Designs for Success
A weblog about advertising, marketing and web design
Archive for the ‘Posts & Occasional Rants’ Category
A while back I wrote how newspapers just don’t get it when it comes to their internet product and their declining print readership. Now, I am not part of the something for nothing crowd. I believe businesses deserve to make a profit and people make as good a living as they can for the product and services they provide. If I pay for a newspaper from the stand, I must thumb page by page to get to the stories that interest me. Interspersed among those stories are the advertisements that make that paper possible. I get it! Not only do I understand that someone has to pay for the newspaper to provide me that information, but as an advertiser, I want to be one of those people (when appropriate for my clients) who places an ad in the newspaper.
The online edition of the paper however, is almost totally divorced from the print edition and has it’s own advertisements, which for most newspaper companies, does not even come close to paying for the bandwidth, let alone the content. Newspapers online make my task as a reader even easier than the print edition by allowing me to search for the news I want and not have to bother with everything else along the way.
Well, the publishing geniuses that control the newspaper empires have salivated for years over the success of the Wall Street Journal Online Edition and the 
paywall that keeps most stories out of the hands (or screens) of those who are not subscribers. It has been reported that major publishers from one coast to the other want to do the same thing. The New York Times wants to debut its paywall sometime next year. It will only end in disaster for them. I just read how the Times of London has lost 1.2 million viewers in the three months since they put the online paper behind a paywall. That’s 29 million pageviews lost. Those numbers will continue to decline because people can get their news almost anywhere….for free.
Why does the Wall Street Journal succeed where everyone else fails? The WSJ is niche publication focused almost entirely on the business community, where dozens of blogs, newspapers, radio stations and TV stations can report about the traffic on the interstate.
The solution is a very simple one. Newspapers and for that matter magazines (are you listening new owners of Newsweek?) should publish electronic editions of their actual publications for dissemination online at no charge. Who will pay for this? The advertisers whose ads are already in their print editions will pay the added bonus for the added eyeballs of all the online viewers who have to see their ads as placed in the publication. Consumers will get to see the newspaper or magazine in its entirety as well as all the ads they would see if they actually subscribed or picked up the publication at a news outlet.
The online edition as we know it now can then be put behind a paywall, with a large number of those ads eliminated and those who are willing to customize their stories and their searches can and will pay for that privilege.
I’ve recently worked with several of my clients who have stubbornly insist on using their AOL email address for business purposes. They see very little to be gained from using a professional email address that has been set up for each of their businesses. They are so comfortable with AOL that they have trouble seeing how this lack of professionalism is most likely hurting their business. It is!
Now, let me clarify something. I have nothing against AOL. I have a couple of AOL email addresses and have for well over 20 years. What I am writing about here is the same principle for those who use Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Hotmail, Yahoo’s Hotmail, or the email given free by your cable internet provider or phone company DSL provider.
Having an AOL email address back in the 90′s might have said you were tech savvy, then… The same thing could have been said to those who first carried the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X (brick phone). Using your AOL address for your business today would elicit pretty much the same response as if you were to use that Motorola brick phone for your mobile calls today. All it shows is you are 15 years behind the times.
What would you think of a company you are thinking of doing business with if the CEO proudly handed you a business card printed on perforated card stock from his ink jet printer? I doubt many of us would rank that company very high on the professionalism scale. Yet, using an AOL email address (or other internet provider address) is the same thing. For one, all you are advertising with that sort of address is your internet service provider. Why not advertise your business?
In point of fact, what sort of impression are you sending clients and potential clients with a freebie email address? Have you been in business long? How much experience do you have? Will you be around for me to work with in the future? Are you cheap? You wouldn’t think of using the closest payphone as your business number (that is if you could find a payphone today)…why give the same impression with a freebie public email account? By not using a professional email address for your business, you are losing customers…customers you will never see because you haven’t established credibility.
The cost of having a professional email (with your business name integrated into the address) is about $30 a year. For most businesses who have a web site, email is included in the price of hosting your site. If you don’t have a website, you should and dba Communications can help you with both your website and your email. Contact us today.
Listening to the recent uproar over Facebook privacy settings, and one would think the executives at Facebook were breaking into each and every house and rummaging through your dresser drawers to determine if you wore boxers or briefs, bikinis or thongs. Facebook, like every other business is just that, a business. They are in business to make money. It costs Facebook nearly $1 million a day to turn on the lights, pay the rent, pay the salaries of over 1,000 employees, and keep over 30,000 servers up and running around the world. Where does that money come from? From advertising of course.
Advertisers want to target their audience. Why would a bridal ring company want to target seniors instead of college age singles? Or in reverse, what age group would a hearing aid company prefer to market to. You get the picture…the more targeted the audience, the better the message is received. To do that, every company needs to know who they are talking to. Facebook provides that information by supplying the “generic” information you proved to Facebook. If you and all your friends are 18, you are much more likely to see ads aimed at 18 year olds. If you and all your friends talk about skiing, you are likely at some point to see ads about ski resorts. That only makes sense, and as Facebook is at the end of the day a business, it makes good business sense as well.
Has Facebook gone a little overboard at times? Sure… however they have always listened to their customers (as any good business does) and has created much greater controls about what anyone can see about you. Before you go overboard in pointing fingers at Facebook however, look at your own activities on Facebook. If you post your every meal, don’t be surprised to see ads for food and cooking. If you readily add apps and games, you give permission to these companies to follow your profile and sell your information to advertisers.
In the end, you are ultimately responsible for your privacy. Just like hanging your laundry outside to dry, don’t post anything you wouldn’t want everyone to know.
