Communication- Changing Forever

We normally don't consider 18-29 year old's a viable market unless your marketing energy drinks or a new way to download free music. It's not like there are too many 26 year old young men looking for marketing services or someone to build their new deck. This generation (the millennials) is living at home longer, going to school longer and not engaging in what even Gen Xers like myself would consider to be the adult norm, marriage, kids, house, car payment, blah blah blah. However while they may be slower to come around to adulthood, infuriating marketing firms across the nation, they are not that far off and the way they have chosen to communicate between each other and the rest of the world is altering the landscape of traditional marketing forever. Sound crazy, consider this, when is that last time you saw a young person pick up a phone book, or stop and write a number down off a billboard, or even watch a television commercial?

I don't want to say there isn't a genuine need for these things because there are quite a few generations ahead of these guys where this marketing is still relatively effective. Not nearly as effective as it used to be because even these preceding generation are adopting some of these communication mediums, albeit more slowly, but adopting none the less. The mediums include but aren't limited to: online video, text messaging, facebook, twitter, pintrest, blogging, and forums.

So the choice has to be made, do we choose to test the waters now on some of these non-traditional marketing ideas or do we let the wave crash on our heads in the next few years. There are so many opportunities to inexpensively make your marketing/advertising dollars work for you that doesn't include a $2000 monthly billboard.

Seek and you shall find.

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Posted 11 June 2012 21:13pm by Patricio Robles 

Since going public in what may be remembered as one of biggest IPO disasters ever, Facebook has come under fire as industry observers question the efficacy of its ad offerings.
But is all of the criticism of Facebook deserved? No, at least according to comScore.
Despite the fact that a large percentage of Facebook users say they're ignoring Facebook ads, comScore says that it's "time to change the discussion on measuring Facebook effectiveness."
In a blog post last Thursday, it previewed some of its findings from its upcoming report, The Power of Like 2: How Social Marketing Works. comScore's key claim: "Facebook earned media is having a statistically significant positive lift on people’s purchasing of a brand."
It came to this conclusion through a "test vs. control methodology", which the analytics firm believes is far superior to the surveys which have indicated most Facebook users are not paying attention to ads and marketing content on Facebook.
"While surveys can be useful in assessing ad effectiveness lifts across attitudinal dimensions such as brand awareness, favorability and purchase intent, people tend not to provide very accurate assessments of their own behavior. And their accuracy in recalling their own behavior over an extended period of time can be especially unreliable," comScore's Andrew Lipsman explained.
So do comScore's findings, which will apparently cast a more positive light on Facebook, trump all of the evidence, some of it anecdotal, that Facebook just isn't as powerful a marketing platform as many had hoped it would be? Perhaps, but there are a few key points worth keeping in mind:

• comScore is not a disinterested observer. As AllThingsDigital's Peter Kafka notes, Facebook is a comScore client and the two companies collaborated on this new report, as well as an earlier report on Facebook marketing. While it would be inappropriate to suggest that comScore and Facebook are cooking the books so to speak, there's no doubt that with so much money being invested in social, companies in the online advertising ecosystem have little incentive to say "It just doesn't work!"
• There is no such thing as earned media on Facebook. comScore's report focuses on 'earned media' on Facebook, but is there really such a thing? Brands invest a lot of money in their Facebook Pages, but they don't really own them. Through its EdgeRank algorithm, Facebook can control the reach of brand messages, and when Facebook makes changes, those changes can have a huge impact -- and not always for the better.
• ROI may still be questionable. Even if there are ways marketers can use Facebook to positive effect, brands will still need to look at ROI. After all, 'earned media' on Facebook isn't free. Case in point: of GM's $30m in Facebook spend, $20m of it was apparently going to its 'free' Facebook Page. Clearly, content doesn't create itself, and Facebook initiatives don't run themselves.

At the end of the day, the differing views on the efficacy of marketing on Facebook serve as a strong reminder that there's no substitute for defining, tracking and analyzing.
Facebook is changing, and will continue to change. Mobile usage is up, audience growth is slowing, and the company will continue to try new things. The only way brands can really make smart, well-informed strategic decisions around their Facebook marketing investments is to make sure they've defined KPIs for Facebook initiatives, are collecting the data needed to measure them and have staff diligently analyzing the data regularly to see if their investments are bearing fruit.
Brands doing anything less than this (like trusting a survey or a report) might as well flip a coin to answer the question, "Does Facebook marketing work?"

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Go Big or Go Home.... or Stay Small?

There is this misnomer that a company has to choose to either focus on large multi-service projects or strictly stick to small "one up" type of transactions. This is unfortunate because opportunity on both sides are going to present themselves and if a company is unprepared for one or the other they are going to miss out on a potentially lucrative revenue stream.

