Dynamic Copywriting

Mike Santoro over at Duct Tape Marketing, has a neat article about a good marketing idea gone bad.

Apparently Delta bought some Google ads for the keyword “cheap train tickets.” Obviously Delta flies airplanes and is not in the train business, but give them credit for understanding that their competition is not just American Airlines or British Airways. They are competing against every carrier that provides transportation to passengers.

But, as Mike points out, clicking the link leads only to Delta's main home page. The visitors, who thought they had clicked an ad for cheap train tickets, find themselves on an airline's site. Huh? I have no doubt that 100% of these visitors either felt they were deceived or clicked away in confusion.

Mike's article goes on to say that if Delta had simply sent them to a page that offered comparisons of their air fares to train fares on certain routes, they may have converted a good number of these visitors. As it was, they no doubt wasted every penny they spent on these ads.

The lesson is that your home page is not the place to send every visitor. If you go to the trouble of getting links for certain types of visitors, such as through PPC (Pay Per Click) ads, think through what these people want, what they are looking for, and what information they are seeking.

AND give them what they want.

This all goes back to the idea of “Buyer Personas” again. Don't treat all your visitors as if they were all stamped out of the same mold. Every website offers different things to different types of visitors. The better you are at distinguishing the different needs and wants that drive these visitors, the better you will do at turning them into buyers.

This is especially true if you use PPC ads such as Google Adwords. Delta's visitors clicked links about cheap train fares. When they arrived at Delta's site, they had questions about cheap train fares and expected answers, which Delta failed to deliver.

Check out Mike's article at Delta Screws Up Smart Google Ad Buy. I think you will find it helpful.


COPYRIGHT © 2008, Charles Brown
Add to Onlywire

Visit most web sites and you get a product or service pushed down your throat right from the beginning. These companies think that if they tell you what products they sell or what services they offer, you will pick one and everyone will live happily ever after.

I disagree.

I have been writing a bit lately about David Meerman Scott's idea of creating (or discovering might be a better word to use here) the "buyer personas" of people who might potentially use your product or service. I believe the best web sites begin with the visitor's problem or want and leads them to the product or service that solves that problem or want.

A web site should be like a doctor's appointment. The doctor asks questions, listens to your complaint, runs a few tests, makes a diagnosis and them prescribes a pill.

Now I don't know about you, but if I came into a doctor's office and I was handed a prescription before the doctor ran those tests and asked those questions, I would turn around and leave. Wouldn't you?

But that is exactly what most (dare I say 99.99999% or them?) web sites do. One-size-fits-all solutions are handed out or the visitor is expected to diagnose herself immediately upon landing on the home page.

Here's a better way:

1. The visitor does a search on Google, Yahoo or some other search engine.
   
   
2. Based upon whatever search term this person typed into the search engine, he or she is given several choices, one of which (your site) seems to fit what this person is looking for and this site gets clicked.
   
   
3. Upon arriving, the visitor is not confronted with a lot of product or service information (although tabs are displayed for those who already know what they want or who have visited this site before). Nor is this person faced with a lot of self-serving puffery about the company. Instead, a diagnostic menu is prominently displayed to help the visitor self-select him or herself as one of your company's buyer personas. (For an example, see Kadient.com, which displays a menu under the heading "What Are Your Objectives?).
   
   
4. Once this visitor makes this initial choice, they are led down a pathway that provides lots of problem-solving information designed for this particular buyer persona.
   
   
5. The visitor continues down this pathway, gathering information, reading case studies and persuasive content that leads to the sale of the appropriate product or service.
   

Consider how different this is from most sites you visit.

Think about this, when that doctor hands you a prescription after asking all kinds of diagnostic question and running a number of tests on you, does she have to "sell" you on that medicine? Does your doctor have to persuade you in any way to follow her advice after she has spent a lot of effort analyzing your illness?

