Category: Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

By Posted on Posted in Advertising, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

With advertising that you pay for, even more than other types of marketing, you want to be effective. Yet I see so many businesses who clearly don’t have a clue; they spend a fortune putting a non-offer in front of a non-targeted list, and what little interest they do generate is too often squandered when they get to Step 2.

So it’s nice to see someone doing it right.

I subscribe to several dozen e-newsletters, including the Organic Consumers Association (OCA). I was reading that one this morning, and came across this ad:

EDEN FOODS OFFERS OCA CUSTOMERS 15% DISCOUNT

Eden Foods is one of the few national organic food producers who goes beyond the USDA Organic Standards. Although Eden Foods is USDA certified, their products do not bear the USDA seal, because they say the USDA standard really represents a “minimum standard” that Eden Foods goes far beyond. As a subscriber to Organic Bytes, you can enjoy a discount rate on any Eden Foods products by When you follow the link, you come to this page, where you’re greeted by a headline that proclaims, “Welcome OCA Customers.”

The copy on the page builds a relationship–and the discount offer is clearly visible at the top right, and the single instruction is easy for anyone to follow. The tone of the landing page is warm and friendly, utterly hype-free, clear and focused on the hot buttons that would speak directly to an OCA reader:

Eden Foods are Free of:
• Irradiation
• Preservatives
• Chemical Additives
• Food Colorings
• Refined Sugars
• Genetically Engineered Ingredients

That means our foods are safe, nutritious, and most are kosher and parve. Oh yeah, they taste good too! Family to Family, welcome us to your table as we give new meaning to “comfort” foods.

So why does this ad work?

  • The market segmentation is an exact match. OCA already reaches people with an interest in natural and organic foods–the exact market that Eden wants to reach
  • Eden’s ad almost seems like part of the newsletter content, hooking in to the reader’s trust of the OCA brand
  • The link is tracked, so Eden and OCA both know how effective it is (presumably, Eden also tracks how many of those visitors actually buy something)
  • As soon as visitors reach the landing page, the headline tells them they’re in the right place
  • The discount offer is repeated, very visibly, and is easy to take advantage of, with no strings or conditions other than excluding full cases and sale items
    The ad and the landing page both use a tone that respects the reader and builds that relationship

    • If you’d like to learn more about effective marketing and advertising, my fifth book, Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, would be a good place to start. A Finalist for Foreword Magazine’s Book of the Year Award, seven of its 39 chapters specifically cover lowering the cost and boosting the effectiveness of advertising; the other chapters focus on strategies that are for the most part much cheaper than paid ads.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

    Watch out for these snakes! Some people have no ethics at all.

    I got an email this morning that purported to be from the IRS. The subject was “2008 Economic Stimulus Refund. [Scanned]”

    And it started like this:

    Over 130 million Americans will receive refunds as
    part of The White House program to jumpstart the economy.

    Our records indicate that you are qualified to receive the
    2008 Economic Stimulus Refund.

    The fastest and easiest way to receive your refund is by
    direct deposit to your checking/savings account.

    Please follow the link…

    And ended with *a numeric URL*!

    I don’t bother to report most phishing scams–I get a dozen or so every day) but this one, I forwarded to the IRS. Unfortunatley, it bounced.

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    By Posted on Posted in Copywriting, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

    I recently purchased a copy of Paul Hancox’s ebook, “Secrets of a 10% Conversion Rate” from copywriting superstar Michel Fortin. You probably already know that most direct mail and PPC convert at somewhere between zero and five percent, so getting up to 10 is huge. I tell my clients they should be able to make a profit at half of one percent, even though we usually get much higher responses than that. But just in case…

    Though it spends rather too much time at the beginning discussing things I already knew, this turned out to be a nice big juicy and informative product, and worth the $50.

    There’s a big chapter on testing, covering A/B split and multivariate testing, as well as something new to me: “flow testing.” You send the reader through a series of short pages instead of one long one, and then track where clicks to the next page fall off dramatically. Fixing those holes plugs the leaks in your copy and ups your conversion rate.

    Yes, extra clicks mean fall-off–so the challenge becomes making each unique page so compelling that most readers click to the next one, each time. And if one page loses half your visitors, that’s the one to fix.

