More money is wasted on advertising than any other business function. That is not to say businesses shouldn’t advertise but rather people should understand how advertising works. There are many ways to characterize ads, but for our purposes let’s make it simple and separate advertising into two distinct approaches: saturation and emotional.

One of the things I’ve learned over a long career is that business folk invariably take their lead from the wrong sources. Small and medium size businesses look to the mega corporations to learn their tricks and adopt their attitudes when they have little in common – advertising being no exception. Since our clients are mostly medium or small size companies we try to help put some of these issues into perspective.

If you’re big enough and have the money available, there are all kinds of marketing initiatives you can invest in, but if you have a limited marketing budget you need to be smart about how and on what you spend your advertising dollars. And the most effective and cost efficient place to spend those dollars is on your website. Yes you need to attract people to your site, but if once they arrive they find it lacks intriguing, engaging content, then you’ve wasted your money. So what tactical approach should you take to deliver your marketing message?

Saturation Advertising

The first approach is saturation advertising like you see on television. Anyone who has spent an evening sitting in front of the TV set is familiar with what I am talking about: the constant repetition of the same commercials over and over until the ads become an unwelcome irritation. The fact is no matter what you do to avoid commercials they eventually seep into your head. Even fast forwarding through commercials on a recorded program has an effect. Saturation advertising depends on repetition not quality, which is why some of the worst and/or stupidest commercials can still be effective.

There are some great commercials on television that do engage the audience with an entertaining, memorable, marketing message that enhances the brand and generates leads, but when push comes to shove, television advertising is all about repetition not quality.

Does Saturation Advertising Work?

Does saturation advertising work? The short answer is yes it does, at least for a television audience it does. Most people believe that it works on others but not on them, a phenomenon, psychologists call the Third Party Effect. The fact is, repeating something automatically makes it appear more believable.

The majority of people will respond that they don’t pay attention to commercials, but inattention does not protect you from the influence of repeated messaging. In fact bad commercials work better if the audience isn’t really paying attention, and fail when the audience is actually listening carefully. Careful attention brings to light all a message’s conceptual, technical and performance issues.

Will Saturation Advertising Work For You?

But saturation advertising is expensive because it relies on huge media buys in order to get the required number of repetitions needed to worm its way into an audience’s collective consciousness. It’s a messaging tactic that depends on deep pockets and that rules it out for most companies. Advertising that depends on constant repetition just won’t work on the Web unless it’s merely to supplement an existing extensive integrated television and print campaign.

Just as an aside, the music industry uses the same tactic. The constant repetition of a song, even of inferior quality but with minimum rhythmic value and a repetitive catchy chorus, can become a hit if heard often enough on the radio or on television in a music video. And like most saturation advertising it’s controlled by whoever has the most money available to purchase audience access. The same holds true for political advertising. Politicians can get away with the most incredible nonsense if they raised enough money to drown-out their opposition.

The Web is a different communication environment compared to television. Where television and the Web converge is with programming: your website is not an advertisement, or at least it shouldn’t be if you want it to be effective; your website is the equivalent of the program not the commercial, and that is why the key to success is the ability to turn advertising into content, and content into a memorable experience. You need to engage your audience with the same kind of techniques and messaging that is used in the programs you watch and not in the commercials you try to ignore.

If You Don’t Establish Your Brand, You Won’t Have a Meaningful, Memorable Message

If you can’t saturate the market with your brand then you have to find a better, more cost effective way to influence your audience. I use the word brand instead of product or service because that is where you have to start – you have to think ‘brand’ not product/service. What we’re talking about here is advertising intended to promote and grow your company within the context of a long term marketing strategy rather than a promotional ad intended to let your audience know about a particular sale or promotional event. Companies that stick exclusively to a promotional format are basically teaching their customers to only purchase goods and services when there’s a sale, and that’s a tough way to make monéy on a long-term basis.

We all know how popular the Google AdWords program is and we all know how expensive it can get in order to gain access to the keywords that trigger your ad placement. The Google system is basically relying on the same principle as television advertising: big audiences and lots of placements equals lots of leads.

The problem in addition to the continual expense is that even if you attract a large initial audience, that audience will not stick around long enough to get your brand story if that story is not at least as interesting and entertaining as the television programs they watch. And even if that audience manages to stick around a while, if your site isn’t interesting enough, they won’t ever come back and that reduces your chances of being remembered. Unlike television where the audience is captive to the commercials, a Web audience is not. Unlike television where the experience is generally a compromised gróup decision, Web viewing is not.

For most Web-based businesses their website is their best and potentially most effective advertising venue, but people only go to websites that interest them, and they will leave in an instant if a website doesn’t engage, inform, and entertain them.

