Situational Marketing

Mobile Marketing Is New Media

This past weekend, Charles Hudson attended the play conference in Berkeley, California. The session he attended was called "The Co-Evolution of Marketing and New Media" and his findings regarding mobile advertising leave us wondering when this type of marketing will take off.........

"the mobile advertising and marketing market is still not well-understood by folks who are not intimately involved in the space. Even among this panel of experienced ad folks, there were a lot of questions about how best to address the mobile opportunity and where the actual opportunity lies."

Even in the realm of video, developers are having quite a tough time trying to figure out how to integrate advertising into videos. Of course, that has more do to with the content that would be associated with these advertisements and not the technological development process.

So when is mobile marketing going to hit it big? The Mobile Brand Advertising report analyzes the still-developing marketing opportunities of the mobile medium and eMarketer projects that the global budget for mobile advertising will hit 3.5 billion by 2011. What this means is, mobile users will, undoubtedly, begin to receive a substantial increase in text mail ads over the next few years. Will they see this as interesting content or just spam?

 

Blog World Expo Caption Contest

It's too late to enter, but Southwest Airlines has completed a caption contest for the BlogWorldExpo.

Blog World Expo is going to be one of the biggest blog and social media events we've run across, and if you have the opportunity, you definitely should try to make it out there.

November 7-9 in Las Vegas.

Southwest is really the focus of this post, because they do so well what all marketers should be trying to do.  They integrate their marketing message across their entire enterprise.

Quick, what's the Southwest brand?  If you said fun, friendly service, then you've flown Southwest and watched their commercials.  Southwest,  a "discount" airline, is one of the few profitable airlines in the country.  Part of that is their business model, but part of it is their marketing.

From their television commercials to their billboards to their blog, Southwest promotes the freedom that flying is supposed to represent.  Though they compete on price, Southwest focuses on the experience of flying, which is directly impacted in large part by the people that work for them.

To Be Successful, Just Be Yourself?

One of my favorite small business gurus is John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing.  John covers a wide array of topics at his site, and has brought in a team of experts to cover even wider ground at the Blog Channel.

Today, on his own blog, John covers the question of coolness.  Small businesses, in their effort to compete, often try to pick up something new, something, cool, that will drive their name recognition ahead of their competition.  Using their speed and their ability to adapt, the small business owner hopes to "brand" themselves as cutting edge.  And it works - sometimes.

John has some words of advice:

In the end, the right look is simply a matter of discovering the most authentic look, and for that matter, feel, words and experience, for you. Regardless of how it might be perceived by some. If authentic is conservative, embrace it, if authentic is wild and edgy, go for it, if authentic is cheesy, go full on cheddar.

There are few things more painful to witness than someone trying to be something they are not. On the other hand, there is something very approachable about someone just being who and what they are - even if we don’t happen to view ourselves that way.

The problem with cool is that it's so elusive, and it's always changing. Look at clothes in the 80's, or the way kids wear their jeans low (Take pictures if you can - the better to embarrass them when they're older).  Companies have the same problem.  When they're cool, it often means they'll just be embarrassed later when someone brings up the past.

Remember that cool is anti-authority.  For some companies, this works.  For those that deliver solid services, cool isn't the brand you want.  Even HVAC dealers want to be seen as professional, and their product is all about cool!

So be yourself, just like your momma told you.  It may not be cool, but long term, it's better for you.

Email Matters!

It's a great title.  Denise Cox, who happens to write across the pond, writes a great e-mail marketing blog called Email Matters!  Aside from being catchy, it's a message of hopefulness that businesses and entrepreneurs involved in online marketing need to hear.

E-mail marketing works.  If you do it right.  So the post I wanted to showcase was on reasons to switch over your print newsletter to an e-mail newsletter.  It's a top ten list, but my highlights are:

5. Email newsletters are a top ROI tool for your website. In a previous post I noted Jakob Nielsen’s article saying newsletters offer good Return on investment (ROI) because they “let you maintain a relationship with your customers that lasts beyond their visits to your site. …. plus, they have one more benefit: they are the primary way to liberate your site from dependence on search engines.” (Email Insider provides lots of stats on email’s ROI.)

3. You’ll be able to easily and quickly test anything in your newsletter. The world of testing is your oyster with email – you can test subject lines, offers, calls to action, time and day of send to see what works best BEFORE you do your full send. (All about testing)

Yes, yes, we all like to complain about our e-mail, but for mostly secure, one-to-one and many-to many communication that includes a "paper trail" and a rolodex in one, email is still the most useful technology around.  It's good for strangers, friends, and colleagues and most of your audience uses it - daily.

