MarketingSherpa Blog

Do you work for a nonprofit or not-for-profit organization? There’s a new email newsletter that specifically addresses what you need to know about Internet outreach, effective Web design and even fundraising online. I’m personally recommending it because I know the editor, Tanya Renne is great at writing the kind of stuff that’s really hands-on useful.

No opinions or newsy news. She just brings how-to tips to make association and non-profit execs jobs easier.

You can subscribe for free at DotOrgAdvisor

OK already! If I get one more promotional email or ezine with prefacing remarks about our national tragedy, I’m going to scream. Yes we all feel very deeply about events. But when you stop and think about how many emails the average person gets … all of which contain about the same preface these days … you’ll see that bringing the subject up yet again when it’s out of context is overkill. It’s ok to go ahead and market something without a preface.

You don’t need to apologize for sending a marketing message at this time anymore.

Does this mean your message should be business as usual? Well, maybe not. Famed Manhattan-based author Fran Lebowitz noted on the radio that the consumer magazines she’s got in the mail last week, written and printed before the WTC events, seemed like “relics from another era. Very outdated.” Which means your normal happy-face-buy-now marketing messages of the past may not be quite right now.

However, if you just change them by sticking that way-overdone preface in front, it won’t help sales. This is where the true art of copywriting kicks in. Good luck.

We won! MarketingSherpa just won this year’s Tenagra Award for “Best Publication Focused on Internet Marketing.” (We tied eMarketer for it. Wow. eMarketer. They rock.) Prior winners include Iconocast, ClickZ, Nua and Industry Standard.

I couldn’t make it down to Houston to accept, but Sherpa Expert Board Member Don Skarzenski who is attending the show graciously agreed to accept the award on our behalf. Here’s my little speech which he read to the crowd:

“Almost 1,000 Internet marketing and advertising professionals from companies as disparate as Oil of Olay and Amsoil Motor Oil, have helped create MarketingSherpa by allowing us to share their marketing stories and secrets with the rest of the world.

Every week we call about a dozen marketers and ask, “What’s really working for you online?” Their honest answers have made valuable reading — and I’m not sure we deserve much credit for that beyond pestering folks with phone calls!

As you probably know, it’s been a very tough year for everyone in online publishing. Particularly those serving the marketing field. An award like this one means a great deal to us at Sherpa. It says, “Stick it out!” And we will.

Thank you.”

Does your own Web site reflect your marketing expertise? This is a particular problem for agencies, consultants and folks like me who write about Web marketing. I get so busy that my own site is sadly abandoned.

Today I was working on the second draft of a new Sherpa report to come out shortly entitled, “Top 10 Online Marketing Mistakes: Every Company Makes at Least One of Them.” The going was slow because I kept on breaking off to contact Sherpa’s Web developer who’s working on our site redesign right now. “Hey!” I’d email, “Here’s another thing you have to change in our specs.” Turns out while I’m “smart” enough to write a report on the topic, I wasn’t smart enough to avoid making some of the mistakes! (It’s not good enough to know, you have to apply.)

At the same time I kept getting peppered with emails from readers of our SherpaWeekly which came out today. Turns out there was a typo in a key link. Dumb, dumb, dumb. It’s those little, eminently-avoidable mistakes that trip me up every time when I’m in a rush to keep everybody happy. (Sound of my head thunking on my desk.) Rushing = bad. Thinking first = good. So how do you apply that to, um, “Internet time”?

Can lessons from life carry over into marketing? I believe so. I believe that although marketing is “just a job” it gives each of us the chance to learn life lessons that affect both our businesses and our whole beings. It’s not just about selling something, it’s how you interact with and respect other people.

My Aunt Audrey, who was my greatest role model in life, died this week. She, an Australian WWII bride come to live in a family farmhouse in a small snowy town in New England, was a pioneer and a welcomed alien in her own community in a way that many of we Internet marketers are in our companies. She worked all kinds of crazy hours to keep a business going, especially during the busy holiday season, while juggling the demands of several children. Again, like many of us marketers today.

She was also uniquely ladylike. When people starting whining and moaning about stuff she rose above it and saw the bright side. When there were business competitors, she made respected friends with them rather than getting all nasty.

As a young marketer, I followed her example by reaching to my then-company’s biggest competitors and saying, “Hey how can we be friends and help each other grow?” I made friends that have lasted to this day almost 15 years later. I also was able to work deals — most notably mailing list swaps — that increased both sides’ profits. I learned buyers of one sort of product are more likely to buy lots of the same type of product from lots of people…. so let’s all profit together rather than prospecting alone. So being friends with competitors was smart, as long as my product had a clearly differentiated USP (unique selling proposition.)

It may sound dumb, but I don’t care. Great online marketing is about being nice. Is about being ladylike.

Biggest online wasted marketing opportunity??? Thank-you pages (aka confirmation pages.) You know, those pages after somebody has ordered something from your site, or subscribed to your newsletter, or registered…. Most folks just stick a “Thank you” and a link back to their home page in there and leave it at that.

Ally Neal, Internet marketer for Support.com, told me she uses her thank-you pages to point visitors to other high interest areas on her site. In her case she’s collecting sales leads with her campaigns, so after they fill out the form she sends them to look at online demos, white papers and the like. Another marketer I know for an online merchant who shall remain nameless, told me they get up to 20% incremental revenue from offers placed on their thank you pages!