Of course not. When a credible diagnostic process precedes a product or service recommendation, there is much less resistance to the solution that is offered in the end.

Do you know of any sites that follow this diagnostic-first approach? I am writing a new book on writing better web content and I am looking for good examples of sites that begin with a buyer personal menu.

Please let me know of any suggestions you may have.

COPYRIGHT © 2008, Charles Brown
Add to Onlywire

I was going to write about Long Tails today since I just picked up the updated version of Chris Anderson's book on the subject.

But I had a very interesting comment to my Wednesday article on Buyer Personas submitted by Heather Margolis, Director of Marketing at Kadient. My article mentioned Kadient because they have created a number of such Buyer Personas and have gone so far as to give these personas names (one is named "Anya" and another is named "Luke").

Heather's comment indicated that when they are brainstorming at Kadient, they will ask questions like, "What would Anya do?" or "What would Luke do?"

This gets to the heart of why segmenting your prospects/clients/customers/voters/supporters/constituants etc into distinct groupings fits right into the concept of the long tail.

The internet has made it possible for businesses to offer a lot of options to a lot of different people. Want proof? Take a look at Amazon.com. No physical bookstore in the world could offer the incredible variety and selection Amazon offers.

But Amazon makes its bundle by selling lots and lots and lots of books no one else stocks. Sure it also sells the odd Stephen King blockbuster, but its real success comes from selling small amounts of a lot of different products (sorry, I keep making the error of calling Amazon just a bookstore).

Amazon succeeds because it has lots of "Anyas" and "Lukes" that they keep cater to. Perhaps they sell only one or two copies of some obscure tome written in 1963. But it makes a lot of such sales.

My 73 year old mother bought eight dishes on Amazon yesterday. They were Correll patterns that have long been discontinued, but we found them available on Amazon after we struck out looking at the manufacturer's site.

My mother's name is "Zella" and Amazon now has a file on her and now knows her taste in dishes. I'm fairly sure that particular pattern is not among Amazon's top sellers, but they make a lot of sales to purchasers like my mother who buy items they cannot get anywhere else. In other words, Amazon makes a lot of money selling a few items to a lot of "Zellas" out there, simply because they have access to products that may not even be available from the original manufacturers.

So you could say Amazon succeeds by asking, "What would Zella do?"

COPYRIGHT © 2008, Charles Brown
Add to Onlywire

I recently wrote a two-part book review on David Meerman Scott's excellent book, The New Rules of Marketing & PR. One of his main themes in this book is the importance of creating "buyer personas" for your target buyers/voters/doners/constituants.

Since completing the book, I have found myself picking it up several times to re-read several sections, but the one that everything seems to connect back to is this idea of buyer personas. I have started thinking of this along the same lines as an FBI profiler who really works hard to get into the head of a criminal (no I am not comparing customers to criminals).

Yesterday Scott wrote a blog article on this concept at How well do you know your buyer personas? One of the things he points out is that creating these profiles/buyer personas helps marketers avoid the error of thinking about customers in a dark room, where ideas that may or may not work are banding about and come to take on an aura of truth.

Alternatively, he uses the example of Kadient, a company that supplies salespeople with support software. Two of the buyer personas Kadient has created are "Anya" and "Luke." They developed Anya and Luke after many interviews with real salespeople that helped them really, really understand their needs and problems.

The first remarkable thing that Kadient did was to actually give their buyer personas names. The second is that they didn't just create a one-size-fits-all buyer persona. Anya and Luke are two very different archetypes representing two very different types of customers. (And by the way, Anya and Luke are only two of their buyer personas, they have several).

As they do their marketing, they keep these seperate personas seperate in their minds. Scott's article even shows a picture of two of Kadient's marketing executives standing side by side with full-sized cardboard photos of Anya and Luke.

Talk about making buyer personas come alive!

What are you doing to distinquish between your various customer types? Are you afflicted with one-size-fits-all-itus? In this day of long tail marketing, it makes no sense to treat the marketplace as one big mass.

