MarketingSherpa Blog

Content marketing, at its essence, is really just a connection. It’s linking those who know something (subject matter experts) with those who want to know it.

This can be a struggle for some marketers who are trying to generate content, especially in complex fields like healthcare IT or power engineering.

That’s why the subject matter expert is so valuable. The vaunted SME (pronounced “Smee.”) Much more knowledgeable than Captain Hook’s right-hand man, but sometimes as ornery as the ol’ captain himself.

To win him or her over, it helps to immerse yourself in the industry to a level that you have their respect.

But to create quality content, it helps to ask the right questions to get that subject matter expert going. Once you tap the keg of passion in a SME, the party about topics important to the egg industry or Sarbanes-Oxley just never ends.

So, to help you generate content for your blogs, videos, email newsletters, podcasts, whitepapers, and the like, here are five general questions that have helped me throughout my career, as I’ve interviewed SMEs to create content.

  Read more…

Very few of us, especially marketers, know what next year or the year after will look like. Things are constantly changing and progressing with new approaches, better analytics and a greater level of sophistication in our industry.

The good news, while those aspects continually evolve, there are a few things you as an individual can do to ensure a productive and prosperous marketing career. They may seem obvious, but consider them carefully because your choice will mean the difference between a rewarding and frustrating career.

First and foremost, according to research I conducted for the 2012 Executive Guide to MarketingSherpa Marketing Personnel,  80% of marketers take assessments  to identify key competencies and personality traits. (An assessment is an examination, test and/or survey(s) that measures specific behaviors, values and/or skills that provide insight into an individual’s abilities and capacities.)

However, what comes next is disappointing … our study also showed that less than half of the assessments were actually used (by companies) to help ensure you are in the right marketing position. So, if you work for one of the companies not using assessments, your career satisfaction and success is entirely in your hands.

“People don’t pay for average.” — John C. Maxwell

And neither do marketing departments.

While you may enjoy multiple aspects of the marketing process, if you really want to excel in your career, you must ask yourself: “Which aspects do I enjoy the most and which am I best suited for?”

The reality is that you may be fairly competent in several areas, but no one is good at all of them — plus, each area is growing in the level of sophistication so rapidly that it is easy to quickly fall behind the learning curve. So what do you do?

• Obtain a copy of your assessments and make an appointment with your manager or HR specialist who had those tests run. Identify what you want to learn about your behaviors, strengths and weaknesses before the appointment that apply to the field of marketing you most enjoy.

• Have the individual go through the results with you thoroughly. Ask questions during the process. Yes, you will hear a lot of things you already know, but it is essential you see your competencies from another’s paradigm, not just your own. Let them identify your strengths and weaknesses based on the data.

• Use the comments you obtain from the debrief session to help you develop a plan.The plan should consist of:
  • How to use your strengths in your present position
  • How to reduce the weaknesses that might inhibit your professional growth and development
  • Try to codify what developmental resources you will need to obtain, either through or outside of company resources
  • Assign priorities and time frames, then implement your developmental process. Do not wait on a manager or  HR to do this for you. You may have to wait a long time for other’s help.

  Read more…

Location, location, location. No, I’m not talking about real estate, I’m talking about event marketing.

The location of conferences, summits, conventions and user groups is critical to their success. People don’t just go to events to network and learn how to do their jobs better, they want to go to a city they would really want to visit on vacation, like Orlando, or Denver, or Washington, D.C.

Or at least that’s how it used to be. Now, everything has changed. Event attendees are no longer looking for flashy cities, they’re looking for budget-friendly destinations. Reasonable flights. Inexpensive hotel rooms. Goodbye New York City, professionals want to head to cities like St. Louis and Nashville for their industry events.

Here’s the thing. I don’t know which of the above statements is true. We were debating this very challenge, perhaps a similar challenge you’ve faced when planning your own events, in our latest event team meeting.

