How important will be is mobile advertising and mobile marketing? It’s difficult to wrap your brain around that fact that advertising is being disbursed on a one-to-one basis so quickly and into so many emerging markets. As long-time advocates of one-to-one marketing we want to embrace this shift and seek new and better ways to tie mobile into consumer or B2B marketing programs. Researching…
The Economist sheds new light on why we (Americans) are not the center of the universe when it comes to mobile marketing. However, many of our current customers are now reaching out to decision makers in these markets as technical infrastructure, cloud computing and other solutions find ways into India, Africa and Eastern Europe. That happening today.
Chris Anderson, Wired magazine’s editor in chief, follows a trend in media these days whereby media no longer interviews an expert, but becomes the expert. Despite this I still tuned in yesterday for a synopsis of his new book “Free” which you can relive here.
As heavy users of 37signals products we’ve been on the consumer end of a freemium business model. We first signed up for free Highrise and free Basecamp. We experimented with free BackPack before dropping it at no cost. Now we pay for Highrise and Basecamp as do several hundred thousand others at about $50 a month. Read more about this business approach here.
But what about the services industry…
Without software or packaged goods to sell what do we give away for free. Would you, our customer, commit to spending dollars or euros with us down the road after we give you “X”. Other than this blog and a couple tweets per day we don’t really have freebies out there. To be honest, I’m not sure we have a clue. Can the freemium business model work in the services industry? What should we give away?
Any advice? via Comment or Twitter @wefightboredom
If you already use Wufoo and Highrise you know that form submits go directly from one to the other. If both are new to you I encourage you to check out this Wufoo blog post and learn more about sending form data into the Highrise CRM.
We offer our clients the ability to do the same into Highrise, Salesforce.com or Sugar CRM, so you can eliminate the manual labor and use that intern for something a little more productive. Your intern will thank you. Trust me.
VW’s campaign in 2009 might be a bit dated, but it lives on in viral form here and elsewhere on the web. You can see all three experiments at TheFunTheory.com. Here’s our favorite. This leaves no doubt that fun trumps dull and boring. Enjoy.
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.
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
Two great Internet topics surfaced in recent days with regard to behavioral tracking and new business models. Will privacy policies undercut online business models before they ever get to their feet?
Part One: Privacy
The impact of opt-in and opt-out privacy rules need to be revisited. Behavioral content delivery of ads or media content serve up relevant content and supposedly shield consumers from a barrage of “noise” found on the Internet. Privacy policies are generally buried in the footer or within pop-up legal agreements that are seldom read. We tend to find these policies boring and easily dismissed.
So as the groundswell of debate related to Internet privacy reached Capitol Hill, maybe those of us in the online advertising industry should pay special attention. The House of Representatives’ subcommittees on communication and consumer protection held a joint hearing last week to more closely examine advertisers’ rights to track your behavior online and consumers’ rights to guard that information.
Central to the hearing were rules regarding consumers’ current need to opt-out of behavioral tracking by advertisers. Yahoo! and Google are front-and-center, because advertisements on those two platforms rely heavily on behavioral and content tracking to serve up ads. Details of the hearing and the debate were brought to light by Canadian Greg in a shared-news story. Greg suspiciously omitted from his blog profile, perhaps fearing retribution or an invasion of privacy.
This is not a new debate, but one that enjoys renewed fervor among concerned special internet groups on both sides of this debate.
Part Two: Revenue Models
If anything was learned from the bursting of the Internet bubble, it was that revenue is just as hard to generate online as it is offline. The margins might be higher, which is the lure for “.com” solution and service providers today. In 1998 we could rid ourselves of pricey store-fronts in exchange for central distribution points, thereby reducing overhead and allowing consumers to place orders in the comfort of their own underwear. That was then.
Advertising revenue is manna from heaven today. Revenue models for many Web 2.0 companies since 2000 lean heavily on advertising revenue to pay the bills. Behavior tracking provides a service unmatched by newspapers. You can’t one-off a newspaper and serve Bob one ad and Sally another in the same household, or several, or thousands of households. The Internet can do that, but needs a little help from cookies and behavior tracking.
Michael Nielsen, though long-winded, presents a cogent argument as to why good companies run by smart people are failing today. (Disclaimer: Nielsen’s article shifts to scientific publishing about halfway through and he lost me.) You’ll find the part about the online news killing newspapers interesting. Behavioral tracking plays a hand in content delivery and not just ads. Knowing your target audience makes it especially easy to serve up content that might actually get read.
The social and anthropological impact of limited content (a.k.a. filtering content) has an Orwellian feel to it, but newspaper editors have been deciding what makes it into the paper and what doesn’t. The fact that online news filtering is determined not by and editor, but by user behavior poses an interesting question. It’s a question I can’t answer, but one that should be discussed.
Part Three: Opt-in Handcuffs
Whether the debate centers on relevant content delivery, or consumer privacy, it should be clear to advertisers and new media (social or otherwise) that behavior tracking is like air in the web space. If we force a user to opt-in each time we track behavior, consumer fatigue will set in and we’ll have to revert to a failing newspaper business model.
The Gray Lady gasping for air?
Subscriptions become powerful tools in this potentially brave new world, but why wait. Building a community of the willing gives you the ability to measure, track and deliver content that’s relevant. Social media opens the door to opt-in content delivery in a way that becomes difficult to regulate without imposing an unnecessarily layer of FCC regs on advertisers and consumers.
Businesses fail or succeed online with or without such changes, because the industry seems to be in a constant state of evolution. How should business respond to this debate? Be agile and creative.
Like lots of people, my browser homepage is set to Google.com. It’s simple. The world at my finger tips just a couple clicks away. Lately that world has become less relevant. I seem to be going to page two and three more often and it’s starting to get old.
Thanks to Lolly Borel (a.k.a @blogtillyoudrop) I may have found my browser’s new homepage. Her recent tweet about Addict-o-Matic just might be the solution to my Google woes. [By the way, did a quick addict-o-matic search for Lolly and found out she took a new gig at ShinyRed. Congrats!] The site has a pretty slick UI and cranks out some interesting results. We took a look at a couple VLG keywords like wefightboredom (our Twitter user name), Via Luna Group, and VLG.
Some results were surprising, others predictable. It was like taking an SEO screen grab of our company. We were able to see where we are doing good and where we lag. We do lag. There are undoubtedly alternatives to this site that just haven’t popped up on our radar. Do you have one?
We’ve never allowed comments on our blog. It just seems to impersonal, so please send me an email. You’ll get a proper response and a mention here on the blog.
