Sitting on your hands is a marketing strategy

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Back in the days when my #1 online spend was Overture, I was called into the president’s office. Seems he had received a call from a competitor concerned about our website coming up when someone was searching for theirs on Yahoo.

Yep, I had been keyword advertising against their brand name. (I did point out that our brand name was in their meta-tags. So there!) I had considered it an experiment anyway … it was the only way at the time to see how much search traffic their brand was getting compared to ours.

Not too long after that that I realized this was legal and fair, but … I saw no reason to be so cut-throat and do it again.

More recently two software companies took this competitive battle to Federal Circuit Court. (Note that for software companies each sale increases their margin and commissions, unlike us equipment makers, amping up their need to be cut-throat.) The defending company was confirmed the right to advertise against the other’s brand by the court.

They won because they played clean: they didn’t attempt to deceive searchers, they didn’t even use the competitive name in their ads or copy.

In fact, SearchEngineWatch’s article about the case says:

“It is OK (currently) to buy trademarked names in AdWords, if:

  1. You don’t mention that product/service on your site.
  2. You don’t mention that trademarked name in your ad.
  3. Don’t try to harm the competitors reputation or product.
  4. Don’t have comparisons with trademark infringements.”

And I while #1 or #4 could count as legitimate marketing, when you are getting traffic off their name as a keyword, you can’t. (Not sure if this is from the courts or Google.)

Doing a quick check, the only company advertising against my brand on Google is a used-equipment dealer who resells our stuff. Certainly this is a legitimate use, and I’ve never had an argument about it.

So, if you’d consider your marketing strategy as cut-throat (hopefully only short-term), you can do advertise against the competitions’ name.

But, if you look around, you’ll realize that most all marketers don’t do this, and it isn’t just because they are afraid of being called into the president’s office. Sitting on your hands makes a statement– you aren’t punching, you aren’t grabbing.

A missing hyphen can unravel your reputation

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Occasionally we get a copy of a quote or specification from a prospect who says ‘quote me one of these’. Well, our version of that, anyway.

One such document I received yesterday yesterday, I combed first doing feature comparison with our products. And I noticed a couple English errors. First I thought maybe I just use a different vernacular to describe our equipment. Nope, found another definite grammatical error. And another.

This morning I picked it up again and started highlighting just the errors. It is full of them! Missing hyphens and periods. Odd capitalization. Periods for sentence fragments.

And there were language errors: pronouns without defined nouns; two sentences where one would suffice; poor use of passive voice.

Then I noticed the typographical errors: curly quote marks for noting inches; Bad word-wrapping; justified text.

You see how a few small errors suddenly makes the reader see every other error. And after all that, you start to notice how poorly worded much of the document is. It just completely unraveled.

The worst crime of this document is the lack of hyphenation. I recently helped my one son with a homework assignment on hyphens, so maybe I am being overly sensitive … or just that I’ve been doing this for 20 years. However, in technical documents, hyphens are pretty common to create specific terminology. “Non skidded” looks lame when your brain wants to put the hyphen in when you read it.

Like when I wrote about this same company last year in A competitor across the aisle, the lesson here is not about their equipment or terms-of-sale, but in their style and presentation. How many prospects read this document and react like I did? It can’t do their reputation any good, that’s for sure!

(And as much as I am ranting and nit-picking, there is one detail that came up that I will be fixing in my marketing materials.)

Marketing by the rules, an SEO lesson

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Rex Hammock blogs: “Don’t do anything you’d be embarrassed to read about on the front page of the newspaper,” is one of those truisms I picked up early and used a lot back two decades ago when I used to run a PR firm and needed to have such quips in my back pocket. #

This, his reaction to a fascinating article about JC Penney gaming Google: The Dirty Little Secrets of Search, in The New York Times:

“When you read the enormous list of sites with Penney links, the landscape of the Internet acquires a whole new topography. It starts to seem like a city with a few familiar, well-kept buildings, surrounded by millions of hovels kept upright for no purpose other than the ads that are painted on their walls.”

Rex, like myself, like to play things clean. Most of us do. But sometimes the temptation is too great, and the line too grey. Link building? Sure all SEOs do that. Link farming becomes a whole ‘nother strategy at some point … but when?

Sounds like JC Penney was contracting-out their optimisation, and probably not paying too close attention to what was being done. The link-farming is nearly invisible. Heck, Google even has a hard time detecting it.

