Tag Archive for: Marketing

Why “Better Than Google” Marketing Fails

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It’s been a week since Microsoft dropped their “Scroogle” attack ads aimed at Google, but they are still running their “Bing It On” challenge trying to convince searchers that Bing is superior to Google. Yet, all of Microsoft’s attempts don’t seem to be working. Despite Microsoft saying Bing It On testers preferred Bing 2:1, Google continues to claim well over half of all searches.

This has Greg Sterling from Search Engine Land wondering why no one believes Microsoft’s and other competitor’s “Better Than Google” claims. Is Google’s brand just that strong? Does it come out of habit?

The most obvious reason people don’t buy Bing’s campaign is they are blatantly aware it is all marketing. They used the same principle as a blind taste test, but those types of tests don’t come off as explicitly biased as a website “blind” test. Just to get to the test you have to go to a website with Bing in the name.

No one is going to trust Bing’s statistics when they are that blatant about the test. There is nothing blind about going to “Bingiton.com“. It also doesn’t help that there is a big disclaimer at the bottom of the search page explaining how the test doesn’t use the full search capabilities of either engine.

Bing It On

Google believes part of the reason users aren’t responding to Microsoft’s negative marketing is customers respond better to companies that “focus on building good products” rather than slinging mud. While Google remained as silent as possible on the “Scroogle” ads while they ran, now that they have been stopped, Google search chief Amit Singhal finally spoke about the issue at a SXSW conference, when taking questions from Twitter. “We focus on our users.”

Google’s right, customers don’t respond to negative marketing campaigns against well established brands as well as they respond to the new and innovative products Google is producing.

But, what about independent studies? A recent study by Butler University found that not only did Bing have better quality answers according to their criteria, but so did ChaCha, Ask.com, Bing, and Yahoo. Why has this type of study not put a huge thorn in Google’s side? One reason is Google’s incredibly strong brand. There is also the “Google Habit” or the comfort with the interface, but more than anything it is personal experience.

ChaCha may have better answers, but most users will agree it is not convenient enough for when you need to make a quick search and find a simple answer. Bing has been making users uncomfortable with their blatant attack ads, and any survey that puts Ask.com ahead of Bing, Yahoo, and Google will be heavily doubted in this age. The website lost its reputation years ago as other search engines grew, and it never regained it, just as Yahoo has steadily lost its market share to Google.

The only companies that can compete against Google are equally strong brands such as Amazon and Apple. Google is so well established in the American market, that it is hard to believe any study reporting that there are a handful of “better” ways to search. But, Google didn’t just install itself into ourcollective hive mind. Google is trusted because they offer a search engine users are pleased with, and they are constantly innovating new and exciting products. If they ever stop innovating, Bing might have a shot. Until then, attack ads and over the top marketing campaigns aren’t going to do much.

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Using Eye Tracking Software to Inform Design Decisions

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Eye CloseupIn pretty much every way, good web design is subjective. Trends come and go, and limitations are removed which open up entirely new options for how a site can look and act. While user experience can be quantified through testing, there is nothing scientific about what people want either. There are objective ways to look at the current desires of the public, and some things, like easily understandable navigation methods, will never go out of style, but in a decade, the rules for “good web design” will be barely recognizable from the standards we have today.

However, the way people read is likely to stay the same for the foreseeable future, even on the web. Eye tracking has allowed up to study just how people tend to look at text on the web and paying attention to how users read and look at websites, designers can make informed decisions on how to design their site around their visitors’ patterns.

Eye tracking has been around since the late 1800’s, though it only became commonly used for studying design and marketing in the 1980’s and 90’s. The first big study on web page viewing happened in 2006 by Jakob Nielson, which shows that visitors read web pages in a steady pattern; people’s eye make horizontal swipes across the page, then move down vertically. There have been numerous other studies since, and they all show that internet users continuously scan websites in the same pattern.

The pattern is usually referred to as an F-shape pattern because of how eyes start at the top left corner, moving to the right in a straight pattern, then back to the left hand side where they scan about a third of the way down the page, then back out to the right in a straight line.

