MarketingSherpa Blog

I was giving a speech at a PR association meeting in New Jersey in early 2001 about how the Internet was affecting PR tactics, when a group of older-looking grumpy attendees just sat there like lumps and left as soon as possible afterward. “What’s up with them? Was my speech that awful?” I asked the organizer.

“You were fine!” she reassured me. “These are the guys who are pretty close to retirement, and they hoped the Internet thing would not get so huge, so quickly that they would have to learn it. They just want to coast for a few more years until they can retire.”

I snorted, full of the superiority of a natural-born enthusiast. I felt sorry for them — they were missing out on what could be the most exciting time of their careers.

Living in Serbia and Croatia these past few weeks, I have been reminded of that moment time and time again. Not because these people are mired in the past — to the contrary, most are straining with every fiber toward a better, brighter future. Nope, that grumpy old person who does not really want to learn a whole new marketing tactic has turned out to be me.

I, who embraced the Internet so wholeheartedly, have grown old. Do I really, really have to do it all over with mobile phones?

Well, the answer is absolutely yes. I knew it for a few years now but buried my head in the sand until now living in this land. Depending on which source you research, the amount of Serbs who are online ranges from 16% to 27%, including students at school and white-collar workers. However, 90% of the population have cell phones.

If the Internet is going to take off here, and, boy, is it ever poised to take off in a big way, it is not going to be when everyone has a computer plus a high-speed connection because that is not going to happen in our lifetime. Instead, it will happen through mobile phones.

The new generation of Europeans, Asians and, increasingly, our own American kids, too, think of PC-based communications as old school. An Internet tied to a PC is such a 20th-century thing. Get with the program, Grandmother, mobile is everything!

The new generation worldwide update their Facebook accounts with their phones. They blog with their phones. They tell everyone where the coolest party is tonight with text messaging. They make YouTube movies with their phones. They trust their phones. They love their phones. They carry their phones everywhere. The “third screen” is the first screen of their hearts and everyday lives.

And it is our job in the marketing community to figure out what, for most of us, is an entirely new platform. Does your marketing department even “own” an official iPhone? Do you routinely play around with a mobile phone just to see what can be done with it now? If you do not watch TV, you cannot design great campaigns for it. Ditto for mobile.

So, I am inviting you to join me in my personal “homework” for the next year. I am going to buy a sample of each of the latest type of mobile phone, and I am going to use them! Please join me. First step, learn how to update my Facebook via mobile. OK, this may take a while …

Oh, blech. I promised my new bosses at Sherpa when they let me move from the US head office to work virtually from a home office in Serbia that there would be no problems.

“You won’t even know I’m gone. I’ll have a great Internet connection, and I’ll work away writing new Handbooks for Sherpa busy as a bee,” I swore. Which was completely true, except for the Internet connection. Turns out in our little town you can’t buy bandwidth faster than about 235 kilobits per second, a speed that testing site BandwdithPlace.com told me is “mediocre.”

This isn’t a problem when I’m writing a Handbook, which is what I spend 90% of my workday doing. However, when it came time to put an official MarketingSherpa Questionnaire online for you guys to take to give your own input on the topic of Landing Pages … I just couldn’t face doing it myself.

It would have taken 10 hours. So, I took the lazy woman’s way out. I emailed my draft questionnaire to the new guy (i.e., the only one with a little open time) in our New York research department and fell on his mercy. Thankfully, he helped out.

Then, he asked me to test the questionnaire before we launched it to find any problems, because the last thing you want to do when sending a questionnaire to 237,000 of your closest readers is to send something that’s broken. OK, now you can guess the depths of my underachievement during the testing process.

All I can say is the bandwidth drove me temporarily nuts.

Now I have two favors to ask you:

Favor #1. Please come and take the questionnaire now if you didn’t get a chance before. The problems are all fixed, thanks to our New York research team. Yes, we’ll send you all a copy of the Executive Summary with new charts in a few weeks:
http://s-r3cij-14367.sgizmo.com
(Closes Thursday, September 13th, because that’s such a lucky date.)

