Marketing 101

Speaking of scary.

Hiring a new marketing company or launching a new marketing campaign can be about as scary as taking off from a short runway - with a cliff at the end of it.

You're putting your all into it and you sure hope you get enough lift before you run out of runway.

Or budget.

It is a rare company that can afford to spend the money necessary for an effective marketing campaign, only to have it fail.

So I wanted to reassure you.

First of all, I am NOT going to propose anything which I don't think is going to do the job for you.

Then all of us - myself, Pat our Art Director, and Vanessa, our Client Relations and Market Research Director, are PERSONALLY committed to making sure that we do a great and timely job of delivering to you.

You'll see.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 04:51 PM | Permalink

Good marketing is often a balancing act between being old and b-o-r-i-n-g and being SO new and different as to be incomprehensible, confusing or scary.

Innovation drives a lot of marketing and it can carry a long ways in terms of notice and free publicity. But it can be overdone.

Here's a page from what pretends to be a Dutch online store. I like it a lot, it's spirited and upbeat and certainly makes me want to buy something from the site. But it never stops moving... not for a LONG time. Good thing it isn't a REAL store, eh (Notice that "ghettoblaster" is the same word in Dutch)!

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 08:43 AM | Permalink

More and more, businesses are using video on their websites.

Why? Because they can.

There are several developments over the last two years or so that have made it extremely practical to add video to your website.

First is the very high percentage of people who now have broadband Internet connections. Video isn't practical with a dial-up connection, but when 80 to 90% of one's visitors are on high-speed connections, that isn't much of a concern.

That trend was followed by the explosive appearance of YouTube which made video commonplace on the Internet. People are used to clicking on those arrows and watching a video, so it isn't anything weird or unusual to them.

The ability to embed a video in Flash (YouTube videos are in this format) means that nearly everyone has the capability of watching them on their computers. Also the video starts right away (so-called "streaming video") rather than having to wait for the whole video to load. And the video file size isn't excessive, so the hosting service's bandwidth limitations aren't strained.

All these factors make it extremely practical and useful to put video on your website. But the real point is what this gains you. The immediacy, impact and "aliveness" of a video can contribute greatly to the effectiveness of your site in achieving its marketing purpose. Just consider the difference between a written testimonial, a copy of a testimonial on a customer's letterhead, an audio (sound recording) testimonial, and a video testimonial. Each of these is more real and impactful and effective.

The same goes for the words of the Owner or President of your business.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 09:35 AM | Permalink

We certainly live in a fast changing world. Nowhere is that more true than marketing on the Internet

Google, the 600 pound gorilla of searches, makes MAJOR changes in how they determiine search rankings, as often as five or six times a year.

Four years ago, banner ads and email blasts dominated Internet marketing.

Now email blasts are almost completely limited to your own compiled list of customers or prospects. And the click-through rate for banner ads is a tiny fraction of what it once was.

Three years ago people were figuring out how to do more and clever popups. Now everyone blocks popups on their computers.

Methods of Internet marketing that were huge a year ago are already disappearing from the scene.

The moral of the story is, if you are going to do successful Internet marketing, you need to stay on top of the changes. Otherwise you can suddenly find yourself "left in the dust."

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 09:29 AM | Permalink

One of the first steps of my design process is to research my client's competition. After all, what I want to accomplish is to not only attract customers, but to differentiate my client from their competitors. If I can make them look the best, the potential customer will pick them over the other guy.

Many times in this research, certain design trends for an industry start to emerge. My work is easier this way, as my client's competitors seem to be all copying themselves. So what do I do? As long as it still communicates the marketing objective, I try to do the opposite. Different colors, images, layouts, typography...anything to separate my client from the competitors.

Because of these common design themes within an industry, sometimes a client will want to do what all their competition has done: copy these designs. In most cases this is the worst thing you could do, and the client must be persuaded from following the same trap that their competition fell into themselves. Standing out from the crowd can make your target audience pay more attention to you and your product or service.