At E35 Creative we run into this on a weekly basis. We're an outsourced digital marketing company. We offer everything from graphic design to website development to brand management and social media integration. We have many companies who choose to utilize us with just one of those services because we're not in a position to turn the work down and I'm not sure I ever want to be. In fact we're in the process of starting and E35 Creative arm that builds websites in three days called 72hoursites.com. That's a "one up", transaction type of business if I've ever seen one. The end goal is to gain trust so we can be their 360 degree marketing company but they have to enter into our services somewhere.

The tough thing in this day and age is to build trust with a consumer who is bombarded with companies saying "trust me". If you can open several doors to your business so your customer has many entry point options, you have a better chance of turning a potential customer into an actual customer. Then you can execute their singular project well and get a chance to sell them on some of your other services.

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Don't Put All Your Eggs In One Basket

 via Small Business Trends

Your website serves as your best tool for attracting attention from potential customers online. Since your web content is what really carries your message across and secures conversions, your content marketing needs to be optimized for your targeted customer profile.

But what if you have multiple targeted customer profiles, with different tastes and motivations, and they all require a different approach? Do you optimize for one group, at the risk of alienating or under-representing another? Do you target your content as little as possible, leaving your website with vague, muddled content that doesn’t attract any customers?

Divide and Prosper: Target Multiple Customer Profiles

The internet is a very versatile medium, and you shouldn’t worry about reaching one profile or another if your business caters to multiple customer bases. Your website cannot only be optimized for a single customer profile; you can optimize it for any number of customer profiles by putting extra work into creating separate user experiences for each customer base.
In simple terms: you can make your website reach who you want, and deliver it in a way that they can customize for themselves.
There are many different ways to implement multiple content sets for different customer profiles. Generally speaking, it is easiest to target individual customer profiles by creating a specific microsite or separate landing page for different customer types, and letting your visitors define who they are on arrival. Allowing your customers to identify themselves through selective content options can provide a wealth of valuable data that can drive your future online strategies.
To accomplish this, you need an entirely different set of webpages for each client profile. You can create individualized landing pages that speak to the pain points and specific needs of a hyper-focused target segment, or you can generalize a bit more and classify your targeted groups by profession, interests, or level of expertise.
Your website will need some sort of navigation options that make your differentiated webpages available to your visitors. This can be done with a simple dropdown menu, a site prompt upon arrival, a gateway page listing specific destinations for visitors, or any other number of creative, attention-grabbing methods.

Wikipedia Segments Their Content, and So Can You

The most common example would be any international website. Take Wikipedia for example. The landing page you arrive on is simple to understand, and vastly segmented. If you are a French or Italian visitor, Wikipedia would be fairly inaccessible to you if you landed on Wikipedia’s English-language front page.
By providing a globally-focused landing page to all users that arrive on their front-most landing page, Wikipedia has segmented their content based on language. The user then clicks their preferred language, and can access the content specifically tailored to them.
Amazon.com also segments their webpage based on languages. If you scroll to the bottom of the homepage, you will see under their bottom-most logo a list of other nations. Canadian shoppers can select Amazon Canada and access Canadian products at Canadian prices. Not only have they segmented their websites by language, but also by visitors’ professional levels immediately above this. If you are an investor or a member of the press, you can find content specially catered to you at Amazon’s Investor Relations pages or the Press Releases page.
Many international businesses have elegant, minimal landing pages that offer segmentation by geographic region, language, and level of interest. These are incredibly broad segments, and may not be immediately applicable to small businesses. You can, however, apply these general ideas to your small business website easily.

Make Segments Work for Your Business

Identifying your targeted segments is the first step in the process. You can use business research, site analytics, and any other resources on this site and others. Once you’ve researched your customers, you should be able to form a general profile of who your most valuable customers are. If you sell kitchen appliances, your segments may include profiles like “The Soccer Mom,” “The Newlywed Couple,” or “Dads Looking to Upgrade.”
From there, you can design content strategies around each profile. What motivates each profile? What do they not like? What are they looking for from your business? After the lengthy task of developing custom content for each of your specifically-targeted customer profiles, you can create special landing pages and other web content specifically tailored to them.
After your segmented content pages are done, you should include a navigation option or engaging interactive elements that prompts the user to identify themselves. However specifically or generally you provide definitions for what defines your visitors, make it clear that there are different categories they should fall under. Designations like “Just Browsing?” and “Looking to Sell” can direct visitors to entirely different sets of content.
After your navigation element is in place, watch your site usage statistics. The types of pages people visit will tell you the success or failures of your targeted segments. If you have one set of content that is hit far more often than another, you’ll know that the lower-performing target profile may need fixing, or might be unnecessary.
By watching your statistics and knowing where your traffic comes from, as well as where they go and who they are, you can craft content marketing strategies that drive results and greatly increase ROI with laser-focused, customer-targeting accuracy.

