The Best Way to Find Out What Your Customers REALLY Think About You Saturday, Feb 21 2009

The Best Way to Find Out What Your Customers REALLY Think About You

 While I was reading Social Media Marketing – An Hour a Day by Dave Evans, I found this test that Dave presented that is designed to measure how well your company is performing when it comes to customer service.  I think that every major company would benefit from implementing this.

The Ultimate Customer Service Test

 

Create a list of your customers and go to www.randomizer.org/form.htm to generate a random list of numbers.  It’s important to make sure the numbers are completely random in order to get the most accurate results.  Pick up your phone and call the customers who match those numbers and ask them:

 

“On a scale from 1 to 10 (1 means “no way” and 10 means “absolutely, without hesitation”) how likely would you be to recommend our firm to your colleagues or others who you feel could use our product or service?”

 

Then, add up the numbers of customers who gave you a 9 or 10, and find out what percentage they are of the total number of customers you called.  These customers are called your promoters.

 

Next, add up all the customers who gave you a 6 or less.  Find out what percentage they are of the total number of customers you called.  These are called your detractors. 

 

Subtract your detractors % from your promoters % and the resulting % is called your Net Promoter Score.  If you come up with a negative number, it means that you have more detractors than promoters. 

 

Why don’t 7 or 8s count?  Because according to the book, people who give you that score, think you are “okay” but they wouldn’t give you a strong recommendation.  “In a world driven by recommendations, 7s and 8s don’t count!”.  If you get a score of 70% or higher, it means you are doing fantastic!  

 

Harley-Davidson scored 81% in this test.  This shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone since their customers love enough to make them willing to tattoo the company’s name to their body. 

 

 

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3 Reasons Why I Like InsiderPages more than Yelp Friday, Feb 13 2009

 3 Reasons Why I Like InsiderPages more than Yelp

 

1.  Customer Service – Recently I broke a “rule” on both Yelp and InsiderPages by posting the same review (word-for-word) for two different businesses in the same industry.  The mistake was careless on my part and I honestly didn’t even realize that I accidentally did this. 

 

Yelp’s Response:  They sent me an email saying that they had shut down my account and I could no longer log in with that email address.  When I replied to the email stating that it was a mistake, they never responded.  Their tone in the email screamed “How dare you break our rules.  You can’t use our service anymore!”.  By deleting my entire Yelp account, they removed every review I had ever written for any business.

 

InsiderPages Response: They sent me email stating that a couple reviews didn’t comply with their regulations and that those 2 reviews are not currently showing, but the rest of my account is fine.  They then stated that I am a valued customer and that if I would like the reviews to display again, I should log into my account and adjust them so that they meet the guidelines. I did just that, and everything went back to normal.   

 

2. Google & Yahoo Reviews – When you post a review on InsiderPages.com, it almost always shows up on that business’ local listing on BOTH Google and Yahoo.  Yelp’s reviews most often only show up on MSN.

 

3.  Negative Press – I searched for blogs that talked about Yelp or InsiderPages and their service.  I wasn’t able to find anything written recently which commented on InsiderPages.  I was, however, able to find quite a few articles about Yelp.

 

I found this article about Yelp that was written in February 2008.  The most interesting thing I found about the article was that the CEO of Yelp was not too happy about the bad press and tried to discredit the author.  Every book or article I’ve ever read on social media says that you don’t respond to negative press by attacking the writer but by addressing what the issue is and trying to fix it.  I was shocked to see the CEO of a Social Media website not practicing this!

 

I also found this article about Yelp which was written November 17, 2008.  The article talked about a few business owners who claimed that Yelp representatives told them that they could “rearrange” reviews written about them if they signed up with the service.  Again, Yelp didn’t follow good Social Media rules because they didn’t “return calls seeking comment”.  If they had returned the calls, it might have changed the tone of the article.

 

This final article I found about Yelp also touches on the conspiracy that Yelp may be allowing paid business owners the right to “manipulate” the reviews written about them.

