Here’s an easy way to tell. Load up your web site of choice on a mobile browser. Hold the device at arm’s length. If you can’t immediately pick out the call to action and get a sense for what the site is about, then your web design isn’t amazing.
The same is true of photography. Load up your photos in iPhoto or Picasa or the thumbnail browser of your choice. If at a glance not a single photo stands out, then your photos don’t have the famed Tom Peters’ Wow! factor.
The very best way to test this out is to do it with other people. Load up your sites or photos on the mobile device and ask someone to quickly take a peek. If they’re not getting the message you want, then it’s time to go back and sharpen the pencil.
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Truffa brand purified drinking water delivers refreshment like few other bottled waters. Inspired by the Italian village of San Pellegrino in Terme, Truffa starts with delicious cold water from the same source as the famed Ice Mountain waters, a highly publicized and recognized source of great water.
We don’t stop there, though. Truffa is triple filtered in a unique processing system for bottled water, involving state of the art styrene methyl methacrylate copolymer filtration systems, food-grade activated carbon, and ion resin exchanges.
After that, in yet another advance in purified drinking water, Truffa brand purified drinking water is energized with a powerful 21% oxygen mixture to provide a clean, crisp taste.
Unlike other bottled waters, Truffa brand purified drinking water is artisan-crafted, all natural, and strictly supervised by experts throughout the purification process to ensure that you get only the best, most refreshing water possible.
Once crafted, Truffa is bottled in elegant solid glass to ensure that no impurities from manufactured plastic corrupt the purity of our water on its way to you.
Of course, a water this sophisticated and pure isn’t for everyone. But for those who choose Truffa, it’s unparalleled refreshment.
Does this sound good? Would you buy this?
Here’s the part that you don’t see.
Truffa does not exist. It’s an Italian word for scam. Bottled at the same source as Ice Mountain? That’s Framingham tap water, courtesy of the MWRA. The SMMC filtration system? Styrene methyl methacrylate is the long name for the plastic that a Brita pitcher is made out of. 21% oxygen mixture? That’s the natural amount of oxygen in the air. So here’s what’s behind this bottled water:
1. Put tap water into the Brita.
2. Pour filtered tap into a glass bottle.
3. Shake briefly.
4. Resell at ridiculous markup.
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The water coming out of the sink in my kitchen is Ice Mountain’s source as well – the MWRA municipal source for metrowest Boston, filtered the same as I filter my water at home.
I got a real kick when I saw the marketing on the Ice Mountain web site:
Slick, well made, and the claim that you could have Ice Mountain delivered to your door for just a dollar a day was awesomely funny – when you do the math, 4 bottles of 5 gallons each for 32 works out to1.60 per gallon. Why? Because that’s my tap water, and the tap water of just about everyone who lives in the metro Boston area.
Figure that you can buy Brita filters on Amazon for 16 or so for 120 gallons of capacity (more, actually, since these filters can easily do 80-100 gallons). That puts your cost per gallon around 13 cents if you go by manufacturer’s filter life ratings. Add in the cost of water –763 for 61,000 gallons, and you’re at 1.3 cents per gallon.
So do the math. $1.60/gallon for home delivery of the same water you can get out of your Boston-area faucet WITH filtration for 14.3 cents.
Only marketing can make a 10x markup like that work and still get consumers to buy product by the truckload.
Oh, and those individual bottles? If you pay 1 per bottle at 16.9 ounces, you’re talking about paying3.78 per gallon of the same water – a 26x markup.
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Barack Obama won the presidency on a combination of many factors, but one often overlooked by marketing is the absolutely essential use of data. Obama’s campaign under manager David Plouffe was a data machine. Consider:
1. Web sites, social media, blogs, etc. – all with Google Analytics, which you could see on page load.
2. The Biden SMS play was brilliant. Get a bunch of people to sign up for your text messaging service by revealing your VP pick on mobile first, and you’ve populated your database.
3. The iPhone app was brilliant. In this Newsweek article, the app’s back end arranged the “call a friend” by states where the campaign wanted to focus. What might have seemed random or casual was in fact well thought out.
4. Email, email, email. Think email marketing is dead? Tell that to the campaign, which sent out more email than I could count, with different voices, topics, subjects, and every combination you could imagine.
5. Word of mouth. The Obama campaign actively encouraged word of mouth at every opportunity, from telling supporters at rallies to call and text friends to encouraging sharing of media by posting to YouTube, broadcasting on UStream, every avenue available to it.
The clear winner in the Obama campaign was marketing. It helped that the product was worth talking about, but without the massive, well-run marketing machine, we’d be talking about a very different president elect today.
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blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah President and CEO said, “blah blah blah blah blah blah leadership blah blah blah we care blah blah blah number one priority”. Blah blah blah savings blah blah blah blah blah blah thought leader blah blah blah blah blah blah competitive blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah full suite blah blah blah blah oh my god are you still reading this blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah Internet blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah serving tomorrow’s blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
Sadly, this isn’t quite the level of professionalism expected in a press release, even if it’s 100% accurate and gets the point across nicely. Why is it most press releases are full of fluff?
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I’ve been playing World of Warcraft (WoW) for fun the past couple of weeks or so. It was a fun game in the beginning, but now it’s a useful game, at least in the sense of honing two vitally important skills, arbitrage and information asymmetry. (two skills, I might add, come in handy in today’s economy)
To the right is a screen clip of WarCraft as it appears with a few pricing plugins installed. By itself, the doesn’t look at all like this, only with some plugins. (Auctioneer, if you’re a WoW gamer) Take a look at what’s in there.
