MarketingSherpa Blog

MarketingSherpa is creating a special report for you in partnership with the Viral & Buzz Marketing Association, and we need your quick input at:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=11516859463

You’ll find a quick one-page questionnaire to let us know what you think about viral ads.

Plus, if you’ve conducted a viral campaign, you can also submit it to be included in the report’s companion Viral Ad Showcase so our 173,000 weekly readers can see the glory of your strategy and creative!

Viral Advertising Showcase submissions are free, and all campaigns selected for the final Showcase will include contact and hotlinks to the agency that created them (if included on submission form.)

Submission deadline: February 24th midnight Eastern Time.

Yes, everyone involved will get both the results data and access to the Viral Ad Showcase in in a couple of weeks, as soon as we’ve published it for you.

Thanks in advance for your help in creating a truly useful and interesting Viral Ad Special Report…

Here’s the link again (yes if you have a Blog or ezine you can share it with others in the marketing and ad industry)
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=11516859463

I received this note from a reader who asked not to be identified because she’s tired of scammers hitting her promo sites.

“Dear Anne,

My promotional Web forms have been besieged by scammers trying to qualify for samples, which they then bring to Wal-Mart for store credits, or sell on eBay. Our data shows how they submit multiple variations to ‘game’ our promotion qualification form.

We have programmed a lot of flags into our online forms, but still these scammers keep trying to get through. We now have to manually check all form entries in addition to the scam ID programming we have done.

I believe there is a business opportunity for all of us online marketers to pool our scammer data into one single file, so that all of us can check our entries against it and disqualify people BEFORE we send them an expensive sample.”

If you are interested in creating such a database, or cooperating in any other clever way to stop offer-scammers online, please contact me and I’ll pass the word onto the marketer who wrote me this letter so you can get in touch.

Just write to aholland@marketingsherpa.com.

You may have seen the news on the wires this morning — we’re holding a formal press teleconference next Tuesday Feb 15th at 2pm ET (11am PT) and naturally you’re also invited.

You’ll discover the top-line results of our new Landing Page Eyetracking Study conducted in partnership with Eyetools Inc, and see a sample heatmap showing how human eyes “see” landing pages.

Get your dial-in number and password by signing up here:
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=18386850910

I’m fascinated by the fact that human eyes all tend to look at Web pages in the same way — there’s a pattern of involuntary movement. If you know the eyeflow pattern, and what elements can affect it, you can tweak landing page design to get better results.

Does it work?

Well, I had our own in-house Web designer tweak our landing pages last Thursday night based on the Study results. We didn’t change a single word of copy — just layout.

Preliminary results show paid conversions up by 64%.

My golly. 64% more sales from a few layout changes that took maybe an hour, tops. Now, as you can imagine, my heart is bursting with evangelical fervor to share this data with the world to make everyone’s landing pages more effective!

Anyway, please do sign up to attend our news teleconference next week at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=18386850910

If you can’t wait that long, and you’d like a copy of the complete study in your hands, it’s over at SherpaStore.com as part of our brand new Landing Page Handbook.

See you next week!

Last year Wachovia improved the results of their house ads almost twenty-fold. It’s a big gain for their revenues because house ads (ads for your own offers that run on your own site) clicks are far more likely to convert than ads run anywhere else on the Web.

Ilieva Ageenko, Wachovia’s VP & Director of Emerging Applications, told me in her gorgeous Cuban accent how they did it. “We were guessing in most situations about where to place the ads, then we implemented new Web analytics.”

“Our marketing group analyzed the average amount of time spent on a page, and compared it across the different types of ads — static, rotating banners, rich media, and so on.” If typical visitors didn’t spend enough time on a page to see rotating creative or load rich media, then the team put static creative there instead.

Conversely, they put ads that require more view time on pages that typically already got more view time. Then they tweaked creative such as skyscrapers versus buttons, to figure out what size worked best on each particular page.

