Niche Marketing Matters

Ever catch yourself staring at a beautiful person or the image of one? I know it sounds a little creepy, but it is like you can’t help yourself from staring at them. Don’t feel weird, as it turns out humans may be hardwired to do this.

There is something compelling about a pretty face, whether it be male or female. We prefer to be around them instead of average looking, or, heaven forbid, ugly people. We tend to chose leaders who are better looking—you have to admit that Obama is a good looking guy. Ever notice that many CEOs are tall and handsome? It is no accident.

Advertisements that include pretty people sell better than those with average people. Open any magazine and you will see products being pitched by pretty women and handsome men. Advertising agencies know this and so do modeling agencies.

As for ugly people, we like to laugh at them. Most comics have big noses or are fat or are just plain funny looking. Think Phyllis Diller, Stephen Wright, Carrot Top, or Margaret Cho. Yep, this is not a pretty group.

So, what is beauty?

It varies from for men and women. According to Professor Victor Johnstone of the University of New Mexico, “Men look for an adult female face that is different from the average face. The two key measurements are the distance from the eyes to the chin, which is shorter - in fact it is the length normally found in a girl aged eleven and a half; and the size of the lips, which are fatter — the size normally found on a fourteen-year-old girl”. Thus, men have a specific facial profile in mind.

Men are judged differently by women. For example, studies show that women are more attracted to the men who are smiled at by other women. Women rely upon the attitudes of others to shape their own determination about the attractiveness of men. Women prefer a man that is desired by other women and feared or respected by men.

Biologically, women are drawn to men that lead the tribe or clan—this is tied to the desire to procreate and make the best babies for the survival of the species. Handsome helps but power is also desired.

Of course, body type, race, height, and other factors come into to play. But, the point is that beauty counts. It counts more than maybe more than you and I like to think. Sad but true.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2009 All rights reserved.

I am frequently asked to give an example of how marketing is changing and of a marketing method that is now outdated or not working as well as it should. The example I often give is yellow pages advertising.

Search marketing is quickly making printed yellow pages advertising obsolete. With the “Generation Y” and “X” crowd leading the way, a quick search of the web will yield quicker and more complete results for a local plumber, pizza parlor, or marketing consultant. Google and Yahoo! simply make a better mousetrap.

Yellow pages advertising success rates are hard to track and you have little control over the process. Online marketing methods will bury you in analytics about your traffic, which will allow you the ability to change your ads in response to competitive pressure. Also, yellow page publishers require that you sign a one year contract while pay-per-click sources let you come and go as you please.

To my chagrin, people are slow to change and the yellow pages remain a giant industry. According to Simba Information, “U.S. yellow pages revenue is expected to total $16.54 billion in 2009″—read that again. Small to medium sized businesses still empty their wallets to the tune of $16.54 billion a year for the yellow pages.

Marketing expenses get institutionalized and remain in place even when they don’t work as well anymore. Take a hard look at your marketing budget. My recommendation is to trim or eliminate your yellow pages spending now.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2009 All rights reserved.

When I was kid I had an aquarium in my bedroom that housed dozens, make that hundreds of guppies and neon tetras. They seemed to multiply almost daily and I was quite proud of them. While I enjoyed watching the pretty little fish, I did not enjoy cleaning the aquarium (much to my mother’s chagrin).

The stink got so bad one day that my mom took it upon herself to clean it for me. Her cleaning agent was Clorox bleach, which did a great job eliminating the bad smell. Unfortunately, after the cleaning I had a mass die-off of the guppies and tetras. In a week or so I was left with 5 mutant guppies. As near as I could tell they were all blind, scarred, and unable to reproduce—they also swam kind of funny.

Needless to say, my mother felt horrible. As for me, I learned a lesson from my negligence and the importance of acting now rather than later. The truth is that I am still haunted by the image of the 5 mutant guppies swimming awkwardly in the tank by my bedside. Poor little guys.

Companies can also be negligent and slow to change. Change is hard and companies will often wait until they have to change. Then they are left with little choice but to react very aggressively. Sometimes management will overreact with over-zealous layoffs or they will layoff the wrong people.

With sales declining and profits gone, firms will often call for a “new strategy”, which is business-speak for “make changes now”. While the changes may be needed, the timing is poor. The best time to change a strategy is when things are working, not when things are falling apart.

For example, General Electric takes pride in continuously changing the firm’s strategy. A key to the firm’s success is a constant review and revision of people, practices, and products. While the GE culture can be criticized for being a bit bombastic, it is hard to argue about their resilience. Former GE CEO Jack Welch had a mantra that still resonates in the hallways, “Change before you have to”.

Like the dirty aquarium, firms need to routinely clean house and review strategy. If not, you may end up with a bunch mutant employees scarred by the management’s swinging ax and desperate reinvention.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.

