Internet marketing

One of the most variable aspects of web design is the way in which we approach width and height in terms of measurements and flexibility. For many years, we have rotated between the benefits and pitfalls of using fixed, elastic, and liquid measurements in a quest to give optimal viewing experiences in highly varied situations, while balancing our need to control things in our web pages.

One of the most variable aspects of web design is the way in which we approach width and height in terms of measurements and flexibility. For many years, we have rotated between the benefits and pitfalls of using fixed, elastic, and liquid measurements in a quest to give optimal viewing experiences in highly varied situations, while balancing our need to control things in our web pages.

The title of this post is the phrase that I use as a Motivational Slogan in my Personal Business Plan.

Why use a Motivational Slogan?

In a sense, the name speaks for itself – a catch phrase to use for motivation as well as marketing. A business plan normally includes a Vision statement as well as a Mission statement – but a slogan? Well, I needed a phrase to use both for my own motivation and for my marketing – a phrase based on a story – so I came up with the Motivational Slogan. I use it anywhere I focus on marketing – from business cards to social media.

Unlike a slogan used by businesses, this is slightly longer, and could be used as a Vision statement if I didn’t have one already.

What does it stand for?

Each word in my Motivational Slogan is carefully selected to match my skills, interests and objectives. Each individual has his or her own interpretation of the meaning of the words, which is why I am describing my selected interpretation here.

Balanced Leadership

Balanced Leadership involves a focus on creating a sustainable business model (for me as a person) with a long term focus on ethics and social responsibility. Balancing Rights and Responsibilities is important to me.

Balanced

Balanced means a strategic focus on a division of efforts so that each gets a strategically selected share, based on business objectives and needs and interests of individuals performing tasks. This includes balancing my own tasks as well as those that work for and with me. Additionally, my goal is to achieve a balance between areas of life, including work and private/family life, health and spiritual needs, and social life.

Balance also signifies a healthy living for myself and my stakeholders (all the people I’m in contact with). Finally, balance also involves techniques for staying focused, based on the belief that you need to relax to focus and be creative (and thus learn and evolve).

Leadership

Leadership includes the focus of leading others in business and in life. To lead, you do not necessarily need to be a manager or have formal authority. This focus includes transformational leadership (as I understand as separate from Change Management), innovation and motivation.

From my skills perspective, Leadership also involves Management of Projects and Outsourcing, including planning and processes.

Global

The Global aspect is a focus on cross-cultural, international (as opposed to multi-national) and localized (culturally and lingually) communication, challenges and opportunities.

Marketing

In my Personal Business Plan, Marketing is exclusively Online Marketing, and activities impacting online marketing. It involves the entire marketing process, including the classical AIDAS model, spanning from advertising and PR, through sales, to customer service and retention. Part of online marketing is also tracking and results measurement.

Technology

As with Marketing, Technology only includes Web Technology in my Personal Business Plan. My technology focus has two subparts – innovative development along with tasks effectiveness and automation. Combined with Leadership, Technology involves IT Management, as relevant to Online Business.

The Motivational Slogan

It is important to clearly define your slogan, for a couple of reasons. One, it sets you apart from your competitors – only you have the unique definition of the Motivational Slogan you have written. Also, it limits your playing field (as long as you stay within your own defined boundaries) to focus on areas that match your skills, interests and objectives.

Defining your Motivational Slogan shouldn’t be taken too lightly – a really good one can really keep you motivated – but don’t spend more time on planning than you do on actions that follow your plan.

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) Affiliate Marketing Council launched its guidelines for best practice in affiliate marketing at the end of November, 2008. Recently, they revised the best practice guidelines, to now include the voucher sector as well.

These are the IAB’s affiliate marketing code of best practice:

1. Affiliates must not use a mechanism whereby users are encouraged to click to interact with content where it is unclear or confusing what the outcome will be. For example:
   • Using “click to reveal code” and opening the site when no valid code is present or an offer/deal/sale is presented instead, without this being made clear before the click.
   • Using “click to copy code” and opening the site when no valid code is available
   • Opening the merchant’s site without making it clear that this will occur
2. Voucher code affiliates must clearly detail the nature of the voucher or offer/deal/sale before a user clicks to interact with it (by revealing, copying, visiting the merchant site etc)
3. A valid code is defined as a code that has been legitimately issued by a merchant for your use online. This code will have an activation date and, where provided, a deactivation date. When a code has expired it must either be removed or the fact that it has expired must be clearly stated in writing, not simply by listing the expiry date.
4. Sites displaying voucher codes must contain clear categorization and separation between deals/offers/sales and voucher codes.
5. Any affiliate judged by one of the participating networks to be contravening the code will be referred to the IAB’s Affiliate Marketing Council and all members will agree on a course of action. The discretion of the council will be used when determining what is judged as misleading or confusing and is not confined to the examples above.