    My question: I wonder if Paul (or Michel) has tested putting not only a link to the next page, but also an order link. I wonder if people would abandon the letters in order to purchase, if they already feel convinced, rather than simply leave because the only option is to keep going all the way to the (unknown) end. It’s something I would certainly test in that situation.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, General Commentary, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, People Helping People, Social and Economic Justice

    Miscellaneous items in the news of late:
    1] The Weekly Spin, an always-provocative newsletter from PR Watch/Center for Media

    and Democracy, reports that corporados and their hired PR guns have stepped up campaigns against citizen activists. Not only are they infiltrating these groups, but also going through activists’ trash, using their spies to release deliberate disinformation campaigns, undermine citizen actions, and generally abuse the public trust. Yeech!

    This is not new–here’s an example from six years ago:

    “Inside information gives companies a strategic advantage,” wrote Amsterdam-based investigative reporter Eveline Lubbers in the 2002 book “Battling Big Business.” Lubbers helped uncover an eight year-long scam by a Dutch security firm, where one of its employees posed as an activist. He collected discarded paperwork from at least 30 different activist groups, saying he would sell it to recycling plants and give the proceeds to charity. Instead, the documents were carefully reviewed and often used against the groups.

    But apparently it’s still very much going on, in both the US and UK, probably elsewhere too.

    CIW began being “vilified online and in e-mails that can be traced to the Miami headquarters of Burger King,” reports the Fort Myers News-Press. The emails and comments were posted under the names “activist2008” and “stopcorporategreed.”

    2]MarketingProfs.com offers six don’ts for effective e-mail marketing. Item #1–don’t e-mail too frequently; you don’t want people unsubbing because you bother them too much.

    But the first reader comment points out that MarketingProfs itself mailed three times within a week about a particular conference.

    3] But PR isn’t just for influence; it can also be fun. My friend Ken McArthur is on a campaign to popularize the coined word “zingwacker,” which is in his new book “The Impact Factor.” As of early April, the word brought zero results in Google. As of before I hit the post button, it’s up to 393. Not bad, Ken–even if the Squidoo page misspells your new word in its URL.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

    If you see my pulse racing and my heart pounding, it’s not because I ran up a mountain.. It’s not because I took medication and this was a side effect.

    It’s because the New York Times reports that drug companies routinely write their own research studies on new drugs, and then find prestigious doctors to sign them.

    “It almost calls into question all legitimate research that’s been conducted by the pharmaceutical industry with the academic physician,” said Dr. Ross, whose article, written with colleagues, was published Wednesday in JAMA, The Journal of the American Medical Association. and posted Tuesday on the journal’s Web site.

    Oh yes, and the red flag was a study on Merck’s now-discredited drug Vioxx.

    Gasp. Cough. Splutter.

    Now–some disclosure before anyone accuses me of being a hypocrite: I don’t object to ghostwriting in principle. As a commercial writer-for-hire, I have seen my stuff go out under other people’s names many times, even on the cover of a book. Ironically enough, one of those was a bylined article in the New York Times that cribbed heavily from a press release I had written several years earlier for a client. I don’t see that as much different from having an accountant prepare my tax return.

    But I see a fundamental difference between helping a client be a more effective marketer by writing stuff for the client to use as if it were his or her own, and putting together the research material that the government and the public use to determine if a new drug is safe. And the latter strikes me, at least, as definitely over the line.

    I poked around and located the original JAMA article, which you can click to read.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, People Helping People, Publishing, Web 2.0/Social Media

    For years, I’ve been a proponent of viral marketing; as one among may examples, it’s the main tool I’ve used to gain support for the Business Ethics Pledge.

    One of the best viral marketers I know is Ken McArthur, known for his joint-venture Internet marketing conferences. I met Ken several years ago at one of Fred Gleeck’s book marketing conferences, and then again a few years later at Mark Victor Hansen’s book marketing conference. We’ve stayed in touch. And since meeting him, Ive noticed that he crops up absolutely everywhere.