The overall amount of rich media used rose a bit after the team discovered to their joyful surprise that 76% of site visitors were on broadband connections.

Three lessons learned:

o Optimizing house ads can produce a quick ROI for Web analytics investments, which makes upper management happy

o Media buyers should ask about average page visit time for each section of a site when planning creative placements

o Although just under 50% of US households have broadband connections, around 80% of at-work Web surfers are on broadband. Since many people do personal surfing at work, business-to- consumer sites may have far higher broadband users than you think.

By the way, I want to give credit to Wachovia’s new analytics firm, WebSideStory, for introducing me to Ilieva. Thanks!

I’m emailing this Blog into our production department (who thankfully are located in Arkansas so they are at work today). Our main offices in Warren RI are closed, as are most businesses here, for the snow emergency per order of the Governor.

I’ve spent the past few days holed up in the storm at my fiance’s house together with his 17- and 20-year-old. And, boy, have I learned a lot about the future of marketing to this new generation.

Lesson #1. “What’s a forward slash?”

When I called out an URL to Sara, who is 17 and has been surfing the Net since she was 12, she could only get an error page. Turns out she’s never heard of a forward slash. In fact, when she types in URLs, she doesn’t bother with www or any of the rest of beginning. She just types in the brand name.com and assumes she’ll get there.

When marketing to kids, don’t spell out the whole URL – it’s assumed.

Lesson #2. Thumb typing speed

When Petar, 20, wanted to email his girlfriend, he whipped out his cell phone instead of going all the way across the room to the computer. Everyone who fusses that cell email won’t really take off until someone can fit an entire keyboard into the appliance has missed the boat.

Petar, and his friends, can type at blinding speed with a single thumb on the phone. He doesn’t need to look at the pad — and can multitask, talking with the cell phone held up to his ear while typing and sending an email with it at the same time.

Lesson #3. Everything is obviously a commercial

Both kids assumed that the cars used in the classic movie Smokey & the Bandit were all paid promotional placements. “That entire movie is really a commercial, everything on TV is,” they assured me. If you think your clever guerrilla campaign isn’t being spotted by these kids, you’re more naive than they are.

Now it’s time to get back to shoveling, sanding, and horsing around in the cold.

Sponsor: New! Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2006 ~~~~~~~~~~~~
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– Typical Cost Per Click & Click Rates – Conversion rates for B-to-B, B-to-C, & Ecommerce – What your competitors are budgeting for search – Do agencies get better results than in-house marketers? – SEO (Optimization) vs PPC campaign data

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By Publisher, Anne Holland

Are you doing a great Blog on the topic of marketing, advertising, business lead gen, or public relations? Please do let us know because we want to sponsor you.

Yup. Every year I try a marketing experiment and this year it’s sponsoring blogs. (Last year it was a desktop application at http://www.marketingsherpa.com/desktop.html and the year before that it was our now infamous http://www.tortureaspammer.com game site.)

For 2005, I’d like to support the best blogs out there on marketing.

To submit your Blog for consideration and learn about how the process works, please contact Henry Copeland at BlogAds (henry@blogads.com) who is creating a network of the best marketing blogs for us to sponsor.

I’m very excited about this new experiment, and will be sure to let you know how it goes!

Thanks for your support.

If you’re into boats, horses, planes or pets you’ve probably read a Belvoir Media Group newsletter. With thirty titles and two million readers, you might even be a subscriber to Practical Sailor, Aviation Consumer, or Whole Dog Journal.

Belvoir started taking its ad-free newsletters online six years ago, allowing subscribers to access back issues. But in a move that surprised us, they still charge even paying customers wanting to download product and gear reviews.

“If you’re buying a $200,000 boat, you’ll pay $7.50 for a boat review, Greg King, Belvoir’s SVP Circulation, told ContentBiz. Same with canned dog food reviews.

Belvoir charges non-subscribers for other content as well (only a snippet summary can be viewed on the site before the paid wall redirect appears). Even so, no one’s biting (and we’re not talking about the dog food).