 

Traffic Comparison for Yelp, InsiderPages, and CitySearch

 

Although Yelp seems to be getting more traffic these days, I will continue to prefer InsiderPages due mainly to the 3 reasons listed above.  I also think InsiderPages has the potential to increase their traffic if they expanded more on their partnership with CitySearch.  Currently, Yelp has an Alexa rank of 573, InsiderPages has a rank of 4,057, and CitySearch has a rank of 868.

 

 

 

 

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GoDaddy’s Super Bowl Ad – Disgusting, or Right on Target? Tuesday, Feb 3 2009

GoDaddy is quickly becoming famous for its provocative, sexual ads displayed on the Super Bowl each year.  This is GoDaddy’s fifth consecutive year in the Super Bowl, and according to many sources, the millions of dollars spent, is well paying off.

According to an article by Ad Age, Godaddy’s estimated value from the publicity of the 2008 commercial (that was never aired) was $11.7 million.  In fact the CEO, Bob Parsons, says “The day before we ran our first ad in 2005, our market share of new-domain registrations was 16%”.  The week after the first Super Bowl ad, it increased to 25%.  He states that “the next year, it moved from 25% to 32%.  We had a nice bump every game.  Right now, we are at 46% worldwide”.  A lot of this traffic is probably generated due to GoDaddy’s call to action at the end of their commercials which invites viewers to view the full “uncensored” ad online at www.godaddy.com.

Also, this chart shows that users are actively searching online for the commercials, even after the game is over.  Clearly, GoDaddy is doing a good job when it comes to generating buzz and brand awareness.

But it still leaves me to ask one question – Aren’t most domain-buyers business owners?  Wouldn’t they find these ads offensive or unprofessional?

Well, personally, I think the ads turn me off to the brand and I find them a little disgusting – but that really doesn’t matter because I clearly don’t fit into their target audience.  Most would agree that the ad is targeted to young, male adults, even though according to this article, 2 out of 3 women who went to GoDaddy’s website “loved” the ad.  However, I think the numbers are slightly irrelevant since the survey was taken on GoDaddy’s website, and clearly anyone who took the trouble to go to their website to watch the ad there, obviously had some interest in the commercial.

Although GoDaddy seems to do a good job at gaining interest immediately after the Super Bowl it seems like they need to work on keeping it after the game-talk dies down.  According to Google Trends, there is always a huge spike in activity for the brand at the beginning of the year near the time of the Super Bowl, however, it quickly fades away for the remaining months.

Also, I find that GoDaddy’s ad is becoming slightly repetitive.  Every year you have a hot girl, taking her shirt off and something with a court room, and an old man being unable to breathe.  It seems to still have an effect, but every good thing comes to an end, and soon their viewers are bound to become bored with the same concept and desire something new.  According to a survey done by Ad Age, 85% of viewers said that they are sick of seeing the same ads over and over.  In the article, someone commented that “anything that irritates the consumer in today’s environment increased control over media is exacerbating the likelihood commercials will be skipped entirely”.

This leads me to my conclusion, that the question isn’t whether or not the ads are working  – they clearly are.  The real question is how much longer can GoDaddy keep up this pattern of increased-business year after year because of the Super Bowl?  I guess we’ll just have to wait and see….

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How Important are Videos on Websites in 2009? Thursday, Jan 29 2009

A lot of talk has been going on about the comments that Bruce Clay made at the Top-Shelf Organic SEO session at PubCon 2008 stating that “ranking is dead”.  In this article, a video covers his comments – one of which is his emphasis on the importance that video will play in placement in 2009.

However, I currently agree with Steve Rubel in his article titled “Why Text Remains King of the Web“.  He points out that text is good for these 5 reasons:

“1.  Text is scannable – according to Jakob Nielsen users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average site visit and 20% is more likely”

This is very true because I recently had a client send me an email to look at a company she was recommended (http://fortunevideos.com).  On this website, there is no content and the video is 45 minutes long! Who has time to watch the whole thing?  I definitley didn’t and there was no way to scan the video, so basically 0% of their message was able to reach me.   “

“2. Three letters: SEO – For all that Google Universal Search has done to elevate video, search results are still largely made up of text and everyone wants better SEO”

Again, very true.  I couldn’t even find the website for www.fortunevideos.com because there is no text on the website so it doesn’t have any rankings for any keywords related to their product.  I tried searching “Make Money with Prepaid Legal Services” or “Prepaid Legal Services” and I couldn’t pull them up anywhere.

