Before the web came along, catalog companies were the first to experiment with merchandising techniques designed to overcome the lack of a fully immersive in-store shopping experience. Punchy and persuasive product descriptions, detailed specifications, and imagery were needed to compensate for the lack of interaction with sales agents. The better catalogs have included lifestyle shots of how customers use their products, rather than merely listing products or showing photographs of products. Instead of listing products in alphabetical order, they tried groupings based on themes, styles, designers, complete outfits, etc.

BASIC INTERACTION AND NAVIGATION

The first generation of e-commerce websites did not take advantage of the medium’s interactivity. Instead they typically took content from a catalog and simply converted it to HTML for the web. The first improvements leveraged the fact that individual customers can navigate a website in any manner they choose. No longer a linear catalog with pages 1-30, merchandisers enabled users to shop by brand, by price, by style, by designer, by occasion, by room in your house, etc.

CROSS-SELLS AND PERSONALIZATION

The next innovation promoted cross-sells by showing additional products that complement products already browsed or inserted into shopping carts. Many of these recommendations were generated statistically a la Amazon.com, whereby “People who bought product x also bought product y.” Others are based on sheer logic as in “You bought the razor, now buy the blades.” Advances in personalization continue to drive higher conversation rates by presenting products that are most likely to be purchased by a given consumer. Of course good market research is helpful to this effort as well as more sophisticated analysis of individual click-stream behavior.

CONTENT AS KING

By providing interesting, relevant and fresh content on your site and emails, you provide non-promotional reasons for people to return to your site on a frequent basis. Blogging is a terrific way to provide this content. By linking your content directly to relevant products pages, blog posts provide a rich context that encourages higher conversion rates.  Such content should also be re-purposed for use in white papers,  e-books, emails, social media, etc.

RICH MEDIA

Additional merchandising strategies emerged as more consumers acquired broadband internet access and e-commerce brands added power and speed to their web servers. This gave consumers greater opportunities to manipulate product images (e.g., rotate, pan, zoom, change colors and backgrounds, see how they look on a model or a photo of oneself). Audio clips can add character to avatars used to help sell products on site. Flash and Videos show how products can be used across time and space and are especially effective for conveying the lifestyles associated with products.

SOCIAL SHOPPING

Of course, people (especially women) often like to shop with their friends because it adds to the “fun factor” and enables them to get opinions from people who they trust and respect. This broadens the selection (”how about this one?”) and helps close the deal (”that looks great on you!”). By offering user reviews, testimonials and discussion forums, e-commerce sites are able to provide some of the benefits of social shopping. By encouraging customers to share what they like within their own social networks (e.g., Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) they are to obtain feedback from their friends and followers. By “voting” on them on such sites as Digg, Delicious and StumbleUpon, they get additional opportunities to share their preferences with, and receive feedback, from others.  Other innovations, including publishing FAQs and providing web chat or click-to-phone capabilities,  provide social opportunities that compensate for in-store salespeople.

THE FUTURE OF ONLINE MERCHANDISING

Soon, such innovations as screen-sharing will become easier to use so that friends can indeed shop online together while geographically separated. People will be able to comment to one another via texting to their friend’s screens while they shop. Applications for iPhones and Tablet PCs will further provide a fuller, more immersive shopping experience and allow for better geo-targeting (e.g., present different products to people on the East Coast, West Coast, in different climates or within cities, suburban or rural areas). And although 3D web environments such as Second Life have not yet caught on in any major way, their ability to simulate real-world shopping experiences are likely to further enrich merchandisers’ future ability to convert browsers to buyers, increase average order size, frequency of purchase and the lifetime value of customers. After all, isn’t this what its all about?

What types of merchandising do you use or envision to facilitate e-commerce?

If They Come, Will They Convert?