If you want to know how you can harness eye movement patterns to inform your web design decisions, Carrie Cousins from Designmodo explores all of the possible implications of eye tracking studies. She breaks down every pattern seen in the studies and even gives examples of websites that are already designed around viewing patterns.

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More Tips For Logo Design

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Apple Logo1One of the most crucial design decisions for a new company is the logo. Great logos are instantly recognizable and evoke the brand image with just one image. When anyone discusses McDonald’s, Apple, Nike, or NBC, it is hard not to imagine the Golden Arches, iconic apple, or swoosh because they are so deeply ingrained in their corporate image.

Creating a logo that perfect is deceptively difficult to do however. The business world is awash with bad logos that no one will ever remember. There is no magic recipe for a great logo, but there are some rules to follow that will help a logo stick out. I’ve given some tips on logos before, but Sarah Clare from Vandelay Design had some suggestions designers should keep in mind.

One of the most common mistakes is just over-doing the logo. Clean lines and simple contrast are striking and easily able to be replicated in any format, neon sign to stationary. Text can be included but only when necessary, and limit it to the brand name. Even if you’ve been in business for 200 years and you’re doing a logo redesign, your icon isn’t the place to tell people that.

It is hard to understate how important it is that your logo is able to be reproduced anywhere. Something may look good on a computer screen, but logos are sometimes printed on endless materials like pens, paper, mugs, and even mints, and stress balls. You want people to be able to recognize the logo whether it is 1″ x 1″ on a memo, or plastered on a billboard.

While a logo has to be simple, it also has to convey the tone and personality of your business. A high tech company with a childish logo may have trouble convincing potential customers of their abilities, especially because everyone in tech hates comic sans. Usually bright colors are reserved for companies more associated with children as well, but Google’s logo shows why that isn’t a hard rule.

As a business owner, you will see your logo more than you actually see your brand name, or at least it will feel like it. If you want your brand to be successful in the marketplace, you need a logo people will instantly be able to identify and connect with. It seems like a small task, but being lazy on the logo can torpedo a new brand.

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The Differences Between Branding, Identity, And Logos

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You know how sometimes a group of words are thrown around together so much their meaning becomes blurry? If you don’t understand what I mean, think about how you understand brand, identity, and logo. Almost any article about logo design will intrinsically link these three words together without clarifying where the line between each one is. I’m as guilty of this as anyone else.

Jacob Cass from Just Creative noticed this and put it upon himself to clarify the differences between brand, identity, and logo, and what each does. Breaking it down simply:

  • Brand is the “perceived emotional corporate image” of the business all together.
  • Identity combines all of the visual aspects that form a brand.
  • Logos identify a business in the simplest form by using icons.
It is a heirarchy in which a logo is part of the visual identity of a company, which helps mold the brand as a whole.

Branding

It is hard to write shortly about branding, as Cass even points out, but to summarize the concept, it is the audience’s idea of a service, product, or organization. Visual aspects of the brand including its marketing and logo can help mold it, but ultimately, the audience decides the shared perception overall. “A designer can’t make a brand […] a designer forms the foundation of the brand”, which the audience then builds upon with their reception of the product and marketing as a whole.

Identity Design

That foundation the brand is built on is it’s identity, or its image. Every business creates sets of visual devices they use to interact with their audience including color palettes, fonts, layouts, etc. Every visual aspect is considered part of the identity, even things like a web page design, and especially the logo.

Logos

I’ve talked quite a bit about logos before, but when it comes down to it, a logo identifies your brand. It becomes one of the most prevalent aspects of the image, and shapes how customers perceive your brand.
According to Cass, a logo doesn’t sell or describe a company, but that is the only aspect of his article with which I don’t completely agree. Once a business is established, their logo is understood by the quality of the company and product it represents. However, for young businesses trying to establish themselves, a quality logo is important in attracting companies by letting them quickly know what that company does and showing they care about how their audience feels about them.

Conclusion

The three are absolutely linked, but when writing about them we often make it unclear what each seperate part really is. Logos affect identities, which set the floor for a brand. All are important, but they are all unique to each other
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Using AdWords to Capitalize on the Holiday Season

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If you’re like me, you do as much of your holiday shopping online as possible. Juding by statistics, there are plenty of people out there like me. Google searches for retail products jump up as much as 500-percent during December.

