Morettini on Management

General Management and Marketing Advice for Software and Tech Companies

Category: Online Marketing

Pay Per Click (PPC) Online Advertising

It’s known by several names: PPC or Pay Per Click advertising, CPC or Cost Per Click advertising, or sometimes by the best known PPC advertising engine, Google Adwords.

Pay Per Click advertising is no longer new; as a result, much of the “easy” money has already been made. But I’m struck by how many companies I run across that are still NOT using this method to attract prospects or make sales on the web. While it is now a competitive channel unlike in the early days of this medium, it can still be very effective and cost-effective in many markets.

PPC should be a staple of the promotion budget of nearly every company (although not a major portion of the overall budget, in most cases). It should also be one of the first promotional methods utilized on behalf of a new product, service or company. Here’s why:

Complex to Optimize–But Simple to Start
PPC advertising campaigns can be very complex and extensive, and will be once you get them optimized. Many companies are spending tens of thousands of dollars/month on PPC. At that point they should be making a lot of money for you–so it’s worth the investment and the trouble!

But getting started is quite easy–anyone can do it. You simply open an account with one of the major advertising engines, which will take you all of five minutes or so. You can put together a basic test campaign in less than an hour’s time. I always recommend starting with Google Adwords first. Once you are successful and understand what you are doing on Adwords, it is pretty easy to move your functioning campaigns to the other major system (Microsoft Adcenter) and the tertiary players. There are differences, but they are fundamentally the same.

Adwords is the most powerful and has by far the greatest reach, yet it is still very easy to set up your initial trial campaigns. There is an excellent set of online Help and tutorials to walk you through the basics. When you set up your initial campaigns, you WILL make mistakes. But don’t worry. Just set your budget limits to a low number that you can easily afford, and you will quickly climb the learning curve. Once you’ve learned the basics of what you are doing, you can then seek assistance to do the final optimizations to your campaigns, which will lead to the greatest success. You may decide to “do it yourself”; if so, there are a lot of different experts out there with modestly priced guides and services to bring you to the top of your PPC game. Or at this point, you may wish to outsource your PPC advertising activity. I always recommend opening an account on your own first, even if you plan to outsource. The knowledge that you gain will help you in hiring a third party who will best optimize your PPC activity, if you decide a third party PPC firm is the way to go for you.

Easy on the Budget
If you are a thinly capitalized startup company, or have a tight budget for a new product or market segment, you can start a PPC campaign that brings you results that you can continually improve, for just a few dollars/month. As usually is the case, the more money available the better. The more money you have to spend, the faster you can receive statistically significant results–which can then be used to tweak your campaigns for improvement, over and over again. But if you can only spare $50, $100 or $500 per month at first–don’t let that deter you. In most cases you can get started and move your campaign forward, at even these low budget levels. The beauty of PPC is that you really don’t need to commit to a large budget until you’re sure that you’ve got a profitable campaign. At that point, you’ll want to pour as much money into your campaign that you can muster. Once a campaign is proven profitable, pouring more money into it is like turning up a profit meter!

Precise Measurements
One of the major advantages of PPC advertising, compared to traditional offline adverting and other promotional methods, is the ability to precisely measure nearly every important aspect of your campaign. The ability to precisely track your results is much greater than any other form of promotion I’ve utilized in my career. This measurement precision turns PPC advertising into the most scientific form of marketing available. After some initial hypotheses with respect to Ad copy, keyword selection and landing page design, it is possible to systematically improve your results by tweaking these elements of your campaign  almost forever–increasing your profitability as you go.

Fast Results
The other important aspect of PPC advertising, in conjunction with measurement precision which makes this medium so systematic and scientific, is the ability to get this precise feedback in near real time. As an example, in traditional, offline advertising campaign, you need to invest tens of thousands of dollars upfront. After this large investment, you won’t even know if your campaign was successful for months. With PPC advertising, you quickly get feedback in the form of precise, quantifiable results, sometimes only minutes after you started it. As a result, you can have a fully optimized, profitable PPC campaign working, before you would even get your initial measurements with other methods.