Favor #2. Please *forgive* me for my pre-testing delinquency if you tried to take the questionnaire last week. I will not ever, ever make that same mistake again. Yes, we do have your answers on file if you submitted, even if you got a weird loop instead of a nice “Thank you” page.

Oh, and one last thing:

Please, please take a look at your own site’s load speed with the comp analyzer you can get at WebSiteOptimization.com. Turns out that although 93.99% of US workers have high bandwidth, only 53% of US consumers do. The rest are feeling the exact same pain I do whenever I visit your site. Actually, it turns out that nearly one out of five Americans online feel a lot more pain because they’re still on 56k dial-up. Ouch!

Thank you.

If you’re in the middle of a homepage design review (just as we are), here’s a handy checklist of eight improvements worth testing based on MarketingSherpa research and Case Studies:

#1. Refocus 80% of the page on a single primary audience

Although your home has to serve everyone — prospects, press, investors, customers, HR recruiting, partners/distributors, etc. — dividing the real estate into even sections for each one will create a mishmash so no one can find anything.

Instead, pick the audience you most need to impress with your homepage (I’m assuming it’s prospects you hope to sell something to) and dedicate the vast majority of the page to their needs. Note: I’m NOT saying “dedicate it to marketing to them” but rather “to their needs,” which is something else entirely — see below.

You can serve your secondary audiences by means of simple tab navigation across the top of the page or hotlinks in unobtrusive places, such as your footer or the top right corner of the page. Examples of this approach range from NetFlix.com to the Virginia Beach Visitor’s Center at VBFun.com.

#2. Move your most useful links into the “small window-fold”

Horrible truth — many visitors don’t open windows all the way to see your whole homepage. This is especially true if they’re surfing from search engines or email. Your analytics stats can’t tell you this, but usability clinics will in short order. (Alternatively, just walk around your office looking at your co-workers’ computers. How often do they have several windows open, none using the entire computer screen?)

This means the classic page fold, which all Web designers work so hard to get critical content above, has moved higher than you think. Unless you are in ecommerce or media, however, it’s my experience that the hotlinks your primary audience needs are rarely above that fold.

Instead, many sites use that critical top-and-center real estate for vanity content created by the marketing or branding department. You know it on sight: a big graphic with, perhaps, a tagline. Useful links are often under that — under the fold. It’s now time to move this vanity content elsewhere (for a lab-tested solution, see my hotlink to a new Sherpa research study below).

#3. Use your internal search reports to rewrite navigation links

Cut through your internal political battles about what should be on the nav bar, how to word it and in what order it should appear in one simple step: review your site’s internal site-search stats. Key, first have all searches from company-owned IP addresses (i.e., your own employee searches) removed. They probably don’t use the same wording that your customers and prospects do.

Then just look. What are visitors typing into search? Can you use those exact same words in your navigation bars and other hotlinks on the homepage? If it’s an incredibly popular term, can you use it twice as both a button and a hotlink in the text? For example, look at the Cars.com home page to see how they repeat the hotlinked keyword term “Sell” in multiple places and formats.

#4. Dump extra columns

Got more than three columns, including your nav bar? Dump one. Trust me, test it. Easiest way: combine two short columns to create one longer one.

#5. Dump external ads and banner-style ads

Unless your business model is driven more by external banner advertising (or AdSense revenue) than it is by whatever else you hope visitors will do on your site, dump the ads.

Don’t let the Webmaster sling up Google AdSense “just to make a little more revenue on the side.” You can do that on your blog or on other pages that are not supposed to be dedicated to your company. Your homepage is to help visitors navigate based on their needs in relation to YOU.

Also, don’t let the marketing department create (or re-use) promotional banners to post to your Web site. People are coming expecting to find useful links for what they need and to learn about what your company offers. Usability studies show that banners that look like external marketing banners (using colors, typeface, images, etc. that would not normally flow with your site design) are subject to “banner blindness” and, frankly, can be annoying.

It’s just unprofessional. If the marketing department has a special on — especially if that promotion is being blasted on other media channels (TV, postal mail, radio, etc.), definitely reference it, even using a graphic and headline that’s directly from the external campaign. However, put that promotional content into a format resembling your site’s format. It should look like it belongs there, not like your marketing department bought an ad on your site.

