Marketing Articles About Quality Search Results
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- The Essence of Research to Your Copy Content. Internet users desire quality web content; approximately 1million sites surface and only a few are being spotted and read by prospective clients. Do you know the reason why? The primary reason is the ...
(04/10/09 09:01 AM)
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- ITSMA: Elevating Demand in a Crowded World . Generating demand has become a top priority for most companies in today’s slower environment. The most successful programs are much more targeted than in past years and favor quality over quantity. You're invited to join me at ITSMA's (IT Services...
(02/25/09 09:00 AM)
- To CEOs Cutting Budgets: "Cheap is Expensive" . What a dilemma! You are asked to reduce budget, cut costs, reduce expenses. However, you need your BEST to gain market share, compete for customer dollars and emerge from the recession as a winner. You need the best employees, technology, service, partners, vendors, and agencies so you can outsmart and out-execute competition. You need the best to drive demand when marketing rules are being reinvented by customer conversations. You need the best because, more than ever before, the quality of your inside is visible to the outside, and that market is judging with their wallets.You’ve been reading (perhaps experiencing) about recent company layoffs. I’m guessing most companies are making lay off decision based on roles the business needs, but also employee performance. It would seem obvious that every company wants to keep their best people. Although I’ve heard of companies that offer voluntary attrition with a healthy severance package. You know who takes that package? The best employees. What’s left at that company? Well…fewer of those best employees. Again, the quality of your inside is visible to your outside. The quality of a company is a function of the quality of people it keeps. At Bazaarvoice, we go to great lengths to hire the best employees, and it has made a significant difference to our performance, which is a function of the performance we deliver for our clients. But imagine if we didn’t hire the best. Imagine if we hired the cheapest employees, or had no discipline in our hiring...
(02/24/09 09:00 AM)
- Third-party credibility ain't what it used to be.
It used to be that we'd get the Good Housekeeping seal of approval and we'd dine out on that for months, even years to come. There was a time when the JD Power reports on "initial quality" (whatever the hell that really is) would be something that we could build an entire ad campaign around. Many of us can remember that industry certification, award or something similar, like ISO certification, that somehow gave us credibility beyond our wildest dreams. Those days are quickly showing up more in our corporate rear-view mirrors than in our forward-looking headlights. In fact, I predict that the day where we look on those awards with disdain, or at least indifference, is much closer than most companies would like to think. In fact, the shift from industrial and commercial third-party credibility, established back in the 40's & 50's, as the gold standard for credibility and validation to a much more personal, peer-based standard of validation is happing right under the noses of a majority of companies in all manner of industries.
It's also happening in the financial sector where you have a number of rating agencies that give AAA, AA and other ratings to financial institutions and commercial enterprises that are increasingly "bought and paid for" and "shopped around" rather than earned through objective review and stringent standards.
The currency of credibility in the marketplace has always been customer satisfaction, and customers have always voted with their dollars and their feet. However, the day is nearly here where those customers will completely usurp the power of the ratings firms, award givers and other long-held institutions of credibility.
In a world where customer trust in fleeting and costs real, tangible dollars (according to this excellent post by Ted Mininni), we all need to be on our toes when it comes to building, maintaining and growing the level of trust and credibility that we have with our customers. After all, it's their peer-to-peer third party rating of our company that will be the ultimate in credibility currency for the future.
(02/24/09 09:00 AM)
- To CEOs Cutting Budgets: "Cheap is Expensive" . What a dilemma! You are asked to reduce budget, cut costs, reduce expenses. However, you need your BEST to gain market share, compete for customer dollars and emerge from the recession as a winner. You need the best employees, technology, service, partners, vendors, and agencies so you can outsmart and out-execute competition. You need the best to drive demand when marketing rules are being reinvented by customer conversations. You need the best because, more than ever before, the quality of your inside is visible to the outside, and that market is judging with their wallets.You’ve been reading (perhaps experiencing) about recent company layoffs. I’m guessing most companies are making lay off decision based on roles the business needs, but also employee performance. It would seem obvious that every company wants to keep their best people. Although I’ve heard of companies that offer voluntary attrition with a healthy severance package. You know who takes that package? The best employees. What’s left at that company? Well…fewer of those best employees. Again, the quality of your inside is visible to your outside. The quality of a company is a function of the quality of people it keeps. At Bazaarvoice, we go to great lengths to hire the best employees, and it has made a significant difference to our performance, which is a function of the performance we deliver for our clients. But imagine if we didn’t hire the best. Imagine if we hired the cheapest employees, or had no discipline in our hiring...
