MarketingSherpa Blog

I got married last week, and as major life events will, it made me think about life, the universe and, naturally, marketing.

My husband (oh, the thrill it gives me to say that!) has been known to turn a fight into laughter by saying, “Marketing, Honey. Marketing.” In other words, he caught me trying to spin the argument my way instead of simply stating the bald facts.

Although it may not be perfect for a marriage, there is some pride to be taken in that form of marketing. Think of the ancient Greeks and Romans who viewed powerful oratory as so important that it was a critical subject for every schoolchild.

However, there’s a faint whiff of shame to being in marketing in the 21st century. Some people think marketing is using science and psychology to bend the will, empty the pocket, distract the mind from nobler thought and even ruin true culture.

If I truly believed that was the essence of marketing, I would not be able to write about it or, frankly, to work for MarketingSherpa which gives marketers the research and tools to do a better job. It would be pretty darn slimy.

If marketing is focusing on profits to the expense of all else, I want no part of it.

Instead, I see the art of marketing as akin to matchmaking. Your client Mr. Widget is seeking a bride. You research the available pool. You may even help Mr. Widget tweak his presentation a bit a la ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy'(without, of course, changing or obscuring his true essence.) Then you introduce Ms. Right to Mr. Widget.

Sometimes they get together right away; sometimes there are
entire families to impress (the dreaded decision-by-committee). But the point is, without a little matchmaking, two people might never have found each other.

Inventors and company executives without marketing backgrounds nearly always make light of this matchmaking facet of marketing. They think the product will “sell itself.”

Perhaps it would in an intimate, easy-to-network world without any other distractions. But on this crazy teeming planet, you nearly always need great marketing to get any attention from the right prospects.

Marketing in its best form is all about helping products and services connect with their perfect customers. If you do it correctly, including plenty of research to begin with, both sides — company and customer — will be grateful for your role in bringing them together.

(And, no, I’m not just saying that because I’ve got hazy romantic stars in my eyes.)

The downfall of marketing is when you’re pushed for profit’s sake alone to gain customers outside the product’s sweet spot — buyers that don’t really fit profile. Or, when you’re hired to trumpet an inadequate product that honestly no one should be buying. That’s when the shame comes in.

The next time you’re asked to market something, reach into your gut and consider, “Is this something I will be proud to have marketed? Will the end-consumers be delighted to have discovered it through my efforts?”

If so you can take true pride in being a marketer. It’s not
about consumer manipulation; it’s about helping shine the
light on the truly deserving.

The other day when I was procrastinating about a rather dull project, I surfed over to Google and looked up my name. (Come on, admit it, you’ve looked up yours, too.)

I was expecting some pages from Sherpa to pop up along with a few other press quotes. So, it was with great surprise that one of the top links was to photo-sharing site Flickr.com. There’s a photo I didn’t know out there on the Internet?

Yup — there I am in all my six-foot-tall glory looming over WSJ.com’s head of marketing Jennifer Singer, who is maybe 5’2″ in heels as we prepare to speak on a stage in NYC. Turns out one of our MarketingSherpa Summit attendees snapped the shot and posted it.

Then, completely coincidentally, I got an email from a marketing pal at Burpee who said, “Hey, go look at our company photos at Flickr!” They’d posted a bunch of stuff, including old catalog covers and even their favorite customer letters. And, because surfing Flickr is based on tagging, the results page also gave links to hundreds of Burpee-related photos that consumers had posted independently.

A complete brand photo library had blossomed on the public Internet, much of it without the knowledge of the brand itself.

Coincidences run in packs, because a few minutes later our own head of graphics Betsy Kreiner asked me, “Where should we put all the company photos from Summits and stuff on the intranet?” “Don’t,” I replied. “Put them on Flickr instead.”

Why not? There’s nothing secret, just various snaps from our Summits, plus several photos of what appear to be me abusing a cat. (That’s Pete, our office cat, and I’m carefully placing him in a fleece-lined container so he won’t make noise during an important conference call.)

