Brandwidth Blog

With home page bounce rates at 48.7% across the board, visitor conversion is and will be the biggest focus in online marketing in 2007 and 2008. Remember when getting a prominent domain name was more important than the upcoming 2008 United States presidential race? Well the death of the home page is near. Home pages, the long-time favorite direct response mechanism, are dying a slow, painful death. The reasons make sense…let’s take a quick look.

#1 Know your audience
Universally dropping site visitors to your home page is like using a bass boat for a deep sea fishing expedition. Although it may get the job done in ideal conditions, 8 out of 10 times the poor little bass boat and its passengers will become victims of the sea. The same holds true for your home page – it’s a starting point into everything you do. But that’s not what your visitors want. They want you to know exactly what they want and demonstrate a compelling reason why they should consider you for it. Enter landing pages. Landing pages direct site visitors to the resources they want immediately. It’s like you know who they are…and you should.

#2 Talk to your audience
Creating a compelling message, talking 1-on-1 with your audience, is nearly impossible on your home page. You can generalize, but again, your audience doesn’t want generalities. They want answers, confirmation that you have what they need. Do everything you can to connect with your audience in the first 8 seconds of their visit, or ask your competitors for co-op advertising dollars.

#3 Make sure your offer is compelling
In general, people are lazy, and that’s fine so long as we know this fact when marketing to them. So don’t make them work to find what they’re looking for – don’t dump them on your home page. Relate to them and then ask for the next step without invading their privacy. Most importantly, make your landing page your landing page and not another home page. Stay focused on your audience!

#4 Measure the results
Bounce rates on your landing pages should be around 55-60%. “Ok, smarty pants, why would I want to use landing pages with bounce rates higher than home pages?” The answer is simple. When users abandon your home page, it’s because they have nothing to say “yes” to. More importantly, they have nothing to say “no” to. As a result, you have no meaningful data to improve upon – no idea of how to convert that visitor into a customer/client. When they abandon your landing page you gave them something to say no to. In other words, it’s useful data. You can now use alternate landing pages to improve your bounce and conversion rates.

#5 Prune and repeat
There are lots of new tools out to measure landing page effectiveness. Consider multivariate or a/b split testing software to do this. Google Analytics offers both free of charge. Now that we’ve got meaningful data, prune what’s not working and repeat what is.

Next time you consider directing site visitors to your home page, consider the true cost(s) of doing so. Create landing pages, make sure your offer is compelling, measure the results and continually work to improve the results. At least you’ll have a true measure of performance. Remember, converting site visitors into customers or clients or loyal advocates is paramount to growing your business.

In managing server hardware, I’ve ran across all sorts of different ways of doing raid arrays. Mainly, they fall in to two categories: Hardware based and Software based. Hardware arrays rely on add-in cards to support the RAID function, while software arrays use Operating system kernel level drivers to manage them.

So, Which way is right? Yes :). The main thing in constructing an array is to think of the function it will be performing and the cost you are willing to eat to make things happen.

Hardware arrays, while being fast and not using system resources, are expensive to set up. Sure, you’re taking a large load off of your server, but you are paying for it in hardware. I’m sure you’ve all seen motherboards with a RAID controller built in to the north or southbridge chips. One common misconception is that this is a hardware array – it really isn’t. It is a special type of hybrid software array that relies on drivers for the operating system to know how to use the array. Without these drivers, the array is useless. Also, the drivers still use the system’s cpu to do all of the calculations rather than having a dedicated processor as in a true hardware array.

Software arrays bi-pass the RAID controller and bring all of the calculation to the CPU of your system. The upshot is that most arrays can be constructed for a fraction of the cost of the RAID controller hardware. For low-impact applications (web servers, light use database servers), software raid arrays are perfect and can give your business enterprise level storage for desktop level pricing. One thing that people sometimes forget is that your system is only as fast as your slowest component – which is the network interface in most systems today. This is perfect for applications like a file server where your array only needs to be faster than the sum total of the network interfaces in the machine.

It used to be that the only way to get good performance out of a RAID array was to use expensive hardware and extremely fast drives. However, with the advances in both CPU’s and drives, one can construct an array that has good performance at a low price point.

