Content Marketing vs Interruptive Marketing Part 4

Posted on March 4, 2015 by ianotr

Content Marketing vs Interruptive Marketing

Interruptive marketing annoys more than it helps

Interruptive marketing still exists online for those who can afford it. Since most people do not go online to click ads, online advertising should only be done when it makes sense and you have an idea how many people you will be reaching. It’s possible to create a successful campaign with interruptive advertising, usually after learning from failed campaigns.

Why Ads are Annoying

A big reason why interruptive ads continue to be annoying is that people have become more conscious of how time can get wasted, especially people who spend a lot of time watching television. Interruptive advertising on websites is forcing many users to move on to the next website faster, especially when it comes to trying to watch videos. Getting hit with an ad has become a two minute slowdown. Many times it’s easier to exit a website than wait for an ad to finish.

Since ads represent clutter, they are usually bothersome. Only once in awhile do ads communicate the way they were designed. Interruptive ads are starting to become hard to justify except in narrowly targeted situations. The problem with constantly interrupting people who don’t want to be interrupted is that it gets old. The person can also form a negative image of the brand if it is over-marketed.

Image Problems

We are moving into an era in which brands are considered phony if they don’t live up to their claims. It’s now easy to look up customer feedback for almost any brand, now that sites like Amazon keep track of consumer comments. Consumers are now conscious of giving such feedback sites weight compared with advertising. The rising popularity of content marketing is causing businesses to understand the negative impact of interruptive advertising.

Now that audiences have learned to see through advertiser claims, it’s becoming a challenge for businesses to win the trust of customers. Since content marketing is more about communicating with the target market, it makes sense to try to gain as much respect as possible by telling the truth than to exaggerate the facts just to trick people into sales. When people realize they’ve been fooled by advertising, it can damage association with the brand.

Less Like Radio

The irony about radio advertising is that it does the opposite of what it’s supposed to do. Instead of delivering a message to a mass audience, it’s delivering a message to people who have switched stations during commercials.In order to meet the standards of content marketing, it’s important to think of the opposite of how radio commercials have been made. Many commercials have used phony voices to try to give the spot more energy. Today’s marketing is closer to being conversational without theatrical characters.

Traditional radio commercials usually told you a limited amount of information to fit the format of a 30 or 60 second spot, whereas content marketing does not limit its message to the constraints of a third party. Radio commercials always get clustered with other commercials in “stopsets,” which is exactly when many people tune out of the radio. Clearly, most people do not listen to radio commercials no matter what the message is.

Another problem with radio commercials is due to the time constraint, many times the announcer will speed up his or her voice and speak too fast to be understood. If you watch business videos designed to raise brand awareness through content marketing, you will likely come across more relaxed than hyper presentations. Interruptive ads have become more annoying over time now that people have learned to use the internet as a quick gateway to many free activities.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company building marketing websites since 2000, with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

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Inbound Marketing & Big Media Advertising Part 2

Posted on February 11, 2015 by ianotr

Inbound Marketing & Big Media Advertising

Big media advertising is expensive and high risk

One of the traps that many start-ups have fallen into has been to set aside a budget for traditional media advertising. This budget can be drained quickly because it involves a fun element, which is creating commercials. But once the spots are run, pressure builds to see a return on investment. Television and radio spots are seen and heard by thousands of people, but most viewers and listeners still consider commercials to be an interruption.

Inbound Marketing vs. Traditional Media

Traditional media such as television, radio and newspapers still reach a huge audience. It’s still a way to deliver a message to the masses and hope that the numbers game will produce a return on investment. The cost of a radio spot depends on how big the station’s market is, but in major markets a sixty second spot can cost hundreds of dollars per minute. Even though television advertising is much more expensive than radio advertising, they both equate to seeing thousands of dollars spent quickly.Inbound marketing usually does not reach as many people as television or radio audiences, but connects more with the target market. While traditional media marketing relies on reaching as many people as possible to produce a single digit percentage of respondents, inbound marketing aims at building a more loyal following, instead of a general following. Reaching followers through blogs and social media has a more personalized feel than traditional media.