One lesson learned — tagging is harder than you think. The graphics team uploaded photos by using words they would find useful to find them again. Terms such as “WL0589R-b2b” as well as our company name without caps. I guess that wouldn’t be too bad on an intranet section only they used. But it drove me nuts.

So now they are re-tagging everything, plus adding in people’s names, etc. There are several hundred pics, so it could take a while. By the way, if you are pictured in there and no one has posted your name to your photo yet, please forgive us. We’re working on it. You can post your name via a comment tag, too, if you want.

In the meantime, consider two things for your own brand -– first, remember to search sites such as Flickr occasionally to see what images are tagged with your brand. Second, consider if like Burpee you should take advantage of this platform to share more of your in-house photos with the world.

***Follow-up note:
We received this letter from a Sherpa reader:

“You know the Flickr thing really brings up a privacy question I have been wondering about.

It used to be, someone took your photo at a party and the most you had to worry about was that they might show it to their friends in their (printed) photo album.

Then, with the advent of digital cameras and camera phones, it could possibly show up attached to a post party email, SMS, or perhaps posted on their private webpage, with funky photo number tags which would never be indexed for your full name anyway.

But sites like Flickr mean that you completely loose any say over how your photo and name are used. What if I take photos at my company’s DMA cocktail hour and add names as tags in Flickr? Now, the client list become public knowledge, or a job seeker from a competitor gets questions about why they are at our party, etc. Or, you end up unintentionally endorsing a particular company because you are listed and indexed as being at their event. (I won’t even mention the whole “here is a photo of Chris snapped at a NY event with their arms around someone who is not their spouse…and Chris didn’t even realize the photo was being taken.”)

I have no hard answers here – but it sure does bring up some questions. Perhaps the issues are not quite as salient in the business world, but our professional and business worlds continue to blur.”

Natascha Lee, VP Marketing Communications
NextAction

Sponsor: Sherpa’s Buyer’s Guide to Web Analytics 2006
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Use new MarketingSherpa research to pick the best analytics software for your site (and your budget)
-> Compare 39 products from 33 vendors
-> 9 mistakes to avoid when selecting analytics software Web Analytics Buyer’s Guide — more info:
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Testimonials certainly aid conversions; but let’s face it, who completely trusts those happy quotes plastered on your site?

Yes, a happy customer probably said or wrote these things.
However, in the end, everyone knows testimonials were hand-picked and possibly solicited by the marketing department.

Which is one of the reasons why social networking ranging from consumer-driven ratings/reviews to word-of-mouth content (blogs, forums, forwarded email, etc.) is so powerful. People trust other people far more than they trust marketing.

And rightfully so.

The problem for many marketers, though, is in encouraging this commentary online. Customers are busy. Although their word-of-mouth or review post may be your life’s blood, it’s all not important for them. If you bribe them, then the entire review is suspect.

Sherpa Reader Ophir Prusak of RESPeRATE, whose marketing we
profile in a recent Case Study, had that problem. (See link to story below.)

His Web team created an online forum for customer comments. Like most ecommmerce sites, he decided *against* moderation except for removing any egregious spam. “It’s definitely unedited information.” Also, the forum clearly indicates when a posting is by a RESPeRATE staffer. There’s no undercover faux stuff going on.

However, there weren’t a lot of postings either. Ophir’s team posted links on the main site to drive traffic to the forum. Then he talked with the customer service team. Turns out happy customers were phoning in to discuss their satisfaction with the product. They just weren’t posting online.

“Now we tell them we’d appreciate it if you’d go to the forum and share your opinions with other people.” So far users and staff have started 85 topical threads on the forum. Only a few hundred people actually post, but tens of thousands read the postings.

Does it help? “You’re not allowed to say you’re FDA cleared even if it’s true,” says Ophir. However, if a customer says so on a forum, the comment can stay published. “The forum is one of the best ways to let users tell a story, to give them a way to discuss their experiences.”

