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Top 10 Successful Marketing Stunts

Best Practices, Marketing • Comments (0)

On May 2, 2017 • By Georgette Kakridas

Ever wonder just how far some companies will go to get noticed? See how 10 companies succeeded–and five failed miserably–when it came to making some noise.

It’s kind of like dating–that’s the bad news. There’s a lot of effort involved, and sometimes, there’s some humiliation. But when you’re an entrepreneur competing for the affections of the world, there’s always a new heart and mind to try to win over because attracting customers never ends. So it’s no wonder you want to try to bring in a ton of them at once by pulling off a marketing stunt.

The good news is, marketing stunts often work. Throughout history, entrepreneurs have tried to be creative about how they inform the public of their product. In 1903, for instance, newspaper publisher Henri Desgrange started a new bicycle road race as a temporary publicity stunt to promote his newspaper, never imagining that the Tour de France would be going strong more than 100 years later. The Miss America Pageant was created in 1921 as a clever way to attract business and tourists to Atlantic City. The Pillsbury Bake-Off, which was launched in 1949, was intended to be a one-time event, but it’s become an annual event for the baking company.

But history is also littered with tales of marketing stunts that ran amok. According to a 1926 Associated Press article, for instance, there was a candy company in Berlin that tried dropping foil-wrapped chocolates on its citizens to advertise their services. But police had to step in after they received complaints of bruises and of children’s Sunday school suits being ruined; they had numerous gripes from bald-headed men who were getting splattered with the sweet treats. In 1976, several airlines launched an ill-conceived marketing stunt and began giving away free drinks to coach passengers in order to convince people to fly. It was apparently popular with the public, but passengers weren’t the only ones getting hammered: So were the companies’ bottom lines as passengers drank up their profits.

In the spirit of helping you learn from other business’s successes and failures, we offer our list of 10 marketing stunts that exceeded expectations–and five that badly flopped.

10 Marketing Stunts Done Right
Company: Taco Bell Corp.
Year of the Stunt: 1996

The Stunt: In the morning, an ad appeared in The New York Times with a headline that read: “Taco Bell Buys the Liberty Bell.” The ad copy explained that Taco Bell was “pleased to announce that we have agreed to purchase the Liberty Bell, one of our country’s most historic treasures. It will now be called the ‘Taco Liberty Bell’ and will still be accessible to the American public for viewing. While some may find this controversial, we hope our move will prompt other corporations to take similar action to do their part to reduce the country’s debt.” It sounded logical, if distasteful. In another press release, Taco Bell helpfully explained that people had been “adopting” highways for years and that purchasing a national treasure was just a way of furthering that idea.

What Happened Next: Thousands of people called in their complaints to the home of the Liberty Bell, the National Historic Park in Philadelphia, but by noon, Taco Bell admitted what many people suspected, since the day was, after all, April 1. The Taco Bell ad was an April Fool’s joke, and the media and public ate it up (no pun intended). More than 650 print media outlets and 400 broadcast outlets covered the prank, reaching more than 70 million Americans, according to Taco Bell’s marketing department. The company’s revenue increased by $500,000 that day, and by $600,000 more the following day, compared to the previous week’s sales. Even then-White House spokesperson Mike McCurry, when asked about the Taco Liberty Bell, got inspired to reveal that the Lincoln Memorial had been sold and would from now on be known as the Ford Lincoln Mercury Memorial.

Lesson Learned: It can pay to have a sense of humor about your business.

Company: ProShade
Year of the Stunt: 2006

The Stunt: ProShade is a company that makes a 3-in-1 gadget that combines a visor, sunglasses and a lanyard–which is a cord and a hook that allows you to carry something on them, like keys or a pocketknife or what have you. Proshade made an intriguing offer to the National Park Service earlier this year when they proposed to give $4 million to Mount Rushmore in exchange for getting to put a logo visor on each of the presidents’ heads. The company explained in a news release, “The National Park Service needs more support in preserving Mount Rushmore. There’s a dearth of funding in the budget to provide the national landmark with the facelift it needs. If they accept, we’d like this to go toward preservation efforts-including a much-needed pressurized wash.”

What Happened Next: Although the National Park Service didn’t take them up on their offer and despite the fact that any decent journalist knew they were being taken, the company received a fair amount of publicity for their outlandish offer. One writer for Adweek summed it up best in a column about ProShade’s concern for Mount Rushmore when he said, “This obviously smacks of a blatant publicity stunt, as I can’t conceive of anyone agreeing to this offer (especially at such a low price). But I’ll write about it, anyway.”

Lesson Learned: Journalists are human, too–they love a good story. Give it to them, and they just may take you up on writing about it.

Company: GoldenPalace.com
Year of the Stunt: 2004

The Stunt: Because they’re legally restricted from advertising in traditional media, online casino GoldenPalace.com, based in the Caribbean, has devised many marketing stunts to grab the public’s attention, from paying people to tattoo their logo on body parts to–earlier this year–purchasing William Shatner’s kidney stone for $25,000, so they could auction it off for charity. But their most famous marketing stunt took place a few years back when they bought a partially eaten grilled cheese sandwich for $28,000. But it wasn’t just any sandwich: It looked like the likeness of the Virgin Mary had been burned into the bread.

What Happened Next: The casino received worldwide attention for their purchase, getting media exposure in everything from USA Today to the BBC to China Daily. CNN, FOX and MSNBC all covered it, as did the evening news networks. The casino likely saw the $28,000 as a bargain, considering that not only did it buy them a lot of media exposure, they were able to milk it for quite awhile. They later generated a few more headlines for buying the pan that the revered grilled cheese sandwich was cooked on, they still sell T-shirts emblazoned with the image of the Virgin Mary grilled cheese sandwich, and they took the blessed food on a world tour, displaying it in places like the Hard Rock Caf? in Las Vegas. They even organized the Goldenpalace.com World Grilled Cheese Eating Championship in early 2005, in which world competitive eaters came to Venice, California, to eat as many grilled cheese sandwiches as possible–and to win $10,000.

Lesson Learned: Even the most outlandish marketing stunts–including those involving the often-dicey topic of religion–can work to a company’s advantage. The important thing to remember is that the marketing stunt should fit into the character of the business. You could definitely argue that any marketing stunt in the name of charity is only going to make an online gambling casino look better, especially when it’s located on an island outside the United States’ reach. And if the public’s expectations of your business are low to begin with, it’s harder for a marketing stunt to blow up in your face.

Company: Burger King
Year of the Stunt: 1998

The Stunt: Obviously inspired by the good folks at Taco Bell, Burger King put out an ad in USA Today, stating that they’d re-engineered their most famous sandwich in order to benefit 32 million Americans, and now they were ready to present . . . the Left-Handed Whopper. They offered details of how the sandwich had been designed to fit more comfortably in the left hand, including rotating the condiments and redistributing the weight of the toppings.

What Happened Next: This one didn’t go over quite as well as they’d hoped, since some of those 32 million Americans came into the restaurant and were annoyed to discover they couldn’t actually order the Left-Handed Whopper. Still, there was no real backlash when the restaurant chain admitted it had been an April Fool’s stunt, and since the ad brought in customers, including many who requested that they receive a right-handed burger, it should be called a success.

Lesson Learned: No harm in being inspired by successful marketing stunts that have come before, as long as you provide your own twist. The newspaper ad on April Fool’s Day had already been done, but otherwise, it was a creative gag. Certainly, Burger King was encouraged by the prank: They’ve continued to have a sense of humor when it comes to their marketing, their latest gag being the website, www.subservientchicken.com , which was unleashed on the internet without much fanfare–only a few friends of people who worked for Burger King’s ad agency were told about it–allowing word-of-mouth to spread and customers to discover it for themselves. For those of you who haven’t heard of it, it’s a video of somebody in a chicken suit who will fulfill (almost) any command you type in for it. In the past several months, the site has received nearly 20 million hits, and web surfers spend an average of six minutes playing the game. Seems it never hurts to have a sense of humor.

Company: SonicYoga.com
Year of the Stunt: 2002

The Stunt: Soon after launching his Manhattan-based yoga school in 2001, owner Jonathan Fields teamed up with Adelphi University to run the first-ever study on determining how many calories yoga burns. Knowing that the idea had media appeal–in fact, Fields also owns a marketing firm called Creative Vibe which he started in 2003–he sent a note to several top fitness magazine editors in New York City, explaining the concept of the study and offering an exclusive to whatever editor reached him first and agreed to do a story on the study. Within a week, Self magazine committed–and even asked to be in the study.

What Happened Next: After the article was written, an editor at Self called Fields and mentioned that it was a shame the studio didn’t have a yoga instruction video to go with the article. Fields instinctively said, “Oh, we do have a video. It’s in post-production, and it’ll be out by the publication date.” He quickly made up a name for the video and a price so the editor could add that information to the article, then he hung up and turned to his partner and said, “We need to make a yoga video very quickly.” They put together a video, which sold out after the magazine hit the shelves. Since then, they’ve made four more videos.