It is a positive trend to see guidelines for affiliate marketing, an industry that has been lacking that for some years.
Image courtesy of tanakawho

As social media spreads, web applications need to get smarter. They have to strike up a conversation with each visitor – and become sociable.

Part of the next evolution of the web – Web 3.0 to some – is claimed to be the Semantic Web, which enables websites to provide information about what information and functionality they have, and to communicate with other websites. It is a way to make information “understandable” by computers, so that they can perform tasks that humans would normally do.

Understandable data is great, and having a computer (your own or an online service) do your tedious tasks for you is brilliant, since it frees up your time to focus on other things. And time is one of the most valuable commodities we have, isn’t it?

But what about the troves of information that you have to wade through to sometimes find things on the web or on a website? Even though there is (or will be) information about the information on Web 3.0 websites, it will certainly take a long time before a significant part of the web is semantic. And even on semantic websites, how will it make your life easier?

At the end of the day, clever systems readable by computers don’t necessarily make them better for humans.

Socialize the web

Social Media is a term used frequently with buzzwords like Web 2.0. Assuming that Social Media 2.0 is part of the Web 3.0 evolution, the Semantic Web should ping your friends and their social application whenever you do anything online.

Great socialization – or is it?

I admit that I have reconnected with old friends and made plenty of new connections through social media, but just because the communication and information gets better and ’smarter’, will it make social media better for us? Sure, we’ll be constantly connected, perhaps using the same applications across devices. That’s really smart, but nothing revolutionary as far as the web goes. I can do that already, with some tweaking (or enough money).

Website Conversations

What the next generation of Social Media (the 2.0 one, or Web 3.0) really could do, is improve the way we interact with each website, application or interface. Make it an intelligent interface, who simply learns from your actions, asks you what you need, lets you tell it the details and finds it or solves it for you.

If Amazon will start talking to me when I visit, and give me the alternatives as I speak, I am likely to spend even more than I do already in their web shop (I buy several books a month).

If I can tell Google that I am looking for the absolute cheapest price on a DLNA enabled Digital Media Adapter that will work with my Linux network at home – and Google asks “in stock only?” or “available for shipping to Copenhagen?”, then we’re starting to have a conversation. With the Semantic Web, Google may find it for me, but the big deal for me is whether I could call Google via the mobile web and find and order the product with normal human-like conversation.

I do a lot of research for work, and read countless sources of information each week. The Semantic Web should help a few percent in finding information, but then the challenge to marketers becomes “who provides more/better semantics?”. If the next evolution of the web is simply about better information about information, will the competition be about providing the best information about information. Phew!

If, instead, interaction with conversational, learning websites that actually perform the task you ask for, that would be a leap up in Internet evolution!

Online Marketing is not an exact science - and far from what it potentially could be. One of the most important aspects on marketing online is to be able to measure your results and the effects of your marketing efforts. There is a plethora of marketing tools to quantify your marketing efforts for you - however there are a few large hurdles before there is a system available which can give you everything in one package.

• Standards are missing
• Internal or External Focus
• Touch points vs. last click
• Quantity, Quality, and Value

Enterprise-size vendors like Coremetrics, Omniture and Unica are trying (each from their own perspective), they have actually gotten a long way already, but their systems are huge, expensive and nearly require a rocket scientist to set up.

A lack of Marketing Metrics standards

For most companies using many online marketing channels, there is nearly one tool for each channel, plus one or two tools that consolidate the information. A lot of larger companies in Europe use a Marketing Relationship Management (MRM) tool for tracking paid marketing activities, and a Web Analytics (WA) tool for website analysis and direct or organic traffic.

Using these two types of tools divides online marketing into two parts, MRM and WA:

The MRM system provides the decision base for paid traffic, while the WA system collects everything else. Although there can be a lot of integration between the two (such as WA integrating with SEM and the ECommerce system), many companies feel that the paid/non-paid separation makes a lot of sense.

However, the missing industry standards for how to collect information, evaluate the information and display the results are apparent, just try for yourself by comparing any two tools. Yahoo’s newly acquired IndexTools is one if the tools in forefront by adhering to the WAA standards, but without the big players following the same standards, they will not be widely spread.

Internal and External focus on Metrics

The traditional WA tools provide plenty (hundreds) of reports that tell you anything from your top exit pages, to bounce rates and session length. The first tools parsed and analyzed the webserver’s log files, which hold loads of information, however not in a format you can easily derive any actionable conclusions from. MRM systems are marketing focused, traditionally, and primarily look at the marketing performance of online marketing channels, partners, ads and the like.

