The point of a brand is to create an instantaneous association in people's minds. The Nike 'swoosh' brings to mind footwear, athleticism, and Michael Jordan. The Toyota 'bull' logo evokes images of compact cars, foreign business competition, and new ways of doing things. The name Budweiser reminds us of everything from the actual beer to those clever talking frogs, and the 'wassup!' advertisements.
These are cases of successful, memorable branding. Michael Jordan is retired from professional sports, the frogs haven't been on television in years, and wassup has almost faded from day to day use in the American pop culture vocabulary. However, every one of these elements remains identifiable, and mentioning them to most people will get the typical, 'oh yeah!' response to memories of clever marketing, cementing the image of the brand in the viewers' minds.
Branding is the creation of these memories. However, recollections of a product being indisputably linked with a particular name, image, or slogan can be a double-edged sword.
MCI Communications was one of the most successful challengers to the AT&T 'Bell Monopoly' consortium between the late 1960s and early 1980s. MCI managed to push through the breakup of the Bell coalition and allow new players to enter into the field of telecommunications. MCI pioneered many telecommunications innovations, such as Single Mode Fiber Optic Cable, when other companies were content to rely on existing standards. They were one of the first companies to provide the now standard idea of 'in-network' calling, where MCI customers got discounts when calling other MCI customers. MCI was one of the big, significant players in the telecom world, so why isn't their name still synonymous with innovation?
Because it is now synonymous with the words Worldcom, Enron, and scandal.
In 1998, MCI merged with another company to become MCI Worldcom, launching a widespread televised and online advertising campaign featuring notable actors such as Sam Neil of Jurassic Park fame. The MCI brand became inextricably linked with the Worldcom brand. Then, on June 26 2002, the Securities Exchange Commission launched a full inquiry into reported auditing and financial irregularities, resulting in allegations of fraud. By July 21st, less than one month later, it was revealed that Worldcom stock was inflated by $11 billion, and the company entered into chapter 11 bankruptcy. MCI was ultimately bought out by Verizon, and the legacy of a once innovative telecom company was left in the same repository as Arthur Anderson, Enron, and the other big financial fraud stories of the early 21st century.
While this is an extreme example, it is a caution worth considering for anyone interested in making a brand name for his or her product in today's market. The world is more connected, more informed, and more critical than ever, and while a legacy of good choices can create a strong brand, a reputation for poor or improper decisions can and will conspire to bury a once successful company forever.
Many times, no one can predict what will make a brand into a particular success or failure overnight. However, every company can take three common sense steps to protect their brand and the products it represents.
1. Promote a Quality Product
Quality talks - if a product works, then it has a certain degree of merit that puts it ahead of competition. If a company puts the time and effort to get a quality product onto the market and markets the brand in such a way that the actual qualities are stressed, people will remember.
As an example, Tylenol is an effective painkiller for post-surgical use. It is not a homeopathic remedy relying on word of mouth and supposed benefits, but has demonstrable, measurable effects on human pain and healing.
2. Be Informed About the Brand's Use
Knowing not just what one is putting out, but what is being done with it in the market, is crucial to proper branding. To continue with the example of Tylenol, many advertisements stress that doctors frequently prescribe it, more than any other over the counter analgesic. Knowing that doctors were using their product allowed Tylenol to make a powerful claim and keep the information in people's minds.
3. Be Prepared to Take Responsibility for the Brand
As seen in the MCI case, scandal led to the irrevocable decline of a once-powerful brand. Conversely, Tylenol managed to take what could have been a public relations nightmare and came out stronger than ever as a result. When Tylenol executives found out that tampering had led to poison getting into the product supply, poisons that killed Tylenol consumers, they pulled every current Tylenol product from the shelves of stores. They investigated each of their production facilities, solved the problem, and then launched an informative campaign letting people know when and why it was safe to come back to their product. This disaster could have led to the death of the company, but the executives' willingness to take responsibility and act, rather than covering up and denying fault, saved-a brand that is still powerful to this day.
Again, these are examples of extreme events. Only a tiny fraction of companies ever take their investments down the path of fraud, and almost no one will have to deal with their product becoming a poisonous vector. However, they illustrate the case that a brand is a powerful association for people to make, and that like any part of a business, it requires information and action in the proper degrees.