What would happen if a customer posted a highly negative review of the product? Ophir would be honor-bound to allow that comment to stay live. In fact on June 24th, a new member posted, “As a new owner I am hopeful of achieving the results everyone posts. I am surprised that I have not seen one negative post. Are negative posts just deleted?”

“We do not delete posts,” a staffer quickly replied.

Useful links related to this article:
CASE STUDY: How to Use Email Autoresponders to Convert Skeptical Consumers (+ Delivery Test Results)
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?ident=28523

Last Thursday morning I got up at 5:30 am and drove through some of the worst traffic gridlock I’ve seen outside of LA to get to Waltham, MA, in time for my 8:30 am keynote speech at the New England Direct Marketing Association’s annual convention.

Despite the crazy traffic, it was a nice change to be supporting my local marketing community. (So often I find myself in places like Seattle or Colorado, which are exciting adventures, but not quite the same thing as “home town.”)

Also, I got to use my joke about how often Sherpa readers under the misapprehension that we are in Manhattan contact me to say. “I’ll be in town next week, want to do lunch?” I guess folks don’t expect Sherpa to be headquartered in a small town in Rhode Island. But, you know great marketing is not remotely limited to Madison Avenue. In fact, the vast majority of our Case Studies are about marketers in regions ranging from Nashville to Vancouver.

Anyway, there I am under the impression that I’m only talking to the local crowd … giving a brand new speech titled Web DM 2.0.

I had no idea a national marketing reporter was in the crowd. So, the next day it was quite a shock to see the email headline from their daily newsletter reading, “Holland: Blogs, RSS Feeds Are Out; Podcasting, Video Streaming Are In.”

At first I thought, “the country of Holland doesn’t like blogs?!” Then the shoe dropped and I realized they were talking about my speech. Oh golly.

You see, in my speech which was slanted toward B-to-B technology marketers who made up the bulk of attendees, I’d discussed the research data showing that unlike other business execs, more than 90% of IT professionals don’t read blogs on a regular basis. And also that 75% of people who do get their news from RSS feeds, view these on portals such as Yahoo News, so they don’t *know*
it’s RSS, and often misconstrue the feeds as being “from” Yahoo rather than the originating brand.

Therefore, if you are trying to market to IT professionals, blogs probably should not be your first or biggest investment. And, if you’re doing RSS feeds, you should find ways to include your brand name in headlines and/or content first paragraphs.

While the story itself fairly accurately represented this
information, the headline was not clear.

To be fair, there’s not much room in a headline for clarity
(that’s what a story is for); and editors have enormous pressures to write headlines that are sensationally clickable these days. I’ve certainly written headlines that might not be perfect myself.

So I understand about the situation. But, it wasn’t fun to worry about possible backlash from the blogging and RSS community who would justifiably feel annoyed if they saw that headline and not the story.

In fact, we hugely support bloggers, et al. So do you guys
apparently because in the past week, MarketingSherpa readers sent in a grand total of 1,028 nominations for our Third Annual Reader’s Choice Blog & Podcasting Awards!

Today, the editorial team are hard at work examining each
nomination to make sure it’s qualified (it’s on a topic related to marketing, etc.) and tomorrow early afternoon we’ll post a voting form for you to use.

I’ll be emailing you one single email alert (with no ad) tomorrow as soon as that voting form is ready online. So, look for it in your inbox.

How much are marketers spending on newsletter ads? Our research team’s very rough estimate is tens of millions. (Frustratingly, most newsletter ad buys are either bundled with other online spots or part of affiliate/CPA deals — so not reported separately or specifically to anyone.)

Mid-2006 MarketingSherpa study data shows that year over year email newsletter ad conversion results are remarkably steady. Plus, we have plenty of happy anecdotal evidence about ROI. So, email newsletter ads may not be the most glamorous campaigns on the planet, but they are generally a media buy you can count on. 

Which naturally makes me wonder: what works? Which creative will get the clicks, and which is more likely to be ignored?

