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If you were to put together a list of irritating and annoying everyday occurrences, those dinnertime phone calls about getting your ducts cleaned or your windows and doors replaced would be high on the list, followed closely by email spam, and television commercials that seem to be twice as loud as the program and repeated 'ad infinitum.'
Would You Like Some Behavioral Targeting With Your Duct Cleaning?
My own special hell includes all those newsletters, reports, and white papers touting...
Assembling Your Web Video Marketing Assets
Now that just about everybody is a believer in Web video, it's time to figure out just how to use it effectively as a marketing communication tool. Oh sure, there are a few diehard holdouts filling their sites with thousands of words of densely congealed text in a vain attempt to attract 'Mr. GoodSearch;' and let's all encourage them to continue, especially our competitors, because as they stick to yesterday's marketing tactics, we can capture market share by communicating using techniques that...
Branded Entertainment: Web Advertising's Future Format
How do you deliver a marketing message to a Web-audience that hates advertising? A few years back I proposed a solution based on short-form television-style programs: the "120 Second Solution," two minute brand-story commercials formatted in a mini three act Web-video presentation. Today this concept is called Branded Entertainment: a two to seven minute commercial that combines content, advertising, and entertainment in a brand story format designed to attract and hold an audience's attention...
Web Marketing Ideas You Can Actually Use
The Web is full of information, articles, videos, white papers, e-books and all matter of research and information. Some of it is very, very good, and some of it is misleading and irrelevant. Somewhere in the middle, falling squarely in the category of spectacularly mediocre, is the vast majority of the rest of it.
If you're like me, always trying to improve, learn, and grow your business, then you've probably been frustrated in your search for truly useful information that you can actually...
How Sound Design Affects Customer Response and Action
If you've spent a small fortune on graphic designers, search engine optimizers, social networking experts and still find that your website conversions are low, then perhaps your website suffers from the marketing equivalent of Capgras Delusion, a failure to make a connection between your online content and your emotional value proposition.
You're Not My Wife
A woman phones her husband who's in the hospital after suffering a head injury. The man recognizes his wife's voice when she tells him...
Seven Deadly Video Marketing Sins
So you want to develop a Web video campaign to put on your website and add to YouTube and all the other Web video directories. Maybe you even want to create a new video micro site to promote that hot new product or service you're about to launch. You want it done right, professional, slick, and you want it to be effective. Well of course you do.
You know you need to hire a firm that has the creative staff capable of not just shooting video but professionals who can write, direct, edit, and add...
HyperRealism As a Motivating Factor in Web Video
If there is one thing every Web business executive can agree on, it's that websites need to motivate people to act. That action can be to place an order, send an email, pick-up the phone, or maybe just join a mailing list, but whatever the intended response, your website must cause a reaction. It's a case of simple cause and effect.
The issue is one of successful communication. What you say and how you say it are what motivates people to connect with your company, the solution provider....
How to Develop a Brand Story Communication Strategy
Marketing campaigns should always start with a communication concept: a conceptual premise and framework that attracts attention and engages an audience in a way that penetrates each viewer's mind, and captures the audience's collective consciousness. It is the foundation of your brand story.
Developing an appropriate communication concept is the first step in creating your own distinctive marketing strategy: a strategy that employs the signature audio-visual-performance vocabulary needed to...
Video Microsites - The Brand Story Campaign Solution
Everyone wants to do more business. Everyone occasionally runs a promotion, a new marketing initiative, a product launch, or a new seasonal lineup. Everyone has a website stuffed with all kinds of content ranging from the important to the useless. But only the truly smart business minds understand that campaigns require their own space and identity if they are to succeed. And when it comes to using the Web as your vehicle for such a campaign, the obvious solution is a Video Campaign...
Your Website's Missing Ingredient
"My mechanic told me, 'He couldnt repair my brakes, so he made my horn louder.' - Comedian, Steven Wright
We all want our websites to be more effective, and if you're like most business people you are constantly searching the Web for anything that will help. What you find is a cabal of experts armed with statistics, analysis, charts and graphs all pointing to how they can get you high-up on the search engines and drive more traffic to your site. The problem is that like Steven Wright's...