All over the web today you will find blogs (like this one), wikis, and social networking sites that hold the portal to lead generation. Your relationship with these portals can provide your business with an enormous group of possible customers. Like a relationship it takes some time to get to know the individual site and the users.

Find out what they like, know, enjoy, dislike, and want. Befriend them so as to not invade their space. It’s a balancing act that can be accomplished with some research and planning. Their opinions and ideas should be taken into account before you make any decisions about changing the way you advertise to them, remembering that their friendship can benefit your product greatly or destroy it completely.

According to Marketing Sherpa, the company Information Builders(a software maker) “used a B-to-B social network as a distribution channel for a serious of white papers. They’ve already exceeded their goal for leads by 42.4% and have seen a 750% ROI.” Obviously the time and resources that this company invested in their relationship with the social network of choice paid off. While it may be somewhat risky to try and gain the friendship of these types of users, keep in mind that nothing was ever gained without first taking a risk and that anything can be accomplished with time, research, and planning.

There I said it. The cat’s out of the bag. “But can’t we just put some keywords on our page and rank #1 in the search results on Google”. Yes and no. Yes you can and no it won’t work.

Circa 1995, web .01 – optimizing your site was as easy as falling down and getting hurt. In fact you could rank in the top 5 in any search engine you wanted with a few keywords in your browser title and a basic understanding of HTML. In 2007, the equation is much more complex. As an example, let’s do a little experiment. Go to Google, key in “click here” and check out the first ranked page. Go on, just do it…

Now that you’re back from Google’land, you might be wondering why on earth someone would want to rank #1 for the search term “click here”. And your rhetorical answer was probably – no one! Voila you’re right. Here’s the point – since Adobe ranks first in the results and no one in their right mind would want to rank for this term…unless it’s a brand name, why then is Google placing them #1 without Adobe optimizing their site for the keyword “click here”. Enter web 3.0. It’s social out there.

Social marketing is alive and well and the above example shows just that fact. Yes you can put keywords on your page, however, you need social resources (people and company’s) pointing links to your site (social marketing). Without such, you’re dead in the water.

Let’s look at a test page we created to demonstrate that keywords alone do nothing to improve your rankings. Click here, notice the browser title “Click Here - Attention Google, please rank this page #1 in your search results for the keyword term Click Here.” Now notice the excessive use of the keyword on the page. Guess what, there isn’t a snowballs chance in Global warming that this test page will show up in the first 100 pages of Google’s search results for “Click Here”.

So is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) really dead? It depends on who you ask, however, by typical definition among nearly 85% of company’s claiming to do SEO, yep it is dead. Thus the reason you won’t think “can’t we just put some keywords on our page and rank #1 in Google” anymore. As a suggestion, make sure your SEO/SEM Agency does more than throw keywords on your site - otherwise, you’re SEO is dead before the ship sank.

“Measure It”!

In today’s business world almost every customer is focused on getting a “ROI” Return on Investment and “TCO” Total Cost of Ownership.

ROI and TCO are mentioned in every trade publication. Customers spend many hours with their teams trying to understand this great dilemma. Vendors talk about how to help customers with these challenges also. With many products and services it’s fairly easy to quantify the hard costs of a product vs. sales matrixes that determine the ROI and TCO.

As a SVP of Marketing or Director of Marketing for an enterprise or global customer this is a real challenge. How do I make sure I am getting a ROI and controlling my TCO with my marketing budget? With so many forms of traditional advertising and web marketing being used all the time, most customers cannot wrap their arms around the big picture and quantify how their marketing $$$ actually affect the bottom line.

Using a web centric Integrated Marketing approach can help you measure the results of your marketing efforts. Did you knowing that the #1 response mechanism in the marketing world is TV directed to the web, the #2 response mechanism is Radio directed to the web, and #3 is Direct Mail directed to the web? Using an integrated software based solution like Brandwidth uses CRM (Customer Relationship Manager) to help measure the results is a great start. Developing a plan to drive as much traffic as possible to the web makes it easier to manage the results. Special landing pages and 800 # tracking makes it possible to measure the results of any marketing effort whether its web based or traditional TV, Radio, or Direct Mail.

The moral to the story is “Measure It”. Measuring the results of your marketing efforts will give you the flexibility to try, modify, and prune your marketing efforts to get the greatest results with the least amount of cost. Measure it and you will seen as a hero with in the sales organization of your company, and be perceived as a cost conscience effective leader by the rest of your company.