Conversely, the service industry sees a major dip in activity through the holidays. Obviously, December is a different landscape than the other 11-months and what was previously working for your business may need to be tweaked for the holidays.

Jeremy Decker, of Search Engine Journal, has some suggestions to make the most of this changing terrain. By pulling the right strings, you can have a very, merry holiday season.

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Blogging and Local SEO: A Match Made in Heaven

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Many local businesses want a quick and easy way to boost their local rankings. The bad news is, there isn’t really a shortcut anyone can take to better local SEO. There isn’t any way to just make a one time change and suddenly be rocking the rankings.

The good news is, there is a simple method to improving rankings, it just requires consistent output of quality content or promotional activities. This usually equates to blogging, which takes consistent effort, but is highly rewarding.

Chris Silver Smith lists all of the reasons why starting to blog can seriously help local businesses at Search Engine Land.

 

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The New Strategies of On-Page Optimization

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On-page optimization goes back to the very beginning of SEO. It has also changed a lot since then. In the old days, on-page SEO was mostly about keyword usage. While you can still use this aspect to create some optimization, it won’t do as much as you would like. This is because on-page SEO has been expanding.

Instead of focusing on keywords, focus on what your users want. You don’t need to repeat keywords your users may be searching for, you just need to have the answers to their questions. The keywords you do use, should be more circled around a theme than they should be trying to exactly match what your users are looking for.

Basically what I’m saying is, if you are still trying to exactly match what your users are looking for, you are as likely to be penalized as you are rewarded. However, if you have content talking about every facit of a topic, users looking for that topic will find you.

It is also important that every bit of information offered on the results page reflect your business and your brand. If the title says the article is about guitars, but the description is about amplifiers – or worse, completely off topic, like kittens – people will be confused and move on.

If you want to see how on-page optimization has gotten here, Almog Ramrajkar has an article on the evolution of the topic. What is important to note is, the old ways are not dead. They still work, but they are no longer all you can do. The few tips I offered here are just the tip of the iceberg to what on-page optimzation offers now.

 

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The Basics of Good Local SEO

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Every topic I cover can be as complicated as you let them be. With the focus on minute data and snippets of code, SEO could easily be intimidating for anyone trying to get started learning.

This is a problem for local SEO because most business owners aren’t experts. If they think of local SEO as a daunting field, rather than seeing the opportunities it could open up for them, they are likely to shy away.

With this in mind, I’d like to take us back to the basics. We haven’t covered local SEO here in depth, so this will serve as a great place to begin exploring the topic. But, the tips offered here are valuable for broader SEO as well.

For good local SEO, there are really three major rules.

  • Get your website up to standards
  • Spread your business details everywhere
  • Use social media to get your customers to do promotion for you

Getting your website up to standard

Google is beginning to combine regular and local search results, and your website quality helps decide where you will land in the local search results, as well as more broad searches. Making a quality site relies on you doing a few specific things. For one, your site should have a clear and functional structure with a set heirarchy of pages. This will help Google’s crawlers go where you want them too, and know what is most important.

Another, more basic step in making a good page is just filling your site to the brim with quality content. Your content makes your first impression to customers as well as search engines. Putting out continuous good content keeps bringing search crawlers back to your page, and generate backlinks to your site from other pages.

Spread your business details

This one is quick and easy, so I’m going to let Myles Anderson from Search Engine Land sum it up. “Having your correct business details widely available is positive for local SEO and sets you up nicely to take advantage of the mobile-boom. Many of the same data sources which feed the desktop internet also feed mobile sites and applications so even if your website isn’t mobile enabled your business will appear on popular mobile applications.”

This is especially true for local SEO because people are searching to be able to contact YOU. Make it easy for them. Google will reward you for it. But don’t get lazy once your information is out there. Remember where you have put it by keeping a record. If you ever move, or change phone numbers, you will need to go change it everywhere the old information is.

Be social!

Just like everywhere else online, Google is becoming more and more intertwined with social media. If you don’t have a social media account for your business, it is time to get one. Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ are all very influential in your SEO status. From there, make it easy to share your content from your site with social media buttons prominently connected with content. Once you have a following, you will notice they share content for you. You still have to be proactive by sharing your content with them on social media in the first place, but if you connect with your followers, you will be shocked to see what they do for you.

