MarketingSherpa Blog

Product naming and branding can get out of hand. Sure, it’s important to differentiate your product names — but you can differentiate yourself right into obscurity.

Technology products seem susceptible to this. The “XQ330 Plus” is a completely plausible name for a phone, camera, latte machine, or some type of hybrid. Other than being original, the name does not offer any marketing benefit.

This is a problem for SEO marketers. The XQ330 may be able to capture traffic for branded search terms, particularly if the company has a strong advertising budget. But it is vulnerable to a complete lack of non-branded organic traffic — and non-branded traffic is SEO’s money maker.

“Many times a marketer will come up with a name or way to describe a product in a vacuum, and that doesn’t always translate well to the Web — especially in search,” says Brad Beiter, Account Director, SEO, Performics.

I recently interviewed Beiter and Performics SEO Account Manager Matthew Holly about some work they’ve done for retail marketers. The methods they use offer good insight into what marketers can do when — for whatever reason — they’re stuck with obscure product names.

When you’re stuck with an obscure product name

If you can’t change a product’s name, one good method is to change its description. Say, for example, your company sells socks. On your website, socks are referred to as “shoe liners” and one in particular is called the “white fuzzy warmer.”

Due to the inflexibility of your website or some other factor, you cannot change these terms. But what you can do is change your product descriptions. Re-rewrite them to emphasize high-traffic, non-branded keywords. For example:

“These soft white cotton socks keep you warm whether you need a boot, athletic or dress pair.”

You can also optimize other on-site factors for non-branded terms, including:
o Internal links
o Image and video metadata
o Sub-headlines

Do not let cumbersome product names hold your SEO hostage. There are many on-site factors you can optimize to pull in more traffic. And from now on, when your team is naming products, make sure you’re at that meeting.

Related resources

MarketingSherpa 2011 Search Marketing Benchmark Report

New Chart: SEO Tactics for the B2B Marketer

MarketingExperiments: Use Social Media and Quality Content to Get a Jolt for Your Site

Few things in life worth having come without risk and hard work — and marketing is no different.

Social media marketing can give your brand a stronger, more personal connection with customers. This is accomplished by spending time interacting (hard work) in a public arena (which heightens risk).

Old Spice made its brand relevant to a new generation of consumers through a bold multi-channel viral video marketing campaign. “Bold” is nearly synonymous with “risky,” and the jaw dropping rate at which this team churned out videos must have been exhausting.

In a final example, MarketingSherpa published a case study today describing how the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra’s marketing team systematically asked email subscribers to re-opt into its newsletters. Those who opted out or did not reply were removed from the database (see case study for details).

The initial result was an email database approximately 4.1% of its original size.

“It was small, but the beautiful thing was that it gave us a really strong foundation to build from,” says Mark Newman, VP, Marketing and Communications, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra. “We were now getting people who really wanted to get emails from us. These are engaged people.”

Newman described the effort as “a scary thing we were embarking on” but knew that it was the correct approach to establish a valuable email marketing program.

“Early on, I felt we were trying to prove the theory right. And I feel good about where we are because we’re seeing our list grow,” he says.

And grow it has. As you’ll see in the case study, Newman’s team grew the list by more than 500% from this low point. It is now a powerful channel for improving sales. By accepting some risk and hard work, the team achieved great results.

If your team ran a fantastic email marketing campaign this year — send it into MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Email Awards. We want to see how your team took risks, rolled up its sleeves and achieved great results. Deadline for submissions is Friday, Dec. 3 — so hurry!

Sales, marketing and customer services teams can each have slightly different views of customers. In large organizations, differences in perception can coexist within the same department.

For example, a search marketing team can perceive customers’ interests differently than an email marketing team. A customer service team can perceive customers’ needs differently than the sales team. In both cases, the two teams connect with customers through different platforms and analyze their behavior through different data.

“Siloed” departments that have teams separated from one another can prevent organizations from understanding and communicating with customers effectively, says Dave Lewis, CMO, Message Systems, a messaging management solutions vendor.

As the number of marketing channels continues to expand with the growth of mobile and social media marketing, Lewis sees opportunities, but also the potential for additional channels to deepen the problem.