The Ideal Platform to Test Messaging, Campaigns and Offers
The expediency and precision of PPC advertising make it a great platform to kick off any new product, market segment or company. It is very efficient way of testing messages, offers and websites. Once you’ve discovered and proven the things that work best, you can transfer this knowledge to your rollout of other promotional vehicles. This greatly reduces the risk inherent in starting up new marketing campaigns of any type, and should increase your profitability across platforms and promotional vehicles from day one.

Summary
As you can tell, I am a big proponent of PPC advertising as a staple of every marketing budget. Unless your market is so small that it consists of only a few hundred prospects, I recommend it to nearly every software and high tech company on the planet. Consumer, Enterprise or SMB–it’s very effective across many markets. In fact, the more of a niche your market is, the more cost-effective PPC becomes, due to reduced competition and lower resulting bid prices. There are a few highly competitive markets these days which are so competitive, that it’s hard to run a profitable PPC campaign. But these are still the minority. So if you aren’t active in PPC advertising today–get started! Give it a try, and let me know your questions or comments.

Follow Phil Morettini and Morettini on Management via Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, RSS, or the PJM Consulting Quarterly Newsletter. Contact Phil directly at info@pjmconsult.com

1 Comment by admin on February 26, 2007
filed in B2C, Marcom, Online Marketing, Promotion, sales
tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Dell Computer

Dell has been in the news recently, and like many big companies that have had a glitch in their performance, not in a good way.

Slowing revenue growth, accounting scandals and customer service issues–you’ve heard it all before. By the way, where was the seminar that all big company managements attended, encouraging them to cut corners on their financial reporting practices? It seems that the same pattern has been replicated to an astounding degree across a broad array of large corporations. There has to be some root cause of this; too much smoke in this area to be a coincidence. And of course, the “Professional CEO” relieved of his duties–and replaced by the company founder, returning on a white horse to his original role to refocus the company.

These things have been so common in corporate America. Business writers may have been able to perform an automated “search and replace” in their word processor and write a new, yet the same, story for each additional corporation unfortunate enough to make the headlines. So what’s the deal with Dell–the details always tell the real story–and what happens from here?

ENORMOUS SUCCESS OVER TIME

First off, I want to give Dell Computer and Michael Dell their just due. This is one of the great success stories in corporate history. Started in a dorm room, Mr. Dell built the company into the dominant PC maker of its time, with a long history of exceptional growth and profitability. The company used the direct model at the time when it was counter-intuitive that this would allow a long run of success–which it did. The story of Dell is much more about what has been done right–than wrong. I had some limited contact with Mr. Dell years after Dell was already a large company. He was courteous and thoughtful and very impressive. I have nothing but great respect for the company and its founder.

Probably the strongest endorsement I can make of my opinion of the company, is that the last 3 computers that I’ve purchased have been Dells–even though I am a proud alumnus of HP.

THE FATE OF ALL BIG COMPANIES

But Dell has definitely hit a major pothole, and has had its reputation tarnished on many levels. As I’ve written before, these things inevitably happen to all successful large companies. Nothing great lasts forever–and it should be pointed out that at Dell, it’s lasted a very long time.

Growth has leveled off, and they are no longer the darling of Wall Street’s growth followers. Accounting scandals always reduce a company in the eyes of the public, and firing your CEO, who you’ve been raving about for a while, doesn’t exactly induce confidence in your future. But I think the biggest issue for Dell, is that they’ve taken their eye off of the ball when it comes to quality–and even more importantly–customer service.

I’ve written about this in the past, and I think it has played a primary role in Dell’s current problems. When I bought my first Dell computer, quality was almost unquestioned, and customer service and support was a real strength. Unlimited support was bundled in with the product, and it was great. Contrast that with the situation today: Now you are buying a product which is perceived as lower quality, and you almost can’t talk to anyone about anything without a charge. If you are allowed to speak someone in support, it’s hit or miss whether they are knowledgeable, or speak your language fluently. I really believe that the root of the problems has been what I’d call “too much of a good thing”: The relentless drive to reduce costs. As the PC business matured, Dell was far and away the low cost producer, and used this fact to great advantage. I believe that they got carried away with this strategy, and took their eye off of the ball of what made the company great in the first place. Service/Support quality has become such an issue for Dell that they’ve acknowledged it publicly, and announced plans to make significant investments to fix customer service. But real damage to the Dell brand has already been done, in my opinion. I, along with many others, will be looking closely at HP and other competitors when it comes to future computer and related technology purchases.