Share your opinion for a chance to win a $1,695 marketing summit ticket

So, we thought we’d start with a little unscientific, qualitative research. Simply put, which city or cities would be most appealing to you for a future marketing event? Let us know from the list below for your chance to win a ticket to a future MarketingSherpa Summit, such as B2B Summit in San Francisco or Boston, Email Summit in Las Vegas, or, well, you tell us….

(and if there are any cities we’re missing, feel free to let us know in the comments section below)

***UPDATE***

Congratulations to  Carol Reid, Owner/Marketing Consultant, Carol Reid Marketing, winner of a free ticket to a MECLABS summit. She has chosen the upcoming B2B Summit in San Francisco.

Related Resources:

Event Marketing: Regional customer forums improve field events attendance rate by 150%

Never Pull Sofa Duty Again: Stop guessing what your audience wants and start asking

Marketing Intelligence: 3 ways to better serve your customers (and your bottom line)

The Indefensible Blog Post: Actually, the old rules of marketing are pretty good

In a recent blog post for our sister company MarketingExperiments, I shared my experiences at the fifth Design for Conversion Conference (DfC) in New York City. Today, I want to focus on a topic from Dr. Dan Goldstein’s presentation, and its relevance to usability and product testing for marketers — how focus group studies can effectively misrepresent true consumer preferences.

Asking you for your input on our Landing Page Optimization survey for the 2011 Benchmark Report has firmly planted the topic of surveys at the forefront of my thinking.

Calibration is not the whole story

The need to calibrate focus group data is well recognized by marketers and social scientists alike. The things marketers want to know the most – such as “intent to purchase” – is more obviously susceptible to misleading results. It’s easy to imagine that when people are asked what they would do with their money in a hypothetical situation (especially when the product itself is not yet available), naturally their answers are not always going to represent actual behavior when they do face the opportunity to buy.

However, mere calibration (which is a difficult task, requiring past studies on similar customer segments, where you can compare survey responses to real behavior) is not enough to consider. How we ask the question can influence not only the answer, but also the subsequent behavior, about which the respondent is surveyed.

Dr. Goldstein pointed me to an article in Psychology Today by Art Markman, about research into how “asking kids whether they plan to use drugs in the near future might make them more likely to use drugs in the near future.” Markman recommends that parents must pay attention to when such surveys are taken, and make sure that they talk to their children both before and after to ensure that the “question-behavior effect” does not make them more likely to engage in the behaviors highlighted in the surveys. The assumption is that if the respondent is aware of the question-behavior effect, the effect is less likely to work.

Question-Behavior Effect: The bad

If your marketing survey is focused on features that your product or service does not have—whether your competitors do or do not—then asking these negative questions may predispose your respondents against your product, without them even being aware of the suggestion. This is especially worrisome when you survey existing or past customers, or your prospects, about product improvements. Since you will be pointing out to them things that are wrong or missing, you run a good chance of decreasing their lifetime value (or lead quality, as the case may be).

Perhaps the survey taker should spend a little extra time explaining the question-behavior effect to the respondent before the interaction ends, also making sure that they discuss the product’s advantages and successes at the end of the survey. In short, end on a positive.

Question-Behavior Effect: The good

However, there is also a unique opportunity offered by the question-behavior effect: by asking the right questions, you can also elicit the behavior you want. This means being able to turn any touch point—especially an interactive one like a customer service call—into an influence opportunity.

I use the word “influence” intentionally. Dr. Goldstein pointed me to examples on commitment and consistency from Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: Science and Practice, such as a 1968 study conducted on people at the racetrack who became more confident about their horses’ chance of winning after placing their bets. Never mind how these researchers measured confidence—there are plenty of examples in the world of sales that support the same behavioral pattern.

“Once we make a choice or take a stand, we will [tend to] behave consistently with that commitment,” Cialdini writes. We want to feel justified in our decision. Back in college, when I studied International Relations, we called it “you stand where you sit”—the notion that an individual will adopt the politics and opinions of the office to which they are appointed.

