Not All Traffic is Created Equal

Google Analytics rocks. Just today, I was taking a look at traffic sources to StrategicText and noticed an amazing difference in bounce rates, depending on where the traffic came from.

The bounce rate, just so you know, is how many visitors never bother to click on anything on the page. As Avinash likes to say, they came, they saw, they puked.

What I noticed, and what seems perfectly obvious now, is that not all traffic is created equal. While I do get most of my traffic from organic search results, they also have the highest bounce rate. This makes sense: people were searching for something, maybe they found what they were looking for (maybe not), then moved on. They weren't looking to engage with the blog, they were just looking for info.

This is when I realized my priorities have been all wrong. Like most bloggers and other webmasters, I've been seeking more and more traffic. My primary efforts have been focused on search engine optimization. And yet according to my analytics, search engine traffic represents the least interested, least committed, and least valuable form of traffic there is. People come and go without really doing anything.

What are the sources of traffic with the lowest bounce rates? My LinkedIn profile, Facebook, comments left on other blogs, and articles I've written for other sites all top the list. Again, this makes perfect sense as well. These sources of traffic are primarily interested in learning what I'm all about, not just seeking a piece of information and leaving.

Do you run Analytics on your website? Have you taken a look to see which sources of traffic have the lowest bounce rates? You might just find that, like me, you've been chasing the wrong crowd. If so, how will you adjust your copywriting strategy?

Which came first? The brand or the sale?

A hot topic lately has been the value of branding. Some argue passionately that in order to sell something, you need to build a brand first. Others argue that the only way to build a brand is to sell something first.

To be clear, if you're a copywriter, the question is whether or not your ads (or other marketing endeavors) should focus on brand attributes like hipness, youth, intelligence, etc., or on product attributes like price, quality, effectiveness, etc.

This question misses the point. It's about as productive of a question as pondering whether it's the chicken or the egg that comes first. They go hand in hand.

You should always be building your brand, and you should always be selling. It's not either/or. If you're not selling, you'll go out of business long before your brand has any real equity behind it in the minds of consumers. If you're not building a brand, selling will always be an uphill battle.

Lesson of the day: Always be branding. Always be selling.

Should you kill your blog?

Once upon a time, I had a blog called Happy Pixels. It did rather well, and got decent traffic. Despite this, I killed it.

I think a lot of blogs should be killed. Perhaps most of them.

Why?

With Happy Pixels, I realized that the only reason I read it was because I was the one writing it. Does this sound familiar?

If you don't love your own blog, then why should anyone else? If you can't even convince yourself that what you're doing is of value, why bother doing it at all?

Since killing Happy Pixels, I've forced myself to stay focused. I also avoid talking too much about myself (though this post seems to be an exception). Every day, I sit down and I try to write something that I think would be of value to you, the person interested copywriting.

Most days, I fail and those posts never get published. This is true for about 75% of my writing. The other 25%, though, are the ones I feel are both relevant and good. Those are the posts you see here on StrategicText.

The moral of the story: Sit down to write every day. Make it as good as you can. Then ask yourself if you would read it. Is it a worthwhile investment of your reader's time? Don't hit Publish until you're satisfied, and don't be afraid to leave it on the cutting room floor.

Photo credit: clix

The Web is a Direct Response medium

Online marketing isn't complicated. In contrast to print, tv, and radio, the web is pretty simple. It's all about Direct Response.

Direct Response lets you know if your advertising dollars are being well spent. In traditional advertising, you ask people to call a number or send a letter with a specific promotional coupon, and then measure how many responses you get and how many of those lead to sales. Most big brands don't do this, however, because it feels cheap.

On the other end of the advertising spectrum, you have $30 million branding campaigns where you never know with any certainty if you're getting a good return on your investment. Did the ads lead to people buying more? We'll never know for sure.

The great thing about the Web is that everything can be held accountable. There's no need to guess as to whether your marketing is working. When done properly, there's good data for everything you do.

Let's say you're trying to sell a 2008 Cadillac STS for $70K+. There are multiple steps involved in convincing someone to spend that kind of cash on a car. To measure your marketing's effectiveness, you simply need to define your sales funnel.