“Measure it”

Client Example: Recreation Unlimited

The Work:
Website development, national landing page promotion, Search Engine Optimization, Hosting, national internet marketing campaign, performance analysis, and web video production.

Background:
Recreation Unlimited desired a web presence and internet marketing initiative to attract a niche customer base for its GoalrillaGoal brand basketball goal. Brandwidth developed their marketing message, clarified their internet marketing objectives, strategies and tactics while developing a clean and easy to navigate web presence that is performing well above initial company and site goals. Integrated web video is the focal point of a landing page promotion program.

Results:
Since beginning work with Brandwidth, sales have increased by more than $2,000,000 per year. Not to $2,000,000, we’re talking additional sales. Recreation Unlimited is now the nation’s #1 online and offline retailer of Goalrilla Goals and has contracted with Brandwidth for the development of two new, unrelated product lines.

The basic definition of E.S.P. according to Dictionary.com, E.S.P. is the “extrasensory perception: perception or communication outside of normal sensory capability, as in telepathy and clairvoyance.”

Perception is a curious thing. It can cause us to look at statistics and metrics from so many different angles that we end up more confused than we were to start with about our customers. Taking a step back and figuring out who the customers will be or what they will need when they do become your customers can help in deciding a marketing plan of attack.

As a rule you want to be able to associate and understand what their problems that they face will be and be able to provide them a solution. And since there are so many tools in preparing yourself with this kind of data, it is imperative that we proceed with this “plan” in the balancing act of customer/company relationship management. These tools are our ways of having the “extrasensory perception” or “perception or communication outside of normal sensory capability.”

To ignore this capability is one of the main reasons that companies can not maintain customer relationships. By allowing ourselves to succumb to new ideas such as tracking data, keyword research, product research, and optimization, we can finally have this communication that is outside of our normal capability. It can provide us with the knowledge we need to be fully prepared for when the customers first meet the company. In other words, being proactive rather than reactive can eliminate stress and many losses in customers resulting in a loss of revenue.

In the fun world of server administration, you come across some real gems sometimes. For the most part, I had been using the standard apache configuration to serve up sites. While this is perfectly acceptable, it can become quite a load on your internet connection when one hosts as many sites as we do. Enter Compressed output.

In trying to increase performance of our servers, we recently enabled the gzip compression module (mod_deflate) in Apache. This module will compress all of the text output of the server (HTML, CSS, Javascript), making sites load faster and cache better on the client side. This works especially well for sites that include large Javascript libraries (AJAX) or large CSS layouts.

There is a bit of configuration you need to do because not all clients can support gzipped content (mainly older browsers). In addition, it is a good idea to tell the server to only compress text based elements. Otherwise you will be wasting CPU cycles trying to compress highly compressed graphics and other components that don’t yield themselves to great compression rates.

Below is part of our server config (standing on the shoulders of giants here.. I found this on the net and modified it slightly):

##—- Deflate options
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
DeflateCompressionLevel 9

## Netscape 4.x has some problems…
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

## Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip

## MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

## Don’t compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary

## Make sure proxies don’t deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary#

The benchmark results were promising as well. For graphic intensive sites, we gained around 2-3 seconds on load time. For text intensive sites, we saw an increase of up to 5 seconds. When you spread these savings over multiple sites and multiple hits, these savings add up quickly.

To test your own sites, you’ll need two tools (three if you count Firefox). You’ll need to download and install Firebug and Yslow (for firebug). These two components will show you the load times, the cache footprint, and the compression rates for your site.

If you want to speed up your server or just more efficiently utilize your internet connection, Server Side compression is the way to go!

Everything you ever needed to know about this business can be found in the following 10 cinematic depictions of men (and women) in gray flannel suits. Not to mention the fact that you can also find some pretty funny moments. And some painful truths. Sadly, few of these films feature any of the nudity, explosions, rap songs, waifishly thin skelebabes or professional wrestlers that make Hollywood what it is today. Still, I think you can put these in your queue and enjoy. They’re not in any order of preference, so have at it and let me know if you make it through all of them.

Crazy People – Arthur meets David Ogilvy, basically, with Dudley Moore – well, Dudley Moore-ing – his way through an innovative truth –in-advertising kick. Enjoy “Volvos – Boxy But Safe” and the notion that driving a Jaguar will get you laid (NOT, by the way).