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New Facebook Pages Help Businesses Better Manage Their Social Media

BY Mikal E. Belicove| 18 hours ago|

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If you manage a business or brand page on Facebook, you'll be happy to know there's a slew of new features that can help make your job easier. Here's a rundown:
Administrative roles: You can now assign administrative roles to the people who help manage your page. There are five different roles: manager, content creator, moderator, advertiser and insights analyst. To assign roles to your Facebook page's admins, login to your Facebook account, visit the Page you manage, click Edit Page above the Admin Panel, and click Admin Roles in the left column.
Scheduled posts: You can schedule your updates to post at a future date and time using the Facebook sharing tool (that's the box you use to create and post a Status Update). Until now, the only way to schedule a post in the future was through a third-party app. But now, simply by clicking the symbol resembling a clock in the bottom row of the sharing tool and selecting a time and date that you'd like it to go live, you can post a Status Update, photo or video up to six months in advance.
Promoted posts: You can pay a fee to promote a post so it will be shown in the news feeds of more of the people who like your Page than you would reach normally. Friends of Facebook members who have interacted with a promoted post will be more likely to see the information in their news feeds. Promoted posts cost $5 or more.
Only pages with 400 or more likes are eligible to promote posts, and similar to scheduling a post to publish on a particular date, promoted posts are initiated from within the sharing tool. To promote a new post, click Promote on the bottom row of the sharing tool, where you'll be asked to set your budget and confirm a method of payment. To promote a post you've already published and is less than three days old, click the Promote dropdown menu in the lower right corner of the post from your Page's Timeline.

Google+ Adds New Local Listings Tab for Businesses

BY Jason Fell| May 30, 2012|

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Google's fast-growing, if only still nascent, social network Google+ has rolled out a new tab dedicated to providing information on local businesses. Located on the right-hand side of the Google+ page, Google+ Local allows users to search for businesses that are nearby, read reviews and find them using Google Maps.
For instance, if you search for "cheeseburgers" on Google+ Local, it will generate a list of restaurants near your location that serve cheeseburgers. If you click on one of the listings, you'll be taken to a local Google+ page that includes photos, reviews from people in your Google+ Circles and other information such as address and opening hours from the company's Google Places for Business listing.

For business owners, this means that a company's information on its Google Places for Business listing will now be available to users across Google search, maps, mobile and now Google+. It can be even more important now for business owners to verify their basic listing data, make updates, add photos and respond to customer reviews.

Related: What You Need to Know About the New Google+ Design 
Additionally, Google has integrated a business's Zagat score into its Google+ Local listings. Google purchased the popular business survey rating service last fall for more than $150 million.
"For example, a restaurant that has great food but not great decor might be 4 stars, but with Zagat you'd see a [score of] 26 in Food and an 8 in Decor, and know that it might not be the best place for date night," Google product management director Avni Shah wrote in a blog post announcing the Google+ Local launch.
The search giant also hinted that it will be further integrating Google+ business pages and Google+ Local listings.
"We know many of you have already created a Google+ Page for your business, and have been hosting hangouts and sharing photos, videos and posts," Jen Fitzpatrick, Google's vice president of engineering, wrote in a separate blog post. "We're excited that we'll soon extend these social experiences to more Google+ Local pages in the weeks and months ahead."

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The Infamous Pipeline

There's no great way to say this.... keep stuffing! The risk for many start ups or established companies that may be seeing a dip in revenue is to get frustrated and stop doing the things that you know will reap rewards in the end. For many owners and CxOs in this situation the temptation is to stop making contacts, stop walking in on other business owners, and stop picking up the phone. They've had several "good" conversations but nothing is panning out. I know how you feel, because I have been their in the past and I'm there in a few ways now.

I wish there was some game changing advise. There's not. The only thing I can tell you this: Established companies, take a look back at your history, this is probably not the first time you have been in this place, it will get better with disciplined systems and lots of contacts. Continue doing what's made you successful up to this point. Start Ups: Even though you are a start up this is probably not your first job, you probably have some experience in the field you've chosen to start a company in. Remember why you did it, be encouraged, and make sales calls. Have the guts to call on customers, figure out ways to reach out when they aren't banging down your door.

The business pipeline is a fickle mistress. You need to have her full and satisfied at all times but even then the faucet doesn't always turn on and when it does sometimes it's just a trickle. Many times she leaks before she's sent leads all the way to the end. But know this, it will always be like this. You may get better at putting in business that she prefers and you may get more skilled at nudging her along but the system will never change. Embrace it, make your calls, do your follow up, and she will flow... eventually.


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