Creative Development » sales

Take Marketing through Social Networking to the Next Level

Robert Steers — Sun, 12 Jun 2011 05:30:22 +0000

I have seen a number of marketing strategies as of lately in my own personal web space. I found it amazing what one can do in such a simplistic manner. Within the last thirty days I have seen three very interesting new marketing strategies take place. I would like to share these with you and hopefully, you can take your business in one of these directions.

Angry Birds/Smart Phone: First of all, I had only heard about this game from other people in my office and haven’t ever tried it myself. I found a You Tube video that went viral within hours of being uploaded. Angry Birds created a joint marketing strategy with the Smart Phone and T-Mobile. Within three days this video has received 2.7 MILLION views! Along with 20,175 likes, 450 dislikes and 2,960 comments. I read some of the comments and many people are looking forward to either buying the phone or playing Angry Birds. Talk about going viral! Here is a prime example why you want to get involved with launching videos. Here is the link if you want to check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzIBZQkj6SY.

Lady Gaga: The Lady Gaga is a very intricate woman and has a reputation for the shock factor which by all means is a great marketing strategy all in its own right. However, the Lady took the promotion of her new single to a level no one expected. She worked out a deal with the infamous game Farmville to promote her latest single. Yes, the Farmville neighbors all went to visit the Lady at Gagaville. It was quite the amusement and Farmville took on new animals, seeds and trees to play along. Not only did Lady Gaga use a social networking platform for her business but she went deep inside the platform and invaded an actual game. In fact, she invaded 43.5 million farms! I’ll be honest with you; I personally, wouldn’t have listened to her new song if it wasn’t for Farmville. And I like it! Great move for the Lady.

Capital One: Capital One has always been a huge television promoter with fantastic commercials but you haven’t seen much of them on the social networking scheme. Well, you have now. After Lady Gaga was off the farm Farmville added a new promotion with Capital One. If you signed up for Capital One’s credit card then you would receive a Visigoth Statue. That statue then gives the Farmville addict 7 days of double mastery. I know, what the heck am I talking about? Or you might know since Farmville has 43.5 million users. In fact, it s projected that Americans will spend over $2 BILLION just on Farmville in 2011.

Partnering up with popular games as part of your marketing strategy isn’t a bad idea after you do all the figuring. Americans are expected to spend over $2 billion on Farmville alone. Facebook currently has 500 million active users around the world. Only 20% of those are Americans so if Americans are spending over $2 billion then how much money is it total? I sure hope you get the picture.

A Guide to Marketing Videos

Robert Steers — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 01:57:35 +0000

Did you know that You Tube gets over 3 BILLION views every day? Wow! Imagine what you can do with a marketplace like that? Don’t be shy you need to get in there and take a piece of that pie! Use the masses of social networking to market your business. Sure you are going to post a video on You Tube but it isn’t going to just stay on You Tube – with the right marketing strategy it is going to go viral!

Let’s get Started: Obviously, the first thing you would do is create your video. Here are some tips to getting just enough coverage to be successful.

Length of Video – The maximum length of a video should be 10 minutes. The most successful lengths are 3-5 minutes.
Video File Size – It should be less than 21.9 MB
Video Bit Rates – The most successful bit rates are 300-400 Kbps

Video Content: The content of the video must meet your goal of brand recognition. The idea in marketing videos isn’t to create an ad campaign but rather create brand recognition.

Subliminal Messaging: You don’t want an ad campaign (unless it was featured during the Super Bowl) but you do want is more of a subliminal message. Example, Coca-Cola and American Idol are a duo. You never see an American Idol episode without the Coca-Cola container in front of the judges. The judges are not saying “Drink Coke”. The product is sitting there ready for you to recognize their brand and without saying it – make you get up and get a Coke.
Product Placement: Product placement is related to subliminal messaging and is in fact, very much the same. Probably the most famous product placement and even one of the originals was in the 1982 film “E.T. the Extra Terrestrial”. In order to feature a product in a movie the movie must get certain “rights” from the product. The joint venture between “ET” and “Reese’s Pieces” paid off. The sales for the little known candy at the time tripled!
Select Popular Categories: The most popular categories on You Tube are entertainment, sports, music, comedy, and news/politics. Make sure you video falls into one of those categories to ensure that it goes viral.
Riveting: Yes, the content needs to be something that is truly amazing, shocking, heart-felt, and the list goes on. At the end of the day the video needs to be viewed not only once but again and again by the same person. You want that person to share the video with all of their friends! Make it worth the 3-5 minutes!