Commercial Risks

In the late 1990s one of the reasons there was a “dotcom bust” was that many new internet companies thought they could create markets for their brands through buying radio and television time. Many of these companies attracted funding that helped pay for the advertising, but they eventually collapsed due to having poor business models that did not have clear revenue streams.

The lesson of the dotcom implosion helped steer internet companies toward more concrete business models. The collapse of hundreds of companies served as a reminder that markets cannot be created so quickly just by spending a lot of money on exposure. Part of marketing that remains true is that you cannot build a brand overnight regardless of the medium.

Print Advantages

In recent decades the number of newspapers and magazines have dwindled, but advertising rates have remained high. Ask yourself if advertising in a newspaper helps your cause in any way, knowing that most of your market gets its news online. Big ads – the expensive kind – work best in print, but the best deal when it comes to print is printing your own flyer and mass distributing it through various channels.

You can combine print with inbound marketing by offering printed materials to people who request them through your website. A big part of inbound marketing is offering free items that give people a chance to engage with your brand. You can use print to promote your website locally at stores that reflect your industry. Working with a printer is also helpful in getting your logo on various marketing items.

Avoiding Expensive Advertising

There’s a tendency for some business owners to blame sales declines on lack of advertising. But a business is much more than the product it advertises, which is why advertising does not always work. Mass advertising works when many factors have come together. Loyalty, brand awareness and reputation are just as important as the message being advertised.

It’s better to conserve resources and develop a business slowly than to try to jump start a business with expensive media advertising. By building a market with inbound marketing, a company can focus on developing a long term organic following.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company building marketing websites since 2000 with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Certified Partner with HubSpot and Google.

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Data Collection and Audience Measurement

Posted on July 10, 2014 by ianotr

Data Collection and Audience Measurement

One of the things that makes content marketing more scientific than traditional marketing is the fact that it provides a mountain of data. Most of this data can be obtained at low to no cost. Google Analytics is one of the best tracking platforms for your online efforts to find out how well your content attracts traffic. Various other tracking services can help you gauge your performance. Studying this data will help you determine your strengths and weaknesses at content marketing.

Google Analytics

There are many different services that offer audience measurement for websites, but Google Analytics is by far the most popular and it’s well respected due to its comprehensive detail. Analytics tell you how much traffic you’re getting, where it comes from and how visitors behave on your site. The research is designed for marketers and is divided into free and premium services. The basic free package tells you how many visits your site got in a given day, week or month, along with average session time and bounce rate, which reveals the percentage of visitors who exit the site after viewing one page.

One of the helpful indicators that Google Analytics provides is how users found your websites. Referrers such as search engines, social networks and websites are listed as sources that brought you traffic. You can use this information to share with referrers to let them know they provide you value. Another use of Analytics is finding out which geographic locations bring you the most traffic, which can help you determine if your branding messages need to be more universal or focused on certain regions. The main limitation of Google Analytics is that users can disable cookies in their browsers, which blocks data collection on how they use your site.

CrazyEgg

You can help improve your conversion rate by analyzing why people leave your site with Crazy Egg heat maps. The software shows you specific locations on web pages that visitors clicked before exiting. A scroll map shows how far visitors scrolled on pages, which helps you determine which parts of pages are most and least effective at holding people’s attention. The Confetti tool within the software helps you learn search terms that were used by people to find your site.

Alexa and Quantcast

Two audience measurement sites that can teach you a lot about web popularity are Alexa and Quantcast. Both sites rank millions of websites, using separate methodologies to measure web traffic. Unlike ComScore and Nielsen, Alexa and Quantcast publish their rankings for the public. You can even use them for free to find out how your website compares with competitors in traffic rankings. If you sign up for either service and paste their code on your web pages you can get much more detailed statistics.

