Posts tagged Internet marketing
Five ways to help your product market itself online
Apr 17th
By Neicole Crepeau, Contributing {grow} Columnist
If you sell a web app or a software product that has web elements, it’s time to consider how your product can help market itself. More and more we’re seeing marketing built into products, allowing the code to do some of the advertising work for you. Here are five methods to consider.
1) Perfect Social Prompts
Social sharing is the most obvious and easiest form of marketing that a product can enable but it is also critically important because when fans and followers see a personal recommendation of your product or service from someone they trust, that carries real weight.
The trick is to prompt users at appropriate times and provide an easy way for them to share, without overwhelming them. Marketers need to work with development to design the right sharing experiences in order to generate maximum, positive posts.
Let’s look at a fantastic example of this. I recently had my laptop stolen. Luckily, I was using Backblaze to back up my files. On the screen for restoring my content, there were prominently placed Share buttons. It was the perfect time to prompt, because I felt incredibly relieved and thankful to Backblaze at that moment.
What better advertisement than seeing a post from a person who feels immensely grateful for your product?
2) Creative Content Options
Does your product generate content or help users create content? Content is the fuel that powers the Internet and in an ideal world, your product would actually create content of interest your customers want to share.
A good example of this is the social influence company Appinions. Just by using the product, they can generate reports and infographics that are interesting and useful to the press, the public and industry publications.
If your product doesn’t naturally provide content, there are still ways to use the product as the content in a marketing strategy.
For example, say you have a business productivity tool, something akin to Evernote. Can you provide a public option that allows business users to highlight and share content that might promote them or their company? Putting a little effort into making your productivity tool a valuable marketing tool for other users means a public page that showcases your app.
Or, perhaps you’re able to track usage statistics via your product and provide data that might be of interest to other business users. Even support-related content, where existing users provide tips and hints, or describe how they are using your product, is a way to highlight your tool and garner SEO benefits.
Another option is to display user-generated or curated content on your site, which draws other potential users like a magnet to see it. This subtly endorses your product simply by showcasing it. Pinterest, which shows up in search engine results, is a perfect example of a site where user-generated content is both the product and a self-marketing tool.
3) In Search of Stickiness
The first step in obtaining powerful word of mouth marketing action is for people to actually use your product. That’s why it’s important to consider how to make your product “sticky,” i.e. keeping people glued and coming back.
The most common method of making a product sticky is through automated notifications through email, text messages, or even Twitter DMs. The notifications can range from a simple, “We haven’t seen you in a while…” to updates that inform users of activity or engagement opportunities. Social media tools often use this kind of engagement notification. For example, Twitter notifies you when someone sends a DM and Facebook tells you when someone has tagged or mentioned you.
When designing notifications into your product, you need to consider the whole experience in order to make sure that you are maximizing stickiness without annoying users. Make sure that messages are useful and the total number of notifications is appropriate to the level of activity and investment the customer has made in your product each day/week.
Make it easy for users to move from the notification to the appropriate, corresponding area or actions of your software, website, or app. For example, when you click the link in a notification from Twitter about DM or @, you go to that DM/tweet so you can see it and immediately respond.
Don’t forget to look for opportunities to capitalize on notification for additional marketing opportunities. For example, say that you’re notifying users of a new post or picture that might interest them. When they click the link to go to that post or picture, it might make sense to have Share buttons that let the user immediately share that item with others, further spreading links to your application.
4) Rewards and Prizes
Who doesn’t like getting something for free? There are myriad ways to build rewards into your product to encourage actions that help market it. For example, Dropbox has a getspace page, listing ways to get more diskspace. In addition to upgrading to a paid or higher-priced version of Dropbox, you can earn space for free by taking actions that market or otherwise help the product:
Consider offering users something for tweeting or posting about your product. Definitely consider a referral reward. Many products generate a “coupon” code that users can share with others. When friends/fans use the code, the sender gets a discount or other reward. (There are even apps like Ambassador to help you create and track these codes for your product.) You might also consider rewarding bloggers for posts. I know a marketer who gives users a free year of service if they write a blog post about his product.
5) Fun, fun, fun
“Gamifying” products is all the rage. It can keep the product sticky, encourage users to explore features, and entice users to take marketing actions in exchange for status, badges, or to level up.
You can even combine the rewards and gamification techniques. For example, users might level-up through marketing actions to earn discounts, free months on your subscription product, or unlock selected premium features. Again, design these gamification elements carefully. If your users can level up to use selected premium features, pick features that will showcase the premium version and that are sticky, making those leveled-up users reluctant to give up the feature or the data they’ve saved with it.
