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Display advertisers gave a shrug of the shoulders at last week’s news that ad clicks weren’t a great measure of success, as illustrated by a study conducted by comScore, Tacoda and Starcom. The study examined the population of people who clicked on Web ads in July 2007 (only about 32% of the total Internet population) and teased out a group they justifiably call ‘Heavy Clickers.’

These Heavy Clickers make up a mere 6% of the online audience but account for 50% of all clicks on ads. Demographically, heavy clickers skew strongly toward the 25-to-44 age range and have a lower income profile than the average. But that doesn’t stop them from spending more online than most. This is probably related to their extraordinary consumption of the Web — they’re online five times more and they view eight times as many pages as the people who didn’t click on an ad.

When their website preferences are mixed with their consumption patterns, heavy clickers appear to treat their whole online experience as a leisure activity, happily wandering around, clicking on shiny things, playing games, gambling and generally acting unemployed. In fact, they’re about 35% more likely to go to an employment site, so that may well be the case for some.

Taking a view that this leisure pattern was connected to their click behavior, the study designers looked for a place where a different demographic would be in a leisurely mindset to see whether their click behavior would start to look more like the heavy clickers.

To do this, they looked at social networking sites — where visitors spend a great deal of time poking around acting leisurely — and found some correlation between clicking and the leisurely mindset. These heavy clickers skewed younger than the rest of their cohorts, but their household income was consistent, so one wonders if this was simply a view into the early development stage of a heavy clicker.

The last of their released findings focused on how brand metrics are affected by click rate. In other words, would a site’s aided brand awareness correlate with the clickthrough rates of their ads?

So, what does all this mean for marketers?
– First off, clickers follow the 80/20 rule.
– It helps prove that search traffic is largely driven by advertising.
– In a study from the Advertising.com, we see a correlation between clicks and weekends and conversions on weekdays, so that supports the leisurely mindset connection to clicks.
– Were rich media ads removed from the study?
– Where do these clicks happen?
– Clicks have little to do with branding.
– If you’re not capping frequency, you’re going to get a skew.

I’m not going to name brand names, but you guys should know who you are. You are Western brands being marketed overseas. And you ought to be auditing your media buys far more carefully.

In Nepal, a country where black hair is so universal as to make any other color seem freakish, I saw repeated shampoo commercials from Western brands prominently featuring blondes. After a few weeks there, even I was staring at the screen with the natives thinking, “Wow, that’s a weird hair color,” instead of, “What great shampoo that must be.”

Then, this month on my way back to the States for Sherpa’s Email Summit on Feb 24-26 in Miami, I stopped off in Croatia for a visit with my in-laws.

Croatia used to be part of the former Yugoslavia, and there is at least one black woman living here. I know this because I saw her on the evening news last night. She was being interviewed as an oddity — as in, “Wow, there’s an actual black person living here, and, golly, she even speaks pretty good Croatian!” As a result I had to endure a lot of ribbing about the lousy quality of my own Croatian speaking skills. …

But, what struck me the most was that on Croatian TV, I’ve routinely seen American-produced ads marketing cosmetics specifically for black women. Surely they’re not all targeting this lone consumer?

Thing is, there’s loads and loads of opportunity for Western products in the global market. I’ve spent much of the last year meeting members of the eager new middle classes in Asia and formerly communist Europe. They’ve just gotten credit cards; they’re buying their first new cars; they’re investing for the first time on local stock markets; and they like to show off their flashy cell phones with snazzy, new ringtones. B-to-B markets are also booming — especially for advice on how to run a business.

Business may be lousy at home, but if you market fast food (especially Mexican), fancy driving gloves and other show-off-able driving accessories, ASP-based business software or cheap, modern-styled furnishings for tiny condos, the Eastern European and Asian worlds could be your oyster.

Just stop blowing your budget on ill-targeted media buys.