“3. The workplace – It’s much easier for cube-based workers to read text on the screen and get away with it vs. watching long videos. Watching videos (even work related videos) screams ‘slacker'”

This is very true.  At my workplace, they block YouTube because they don’t want us watching videos online.  Also, text is silent, so your co-workers won’t hear the sound blasting from your speakers.

“4. Mobile Devices – Yes, of course you can put a video on an iPhone. But it’s work and requires planning. Text is easier to pull up in a nanosecond”

Anyone who has a new smart phone knows how easy it is to make them freeze. Pulling up regular websites would sometimes freeze my HTC touch phone (which I DON’T recommend), but pulling up video would definitely never work.

“5. Distribution – Nothing flies like text. It’s so easy to cut and paste it and send it somewhere or to clip and re-syndicate it via email, RSS or social networks”

Again, very true.  Although many people have high internet speeds, computers are still known to crash randomly and it’s much harder to download or transfer video files than it is text files.

In conclusion, it is still very important to integrate video in 2009, but make sure while you’re doing that, include lots of text around the video to summarize what the video is about.  Also, you might consider attaching a text file next to the video that summarizes the video word-for-word so that the concept can be shared by users who want to forward or syndicate the text.

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Should I Bid on Branded Keywords? Monday, Jan 19 2009

3 Reasons to Bid on Branded Keywords:

1.  A lot of other companies have had success with it: In Online Marketing Heros, Jeffrey Glueck from Travelocity stated “We found, and many other large e-commerce players have found, when they deconstructed the data, that 3/4 or more of their profit were coming from people typing in the company’s brand name into the search engine”.
2.  People might search branded keywords because they remember your product from another advertisement: In a TMP Directional Marketing report, it stated that approximately 70% of users will not remember a URL that they saw on television, but they might be likely to see an ad and remember the company name or product.
3.  Branded Keywords are searched frequently: According to a study conducted by Yahoo in 2007, 24% of searches that occur online are navigational in nature which means that users are looking for a specific site, or brand name.

Is it Useless to bid on Branded Keywords if I already appear in the Organic Results?

Although it’s important to make sure you show up in the sponsored section, a lot of people think it’s a waste of money if your site ranks well for branded keywords in the organic listings.  Young-Bean Song states in an article published by AdWeek in 2007 “The reality is those people are already intending to go to your Web site. What you’re really paying for is a glorified Yellow Pages listing.”

Although sponsored ads do not get clicked on as much as organic listings (as shown in the graphic below), Neilson NetRatings has found that users tend to spend 40% more time on the sponsored ads than they do on organic listings.

Where People Click on Google

Although Advertising Age didn’t have the same findings, their chart does indicate that visitors that click on Sponsored ads tend to have a lower bounce rate and therefore may be more interested in the content found on the website.

Advertising Age - Comparing Sponsored and Natural Search Results

Based on all the findings, The Best Results seems to come when Websites appear in the paid and organic section.  In March 2007, a study by Media Post Search Insider, indicated that a listing found both in the paid and organic listings on the same term resulted in an increase in clicks and post-click activity.  Enquiro Research did a similar study in 2007 and came up the results indicated in the graphic listed here.

Enquiro Research, 2007

Branded Keywords may not give you as many conversions as you’d think:

Although it is clear that bidding on branded keywords is probably a good idea, just how much attention should you put towards the brand-specific keywords?
In his book “Online Marketing Heros” Michael Miller states, “Don’t assume that every link you get from a search engine is attributable to the search engine itself; anyone typing in your brand name probably heard about you from a different medium, and the search engine shouldn’t receive full credit”.

