MarketingSherpa Blog

I’m not sure why, but such is the nature of PR people that they almost never include clients’ URLs in press releases or emailed story pitches. So I frequently go to search engines to find somebody’s client’s site, and see if we should write about them.

It’s not always easy to find the link even then because so many marketers are buying paid ads against their competitors’ names. So, there you are looking for Acme Company and five of Acme’s direct competitors spring up to coat the results screen.

So I was extremely interested to hear about new study results from an outfit called NameProtect®.

This month, they analyzed the paid search ads that appeared on Yahoo! and Google against the trademark terms associated with America’s top 100 brands (as ranked by Interbrand and BusinessWeek.)

– 92% of the top 100 brands’ had third-party ads appeared in search results against their names.

– Of these paid search ads, 98% included the actual brand name in the ad. So the trademarked brand name was in the text of the third-party ad. (This is a critical factor in determining whether the sponsor is violating trademark rights.)

– 45% of the ads were for directly competitive and potentially unlicensed offerings. Others were for related offers.

– Just 7% of the paid ads were placed by the actual brand owner.

So, the big brands are currently not protecting their trademarks very aggressively in paid search. I guess big companies move more slowly than nimble competitors. However, I’ve heard the courts don’t tend to look favorably on brands who have a history of leaving their trademark out defenseless and unprotected in the cold competitive world, even if it is the brave new world of search.

Time to call legal and get those cease-and-desist letters flowing!

“Tell that to the next corner-office stuffed shirt who doesn’t think email marketing pays off.

That $15.50 per email-marketing dollar spent is roughly 17% more than in direct-mail campaigns and 73% more than telemarketing campaigns, according to a new study from the Winterberry Group, a New York-based research and consulting group.

Winterberry also predicts that email sales will go up to $16.70 per dollar in the coming year, compared to $14.60 generated per DM dollar, and $9.71 in sales per telemarketing-campaign dollar.

(We got these numbers from an Internet Retailer story, which you can read here, but we should be getting more detailed numbers soon, so check back for an update.)”

“Do you like to stick a big ol’ promotion into your order confirmations or CRM follow-ups to upsell or cross-sell customers? You might think those are transactional emails, and thus exempt from CAN-SPAM, but the Federal Trade Commission isn’t so sure.

The FTC today dropped another shoe on its way to implementing CAN-SPAM: It just opened another comments session (open through September 13, 2004), this time on its definitions of what constitute’s an email’s “primary purpose.”

This is a pretty key stage in the rulemaking process, because email whose primary purpose it defines as commercial has to comply with CAN-SPAM. Transactional and informational ones don’t.

Here’s what the FTC is considering:

What it boils down to is this: If an email message looks commercial, then it is, either by what you put in the subject line or how prominently you feature ads or promos — your own or a paid advertiser’s — in your content.

In other words, if you send an order-confirmation email that features an upselling promo in the subject line or is the first thing somebody sees when opening the message, that could make your email commercial, not transactional or relationship-focused.

1. Any message is commercial if it only advertises or promotes a product or service, either in the subject line (“15% Off If You Act Today!”) or in the message body.

2. An email message that has both commecial content and a transactional/relationship message (subscription or order confirmation, customer service follow-up, etc.) is commercial if you put the promo in the subject line or if it’s the first think somebody sees after opening the message.

3. Email messages that mix promotional content, such as your own house ads or third-party ads, with informational content, as in an email newsletter, are commercial if they give the ads top billing in the subject line or message body, especially if you give the ads more real estate, color or graphics to make them stand out from the text.

Craig himself explains how the unexpected deal came about here.

MarketingSherpa reader Barry W. Dennis of Netweb/Omni wrote me today, “I participate in all or most of the Paid ranking services by Google, etc. Because my competitors want that Number 1 ranking as well, they overbid me, and I do it back.

One decision point is when the Cost Per Click exceeds the Gross Profit or other measurement of the value of that customer. The second decision is whether overpaying for a customer is worth keeping that customer from a competitor.