Remember to make people’s level and status prominent in the product. Part of the benefit of gamification is to encourage competition. When a new user sees that another user has a special status, the new user may be driven to obtain that status as well. This competitive instinct can be leveraged to encourage users to take the actions you want.
As a marketer, you need to also consider your product pricing structure and how you can use gamification to get users to spend more money. For example, users who pay for higher-priced versions may have greater public status and privileges (like an American Express Black Card). You may also decide that it makes sense to allow users to earn or pay for specific features or privileges.
It’s a wired world, so let’s allow our products to help them market themselves! Was this helpful? Any ideas you’d like to contribute?
Neicole Crepeau is the Senior Marketing Manager at Vizit Corporation, and blogs at Coherent Social Media. She’s the creator of CurateXpress, a content curation tool. Connect with Neicole on Twitter at @neicolec
The Native Advertising Trend: Hot or Hoax?
Jan 23rd
By Neicole Crepeau, Contributing {grow} Columnist
Native advertising. It’s all the buzz. Marketers are enthralled with it, and studies suggest spending on native advertising will increase significantly in 2013. Let’s take a reality check of this big trend.
Why all the excitement?
Traditional ads that display on blogs and publisher’s sites are easy to spot. That’s led to what advertisers call “ad blindness,” the tendency for readers to ignore ad blocks on websites. Native advertising helps counter ad blindness by embedding the advertising into the site more subtly.
Definitions vary, but in general, native advertising is content presented in a way that closely fits the tone and style of the online publication where it is shown. Facebook’s sponsored posts and Buzzfeed’s presented-by stories are oft-cited examples. Native advertising goes beyond this, though.
Native advertising blurs the lines between paid and earned content, and it’s creeping into the blogosphere as well. More successful bloggers are accepting payment for posts and links, and establishing all manner of sponsorships and partnerships whereby they promote and write about companies and products for pay. Most of the bloggers I know appear to be responsible and are following the FTC disclosure rules. However, since those rules aren’t well enforced, it’s unclear how many bloggers and publishers aren’t giving disclosures.
The opportunity for bloggers
As a blogger, I’ve been approached in the last year with several native advertising/sponsored content opportunities. They ranged in form. Some would have me produce the content, usually as an article that looks much like the publisher’s content except for my bio at the end. I would then pay to have it hosted on the publisher’s site, with links to the content embedded on the publisher’s site in such a way that they look like links to the publisher’s own content.
In other cases, the opportunity was to jointly-develop content development/presentations, such as joint webinars along with white papers I’d produce. I would pay for run-of-network promotion.
In yet other cases, I’d pay for advertising or a white paper promotion, but as part of the package, I’d also provide information to the publisher about a product or topic. The publisher’s own writers would then write and publish an article on my product/topic. I was told that this was done to keep the content “unbiased” and accurate — but since I would be paying the publisher, how unbiased could it really be?
You can see how fuzzy the lines are getting. As the amount of native advertising and sponsored content rises, we’ll witness more complex and blurred business relationships between bloggers/publisher and advertisers.
So what’s the problem? Trust.
We all want to see our favorite bloggers find a way to earn a living from their content. And, as I said, many of these bloggers are putting the requisite disclosure in their promotional posts.
Yet … even though I know they are disclosing relationships, I suddenly find myself skeptical of any mention of a product on those blogs, especially if there’s a link to the product site. Now that I know these bloggers are earning money by promoting businesses through their content, I can’t help but be suspicious of any blog post that turns into an advertisement.
I expect I’m not alone.
Consumers avoid ads. There’s no reason to believe they won’t be able to see through native advertising on blogs and avoid these blogs, too.
So, given that advertisers will jump on and drive the native/sponsored content wave, and that consumers will inevitably see through the trickery, what does it mean for the long-term future of native advertising and sponsored content? I can see several possibilities:
- Native/sponsored content becomes less effective. That’s pretty much a given. As consumers become familiar with the new native advertising territory, they will be less likely to click on the content (except perhaps for content like Buzzfeed’s that is purely entertainment with branding).
- Consumers abandon bloggers/publishers that are clearly being paid. Bloggers/publishers invest in building a following, which is what enables them to monetize. Yet, it’s the regular readers who will most easily spot the monetary influence. (A first-time visitor to a site may not as easily distinguish paid versus unpaid content, when advertisers and publishers are working hard to hide it.) As the regular readers become less trustful of the blogger/publisher because money is now clearly in the picture, they may abandon the site. That would create a real Catch-22 for bloggers who become successful by building a following, but need to make a living from their blog.