SO WHERE DO THEY GO FROM HERE?

All great companies hit this point eventually, and with all the company has going for it, the problems are imminently fixable. Unlike most companies that hit a bump in the road at this point, it doesn’t appear that it has happened because the company has become grossly “fat, dumb and happy”, with a bloated bureaucracy. No doubt there is some bureaucracy with a company this size, but ironically, cutting in the wrong places has been the major problem. Michael Dell has announced that he will look at “new strategies” for the company in his return to the CEO role. I consider this a positive. Often founders want to “go back to the future”, and return to what they know made them successful in the first place–I don’t believe that this is the right answer here.

THE OBVIOUS ANSWERS

The first thing is to fix customer service and support, regardless of the cost. The brand will continue to suffer without this, and that would ultimately be deadly. Mr. Dell has announced that he plans to greatly reduce the number of direct reports to the CEO. If done for the right reasons, I applaud this directive.

Even in a famously lean company like Dell, a company at this size tends to become pretty bureaucratic. There tends to be a lot of people around with curious, abstract job titles, who only serve to slow down, and get in the way of progress. Personnel in companies this size often end up spending a lot of time in large internal meetings–talking to each other, instead of listening to the market. Getting ahead in a company at this mature stage often is dependent on bureaucratic skills, rather that creating actual marketplace value. It’s usually important to cull the herd of extraneous roles, and simplify and focus business processes on only those things that create revenue and profit. This looks painful in the short run, but the company actually runs much more smoothly in the long run.

THE NOT SO OBVIOUS ANSWERS

A more difficult decision is whether to remain with a largely “direct-only” business model. This is particularly difficult for Dell, because it has always been what they’ve hung their hats on. In fact, years ago when I had a few discussions with senior managers at the company, the feeling among upper management was that they didn’t know how to do other forms of distribution, and that they had failed in their few toe dips into indirect waters.

In hindsight, at that time, the decision to remain primarily direct-only was the right one. Enormous value has been created with that strategy–you can’t question it in hindsight. But at this stage of the company’s development, I believe that they really need to rethink this. There is evidence that they’ve run out of steam with a direct-only distribution model. In fact, Dell has been dealing with the channel in a very low key manner for years. But both sides have sort of looked at it like “dealing with the devil”: do it because you have to, but be careful not to get burned.

In my opinion, while it may appear risky, it is time for Dell to look at becoming a company that wants to be a real business partner with the channel. Do they want to have a real chance to stay a growth company?(which I assume they do–this is where the high stock P/Es are). If so, there are few other choices other than indirect distribution, at their current size, that will enable the kind of growth opportunities required for real growth. As they’ve looked farther from their core computer offering, to find other things to push through their direct pipe, they’ve been much less successful–as generally is the case. They’ve not become a real player in consumer electronics, and
while they were initially pretty good at giving away printers–they were not so good at selling them, or more importantly, the consumables which are the money maker in that business. The company should proceed carefully and thoughtfully in this regard. I’m sure that Mr. Dell has other initiatives that he is considering, but I’d be shocked if consideration of a major indirect distribution push isn’t high on his list of possibilities.

SUMMARY

What happens from here? Your guess is as good as mine. It should be very interesting to watch what new strategy emerges, and if this company famous for execution can return to those ways–especially if the future includes a major strategy shift. Corporations that have been as successful as Dell for as long as it has usually have 9 lives (see Apple Computer), and Dell is only on its second, by my count. So I wouldn’t bet against them.

That’s my opinion–what’s yours? Post a comment or send me an email.