So how does this apply to marketing? You need to examine all touch points between your company and your customers (or your audience), and make a deliberate effort to inject influence into these interactions. This doesn’t mean you should manipulate your customers—but it does mean that you shouldn’t miss an opportunity to remind them why you are the right choice. And if you’re taking a survey—remember that your questions can reshape the respondents’ behaviors.

P.S. From personal experience, do you think being asked a question has influenced your subsequent behavior? Please leave a comment below to share!

Related Resources

MarketingSherpa Landing Page Optimization Survey

Focus Groups Vs. Reality: Would you buy a product that doesn’t exist with pretend money you don’t have?

Marketing Research: Cold, hard cash versus focus groups

Marketing Research and Surveys: There are no secrets to online marketing success in this blog post

MarketingSherpa Members Library — Are Surveys Misleading? 7 Questions for Better Market Research

(photo credit: MYMRMARK)

David Meerman Scott is a marketing strategist and author of Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now. He describes himself as a recovering VP of Marketing, and as the keynote speaker he pumped up the crowd at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit 2011 at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.

Real-Time Marketing and PR

David shared a number of examples of actual real-time marketing and engagement, and one had a little relevance to the Summit because the event driving the effort happened in Las Vegas. At the end of last August, Paris Hilton was arrested in Las Vegas for possession of cocaine.

Paris Hilton and Wynn Resorts in Las Vegas

Wynn Resorts immediately sent out a press release stating that she was banned from their properties. The immediate result was that most stories covering the arrest also mentioned that Wynn Resorts banned Hilton as well. Over 5,000 stories were written right after the arrest and a Google search today using this string, “paris hilton arrest las vegas wynn banned” pulls up over 500,000 hits. Wynn resorts took advantage of a real-time event to drive promotion in the form of traditional media coverage.

David said speed and agility are a decisive competitive advantage. Reacting to, and focusing on, what is happening in the news can apply to both email and marketing campaigns. He added that too many companies are run by “MBAs and spreadsheets,” and are looking at data from last week, last month or even last year, and forecasting out as far as five years. He said he didn’t have anything against long-term planning, but David asks, “What about now?” Focus on today.

The Gap logo change

To provide another example of just how fast things happen in real-time, David talked about The Gap changing its logo. The change set off a firestorm of traditional and social media coverage, and most of that coverage was negative. The entire process from logo change, loud and energetic negative reaction, and The Gap announcing it was keeping its old logo happened over four days.

David asked the audience, “Is there anything you could have done with this?” for Summit attendees to think about opportunities with their own businesses and how they might use an event like The Gap logo change, and he pointed out that the event would have played out differently even two years ago. Twitter, Facebook and other online tools have changed the timeline of how the public reacted to the new logo.

(photo credit: @ContactLab)

Real-time guidelines

David said the way to start the process of real-time marketing is set guidelines in the company that allows for employees to take advantage of, and react to, real-time events. He pointed out that news happens all the time. The CEO might be away at a conference, or it might be the middle of the night, or during dinner after business hours.

To truly implement real-time marketing, the triggering event needs to be addressed immediately, and not have to wait for business hours and approval within the company.

Comments from the Twitter feed:

• Nobody cares about your products, except you. Create interesting content! #dmscott#Sherpaemail — @BjarteFalck (Bjarte Falck Olsen)
• Offer valuable content – not incentives. (@dmscott) #sherpaemail — @kristinhersant (Kristin Hersant)
• Don’t “do” social media. Make it a part of who you are. (via @dmscott)#SherpaEmail — @martinlieberman (Martin Lieberman)
• Create interesting content for your audience to share. People love to share valuable or funny information. (@dmscott) #sherpaemail — @kristinhersant (Kristin Hersant)
• Hard to separate work/personal on social media. Just be an authentic human being. (via @dmscott) #sherpaemail — @martinlieberman (Martin Lieberman)
• “virtually everyone is online.” @dmscott. Love it! #sherpaemail — @jenniebennie (Jennie Beyer)

(photo credit: @mattmcn)

Related resources

David’s blog, Web Ink Now

Improve Your Copywriting with Help from Social Media: 7 Tactics from David Meerman Scott

Lead generation: Real-time, data-driven B2B marketing and sales

Email Marketing Manager: Look past campaigns to boost your career

What’s the difference between a webinar and a website? The last four letters.