Whether we’re entering an official recession or just an economic lull, it’s clear that most US marketers are in for at least a slightly rough ride for the next 24 months. That’s OK, when the going gets tough, it gets my blood up. I hope you are the same way!

Over the next few weeks I’ll discuss tactics you can use to ride out the storm. First up: establish two current customer benchmarks.

During a recession happy, loyal customers are incredibly important. During good times, you can market your heart out to land new accounts. Pluck that new fruit. In bad times, the branches raise themselves up. Landing new customers is harder – more expensive — just at the time when your CEO holds that “How can we cut marketing costs?” discussion with your department.

Your company’s profitability for the next two years nearly certainly rests in the hands of people who are current customers. They are more likely to buy than anyone else. The cost of selling to them is likely to be lower than to anyone else. They are also far more likely to refer prospects who are likely to become new accounts than any other media you can market through.

If you have not already established benchmarks, measuring your current customer base, now is the time to do so. At the very least, you’ll have data to benchmark your own performance against in future months when hoards of new clients may not come knocking at the gate. You can say your marketing has helped current profitable accounts stay alive longer, refer more prospects, buy more products or services.

Measurement can be as complex as you like it, but the basics are:

-> Step #1. Segment your customer base
Chances are certain customer segments perform far differently than others. You may chose to segment by your most and least profitable accounts. Or by accounts in certain countries, or by industry, or by total units sold, or by lifetime. You may want to study multiple types of segments at the same time. The key is, it must be a segment you readily identify and sort your database — or spreadsheet — by on an ongoing basis. It must also be a segment you think you could affect with a campaign of some type if you want to make an impact on that one segment.

-> Step #2. Lifetime length and value
Next, for each segment, you’ll want to measure median account lifetime length and value — in terms of profitability as well as overall sales. (Median is always better than average which can skew too easily.) These are the benchmarks you’ll continue to re-assess over the next 24 months to see if anything has changed. They are also values you can use to decide which segments to continue marketing aggressively in for new accounts and which to cut back on for the time being.

-> Step #3. Satisfaction and likelihood to refer and/or continue
Finally, ask customers directly to rate their account satisfaction, if they are likely to continue being customers, if not can you change anything that would make then stay on, and if they would be likey to refer you.

I strongly suggest that you don’t ask customers directly unless your brand has a very high reputation for trust and honesty. Most customers do not want to tell you bad news directly. They’ll lie with blandness or they’ll say, “Sorry but my budget was cut,” instead of telling you they really resigned the account. However, they are often willing to tell a third-party researcher the cold hard truth in vivid detail. So, hire a third party.

Now you know what product or service changes must be made to save current accounts, and who you can count on for the long haul. You will almost certainly be surprised by some of your top customer’s answers.

By the way … never ever allow anyone to contact accounts without getting buy-in from the sales department or accounts services department beforehand. And warn customer service to boot. Now is not the time to ruffle internal feathers!

As a young copywriter, I used to pop bullet points into the middle of long direct mail letters to break up the prose on the page, catch and re-engage the eye.

These days — especially in email and online — bullet points are the most-read copy on the page. Bullet points are doing the heavy lifting, and ours eyes skip over prose nearly entirely. I’ve learned two rules from years of eyetracking tests, search marketing, landing page construction and email copywriting that you may find useful. 

Bullet point success is all about putting your most powerful copy where the human eye is most likely to see it as it scans the page (or screen.)  You’re not controlling the eye so much as you are letting the eye’s known habits control where you place copy. Two ways to do this:

#1. Reorganize your list

Copywriters write numbered or bulleted lists in order of importance. The first is usually the most important and the last is the least important. The problem is that the eye doesn’t see importance that way. The eye sees the top two bullets. Then it often skips down to the very last bullet. And then it skips merrily on its way to someplace else on the page. Middle bullets are often ignored completely.