#6. Bigger typeface

I see this a lot on B-to-B homepages. They use 60% of the page for one massive rectangular graphic and a large headline. Then, they squish all of the remaining content, especially useful hotlinks, into teeny, tiny type. Come on, guys! Body copy that’s under 10 points (preferably 12 points) is hard to read and probably wasted.

Consider Web 2.0-style design that’s now sweeping the cooler corners of the Web. These sites, such as Mozilla.com, use bigger type both for readability and for personality. They effectively say: “This is a clear, easy-to-understand place. Welcome.”

#7. Fast load time (for at least half the screen above the smaller fold)

Not everyone is on a super-speedy line like you have in your office. Some are still on dial-up, and some (like me) are on “high speed” lines that aren’t so high speed when everyone in the house or neighborhood is using them to download movies.

I understand if your CEO wants to look super-cool by having Flash or video on your homepage. It’s probably not a good idea given usability concerns but, hey, it’s a political battle many marketing departments lose to the forces that be. So, fine, give in. Let them stick Flash on the homepage if they really, really want to.

However, relegate that Flash to one side of the page — preferably the right side, although you’ll want to test it. This way anyone who opens your homepage with a small window can read useful information and click on useful links immediately if they want, while the Flash takes its sweet time to load on the other side.

A site that does a fantastic job of this is ClearInk.com. Another useful tool for your internal design-vs.-load-time battles is the (free) Web Page Analyzer tool over at:
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/

#8. Are your basic info links getting too much traffic?

Ask your Web analysis team to divide your traffic into newbies versus repeat visitors. Then ask them what the most clicked links for newbies are. If “About Us,” “Products” or “Services” links on your homepage are getting more than 10% newbie traffic, then your homepage copy has a problem.

Your homepage should clarify for new visitors what your company does and what your major product lines or services are. It should also provide easy-to-find (above the smaller fold) links to the most popular of these. If newbies are looking at your homepage and not finding this basic information and then, in desperation, digging further into generic info pages to try to find something relevant to their needs, you have a copywriting problem.

Your homepage real estate is being wasted. Rewrite your copy based on what people need to find to take the next step and post it up. Then, as soon as you have another 500 newbie visitors, review the analytics again. Have you gotten more people directly to where they need to be from the homepage, or are they still wandering confused to generic information?

Yes, I know this is enormously easier to say than it is to actually do. I’m on that homepage revamp committee for Sherpa right now, remember? Now we have to put our own words into action. Gulp!

P.S. If you would like to see Sherpa’s latest research study into homepages — we had 60 business execs visit real-life homepages of companies such as Oracle, IBM and Sun, it’s available at:
http://www.sherpastore.com/b2bbenchmark08.html

Admittedly, our B-to-B Marketing Summit Brochure was brochure-from-hell from a proofing standpoint. The marketing department had to get 29 different speakers’ names spelled properly (this must be very easy in places, such as Sweden, where you have a limited pool of names to deal with, but in multicultural America you always have to double-check.) And we had to make sure the right headshot went with the right speaker, which can be easier to screw up than you think.

Plus, there were 500+ past attendee company names to spell correctly, including some with caps in the middle (Sherpa included, unfortunately) and some without, which also makes guessing impossible.

And, of course, all those session times … for some reason putting sessions into the proper slots is also always harder than expected. Like children, they wiggle about and bump into each other instead of lining up in a nice, quiet, orderly fashion.

So, when the marketing team proofed the blue lines the printer sent over for our big August campaign, they had a lot to review.

Which explains how everyone totally forgot to proofread the response URL. So, we ended up with tens of thousands of brochures that read, Go to “http://www.vanityurl.com,” which was typed in as a placekeeper copy early in the process and never updated.

When the team alerted me about this, I said, “No problem, just go buy VanityURL.com and redirect from it!” Which would have been lovely except for the fact that NutriSystem already owns it.

They must have a marketing department very much like ours.