Over the years, we’ve all had competitors just too willing to see what they can do to rank higher. It started with meta-tags, keyword stuffing, then doorway pages, and today link-farming.

The thing is, our bosses have no understanding of how SEO works. They have no idea if we are cheating or not. Likely, quite a few bosses can’t tell the difference between a paid link and an organic link in Google SERPs.

So, really, the decision (and responsibility) is ours as marketing managers. As Penney’s learned, and Rex said, you never know when what you do may end up in the paper. Play clean, play smart.

First step after setting your moral compass, is to get educated. NYT can’t cover the nitty-gritty, but Rex was nice enough to add a bonus link. Start here:

“Bonus link: On Search Engine Land, former Googler Vanessa Fox breaks down the New York Times article and explains what J.C. Penny’s now-fired SEO consultants were doing. #”

(And, yes, you can turn in a competitor who isn’t playing by the rules. Obviously Google can’t catch them.)

Problems before and after marketing

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Marketing is part of a process. Often a process we don’t have control of, but have to work with. I found two blog-posts this morning talking about getting squeezed:

1. What happens if nobody’s looking for you?

Chris Rand at BMON talks about overcoming the situation where your prospects aren’t searching for your new-and-improved or totally-new widget.

“What you need to do is to work out what the potential customers are looking for, and to muscle in on that territory. Just invented the world’s first red widget, which nobody thought would ever happen, so nobody’s looking for? Write some articles about boring old blue widgets, get the widget buyers to your site through natural or paid-for search, and then drop the red widget bomb on them.”

Chris also shares a story of what he did with one client, which was generate a more general page about conferences for his target market. Smart!

2. When Marketing is a Waste … Your Sales People Can’t Sell

What a post title, huh? Susan Tatum at Clicks n’ Conversions tells the horror story of doubling qualified leads for a client. The horror starts when the conversion rate drops … and gets scarier when the marketer gets blamed:

“In the end it was a leadership issue. But it was also a communications issue. Had marketing and sales really been working well together; had management been asking the right questions; maybe much of this could have been avoided.”

One wonders in this situation if the marketer was brought in to shore-up sales, but was really just a band-aid to a broken sales process. I’m sure for consultants (and even us in-the-trenches marketing managers), pushing to review or change how the sales department is a sometimes dangerous request. But obviously from this story, not doing so has its own horrors.

What are engineers up to on Twitter?

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Are engineers using Twitter? Here is a post from Duane Benson at Screaming Circuits (who says he is studying Twitter) about what those who are, are doing:

It can lead to interesting activity though. Recently, one tweeter, Jeri (twitter.com/jeriellsworth) suggested a design contest centered around the old stalwart 555 timer. Chris (twitter.com/Chris_Gammell) picked up the ball with her and In about three days, just over Twitter, they organized it, other tweeters chimed in, sponsors offered prize money and they’ve set up a website for it. Fascinating.

So, this is what’ is going on on Twitter? Where is the ‘social media’ opportunity? How about being a sponsor of the contest?

Email newsletter advertising math

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Newsletter sponsorship for an admittedly ‘targeted’ list:

  • 12,000 subscribers /$1,900 = 0.15 per impression
  • 1/3 open rate = 0.45 per impression
  • 1/3 open rate * 3 issues (for possible exposure to entire email list once) = $5,700
  • Clicks per issue (ads & content) = 900 / 15 links = avg. 60 clicks per link

Okay, the math is done. Now the manager has to take over:

  • Are those sixty clicks worth $1,900?
  • Will clicks drop or rise if I run multiple times?
  • Is exposure to 4,000 readers worth it?
  • Will the other 8,000 subscribers ever open if I run multiple times?
  • How many insertions will I have to run for branding effectiveness beyond clicks?
  • What are my other choices? Can I reach a similar audience any other way?
  • What is the quality of this email list?

That last question is ultimately the most important. Kinda makes me wish I had a BPA audit of the list and traffic numbers (like you get from print trade publishers). Really, I guess I should make sure the publisher’s salesperson wish he had a BPA audit.

Social media do or do-not checklist

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Social media … is getting right up there in my hated marketing terms along with webinar, buzz, needs, and solutions.