Unfortunately conversion rates continue to be low for most websites. So you get your graphic artists and copywriters to create landing pages that contain a compelling offer,  supporting content, and the best graphics to close the deal.  But why are only 1% of the people coming to your site actually filling out your lead form or purchasing something on your site?  You’ve done your homework of segmenting your customers and understanding the types of messaging that will resonate with each buyer persona.  And you have terrific creative people to translate these messaging strategies to the perfect copy and graphical elements.   So what went wrong?

No matter how good your research and creative talent are, the results are simply hypotheses regarding the elements of the landing page that you think will most appeal to your prospects.  But I’m learning that the hunches of even the best online marketers are simply wrong!   So where do you go from here?

If you’ve been following this blog at all (and I apologize for my lapse in posting), you know that the answer lies in testing the different creative treatments to learn which one’s actually convert the most customers on your site.  Consider your first stab at a landing page to be the control group and test various combinations of creative elements to determine the combination that leads to higher conversion rates.  Use your creative talent to come up with the various alternatives, but do not get ego invested in only one solution.

Let your customers vote with their wallets

Your customers are the actual experts as to the elements of your marketing campaigns and landing pages that work best.  You need to dynamically present the various combinations of creative elements (e.g., offer, body content, graphics and layout) to your customers.  Once the customers have voted with their wallets, statistics identify the combination that works best to convert visitors to customers.  You should then use that landing page as the new “control”, and develop additional versions to see if you can achieve even higher conversion rates.  This results in the continuous improvement, or optimization, of your conversion rates.  But how can you dynamically generate the different combinations and measure their results?

A/B and Multivariate Testing To the Rescue

Most of us can easily comprehend the idea of A/B testing, also know as  split testing.  By exposing half of your test audience to one creative treatment and the other half to another,  you can easily understand which treatment works better.  Take email subject lines for example.  Send emails with one subject line to one group of prospects  and send an email with another subject line to a different, but comparable, group of customers.  Whichever subject line results in the higher open rates should be used going forward, while the poorer performing subject line should be dropped.  The winning subject line now becomes the  new “control” against which you can test additional subject lines.  Present, test, analyze,  and repeat this process to see continuous improvement, or optimization, of your email open rates.

OK, so we tripled the open rates of our emails over the course of three weeks.  So we should declare victory, break out the beer and pizza, and call it a day, right?

Not exactly.  If people open their emails but don’t click through to your landing page, what have you accomplished?  Nada!  You now need to optimize the body of the email itself.  This requires a more complex form of testing named multivariate analysis.  Multivariate analysis enables you to test many variables at once to determine the combination of  elements (e.g., offer, content, graphics, layout) that lead to the highest percentage of clicks.

OK, now you’ve tripled your email open rates and doubled your click-through rates to drive six times the amount of targeted traffic to your site!  Now its definitely time to break out the caviar and champagne and give the crew a day or two off.  Right?

Unfortunately,  if  all of that traffic comes to your site, but doesn’t sign up for your newsletter or buy anything from you, it sounds like you’ve been spinning your wheels, and burning through your budget, without any return on investment (ROI).  Now you need to shift your focus to the landing page your prospects are sent to once they click-through on your email (or SEM ad,  web banner, blog, affiliate’s site, Facebook post, etc.)

Conclusion

The objective is to spend as little money as possible by testing the various permutations of the creative elements (e.g., offer, body content, graphics and layout) with just enough prospects to obtain a statistically significant result.  Declare the landing page that converted the highest percentage of customers the winner, and let it serve as the “control” for additional treatments to be tested.  The result?  Continuous improvement, or optimization, over time. You not only increase your customer acquisition costs, but also reduce your cost-per-acquisition (CPA).  Now that’s something you can take to the bank!

I can’t believe how many people still can’t see the value of  Twitter! That’s because the hype has focused on the tremendous growth of Twitter as a social network. and the apparent lack of  Twitter’s ability to monetize their traffic (although this too is changing). That leads many veterans of the 2000 tech bubble to be wary of  “eyeball metrics” when business models haven’t been fully thought through or well executed.  Then of course everyone gets in on the 7 Tips for Optimizing Your Presence on Twitter gravy train which propels the lemmings into the Twitter sea, with no sense of  why they are there or where they are actually going.