So why do we need to combine the two?

It’s not necessarily so that you need to. However, there are some benefits to using one (or fewer) tools.

• There are a lot of marketing insights to be made from studying user behavior on a website. If you have an ad campaign with a great offer - but no conversions to sales - you can get a lot out of looking at the user journey, bounce rates per ad or message, and so on.
• The same is true for the opposite - if you have a problem on your website, the cause may lie outside your website.
• Fewer tools mean fewer logins and administration interfaces you need to learn.

Touch points vs. Last Click

For some time, MRM systems have attributed ROI (Return-On-Investment) and commissions to the source of the last incoming click on a website. Payments went (and mostly still go to) the source of the last click - whether it be an affiliate, strategic partner, campaign or any other paid marketing activity. However, recently some tools vendors (like Coremetrics or ATLAS) have added functionality for making the entire marketing user journey visible - showing where each user clicked or was exposed to marketing before making a purchase (or any other conversion). These touch points can provide valuable information for marketers as to how to divide their budgets. SEM campaigns can have effect on organic search traffic, and ad campaigns plastered over strategic websites can effect which users enter your URL directly, without clicking on any ad.

All this sounds really smart - and is, for sure - but you cannot tell Google Adwords that they only get 74.1% of their click price, since they were only partly contributing to a sale. On the other hand, by using an MRM system for CPA (Cost-Per-Action) activities, and only giving commission for the last click, you limit your spenditure to the last touch point, regardless of previous (non-Pay-Per-Click) activity. It may give some marketers some peace of mind to not stretch their budgets further.

Quantity, Quality and Value

Where I work, we use this equation a lot - focusing on both Quantity, Quality and Value of the activities we engage in with our clients (don’t worry - this is NOT an ad).

• On the web, things are easily quantifiable. Quantity can refer to the number of clicks, sales, leads, ad views, pageviews, visitors, or any other metric that you want.
• The quality is many times harder to establish, and may mean different things in different contexts. The quality of traffic from an affiliate may be measured by the conversion rate (CR), while the quality of the website may be users’ opinions.
• The value is generally monetary, but can be any value that you attach to a measurable KPI (Key Performance Indicator).

How does this related to the Marketing Metric Divide?

Tracking technology aside (1×1 pixel vs. Javascript vs. other solutions), the MRM and WA tools have completely different focus. MRM systems are great at showing you the Quantity and Value of your marketing efforts - outside your own website. WA systems are great at showing the Quantity of anything measurable on your website and many are focusing on the Quality - visitor surveys and the like - but the monetary Value is not measured as well as MRM systems do, in integrating with ECommerce systems and online marketing channels.

What I see sorely needed is a top view - the “Web Marketing Dashboard” - showing the overall performance of each online marketing channel, related to the website performance, as well as the detailed drill-down into each channel and each web page performance, as related to external and internal details, respectively. My Web Marketing Dashboard would include the Quantity, Quality and Value of each of the above (top view, channels and web pages), and provide trends for each. With that information, the dashboard should easily be able to tell me what happened recently, why it happened and what I could do about it(!).

Tell me what you think

Do you have a complex setup for your online marketing? How do you work out your qualitative and quantitative information?  And seriously, are the tools you use smart enough? Please add your comments!

Like many professional marketers, I glance at what Seth Godin has to say, once in a while. Mostly, it’s high-level words of wisdom for any business, with the view that marketing is part of every contact anyone has with the business.

Well, here is a courtesy from Seth that I have been using once in a while, to bloggers that write posts that are very useful to me. I leave a small ‘tip’ by clicking on an ad next to their post – it has to be something relevant to me, but if I see one, I will click it.

That is to say to the author: ‘Thank you for taking the effort to provide such useful content for me – here’s a few cents from your advertiser’. Once in a while, I actually take action on the landing page, but my conversion rate is probably below half a percent.

Instead of saying “I’m too smart/busy” to click on ads, consider helping the person who took the effort and helped you with the information you received. Don’t overdo it – but just do it once in a while.

Have you considered tipping your fellow bloggers?

It’s been over two months since I posted to this blog. Not because of laziness or lack of motivation, but because I have come down with an illness. It’s called Thyroid, and it is thoroughly unpleasant.

Not that blogging is the cause of this illness, but theoretically stress could be a contributing factor. I had not gotten far with the renewed effort on this blog, but I am still determined to get it rolling again.

Despite my illness, I am working hard to deliver SEO projects and Reputation Management work, and when I have recovered enough to continue with this blog, I will post about some interesting findings there.

Thank you all who are so supportive – I appreciate it more than I can tell you!