Us industrial manufacturers are nonplussed by the buzz (shoot, I used one myself) of social media. But truly it is a case-by-case basis. Some marketplaces lend themselves to social media. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

  • Are some of your staff already involved in social media for your market?
  • When you go trolling for mentions of your company or a competitor, do you find anything interesting?
  • Does your product require programming or constant use so that operators want to talk about solutions?
  • Do you have an email newsletter that you send out already?
  • Are there changes in your market? Do people want to know about them?
  • Are you interested in social media because it is ‘free advertising’?
  • Is there a specific trade-pub or website that embodies the whole of your market?
  • Does the one video you posted on YouTube have more than 25 views?
  • Are prospects curious about your technology, but not always ready to buy?
  • Does the trade pub in your market have more than 175 Facebook fans?
  • Do you have the time, content, and energy to put into such a program?

These are just off the top of my head. The last question is really the zinger. Because if you can’t do it right … strategically … you are going to fail. Publicly:

  • Everyone can see how many Twitter followers you have. How many Facebook fans there are. When you last blog-post was. How you responded to a upset customer.

So give it some thought. Drag out these questions to anyone bugging you to do SMM in 2011.

Personally, I’d invest my time in making videos. They are for the ages, and much more versatile. And your customers will appreciate them much more than a fan page regardless of their use of social media.

Stupid Press Release Distributors

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Last year one of the shows we were going to made this offer: We could get a free press release published by PR Newswire.

Now I don’t really care much about press releases. But for this show we actually had news, and were working with another company on a new project. A press release would be great! Of course the PR had to mention that we would be at the show.

A couple of the publishers for that industry did run the press release in their newsletters, and their websites. But the press release was published on another thousand websites.

A thousand websites! Forever, apparently.

We don’t really need our news of corporate cooperation posted at CBS-19, The Eye of East Texas. It’s still there eight months later. If it had a link back to my website, it would at least give me some Google juice.

I can only assume that these 1,000 websites hope that they get some traffic to their sites so that they can earn page-views for their advertisers.

So, what’s the point? Stupid stupid stupid!

B2B prospects *need* pricing

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Did you know that product info is the second thing prospects are looking for?

Dale Underwood of EchoQuote takes a MarketingSherpa/Enquiro report on needs of B2B shoppers and builds up an impressive article about why prospects need pricing. You can read Product Content is #2 for B2B Buyers yourself.

Key takeaway:
Website visitors need pricing MORE THAN they need product information.

In a way it makes sense. B2B prospects basically know what your product is by the time the get to your website. They need to know if they can afford it. Are they on the right trail before they invest more of their valuable time?

Reminds me of a classic Dilbert cartoon I used on this blog when I wrote about pricing in 2007:

Email marketing a high priority? Really?

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There was a day when I thought I was a progressive, internet-savvy industrial marketer.  Still today, among B2B marketers willing to fill out an online survey, I’d like to think I’m ahead of the curve.

But apparently the rest of the industrial/B2B marketers have moved on and decided that email marketing is the most important type of marketing they’ll be doing in 2011.

I was stunned to see blogger Chris Rand’s BMON’s response from 183 marketers “Where are you advertising next year?” survey:

What do we find? Firstly, there’s a clear winner. Email marketing is going to be the most important area of investment for industrial and scientific companies next year. Over 80% said it was going to be “high” or “medium” priority, and only 3% said they wouldn’t be using it at all.

I’ve got one niche mailing list I use a couple times a year, and email blasts culled from my CRM for the few shows we do. I don’t even count those as enough to get me out of the lowly 3%, let alone the bottom 20%.

I’ve always put us scientific/industrial/capital-equipment types as ‘demand driven’ marketing. Email should be a lower priority, while optimizing being ‘found’ would be the top goal.

All I’m going to do with email marketing is annoy the very same engineers who will sooner or later be shopping for our type of equipment. They remember what salespeople and companies annoy them. Trust me on this!

Both extremes:

I’ve seen the rise of ‘marketing automation’, and been confused by it all. But for certain marketers (technology/software marketers especially) where nurturing, educating, and creating demand are key tasks, I’m sure it makes sense. Slickly done, with a dedicated staffer running the program, it has to easily show value.

Then there are the really lame email blasts I get from companies that are going to try email marketing about once, half-heartedly. The messages are so bad, no one responds, and email marketing is declared a waste.

Somehow, I suspect there are a lot more than 3% of marketers who fall in the ‘really lame’ category. They certainly aren’t thoughtful enough to read a blog or respond to a survey, though.

Note: I hate surveys because benchmarks don’t always apply to what is right for me. This is certainly the case. But I’m just surprised to be so far in the minority!