Emotional Advertising

“People forget what you say, but they remember how you made them feel.” – Warren Beatty

Everybody likes to think of him or herself as a rational, intelligent human being, but in truth, we are all motivated by the same hardwired emotional triggers. Our brains are marvelous, malleable organs that absorb information without us even knowing it; they process information, massage it, and produce instinctive responses to external stimuli. Our survival and dominance as a species depends on this ability. Our brains are not cameras that just record input; they are interpretive instruments that produce gut-instinct. As a consequence, successful long-term marketing strategies depend on an emotional brand association with basic Maslowian needs.

No matter who you are or what you do your competitors will undercut your price, add new and better features, or come up with superior alternative solutions. The business world is littered with the corpses of once proud companies that owned their market until someone came along with something better, or cheaper, or just different. No one wants a Polaroid camera when digital cameras are all the rage. Once proud Kodak has been humbled and downsized considerably because they saw themselves as a film company and cameras as merely a way to sell more film rather than tools of human creativity. Products and services come and go, but brands are forever, and brands are defined by their emotional appeal.

A low bounce rate is often cited as a hallmark of a good website – 40% or lower is typically heralded as the goal – signaling that visitors are engaged with your site and finding useful content. A high bounce rate is often assumed to mean that your site is not doing its job. In reality, bounce rate means different things for different sites and the emphasis you place on it will vary according to the type of site you have and its goals.

What Does Bounce Rate Mean?

The definition from Google’s Analytics help pages is: “Bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits or visits in which the person left your site from the entrance (landing) page.”
When is Bounce Rate a Relevant Metric?

– If you have a sales or conversion process which requires the user to follow through multiple pages on your site.
– If exploration of your site is important to your goals.
– If you are trying to turn new visitors into loyal readers or customers.
– If yours is a retail site and you want people to shop around and make purchases.
– If your homepage is not inducing further clicks, particularly if it contains blog excerpts or other ‘teaser’ content.

What a High Bounce Rate Could Mean:

1. Keywords and content are mismatched.

In cases where visitors are coming from search engines, a high bounce rate may mean that the keywords they used and the content they found on your site are not aligned – so your site doesn’t meet their expectations in some way.

What you can do:

Analyze your keyword traffic and make sure your pages are optimized for the keywords you want and that the content is closely aligned with keywords and not misleading in any way.

2. The next step in your conversion or goal process is not obvious or easy enough.

What you can do:

Look at your landing pages with an objective eye and make the next step clear and easy to take.

3. The navigation on your site is confusing or unclear, making additional content hard to find.

What you can do:

Re-evaluate the navigation and see if there are ways to streamline or simplify. Also double-check for browser compatibility – perhaps the page is not displaying correctly under some conditions.

4. Your offer or product is not presented in a compelling or easy to understand way.

What you can do:

Look at your sales copy or offér details and see if you can refresh it or make it more appealing. You could try split-testing different versions to see which performs better.

5. Your site has technical problems. Particularly if your bounce rate suddenly spikes or displays an unusual trend, it could be an indication of technical issues – broken images or links, or something on the page not loading correctly.

What you can do:

Check for compatibility and broken links. Test the load speed of the page and generally make sure your code is as clean and functional as possible. Check for server outages and other issues that could have temporarily affected the functionality of your site.

A high bounce rate might not be a problem if:

– You have a blog homepage containing all your recent posts in their entirety – Blogger blogs are notorious for this. When all your posts are presented up front there would be little reason for someone to clíck to any other pages.

– You have a loyal blog following and your site has a higher proportion of returning visitors than new visitors. Your followers and subscribers may just want to read the newest post and have no need to visit other pages.

– you are promoting a landing page which contains the call to action within it, such as submitting an email address. That single page can do its job effectively without requiring further clicks.

– the call to action or conversion takes your visitor off-site – to an external shopping cart or email sign up for example. This would look like a bounce, but can still be a conversion.

– Blogs typically have higher bounce rates compared to other types of sites so the same benchmarks do not apply.

Bounce Rate is Not the Only Metric.

Don’t look at bounce rate in isolation – look at the overall picture of your website and how it’s performing according to the metrics that matter to you. What DO you want your visitors to do at your site? Are you making it easy for them to do that, and are you measuring it?

Look for trends and other data that give you a fuller picture of what the bounce rate really means:

– Is the bounce rate higher or lower for certain keywords?

– Does it vary according to how people found your site? Search engines vs. social media, for example.

– How does it vary with New vs. Returning visitors?

– Which particular pages or types of content on your site have higher or lower bounce rates?

– Look also at length of time the visitor spends on the page which could indicate whether or not they are reading what they find – this is very important for a blog.

