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Archive for the Marketing Category
Crain article on digital sites geared for women shows segmentation is essential for savvy business online
Posted in Business, Marketing, Social Media, Web Analytics with tags Marketing, business intelligence, Small Business, Social Media, consumer, Business, demographics, search traffic, marketing to women online communities, Crain's New York, Crain's on May 5, 2010 by pdebois
Today many online communities court women for lifestyle and consumer interests
Crain’s New York had a great recent article on online media properties and the increase competition among online women communities. The article focused on the relaunch or iVillage — NBC is attempting to make a portfolio of brands — as well as Glam Media’s continued dominance. From the article:
“Magazine publishers are also getting better at identifying audiences across their networks of sites and delivering them in big numbers, media buyers say. Hearst Digital Media’s network had 17.6 million visitors in February, comScore reports, and Conde Nast Digital had 15.3 million”
These are just the opening salvos — Glam Media has the largest number of unique visitors at 78.0 million (comScore figure). All hail from the “fragmentation of audiences and the way people now use search engines to travel around the Web.” You can read more at Crain’s New York (Site has a thing or 2 for Women)
Takeaways for small businesses:
- Business owners must pay attention to the different sites/properties available to their business, and see if there is an audience that rings true to their goals — to strengthen its position in a market or even extend its audience (long tail).
- In paying attention, businesses should decide what services and features to focus on the most — the fragmentation that is occurring has made being a jack-of-all-trades a very expensive proposition to maintain. The cost for marketing to as much traffic as possible may exceed the revenue generated. See the Zimana blog articles on segmentation and the Orient express as well as the post on the Lexus LF-A launch for examples of how large organizations deal (or not deal) with segmentation.
- In focusing on a segment, the marketing dollars and effort will be better focus and can yield better results for campaigns and attracting the right visitors who will convert.
What Kick-Ass Teaches Small Businesses About Targeting the Right Market
Posted in Business, Marketing with tags Business, consumer, entrepreneurship, Marketing, segmentation, Small Business, Web Analytics on April 18, 2010 by pdebois
A product can gain buzz, like the movie Kick Ass did initially... but is the buzz coming from the right audience?
USA Today posted an article on the movie box office. Not usual. In it, the article mentions the anticipation built for the movie Kick-Ass, even with comparison to another comic book turned movie 300. Not usual either. What was unusual was the relatively low box office. Yes there was online buzz. What’s not kicking ass here?
Well, buzz does help for exposure. But the movie had a risk — The main characters were kids, yet the movie had an R rating.
Takeaway for small businesses:
- Any ol’ buzz is not equivalent to sales — if the audience talking about the product the most can not use/see/purchase it, then the buzz is worthless. Which means….
- The target consumers really need to be the ones doing the buzzing to make an event/product launch a success. Otherwise…
- The benefit of what is being offered is not of value to the intended consumer. In this case, the tough sell was getting adults who could see an R-rated movie interested in seeing an action movie with children as main characters.
The last point is not a light subject in movie making. Even Star Wars creator George Lucas, who admits he likes the R2-D2 character the most, was concerned that A New Hope (first Star Wars movie) may not appeal to moviegoers because the earliest scenes had no humans onscreen between the attack on Princess Leia’s ship and when audience first meet Luke.
In short terms the benefit of a product may not be of value to a consumer. In the case of Kick-Ass, the buzz may have been a distortion to whether the movie was marketed to the right audience. But there is some financial hope for Lionsgate (see this article on the box office for Kick-Ass in the LA Times).
What do you think?
Want more conversions for your website? Webtrends shows how through web optimization road show
Posted in Analytics, Marketing with tags Web Analytics, Marketing, webtrends, website on April 16, 2010 by pdeboisWebtrends is sending their Optimize experts to four cities to discuss how to conduct website optimization. San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles will be the host cities for the Webtends’ presentation. The goal of the presentation is to show attendees how to increase conversions at a website or more sales, downloads, or more visitor activity.
From Omniture CMO: Why a drop in search traffic is not always bad news
Posted in Marketing with tags search traffic, omniture on April 14, 2010 by pdeboisThis is a retweet from Omniture’s CMO site – Why a drop in search traffic isn’t always bad news. The post is a lead to a iMedia Connection post — the idea is to correlate search traffic for a given company to what is happening within said company’s industry for search. You can learn more about the post here (with graphs at the iMedia Connection site) here: http://om.ly/iCRz
Think Analytics is for auditing SEO? Use it for its true intent, to guide your online presence
Posted in Analytics, Business, Marketing, Web Analytics with tags Marketing, Marketing Strategy, search engine optimization, SEO, Social Media, Web Analytics on April 13, 2010 by pdeboisThere are many small businesses that believe that web analytics is linked entirely to PPC and keyword campaigns. It can be. But analytics solutions can do so much more by inferring your customers wants and desires from a number of marketing channels. Small businesses are bombarded with new means to market themselves, so as a business adds a new marketing tool — both online and offline — the new tools increases the attention needed. Remember your business can market itself through:
- Powerpoint presentations uploaded online
- Video uploaded and advertised through YouTube, Vimeo, AdMogul, etc.
