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We just got some new Internet statistics from Nielsen and they are astounding! An average of 211 million people in the USA regularly uses the internet - that is 70% of the total population. We average 34 hours per month online and visit an average of 64 sites. The average surfing session is 54 minutes long. In 1996, one out of fifty used the Internet for news and information. Today, it's one out of three! And talk about eCommerce - this past holiday season, excluding travel purchases, an unbelievable 26 billion dollars was spent online. Make sure that your company has a professional web site and use it to sell your products and services.
Have a great day!
Larry Kirby and Jet Angel
Effective Advertising Seminars
New Business Opportunities
Brand Your Business Wisely |
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Finding Your Brand Identity
Q. I know that branding is an important aspect of Internet marketing. How do I compete for eyeballs?
A. As a small company, you need to be concerned with attracting your target market to your brand. If you can distinguish your product or service from the competition, you will be ahead of the game. And you may even win over some customers from the larger competitors.
Having a recognizable brand doesn't necessarily mean that your business will be universally known. It simply means that you are increasing your chance to compete successfully for the attention and market share in the appropriate space. It doesn't take an expensive global advertising campaign to brand your business.
First of all, identify your target market. Without knowing who your customers are and what their likes and dislikes are, your branding efforts will be in vain. Informal surveys, focus groups, magazines such as American Demographics, census information and research reports can all be helpful in determining your niche. In addition, trade magazines for your industry may point you in the right direction.
Once you have identified your target market, remember that customers are bombarded by ads and brands, and it is virtually impossible for them to distinguish among all the messages. As a result, you need to cut through the noise. Differentiation is key for any product or service. A name, logo and domain name are the obvious and necessary steps in creating a brand message that will set you apart from the competition.
You can either work independently to come up with a logo and name or you can work with a branding consultant to come up with a package containing logo, brand, tagline and so on. Branding consultants can be expensive, but will give you professional results that will make a difference in the long run. There are numerous branding consultants, big and small, so try getting a referral from colleagues. Or if there's a company whose logo and branding efforts you particularly admire, call them up and see if they can recommend a consultant.
Take your brand development seriously, and invest what is necessary to have a company help you achieve your goals. Make sure you are able to communicate your company's positioning and core values. If you can't articulate what differentiates you from your competitors to your branding consultant, chances are they won't be able to communicate it to your customers. They need clear direction from which to craft a memorable, differentiated brand.
Once you have a brand identity, you can focus on marketing your company to your target market on the Web. There are numerous ways to accomplish this:
- Build a Web
- Advertise on Web sites
- Optimize your site for search engines
- Register with search engines and directories
- Collect e-mail addresses and send out an e-mail newsletter
- Write a Weblog
Branding can be quite a time-consuming process that requires a lot of patience waiting for your efforts to come to fruition. Don't be tempted to tinker constantly with your brand. Instead, work on getting your name out there. As a result, you may find customers who appreciate your attention to detail and your personalized service.
Thanks to David Carlick from allbusiness.com |
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Web Design Experts reveal their top 10 trademarks of stellar sites
- Descriptive Tag Lines: "Right from the home page, some companies don't do a good job of communicating what their companies do," says Hoa Loranger, a user experience specialist at the Neilson Norman Group in Fremont, California. "If your business name isn't descriptive, you need a descriptive tag line."
- Excellent Content: Vincent Flanders, whose WebPagesThat Suck.com shines a light on bad website design, says, "You can get anyone to visit your website once, but why would anybody come back a second, third or fourth time? Content. Great content solves problems.
- Edited Text: "The gap between presentation and what users actually read is, by far, the most pervasive problem in web usability today, and among the easiest to fix," says Eric Anderson, director of agency services at White Horse Productions in Portland, Oregon. "Estimate the absolute least amount of text your users will read on your site, then cut that in half. Keep your font size at 10 points or above and your paragraph size at 120 words or less."
- Simple Design: "Overusing colors, fonts and graphics creates clutter and keeps people from focusing on your information," says Loranger. "The minimalist approach makes a site appear more professional."
- Using Text Hyperlinks: If you want to feature something, use a text hyperlink instead of a graphic, says Loranger. "People have trained themselves to look away from graphics and rectangular boxes because they look like advertising," she says. "Designers include graphical elements to grab people's attention, but they backfire."
- Consistent Layout: "Each page or section should have the same general look," says Flanders. "Don't have navigation at the top in one section and on the left side in another section."
- Sticking With What Works: Certain web conventions put visitors at ease and help turn them into customers. For instance, out your logo at the top-left corner of every page, the search engine in the first screen at the top- right, and make sure all links are clearly labeled.
- A Focus On Search: A site's search function is the user's lifeline - the more lost at sea he feels, the more he'll grab for it, says Anderson. "If your web analytics show a high proportion of users going to that lifeline, chances are your navigation isn't doing the job," he says. "You need to attack the problem on two fronts: gather usability data to improve your navigation, and make your search function the best it can be.