Sherpa reader Kristin Paxton of the National Association of Realtors, who we interviewed for the top Case Study below, told us that she reviewed the data for all sponsors of her organization’s newsletter over the past four years. It’s one of the highest circulation business newsletters in the world, so these numbers may have some merit:

Two things that don’t seem to work as well:

1. Ads in the right column — these may be cut off when people who use Outlook view issues in their email preview pane. (Far more people read entire issues in their preview than you’d imagine.)

2. Graphical ads — anything that looks like a banner generally won’t work very well for clicks (although it might be great for brand awareness.) An ad that’s mainly or completely text can outpull an ad with colors or images.

The best-pulling ad of all time:

Kristin says the ad with the best clickthrough rate of all time for the newsletter ran in their May 2006 issue. (You can see a copy of it in the Creative Samples link at the end of the Case Study below.) I spotted four elements that probably helped clicks soar:

1. Preview pane “hotspot” —

The ad is placed immediately above the first story of the newsletter edition. So, it’s where the readers’ eyes naturally go when they are looking for “real” content.

2. Text-only —

The ad is nothing more than copy, set in the same size and style as articles appearing immediately below it. 

3. Wording —

The ad is very clearly an ad because it’s labeled as such in the headline. However, without that label you might not guess it’s an ad at all. The copy is styled to read as though it’s just like one of the article summaries directly below it. The first two words are “Business Tip” … and the name of the newsletter is  “Business Tips Newsletter.” That kind of customized copy must pack a wallop.

4. Link at the end of the paragraph, not in middle.

The hotlink to click to respond to the ad is at the very end — not the middle or the start. This has two advantages – first it looks more like a story summary that also feature a link at the end.  Plus, it is easier for humans to click on links that are next to white space, rather than buried within text.  

Right after I saw this creative sample for the first time, I naturally ran down the hall to our own graphics department to share these revelations with them. “Look!” I cried, “It’s the best performing newsletter ad in history!”

They were less than overwhelmed.

But then, these are mainly women with Macs on their desks and awesome personal shoe collections. They like style. They embrace cool graphics. A boring old text ad that looks just like editorial … it wouldn’t catch their attention.

Luckily I am in a position of some power (OK, fairly limited, but some anyway) so my burbles of delight about this plain-as-dishwater ad format were taken fairly seriously. You can expect us to begin testing dulled-down ad formats placed on the left side of our newsletters shortly. 

I’ll let you know what sorts of stats we get back from the tests and if a boring format works here, too. In the meantime, please let me know if you’re running tests, too. 

Anne Holland, President

Feedback(at)marketingSherpa(dot)com

MarketingSherpa Inc.

Here’s that link to the Case Study:

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=27915

Sponsor: Sherpa’s Buyer’s Guide to Web Analytics 2006

~~~~~~~~~~~

Use new MarketingSherpa research to pick the best

analytics software for your site (and your budget)

-> Compare 39 products from 33 vendors

-> 9 mistakes to avoid when selecting analytics software

Web Analytics Buyer’s Guide — more info:

http://www.sherpastore.com/Web-Analytics-Buyers-Guide.html

or call 877-895-1717

~~~~~~~~~~~

Your house list, customers and prospects who’ve eagerly asked to hear from you, is one of your most valuable marketing tools.

However, MarketingSherpa’s research has determined that one of the most significant factors in response rates is the age of an individual email name’s opt-in.  If an individual signed up for your list fewer than 60 days ago, they are vastly more likely to open, click and convert for additional offers. 

(This makes sense, because it’s always been true for print direct mail names, but it’s still good to know real-world studies have tracked the recency factor in the email world as well.)

So, if you want a high-performing list, you must focus on two activities, aside from overall email best practices:

#1.  Place an email opt-in *form* near the top of your home page

When visitors come to your site, you should try to get as many of the truly interested prospects as possible to sign up for your list. Multiple site analytics and usability studies have shown two critical factors play into getting more sign-ups, including:

-> Put your email offer above the fold because the vast majority of visitors won’t scroll down.