According to an article that

Adam Goldberg

wrote in Search Engine Strategies (Volume 2, Issue 5), users are not actively searching a specific brand at the start of the buying cycle.  Instead, they first search for your product or service.  During these searches, they will establish which brands they prefer.  After that point, they will do searches for the specific brand they chose.  Adam Goldberg points out that too many advertisers today give a lot of credit to their “branded keywords” and assume that these keywords are the ones that are providing them the best ROI.  Adam’s suggestion is to break your keywords down into 3 categories: introducers, influencers, and closers.  Since branded keywords fall into the “closers” category, it’s important to make sure you have keywords that fit into the other 2 categories as well.

Offermatica also found that a campaign that has a mix of general search terms and branded search terms, tends to generate a 23% higher conversion volume and a 22% higher average revenue per visitor when compared to a campaign that does not include branded keywords.

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Are the Yellow Pages a “Dying Trend” Saturday, Jan 10 2009

 

Every day, I constantly hear my clients tell me that they are cutting back on their yellow pages advertising because ‘no one uses the yellow pages anymore’.  I’m sure you’ve heard it too – many people claim the only thing that the yellow page books are good for is firewood.  Although this is clearly not entirely true, it’s good to know about the current situation facing the yellow page companies.

What are they losing?

A report called “Say Goodbye to Yellow Pages” was done in July 2008 by Borrell Associates.  This report estimated that the Yellow Pages industry will lose 38.9% of its revenue over the next five years because smaller businesses are focusing more on online advertising.  It was expected that in 2008, the print annual revenue was $12.7 billion.  This is forecasted to decrease to $7.8 billion in 2013.

The Yellow Pages website doesn’t seem to indicate what their current standing is.  Here it says that they are “on target to generate 1.8 billion searches by the end of 2007″.  Since this information is clearly VERY outdated, it makes me wonder if the reason why they haven’t updated this is because the current number is lower.

But what about online yellow pages?

Although the amount of advertising done on online yellow pages sites is increasing, the industry is still losing revenue because the yellow page internet ads are only a third of the price of a print ad.  Half of the reason why they’re cheaper is because online advertising on yellow page websites are performance-driven and therefore the businesses only have to pay based on the activity of their ad (clicks and impressions).  For a lot of business owners, the question of whether they should migrate online or not has a simple answer – yes, because it’s cheaper and easier to track!

So should I stop advertising in yellow pages altogether?

I would say no.  60% of small businesses still advertise in the printed yellow pages, and some of them rely on this as their main source of leads.  Just because the usage of yellow pages has dropped a small % doesn’t mean advertising there is useless!

TMP Directional Marketing, an online advertising company, made a lot of great points in a paper that they published called Say Goodbye to Yellow Pages?  Or Maybe Not. 

1.       These days you need to advertise in more media sources. I agree with TMPDM when they stated that “The reach once enjoyed by advertisers can no longer be achieved through a few select media sources”.  Small businesses today need to really take advice from advertising professionals and “think outside the box”.  In order to stay ahead of your competition and not lose out on business, you can’t put “all your eggs in one basket” anymore.  Gone are the days where you can pay one company and all of a sudden reach 60% of your target audience in one shot.

2.       How companies should advertise should be different based on the industry.  TMPDM also pointed out that in the travel industry, there has been a steady decline in Yellow Pages advertising since 2003.  National revenue for this category have dropped an average of 7% annually over the same period of time.  Online, there has been a 48% average annual increase in travel agencies references since 2005.  This indicates that many companies in this industry are moving online.   TMPDM says that this isn’t the case in other industries, such as the tire dealers.

Advice for the yellow pages companies:

Chris Smith from Search Engine Land makes some great points in his article What Could Save the Yellow Pages? 10 Ideas. 

1.       Stop denying the trends –  He points out that one of the biggest mistakes of the yellow pages companies is that they are not dealing with this loss very well.  For the most part, they are refusing to admit they have a drop in usage and this “refusal  to acknowledge the bad news has resulted in distrust from advertisers, so small businesses are skeptical and are not listening to their premise sales reps as easily any more”.