At first, this seems like a bad joke out of the “1,001 Wacky Jokes for Children of Marketers” (which I believe is out in paperback now). But take a step back from your website and webinar, look at the big picture, and you’ll quickly find that they both have the same goal – a conversion.

At MarketingExperiments and MarketingSherpa, not only do we research and publish information about the most effective marketing practices – the “what really works” – we also conduct webinars ourselves.

With that in mind, here are five questions we ask ourselves when staring in the mirror on the morning of a webinar…

Are you providing value?

According to MarketingExperiments research, the most important positive element to conversion is motivation. A negative element that hurts conversion is friction. Not to be overly simplistic, but given this paradigm, the ideal situation to use a webinar is when you have customers motivated enough to overcome the friction of having to take an hour or so out of their day and spend it with you.

Of course, this is why so many B2B companies conduct webinars. They have complex knowledge and products that customers are, at some level, motivated to find out more about. But let’s drill a little deeper into that thought, and perhaps address that second question as well. For any conversion to happen there must be a value exchange, and webinar attendance, while not a final sale, is a mini-conversion. So the best kind of customer to reach is the one you can truly provide value for.

Your knee-jerk reaction might be, “I provide value to every possible customer.” However, it will better serve your efforts if you take an honest self-assessment of your possible content, and decide who (if anyone) would give something for this content. Because attendees are paying with their time.

Are you communicating that value?

Every activity that happens before the webinar is your chance to make this sale. Remember, this is essentially a sale and the price is your audience’s time.

Your title, the description of your webinar, promotion blog posts, tweets, social media conversation – these all must be focused on a challenge or objective the customer has, not on your product’s features and functions.

All of your pre-webinar activity must create a solution to that challenge on three levels.

• It must be relevant. If your audience is mid-level warehouse managers, telling them how to recreate an entire manufacturing process over which they have no control is not relevant to their challenge of meeting their production goals within the current process.
• It must be urgent. Your customers will not spend an hour with you to solve a problem that is 15 months away. They have to meet this quarter’s goals and numbers and that is where their greatest motivation lies. In the long run there is no long run if they don’t fix short-term problems. Or, as noted economist John Maynard Keynes has said, “In the long run we are all dead.”
• It must be important. Your audience likely has many challenges in their job. But if you are only addressing something minor, why should they spend an hour with you? Put another way, would you try to sell better tires for an airplane that has no wings?

Take an unbiased look at your efforts and make sure you truly are addressing your customer’s most pressing issues, and not just, like many companies, putting new wrapping on the same sales pitch.

Are you constantly engaging your audience?

For the host, the key is value, value, value. Why start the webinar with an ad for yourself, as so many do? What is the value for the customer? Every minute they remain on the webinar is a micro-sale to get them to stay on for the next minute.

As Flint McGlaughlin, the Director of MECLABS Group, teaches, “Dazzle me gradually.” Continuously provide value to your audience, to overcome the inherent friction of staying on any webinar.

From a technology standpoint, have a conversation with them using polls and answering submitted questions throughout. Have staff on hand to conduct Q&A through your platform since you won’t likely have the time to address every question on the call. Encourage them to have a conversation with each other by using a Twitter hashtag.

Again, your focus is not the sale, its helping and providing value to your audience.

Are you listening to your audience?

Once you have dazzled your audience, give them a way to learn more about how your company can help them. Over time, you can start to measure the value of these leads with your sales team and then discern how many leads you get per webinar and how much these leads are worth. Are they more likely to close than a bought list or other cold lead? Do they end up being higher-value deals since they are from more motivated, more engaged customers? Answers to these questions will help you determine ROI.

Beyond ROI and independent of leads, make sure you keep a finger on the pulse of your webinars themselves by making sure your audience has a way to provide you feedback and let you know how much value and help you provide through them. By keeping an eye on this soft metric, you can use your webinars to help educate a community instead of alienating potential customers.