The answer is yes, you (or someone else in your organization) should tweet.  At least until Twitter is perhaps eclipsed by a better real-time, short messaging service.

The most prevalent reason people cough up for not getting Twitter  is typically expressed as the question: what can you do with only 140 characters? Since links can be sent with your tweets, you have ample opportunity to present your message in any format, from simple text to rich multimedia and video.  And how many characters would you want to input into your phone?  The mobile SMS nature of Twitter means you can tweet anytime, anywhere.  Unlike other media, Twitter forces the marketer to boil down the marketing message to 140 characters.  Tweets are therefore direct and to the point, with little room for bloated or mixed messages.  Twitter  is a place where you can hang out with people that share your interests any place in real-time, offering opportunities for deeper collaboration.

That brings me to the second question twitter-resistors ask: Who has the time for this? This is a trickier question.  The answer depends upon your overall involvement with social media.  Engaging on Twitter typically takes a relatively small fraction of  time invested in one’s overall social networking opportunities.  You can of course reduce the time you need to put in by leveraging content that you can easily find across the deep and broad web.  There are also plenty of tools that enable you to replicate your postings on multiple social networking sites, as well as search tools to keep your Twitter view very targeted so that you don’t get distracted by all the other stuff going on in the vast Twitterverse.

But most importantly, there is no single social network or networking tool that will get the whole viral, word-of-mouth thing going for you or your brand.  You need to work them together.   Twitter is just another arrow in your sling.

SOME SPECIFIC REASONS TO TWEET

Let’s get a little less abstract and describe, more specifically, why its important for your organization to tweet:

Gain Market Intelligence. Find out what your customers are saying about you, your company and competitors.  Listen to what they are saying about your products, customer service, community involvement, etc., and make adjustments to improve your products, services, and reputation.

Build the Brand.   Increase brand awareness and reinforce brand messaging through another channel.  Make brand adjustments based upon real data from your customers and the customers of your competitors.

Increase Sales.  By providing real-time offers, based upon real-time information about your inventory, buying trends, etc., you can otpimize sales for the current moment.  Perhaps the best example is how Dell earned $3 million by announcing special offers on Twitter.   Another great example is the Kogi Korean BBQ Taco Truck that increased sales exponentially by simply letting their followers know where the truck would be in the LA area  throughout the day. Hundreds of followers, who would have otherwise missed out on getting these delicious $2 tacos, line the streets at the specified time and location to buy their favorite tacos.   All of the customer testimonials on the quality of the tacos, as well as the inherent fame of becoming a “social media celebrity, ” elicited requests to open up more profitable taco bars in some of the cities nightspots.

Improve Customer Service.  As documented by the infamous website ComcastMustDie.com, Comcast had a terrible reputation for its poor customer service.  As we all know, cable TV installations are fraught with problems, and Comcast was castigated for its inability or unwillingness to respond to service problems. Then came Frank Eliason, and his comcastcares presence on Twitter. His team of 10 has received about 30,000 public tweets to date.  Their real-time responsiveness to customers has resolved thousands of customer service issues and has greatly overcome negative sentiment about the brand.

Facilitate Collaboration.   More and more,  the knowledge community is spreading throughout the far reaches of the globe.  Even people who work in the same organization are less likely to be co-located.   Instead they are spread out in offices around the globe or isolated in their home offices.  Twitter has become a virtual  “water cooler” for many of these workers by enabling informal communications to occur,  often stimulating productive collaboration and creativity for the company.  Even when it doesn’t yield direct productivity results, it adds another important social element to the work “environment.”

Still wondering why there is all this fusss about Twitter?  Do you have your own examples about how Twitter has helped your business or reasons why you’re still sitting on the sideline?

