed and off you go — be the first to know when your competitors update their homepage, product pages within their sites, and so on.

In a tough economy, advertising dollars are typically the first to go. On the flip side, in a flourishing economy, advertising dollars seem to be readily available without needing much justification or proof that the advertising will pay off. Why is this?

Many advertisers have no methodology for measuring the effectiveness of their ad campaigns. In a flourishing economy, taking risks with a low probability for success is often encouraged in hopes of the big pay-off. In a tough economy, investing in anything (advertising, R&D, etc.) will require a great deal of scrutiny.

At SES NY in ‘06 I attended an invite-only dinner with WebTrends with a group of about a dozen online marketers — some existing clients of WebTrends and some were potential clients they were wining and dining. One of the dinner guests I sat next to was Rex Briggs, co-author of What Sticks.

For anyone who thinks “advertising cannot be measured,” I would recommend reading this book. It covers concepts that online marketers should hold close to their hearts: Test, Learn, Deploy, Repeat. Many traditional marketers are used to deploying large budgets on print and TV advertising with no plan or budget to measure the effectiveness of the ad spend. They excel at developing the creative, but fail miserably when it comes to answering the simple question of “Did it work?” 

In the online world, measuring ad spend becomes somewhat easier with the various tracking technologies (particularly if you sell online). If you can definitively prove how advertising positively impacts sales (directly or indirectly), then you’ll most likely see your ad budgets remain flat in a tough economy, but not entirely eliminated like some marketers are experiencing this year.

In an attempt to solicit feedback, Scion commits an end-user faux pas which drives me nuts. In a previous post, I showcased a similar end-user violation by Men’s Health.

Website accessibility is no different than in-store accessibility within a retail environment. Would you design your store aisles and product shelving so only people that were 5′10″ or shorter could fit into the aisles? Of course not. Even if the majority of your customers may be 5′10″ or shorter and only a small percentage must duck and maneuver their way through crammed aisles, this small percentage are being turned away for really no reason other than poor planning. There is no excuse for this type of website accessibility limitation because it’s not a bug — it was literally a decision made to specifically not develop a survey (of all things) to be accessible to everybody.

When working on the bleeding edge of technology with ajax and dealing with the browser-specific intricacies of javascript (among many other challenges of a web 2.0 implementation with an older end-user demographic), we spend a large percentage of our time in the QA stage testing features of Levolor.com across operating systems and web browsers. From Windows 2000 running “vintage” versions of IE6 to Mac OS X running Safari 3, Levolor.com is very accessible.

We’re human and do admit to making mistakes — and sometimes the capabilities of an older browser simply cannot support web 2.0 functionality — but at the same time go out of our way to ensure an optimal experience for all of our visitors from accessibility to usability. Popular brands like Scion need to embrace similar strategies for all online touch-points.

It’s interesting reading about large consumer brands and their various methodologies for consumer research as it relates to new product development. In the consumables business, P&G is the heavyweight and is the pinnacle of research with their expertise in identifying the products that resonate with consumers. They also have manufacturing and distribution dialed in which makes them the “ideal” that many manufacturing-driven organizations aspire to be like.

Then there’s Apple. Their products are generally always innovative and meet some consumer unmet need so well that people literally fall in love with their brand and products they pump out each and every year. Yes, there have been some duds (the Cube is one that comes to mind), but it doesn’t happen often.

To research or not to research?
In a recent article from Fortune, Steve Jobs is quoted:

“We do no market research. We don’t hire consultants. The only consultants I’ve ever hired in my 10 years is one firm to analyze Gateway’s retail strategy so I would not make some of the same mistakes they made [when launching Apple's retail stores]. But we never hire consultants, per se. We just want to make great products.”

I found this to be fascinating. How can one of the most popular and successful consumer brands not perform any consumer research? Then I read the following quote:

“It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.

So you can’t go out and ask people, you know, what the next big [thing.] There’s a great quote by Henry Ford, right? He said, ‘If I’d have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have told me “A faster horse.” ‘ “

Keep it simple, stupid
When one sits back and thinks about it, Apple really makes products people want. There’s no real convincing that needs to happen as to why they they need an iPhone or iPod — people just get it. The features offered on Apple’s products are such “no brainers” that it’s an obvious purchase the consumer wants…or rather, needs to make.

All Apple really needs to do with virtually any of its products is build awareness (which they are excellent at doing) and let the product do the work. They don’t have ads or commercials explaining why a “touch screen” iPhone is better than a standard cell phone. They simply show the sexy design, a few things that it can do, and people are hooked — they just get it.