Are you building a community?

Before, during and after a webinar, social media and other content marketing is an excellent fit to building a community around your solution (and, as the name suggests, your solution is not your product but rather the value you provide to customers).

Before a webinar, solicit feedback through LinkedIn to understand what topics your customers want more information about. Then, perhaps release a juicy whitepaper that you can dissect live on the webinar. During the webinar, use a Twitter hashtag to facilitate conversation with (and between) attendees. After the webinar, write follow-up blog posts (with audio and video replays) to share information with those who couldn’t attend, and interest them in attending your next webinar and further feeding the virtuous value cycle.

Remember, a webinar – just like social media – is a channel. It has no inherent value. Your job is to provide that value.

Related Resources

“Double the Value of Your Online Testing: Don’t just get a result, get the maximum customer insights” Web clinic

“Top Five B2B Marketing Practices For 2011” webinar

How to Promote Your Webinar Via Google News

The Art of Inventing Must-Attend Webinar Topics: Real-life Inspiration

Marketing with white papers and/or webinars

Many journalists will agree to a quick informational phone call with new marketing leaders, if you respectfully request it. Let them know the conversation will not run longer than 15 minutes and will be at a time of their convenience, and promise you will not pitch them during that time. You’re seeking information so you can serve them better as a possible source and advertiser.

If you can’t get through, but you already sponsor the publication in question, a gentle nudge from your ad sales rep can help, too.

Here are the best questions to ask during those 15 minutes:

– Is there a particular PR person or firm you respect the most in their field? Whose email or calls would you be most likely to respond to because you know they’ll bring you good stuff? (Never hire a PR firm that’s not vouched for by the press they pitch routinely.)

– Do you or does any member of your team ever freelance for vendors to write white papers or articles for email newsletters? Are any of you ever available as speakers or moderators for vendor user conferences? Obviously, we understand this possible relationship would not affect your other coverage.

– How far out do you begin working on major stories for issues? What are your biggest deadlines? If we wanted to be considered for a quote or as background for a story, by when would we need to contact you if we see something in your editorial calendar coming up?

– What do you see as the hot button stories or areas of coverage that your readership is deeply interested in over the next six months? What’s over, done, dead?

– Do you study which search terms are very popular on your site’s search engine? How about which types of articles get the most clicks and views from your email newsletter? Is that information I could get routinely, say every month or quarter, from my ad sales rep if I’m a client?

– Which bloggers do you pay the most attention to? If you blog, what sorts of items, gossip and otherwise, make useful snippets for you? Do you mind being pitched on possible blog snippets?

– What sort of story or data would you love to get from a source as an exclusive? How about a case study? A tip sheet? Statistical results from a new industry survey? An interview with one of our top clients? Product launch previews? A sample of the product to review?

– What sort of story or information should I just never bother you with?

– Who on the staff should we contact? Should we just send information to one beat reporter in particular?

Note: You may also want to check MarketingSherpa’s extensive library of PR interviews, ranging from BusinessWeek to Women’s Wear Daily. Top journalists reveal exactly how they wish you would pitch them stories. This Members-only resource is available on free trial at:
https://www.marketingsherpa.com/memberhome.html

In November 1999, I woke up abruptly at about 3 a.m. in a hotel room outside Phoenix where I was attending a marketing conference.

I’d had this strangely intense dream. The vision was so overwhelming that I fumbled in my bag next to the bed for a pen and paper and started furiously scribbling.

The result: a blueprint outlining every aspect of what would become MarketingSherpa — an encyclopedic resource with practical research data, inspirational real-life samples and instructional how-to to help marketers get better results.

I’ve kept that piece of paper tacked up on my office bulletin board all these years. Although the ink is now faded, it still inspires me.

