Is your site design Googley?

Published
by
Kyle Bumgardner
 
on April 24, 2008 
in General Marketing
. 0 Comments

A member of the Google User Experience Group has posted a guide to “Googley” design on the Official Blog…which seeks to provide insight into how Google designers and researchers worldwide approach everything from - user interface design, visual design, user research, web development, and user interface writing.

The ten “googley principles are here and listed below:

1. Focus on people—their lives, their work, their dreams.
2. Every millisecond counts.
3. Simplicity is powerful.
4. Engage beginners and attract experts.
5. Dare to innovate.
6. Design for the world.
7. Plan for today’s and tomorrow’s business.
8. Delight the eye without distracting the mind.
9. Be worthy of people’s trust.
10. Add a human touch.

Does your company’s site convey these principles?
Would adopting or at least considering ways to incorporate these principles improve the user experience of your customer or prospects?

Yes.

For additional insight into the “Googley” philosophy, you can check out Ten things Google has found to be true.

How can you survive an economic downturn?

Published
by
Tom Dressler
 
on April 10, 2008 
in Social Media
. 0 Comments

According to Forrester…

Q1 was rough with consumer spending in the US dropping, hurting both US and global brands, and with stocks in a tailspin every time anyone used the word “recession.”

In March, Forrester asked its CMO Panel how the downturn would affect their budgets. More than one hundred panel members, with an average marketing budget of $83 million, responded that they expect their CFOs to demand an average cut by 3%. They said they would save on branding, advertising, and traditional media, while keeping budgets for loyalty programs, marketing technology, and new media mostly untouched.

Employ agencies that connect with consumers. Traditional agencies excel at above-the-line mass marketing — the line items you want to cut. Forrester believes that the agency of the future will excel at understanding your consumers, involving them in defining the brand and spreading the message, and in making them loyal brand advocates — supporting those budget items you are keeping strong. Some agencies are on the path to connecting with consumers via social networks. Is your agency, or should you switch to a strong partner in these rough times?

Start experimenting with online video. Traditional media is getting into the perfect storm: Consumer attention and trust is at an all-time low, and advertisers are cutting both ad budgets and old media budgets. To survive, they need to target ads and content to individual households and consumers. While Time Warner, Comcast, Disney, and many others will speed up their trials in this field, marketing leaders should get ready for the biggest change since color TV. How? By experimenting with Web video, to understand which processes, content, and customer intelligence you will need when television offers the same functions.

Invest in intelligence. The name of the new marketing game: targeting. Marketing leaders have voted with their wallets to reduce the two large budget items that show the biggest waste. To get the most from their reduced budgets, they need to understand their clients better — their (media) behaviors, attitudes, needs, and social connections.

This requires investments in marketing technology like CRM, in analytics, and in training. We are glad to see that CMOs kept these line items intact.

We believe that these actions are critical for every marketing leader’s success.

New Benchmarking Service Available from Google

Published
by
Tom Dressler
 
on April 10, 2008 
in Website Analytics
. 0 Comments

Google recently announced the availability of a benchmarking service that gives users the ability to compare their properties to other sites within an industry. Brett Crosby from the Google Analytics blog writes, “Of course, benchmarking only works if people can opt to share their data into the system, so we’re also introducing a new data-sharing settings page. On this page, customers can choose whether to opt in or opt out of sharing their Analytics data. To be clear, we are not sharing individual data with competitors; we bucket data into industry verticals and then anonymize and aggregate the data.”

Wikipedia defines benchmarking as follows, “…a process used in management and particularly strategic management, in which organizations evaluate various aspects of their processes in relation to best practice, usually within their own sector. This then allows organizations to develop plans on how to adopt such best practice, usually with the aim of increasing some aspect of performance. Benchmarking may be a one-off event, but is often treated as a continuous process in which organizations continually seek to challenge their practices.”