“We discovered pretty quickly that people will only pay for our evergreen content,” King explained. General back articles, interviews or news don’t go anywhere.

Of Belvoir’s thirty pubs, only eight focus on product reviews. The numbers are small so far: just about 2500 downloads per month at $7.50 each. “This is definitely ancillary income,” King said.

But it’s also easy income. Belvoir uses the same basic template for each of its titles, provided by vendor IProduction.com which has set up its 300 primarily newsletter customers for usually under $10K a title plus a monthly maintenance fee.

At these prices, when Belvoir expands to a hoped for 12 online titles next year, it should be mostly gravy on the dog food reviews that are making up a small but healthy side dish. And it’s a savings over the way Belvoir did business before when consumers ordered a product review, they’d receive the whole issue by postal mail.

As King puts it: “it aint huge, but it’s money.

Are you about to send a special “warm fuzzy” holiday card or gift to your top customers? Here’s an idea I love from Teri Schacker, head of marketing for the Credit Union Executives Society…

This fall she researched to find out which common attributes her top 100 best customers all shared — aside from being great customers of course. These might be location, number of employees, types of purchases, email open rate, whatever….

Then she ran those attributes across the rest of the Society’s customer files to pinpoint who else matched those attributes, but wasn’t a top customer yet. Turns out roughly 50 additional members matched the demographics and characteristics of top buyers.

So now she’s launched a year-long campaign focusing on those should-bes, and essentially giving them the kid-glove special treatment that top 100 customers get. I’ll bet by next holiday season many will have moved into the ranks of top buyers.

This is such a great database marketing idea — you can copy it a bit by simply extending the reach of your normal holiday goodwill campaign. Perhaps you can encourage a few more pretty good customers to grow into extremely good ones 🙂

Are you about to send a special “warm fuzzy” holiday card or gift to your top customers? Here’s an idea I love from Teri Schacker, head of marketing for the Credit Union Executives Society…

This fall she researched to find out which common attributes her top 100 best customers all shared — aside from being great customers of course. These might be location, number of employees, types of purchases, email open rate, whatever….

Then she ran those attributes across the rest of the Society’s customer files to pinpoint who else matched those attributes, but wasn’t a top customer yet. Turns out roughly 50 additional members matched the demographics and characteristics of top buyers.

So now she’s launched a year-long campaign focusing on those should-bes, and essentially giving them the kid-glove special treatment that top 100 customers get. I’ll bet by next holiday season many will have moved into the ranks of top buyers.

This is such a great database marketing idea — you can copy it a bit by simply extending the reach of your normal holiday goodwill campaign. Perhaps you can encourage a few more pretty good customers to grow into extremely good ones 🙂

If you’ve been to one of our ContentBiz Subscription Summits, you’ve no doubt heard Patrick Spain speak about how his firm HighBeam Research makes for better researching on the web. Now HighBeam has put together an unusual, yet fascinating new promotion.

They’ve partnered with Christopher Locke, co-author of the best selling Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business As Usual and Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices, to write a blog about how to use HighBeam in, well, blogs.

Confusing? It was to us as well at first…it’s not clear whether the demo site, which has the tongue-in-cheek URL of ChiefBloggingOfficer.com, is supposed to be a good blog read or a not-so-subtle advertisement.

The site has Locke blogging on various subjects with links to HighBeam-researched articles. Good news is the linked articles are free. The idea is to convince bloggers who often need to research deep into the archives for their blogs to use HighBeam to locate that background material.

Locke has assembled a blogging A-list of buddies linked on the left side column, including Cory Doctorw, Esther Dyson, Doc Searls, and Chris Pirillo among others, who he says will also post links to HighBeam content.

The model makes sense in a certain way, though it’s bound to rub some bloggers the wrong way. In the ongoing quest to figure out a sustainable blogging revenue stream, HighBeam is essentially saying: let us help your blogs dig deeper.