Alexa, owned by Amazon, tells you how your site ranks globally as well as in the United States. If your site gets enough traffic it will tell you other interesting information, such as bounce rate, daily pageviews per visitor, daily time on site and heat maps for gender, education level, browsing location (home, school, work) and visitors by country. It will also tell you the percentage of visits that originated from search engines and the top keywords used from search engines. It will also give your site an SEO score on a 0-100 point scale.

Quantcast is useful for looking at income levels and other demographics of your users. Both sites provide much more information if you subscribe.Take the lead in content marketing by utilizing website Analytics, which will help fine tune your understanding of your audience.

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Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company building marketing websites since 2000 with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Partner with HubSpot.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements

Contact OTR Web.

Lead Nurturing for the Sales Funnel

Posted on April 6, 2014 by ianotr

Lead Nurturing for the Sales Funnel

The whole point to content marketing is getting leads with a good ROI, unless you’re just doing it as a hobby. Most people who go through all the trouble of massive content creation appreciate the business that it can bring. Your business will be elevated by implementing a system that captures, nurtures, scores and converts leads through your sales funnel, which ultimately directs users to your product pages.

Landing Page Optimization

A landing page, as defined by Google Analytics, is the first page that a user enters on a website. Marketers tend to extend the definition to pages where customers arrive after clicking ads. To avoid confusion, you might refer to pages where you sell products as your product pages or lead capture pages, whether the products are physical or digital. Use these pages to develop leads you can nurture for future sales. You can capture leads by offering a form, email address or link to your social media profile.

The most effective product pages will make it easy for the consumer to quickly learn the product name, what it looks like with a thumbnail or image, the price, product reviews and a purchase button. No matter how sophisticated the e-commerce software is, the buying experience needs to be simple. The consumer should have multiple methods for purchasing, such as credit, debit or PayPal. Product images need to be sharp and colorful. Reviews are essential because they provide real life experiences and give the consumer deeper insight.

A/B Testing

One of the ways to improve landing pages is through A/B testing, which is a process of experimenting with various versions of web pages to narrow down the most effective lead generation strategy. Multiple pages can be tested either at one time or in a sequence. The goal is to figure out which type of presentation gets the best click-through and conversion rates.A/B testing does not produce complex statistics. It’s more of a simple approach to decision-making that doesn’t require a lot of time, effort or expense. Variables can be the layout and the choice of wording, color and images.

Creating a QA Page

Offering a QA page is strategically advantageous because it’s what many leads gravitate toward when they have questions and want quick answers. Think of 10-20 or more questions that your customers might ask you regarding the purchasing process and how to learn more about the product. Provide links for further information if necessary. Be sure to also provide a link for followers to ask further questions, which captures leads.

Lead Scoring and Nurturing

As leads come to you through forms, email and social media, you can save time with the conversion process by developing a lead scoring system. You can use marketing automation software such as Hubspot, Pardot, PlanPlus, LeadMaster and a variety of other programs or you can do it manually. Simply create a 0-10 or 0-100 scoring system with the highest numbers being the most likely leads to convert. Then score your leads based on the information the potential customer gives you.

Concentrate your efforts on high scoring leads so that you don’t annoy the people who are not interested in making purchases. Low scores may someday shift to high scores if you nurture them in a friendly way. You can maximizing lead nurturing by keeping all contacts on your radar and interacting with them through social media and finding out more about their lifestyles and interests. Offer them free information whenever you can.

Would you like to get relevant information such as this blog/article delivered to your mailbox? Join our OTR Web Newsletter now.

Take the lead in content marketing by converting leads to sales based on a sensible system that evaluates followers of your content.

Ian Conklin is the President of OTR Web Solutions a web development company building marketing websites since 2000 with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

OTR Web is a Partner with HubSpot.

For all your Inbound Marketing and Website requirements Contact OTR Web.