Text messaging has created a new “language” of sorts that is destroying the written word and has infected all aspects of our society. Driven by young cell phone users who would rather text than talk, these abbreviations are appearing in advertising, new media, and college term papers.

SMS (Short Message Service) technology is a communications protocol allowing for short text messages to be sent between mobile telephone devices. Text messaging has become the most widely used data application in the world with 2.4 billion users—-74% of all mobile phones send or receive text messages.

What SMS has done is to create a new language based on the use of fewer key strokes. For example, consider the following:

• “how r u?” means “How are you?”
• “lol” means “Laugh out loud”.
• “brb” means “Be right back”.
• “ttyl” means “Talk to you later”.
• “pcb” means “Please Call Back”.

My concern is that I don’t think this destruction of the English language is going away; in fact, I think it will only become more common. While at first it may seem no big deal, when you dig deeper into text-speak, you will see that many discrepancies or exceptions exist. For example:

• “because” can be written as “cuz”, “bcuz”, “bcz”, “bcos”, “bc”, “coz”, and “bcoz”.
• “lol” may mean “Laugh out loud” or “Lots of love” or “Lots Of Laughter” .
• “Got to go” can be written as “g2g” or “gtg”.
• “Tomorrow” can be written as “tom”, “2moz”, “2moro”, “2mrw”, or “2mara”.

Honestly, English is hard enough without all this new slang. Yet, this phenomenon is real. The Associated Press is reporting that New Zealand is going to let high school students use text-speaking or texting acronyms in national exams. The move has been extremely controversial. New Zealand’s high school students will be able to use text-speak in national scholastic examinations.

Advertisers seem to be greeting this trend. AT&T /Cingular recently ran a highly successful commercial which featured a mother and daughter having a conversation talking in cell phone text-speak. You actually had to understand text-speak to be able to understand the advertisement’s message.

IMHO (in my humble opinion), text-speak does not belong in business communications, but I may be drowned out by the thundering herd of text message users. So, to you who are text speak illiterate, I recommend that you “rtfm” (read the flippin’ manual) and get on board.

The reason for my flip-flop on this issue is cuz (because) hcb! (Holy Cow Batman!), this text-speak is real.

Hand (have a nice day),

JBJ (John Bradley Jackson)
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.

The language of the web sometimes resembles Swahili and this is especially true with domain names. Coming up with a domain name with a .com suffix that matches your company name or offering is darn near impossible.

The first thing you have to ask yourself is should your business or product name match your URL? Conventional wisdom says yes, yet if you do a Google search for some of your favorite brands you will discover that many do not match. For example, if you enter the word “iPod” you get directed to www.apple.com/itunes. Ok, that makes sense.

Most people will do a Google search for a company or product instead of entering a URL. I have seen estimates that up to 80% of companies are found by web searches instead of directly entering a URL. There is a good argument that a perfect match does not really matter much anymore.

My personal take is that it makes sense to have a domain name that reflects your site or business. It is easier for your customers to remember. Now here is the hard part. Just about every two and three word combination for a .com URL is already taken. Don’t believe me? Go to Godaddy.com and enter any three word combo and you will discover that these URLs are already owned by someone else. Amazingly, this applies to the .net, .org, etc. They are almost all gone.

Unbelievable but true. This explains the trend of inventing company or product names. For example, www.Kijiji.com is an online classified ad website that competes with venerable Craigslist. “Kijiji” is Swahili for the word “village”. If you don’t believe me, go visit www.kijiji.com.

An alternative to Swahili or fabricating words is the use of long domain names. Kijiji could have used www.onlineclassifiedadwebsitethatcompeteswithCraigsList.com. I didn’t check but I am pretty sure this URL is available—cheap. But, can your customers remember it?

There is some evidence that longer URLs are easier to remember than single word inventions. Yet, it took me a few years to quit confusing Yahoo! with Wahoo; I just love their fish tacos or is it their pay-per-click advertising? No matter.

Hyphens or underscores can help you create shorter domain names but they confuse me and where is the underscore key on the key board anyway? Maybe you feel the same way.

Another workaround you can try is to add “the” to the beginning of a URL. I think this trick works if your business is known as “The BirdDog Group” which is the name of my publishing company. In this case, “the” has meaning and is logical.

The final challenge is to choose between .com, .net, .org, and the many others now available. Candidly, .com still has cache and is the suffix of choice for businesses. For those that do enter a URL in a search, 99 times out 100 they will enter it with a .com prefix. The choice for you is made easier since most .com URLs are already taken.

I wish you best in your domain name search. Or, as we say in Swahili, “Hakuna matata” which means no worries.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.

So what is the difference between paid inclusion and pay per click advertising ? First, let’s agree to a few definitions.

