CorporateRaiter

Finding Your Unique Selling Proposition

2009-10-08T09:07:00.000-07:00

This is what most marketeers are talking about when they say, 'what's your USP?' or 'what's the USP?'

This is fundamentally tied to your value proposition as well, and i cover this in some detail in a post called defining your value proposition on corporate raiter 's new home.

Defining a USP or value proposition is one of the most challenging things for many entrepreneurs, copywriters, or marketing specialists, and one that will go a long ways towards making or breaking the success of a business or product in the marketplace.

The USP will be like a shadow over everything that you do throughout the life of your product and influence all of your marketing and sales efforts -- either positively -- or negatively.

I suggest you take the time to go and read the post. It will change your life! It did mine. :)

In Website Marketing -- Start from the End

2008-09-03T17:17:00.000-07:00

Let's face it, there's a natural aversion to going "backwards".

Regressing. Backsliding. Losing Ground. etc.

The same laws seem to hold when it comes to Internet Marketing.

When I engage a new client, it's usually because they have a website and feel that they are getting suboptimal results. The answer, in their mind, is most often to increase the amount of traffic coming to the site. More traffic = more business right?

Well, in probably 95% of the cases I've looked at, the most cost-effective move would be to do a better job of converting the visitors that the website already gets.

Once you've increased your conversion rate, you can take your new-found wealth and use that to "pay" for traffic (google adwords, or yahoo or msn paid search traffic) to get an immediate boost whilst you go about the slow and tedious process of search engine optimization.

The problem is, when someone comes to me for help, it's almost always because they want search engine optimization done to their site. Since it makes no sense to argue with the client, I usually oblige. But, I do my darndest to plant seeds in their mind regarding the testing and eventual improvement of their site's (or sites') conversion rate(s).

There have been a number of studies that have been done that track the changing sophistication and importance of certain elements on your site as they relate to converting traffic into customers.

I will attempt in this blog to go into more detail regarding the actual *details* of what works (for me -- or through verifiable testing of others) and what does not. For now, I will leave you with one thought that I will expound and expand upon in future blog posts -- stolen from the good folks at marketingexperiments.com -- "Clarity Trumps Persuasion"

Clarity Trumps Persuasion

Probably the number one thing to remember about visitors is that they don't actually READ your website -- at least most of them don't. They interact with it.

Have you ever caught youself hitting "OK" on a dialog box in windoze without actually reading what you are saying OK to? Well that happens ALL THE TIME online.

Often it's because we are in a hurry, we already know what we want, we think we know what it says, or it's just too difficult (through bad layout small font big words, etc) to read it all. If/when the site gets too hard to interact with, people get frustrated or give up and go somewhere else.

Great strides have been made in recent years to make sites more "clear" -- to allow folks to merely interact with them to get what they want. And, this trend will continue -- through sheer force of Darwinism if nothing else.

We'll revisit this concept over and over in subsequent posts, but if you've got a live site, or one you're just designing -- how long does it take the average first time visitor to realize and act on what it is you want them to do when the first come to your site?

Are you clear on what it is you want them to do when they come to your site?

Honest self-evaluation is critical on this point.

More Later,
Corporate Raiter

Google's website Optimizer - a follow up

2008-02-18T18:41:00.000-08:00

I have a million and one things to do, and a million more to document in this blog, but i wanted to give you a follow up on the split test we ran in Google's website optimizer.

I finally had to turn it off.

It was running at over 90.7% improvement after 61 actions. Google tells me that is a 99.3% chance of being better over the "long haul" than the control. No kidding, google :)

Anyways, once you stop a test in optimizer, google gives you the option to "promote" your test to the control, to presumably continue with the testing process.

I did this and will continue testing with some additional changes I discussed with my president today. I will update you on the rationale for the additional changes and the results when I have them in hand.

good luck

Google's Website Optimizer - Free Marketing Advice From Google

2008-02-15T13:37:00.000-08:00

If you are a salty veteran of website testing, this post isn't going to be that helpful.

But, if you're like one of the many, many, many people aren't sure why their website isn't converting traffic into desired actions (like sales!), and you haven't been testing your pages because:

testing is too hard
you aren't sure how to get started
you're not sure where to test
you're not sure how to test....

then, you should read this post.

In the past, without a specific piece of software to manage the process, testing was kind of a pain in the neck.

A test is best done when extraneous elementst that can skew results are reduced or where possible eliminated.