Lesson Learned: There’s something to be said for thinking big and on the fly. Fields could have been extremely embarrassed had he not been able to quickly produce a workout video that actually was generally well reviewed. And certainly another lesson to take away from this is that when you’re small, teaming up with big names–Adelphi University, Self magazine–can make you seem bigger to the public than you really are. But maybe the best lesson is to emulate Fields’ confidence. As Fields puts it, “If you want to be in the news, make news. You don’t need connections, you don’t need a publicist, but you do need to think way outside the box.” Having said that, Fields cautions, “Even in the throes of wild creativity, there’s a sound business reason, beyond publicity, to do what you want people to notice. Integrity is paramount.”

Stunts 5 – 10

Company: D.C. Comics
Year of the Stunt: 1993

The Stunt: Whether we’re talking art or not, D.C. Comics is–yes–a business, generating approximately $40 billion in revenue each year. So it’s not surprising that many people felt that releasing a comic book called The Death of Superman was a marketing stunt, given that nobody with half a brain really, truly thought this company was going to stop producing its most popular title, a hit since the Superman character was born in 1938. (According to a recent estimate published in Entertainment Weekly, since that time, Superman has generated some $4 billion in revenue.)

What Happened Next: The news media covered this development extensively, not quite as if a head of state had passed away, but seriously enough, and the comic book featuring his death sold out on the first day. As more issues were published, they kept selling out. In fact, millions of readers purchased not just The Death of Superman issue but numerous others that followed, including Funeral for a Friend and eventually–who would have guessed?–The Return of Superman.

Lesson Learned: If you have a popular product but feel that sales are stagnant or your customers’ excitement toward the brand is weaning, it may not be a bad idea to tinker with it. “Well, not so fast,” you’re probably thinking. “Jump into a time machine and see how people felt about New Coke in 1985.” But that wasn’t a marketing stunt–it was a colossal business mistake that offered numerous marketing challenges, which Coke eventually conquered, by reverting back to its original formula. Businesses revamp their products all the time, whether it’s coming out with a “new and improved” formula that truly is new and improved (unlike Coca-Cola’s 1985 misfire). But more often than not, instead of replacing the product, companies now just add new varieties to their line. What Superman and other beloved brands can teach us is that if you can create some drama around your product–and tug at your consumers’ emotions–you may just find that your potential for bringing in a profit is, well, super.

Company: Maui Beverages
Year of the Stunt: 2005

The Stunt: Because Maui Beverages isn’t very well known, their PR department suggested something splashy to let people know how fun this company was. First, they changed the founding executive titles–from Chief Executive Officer to Chief Entertainment Officer–and the Chief Technology Officer to Chief Tasting Officer–giving their company a more lighthearted appeal. Then they set out to prove that they really were fun. Maui Beverages’ PR company sent the founders, Mark Mahoney and Al Williams, to be hosts at an annual conference of food and beverage trade writers. They threw a huge party with a Jimmy Buffett-type “Caribbean island” theme and gave out lots of free sunglasses–as well as free samples of their product.

What Happened Next: Sure enough, after the title changes and the party, the company started getting a lot of positive press, which is directly affecting their bottom line: Their annual sales have gone from $6 million in 2004 to a projected $10 million by the end of this year.

Lesson Learned: A marketing stunt doesn’t have to be something that nobody’s ever done before, but you should “keep it fresh and exciting,” says founder Mahoney. Maui Beverages wasn’t the first company to throw a party–or to throw it for a group of people who could help get the word out about them. But what they did was creative and a much better strategy than hoping your company’s silent and under-the-radar personality will somehow get people to notice you anyway.

Company: Del Monte Foods
Year of the Stunt: 2006

The Stunt: This ongoing stunt is part of a larger trend called advertainment–pure entertainment wrapped around a product with hopes of convincing consumers to purchase said product. Del Monte is currently airing a reality show for cats on Animal Planet. They’ve put up a Meow Mix House with webcams for people to look in and watch these cats in one room–from 10 shelters around the country–where they hang out and have various visitors (think Big Brother, but for felines). Every Friday, on Animal Planet, Meow Mix announces which cat has been “voted out,” but in this case, that means being put up for adoption and receiving a year’s supply of Meow Mix.

What Happened Next: So far, so good. Meow Mix’s marketing director has been doing tons of interviews, and the brand is being associated with a worthy cause: cat adoption.

The Lesson: If you’re going to look for inspiration for a marketing idea, why not borrow from popular culture?

Company: Half.com
Year of the Stunt: 1999

The Stunt: Half.com, a retail website known for having sharply discounted items, paid Halfway, Oregon, to adopt the name Half.com for their town for a year. In exchange, Halfway received $100,000, 20 new computers for the local school and other financial subsidies.

What Happened Next: The media picked up on it, Half.com became very well known, and in 2000, five months after the IPO, eBay bought the company for $300 million. Halfway, Oregon, was a little less fortunate. According to Halfway, Oregon’s official website, “Half.com made many promises. Some of which were honored and others not.”

The Lesson: Creativity works, and you can apparently talk anyone into anything, if you show them the money. It also helped that Halfway, Oregon, felt it was a winning situation for them, too, beyond the monetary reward: They were the first dotcom town in the nation–though not the first community to change their name to a brand name. That distinction goes to Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, which changed its name from Hot Springs in 1950, when radio personality Ralph Edwards was hosting a popular radio show called “Truth or Consequences.” He’d said he wished a town loved the show enough to rename itself after the program–and if one would, he’d air a live program from the community. Hot Springs, anxious to shed its name, anyway, since people confused it with the town in Arkansas, jumped at the chance.

Companies: PokerShare.com and CasinoShare.com
Year of the Stunt: 2006

The Stunt: Another casino, unable to advertise in traditional media; another amazing marketing stunt. Over Memorial Day weekend this year, with gas prices hovering around $3 a gallon, PokerShare.com and its newly launched CasinoShare.com gave away more than 8,000 gallons of gasoline to hundreds of New Yorkers. In a long, snaking line of traffic, New Yorkers lined up to receive $40 of free gas while free food was distributed and music blared.

What Happened Next: Before the morning rush hour had ended, the New York City Police Department shut down the stunt because the lines were wrecking havoc with traffic flow. Many people–including off-duty police officers and government officials–left empty-handed. But PokerShare.com and CasinoShare.com could hardly call their efforts a failure. The free gas stunt, conceived by Popular Culture PR, was popular enough to be held again in Los Angeles several weeks later.

Lesson Learned: Generosity is a selling point in a marketing stunt, but you have to tap into human nature and, if possible, current events. If the same company had given away $40 in PokerShare.com gift certificates, it’s likely the media wouldn’t even have noticed since coupon giveaways aren’t exactly a breaking news item. And if PokerShare had handed out $40 in cash to just anybody on the street, they might have warranted a story from some local media outlet but, save a mugging or mobs, probably not generated a mention on the national evening news. But free gas when the headlines these days are all about the rising price of gas? This marketing gimmick wasn’t just covered by the evening news, but also by Fox News, The New York Times, the Washington Post and other media outlets, reaching more than 9 million people.

Marketing Stunts Gone Wrong

Company: Snapple
Year of the Stunt: June 2005

The Stunt: Snapple attempted to erect the world’s largest popsicle, made of frozen Snapple juice, twenty-five feet tall and weighing 17.5 tons.

What Went Wrong: It melted. As a crane pulled the frozen treat into an upright position in Times Square in New York City, someone at Snapple made the decision to abruptly call the whole thing off–it was very clear that something was wront. With the temperature at eighty degrees, the popsicle was melting fast, sending a flood of kiwi-strawberry-flavored fluid pouring onto the streets of downtown Manhattan and forcing innocent bystanders to flee from the sticky, sugary mess, according to the Associated Press. (Apparently, Snapple executives understood that the snack would melt but not as fast as what happened that day.) Firefighters then closed off several streets and used hoses to wash away the melted gunk.

Lesson Learned: It’s pretty obvious, isn’t it? Stunts take planning–a lot of it–and not taking even the smallest detail, such as the weather, into account can really trip you up. That may explain why Snapple’s more recent stunts have been slightly more safe: When the New York City-based marketing company, EMCI, contacted them to be the sole sponsor on a Boston radio station for six weeks, in effect giving listeners ad-free radio, or at least less ad clutter, Snapple snapped at the idea.

Company: JMP Creative
Year of the Stunt: 1990

The Stunt: Jim McCafferty, a magician turned marketer, was trying to promote his marketing startup business and decided to pull something worthy of Houdini to advertise his new venture. As the opening act for a concert, McCafferty allowed himself to be put in a straightjacket and then enclosed in a welded-shut steel cage and hoisted by a crane to the height of 300 feet. He was supposed to escape from the jacket and cage in two minutes and secure himself to a harness before a timer released the cage and allowed it to crash to the ground.