    Yet even though he’s obviously been gong to book marketing conferences for years, he didn’t have a book. Now, he’s finally about to release IMPACT: How to Get Noticed, Motivate Millions and Make a Difference in a Noisy World (yes, its an affiliate link). I’ve been one of his many informal advisors, and even commented to him a few months ago that I also have a book title that ends with “in a Noisy World” (Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World, published in 2000 by Chelsea Green

    Frugal marketing genius that he is, Ken wouldn’t be content with an ordinary book launch–so he created one of the most powerful viral marketing ideas I’ve ever seen. I wish I’d thought of it.

    You know the concept of internships: students donate labor in exchange for training. Ken has taken this to an extreme: he recruited over 100 people to be his unpaid Internet marketing corps, in exchange for learning all his tricks via a series of conference calls. What a perfect example of the Abundance Principle at work! The six-week program started tonight.

    I decided that one of my contributions to the effort would be to chronicle it here. So thus, my key takeaways from call #1:

  • 100 people can have a huge impact in a number of ways, for example all contacting the same key influencer, or divvying up John Kremer’s 1001 Ways to Market Your Book (fewer than 10 ideas per participant)
  • Not only are affiliate commissions an effective motivator, but you can motivate your affiliates further by making the deal open-ended. When people sign up for Ken’s affiliate program, they will not only earn a couple of bucks on the book, but also on all sorts of backend products from now to eternity–products that will pay many times better than the book sale.
  • Ken is providing tasks and thus not only training others but outsourcing the ground work. He asked participants to generate lists of key contacts, blogs, forums, and potential joint venture partners.

    • This is an easy one for me, as I know a lot of people in the independent publishing sector. Except that I can’t really separate influencers from JV partners. But because what he’s doing is newsworthy in the publishing world and in the Internet marketing world, I have a number of people I could approach to let them know about what’s going on, including John Kremer, Dan Poynter, Fern Reiss, Patricia Frey, and Joan Stewart–all very big names in the world he’s trying to reach.

    Ken being Ken, he makes it quite worthwhile to visit his site, offering a truckload of quality resources just for dropping by.

    Is this your chance to learn from a master launcher, without paying thousands of dollars for a product? I think it might just be.

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    By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

    The other day, I got invited to help promote an Internet marketing report. Since I don’t endorse anything I haven’t seen (unless I make it very clear that it’s a favor to a friend, etc., and I haven’t personally evaluated), I asked for a copy–and boy, was I appalled.

    The model these folks were pushing was to steal content, intersperse enough meaningless blather so Google doesn’t think it’s a duplicate page, and build traffic/ad revenues.

    Eeeeeeew!

    I let it simmer for a couple of days, until I could respond with enough politeness to get read, and until I could find a way to talk to the part of these people that wants to be better (with a tip of the hat to my friend Bob Burg, who taught me how to do that), and then responded this morning, thusly:

    “Let me know what you think, good or bad. I appreciate your opinion.”

    OK, you asked. I read it over the weekend.

    I’m sure you have good intentions, but frankly, I find your business model unethical. It is one very small step above splogging; the only difference is you’re adding meaningless content around someone else’s words instead of just presenting someone else’s hard work.

    It devalues the Internet as a useful information medium; I’d hate to see search results be as useless as e-mail, but if people follow your model, they contribute to poor search results.

    And then there’s the matter of making a buck on other people’s hard-earned intellectual property without compensating them in any way, or even asking permission, and doing so in a way that most definitely violates the Fair Use provisions of the copyright law.

    I think with the intelligence and understanding of the Internet that underlies your black hat approach, you could come up with a business model that would be just as profitable and a whole lot more palatable. Come talk to me when you’ve done so.

    Postscript: I got a response, quickly, that basically said, “well, that’s fine, but I disagree.” Needless to say, I won’t become her affiliate any time soon.

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    By Posted on Posted in Copywriting, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

    I won’t embarrass this company by naming it, but boy, they could use some marketing help. They really haven’t got a clue.

    I found their quarter-page ad in the program guide of a play I attended.
    here’s what it contained:

  • An attractive, professionally done logo with the firm name (but no clue either in the name or in the graphic representation about what this company actually does)
  • This very pleasant quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm” (Still don’t know what they do)
  • Street address, phone number and Web URL–which is such an abridgment of the firm name that it does nothing to reinforce brand identity

    • I am guessing I will be the only person to type in that URL on the basis of that ad–and only because I wanted to be able to write this blog post. Turns out it’s a financial services firm, ad even that wasn’t obvious at first glance. the home page is dominated by a picture of a park and skyline in a nearby city–but this company is actually located in a nearby suburb.