Lessons From History

For their 2005 report, “Turning adversity into advantage: Does proactive marketing during a recession pay off?” researchers at Penn State’s Smeal College of Business interviewed 154 senior marketing executives.  They cited how both P&G and Kellogg’s took advantage of the Great Depression to step-up their advertising to gain market share from their respective competitors.  Chip-maker Intel not only maintained its B2B advertising during the 1990-1991 recession, but launched an expensive Intel Inside campaign to consumers.  This investment was critical to maintaining their share of the growing PC market as competitors such as AMD were trying to make inroads.  Walmart, moreover, successfully launched its Everyday Low Prices campaign during the recession of 2000-2001.

The Current Recession

Walmart is also  succeeding during the current recession, at the expense of more expensive retailers, because more consumers shop on the basis of price during a recession.  Housing starts actually showed an unexpected jump during February of this year.  If you look deeper, however, the growth came from the construction of low-end multi-family rental properties.  Clearly, the need for affordable housing has replaced the American dream of home ownership for many families.   So we can’t overgeneralize.  This brings us to some important factors to consider before deciding how much to invest in marketing during the current recession.

Type of Business.

One could easily argue that businesses that sell essential goods and services should increase their marketing efforts.  Conventional wisdom would also suggest that those selling non-essential goods, or goods that consumers can defer purchasing until better times, should decrease their marketing investment.  For the two latter categories, the typical CEO believes that no matter how much they spend on marketing, consumers simply will not open their wallets during a recession.

Have Your Cake And Eat it Too

I would argue that regardless of the type of business you are in, you can actually decrease your marketing spend and still out-market your more conservative counterparts.   I often tell my clients: “When your competitors go dark, you don’t have to be very bright to be seen.”  This suggests that a recession provides an opportunity to wipe out a competitor or two, increase your market share or–at the very least–position yourself for when the economy recovers.  By going dark, your competitors not only lower the bar, but also drive down advertising costs.  You must leverage your increased negotiating power during a recession to take advantage of your competitors’ weaknesses.

What Types of Marketing Make Most Sense?

First, gain valuable insights. Check out some of the free servies that will help you measure the buzz, or what people on the web are saying about your brands, products and services.  These include Google Trends, Facebook Lexicon, Blogpulse, Technorati, Delicious, Digg and Twittermeter (yes, Twitter generates much of the web’s “chatter” these days).  If you can afford more expensive services, such as those  offered by Nielsen Online, they can provide you with much more granular results.  This information can be used to learn about positive and negative sentiment about your brand, where these conversations are taking place and enable you to react to what your customers are saying. For more customized market research, there are inexpensive  (and sometimes free) web-based survey tools from Survey Monkey, Zoomerang and Survey Methods, among others.

Be there when people are interested. You certainly want your products and services to appear in search results when potential customers are researching your categories on Google, if not other search engines.  Your content providers can work on optimizing the keywords and anchor text on your web pages rather than writing advertising copy.   Your web developers can focus on renaming page titles and placing the appropriate meta tags on your site rather than developing new sites.  Its also a good time for business development types to obtain links from credible and relevant websites.  This will provide the link-juice you need to rise in the ranks of organic search (SEO).   So instead of lowering morale by laying off these key resources, put them to good use to solidify your web infrastructure.

Since it takes time for such SEO efforts to kick-in, you should experiment with or step-up your paid search campaigns (SEM).  Why pay for impressions when you only need to pay for bona fide leads to your site? Such PPC campaigns are a very cost-effective way to increase traffic to your site and can provide instant sales if you provide a good e-commerce experience for your users.

Try some relatively inexpensive branding. Although not as efficient as SEM for lead-generation campaigns, banner ads are still good for branding purposes and are certainly much cheaper than traditional media.  Choose sites that allow you to use such Rich Media as animated gifs, Flash and videos to emotionally connect with viewers.

Have others get the word out for you. Instead of depending upon massive advertising budgets to try to zonk your customers into submission, use more viral tactics to get the word out.   Peers are considered more credible than brands these days, so make sure you encourage and publicize user reviews of your products and services.  Moniter the buzz about your brands to find out where conversations are taking place throughout the web (e.g., on blogs, social networking sites) .   Then participate in these discussions to influence the key influencers and engage your customers in more meaningful ways.  Start your own blogs and encourage comments and fuller discussions.  Consider placing forum software on your site so that your customers can fully engage one another, as well as you.  Such “fresh” content on your site also “reminds” the search engines to steer customers in your direction.