“You’re only furthering the fragmentation that gets in the way of understanding your customers on a holistic basis and being able to communicate with them on that basis,” Lewis says

That’s why Lewis says more teams need to pursue marketing integration (Lisa Arthur, CMO, Aprimo, expressed a similar sentiment in our post last week). By having a central platform from which to communicate with customers and monitor their behavior, teams can get a more well-rounded understanding of their customers and how best to reach them.

Several months ago, Lewis’ team launched a new solution called Mobile Momentum, to help marketers avoid further fragmenting their customer data and messaging. The software combines email and SMS messaging into a single platform that can track customers’ delivery preferences and provide reports on the channels’ performance jointly and separately.

Lewis anticipates incorporating more messaging services into the platform, such as MMS and social media. His team started by combining email and SMS because of the tremendous volume of SMS messages consumers send per day, and because more marketers can benefit from SMS than are currently, he says.

“My view is that the overlooked opportunity associated with text (messaging) is in using it to strengthen the customer relationship over time,” Lewis says.

By offering a platform that combines email and SMS, Lewis’ team is helping marketers better understand their audiences, better meet their needs and provide a better experience. Marketers who feel pulled in too many directions should take note that combining several marketing channels into a single platform may provide more insight into how best to reach customers.

Marketers have many software vendors to choose from. There are laundry lists of companies willing to upgrade your website analytics, email marketing, display ads and almost any other part of your online business.

The growing list of platforms is making the job more complex. Work is done through several dashboards, and data comes from several directions. You have to spend time with each platform to achieve a single goal.

That is why Lisa Arthur, CMO, Aprimo, argues for marketing integration. Aprimo is an integrated marketing software provider. Arthur says integration can help marketers get back to focusing on driving higher ROI.

“The goal and promise of marketing integration is to simplify the complexity of marketing and allow marketers to spend more time on the strategy, the messages and the content, instead of chasing data and ad hoc processes,” she says.

Integration essentially pulls fragmented marketing processes under a single, centralized platform. The approach can free up some of your time, as well as:
o Streamline a multi-channel ROI calculation
o Cut campaign launch time
o Align disparate marketing goals
o Give executives and managers a quick view of overall marketing performance
o Give multiple marketing teams a central platform to work from

A key to starting the integration process is to align business strategy and marketing objectives with the goals of the effort. Consider how aligning marketing data and technology under a central platform help your company achieve its goals.

Second, marketing integration is more of an on-going journey than a short project. The process can continue for years and will require an executive sponsor. If you’re interested in integration and you’re not an executive yourself, find an executive to champion the project and point to how it will improve business goals.

Third, you should track and benchmark operational and strategic metrics. For example, on an operational level, will your team get campaigns planned and launched faster after integration? Strategically, will your team improve campaign performance?

Not all of your marketing needs to be integrated at once. Your team can start small by centralizing a disparate and manual process — such as creative review. Emails, ads and landing pages can be viewed and approved from a single, central location, rather than through an endless chain of emails.

Your team may not have a conversation around integration tomorrow, but if your number of marketing channels continues to grow, you might want to consider having the conversation soon.

Pay-per-click advertising in search engines is a veritable money machine for some companies. They put money in, turn some wrenches, and money comes out the other end.

However, PPC is not a miracle worker. Turning those wrenches can take a lot of work. And there are several marketing goals PPC achieves less effectively than SEO.

Comparing data from MarketingSherpa’s 2011 Search Marketing Benchmark Reports: SEO and PPC Editions, more marketers reported SEO as “very effective” at achieving the following objectives:

o Increasing brand or product awareness: SEO: 42%; PPC: 34%

o Improving brand or product reputation: SEO: 29%; PPC: 19%

o Improving public relations: SEO: 27%; PPC: 6%

Clearly, more marketers believe SEO is more effective than PPC at changing people’s opinions about their products and brands. However, when it comes to conversion-related objectives such as increasing lead generation and online sales revenue, more marketers report PPC as “very effective” than SEO.

The data lead me to believe that people searching to learn more about a company or industry are more interested in natural search results than paid results. Ads take on a larger role as searchers make purchase decisions or consider other conversions (such as reaching out for more information).

If your team is hoping to lift brand awareness and reputation, you’re better off working to improve your natural search performance than increasing your PPC budget. PPC is not necessarily ineffective, but it’s likely to have a smaller return than time invested elsewhere.

Despite the rocky environment for marketing budgets during the last two years, a much larger percentage of organizations increased their email marketing budgets in 2009 than decreased them, according to MarketingSherpa’s 2010 Email Marketing Benchmark Report.

