Ads that make you think….
May 25, 2007
The Accenture ads with Tiger Woods have Scot Herrick over at the Cube Rules blog thinking about his business. Scot writes:
Here’s the [Accenture ad] I’m reading now: a full page ad in Business Week showing Tiger with a driver and Accenture putting a line across his body that shows this:|——————————|—————-| flexible 70% unbending 30%
Accenture’s ads have gotten them a mention in a blog…. and then another mention in this blog. And so the story goes. You don’t have to have the advertising budget of Accenture to accomplish this type of "viral" marketing…. just a blog with your posts is all you need to get started.
Google Trends: What you need to know
May 23, 2007
Google has just announced it’s latest tool Google Trends.
With Google Trends you can see which keywords are heating up in the search category and begin to create content that your users want to see. Now, Google Trends is a powerful tool, but in the search for Niche Marketing Greatness, you have to do a bit of digging to see if these keywords will deliver the audience you want visiting your site.
For example, the number one keyword today is "singer irene" … which if you’re wanting to reach fans of Singer Irene Gandi, (who is the first Italian singer to shoot her video in the alternate reality hang out Second Life), then it’s a GREAT keyword to target for you.
If however, you’re speaking to the World of Warcraft crowd, then you’ll want to target the "wow patch 2.1.0 download"
Of course, being LISTED in the Google Trend listing is going to create a self feeding frenzy…. more people searching to see what’s out there while others blog to create content. Still, it’s a great tool you can use to see what people on the internet are seeking on any given day.
Niche Marketing in action
May 21, 2007
Marketing Syndrome is also beating the drum of focusing upon a niche market to create success for your small business.
It take more than going to a book store and flipping through some magazines looking for a nich.
No truer words were ever written. Focusing upon a niche market because it’s “profitable” is probably the WORST reason in the world to target an audience.  Why? Because passion will trump profits every time. About the time you’ve begun harvesting the rewards of your “secret” niche market, suddenly you’ll discover the competition has discovered your “secret” niche market as well. Then the competition begins and your highly lucrative secret niche market is now a battleground.
Believe me when I tell you that I’d rather go “up” against a competitor who is focused upon profits rather than one who is driven by passion. The passionate entrepreneur will ride out the storm of price competition…. until the other profit driven competitors are bloody from battle and ready to find a “new” secret niche market which to exploit.
In finding your niche market, be sure it’s one that you’re passionate about serving. In speaking with a client last week, she reflected that she LOVES going to the gym. Through our conversation, it turns out that it’s not her passion for exercise that drives her to the gym, but rather that’s where she finds the people who need her help and guidance.  The gym just happens to be where her favorite type of clients hang out and THAT is why she loves spending time there. If she were just there for the work out, well, that she could do at home.
The point is, if you would decide to enter into the nutritional behavioral coaching field merely because it’s profitable, watch out because my client is more than willing to perform her services for next to nothing because she’s passionate about it! It will become a highly profitable niche for my client when she has more people signing up to be her client than she has hours in the day, but she’s passionate and willing to perform her services at rock bottom pricing and is willing to wait until the end of time for that market to become “highly profitable”.
So instead of being driven by “profit” focus instead on where your passion lies. Chances are, by focusing on your passion, you’ll find yourself well on your way to selecting a highly “profitable” use of your time and energy.
Career search sites discover the value of niche marketing
May 17, 2007
Bad News For Monster And CareerBuilder Is Good News For Niche Boards reports “Hiring managers are moving their attention and budgets out of Monster.com and CareerBuilder and on to niche sites.”
Seems when hiring managers post jobs to the big boards such as Monster and Career Builder, they get deluged with resumes and finding qualified candidates from the deluge is a lot like finding a needle in a haystack.
According to Career Journal, hiring managers “say these so-called niche sites attract better-matching candidates than sites that list positions in a wide range of career fields and ZIP codes.”
It makes sense. Whether you’re advertising for candidates for an open position, or advertising for customers for your business, defining and targeting a niche market gets better results.
Direct Mail Mystery
May 16, 2007
The other day, I wrote about a direct mail piece I got from Gold’s Gym. In the piece, Gold’s Gym skipped the envelope and sent their direct mail piece in the form of an oversized post card. Instead of dominating the piece with an image of the ideal hardbody one might be seeking when one joined a gym, instead the dominant image was that of a cell phone.
John Jantsch in his post “Trick or Trust” offers some advice about getting your envelope opened, which is the name of the game in the direct mail arena. John wisely advises against “trickery” such as disguising your mailing as a notice from the IRS….
Trust is the most important part of the small business marketing hurdle. Don’t prove yourself untrustworthy before you get a word out.
Great advice from a master marketer.
Taking Viral Marketing to a New Level
May 15, 2007
Over at Wired.com there’s a great post about an Adwords Campaign that’s causing quite a stir.
In the article Hundreds Click on Google Ad Promising to Infect Their PCs the story emerges about a security researcher (Didier Stevens) who launched a Google Adwords campaign that read:
Is your PC virus-free? Get it infected here!
For whatever reason, he had over 400 people click on the ad and the fact that over 400 people clicked on an ad that PROMISED to infect their computers.
However, rather than add yet another “voice” to the “some people are too stupid to own computers” choir, (not to say I’m not tempted)… his click through rate was a DISMAL 0.16%.
He writes in his blog:
I’m sure I could get much more traffic with a higher Google Adwords budget and a better designed ad.