When to Post your Video: Yes, it is all down to a science! You should know when the best times to post your video are. The most common times that people browse You Tube are on the weekdays between 2pm and 6pm. The two most common days are Wednesday and Thursdays. If the peak hours begin at 2pm then you need to post your video between 12pm and 1pm since it takes about an hour for your video to be posted.

Going Viral: The whole point of posting a video is to ensure that it goes viral. Follow these tips and you are sure to make it on the “most viewed” charts.

Pay per Post: You can market your video to people that write blogs about your latest video and pay them to post your video on their blog that day.
Forums: You feature your video on various forums and start commenting on them. Yes, people do it all the time. They comment back and forth with themselves between different accounts to make it appear as though they are other people.
MySpace: MySpace has the capability of adding videos to your web design. You can embed your video on your profile and see if your friends will also embed the video. Then their friends and so forth.
Facebook: Facebook has a number of ways to share a video. First you can put it on your profile, suggest it to your friends, create an app, tag the video with your friends’ names, like it and encourage others to do so and you can even create an event and invite everyone to watch the video.
Email List: You can email the video to all your friends, families, and business associates. If you already have an emailing messaging company you can create an email campaign with the video.
Circle of Friend: Yes, get your friends involved. You need that base to start the spreading the word and your friends should be able to help you in all of the suggestions above.
Titles are Important: Make sure your title will do what you want it to do. Use keywords that explain your video but make sure it is riveting and people want to open it to see what you are talking about.
Thumbnails: Pictures, yes people need pictures. If it doesn’t have a thumbnail attached to it, it is going to get overlooked. People look first at the picture and then the title. No picture – no one reads the title – no one watches your video.
Comments on You Tube: You got it, just what you did for the forums. You are going to do it straight on You Tube. Create a controversy. People love a heated debate!
Multiple Videos: If people liked the first video they are probably going to be looking for more. Create a series to get more hits in total for your concept.
Relevant Tags/Keywords: When I type in a search bar to find ice cream. I expect to find ice cream. The only way I can find the kind I want is by tags or keywords. Make sure that your video is tagged with the correct tag and as many tags as permitted (yet, relevant).

Using Seduction in B2B Marketing

Robert Steers — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 00:28:27 +0000

Good marketing is a lot luck the art of seduction. Convincing a new business to purchase your product or service is a lot like trying to win over a potential suitor. All the pieces of the puzzle are the same. There are two parties, one wants to convince the other of their value. There is a goal in mind and there are powerful emotions. To put it another way, seduction follows the same process as marketing;

Make the prospect feel the need to buy the product or service
Make the offer attractive
Use emotions to engage the prospect
Make the prospect comfortable with buying the product or service, reduce fears
Escalate the prospect towards a completed transaction.

In the world of “professonal” seduction, there are set patterns and plays that have been accepted as the best ways to attract a member of the opposite sex. One of the leaders in this world is Neil Strauss, who wrote the bestseller “The Game”. Using the main ideas behind his book, you can see how a business can use the rules of attraction to pursuade a new customer to buy from them.

Pre-Game

Like any good project, good preparation prevents poor performance. Understanding what you are trying to sell, and how you are going to sell it goes a long way to building a marketing program that delivers results. In this stage of the marketing process, an organisation would look at past sales, the competition, the current market, their budget and their current product or service to build an offer that will be attractive to potential clients. In the book “The Game, ” the author went through a make-over process, shaving his head, having his ears pinned back, and joining a gym. Businesses could also follow this lead, but rebranding, or reinvigourating their marketing programs.

Select a Target

Targeting is the most important step in the marketing process. Finding and understanding your customer will allow you to build a thorough picture of their mindset and desires. In seduction terms this would mean a quick scan of the bar or venue to find the girl or boy you are going to target. In marketing terms this means going through your customer list, looking at lists of potential new customers and narrowing down the field. Targets can be selected by demographic, by industry, by buying location, by budget etc. The main aim is to narrow the field to an acceptable number of targets that all have something in common. You also want to be able to talk to the target customer as if it is a face to face meeting.