2.       Lower the costs for print yellow pages – He says that the yellow pages companies should lower their costs in order to meet with advertisers’ expectations.  He says “You’re going to have to drop the costs  some in order to align with advertisers’ value perceptions – if usage is dropping […] then the value of advertising is dropping as well”. 

3.       Merge with your competitors – He suggests that some of the yellow page companies should join together so that they can be a stronger force.  He says, “If the market forces are doing what I’m thinking they are, companies will either need to merge, or else the weaker ones will just die off while the strongest organisms survive.  Sure there’s major expenses with planning a merger and bringing it to fruition, but your alternative might be to die off completely”.  This kind of goes a long with the idea that MSN had when they tried incessantly to buy Yahoo.

 

 

 

 

 

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Cheap Ways to Promote your Website (part 1) Saturday, Dec 20 2008

A lot of people have the idea that online advertising is expensive.  This can be true, but I’ve recently been looking for inexpensive ways to promote your site that are different than the standard “yellow pages” or “direct mail” that so many small businesses seem to be fixated on.  Here are 3 ideas that I’ve come up with so far: 

1.  Advertising on StumbleUpon

I explained what StumbleUpon is in a previous post.  Their toolbar suggests websites that they think the user would be interested in, which is based on their previous browsing history. 

With StumbleUpon advertising, they let you submit your site so that users can see it when they “Stumble” and give it a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’.  You can target the users by their age and location to make sure that you are only advertising to individuals in your immediate area.  This is good for industries like real estate or insurance where they would only have an interest in reaching individuals within a certain geographic proximity.

With your account, you are able to log in and see what types of ratings the users have given your site.  You pay as little as $0.05 per visit, so essentially for $5-$10 you can have 100 visitors view and rate your website.  This is a great form of advertising because it will only work if you have interesting content on your website.  It keeps business owners realizing that if they are going to have success online, they need to have something unique to offer.

 

 

 

 

 

2.  Advertising on BrownBook

BrownBook is an online directory like InsiderPages or Yelp.  They allow users to go on and rate local businesses.  The great thing about BrownBook is that it is free to submit a business listing, and for $10/year you can get priority placement in all the listings, a detailed marketing message, and instant alerts when your listing is reviewed by anyone else.  I have yet to find any other websites that can offer that for as little as $10/year.

I know some people will wonder, well, how much is a listing on BrownBook going to do for me – I’ve never even heard of them!  The answer is simple.  BrownBook has a great standing with the search engines, mainly with Google.  Every listing I have ever submitted to them shows up on the first page of Google under the business keywords/categories that I put on the listing.  If your name is Bob Thorton Real Estate in Orange, CA, your Brownbook listing will be very likely to show up when someone “Google’s” your business name, or does a search on Google for  “real estate in Orange, CA”.  Obviously you have to make sure you tag and enter your business information correctly for this to happen.

 

 

3.  Advertising with Press Releases

A lot of people are aware that there are tons of “free press release distribution” websites out there.  However, sometimes it will be more beneficial to go with a company that will distribute your article to sources that people actually visit on a day-to-day basis.

Marketwire is a press release distribution company that will send your press release to every major news source (on and offline) for $140 and up.  On their site, they show you all the different sources that they distribute to, and you pay based on whether you want to do a national campaign, regional, state-wide, or just your metro area.  To distribute a 400-word press release in New York City, it costs $140.  If you’re doing a national distribution, it’s going to be closer to $600. 

The great thing is that they are able to tell you when a source has published your article so that you can track your efforts.  You do this by logging into your account online.  They will also distribute your release to online sources to help better your SEO campaign by inserting keywords into the article. 

 

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Banner Ads – Are they Worth the Price? Tuesday, Dec 16 2008

How much do they cost?

 

According to http://www.markneting.com/internet_marketing.shtml, banner advertising is the most expensive online form of advertising.  This is partially because of the cost-per-impression payment model, and also because of the low click-through-ratio that banner advertisements receive. 