We spoke with several marketers this week to uncover a few more email marketing trends. We asked for their impressions on this vital tactic’s role in today’s marketing. Here are the highlights we found:

Deeper Integration with Digital Channels

Email marketing is becoming less of an isolated silo and is taking on a more cohesive role as marketing channels further integrate. Email has long tied directly to companies’ websites, but lately it has expanded to connect with audiences via:

– Social media

Click-to-share buttons added to email messages with strong, relevant content are expanding the reach of marketing campaigns.

– Mobile

Mobile devices are frequently used to read email, and marketers are formatting messages to ensure they render clearly.

– And others

Companies are asking for customers’ email address as the points-of-sale, and they’re linking emails to videos on YouTube.

The next step, says Blaine Mathieu, CMO, Lyris, is that companies should develop an integrated mindset and plan how marketing channels could be best combined to achieve the most effective results.

Tactical Advances from Technology

– More Sophisticated Segmentation

Email marketers have long segmented their audiences to deliver customized content to increase relevancy and response rates. In the beginning, segments were often broadly determined, such as by product category or topic of interest.

Now, behavioral segmentation is more common. Marketing teams are studying their subscribers’ actions and timing and crafting messages based on their positions in the buying cycle. This technology has been around for several years, but more marketing teams are taking advantage.

– Automated messaging

“There is no way any company can interact one-to-one in a relevant manner with thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of people,” says Dylan Boyd, VP Sales & Strategy, eROI.

The increasing need for relevance and volume in email communication has driven the rise of automated email marketing. More teams are establishing automated email series based on events, such as abandoned shopping carts and white paper downloads. The growing sophistication of product suggestion and other personalization technologies has given these messages a personal, tailored touch.

Less Tactical, More Strategic Planning

Digital marketing has witnessed a boom in third-party solutions over the past few years. The growing lists of targeting and analytics platforms have outpaced many market teams’ abilities to leverage them, especially since many require a high-level of technological expertise to establish. However, the adoption process is simplifying.

“Especially in the last year, the tools of an email marketer and an online marketer are finally becoming simple enough to use and connected enough to each other across channels that the marketers no longer have to be a technologists – they can be marketers again,” Mathieu says.

Google rocked the search world last week by introducing a new feature that automatically predicts and displays search results as users type their queries.

Google Instant met with a swarm of speculation, including predictions that it would kill SEO, change SEO, and not change SEO.

All commentary is speculation at this point. Google Instant’s impact on search marketing will not likely be clear for another 30 to 60 days. The change will likely affect some marketers more than others, depending on search’s role in your marketing.

The folks at search agency and software provider Covario sent me a seven-page brief on the topic they wrote for their clients. Three highlights from their analysis and predictions:

1. Top organic positions are more important than ever

As users type search queries using the new feature, a drop-down “suggestion box” appears, pushing down paid and organic search results, and pushing some organic results below the fold.

Results pages with three or four ads in the top position sometimes only list one organic link above the fold (see image). The links pushed below the fold will likely experience a drop in traffic.

2. More ‘broad matching’ in PPC

Since users see results as they type, marketers will migrate toward strategies that use broad matching on the first keywords of popular multi-keyword queries.

In the short term, CPCs will increase and advertisers will have to budget more toward Google to drive similar volume, according Covario’s brief.

3. Not all searches are “Instant”

Google’s new feature is designed to work in the following browsers:
o Internet Explorer v8
o Safari for Mac v5
o Firefox v3
o Chrome v5, v6

Users running other browsers will perform traditional Google searches. Filtering your website analytics to track visitors by browser will help your team better understand how Google Instant changes your visitors’ behavior.

Please note: Covario’s brief emphasized that its analysis is strictly speculation. Only time and rigorous testing can determine what impact Google’s latest feature will have on your marketing and the marketing community as a whole.

Offline ads are likely to get a refreshing breath of relevance as 2D barcode technology becomes more prevalent in mobile phones. The pixelated images can be added to magazine and billboard ads, for example, and scanned by mobiles phones to pull up various media, such as a product videos or landing pages.

Smartphone users who have the technology or who download and install the software simply have to point their phone’s camera and at one of the barcodes. The software then communicates with a server to send the user to a registration page, video, app download, or whatever the desired media may be.