COPYRIGHT © 2008, Charles Brown

The New Rules of Marketing & PR
With my apologies, this article is a couple of weeks over due, but I have been busy with several other writing projects.

I had promised a second part to my review of David Meerman Scott's wonderful book, "The New Rules of Marketing & PR."

If you recall from part one, Mr. Scott experienced an all-too-typical example of the wrong way to market when he went online to gather information about buying a new car. All three of the big US automakers' web sites began with the assumption that he was ready to buy now when he was still at the information-gathering stage.

He was assaulted with TV-style broadcast advertising with one-way messages focused on price.

Compare this approach to what he calls the new rules and how you and I as marketers can implement them.

The first step Mr. Scott suggests is to create "Buyer Personas" for your target demographics. In other words, break each visitor to your web site, each person who may eventually buy your product, into distinct groups based upon what each group of people want and need and what information they seek, regardless of whether this information will lead them directly to make a decision to buy.

For example, political campaigns have long targeted groups they call "Soccer Moms" and "NASCAR Dads." By singling these groups out from the electorate, they can identify what concerns these groups and what they will base their votes upon. Also by giving these "Buyer Personas" names, they make them real to the marketers involved in the campaign (and let us not for a moment think that a political campaign is not a marketing effort).

Suppose the car companies had done this when they had built their web sites. They would have realized that not every visitor was in a "buy now" mode. They would have realized there were many who wanted to simply gather information, get user generated feedback, check out safety, reliability and fuel economy information. They also could have treated different visitors as having distinct wants and needs.

Instead, they thought of all their visitors as a single entity. Don't you think that NASCAR Dads and Soccer Moms would have different motivations they could have appealed to?

Once you have create profiles for all the distinct "Buyer Personas" that have an interest in your web site or your company, Mr. Scott lays out one of the main themes of his book: "Think Like a Publisher."

Thinking like a publisher means to create content and information that would be of benefit to these Buyer Personas. This does not mean product information or sales content, but to simply understand what information could benefit these groups.

For example, what content can you create that would solve problems for your identified Buyer Personas without mentioning your company or products or services?

Some examples Scott uses is an automobile tire company that could produce an ebook or video on how to drive safely over snow and then offer it free on your web site, on YouTube or to give it free to auto clubs or drivers' education schools.

Another example could be a catering company that could produce content on how to plan a wedding reception or a dinner party.

Notice that all of these address problems for certain identifiable groups of buyers without being overt sales pitches. Having said this, however, this kind of non-selling can often be the most powerful selling tool you can create because it positions you as an expert (an unselfish expert) in your field.

Another very interesting example he cites is a company called The Concrete Network. A "brick and mortar company if ever there was one, the Concrete Network diligently produces how to information, problem solving information and media releases that address the needs of both their b2b and b2c (sorry, "business to business" and "business to consumers") buyer personas.

These include buyer guides on all sorts of home improvement projects and a Find-A-Contractor service that links homeowners to builders on 22 different specialties in 192 metropolitan areas in the U.S. or Canada.

Does this content always lead directly to a buying decision? No, but they do imply a generosity of spirit in these companies.

Several years ago, during the late 90s dot.com meltdown, I volunteered to do career counseling for a group of downsized managers and executives. One of the first things I had my classes do was to think of themselves of solutions to specific problems.

One by one, these folks all "got it" and it transformed their thinking from being job seekers to people who were very, very good at solving particular problems for organizations. Once this occurred, their whole approach to the job market was transformed. They were not job applicants, they were solutions to a big problem.

I think Mr. Scott is talking about the same thing here. When you begin to "Think Like A Publisher," you start producing problem-solving information for targeted groups of potential customers.

Be sure to pick up The New Rules of Marketing & PR. You will be very glad you did.



COPYRIGHT © 2008, Charles Brown




The New Rules of Marketing & PR