Which Website Visitors Are Potential Clients?
With today's website tracking software and services you can find out a lot about the people who visit your website. You can learn where they're from, what kind of browser they're using, how long they stayed on your site, and a whole lot more. But what all this high tech intelligence won't tell you is what kind of people they are, and how likely they are to be transformed by your Web presentation from viewers to customers.
Your ability to convert website visitors into clients depends on your...
Your Website As Persuasion Machine
The combination of the Internet, the Web, and technology has democratized business almost beyond recognition. Today the small, nimble, clever adaptor has the competitive advantage over their bigger, slower moving, 'we've-always-done-it-this-way' competitors; but the confluence of the Web environment and digital technology is one thing, how to use it effectively is another. Not every trendy social networking gimmick, user generated irrelevance, and pointless viral voyeurism is a productive...
Shaping Web Audience Preference
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you had the power to convince people that your product or service was exactly what they needed, and as a consequence your in-box was filled with inquiries and your e-commerce site was stuffed with orders. Wouldn't that be great? And isn't that exactly what you want to achieve with your website?
The problem is you are part of a giant online bazaar called The Web; and just like your local weekend flea market The Web is filled with crap, conmen, and contraband. Without...
The Brand Story Web Marketing Process
If websites have one overarching goal it is to create confidence in whatever the website is promoting and who's promoting it. It doesn't matter if it's a product, a service, a sales campaign, or an idea, if the presentation is not minimally credible or optimally motivational, then it fails as a means of marketing communication.
Communicate to the Subconscious Mind
Branding is often thought of as a marketing strategy reserved for major consumer product companies, but the fact is all businesses...
Web-Marketing Analysis Questionnaire
Everyday I receive marketing reports loaded with statistics and numbers that have the appearance of relevance but in fact merely mask the true meaning of what's important: human emotions, not rational reasoning, are the subconscious basis for most decisions.
Reliance on rational quantitative analysis leads people to ask the wrong questions, implement the wrong solutions, and produce disappointing results.
Your website presentation is how you tap into your audience's subconscious desires. If...
How Much Face-Time Does Your Website Need?
How much time does it take your website to deliver your marketing message? Assuming the site traffic you generate is the least bit interested in what you have to say, how much of what you're saying do they remember, or more to the point, how much do they need to remember?
Have you ever thought about, or even considered, how much face-time your website needs to be effective? It is probably the last thing many business website operators ever think about, let alone do anything about.
The notion...
8 Brain-Branding Web Presentation Concepts, Part II
In '8 Brain-Branding Web Presentation Concepts, Part I' we discussed the first four brain-related marketing concepts that if incorporated into website presentations help generate brand preference purchase decisions. Part II continues with the next four concepts.
5. Cognitive Itch
James J. Kellaris, Associate Professor of Marketing at the University of Cincinnati College of Business Administration is an expert in studying why certain songs get stuck in peoples' heads. Its a phenomenon we have...
8 Brain Branding Website Techniques Part I
According to eMarketer August 2008 video ad spending will increase a thousand percent over the next five years. This means Web video is on the way to becoming the must-have Web presentation tool.
Some may see video as merely the next trendy marketing tactic that you should have because everyone else has it, but that would be a misreading of the trend. Discounting the importance of video presentation as just a fad misses the underlying human motivational impact of engaging an audience's neural...
A Case For Marketing Experimentation: Making Failure Work For You
Remember Roy Hobbs
Any baseball fan that likes movies should know the name Roy Hobbs, the fictional character played by Robert Redford in "The Natural." Hobbs at nineteen years old is one of those athletes whose easy grace and athleticism, makes him a natural, but his career takes a fifteen-year detour due to a youthful indiscretion and some bad luck. Eventually, at the end of his failed career, Hobbs finds success and redemption. This story transcends sport and becomes an allegory for life,...