Build and leverage your email list. To get the most out of the traffic that comes to your site, provide good reasons for them to register with their email addresses.   Capture these emails to build your in-house list.   This is also a good time to email your current customers.    This will not only help generate sales in the short-term, but ensure long-term customer loyalty, which will be critical when the economy recovers.  As you know, its much less costly to retain existing customers than it is to acquire new customers, and emails and loyalty programs can go a long way here.

Provide useful rather than promotional content. Content is still King, but the nature of powerful content has changed.  Your customers have become wary of your promotional messages.  Instead, provide them with useful content.  This adds  a tremendous amount of credibility to your brand and will have your customers returning to your site for additional information.   When they do return, its OK to sell them more stuff

• Approximately one-half  of the material Marketing generates for Sales never gets used?

• Salespeople typically spend about 40% of their time creating customer-facing collateral rather than selling?

• Only 10%-15% of the collateral Sales produces is consistent with corporate strategy and messaging?

I am dismayed by the lack of cooperation I often see between sales and marketing within B2B companies. Each frequently blames the other when things aren’t going so well.  Each typically tries to take the credit when things actually do go well.   This post looks at some of the causes of this dysfunctional relationship and how to begin to bridge the gap.  I realize that I’ll be throwing around a lot of generalities and stereotypes here, but I have enough experience on both sides of the fence (sometimes laced with barbed wire) to verify that these issues are more prevalent than we would like to think.

How Marketing Perceives Sales

Sales people are typically viewed as more opportunistic than strategic.  They chase down short-term opportunities,  sometimes to the detriment of their company’s long-term goals.  This is also known as the cowboy or lone ranger mentality, inspired by their sales personalities and how they are compensated: commissions on sales.   These one-off deals make it difficult for the company’s development and customer service teams to deliver what the salesperson has promised.   These teams become distracted from their main mission, which is to cost-effectively support the company’s mainstream customers and applications.  For companies that are tying to develop and support a common business platform, these one-offs can be devastating.

Salespeople are also accused of not following instructions, another aspect of the cowboy mentality.  They might come back from an expensive trade show with a bunch of business cards, with little information as to who these prospects are (other than their titles and company names), and whether they were just interested in picking up one of your logo-clad stress balls or truly represent a qualified lead.  So how can the salespeople prioritize who to call on when they return to the office? And what does this do to the ROI of your trade show investment?

How Sales Perceives Marketing

Marketing folks, on the other hand, are perceived as operating in an ivory tower, without really understanding what’s going on in the field.  They frequently want to focus on relatively glamorous, news worthy messages. I remember leading the sales effort of a Silicon Alley interactive agency in the late 1990s.  While most of our customers were seeking first generation websites for their dial-up consumers, the marketing department was talking about its capabilities to bring rich media (e.g., videos) to the web.   This provided a distinction from all of the other interactive agencies at the time, which impressed some venture capitalists and reporters, but was entirely impractical until broadband internet access became more prevalent many years down the road.   By that time, the agency went bankrupt (in fairness, so did most of the others!).

Marketing collateral is supposed to soften-up customers so that they are predisposed to buy from your salespeople.   When there is a disconnect between customer needs and your company’s selling proposition, marketers are not supporting their salespeople in the field.

