Interested?

Tiffany billboard

The reason why you should buy that piece of carbon is beautifully illustrated in this Tiffany poster. It is positioned across the Goldman Sachs offices in New York. Every day when a rich banker exits his office at dusk he is reminded that even a busy man like him can get a woman to look at him like that.

Of course I don’t sell you a piece of carbon. I don’t even sell you a beautifully cut diamond. I sell you the promise that the poster holds, a beautiful story. One where you are happy, special and where you are loved.

Now you know why you should buy a Tiffany diamond.

But why should anyone buy your product? And why should they not buy it from your competitor?

Chances are you already are special and remarkable in what you do , but do you communicate this to your customers at the moment they are making their purchase decision? Or perhaps there is something that the market is hot for and could give you a flood of customers, but you aren’t aware of?

Ask yourself a couple of simple questions

1. What do you do? More importantly, what do you do exceptionally well? When you look at your competitors, what do you excel in. What do they excel in? Make a list.
2. Who are your customers? What do they want, what do they need? We’ve blogged before on how you can find your target audience. Match their wants and needs to the things you could provide exceptionally well. That will be your niche. You will clearly message the things you do better than anybody else, and you will message it to the people who need that difference the most.
3. Change the way you do business. Change everything about your business to dominate your niche. Build a profile of your customer that clearly tells you where they hang out, what they read, what they notice. Use this knowledge to advertise where your audience will see your advert, and message your unique benefit clearly, so that they understand they need to check out your business.

If you engage in this type of thinking, you can change the rules of the game. Even a small company can take a big market share from a big company, because you don’t fight them on their turf, but on a turf they haven’t even considered yet.

Marketers who want to sound smart call this ‘developing a unique selling proposition’. That is a fancy term for finding out what people want (that others perhaps overlooked) and how you can deliver on one of their needs in a way that is uniquely yours. You do this every day in many ways: for your spouse, your friends and now for a wider community of clients…

"I create nothing. I own." - Gekko

Gordon Gekko coined the phrase “Greed is good”. It seemed lost on the wider business community that Gekko was the villain of the piece, a caricature meant to personify everything that is wrong with business. Instead, the mantra was adopted by the Wall Street Journal in its opinion pages and spread like a virus through the business community.

The irony is that it is a bit like Darth Vader’s “Give yourself to the Dark Side” becoming a mantra in our society. Both Vader and Gekko where the antagonists of the story, but somehow, Gekko became the ‘good antagonist’, an anti-hero.

Despite several recessions caused by short term greed that lead to a failure to calculate long-term, often systemic risk, the mantra “Greed is Good” remained alive and well, empowering lawyers who like to argue “Caveat emptor” in court to defend their clients’ dubious business dealings.

Is it wrong for a business to sell you goods they don’t believe in? Goldman Sachs believe it isn’t. And since they sell risk, they might not be entirely wrong.

Still, people are outraged. And with good reason. Instinctively, we know that if you don’t create a win-win situation, you rob society of a chance to grow.

Creating win-win relationships creates powerful ripples through society: you get recommended more, you get more repeat sales, when somebody gives you money for your product and service, they make more money back then they invested. That profit leads to more spending and the economy grows.

Creating win-win relationships is vital for your business. You cannot expect your clients, your customers, suppliers, affiliates and others to be loyal to your brand unless they all stand to win as much as you do.

Greed implies that you eat someone else’s lunch. Somewhere, something in society is lost and someone walks away hungry. Goldman Sachs allegedly made a profit by misrepresenting the potential returns on investment of the risk they sold (the emails suggest this) and created part of the economic collapse.

In the end, this type of greed meant we all had a little bit less.

Now it is time for your business to create win-wins, create the conditions for your growth based on someone else’s growth, and rebuild the economy.

Upon inspection you’ll probably find that somebody left a yellow and black jacket behind from their last camping trip. You deplore their fashion sense and move on with your journey.

But what does this have to do with marketing?

Everything.

Based on this first impression, wouldn't you scrutinize what this school teaches your kids?

Our brains are programmed to make instantaneous judgments. We no longer live in an environment where dangerous animals could pose a threat, but we still function as it does.

And that’s why it takes years to build a business but only 1/10th of a second to lose a sale: because or brains are wired to make the most important judgment in a blink of an eye and not to trust the flood of information that comes after that 1/10th of a second. After all, if a cavemen stood there to think about what the yellow and black stripes really could be, he or she could be dinner for some exotic animal.

The truth of this is nicely summed up in the saying: “the suit makes the man”. We all know that “you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover” but in evolutionary terms, if you met another caveman, you had to make a split second decision whether the other was a friend / foe / leader / follower / harmless being, lest not to knocked out stone cold and have your women and food resources stolen from you.

