Over the years we know only a handful of things to be true 99% of the time. One is that the more people empowered to make suggestions that “have” to be included in a website the worse that website becomes.
A good analogy and example of bad is your t.v. remote control. Just because it has room for 100 buttons doesn’t mean it has to have 100 buttons. Keep the message simple. Keep the site clean and navigable.
Think about a remote with 10 buttons. What would you keep and what would you throw away?
That’s how much time today’s 8- to 18-year old spends in front of a t.v., computer, mobile phone, and/or iPod each day. Thirty years ago that same demographic spent 1.5 hours in front of digital media each day, but that’s probably just because we didn’t have very much digital media. Bad or good this is a trend unlikely to reverse itself.
How will this change how you target these up-and-comers? Almost 8 hours of digital leaves very little room for print media, so that’s out. Tech savvy children won’t know what it’s like to sit through t.v. commercials. Heck, what’s a t.v.? Facebook ads, PPC, iPhone app banners, and other ad delivery vehicles will likely lose influence and go the way of the classified ad in the Sunday paper.
Peer pressure. That little thing we all want to resist will be the new way to advertise. Social influence is huge and will only get bigger, especially in this young demographic. Peer pressure is not a new thing, but the availability of new social media tools is amping up the influence both in volume and distance. Think that all night Halo 3 marathon in four states and two countries holds any sway over kids today.
It becomes very easy to see why the advertising landscape evolves so rapidly. It’s too hard to see how the landscape will change, so the best option is to be the one driving change. They’re the only advertisers that will know where they’re going.
These days everyone has a formula for marketing success and no two are exactly alike. We either adapt our clients to our direct marketing approach, or adapt strategy to the goals set forth by the client. Giving clients solid advice along backed by previous campaign metrics creates an healthy partnership and solid dialog marketing campaigns. It takes a delicate touch to offer advice without talking down to clients. Many agencies fail here. You should hear our clients relay stories of agency egos the size of conference rooms.
Revenue generation is a team sport. Marketing starts with solid prospect or customer lists.* High mail-to-web rates drive these same prospects and customers into the marketing funnel.** Sticky microsites educate these folks and prime them for discussions with sales. Sales cycles grow shorter as sales gets into deeper and deeper conversations. Decision makers and those that influence the purchase get involved. Revenue is won. It all started with established campaign expectations and a solid customer-vendor relationship.
Not all clients buy into our approach 100%, but together we find ways to leverage our creative work to meet organizational milestones and goals. At the end of the day it’s about communicating expectations, setting goals before the first brainstorming session, and executing against those goals. That’s where the rubber meets the road.
*Marketers spend far too little time cleaning lists. Traditional direct mail took a shotgun approach. You could afford bogus data, because the per unit costs were somehow justified. Not so with dimensional mail. Higher-end mail pieces help keep lists smaller with better, targeted contacts.
**Once you have a solid list it’s up to us (VLG or whatever agency you use) to deliver a value proposition to those future/current customers. Look for mail-to-web (or visit rates) over 20%. Our Dialog Marketing gives you a leg up with real-time behavior tracking online and notifications via email, SMS, or RSS feed.
We promised feedback after week of trying out three similar mtg/event scheduling tools. To recap, we are playing around with Presdo, Tungle and TimeBridge. For our purposes TimeBridge came out on top. I encourage you to run out and try each of these apps and feel free to come back here with comments.
Pro: Scheduling meetings with several busy people without haggling is our biggest pain point. Problem solved. The user interface was straight forward. Trial account left open the possibility of a cross sell to other features. (We are entrepreneurs, too. Nice to see good pricing strategy.)
Con: Sharing calendars left users confused. Most found it difficult to find the colleagues shared calendar. In the end, that’s not very useful as it makes better sense to send an invite out that fills holes in your own calendar.
Pro: Easy to use. Super easy. That bulldog that rides a skateboard could use it. Sign up is easy, so it took no time at all to get going.
Con: Not sure how this trumps iCal or Outlook when scheduling events for your calendar. It seems like an extra step, though I understand the argument for Presdo meeting reminders in advance, which is better than most calendar apps. No collaborative scheduling. Outbound only scheduling, which make it more like a nice scheduling to-do list.
Pro: Handles collaborative scheduling with ease. Remember, that’s our biggest pain point. UI is intuitive once you get past the early handholding. Seems this app was intended for perhaps a less web-savvy users–Wall Street v. One Dell Way. Short URL can be copy and pasted into your own email client quickly and easily. That’s an interesting feature for contacts not interested in third-party mail, or leerily of it.
Con: Some of the sharing UI is tough to navigate. It’s just me, but loads of white and purple on the page make navigation visually distracting.
It’s a tie (for now). We’ll continue to run Tungle against TimeBridge and vice versa until we settle on an app. Time to kick the tires when it matters–with clients. Sorry, Presdo. Nifty little app, but didn’t have enough muscle as a business tool.
Tungle
Tagline: Scheduling made easy
TimeBridge
Tagline: Run great meetings
Presdo
Tagline: Make time to “___”.
VLG is signing up for the Social Media Challenge. We encourage you to do the same. Check out Colin Alsheimer’s blog post for the rules. We’ve gathered a list of blogs from the folks here at VLG. Below are the 14 blogs we’ll track and promote over the next couple of weeks. With any luck we’ll learn something original. Don’t forget to bookmark and read our humble opus, too.