This actually made us feel much better about having to trash the printed brochures and start again; we were not alone in the world in being imperfect at proofing. In fact, when I mentioned the snafu to a few friends in the Net marketing world, they laughed and told me their own horror stories. (The worst was when a major news media article misspelled an ecommerce domain in a big story, and it wound up sending traffic to a competitor who had been canny enough to buy every typo in sight.)

My three lessons learned:

#1. When you are proofing marketing copy or ad creative, ALWAYS check the URL first. Even typos in the headline are less important.

#2. If you are speaking with a reporter on the telephone, ALWAYS spell every letter of your domain out loud verbally even if it seems obvious and easy to spell.

#3. If your online ad campaign uses a redirect or tracking system that changes URLs behind the scenes, you should BOTH handtype the visible URL and click on the working link to be sure both are correct.

Hopefully, we’ll never have this problem again — but in the meantime, my hat’s off to NutriSystem, with a capital S in the middle!

I was listening to a presentation by Rab Govil of Naehas yesterday, when one stat really made me sit up. His agency tested mailing follow-up campaigns for two different B-to-B clients. In both cases, they sent the same offer to the same list twice in a row, waiting roughly three-four weeks between mailings. Nothing startling there except for the fact that both campaigns were sent via postal mail.

Now, we all know postal direct mail still works, and, in fact, can work exceptionally well in these days of email overload. But it’s so much more expensive per piece that many marketers I know have cut back on follow-up mailings, which were routine 10-15 years ago. Instead, they may invest in multiple media channels, such as search and email.

Here’s what startled me: in both cases, the results for Rab’s second postal mailing were far closer than I expected to the response rates for the original wave. For example, one original wave got a 1.90% response rate with the follow-up achieving 1.46%.

In the old days, you would expect a second wave to maybe get 50% of the first wave’s success. If you mailed them closely together, perhaps arriving in the mailbox within 10 days of each other, the second wave would drop to only 25%-30% of the first, but the first would leap higher in compensation. (We assumed it was the “reminder” factor where recipients would mail back the first wave’s reply card when reminded by the second wave.)

Anyhow, what this new response data may indicate is that if you have a direct postal mail campaign that’s doing fairly well, you should immediately roll out a second test wave. Key: only mail the second wave to your best lists from your first wave. Never invest in trying to pry responses out of a hitherto nonresponsive list (a.k.a. “sending good money after bad”).

For your best response, I suspect you should strike while the iron is hot and get that campaign into the mailbox within three weeks.

Production-wise, this could be a nightmare — if your first piece was remotely complicated — except, you don’t have to use the exact same piece. In fact, a cheap-to-produce “reminder” postcard can work as well or even *better* than a fancier piece.

And the Internet Age is perfectly suited for reminder postcards because these days you can load up creative and lists online to a postcard specialist house for one-week turnaround, including printing and mailing. Plus, you can promote an online landing page URL (plus phone number, of course) for replies. (Note: I would never suggest doing away with a printed response form for fax or mailback in your first wave. In my experience you have to give people as many reply options as possible for best results.)

In his speech, Rab actually mentioned he had tested a campaign last year with both a multipage catalog-style self-mailer as well as a follow-up postcard. He got far less than 1% response rates from people who got either the postcard or the self-mailer. However the people who got both resulted in a 3.78% response rate.

Now, take that with a grain of salt, because, obviously, the people who got both were the core, most-worth-investing in, section of his list. So, you can’t assume just any old list would see a giant leap with two mailings. However, if you have a core, consider investing more in them.

And. please, let me know how it works out. Are your direct postal mail response rates different in 2007 than they were in 1997?

Related links to this blog

Rab Govil’s agency:
http://www.naehas.com

Today, I write you from Sombor, Serbia, a mid-sized town a couple of hours from Belgrade. I have been planning the move since, well, perhaps since I was a young girl reading storybooks of world travel, but it’s still all a bit of a shock.

Forty-odd years of dreaming, and now it’s real.

I’m in a small home office about two blocks from downtown Sombor, where there are more bicycles than cars and local farmers come every day with fresh fruit and vegetables to market. My Internet line is great, if a bit spotty on occasion. My work phone line is great, if insanely expensive for calls back to America.

