Most companies offer
services to their customers which don't appear in their brochures or price
lists. These can be the oil which smooths the path to more successful business
relationships, or the catalysts to speedy growth.
ACSL, publisher of
STORAGEsearch offers a number of
services to advertisers that we rarely talk about publicly. We can use our 8
years experience in selling and monitoring the effectiveness of web advertising
in our computer portals to do the following kinds of things.
- Critique your current web site (or mock ups of new designs), and
suggest changes that will make your online promotion more effective. After all,
there's little point in driving qualified targeted readers to your web site, if
the experience when they get there doesn't reinforce their expectations and make
them more likely to do business with you.
Simple examples of this can
be when a vendor wants to advertise a product which can't be found on their web
site. Complicated examples can be a detailed list of changes that will make your
web site work better not just with our readers, but with all visitors.
I'm
not usually reticent on this subject, and have often pointed out gross defects
in a vendor's own web site even if they weren't a customer, and have simply
sent me a press release...
- Estimate pageviews and realistically achievable click rates for new
ads related to specific types of products. If I'm not sure about this, I'll
offer a free benchmarking trial, a sort of try before you buy advert. But I can
extrapolate reliably from as few as 1,000 impressions, so it doesn't replace
buying an ad - if it works.
- Advise on detailed changes to your banner ad (once it is running.)
Our feedback, which starts after the first couple of days of the campaign can
suggest design changes (which if implemented) increase click rates by several
hundred percent. We've run and analyzed more than 2,000 banner designs and are
experts at effective web marketing in the storage and Sun markets.
In
some cases - it's not the click rate which has been the problem for advertisers
- but they have been getting inquiries from the wrong type of customer - which
they were unable to service because of geography or channel conflicts. When that
happened we used deep analysis and several iterations to figure out why - and
suggested changes which attracted more customers of the type which our
advertisers could do business with. That was hard - but we did it.
- Design your banner ad. Rare - but it does happen. We don't design
banner ads for most of our customers because there's a conflict of interest with
other advertisers and our main business is aggregating readers and running ads -
not designing them.
But if you are advertising in a category in which
there are no other current targeted banner advertisers, and if you don't have a
banner ad, and if your initial order is $4,000 or more, then we may offer to
design a banner (or series of incrementally better banners) and guarantee a
minimum number of reader clicks. We started doing this over 5 years ago, and we
don't do it often. We don't charge for the design either. It helps emerging
companies in product areas where we have high readership and low advertising
coverage. Many of the highest performing banner ads on our sites are those which
we designed or where we influence the design with our detailed feedback.
- Predict which of your products will be winners. As a publisher I
have access to our web logs which analyse tens of millions of pageviews. I can
use this information to tell you that some of the products you may want to
advertise are actually on an upward (or downward trend) - as far as reader
activity is concerned. If you have a choice of promoting products in your
portfolio, then usually promoting the rising stars will provide better results.
But I can also advise you about which types of products and price points have
worked better in the past. Sometimes promoting the $25,000 product works better
than the $2,000 model. Or we can test - and run with the one which works best.
- Custom
Market Research service - aimed at startups and vendors who need
market data to help their growth in emerging and disruptive fast growing
segments of the storage market.
It's all part of the service aimed at
making our customers more successful.
Of course, if I'm busy and ad
revenue is growing at a treble digit year on year rate - I may have less time to
do some of these things. But I always try to make time. It's a challenge and is
good for business. When we get a new customer - we typically aim to keep them
for 5 to 10 years. We're successful when our customers are more successful. And
our low advertiser churn rate means that helps our bottom line too. ...ACSL profile |
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news etc on
MarketingViews |
Captain Feary's
contracts always included
the splash penalty clause - in which marketing
consultants agreed to walk the plank if their
brilliant ideas didn't
work. | |