Today, at long last, we’re officially launching beta versions of not one but five major new services all initially envisioned in that dream:

#1. MarketingSherpa Membership Beta

Many of you have emailed and called over the years to complain that buying Case Studies one at a time was inconvenient. Now that pain has ended. When you join as a Sherpa Member, you’ll get complete access to everything year-round, including 744+ Case Studies and 526 how-to pieces.

And, yes, we’ve improved search and added 52 topical microsite sections so it’s easier to quickly find what you need.

#2. Research Database Beta

I’ve had a team of four, headed by a research librarian, working behind the scenes for more than a year now to make this for you. They’ve created more than 2,000 searchable records of every type of research to do with marketing, ads and PR from more than 500 organizations.

If you’re looking for a number, chances are you’ll find a source referenced in this handy, ever-growing database.

#3. Creative Samples Library Beta

We’ve gathered, organized and cross-referenced more than 2,200 creative samples from MarketingSherpa Case Studies into a searchable library for you. Each one includes hotlinks back to the original story so you can see how effective the campaign was.

Yes, you can search by brand name so you can see what we have for your company and your competitors.

#4. Awards Calendar Beta

A personal favorite of mine, we track 254 different awards in marketing, ads and PR throughout the year. It’s easy to search by topic, location and — most importantly –nomination deadlines!

#5. Events Calendar Beta

Many of you write in asking if we know of good events for marketing professionals to attend, sponsor or speak at. That’s why our research team created this calendar for you tracking 577 events and trade shows throughout the year.

You may be wondering why all of this is called “Beta.”

I stole the idea from Google, who call lots of their new services Beta. Beta to me means that I’m very much looking for your input as you try the new services so we can improve them further. You understand the site is not locked in stone, but rather a work in progress based on your feedback and demand.

It also means that as a Beta user, you’re one of the first. Some people don’t like being first; others really do. The choice is in your hands. You can learn more at:
https://www.marketingsherpa.com/membertour.html

In closing, all this weekend I thought a lot about the past seven and a half years — what an incredible journey it’s been from that waking up alone in that hotel room with a Big Idea to an office packed with researchers and reporters working to make it a reality.

So, I’d like to quickly thank some people for their help along the way:

o Andy Bourland, Founder ClickZ, and Dr. Flint McGlaughlin, Director MarketingExperiments, for sending in two of Sherpa’s very first reader testimonials years ago.

o Aimee Kessler Evans, employee No. 1 and now one of our very first Beta Members.

o Tad Clarke, our editorial director, for leaving his decade-long position at DM News and moving from Manhattan to Rhode Island to take a chance with Sherpa.

o Stefan Tornquist, our research director, for making the exact opposite move so we’d have a New York-based research presence.

o Reporters past and present, especially including Jennifer Nastu, Mark Brownlow, Dianna Huff, Alexis Gutzman, Chris Heine and Sean Donahue.

o Longstanding team members Sharon Hamner, Ron Perry, Aimee Croke, Kim Pezzetti, Terra Hughes, Meinhart & Associates and the guys in our Sombor, Serbia, branch office.

o Newer Sherpas including Cintia Miranda, who’s taken on the, perhaps, daunting task of running the marketing department.

o All the programmers and designers from Matrix Group to CVanek Studios, who made the site’s evolution possible. Plus, Holly Hicks on the newsletters front.

o Tech suppliers, including Omniture, ExactTarget, WebSideStory Search, Kowabunga and SurveyGizmo, who make our services possible.

o Hope Hopkins, Membership Services Producer, and Erin Donovan, Research Librarian. To you two falls the now even bigger task of keeping our new services growing healthy and strong.

And, last, but overwhelmingly not least, you, our 237,000 weekly readers, who have made this incredible journey possible — and who give us the reason to keep on building a newer, better Sherpa every single day.

Thank you for your support and guidance.

A week and a half ago, I sent you a note about the fact that we are being acquired by another research firm, also in the ‘what works in marketing’ arena.

So far, it has been a heck of a crazy ride. Here are two main results you might find useful if you ever have to announce an M&A to your own company newsletter audience:

-> Congrats letters pouring in

It’s terribly exciting when the reader response floodgates open in response to an announcement like this. Then the typing starts. And goes on, and goes on, and goes on.