How to Restore a Healthy Relationship Between Marketing & Sales

• Get drunk together (seriously).  This is how many sales get closed.  It will help all parties become less defensive and hopefully more cooperative going forward.  Just one cautionary note for the marketing folks:  the sales guys (and gals) will drink you under the table!
• Make sure that the development of Marketing Plans is a cross-functional effort that needs to be owned by Marketing, but requires input from–and output to–Sales, Customer Service, Engineering and Operations (as applicable).  The delivery organizations need to be able to deliver what marketing promises and all functions of the company have an impact on the customer’s  perception of the brand.  Marketing needs to lead the way with market research, competitive and business case analysis, but cannot do so without input from the various functional organizations.
• Agree on who needs to cover the “overlap” between marketing and sales.  Some call it Sales Support, some call it Marketing Support (therein lies part of the problem!).   Regardless,  its important to integrate sales operations with marketing operations.
• If you don’t already have one,  develop a formal process for  how leads are collected, prioritized and communicated to salespeople and how marketing, in turn, receives feedback on lead outcomes.  This is critical so that marketers can measure the ROI of the marketing campaigns that generated the leads in the first place.   Use of a formal salesforce automation tool, or a full-blown CRM system, is helpful here.
• Hold regular meetings between marketing and sales, with real agendas, to ensure that communication is an ongoing process. Marketers should ask salespeople directly about what they are experiencing in the field.  What competitors are they meeting in the market?  Which tactics are working and which aren’t'? Salespeople should ask marketers for strategic direction, as well as tactical tools (e.g., scripts, templates, collateral) to execute the strategy in the field.
• Marketing should continuously update the marketing calendar and make it easily accessible to sales.  This calendar should should list and describe all upcoming advertising campaigns, press releases, events, new product releases, updates to collateral, etc.

These solutions are all about better communication between the people in marketing and sales.  The first step is to recognize that the two disciplines attract people with very different personalities.   The next step is to communicate in more productive ways, both formally and informally.  Finally, you need to instill and codify a culture of cooperation and mutual respect.  Maybe then we will be all be able to sing from the same sheet of music, which should be written by marketing with input from sales!

What do you think?

See Marketing Sherpa’s excellent article on how marketing and sales can collaborate to score and prioritize leads

Last Sunday, it became clear that some of the changes to Facebook’s Terms of Service (ToS) enacted earlier in the month were detrimental to users’ privacy and granted the company total control over the content you share on their site.   Facebook changed the ToS to to say it owns any content you upload to the site until hell freezes over, even after you delete your profile.  This means they could reuse any of your content whenever and wherever it want. More specifically Facebook declared they have an:

“irrevocable “perpetual” license to “use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, [and] adapt” any content you’ve ever uploaded, including the option to “use your name, likeness and image for any purpose”

What nerve! This authorizes Facebook to steal your content and violate your privacy.   So will you see that funky profile photo, that was only meant for friends,  on a Facebook ad?

This change provoked a formal federal complaint form the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) with the Federal Trade Commission over the social network’s updated licenses.

The opposition was not limited to official organizations like EPIC.  More than 38,000 Facebook user joined a group that protested the new ToS.   It turns out that Facebook users are not willing to sell their soles in order to socialize with their friends online.

By Tuesday, Facebook did an About Face, declaring that it was reverting, at least temporarily, to the old terms of service.  These old (and current) ToS aren’t particularly safeguarding users privacy either, for that matter.  It states:

“By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose, commercial, advertising, or otherwise, on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing”

So how much of a change is this really? We’ll these terms clearly state that Facebook does not own your copyright.   But in copyright law, the fact they have a non-exclusive license, with all of the rights they attach to it, means virtually the same thing.

The moral of the ToS on many social networking sites is that you must vigorously protect your social reputation online.  Be careful about: what you say and the photos and videos that you upload.  What would your mom or your boss say about the information that you share with “friends” (often strangers) online?  This also applies to other social networking venues.  Most people are very careful about what they put in their LinkedIn profiles and status, because these are typically used professionally, but you may behave less “responsibly” on such sites as Facebook,  MySpace, Twitter, YouTube and Flickr.

Stay tuned on this one, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg declared that he wants the Facebook community to have input in the next iterations of the company’s ToS.

Meanwhile, how do YOU manage your online reputation while having fun in the various social networks in which you participate?