How do you deliver a marketing message to a Web-audience that hates advertising? A few years back I proposed a solution based on short-form television-style programs: the “120 Second Solution,” two minute brand-story commercials formatted in a mini three act Web-video presentation. Today this concept is called Branded Entertainment: a two to seven minute commercial that combines content, advertising, and entertainment in a brand story format designed to attract and hold an audience’s attention while delivering a memorable core marketing message.

The concept has been a hard sell as it flies in the face of a lot of conventional wisdom about advertising formats, attention spans, and content credibility. Like most good ideas it seems that branded entertainment’s time has finally come. Various marketing blogs are all a twitter about Orbit Gum’s new campaign called “Dirty Shorts” featuring its first branded entertainment effort, a 5:17 minute branded video from Jason Bateman and Will Arnett. It seems these well-known actors have enough faith in this advertising format that they’ve formed DumbDumb, a branded video production company. Their first effort, “The Prom Date” was viewed 110,000 times in just three days.

Commitment To A Core Message

Of course not everybody has the deep pockets required to hire Jason Bateman, but with proper planning and implementation a branded entertainment video campaign is within reach of most successful small and medium sized companies.

The single biggest obstacle in implementing this kind of campaign is not the cost, but rather, the commitment to a style and format most business owners find hard to swallow: the need to focus on a single core reason why customers should purchase your product or service and to deliver that message in some bold or offbeat manner.

All too often entrepreneurs think of advertising in conventional terms like display, banner, and classified (e.g. Adwords). Even Web video has been pushed, prodded and crammed into pre-roll and post-roll television style spots. The Web isn’t television; it requires a whole new way of thinking when it comes to marketing presentations.

The Web is by nature an unconventional arena that demands bold content. You can say and do a lot of things on the Web, but the one thing that won’t be tolerated is boring your audience. Add to that the fact that we live in a product placement world where the line between advertising and content has been permanently erased and you have an advertising environment that demands something different.

You must stop thinking of your website as a digital brochure and start thinking of it as a total immersive multimedia advertising environment that connects to a target audience using standout, break-through communication techniques. The goal is quality engagements not shotgun traffic.

The Goal Is Quality Engagement NOT Traffic

For the average Web business it is important to remember that huge viral numbers don’t come from clever campaigns alone, but rather, are the result of great campaigns plus advertising support, extensive PR, and paid-blog placement. That is not to say that small and medium-sized companies shouldn’t pursue this approach but rather, the goal of these campaigns should be quality engagement not quantity traffic – a far more affordable and productive objective.

How To Deliver Break-Through Advertising

There are various ways to achieve what ad agencies call break-through advertising, but in every case those methods call for content that stands out from the crowd, be it humorous, offbeat, alarming or just plain entertaining, if it doesn’t standout it won’t make a connection, and your website presentation will be instantly forgotten.

The best and most complete example of branded entertainment that I have seen was the brilliant Shredded Wheat “The Palace of Light” campaign. It was very funny while delivering a powerful marketing message. Unfortunately the campaign is no longer running, but if you can find some of the videos on the Web, they are definitely worth seeing. They are great examples of how to turn advertising into content, and content into a memorable experience.

In a speech about break-through advertising, Chuck Porter, co-founder of Crispin Porter + Bogusky states the average person sees conservatively 1600 to 3000 marketing messages a day. That’s a lot of advertising. If your marketing communication doesn’t standout in some way, you are probably wasting your advertising budget.

Two Kinds of Advertising

In response to a question asking whether advertising was technology and data driven, or creatively driven, Porter explained that there are basically two types of advertising.

The tech-data driven ad is all about finding that person who needs what you sell at a time when he or she wants to purchase it and then delivering the message to them. This is the reason why so much of what you see, hear, and read in marketing journals and blogs is filled with statistics and analysis of who is doing what and where. All of which is perfectly fine if the only customer you want is the one that needs what you sell instantly or who is motivated by impulse.

This kind of advertising is all about immediacy; the customer needs or impulsively wants what you provide right now. The key is immediate access. If customers don’t have instant accéss, chances are the impulse to purchase will fade, or the prospect will find it more convenient to get the product elsewhere. In this type of advertising, timing and immediacy is paramount. The downside is no long-term relationship is established.

Digital products that can be downloaded instantly seem to be most appropriate for this approach, however that must be qualified by the level of cost and sophistication associated with the product or service: the higher the cost and the more complex or advanced the offering, the less impulsive the decision, and the more a client must be wooed. Advertising theory commonly suggests it takes seven engagements in order to win over a client.

The other kind of advertising is creative-based; it’s advertising built around brand awareness and identity. This is the kind of advertising that creates customers, and establishes long-term loyalty. This is the kind of advertising that can benefit from implementing a branded entertainment campaign.