(01/28/09 09:00 PM)
- Third-party credibility ain't what it used to be. It used to be that we'd get the Good Housekeeping seal of approval and we'd dine out on that for months, even years to come. There was a time when the JD Power reports on "initial quality" (whatever the hell that really is) would be something that we could build an entire ad campaign around. Many of us can remember that industry certification, award or something similar, like ISO certification, that somehow gave us credibility beyond our wildest dreams.
Those days are quickly showing up more in our corporate rear-view mirrors than in our forward-looking headlights. In fact, I predict that the day where we look on those awards with disdain, or at least indifference, is much closer than most companies would like to think. In fact, the shift from industrial and commercial third-party credibility, established back in the 40's & 50's, as the gold standard for credibility and validation to a much more personal, peer-based standard of validation is happing right under the noses of a majority of companies in all manner of industries.
It's also happening in the financial sector where you have a number of rating agencies that give AAA, AA and other ratings to financial institutions and commercial enterprises that are increasingly "bought and paid for" and "shopped around" rather than earned through objective review and stringent standards.
The currency of credibility in the marketplace has always been customer satisfaction, and customers have always voted with their dollars and their feet. However, the day is nearly here where those customers will completely usurp the power of the ratings firms, award givers and other long-held institutions of credibility.
In a world where customer trust in fleeting and costs real, tangible dollars (according to this excellent post by Ted Mininni), we all need to be on our toes when it comes to building, maintaining and growing the level of trust and credibility that we have with our customers. After all, it's their peer-to-peer third party rating of our company that will be the ultimate in credibility currency for the future.
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- How to LIVE RICH. A good friend and ex-Dell colleague passed away on Friday, April 25, 2008, after a courageous and inspiring battle with brain cancer. I want to celebrate and share the piece of his life I knew, and the words of wisdom he left for all of us. Two months after I joined Dell in March 1999, a curly-haired Harvard grad moved into the cube next door. Over the next seven years Rich and I worked together to help build Dell’s consumer eBusiness to a $3.5B business, and then on Dell’s CRM and segmentation strategy (he worked on corporate strategy while I worked in Consumer division). But what he worked on is not as important as HOW he accomplished his goals. Rich exemplified leadership. In fact, he had the rare quality of being a Level 5 Leader, as outlined by Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great. He excelled through confident humility amidst a (typical) corporate environment of politics, ego and alpha aggression. He always put decision in terms of what was right for the business, and helped others grow in the process. Everyone loved to work with Rich or for him. So many of us were awestruck at Rich’s knowledge and wisdom. Rich often put up ‘observations’ on his small whiteboard in his cube. One time he made the observation that time and quality of mission statement are inversely related – graphed on the board, the more time spent on the mission statement the less it resonates. So true. And so funny....
(04/29/08 09:01 PM)
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- Lovely E-Mail.
I get quite a few e-mails each day. Some are from people asking about my services, others want me to answer their questions, and still others write rather lengthy stories about various hardships that they want to overcome by getting grants that don't exist. Then there is the e-mail I received yesterday asking for a donation so that the sender could attend a conference in Las Vegas, which she can't pay for because she doesn't have any consulting work. Hmmm, I would like donations so that I too could go to Las Vegas.
But every so often I receive an e-mail that just plain makes me happy. I got one of those yesterday too. Here it is:
I am 30 yrs old with little to no experience in writing up
proposals. I am currently working in a middle management position in a
small company. I feel I have an idea that would greatly benefit the
company I am currently working for. After approaching one of the senior
management with it, he told me he liked it and to write up a proposal.I have been searching the internet for the past week and a half
attempting to gain insight and advice into how to create a quality
proposal. I am not the type of person how expects, or even wants, to
have someone else do my work for me. Most of the sites I found offered
to create a proposal for a fee. It is my belief that unless
circumstances require otherwise that a person should learn to do things
for themselves. It was a nice surprise to find on your site a starter
list of sorts that I could use to begin to make a proposal on my own.
Your "Proposal Preparation Checklist" and Proposal Pointers and
Pitfalls" are wonderful tools and I wanted to take a moment to thank you
for freely distributing them. It is a welcome relief when someone sets
forward information to allow people to empower themselves. The links
you have provided to other websites are also wonderful. Just skimming
over the Checklist and Pointers, I have already noticed some points I
would never have considered.So again, thank you so very much. I really appreciate the effort you
have put into your site and also the information you have offered freely.