You may be interested in reading some of the other takes on this latest Facebook SNAFU at:

• Facebook Still Owns You (geeksaresexy.net)
• Facebook Reverts Terms of Service After Complaints (insidefacebook.com)
• Facebook’s about-face: Change we can believe in? (news.cnet.com
• Facebook backs down on privacy terms (news.cnet.com)
• Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: “We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.” [Your Rights] (consumerist.com)
• Naive Facebook Users Cry Over Mythical Privacy “Rights” (mymediamusings.com)
• Facebook terms of service - changed, defended and revoked (nickburcher.com)
• Power in Numbers forces Facebook to Reverts to Old Terms of Use (thenextweb.com)
• Facebook ‘New Terms’ Caption Competition Winner! (thenextweb.com)

It doesn’t sound revolutionary does it? But for those who have been dying to have some impact on the design of their AdSense ad appearance, this could be the start of something very useful.  For the first time, Google is now offering the opportunity for non-premium users  to select among three fonts for their AdSense text ads:  Arial, Times and Verdana. (Larger premium publishers already had more control of the appearance of text ads on their sites.)  Hopefully,  Adsense  will increase these offerings in the future.  Google has already received a number of requests for Trebuchet MS,  since many websites utilize this font for content.  Others have asked for flexibility in the size of the font face.

How to Do It

To customize the ad units, AdSense users need to visit the “Ad Display” section within their Account settings and select the custom font they want to use for their ads.  Once they pick that font, they can update their account and, as soon as the updated code is copied to their site, all of their ads will immediately change.

The Value of Additional Fonts

By enabling website owners to match the look and feel of their Adsense text ads with the rest of the content on the site,  they are able to blur the distinction between the ads and editorial content on the site.  This should theoretically increase click-thrus and revenues for the publisher.    Of course its always best to test the different alternatives to see which actually outperforms the others.

What do you think?

For the full story go to http://adsense.blogspot.com/

1. Consistency of messaging across different marketing vehicles and communications channels. So that you do not confuse your customers and prospects, the look, feel and messaging of your print advertising needs to be consistent with that of your website, exhibit displays at events, (as well as the venues themselves), direct mail, online advertising, social media and public relations activities. This helps to solidify and extend your brand.

2. Consistency of messaging over time. Instead of chasing “the opportunity de jour” with messaging that appears random to your constituents, you need to have a long-term strategy and the patience to stick with it for an enduring period of time. After all, repetition is the key to brand-building. Yes, mid-course corrections are sometimes needed as you continue to learn from the marketplace. While specific words and positioning can always change, overall themes must be preserved until you are ready for a major re-branding initiative.

3. Continuity of marketing processes from setting objectives > market research > product/service strategy > product/service development > communications strategy > communications tactics > analysis of results, with a feedback loop to ensure that past learnings improve future performance.

4. Integration of marketing with other corporate functions. Think of marketing as efforts to predispose prospects to say yes to your sales people, who are needed to close the deal. If the marketing message is inconsistent with what the salespeople are saying, you will confuse prospects and diminish sales. Every part of the company that touches the customer must be in tune with the marketing messages, including receptionists and customer service representatives. Each touch point with the customer either reinforces or diminishes your brand.

Future posts on this blog will provide more detail and illustrative examples of each aspect Integrated Marketing.

It used  to be that the newest, hottest must have would set you back a paycheck or two, or at least a few hundred bucks. These days everyone is looking for value. A Star Ledger article today mentioned that many are looking to do without the frills. This goes from ditching organic foods to buying used cars.

No industry will be immune. With the expcetion of the ultra-rich everyone these days wants a bargin and they are willing to hunt for it. As with any downturn there will be winners and losers.

Did your company plan for a downturn? Do you have a product that fits into the “value” segment? If not ask yourself the following.

1. Can I reposition one of my current products into the value category?
2. Can I dumb-down some of my current product/offerings to fit this new niche?
3. Can I get new product to market that serves the basic needs without going over the top?

These are by no means the only way to attract the new value consumer but it’s a good place to start.