We recently ran across an article on virtue.com that valued Facebook fans at $3.60 each. What does that mean to the small business person? A lot! All of us have limited marketing budgets. We try to do what we can with every dollar we can. There are 400 million people on Facebook and that number is growing daily. In fact, while teens and Y generation were the first to become members, the fasting growing segment of Facebook are those over 35.
According the Virtue (who manages over 45 million fans for their clients), the impressions on a single wall post to fan ratio were approximately 1:1. Marketers value advertising by impressions. These impressions are practically free, similar to earned media. Value those impressions with a conservative $5 CPM (cost per thousand).
Using this formula, let’s say we work hard and develop a fan base of 10,000.
10,000 impressions x 1 post x 30 days = 300,000 impressions
300,000 impressions divided by 1000 x $5 CPM = $1,500
The article on Virtue continued pointing out that Facebook wall posts have further social engagement value with things like clicks, comments, likes, shares, etc. Wall Apps such as a coupon or a poll offer even greater levels of engagement. Brands engaging their Fans stand to earn much more value. dba Communications works to help smaller independent companies maximize their marketing dollars. Strategies such as this are just one ingredient in helping businesses reach their sales goals.
So then I took my turn
Oh all the things I’ve done
And it was all yellow
I drew a line
I drew a line for you
Oh what a thing to do
And it was all yellow
Some of the lyrics to the wonderful Coldplay song, Yellow. Yellow’s turn in advertising however is changing dramatically….the yellow pages that is. The time when people looked forward to getting the new directory has long since passed. While still a $15 billion business, yellow page books have fast become nothing more than doorstops. I’ve seen many a high-rise building where yellow pages are dropped off in bundles and weeks later have only grown a dusty covering as people left to take them, choose not to. Why? 
Website Magazine recently reported how vital it is for retailers to have an online presence. The survey found that a whopping 94% of consumers perform some form of research before shopping online, demonstrating the importance of having a presence you can be proud of, to garner those shopping dollars.
According to the latest Compete Online Shopper Intelligence Study , three out of five consumers use search engines as their go-to online shopping resource. 61% of respondents chose search engines as the tool they rely on most when shopping. Number 2 were coupon sites with 35% followed by email blasts at 29%. Let dba Communications help you get noticed in this competitive arena. Contact us today.
This past Friday I had scheduled a newspaper ad with a local daily for one of my clients. The paper unfortunately scheduled the ad for a different day. Ok… honest mistake, however, this retailer had a large Trunk Show scheduled with a representative from France. The newspaper finally came up with an email blast to 135,000 to make up for the ad missing from the 300,000 papers published daily. I am happy to report that my client’s website received 493 unique visitors from that afternoon email blast, which is about 5 times their average daily web visits. Once again, this proves the strength of online, even though the paper is still stuck in selling………….paper. I wish they would see that they are more than a publisher of print. They can be so much more, if they would only awaken to the fact they are a media organization, not just a printer…..
I’ve been very impressed with two recent campaigns to bring visitors to client’s websites.
One was a Groupon promotion where-in the client offered $75 worth of product for $25. Of course the first question you ask yourself, is the profit margin of this client enough to make money doing so? The immediate answer is a resounding NO. By itself, that promotion cost money. However, looking long term, the client was able to generate over 700 website page views in a single day (compared to an average 120) and because their average sale is over $350, there are now close to 200 people with a $75 credit burning a hole in their pocket ready to spend over the next several months. So, looking long term, this was a very successful promotion and this particular client will be repeating something similar this Spring.
The second promotion was an animated banner on the Denver Post website. Once again, the response in website page views was a huge bump for the day. While our success with standard size ad banners has been hit and miss, this sizable animated sliding billboard ad on the front page of the newspaper’s website is another winner in a constantly changing and hard to hit advertising media market.
There is a new trend I’ve noticed the last few months of companies presenting themselves to unsuspecting retailers with tall tales that by signing on to their local service these retailers will somehow appear at the top of the list in Google searches. One company explained to me just a few months ago that through their help an Alzheimer’s research firm was now appearing in the top 5 on a Google search…IF, you were to type a series of qualifiers no regular consumer or even investor would ever type. It took a tremendous amount of self control to keep from laughing at the gentleman on the phone so proudly crowing about this accomplishment.
Appearing at the top of so specific a Google search that one would be lucky if a handful of people in a year put that combination of terms together isn’t the goal of any self respecting company. Worse is the waste of hundreds of dollars to show up in such a search. The particular company who sold this bill of goods to the neurological center is doing the same thing to the center as the center would be to its patients if it were selling them a sugar pill to cure Alzheimer’s.
The goal of SEO is to be seen in the categories that matter to your customers, in the searches your customers and potential customers do. Building a solid site, having the right keywords, using ALT tags, having a blog, participating in social networking, keeping your site updated to the newest protocols, and submitting to the search engines are all much better than spending money with some fly-by-night outfit whose promises are too good to be true and upon further inspection are worthless anyway. What good is a $5 television commercial no one will ever see?
If newspapers wish to be profitable, they need to stop thinking PAPER. Years ago in school, I read a Harvard Business Review article from Theodore Levitt, first published in 1960 (and updated since), that challenged businesses to understand the business they were actually engaged in. The article noted how railroads ignored the airplane industry as they saw themselves in the railroad business instead of the transportation business and how Hollywood studios ignored for decades the power of and profits from television.
You see that same stubborn myopia today with the Internet. While the world has embraced the Internet, the music industry, the motion picture industry, and the newspaper industry have either ignored or fought against new technologies every step of the way. When video tapes (betamax and VHS) first appeared for public use, the movie industry went to court to prevent people from owning or recording movies. They feared people would stop going to theatres. Today, the successor to the video tape, the DVD, now accounts for 30% greater sales than box office receipts. What will broadband sales and rentals be when the movie industry finally not only accepts the technology, but embraces it?