What a beautifully-written thank-you note. And to boot, it expresses my own mantra -- "do your homework" -- just perfectly.
It's just so nice when something like this pops up in your mailbox!
(03/01/08 09:01 AM) - Lovely E-Mail.
I get quite a few e-mails each day. Some are from people asking about my services, others want me to answer their questions, and still others write rather lengthy stories about various hardships that they want to overcome by getting grants that don't exist. Then there is the e-mail I received yesterday asking for a donation so that the sender could attend a conference in Las Vegas, which she can't pay for because she doesn't have any consulting work. Hmmm, I would like donations so that I too could go to Las Vegas.
But every so often I receive an e-mail that just plain makes me happy. I got one of those yesterday too. Here it is:
I am 30 yrs old with little to no experience in writing up
proposals. I am currently working in a middle management position in a
small company. I feel I have an idea that would greatly benefit the
company I am currently working for. After approaching one of the senior
management with it, he told me he liked it and to write up a proposal.I have been searching the internet for the past week and a half
attempting to gain insight and advice into how to create a quality
proposal. I am not the type of person how expects, or even wants, to
have someone else do my work for me. Most of the sites I found offered
to create a proposal for a fee. It is my belief that unless
circumstances require otherwise that a person should learn to do things
for themselves. It was a nice surprise to find on your site a starter
list of sorts that I could use to begin to make a proposal on my own.
Your "Proposal Preparation Checklist" and Proposal Pointers and
Pitfalls" are wonderful tools and I wanted to take a moment to thank you
for freely distributing them. It is a welcome relief when someone sets
forward information to allow people to empower themselves. The links
you have provided to other websites are also wonderful. Just skimming
over the Checklist and Pointers, I have already noticed some points I
would never have considered.So again, thank you so very much. I really appreciate the effort you
have put into your site and also the information you have offered freely.
What a beautifully-written thank-you note. And to boot, it expresses my own mantra -- "do your homework" -- just perfectly.
It's just so nice when something like this pops up in your mailbox!
(02/21/08 09:01 PM) - Lovely E-Mail.
I get quite a few e-mails each day. Some are from people asking about my services, others want me to answer their questions, and still others write rather lengthy stories about various hardships that they want to overcome by getting grants that don't exist. Then there is the e-mail I received yesterday asking for a donation so that the sender could attend a conference in Las Vegas, which she can't pay for because she doesn't have any consulting work. Hmmm, I would like donations so that I too could go to Las Vegas.
But every so often I receive an e-mail that just plain makes me happy. I got one of those yesterday too. Here it is:
I am 30 yrs old with little to no experience in writing up
proposals. I am currently working in a middle management position in a
small company. I feel I have an idea that would greatly benefit the
company I am currently working for. After approaching one of the senior
management with it, he told me he liked it and to write up a proposal.I have been searching the internet for the past week and a half
attempting to gain insight and advice into how to create a quality
proposal. I am not the type of person how expects, or even wants, to
have someone else do my work for me. Most of the sites I found offered
to create a proposal for a fee. It is my belief that unless
circumstances require otherwise that a person should learn to do things
for themselves. It was a nice surprise to find on your site a starter
list of sorts that I could use to begin to make a proposal on my own.
Your "Proposal Preparation Checklist" and Proposal Pointers and
Pitfalls" are wonderful tools and I wanted to take a moment to thank you
for freely distributing them. It is a welcome relief when someone sets
forward information to allow people to empower themselves. The links
you have provided to other websites are also wonderful. Just skimming
over the Checklist and Pointers, I have already noticed some points I
would never have considered.So again, thank you so very much. I really appreciate the effort you
have put into your site and also the information you have offered freely.
What a beautifully-written thank-you note. And to boot, it expresses my own mantra -- "do your homework" -- just perfectly.
It's just so nice when something like this pops up in your mailbox!