What Happened Next: While he escaped his straight jacket relatively quickly, the cage malfunctioned and he was trapped inside with less than a minute to go. Struggling with the cage, he scrambled onto its roof with 10 seconds to spare. But before he could attach himself to the harness, his time ran out and the cage dropped, plunging 60 feet before Jim clicked himself onto the harness, just seconds before the cage smashed into the ground. The crowd, thinking this was part of the act, loved it. Meanwhile, McCafferty was placed on a stretcher and carried to an ambulance, suffering from first- and second-degree rope burns. Before he was taken away, he asked one of his guests, a potential client, what he thought of the act. “I love the illusion of drama,” the guy said, apparently not realizing how close Jim came to dying. “I truly didn’t believe you were going to make it. And that fall, it was brilliant. It scared the daylights out of everyone.” McCafferty didn’t miss a beat: “Yeah, but just imagine what I can do for your brand.”

The Lesson: In many ways, McCafferty’s stunt did work–he has a multimillion dollar marketing business today–but we can’t in good conscience say this stunt was a success. Marketing stunts are a game of chance, and if something can’t go wrong, it’s probably not much of a stunt. But gamble with the company, not yourself. No entrepreneur should ever risk his or her life.

Company: Vodafone
Year of the Stunt: 2002

The Stunt: At a rugby match between New Zealand and Australia, two streakers interrupted the game, wearing nothing but the Vodafone logo.

What Happened Next: The police got involved, arresting the streakers before the game was over. Sure, there was a lot of attention and publicity from the media, and if you feel that even bad publicity is good publicity, then consider exposing your company by having somebody expose themselves. Just know that Grahame Maher, one of the CEOs of Vodafone, an international telecommunications company, was forced to apologize for encouraging these two guys to streak through the game–and thus break the law. The company also ended up donating $30,000 pounds to a nonprofit campaign aimed at reducing sports injuries.

The Lesson: If you have to break a law to pull off your marketing stunt, it’s probably not a good idea. In fact, it’s not a bad idea to consider the law even if you aren’t breaking it. Paramount Pictures learned that the hard way earlier this year when it teamed up with the Los Angeles Times to rig 4,500 randomly selected newspaper boxes around the city. Unwitting customers paid for the paper and opened the rack, unaware that the Mission: Impossible theme song was about to start playing. It sounds harmless enough, but the machinery that played the music had red wires stuck out of it and looked like an explosive device. A bomb squad was called in at one location and actually blew up a newsrack before learning what was really going on.

Company: Sony
Year of the Stunt: 2005

The Stunt: Sony had graffiti artists design–and spray paint–various pictures of their PlayStation Portable at several locations around New York City.

What Happened Next: Many people hated the look of the ads–after all, who wants graffiti in a city–and others saw it as a blatant attempt to be cool, or to get cheap labor from struggling teenagers. An online petition was started with comments like, “Stop cynically exploiting graffiti artists.” Another declared, “I will never buy a Sony product again.”

The Lesson: If you don’t have street cred, really examine whether you have any chance of getting any. If something about your company or brand doesn’t have it, it might be worth living with that.

Company: Pontiac
Year of the Stunt: 2004

The Stunt: If you haven’t already heard, Oprah Winfrey gave away a Pontiac to each member of her studio audience–her entire audience–for free one day.

What Happened Next: Sure, the audience members were thrilled and the marketing stunt made news in all corners of the world. But advertising experts have argued that the real winner of this marketing stunt was Oprah–not the car manufacturer. Who actually today remembers that the car given away was a Pontiac G6 sedan–or even that it was a Pontiac? Everybody was applauding Oprah Winfrey for her generosity, but not Pontiac, which had come up with the idea for the giveaway. And there was some bad publicity, too: The winners were upset when they had to pay a huge tax bill for their gift. And for those who did pay attention and try to buy a Pontiac G6 in the immediate media aftermath, the new sedan wasn’t yet available at many dealerships.

The Lesson: –if you partner with somebody really big, every time you’re in the same room, you might find that you’re not getting any time in the spotlight and you’ve simply become a prop.

Original Article Located on Enterprenuer.com

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Targeting Mobile Users Through Google AdWords

Best Practices, Marketing • Comments (0)

On August 26, 2014 • By Georgette Kakridas

Article provides via Smashing Magazine

“Know your audience” has stood as a fundamental marketing principle since long before the web. When advertising online, you need to take into account one of the most basic factors of the audience you are reaching: what devices they are using.

The most popular online advertising platform, in use by marketers of all sizes, is Google AdWords. Up until early 2013, AdWords allowed advertisers to set up separate campaigns to target mobile devices. Best practice generally entailed targeting mobile, desktop and sometimes tablet users in unique campaigns.

Then, in a bold move to push the importance of mobile usability (some would say to drive up its own revenue), Google announced it would no longer allow campaigns to target by device, as part of what it called “enhanced” campaigns. Pay-per-click (PPC) managers made outcries about Google’s forced decision to remove control from advertisers, even cautioning people against upgrading immediately as the option became available to do so.

A year later, the dust has settled somewhat as advertisers have adapted to the new campaign format. With the ability create device-specific campaigns gone, they’ve modified tactics with their campaign structure and bidding strategy to best reach people across multiple devices.

Why should you care about who’s using a mobile device and who’s not? First of all, people often behave differently when browsing on a phone versus a desktop. In reviewing data from a site that received just over three million sessions over the past year, users spent an average of 2:42 when coming from desktop and 1:16 from mobile. That shows mobile sessions dropping off after about half as long as desktop sessions. A smartphone user might not care to spend time sifting through an extensive product inventory, instead just wanting a number to call or immediate directions to a location.

Secondly, costs can vary widely by device. A study by Marin Software shows that the average cost per click on mobile was 26% lower than the desktop average in 2013. Also, the average cost per lead or sale might be more or less on mobile. Advertisers who take this information into account will see the need to control bids by device in order to maintain their target costs for leads.

Thirdly, visits from mobile might provide more or less value to a particular advertiser. For example, the owner of an e-commerce website might find that desktop users put more items in their carts and spend more on average.

Fourthly, you might want to drive mobile users to different pages than desktop users. Especially if your website is not responsive, you might have separate URLs for mobile. While a responsive website is ideal, your agency might be forced to work with a client’s existing website when running an ad campaign.

So, how do you build a campaign that targets only mobile devices via AdWords? The short answer is you can’t. However, a number of workarounds are available.

First, let’s look at a couple of AdWords features that focus spending on mobile: bid modifiers and mobile-preferred ads.

AdWords Features To Target Mobile

USE BID MODIFIERS

Enhanced campaigns introduced a feature called bid modifiers, which allow you to increase or decrease bids by a percentage for ads appearing on mobile devices. A number of PPC professionals have suggested using bid modifiers to focus a campaign’s spend on mobile placement. You could set a low general bid and increase the mobile bid modifier to 300%, the maximum percentage allowed.

To set a bid modifier, go to the “Settings” tab in your desired campaign and select “Devices.” You’ll then see statistics broken down by device and the option to change the percentage for mobile.

However, this technique will not completely exclude desktop searches. In a test across multiple accounts, Brad Geddes found that about 19% of searches still end up occurring on desktop.

CREATE MOBILE-PREFERRED ADS

Another option is to create mobile-preferred ads. When you build an ad in AdWords’ interface, selecting a check box enables you to mark the ad as mobile-preferred. Such ads are an opportunity to customize messaging specifically to people on mobile devices. We’ve improved both clickthrough rates and conversion rates by using phrases like “Call now” in mobile-specific ads, because searchers can click-to-call from a phone.

To create a mobile-preferred ad, just click the check box for “Mobile” under “Device preference” when making an ad via the web interface.

However, even these ads are not guaranteed to appear only on mobile or to prevent standard ads in the same ad groups from showing up on mobile. PPC Hero put this to the test and found that a number of desktop impressions still occurred with mobile-preferred ads.

USE SMARTPHONE-SPECIFIC AD SIZES

When running display campaigns, the 320 × 50-pixel mobile leaderboard ad size will appear specifically in a smartphone browser or app. You can even create animated ads in this format to get more attention. If you want to run them on mobile devices that don’t support Flash, AdWords offers an option to convert the Flash files to HTML5 when uploading them.

This ad size is great for driving branding, because it takes up an extremely visible portion of a mobile screen, often on top. Clickthrough rate tends to be high. In one campaign, I saw an average of a 0.5% higher clickthrough rate on these mobile ads than the standard desktop sizes (a pretty significant difference for display ads). Be aware, however, that people often unintentionally tap these ads on a touch device, especially while playing games. If you are encountering a high bounce rate from these ads, then consider excluding mobile apps. Bryant Garvin has written about a quick and easy way to do this.

We’ve looked at some options available in AdWords to focus on mobile. Next, let’s consider another platform that allows for more granular targeting at the device level than AdWords.