Check out Denise's blog for more tips on e-mailing - and if it's spelled different than you might think, remember that they're the ones that officially speak the language.

http://www.newsweaver.co.uk/emailnewsletters/?p=103

Building A Mobile Marketing Database Through Widgets

The goal of marketing in a Web 2.0 (or Mobile 2.0) world is to identify clusters of users interested in your product and willing to help you promote it (because they benefit in some way themselves).  This dynamic has led to the creation and success of widgets - tiny applications that help web users accomplish some task, from looking at a calendar to playing a game to giving money to a cause or political candidates.

Old school readers remember when "widget" was the all-purpose word used in marketing and sales pitches. 

If Company ABC is making widgets that sell for $20, and Company XYZ comes in and begins selling widgets at $18, how much money should be spent on marketing to protect the $20 price?

Widgets are now much, much more, and it seems every company has one.  The hope is to embed your widget on the millions of blogs, MySpace and Facebook pages, and thus create cheap marketing while giving the users some value.

It's a great strategy, at least when the widget is cool and people adopt it.  A company called MoFuse has taken this strategy and added it to the mobile world.  Victor at Mobile Marketing Watch chats with David at MoFuse on their success in widgeting their mobile marketing.

David though, emailed me for a different reason, he wanted me to check out their new SMS Widget, I’ve got it loaded to the right of this post on my site. From a mobile marketing perspective this is brilliant! Wanna know why? MoFuse is doing something that mobileStorm talks about all the time. They’re building their mobile marketing database by giving out this widget and getting folks to sign up for mobile blog delivery. Too, they’re helping me promote my mobile web site. Pretty cool idea huh? Hey David, are we gonna get stats on how many folks actually sign up through the widget?

The next question is how your company adds value to its users, and if you see how this can be used to build an army of brand evangelists in promoting your product.  Can you integrate your website and mobile gadgets?  Is your marketing firm aware of how to?  (ed.  hey, would this be a good place to insert a plug for blast marketing services and products?)  It sure would.

Joseph Jaffe: Join The Conversation

Scott Monty, over at the Social Media Marketing blog has given his readers a call to action.  Evidently, Joseph Jaffe's new book "Join the Conversation: How to Engage Marketing-Wearing Consumers Through the Power of Community, Dialogue and Partnership", is now available at Amazon and Scott is asking everyone to tap into the very power of community that this book talks about, by ordering this book tomorrow......

"Joe is using new marketing to prove new marketing. This Sunday, October 21, he is going to bum rush the charts at Amazon. "Do what to the what?" I hear you asking. He's asking that everyone wait until Sunday to buy the book and then hit that purchase button at once, helping to drive his book up the Amazon rankings."

So this is kind of a crazy idea, but could seriously work if we all participate. The power of community is just another avenue in the realm of new marketing and I for one am all about promoting my social media brothers.

Paid Search On Your PDA? Better To Spend Your Client's Money At The Slots.

Our parent company, Blast Companies, is a mobile marketer.  They do a lot more than that, but they use a variety of communication mediums to help you the marketer get your message out.

Our owner, Chris Torbit, started in the wholesale telecom business, and has worked his way through SMS texting, e-mail marketing, and IVR communication.  I say this because mobile marketing is something we understand, and because we come at it from the technology side and not the marketing side, we have the advantage of not being bound by conventional marketing thought.

You know conventional marketing thought. It's the stuff that leads us to copy strategies that worked in direct marketing onto e-mail (giving us the wonderful world of spam).  Conventional marketing thought also brings us to idea of mobile search.  In this case, businesses are considering, and in some cases, forking out cash to put PPC ads (still pay-per-click, even if there's no phone mouse to click) on your mobile device.  People use search engines on their desktops - why not on their phones?  Although it's glossed over with the more professional "paid search terms," the idea is still one that only really works if you are a marketer who believes that there are enough mobile searchers with the urgency of looking up information and the patience to weed through a search engine on their phone.

We were thankful to find that the marketo blog thinks it's a big pi..well, Jon Miller says it's irrelevant, and we agree.

However, when it comes to mobile search, I argue that the way B2B buyers use search just doesn't fit with how people use mobile search. My top two reasons:

• The most popular mobile searches are maps and directions, weather, and local information, followed by news, entertainment, sports, and finance — not B2B related terms.
• Even if someone were to click on a B2B pay-per-click ad on mobile device, it's nearly impossible to capture a lead from a mobile landing page. Almost no one will go through the effort to fill out a form on their mobile device.

The goal of mobile marketing should be using the strength of the devices, not taking successful strategies from other platforms and trying to shoehorn them into your marketing strategy.  Mobile devices are wonderful platforms, but rather than paying for ads, focus on the low-hanging fruit of convincing users to use their phones to contact you versus SMS or maybe, just a phone call.