Paid inclusion is a search engine marketing product where the search engine company charges fees related to the inclusion of websites in their search index. Let’s new say you launch a new website and you want to get the word out about your site. Paid inclusion is one way to get noticed; specifically, you can contact the search engines directly and register your site for a fee. For example, Alta Vista offers such a service for a fee.

Paid inclusion products are provided by many search engine companies, the most notable exception being Google. Inktomi, Alta Vista, and many other specialized search engine firms charge to list your website. The fee covers an annual subscription for one web page, which will automatically be cataloged on a regular basis.

Pay per click is a form of advertising found on search engines, advertising networks, websites and blogs. The advertiser pays when a visitor actually clicks on an “ad” to visit the advertiser’s website. Advertisers bid on keywords or terms that they believe their target customers use to find information on products or services.

Both hope to drive traffic to the website. Paid inclusion positions itself as a registration process for “legitimate” websites which basically means those websites that can afford the fees. It could be argued that paid inclusion is simply advertising. Yet, paid inclusion really works; in fact, many SEO (search engine optimization) companies rely on paid inclusion as a part of their “secret sauce” to help improve site rankings.

Paid inclusion is like being a member of a special club which advertises its members. Pay per click is like the yellow pages. The end game is the same.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.

If you are a frequent reader of my blog, you know that I am a big fan of Google AdWords and the other varieties of pay per click advertising. In fact, some of you reading this blog right now came to my site from such an internet advertisement.

While internet advertising is the rage right now, it is not without its problems. Mostly, it is because of the internet pirates out there known as scammers, spammers, crooks and thieves who prey on the websites like yours and mine. The bad guys have many tools.

One such tool is “malware” or malicious software designed to infiltrate or damage a computer system without the owner’s informed consent. The expression is a general term used by computer professionals to mean a variety of forms of hostile, intrusive, or annoying software or program code. Malware includes computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses, spyware, dishonest adware, and other malicious and unwanted software.

My AdWord campaign was infiltrated with malware and Google caught the problem and shut down my account. The bad news is that I have to prove to Google that my website is clean. They provided me with links to software tools to clean things up. So, my campaign is shut down for 48 hours.

Additionally, my site is considered suspect for Google users for the same reasons. When I do a search for my blog, Google posts a warning that my site may not be safe. It kind of feels like the health department did an inspection and shut me down until I get rid of the cockroaches. I fully understand Google wanting to protect its customers, but this really sucks for an internet based business.

Prior to this event I routinely ran Norton Internet Security and Webroot Spyware, which apparently is not enough to avoid this type of problem since the bad guys keep on inventing new ways to get around the protective software. At Google’s suggestion I loaded a software program by Trend Micro called HijackThis. It is used to identify and purge the malware.

With that done, I contacted Google via live chat and they said that they would be back to me—-you see, they think that I am part of the problem. Let’s see how this goes over the next day or so. Stay tuned.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.

Pay per click is a form of advertising found on search engines, advertising networks, websites and blogs. The advertiser pays when a visitor actually clicks on an “ad” to visit the advertiser’s website. Advertisers bid on keywords or terms that they believe that their target customers use to find information on products or services.

When a searcher enters a keyword or term in a Google or other search engine that matches the advertiser’s keywords, the advertiser’s ad is displayed. These ads are called “Sponsored links” or “sponsored ads” and appear next to or above the “natural” or organic results on the search engine text listings or results. You will typically see these ads displayed to the right of the text search results.

Pay per click ads may also appear on websites. In this case, Google AdSense and Yahoo! provide ads that are relevant to the content of the page where they appear, and no search function is involved.

The major players in the pay per click industry include Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing, and Microsoft; there also are many small players. Prices for per click can be as low at $0.01 per click. Popular search terms can cost as much as $10.00 per click.

Sophisticated buyers of pay per click advertising learn to pick multiple key words that better target their customer, but cost less. For example, “car dealers” is a common but expensive term that frequently gets bid high and may not be affordable. Yet, “Orange County California Car Dealers”, which is a much more specific term, is much more affordable. The prices for keywords are determined by an auction process and thus can change.

Pay per click is proving to be a viable and cost effective way to advertise on the web. Choose your keywords carefully.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.

Online advertising has been hailed as one of the most effective and economical ways to reach customers in the new millennium. Google Adwords, Google Adsense, and Yahoo! Pay-Per-click are three of the more common publishers of online advertisements. Recently, Click Forensics, a web market researcher, determined that 13.7% of clicks are fraudulent.

Google and Yahoo! both offer online advertising programs that allow website owners and even bloggers the money-making opportunity to show “contextual ads” on their own pages. A contextual ad is advertising on a website that is targeted to the specific individual who is visiting the website; they use a system that scans the text of a website for keywords and returns ads to the web page based on what the user is viewing, either through ads placed on the page or pop-up ads. The search engines then pay the publisher most of the generated revenue.

