A User Experience Isn’t All Graphical

February 9th, 2010

A few months back I was attending a Triangle AMA meeting in which Brooks Bell was speaking about e-mail marketing optimization efforts.  During the Q&A session, I asked her the following:  “If you only had enough money to hire one person, which would it be – a copywriter, or a designer?”   Before I tell you what she answered, let me tell you about a little test we just ran for a client.

We took over a new account in October, and have had nothing but great success since taking over the account.  Even though we were having success, we still had recommended doing some A/B testing of their landing pages to try to improve results even further.  Specifically, we wanted to give a friendly new look, but we also wanted to test their copy on the page as well.  Without changing too many variables, we settled on performing an A/B/C test.  The A would be the original, the B would be a design change and the C would be a design and copy change.

The change to the imagery resulted in a 7.4% increase in conversion rate.  It alone had paid for itself!  The landing page with design AND copy edits though showed an increase to the conversion rate by 43.4%.  The design alone is much more user friendly, but being allowed to test a copy change in conjunction with design has yielded results that are well worth every penny spent.

As for Brooks’ answer…  She said “definitely a copywriter,” and I would tend to agree…  But then again, I did put her on the spot and say she could only choose one, and obviously, having the resources of both design & copy is a huge benefit!

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Search Marketing: You Must Bid on Your Brand

January 26th, 2010

Over the years, I have heard many “professionals” debate how much Search Engine Real-Estate is appropriate when it comes to your own brand terms.  What percentage of the listings you must “own”, or what keywords you must be on top for.  I have heard that as long as you hold the top natural position, you don’t need the paid positioning.  I’ve heard that you need a good mix of both.  I’ve heard that with universal search you need a balance of everything.  Regardless of what I’ve heard over the years, it is still my professional belief that you need to own EVERY spot on your branded search results as you possibly can.  Why you ask?  To quote John Belushi in Animal House:  “Why Not?!”

1. Getting to the top natural position on your brand is a must.  Prove to the engines you are more relevant than other variations of your name, and you will be rewarded.  People rarely, if ever, look past the first page of search results when performing a brand specific search.
2. Do all of the social media strategies in your power to occupy image searches, video, blog, twitter and more…  Relevance matters in SEO, and social media is a great way to have fresh, relevant, indexable content.
3. Bid on your brand terms in paid programs.  Many will argue that you’re robbing Peter to pay Paul, but the reality is, with Google’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy, chances are one of your competitors will eventually bid on your brand name (or in our case, Target will continue to ask you if you want to buy Two Media’s).  If you are bidding on your own brand (I’m not saying throw your money away – rather set your bids low to start), then you will start to build a historical relevance with the engines making it next to impossible to unseat you without your competitors paying a huge bounty.
4. Bid on your brand terms in paid programs with a purpose!  By that, I mean factor them into your other campaigns that may be running offline.  This is especially relevant for retail clients, but good for everyone to follow…  People may not remember exactly what was being advertised, so support your marketing mix with search, even on your brand terms – otherwise, you will be doing your offline efforts injustice.

Start thinking of your brand results in search engines as your own personal search engine site map.  Your potential clients may be searching on your brand name, but you may not know exactly why or what for.  Fill up as many of those positions on the screen with different navigation options (aka – search results), and you’ll find that your analytics are starting to tell you a story about the importance of not leaving that white space blank on the right hand side.

True story – we once ran a campaign on targeted clients’ brand names, but only the ones that had all white space appear in their search results.  The thinking was, it was white space because the particular brand was paying attention to their brand name and making sure others weren’t there (smart).  The ads said something like “Dear XYZ, congrats on new TV campaign launch. Let us promote it online.”  We watched the analytics and saw that some companies would click on our ads until budgets were depleted to make us go away (hint: this is not effective), some cried foul to Google, but one said “Ok, you got my attention, now get the F*** off my brand and call me so we can do business together.”  The point of the story is, if you don’t use the white space, somebody else will – and it may not be just us asking to partner with you!

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New Year’s Must-Know’s for the CMO

January 6th, 2010

I actually have about 25 of these, but if I ever wanted anyone to read to the end, I thought I should focus on the top 4…  So, in no particular order, I wanted to address four items that I consistently saw overlooked or misunderstood in 2009 that I’d love to see corrected in 2010:

1. Well-Balanced Search Approach – So this isn’t new, but what is new, is more and more companies will start to rely on their analytics package to see that paid search and organic search go hand-in-hand.  When you remove your paid search out of your marketing mix, your organic search leads/sales/etc will undoubtedly fall off as well.  You will need one voice, and one campaign structure with one owner making sure all of your campaigns are being judged on an apples-to-apples basis.  No longer can you have each of your 50 different divisions competing against yourself internally and driving up the cost of your own brand name in keywords!  You must know how your search is performing and how it affects everything else around you.
2. Weight your Marketing Mix – A marketing mix does not mean you give 20% to TV, 20% to radio, 20% to internet, etc.  It means you truly assign value to your goals, and identify which mediums will be able to most effectively reach those goals in the most cost efficient way.  If you have always run TV, and it’s worked for you pretty well in the past – you still need to branch out and push your limits.  You might be able to reach the same audience in a more affordable manner.  That’s not to say that you should cancel your TV all together, but you should definitely align yourself with a nimble agency or marketer who can test small amounts of money in new mediums and guide you to the appropriate budget allocation that makes up your marketing mix.  If the economy in 2009 didn’t teach us anything else, you must know your most cost efficient marketing mix that delivers results.
3. Don’t Hire an Agency to ReDesign Your Website – The greatest websites in the world don’t do you any good if nobody knows how to find it.  Make sure the agency you hire thoroughly studies your analytics or log files and understands your current audience, and then cross references it against your objectives before building out any design.  Many firms forget the latter before going into redesign mode, and what they may be missing is that an improper structure can drive more visits to pages you don’t care as much about – so make sure your analytics match your goals, and then improve upon them.  Just as importantly, make sure the design firm or agency understands how to drive traffic to your site after the build is complete.  Too often we see great ideas built out with no realistic way of executing them – so don’t hire an agency to redesign your website, hire them to infuse life into it with a purpose and a plan.
4. Build a Strategy for Social Media (if you haven’t already) -  Yes, every college kid out there knows Facebook and MySpace, but that doesn’t mean they understand marketing or your clients/customers.  Determine if you even need a presence, and if so, on what locations – but please, don’t put it in the hands of the intern just because he/she has 10,000 followers on twitter.

Happy New Year to everyone, and may 2010 be the economic boom you always dreamed about!  Finally, here’s the New Years in Raleigh Flash Mob if you haven’t seen it yet – check it out:

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Social or Not-So-Social?

December 18th, 2009

So today at Media Two Interactive, it’s been a very busy day – but not in the “normal” kind of busy…  At 2:00 we are shutting down for our holiday party, which admittedly is going to be much more low key than years past, but still a time to celebrate our successes and enjoy the spirit of the holidays with friends and family (and pets).  The pending snow “storm” (in North Carolina that just means we might see more than 3 flakes of snow) will undoubtedly add some more chaos to the day – but what has made this a fantastic day today was our first attempt at anti-Social Media…

The rules for today were very simple…  You may not use email.  You may not tweet.  You may not use IM.  You must get up from your desk and go talk to people.  You must pick up the phone and call people back when they email you.  If you have to email something, you must call that person first and explain what you’re emailing.

The result has been fantastic!  Our office is as noisy as it’s ever been!  People are socializing and having fun, yet getting tons done.  Just as importantly – every time I get up to go talk to someone I learn about cookies stuffed with caramel, donuts, starbursts and everything else that makes the holiday’s great!  As entrenched as we are in our interactive technologies, it’s still fun to see us taking a purely social look around us.  The communication methods of tweeting, emailing and IM’ing are supposed to complement the human interaction, and not replace it.  That being said – I hope I don’t get flagged for blogging today, as I’m proof that it’s next to impossible to turn off all of the new conveniences of Social Media.

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Not Your Parents SEO

December 12th, 2009

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, has frequently been referred to as voodoo magic…  All right, maybe only frequently called that by me – but nonetheless, I find myself preaching SEO relevance more and more in every conversation.  Whether it’s in building a supporting Search Engine Marketing (SEM) campaign, or display advertising campaign, or even social media strategies – my message is always the same: Forget what you were sold 5-10 years ago about SEO, it’s now all about relevance.  (For the record, it’s always been about relevance – that’s just not what you were sold before.)

Many of our clients and colleagues have been asking how we got to the number one listing on Google for the search phrase Interactive Planning & Buying (see results on Google)  .  The reality is, that’s what we do, so it is probably the most important page listing for us.  When you go to our interactive planning & buying page, you’ll notice one thing: Relevance.  What you won’t see is 50,000 links pointing to the page; meta tags flooded (read: spammed) with the same words over and over; body content that tries using the terms Interactive Planning & Buying so many times that you have no idea what the page reads.

The page is about relevance, and so I’ve been imploring our clients to quit worrying about what the old SEO companies used to be selling and focus on what the user experience should be.  Make it a relevant and resourceful read, and you will be rewarded.  If you don’t believe me, try paying one of those firms thousands of dollars a month for your guaranteed search results, and just see where it gets you.

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