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
www.pjmconsult.com

No Comments by admin on February 13, 2007
filed in B2C, Business Models, Corporate Strategy, Distribution Channels, General Management, Online Marketing, Retail, VARs, sales
tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Through Online Bookmarking

I’ve spent a fair amount of time talking about Search Engine Optimization in the past. The reason is that in the new century, this is as fundamental to marketing success as print advertising in the last fifty years, and maybe billboard advertising in the fifty years previous to the last fifty. The details and tactics of marketing change, but goals don’t really–getting your products and business in front of prospective customers. It would be really hard to find a business of any size these days that doesn’t have a website. If they don’t, they are probably on the same path as the carriage builders of the early 1900’s–becoming extinct.

That’s why I spend so much time exploring SEO: it is nearly universally critical to the market presence of every company, especially high tech and software companies. So here is one more new technique that you can use to build your company’s Internet presence, including the always present goal of improving your ranking in Search Engine Results for the keywords important to your business.

ONLINE SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

Online bookmarking, also known as “tagging” is a way of making available to others online, your recommendations on interesting content to visit on the Internet. Think of it as making your browser “bookmarks” or “Favorites” available publicly. In fact, most social bookmarking services allow you to upload your bookmarks/favorites into their system to streamline the process. You often have the choice of making your bookmarks available to just people you are acquainted with, or broadly to the public.

While this is a neat thing to do for a consumer from a Web 2.0 perspective, this activity also can have application to online marketers, if used correctly. You simply bookmark or tag the articles that you’ve written and posted online, press releases, news stories, etc.–any important and interesting content related to your company. In doing this, you get the opportunity to include your name, company name and a link to your company’s website in the tag detail. This will create some organic traffic to your site, but will also be of assistance in improving the SEO rankings of your site.

Some people consider this to be spamming, but it really isn’t. You are simply tagging interesting things for people in your industry to find easily. I recommend that you also include your other interesting bookmarks along with your company-specific content, to minimize any concerns.

Now this is a bit of work, even for one social networking service. For maximum effect, you want to cover as many social networking services as possible.

I’ve come across another great, free website that’s assists you in doing just that, greatly limiting the labor involved. It’s called ONLYWIRE. You can use this site to place a tag across multiple social bookmark sites(currently 16 different sites). Using OnlyWire you only have to place the tag once, instead of 16 different times if you tried to do this manually. It requires you to visit the 16 sites and open an account first (which you’d have to do anyway), which is a bit of work–but OnlyWire then increases your productivity tremendously from there on. I’ve been using it for a couple of months and found it to work great. Give it a shot and let me know what you think!

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
www.pjmconsult.com

No Comments by admin on February 1, 2007
filed in Online Marketing, Promotion, Social media, Startup/Early Stage
tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Publishing White Papers on the Web

Let’s talk about another great way of promoting your High Tech product or business on the Internet. One of the best ways to bring QUALIFIED prospects to your site is by publishing whitepapers.

In a previous column, I wrote about WhitePaperSource.com. This is still a great place to start if you are thinking about writing a new White Paper, or even starting a long term white paper campaign. I consider it the authoritative source of information on white papers as a form of promotion. There are forums there where experts reside to answer whatever questions that you may have about this important form of promotion.

The reason that white papers are so important, relative to other forms of promotion, is because they are credible. In fact, if you write a truly great white paper it won’t be viewed by the reader as a form of promotion at all–but as a key information source in the search they are on to solve a particular business problem. So don’t waste your time writing a thinly veiled product advertisement. Write a really useful white paper that will build your company or product’s image as a leader in your business category–and one whose products and services should be checked out FIRST.

I wanted to provide you with some great additional online resources for your white paper campaigns:

PLACES TO LIST YOUR WHITE PAPERS

IT AND TECHNOLOGY TOPICS

http://www.keyitsolutions.com/

http://www.itpapers.com/

http://www.tecwhitepapers.com/

SOFTWARE

http://www.softwareceo.com/white_papers.php

NETWORK SECURITY

http://www.securitydocs.com/

GENERAL BUSINESS AND VERTICAL MARKETS

http://www.bnet.com/whitepapers.html‘

So there you go, some additional resources for you Technology and Software white paper campaigns. Check them out and let me know what you think. Since this is my last column of 2006–Happy New Year–let’s have a chat in 2007!