(02/20/08 09:01 AM) - 20 Articles on Social Commerce & Word of Mouth. I haven't kept up the pace of posts here compared to previous years. Part of this is because it's been an exciting, busy year. But the other cause is my writing time is fractured between this Decker Marketing blog, our company blog (Bazaarblog) and writing other articles / columns. So, I thought I'd point you to articles I wrote elsewhere over the past year or so that you might find interesting... Some of my columns on iMedia Connection: The Big Idea Behind Social Commerce How to Market Social Media to Execs Get Web Analysis Fundamentals Right Positives About Negative Product Reviews Other articles / interviews: Word of Mouth and Your Business: Bridge the Gap Bazaarvoice's Sam Decker on Fueling WOM Implementation Social Commerce Interview with Sam Decker Sam Decker on Customer Centricity and Culture Selected blog entries from Bazaarblog: Why Customers Write Reviews Can Customers Trust Online Reviews? The NPV of Reviews 16 Insights from Ted Leonsis (AOL) Summary of Answers for "What about Negative Reviews?" New Frame of Reference: Value is in the Quality of Co-Creation 18 Customer-Created Marketing & Merchandising Tactics 10 Clues You have a Marketing ROI Culture "Operationalize" Customer Centricity A Story of Customer Centricity: Discovering Your Customerrs' Perspective Defining Social Commerce The "Waggle Dance" and 7 Steps to Reaching Customer Centricity
(12/26/07 09:01 PM)
- Seattle Networking Takes A Turn for the Better. We have lots of great networking happening in the Northwest. I was appreciative of a new effort, though, to bring quality and thoughtfulness to a social networking mixer - like the one I attended a couple of weeks ago. It...
(12/11/07 09:01 PM)
- Be Masters of Reality. At last week's Forrester Consumer Forum, Richard Edelman suggested today's PR has to be 'masters of reality' rather than focus on spin and hype. This was underscored by his tagline, "Be it. Don't Buy it." I think that's a great mission for marketers in general. In a world of higher transparency the best products and companies will succeed. The true reflection of their quality and character will be amplified. As masters of reality we will realize that products need to be great, word of mouth follows, and marketers (as masters of reality) will leverage the truth.
(10/14/07 09:00 PM)
- Innovate, Create, and Re-create. Michael Port blogged about my son, Leon, who recently went from being a professional athlete to a corporate gig. Michael's right, I AM a proud parent, and really impressed with the quality of the article written by Brian Compton of...
(10/12/07 09:01 AM)
- JibJab's "Starring You" Now Live. JibJab has finally launched its Starring You series, where you can upload your head into a JibJab animated video (you can see me and my wife shaking it above). This an example of giving average people the tools to create high-quality content (see previous post). I broke the Starring You story a month ago in one of my Disruptors videos....
(08/16/07 09:00 PM)
- Universal Music Tests the DRM-Free Waters. DRM Elimination Crew Suit Originally uploaded by GregoryH The future of digital-rights management (DRM) took another blow, as Universal Music tests the effects of selling its music catalog in the unrestricted MP3 format. The good news is that it looks like it will sell its MP3s at the regular 99-cent price per song (instead of charging more for the lower-quality MP3 format, as EMI is wrongheadedly attempting to do). But Universal Music is playing its own games with this move by making its MP3 catalog available to every online music retailer except iTunes. That's just it's way of trying to shake Apple's hold on the digital music market. Universal MP3s bought from Amazon or Rhapsody will play on your iPod, but if you buy the same songs from iTunes, they will be wrapped in Apple's DRM software. This is doubly ironic, given Steve Jobs' public stance against DRM. But he cannot take the DRM off of Universal's songs sold on iTunes. Only Universal can. And since Universal is the largest music label, by keeping iTunes out of the MP3 camp for now, it might gain some leverage at the bargaining table with Apple. Or it might just piss off Steve Jobs, which is never a smart thing to do. (In other Universal Music news, video-sharing site Veoh filed a preemptive lawsuit against Universal before the music giant could sue Veoh for abetting copyright infringement by its video-uploading members. First YouTube (with Viacom), and now Veoh. It won't be long before...
(08/10/07 09:01 AM)
- The Last Wall is About to Fall at the NYT. Donovan Building Demolition Originally uploaded by Allan M Some newspapers have tried stubbornly to resist giving away their content for free on the Web. But the New York Times is finally about to give up the ship, according to the New York Post. It already gives away most of its stories for free online—all except select Op-Ed pieces on TimesSelect. In an age of seemingly unchecked growth in online ads, subscription walls don't make a lot of sense. And with Rupert Murdoch thinking about taking down the subscription wall at WSJ.com, the Times would not be wise to become the last holdout. Scott Karp explains the disruption occurring in the media world:The new economics of media make charging for content nearly impossible because there is always someone else producing similar content for free — even if the free content isn’t “as good as” the paid content by some meaningful metric, it doesn’t matter because there’s so much content of at least proximate quality that the paid content provider has virtually no pricing power.News and commentary are no longer a scarce commodity....
