Last week I talked about the power of our beliefs to shape our view of the world around us. I also mentioned how our belief constructs impact our view of brands. As luck would have it, two separate pieces crossed my path this week and I think both provide excellent examples of how we may perceive brands, and how marketers often get it wrong when trying to shepherd a brand through the marketplace. The first piece was Does Branding Need to be Rebranded by Mediapost’s Matt Straz in Online Spin. In it, Matt mentioned the backlash against Sir James Dyson (he of the cool vacuums) when he dared to mention that he doesn’t believe in branding. Now, to clarify, Dyson doesn’t believe in branding the way it’s practiced by many companies, where through sheer force of advertising, their heavily controlled (and often contrived) brand story is theoretically imprinted in your brain. This isn’t so much branding as brain washing. Let’s call it “brand-washing.” But let’s go back to how our beliefs define our view of brands. We use beliefs as [...]
PC, Tablet & Mobile: Our 24/7 Companions
The number of studies, statistics and engagement metrics around mobile and tablet usage is overwhelming. In the search marketing world, there was much speculation for a number of years about when the mobile wave would finally hit. If you haven’t noticed, that wave has hit us and with the chart popping smart phone & tablet adoption rates, mobile engagement is only going to keep growing.
According to Google, if you haven’t shifted some advertising dollars to mobile yet, it’s too late to be early.
Believing is Seeing
In his book, the Believing Brain, Michael Shermer spends several hundred pages exploring just how powerful beliefs are in forming our view of the world. Beliefs impact not just what we think, but it literally filters what we see and do. And, once in place, beliefs tend to be stubbornly unshakeable. We will go to great extents to defend our beliefs with rationalizations that are often totally or partially fabricated. As Shermer says, “Beliefs come first, explanations for beliefs follow.” In the world of consumerism, this becomes important in any number of ways. For one, we have beliefs about brands, both positive beliefs and negative ones. And, as previous neuro-research has shown, those beliefs can dramatically alter how we sense the world. In a study at Baylor University, Dr. Read Montague found that the reason Coke devotees are so loyal has almost nothing to do with the actual taste and much more to do with the Coke brand and what it says about them as people. It’s not the taste of Coke we love; it’s the idea of Coke. A [...]
Content Marketing = More Effective B2B Lead Management
There is a lot of information out there emphasizing process and tools that will help your business convert more visitors to qualified leads. Content marketing seems to be an afterthought. I don’t think it can be said enough how important good content is to your entire digital marketing strategy. Specific to lead management optimization, content is at the core. It’s doesn’t do much good to go through the process of capturing contact information, setting up a lead management tool, and creating a prospecting process if you don’t have valuable content to support the system. There are two fundamental elements of content marketing that must be considered if your lead management strategy is going to be successful. Identify with your audience. What subjects and information will interest your audience and keep them engaged? What insight are they looking for to address their business needs? Audit your existing content inventory, conversion sources and engagement metrics, or ask your sales team to help answer these questions and determine your content requirements. Align content marketing to your buying cycle. In complex purchase decision cycles [...]
Strategies for an eCommerce PPC Model: Part One
The world of paid search becomes very interesting, with eCommerce supported websites one my favourite types of campaigns to run. ECommerce gives instant gratification when you start to see those sales occurring on the site; but it can also become extremely complicated with a myriad of options available for eCommerce marketers. In this article I will discuss how you can leverage bidding strategies to enhance your paid search performance and improve your return on ad spend (ROAS).