Therefore, testing one page, and then another in a sequential fashion was really pretty lame. At a minimum you needed to test your pages simultaneously against the same "group" of visitors...meaning people coming to your site from the same sources at the same time.

To do this in the past, you had to setup two different pages (at least), create a randomizer to send traffic randomly at one or the other, track the results separately...and then even after the test you had to leave your testing pages up (or fwd them to the eventual winners) or risk someone bookmarking a page, and returning to a 404 not found.

The simplest of tests is the a/b

An A/B test simply tests the efficacy of one page (the control) over a new page that you create that you hope will be "better" than the control page.

A/B/C or A/B/C/D etc, as you might imagine, are just more complicated tests, which test more variations of the given page.

In addition "multivariate" tests are tests that attempt to test different elements within a given set of pages to give you the best combination of elements that the "best" theoretical page would have.

Google's Website Optimizer, part of Google adwords, lets you do any of these test types and get the results. in addition, it will give you a "confidence reading" that will tell you whether or not the given test has had enough samples to be a statistically valid reults within some given confidence range.

So, let's dump the theory and get to present day practice, because you're probably wondering, "ok...why go through the hassle of learning another application. What will it get me?"

Well, on a website I was working on, I had a homepage that actually was doing a pretty good job of converting. Not a GREAT job....but I had attributed this to the value proposition and the product needing a little bit of work.

In spite of this, I had been pushing hard to try to inch up the conversion rate, while pushing down the cost of traffic that I'm driving to the site. Well, the cost of traffic I had more than halved over a couple of month timeframe, but I really hadn't spent the time necessary to increase the conversion ratio in a meaningful way.

I put my head down and wrote some long copy for the site....Actually about 100 versions of this landing page....and I ran it through google's website optimizer....sure that i had hit the motherlode.

Now, perhaps I wasn't patient enough to let nature take it's course and let the law of large numbers swing into effect.....at least 30 to 50 ACTIONS, or better said people doing whatever it is that you are measuring to see if they do are usually necessary (at a minimum) to get any kind of statistically significant results.

But, needless to say, after a slight lead, after about 18 actions in all, and my long copy behind 8 to 10 with the original, I decided that even if it WAS going to be a little bit better, it wasn't going to be significant....back to the drawing board.

After consulting FOR some folks on their landing page, i had a "doctor heal thyself" moment and thought about how some of the advice I was giving them I wasn't following very well on my landing page.

I decided to run a second test....My webmaster was out of town, but my artists had enough skill to change up some text on my landing page. Now, typically, this is a VERY simple exercise but because of the way our php and css is jerry rigged, I didn't have the time or inclination to dive in there myself.

I just hammered out some HTML and sent it over to him to test out against our "control"

The things I changed were:

The subhead (the line right under the headline)
The content in 3 bullets that are up under the subhead
The order of the paragraphs down below
Changed "greyish" text to black, and
Made certain words bold...like i've seen other copywriters do.

The long copy I did earlier that failed took literally over a month to create. This test took about 5 minutes, and another 15 minutes as my artist kept screwing up the upload and leaving out or putting in random elements or messing up the alignment of elements from the way it WAS...not sure how he did this, but...

The results so far from Google Website Optimizer (note: the results actually didn't take this long to accumulate...the first few days I only had a little bit of traffic because I was limiting the input to a few kewords on adwords...when I saw a little success i increased the channels feeding this landing page)

Click on the image to enlarge it.

The first row is the control. The second is the test.

So what would an improvement like this mean to your business???

Remember when you drop revenue like this directly to the bottom line without increasing expenses there is a LEVERAGING of profit.

In other words, depending on your gross margins, fixed overhead, etc., a 70% increase in revenue could multiply your bottom line profit many times over.

All the best to you in all your Endeavours,
corporateRaiter

Who is Corporate Raiter?

2008-02-13T16:39:00.000-08:00

...and furthermore....who gives a damn?

a classic, classic mistake of commercial advertising (and especially commercial websites) is to focus too much time, attention and real estate on telling people who you are.

As a general rule, on a website, unless you can tie it back to some obvious customer benefit solving a burning need within your ideal customer either.

1.) leave it off your home/landing page and bury it in your aboutus, or
2.) just leave it off the site entirely

A copywriting trick is to take a sales letter and circle every "I" or "We" or "us" in the copy in red. Then go back and circle every "You" Yours" etc in green. Step back from the copy and look how much green you have to red. Keep tweaking the copy until a sea of green swamps the red. And, that is a shortcut to compelling copy apparently.