Direct People To Proper Pages

While a responsive website is the ideal option, if you do have a separate mobile website, make sure that users who are coming from mobile devices will see the proper page. One of the worst mistakes you could make is to forward all mobile visitors to a generic home page. I’ve audited campaigns whose ads were set up to very carefully link to very specific inventory items, only to completely lose all of that value because no equivalent pages existed on mobile. Make sure that individual product and service pages forward to their respective mobile versions.

AdWords also lets you use ValueTrack parameters in ad-destination URLs to specify mobile and desktop versions. People who click on ads will be directed to the proper page based on the device being used.

Try Bing Ads

While Google might have removed the capability to target separate campaigns at mobile devices or tablets, Bing still allows you to segment by device; you can still create a mobile-only campaign to reach searchers on Bing and Yahoo. While Bing-powered search accounts for a much smaller volume than Google, I’ve found that allotting a portion of spend to Bing Ads to be valuable for many clients, with less competition, as well as a generally lower cost for leads. For one particular client with a limited budget, we found that the cost per lead averaged about $20 less in Bing Ads than AdWords; so, we shifted money over, resulting in a stronger return on investment from their ad spend.

To set a Bing Ads campaign to serve only on mobile, go to the “Campaign Settings” tab. Under “Advanced Targeting Options,” select “Device” to choose the devices on which to run your campaign. You can also set bid modifiers here, as in AdWords.

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Infographic: Social Sharing Enlightenment

Best Practices, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy • Comments (0)

On July 9, 2014 • By Georgette Kakridas

We came across this great infographic and had to share. It reflects the positive effects of encouraging social behavior and social sharing on all levels of large scale enterprises. The power of social sharing is unlimited. Take a read, learn and share with your tribe! Remember, every brand has a story to tell, how will you encourage your employees to share your story?

View full image here

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How Hospitality Groups Are Using Social Media

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On June 27, 2014 • By Georgette Kakridas

Although this article is a few years old, there is some valuable information take away from it. Getting back to what we tell our clients, you need to choose your social media networks wisely and ensure you are producing original content that is targeted at each audience on each platform. Just because you think you need a Facebook account doesn’t mean you actually do. Research what other’s in your industry are doing and then differentiate yourself from them when creating all your accounts. Branding is key, all of you accounts should have the same cohesive branding so that when you users see them, they know it’s yours. This also creates brand loyalty amongst your customers and followers.

Social media is a whole beast of it’s own, you have to be on top of it every day, monitoring and producing content. In today’s day and age, we are bombarded by messages and content from all angles, all day every day. If your message isn’t different and you are not creating original content on a daily basis, it will get lost in the sea of content already out there. That’s why video storytelling is becoming more important than ever… but that is for another blog post. Content is still King.

Original article provided by Mashable

Often, we think of our offline lives as distinct from our online presence, but social media is real life. Look no further than the hotels you stay in, the restaurants where you dine, the airlines you fly on and the theme parks you take your family to for proof. More often than not, there’s a Twitter and Facebook account — possibly even a Foursquare presence — behind the venue in question.

Because social media is a platform for the customer’s voice — and that voice can be heard by anyone in the world — the hospitality industry as a whole has embraced social media in a huge way.

Hospitality businesses of all sizes — from the biggest hotel chain to the little neighborhood cafe — have found their own unique way to harness the power of Facebook and the distribution possibilities made available via Twitter.

Personalizing Customer Service

Customer service is the most obvious way for the hospitality industry to use social media, and Twitter is the perfect vehicle for resolving customer issues or making a guest’s day with a simple “thanks for visiting” tweet.

But the best in the business are going above and beyond in the customer service arena. For example, the Wynn Las Vegas and Encore hotels use social media sites like Twitter and Foursquare to improve their customer service efforts and better meet the needs of their guests.

As the E-strategy Development Manger for the hotels, Jade Bailey makes sure that her team greets and caters to guests who check in there on Foursquare or tweet about being somewhere on the property, both on social sites and in person. The team has also seeded Foursquare with numerous tips inside the hotel, enlightening guests on the fascinating stories behind some of the more lustrous decorative embellishments.

Smaller businesses are going the extra mile as well. CoffeeGroundz — an independent coffee shop in Houston, Texas — uses Twitter as a way to make its customer service more personalized than its bigger competitors.

The store’s general manager is credited with making CoffeeGroundz one of the first businesses to take to-go orders via Twitter, an effort that began in October 2008. In addition to to-go orders, the boutique coffee spot now also accepts table and event reservations via direct message on Twitter.

Storytelling

At the Roger Smith Hotel in New York, social media has become immersed within the hotel’s unique culture. At its core, the Roger Smith Hotel is about storytelling — with a focus on art and people — and social media has become the way in which the hotel can share these stories and create new ones.

In fact, Brian Simpson, the hotel’s director of hospitality, says that while the hotel certainly attempts to connect the dots between social media and sales, ROI is not the focus of the team’s social endeavors. “We’re less concerned about how many rooms are booked because of social media, and more focused on telling stories and connecting people … you can’t pay a marketing firm to make those connections.”

It’s this type of open thinking that keeps The Roger Smith at the forefront of the social media curve.

Simpson primarily relies on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and the hotel blog to distribute and collect stories, but also recognizes the value of location-centric social networks like Foursquare and Pegshot. He approaches each social site with a different strategy, saying, “We take all of these stories and figure out which social media networks support them best.”

Simpson points to an event back in 2009 as a catalyst for some of its creativity. The artsy hotel then hosted a Social Media Breakfast, which led to interest from other social media and web groups, and ultimately inspired Simpson to actively immerse himself in the social media culture.

Because The Roger Smith is independent, Simpson found ways to bend the rules for groups and startups, making the hotel inviting to all types of social media event organizers. For Simpson, exposure is key and hosting these events helps get the hotel’s name out there. Today, the hotel is essentially the social media-friendly hotel of New York; events are booked for each night of the week and its become the official hotel of many a New York web conference.

“We’ve made social media a part of the hotel,” says Simpson. “If we stopped doing social media, the culture wouldn’t change, but the stories that get told about us would change, and that would change the perception of the hotel.”

With storytelling at the center of everything the Roger Smith does online and off, Simpson is also looking for the next great way to engage current and potential guests. He says, “now that everyone’s on Twitter, and everyone has a Facebook Page, our objective is to find out what’s next and stay ahead of the curve.”

The hotel is also being extremely avant garde with its approach to installation art. They’ve commandeered an art studio on Lexington Avenue outside the hotel and turned it into an experimental space where art meets social media. The space is dubbed the RS Pop-Up Shop, or RS POP, and it’s open to up-and-coming designers and artists who want to showcase their work with social media flair.

Each selected RS POP participant is heavily supported with social media exposure, so artists and designers are featured both in the art studio and online via the hotel’s social media channels.

Disclosure: The Roger Smith Hotel has hosted Mashable events.

Making Good with Mom

Mom is a very important person in the hospitality space. She books the hotels, makes travel arrangements and handles most of the money matters. Mom is often the decision maker for the family.As the former Vice President, Public Relations/New Media at Universal Orlando Resort,Cynthia Gordon developed The Universal Mom Squad to make Mom’s experience at the park second to none.

Gordon says, “Hands down the best way to reach moms is online and through mom bloggers. Let’s face it, mom bloggers are a full-fledged Internet phenomenon. You have 42 million women online, with nearly half of those visiting blogs to get advice and recommendations. Mom bloggers have powerful voices and their opinions are valued by their readers.”

She credits Disney for its social media outreach efforts saying it “took the lead in courting mom bloggers and inviting them to experience their parks’ new attractions and services.”

Gordon is referencing the Walt Disney World Moms Panel — 43 hand-picked moms, and a few dads in the mix — who serve as online advisers and help answer park-related questions on behalf of Walt Disney World. The moms answer submitted questions and the inquisitive can browse through topics, search for answers, submit their own question or learn more about the panel. The program started in 2008 and new moms are added to the group each year.

Another hospitality brand catering to moms is the Royal Caribbean International cruise line. The company recently took the opportunity to invite a group of moms participating in the weekly hashtag Twitter event #gno (Girls Night Out) aboard its Oasis of the Seas cruise ship to host one of its Twitter parties while at sea.

The moms aboard the ship engaged with other moms the world round, spreading the message that cruise vacations are ideal for fun, family travel — there’s no cooking, cleaning or child care concerns to worry about. As the host, Royal Caribbean was a part of the thousands of tweets generated during the two-hour Twitter party.

Employee Education

Often, social media is siloed to an individual department. This situation sets the customer up for failure. Imagine an eager customer — aware of a company’s social media presence — who ventures out in the real-world and encounters employees with zero knowledge of their own company’s Twitter account or Facebook Page. The end result defeats the entire purpose of social media.

If social media is on the menu, then everyone from the doorman and the bartender to the CEO should know about it. Those in the know should make it a point to educate staff on their own social media presence and promotions, as well as encourage employees to embrace social technologies for their own personal use.