1. Customer Experience Crossroads
Our favorite Canadian that has on several occasions bought our loyalty with profound words about our own Dialog Marketing. Susan Abbott makes it onto the VLG top 14.
2. Servant of Chaos
Gavin Heard represents marketers from down under in a sometimes disturbing, yet informative way. Don’t let the crazy eyes headshot on his blog fool you. Australians, as you know, are good people.
3. Church of the Customer
I’ve never seen Ben McConnell and Jackie Huba speak in public. I’ve never read one of their books, but they crank out a good blog post every now and again. (Any blog that posts a PSA staring the late governor of Texas, Ann Richards, deserves a nod.
4. The Big Fat Marketing Blog
Get in the heads marketers kind of like you as they post prose about our favorite topic, big fat marketing.
5. Gaspedal “The Blog”
Brought to you by the people that gave us tidy white papers, books and conference panels and speeches littered with word of mouth and social media that matters. This is a good blog for people that communicate.
6. Unleashed on Marketing
Gary Bembridge has two passions in life. Want to guess one of them? This Londoner mixes it up with commentary and links to EMEA marketing goodies.
7. Good Is
Collaboration is very Good. Go hear for an “Ah-ha!” moment everyday.
8. ILT
John really, really loves typography. It’s blog posts by a British expat in Japan, so it has to be interesting.
9. Just Stuff I Find
We all could start a blog like this, but we don’t. This blog will find stuff for you.
10. Kottke
Jason was named after Alexander the Great and has big shoes to fill, he says. Can’t believe he didn’t see the Empire Strikes Back on the big screen. Nice little posts on his blog.
11. 37signals Blog
This blog might not fit within the SMS Challenge rule book, but it’s pretty darn good at making you think strategically.
12. Design Mind
Three times a year you can get this content in print form. Frog design takes this blog stuff pretty seriously. Always harder to make anything look easy, simple and clean.
13. Dustin Curtis is a superhero.
Dustin takes it to another level. Hard to explain. You have to check it out on your own, because I don’t want to ruin the surprise. Tell him hi for us.
14. the tortoise initiative
This six person team pulls together interesting work, design, quotes, etc in one easy to read package, very simple package. Blogger template, “sacrilege!” they say. We say bully for you.
It’s so difficult to track case dropboxes, rendering the feature pretty much useless. However a new shortcut allows you to put those files away using a simple forward slash (/deal AA Fly Home, for example). You’ll keep those deal and case names shorter to really get the benefit of the new feature, so impact how you use the app. When will we get API access to add tags to contacts? Still patiently waiting for that…
MarketingSherpa picked up a campaign we built on behalf of Fuze Meeting and the good folks at Fuze Box. I’m not sure we totally agree with everything in article, but most. Let the debate begin. (Yes, we really did get those numbers.)
After you read the case study (and I know you will), please come right back here with some solid feedback. Bad or good, we can take it. In the meantime, take a peek at the microsite we built: www.seehowdifferent.com/prospectname
There are lots of reasons I read the Economist. One, to bore the heck out of the folks at VLG with economic minutae. Two, I love economic minutae, which brings me to the subject of today’s post. Paywalls.
Paywalls are those imaginary barricades that keep us from valuable content online unless we are paying customers. It’s nothing new, but the article I read did a pretty good job explaining and projecting how these monetary walls will be used in the coming year.
[You can read the full article here.]
It’s not the erosion of print advertising causing newspapers to consider building walls, but the erosion of online advertising revenue. A decline in print advertising revenue is expected. an industry that now finds itself in the entertainment business might find it worrisome with its inability to transfer offline readers to online readers and offline advertisers to online advertisers.
Let’s try a quick litmus test. Would you pay to read this blog? No. Would you pay to read the article about which this blog post was written? No, because you don’t have to or no, because this blog post told you all you need to know on the subject? No, because going forward you will not look for news, news will find you.
Where do you gather the majority of your news today? I get weather from my colleagues at VLG and my mother-in-law who is addicted to Weather Bug, I think. I get my traffic updates and Dallas Cowboys news from The Ticket (1310 AM) while driving. All but about 10% of my news comes from my wife, my colleagues and other family and friends at no cost.
Someone is getting news from a credible source, right? Finding out who that someone is and convincing them to part with the contents of a pocket book poses a huge challenge to the print industry today. Well, that and maintaining status as a credible source.
A little experiment is underway here at the VLG offices. While we haven’t subjected our clients to it yet, there is a serious need to streamline the entire process of scheduling meetings. We’re evaluating the following apps. Let you know who comes out on top. Are you using these or others? Comment below.
To save time I’m going to copy and paste the elevator pitch for each below.
TimeBridge
TimeBridge’s one-step scheduling allows users to quickly determine the best time to meet, establish meeting-centric trust networks and automatically provision an online shared meeting space. You select participants and send alternative meeting times. TimeBridge collects everyone’s availability, quickly finds and confirms the best time, creates an online space for documents and comments, and updates your calendar.
Presdo
Presdo takes the hassle out of trying to find the best time to get together with people. Use Presdo to minimize the annoying ping pong of email, texting, and voicemail when organizing the next team lunch or trying to grab coffee with a friend.
Tungle
Tungle reduces the amount of communication ordinarily needed to schedule meetings, by allowing users to view the availability of their contacts before sending them an invitation. The best part about Tungle is that users can share their calendars with ANYONE.
Back in a week to tell you what we found.