Newer! Bigger! Better!

This blog, that is!

I'm combining forces with Squarevox associates J. Sean Branagan and Maureen Rogers on a new group blog, The Opinionated Marketers. This will be the last post here; I'll be continuing to blog over in our new digs.

Sean and Maureen are two of the brightest people I've had the pleasure of working with, and I'm really excited that they're jumping into the blog world with me. So head on over, see what they've got to say, and join in with your comments!

Time to Go Organic?

What works better - organic search optimization (tweaking your web site so that you come out high on search engine results) or sponsored search (pay per click programs, like Google Adwords, where your message appears next to search results)?

ClickZ reports on a new study that indicates the two techniques produce similar results:

If you gathered the opinions of 100 paid search practitioners, and compared that to 100 organic search optimization experts, you'd find persuasive arguments for each method being superior at driving conversions. A new study from WebSideStory will justify the arguments of both sides.

The study looks at traffic and conversion data from 20 business-to-consumer e-commerce sites during the first eight months of 2006. Paid search had a median order conversion rate of 3.4 percent, while organic search results produced a conversion rate of 3.13 percent. The data set included more than 57 million search engine visits.

There are arguments to support both sides, Rand Schulman, WebSideStory's CMO, told ClickZ.

"On the one hand, because you control the message of paid search, you'd expect higher conversions. On the other side, because people value the 'editorial integrity' of organic, you'd expect higher conversions," he said. "Ultimately you need to do both. I think the eye-opener here is that neither side has a significant edge."

The findings match my own experience working with both kinds of search marketing. There's a credibility to organic search that sponsored search can't match; sponsored search, however, lets you get immediate results and lets you control exactly what you spend and where you appear.

Also, sponsored search self-selects for people who want to spend money:

There are many factors on both sides of the argument, which ultimately balance each other out, according to Dana Todd, executive VP of interactive agency SiteLab and president of the Search Engine Marketing Professionals Organization (SEMPO).

"Most visitors are not looking past the top three paid search ads, and the top three organic results. At that level of quality sites, you'd expect to see conversion rates that are close," she said.

In addition, organic search's higher volume of clicks, which tends to be 1.5 times higher than paid search volume, is balanced by the recognition by users that paid search ads are ads, which leads to a self-selection by users who have a commercial intent to their search, Todd said.

Bottom line: do both. But watch out for two common mistakes:

First, remember that organic search isn't a one-time effort. Too often, companies spend some time optimizing their sites, see the results, and stop. Keep monitoring your search results, because new sites are always appearing and everyone else is spending time optimizing their own sites, and if you don't stay on top of it, your results will drop off.

Second, make sure you (or anyone you pay to do search optimization for you) are using white hat, not black hat, techniques. There are a lot of ways to trick search engines; they'll give you some quick results, but if you're caught (and you probably will be eventually), you'll find yourself blacklisted from search engines. There are, unfortunately, a lot of consultants out there who promise great results by using these techniques; it's a risky approach and I don't recommend it.

Abandoning Your Leads to Die

MarketingProfs has a nice piece on a classic marketing danger zone: handing inquiries off to the sales team.  The most important cautionary paragraph:

If you merely dump prospects on sales without first agreeing on the meaning of "lead" and then qualifying each prospect based on your definition, you and sales may end up at loggerheads when supposed leads don't become actual customers. At the very least, you'll confirm any assumptions on salespeople's part that you can't help them turn leads into cash.

Amen. Dealing with the issue goes well beyond that warning, though.

Remember how salespeople think: they need to be focused on closing deals, because they are trying to hit a monthly or quarterly quota. If you give them an inquiry from someone who isn't ready to buy - and that will be most of the inquiries you can get - they will follow up a couple of times, and then chuck it, usually complaining about the crappy leads they get from those stupid marketing people who don't understand how to bring in business.

Worst of all, that person might buy something - in six or nine months. Probably from a competitor.

If you try to handle this by just doing more "acquisition" marketing - getting yourself out there in  front of everyone all the time - you will do better, but the price will be a lot of money on marketing and a lot of wasted time sorting through the raw inquiries to find the near-term buyers.

A better approach - look for the real value of that inquiry. It's an invitation to start a conversation. And as a marketer, that kind of conversation is what you're good at.

Not a "please buy now" conversation, but a "tell me about yourself!" conversation. Think of it as a first date. You're not going to pop the question yet.

But you can keep the conversation going until that prospect is ready (or you figure out that she or he never will be).

You can do it through mail, email, seminars, surveys, white papers, newsletters, blogs, podcasts... in fact, through almost any communications medium.

They key, though, is remembering that your salespeople don't have the time, need, or (often) skills to manage that conversation. That's your job as a marketer.

And when it's time to pop the question, that's when you have the "meet the family" moment of introducing the prospect to your sales team. You'll be far ahead of competitors who haven't been having that conversation. And your sales team will be happy because you're giving them something to help them make their numbers.

Blog to Blog Advertising

Here's an interesting approach to blog advertising: on Techmeme, sponsors pay to have their latest blog posts appear in a "sponsored post" section on the site.