It’s just like working from a home office in the US … except for the six-hour time difference and utterly alien snacks at the supermarket. I’m already missing corn chips, hot sauce and Diet Pepsi.

How did all this come about? Well, first, back in late 1999 I founded MarketingSherpa. Then, I grew the company until it was too big for my taste. I was spending more time on HR, legal, accounting and IT than on researching and writing about what works in marketing. Arrgh! I wasn’t cut out to be a company president.

On the cusp of this intense work frustration, my personal life was also transformed. Out of the blue, I met and became engaged to the man of my dreams, who just happened to be a former Yugoslavian.

Together, we agreed on a “deal.” He would stand by and support me while I built the company into a solid-enough organization to be able to stand on its own without me … and then I would sell to the best possible new management team and let them take over things. “Then,” I promised, “we can live anywhere in the world you want us to live … just as long as I have Internet access and I can still write.”

And, that’s pretty much just what happened. As you may recall, Sherpa was bought by MarketingExperiments’ parent company a few months ago, with their management team combining with ours to form a stronger organization. While I’m still on staff as a writer and researcher, I have very thankfully relinquished operational duties.

Plus, now I can work from home anywhere in the world. So, here I am in Serbia through September, with weekend trips to Belgrade and Zadar, Croatia.

Then I’ll be back in the States in October for the MarketingSherpa B-to-B Summits (my suits will probably feel very odd to wear for the first day or two). In November, we’re moving to Pokhara, Nepal, for the winter. From there on, I’m not sure. Both Brazil and New Zealand have been touted as stars on the horizon.

I’ve always thought the Internet would make this new home-is-anywhere lifestyle possible. But, I’ve never actually experienced it. In practicality, will this work or will I dash screaming back to my home office in Rhode Island?

Only time will tell.

In the meanwhile, may all your dreams come true just as mine have.

Useful links related to this article

Wikipedia for Sombor:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sombor

Past blog written when visiting Zadar, Croatia:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.html?ident=27237

MarketingSherpa B-to-B Summits
http://www.sherpastore.com/B-to-BDemandGenerationSummit.html

In 2004, the marketing team at Ciena Corp., a global telecom equipment supplier, had a major image problem with management.

As VP Global Marketing Bill Rozier explains, “Marketing was seen as a press release and trade-show team, a tactical group with marginal business value. At best, marketing was a ‘cost of doing business.’ ”

Today, just three years later, the same marketing team has a seat at the executive table, is invited as a key player to all sales meetings and is credited with building a fully qualified sales funnel of $120 million.

How do you go from nobody to superhero status so quickly?

One of the many factors Bill cites is his in-person partner meetings. Every July, just as the teams are prepping ideas for their big end-of-year push, he and handpicked staffers go on a personal tour of key vendors’ offices.

He calls it his “Tour of Talent.”

Why not make vendors come to his office instead? After all, he’s a busy guy and they are supposed to serve him, not the other way around. Bill says you simply don’t get the same benefits from the “vendor dog and pony show.” He explains, “If you’re really talking about your relationship as a partnership, then you should put the effort into visiting them.”

That in-person meeting can turn you from one of many clients into a most-favored client and build communications that can make-or-break you when things get insane during the height of promo season. Plus, you’ll get to dig deeper into the vendor’s organization — meeting the juniors, techies and creatives who serve your account — instead of just the principals.

Although Bill’s meetings have a formal agenda, he says the most valuable interaction is connecting on a human level — laughing and breaking bread together.

So, while he and I heartily endorse all the technology that can help keep a team connected throughout the year, from shared analytics dashboards to video conferencing, for true success you have to go eyeball-to-eyeball at least occasionally.

I think this is tough for many marketers because as a breed we are not very outgoing animals. We tend to be readers and writers, introverted thinkers, rather than social gadflies. If you’re that great at socializing, you’re probably an account exec or in sales!

Personally, this weighs on me, because, of course, I have to hang out networking at MarketingSherpa Summits. I’m probably an absolutely prototypical marketer — sometimes I yearn to run up and be alone in my hotel room instead of networking with all those customers and partners at the cocktail party.