- Smaller and independent bloggers/publishers are favored by readers. Readers will probably begin to show a preference for smaller bloggers and publishers who are keeping it clean. Similarly, business blogs (sites that are creating content solely for the purpose of promoting their own business and not taking money from other businesses) may be considered better sources of information. Sure, they have a bias, but they have only one bias (promoting their business) and it’s easy for a reader to account for.
- People become more willing to pay for content. With the increased gaming of review sites and an increased mistrust of “free” content, users may prefer to pay for content from journalist and analysts. Especially when researching large purchases.
- Google works against native advertisers. How is Google making money on native advertising on publisher sites? They’re not. Native advertising is an alternative to AdWords, and currently it’s mostly a direct publisher-to-advertiser play. Anything that threatens Google’s ad revenue is likely to become a target for Google. Given the Panda update which focused on ensuring high-quality content, and the fact that native advertising siphons money from Google, it’s likely that Google will adapt its algorithm to penalize bloggers and publishers using native advertising or sponsored content. Or, the company may find a way to enable native advertising through its network.
I don’t know exactly where we’ll end up, but I’m sure that native advertising won’t be a panacea for advertisers. The web is an ecosystem. When a new element, such as a new ad format, is introduced users adapt to it and change their behavior. In this case, the likely change is one of mistrust, which will undermine the native advertising/sponsored content monetization strategy in the long run.
Are you starting to see any of this cropping up in your web reading? What impact is it having on you?
Neicole Crepeau is the Senior Marketing Manager at Vizit Corporation, and blogs at Coherent Social Media. She’s the creator of CurateXpress, a content curation tool. Connect with Neicole on Twitter at @neicolec
Illustration courtesy BigStock,com
How do you make your content go viral — offline?
Oct 25th
You’re probably stressed.
It’s likely that you (and your customer contacts) are doing the job that used to be done by three people. The information density of our world is overwhelming. Budgets and resources have been slashed.
It seems that everything is working against our ability to connect with customers and share information that could influence a purchasing decision and close a deal!
On the Internet side of the business, a new model for personal power and influence has emerged. Enabled by widespread access to high-speed Internet and free publishing tools like blogging and Facebook, a new generation of influencers has emerged who have created a niche by being able to create compelling content and move it through an engaged network.
So now I want to take this idea a step further and push this thinking a new way. If you have been immersed in the social web for awhile, this idea of influence probably makes sense. But how do we apply this same model to the OFFLINE world?
How do we establish power and influence by creating compelling content and moving it through a HUMAN network instead of a digital one?
For example, success in sales often depends on your ability to tell the story of your company and the benefits of your product. But that task is more difficult than ever. The competition is fierce, and your procurement contacts have less and less time to learn about what you do … let alone understand it.
So how can we use Web 2.0 communication tools to break through the clutter and move our marketing message virally through Procurement, through corporate gatekeepers, and into the hearts and minds of executive decision-makers?
Here are a few lessons from moving content online that might help move it offline too:
Infographics – While we might be weary of infographics, wouldn’t that be an interesting way to cut through the clutter with a busy purchasing manager? Instead of giving them a glossy brochure or power point presentation, why not a one-page, cleverly-designed picture of your business?
Aggregate content – When I interview customers during my market research activities, I always ask them what they hate about their jobs. I look for activities that my client might be able to take on for them to make them indispensable. The answer usually leads back to something about stress and a lack of time to get things done. How can you use Web 2.0 utilities to help customers solve problems and save time? Can you aggregate industry content in a helpful way so that a message from your company cuts through the clutter once a week?
Make ‘em say wow – Let’s face it. Most company corporate communications are bland. They’re little more than glossy, buzz-laden press releases. Yet the communications that really stand out and get shared ENTERTAIN people! Do you remember the day last year when the Google logo was a little PacMan game? If you saw it, I’ll bet you remember it, played it, and probably shared it. It was a little thing that helped them stand out and make people go “wow!” If you have ever seen an example of a corporate marketing communications that makes you go “wow” I’d like to see it. Rare exceptions … but why?
Visual selling — I don’t know what you call this technique, but many magazines are now doing lists where you can feature the “top 10 of something” by flipping through a picture or graphic and a small amount of text. An example from Inc. is here. This is an effective communincation format when you want to summarize the highlights, yet I have never seen it used out side of this magazine format. Sort of a Flipbook/infographic combination.
I don’t have all the answers, but what do you think about the idea? How can we apply online marketing principles and best practices to the offline world to get to decision makers?
