| 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 | |
- What's a Good Click
Rate for a Banner Ad? - what you learn from testing banner ads - often
results in you having to change the way you talk about your company in other
places... your web site, your PR. Leaving this important task in the hands of
graphics designers is lunacy.
- Customers
Search Differently - customers (who want to find suppliers and buy stuff)
search differently to marketers (who want to promote their companies and sell
stuff). That's why most search marketing misses the best targets.
- Press Release Errors
I see every day - Every month I have to disregard thousands of press
releases, which vendors have paid good money to their agencies to write and
distribute. Here are some of the common reasons why.
- Smashing the Myth of the
Press Release - Publicity "gurus" are springing up all over the
Internet touting the press release as the answer to all marketing ills. Just
knock out a release, mass e-mail it to journalists, sit back and wait for Oprah
to call. It's a cruel joke. Here's the reality:
- The Mysteries and
Future of Websites - Either your customers can find you easily or you're
simply lost. No amount of money can create a bounce to your expensive websites
or your big budget branding in these times, except your alpha-structure of your
URLs.
- Think of Web Ads
as Signposts - they can lead the right people to your destination. But give
them a credible message so that the brain follows the mouse click for sound
business reasons. Ideally the ad should also signal to the wrong type of
customer they can filter themselves out at this point and not waste their
time and yours by following this path.
- 7 laws of direct marketing
- The late Isaac Asimov managed to write volumes of entertaining stories which
revolved around his three fundamental laws of robotics... The stories showed
that complex behaviour can result from apparently simple origins.
- Aspects of Web
Advertising - This classic article from 2000 outlines the theoretical
framework behind the major types of online ads.
- Rethinking the
Banner Ad - There are 2 sets of viewers who see you banner ad, and you
should cater for both. The most important set, are the 94% to 99.5% who are
typically going to see the banner, but not click on it at that moment in time.
What impression are they left with after seeing the banner?
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