Yet, when I force myself to conquer my nature and meet people eyeball to eyeball, that’s when the magic happens. That’s when together we come up with new ideas for research projects, better ways to help people and a big rush of fellow-feeling. I walk out of each cocktail party on a total high, determined to serve our readers even better now that I *really* know them.

My advice? Copy Bill and meet with your key vendors in person at their locations. And, while you’re out there, see if you can fit in some customer meetings, too. (Note: not just hiding behind that focus group mirror.) Your entire world view changes once you have hung out in person with your partners and customers.

You can never be too busy for the kind of value this will bring you. Never, ever.

BTW: If you would like to meet Bill in person, he is speaking at Sherpa’s B-to-B Summits in Boston and San Francisco this fall. I’ll be there, too. If you see me gulp as I enter the room, now you know why.

Like nearly everyone else in the ad world, especially those us of over 40, I avidly watched the first two episodes of AMC’s new Mad Men TV series.

As its ‘Making Of’ trailer on iTunes explains, the show’s creators leapt through hoops to make sure the show accurately depicts Madison Avenue ad agencies in the spring of 1960. I was bemused by the show’s relentless in-office smoking, drinking, tie-wearing and, of course, rampant sexism.

However, a mistake in the first episode broke that spell for me.

To illustrate how hung over the agency’s creative director is, we’re shown a close-up of two Alka-Seltzers fizzing away in a glass of water. The image works great, except for the fact that the idea of using two Alka-Seltzers (instead of just one) wasn’t invented until about five years later, in an ad campaign during the mid-sixties.

Plus, the creative team behind that breakthrough (which wound up nearly doubling its client’s sales), was lead by not by an ad man, but by an ad woman–Mary Wells.

Mary Wells wasn’t the sole top woman in the field back then. In fact, nine out of the 54 greatest advertising creatives of the past featured in ‘The Ad Men and Women’, a fascinating collection of bios edited by Professor Edd Applegate, are women.

While watching ‘Mad Men’ is an entertaining way to spend an evening, if you’re looking for inspiration from ad pros of the past, I suggest you get yourself a copy of ‘The Ad Men and Women’ instead.

Discover how dead-honest copy (to the point of calling your product “rotten”) can dramatically raise response; how to rename a product to increase sales (example: war bonds vs. peace bonds); how to use a silly contest for seriously big publicity (example: Scientific American’s paper airplane fly-off in New York), etc.

Plus, you’ll find this book insightful if you’re considering your own career trajectory. Should you move from client-side to agency-side (or vice versa?) Should you join a bigger name firm? Should you defect to launch your own ad shop?

If you’re marketing for any of the brands named in this volume, from Alka-Seltzer to the YWCA, you’ll learn how they became so famous in the first place, leading perhaps to an idea to sustain that fame in the 21st century.

Very few of us have any sense of ad history outside of dancing cigarette boxes on 1950s TV shows that we’ve seen in movies. So, it’s easy to presume marketers of yesteryear were a bit amateurish and dumb. As this book proves, nothing could be further from the truth.

We, marketers of 2007, have enormous shoes to fill — and it just so happens many of them were high heels.

Last week, I outlined six ways to calculate if a particular blog is worth sponsoring.

However, getting pricing and cutting an insertion order is work. Deciding which creative to use is work. Measuring results is work. All this work isn’t usually worth it to reach a few hundred or thousand qualified readers per month. (By qualified, I mean ready, willing and able to buy the sponsor’s product.)

That’s why most sponsors prefer ad networks — mainly Google AdSense but also sometimes BlogAds, Pheedo and others — where they can make a single buying decision across dozens or hundreds of blogs based on topic or keywords and let it ride.

Contrarian view: here are four reasons why you should create your own network of handpicked blogs to sponsor, plus some tips on what your sponsorship should entail:

#1. Competitive positioning

Google ads show up as a group of generally 3-4 on the blog. Even if you show up in there for every posting on an influential blog (not always a sure thing given your PPC budget and keyword selections), your competitors are probably in there, too.

Do you want to be one of three or four somewhat related offers based on keyword or do you want to be the brand that stands in its own prominently placed spot alone? For the top blogs, I assume the latter is true.