(08/07/07 09:00 PM)
- Picnik; The Slickest Pic App Out There. Temps of the World Unite Originally uploaded by Erick Schonfeld Yesterday, Jonathan Sposato, the CEO of Picnik.com, came by my office to show me the slickest Webtop application I’ve seen in a while. It’s a fully-featured picture editing app that blows away iPhoto in many respects and is completely browser-based. Picnik can ingest digital photos from your computer hard drive or from various photo-sharing services, including Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket, and Google’s Picassa. Once you pick a picture, you can rotate, crop, zoom in and out, remove red-eye, resize, and add tons of effects from heat maps to sepia tones to doodles to borders. What is impressive is that it does all of this faster than a desktop application like iPhoto. For instance, it took me literally two minutes to create the image above from this image I had previously put up on Flickr. The breadth and quality of features on Picnik fall somewhere between iPhoto and Photoshop. Sposato is the programming whiz who managed the team that built the Halo videogame for the first Xbox. Then he created a startup called Phatbits which was bought by Google and became Google Gadgets. Picnik is free and has attracted about 300,000 users. Sposato plans to try to upsell members to a premium version to get access to some of the fancier effects that are now free in the beta version of the site (like heat maps and doodling). It's not clear how many people will end up paying for such extras, especially...
(07/12/07 09:01 AM)
- Why Facebook will Network Business Users. Facebook launched its open platform in late May, preceded and followed by a lot of buzz. As a (late) early adopter, I launched a profile several weeks ago. I uploaded my contacts and found many professional friends were already on Facebook. People who joined after me did the same thing, and added me as a friend. Today I have 140 friends on Facebook, and growing. I’ve told my team to get on Facebook and introduced colleagues to Facebook. I suppose I’m an evangelist right now, encouraging people to get on Facebook to, if nothing else, experience a turning point in social networking. In the ‘early days’ I was on Ryze, Orkut and eCademy, but I wasn’t very active. Several years ago, I got on LinkedIn. Its superior interface and quality of professional members hooked me. I’ve focused my time there to reconnect with colleagues, find employees, and answer questions. I’ve amassed hundreds of (mostly relevant) contacts. LinkedIn is a superior tool for finding people with relevant business connections or experiences. Now that Facebook is open, how will the landscape of these online networks be affected? For professionals on both networks, which will garner more care and feeding? How will each network evolve, especially after LinkedIn’s announcement of opening its platform to application developers? My prediction is LinkedIn will remain as a business network. It is suited to accomplish tasks: hire people, get answers, find experts/contractors and maintain professional contacts. At the same time, despite its heritage being rooted in fun...
(07/11/07 09:01 PM)
- How should Chipotle Invest $.26 per Burrito?. I was intrigued by an article in this week’s BusinessWeek regarding Chipotle’s incredible growth (27% YOY last quarter), despite a relatively small advertising budget. McDonald’s spends $820M+/yr in marketing on $21.5B revenue…4% of revenue. Chipotle spends $4.5M on $882M revenue…less than 1% of revenue. I did the math... if you assume the average meal is $8 (with drink, maybe chips), then Chipotle is serving over 110 million burritos (or burrito bowls, as I prefer) per year. If they decided to spend as much as their McDonald’s parent and competitors (4% of revenue), they could spend an additional $29M in marketing. That’s an extra $.26/burrito they could spend on advertising. Or perhaps they should spend it on something else? I’m not suggesting they spend this money. They are growing 26% YOY and pulling in $41M in net income. They are not ‘growth challenged’. More importantly is the positive business results growing on such a small marketing budget? How does Chipotle do it? They create a great atmosphere, built an eco-friendly company, and invest in great food that is served fast. I eat there once a week -- they give me more food than should fit in my stomach for a decent price, and it comes nowhere near the poor quality of first-frozen fast food. As growth slows Chipotle will face the pressures of a public company, typically to reduce costs. Bad idea…see my post on “Marginalizing Quality”. Or, ironically, analysts may ask for them to spend more on advertising. This is...
(03/05/07 09:00 PM)
- Good vs. Worthwhile. I'd like to elaborate on this morning's post on Worthwhile brands, ask a lot of questions, and then open this up for discussion. My earlier post discussed some initial ideas for defining a worthwhile brand: does it measurably improve quality...
(12/16/06 09:00 AM)
- Valuing Your Off Selling Time. Quality of life is important as the holidays are upon us. Getting things done - and working smarter is a key to success - so that one can participate in fun, after hours events. For me, shopping during the hectic...