Somehow I don't expect to find many millionaires in this club...

For the purpose of this blog post I wore a seersucker suit for the day. Doormen, cashiers, prospects treated me differently. In the age of casual dress, I was stunned just how much difference a $99 suit that looks just that bit different makes.

First impressions don’t only matter, they define a narrative about you and your business that is hard to alter once it is established. You never get a second chance at making your first impression, so you’d better get it right. And you better not overdo it: make it just enough, leave room to negotiate, get to know each other and define that unique relationship.

Putting on a magnificent suit won’t do the trick every time of course. You don’t know what the first contact will be, so you should cover all your bases.

Not so great first impressions:

This parking lot must be very empty...

I guess they had a drink before making this sign

Intellectual stimulation guaranteed

Time to take some of your own advice

Might be a typo. Or a new religion.

Imagine their attention to detail when cleaning your car

I guess God isn't bigger than your spelling problems

You gotta love experts

Try to look proud when wearing this garment

Somehow I am not surprised

Shop here if you want your computer destroyed

I don't feel unortherised. Great, let's park here.

Hayyp newyears are so hip

Covering all your bases

Have you thought about making a great first impression at your first point of contact? Here’s just a few to consider:

* Business cards
* Stationary
* Emails
* Voice Mails
* Presentations
* Website
* Networking
* Telephone
* Word of mouth
* Trade shows
* Publications
* Ephemera (short lived publications)
* Packaging
* Product
* Place
* Staff
* Location
* Vehicles
* Services
* Products
* Speeches
* Corporate identity
* Advertising
* Public Relations
* Public Affairs
* Civic marketing – give back to the supporting community
* Sales Promotion
* Environments
* Experiences
* Newsletters
* Business forms
* Exhibits
* Signage
* Point of Sale
* Livery – delivery of goods

Malcolm Gladwell wrote an interesting book about the power of thinking without thinking.

From that flows everything else. You’ll take greater interest in your clients, you’ll sit down and discuss solutions to their problems, you’ll devise specific answers to the pains they feel and you’ll be able to charge a premium because of your unique value to them.

This month I’ll be writing about marketing basics. But they could all be summed up by that one word.

Are their popular ideas or trends in your industry that you can combine to create a new product?

OurStage just did and created a whole new community.

American Idol was America’s most watched TV series last year, and YouTube is arguably one of the most popular online destinations.

OurStage looked at these trends and came up with a simple business plan: combine the two and create an online American idol type competition through user created video files.

In fact, they improved on the concept, by segmenting the music competitions into genres such as Acoustic, Indie/Alternative, Electronic, Metal, Solo Performance and Reggae, giving a forum for those who don’t champion pop music.
They further extended the model to include film makers who can submit their materials in categories such as Animation, Comedy, Short Films, Trailers, Documentaries and so forth.

Creative types can upload their content, and the rest of us can judge works side by side, vote for our favorites and see them progress ’till one takes the Grand Prize for that month (a whopping 5,000 US dollars).

What more, the power is put firmly back into the hands of the people who are actually purchasing CDs, concert tickets, movie passes and DVDs – in other words: given large enough a user forum, OurStage can inform on sure bet artists in all genres, something they could benefit from in a myriad of ways.

What is it that you can combine to create a product with added appeal? It doesn’t need to be anything as ground breaking as OurStage, but could be something as simple as combining an element of game-play with your education packages, combine calorie-counters with your food delivery service or trying to create a community around your brand.

Take Spotlight Live for an example: they created a hybrid between a restaurant and American Idol. Their motto is: “Eat, drink and be famous” and they offer a four-story performance amphitheater, setting the stage for aspiring popstars and starlets who are supported by a team of entertainment professionals to create the live performance of a lifetime. The acts are broadcasted online and on Spotlight Live’s own Times Square Jumbotron! You can come to their restaurant in the heart of New York’s Time Square to eat some whimsical American cuisine while watching live American Idol style entertainment.

The only limitation is your imagination…

New Media however, doesn’t work like that. It isn’t as in your face, doesn’t reach as many people and you can’t be as gun-ho about it. More than TV marketing, it requires creativity, standing out on the page, authenticity to build trust, speed and accurate timing, a keen understanding of your target audience, flexibility and A/B testing, patience, measurement and lots of data digging.

There was a time where everyone could succeed in marketing if they had a good enough product and enough exposure.

New Media is changing that: 1) it requires highly specialized skills and 2) it changes how people want to be marketed to. No more interruption, no more in your face. Instead, a steady companion when the user executes a search, is in a particular frame of mind.

