A couple of years ago we made the decision to stop print advertising. We were definitely too hasty in that decision. Because print advertising is so difficult to quantify in metrics we sometimes lose sight of its effectiveness. Just ask Vonage, who yesterday announced that they added far fewer customers than anticipated, largely due to cutting back in advertising. Their CEO said that the company had underestimated how much traffic the TV advertisements were driving to its Web site and other recruitment channels.
In January we brought print advertising back, and the pshycological boost to our sales force was immediate, and queries from our customers about ‘why aren’t you in SQL Server Magazine?’ dried up too.
Recently I was talking with our European Marketing Manager about how to gain new prospects in Germany, something we have been struggling to do. Email marketing doesn’t seem to be having the same impact there as it does in the US, so we discussed doing some direct mailers. Doesn’t get more old school than that!
Yesterday, this was forwarded to me from our friends over at Marketing Sherpa, making the case for complementary direct mail programs to any email marketing strategy.
In summary:

– Use targeted mailings, such as a simple postcard, to promote new white papers or upcoming webinars.
– Larger mailings can also have a big impact on some of your best prospects. If you have a list of dream clients in your marketing database, consider sending them attention-getting dimensional mailers.
– Integrate mailings with your telemarketing calls. When a telemarketer has identified a more qualified prospect, assemble a customized package of printed materials that demonstrate how your company can help meet their business needs or address particular pain points.

While content may be king, fancy artwork and graphics go a long long way too. Funny, true story from last week:

We were in meetings in the UK with our sales management, and I was presenting our marketing strategy for the year; both in recap and looking forward. Our GM asked a very simple question: ‘How do you rate the different collateral we are putting together?’

This year we have devoted a ton of energy into creating original content through our experts, both internal and external. We have white papers, videos, podcasts, customer case studies, technical briefs, blogs, articles, posters, magazine, datasheets and probably more that I am forgetting.

Our white papers (general educational pieces designed to increase awareness and boost thought-leadership) scored lowest.

Our ‘consolidation guide’, a printed piece with great graphics and a magazine layout scored highest.

So what?

The consolidation guide consists of three white papers and a technical brief that are available standalone. So while content may well be king for the intended readership, polish goes a long long way with the sales teams.

The greatest political ad I’ve ever seen is being run by the John McCain campaign.  Full disclosure – I am registered as an independent in the state of California.  I feel that a politician is a politician and don’t base my voting decisions on “party”.  That being said, I am likely to be an Obama voter in November.  There I got that out.  Now, I am going back to talking about how great McCain’s ad is. 
The positioning the ad makes is that Obama is more celebrity than seasoned politician and that his plans, if elected, include pros on higher taxes and foreign oil.  The best part of the ad is in the beginning where it lays the foundation for Obama’s celebrity status by showing clips of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton…brilliant and HILARIOUS!  I loved it – two of the more IN-famous celebrities who are constantly in the news and that the majority of Americans feel negatively about are shown in the same “breath” as Obama.  Sounds pretty clever in theory, but overall the ad is really kind of disjointed and odd (including the boilerplate “I approve this message” part in the end, IMO), but it’s completely entertaining, too.  Check it out if you have a chance – you’ll probably watch it more than once.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

So I just checked out the newest search engine Cuil after reading an article about the launch and the brains behind it…and it’s a pretty cool experience.  I’m not 100% sure about the difference between the indexing capabilities of search engines…I’ll have to educate myself on why “more” is better…but I will say this, the way Cuil does its layout of search results is pretty slick and the consolidated results in their “explore by category” section is a cool way to show results organized in a new and interesting way.  Time will tell how much success Cuil has, but I’m certainly looking forward to seeing more and will continue to play around with it.  One criticism at this point, which is only aesthetic, is that the color scheme of the site is a bit off to me – but that can certainly be because it’s just new and I’m not used to it – I remember thinking that Google’s home search page was a bit off, too with only the white page and the search box…
Another interesting thing to watch will be to see what promotion strategies Cuil uses to get users to adopt their engine as their primary search option.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Seth Godin actually wrote this post a couple of days ago and I needed the extra time to chew on it.  The post describes examples of when messaging falls on deaf ears.