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
www.pjmconsult.com

No Comments by admin on December 29, 2006
filed in Marcom, Online Marketing, Promotion, Social media
tagged , ,

Google Sitemap Creator

There are a great many different avenues to creating a website optimized for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). We’ve covered many aspects of this very important marketing activity in several past columns. Let’s talk about one more today, creating a sitemap for your site.

Many websites have historically had a page containing an index, or map, of every page available on your website. The reason was to provide a master index for the human eyes that were surfing your site. It was always considered to be most helpful for very large sites, as a way to efficiently find exactly what you were looking for. That rationale for creating a site map still exists today.

But there is now an additional reason for creating a sitemap, and it is possibly even more compelling.

Google has enacted a program that allows webmasters to make it easier for the Google Bots to successfully find, surf and index their sites. They call it Google Sitemaps. It is essentially a specialized form of the old sitemap concept, this time utilizing an XML format rather than plain old human language. By using this special XML format, you enable the Bots to easily “read” what your site looks like, so it will know how scan the site, and (hopefully!) index it fully. Google has built in some ability to troubleshoot your site by viewing it from the Bots perspective, allowing you to fix any issues that might prevent your site from appearing in the index. Things like flash, frames, etc, if they are issues, by participating in Google’s program you might become aware of the issues and be able to fix them. I believe that Google is also working with the other major search engines to make this a standard.

There are some nice things that drop out of creating a Google sitemap. You can tell the Bots what the most important pages are, how often the site is updated, etc. Supposedly this is simply a way to make it more efficient to get your site indexed (IF the Bots decide it is worth indexing), and doesn’t give your site any preference with respect to actually GETTING indexed, or WHERE your site might fall in the rankings. But it’s Google, so you never know! They are after all, the “international company of mystery.”

There are many good free Google Sitemap creators available on the Internet. I’ve used a couple of them without incident. Here’s one of the newer ones that I’ve run across:

XML-Sitemaps.com

Give it a try and let me know what you think.

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
www.pjmconsult.com

No Comments by admin on November 20, 2006
filed in Marcom, Online Marketing

Link Building for Free

As most everyone who isn’t a newbie to Search Engine Optimization (SEO) knows, building links is one of the most important activities to excel at, if you want to eventually rank high on the Search Engine results pages. But how do you accomplish this? When you are first getting started, it seems to be a daunting task.

Frankly, without using black hat techniques that will ultimately cause you more harm than good, it is a lot of work–there’s no way around it. My suggestion is that you look at link-building as a marathon, not a sprint. If you don’t, the task can appear so overwhelming that you might not ever start–which would be very unfortunate. It’s just too important to establishing a strong online presence.

Like just about everything else in SEO, this is a constantly changing area, which you need to stay on top of. This is mostly because the Search Engines are continuously trying to improve their results. The way they believe that this improvement will come about is by ensuring that the results are “natural”. In other words, they are always attempting to overcome any and all SEO techniques which might “artificially” raise one web page over another in their results. What represents good marketing to website owners is seen as obstacles to overcome by the Googles and Yahoos of the world, in a great many instances.

For example, it wasn’t too long ago that joining a link exchange network was a smart and attractive way to build links. But a recent change to the major search engine algorithms has “penalized” reciprocal links, to the extent that most inbound and outbound links “cancel each other out”. It no longer makes sense, in most circumstances, to invest time in reciprocal link-building activities. The exception is if you can exchange a link on your low PageRank (PR) page, for a link on a partner’s high PR page. But to do this successfully in any volume, you will need to find some pretty clueless partners!

So what’s the best way of going about gaining high quality inbound links? Well, there are several that I recommend for just about anyone. A regular Press Release campaign, utilizing an online Press Release distribution service, is a great way to build links. Make sure that you are sending out real news, and not just fluff. You’ll also want this to be useful for your offline marketing, as well. Make sure after you’re written the release “organically”, that you go back and optimize it for your important search keywords. Don’t be so maniacal about this that you mess up the readability, but I find if you go back after your first draft, you can usually make the release more keyword-rich, without negatively impacting the content or readability.