In competitor research, it's also important to see what they've done right. What phrases and messages have they created that really work? What have done with the design that communicates? You can still use this information without copying the look. For example, I did a website for a skin care salon. Most featured soft images of a woman in a spa setting. This definitely works and isn't the wrong thing to do. But, to stand out, I choose a more striking image of a woman laying upside down with rose petals surrounding her. This was enough to use what worked, but did something different to stand out.

What ever you do, do your research. The worst thing you could do besides not knowing your target market is not to know your competition.

Posted by Pat Floyd at 04:34 PM | Permalink

Too often, those creating or purchasing marketing services judge an item only by its visual impact or cleverness.

This is known as The Curse of The Clio - that being the marketing world's version of an Academy Award.

Visual impact is an essential element of good marketing (except for radio of course!), and a good dose of cleverness can turn a boring item into an outstanding one.

But a high percentage of Clio winning agencies, lost the account for the ad that won them the award.

"I like it" "Cool!" or "WoW!" are not adequate endorsements of a marketing product.

The true test is will it accomplish its purpose - to create want and sell something!

So how do you know if a marketing piece will work well? There's a lot to that. Here at Fast Forward, though, we have a simple answer:

Follow Fast Forward's advice.

After all, you hire us because we're marketing experts, right?

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 08:38 AM | Permalink

Occasionally I get a call from someone who wants to conquer the world for $9.95. Or, to give a real example, to make their brand a household name on a budget of $1000 a month.

This is known as having champagne taste with a beer budget

If you are doing marketing, you should be planning a campaign - not just isolated pieces or actions. That's how you make the most out of your marketing effort.

But early on in your planning, you need to have a pretty good idea of what your budget is going to be.

Unless you have an essentially unlimited budget, your choice of what media or methods to use will be heavily influenced by how much you can afford to spend.

Why?

Let me give you an example. A new client came to us complaining that he had spent $30,000 on advertising in the previous year with no result.

Turns out, almost the entirety of his budget went into TV commercials. $30,000 on cable translates to about 2 ads a day, spread across several channels.

But it takes repetition to get results in mass media advertising. With that meager exposure, probably no one even noticed their ads!

That same $30,000 put into, for example, online advertising, could have gotten them tons of business.

Of course, by then, he couldn't afford to spend another $30,000. But, knowing his budget, we got good results running a large, full-color, back page ad in a magazine with a very small circulation but one very highly targeted to potential customers of theirs.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 09:51 AM | Permalink

It just warms my heart when I find someone that doesn't mince words. And except for his comment about surveys I agree with Dave on this one.

Posted by Vanessa Steele at 02:03 PM | Permalink

When you do a search on Google or other search engines, "Organic Search Results" are the ones down and on the left - based on the search engine's evaluation of the importance and relevance of the page. "Click ads" are the sponsored links at top and right which people are paying for.

A recent report in Ad Age pointed out one reason why organic search results - as opposed to paid "click ads" - are superior.

We've commented many times on the rapidity with which the Internet changes over time. This is a recent change.

People are now distinguishing between organic search results and the click ads - and ignoring the click ads in large numbers (on the order of 90%).

Of course, that doesn't make click ads invalid, since you are still only paying when someone clicks through to your website.

The point is there is a LOT more traffic to be gotten by getting high natural search engine results.

It can be a lot of work to get high search engine rankings. It can also take a while (it has taken us as much as a year to get someone onto page one on Google).

Sometimes it is easy.

And you don't have to pay for every click!

Sometimes click ads just don't make sense economically. But when they do, the best use of click ads in most cases is short- to medium-term, until you can get your natural rankings where they should be. And they possibly to continue to use them as a supplement to increase traffic volume.

MOST cases. There are exceptions.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 09:44 AM | Permalink

For a few years now, with the growth of the Internet, Yellow Pages and newspaper advertising (especially classifieds) have been in a decline.