Remember, people who see your thank you page are involved with you at that moment, and are more likely to respond favorably to another offer (product or information) than practically anyone else. It’s the same reason most cataloguers will enclose another copy of their catalog in the box they ship your order in. Something to think about……

Question of the day: If you are an email publisher, should you send “We’re on vacation this week, but you’ll get a regular issue next week” announcements to your list?

Seems like everybody does. This week Sherpa is on break. (Well, ok I’m still working, and working late I might add, but we’re not actually publishing which is a HUGE load off so it sorta feels like I’m at the beach.) When I went to send out those vacation emails to subscribers I stopped in my tracks, struck by a thought: People hate having to wade through lots of useless email. A vacation message is pretty useless… So would my subscribers feel sorta like I spammed them ’cause it’s not a regular useful issue?

And anyway, maybe those ‘vacation’ messages are more about the publisher’s ego thinking, “Oh my God they are going to miss my newsletter and worry where I am!!!” than they are about in-box clogged reality.

So this week, you’ll note (if you are a subscriber to any one of our 6 newsletters at MarketingSherpa.com) that no vacation messages are being sent unless I also have a useful news tip to make them worthwhile.

I thought most of the awful, high tech, buzzword-laden marketing copy had gone the way of the VCs that spawned it. Guess not, according to a funny note just in from SherpaBlog subscriber Lisa Dilg of PerkettPR. She writes:

My co-worker and I went to the Detroit ITEC a few months ago and we would stop at booths and say, ok, read that company description, and tell me what they do. We almost never could. Even though so many in the press have complained, “just tell us what you actually do, don’t tell us you are a solution, next-generation, a leading XX or you do something in real-time,” companies’ boilerplates and web sites, continue to say nothing.

Today put me over the edge. I was going to the web site of a company my cousin works for to see what they do. You tell me:

‘XX is the leading provider of Total Business Integration solutions — delivering infrastructure software that lets companies seamlessly integrate every aspect of their business in real-time.’

Then I went to their PR’s web site, and found they are a perfect match:

‘XX fields multi-disciplinary teams of technology PR and marketing professionals who use the XX Lifecycle methodology to create market-specific, stage-appropriate communications programs and services.’

Whose responsibility is it to stop this? PR pros, marketing pros, the companies themselves?”

Well Lisa, my input is that the buck stops at whoever pays the bills for that bad PR — i.e. client-side. Here are two helpful sites that can help PR clients everywhere doublecheck the work that’s being done for them: buzzkiller.net and buzzwacker.com. You can pretty much bet if your press materials (or site) have words listed at these two sites, then journalists will think you look stupid and boring. ‘Nuff said.

Journalist Pete Barlas who covers consumer ecommerce for Investor’s Business Daily told me he’s having a hard time finding good sources for quick quotes these days. Apparently many of the analysts he used to count on have either been told to button their lips due to the threat of stockholder lawsuits, or they’ve simply lost their jobs because many research firms and financial institutions who cover the area are cutting back. Seems to me like it’s a great time to get your name out there as an Expert.

Just be sure you’re able to respond quickly. These types of reporters often work very tight deadlines.

Thanks to everyone for your positive feedback on last week’s special Job Seekers issue! Here are three notes from readers:

1. Bobbing4jobs.com
http://www.bobbing4jobs.com/
This is not a jobs site per say, but rather a links site that points to dozens of other major jobs sites. So why add it to this list? Because it includes the best list of general Canadian job sites we’ve seen. If you’re up in the great North, go for it! [Suggested by MarketingSherpa Reader Peter Jackman]

2. Brilliant People – Management Recruiters [Amended Listing]
http://www.brilliantpeople.com
Although we got more than 1,000 results when we checked the “Marketing” jobs in this site cited as one of “Forbes Best of the Web” the vast majority of them are in sales, which is frustrating to sort through if you are a marketing specialist. Kim Ferraioli, VP Management Recruiters, wrote in to advise, “You can search by job or by recruiter specialty. The specialties can be very broad as well so I suggest to people that they search by job and look at the recruiters who have positions that would be of interest to them and contact those recruiters directly to establish a relationship.”

3. Marketing job seeker, Alison Mittelstadt, who co-edited the original report, sent in an update on the world out there:

“After aggressively posting my resume to about 20 different job boards and contacting all the headhunters on your list and then some, I am not too optimistic about relying on these avenues to generate real leads. Many of the job boards have old, outdated postings and often when I have heard back from a particular company (which is the exception, not the rule), the position has been filled, even though the job board listing is still active. The headhunters, and particularly those who are marketing-or advertising-focused, are really hurting right now. Most of them do not have active engagements from their client companies.

“So what’s the solution?

“I am writing very personalized, very targeted letters to top managers at companies where I’d like to work and networking a lot–having friends pass along my resume to folks they know, and in many cases, people I’ve never met and whom I’ve contacted at someone else’s suggestion have been very receptive and helpful to me. I’ve had about ten informational interviews this way, and a number of ‘if the economy picks up, we’ll hire again in the fall and we will certainly consider you’ remarks.”