The Art of the Sale: Developing Website Content
There was a time in the Province of Ontario, when you couldn't show people drinking beer in a television commercial. In fact, you couldn't even show the bottle; about the only beer-related item you could show was the label. So advertisers were forced to concentrate on attractive young people having a good time. The beer was never seen, only implied.
You would think this restriction would have been a major impediment to selling beer, but because advertisers were forced to sell the psychological...
Seven Words That Will Make Your Website Worth Viewing
Seven. It's just a number like any other, but it does seem to come up on a fairly regular basis. There's the Seven Wonders of the World, The Seven Deadly Sins, and the Seven Dwarfs: Happy, Sneezy, Sleepy, Bashful, Doc, Dopey, and my personal favorite, Grumpy.
Phone numbers are seven digits, and they say the optimum brand name should be no more than seven letters long. Seven it seems is a magical number, as the average human brain can only grasp seven things at a time. Interesting, my wife says...
The Plan - 4 Steps to a Website Brand
Do you have a plan? Most companies spend a considerable amount of time, energy, and money planning what to do and how to do it.
Let's say you need a website, so you develop a plan, present it to a bunch of website designers, and get quotes or proposals. You're not going to get caught with your pants down like the last time by some nerdy geek, you know the skinny kid with the scraggly beard, whose techno-babble gave you a headache, or the bizarre young lady dressed in gothic chic with the black...
Your Website Doesn't Need a Traditional Call to Action
The other day I received two emails, both with the same question, why didn't we have a direct call to action on our website?
Sales people are taught, you always need 'a call to action,' a request to act or lose the opportunity of a lifetime. I'm sure you've seen the infomercials, website presentations, online direct marketing come-ons, and even high-pressure seminar and tradeshow presentations that will never be repeated, so you better act now. You're familiar with the language used: "act now...
All Websites Are International
Tip O'Neill, the late Speaker of The House of Representatives is often quoted as saying "All politics is local," meaning a politician that helps a constituent with a problem is likely to win that vote based on the personal assistance provided, irrespective of that politician's stance on the larger, more weighty, geo-political issues. What then of business, is all business local or international?
Shopping Is An Experience
The world has changed dramatically since the days when neighborhood...
Does Your Website Need a Magic Act?
In preparation for an initial meeting with a new client, we were asked to preview their website to see if we could come-up with some ideas for re-branding the company, and invigorating product sales.
The client was suitably impressed with our thoughts but there was one problem, the product line that we stressed was not the focus of the company. The client explained that despite the fact most of their current website was devoted to a particular product line, it was not the product that...
Upgrading Your Company Website
Dealing with website development issues can be an overwhelming task. There are many things your marketing team must consider, in fact, there are so many things to bear in mind that many of the most important ones never get dealt with, or are buried under competing interests.
To avoid project paralysis you should focus on certain key areas of concern from which all other issues flow. Whether upgrading your existing website or developing a new webmedia initiative from scratch, consider these...
What's Wrong With E-Commerce Websites?
What is going on with e-commerce websites? It appears that online entrepreneurs spend so much time worrying about website traffic that they ignore the customers who actually want to buy something.
Recently, I tried to order a product we spotted at a trade show. It was perfect for our application so we did a Google search to find the manufacturer and a list of dealers who sold the item.
Almost all the websites that distributed the product had proper contact information and invited people to...
7 Tactical Reasons to Use Mini Campaign Websites
How many websites should your company have?
That's a question that comes up often in discussions with clients, but perhaps the idea never crossed your mind. Why would any company need more than one website? Not to be glib but the answer is as many as you need, but how many is that?
If you're a large corporation it is fairly obvious that you need a separate site for each brand you offer, and a separate site for corporate background material and perhaps investor information.
But what if you're...