What if you can’t keep it simple?
When your product can’t do this and you find yourself listing feature/benefit statements in every piece of marketing collateral, you know you’ve got an uphill battle ahead of you. Find that one thing that if a consumer sees it, they’ll just get it and be sold on your product.

So, let’s go out and quit doing research, right?
Apple’s product portfolio is about 30 products (which is incredible for a $30 billion company), so they can be very focused on things they are good at. Other companies do not have such luxuries and simply do not have the bandwidth to be consumer experts in every single product line.

Usability studies for your website
The same can be said for websites, too. Sometimes, while online marketers and designers have the best intentions for site design, it does need to be tested and researched outside “the four walls” of the company to get real-world feedback. As sites scale, it’s hard to keep your head wrapped around every single page, link, and graphic on the site. This is where usability studies come into play.

Usability studies are great for two reasons:

1. They expose the huge gaps or even little intricacies that you may have overseen during the development stages. Better to capture these gaps now and fix them before rolling out features on a wide scale.
2. Sometimes you need the validation from consumers about satisfaction ratings on the site — often a point that needs to be used in a supporting argument for convincing upper management or potential customers that the site design, user interface, and/or information architecture is favored by consumers.

Sometimes you need consumer insights and market research to “sell” your ideas internally
Apple has the luxury of a CEO that understands the art behind product development and views things from a consumer standpoint. But it looks like he can also squash a project in its tracks without any consumer insights — making a new product launch vulnerable to his own opinions. For the most part, Apple has been very successful with this model.

In other businesses, this is often not the case, and a website can be driven in a direction that can be misguided by upper management who may not “get” web design, navigation, and information architecture. Usability studies and consumer insights can be a powerful tool for not only consumers, but for you when “selling” the site internally.

In this era of Google-dominated web applications, it’s a rare find when another competitive service by a much more established company is actually better than Google’s. My wife and I are AAA members. AAA provides a service in which they will map out a road trip for your travel needs. This service is called a “TripTik.” Historically, this has been a service that you call AAA for and they send you a bound, printed copy of your driving plan, like this:

Like any company adjusting to modern times, AAA is moving many of their services to their website at AAA.com. This includes the TripTik service (you can still order a printed copy!).

AAA TripTik vs. Google Maps
One thing I do give Google Maps is the fast, convenient nature of their mapping tool — which is great for short trips and quick directions to that new restaurant or store in your area that you want to check out. For road trips, however, it falls short of the robustness of AAA’s TripTik service.

Google’s UI Advantage:
This post wouldn’t be complete without some discussion on usability and user interface. Google makes it extremely easy to quickly type in your start and end destination. Simply enter in the following:

minneapolis, mn to chicago, il

And voila! Your map is created.

AAA’s UI Disadvantages
On AAA.com’s TripTik, you have to first find the “Internet TripTik” link (small, fairly unnoticeable button…see it? It’s under the “Gas prices near you” tool on the bottom right-hand side of their homepage.):

There is no easy URL to remember like there is for Google Maps (maps.google.com). If there is one, they don’t advertise it, which is a bummer. A simple http://triptik.aaa.com that redirected to the full URL would work wonders! Here’s their full URL:

http://ww1.aaa.com/scripts/WebObjects.dll/AAAOnline.woa/2004?

association=aaa&poiKey=259&club=111&page=ITTServices&

sessionRedirect=1198155291293

Next, there’s the interface for entering your “start” and “end” destinations. This is also another usability issue compared to Google Maps in that you are required to type in your city separately from the state (you have to choose the state from a drop-down menu). This is another reason why Google Maps is better than AAA for “quick” directions & maps. It’s much easier to quickly enter a “start” and “end” destination within Google Maps: Type in maps.google.com, page loads instantly, type in “from city, state to city, state” and you’re done. The extra clicks and effort to fill in the AAA TripTik do not make it a viable tool for extremely easy and quick data entry.

AAA’s advantage over Google
The meat of the TripTik service is its ability to map out detailed driving directions, including lodging information, notices on when to expect heavy traffic (when traveling during rush hour through various cities), and road construction details. These are all areas where Google Maps does not provide any guidance.

Additionally, the “printable” version of AAA’s TripTik provides a nicely-formatted PDF specifically designed to be printed on your home computer. Google Maps on the other hand will print like any normal web page would — adding page breaks where it’s most inconvenient. AAA’s TripTik PDF’s have directions in logical chunks so that it’s easy to follow on your road trip. Take a look at the screen shots:

(The yellow boxes indicate road contruction. Also notice the rush hour notification at the bottom of map #2)

AAA Internet TripTik trumps Google Maps for road trips…but not for quick, local trips
With a few minor changes, AAA could actually be a contender with Google Maps for quick, local directions and trips. Longer distances, where it’s important to know where lodging is available, where road construction is, etc. and it’s an excellent tool. I’m willing to look past the usability nuances for the much more detailed information for extended road trips.