    And the copy–oy! It’s the perfect example of what I call “we, we, we all the way home.” See for yourself:

    We are a fully integrated financial services company. Our mission is to help our clients build, protect and preserve wealth to meet their long-term financial goals.

    (Firm name)’s centerpiece is our own unique Process approach, which allows us to offer comprehensive advice to our clients. We have an exceptional degree of expertise across four disciplines, including Wealth Transfer, Investment Management, Executive and Employee Benefits. Each discipline works together to meet our client’s goals.

    Let’s see…out of 74 words, eight are either “we”, “our”, or “us”. That works out to 10.8 percent.

    Now…how many times can you find a “you” or your”? I’ll give you a hint: a four-letter number that begins with z and ends with o. Yup–zero. They do say “clients” or “client’s” twice, d would have been easy to replace those with “you” and “your”, respectively.

    Okay, how about any testimonials? None on the home page. How about anything about what makes the “Process approach” (and whose idea was that bizarre capitalization scheme?) different from/superior to any other agency’s offering? Nope.

    I’m sure this is a well-meaning company and probably does right for their clients–but I think they could have more clients if they stopped patting themselves on the back, stopped assuming people know what they do by their firm name (two last names), and started positioning themselves as people who can help answer your investment questions.

    And yes, I know, the ad that caught my ire was a charity ad that they don’t really expect to bring them any business. But why exclude the possibility?

    It would have been just as easy to make the Emerson quote smaller (it fills fully half the ad) and then add a line like “For enthusiasm about growing your investments, please call or visit.”

    It would have cost nothing more to make the home page you-focused, and to make it obvious on first click what exactly their offering and what their specialization is. (A headline would help; there isn’t one).

    And then people say marketing doesn’t work. Of course it isn’t going to work if you can’t be bothered to even try!

    Unfortunately, this is all too typical.

    I’m sorely tempted to dig through the contact page and send a gratis copy of my book Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World–but I have a feeling it wouldn’t be appreciated.

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    By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News

    Over at Publishing2.com, Scott Karp takes the Washington Post to task for using the same old coupon-style discounting offers they’ve used for decades–when in order to get him to pick up a physical newspaper, they’d have to speak to why it’s a better option than just logging on to read online.

    He cites one motivation that might have worked for him: enjoying an unplugged no-computer day kicking back with in-depth analysis he wouldn’t normally have time to read.

    Fr me–and I still read the print form of my local daily paper–a key argument might be reduced eyestrain. I’m always looking for ways I can get offline to do some of my work.

    I discuss in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First, and elsewhere, why discounting is often a poor strategy for lots of marketers. It’s always better, as Scott points out, to show the real value you add.

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Marketing Trends/News, People Helping People, Web 2.0/Social Media

    Yeah, I know–viral marketing and all that. And I actually love referral marketing, but not like this.

    But am I the only one offended when someone gives me a tell-your-friends page before I even see the product? It’s happening more and more lately. These unfortunates happened to be the ones to push me into ranting about this trend, but it could have been any number of others.

    At least these guys were smart enough to do a “no, thank you” link where I could still get the download. But I value my reputation and I’m not in the habit of sharing e-mails of my friends with strangers who send bulk mail. Had the only way to get the report been to fill in e-mails, I’d have either given phony names or bailed out.

    Maybe this is one of the factors contributing to the growth of social media at the expense of e-mail. Successful marketers can still be clueless when it comes to human relationships.

    In fact, when I get to all those petition sites (and I confess, I sign a lot of political petitions), the thank-you page invariably asks for addresses of my friends. I never give them. Instead, if I find the petition worthy enough to send, I’ll forward the e-mail, bcc, to my politics list.

    And at least there, I’ve had a chance to see the text, decide if it’s something I want, and pass it on. Why marketers think I’m going to feed their mailing-list fish tank before even seeing the fish… Yuck!

    If you like this rant and want more about how to run and market an ethical, successful business, you may have a look at my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First. You can get the first few chapters as a no-charge download, and you don’t have to fill in a squeeze page OR a tell-a-friend page to get it. So there.

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