Create a Branded Website Host
The Web has gradually transformed itself from a haven for socially dysfunctional misanthropes and programming savants into a grand social and business networking environment. The popularity of MySpace, Facebook, Linkedin and all their various clones serves as evidence that people want to connect to other people. The fact that the Web is a cold, remote, isolated world oddly enhances, and actually encourages the building of relationships.
For those businesses that really don't know how to...
Creating a Successful Online Sales Strategy
You have a website, and perhaps you're even a professional salesperson, and as such you know that the best way to sell someone something is face-to-face, but have you seen the price of gas lately?
So whether your customers are local, national, or international, the cost of getting to them is just too darn high to make any money. You could call them on the phone or email them, but with voice mail, spam filters, and all manner of gatekeepers, it is literally impossible to get to people, even...
8 Things That Motivate Web-Audience Response
It's always a good idea to stick to the basics. When businesses stray too far from the fundamentals, problems arise, but sticking to the basics doesn't mean boring people into a state of unconsciousness. If Web-visitors' eyes glaze-over upon entering your site, you've lost them before you've begun.
Web success is based on creative implementation of the basics, and that's where your Web-marketing presentation should begin.
1. Web-Audience Response Demands Communication
The Web has a lot in...
Viral Marketing, Let's See How it Works
The 7 Elements of a Viral Video Campaign
The biggest problem most websites have is that they are instantly forgettable. They sell or say the same thing as hundreds or thousands of other sites; to an audience that is so quick to click-away that a large percentage of their traffic never appreciates why they should buy anything or listen to what's being said.
In order for a website or ad campaign to be interesting enough for visitors to stick-around, or clever enough to be viral, it must be...
How Far Can You Push a Talking Head?
Let's talk about talking heads, and why adding one to your website might just be the smartness thing you've done since dumping the SUV and fast-food, and opting for hybrids and salads. Okay - perhaps that's asking too much, but you get the point.
Talking heads, as we all know, is a reference to presentations, originally on television, where a host would sit or stand in front of a camera, usually shot from the waist up, for example, most evening news broadcasts. The term has taken on a negative...
Cache's Web-Marketing Manifesto
Who is Cache Closed and what can he do for you? Cache is a digital construct created to inform, enlighten, and entertain Web-marketers interested in learning how best to market on the Web.
Now don't be alarmed, Cache isn't interested in selling you anything, no e-books, no DVDs, no magic elixirs or potions, no sir, just a pixelated-paranoid, pied-piper of ideas and concepts designed to improve your Web-business.
The Cache-man has put a little something together he modestly calls, 'Cache's...
Turn Knowledge Into Sales: Discover Hidden Web-Profits
Your company's collective knowledge and know-how is its greatest asset not the products or services you offer; products and services are merely the means to implement your expertise. Your capacity to grow and prosper is dependent on your ability to effectively present your know-how in creative, informative, entertaining, understandable, and above all memorable ways.
To excite, inform, and motivate people by showing them how to get the most out of what you sell is where your profit potential...
Successful Brands Are Based On Great Themes
A true brand is a metaphor for desire, a container for aspirations and the promise of fulfillment. We are all the same, each of us searching for the same things and they aren't keywords. Most businesses think way too narrowly; too focused on the concrete instead of the psychological. Branding like history is based on enduring themes, the universal hardwired predilections that form our basic needs and wants, whether for business or pleasure.
Quintessential Brand Themes
Gerald and Lindsay...
Web-Content Conundrum
The Web consumes content like a teenager at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Lots and lots of content makes you more search engine friendly, helps establish your knowledge and expertise, explains in detail what you offer, and justifies that offer with all the explanations, statistics, and rationale you can muster. The problem is nobody reads it.
Well that's not exactly true: some people read every scrap of information on your site; they just happen to be the tire-kickers, the people looking for...
Brand-Personality Self-Analysis: Finding Your Brand's Emotional Aftertaste
Marketing is difficult because it is unlike any other business discipline. Most of our business day is filled with left-brain tasks that may be complex but are for the most part logical and procedural in nature whereas marketing and branding are right-brain activities governed by that hated enemy of rational business thinking, psychology.