Using Blog Software To Power Your News Section

One of the easiest uses of blog software is the replacement of your news section with a blog.  The vast majority of sites with a news tab have to major problems - a lack of current information and a poor structure to report their news.

The problem is one of publishing.  The people responsible for discussing the company aren't the ones capable of adding information to the news section.

And the issue of architecture is simple.  If all you do is add some content to a page, you're missing out on the ability to grow the site, and cluttering up your stories.

Blogs solve both of these problems.

1) Blogs are easy to for marketing, PR, and management to use.  If you can type an e-mail, you can publish a blog post.  WYSIWYG editors abound, and with 30 minutes of training, any employee can be taught to publish to the web.  That's important because often the news section of the site is years behind.  If the last entry you have was in 2005, you need to get rid of the news section or get someone to update it regularly.

2) Blogs create a new webpage with every entry.  This page is archived individually, by category, and by month (or week).  What this means is your website steadily grows with each entry.  Contrast that with a static website that adds content to the same page, and you have the SEO benefit of blogging.

3) Incoming links to individual pages also increase your SEO. If you're writing interesting material, or even just publishing press releases, you're giving a hyperlink to an individual story, increasing the likelihood that someone will deep link your site.

This simple procedure is as easy as starting a Typepad, Wordpress, or Blogger blog at news.yoursite.com, mapping the name to the blog, and altering the colors to match your website.  You don't even have to call it a blog.  You can call it your news section, and no one will be the wiser.

Search Engine Marketing Miss: Ask.com Gets A Question

We love television commercials.  When a good one comes on, we rewind the TiVo and go back to watch it (honestly we do), simply because we think good commercials are worth seeing.

The creative approach is worth taking a look at (and often is better than what we're watching).  Sometimes, the creativity is good, but the execution of the television/online integration doesn't go so well.  Take Ask.com, for example.

Wait - let's start at the beginning.  The point of the situational marketing (the idea, not this site), is to understand your target market and communicate with them the way that best fits them. Based on age, demographics, earnings, ethinicity - whatever your marketing people dig up - if you can understand how they want to be marketed to, you can improve your efficiency by giving them what they want.

Know your audience. It's pretty simple.

So when Ask.com ran commercials on television, I was initially impressed.  I liked what I saw.  Apparently, a lot of people did, because Yahoo and Google jumped into blended results real fast.  But I still liked the commercial, and so added Ask to my search list.

But it seems Ask, while creative in advertising, missed a big part of the integration.  David Erickson of e-strategy.com liked the commercial.  He liked it so much he followed the instructions.

I've been watching your most recent television ads that show off your blended search results by demonstrating a search for "eagles of death metal" and felt compelled to write a blog post about the commercial.

First, of course, I had to try out your demonstration search. So I typed "eagles" and out popped some search suggestions from the search box but as I continued to type and my search filled out to "eagles 0f"..., you no longer had any suggestions for me:

David wasn't amused, and you have to figure that if he typed in eagles of death metal, so did a lot of other people, all of whom were disappointed.  And then add people like me, who liked your commercial, but after reading e-strategy, are rather less than impressed with your follow-through.

Granted, we should be blaming the agency rather than Ask.com, but integration is something all companies should get, but search engine companies, if they don't get it, aren't going to be around.

The internet is a magnifier.  It amplifies your message, and let's your public take your ads and spread them far and wide.  Or it could have been.

That's A Lot Of Stamps: Newspapers Love Direct Mail

New Communications Review collects a number of reports of interest to marketers in this blog post, and one of the facts that jumped out at me was the amount of money spent on postage by US newspapers.

 The nation’s daily newspapers are spending nearly $1 billion on postage for services from the U.S. Postal Service, according to a national survey by the Newspaper Association of America. The survey says that newspapers spent more than $972 million in 2006 compared with $901 million in 2004 and $700 million in 2002. “Collectively, daily newspapers are a leading customer of the U.S. Postal Service and many of our member newspapers are the largest mailers in their local markets,” said John F. Sturm, president and CEO of the Newspaper Association of America. “Along with door-to-door delivery, on-street boxes, specialty publications and digital transmission, mail is one of many different platforms newspapers use to guarantee an audience to their advertising customers.” Read the entire article here.

$972 million, which rounds to a nice even billion, and then we go off to gnash our teeth and beat at our breast when we think about what could be done with that billion dollars if it were used in internet communications.  As is clear from the quote -- this does not include door-to-door delivery, on-street boxes, or the internet (lovingly described as digital transmission).

$1 billion dollars spent on postage by the newspaper business.  It staggers the mind.  Of course, it's clear from the article that more is going on than delivering newspapers.  Direct mail advertising is a big piece of the puzzle, accounting for almost all of that money - $713 to $785 million sent as part of a package deal to non-subscribers.

In essence, the newspapers are a big Direct Mail conglomerate.