So, organize your bullet lists like this:
o Most important point
o Second most important point
o Less important point
o Less important point
o Third most important point

#2. Put the keywords first

When people scan lists they are not reading prose, so you cannot write a list as if it were prose. You also can’t (heaven forbid) start each bullet with the exact same word or even words starting with the first same letter of the alphabet, unless you want the rest of the bullet content to be ignored or all swim together into an unidentified blur.

Here are the words that the eye tends to read on a bulleted list (I put the words it doesn’t read as “blah blah blah”)

o Word word word word blah
o Word word word blah blah
o Word blah blah blah blah
o Blah blah blah blah blah
o Word word blah blah blah

If you put your best words — especially ones that look physically different from each other by starting with different first letters (again, catch attention by breaking patterns) — in the spots I marked as “Word,” your copy is immediately more powerful.

In practical terms, I usually find it’s easiest to write a bullet point list as I would normally do it, to get it out on paper for my own working needs.  Then I re-craft and edit it, moving words, positions and tweaking verbiage until I get it right for the reading eye.

Got any copywriting tips that work for you that you would like to share with Sherpa readers? Comment below!

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Still, results from a survey conducted earlier this year showed that 68% of our readers don’t know how long articles are available before going behind the membership wall. We decided our limited-access policy needed to be clarified. We also wanted to see if adding an expiration date to newsletter subject lines might create a sense of urgency that would boost open and clickthrough rates. Read more…

I just received an email from a good friend in Massachusetts. A girlfriend of hers, a 20+ year marketing professional was “let go” from her position as head of a technology firm’s marketing … right before Christmas.

Crazy but true, the CEO in question tried to paint the layoff as a compliment. “You’ve done such a fine job putting a team in place here and training them. We really don’t need you anymore.” he apparently said.

Now, when was the last time you heard of a CFO being laid off like that? “Bob, you’ve done such a fine job training bookkeeping and hiring that accounting firm. We’ve decided to do without you this year.”

Or how about the CIO? “Jerry, those technicians of yours are fantastic geeks. Our tech has never been in better shape. Thanks and have a nice life.”

Yet, somehow on a planet where it’s nearly inconceivable to lay off your most critical leaders when a company needs them most, during a crisis, it’s all too easy to lay off the head of marketing.

Back during the downturn of 2001-02, marketing got socked in the stomach. We were money wasters; we weren’t accountable enough; we were “suits”; we were bad. In fact, when in reaction to the then-common marketplace feelings, an ad agency in Massachusetts did a joke song CD titled, ‘Let’s All Blame the Marketing Director!’ It was so true to life that it was hard for some of us to laugh.

We’ve come a very long way since those dark days. The profession as a whole has nearly reinvented itself — especially in terms of accountability and measurement. Now, we all measure everything (and now CEOs complain our reports are too detailed; if it’s not one thing, it’s another.)

But, I think we still have one profound challenge to address as a profession. We have raised our reputations as tacticians, but we are not seen as mission-critical strategic leaders.

Strategic leaders keep their jobs during recessions. Tacticians can be downsized. You can always get a cheaper tactician or make one tactician do the work of two. Heck, you can even outsource tacticians to other, cheaper countries.

How can marketing as a profession seize the day and get upper management to (a) give us a seat at the table, and (b) see us as the strategic leaders that we are?

I don’t have the answers — but I hope you do. Write me. Share your insights and ideas. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.

I think nearly all CEOs share two fantasies. The first being that they could appear on the front page of The Wall Street Journal or cover of Business 2.0 … if only a PR person gave a bit more effort. The second is that they could save a heck of a lot of money if they slashed the ad budget and got more PR coverage instead. Because, PR is “free,” right?

(Anyway every CEO is convinced that 50% of the ad budget is wasted as things are.)

This explains why PR always gains in popularity during a recession, even an incipient one like what we’re undergoing these days. Unfortunately, this doesn’t help the PR profession all that much. Scads of PR pros were laid off or barely survived in downsized firms during the economic downturn of 2001-02.

