OnlineMarketerBlog.com by DJ Francis
March 20, 2008
05:55 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
Written by today’s guest blogger: This is my first post here on
the OnlineMarketerBlog. I was asked by our kind host to share some
thoughts I have about online branding. By way of credentials, I work in
the marketing department of a large national company. I’m a copywriter
by training with internet, print, and broadcast experience. And now for
the disclaimer: These ideas which I’m about to share are of course
mine, and don’t reflect the ideas of this blog’s host or my employer.
I was at work the other day when I came across this Acura landing page.
It’s a robust landing page that touts the features of the car. And
these types of pages are everywhere. Nissan, Toyota, Honda, GM…they all
have them. And they’re all really boring. They do serve a purpose.
These sites let prospective buyers learn about and price out a car. But
they don’t tell a prospective owner anything about the brand.
And then I started thinking…why don’t car companies spend some of
their immense marketing budgets on online branding efforts? The car
market as a whole is perfect for online branding. Since cars are
aspirational, a branded message speaks directly to how people should
feel when they buy a specific car. In a lot of ways the brand message
is just as important as a car’s features to a consumer. I tried to
think back on examples of online branding in the car market and I came
up with two, a Scion advergame and two Nissan Rogue videos.
So where are the online branding campaigns? Is it purely that these
companies are focused on the active consumer? Someone who is currently
researching new cars? Is it because they are scared that they can’t
track the value of a branding campaign?
Click here to continue reading It's Online Branding Time...
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March 17, 2008
06:07 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
BG and I were driving to work yesterday when I commented on a radio
ad. She said she hadn’t even noticed it and I can’t say I’m surprised.
It was a car ad from one of the big companies - Ford or Chevy, I think
- and it made me think about one of the most important rules of
adverting.
Features Vs. Benefits
In their book Made To Stick,
Chip and Dan Heath frequently mention the difference between features
and benefits. Features are specific details that made the product
unique or special. It’s the phrases that the guys on any sales floor
repeat ad naseum. Benefits, however, explain how the product fits into
a person’s life or makes their lives easier or better.
Click here to continue reading Please Ignore This Ad - Features vs. Benefits
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February 28, 2008
07:13 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
“How to become an A-list blogger,” indeed. I may be going out on a
limb with this series because I am not, in fact, an A-list blogger.
However, I do contend that you don’t need a Ferrari to know how to get
to the grocery store. I’m perfectly happy being the Honda Accord of
your marketing strategy.
I got this idea from mega-blogger/Web 2.0 pioneer Jason Calacanis.
If you’ve never heard of him, you may have heard of his companies. He
started Silicon Alley Reporter, co-founded Weblogs.Inc, then became
general manager at Netscape (when they were good), joined up with
Sequoia Investments, and founded Mahalo.com. Needless to say, I can’t hold a candle to this man.
However, while I was at the gym, I was listening to a months-old edition of the CalacanisCast,
in which Jason off-handedly offered two simple ways to become an A-list
blogger: show up (fairly obvious) and comment on other (respected)
blogs. Here’s the quote:
Keep reading How To Be an A-List Blogger - Commenting (Part 1 In a Series)
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February 21, 2008
07:43 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
Someone lied to you if they told you statistics were boring. Website
metrics show just how your audience is using your site and you ignore
this data at your own peril.
A bounce rate is when someone comes to your site and immediately
leaves. They bounce off of your website for whatever reason. A bounce
is undesirable - you want people to come and stay on your website! Bounce is the opposite of sticky.
Time vs. Pages
I had always understood bounce determined by time - that this figure
was measured from people leaving a site in a certain increment (usually
2, 5, or 10 seconds). So I was surprised when I read in Website Magazine
that they asserted that bounce rate “is calculated by dividing the
number of total page visits by those visits that did not result in an
additional page view.”
Click here to continue reading:
<a href=" http://onlinemarketer.wordpress.com/2008/02/21/monthly-metric-bounce-rate/"> http://onlinemarketer.wordpress.com/2008/02/21/monthly-metric-bounce-rate/</a>
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February 14, 2008
08:46 pm | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
I wanted to do something a little out of the ordinary, so here’s a little mystery for your Friday.
Three employees at a company find themselves in an elevator. Each has a different problem that they need solved. They are in the elevator to visit a staff member who can help them with their disparate problems. The mystery is not “How will they solve their problem,” but rather “Who are they going to see?“
Continue reading The Friday Mystery…
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February 14, 2008
08:29 am | 0 recommendations | Be the first to comment
BG and I do not celebrate Valentine’s Day. She is vehemently opposed
to what she describes as “fake holidays forcing people to buy stupid
crap” (gosh, I love that woman). I prefer to say that every day is
Valentine’s Day for us and then I giggle.
Last night I was reading Chip and Dan Heath’s great book, Made to Stick.
One of their tenants of “stickiness” is the unexpected. But sometimes
when ads use unexpectedness or surprise it comes off as “WTF”? They
say, “The easiest way to avoid gimmicky surprise and ensure that your
unexpected ideas produce insights is to make sure you target an aspect
of your audience’s guessing machine that relates to your core message.”
I have seen two Valentine’s Day ads that I think work well with this concept. (Chip and Dan: feel free to correct me!)
Click here to continue reading 2 Unexpected Valentine’s Day Ads!
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