- Guided Search: "The technique known as 'faceted' or 'guided' search is a must for sites with heavy catalog or product content," says Anderson. "It's a way of displaying search results according to the product category they fall into."
- Designing For Users: "Don't assume your target audience has the same skill set or likes the same things you do," says Loranger. Instead, perform a usability test with three to six average customers. Have them test the site by doing specific tasks, such as browsing the site for shoes and then buying them.
Thanks to Melissa Campanelli
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Will the Two-Second Ad Last?
It goes by so quickly, sneeze and you'll miss it, that it's almost not there at all. Just as one song on the radio fades away and another begins, a ghostly voice intones: "Iced coffee at Starbucks."
No elaboration, no product superiority claims, no "tastes great!" braggadocio. Just four words. And gone.
Way back when, radio commercials were 60 seconds long. Eventually, the :60 begat the 30 second ad, which begat the :15. More recently, some spots have shrunk to just 5 seconds. Now "Iced coffee at McDonalds" is part of the Vanguard of radio commercials that take this trend to its obvious next diminution: the two-second ad.
Two-second ads have been popping up anew, briefly of course, on stations owned by Clear Channel Communications, the radio leviathan that developed the concept and began selling it to marketers last year. Listen closely, and quickly, and you'll hear the McDonalds adlet between spins of, say, "Spirit in the Sky" and "Another Brick in the Wall" on local oldies station WBIG-FM. Or you might hear the fast-food chain's jingle "Bah-dah-bam-bam-bah!" between the Billy Joel and Elton John tunes on WASH-FM, Clear Channel's soft rock station.
Nano ads are being sold as a clever innovation for advertisers, even if some listeners might consider them a distracting new intrusion.
The two-second format, Clear Channel calls them blinks, offers two immediate benefits for advertisers. Because the ultra-brief ads pop up within the programs themselves, they don't compete for consumers' attention with longer ads packed into minutes-long commercial breaks. (Clear Channel says it will run no more than two "blinks" per hour.) The second advantage is the ads brevity and, well, sneakiness: A listener would have to be mighty fast on the draw to zap a two-second spot.
As such, "blinks" are the radio equivalent of the "take you by surprise" school of advertising. Internet sites for years have flashed pop-up ads at computer users. TV networks are increasingly plugging upcoming shows with text and animation messages that appear at the bottom of the TV screen at the start of a new program (CSI: Later tonight on CBS!). These kinds of ads proceed from the assumption that the audience is essentially captive and won't, or can't, switch away before seeing the sponsor's message. It's pretty hard to be boring in two seconds. But it's also difficult to convey many of things that advertising traditionally does, such as prices, comparisons, descriptions, ordering information or a brand "image", says Jeff Haley, president of the Radio Advertising Bureau, an industry promotion group.
Given the limits of human perception, how much of a message can you absorb in two seconds? Haley says flash ads don't really work very well for small advertisers with unfamiliar messages. Instead, he says, the biggest beneficiaries are likely to be companies that have already spent millions of dollars pounding jingles, images and word associations into consumers heads, such as Rice Crispies ("Snap, crackle, pop!") or Aamco ("Double A - beep, beep - MCO")
"There's a fair degree of skepticism about the effectiveness of" the two second ads, Haley says.
The radio industry intends to find out just how effective super-short ads are. The National Association of Broadcasters, composed of radio and TV companies, in April commissioned a year-long academic study on the new ads. David Allen, a St. Joseph's University marketing professor who will conduct the research, surmises that "blinks" are best remembered by listeners who've already heard 60- and 30- second ads for the same product or service.
"I don't think this is going to replace [longer] ads on the radio," Allan says. "But the radio industry realizes that it may have reached a tipping point" in packing so many ads into broadcasts. Short ads "may be a way to cut the clutter and still make money. It's something new and different.
For the moment, however, short-attention-span ads haven't exactly taken over radio since Clear Channel introduced last summer. McDonalds is one of only two national advertisers that have taken up the two-second challenge. The other is the Fox network, which last fall promoted its TV shows with a few short-shorts. One featured Homer Simpson uttering his signature expression, "D'oh!" followed by the voice-over "Tonight on Fox."
Fox spokesman Scott Grogin says the radio ads were "experimental." But the experiment doesn't appear to have been a success; Fox hasn't deployed similar ads since and Grogin says so far they don't figure into the network's plans for next season.
This is fine by Robert Weissman, managing director of Commercial Alert, an activist group that opposes excessive commercialism. Weissman says super-short ads are a great idea if they mean fewer ads overall. But he doesn't think that's going to happen; instead, he figures it will merely permit radio stations to shoehorn advertising into areas that had previously been commercial-free.
"I realize the for-profit media needs a revenue model," he say, "but there has to be more respect for the consumers' desire to let their guard down and enjoy the music without someone trying to get them to buy something. Even so, Haley suggests we haven't seen the end of this. Just wait until the election season, he says. Next up as races heat up, perhaps: the one-second ad.
Thanks to Paul Farhi
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