That said, this isn't a commercial site and I'm not trying to sell anything so you'll have to indulge me a bit. :)

I cut my teeth in *internet* marketing back in the late hey-day...circa 1998. Some friends and I started an Internet casino that ran under the name of worldwidevegas (not my name choice. i was only on the board at the time)

I had a lot of "book knowledge" that related to marketing high technology products at the time which really pushed "differentiation" and "category creation", "category leadership" (at all costs) and the challenges of creating a mainstream technology product and the financial benefits of doing so.

A couple "bibles" for high tech marketing I had at the time were "Crossing the Chasm" and "Inside the Tornado" both by McKensie.

For print advertising I liked "Olgilvy on Advertising"

and, for straight marketing concepts, still one of the best books (i believe) is 22 immutable laws of marketing.

The irony is/was, at the time I was a techie....I was not in marketing. I was a guy who was paid to teach developers and programmers how to integrate our software application into standalone software products and corporate IT development projects.

Now, technically, our department was "Solutions Consulting" and we were under marketing....But I believe that this was more driven by our brilliant boss' insistance that not have a "number" tied to our heads (like we would have in sales) gave us the flexibility to go after longer range initiatives. The company was public and quarterly sales quotas were a big deal.

That was the metphor at the time:

Marketing was dominated by the "beautiful people" (our group notwithstanding...we were nerds). They could come in, splash some b.s. around, paint some pretty pictures in powerpoint, and take the credit when the sales team made their goals.

It's not that marketing metrics didn't exist. Or that tracking results in some specific way just grew out as an extension of the internet.
BUT
With the exception of reading Olgilvy's, "Olgilvy on Advertising" I hadn't been exposed to systematic tracking of results in any "real" way. Marketing to me, and the non-cogniscenti around me, was something akin to working in ad agency where you just come up with fancy ways to try to manipulate people through mass media.

In reality, this was really just "marketing communications", but what did I know....I was the nerd hired to help people sling code around our application.

Now, for more than 100 years, direct marketers had been tracking results and testing testin testing copy and other ad elements in "split tests" with different campaigns. In fact, there was an excellent book written on the subject dating back to the 20's or 30's....I'll add in the name and author to the comments when I look it up later as it slips my mind right now.

However, these "direct marketings" had always been the red headed step-child of marketing. They weren't "fancy" like the flashy madison avenue image branding guys. All they did was deliver results.

They did this through "keying" as they put it ads and tracking the results. They would do this by including an offer, often in the form of a clippable coupon, with a code. The coupon would be collected at the point of sale and analyzed later by the direct marketer for the results of a specific sales letter or advertising campaign.

Olgilvy was especially disciplined at this later in the 50's 60's and 70's and grew a global ad agency out of his expertise and reputation for success.

Now, of course, with the advent of the internet and automated ways to track the results of a given advertising campaign, the techniques of the "direct marketer" are in vogue...In fact, widespread adoption of the direct marketing techniques have spawned the revenue model for none other than google, among others, to grow from nascient internet tool, to global media powerhouse.

So, back to me....the real focus of this post :)

After a few months of racking my brain, trying to come up with a "unique" new thing that we did at the casino it became somewhat clear that without multiplayer ability (for texas hold'em), and without being able to convince them to be the premiere betting site for thai cock fighting :), we were stuck with commodity games.

ironically, most every casino on the strip of vegas has "commodity games" and a lot of these games haven't changed alot since the beginning of time.

It also became clear, very early on, that we were in a knock down, drag 'em out, old fashioned, lucrative, crowded space with low barriers to entry -- a gloves off, no holds barred, fisticuffs with the creme de la creme in Internet marketing at the time.

As an advisor and early investor, I had intuited the need to create an application that tracked our marketing.

This sounds rudimentary and obvious right now, but at the time, nothing was available in the market that accomplished this. Some things would do small subsets, but nothing that was complete

What I wanted (and we ended up having to build) was a database application that would track everything unique about a campaign, an advertisment, an ad source and carry that with the prospective player when he came to our site via an image or text link ad somewhere on the internet.

Once he registered, that info would be associated with that player, and the casino backend would track all of his purchasing and playing habits.

The idea was that I could quickly discern a.) what ads were paying for themselves b.) what kind of players responded to what kinds of ads c.) perhaps soem siimilariities between the page placements, messages, colors, sites, that the bulk of our players came from

We took our rather sparse developer talent at the time and built something "good enough" that delivered what we needed....instantaneous feedback loop that let us continue to hone and refine our advertising spend.

