Our answer is yes. Over the course of the past 50 years, the advertising industry has transformed to encompass all new media that fall under the advertising umbrella. If you recently haven’t reviewed your marketing strategies and costs when working with an agency, you should. You might be losing a fortune.
I read an article today by a former head of creative at a major ad agency that read how he had witnessed a large amount of frustration by Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) caused by how their agencies charge for creative and account services. The author says he had an epiphany and that maybe charging by the FTE (full time employee) should be a thing of the past. He states, “the fact that agencies charge more money when they put more people (or say they do) onto a project,” is wrong. No kidding.
I have always felt that the standard advertising agency model he wrote about is broken. In this model, ultimately agencies are compensated greater when deadlines are not met or only sub-par work is delivered. I’ll explain.
Let’s say that your agency presents you concepts for a new campaign. Its employees have been working on storyboards, scripts and ads for weeks while billing you for the time. You take a look and see nothing you like and say to the agency, “I need to see more concepts.”
If the agency uses this standard model, ultimately, it just hit the lottery. Now it can go back and create additional campaigns and of course bill you more money. If the agency presented you great campaigns in the first presentation they lose potential income. The agency is being rewarded for delivering inferior work.
I’ve always wondered why CMOs put up with type of agency model.
Now you’re probably saying, “This isn’t the relationship I have with my agency. I would never agree to this type of arrangement.”
The truth is you might have a similar type of relationship but don’t realize you do. Are your invoices always much higher than the initial quote? Are hidden fees popping up each month? If you answered yes, let me tell you how Davis Advertising can help.
At Davis we can operate using a fixed pricing model to help businesses of any size. This model has our clients pay a locked-in price or a pre-determined monthly fee (not retainer) that covers all required services for the completion of a project or campaign. This fixed pricing model would penalize us for creating campaigns that were not accepted by our clients at the first presentation. At Davis Advertising, if our first presentation is not great we will not be compensated for future concepts. Clients are invoiced only once we get it right. Not only does this method make us work more efficiently, this method is fairer to our clients and saves them time. So when you ask your agency if it can fix your problems and save you money be sure to also ask which model is used.
After taking a good, long, honest look at your business’s online identity, you have come to the realization that it is lacking. Maybe the look and feel is reminiscent of an Atari game. The only emails you receive from your website are from Nigerian Princes or offers to rebuild your website. Even though your site is old and out of date, trying to load up your website on a Smartphone is an impossibility with all of the flash navigation you have on it. Not to mention, the name of your site is www.2beornottoB.net, for all of your Shakespearean needs. How do we fix this without completely starting from scratch?
First, we’ll conquer the domain name issue. Your domain name is a main part of your branding. If you cannot line up your business name with your web name completely, you’d better have something close. Buying multiple domains, and pointing them all at the same site, is one way to help organize this. Just for fun, type in www.coke.com. Notice, it brings you to www.coca-cola.com. Try www.cocacola.com. Same thing, right? If your name could be confusing, or if there’s a chance that someone will type it in wrong, go out and buy yourself some extra domain names, and point them all at your site. Do your best to make sure that you have all of the possible names customer’s may accidentally put when looking for your name.
Next, if your website design hasn’t changed in the last couple of years, you probably need an overhaul. For one thing, any pictures you have of people may seem dated, due to their outfits. Even something as simple as blue jeans and a T-shirt can appear dated. Colors have come and gone out of style. Even your font choice may cry out “New, Inexperienced Company Here”. Keep your site current, with new graphics and style cues. Hint: there’s more than 16 colors allowed on computers now.
If you’re trying to get email from your website, have a form, not just your email address posted there for the world to copy. A form will help to limit some of the junk mail. Understand, there are still desperate people that will go and fill out your form, trying to sell you things, but at least they have to do it on your website. They can’t simply copy your email address into their mass email program and pepper you over and over again. It also makes things easier for your customer. For example, if a customer uses a web-based email system, like Yahoo, they have to copy your email address and LEAVE YOUR SITE to contact you. Do you really want them going off, onto a different site to contact you? Or do you think that they could be distracted when they leave your site, and go to their email? Who knows, maybe that Nigerian Prince has contacted them, too...
In case you didn’t know, people don’t want to read about your business. How many “About us” categories does one business need?(about us, our history, our goals, what we do, how we do it, when we do what we do, our beliefs, meet our staff, meet our staff’s family, meet our pets, our pet’s history and goals, etc.....) The primary subject of your website is your customer. Your website needs descriptions of your products, FAQ’s on how to use them best, contacts for sales or customer service, and a limited amount of social proof. Your website is a sales tool, to either directly sell your product or service right online, or to increase off-line sales. Make sure the point of your website is one click away at most. If you are selling goods, make the sales process easy. Don’t force the customer to fill out 20 different forms before they buy, or they won’t bother.
Remember, it’s about ease for the consumer, not for you.
I had a discussion with a peer yesterday regarding the importance (or lack thereof) of Google Page Rank. I'm a firm believer that Page Rank us fairly useless. Here's a blog a wrote on the topic a few months ago regarding Google Page Rank.
Why? I’ll tell you why...
You can’t track Page Rank.
Typically, the most accurate Page Rank data is months old. Unless you can accurately and frequently get new data for a metric, it’s pretty much useless. Page Rank has nothing to do with SEO rankings.
A website can have a Page Rank of 0, and still garner organic rankings and search traffic.
Page Rank does not take social results into account.
So, what should you do? Don't worry about Page Rank. Instead, worry about creating engaging content, promoting it via social media, and converting those content readers into leads and customers.
We typically don’t use this blog to promote things. It’s bad form. So, please forgive us for it this one time.