Simpson says this is what helps set the Roger Smith Hotel apart from its bigger competitors. He works with his social media partner Adam Wallace to maintain the Roger Smith accounts, but the two of them have also prioritized educating the hotel’s 100+ member staff. Together, they’ve inspired nearly a quarter of the team to take up tweeting by teaching them that it’s just about conversation.

As such, one of the hotel’s bartenders has developed his own following on Twitter. Simpson says that often the bartender will tweet while working his shift and even offer to pick up a drink for the first few patrons who stop by.

In connecting the dots between social media, management and staff, the hotel can ensure that guests’ expectations are superseded, and not deflated, when they walk in the door.

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Women Entrepreneurs Fight for Their Piece of the Pie

News, Strategy • Comments (0)

On May 13, 2014 • By Georgette Kakridas

Original article provided by Newsweek.
Written by Zoë Schlanger / May 7, 2014 5:47 AM EDT

On a clear Friday morning in April, in a room near the top of the New York Times building with a humbling view of lower Manhattan, the world’s financial epicenter, eight groups of women wait to pitch their businesses.

They’re vying for $25,000 in early-stage investment by five so-called angel investors. First up is Miki Agrawal, who speaks casually, convincingly and fast. She has done this before. She locks eyes with the five investors, one by one, as she describes something every woman in the room can relate to—the fear of period leaks.

The line of underwear she developed with the other two women who founded Thinx would end that worry forever, she says, with four high-tech layers of fabric in the crotch. By the time she gets to the part where girls in developing countries often miss a week of school while they are menstruating simply because they lack proper sanitary supplies, and how her company would donate washable pads for every pair of underwear sold, the investors are nodding, totally into it.

The entrepreneurs have just completed something called the Pipeline Fellowship, which is trying to level the playing field for women in angel investing, an increasingly integral part of America’s capital formation. startups with at least one woman on their founding team are roughly 18 percent less likely to attract equity investors than their all-male counterparts, according to 2013 data from an ongoing survey by Emory University. Yet they are almost 20 percent more likely to have generated revenue—and that’s no small distinction in a world where the vast majority of venture-backed startups fail. Data collected by PitchBook found only 13 percent of all venture capital deals in the United States went to women in 2013, a significant increase from the firm’s 2004 data that put the figure at 4 percent. But that still means 87 percent of deals are being given to all-male teams.

The numbers paint just part of the picture. The rest is made up of the experiences—often ranging from frustrating to infuriating—of female entrepreneurs navigating the world of equity investors, where 96 percent of senior venture capitalists are men.

The anonymous confession-sharing app Secret is rife with posts by female entrepreneurs bemoaning the process of finding financial backers. “Just got out of a meeting with a [venture capitalist] who couldn’t stop staring at my boobs. Not sure whether this means we have a better or worse chance of getting his investment,” reads one.

Kathryn Minshew, who co-founded the career advice and job-search tool The Muse in 2011, says women are frequently asked to drinks by VCs who say they might be interested in investing. But instead of a business meeting, it turns out to be a date. Over the course of her company’s first year, Minshew says, she spent “probably 30 hours, maybe more” going on bait-and-switch drinks of that nature.

“One of the very common questions I get from younger entrepreneurs is, How do you very nicely confirm with an investor that something is a business meeting and not a personal meeting, without offending them?”

Natalia Oberti Noguera, the founder of the Pipeline Fellowship and a self-described “LGBTQ Latina and a feminist with a capital F,” has come to terms with that bias. That’s why the crowd assembled in the Goodwin Procter offices for the pitching event is almost entirely women. Just two men are in the audience, to support their co-founder Holly Pressman, who is pitching their finance-education site FinLit.com. Oberti Noguera’s program trains women to be angel investors, through mentoring with seasoned investors and workshops on issues like due diligence and valuation. The five women at the table in the pitch meeting—an insurance executive, a mortgage executive, two magazine executives and the vice chair of a New York City school, were nearing the end of the program, the part where they narrow down eight potential investments to three.

“People will probably invest in people who make them feel safe, and usually that means people who are not different. So if that’s how we work, let’s get more women and people of color on the investing side,” Oberti Noguera tellsNewsweek.

In the first half of 2013, according to the Center for Venture Research, just 16 percent of companies pitching to angel investors were women-owned, but 24 percent of that group got funded—a higher rate of success than the deal rate overall. That may in part be thanks to programs like Pipeline Fellowship, Golden Seeds, 37 Angels and others like them. Angel investors back projects they feel passionate about, and that are in their early stages of development, in return for equity in the businesses. They are a different financial species from venture capitalists, who invest institutional money—from pension funds, university endowments, wealthy individuals—in much larger sums, and typically require a seat on the board of the business they back, as well as an equity stake.

In a study released by Harvard in March, investors, both men and women, heard real startup pitches adapted from real businesses. Each pitch was shown in one of four ways to different investors: in one version, a male voice presented the pitch alongside a photo of an attractive man. In another, the voice was male and the photo of the man was less attractive. Another two versions were narrated by a female voice, one with a photo of an attractive woman and one with a less attractive woman.

Investors chose businesses presented by men 68 percent of the time. Only 32 percent of investors chose to fund the ventures presented by women, despite the pitch being exactly the same. The pitches by more attractive men fared considerably better than the ones by less handsome, while better-looking women did slightly worse, by a negligible margin, than their less pretty female counterparts.

You read that right: Both men and women would rather invest in a man over a woman, especially if the fellow has the right look.

“It’s more about intuition than data,” says Deb Nelson, the executive director of Social Venture Network, which connects social entrepreneurs with socially conscious investors. In traditional profit-driven investment, especially with early-stage funding where data are scarce, the decision of who to fund can come down to which entrepreneurs look and sound as if they will succeed. As long as the image we conjure in our collective imagination of a capable business leader is an attractive (likely young, likely white) man, that intuition will look a lot like sexism, racism and ageism. “We need to unlearn how we’ve been socialized,” Nelson says.

Natalia Oberti Noguera founded the Pipeline Fellowship as a way to put more women on the other side of the table, deciding which companies to invest in. Bryan Thomas for Newsweek

PICKING WINNERS

Consider the story of a tech startup called Clinkle. Its 22-year-old white, male CEO, Lucas Duplan, raised $30 million in investment over the past year. Now, the company has laid off a quarter of its staff, lost its chief operating officer and has been christened a hot mess by the tech news website Re/code, all without putting out its product yet, an app to stealthily transfer payments between smartphones.

“I don’t think it was the app that was impressive,” one former employee toldBusiness Insider. “I think it’s Lucas who is so compelling. He sells the vision of what every investor wants, which is a 20-year-old, white, male Stanford computer science major. He fits the bill. He appears to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, and he carries himself that way.” Duplan declined to comment for this story.

Oberti Noguera says there’s a wider lesson to be learned from such stories.

“If a guy has a really great exit, then of course that guy was awesome. And if a guy doesn’t do well, it’s like, ‘Well, he must’ve not had the pricing strategy down pat.’ But if a woman doesn’t end up succeeding, it’s ‘Oh, women suck,’” she says. “We don’t have enough female success stories, so the failure stories end up overshadowing everything. We have so many white–guys stories, but that doesn’t mean that if the guy is white and wearing a hoodie that he’ll succeed.”

If looks aren’t a good benchmark for investors, what is? A 2012 report fromDow Jones found that a company with at least one female executive at the vice president or director level was more likely to be successful than companies with no women at that level. For venture-backed startups with five or more female executives, the report found 61 percent were successful and only 39 percent flopped, compared with a 50 percent failure rate overall. The study did not find any statistically significant relationship between a company having female founders and its success, perhaps because there were so few represented: Of the 20,194 companies in the report, only 1.3 percent had a female founder.

There are those who argue women need to adapt to the system, rather than the other way around—that it’s the women themselves who are to blame. And not all of these critics are unreconstructed Mad Men–era throwbacks.Bryan Thomas for Newsweek

“VCs don’t have a bias against women entrepreneurs; we’re just bad at pitching,” claimed a headline on the website Venture Beat last year. The author, Mauria Finley, a woman who founded Citrus Lane, a subscription service for children’s products, says women don’t think big enough and spend too much time focusing on details. In The Boston Globe magazine, Fiona Murray, one of the authors of the Harvard study, wrote that women should “watch sports” to have something to chat about with male investors.

“Women have to do things proactively against a tide of bias,” Murray tellsNewsweek, adding that “it’s not to say those biases are okay. It’s not just what women can do, it’s what men can do too.”

All the investors Newsweek spoke with say that having something in common does make an enormous difference to winning their support. Having a personal connection with the proposed product also makes a difference.

According to a study of a wide range of corporate firms by the Center for Talent Innovation, 56 percent of employees said the leaders at their companies didn’t value ideas they don’t personally see a need for, “even when there [are] strong data and evidence that it’s a good, marketable idea.”

Jules Pieri, who founded e-commerce site The Grommet in 2008, says she has seen that in action. “Every woman has heard this if her business has a consumer side to it: They say, ‘I’ll go ask my assistant, I’ll go ask my wife about this.’ And you just want to jump out the window,” she says.

