Today and this weekend, I'm at Las Vegas Motor Speedway as a guest of execs at LVMS, attending my first NASCAR event. I'll be Twittering on location with my behind the scenes observations and impressions of the event.
Recently in Marketing Category
I recently attended a presentation by Dan Heath, co-author of the best selling book "Made to Stick". Here is a summary of the most interesting things I heard about why some ideas thrive while others die - and how to improve the chances of worthy ideas.
"With millions of ideas clamoring for attention, you've got to figure out how to get attention," Heath said. "You don't necessarily have to be a creative genius. There are templates for ideas that stick."
Heath developed the book by first asking the question, "What makes naturally sticky ideas stick?" He then set out to reverse engineer that and arrived at six traits that successful ideas have in common:
Heath said that he thinks marketers spend too much time obsessing about their customers and demographics. Customers want something that will do a job for them. The successful Swifter product wasn't born out of understanding the "mopping demographic", it came from an understanding that people need to do a job - sweep floors.
"Think about what people expect us to say, that as soon as we say it, people tune out," Heath said. "Is there something we could disrupt there to get their attention?"
Heath said that the Atkins diet is an example, because it was completely different than what we expected a diet to be. Interestingly, you probably first heard about it not from marketing but via word of mouth, which is how sticky ideas travel.
Heath talked "identity appeal", which is about three questions people ask: who am I, what kind of situation is this, and what does someone like me do in this situation? As an example, Texas had a wildly successful ad campaign to reduce litter in the state with its "Don't Mess With Texas" ads, which appealed to a Texan's sense of patriotism for the state, what they think of themselves as a Texan. This is in contrast to "consequence appeal", which is about cost vs. benefit.
These six qualities are quite powerful and many are common sense, however they aren't commonly applied due to the 'curse of knowledge'. Heath explained:
"The smarter we get, the more experience we gain, the more skill we get," Heath said. "But simultaneously, it becomes increasingly hard to empathize with our audience, who doesn't have all the knowledge we have. The people with the most knowledge often have a difficult time talking about it."
The cure: translate that message into something sticky. A person can learn without a lot of domain knowledge.
Heath was asked, how do you apply these principles?
"We all have the moment when we have the spark of an idea," Heath said. "Freeze that moment. How do you go about expressing it? What is the creative execution?" That's where the six traits come into play.
A great article in newest edition of The McKinsey Quarterly entitled, "Coaching innovation: An interview with Intuit's Bill Campbell."
In this Q&A, CEO Campbell talks about the role of innovation in stimulating growth, as well as the management challenge of building and sustaining an innovative corporate culture.
Points I found compelling:
NEW YORK - Joanne Casley, who leads Reuters consumer facing paid content businesses in the U.S., presented an in-depth case study "Selling Content Online: What We've Learned".
We've all heard of Reuters thanks to the company's global reach. What you might not already know is that Reuters has launched premium content offerings, including pay-per-view analyst research reports and subscriptions services for individual investors.
As Reuters developed their paid content offerings, they faced some major challenges. Foremost, the company has historically had a business-to-business focus, and lacked experience and systems to support a business-to-consumer initiative. For example, the company didn't have any of the following: an e-commerce platform, a shopping cart, recurring billing system, customer support for online customers, segmented customer database, path analysis, or A/B split testing. Adding to the challenge, it wasn't easy to make changes to Reuter's technology systems on the fly.
To overcome these challenges, Reuters partnered with research company "Marketing Experiments". The company helped Reuters build a separate testing platform to host test pages, enabling Reuters to bypass their own in-house technical constraints and get quick learning.
What Reuters learned about optimizing marketing pages:
What Reuters learned about optimizing the order process:
What Reuters learned about product name testing:
What Reuters learned about customer research:
NEW YORK - On Monday, Peter Morse, VP, Search and Advertising at ECNext Inc., presented a case study "Search Engine Optimization for Premium Content Providers".
Getting your web pages ranked high in the organic (free) listings of search engines is important for generating greater traffic to your website. Especially when as much as 75% of clicks within Google are on organic listings.
So how do you do it? Depends on who you ask. Search engines want you to create a content rich site and build it so it works well for users - then let their crawlers and secret algorithms do the rest.
But what do you do when much of your website is behind a subscription wall or login box? It can be difficult for search engines to crawl and index your site. Further, it can be difficult to acquire inbound links because people generally deep link to free content. Finally, free pages within a premium content site tend to share similar characteristics, prompting search engines to exclude them from indexing, thinking they are duplicates. Net: fewer pages indexed and lower search engine rankings.
Let's take a look at the essential elements of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) - the process of improving web pages so that they will rank higher in organic search.
At the most basic level, search engines crawl, index and rank web pages:
Premium content publishers should: 1) leverage existing content; 2) create new content and give it away; 3) build relevant links; and 4) decrease page duplication; 5) catch long tail search term traffic; and 6) track progress.
NEW YORK - Hoover's delivers comprehensive company, industry, and market intelligence services. Paul Pellman, EVP Marketing of Hoover's, presented a case study on the redesign of Hoover's free website.
Hoover's typical prospective customer: people researching a topic stumble across Hoover's. Once on the site, Hoover's needs to quickly communicate the value proposition of their service - and get the person to subscribe.
The goals of the redesign were to 1. Improve the UI to better communicate Hoover's value and quickly guide users to the information and tools they need; 2. to showcase subscriber-only content and tools; and 3. to improve advertising integration and generate more advertising revenue.
The key challenge Hoover's faces is finding the right balance between the free and paid portions of their website.
Hoover's worked with Optimost to perform multivariate testing (a statistical methodology of testing many variables at once vs. the slower process of A-B testing).
Key points covered by Pellman:
Next Up: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tactics for Premium Content Providers
NEW YORK - People check their e-mail four times a day. That's four times a day you can market to people via e-mail. Michael McCurdy, CRM Product Marketing Manager at Match.com, got the conference started with a case study, "Secrets of Match.com's Email Marketing Success". Key points covered by McCurdy:
Next Up: "Hoover's Website Design Tests Results to Increase Conversion"
About
David Eckoff is a media and technology executive.
Views expressed here are his own and not those of his employer.
Views expressed here are his own and not those of his employer.