Most businesses advertise; a rather common practice designed to get the word out about your company, product, or service. A lot of companies despair at the...
The Campaign Killers: 12 People You Need To Fire
Sometimes it seems like the hardest thing to do in business is to get things done: so little time, so many obstacles. And when it comes to marketing it gets even worse, after all there are all those administrative details that need to be dealt with, emails, inquiries, suppliers, and on and on. Finding the time to devote to creating a sustained, focused marketing effort seems like it's near impossible. But the biggest obstacles of all are some of your trusted colleagues and advisors; you know...
The 120 Second Solution
Like it or not, the Web is turning into an environment that will be dominated by audio and video presentations. And as we have already seen, the democratic nature of the Web has allowed the best and worst to stand side-by-side.
On one side, you have the whacky viral videos that serve little commercial purpose other than to enhance the reputations of their creators; and on the other side, you have deadly boring corporate videos that lack any of the qualities that make Web-video the best sales...
How To Make Web-advertising Worth Watching
It has become an article of faith that the Web is all about content; content is King on the Web as opposed to television where commercials are king. It seems that television networks just can't wrap their heads around the Internet and fit it into their standard commercial box. The traditional media's tactic of last resort, buying-up the competition and imposing its commercial will, just won't work with the Internet.
Businesses that want to succeed on the Web must learn how to turn their...
Every Brand Needs A Message And A Messenger
I don't drink, although after a hard day it seems like it might be worth starting, but since I can't stand the taste of the stuff, I generally just settle for drowning my troubles in a stiff diet soda. However if I were going to take up the evil spirits, I would start with Reyka Vodka, not because it's better or worse than any other vodka, but because they have an extraordinary marketing campaign and an equally clever integrated website (http://www.reykavodka.com) with an enchanting if...
How To Create A Video Campaign Concept
Have you ever had a good idea, maybe a great idea, only to find that someone else already ready did it? Frustrating. You want to be a success and who doesn't? It's why you do what you do, why you put-up with what you put-up with? But it all gets so frustrating.
As much as you'd like to believe otherwise, there just aren't any secret methods, special potions, or motivational DVDs that are going to make you a success in thirty days, but there are things you can do that will help. Sure working...
Ten Stories That Can Sell Anything
Advertising is all about telling your marketing story: a story that your audience can relate to, so that it builds confidence and credibility in your ability to deliver your product or service.
A well-crafted business story invites your audience to open a dialogue with you, a line of communication that will ultimately lead to a customer and sale for you, and a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment for your new client.
Effective marketing stories are about universal truths and primal...
How To Make Boring Businesses Exciting
Wouldn't it be nice if everyone got as excited about your company as you are? Unfortunately some businesses just aren't very sexy; in fact, some businesses are downright boring. As a consequence, companies that sell commodity products and routine services tend to rely on presentations that load-up on features, specifications, and statistics that may be relevant to anal-retentive types, but hardly compelling to the vast majority of your audience.
There is no reason why every company can't...
11 Ways To Drive Traffic Away From Your Website
Why Web-Users Are So Impatient
While watching a Toronto Raptor basketball game I saw T.J. Ford, one of the fastest players in the league, rush down the court like a man possessed and proceed to throw the ball behind his back to a trailing Andrea Bargnani. The trouble was the ball sailed over the head of the seven-foot Bargnani into the second row of seats. Ford, himself, ended up with a beer and popcorn facial after landing in the lap of a front row patron. So what does this have to do with...
Brand Positioning Using Web-video
As Web-video presentations increase in popularity as a means of delivering marketing messages over the Internet, there will be the inevitable major successes and unfortunate failures. It is only a matter of time before Web-video becomes the dominating vehicle for businesses that are serious about marketing communication.
The businesses that will be successful will learn how to use the medium beyond its technical implementation, focusing instead on the psychological elements that communicate...
