Guruisms for the week of 02-03-09
The extrovert in me
loves online marketing because there are as many things to sell and ways to
sell them as there are the sum total of human experience.
The introvert part of
me loves online marketing because there is no failure. There is only missing
projections and not hitting your numbers. The only way to fail is to quit and
that is not failing, that is quitting.
Why Am I Not Converting?
Well, the
short answer is --- you are thinking about you and not about them. Or even
worse, you’re not thinking at all.
Do you have
ANY idea how much money gets spent on market research? Trying to predict
whether a new product will be a big hit or a big flop, or whether, “you deserve
a break today” will sell more burgers than “I’m loving it”.
Don’t feel
bad. It was more of a rhetorical
question anyway since I don’t actually know the correct answer and apparently
neither does Google
But I can
say with considerable confidence it is a XXXXload!!!
Naturally,
the vast majority of us online can not even come close to being able to afford
what it really costs to conduct, accepted in a scientific sense, marketing
research. I’m not talking about running keyword suggestion tools while we rub
our chins looking at AWstats and tell ourselves we are doing behavioral analysis.
I’m talking about conducting surveys of a cross section or your target market,
(do you know who you’re target market is? Some companies pay millions of
dollars just to find that out). Eye tracking, psychological profiling,
demographic analysis or even neuromarketing.
Anyone happen to have a MRI I
could borrow?
Do we tell
ourselves that stuff doesn’t really matter or do we try to expand our scope of
expertise and keep raising the bar on what we CAN do? No one has to look at
very many websites, big or small, to see that the vast majority of developers
have built sites that pay VERY little heed to anything beyond flash templates
or placing the target keywords in the title tag. And that is only the “GOOD”
sites.
So we might
as well just forget about it and keep pursuing a philosophy of “if one is good
then a million must be better” I suppose? Well ---- one little issue with that
prospect is that million it takes to be better keeps getting increasingly
expensive every day. The only winner in that game is google adwords. Maybe
there is another answer?
Maybe we
can’t afford paying a cross section of Americana to submit to neuro testing to
tell what makes their frontal lobes light up when they see an Izod logo or to
pay college undergrads to stand in front of department stores and interview
walk-in traffic. Should we just give up because it sounds too hard?
Is our
only logical choice to just accept that 2 buyers out of every 1000 uniques, (point zero
2 percent), is about average and 2 out
of 100 is really pretty good, ( a 2 percent conversion rate)? Or is there
something we CAN afford in terms of money and time that would actually give us
more time and more money in our pockets than what we have now by simply using
some simple steps and a dash of common sense to increase conversion
ratios by factors of 10?
Everyone Keeps Telling Me I
Need To BRAND My Site But No One Is Telling Me How To Do It
Yeah I know.
If you are
like me, you struggle with the concept of branding and how it applies to my
little site. I always thought of branding as Nike or McDonalds. I thought it
meant that you had to have enough money that you could shove your logo up the
brains of as many people as possible with all the subtlety of an enema with a 3
inch hose. But it’s not nearly that complicated, expensive or difficult to get
people to sit still for.
Let me tell
you a short story I got from a man I like to consider a friend. Hi name is
Martin Lindstrom. The story I got from him explains branding in a way that makes
it much easier to wrap your mind around exactly what it is and how you apply it
to ANYTHING.
You see, we
all as humans, ascribe a greater value to things we perceive, logically or not,
to be in some way special.
Suppose today is your 35th birthday
and I give you a beautifully wrapped small box with a bow on it as a gift. You smile so
wide I’m afraid you’ll knock off an ear but as you open the box you find inside
a single small gray rock. The kind of dull, gray rock anyone might find lying
on a roadside. “Thanks a lot”, you’re sarcastically thinking.
But what if
I then told you that it’s not just any old rock but a one-of-kind historical
symbol. It is a piece of the Berlin Wall that was smuggled out of the country
only days after the wall’s destruction that re-united East and West
Germany back in 1989. You now own a talisman that represent a global event. The end of the
cold war.