The Death of Internet Marketing and the Rise of Social SEO
Sep 14th
By Robert Dempsey, Contributing {grow} Columnist
Internet marketing as we once knew it is dead. Gone are the days when a sales page was enough of a relationship to sell a product. Gone are the days when claims of riches tugged enough at the emotions to persuade a sale. Gone are the days when bloated claims could pass as truth and lies went unpunished. Now is the time of social SEO. And this time has already begun. Are you ready for it? Let’s find out.
The Web Has Always Been Social
From the time the Internet was called the World Wide Web people have been using it to send communications back and forth. There was Arpanet (1969), bulletin board services aka BBS (1978), Usenet (1980) and then the email system Listserve (1986). The Internet was created as a communication medium not only between computers but between the users of those computers – us. And since those early days we’ve been trying to connect with each other more and more.
Then Came SEO
With advances in computing technology came the ability to create and post web pages. As more and more people connected to the Internet the need arose to help people find those websites. You may remember getting in your (physical) inbox an AOL cd, or perhaps 10-20 of them. AOL provided a human-filtered gateway to the Internet. Then came Yahoo! and other search engines and web portals. It was during the mid-1990s that search engine optimization came about.
In the beginning people used to try all sorts of things to get their sites to rank higher – stuffing keywords into a page, hiding keywords using white text on a white background, buying links and more. Today these other assorted tactics will get you banned from Google or at the very least ensure that you never show up in the search results. Then in the late 1990s the next shift came about.
Blogging Hits The Social Scene
What began as a way to tell the rest of the world about what was going on in yours, blogging turned into an SEOs happiest dream. Now it was easy to create a metric ton of pages all optimized for search. But unlike static sites people could comment on blogs. No longer the domain of chat channels, instant messenger and walled gardens, websites became a two-way communication channel. In 1998 Open Diary was the first website where readers could add comments to someone’s blog entry.
And the web was forever changed.
And Then Social Media Hit The Fan
Fast forward to early 2000. Social media came into it’s own and really started to take off. Here’s a brief timeline with a few you may recognize:
- 2002 – Friendster
- 2003 – Myspace
- 2003 – LinkedIn
- 2004 – Facebook
- 2006 – Twitter
- 2011 – Google+
For a time SEO and social media were separate. As I alluded to in the introduction, that time is over.
The Rise Of Social SEO
Social SEO is the combination of social media and search engine optimization. The term itself is an acknowledgment that the two are no longer separate. In a recent post of mine – Google Proves Not Being On Social Media Will Kill Your SEO - I discuss the changes already in progress at Google. In a recent video with Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson of Google mention in a rather off-handed way that Google is working to incorporate social signals into search engine rankings. This isn’t anything new. Google has been personalizing search results for quite some time. Now it’s going to an entirely new level.
In today’s world of social SEO you must be publishing content that is optimized for the search engines AND is shared within social networks such as Twitter and Google+. In Google’s eyes which already measure authority using somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 factors, social shares from others are another indication that you know what you’re talking about. In addition, they are now supporting the rel=“author” and rel=“me” tags which allow you to indicate if a piece of content is authored or about you.
Already in progress, the content you create everywhere is being linked to directly to you. In addition, people’s reactions to that content is also being measured and noted. It has been said that every person is a content producer. Now every person is an authority, or can be.
This is where the death of traditional Internet Marketing comes into play.
The Fall Of Internet Marketing
When I say “traditional Internet Marketing” what I’m talking about is a certain set of tactics used to sell products online, specifically:
- Sales pages with big red headlines that insult our intelligence
- Outrageous claims of instant or close-to-instant riches with very little work
- Hard-sell sales tactics
- Ups-ellathons mixed in with cross-sell-athons
- A bombardment of swiped affiliate emails that are impersonal and arrive by the dozens
On the social web it takes more than well crafted paragraphs to create enough trust and authority to make a sale. Now I’m not hailing the death of e-commerce, far from it. But the way products and services are sold online by non-e-commerce businesses has changed. A relationship built on trust and authority is now what makes the sale.
Embrace The Change
15 years ago businesses were told they needed a website. Many didn’t listen.
10 years ago businesses were told they needed to use SEO. Many didn’t listen.
5 years ago businesses were told they needed to blog. Many didn’t listen.
2 years ago businesses were told they needed to be on social media. Many didn’t listen.
But many did.
The companies that blog, that use SEO, that use social media continue to thrive despite uncertain economies. The businesses that embraced stronger relationships with their customers continue to thrive. The businesses that acknowledge the upward trend of social seo will be the companies that continue into the future.
Will yours be one?
Robert Dempsey specializes in direct response social media and blogs at http://DempseyMarketing.com/journal/.
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