The more TVs power is eroded, the more complicated marketing will become…

We also discussed the steps you should take to generate traffic to your site without SEO. This will give you your first traffic and help you gain some local awareness of your business.

But of course, the world is your oyster. Now that you have a well planned website and are diligently working on making a name of yourself in the offline world, it is time to focus on one of the most effective ways to get traffic to your site and capture leads: SEO.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the art of having your website rank on the first page of search engine results when they search for your product or service.

Example of a search engine listing.

The below example shows a search result we’ve achieved for one of our clients. The box in grayish pink are the sponsored search results. Somebody actually paid to be shown there. Below are the “organic search results”. These are the results that Google thinks offer the best content about the search “residential architect”. As you can see, our client is listed twice on the Google home page for searchers in Dallas, Texas. People looking from other towns will see a local results for Google maps, but searchers in the USA will still see our client featured in 3rd place (these results are accurate on 04/02/2010, search results may fluctuate). These “organic search results” are free! All you have to do is optimize your site well enough to be listed on the first page of Google without having to pay them a penny.

(You can read a case study about our work for this client here).

SEO is the art of having your website positioned on the first page of Google when someone does a search related to your products and services.

Search engines want you to do SEO

The mission of Google and other search engines is to list the most relevant result when someone uses their search engine. But they do understand that their results aren’t always perfect.

In order to help businesses that try to rank their website well, Google has provided a brief SEO manual.

They also provide advise via the media. Google engineer Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team elaborates on some tips and techniques in an interview with USA Today:

Tips and tricks to rank well in the search engines

But the advise that search engines dispense usually won’t get you very far. There is simply too much competition out there, all following the same advise.

That’s where we come in: throughout this month and the next we will be featuring a tutorial on how to rank your website well in the search engines. It will give you practical step by step advise and give you measurable results along the way.

So stay tuned.

Bonus Content: how do search engines work?

Matt Cutts, engineer at Google, gives you a brief overview on how a search engine gets all these great results to you:

Over to you

Please leave a comment with your questions and / or opinions. You can also ask questions in our SEO forum, that features many helpful tips on how to get your website ranked on the first page of the search engines.

In this final blog post of the month, we’ll do a quick round-up with every step required to create a successful business website.

Step 1: Define your target audience

Before you create a website, you will need to understand who your customers are.  Understanding your customer needs and lingo will determine the look and content of your site.

The logic behind this is simple: you want your website to be found by someone who is looking to solve their problem with your product or service. Your content will have to clearly outline that you understand their problem and that you have the solution, and explain this in terms that your audience can understand.

Use the steps outlined in our article on defining your target audience.

Step 2: Buying a domain name

Next you’ll need a domain name. A domain name is a web address that people can type to find your business. E.g. the domain name of this website is http://onlinedesignbureau.com.

You could of course trust your web designer to buy the domain name for you, but then ask the designer to immediately transfer it in your name. Your domain is the most important part of your online presence, it is the place where your visitors can find you again and again. If you don’t own it, you are vulnerable to losing your domain one day.

Read this article for more information (and inspiration) on buying a domain name.

Step 3: Hire a web designer

Of course you might think we are biased: we are a web design agency and we advice you to hire a web designer.

But the logic behind it is quite simple: if your website doesn’t look professional, you are going to convince only a small amount of your visitors to buy from you. Looks do matter. And a web designer can make sure that your website looks like the rest of your brand (or help you create a brand that presents a unified look and message to the world).

Another advantage of hiring a web designers know what converts visitors into customers and can help you develop powerful calls to actions for your website (more on that later).

If you are looking for a web designer, this guide will help you with you to search for and interview web designers.

Step 4: Write effective content for your website

You’ve already established who your audience is. Now you need to convince them that you understand their problem and provide an expert solution.

Delivering that type of content is where many websites fail. If your content is to self-centered, you will not convince anyone you care about them and will deliver great value.

Your content needs to be customer focused, discuss the problem they are facing with detailed information on how you will solve this problem. But your content also needs to be short and easy to absorb.

Content creation seems like an art, but there are some simple principles at play. You can learn more in our creating effective (sales) copy blog post.

Step 5: Build trust in your website

Great, you’ve got a professional design and have great content that is customer focused. That means your website will be converting visitors into customers quite nicely already.

But you can increase this conversion rate by adding features that build even more trust in your website, such as:

• Social proof
• Security
• Transparency
• Guarantees
• etc.

In our blog post we discuss in detail how you can increase trust in your website.

Step 6: Create a marketing funnel and powerful Calls to Action

The logic behind this is straightforward: if you clearly tell your visitors what to do, it is more likely that they will do it. You don’t want your website to just get lots of visitors. You also want your visitors to perform an action, whether it is clicking on an ad, contacting you via email or phone or subscribing to a newsletter.