#2. RSS ads

Google (for now at least) doesn’t offer RSS feed ads to bloggers. Much of some bloggers’ readership is via RSS feed — both fans who subscribed to the feed and third party sites which carry the feed as part of their content. (Of which the latter may often be the biggest share.)

If you create your own network, you may also be able to insert ads into every 7th-10th RSS posting they run. (Any more and it’s a little spammy. See below for ideas for creative.)

#3. Expanded creative options

If you own the ad spot, you’re not restricted to the ad layout (generally brief text-only) of outside networks.

I’m not saying you should go crazy with colorful banners; instead, I suggest inventing a banner type which is informational and educational in nature — useful vs salesly — to fit the blog environment. The types of offers to run might be:

o A list of your top three most popular white papers or ecommerce bestsellers
o Sign-up link for your next webinar
o Free download link for samples, trials, or ecoupons
o Hotlinked headlines from your own newsletter or corporate blog
o Hotlinks to your new branded videos or podcasts
o Quiz or survey offers (for lead gen or market research purposes)

Plus, I recommend placing your logo at the top left corner, of course.

The content within the banner itself can be routinely updated on your end via syndicated XML feed into the banner so the bloggers don’t have to do any work to change things out. (Note: This also can work extremely well for affiliate network banners.)

You will want to offer bloggers two versions, one vertical and one horizontal — so they can pick which fits their layout the best.

#4. Loyalty

I vehemently believe in church and state when it comes to editorial vs advertisers. So, I don’t think you should use ad dollars as a stick to lead (or chastise) bloggers in your niche.

On the other hand, bloggers may be your brand’s biggest evangelists and most intelligent critics. Why not support them? As MarketingSherpa research shows, your prospects are more likely to listen to a third-party blogger’s opinion of your brand than they are to your own marketing messages … or even famous-name analysts. Often bloggers are perceived to be “in the trenches” with an “everyman” voice that’s nearly trustworthy as the guy in the cubicle next door.

If you treat these bloggers well, giving them “special most favored nation status,” they will treat you well in return. Yes, they may still criticize you on occasion, but at least they’re more likely to contact their “evangelist hotline” person at your company for answers before haring off on rumors.

For this reason, along with ad dollars, you should set up a named blog-evangelist within your own organization to maintain relations with external blogs. I suspect that job will be in your PR department and routinely interact with advertising, sales and investor relations.

That point person becomes bloggers’ evangelist in your own company. The goal: to treat key bloggers as you would highly influential press and analysts. Some areas:

– Invite bloggers to private meetings — If they are in the area, invite them for a tour and meeting once a year. Also invite them to private webinars for key announcements and new product views in the same way you would other press and analysts. Advance and insider knowledge is gold to bloggers. Don’t treat them like the rest of the public.

– Offer key bloggers press passes to your own user conferences and also to conferences where your CEO is giving the keynote. You can even do a private bloggers-only dinner party at the event.

– Add relevant hotlinks to key external bloggers on your own corporate blog’s blogrolls and posts. (Bloggers adore hotlinks sometimes even more than cash for sponsorships.)

– Sponsor them directly — a monthly flat fee paid quarterly would be sufficient for many. I would advise against CPM or PPC because they won’t be adequately recompensed for their true influence, plus the admin burdens in both are extra work you don’t need to take on.

How many should you sponsor? My suggestion is to conduct a research project every six months or year and review who is most influential. Then contact these folks directly to ask if they would like to join your sponsorship program. Be sure to note this includes insider meetings, but also that you too believe in church and state.

You’re at the start of a beautiful long-term relationship.

Useful links related to this article

My blog last week on how to calculate a blog’s influence:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=30044

Past Sherpa Case Study: How CafePress tested offering affiliates (mainly bloggers) contextual ads based on tags:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/article.php?ident=29702
(Note: This is Members-only. Membership trials are free.)

Last week, Microsoft held their huge annual Worldwide Partner Conference. Despite hordes of official media reporters and partner press releases at the event, independent blogger Paul Mooney’s postings dominated online search results for it.

