January 31st, 2006

The FULL Value of Internet Marketing

Here at SRB, we work with organizations all of sizes — as is probably evident by some of our earlier blog posts.

This, I believe, has lead to a wide variety of expectations from prospective clients regarding the value of Internet marketing in general, and of our services in particular.

Some of these prospective clients want instant ROI. “We’ll do a test for a month and, if it makes money, we’ll continue — otherwise not.” When we clarify, it ends up they want direct sales results that immediately makes them a profit. That’s instant ROI! Doesn’t that make Wall Street types, who go by the quarter, seem like paragons of patience?

God bless ‘em, wouldn’t that be a no-brainer! And we can actually do that for some clients. But, can you imagine applying for a job at a company and your prospective employer tells you that you have a month to bring in more value than your salary, benefits, and overhead combined?!

Other organizations are less in a rush. They may realize that building a relationship, obtaining ROI on their marketing investment a few months or more later (gasp!), and realizing increasing ROI over time are both more realistic and potentially more lucrative in the end.

Still, even many of the later types of marketers don’t realize what I call here the FULL value of their Internet marketing efforts and budget. In order to derive the FULL value of such efforts, most marketers should consider at least the following 3 additional benefits:

1. The lifetime value of the new customers brought in. When you acquire a new customer who initially spends X dollars, will they spend 2X-3X dollars over the next year? Five X or more over the course of time as your customer? Look at your data and find out from your previously recurring customers what this value averages!
2. The higher volumes reached online than in other media for the same or lower price. Branding is something many smaller companies won’t pay for, but should always be considered all things being equal — e.g., if you can reach over 1 million people online for the same price and space as a print ad to 200,000 people, isn’t that worth more? Studies have confirmed it is — that more people will recall your brand, even with puny search ads (not to mention email blasts and other, more “robust” ads).
3. The value of other online and offline behavior driven by the online efforts — phone calls, catalog requests, newsletter or list sign-ups, bricks-and-mortar sales, greater wholesale results, word-of-mouth referrals, etc.

These benefits aren’t always easily quantifiable, but shouldn’t you give it your best effort? Your online marketing investment may be paying off more than you think. Maybe even much more.

Posted by admin
Permanent Link -  No Comments »

January 24th, 2006

Successful search advertising not rocket science, but requires some effort

I’ve spoken to a lot of prospective clients in recent months about what they are doing, if anything, with Internet marketing.

Almost everybody seems to express an interest in email marketing, but many seem to be sour on what remains one of the hottest online tactics — search engine advertising. When I ask why, they save they’ve “tried Google” but with mediocre or bad results.

When I dig deeper, I find most still spend time and money on this tactic but implement few if any of the most basic best practices that industry insiders use. For example, few really do thorough key word research, or organize key words into relevant groups to match them to specific ad variations.

Moreover, instead of sending visitors to a special landing page, most people send them to an existing web page or, worse yet, their homepage (I should preface that by saying there are certain circumstances when that is the thing to do). A landing page looks, reads, and has a much different purpose than a public website page — it also entices visitors to take exactly the action you want them to take at a typically much higher rate.

If you have tried search engine advertising without utilizing these and other best practices, then you are potentially missing out on a very lucrative tactic. We’ve worked to improve some of our clients’ existing campaigns and these simple changes have turned unprofitable search ad campaigns into highly profitable ones.

Don’t be discouraged — read up a little on this tactic, on which much as been written. We’ll be making a free whitepaper on the search topic available in the next two weeks for a short time — if you’re interested, just email us with your name, company and address and we’ll provide you the location to download it. Also check out the great articles on it at ClickZ and MarketingSherpa.

Posted by admin
Permanent Link -  No Comments »

January 19th, 2006

Philadelphia Freedom from advertising

I was in Philly last weekend, on a short weekend get-a-way.

While reading the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer, I noticed an article titled “Ads nauseum” by John Dvorak, which argues that too much advertising in too many places could permanently scar our culture. The author gives a number of interesting and insightful examples and snippets of information to support this argument, ranging from broadcast television, to print, to online; and even mentions the ominous consolidation of media.

It’s hard to disagree. This premise has occasionally troubled me, since this is a part of our business. Advertising plays an important societal function from informing people about useful (as well as useless) products to informing them on public policy issues. Yet, can there be too much advertising? It does seem to find its way into more and more places, with men’s restroom urinals being one of the more humourus.

But can advertising’s increasing ubitiquity do our culture permanent harm? I’ve taken some comfort because people are becoming more savvy to advertising, even as they become more numb to it. Advertising has also made more and more information available free of charge – and that’s certainly a good thing. And because my company works only with environmentally- and socially-responsible organizations, we’re trying to help solve important problems not being adequately addressed by business, government of other sectors of society.

Dvorak’s article hits one of the main culprits when he mentions the consolidation of media. There are now only six companies that own most of the media in the world. Communications and antitrust laws and policies have allowed this consolidation. Now, these six conglomerates control much of what we see, hear and read in the media — and profit is their number one priority (no Ed Murrows here to save the day as in George Cloonye’s movie “Good Night and Good Luck”).

Addressing this problem will go a long way toward allowing a stronger, more independent media to emerge that is not as dependent on advertising. People will also increasingly invest in technologies and services that allow them to access media and public places free of advertising (Tivo, satellite radio, etc.).

Posted by admin
Permanent Link -  No Comments »