Evaluate the usability on your website
Are there any areas like this on your website? Would a simple, easy-to-remember URL benefit your consumers or customers so they can quickly arrive at a tool they use most often (i.e. maps.google.com)? Or do you force them to navigate through your site to find the tools they need?

Subtle changes can go a long way in improving your site’s usability and customer satisfaction. It’s always good to solicit feedback from your web users and do frequent competitive analysis of “the other guys’” sites.

As the blogosphere ogles at the “success” of the “Elf Yourself” campaign, I find myself wondering if the old cliché “there’s no such thing as bad press” is true. While this particular campaign has been positive for Office Max, will it (ever) contribute to the bottom line? Or does this campaign simply go down in the books as “fun” and win an award?

The “Elf Yourself Campaign
Put together by Officemax, here’s the comparison of the ElfYourself.com demographics and Officemax.com demographics:

The above graph is for ElfYourself.com

The below graph is for Officemax.com:

Demographic & site analysis
Officemax.com hits the internet average for female and male visitors skewing slightly higher in the 55-64 and 65+ demographics. The ElfYourself.com campaign however is highly skewed towards 65+ females. We do see an obvious jump in traffic to OfficeMax.com during the same timeframe that the ElfYourself.com site has been running (presumably due to the coupons offered on ElfYourself.com when you click on the OfficeMax logo).

Will it translate to revenue? Time will tell.

PR firms focusing on “viral” vs. product
Switching gears from OfficeMax to my day job…it’s interesting seeing the campaign ideas we are pitched from marketing firms who aspire to earn our business. There’s an overwhelming amount of focus with online marketing, but in our industry (blinds & shades), is making it up the ranks of digg.com really going to translate to revenue? Many marketers think so and go out of their way to focus on links we receive due to PR, blog mentions, and diggs. Let’s step back for a moment and focus on digg.com’s demographics (courtesy of Quantcast):

Skewing higher than the internet average on the 25-34 Male demographic is not exactly the sweet spot for us when it comes to spending money on press that end up on digg.com.

Common sense in online marketing
Viral campaigns are fine — if they are targeted towards the demographic you are seeking as customers. digg.com is not a “mass consumer” demographic and should not be treated as one by marketers, but for some reason it is. This is nothing against digg. There comes a time when you have to ask yourself the “So, what?” question when a marketing pitches you a concept. With the viral success of the Elf Yourself campaign, be sure to ask yourself the “So, what?” question if a marketer comes to you with a great viral idea that does not pave a clear path to sales revenue.

Marketing campaigns can and should be measured in sales
Some marketing agencies are not held accountable to revenues generated from campaigns. Generating impressions is great, but if the campiagn cannot be tied directly to sales, then you should find a way to measure it. Every campaign we run is measured — sometimes we may not know the potential return (which is often the case testing new ideas/technologies surrounding promotions and marketing), so we measure it to see what the return is after the campaign is over with.

Your sales cycle may be a long sales cycle, so campaign “success” may not be measurable immediately — it could take weeks, months, or even years. If this is the case, plan your campaigns accordingly because the sales cycle should help drive the types of promotions that work for your business. OfficeMax seems to have played their cards right with the coupons/discounts on ElfYourself.com and the traffic spike to Officemax.com.

However, traffic spikes do not always equate to revenue — especially if the campaign is driving unqualified customers to your site. This is the one thing that many agencies fail to grasp in this new age of viral campaigns and del.icio.us, YouTube, and digg.com’s of the world.

I came across this article yesterday which presents very interesting findings relating to branding and search engine results. The proper combination of paid results and organic results has a positive impact on brand affinity, brand recall, and purchase intent.

This presents an interesting dilemma for those keywords that don’t convert well (i.e. “blinds”) but are high-volume in nature. Some terms are so generic that for folks in the market for the product, it can actually make sense to play in these areas for branding-related purposes.

A proper SEM strategy with channel partners and an SEO strategy for your own site now theoretically will not only help conversion rate, but the influence of your brand. Sometimes you can’t show up for every possible keyword that relates to your products, but through a combination of leveraging the breadth of sites that sell your products online (i.e. your channel partners) and your own SEM/SEO strategy, search has a significant potential to influence buyer preferences.

In essence, the more they see your brand for all keywords related to your product, the higher the probability they will associate your brand with those terms — and hopefully convert/purchase your products.