What Does This Mean to Me and My Website
Normal advertising just informs the consumer about a product and a company's brand identity. With digital advertising, the consumer can be more involved in the brand image. In this interactive domain, a company can listen to consumers who make comments on their website or blog and act on negative feedback before it becomes uncontrollable. They can try out different advertising strategies to learn which products they should continue to develop and which new features a product should have.
Effective digital branding allows you to identify a singular position and establish your distinctive voice in the marketplace and incorporates all three of the above-mentioned branding points. You'll be promoting a quality product. You'll use social media strategies to keep informed about your brand's image and you'll take responsibility for your brand, to guide and shape it to its best advantage.
Branding takes time and thought. Digital branding takes time, thought and an interchange with your consumers. Engaging your customers in your brand in a relevant way is the key to successful online branding
By Enzo F. Cesario
How to Use Web Analytics to Grow Your Business
If you own a business, chances are you do. But don't pat yourself on the back too quickly.
By now it's widely-accepted that if you have a business card you should probably have a website. It doesn't matter what your company is selling - a website, however modest, has become a standard.
The real question is: what is your website doing for your business?
As a web marketer I often put this question to the business owners I meet. Not because I'm trying to lead into my sales pitch, but because I'm intrigued to hear the answer.
Most people get a certain "deer in the headlights" look in their eyes when I ask this question. To be fair, it's not a question we're used to hearing. But that's not all that's going on here.
Traditional advertising mediums - print, TV, radio, etc - are notoriously difficult to track. Sure, you'll know how often the phone is ringing or how many people come in with a coupon clipped from the Sunday paper, but what you don't know is how many people saw/heard your ad and whether they were interested, oblivious or, worse, annoyed.
Business owners are used to this. We all know we need to advertise - it's a necessary cost of doing business - so we buy that half-page ad in the Yellow Pages or the local newspaper, we sponsor an event or a little league team, we have a radio commercial written (maybe even with a jingle) and we hope for the best.
This has been a given in marketing since the beginning. But the web, and analytics, changed the game.
So how should you be using your web analytics to grow your audience, and your business, online?
Track Everything
With web analytics on your site you can track:
Where your traffic is coming from by
- The referring website and page
- The search engine and keyword used
Your website visitors by
- Their location
- Their operating system, browser and monitor resolution
- Their network
Visitor behavior and actions by
- Duration of visit (time on site)
- Pages per visit (number of pages viewed)
- Bounce rate (percentage of users who viewed only one page before leaving)
- Conversion rate (percentage of users who completed a preset task)
If you're planning on doing any kind of web marketing, be it through search engines, email or advertising on other websites, information on your past and current traffic is crucial. Not to mention you'll want analytics in place so you can properly track the new traffic your promotions will, hopefully, bring in.
Tie Your Traffic Sources to Your Users' Actions
When looking at your analytics data the behavior and action metrics mean little by themselves. If the bounce rate of your site overall is 75%, what does that tell you? Well, this is a pretty high bounce rate - you should at least be shooting to have a bounce rate lower than 50%. But does this tell you exactly what is wrong?
Likewise, if you have secured advertising or a listing on another website, the number of visits coming in from that site only gives you part of the picture.
Tying your bounce rate to a specific traffic source, on the other hand, can tell you a lot.
If a given traffic source is generating a bounce rate of 85% or more, for example, this indicates that users are not being satisfied. There are a few possibilities as to why:
* The users may not be well-qualified - or the site where you are listed or advertising might not have the best audience for your content/offer.
* The listing/ad may promise something that the entry page does not live up to (or, at least, the promise is difficult to locate once the user arrives at your site).
* Your site is simply not usable, is unattractive or unprofessional, causing users to leave immediately (and most don't come back)
* Your users are not connecting with your content/offer.
There are other possibilities, but you'll want to find the most likely answer here - and try to fix it. Then, using the same metrics (traffic source + bounce rate), you can see whether things improve moving forward.
Using metrics like these you can also get a sense of which advertisements are bringing you a return on your investment and which aren't. With goal tracking in Google Analytics, for example, a conversion rate is added to just about every traffic metric, including referring websites. If you're finding that a website is sending you plenty of traffic but none of it is converting, re-examine the referring website's audience, how your site is being presented and the user's experience when they click through.
The Point
Your website is more than a brochure. It's an interactive tool for your users. The only true way to find out how they're using it (or not using it) is to get web analytics set up properly on your website (including setting goal points to track conversions).