- Magazine and Billboard ads with URLs to a landing page
- e-Mail (like MailChimps site analytics)
- Facebook (which requires a different approach to a keyword search….more later!)
- Profiles on sites such as Linked In, OPEN Forum, Biznik
- Local or specialty associations like the Web Analytics Association and the New York Entrepreneurship
- Customer responses via Yelp and Mr Tweet.
- Blogs
Plus, there are additional analytics for some of these, sources such as MailChimp’s Site Analytics (see a previous post on the subject here).
So the point is to use your analytics solutions as an anchor for understanding your marketing and managing your costs.
How iPad + Hyundai Equus = Analytics opportunity for revolutionizing customer service at auto dealers
Posted in Analytics, Marketing, Social Media, Web Analytics with tags Analytics, Apple, Cars, customer segmentation, customer services, Equus, Hyundai, IPad on April 5, 2010 by pdebois
Apple's iPad may be revolutionizing customer service for auto dealers
The iPad has received much hype since Apple’s announcement. But the news that really caught my attention was Hyundai’s offering an iPad in the glove box of every new Equus. The Equus is the brand’s most expensive vehicle, a premium sedan aiming to be a BMW 7 series alternative. The iPad will serve as a service manual instead of the standard brochure.
Now this may sound like a slight come down for Apple — why have a $500 computer serve as a book — but there is a marketing advantage for Hyundai and Apple, along with an analytics opportunity as well.
Hyundai is in an interesting position. It has been strengthening its brand as of late to gain more upscale customers, but unlike Toyota, Nissan, and Honda, they can not create a whole new network and sales division by scratch (ie Lexus, Infiniti, and Acura). Adding an iPad creates a special and timely interest about the Equus.
For Apple, the inclusion addresses the criticisms for what an iPad can be besides an extra computer device. Although much has been said about the ebook reader capability (and even more said about e-book pricing — more later in a separate post), there are not many innovative examples to show the capability of an iPad or Slate device. Replacing the service manual changes that. The iPad revitalizes a long ignored feature in an automobile and renews the usability in an interesting way, similar to how Starbucks revitalized how consumers perceive coffee.
The iPad also becomes an analytics conduit for information. According to USA Today’s article on Hyundai and Apple, the iPad will provide service information:
“The iPad will also schedule service appointments, for which owners won’t even have to drive to the dealer. To give the brand a more upscale feel, (Hyundai CEO John) Krafcik is creating a system in which a service attendant will pick up the car from the owner and leave them a loaner. Hyundai also is offering home test drives for potential buyers.”
This means increased customer service capability and more information on its target customers, premium buyers. Toyota, Nissan, and Honda had the natural progression of customer lifestyle — buyers wanting more premium vehicles as they progress professionally — but these brands did not have the feedback potential Hyundai will have from customer communication to the dealer via the iPad (Maybe Toyota could learn a trick or two for the Lexus LF-A — see the Zimana blog post on it)
Can an iPad be better in a Hyundai? With a little analytics, like Obama, yes it can!
Takeaways for small businesses:
- Match your branding accordingly with whomever you partner with — Apple is not a luxury brand, but features and its stores incorporate features of a premium brand (and it is positioning iPad to be superior to netbooks). This is a fit for Hyundai, which is not an Acura but will limit production on Equus, establishing some premium level above the vehicle on the second rung, Genesis.
- Technology can serve as a gateway to offline engagement of customers. Using the iPad will allow Hyundai to use all the techniques and tools to encourage a positive engagement at the dealership. Auto owners have had a negative impression of dealership experience, and all automakers struggle to ensure that any repair is a positive experience that will lead to repeat sales.
- Analytics can aid your brands effort to strengthen its image by providing a means to gather customer feedback and infer how to improve customer service or product offering.
Increase your patience, retailers! Online Shopping is becoming Online Browsing
Posted in Business, Marketing, Social Media, Web Analytics with tags Analytics, Business, consumer, Google Analytics, Marketing, Small Business, Social Media, Twitter, Viral Marketing, Web Analytics, Yahoo! Analytics on March 11, 2010 by pdeboisWhich would you believe is true when a customer comes to your website – the customer sees what they want, then go ahead to purchase? Or that the customer visits several times?
If you said the latter, you get a gold star. Recent Google posts indicate that more customers are delaying their online purchase, and browsing. This has increased the number of days between first arriving on a site and making a conversion (in this case purchase).
You can see a bar graph of the average number of browsing days by product category on the Google Retail Advertising blog. This data is based on the 2009 holiday shopping season. Electronics, home appliances, and home furnishings had the longer average number of browsing days (16 days), while beauty items, gift cards, and pet supplies had the shortest periods (7 days).
The data also confirms what many analytics folks have said for a long time –
- Your traffic does not immediately purchase when they arrive on your site.
- Your traffic is not monolithic – they come for different reasons. In this case sited, there’s browsing as well as taking action
- Your analytics is important for understanding the site behavior
- You have an opportunity to provide content that would inform your visitors and potentially encourage conversion
Have you and your marketing team seen a difference in website performance from more browsing at your site? What do you feel lead to more “browsing”? Or is it just client and customer behavior that was inevitable? Feel free to share your insights…