Let's break it down:

• Your goal is to sell this luxury car. What needs to happen for someone to do this?
• Well, no one buys a car online. People have to go to a dealer. How do you get people to go to the dealer?
• There are many ways, but on the online side of things your website is the ultimate tool for convincing people to go see a dealer. What does your website need to do to get people to go to a dealer?
• Information. They need to be able to learn anything and everything. There needs to be great pictures. It needs to be beautiful and easy to use. And at all times, the user should be able to quickly find a dealer and, more importantly, book a test drive. They may also need some time to be persuaded, so offering a high-quality and relevant email newsletter is a great way to stay top of mind. When they sign up, they've given you permission to market to them. But how do get people to go to your website to begin with?
• By showing up in organic search results; by using paid search; by working with journalists and bloggers to have articles writing about - and linking to - your products; by sponsoring content; by engaging in affiliate programs; by blogging, podcasting, and otherwise participating in social media; etc.

For each and every step, analytical data can measure your success:

1. What's generating the most traffic?
2. When users land on your site, are they booking test drives? Are they signing up for the newsletter? Of those that sign up for the newsletter, how many remain engaged (by opening the emails, clicking the links, continuing to browse the site)? How many of them then go on to book a test drive?
3. Of those who book test drives, how many actually show up?
4. Of those who show up, how many end up making a purchase? Which sales people are making the most sales? And now for the most crucial step...
5. Optimize! What paths led to the most sales? Which marketing efforts in steps 1-4 made you the most money? Focus on those, cut out the poor performers, and keep experimenting to see what works best.

Direct Response: Best of both worlds

Not every sale can be directly traced to specific marketing efforts, but that doesn't mean marketing wasn't influential in purchasing decisions. Advertising works in many other ways, of course. Someone may go to your site, read about the Cadillac, and then just drop in for a test drive, without booking online. What's great about the web is that branding and awareness campaigns can also be Direct Response campaigns. It's not either/or, it's both.

Photo credit: Blitz USA

How to run a Huffington-like website

With the big news that the The Huffington Post is now valuated at $100 million, and alongside the rapid demise of print newspapers, I think we're on the brink of a rise in independently run "internet newspapers".

First, a definition. The Huffington Post is, in a sense, a blog. Some articles are written by them, but most of it is just links. How they differentiate themselves, though, is by having their information organized much like a newspaper site. They have many topics, the home page is displayed in such a way that you can get an overview of all the big news for the day, and you click through to see the rest. Often, they break the news. Other times, they're the first to link to it.

This model is proving very successful. The Drudge Report does a similar thing and, although not as successful as Huffington, seems to generate enough advertising revenue to provide a very comfortable income, which is more than can be said about even most successful blogs.

If you're tempted to duplicate this model, here are a few things to consider:

1. Focus. Huffington and Drudge are doing well as generalists because they had first mover advantage. I would not recommend taking them on. There's still tonnes of room, though, for slightly more focused topics. Instead of doing general national/international news, try focusing on an industry. Like, say, advertising.
2. Realize why this is valuable. "Internet newspapers" like this are great because they do the work for you. You don't have to follow a millions news sites, because they're bringing the best of the web to you. And unlike a simple link list like delicious.com, they communicate what's most important at this very minute by using newspaper conventions for organizing information.
3. Get organized. I believe you need 2 people, at a minimum, to do this well. One person needs to be finding the stories to link to. They need to be constantly tuned in. The other person needs to take those stories and organize them on the site. One person can't effectively do both, because while you're busy formatting and organizing the news, you're missing the breaking news. Your value decreases dramatically if people can't count on you to be on the ball.
4. How to get organized. I would recommend Google Reader. Subscribe to every site related to your topic (so, for advertising, subscribe to every significant advertising site and blog out there). Person A works as fast as possible to process these stories and decide which should be featured. When a story is to be featured, they "share" it. Person B is subscribed to that shared feed, and tries their best to keep up with updating the site. If Person A sees a story that should be THE headliner for the day, they can "star" it. You can also add labels to a story or share notes.