-> Include a form field for email address immediately rather than merely asking visitors to click on a hotlink or button to go to another page to sign up.

This spring, MarketingSherpa’s research team conducted two observational studies to determine how well typical marketers were following these two critical rules. The results were mixed. Of 100 ecommerce sites visited (such as Amazon), 79% placed an email registration form above the fold on their home page.

However, of 200 online publisher’s sites visited (such as WSJ.com), a mere 49% placed an email sign-up offer above the fold — and of those only one in four used a form. The others simply gave a hotlink to click on to sign up. Given that online publishers depend commercially on the strength of their email lists, these results are fairly pitiful. 

#2.  Send all newbies a special welcome

As noted above, multiple MarketingSherpa partnered studies have found that new names are far more involved in your email than folks who’ve been on your list for a while. So, best practices would be to take advantage of this heightened interest by sending the new names something special. 

Some companies, such as Dutch Gardens, send a special Welcome promotional offer as soon as a new shopper signs up. Other companies, such as Travelocity, send a carefully crafted series of welcoming messages, all designed to convert a new opt-in into a faithful customer. We’ve got anecdotal evidence, via a series of MarketingSherpa Case Studies, showing these sorts of new-subscriber campaigns do extraordinarily well. 

So, for our two studies this spring, we signed up for email at the 100 ecommerce sites and 200 online publishers sites and then watched our research mailbox to see what would arrive. Sadly — and somewhat shockingly — very little did.

Only 3% of ecommerce sites we signed up at sent us anything with a promotional offer — defined as a sale, a product offer or a newsletter. 71% sent some type of non-promotional form letter, often a subscription confirmation or text-only thanks note with no offer or engaging links. 26% sent us absolutely nothing at all for at least 14 days, if not longer.

The 200 online publishing sites we tested had extremely similar numbers. In that case 75% of sites we opted in at sent us some type of welcoming note — but it was a “weak” effort, a “you have been subscribed” form message with no other involvement device to bring the recipient back to the site, and back to interacting with the brand right away.

My suggestion based on this evidence? Go to your own site(s) and sign up for email.  Then watch what arrives in your in-box. See if it would move you to take action, to buy something, to read something, to return to your site…

If it would not (or if nothing arrives at all), then task your email creative team with creating, testing, and tracking the results of a welcome series that is more powerful. And then sit back smiling at the comforting knowledge that you’re probably five steps ahead of your competition by doing so.

Useful links related to this article

MarketingSherpa’s Email Marketing Benchmark Guide:
http://www.sherpastore.com/email-benchmark.html?8966

MarketingSherpa’s vendors:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/vendors.html

In 2006, from November through February, researchers for Outsell Inc (a research firm much like MarketingSherpa) interviewed 7,000 professionals in corporations, government, healthcare and academia to find out:

o How much time they spend searching and reading info for their job: 12 hours per week, up from 10.9 in 2005.

o Where they search and read that info: They look first at search engines just like everyone else with a computer on the planet. 

I was expecting both those factoids.  However, the rest of the study’s findings surprised me quite a bit.  Here’s the shockers, plus how your marketing might be affected by them:

#1. Press releases online (especially in sites such as Google News, YahooNews and MSN News, which is where most executives find and read them) have overtaken trade journals and their respective sites as the top information source for knowledge workers.

My suggestion: Now more than ever, consider posting your knowledge-offer promos such as white paper, article and webinar offers as press releases through the wires.  Here’s a basic how-to blog I recently wrote on the subject — it’s a bit 101 but good as a starter:

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?ident=27447

#2. 47% of study respondents were reading “real content” such as news and e-books on their wireless handhelds regularly.

My suggestion: Great excuse to get yourself a variety of handheld devices and expense them to your company!  Consider them your testing platform for all email newsletter templates and campaigns plus your significant Web content that might be accessed by a prospect or customer via handheld.  Then use the results to have your design team redesign everything to look better on the “third screen.”

