Helping Aussie businesses with online advertising during hard times
While times are tough, online advertising spend has increased “Online advertising is surpassing $1.7 billion for the 2008 calendar year, representing an increase of $364.25 million or 27% year-on-year growth according to figures released today by IAB”. Clickfind is the first Australian business directory to help fellow Australians out in a time of need by offering free online advertising accounts to promote their business online for a limited time.
Clickfind is helping out by completely removing its already low monthly fee and allowing any Australian business who is experiencing hardship to advertise online for 3 months at no cost at all. Contrary to other business directories, a clickfind listing also allows advertising of products and services online.
To sign up just email free-2009@clickfind.com.au and we’ll send you further instructions via email, if you make a donation to the Victoria Bush Fire appeal http://www.redcross.org.au/default.asp let us know and we’ll provide a 12 months listing. This promotion is valid for 2 months.
Establishing a Unique Selling Proposition
Your brand image is primarily an emotional construct. Emotion is probably always more powerful in swaying people than reason, but people like to be able to rationalise their choices. This is where awareness of another advertising theory - the USP - can be helpful to you.
The USP, or unique selling proposition, formula was developed by Rosser Reeves, an ex-copywriter who became head of the Ted Bates agency in New York. He wrote an excellent book, largely dealing with this theory but also covering other aspects of advertising, called Reality in Advertising.
To establish your USP, you compare your product or service with your competitors. Then you determine one feature you have which no one else can offer. This is your unique selling proposition. It is this which you must promote single mindedly.
A 1987 issue of Marketing Week, the British trade paper, gave a wonderful example of how little the average marketing executive understands the phrases he deploys with such gay inconsequence. The subject was ‘Store credit cards’. A bank executive said: The whole point of a Marks & Spencer, Boots, Dixons or even Fortnum & Mason card is to bring people into the store - and to provide a bit of a LISP’ (my italics).
How a credit card can be a unique selling proposition when the same facility is offered by any number of retailers is difficult to comprehend. It reminds one of people who refer to things as being ‘rather’ unique, or ‘fairly’ unique. Here are some typical USPs:
‘Cleans your breath while it cleans your teeth.’
Colgate toothpaste. ‘The too good to hurry mint.’ Murraymints. ‘There’s more for your life at Sears.’ Sears Roebuck. ‘It ain’t fancy but it’s good.’ Horn & Hardarts. ‘The mint with the hole.’ Polo Mints. ‘It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.’ Perdue Chicken
And, finally, another gentleman in the chicken business: ‘It’s finger lickin’ good.’ Colonel Sanders
One of the problems with the USP is that you sometimes have to rely upon some pretty trivial points of difference to arrive at your proposition - as you can see from the list above. And although, for simple products a good USP may often supply a successful selling idea, I think it is difficult to arrive at one for complex services such as American Express or The Consumers Association.
However, comparing yourself against your competition to discover what USP may exist is a great aid to clear thinking. For example, I was able to improve results for Odhams’ Kathie Webber Cookery Club by writing a headline which was simply a personal way of expressing a USP: `My cookery cards mean you control your weight without giving up luscious food you love to eat.’ This did well in the UK, and even in France, home of gastronomy. Moreover, subsequent approaches to selling this product revolved around this original thought. ====
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Validating Your Company’s Service Positioning
Once you have decided on possible positionings for your product or service, it’s wise to research them and see which of them your market finds believable and appealing.
For instance, one of our clients sells a wide range of bathrooms and home hardware to the public through shops. We wanted to find out what the right positioning for them could be - and then reflect it in their advertising.
Accordingly, a number of lines were written, each reflecting a different position. I am going to give you these lines with a brief indication as to how customers reacted to them. This should prove thought-provoking if you ever feel tempted to brag or misrepresent what you offer.
- ‘The best DIY store in town’ - consumers appreciated that the stores were not DIY outlets, so this was seen as inaccurate.
- ‘The ideal home improvement store’ - consumers thought this dealt only in superlatives, which were glib and self-congratulatory.
- ‘The store for top quality home improvements at value for money prices’ - customers thought this was not distinctive; it was overused phraseology; nor did it appear credible - people expect to pay a premium price for quality.
- ‘The home improvement store where service really is personal service’ - the idea of service was good news, but not enough; products had to be good, too. In any case, this claim was seen as something other stores like Marks & Spencer could make.
- ‘Find out what “the trade” has always known’ - people had mixed feelings about the trade. Some thought of it in association with craftsmanship; others thought of cheap workmanship and cowboy operators.
- ‘The store traditionally used by the trade’ - here the same negatives aroused by the previous trade line came up, though in a better sense because of the use of the word ‘traditionally’. One problem, however, is that the line implies such products need proper experience to install.
- ‘Made to last by us. Sold direct to you’ - this conveyed that the company was personally involved in the making of the products, as opposed to being an importer.
Moreover, the line was seen as patriotic, because it clearly meant these were British goods. It also conveyed craftsmanship, durability and the good value you get by buying direct. Readers also appreciated that the line was to the point, not gimmicky. This line came out on top.
Successful companies tend to have a clear positioning from which they rarely if ever deviate - and then only with great care. I make no apology for reintroducing American Express. It was positioned single-mindedly for many years as ‘the world’s most prestigious financial instrument for business travel or entertainment’. This positioning came out in everything American Express did. For instance, the letter sent out to entice new members which began: ‘Quite frankly the American Express card is not for everyone …’. This reflected the positioning so well that for many years in most countries of the world it was the most cost-effective direct mail used.
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The sniper approach to search engine marketing
Lack of focus is the most common mistake people make when trying to improve their search engine rankings. It’s a natural mistake to want to rank on as many keyword phrases as possible. The trouble is that approach doesn’t work any more. Search engine marketing is no different to any other personal endevour, be it business, sport or the arts. Focus wins.