I feel very strongly that if you write me a letter, you should get a swift personal response. My husband feels very strongly that since I married him earlier this year, I should come home in time for dinner. You can see where this is heading …

Three other items on dealing with congrats:

o Folks who reach out and touch at a time like this often are your biggest evangelists, closest contacts and longstanding fans. Another reason not to relegate them to a form letter or make them wait for a thank-you reply.

o The word “congrats” spelled out goes directly into many Outlook junk mail filters. This means you’ll have to dredge through your filtered mail more diligently than usual for a week or two.

o Some people send gifts. Honest to gosh. Thanks to Paramore Redd for the yummy cookies and Elie Ashery for the huge fruit basket.

-> Less reaction than you (dumbly) expected in the blogsphere

Oh, even with 20+ years of WIIFM (what’s in it for me) marketing training on how to appeal to an audience, I still made the junior-league mistake of expecting the blogsphere to be hopping with posts about our acquisition.

What would they say? I clicked over and over and over again to blog-tracking services such as Technorati.com to track the world’s response to our ground-shaking news. Yes, there was some. But not much.

In fact, blog reaction was limited mainly to people who pick up press releases in part or in whole and repost without comment (or sometimes caring). So, we were splog fodder and release reprint “news notes” but not anything more, except for a tiny handful of bloggers.

Strikingly, way more folks blogged, discussed and linked to Case Studies and other stories our editorial team had published that week than to our corporate news about ourselves.

Old lesson re-learned. No one cares really deeply about you being acquired except for you, your staff, your family, the people buying you and their PR firm.

Oh, and the local paper. It was way fun to pose among fulfillment stacks of our Search Marketing Reports for the photographer Providence Business News sent over.

Anyway, news about you may not be remotely relevant or useful to your marketplace. So, they won’t blog about it.

That’s a fact that folks who publish corporate newsletters overloaded with words such as “Us” and “Our” should consider before the next issue goes out.

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Over the past year, Ask.com (formerly AskJeeves) has run two heavy TV campaigns. The first was September 2005 and the second March 2006 (and they’re in the midst of another fall campaign now.)

Ask.com, which is the fourth most-used search engine in the US, was hoping to lure users from the big three: Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search. (The days when AOL Search was one of the big three are long gone.)

Could well-done TV creative broadcast at high-enough saturation move the needle? Is it possible to break Google’s stride toward desktop domination? It’s a question Microsoft especially would love to know the answer to.

So, MarketingSherpa’s research team partnered with Compete Inc. to find out. You can see the results on the chart I’ve taken from our Search Marketing Benchmark Guide 2007 below.

The thin line above shows Ask.com’s ad spend. It’s pretty
dramatic; yet, at first glance, the results don’t appear to be. After a fairly major media spend, Ask.com’s online market share went from just over 3% to a bit over 4.5% and then subsided a bit.

The answer to the question then is, yes, you can grow online market share, but perhaps only a little if your competitors are heavily entrenched and you won’t keep your peak forever.

However a look behind the numbers tells another story. From
August 2005 to August 2006, Compete and MarketingSherpa research also discovered that Ask.com was the *only* major search engine to grow market share besides Google. Yahoo! and MSN Search both lost measured market share.

In that light, Ask.com’s achievement is a major triumph.

Lesson learned? Google is a juggernaut. Expect MSN and Yahoo! to do heavy TV. And, if you do invest in major TV, be darned sure you’ve got a must-return-to site or service beforehand. Because one or two TV-driven visits per consumer do not ensure long-term loyalty.

Note: As with all MarketingSherpa content, the above chart is copyright protected. Please do not copy it; however, you can link to it on this permanent link.

Useful links related to this article

MarketingSherpa’s SearcnMarketing Benchmark Guide 2007:
http://www.sherpastore.com/Search-Marketing-Benchmark-SEO-PPC.html?8966

MarketingSherpa’s vendors:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/vendors.html