I also recommend that you write articles relevant to your industry or specialty. Post them on your site to build your own content, but as they age, you can also release them via an Internet Article distribution service. If you do this right, you will end up will thousands of additional inbound links over time.

The final method I’d like to talk about is the one just about everyone should start with–Directory Listing. This is a bit of work, but it’s completely free, with the exception of you time commitment. And many of these directories will be of real benefit to your SEO efforts due to their high PageRanks. Anyone can do this, so it’s something you can assign to a junior member of your company. Start with the free directories, and then look at the ones that charge for inclusion, but are inexpensive. In some cases they may make sense as well. A good starting point for this effort is the directory list at http://www.strongestlinks.com/directories.php.

That’s my tip for today on free and cheap ways to enhance your web presence. I hope it helps! Let me know about your own tricks.

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
www.pjmconsult.com

No Comments by admin on October 30, 2006
filed in Online Marketing, Promotion, Social media

Online Marketing Widgets

In this article I thought that I’d provide an update to my online marketer’s bag of additional free tools that I’ve run across on the Web–and which I found useful:

Domain Age Checker -The age of your websites domain is factored into the rankings of some search engines. If you are thinking about buying an existing domain, this can give you an indicator of its age. Older domains get a slight edge in the search engine rankings.

Keyword Cloud – I found this one to be really neat. It provides a graphical representation of the keywords on a website page, as well as a listing of the frequency of keywords in tabular form. This is a really good starting point in evaluating an existing site relative to target keywords.

Future PageRank – Another unique little tool. This one queries the 10 Google Data Centers, to see if a particular page is ranked differently on any particular Google server vs. the rest. If there is an outlier, it could indicated that there is an upgrade or downgrade in PageRank coming for that webpage.

Bid Stats
Bid Stats is a tool to automate the monotonous task of checking keyword prices. It queries the Overture Bid database and compiles useful statistics to help you make decisions on keywords, such as if you want to bid on them, or develop content around them. Although the numbers will be different for Google Adwords (almost always higher), it still gives you a good idea of the competitiveness of your target keywords in both the PPC and SEO world. You can enter up to 15 keywords to compile the statistics about, and simply enter one keyword or phrase per line.

Website Promotion and Targeted Link Popularity – This is a nice tool which assists you in finding other websites which could provide high value to your site, if there was a backlink listed to your site. You simply input up to seven websites which are your competitors, have similar visitors to your site, or offer similar but non-competing products and services to your site. The tool returns to you a list of sites that are linked to at least two of the sites that you input. This is a great way to find sites that you can pursue links on, either via PR, link exchange, or some other strategy.

That’s what’s new to the toolbag this month! Drop me a note, or post a comment and let me know if any of these prove useful to you.

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
www.pjmconsult.com

1 Comment by admin on September 22, 2006
filed in Online Marketing, Social media

Overture and its Bid Tool

I wanted to tell you quickly about another very useful tool for Search Engine Marketing. It’s the Overture Bid Tool, which you can access from several different places. I’ve linked a site above that is accessible to anyone; if you are currently doing business with Overture, you can of course access it from within the Overture site.

For those of you who don’t know, Overture is the Pay-Per-Click (PPC) division of Yahoo. Overture was the pioneer in the PPC business, and was later purchased by Yahoo. It is now officially known as Yahoo Search Marketing, but many people still know it as Overture, so the brand has stuck around. It’s a direct competitor to Google Adwords; although it was the pioneer, Overture’s technology has fallen behind Google. Yahoo has a big new upgrade of the service which will be available soon (it was supposed to be released by now, but was delayed). It is supposed to help Yahoo get back in the game and catch up with Google in the PPC business–we shall see. Google surged ahead of it with superior technology that it released at a far faster rate. There may be quite number of you who have utilized Google Adwords but have never tried Yahoo/Overture, since the general perception is that is “where the action is”. These days with the extreme competition for good keywords on the Adwords platform that may be a dubious strategy, but that’s a discussion for another time.