The Role Of Memory In Website Content And Advertising
The primary goal of all advertising, including website content is to be remembered. No matter what other marketing goal you want to achieve, if your audience doesn't remember your presentation, it is a wasted effort and lost opportunity. All the money spent on attracting people to your website goes right down the drain if your content is instantly forgettable. With that in mind it is hard to believe how little thought is put into creating content that people will remember.
In order to create...
What Your S.E.O. Strategist Won't Tell You
Maybe you own your own business, or perhaps you're a critical cog in the corporate machinery responsible for marketing your company, brand, product or service. If that describes you, here's eighteen things you need to know about Web-marketing but were afraid to believe.
1. Time To Be Heard Your mother told you 'children should be seen and not heard,' but you're not a kid anymore. So why are you listening to all those guys telling you not to use audio on your website. If you want to deliver a...
Designing Websites That Appeal To The Senses
Taking Advantage of The Experience Factor
We read the newspaper, we watch television, and we listen to the radio, but we experience the Web; this is what makes 'The Website' one of the most powerful marketing tools available to today's marketing executives. Unfortunately conventional wisdom has stifled the 'experience factor' on most website presentations.
Traditional circulation based advertising biases and pitch-mandated direct mail practices from metric-minded agencies have limited...
How To Manipulate Website Visitors
Everyone Has An Agenda
When we watch our favorite television programs like 'CSI' or 'House', we knowingly and even gladly allow ourselves to be manipulated. When we watch the evening news we are also being manipulated, knowingly or not, by the selection and presentation of stories that have been filtered through a series of network agendas ranging from the benign time constraints of a thirty-minute broadcast to the more suspicious dictates of network and sponsor interests.
Websites are...
How To Create Profits Using Viral Marketing Techniques
The Difference Among Viral, Buzz, and Word-of-Mouth
There are certain words, jargon that stands in for theory, that starts with marketing industry insiders and before you know it becomes the 'in' subject of books, blogs, articles, and MBA dissertations. But as jargon filters down to the less sophisticated, the meaning and ideas behind these words becomes lost. Such is the case with the current state of thinking on Buzz, Viral, and Word-of-Mouth marketing.
These terms are often used...
The Sound Of Business Part 3
HOW TO GIVE GOOD SONIC PERSONALITY©
We live in an age of metrics. Traditional and new media advertising agencies often substitute metrics for understanding. Mathematical models create the appearance of scientific analysis, when in fact they are often manipulated to support a preselected agenda. We all know data can be massaged to conform to almost any conclusion. Besides, most small owner-managed companies can't afford the expense of these agency-driven number crunching solutions. The real...
The Sound Of Business Part 4
STEPS TO CREATING YOUR SONIC PERSONALITY©
1. List all the human attributes inherent in your business personality. An accounting firm may want to project stability, reliability, and a conventional outlook - think the avuncular voice of Walter Cronkite. An advertising agency might want to deliver a hip, cutting edge, in your face creative personality - think the edgy delivery of Chris Rock or Dennis Leary. Now before you get all excited and start shouting, 'how I am I going to afford these...
The Sound Of Business Part 1
BREAKING THE LIQUID CRYSTAL BARRIER
The Web is an emotionally remote hinterland delivered to us through an impenetrable liquid crystal barrier. How then, can you as a business owner, entrepreneur, or marketing executive connect to a target audience that requires emotional reassurance in order to do business?
Willy Loman is Dead
Gone are the days when we sent out phalanxes of sales representatives pounding the pavement, beating the bushes, and generally getting in the face of prospects. Too...
136 Words That Will Reinvigorate Your Website
Defining the Problem
It is not surprising that many CEOs, marketing managers and business owners are frustrated by the ineffectiveness of their websites. Everyone in business understands the power of the Web and we are all tantalized by its potential. But rarely does that potential get fulfilled. So whose fault is it? Well there is certainly enough blame to go around: website designers who don't understand business; IT departments that superimpose technical solutions on marketing problems;...
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