It’s really a brave conclusion to come to to determine that the audience that you thought you were directing your marketing and advertising toward is simply not listening…but a slippery slope as well.  In my opinion this can show a fundamental lack of understanding of who your target audience is and what resonates with this audience.  By the time that decision is clear, well, a lot of money and time could have been wasted on marketing programs and that can kill the product or service you’re marketing – as well as possibly the job or jobs of those behind the poor analysis and decision making. 

As a marketer, to get to the point where you are in a position to chalk a failed campaign, program or message up to the audience just not listening can really call your credibility into question – hence the slippery slope.  From the perspective of the marketing initiatives that we try to push in my BU, vetting ideas and potential programs with our customers and external individuals who are in our target audience, and doing our own listening to these folks, has been critical to our goals of: raising awareness of the value behind our products and expertise, generating quality leads for our sales force; and, ultimately generating revenue for the business. 

Marketers like myself don’t have the extraordinary experience or incredible body of work that Mr. Godin has to be able to come to this conclusion without losing some sanity or a job, so ensuring that I’m listening to the audience that I want listening to me is priority number one.

In a previous post I talked about Andy’s and my experience advising a wireless irrigation start-up on positioning. The obvious target audience was the landscape developer responsible for ensuring remote irrigation systems are working and water being delivered. The obvious value proposition was the savings of up to 30% in water usage.

However, after conducing interviews with the founders a rather more powerful value proposition and target audience emerged. The target audience was the people who hold the purse strings at Caltrans , a massive organization responsible for the highways and byways in California, and incidentally thousands of miles of greenbelt land along those roads, which require massive amounts of irrigation and…COPPER.

Copper has risen in price 150% in three years, thefts are on the rise, and the cost of replacement for government departments is tens of thousands of dollars. Caltrans lays thousands upon thousands of miles of copper to operate those remote irrigation systems, and much of it is being stolen. Caltrans won’t say how much it costs them, but the pain is real, and it is immediate. Green Wireless Systems has a target audience and a powerful value proposition, offering instant, tangible ROI. Shame they didn’t get their funding.

No.

It’s tempting to leave this blog post at just that, but have been thinking a lot about branding/taglines lately as they apply to our SQL Server business at Quest Software and five statements are spinning around in my head:

Change We Can Believe In
Just Do It
Yes We Can
Impossible is Nothing
The American Dream

Looks like one of those Mensa quizzes from the American Airlines magazine that I use to while away the time while sitting on the tarmac in either Dallas or Chicago (never seem to have the on-time departure mojo at those airports). In a way it is – there are two pairs of taglines, each with something in common. Two of them are arguably the most recognized taglines in America today. Two of them didn’t really catch on. One of them is a dead brand.

Let’s start with the easiest two. Just Do It! Simple, memorable, impactful message. ‘Get over yourself, don’t make excuses, just get on with it’. That’s what comes to mind whenever I see or hear that. In fact, it’s so sticky all I need to see is the swoosh and those words to mind. Impossible Is Nothing – clever, yes, grammatically incorrect, yes (it is a German company), and sort of demoralizing. The common phrase, Nothing is Impossible, has such as positive outlook. But put Impossible at the beginning and it emphasizes the ‘Impossible’ aspect of the statement, and diminishes the ‘Nothing’, making it almost negative in connotation. So, sorry Adidas, but a clumsy attempt at knocking off Nike’s brand statement, and a big miss. Whenever I see it I just think of Nike, and I am not sure that’s what you want.

Yes, Barack Obama started out the primary season with full blown promotion of Change We Can Believe in, but since the waning days of that campaign, Yes We Can caught on with the masses, who attended his victory and runner-up speeches. It was so easy to say, to chant, to sing – in fact it is a tagline/brand statement developed, not by his expert marketing team, but by his target audience. That is a powerful statement indeed. However, I don’t think it’s the pithiness of the statement itself that has led it to take on a life of its own, but what it represents.

Yes We Can speaks to the very thing that I so admired and envied in America as I grew up in England. That ‘can do’ attitude that is so very American. Always looking at the positive. Whereas we English pride ourselves on examining the negative. Positive Mental Attitude is such an admirable trait, and probably a great deal of the reason we English haven’t won the World Cup (it pains me to have to write that it is a ‘soccer’ tournament – it’s quite a big deal outside the US) since 1966 is because we don’t believe that we can. ‘No we won’t’ is more our brand statement for international football.