Bryan Thomas for Newsweek

BLOWING UP THE MODEL

Projects like the Pipeline Fellowship are focused on getting more women with resources to invest in other women. But such solutions operate within the equity-investing system. Danae Ringelmann wants a better system: online crowdfunding campaigns, housed on sites like Indiegogo, which she founded in 2007. She says 47 percent of the projects that reach their funding goal on Indiegogo are female-led.

“Being able to sell your idea to one person is a dependency that really shouldn’t matter. You’ve changed your whole approach for that one person, what you think that one person wants to hear,” Ringelmann says.

Before Indiegogo, she worked in investment banking. One day, she went to an event in New York City, where people making films and theater productions could meet potential investors, even though she didn’t have the money or influence to fund a project. One director approached her, hopeful that she could help make his production of Arthur Miller’s Incident at Vichy an off-Broadway reality.

She co-produced a concert reading—where potential investors can attend and consider whether to invest. Ringelmann ultimately couldn’t gather enough capital to get the play staged, partly because she didn’t have a personal relationship with enough theater investors.

“The people who wanted the play to come alive the most didn’t actually have the power relationships to make it happen,” she says. Years later, Indiegogo came out of that sobering experience. “We decided to use the Internet to blow that [model of capital] up,” Ringelmann says.

Indiegogo has helped thousands of entrepreneurs get started. Businesses that want to seek traditional investment later have used the success of their Indiegogo projects as proof of their project’s viability, according to Ringelmann.

For its part, Indiegogo still needed venture capital to get off the ground. Ringelmann says her team was rejected by over 90 venture capitalists before they raised their first VC dollar. But now the funding appears to be flowing: In January, the site announced it had raised $40 million in Series B venture funding, the funding stage meant to speed growth.

CASINO ROYALE

A fact that gets lost in all the bleak reports about the capital gap is that women start many successful businesses without VC funding. Indeed, women own 30 percent of all businesses in the United States. Many choose not to approach investors in the first place. Instead, they grow their businesses at a rate directly proportional to their businesses’ success.

The point of venture capital isn’t necessarily to grow a sustainable business. The point is to make a lot of money. The VC’s investment is worthwhile only if and when the company has a major liquidity event, called an “exit,” by either being bought or going public. Exits are very rare, and most VC-backed startups fail.

When a fledgling business makes a successful pitch and receives a sudden injection of millions of venture capital dollars, it has often made an agreement to grow as fast as possible. Perhaps it moves into offices and goes on a hiring spree. It’s racing toward the exit.

For all their expertise, venture capitalists are basically shooting craps, only with worse odds. Just 2.3 percent of venture capital deals end in a payout of more than $100 million, and 0.18 percent get a payday that exceeds $1 billion, but those are the margins that major firms are gunning for. More than 90 percent of venture capital-backed startups fall short of their projected success, according to Harvard Business School research. Fully 45 percent fail entirely and return nothing to investors, according to data from Sand Hill Econometrics. Another 25 percent might make some money, but fail to return all of the original investment. In both cases, or around 70 percent of the time, the entrepreneur walks away with nothing at all.

MIT engineer Limor “Ladyada” Fried didn’t seek out any investors when she founded Adafruit, her a DIY electronics kits company, in 2005. Adafruit had over $22 million in revenue in 2013 and is expected to double its 50-person staff this year. Fried isn’t opposed to venture capital or angel investment, but with a company that focuses on education and “making more engineers,” rather than short-term profit, Fried doesn’t see how the equity investment model would fit in, at least for now.

Adafruit has more than 1,800 products for sale and is engineering new ones all the time. It recently launched a new children’s show about electronics called Circuit Playground. An investor might consider all those diverse focuses “outside the core business” of shipping out kit orders, but it’s just how Adafruit does things, Fried says.

Bryan Thomas for Newsweek

“Had we taken investment and not constrained growth, we could have made some mistakes with hiring and space. It’s given us more flexibility to not have the pressures of a return on investment from an outside group. We’re growing at our own pace and on our terms,” Fried says. “There hasn’t been a challenge that a cash infusion could solve. And we know that taking on investment and investors would take one important thing away that cash definitely cannot solve: time.”

It’s a lesson women and men could take to heart.

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Headline Testing: What works and doesn’t work

Best Practices, Content Writing, Marketing, Strategy • Comments (0)

On May 6, 2014 • By Georgette Kakridas

A colleague of mine recently sent this to me because we are in the midst of doing something similar for a client. I thought the article was educational and supported some great points. It was originally published in 2009, but still a great read. Enjoy!

Writing Decisions: Headline tests on the Highrise signup page

Jason Fried wrote this on Jan 13 2009 83 comments

We’ve been rotating some headlines and subheads on the Highrise signup page to see if they have an effect on signups. Answer: They do, sometimes significantly.

The test

Here’s how the test works. We used Google Website Optimizer to randomly rotate five different headline and subhead combinations on the signup page. We’re measuring the number of clicks on any green “Sign Up” button. We’re not measuring any specific plan, just that “someone picked a paying plan.” We ran the test for 4000 page views. Why 4000? The numbers didn’t change much after about 3000 page views, so we stopped at 4000.

Note: We recognize that switching both the headline and the subhead isn’t quite as informative or scientific as just switching the headline or the subhead. We’re OK with this. This experiment was part learning how to use Google Website Optimzer, part curiosity, and part conversion research. More detailed tests will follow.

The original: Worst performer

This is the headline we launched with. The headline asked people to “Start a Highrise Account.” “30-day free trial” was centered bold in the subhead. The rest of the subhead highlighted that Highrise is a pay-as-you-go service and that there are no hidden fees.

The winner: 30% better conversion than the original

This combo put the emphasis on the 30-day free trial by making that the headline. The subhead let people know that signup was quick (less than 60 seconds). The second part of the subhead asked someone to “pick a plan.” This was also the only combo to feature an exclamation mark. Would be interesting to run this headline against itself — one with a period and one with an exclamation mark.

Second place: 27% better conversion than the original

This one also promoted the “30-day Free Trial” in the headline, but instead of highlighting signup speed, we highlighted other benefits: Pay as you go, no long term contracts, no hidden fees, no surprises.

Third place: 15% better conversion than the original

This combo went back to the original “Start a Highrise Account” headline, but tacked on “Today” at the end. The subhead was the same as the second place finisher: Pay as you go, no long term contracts, no hidden fees, no surprises.

Fourth place: 7% better conversion than the original

This combo featured the winning “30-day…” headline, but replaced plan information in the subhead with quick customer testimonials plus a link to the buzz page. Even though this was the only design with a link away from the signup page, it still performed better than the original design.

What did we learn

We have some theories, but we’re curious to hear from you. Why do you think these combinations finished the way they did? What other combinations would you like to see us try? What other tests would you like to see run on this page? How else do you think we could increase conversion?

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Content Shock: Brands Face Their Moment of Truth

Best Practices, Marketing, Strategy • Comments (0)

On April 25, 2014 • By Georgette Kakridas

The writer brings up some very interesting points in regards to the amount of content that is being pushed through social networks and the internet every day. We are bombarded with constant content and messaging, whether we are searching for it or it just decided to pop up while you’re viewing a website, like those annoying commercials that just automatically start playing and you can’t turn them off, clearly at that point user experience isn’t even taken into consideration. We agree with the writer in saying that as time progresses, marketers and content writers will have a harder time getting their stories or brands message out into their target markets. We really enjoyed reading this article and we hope you all take the time to read it as well. Original Article is from Contently.com –

At SXSW Interactive last weekend, Subway rented out a square block outside the Austin convention center and turned it into a festival field of free food to celebrate their new “Eatovations;” inside, they were showing off a mind-control video game. Sounds like a modest marketing win at worst, right?

Not so much. Even on Monday — the first warm, sunny day of the weekend — the Eatovations field was mostly abandoned. The mind-control video game was generating surprisingly little press. It seemed there was just too much else going on at South By. Too many startups. Too many brands. At any given moment, Subway was just one of hundreds showing off a cool technology, just one of hundreds giving away free food and drinks.

And within the marketing crowd at the conference, there was a palpable fear that the same competitive saturation would make content marketing as difficult as SXSW marketing.

This theory is called “Content Shock,” and it was the subject of a panel I was on down in Austin. It goes something like this: As more and more people get into the content game and create better and better content, it’s going to be increasingly difficult and expensive to earn people’s attention. That’s because you’re going to have to tell awesome stories to stand out, and telling great stories on a consistent basis takes time, money and effort. And since there are only so many people out there and only so much time that they can pay attention to media, some brands are going to fail.

This is true. Publishing is really hard, and the competition is heating up. Digital media upstarts like Vox, BuzzFeed, and Business Insider are raising money that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. Simultaneously, brands — seeing diminishing returns for TV commercials, print ads and display — are scrambling to become publishers. Everyone creating content is competing against everyone else creating content. It’s a free-for-all, with alliances and power positions changing faster than a game of Risk.