Why Branded Entertainment Works

If branded entertainment is done right, it engages an audience, it informs and enlightens, it entertains and amuses, it’s meaningful and memorable and potentially viral. Branded entertainment is more than advertising, it’s marketing, and it is designed to influence attitudes, change perceptions, and prompt action.

Google Case in Italy Has Serious Implications for the Web

A judge in Milan, Italy has convicted three Google executives over a video uploaded to YouTube in a case, which could have serious implications for social media and ultimately, the web in general, at least in Italy. The video, uploaded back in 2006, featured a group of school kids bullying an autistic child. Google says it worked with Italian authorities to help ID the person responsible for uploading it, and the uploader and other participants from the video were sentenced to community service.

Now, in 2010, Google executives David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes (3 out of 4 defendants) have been convicted for “failure to comply with the Italian privacy code.” They were all found not guilty of criminal defamation.

“In essence this ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload,” writes Matt Sucherman, VP and Deputy General Counsel – Europe, Middle East and Africa on the Google Blog. “We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question.”

This is a case of a business being held accountable for user-generated content. Isn’t the entire web generated by users? What if Google’s search engine (algorithmically) indexed something illegal. Should company execs be penalized, even if they comply with authorities’ requests for removal of such content? Ask yourself these questions:

- What if YouTube, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. had to shut down because it couldn’t control the things users post?

- What if every blogging platform had to do the same?

- What if you went to jail for comments posted on your blog?

You’re not likely going to go to jail for comments posted on your blog, but the point is, that by allowing people to post comments on your blog, you are allowing user-generated content, that you can’t necessarily control until after it’s been posted, unless you don’t let them go live until approving them. Google is being held accountable for content that users uploaded, which was not in their control until after the fact. YouTube users upload 20 hours of video every minute, according to Google.

You can see why this case is much bigger than just the specific instance it involves. The case is subject to appeal, but if it is not overturned, what will this mean for the web?
The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police,” says Sucherman.

“To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video,” he says. “They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video’s existence until after it was removed.”

He goes on to talk about how the case “attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built,” also mentioning that European Union law dictates that hosting providers have a safe harbor from liability as long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. “If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear,” Sucherman says.

If rulings such as the one against these Google execs were to become commonplace, how much do you think that would affect the social media industry? Companies like Google, Facebook, MySpace, etc. couldn’t let users upload content, which essentially means social media couldn’t exist. User-generated content couldn’t exist. How could you blog? How could you leave a status update on Facebook, or upload a family photo to Picasa? There is always the possibility that some user could make a death threat or upload a murder video, so if the companies behind the services that were used to commit these crimes were held accountable, how could their businesses continue?

That’s why Google is not only upset about the ruling against its executives, but calls it a “serious threat to the web.”

How can you help your readers know whether your site can really help them? Do you need a web designer to make it happen? Why is content writing for the web different from any other kind of writing? You’ll find answers in this article.
Web Design: Scannability

Would it interest you to know that most web users don’t come to your site to appreciate the attractiveness of the design? That’s not to say that an attractive web design isn’t important.

However, the majority of site visitation happens because the consumer was motivated to look at your site to see if you could give them a reason to purchase from your ecommerce business.

The web is based on small resolution sizes. The words read online aren’t even as clear as newsprint. The pictures are often low resolution and a computer screen can tax the best of vision.

Practical Application

One of the most cost effective applications this information can produce is that you may not need a website filled with all the toys such as Java Script or Flash design. These tools add spice to your website, but can often detract or even annoy visitors who are simply looking for information they expect to find on your website.

A well ordered website can reap incredible rewards for ecommerce business. Effective bullet points, keywords or phrases accented in bold type and an easy to navigate page may have a greater impact on your ecommerce web design than anything.

What this may also mean is that the web design options you can chose from may expand.

Self-Directed Design

You see, if you know what will help make your site better you can self-direct the development of the site through template rich designs that allow you total control over the text in an easy to use environment that does not require the use of complicated code or extended training seminars to use.

Obviously many web design experts would rather have you seek an alternative using their personalized service, but in the end you have a stronger interest in the success of your website than a hired web developer.

If you can utilize the tools available to make your site user friendly and highly scannable you will likely find you can achieve your own success in web design.

Writing for the Web

Content writing for web pages is not the same as writing for any other type of content. Thoughts must be compact and content must be scannable.

This means when you write for the web you must help your reader find the subject they are most interested in using a sub-heading or indexing system that allows a quick scan to determine if your web page contains the information they need.

Even if your website does not contain the exact information your visitor wants they may be pleased to know it didn’t require extended reading to make that determination. In turn the visitor may venture to other pages of online content to determine if you have the information they need elsewhere on your site.

Author: Scott Lindsay