As we are continually faced with more competitive online marketing environments, this information becomes critical in your strategic planning. When future direction is determined by a hunch or a perception the outcome can be negative. The solution lies in the continual use of this information over the long haul. The advantages of using this information enable organizations to see new methods, ideas and tools to improve their effectiveness. The savings over the long haul are significant in reference to both time and money.

So the question becomes…Am I using this information in my strategic planning initiatives?

  1. Identify your problem areas
  2. Identify other industries that have similar processes
  3. Data Collection (Now Available)
  4. Determine current performance gap
  5. Implement new and improved business practices

Remember: “Benchmarking isn’t just about data-culture and circumstances must be taken into account when you view the results.”

Social Networking in “Plain English”

Published
by
Kyle Bumgardner
 
on April 8, 2008 
in General Marketing and Social Media
. 2 Comments

I was recently invited to speak in “Plain English” on the topic of online Social Networking for Businesses as part of a quarterly program hosted by Womble Carlyle, one of the nation’s largest and most innovative law firms.

Our discussion outlined best practices and marketing options available to businesses in social networks as well as an analysis of the potential legal risks facing companies in this space. As expected, the interesting pairing of marketing innovation and legal perspective…drew a diverse crowd of bankers (event held in uptown Charlotte, NC), entrepreneurs and even a few innovative small business owners. Our panel discussed and shared a collection of definitions, case studies, and a few humorous examples of social networking gone bad (Second Life banking crisis). Overall, the event seemed to satisfy the expectations and curiosity of the audience…there were plenty of “head nods” and notes-taken. Following the event, I eagerly awaited the anticipated growth of my social network from the 120 attendees…through LinkedIn and Facebook requests…which was the final call-to-action from our panel discussion. While, I’m still waiting for the wave of “Friend” requests, I have received a steady stream of feedback (mostly positive) and more importantly, a common theme continues to arise:

How can I explain social networking in 2 minutes or less?

While this question, indicates that our panel may have missed the mark of defining social networking in Plain English… I’ll take the feedback as an opportunity for improvement. In reality, explaining online marketing concepts can be a challenge for busy executives and marketers who need to create vision within their organizations in an ever-changing industry. So, in posing the question to my social network, I stumbled upon an interesting group, Called Common Craft, who takes visual explanation of difficult marketing concepts to a whole new level… Check out the video below, entitled “Social Networking in Plain English.” By the way, The full video of our panel discussion will be available at WCSR.com/WombleTech soon. Enjoy!

Measuring Results Online - What should you track?

Published
by
Kyle Bumgardner
 
on February 28, 2008 
in Branding, Customer Acquisition and Website Analytics
. 0 Comments

Unfortunately, I still see marketers struggle to communicate the value of online marketing and how it drives bottom-line results. Much of this is caused by a lack of standard metrics by which to measure and report impact…especially when a direct response conversion is not clearly evident.

Most CEO’s and CFO’s are focused on driving efficiency and scale to acheive revenue growth. But when it comes to marketing, they need to be able to make a connection between the work ($) that is being done and the revenue that will be produce as a result.

Bottom line.

With studies suggesting that merely 2/3 of all marketers include metrics in their marketing plans…a need for more standard measurement is very necessary. So, what do you track? The ultimate answer is Everything…but realistically, try focusing on things that will move the needle and provide leading indicators of revenue. (Stuff that C-Levels discuss).

Here are a 10 tactical examples that you might not be considering when establishing metrics for your online marketing campaigns:

  1. Brand impact (i.e., increased brand awareness, intent or favorability)
  2. Number of impressions
  3. Position of paid listing
  4. Number of clicks
  5. Ratio of new to returning visitors
  6. Amount of increased website traffic
  7. Duration of website visits
  8. Amount of increased traffic to physical store
  9. Amount of increased volume to call center
  10. Number of leads generated for products sold online
  11. Number of leads generated for products sold offline
  12. Number of immediate sales generated for products sold online

Collecting this data will create trends and insight that will translate across most organizations.