Dangerous Thinking

YSM (Yahoo Search Marketing) is junking the long descriptions in its ads. No longer do we have 190 characters to get over our message, but we have just 70, instead – the current short description.

I’ll leave it to YSM to explain why:

Why are we making this change?
We’ve found that ads written more concisely give users a better experience and generally get better results. Users are exposed to higher quality search ads and advertisers may attract more interested and enthusiastic potential customers.

I wonder if this is really true. Longer rubbish copy doesn’t get you anywhere, but longer good-quality copy normally out-performs shorter copy on line as it does off line. I think, instead, Yahoo! is just continuing to make YSM more and more like Google Adwords.

What happened to the idea of brand differentiation? Why should I ever buy a pale imitation of the original or the market leader, unless it’s significantly cheaper.

I do hope that YSM will tell me a compelling reason for recommending YSM to my clients – for Yahoo’s sake, as well as mine.

One of my favourite parts of SEO is key phrase research – and, make no mistake, you do have to do the research. The obvious key phrases are just that – and so obvious that any group of people could get there with a little brainstorming.

So we research the high traffic key phrases that competing sites aren’t properly targeting. The niches that will make the site and our client’s business a success.

Yet these niches don’t have to be obscure.

I’ve spent this morning researching key phrases for a client in the… now that would be telling, wouldn’t it? Suffice to say that it’s a highly competitive sector of a very competitive market. And, you know what I’ve found? Relevant, high traffic niches so deep and inviting that I’m going to have to check them again tomorrow.

This is the exciting stuff. The start of how we’re going to get one over on the other guys!

I bet you’re already groaning at the naivety of Emerson’s words. Back when I was foetus copywriter, it was one of the great un-truisms of the industry. Of course you need to let the world know about about their wonderful new mousetrap, that goes without saying, doesn’t it?

So why do so many companies (even large ones) invest so heavily in their better mousetrap and keep schtum about it? I’m talking, of course, about the money poured into Web sites, corporate identity and so on. Yet somehow at the same time, omitting to plan for a realistic budget for promoting the thing.

If you build it, the chances are they won’t come. There’s so much competition out there for both organic (natural) search and PPC (pay per click) that just about any site – established or new – needs to invest seriously in SEO/SEM, or few people will ever find their way there. And low traffic means low profits.

Internet marketing is as serious an undertaking as any other part of the marketing mix, and in an increasing number of cases requires a similar level of investment.

Unwelcome news? Maybe. But if businesses are going to be successful on the Net, they must understand the extreme competitiveness of the online marketplace. I’m afraid too many are simply failing to face up to reality when they put their plans and budgets together.

The answer is simple, in my opinion.

To get on the first page of the major search engines for your chosen key phrases and to stay there.

Staying there is just as important as getting there, as it’s the only way you’re going to get the ROI you should expect.

Do you like being telemarketed at? I’m sure there is a proper lump of jargon, but I can’t be bothered to find out.

I spend a lot of time writing in my home office. Do know what I hear sometimes up to six or eight times a day? Our home phone ringing with telemarketing calls. And that’s on a line that’s registered with the appropriate opt-out body. On bad days, I just put the line straight on to voice mail.

But what does this kind of barrage of calls say about the companies involved? I think it says they couldn’t give a stuff about the people they’re phoning – butting in to their lives just because they want to sell double glazing or credit card insurance. It says they have products and services that they can’t sell in any less pressurized fashion. It says someone has discovered cheap offshore call centres in many cases.

You know what? It works both ways. I do my best to keep a mental note of the perpetrators. I then avoid them like the plague.

It seems I’m not the only person who thinks this way. I was listening to Seth Godin et al’s The Big Moo the other day. He mentioned a successful US-based financial services organization that doesn’t do telemarketing.

More power to their elbow!

There was a cause for celebration last week in the Rosam household. My wife won a whole case of wine in a competition!

It turned out to be a budget case from a well-known online supplier of wine, one that we occasionally order from anyway.

So far, so good. We’ve drunk one OK bottle of white and a red. It’s absolutely the worst bottle of wine I’ve sampled in the last 10 years. I thought the Italians had long stopped making that kind of nasty, acidic, thin, chemical-tasting bilge water.

They obviously haven’t. The wine wasn’t off. It was just undrinkable.

Am I being ungrateful? Maybe.

But I think there’s a salutary marketing point here. The two companies involved have shot themselves in the foot. By sending out a budget case of wine with poor quality contents, we don’t feel very well disposed to either the competition runner or the wine supplier – why should I let them make the choices for me on a purchase, when they obviously believe this stuff is acceptable and should be enjoyed as wine?

So, the upshot is that I’m left wondering if to ever bother again with an order from that supplier. I’m not going to identify the company at this stage, because I want to see what the rest of the case is like – I also think there’s another bottle of the vile stuff sitting in our wine rack, so we’ll see if there was something wrong with the first bottle.

The general point I’m making is that if you’re going to give away a freebie, make sure it’s something that will enhance your relationship with the recipient, not jeopardize it.

Find out more in Technology Marketing Tips.

If you’re in the IT business, in particular, that’s an important question.

Most marketers are keen to profile their prospects. For some products and services, these may be ‘people with a large lawn’, ‘married couples over retirement age’ or ’students living away from home’.

What about your targets? Perhaps ‘businesses running Microsoft Exchange’, ‘people running an e-commerce Web site that require more advanced visitor analysis’ or ‘telcos offering an increasing diversity of services’. In each case, you almost certainly have more than one type of person to talk to within your target groups – the techies and the business people. Those who bite first, and those who control the budget!

Be careful to say the right things to the right people

Whoever you’re talking to, they need to be excited by your copy – as someone in the advertising business once said, said ‘no-one was ever bored into buying anything’. And different people are respond to different things. Broadly, you should talk technology and technology benefits to technical people, and business benefits to the budget holders.

Look at it this way

You need to really put yourself in their shoes and understand what matters to them. As a contact of mine would say – where’s the pain? What are the pressures on the enterprise, department or even the marketplace as a whole?

Can you present a persuasive Return On Investment? Can you show how your product or service removes the pain?

It’s all about identifying with your audience.

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A version of this piece appeared on Ecademy today.

Thanks to Paul Silver for leading me through what feels like a maze of HTML and PHP.

There is a certain amount of satisfaction in hacking around these pages with just a text editor – I feel a purchase of Note Tab Pro coming on – when you’re a writer of words not code.

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