That's about all there is to it in my opinion. Like all things in life, nothing is guaranteed. Some people will naturally be better at this than others. Design and writing principles apply, and will also contribute to your success. That being said, if I had the time, I would be doing this right now for the advertising/marketing world. I don't have the time, unfortunately, so please feel free to take this idea and run with it. If you do it, you can become THE place to go for industry news, since you'll be constantly highlighting the best of the best from around the web.

Can ads be more exciting than content?

The effectiveness of ads are, evidently, going down rapidly. Nothing new there. There are many theories about it. I, for one, think it's because humans naturally avoid things that suck.

Every now and then, though, we see an ad that doesn't suck. Sometimes, an ad is down right riveting. This is rare, but when it happens, people pay attention.

From this simple insight, we can deduce two things:

1. Your ads need to be exciting. Yes, they also need to make a damn good sales pitch. But if the ads are boring, no one will pay attention and your pitch will go unheard.
2. Wherever possible, run your ads alongside content that is less interesting than the ads themselves. Direct response marketers have known for a long time that commercials are more effective when viewers are bored than when they are riveted. That's why you don't see alot of direct response commercials while watching Heroes, but you can't find anything other than "paid programming" at 2am. Conveniently, it's also cheaper.

In short, your biggest competitors in advertising aren't other advertisers. It's the very content producers you're paying to run your ad. This is true in print, on television, on the radio, and yes, on the web. People are more likely to notice and pay attention to your stuff when everything else being displayed bores them.

(Of course, if everything else is too boring, they might just leave. This is especially true on the web. The "trick" is to make your ad exciting enough that it can still effectively run alongside great content.)

Photo credit: GfxSally

To survive - and thrive - during this recession, you're going to have to kill traditional media

I'm not an old media hater. I love magazines, newspapers, television, and yes, even radio. During these somewhat insane economical times, though, we can't afford to be sentimental. Kill the beast before it kills you.

If you want your marketing budget to really have an impact, to really grow your business, you have to go digital. Not tomorrow; today. Don't dip your toe in the water; dive in. Don't just start to shift some more budget towards the web; declare your entire marketing budget to be digital.

Reasons Why

1. It's cheap. Just take a look at how much a digital agency's annual billings are in comparison to traditional media agencies. The simple fact is that traditional media is expensive. I'm not suggesting that price should be the determining factor. Obviously if a $300 million investment manages to generate $600 million in profits (not revenue, profits), then that's a good investment. Is that really happening though? If not, it's time to reconsider where that money's going.
2. It's accountable. If you run an ad on TV, you have no way of really knowing how many people paid attention. And unless your ad is direct response (where viewers are asked to "Call Now!"), you have no idea what each individual ad is generating. In contrast, if you run an ad on the web, you can know exactly how many impressions are being generated, how many people are clicking through, how many click-throughs lead to sales, exactly what point in the sales funnel that you're losing people, which sites are under performing, what day and times are most lucrative, and you can easily do A B testing on different ad variations to see which ones work best.
3. Targeting is almost ridiculous. With traditional media, you have a rough idea of the demographics and you try to find a channel that best matches your target demographic. On the web, there are niche websites targeting almost every unique demographic imaginable. Why pay to advertise to business people in general when what you really want is purchasing managers looking for copper piping?
4. Total Control. Feeling the need to crunch your budget a little bit? It's as simple as clicking a mouse. Is there a special event going on today that you'd like to leverage? Your ad copy can be tweaked and frequency temporarily ramped up in the span of 10 minutes.