“Wow, thanks
a LOT man”, you say, with genuine enthusiasm now. But as you hold it and admire
it for a second I say, “I was kidding you man”. That rock didn’t come from the
Berlin wall. It’s a LOT more exceptional than that. It is a one in million at
least!
I say, "I have a
really good friend that is a scientist for NASA and a few days ago he gave me
that. It’s a rock from the moon when the Apollo 11 mission with Neil Armstrong
made that historical walk on the moon. You remember? Well, they brought back a
bunch of sample data and once they were examined they were stored but they
never allowed the public to have them or even view them. It just so happened it
was your birthday and I thought of you".
Now you are
literally at a loss for words to verbalize your appreciation. But the mact of
the fatter is, I found a rock by the roadside, threw it in a box and wrapped it
pretty. It's just a rock.
I’m not
advocating lying to anyone. That was not the point of the story. The point of
the story is that when we brand things with something else seen as a positive thing, we see them in
our minds as more special or valuable than they actually may be.
Branding
simply means identifying one thing with another. You get people to do that by
telling a story. It doesn’t HAVE to be spending hundreds of millions of dollars
showing cute kids jumping in Grandpa’s lap to share a happy meal thereby
getting you to associate a greasy cheeseburger,(with some brown substance that
may or may not be meat), with the warmth, caring and love that a Grandpa can
give. So, if you eat this particular low-priced fast food of the presumably
meat persuasion, you can feel like Grandpa loves you. Nice ending to a good story huh?
You can
brand anything. I just branded this article above, (and myself), by implying that the author
of the book I mentioned was a friend of mine. I did it intentionally for
illustration purposes hoping to show a good example of not needing a lot of
money to create a brand. It just takes a little planning and forethought.
Sometimes even a three thought may do.
I did not say
Martin Lindstrom was a friend of mine. I
said a man I LIKE to consider a friend. I’m sure he doesn’t know me from a roll
of toilet paper, but I enjoyed the book so much that when I think of this guy
and what he did, I actually do LIKE to consider him a friend. BUT whatever the purpose, it had an impact on your perception
even if it was sub-conscious. It altered the way you perceived the content and
the author. For better or worse, that is branding. Associating my name with his
is an example of branding.
So how do
you associate your personality, your website, product or service with something
else. Things like, reliability, quality, family values, religion, superstition
or anything else that makes people buy the things they buy? Keep in mind,
negative branding can be just as powerful as positive. What do you think they
are doing when the give the Pepsi challenge trying to get people to select
Pepsi over Coke? Think they are trying to make Coke look good?
First of
all, if you have not taken the time to identify your target market, then keep
doing what you’ve been doing and shoot for that million hits to get that
.0002% conversion ratio because doing anything will probably not result in much of
an increase until you have a pretty good idea of who you are wanting to do it
to. Of course you can always get lucky AND don’t forget the G’s quote at the
top of this post. You don’t really HAVE to do anything except not quit to keep from complete failure.
But if you
do have even a vague concept of who is most likely to be your customer then you
can start telling a story using words, graphics, videos, sounds, layout, colors
etc. that will most likely get that
target to start associating you with something else that stimulates an impulse
to be a part of your story.
If you look
honestly at your index page, does it tell a story or does it just repeat the
same boring crap anyone can find on 100 other sites about the same topic. See,
even if you don’t tell a story at all, you are telling a story that brands you
as the same as the other crap! When they think of you, (probably for not more
than a few seconds while they look for the back button on your site), they are
thinking of all the other crap. You’re building brand whether you actually want
that brand or not.
My next
installment is going to be about how you can use sound and or graphics to
stimulate some somatic response in your visitors and that alone may shoot your
conversion rate through the roof!
If you are not
familiar with the term subliminal messages, maybe now would be a good time to
start doing a search or two on the subject as we will be discussing that very
shortly.
Peach Y'all
kem cho
The
“anti-seo”,SEO Guru
Additional
References
Buy-ology - Truth and Lies About Why We Buy by
Martin Lindstrom
READ IT!
All
Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin
READ IT!
Why We Buy - The Science of Shopping by Paco Underhill
It
MUST be Wednesday. We’re havin fish sticks for supper ain’t we?