One of the features where Overture has maintained some functionality not available on Adwords is the Overture Bid Tool. This tool is of great use for Search Engine Marketing, in general. It’s very easy to use: you simply type in any search term that you are interested in, and the Overture Bid tool will return a list of advertisers for that the keyword or phrase, with the exact amount that they are bidding.

This can be very valuable in a number of instances. You might for example, use it to scope out a new market, to see if PPC advertising will make economic sense. You can use it to get an in depth view of the marketing strategy of your closest competitors. In a more global view, it can give you an quick overall picture of the competitiveness of a market segment. In many markets, PPC spending can be an excellent proxy for how competitive a particular market space is. So if there is brutal bidding on Overture, you can expect the SEO competition will be almost as bad, and even traditional marketing channels have a good chance of being pretty clogged up as well. And since Overture doesn’t have the volume of Adwords, the bids tend to be lower–so you can expect the competition on the Adwords platform is even worse.

Give the Overture Bid Tool a try–use it for whatever purpose that you like. It’s free, and easy to use. Let me know what use you found for it.

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
http://www.pjmconsult.com/

No Comments by admin on August 30, 2006
filed in B2C, Marcom, Online Marketing, Promotion

Behavioral Marketing – What’s all the Fuss About?

There’s a “new” form of online marketing that’s all the rage, and is getting a lot of press these days. Different people call it different things, including “Behavioral Targeting”, but for the purposes of this discussion we’ll call it “Behavioral Marketing”. The most interesting thing about this technique is that it real isn’t new at all.

Let’s talk about what Behavioral Marketing is, and isn’t. It’s not any great new marketing theory or technique. It’s really just another form of database or segmentation marketing. Marketers have been attempting to categorize and segment potential customers since the beginning of the free enterprise system. What’s really new and exciting about it is that it has couple age-old marketing techniques with web technology that enables the marketing segmentation to be applied more efficiently and accurately. As I stated in the headline, it’s all the rage, being used by brick and mortar companies like Best Buy in store design, and pure web companies like Yahoo, who utilizes their vast portfolio of free services to get a handle of what Internet surfers are really up to.

My personal focus is on Technology and Software Management and Marketing Techniques. Behavioral Marketing isn’t a technique specific only to the market served by PJM Consulting, since it is broadly applicable to any company marketing products or services online. But my client base of software and technology companies should have a special interest in this topic, since they tend to be early adopters of leading edge technologies, such as utilized in this technique.

BEHAVIOR, NOT APPEARANCES OR LOCATION

In the context of online activity, behavioral marketing is the technique of targeting consumers based on their behavior online, rather than by simply the content of pages they visit, or the demographic characteristics of the prospect. For example, the prospect’s surfing habits might cause them to be grouped into a category of active car shoppers, or a different category of engaged women planning a wedding in the very near future–or both. These categories are constructed using information compiled from both clickstream data and IP information. Behavioral marketing networks with thousands of participating websites are being developed, which allow marketers to build databases that characterize online surfing behaviors across a wide spectrum of websites, in near real time. Marketers using behavioral techniques can then target these consumers by serving ads tailored to the predefined segments or categories. This is an example of a classic marketing technique that is made much more practical by Internet technology. The Internet isn’t essential to the practice of behavioral marketing, but it can greatly add to its effectiveness.

HOW IT WORKS

So how does it work? Generally, you’re being tracked as you surf the net using Adware, or tracking cookies on your computers. Adware is a dirty word to a lot of people, and is often lumped in with Spyware. What’s the difference? As I’m defining it here, Adware has no “mal intent” like some Spyware, and is fully disclosed and consented to. It is used strictly to track behavior and activities online, for the purpose of categorizing the surfer into a preset category, then serving an Ad targeted to that group. Not to steal your identity, or empty your bank account (at least not without your knowledge!).

IS IT A GOOD OR A BAD THING?