Approach and Open

The seduction community says you have 3 seconds to approach and start a conversation with a girl. This should be no surprise, because first impressions are the most important. In order to attract their attention, PUAs (Pick Up Artists) use “peacocking”, a method of wearing outrageous or loud clothing to attract attention. In marketing, you have 3 seconds to grab and maintain the attention of the customer. A businesses “peacocking” might be using outstanding design and original marketing. This also means using a headline that will interest your customer. The best headlines are short, punchy, use simple language and convey the most important piece of value of the product or service.

Demonstrate Value

The best description of what constitutes good value, is adapted from this website

1. There is a clear distinction between, and balance of, customer benefits and the offer.
2. Value involves the psychological and physiological effects of both the benefits and the offer.
3. Good value harnesses the difference between surface attraction and deeper neurology based attraction.
4. Value includes practical applications and call to action to increase the overall odds of converting.

In order to demonstrate clear value to your prospect, you need to show what they will get, how it will improve their lives and how they will feel by purchasing from you. Demonstrating value is also showing that other people have bought from you before, that you have delivered on your promise, and you are not going to let the customer down. This might come in the form of a testimonial, a review from a magazine, or just some facts about how much of a difference your product makes to people.

Disarm the Obstacles

There are many reasons for a customer to not buy from you. In a B2B transaction this might be no previous business relationship, that you are new to the market or that they are “not looking for” your product right now. Having pre-prepared lines to counter these situations are important in telemarketing and face to face selling. In the PUA world, this would be equivilant to being “not really looking for a boyfriend“. To translate this into a business context might be the prospect being “happy with their current provider“. To counter this situation you don’t want to bash their current provider, you don’t want to claim to be better either. You want to put the seed of doubt in their mind, and show you have value in your product. Something like “Does your current provider give you XYZ? Because if when we work with our other clients, not only do we offer ABC but also XYZ“, where you fill in the blanks with your core values.

Isolate the Target

Meeting face to face is an important part of the buying process. We more easily buy from people than we do an automated machine or a website. In the seduction community, moving the target into a position where you are one on one reduces the opportunities for the bond to be broken. In a sales environment, this would mean trying to get a one on one with the prospect, without the distraction of being in the office and around other people. This also means isolating

Create an Emotional Connection

Again, here is paraphrasing from a pick up routine, applied to a B2B transaction.

Find out if the prospect has any business problem or desire in business they feel “passionate” about. Most likely, these may be their sales team, not spending enough time with their customers, cash flow, gaining new customers, anything they would do even if they did it for free.

Ask them “what’s important to you in doing (activity)?” “What do you feel about(activity/business)?” At this point, you are looking to recreate the feeling of doing that activity, and moving them into the states they feel while doing the activity.

Then, feedback these nominalized “feelings” and link these to your product. “What would it be like if we could get you feeling different? ” “How would you feel if we could remove that frustration?”

Emotional connections in business are rare, and hard to achieve. However the goal of all marketing is to get the prospect to recreate the feeling they would have when using your product or service. If they can see themselves using your product, and they can feel themselves in that position, you are most of the way to completing the sale.

Blast Last-Minute Resistance

Most rational people know when they are being sold to. Sometimes it is obvious when someone is trying to sell us something, eg telemarketing, and other times it is less obvious, word of mouth etc. Instinctively people will throw up conscious and subconscious reasons to NOT buy from you. In the case of the really desirable TV or car, the nagging feeling that you can’t afford the purchase is the subconscious urge to not buy that product. It is the job of the marketing professional to smooth the way through those rough waters. In the seduction community, disarming the obstacles might be dealing with a girl who wants to leave with her friends, or getting the guy to move to a quieter location. In the marketing process this would be focussing on the value of the product to the customer, offering payment plans and guarantees to reduce anxiety or giving them a money back guarantee.

In the pick up world, targets almost always go for the person who isn’t completely available to her. In the business world, we always want to deal with partners who are busy with other clients too, because it shows they are valuable. We all want something we can’t have. We want what there is a limited supply of, because by the sheer fact there’s limited supply of it means it must be good. Many pick-up artists know this so here are a few things they do that can be applied to marketing;

* Always be the first one to end the conversation, if on the phone

* Set a time constraint on any offer, or for the conversation

* Say the product will only be available after a certain date

As you can see there are many ways good marketing is like seduction. Going through the websites on seduction unearths a great range of methods for breaking down a prospect and turning them into a client.

Creative Development is a marketing and web design agency based in Sydney.