A lot of brands would prefer to sit this game out; after all, winning over an audience means getting a lot of things right. You need to find the right niche, like American Express did with small business and OPEN Forum, and like Red Bull did with extreme sports. You need a site that’s incredibly pleasant to read. You need great writers and designers working for you, and you need to pay them competitive rates. You need to be reevaluating and optimizing your publishing efforts every single day. You need to organize yourself in a way that enables you to work swiftly and intelligently.

Brands are approaching their marketing moment of truth as they contemplate this challenge. Those that are proactive and build an audience for their content — such as Amex, Chipotle, Red Bull, Samsung, GE and Net-a-Porter — will be in an incredibly advantageous position. Their publishing efforts will give them a direct connection with consumers at scale, while their late-to-the-game competitors will struggle to compete, and find it more difficult and expensive to catch up each year.The stragglers will experience Content Shock alright, but on the flip side, those ahead in the brand publishing arms race will experience Content Euphoria.

The good news? There is absolutely nothing stopping a brand from becoming a great publisher and experiencing Content Euphoria for the next decade.

It takes money, yes, but brands have the budgets to fund successful publications; doing so only costs a fraction of a TV campaign. There are hundreds of talented journalists out there ready and willing to helm a brand publication, as long as it’s authentic and ambitious. Salary and creative control are powerful recruiting tools. And if you doubt the ability of great editorial minds to win audience share when given the proper resources, just look at the successful, upstart publications we see popping up every few months.

It’s getting more difficult to get ahead in the content race every day, though, and as a result, whether a brand finds themselves in the Content Shock group or the Content Euphoria elite will be heavily determined by what they do in 2014. Will they race ahead and build the publishing empire that will sustain and drive their marketing for the next 25 years? Or will they lag behind, doomed to play with a stark handicap for the foreseeable future?

Brands can afford to ignore SXSW, but they can’t ignore this reality. SXSW lasts nine days, but the content race is forever. And it’s just heating up.

What’s the deal with the Content Strategist? It’s something we created at Contently because we believe in a world where marketing is helpful, and businesses grow by telling stories that people love. Take advantage of our tools and talent and come build that world with us.

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6 Social Media Tips That Will Improve Your Marketing via @FastCompany

Best Practices, Content Writing, Marketing • Comments (0)

On February 11, 2014 • By Georgette Kakridas

DO YOU KNOW WHEN YOU NEED TO PUT A PERIOD IN FRONT OF YOUR TWEETS? BRING YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIES UP TO SPEED WITH THIS USEFUL LIST OF UNIQUE TIPS.

Check out original article on FastCompany’s website here

When it comes to helping you out with social media, we often like to categorize things. For example, we’d write about the optimal timing of your posts, or how to come up with the best headlines, and the like.

What happened over the last few weeks though is that we collected a number of awesome tips to post on social media, that didn’t quite all fit together. So we thought, why not creating a list of unique tips, that might not have that much in common, but are hopefully still very useful for you!

So, here we go, a list of six rather random social media tips to help you improve your marketing today:

1. STOP MAKING THE MOST COMMON TWITTER MISTAKE

Here’s a quick tip about a mistake that is made all the time on Twitter. In a HubSpot post, Jay Acunzo was kind enough to offer up his own experience with this for us to learn from.

Here’s Jay’s Tweet, which he used as an example:

The mistake is an easy one to miss, but it all comes down to the very start of the Tweet. Starting a Tweet with a username (this one starts with @HubSpot) means thatonly the sender, the person mentioned and anyone who follows them both will see it.

In this case, Jay and HubSpot will both see the Tweet in their timelines, and anyone who happens to follow both Jay and HubSpot will see it in their timelines.

Of course, anyone who scrolls through Jay’s whole Twitter profile would see it as well, but we want to focus on getting your Tweets into the timelines of your followers.

So, how do we solve this? If you really want to start your Tweet with a username, add a period to the beginning, like this:

Gary Vaynerchuck even created a 44-page slideshow for this one Twitter mistake. It’s definitely worth flicking through it:

So next time you want to Tweet about someone, don’t forget to add a period at the beginning if you want all of your followers to see it!

Of course, writing great headlines for Twitter, can often be a big pain in general, so we collected some of the best tips here.

2. SCHEDULE YOUR UPDATES TO POST JUST BEFORE OR AFTER THE HOUR

Convince & Convert founder Jay Baer shared a great tip in this Social Media Examiner post for scheduling your updates at just the right time.

If you’re trying to reach business people like marketers, office workers or managers, this is especially handy. Jay sets his Buffer schedule to post updates just before or just after the hour. He does this to catch people who are checking social media just before or just after a meeting.

Here’s Jay’s example:

Meeting is scheduled from 1-2 pm. Meeting lets out slightly early at 1:57 pm, and attendees check Twitter on the way back to their desk. Meeting goes a little long, and that dip into social media occurs at 2:03 pm.

Jay also makes a note that scheduling Tweets around common lunch and dinner times (if you can–time zones can make this a bit difficult) is a good way to make sure more of your posts are seen. When look further into the science of timing, there’re alsosome other great tips beyond Jay’s ideas.

3. FOLLOW OR FAVORITE ALL PEOPLE RETWEETING YOUR ARTICLES TO GROW YOUR AUDIENCE

One tip that I learned from Leo when I joined Buffer was to keep an eye on who shares my content on Twitter.

Just by monitoring mentions of my username, I can find people who are interested in the posts I write, and then quickly follow them or favorite their Tweet.

This is a good way to gather more followers who enjoy your content. You can also use a Twitter search to find people who aren’t mentioning you by name.

Try searching for your website’s name or URL, your full name and any specific keywords or hashtags that you use. If you don’t have time to reply to all of the matching Tweets, a quick favorite can help you make contact with those users.

Being able to get more Twitter followers with a number of tips that simply show gratitude are my favorite, since they’re completely non-intrusive and build on your previous efforts. We’ve written about more examples here.

4. KEEP AN EYE ON FACEBOOK’S CHANGING GUIDELINES

Facebook has had some pretty strict guidelines for running promotions on your Page in the past, and it’s always a good idea to make sure you’re not in breach of any of these. In fact, their recent big algorithm change, turned the Facebook marketing worldupside down.

What you might not know is that Facebook has actually lifted some of the rules for running promotions (they’re fond of changing things at Facebook). A recent Socially Stacked blog post looked at five of the guidelines Facebook has removed:

1. Promotions on Facebook must be administered within Apps on Facebook.com, either on a Canvas Page or a Page App.

You can now run promotions on your Timeline or by using a third-party application.

2. You must not condition registration or entry upon the user taking any action using any Facebook features or functionality other than liking a Page, checking in to a Place, or connecting to your app.

Now that you can run promotions on your Page’s Timeline, you can require a Comment or Like on your post for entry. You still can’t ask fans to enter by sharing your post on their own Timeline, though.

3. You must not use Facebook features or functionality, such as the Like button, as a voting mechanism for a promotion.

Not only can you ask fans to Like or Comment on a post to enter your competition, but you can use Likes as a voting feature now, as well.

4. You must not use Facebook features or functionality as a promotion’s registration or entry mechanism.

You can actually use a Like on your Page or a check-in to your business as entry into a promotion, now. Since Likes aren’t differentiated for promotions, however, the Socially Stacked team don’t recommend using this option.

5. You must not notify winners through Facebook, such as through Facebook messages, chat, or posts on profiles (timelines) or Pages.

Facebook has relaxed this guideline, so that you can now use the comment stream, status updates, your own blog or website, and even email or Twitter to notify winners.

Being in the know of Facebook’s changes is crucial, especially as they’re changing things so often and frequently.

5. ADD A COMPLETE ADDRESS TO FB SO PEOPLE CAN CHECK IN

If you have a local business, or you manage the Facebook Page for one, this tip can improve engagement.

If you add a full address in your Page’s settings, your fans and local visitors can check-in to your business on Facebook.

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10 Online Strategies for Your Next Product Launch via @Mashable

Best Practices, Branding, Marketing • Comments (0)

On February 10, 2014 • By Georgette Kakridas

Long gone are the days when announcing a new product was simply a matter of putting together a news release, sending it off over the wire and counting on major news outlets to spread the word. Today, because consumers are able to get information from a variety of sources and platforms, a successful product launch requires an integrated approach; one that includes traditional, social and online marketing tools. Here’s a look at how to focus these approaches into one concerted effort around a product launch. (View Original Article Here)

1. Traditional Methods

Even though new media seems to get all the glory, traditional television, print or radio media outreach remains an effective way to expose a never-before-seen product to the masses. Be sure to clearly spell out the elements of your product that make it newsworthy. How is it different from your existing products? How is it different from other similar products? What benefits does it provide to the consumer? You can also go a step further and subscribe toHelp a Reporter Out, ProfNet and NewsBasis. These are great resources for connecting with journalists who are looking for experts and story ideas.