At some point, overpriced advertising leads smart marketers to reassess their usage. We are getting there at this time on Paid Rankings, and it will get worse in the next twelve to eighteen months.”

His solution? Increase site content and optimization to get better organic listings instead of relying on paid clicks.

If you’re considering the same thing, here are some of my favorite content ideas to add as static (not dynamically-generated) pages to your site:

#1. Topical glossary: Especially great for tech marketers.

#2. Topical Q&A: Grab common questions from customer service, from your booth at shows, from prospects, and post them with keyword-rich answers on your site.

#3. Press releases: Ask your IT department to revamp the PR and IR sections of your site so it’s a series of static pages (and not a dynamic area or hosted by a 3rd party service). Then start posting your releases regularly — you’d be shocked how few companies remember to do so.

#4. Email newsletter articles: Post them as static pages too, and make sure the headlines are keyword-rich instead of “December 2003 Issue”, etc.

#5. Blogs: Often, especially in larger companies, you may have employees writing work-related blogs that the marketing department is only half-aware of (if that.) Make sure these are also tied into your site map and architecture, without destroying the blog’s look and feel as a personal ‘non-corporate’ communication too much.

And please, let me know what you’re testing and how it works!

Last week I interviewed Jay Habegger, CEO Bitpipe, in a teleseminar they were doing for their clients. Jay actually used to be a CIO himself, so he had some great insights from the “other side of the fence” for marketers trying to impress CIOs…

Lesson 1. Trial demos convert best – but don’t offer them a lot

Jay says the data showing that trial demos are by far the most effective offer for leads that will convert well is extremely deceptive. The problem is, only prospects who are already educated about, and half-way sold on, your product will bite at the offer.

Which means you’re ignoring everyone else you need to get in your lead pipeline. So, only offer demos to the proven-hottest-leads, and use info offers (white papers, webinars, etc) for your broader outreach campaigns, including search.

Lesson 2. Offer a Word doc to help prospects prove ROI

Crazy to say, but in this day of cool ROI calculator tools etc, the one thing most IT pros really need to pitch your service of product to their boss is … a word doc.

Jay says glossy brochures and snazzy PDFs won’t do it. IT pros know if they show up with your prettied-up sales materials in their presentation, they’ll be laughed out of the room. (Actually he said something even harsher.)

Nobody trusts vendor materials. They do trust a memo written by their own in-house team. If you hand over a Word doc (or even an Excel file) that their team can use to cut and paste ROI info into their own presentation, you’ll have greater success.

Lesson 3. Consider paying for editorial

Jay noted that when he sees most b-to-b marketer’s budgets, everything is divvied up by “delivery mechanism” — ie. the marketing campaigns you’ll run to alert prospects to your lovely white paper, webinar, newsletter, tech specs, etc.

But, what’s going to influence the prospect is the quality of that content. So if you budget 100% of your funds to run ads to promote a paper, and then the paper is tossed together in-house as almost an afterthought, that doesn’t make sense.

As one of the judges for the annual White Paper Awards, Jay’s seen more papers than probably anyone else. And he says many are awful. I can say the same thing about many b-to-b marketer’s email newsletters myself. So, when you start budget season this fall, consider putting a slice of your budget toward writers, researchers, proofers, etc. Where to find them? Often trade magazine editors and trade association researchers moonlight for folks in the industry.

If you’re launching a subscription site, should you start entirely free in order to drive up initial users quickly, and then switch over to a paid offering with only a little free stuff as teaser-content? Or should you start out doing the latter from day one?

Marc Cenedella, President TheLadders.com, who has been rolling out a series of paid sub sites for high-level job seekers for the past year, has tested it both ways. Results?

“In the weeks after we went paid, people who came on board who had never known there was a free version were happier customers. That got rid of customer angst, it was better business, and we didn’t have to spend time explaining why we did it.” The site that launched directly in premium version, “has one of the highest conversion percentages among premium users.”

He still uses free newsletters to generate the conversions of course. The best place to get opt-ins are word-of-mouth and paid search ads. So far, the majority of conversions happen within two-three weeks of opt-in to the weekly ezines.