A Few Opportunities

1. Search Engine Marketing. Do a search for your product categories online. What ads show up? Chances are, you'll see either a bunch of low-quality ads for small time competitors, or maybe even nothing at all. Try, for example, a Google search for Angels & Demons, the best-selling novel by Dan Brown, which is the sequel to the Da Vinci Code and has been made into a movie. No ads show up whatsoever. If you were a book store, movie chain, or even the publisher themselves, you should be ashamed. What an opportunity! Thousands, if not millions, of people will be searching for this exact title and no one seems to be paying for their attention. At least not to Canadian Google users. You should be running ads on every product you own. You only pay if people click the ads anyway.
2. Partnerships. Why not experiment with partnering? Let's say you find a site targeted at exactly who you want to sell to. Give them a call. Tell them you'd like to officially sponsor their content, or have a microsite created uniquely for their audience. Run a sweepstakes only for them. Here's the big secret: Almost all web publishers are desperate for this stuff. Content is hard to come by, and writers are expensive. If you can provide high-quality content or some type of offer that would excite their users, they'll jump at the chance to work with you. The smaller (and more targeted) the site, the better. It increases the value to you and decreases the investment.
3. Go social. Blogs and podcasts aren't for everyone. But ask yourself this: do you have something to say that would excite your most loyal customers? If you're in the copper piping business, for example, can you think of something really important to talk about every week that would draw in all those purchasing managers? If not, stay away. If you can, though, this is a ridiculously cost-effective way to build a community around your products. You'll be able to connect with your target audience in a way never before possible. Plus, you stand a damn good chance of getting great search engine ranking on the very terms you would have otherwise had to pay to advertise on.
4. Go social-lite. So let's say you really can't find a way to build an exciting blog. It's just not in the cards. Don't give up! At a minimum, set up some Google Alerts on all of your brand names and for terms related to your product categories. Every day, you'll get an email informing you of anyone mentioning those terms online. If those happen to be blogs or forums, you can choose to then participate in those discussions, answer questions, and otherwise interact with the very people you'd like to sell to. (Warning: This can backfire if you don't respect users and the community. You're a guest in their home, act accordingly.)

What are you waiting for?

I've really just outlined the basics here. There are of course many other opportunities out there. The point is that your time and money is better spent engaging prospects online, where you can control your spending, rapidly test and modify your approach, and experience a level of accountability that's always been lacking with traditional advertising. This recession doesn't have to mean an end to your marketing. It might just be the wake up call we've all been needing to start doing things better.

Photo Credit: straymuse

"Seeking long term relationship with that special media planner"

I admit it. I'm a sucker for any ad that manages to grab my attention. Even more so when it peaks my curiosity enough to read all the copy. If that then leads me to click through, wow.

This ad from Casale Media did all of the above:

I know, I know: it's just a semi clever ad trying to grab attention in an old-school advertising kind of way. But you know what? I think it's great. Let me count the ways...

1. It's out of place

This is pretty straight forward, but one of the best ways to grab people's attention is to make your ad seem out of place. Clearly, a torn out classifieds ad being pasted on a digital screen is out of place. Bam! You have curiosity and even a touch of story appeal.

2. It's all about love

I've said it before and I'll say it again: the best advertisers tell love stories. In this case, they're telling a love story in a pretty direct way. They're not just looking to sell you something, they're looking for longterm commitment. They're looking for the kind of love that happens when two businesses meet and find a connection. Hokey? Of course! But then, so is bringing your wife flowers. The gesture is still appreciated.

3. It's a clever spin

I'm not talking about that kind of cleverness that screams out from the roof tops "Look how original I am! I'm a genius!" I'm talking about the kind of cleverness that sells. It's entertaining, it's touching, it puts a boring idea into an attractive context. It's easy to read. It's engaging.

4. The call-to-action begs to be clicked

The call-to-action is simple: View Profile. Now my curiosity is peaked. What will I see when I click that button? Will the story continue? Will I keep learning about how perfect of a match we are?

Then it all falls apart on the follow-through

Unfortunately, when you click on the ad you're brought directly to a sign up form. The story doesn't continue. All that momentum they had going in the ad and getting me to click-through is lost when I get there, because instead of continuing this enjoyable experience, I'm dumped onto some administrative garbage trying to get my information.

This was so close to being a great campaign. I bet you the click-through rates are phenomenal (or at least, above-average), but that the sign-ups are dismal.

Lesson of the day: The job doesn't end when you've peaked my curiosity. You have to court me through the entire process. Even the best banner ads can't save a poor landing page.