On Thursday, June 2nd, there is a Social Media and E- Marketing Summit occurring in Marlboro, MA. We don’t feel bad promoting this one event on our blog, because it goes so hand in hand with what we talk about on here a couple of times a week, and if you are a local reader of our blog, this event will certainly be something worth visiting. It’s happening at the Marriot Courtyard at 75 Felton Street, in Marlboro, MA. Tickets are on sale, and you need to pre-register for this event NOW.
The topics being discussed are Social Media 101, the Power of Video, the Latest in Mobile Marketing, Understanding Website Analytics, Email Marketing, and Leveraging Social Media for your small business.
For those still on the fence, let me help make it even easier: It goes from 7:30 until 11:45, so it won’t take up your entire day. Basically, come in, learn, and go do it on your own.
While you’re there, if you have any additional questions about any of the information covered, our Senior Account Executive Mike Ivas will be available to schedule one-on-one consultant appointments, that will personalize all of this new material and help you custom tailor it to your specific business needs. So be sure to keep an eye out for him!
Thanks for reading while I shamelessly promote this event! We’ll get back to the practical advice for your advertising needs next post.
I remember years ago, before there were smartphones, visiting a doctor’s office, and grabbing a magazine. I had about 15 minutes of wait time, and although the chair looked like it had some padding, I believe it was simply an elaborate paint job, that gave the appearance of a cushion, when in reality it was cold steel. I was flipping through a magazine, and came across an ad for a product. It looked interesting, and the call to action was “Please visit http://www.thecompanywebsite.com/thiscurrentpromotion for additional information.”
I had only a few options:
Find a pen and paper, and write down the webaddress to look it up later.
Smuggle the magazine out under my jacket on my way out the door.
Be that guy that rips pages out of a magazine.
Hope that I’d remember what it was.
I’m not the type to steal the magazine, and destruction of other’s property is never a viable option. I don’t typically carry a pen with me, and it seemed like it was too much work to bother the busy nurse at the desk for one, so I went with option 4.
Needless to say, I never went to the website.
Enter in a new era. A smart advertiser now would have attached a QR code to the ad, and made it so that I didn’t even have to type the web address into my phone. I would have simply scanned the code, and presto! I would have been on the site the author wanted me to visit.
QR (Quick Response) Codes are wonderful little graphics that have hundreds of uses. Basically, they allow the creator of the code to build a graphic that stores the text of a website’s URL. The person with the scanner can “read” the image, and the scanner will direct their device to open up a particular webpage. Every smartphone has a different app that can do this, and so every smartphone user can be automatically linked to whatever the QR code points to, with the push of a button.
These little codes are popping up everywhere. They can direct users to websites, to watch videos, to social media sites, and more. They can link a mobile phone to anywhere on the web, simply by scanning. Looking to increase traffic or customer engagement? Take a look at QR codes.
There are so many different uses for these codes, it does not make sense to try and create an example that would fit everyone. The beauty of these codes is that they are completely customizable for every situation. For ideas on how to use these codes for your business, please feel free to contact us. For a free PDF guide on these wonderful codes, click here.
Last week Google launched an upgrade to its search engine, adding social results for users signed in with their Google accounts. In addition to traditional website search results, searchers will start seeing results from their friends on Twitter, Blogger, Flickr, LinkedIn, etc.
Where's Facebook?Facebook won't give access to its social data as they want to compete with Google to be the leader of search in the coming years. Because of this, Google has tried to work with just about every other social platform to make the search more social.
For a better understanding of these changes, check out this video from Google:
With this new take on search, rank is officially dead as a metric for companies to obsess over. It doesn't matter if you rank high for a certain keyword -- Google is scaling personalized/social search.
What Does This Mean?
It means that everyone who searches on Google will see a different set of results, based location, search history and connections across major social media platforms.
It also means that companies need to be more active on social media. The number of connections you have on different social media platforms now directly correlates to the number of people you can possibly reach through Google search results.
What Should You Do?
Stop worrying about whether or not you have enough relevent keywords crammed into each page on your Website. Instead, focus your energy on creating rock solid content, and dispersing it through the different social media channels.
After you read this blog, type the letters “PRE” into Google today, and see what pops up as suggestions. You will see President’s Day, and President’s Day 2011. Google’s suggestions change based on what people are currently searching for, and so it is a safe bet that if you do the same experiment in June, you will have a completely different list of suggestions.
What does that mean to you? It means that you need to be set up to capture all of this extra traffic, that’s what!
Create a custom landing page, with President’s Day specials. Make sure that the page is titled appropriately, and that your meta data and page content are geared towards capturing the attention of search engines on this holiday. Creating additional pages for each holiday is always a good idea, since it keeps your page fresh. Do not simply change the graphics on your homepage to suit the sale; chances are this will not get picked up by search engines.
If you run a lot of Google Adwords campaigns, add President’s Day into your description for this weekend. I am not suggesting completely changing all of the ads, but incorporate “President’s Day” into the text under your ad, as well as adding a couple of new keyword combinations.
Lastly, remember to answer your phones, and greet your customers appropriately. Every customer should be welcomed with a “Happy President’s Day”. Even if you do not do any special pricing in your line of business for this holiday, simply mentioning it implies that the customer is receiving a better deal. I know this last part has nothing to do with SEO, it’s just sound business advice.
For over 60 years Davis Advertising has been the stand-out ad agency in Central Massachusetts. In 2007, riding the wave of great success we opened a second office in Greenville, South Carolina. Davis Advertising brings the talents of over 50 marketing professionals together to create the kind of strategic thinking that sells. You can’t move a product until you move a person and the advertising we generate has proven extremely effective in doing just that. Davis Advertising creates marketing that stands out from the crowd, conveys a message that hits home and sells your product or service. So contact us today and get the small town service you want with the big-city creative and capabilities you deserve.