So is this new Behavioral Marketing stuff a positive development? Like most things in Marketing, that’s in the eye or the beholder–and the hands of the user.

Extreme voices on the user side of the privacy discussion will object strenuously to anything that has even the slightest privacy implication, no matter how benign. It doesn’t matter whether the risk of abuse is slight or non-existent; they will toll the bell of alarm and protest vigorously. These folks are against just about any form of marketing that is proactive. There feeling is that marketers must wait for people to come to them. If their logic was followed, a great many innovative, productive technologies would never have found their way into common use. Thankfully, our free enterprise system isn’t that restrictive.

On the other side of this equation are the abusers of technology (I refuse to call them marketers), who will take any innovation and unscrupulously attempt to use it to their advantage–consequences be damned. Email Spammers are the most recent and dramatic example of this genre of fast-buck artists. One of the great innovations in communications in our time, email is perfectly suited to direct marketing, when used properly and responsibly. With proper targeting and a reasonable approach to permission, email marketing has strong benefits to both the marketer and the consumer. But the Spammers repetitively stuff our in-boxes with the same useless drivel, until this elegant technology becomes practically unusable for its intended purpose. By doing this, Spammers turn the flabbergasted public against even legitimate forms of email marketing, wasting a huge opportunity to conduct efficient commerce for us all.

WHAT’S THE VERDICT?

So what will it be with Online Behavioral Marketing? Will it be used just for good, or for evil as well? Since this form of marketing is really just getting started, it remains to be seen. But if history is a guide, there’s a good chance it may end up being both a blessing and a curse.

What’s your position on Behavioral Marketing? I’d like to hear your thoughts.

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
http://www.pjmconsult.com/

No Comments by admin on August 21, 2006
filed in B2C, Online Marketing, Promotion, Social media, market research

Maintaining and Editing your High Tech Blog

Blogs have become important marketing tools for many companies these days. Of course, being in the forefront of technology means that software and tech companies are early adopters of business Blogs. Whether it’s for marketing purposes as an online newsletter, to obtain feedback from the customer base, to have dialogue with potential clients, or to simply add interesting content to your website thereby increasing its “stickiness”, business Blogs are all the rage.

It’s challenging enough to come up with the content to include in your Blog. What you don’t need is difficulty in implementing that content, quickly and easily, into your Blog.

Unfortunately, some of the standard tools provided by the Blog software companies and services leave a bit to be desired. I use Blogger by Google as the infrastructure to my own Blog, Morettini on Management. I am generally happy with Blogger, as it has most of the features to meet my needs, and is generally stable.

But one area where Blogger is weak is in tools for creation and editing of Posts. The biggest problem is that the tools are browser-based. That’s a good thing in general, but when I’m trying to quickly write a serious document of any length, the lag time between typing and appearance on the page can be maddening. In addition, the editing tools aren’t exactly “feature-rich” with respect to formatting issues. For this reason, I prefer to use an offline editor, to create and publish my posts.

Luckily, there are some add-on tools out there to make your life easier. I use an MS Word add-in provided by Blogger itself, called Blogger for Word. It integrates in smoothly with Microsoft Word, and adds a few menu items to Word which enable “one-click” posting. Using this tool, I can create Posts like I do any other document in this venerable word processor, and simply post to my Blog with a single click. All the formatting that I use in Word is maintained when the document is posted to the Blog. It works great!

If you don’t use Blogger, there’s also a similar, but more general tool available: w.bloggar. This tool is an editor that can be used to post to a number of the well-know Weblog systems that are available. Currently, w.bloggar is compatible with all Weblog Systems that implements Blogger API, metaWeblog API, MovableType API and b2 API; all based on the XML-RPC definition. I haven’t used w.bloggar yet personally, but it looks pretty slick.

Both Blogger for Word and w.bloggar are available for free, although w.bloggar appreciates donations. Try them out and send me your own review.

Phil Morettini
PJM Consulting
www.pjmconsult.com

No Comments by admin on July 24, 2006
filed in Marcom, Online Marketing, Promotion, Social media, Startup/Early Stage
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