Pay for content – A Branding Perspective

Robert Steers — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 22:36:03 +0000

News this week that The Times is going to start charging for content should come as no surprise. News Corp, the parent company of The Times, The Wall Street Journal etc, has talked about forcing people to pay for content for a long time. With falling advertising revenues, falling circulation numbers and a general shift in attitudes, it seems that the news dinosaurs are resorting back to methods they tried in the early days of the net.

Even discussing paying for content seems to wind people up on both sides of the divide.

The truth is, from most corners of the web is, people will pay for content, as long as it is unique and irreplaceable.

The star of the pay for content model is The Economist which has a large portion of its content free to read, with the more in depth articles and technical journals on a subscriber model. The key things that make The Economist content bankable is because it is unique, in depth, and a leader in its field.

The same can be said of any pay-TV model. People will pay to watch sports, or have in-depth news coverage if the content is unique and of top quality.

What is causing Newspapers and other old media to struggle is they are trying to be all things to all people. They are still running on the Cost-Per-Mille advertising model that means you have to reach as many people as possible. Pay for content media like Gaming Industry Weekly know they are reaching a select audience, but that is the idea. They even still sell advertising, but that too is ok because the advertisers want to reach a select audience too.

Where newspapers started to go wrong, was they refused to shift their advertising model when people started to spend more online. Why would an advertiser want to spend thousands of dollars reaching thousands of people that are not interested in his product? With the pay per click model Google promoted, advertisers can now spend tens of dollars reaching the tens of people that will buy their product.

Again this, then comes back to branding, and the strength of a brand. You want your brand to become the most authoritative and trusted brand in your field, so that both suppliers and customers are willing to buy from you. You need to make your brand unique and targetted.

Creative Development has just launched an Integrated Marketing Communications program. For more information email us at info@creativedevelopment.com.au.

Other Interesting Blogs on Pay For Content;

Shirky: What “people must pay for content” really means – Boing Boing
This observation about complexity is perfectly nice but it doesn’t say anything about whether people will pay for content. If you believe the argument– and that’s only if you believe it- you’ll believe that people won’t want complex …
Digital Media Consumption Increases – But Few Are Willing to Pay …
Even though more newspapers are putting their content behind pay walls, the number of consumers who paid nothing for accessing online news actually increased over the last few months. Sponsor People Spend More Time with Digital Media.
Why You Need To Utilize An Article Writing Service
This choice makes sure that you will not be obligated to pay for content that you just cannot make use of. Nevertheless, you are not permitted to call for corrections brought about by unclear directions; for example, if you need a …
Digital Media Consumption Increases – But Few Are Willing to Pay …
Even though more newspapers are putting their content behind pay walls, the number of consumers who paid nothing for accessing online news actually increased over the last few months. Sponsor …
http://www.search-internetmarketing.com/ – References
Content is Dead: Long Live the Mighty Page Rank | Search Engine …
Try to come up with unique and incredible content or news that will make people want to link to your site (if they know how), and then pay per click your way into the hearts of these earnest and admiring visitors. …
http://www.mediaverso.com/ – More results from MediaVerso
Rolling Stone website now has a pay wall
The big news is that the service now features a pay wall restricting access to most of the content to web users. Users wanting to access the content on the service would be required to pay a a $3.95 monthly fee. …
http://techwhack.com/
Will American Airlines make travel agents, corporations pay for …
The Business Travel Coalition is circulating a letter attacking a rumored American Airlines plan to charge travel agencies, GDSs and corporations for content.
http://www.tnooz.com/ – More results from Tnooz
Cash for Blogging MRR Ebooks – Internet Marketing MRR Ebooks
There are sites that will pay you upfront, pay you a percentage of the revenue that your content makes, and sites that will hire you to write or blog for them. If you’re in a financial bind, or need emergency cash, writing for these …
http://www.theplrstore.com/
elearnspace › Audiences don’t pay for content
A vast amount of content is free, thanks, in particular, to radio and TV. Even when I pay for content (such as I do on iTunes for downloading a song or a TV program), I’m paying not for the content itself but for the convenience of …

The lifetime value of a customer

Robert Steers — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 04:38:58 +0000

One of the number one things marketing companies should do is calculate the (average) lifetime value of a customer. This can be done in many ways, but basically you are looking at taking total revenue per year x number of years a customer would normally work with you.

There are some other ways of doing it but that is basically it.