Grandparents.com aims to entice grandparents to register a profile and/or subscribe to a free email newsletter by providing useful content that’s relevant to being a grandparent. Sound familiar? That’s kind of what we do at MarketingSherpa (for marketers, of course).
Whenever you have a site like this there’s one thing you’ve got to keep in mind, says Jerry Shereshewsky, CEO of Grandparents.com: “The Web is research on the hoof.” Read more…
I’ve heard of marketers doing strange and wonderful things, but this weekend’s episode of This American Life on Chicago Public Radio described, by far, the strangest marketing campaign I’ve ever encountered.
The episode, called “Numbers,” described people’s attempts to quantify the unquantifiable, such as emotions. The fourth segment described marketer Will Powers’ efforts to better market himself to his wife (Powers’ boss at Brand Solutions thought the task would teach him the principals of brand loyalty)
Read more…
2008 has come and gone and I have a folder loaded with a year’s worth of Sherpa articles I’ve written. Here are a few of my favorites, from which I’ve pulled out nuggets of wisdom to share.
Read more…
Is this marketing genius? Pontiflex, the self-dubbed first open and transparent cost-per-lead (CPL) market, yesterday announced the revealing of a free Online Advertising ROI Calculator.
It allows online advertisers and marketers (Pontiflex’s target audience) to compare the costs of online advertising campaigns based on CPM, CPC, and CPL pricing models.
Read more…
Just in case you needed another reason to monitor social media, the Economist had a quick article last week about two airlines’ response to PR bombshells that detonated on Facebook.
The airlines’ staff members were joking about cockroaches on board and smelly passengers–not exactly good PR. The companies discovered the comments only after customer complaints and press reports started coming in.
Monitoring social media–like blogs, social networks and bookmarking sites–gives you a good idea of your company’s online reputation. And it will help you find employees badmouthing the company before your customers do.
Monitoring is only part of the solution, though. You need to have policies against disparaging the company, and you need to remind your staff that what they say online stretches across the planet.
On a side note, I’m starting to think that monitoring social media can have amazing benefits. Alan Scott, CMO, Dow Jones, told me in a recent interview that Dow Jones identifies trends and customer preferences by crunching data from its social sites and others across the Web. That’s a heck of a way to judge your market.
Monitoring Web chatter about your brand can be a challenge. We’ve written at least one article on monitoring social media to protect your reputation. The task can be expensive or time consuming–but it doesn’t have to be.
You can take a quick, free look at what the Web thinks about your brand with HowSociable?. The site is incredibly useful and easy to use. It doesn’t require any registration, usernames or passwords. You can even look at what people are saying about your competition.
Simply type in a phrase and see the number of times it’s mentioned on 22 social media portals. All the biggest players are there–Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Technorati, YouTube.
Not only do you get the number of times your brand is mentioned, you also get the links to where your brand is mentioned. That’s so cool! Find out what people across the Web are saying about your company from one spot.
If you’re ever looking for an interesting marketing read (besides MarketingSherpa, of course!), check out Robert Cialdini’s books on influence.
The two books I’m most familiar with are Yes! 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive and Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Both books cite droves of research to help explain why people say “yes” to marketing offers and other requests. We recently published an article highlighting some of Cialdini’s strategies.
Both books are loaded with takeaways and interesting background stories. I found a particularly interesting piece of marketing history in Yes! concerning Duracell and Energizer.
Read more…
Getting “free stuff” makes me feel good about a brand. Many of us feel the same way. And all we have to do is give up a phone number or a mailing address.
Read more…
Even after about a decade, the jury is still out on email open rates. Some marketers disregard them as pointless. Others check them daily to guide subject line and content decisions. Personally, I think there is value in measuring open rates — even if it is limited.
Read more…
An often overlooked and undervalued metric is website bounce rate. A page’s bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave immediately after arriving. There are two ways to measure it:
o Percentage of visitors who leave before a set time
o Percentage of visitors who leave without clicking into the site, regardless of time spent
For landing pages, it measures the connection of the message driving the traffic to the message on the page. A poor connection causes a high bounce rate.
Read more…
