September 4, 2008

The Two Most Important Components of Social Media Marketing Campaigns

Filed under: UI/UX, advertising, analytics, creative, marketing strategy, metrics, social media — Tags: , , — bstraley @ 10:55 am

The first is content. Without interesting content that makes you stop, focus, and respond, your online marketing effort will fail.  As I wrote in an earlier post, your campaign needs a value proposition and a large portion of this value is created with really good content.  Obvious.

The second factor that gets overlooked a surprising amount of the time is enabling the sharing of the content.  Not just enabling it in fact but integrating this act into the very fabric of the user experience.  By this I mean, clever marketers (and content creators) understand that a social experience requires involves two or more people.  What I do with your content can and should enhance the experience for subsequent viewers.  Take YouTube for example.  The reason why they display the number of views, favorites, etc. and enable comments is because the perceived popularity (or lack thereof) of a specific video is a key indicator of content quality for visitors to the page.  As a consequence of making this information available to the visitor, YouTube increases the probability of the two primary goals of any social media marketing campaign:  views and pass-alongs.  It’s quite simple.

The next step in the process of engaging users in a truly social experience is to allow and encourage them to share it with others.  It’s striking how many online marketing campaigns we see that do not incorporate even the most rudimentary concept of “sharing” into the UI and flow of the user experience.

While all the attention and focus around social media is generally related to the creation of crazy, wacky content and how easy it is for individuals to get their 15 minutes of fame, the real juice for marketers looking to boost the effectiveness of their online campaigns through social media involves the sharing and evangelism of that content across each user’s social graph.  Do that and your social media marketing campaign with be a smashing success.

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August 11, 2008

Does Your Marketing and Ad Strategy Have a Value Proposition?

Filed under: UI/UX, Uncategorized, advertising, creative, entertainment, marketing strategy, social media — bstraley @ 11:58 am

This article in Brandweek about widgets got me thinking.  As the Web offers an increasingly two-way user experience and enables people to discover and amplify content and messages at virtually zero cost, we in the online marketing and advertising professions have to shift our thoughts and actions away from “capturing” eyeballs to “attracting” them.

In practical terms, this means your online marketing programs need to be built around a core value proposition.  It’s no longer enough to develop creative ways to “sell” an audience on the value proposition of the product/service we’re promoting.  Today, the most successful online marketing programs are the ones that create value themselves which is accretive to the business’s overall marketing performance.

Take search marketing for example.  One way to approach the planning and execution of an SEM program is to “carpet bomb” Google et al with text ads and wait and watch to see what pulls.  What you will no doubt discover in the process is that the most effective pairings of keyword (ie “customer intention”) with a message relevant to the need signaled by the keyword will perform the best. That’s a simple instance of the online marketer creating value for a consumer.  The user asks Google for help finding a solution to her problem and the online marketer raises her hand to help the user out.   Think of it as pre-sales support.

What makes search such a perfect medium for the value creation model of online marketing is much less straightforward from other types of content on the Web.  How can display advertising be seen as value creating when they’re generally in the way and/or noise that’s easily tuned out by the visitor to a site?  Unlike search where the act of searching qualifies the user for certain types of targeted messages, content sites have to rely upon ad platforms to deliver “relevant” ads.  The challenge in this case is to deliver an ad that creates value when the visitor’s intent when landing on the page was to read something, watch a video, catch up with a friend, etc.  Except at the margins, it doesn’t really matter what the age, gender, location, income, etc. of the visitor is on most content sites because they have a choice and they choose to not notice ads let alone click on them.  A contextually irrelevant banner ad doesn’t create much value and the landing page sitting on the other side of that display ad almost never creates any value.

So what’s an online marketer do beyond ensure her site’s optimized for natural search discovery and creating incremental value for consumers through a savvy search campaign?  Find ways of producing content and experiences that:

  1. create value for the target market
  2. deliver messages that are aligned with the brand’s value proposition

In future posts, I’ll identify a few terrific examples of how this can work using some combination of videos, games, and offers.  For starters, check out a brilliant viral online marketing campaign gets done.

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May 21, 2008

An All-Too-Common Problem with Brand Sites

Filed under: UI/UX, Uncategorized — Tags: — bstraley @ 9:54 am

While it looks cool and offers a lot of the sizzle that brand marketers often desire, an over-use of Flash (and other less crawler friendly technologies) can seriously diminish the effectiveness of a brand’s site.  First, embedding valuable information within a swf (flash) file makes it a virtual certainty that that content will be ignored by all of the search engines.  Problem.  Second, an over-use of Flash can actually box users in rather than allow them to move where they want on the site when they want.  Third, Flash developers oftentimes fail to incorporate even the most basic social media features and functionality like delicious bookmarks for example.

As someone who has worked on/for big brands, I understand and empathize with the need and desire to make a splash with creative.  In addition to setting high goals for the creative, it’s imperative that the creative is designed and packaged in such a way that it can be easily viewed, navigated, and distributed by users.

One blog I follow for useful insights into UI/UX is Logic+Emotion.

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