As ad models go, I like this one. The sites that are sponsoring Techmeme are likely to be of interest to some of their readers, and rather than run gimmicky banners, they're just putting the blog posts themselves up. It's almost like a formalized, for-pay blogroll.

My guess is that this model of advertising on blogs will turn out to be a higher value form that the search ads and banners that are more commonly seen (and therefore command higher prices).

Another interesting feature: in order to advertise with Techmeme, you've got to have a blog. If you don't "get" blogging, your money's not welcome. It works as a built-in quality control feature from the point of view of Techmeme's readers; anybody who sponsors the site must be clued-in to blogging to even be there.

From Starbucks, a Lesson in Thinking Like a Customer

Over at StarbucksGossip.com, a blog that exists solely to comment on Starbucks, there's been a little debate raging about customers who make their own iced lattes.

Scanning the coffee menu at Starbucks on Fourth Street in Santa Rosa reveals that the cost of a tall iced latte is $2.45.

Don't want to pay that much? Order a shot of espresso and a cup of ice — at a cost of $1.35 — and use the milk at the condiment bar to make your own latte. That's a savings of $1.10.

Is it stealing? Some say it is.

Some of the baristas find it particularly annoying:

At starbucksgossip.com, many of the more than 400 posts on this topic said customers are taking unfair advantage of the company, which for the month of August reported revenue of $617 million, up 21 percent from August 2005 revenue.

"The condiment bar is called a 'condiment' bar for a reason," a barista wrote. "The milk should be used as a condiment, not the base of a beverage."

"I have to say that this is a sucky thing to do," another barista wrote.

A lot of companies would look at the money lost of DIY lattes, get worried, and come up with some kind of irritating scheme to lock up the milk or turn the store employees into latte police. Starbucks, to its credit, did not:

In a statement released last week, Starbucks sided with customers.

"Customization is a fundamental attribute of the Starbucks Experience," the company said in an e-mail statement. "We provide condiments to our customers so they can make their drinks to their liking, and we appreciate their patronage. We trust our customers to make the choices that are right for them."

The statement reflects the company's "Just Say Yes" policy, another way of saying the customer is always right.

Starbucks knows what its selling. The coffee is good but not great. What brings people in is the desire to go to Starbucks.

With the margins on those eighteen-syllable concoctions that are more like candy than coffee and the add-on sales of CDs, mugs, coffee machines, and the like, they can afford to lose a little on the DIY-crowd. What they can't afford is people who don't like going to Starbucks, because then the whole business falls apart. This kind of thinking is one of the reasons they're so fantastically successful.

Don't annoy your customers over the little stuff; recognize what makes them want to do business with you, and you'll find plenty of profitable ways to sell to them. If you damage that fundamental relationship, all the smart products in the world won't help you.

Infect the Language for Fun and Entertainment!

Most of us who communicate for a living have found ourselves cursing the way language gets abused in the corporate world.

We've all seen how horrible words and phrases spread. One day someone told me he'd been "tasked with" something, and I thought, "What a strange, contorted way to say you've been asked to do something." A week later it was everywhere.

And so they come and go and come and go. Remember when "tiger teams" were all the rage? How about "templatize?" "End-to-end?" "Turnkey?" "Clicks and mortar?"

Buzzwords usually have one of two important features:

1. The buzzword (or buzzphrase) means something, but it's something that's already expressed more clearly and simply by ordinary English. ("Anne tasked me with re-envisioning the corporate presentation!" vs. "Anne asked me to look at the corporate presentation and recommend some new approaches to it.")

2. The buzzword actually describes some new concept, but quickly gets applied to everything in sight. (See "Web 2.0.")

Generally, they are born, they annoy millions, and they either fade away or we all get used to hearing them. What can we do?

Well, here's a very funny story about how you can fight back, or at least entertain yourself while the language degrades: create your own stupid buzzword and release it into the wild to see how far it can go!

By any other name

Missouri City, Texas, a suburb of Houston, has some problems. It's not considered a particularly desirable location; its main roads are a morass of not-too-high-end chain stores and restaurants; it's not attracting any particularly interesting development. And so city leaders are thinking the solution is to change the name of the city.

Some of the motivation here is, I'm sure, irritation that neighbor Sugar Land, just up the road, is considered a highly desirable suburb of Houston and was recently on one of Money magazine's inane lists as one of the best places to live in the US. If you drive along Highway 6, you can barely tell that you've crossed from Sugar Land to Missouri City; the same set of stores in similar strip malls along a traffic-choked road just keep repeating themselves.

Here's something interesting, though; Missouri City has a large African American population, and in 2000, Black Entertainment Television called the place a "model city" for African Americans.

That's a point of differentiation from Sugar Land, which to many folks around Houston epitomizes bland suburbia.

There's a point of differentiation that Missouri City's leaders could start with to figure out how to position their community as a desirable place to live, work, or invest. Is it the right one? I'm not sure, but it's a better starting point than changing the name and hoping the perception follows.