In fact, he told me that he’s one of more than 200 independent bloggers — employed neither by the company nor by the media — who routinely get high rankings and readership for news and views about Microsoft.

“How many readers do you have?” I asked. Turns out that was the *wrong* question. Paul said that if you’re considering sponsoring an independent blogger, determining their reach requires at least six separate calculations:

#1. Traffic (don’t trust it alone)

Media buyers usually ask, “How much traffic is there and how much is unique?” and leave it at that. Paul notes the problem with traffic stats for blogs is that so much may come from search engines and other sites linking to one particular posting.

So, a blogger who is otherwise unread may get insanely high traffic to a single posting that’s not even likely to be a current one. And, given the meandering nature of many blogs, that posting may not even be about the key topic the blog generally focuses on.

If you look at monthly traffic figures, one particular posting that may have little to do with the main subject of the blog could be pulling in the lion’s share of traffic. (Note: I’ve definitely seen plenty of evidence of this phenomenon elsewhere.)

#2. RSS feeds

In some markets, especially the high-tech field, RSS feeds may represent as much or more of the traffic of the blog than Web traffic does. However, as Paul noted to me, RSS feeds are a *much* bigger deal than this. Why?

Hundreds of thousands of sites — ranging from automated splogs to high-profile online media — use RSS feeds from good independent bloggers as part of their content. Paul noted that his own posting headlines often show up on places, such as O’Reilly media. That’s pretty impressive reach.

#3. Inbound hotlinks

As with other media, traffic volume can be far less important than traffic quality. In the blog world, quality usually equates with influence. A blog read by a tiny group of people can have gargantuan influence if they are the right people.

For measurement’s sake, you can often figure this out by tracking back hotlinks. Key: it’s not just how many other bloggers hotlink to a blog, but how many blogs hotlink in turn to them. One single hotlink from an influential blog (someone with 50 or more incoming hotlinks of his/her own) is worth way more than 50 hotlinks from bloggers no one links to.

And don’t forget hotlinks from key social networking sites. If a blog is highly linked to from Digg, StumbleUpon, etc. (or the current Holy Grail, Wikipedia) then that blog may be far more influential than it appears to be at first glance.

#4. Search position, part one

You can research a blog’s search position in two ways — first, does that blog appear for key terms related to your business or brand? Paul sometimes gets first page rankings for keyword related to Microsoft. This, in turn, means press, customers, investors, prospects, etc., all see his postings positioned in such a way that they appear to be highly influential and even somewhat “officially” sanctioned by the search engine itself.

(Remember, it’s not just the click, it’s the general visibility and what words are near your brand’s official postings. If, heaven forbid, a blog post dissing your brand appears on page one of search results for your brand, your CEO will not be happy.)

#5. Search position, part two

Separately, also review a bloggers’ general search ranking under keywords associated with his or her own “brand,” such as their personal name, their blog’s name, their tagline, etc. This tells you how much search engines notice them in general — so if they were to post about you, how much attention such a posting might get.

For example, as Paul pointed out, if you search for him by first name alone, his blog is more than likely to show up in the first two pages of listings … despite the millions of competing Pauls (including McCartney and the Apostle.)

#6. Voice

Last, as with any other media, read the blog to discover if the brand voice feels influential, sounds like they know what they are talking about, feels even-handed and trustworthy. If you’re considering a media buy (even via Google AdWords), you may not want your message appearing on an angry rant site or even on one filled with irreverent humor.

That said, a media buy on a blog that doesn’t always spout your company line can be a benefit. You can appear to be strong, considerate, above-the-fray, even concerned about the “little guy’s concerns.” You’re not limiting your ads to yes-men only. That’s advertorial, and few people trust it wholeheartedly.

It’s just that you want to allay your brand with the type of voice that you feel your audience (investors, press, customers, etc.) would respect.

Plus, has your company sponsored, influenced or worked a partnership of some sort with an independent blogger? Let me know if you have some lessons learned (especially how to measure results more accurately) so I can share them with MarketingSherpa readers. Click on the comments link below — thanks.

In the meantime, here’s a link to Paul’s blog so you can see it for yourself:
http://dotnetjunkies.com/WebLog/paul/