Stars: Dudley Moore, Daryl Hannah, Paul Reiser and the ubiquitous J.T. Walsh.

How To Get Ahead In Advertising – Adman Dennis Dimbleby Bagley grows a stress-related boil on his neck that comes to life. This is as close to a documentary as you’ll find about the ad game and the boil will remind you of many account people you’ve worked with.

Stars: Richard E. Grant, Rachel Ward (worth the price of admission), Richard Wilson, Jacqueline Tong and John Shrapnel, whoever he is.

Nothing In Common – “I’m Tom Hanks. Fly me.” Some good stuff with Hanks and the late, great Jackie Gleason, who plays Hanks’ dad. A nice look at how tough it can be to balance a career with an actual life. The agency will remind you of any of the “precious” poser shops you’ve had to work for.

Stars: Tom Hanks, Jackie Gleason, Eva Marie Saint (still hot), Hector Elizondo and the ever-smarmy Barry Corbin before the tragic fake tan.

Beer – Maybe the best of the lot. Spoiler: There is a presentation scene in which the account guy (aptly named “Dickler”) gets a raisin stuck up his nose. Milk will come out of yours. The whole flick centers on an agency trying to keep a brewery account. Been there. But never laughed this much losing an account. A quirky cast makes this a must-see.

Stars: Loretta Swit, Kenneth Mars, David Alan Grier, William Russ, Saul Stein, Peter Michael Goetz, David Wohl (Stanley Dickler), Dick Shawn lots of other really funny people.

Planes, Trains & Automobiles – Ok, so it’s not really a movie about advertising. But Steve Martin does play an ad guy on his way home from a pitch when he meets the hapless John Candy and his pillows. Enough said.

Stars: Steve Martin and John Candy.

Advertising Rules! - Edward Kaminsky is an aging ad man (aren’t we all) who wants a golden parachute from his agency (don’t we all). The catch – he’s got to land a primo car account first and as such, will do anything and screw (literally) anyone to get it. Note: it’s a German flick for those of you who prefer domestic but not in the way German flicks are often portrayed on South Park.

Stars: Alexander Scheer, Götz George, Chulpan Khamatova, Maria Schrader and Vadim Glowna.

30-Something – It’s not a movie, but it could have been. This is probably the work that is the closest to life at Brandwidth, though Geo is no Ken Olin. Come to think of it, Adam is no Mel Harris. Amazingly well written show and a must-see if you can find the DVD sets.

Stars: Timothy Busfield, Polly Draper, Mel Harris, Peter Horton (who Geo’s wife thinks is hot), Melanie Mayron, Ken Olin and the always outstanding Patricia Wettig, the hottest bug-eyed woman on television, ever.

Bewitched – No discussion about the industry on the screen would be complete without Bewitched (the TV series and not the stupid movie with Will Farrell and leatherface – what’s her name – Nicole Kidman). Wherever I’ve lectured, I’ve been asked if the industry “is really like Bewitched” by at least one student. The answer of course is: absolutely. It’s all magic and misogyny, don’t you know.

Stars: Elizabeth Montgomery, Agnes Moorehead, David White, Dick Sargent (Darren 2) and Dick York (Dick 1) and Diane and Erin Murphy (trivia contest – who did they play in the show?).

MadMen – Speaking of misogyny, this show is a slam-dunk, absolute must-see about the ad game in the age of the “man in the gray flannel suit.” Maybe the best thing on TV since The Sopranos, Deadwood and John From Cincinnati. The characters are so well defined and the writing so, so pristine, this may turn out to be the best portrayal – ever – of our business. Well, except for the account exec with the raisin in his nose from Beer.

Stars: Jon Hamm, Vincent Kartheiser, Elisabeth Moss, John Slattery, Christina Hendricks for Firefly fans and an absolutely amazing ensemble cast.

Okay, so they’re not all movies. And okay, so there are only 9 of them. Simply count MadMen twice and tune in. And please, if you’ve other favorites of your own – particularly if you’ve got some with some decent nudity, explosions and/or professional wrestlers - send them along.

Popcorn on me.