Pricing
Median buyout price
Buyout prices at the extremes
3, 7, and 14 day moving averages of prices
Item availability from vendors and pricing
Resale valuation and estimated ROI
Bear in mind, the average player of WoW doesn’t install this add-on software, which means they don’t have access to this information.
What does this have to do with marketing? There are two concepts at work here.
Arbitrage is unequal pricing for equal things. In this example, I can tell what items are good deals and what items aren’t, what items are a bargain, what items are overpriced. Arbitrage extends to marketing and new media as well – concepts that work in proven systems can be adapted to new media, and the result is information arbitrage. I can take a concept like a proven sales letter template and adapt it for a blog.
Information asymmetry is even more important in this case. I have access to information that the average WoW player does not. This allows me to be more effective as a WoW gamer, because I can earn rapid profits from better information, especially competing against players with less information or lower quality information. Marketers in new media have an information asymmetry advantage that marketers outside of new media don’t enjoy. Marketers in new media have access to the Twitter stream, to blogs, RSS, podcasts, and so much more. If you can know what your target market is thinking and saying about your product, service, or industry, you have a massive advantage over marketers who lack that information and either have to compete by spending more or can’t compete as well.
Arbitrage and information asymmetry – all from a fun game.
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“The market crashes, turns to ashes that you’re dancing on while some fat lady cues up for a song.” – Matthew Ebel, Better Off Dead
Well, folks, the great unraveling is picking up pace, with more banks failing, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac taking up hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars in a bailout, and companies like Lehman Brothers essentially saying “Everything for sale, cheap! We need cash fast!”
What does this mean for you, the new media professional, the marketing professional?
It means that flash cash for new media is dwindling fast. Companies can’t afford Bubble 2.0 any more.
You’d better have a revenue stream that isn’t dependent on just advertising – MarketingVox recently cited sharp declines in expenditures.
You’d better have a revenue stream that isn’t dependent on discretionary income – that’s going away real fast.
You’d better have a revenue stream that isn’t dependent on corporate largesse – budgets simply aren’t there.
So what should you be looking for?
Look for pay-for-performance revenue streams like affiliate marketing that pay a cut of the sale. Take a look at Shareasale, for example. (Full disclosure: PAID link that supports the Financial Aid Podcast.) As long as you make affiliate publishers money, you make money.
Make premium subscriptions for irreplaceable content. Your content has got to be so valuable, so top-notch, that it’s no longer discretionary spending, but mandatory spending.
Above all else, if you’re not building your database, you’re dead meat.
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Here’s a vital question I have from a recent discussion with my CEO at the Student Loan Network:
What happened to the other 98%?
We talk a lot, especially in marketing, about click through, conversion, and retention rates. Invariably, these rates are small fractions in all of the discussions I’ve had. 1% click through rate, 10% open rate, etc.
When you turn these metrics around, they’re a little more depressing.
90% did not open rate.
99% did not click through rate.
95% did not buy something rate.
96% did not volunteer rate.
94% did not complete the form rate.
As a marketer, that looks appalling, so we state things in the positive – ooh, that cold calling campaign landed a 2% conversion rate.
What the heck is happening to the other 98%? Didn’t open? Why not? Didn’t click? Why not?
Often we talk in marketing about increasing market share or conversion by a few percentage points.
Why don’t we ever talk about increasing conversion by an order of magnitude?
If you were in charge of a marketing campaign, how would you get the did X/did not X rates to switch places?
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The martial art that I practice places an incredible amount of emphasis on the basics of the art. Basic footwork patterns, basic abilities to hit, grapple, throw, and otherwise put the kibosh on someone trying to hurt you.
One of the things that every senior instructor at my dojo, the Boston Martial Arts Center, constantly emphasizes is the refinement and polishing of our basics. If you punch someone, you want them to stay punched. If you throw someone, you want them to stay thrown. All the fancy moves and movie-like choreography will do you no good whatsoever if the bad guy gets back up and starts griefing you again; conversely, all the fancy moves are completely unnecessary if you get out of harm’s way and deck the guy so hard that his unconceived children feel it.
What does this have to do with marketing? Simple. We forget the basics all too often. In our attention deficit society, in our 90 hour work week system, we’re so easily distracted by flashy toys and tricks that we forget to practice and refine our basics. The ability to send out an effective direct email campaign. The ability to optimize a web page for the basics of search engine optimization. The ability to design a usable interface to our information.
This is a topic I’ll be talking about more at the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer in October. We’ll explore the levels of marketing basics just like a martial art, showing you what “white belt” skills will always pay off no matter how many grades of black belt you have.
In the end, no matter how fancy your marketing or martial arts, chances are in any real encounter on the street or in your vertical, you’re going to get one shot that will decide whether you make it or don’t. There’s no second place prize. The only way to be confident in that one shot is to have solid basics that you can rely on.
Ask yourself this as a marketer: what are your basics? How reliable are they? How confident are you in the results you can generate with them?
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Here’s an easy way to tell. Load up your web site of choice on a mobile browser. Hold the device at arm’s length. If you can’t immediately pick out the call to action and get a sense for what the site is about, then your web design isn’t amazing.