Don’t discount other proven methods like advertising, trade shows, speaking opportunities, promotional events and direct mail. Ignoring them can lead to wasted opportunities. If you invest the time to truly understand the demographics and behaviors of the people you’re hoping to reach, you’ll know if these traditional methods are worth your time and investment.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Before you begin your online efforts to market your new product, you must have a “home base,” which ideally is a search-friendly website or blog. When launching a product, to aid both potential customers and contribute to optimized search engine performance, consider creating a product-specific landing page that features photos, descriptions and/or video. Make sure this page is appropriately coded for search, complete with keyword-rich copy, title tags, header text, a unique URL and meta information that succinctly describes your new product. Make sure this page is visible and easily accessible from your home page, at least for its initial release.

To build your online content library, consider enhancing your traditional media outreach efforts and social media news presence by distributing your product press release using paid services with both text-only and multimedia options, such as PR Newswire, PRWeb andPitchEngine. If you’re looking for a less expensive route, Free Press Release and PR Logallow you to share news for free.

3. E-mail Marketing

E-mail marketing is a fantastic way to provide specialized content to people with whom you’ve already built relationships. Consider offering a pre-order for your new product, exclusive only to e-mail recipients. Or, offer a sneak peek at the new product before it’s released to the public. This will help to nurture and reward your existing relationships and continue building on the trust you’ve already earned.

Additionally, you may set up an e-mail drip campaign that sends messages on a regular schedule at timed intervals to keep your product or service top-of-mind with your customers, and also to keep the sales funnel flowing.

4. Online Advertising

Tools such as Google AdWords (and other pay-per-click services) can boost awareness and funnel parties directly to your product. Online advertising allows you to get in front of a specific audience but with wide reach.

Another option is to do some research to determine the most widely read blogs and sites in your industry and also those frequented by people in your target markets. Advertising is often the main revenue generator on these sites and blogs, so it’s a great way to begin building relationships with the editors and site operators for a chance to get in front of the people who are most inclined to care about your product.

Don’t overlook opportunities to advertise on social networks. Some have predicted that $4 billion will be spent on Facebook advertising alone in 2011. Marketers are already realizing the benefit of getting in front of this giant’s more than 500 million users.

If you choose to pursue any of these options, make sure the ads are clickable and direct all referrals to a targeted landing page on your company’s website. This page should have content specific to the new product, along with information on how and where to purchase it.

5. Social Networks

When your product is ready to go, inform your current customers and brand enthusiasts by updating your existing social networks. Whether you have a presence on one of the well-known platforms and/or another niche social network, craft catered messages for each. But, don’t just post to any of these social networks and walk away. There are many tools available to help you manage multiple social network profiles, keep the information up-to-date and continue to communicate with your connections, while providing the social proof needed for people to buy.

Naturally, these networks are filled with potential for people to share your information. For this reason, make sure you provide valuable content. Try different mediums for discussing your new product, such as videos, podcasts, photos and/or live chats. Many people are nowgetting their news, or topics of interest, from social networks and e-mail sharing, so this is a perfect place to get your product information in front of an audience that has already been “sold” on your business.

6. Geolocation

If you have a physical location your customers frequent, utilize geolocation tools likeFoursquare or Gowalla to further your marketing gusto. By closing the gap between online marketing platforms and a physical store, you are encouraging sales through different channels and fully connecting the buying experience. Offer special deals for your business’ mayors, and promotions for your best customers; this kind of strategy goes a long way in creating a lot of buzz for your new product.

7. Group Buying Sites

Groupon, Living Social, Deal On, My Daily Thread and other collective buying sites continue to grow in popularity and offer the opportunity to introduce and incentivize the purchase of your product to an opt-in audience. These sites give you the ability to customize your product offer by market and expand the product’s reach beyond those who are already familiar with your company.

8. Blogger Outreach

Blogging has grown tremendously in the past five years. Even though Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2010 report found that 65% of blogger survey respondents are hobbyists, it’s likely you’ll find several bloggers in your industry who have very active communities and traffic/subscriber numbers that blow traditional media websites out of the water.

Blogger outreach goes hand-in-hand with traditional media outreach when it comes to generating interest for a new product, and the approach and methods used are much the same. Understand the blog, its audience and its content before sharing information about your product. If it makes sense, offer your product for the blogger to review.

When working with bloggers, remember this golden rule: Treat them with the same respect as you would traditional journalists.

9. Social Media Influencers

Using a strategy similar to traditional media outreach, take the time to research, locate and understand the most active social media users in your target markets. These people are at a unique advantage, having earned a large and tuned-in set of viewers, listeners and followers. While the payoff might not be immediate, creating relationships with these highly influential people can lead to valuable long-term opportunities.

While there is no universally accepted way to define and measure influence, using tools likeTwitter Grader and Klout will give a good indication of the major players in the social space and in your specific industry or market. You can also take it one step further and narrow your search by category. Tools like Twello allow you to search a directory filtered by self-identified expertise, interests and professions. This can be especially helpful for identifying Twitterusers in a subfield that directly relates to your new product.

10. Online Retail Sites

Invest in partnership opportunities with well-respected online retail sites to improve the availability and credibility of your business and product. Advertising on sites such asAmazon, eBay and Google Product Search will place your product in an environment searched by people that have already identified themselves as inclined to buy.

Amazon, specifically, offers a program called Amazon Advantage that allows sellers to delegate order fulfillment and shipping to Amazon. In addition, these products are eligible for “Free Super Saver Shipping” and are labeled as “shipped and sold by Amazon.com.” This provides buyers with the peace of mind they might not have when buying from an unknown vendor or site.

Get Customer Feedback

After your product has launched and your marketing and public relations strategies are underway, use a program like Radian6, Awareness, Netvibes, HootSuite, etc. to monitor your customers’ responses to your new product. This is a prime opportunity to open up the lines of communication with your customers and to show you care about and will listen to their feedback to improve future products.

To include your customers in your company’s product development and initiatives, consider tools such as UserVoice or GetSatisfaction to get an idea of what the people would like to see in the future.

Conclusion

With all of the social media tools available today, companies are truly missing out if they don’t evaluate the opportunities to execute a social/online strategy that complements their traditional marketing and PR programs for a product launch.

While it’s not commonplace for all of these tactics to be used, they should serve as a launching pad for your company to be creative and to choose the best strategy for you.

What experiences do you have with integrating traditional and online methods to make a product launch successful? What opportunities would you add?

More Business Resources from Mashable:

– What to Look For When Hiring a Community Manager
– 8 Ways Entrepreneurs Can Get More Out of Twitter
– 5 Masterminds Redefining Social Media Marketing
– 24 Professional Events & Organizations for Social Media Strategists
– The Future of the Social Media Strategist

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, pavlen

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Tagged ‘business strategies’

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10 Online Strategies for Your Next Product Launch via @Mashable

1. Traditional Methods

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

3. E-mail Marketing

4. Online Advertising

5. Social Networks

6. Geolocation

7. Group Buying Sites

8. Blogger Outreach

9. Social Media Influencers

10. Online Retail Sites

Get Customer Feedback

Conclusion

More Business Resources from Mashable:

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Google Search is Going Mobile-First – Here’s What It Means...

Top 10 Successful Marketing Stunts

Get Loud! Marketing Happy Hour @ ROC with Loudmouth Strategies

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Tagged ‘business strategies’

Ever wonder just how far some companies will go to get noticed? See how 10 companies succeeded–and five failed miserably–when it came to making some noise.

Stunts 5 – 10

Marketing Stunts Gone Wrong

AdWords Features To Target Mobile

USE BID MODIFIERS

CREATE MOBILE-PREFERRED ADS

USE SMARTPHONE-SPECIFIC AD SIZES

Direct People To Proper Pages

Try Bing Ads

Personalizing Customer Service

Storytelling

Making Good with Mom

Employee Education

The test

The original: Worst performer

The winner: 30% better conversion than the original

Second place: 27% better conversion than the original

Third place: 15% better conversion than the original

Fourth place: 7% better conversion than the original

What did we learn

1. STOP MAKING THE MOST COMMON TWITTER MISTAKE

2. SCHEDULE YOUR UPDATES TO POST JUST BEFORE OR AFTER THE HOUR

3. FOLLOW OR FAVORITE ALL PEOPLE RETWEETING YOUR ARTICLES TO GROW YOUR AUDIENCE

4. KEEP AN EYE ON FACEBOOK’S CHANGING GUIDELINES

5. ADD A COMPLETE ADDRESS TO FB SO PEOPLE CAN CHECK IN

1. Traditional Methods

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

3. E-mail Marketing

4. Online Advertising

5. Social Networks

6. Geolocation

7. Group Buying Sites

8. Blogger Outreach

9. Social Media Influencers

10. Online Retail Sites

Get Customer Feedback

Conclusion

More Business Resources from Mashable:

Connect With Us