In a February of 2007 survey, Forrester Research reported that nearly 80% of marketers had any way whatsoever to determine return on investment from their lead marketing agencies. Is it any wonder that in that same survey only 21% of marketers would actually recommend their agency’s services to others? Now, for one reason or another, agencies always seem to find themselves in the crosshairs…and as we all know, sometimes it’s even justified! Like in the case of ROI.

One of the benefits of a targeted, web-centric strategy – whether it be traditional integrated marketing strategies driving to the web or an email marketing campaign driving to the web – is that you can measure response. Index that response against bottom line sales against expenditures for those efforts and voila – you’ve got a pretty good indication of your return on investment, something that is truly advantageous to the web as a medium and with us as your erstwhile agency.

The same holds true for Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click advertising strategies – whether it be sponsored listings or vertical directory advertising or what is becoming more traditional “banner” advertising. As we sit here, Search Optimization is the single fastest growing medium in the marketing industry. And that is specifically because it not only works, but can be documented to work.

As far as search optimization goes, we can actually give you a projection of your ROI up front – as long as you’re willing to share the income figures we need to be able to index against. As for offline campaigns, tying in custom 800#’s to all your campaigns – integrated as well as new media campaigns – is another strategy that should be included in the mix, but we’re going to hold that discussion for another installment.

The proof should be in the pudding and if not, buy new pudding. Bottom line, we can help you manage your bottom line – for marketing’s sake that is.

Is there any other industry that likes buzz words and anagrams more than the “ad game”? In our Q-Score, DNK and SNK, OBT, QVC, STD, BVD, integrated marketing, prezo, convert, retain, lather, rinse and repeat world is there anything left that hasn’t been branded so? I don’t have the answer, mind you; I’m just putting that notion out there before introducing you to the notion of “brand response.” As buzz-wordy as it may be, the inherent concept of “brand response” really speaks to the heart of what Brandwidth is – and isn’t.

A lot of folks – from clients to resource partners – have commented about our description of ourselves on our homepage: We’re not a web agency that “does ads too.” We’re not an agency – or worse, a PR firm – that “does websites, too.” We’re more. Of both. (Incidentally, folks really get a rise out of the PR part, what with so many PR firms out there really making a royal cock-up out of their web marketing forays).

What we’re addressing here is the notion that somehow pursuits supporting your branding and your brand ID and image and personality are somehow mutually exclusive from response strategies that actually translate to “attracting” a prospect, ”converting” that prospect to your product or service or sales proposition and then “retaining” that prospect for future business.

I would like to propose that these precepts aren’t mutually exclusive, that one can, indeed enjoy the best of both worlds – branding and a workable response mechanism – and live to tell about it.

Don’t tell that to those “precious” agencies that think affecting some manner of response and results-oriented work for a client is somehow counter to their creative pursuits, detrimental to their creative awards agenda or, worse, “uncool.” And don’t tell that to one of those poor, fumbling PR firms who are still managing to foist the notion that the web is somehow a public relations function. A little strong? A chip on my shoulder? You betcha’. The business is changing, baby, and some folks don’t want to get on the new bus. Or off the old one. Hey, this is my blog and I’m entitled to my opinion and my opinion is: even most traditional agencies who claim to understand the new paradigm – and who say they offer web marketing as a core service – essentially do the cosmetics of creating a home page design or email template and then outsource the rest of it to a web development firm anyway. And at a significant markup to their clients, I might add. And while there are, indeed, a few good shops out there – of which we are one – most traditional agencies (and PR firms) positively suck at creating a strong “integrated” initiative that provides both brand support and response/results.

There, I said it. The point is, marketing expenditures on web-centric, response-driven initiatives are expected to surpass broadcast advertising by 2010. And web marketing is the single fastest-growing medium in the business. The industry simply can’t afford to look at web response and integrated branding and response strategies as mutually exclusive any longer.

Which brings me back to the notion of brand response – the combining of branding initiatives and strategies – sound traditional strategies based on an understanding of your audience, your brand, your competition, compelling creative, good, smart ideas – with the more response-oriented strategies afforded by a web-centric marketing and communication approach or other in-ad response mechanisms (a custom 800# for instance).

That’s what brand response is all about. And that’s where “more” comes from. More good, smart work. More traction with your key targets. More return on your marketing and communications investment. And in a word, more client “satisfaction.”