BTW: If your prospects are unusually heavy mobile users– such as doctors, young adults and field sales development reps — then consider this a high priority.

#3. The average respondent was reading nine (9!) blogs on a regular basis.  And these weren’t blogs for personal info — these were job-related. 

My suggestion: Add hotlinks (copywritten in suitably bloggish fashion) to your press releases to your company-written blogs.  Also make sure your blog can be read via handheld device.  Best way — add an email opt-in form to the blog as a standard part of the page template and then start emailing out updates to your opt-ins.  (Don’t rely on RSS feeds alone, there’s a big population of professionals who don’t use them routinely.)

Plus, if you are in a tight vertical niche, start investigating blog sponsorships.  You may only hit a few readers per media buy, but they could be incredibly qualified candidates for your goods and services. 

BTW: Sorry no, we don’t accept sponsorships to this blog.  So that wasn’t a plug in any way, shape or form for your business 😉

Until next week.

Anne

The hottest new search engine marketing tactic isn’t paid search ads0 or tweaking your site to get higher organic rankings.  Instead, it’s using press releases (yes, old fashioned PR) to get clicks.

You see, every month millions of business execs surf the news via search engines’ news sites — such as Google News, MSN News and Yahoo News.  These news sites pick up headlines from thousands of newspapers and trade journals.  But, they also pick up “news” from the wire services that PR pros use to get releases out to journalists.

That means if you put out a press release via any one of the major wire services, including Business Wire, PR Newswire, or Market Wire, that release will show up in the big search engine news services. 

As MarketingSherpa’s research team has tracked in our Search Marketing Benchmark Guide (link below), online marketers have been experimenting for the past two years to figure out ways to take advantage of this fact.  We’ve discovered the following three tips to making a PR search campaign drive more traffic to your webinar:

Tip #1. Use a keyword in your headline

Your prospects are not searching the news engine looking for the word “Webinar.”  Instead, they may be searching for news about:

– Your brand name

– Your stock ticker

– Technical terms associate with your product or services

– Your CEO’s name

– Descriptive terms from their own industry or job function

So, instead of simply having a headline that reads, “XYZ Corporation Offers Webinar,” you probably want to say something like, “XYZ Corporation Offers Webinar for IT Security Professionals on Repairing XYZ Breach Factors.”

Tip #2. Load your first paragraph with keywords

You’ll want to repeat the most important keywords in your first paragraph (which is the copy that search engines view the most carefully to decide what your press release is about.)  Plus, be sure to include any alternate spellings, such as e-commerce versus ecommerce.

Often the easiest way of writing a press release for this purpose is to first write down a list of keywords that are related to your webinar and the prospects most likely to appreciate it.  Then take a standard release and see where you can replace ordinary words with keywords. 

Key – don’t repeat the keyword more than five times in the body of the release.  It starts to look “spammy” and may hurt your results.

Tip #3. Include a well-worded hotlink in your first paragraph

Traditionally, press releases are written with the hotlink and/or other contact information at the very end.  You’ll have to break yourself of that habit.

When busy executives read releases in the news on search engines, they often don’t scroll all the way to the end of the news for a press contact.  (In fact, they are not interested in a press contact, nor would you want them to be.)  Instead, they glance at the first paragraph, skimming to see what’s of interest for them.

If you place an offer and hotlink in that first paragraph, chances are it will be clicked on by the right prospects.  Two keys — don’t make it sound too promotional.  It should sound informational, factual, not  “marketing.”

Also, be sure to use keywords in your actual hotlink.  You may need to enlist your IT department’s help for this, but it’s worth the extra bother.  You see, the search engine spiders are reading the actual text in that hotlink both to determine how to rank (display) your press release, but also to see if your landing page (which I assume is your webinar registration form) should be listed in the main search engine.

So, adding keywords to URLs makes them infinitely more powerful. 

Results?  Depending on how well you word your press release, you can expect to receive clicks to your webinar offer page for 21-28 days.  Then the release is “retired” from the engines news services. 