It’s due to the “PR is free” thing that your CEO can’t seem to shake from his or her head.

PR is, in fact, a heck of a lot like search engine optimization. A skilled practitioner comes in, redoes your site’s messaging, builds inbound link relationships with hundreds of influential sources and then everyone waits six months to begin to see significant impact. In the meantime, the fiscal quarter is ending and your CEO is getting nervous. “Where are the ’free results’ already?!” “Where’s my No. 1 ranking?” “Where’s my WSJ cover mention?”

Then, your CEO asks, “Hey, if it’s free, why are we paying for this? How hard can this PR (or SEO) thing be? Let’s bring it in-house and save even more money. It’s a recession after all, we all have to work a little harder and tighten our budgetary belts.”

Which is how even the best PR firms get fired. And the best marketers start looking a little hollow-eyed and permanently exhausted. PR is people-work after all. It’s relationship building — not something a typically introverted marketer tends to be fabulous at. When well done, PR also takes an extraordinary number of man-hours … something you may not have on hand when the CEO just cut your staffing budget again.

PR is invaluable — especially when you get strong mentions in niche media that your prospects read passionately. But, it’s not free.

OK, so what’s my advice this week? If you are trying to get more glowing press coverage in this down market, one factor can help you. Trade journalists like exclusive case studies in any economy, but when the going gets tough, they utterly adore them. In 2008, it’s going to be easier to get case study coverage than ever before.

As Micky Long at Aberdeen Group once told me, “In a recession, reporting coverage moves. It’s not about vision or the next greatest thing; it’s about show-me-the-money. Show me the ROI. Reporters say ‘Let me talk to a customer.’ ”

So, there’s your hook. Go forth and build media relationships. Good luck!

Many journalists will agree to a quick informational phone call with new marketing leaders, if you respectfully request it. Let them know the conversation will not run longer than 15 minutes and will be at a time of their convenience, and promise you will not pitch them during that time. You’re seeking information so you can serve them better as a possible source and advertiser.

If you can’t get through, but you already sponsor the publication in question, a gentle nudge from your ad sales rep can help, too.

Here are the best questions to ask during those 15 minutes:

– Is there a particular PR person or firm you respect the most in their field? Whose email or calls would you be most likely to respond to because you know they’ll bring you good stuff? (Never hire a PR firm that’s not vouched for by the press they pitch routinely.)

– Do you or does any member of your team ever freelance for vendors to write white papers or articles for email newsletters? Are any of you ever available as speakers or moderators for vendor user conferences? Obviously, we understand this possible relationship would not affect your other coverage.

– How far out do you begin working on major stories for issues? What are your biggest deadlines? If we wanted to be considered for a quote or as background for a story, by when would we need to contact you if we see something in your editorial calendar coming up?

– What do you see as the hot button stories or areas of coverage that your readership is deeply interested in over the next six months? What’s over, done, dead?

– Do you study which search terms are very popular on your site’s search engine? How about which types of articles get the most clicks and views from your email newsletter? Is that information I could get routinely, say every month or quarter, from my ad sales rep if I’m a client?

– Which bloggers do you pay the most attention to? If you blog, what sorts of items, gossip and otherwise, make useful snippets for you? Do you mind being pitched on possible blog snippets?

– What sort of story or data would you love to get from a source as an exclusive? How about a case study? A tip sheet? Statistical results from a new industry survey? An interview with one of our top clients? Product launch previews? A sample of the product to review?

– What sort of story or information should I just never bother you with?

– Who on the staff should we contact? Should we just send information to one beat reporter in particular?

Note: You may also want to check MarketingSherpa’s extensive library of PR interviews, ranging from BusinessWeek to Women’s Wear Daily. Top journalists reveal exactly how they wish you would pitch them stories. This Members-only resource is available on free trial at:
https://www.marketingsherpa.com/memberhome.html