We came from a position of being VERY undercapitalized and a little bit late to the online casino business, to being very profitable. That profit allowed the company to jump on the online bingo movement very early and the company now owns and runs bingopalace and onlinebingo among some other sites and does very well for itself financially.

However obvious this seems now, we were the exception to the rule.

Dotcoms were everywhere. Kids my age were getting "funded" and making good money in lavish offices, with nearly unlimited resources and big parties seemed to be the norm. we were stuck with limited resources and havin to do the heavy blocking and tackling of building a real business from nothing without a whole lot of VC, consulting, advisory talent to guide us.

In addition, the "grey area" that online gaming was under at the time meant that no legitimate sources of funding (or the coveted public market entry, or IPO payday) was a possibility.

The DotBombs were funding crazy ad spends in "alternate" media. While we learned that there was almost no way to make a t.v. or magazine ad get the kind of traffic on the Internet to make it pay, companies continued to sponsor bowl games and high ticket superbowl ads.

Predictably (at least by those of us that had built the metrics and run a profitable website) the dotbombs flamed out in a massive fireball of death as the weight of the mighty nasdaq collapsed under itself and virtually shut the IPO window, and with it the appetite for early stage funding from venture or angel sources overnight.

The size and severity of the collapse was underestimated by me. While I had stayed way away from the Dot Bombs....I had reasoned that the networkers were like the guys selling the picks and shovels in the gold rush. They'd prosper whoever lived. WRONG. I watched my tech heavy investments collapse and rode them all the way down reasoning that a bounce back was right around the corner. :) I think i still have a few shares of JDSU in an old IRA account after a reverse split....sigh....

I left the online gaming business in early 2000 to pursue other opportunities -- ones that didn't involve fighting off Russian hackers, hucksters, and schemers....well...hucksters and schemers of another type I guess. I move to San Francisco in time to watch the technology sector collapse out from under me and put my plans for future IPO greatness seriously at risk.

I spent 5 years in SF and Easy Bay, and silicon valley scrounging up funding and helping to grow early stage technology companies. I worked as a CFO/Controller and CTO. Only bothering to look in on marketing in the infrequent times I was at a company that actually had a product and sales to worry about :)

I stopped working for a few years in early 2005. I reasoned that the risk/reward just wasn't favorable for early stage technolgy (one of my great loves) and probably won't be there for stateside entrepreneurs for another 10 years.

i took some years off to travel, and trade, and only just now -- a year ago -- began doing online marketing again.

So what has changed? when I left google was a gleam in someone's eye...not a powerhouse...tracking results was very rare.....pay per click was an "idea" being done by a lesser search engine....and you could still buy a keyword but not a keyword phrase. These buys were done with inside connections and typically involved either exclusive or shared (50/50) deals where banners were stretched across the top of the search box and the natural results.

Even though these banners were a terrible way to advertise, the early results were already in from our testing.

keyword purchases were THE most effective ad dollars spent -- in some cases 10 times more effective than the next best. The lucky few who locked up these keywords with the big search engines by being a first mover or having and inside track at the search engines secured themselves fortunes before the knowledge of their value was finally realized.

This was all the precursor to the rise of google's pay per click model. Once google had enough traffic to make it worth while to figure out their model and interface.....the "power" of keywords search became obvious to those that had not had the chance to lockup keywords with banners earlier.

Those that didn't figure it out...or another source of viral or cheap/free traffic...either went out of business or stopped doing paid advertisting. Those that did, thrived and helped create a juggernaut in the media space today -- Google Adwords, and to a lesser extent..Yahoo Search marketing (which ironically is overture the "originator" of the paid placement bid model)

In my subsequent posts I will get into some of the theory and alot of the practice of Internet marketing nowadays....the stuff that you're probably more interested in if you're here for free internet marketing information and advice, right?

Free Internet Marketing Advice

2008-02-13T16:33:00.000-08:00

Free Internet Marketing Advice

worth every dime you pay for it, huh? :)

This blog is going to be dedicated to publishing some of my personal observations, findings, links to those that have come before me (and after) and in general a place to go to get some *help*.

Who is this blog for?

Well initially it will be for me....no one else will find it, I'm sure.

I don't plan to heavily market this site. I will use it as a reference point for my thoughts and observations and also as a place to point those that ask me a question I've been asked 1,000 times before.

A blogspot blog is clearly not the "best" place for organizing what is likely to become a sprawling amount of information and musings....But, as they say, "do as I say, not as I do."