Cost?  The good news is you won’t be paying by the click, only for release distribution.  Each of the services has a flat fee for this, which makes it far easier to budget.

For more information on the Search Marketing Benchmark Guide go to:

http://www.sherpastore.com/Search-Marketing-Benchmarks-2006-SEO-PPC.html?9006

I’ve been hearing incredible buzz about MySpace for the past year. 

More than 82 million MySpace members and counting — that’s a huge media destination to spring almost out of nowhere in nine months of server-quaking growth. 

As the leader of a research firm, I’ve been tracking MySpace’s size rather than participating in the phenomenon. That’s probably because I’m not hip, I’m not cool and I’m not remotely near 12-17, which is the age group nearly 60% of MySpace members belong to.

This weekend as I was shopping Memorial Day specials online, I surfed over to MySpace to see what all the fuss is about. My 21-year old stepson was in the room so I called over, “Hey, do you know about this MySpace thing?”

“Oh yeah,” he said.  “I’ve got my own site there.”

“You do?!” I was stunned he had a site I knew nothing about. “Oh, Anne,” he said in a ‘Duh’ tone, “Everybody has a MySpace account. Heck even Betty has one.”

That’s right. Our family dog, Betty Boop, has a MySpace account, and as it turns out, she has an ongoing blog there as well at  http://www.myspace.com/bettyboopdog 

I’m about to go into our weekly editorial meeting, and I bet you can guess what I’m going to assign the research team. Yup, a special report on marketing and social networking sites. If you’ve conducted any tests and have lessons learned to share, please contact our Editorial Director at TadC(at)MarketingSherpa(dot)com.

Thanks — and looking forward to those research results!

For the past six years, I’ve worn two hats: both President and Editorial Director of MarketingSherpa.

But, as we’ve grown (35 staffers, four annual summits, nine annual research reports, eight weekly newsletters, four Webinars a month, etc.) it’s become too much for me to do both jobs well. 

So this January I started looking for someone senior to come in to head our editorial team. I’d still be in the background, brainstorming research projects and conducting the most fascinating Case Study interviews myself. But, there’d be someone else to lead daily editorial operations.

I thought the search wouldn’t be that difficult. I was completely wrong.

First, we placed ads on major online classifieds along with specialist sites such as JournalismJobs.com, MediaBistro, SNAPonline.org and Editor & Publisher. Then I expanded the search by contacting personal connections such as Sam Whitmore of the excellent MediaSurvey.com, editorial members of NEPA (newsletters.org), and the Internet OldTimers group at SoFlow.com. 

Result? After reviewing dozens of candidates, including flying the top three to Rhode Island for day-long interviews with the whole Sherpa team, we wound up asking Tad Clarke to come on board.

Biggest surprise? He’s from a marketing publication background. Tad spent the past eight years as Editor-in-Chief of ‘DM News.’ (Before that he edited and reported features, business and news for newspapers — the third generation of his family to do so.)

I’d actually not limited our search to marketing editors, nor expected to hire one. I just wanted to hire a darn good editorial director.

Here’s the funny thing — most of the editors outside of a marketing journalist background made it pretty clear they expected marketing to be a bit like basket weaving. It’s that gut course you take for an easy A. 

Actually, having taken basket weaving for precisely that reason my senior year in high school I can tell you it’s much harder than you’d think. And so is research and reporting on what works in marketing. 

Once I explained to our top candidates from outside the marketing journalism world what Sherpa’s editorial really entailed — all of the data analysis, advanced tactics, and ever-changing technology — most *backed down*. In fact, one of the senior folks from ‘MIT Technology Review’ told me, “That job’s too hard.”

That’s right. Editing articles on nanotechnology is easy stuff compared to editing Case Studies on marketing. Which gave me a kick, and I thought it would give you one, too.

Anyway, from now on if you have input, news, feedback or questions for our research and editorial team, contact Tad directly at TadC(at)MarketingSherpa(dot)com. 

He is very much looking forward to hearing from you!