That’s why Barack Obama will win the election. His brand (of which he is an integral part) reminds us that yes, we can do anything in this country that we put our minds to.

Yes, We Can; Just Do It; those brand statements may just lead to the resurrection of one of the most powerful brands in history – The American Dream. Now, there’s a brand even a miserable Englishman ‘can believe in.’

When does size matter?  What I mean here is, when customers are looking to evaluate software, when does the size of the download of that software become a turnoff?  Currently, I am responsible for a product (bundle actually) that is 102MB in size (zipped).  Since it’s a bundle of two products, I wondered if instead of having a single zip file to download that’s 100+ MB, that we separate the two and offer a download for each on the same page.  The feedback that was received was that 100MB was not a big deal and, more importantly that being able to get both install files for this bundle in one download was the choice b/c we don’t want prospects to have to download one, then go back and download the other.  Fine, I was cool with that, it made sense enough.  BUT, I still had a nagging feeling that we are moving closer to the point where someone will think about whether the download is something they want to deal with in regard to size.  Think about it, if someone offers you a free trial of a razor or toothbrush or even coffee maker for instance, you don’t think too much about it – they’re manageable in size (the coffee maker example is kind of weird, but is done to give perspective to what I consider manageable). 
Now, think about the DR Mower or even the SoloFlex where you can try these two enormous products out ‘free of charge’ to evaluate for yourself.  I mean, I know some people do that, but c’mon, the size of these things is crazy and b/c of this, I’m sure they’re evaluation numbers suffer and in turn their sales numbers take a hit.
My concern here is, when does one of our software products become so big that the download to evaluate becomes a decision like that of evaluating the DR Mower?

“Eye catching post titles” – that would probably be number 22 on the list of the “21 Ways to Make your Blog of Website Sticky” but I guess the list can only go so far.  Just finished reading this article which I was sent a while ago by “he who keeps me from sounding like a total idiot when talking about communities/wikis/blogs/social networking” and even though the punchline for the article is “way 21”, it’s chock full of good little tid-bits for improving traffic numbers for your site/blog.
Content is king…but a catchy post title can ALWAYS help you get some eyeballs.  “Conventional wisdom” (believe that term or not) is to make the post title interesting but descriptive of the post itself, though IMO opinion, having fun and treating the title like a creative tagline can be a useful tactic, too. 
Oh yeah, also make sure your title tag mathces the actual post title! 

I’m looking forward to checking out our analytics to see how well this posting does compared to others on 2blokes.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Just kidding about the ‘greatest debate ever’ part of the title, by the way, but it’s an interesting one.  Before I get started here I want to offer this disclaimer:  *I’m NOT a search marketing expert and fall much closer to ‘idiot’ in the knowledge spectrum of SEO than ‘guru’…but I think I’m clearly in the majority here*

I understand the stated pros and cons of both paid and organic search strategies, but am really struggling to say that paid search is a “necessary” option and that marketing budget, or at least that much of it, should be dedicated to paid search and not reallocated to other programs.  *I will note now that I’m speaking specifically about the use of paid search around Quest’s products of the SQL Server BU.*

Here’s why: 
1.  Quest has been in business with a web presence for about twenty years – so what? Well, the point here is that we have a web site that has been a destination for hundreds of thousands of visitors (customers and prospects) so that simple traffic shouldn’t be a concern in terms of contributing to our search ranking
2.  We have a pretty large telesales team that is constantly driving traffic to our site – everyday
3.  Our customer marketing team helps promote activities that we’re doing by using email marketing tactics (they blast customers and prospects who can forward on the ecards that are used to promote specific activities)
4.  We have a dedicated web team that is in the process of redesigning our website and shaping content and usability to be optimal for visitors to the site and its pages
5.  This one actually builds on number two, but again, our internal web resources are able to ensure proper use of keywords, meta-tags, title tags, and meta-descriptions which are good ways to improve SEO

So, as you can see here by these five examples, we have ALOT of people performing tasks that at the end of the day are helping push the popularity of our website UP and are not part of a paid search strategy.  I understand  that a truely smart search strategy will blend organic and paid elements, which is probably great for a small business or business that is relatively ‘young’ in their web presence.  BUT, I don’t know that for our BU that paid search is an area where a large investment should be made – especially if we can use that budget to do more varied activities for raising awareness and lead generation.

The head scratching continues….

Blogged with the Flock Browser