Conclusion

Of course, there are a ton more things you can do to help give yourself a boost. It is high time you have a mobile optimized page for your site, and it is important to make sure you are listed on Google and Apple Maps. But, these first three rules will help you easily expand, and see what investing in local SEO can do for you.

 

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Targeting Your Audience Effectively Through Web Design

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Anytime you have an industry where creativity meets business, you face the conundrum of who to target with your work. Do you want to make something exciting and fun that other people interested in design will like, or do you want to make something consumers will enjoy?

The good news is that web designers can do both. If you have just a bit of marketing knowledge and some strategy, you can make a solid design that was as fun for you to make as it is for consumers to explore.  Any good designer should already be attracting their potential audience while making interesting designs. But what do you do if you aren’t?

The first step is to identify your target audience. If you can spot who your demographic is, everything else will fall into place.

Thankfully, identifying your audience has never been easier since you have tools like Google Analytics at your disposal. This isn’t to say this is a walk in the park, but pinpointing your customer base is much more simple and precise than it used to be.

By doing a keyword search in your analytics dashboard, you can also see what people are searching for, and what kind of people they are.

Another way to identify what your visitors like is by simply asking them questions. Blogs are a great platform for this, because you should already be trying to interact with your audience, and you can leverage to ask them what they think about different topics and to offer their opinions. It is also important to note, if you are struggling to interact with commenters because of spam overload, adding a simple Captcha is easy and rids you of most spam.

Social media also offers a huge opportunity to interact with your audience. It is easier to connect with readers on Facebook than it is to interact in the comments sections of articles. Taking advantage of social media also means your content is easier to share, which will attract more readers.

Once you know who you are designing for, you can find ways to make a great site they will enjoy, and you won’t hate making. Christian Vasile has great design tips if you’re having trouble getting started.

You don’t have to sell out and make boring websites because you are designing for a company. In fact, if you do, you are just making bad websites and your clients won’t be happy anyways.

 

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The 5 Most Common Mistakes on Landing Pages

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You can do a lot of different things with landing pages, be it selling something, encouraging visitors to subscribe to a newsletter, or trying to get people to sign a petition. No matter which of these goals you have, you are ultimately trying to get visitors to perform an action.

Making a great landing page seems like it should be easy, but it is more complex than you may think. This leads to poor sales because a landing page is only working if it is getting people to convert.

With that in mind, let’s examine the most common problems with landing pages.

  1. Mismatching Text Ad Copy and Landing Page Headline – There are numerous reasons you should make sure your Google AdWords text ads match your landing page headline. For users, the text ad creates an expectation, and you don’t want to confuse your visitors or make them feel mislead. The quality of your landing page also decides cost-per-click in AdWords, so if you raise your quality score, you will lower your cost-per-click.
  2. Poor Grammar and Misspelled Words – Throwing up a quick landing page is always a terrible idea because it leads to a ton of smaller problems. One of those is bad spelling and grammar. This is one of those mistakes that just shouldn’t be allowed to happen. Your visitors will take any reason you give them to not convert, and this one is a big reason to leave.
  3. No Trust Signals – To get visitors to convert, you have to establish trust. You can build this into your landing page in just a few ways. If you establish your brand’s popularity, people will view it as credible. You can also present your 3rd party certifications with organizations like Verisign or the Better Business Bureau. You can also establish trust by making positive mentions of your brand in the press easily available on the landing page.
  4. Lack of Good Call-to-Actions – You’re call to actions are important to help make people convert. They should also be compelling, with practical language, and solid, consistent design. You should also keep it short, between 90 and 150 characters. You need to make it clear what you want the visitor to do, but short enough to keep their attention.
  5. Poor Quality Videos or Images – Videos on your landing page can help boost conversion rates by about 80%. Images don’t raise conversions that much, but they still have their own positive effect on visitor activity. This doesn’t mean you can just toss up any image or video you want however. Poor quality images or videos will actually lower conversion rates rather than improve them.

Eric Siu from Unbounce has even more common mistakes, but these will help get you started with making sure users are converting. Remember, if users aren’t converting, your landing page has problems.

 

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