 

Although the cost will vary based on the site, I recently had a client that was quoted that it would cost him about $6-$10 for each click he would get from running a banner ad on several sites including automotive and financial sites. 

 

Do the People who “click” care about your product?

 

Many people will argue that these clicks are not as “qualified” as the ones they will get from search engines, since the consumer was not actively searching your product.  This is because banner advertising is a form of indirect advertising such as TV or Radio advertising versus the more effective direct advertising such as direct mail, telemarketing or search engine marketing.

 

How do I make my banner ad experience more successful?

 

According to “Web Marketing for Dummies”, with banner advertisements, bigger is always better.  The smaller the ad, the less clicks it will potentially receive.  Also the best positions for banner ads are:

 

1. The right side by the scroll bar
2. As close to the top of the page as possible (above the fold)
3. Rectangles integrated into the page layout

 

They said to avoid the standard banner ads that run across the very top of the page (486 x 60).  These are the most popular, but surprisingly the most ineffective. 

 

According to a Burst Media study, the more banner ads that display on a single page, the less success the advertisers will have.  They said that “ad clutter not only annoys the audience but it also diminishes ad effectiveness. An astonishing three-quarters (75.5%) of the respondents who remain on a site they perceive to be cluttered say they pay less attention to advertisements appearing on its pages”.

 

In my opinion, spending money on Search Engine Optimization is the best form of online advertising and has a much better ROI than banner advertising.  As shown in the illustration, it is second only to customer referrals. 

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Who Should Manage Your Domain Name? Sunday, Dec 14 2008

My simple answer to this question is – YOU.  I have run into many clients who have had online companies purchase and maintain domain names for them.  Here are some of the problems that they seem to run into:

1.  The company won’t release their domain name to anyone else.  Basically meaning, if Bob Smith calls up his current company and says that he doesn’t want to renew www.bobsmith.com with them, but with another company (or even on his own), the company will keep renewing www.bobsmith.com just so that poor old Bob can’t have that domain name UNLESS he renews it with them. 

2.  The company will refuse to do some necessary changes to help with SEO.  I have had several clients who have asked their current domain name provider to change the meta description or title tags so that the title of their website is more relavent.  These companies will sometimes claim that they are simply “unable to do that”.  They basically say this because they do not want to do any extra work outside of the necessary purchase of the domain name itself.

3.  You pay a company to build a website and purchase a domain name for you and they “tell you” that after you pay for a certain period of time, you own the website.  This is partially true.  In order for you to own the website, you will have to transfer all the files from that particular company to the company who you are going to host the website through.  A lot of companies won’t be quick to let their clients leave them, therefore may come up with many reasons why they “simply are unable to transfer the files” within the same time frame as you would like.

4.  Purchasing a domain name on your own is usually much cheaper.  Let’s face it.  The online company has to be making a profit somewhere.  Domain names on GoDaddy go for $8-$10 a year in most cases.  I’ve heard of clients who pay $100 a year for theirs. 

5.  Your company may forget to renew the domain name, which may cost you in the end.  On the Keystone Blog, they recently posted a story about George Bush planning on opening a library.  Whoever was managing his domain, forgot to renew it, and it was bought up by someone who was watching for expired domains.  Companies will do this to make a huge profit, and they were clearly successful because they sold it back to the foundation for $35,000.  It’s a pretty big price to pay for merely forgetting to renew a domain name. 

My solution is to buy the domain name yourself, mangae it yourself, and make sure you don’t forget to renew it.  This way you are the only one in control.  I recommend buying your domain through a well-known, big company such as GoDaddy or Name.com.

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The SEO Pyramid Sunday, Dec 14 2008

www.SEOmoz.org recently released an article on their blog introducing their “SEO Pyramid”.  This is basically the structure that will produce the best results for Search Engine Optimization.  As shown in the illustration above, you need to have the basic steps at the bottom of the pyramid before you attempt the ones at the top.  It is a very helpful visual that will help beginners at SEO know where they should start and end their process.

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