Click fraud is easy. Here is how. You place an ad and watch the clicks build up and this looks great, at least for a while. Your competitor finds your ad and camps out at the keyboard repeatedly clicking your add. The dollars add up in a hurry. This malicious mischief can also be automated with software robots pushing the clicks through to your website. You get stuck with click fees. The motivation is to make the competitor waste money on online advertising. This is an obvious source of fraud.

But it turns out the publishers (the firms selling the ads) also commit fraud. They know best that volume of clicks is the prevalent indicator of success. Pushing the numbers helps the publishers sell more online programs. The Click Forensics report indicated that the fraud is actually greater (up to 30%) at the smaller publishers of which there are hundreds of firms to numerous to name.

What this means to folks like us (I use Google Adwords) is that we need to carefully monitor our online advertising. Truthfully, clicks are just clicks. Focus on the real measures of online marketing success which could include sales leads, website registrations, online purchases, and sample requests—these are the metrics that really count.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.

No, this is not a flashback to the psychedelic sixties. Instead, this is a serious discussion about color and how it can be used in marketing.

While perceptions of color are somewhat subjective, there are some color effects that have universal meaning. Colors in the red area of the color spectrum are known as warm colors and include red, orange, and yellow. These warm colors evoke emotions ranging from feelings of warmth and comfort to feelings of anger and hostility.

Colors on the blue side of the spectrum are known as cool colors and include blue, purple, and green. These colors are often described as calm, but can also call to mind feelings of sadness or indifference. But, first a history lesson.

Ancient cultures, including the Egyptians and Chinese, practiced chromotherapy, or using colors to heal. Red was used to stimulate the body and mind and to increase circulation. Yellow was thought to stimulate the nerves and purify the body. Orange was used to heal the lungs and to increase energy levels. Blue was believed to soothe illnesses and treat pain. Indigo shades were thought to alleviate skin problems.

Today, most psychologists view color therapy with skepticism and point out that the supposed effects of color have been exaggerated. Colors also have different meanings in different cultures. Research has demonstrated in many cases that the mood-altering effects of color may only be temporary.

Yet, when it comes to web design and creative work, colors define a business and a brand. When designing printed materials, logos, and websites, many factors come into play. One factor of great importance is color since your brand is expressed through your choice of color. Color evokes a mood or feeling and must be chosen carefully. It must be consistent with the image that you want to communicate to your target audience.

Red is a call to action, is aggressive and can be exciting. It is a great color for logos and for accents when it is used with other more neutral background colors. It can clash with green, blue, and purple. It is best used with other warm colors like yellow, brown, or orange. Red demands attention; it says stop and come look at me. It is too strong for a background color since it would be irritating or overwhelming.

Black can be a depressing, if not a mournful color. It feels heavy. Yet, it can also be sophisticated and alluring; it can feel luxurious and prestigious. It functions well as a backdrop for an artist’s work or with photographic images. It seems to go well with technical images or presentations. Black can be a great color for text on the website.

White is an excellent background for a professional business on a website. It denotes cleanliness, purity, and youth. It feels simple and innocent. Many of the best consumer websites choose white as the background of choice, Note that Google’s home page is white and very simple; they spell out the Google name in primary colors making it fun, if not child-like.

Green is the color of nature and the environment. Light green is a great background for professional service firms like a law firm or a CPA firm. Green communicates safety and encourages you to go forward. Bright green is trendy right now for high tech firms; it has a retro feel that reminds us of the sixties.

Blue can create an image of tranquillity and peacefulness. Light blue is a common background for service-based businesses such as consulting firms; it communicates a calm solution. Blue can be authoritative while dark blue is heavy and morose; think police officer. Medium blue can also be over-the-top and goofy.

Beige is a great neutral color, which speaks of conservatism. By itself it is boring or plain. Paired up with accent colors like green or brown or blue, beige is very readable. Beige can make a super background, if complemented with the right accent colors.

Brown is a great color for text in print and on a website. Generally, brown is viewed as earthy or natural, while to others it might be dirty or dingy. Brown works well with green. It can also communicate a natural or rural or primitive look. Brown is warm and comfortable.

Yellow is the most irritating color out there and is great for getting your attention, but use it sparingly. Many great logos use yellow (often paired with red). Yellow is the color of cowardice or caution.

When choosing a color, you should consider the 216 colors supported by web browsers. It is generally recommended that you start with color choices compatible with the web palette and then consider color on paper. Go to Google and enter the words “web palette” and you will find all 216 vibrant colors. If you start with color on paper, it might not be found in the web palette. Consistency is a huge factor in building brand awareness with logos.

John Bradley Jackson
© Copyright 2008 All rights reserved.