I know when an SEO customer needs help when I ask them: “so what key phrases to do want to optimise your web pages for”, and they answer: “hundreds of them, I have a list of suggestions from Google right here”.
I know they need even more help when I ask them to describe their target market and they say: “everyone in the world”.
I know it’s going to be difficult to get quality traffic for this client’s web site when their business has multiple products and services with very little relationship to each other.
Lack of focus is the most common mistake I see in business in general and from people trying to optimise their web site. It’s a natural mistake to want to rank on as many keyword phrases as possible.
The logic is that you want to get as many visitors as possible so that you can present your compelling offer to them and hopefully convert them into customers.
This is the “general store” or “shotgun” approach and in the 90s during the era of keyword-stuffing, hidden text and doorway pages this approach worked pretty well.
The trouble is that traffic does not equal sales and these days it’s just too hard to optimise a web page for multiple competitive keyword terms.
The most successful SEO projects I have done were focused on one keyword phrase per page to a well defined geographic area for a very focused business offering. Simple examples include:
Wedding makeup Brisbane, Aluminium awnings Brisbane and Dayboro Bed and Breakfast.
They were successful in ranking well for search terms that motivated buyers in the target service area were searching on.
Users of search engines have become far more sophisticated with their search terms. For example, say someone living in Sydney was interested in buying a new canvas awning for their house. Five to ten years ago they may have searched on a single word: “awning” or even “canvas awning”.
These days they are more likely to search on a complex phrase like “Sydney canvas awning suppliers” or “canvas awnings Sydney” or even “Sydney awning installers”.
They have learnt through trial and error that by adding search modifiers like “canvas” and “Sydney” the most relevant results will appear.
How do you search for information on the Internet? I bet you are using more refined search terms to save time and improve the quality of your results.
The golden rule to remember is that the longer the search phrase - the more motivated the buyer. And that’s what most web site owners want, motivated buyers and shoppers rather than browsers and accidental visitors.
Through investing time in keyword research it is possible to identify search terms that do generate significant search volume and are easier to optimise for.
Google has some excellent free tools to help with that research. A search on “free keyword research tools” will also lead you to many others.
Once those phrases are identified and tested the best approach is to build a web page for each of those phrases.
Each web page should stand alone and have it’s own unique navigation menu link, title tag, heading and sub-headings.
Search engine marketing is no different to any other human endevour, be it business, sport or the arts. Focus wins.
John Hacking is Product Manager for an Internet marketing Brisbane company. For Australian web directory listings and SEO services in Brisbane, contact him today.
Marketing Segmentation and the Rise of Database Marketing
Marketing academics have noted increasing media fragmentation. In recent years, the role of advertising and promotion in the overall marketing process has changed considerably. The audiences that marketers seek, along with the media and methods for reaching them, have become increasingly fragmented. Advertising and promotional tactics have become more regionalized and targeted to specific market segments.
The extraordinary expansion of media options to reach niche markets has been fully documented. Along with the growth of products and services and the segmentation of types of consumers has come an extraordinary proliferation of media. There are new kinds of media, new developments in the traditional media, and new uses for media. Increasingly, the new media are tools for targeting rather than for saturating the mass market.
Information and the role of the marketing database In the information age marketers are not only focusing on analysis, but also understand the value of information collection.
In the past, direct marketing has been distinguishable from other marketing disciplines because of its emphasis on initiating a direct relationship between a buyer and a supplier, a relationship that until recently centered primarily on the exchange of goods and services. However, in today’s market, exchanging information is becoming almost as important as exchanging goods and services. With rising costs, crowded supermarket shelves, and over stuffed mailboxes, smart marketers are not just efficiently consummating a sale, they are also providing a chance for customers to communicate with them.
Of all these changes surely the most revolutionary is the ability to store in the computer information about your prime prospects and customers and, in effect, create a database that becomes your private market. As the cost of accumulating and accessing the data drops, the ability to talk directly to your prospects and customers — and to build one-to-one relationships with them — will continue to grow.
The new marketing landscape The effects on consumers of overwhelming change and the acceleration of change in our time have been brilliantly documented by Hugh Mackay in Reinventing Australia: So apparent is our national malaise that it has become fashionable to talk about the Age of Anxiety.
For people given to applying labels to decades, the 1980s was popularly described as “The Anxious Eighties” and there is no doubt that the decade lived up to the promise of that rather anxious label. Australia has not been alone in all this. All around the Western world, social commentators have been impressed by the rising level of angst over the past 20 years. The mind and mood of consumers in the 2000s provide interesting challenges.
The growing number of market segments and the simultaneous increase in available products have made marketing much harder. Manufacturers are in a quandary about what to produce; retail merchandise buyers are overwhelmed by the task of product selection; and advertisers feel swamped trying to convey appropriate messages to so many market segments about so many products …companies are grappling with the fact that mass advertising campaigns have become less and less useful in reaching diverse groups of consumers.
Marketers must now fight to establish the relevance of their products in an extremely noisy marketplace. The marketing future will undoubtedly look different in another respect as well: customer information technologies will change the relative roles of retailers, manufacturers, and media companies.
Retailers have a natural advantage because they can directly measure customer response and get first option at the broadest range of information. Indeed, point-of-sale scanning systems have already played a significant role in shifting power from manufacturers to retailers.
Most important, the balance of power between large and small companies will change. As customer information technology becomes more prevalent, only those companies that can invest the resources and show technological leadership will succeed.
If you’re looking for a Brisbane Marketing Company contact Search Tempo Pty Ltd. For a Brisbane Internet Consultant contact John Hacking. BSON081208ST