And the way you can increase the chance that visitors will perform this desired Call to Action is simply by telling them exactly what to do.

For more information, read our article about inserting Calls to Action in your website.

Over to you

Feel we left anything out or need clarification about this topic? Leave us a comment. Or if you already have a website and need advice on everything to do with website creation and marketing, ask your questions in our forum.

And of course, if you are looking for a web designer, have a look at our web design service, contact us or call us: (214) 302-7631.

• Track retail traffic by counting the number of people that visit your store. Monitor traffic both before, during and after the ad campaign. If your campaign only runs in designated regions, compare the data by regions where you advertised vs regions where no ads ran.
• Give incentives to your customers to tell you when they have responded to an ad: For every add in print or online, add “Bring this ad to the store and get a 10 percent discount on your first order.” Include the discount in your marketing expenditure to better calculate ROI.
• Compare sales before, during and after an ad campaign. Keep in mind that advertising often has a cumulative or delayed effect, so ad-driven sales may not materialize immediately. Make sure you also measure sales before the advertising campaign, in order to have something to compare to.
• Use different phone numbers for each advert and each region. Create script for your call-center staff making sure that you capture all the questions you need answering (keep it short). Consider setting up a separate phone number for your Yellow Pages ad
• Compare pre- and post-advertising traffic on your Web site. Free solutions like Google Analytics will easily allow this. If you have the expertise, it is adviseble to drive your traffic to a sub domain, so that you can ad resulted in what traffic. Afterwards, you can direct the traffic to your main website.
  
• If you advertise online, track the click-through rate. This is easy to do: create a banner ad (or any other ad), designate a specific landing page for it (a page you normally couldn’t visit through your website) and see how many people land on that page.
• Ask all new customers how they heard about your business.

Soon you will find out what media seems to work for your company. However, some campaigns fail, not because of the media, but because of a poorly thought true strategy or lousy creative.

Make sure that your ads have clear calls to action. Powerful branding and a catchy brand name will further increase the effectiveness of your adverts, regardless of the media you use, as targeted consumers now can recall the brand, and perform a search for the brand.

Identify particular types of customers you want to attract, and speak in their language, communicate with their needs, identify where they work / play.

Also keep in mind that you can’t measure success if you don’t know what you are trying to achieve. Set a clear, focused goal – keep it specific! Yes, we all want to boost revenue overall, but your objective should be far clearer: e.g. increase sales for one product, or building awareness of your company, to increase the volume during a certain time period or to expand your business in a particular market. All these different goals need their own, tailored evaluation method.

As always, if any of this wasn’t clear and you need me to clarify, leave a comment or contact us privately.

A friend of mine had tried everything to convince his company to try new strategies, but got nowhere. What to do?

Peer pressure is your only option left.

Smaller company execs usually look with admiration at a few influential and respected people outside of their industry and tend to trust them implicitly. If you are unlucky, it is some old codger with a wicked-bad idea who undermines all of your arguments. But take a closer look at your exec’s trusted sources: who do you find there who has religion on marketing and has great interpersonal skills? This is the “trusted contact” you will want to approach.

Before you go and meet them, identify what YOU think is the ONE best pony to ride. Whatever your choice, be it PR, events, etc, find every article that demonstrates the successes driven by this type of strategy, accumulate case studies and best practice reports. Summarize each, and collect them in a file but don’t unveil anything to your execs yet, not even a hint.
While you are doing this, talk with the “trusted contact” and explain your strategy, and how it could bring benefits for your company. Then, let him grease the skids for a while. He’ll be slowly introducing your strategy during lunches, golf, cocktails, etc, probably indirectly, in anecdotal style: “You know, those folks from company x-x’d, they started doing this [insert your strategy] and they saw their profits tripple”. Then, once your execs show some interest in the massive benefits others have reaped, he’ll shrug his shoulders and say: “why don’t you give it a try?”

And so, one fine morning, your exec will walk in and say: “You know, I was talking to good old John last night, and he gave me this great idea.” That’s your cue to whip out your proposal on the idea.

You can’t teach old dogs marketing strategy. You can only get them to salivate over what a respected peer achieved.
ADDENDUM:

Here are two more strategies you could try:

Despite little ability to quantify or prove the intangible benefits of advertising, pick one method that is applicable to the market that you can implement and require a tracking system and show cost / benefit. This is a logic they will recognize and go for.

I would also dig deeper on how the client has been successful up to this point. How do they get sales that support the company at large and why did they feel the need to create a marketing strategy? Find that answer and you may find your pot of gold and conquer this challenge.