And the best way to improve your website in the aim of building your business is to use the information your web analytics give you.
The age of blind advertising - of throwing money at the problem and hoping for the best - is dead.
If you aren't tracking everything, taking time on a regular basis to understand what the data reveals about your users and adjusting your efforts based on this information, you're missing an opportunity to optimize your advertising and get a better return on your budget.
In this economy, is that something you can afford?
By Mike Tekula
By now it's widely-accepted that if you have a business card you should probably have a website. It doesn't matter what your company is selling - a website, however modest, has become a standard.
The real question is: what is your website doing for your business?
As a web marketer I often put this question to the business owners I meet. Not because I'm trying to lead into my sales pitch, but because I'm intrigued to hear the answer.
Most people get a certain "deer in the headlights" look in their eyes when I ask this question. To be fair, it's not a question we're used to hearing. But that's not all that's going on here.
Traditional advertising mediums - print, TV, radio, etc - are notoriously difficult to track. Sure, you'll know how often the phone is ringing or how many people come in with a coupon clipped from the Sunday paper, but what you don't know is how many people saw/heard your ad and whether they were interested, oblivious or, worse, annoyed.
Business owners are used to this. We all know we need to advertise - it's a necessary cost of doing business - so we buy that half-page ad in the Yellow Pages or the local newspaper, we sponsor an event or a little league team, we have a radio commercial written (maybe even with a jingle) and we hope for the best.
This has been a given in marketing since the beginning. But the web, and analytics, changed the game.
So how should you be using your web analytics to grow your audience, and your business, online?
Track Everything
With web analytics on your site you can track:
Where your traffic is coming from by
- The referring website and page
- The search engine and keyword used
Your website visitors by
- Their location
- Their operating system, browser and monitor resolution
- Their network
Visitor behavior and actions by
- Duration of visit (time on site)
- Pages per visit (number of pages viewed)
- Bounce rate (percentage of users who viewed only one page before leaving)
- Conversion rate (percentage of users who completed a preset task)
If you're planning on doing any kind of web marketing, be it through search engines, email or advertising on other websites, information on your past and current traffic is crucial. Not to mention you'll want analytics in place so you can properly track the new traffic your promotions will, hopefully, bring in.
Tie Your Traffic Sources to Your Users' Actions
When looking at your analytics data the behavior and action metrics mean little by themselves. If the bounce rate of your site overall is 75%, what does that tell you? Well, this is a pretty high bounce rate - you should at least be shooting to have a bounce rate lower than 50%. But does this tell you exactly what is wrong?
Likewise, if you have secured advertising or a listing on another website, the number of visits coming in from that site only gives you part of the picture.
Tying your bounce rate to a specific traffic source, on the other hand, can tell you a lot.
If a given traffic source is generating a bounce rate of 85% or more, for example, this indicates that users are not being satisfied. There are a few possibilities as to why:
* The users may not be well-qualified - or the site where you are listed or advertising might not have the best audience for your content/offer.
* The listing/ad may promise something that the entry page does not live up to (or, at least, the promise is difficult to locate once the user arrives at your site).
* Your site is simply not usable, is unattractive or unprofessional, causing users to leave immediately (and most don't come back)
* Your users are not connecting with your content/offer.
There are other possibilities, but you'll want to find the most likely answer here - and try to fix it. Then, using the same metrics (traffic source + bounce rate), you can see whether things improve moving forward.
Using metrics like these you can also get a sense of which advertisements are bringing you a return on your investment and which aren't. With goal tracking in Google Analytics, for example, a conversion rate is added to just about every traffic metric, including referring websites. If you're finding that a website is sending you plenty of traffic but none of it is converting, re-examine the referring website's audience, how your site is being presented and the user's experience when they click through.
The Point
Your website is more than a brochure. It's an interactive tool for your users. The only true way to find out how they're using it (or not using it) is to get web analytics set up properly on your website (including setting goal points to track conversions).
And the best way to improve your website in the aim of building your business is to use the information your web analytics give you.
The age of blind advertising - of throwing money at the problem and hoping for the best - is dead.
If you aren't tracking everything, taking time on a regular basis to understand what the data reveals about your users and adjusting your efforts based on this information, you're missing an opportunity to optimize your advertising and get a better return on your budget.
In this economy, is that something you can afford?
By Mike Tekula
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