Although less efficient, feature-phone users can take a picture of a code and send it via MMS to a specified phone number to load the desired media.

“There’s really nothing the end-user needs to know other than how to turn on their camera for this to work,” says Mike Wehrs, CEO, Scanbuy.

Scanbuy creates technology to enable cell phones to read barcodes, and also runs a backend system for renting 2D codes to businesses. Marketers can purchase one or a handful of codes and a set number of “scans,” or impressions. Then it’s as simple as defining what you want a phone to load after scanning a barcode, and adding the code to marketing materials.

“Done appropriately with the right kind of support and end-user prompting, you can get enormous positive results from the inclusion of a barcode,” Wehrs says.

Wehrs cites his team’s work with Verizon. Advertisements in Verizon stores encouraged new Android smartphone owners to scan 2D barcodes to instantly download new apps (samples of the ads). The team achieved 175,000 app downloads in the first month, Wehrs says.

Wehrs can rattle off many marketing opportunities the codes present. The codes, for example, can have the media they load changed over time. Products can have codes permanently applied to them, and when scanned, offer a new piece of media every month, creating on-going customer engagement.

There are many 2D barcode standards. Google has embraced the QR standard, which Scanbuy’s technology supports along with several other popular ones, Wehrs says. Take a look if you think your offline ads could benefit from offering mobile consumers deeper interaction.

A new report from ExactTarget and CoTweet reveals interesting differences in consumers’ motivations and habits when connecting with brands via email and social media. Take a look to find out more about why your customers are listening to you.

The report (you’ll be asked for an email address and phone number) is the result of three types of focus groups conducted with 44 people, and a 1,506-person survey (see methodology). It is loaded with interesting stats, such as:
o 38% of U.S. online consumers are fans of a brand on Facebook
o 5% follow at least one brand on Twitter
o 93% receive at least one permission-based email per day

The report offers plenty of other great metrics, and touches on useful topics, such as the motivational differences between consumers who first check email in the morning and consumers who first check Facebook. Check out the report for more.

The report also offers great best-practice advice for communicating with customers via social channels. However, there was one piece of advice I want to offer a different opinion on.

The report suggests that marketers avoid promoting exclusive, channel-specific offers in social media, and that “tone and content should be the primary differentiators in our channel strategies, not promotions.”

In general, this is sound advice. Integrating campaigns through multiple channels always drives stronger performance. And you do not want to condition followers to receiving special deals.

However, I feel like marketers should throw their social media followers an occasional treat. They are often truly fans of your brand. I do not think it could hurt to make them feel special, say, once every six months.

The “treat” does not have to be a discount or offer, either. For example, it could be a hint of a product launch sent to the audience two days before a press release is issued. And if it is a deal, it does not have to be exclusive to social media followers. Maybe, just once, they receive a coupon code a few days before your email subscribers.

How do you feel about occasionally giving social followers and fans special treatment? Waste of time? Vital display of gratitude? Let us know…

Many marketers have yet to explore mobile webpages as a marketing opportunity. If you are putting off tests because you think they are too complicated, take a look at this case study on mobile page testing we published today.

Mike Brown, VP, Internet Optimization, Vegas.com, and his team tested if catering to a mobile audience could improve site performance. The team showed mobile visitors a homepage and category pages designed for their devices. The test was a proof-of-concept on whether to invest in an end-to-end mobile experience for Vegas.com.

The tests successfully improved site metrics such as bounce rate and conversion rate (see the case study for details), and Brown’s team plans to rollout more mobile pages this fall.

Brown said these tests were easier than his team anticipated. From our conversation, I understood two criteria the team met to successfully run them:

– Mobile traffic present

Testing mobile pages only makes sense if your website receives mobile traffic. The team looked at its site analytics and noticed mobile visitors accounted for 7% of traffic, and growing rapidly.

– Testing and page design expertise

The team had extensive testing experience with Brown as the head of Internet Optimization. Also, the team used SiteSpect‘s multivariate and A/B testing tool to run tests. SiteSpect team members helped Brown’s team learn to create mobile pages, which Brown noted was surprisingly easy.

So if your team has capable developers, some mobile traffic and good testing experience, there should be little preventing you from running similar tests. And remember: you don’t have to dive in with a full investment. Brown’s team only dipped its toe and is now comfortably moving forward.