The Yellow Pages companies have attempted to deal with this by simultaneously increasing their rates and offering more deals. They have also attempted to get into the online marketing game with online directories such as RealPages.com.

It is a losing game they are playing as more and more businesses are finding Yellow Pages advertising just no longer pays for them.

Most businesses are spending more and more of their marketing budgets online. Intelligently spent, it is getting them the best return on their investment.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 04:56 PM | Permalink

A new word that has captured a lot of attention recently is "googleganger" - from "Google" plus "doppelganger." A Googleganger is someone else with the same name as you who shows up in Google searches.

Of course this brings up an important point.

Commercially significant Google searches aren't just for companies and products and the like. They are also for individuals.

Many is the person who "egosurfing" for what's the Internet's take on themselves, finds they have the same name as an adult video star. Or probably worse, that someone has false, negative information about you on their website - and it comes up high in a search.

The good is news is something can be done about it. Lawsuits are expensive, take a long time, are uncertain of result - and by then, you could have 90 new pages saying "Joe says Fred is bad."

But with some work, you can drive the negative material off of page one by getting other pages that have nice or just anything true about you, showing up with high search engine rankings.

It can take a while for these other pages to get up the search engine rankings, but it often isn't difficult to do.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 11:26 AM | Permalink

From an interview with one of my heroes, Samuel Clemens, in the New York Times, 1905:

"Whenever I've got some work to do I go to bed.

"I got into that habit some time ago when I had an attack of bronchitis. Suppose your bronchitis lasts six weeks. The first two you can't do much but attend to the barking and so on, but the last four I found I could work if I stayed in bed and when you can work you don't mind staying in bed.

"I liked it so well that I kept it up after I got well. There are a lot of advantages about it. If you're sitting at a desk you get excited about what you are doing, and the first thing you know the steam heat or the furnace has raised the temperature until you've almost got a fever, or the fire in the grate goes out and you get a chill, or if somebody comes in to attend to the fire he interrupts you and gets you off the trail of that idea you are pursuing.

"So I go to bed. I can keep an equable temperature there without trying and go on about my work without being bothered. Work in bed is a pretty good gospel - at least for a man who's come, like me, to the time of life when his blood is easily frosted."

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 10:45 AM | Permalink

We launched a new look for our website this last week.

If you've seen the previous look, you'll notice it is MUCH higher impact visually.

Actually, we were kind of bored with the old look, but there are a few important points to make:

1. Website looks get old! Styles change fast on the Internet and a site that is 2 or 3 years old will probably have a bit of an "old-fashioned" look to it.

2. Also the kind of monitors people are using change. There are a LOT more wide-screen and high-resolution monitors out there than used to be, and that is a factor in designing websites. A few years ago, we were designing for 800x600 resolutions. Now those are less than 10% of visitors to most websites.

3. The FIRST thing you have to do with any marketing is get people's attention. On the web, that means high-impact visuals for your home page or landing page.

Anyway, there you go. Let us know what you think of it.

Posted by Richard R. Byrd at 12:09 PM | Permalink

I have read some recent blog postings about, “if they don’t allow comments, is it a blog?”

I find it interesting that people want to make a distinction like this. Is it a blog if you can’t comment? Who cares, really? Quite a few people who comment on blogs have their own blogs. If they want to comment on an entry in a blog, why not do so on their own blog?

Link back to Seth or Mark or whoever else you want to disagree or agree with. Put your own ideas and opinions on your own blog.

I personally read the various blogs I do because I want to see what the blogger has to say, not what anybody’s comments are. In fact I think in the past year I have clicked through to see the comments on any blog I read maybe twice.

Am I a professional blogger? Obviously not, first of all I don’t have time and second I want to see what those in my field have to say about the new trends. That’s all, what THEY think, what are their opinions. And I’m not interested in getting into an on-screen discussion about something that is really not going to change the outcome of my life, or even my day.

Then again what do I know? I have a tendency to think for myself.

Posted by Vanessa Steele at 10:56 AM | Permalink