Dude! Please!!! Don’t!!! I really don’t want to know how high you could get your clickthrough rate with a strong call to action.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LSgy2c_-CU[/youtube]
Creating Compelling Creative
May 14, 2007
The first rule of creating compelling creative is to grab your target audience’s attention.
Saturday, as I was sifting through my mail, there was an oversized post card with an image of the Motorola Razor cell phone dominating the front of the piece. I glanced, and since I didn’t want or need a phone and quickly tossed the piece into the garbage. Once lodged in the garbage can, the image of the phone was obscured and only the logo was displayed…. it was a piece from Gold’s Gym.
The thing is, I am considering joining a gym but I’m NOT in the market for a new cell phone, especially one that is as "old school" as the Razor they featured. The decision to toss the piece would have to have been measured in nanoseconds. I’ve got to wonder how many other people tossed the piece into the circular file without reading further… people like me who are considering joining a gym but who aren’t in the market for a new cell phone. It has been said that consumers today are much better at filtering.
Years of scanning through spam subject titles has honed our abilities as humans to quickly determine whether a message is right for us or not.
Even more reason to tightly target your audience and create your messages with that audience’s wants and needs in mind.
Ad Waste and Marketing Speak
May 7, 2007
I recently wrote about the experience of re-entering the “Ad Speak” waters after a full 10 days of going cold turkey.
10 days of abstinence from Ad Speak has helped me to “reconnect” with the average small business owner. You know, the one who speaks DIRECTLY with his/her ad rep. The business owner who has the ability to make a decision regarding advertising without getting a PO or approval from the home office. The business owner who knows that once he/she okays the purchase of advertising space, that he/she will be writing a check whether that advertising is deemed “successful” or not.
The second article I consumed after my Ad Speak fast was 5 Tactics for Finding Your Niche. To Jim Meskauskas credit, he does a GREAT job of trying to pull more than a few heads out of the sand with regards to targeting a niche market.
Again, I am reminded of the contortions one must go through on the journey to convey and convince a faceless mob of the value of common sense. Jim writes:
When using available syndicated third-party research to find the sites that might be most appropriate for your client’s advertising, take a look at composition index rather than the reach the site might have against your target.
The index represents the likelihood of the site consisting of your target audience versus that target audience’s presence on the web as a whole. If a site has only a few percentage points of reach but a unique visitor index of 200, that site is twice as likely to consist of your target audience as the overall web.
In layman’s terms, what Jim is trying to illustrate is this:
The Yahoo portal reaches, in terms of numbers MANY MORE visitors than a magazine web site like, say South Florida Parenting Magazine. As a matter of fact, the Yahoo portal reaches a LOT MORE women aged 25-54 with children than the South Florida Parenting Magazine web site reaches. However, when you advertise on the Yahoo portal, you’re PAYING to reach EVERYONE, which is overkill if you only want to reach mothers with children who live in Southern Florida.
See, you’ll pay DEARLY for a position on the Yahoo portal. So while you may reach 10 times the number of mothers with children living in southern Florida than you might reach with the South Florida Parenting Magazine web site, you’ll be paying for a LOT of impressions …. wasted impressions.
Advertising on the South Florida Parenting web site is an example of tightly targeting a niche market. By tightly targeting a niche market, you can eliminate a lost of WASTE from your advertising dollars.
Transmedia Engagement
May 5, 2007
I spent last week traveling, so as a result didn’t have the time to devote to staying current with my favorite “Ad Speak” blogs. So when I saw that IMedia Connection had a post on “The Matrix” Guide to Brand-Building: Neomarketing & Transmedia Engagement” I felt compelled to click. After all, we had passed the time on the trip watching The Matrix trilogy and so the reference to the movie franchise was actually quite timely from my point of view.
Adam Cahill writes:
A switch to transmedia branding would mean that not only would we use multiple media to tell a brand story, but each of the channels would communicate a unique, complementary piece of that story.
If The Matrix took the lead in the world of entertainment, then Geico’s disgruntled Caveman has emerged as a transmedia brand leader. After gaining some traction with the TV spots, Geico launched CavemansCrib, where visitors can explore the Caveman’s bachelor pad.
Whereas a traditional cross-channel approach might have led Geico to edit down the popular TV spots to a more consumable length and run pre-roll video placements (i.e., new channel, same content), CavemansCrib introduces a new channel, as well as a fundamentally different experience, that amplifies and extends consumer engagement with the television spots.
Now I remember why I ran screaming from a career in a traditional advertising agency. I had forgotten all the “contortions” one had to go through to convince layers upon layers of “management” in the client’s company that, in the end, if people connect with the Caveman…. then creating other ways for them to interact with the Caveman is good for the brand.
Obviously, common sense has not seen a renaissance since my depature from the offline “ad game”.
Do we really need to call it “transmedia engagement” to simply state that since audiences are connecting with the much maligned “Cave Man” created by the Geico commercials, then it makes sense to give audiences other ways to experience the “Cave Man” than just via 30 second commericals?
I guess a week of “abstinence” from ad speak has only made me recognize why my clients hire me. What happened to the role common sense plays in marketing and advertising?
Or is the Geico Cave Man another example of the Nissan GI Joe and Barbie advertising debaucle from the 1990’s? Is the caveman generating a lot of hype without a corresponding increase in sales?
I guess THAT is where injecting common sense can get ugly. What is your advertising goal? Is the goal to create a character with whom people can “relate”? Or is the goal to create increased sales, in this case of Geico insurance?
I don’t have access to Geico’s sales figures…. but it’s been my experience that it’s a rare breed that axes a popular campaign merely because it’s doing nothing to boost the bottom line.