(12/12/06 08:47 AM)
- My Fight Against Inappropriate Ads. "I've used advertising at this site since its inception. The income keeps me motivated to provide quality content. I experiment with different ad formats from time-to-time, but I try to keep them as innocuous as possible. My greater concern is screening inappropriate advertisers. Because the words 'get rich' are in the name of the site, Google Adsense frequently sticks 'get rich quick' ads in my articles. I hate this."
(12/12/06 08:04 AM)
- Sundays Contract Management News and Comment (27th August 2006).
Nuñez's wife got AQMD contract (Los Angeles Daily News)
SACRAMENTO - The South Coast Air Quality Management District awarded a $125,000 consulting contract to the wife of Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez at the same time the district was seeking legislation to cut train engine emissions.
Contract Given To Assembly Speaker's Wife (CBS ...
(08/27/06 09:03 AM)
- Sponsoring B2B email newsletters. Globalspec's newsletter, Marketing Maven, posts a e-marketing 101 article titled What to Know About Sponsoring e-Newsletters that caught my attention. I don't think the subject gets talked about very much. Ultimately, she is making a case for sponsoring Globalspec's industry-specific newsletters.
"A compelling case exists for suppliers and manufacturers to add sponsorship of e-newsletters to their marketing mix. The benefits of the right sponsorship include:"
- Brand visibility
- Frequency
- Low barrier to entry
- Audience
- Ability to test"
Okay, the Maven is right on these (and she explains more for each bullet), but there are two other issues that come to my mind:
1. Cost. Of course.
Globalspec has always positioned itself as costing about as much for a one year listing as a single full page ad in a trade publication (around $15K). Their newsletter sponsorships (three different positions available) are about $2,500 per issue. This was true regardless of the audience size (30K or 70K), but is on par with pricing I've seen with trade publications.
This expense could be acceptable for an advertiser with a large budget trying to round out their exposure triangle. For a partial-page advertiser like myself, this is a big price to pay for a extremely fleeting exposure. But that leads to my second point.
2. Effectiveness
Just how fast do people scan e-newsletters? Fast. The quality of content and the format is going to effect how the user reads the newsletter, but the process is fast nonetheless. While there is a 'low barrier to entry' as the Maven says, and it sounds good to get your promotion in front of 70K folks at one shot, I don't think that you can just throw money and a simple ad/listing and expect results. Particular care needs to be placed on what your ad says and looks like, and how it fits in the newsletter. Essentially, the same due-diligence should be applied as to a print ad in order to be effective.
So, in summary, I think e-newsletter sponsorship works when:- It is a smaller part of an overall marketing program
- The newsletter format makes the sponsorship likely to be noticed
- The advertiser prepares content that gets noticed
- Sponsors should take advantage of the points the Maven calls out
- Tuesdays Contract Management News and Comment (22nd August 2006).
Inaugural Call for Papers: The W. Gregor Macfarlan Excellence in Contract Management Research and Writing Program (PR Newswire via Yahoo! Finance)
The National Contract Management Association is pleased to invite the submission of high-quality papers in the inaugural solicitation for the W. Gregor Macfarlan Excellence in Contract Management Research and ...
(08/22/06 09:01 AM)
- What he said--review of online directories. Robert J. (no relation!) just found my blog and left an interesting comment on my last post. In it he left a link to an article called:
Industrial Search Engine Marketing - Industrial Search Engines and Directories.
The author, Mark Forst, offers to "review the major industrial search engines and directories to provide some of my personal experiences and opinions on their quality." He goes on to give pretty fair assessments of ThomasNet, GlobalSpec, KellySearch, and some others. He errs on the side of being polite, but is more judgmental about cost. Oh, and he does name prices, in case you didn't know how much these services can cost.
Mark, if you keep writing handy articles like this, you'll put B2Blog out of business :-) (07/29/06 02:28 PM) - Guess what is the top B2B marketing tool?. Us poor B2B marketers...the top three things buyers look for in a product aren't under our direct control...price, service, quality. We can add sizzle to these, but ultimately, the buyer will discern the truth.
So what is our #1 marketing tool? Amazingly it is something we've only had for ten years...our websites. Results of a user survey by ThomasNet were summed this way:"Of course, competitive pricing, good customer service and high quality are a given, but the next single most important thing buyers mentioned is a detailed, user-friendly Web site. "
The article has lots of other handy tidbits from the survey:
Comments by users like this:
"Provide enough information within their Web site for me to make an educated decision-? comparative product details, listed prices, and list of distributors that I can purchase from if they don't sell direct."
This factual gem:
36% of the time users will seek out new suppliers for a new purchase.
Look at the top two of '10 Things Buyers Look For In a New Supplier'
1. Easy-to-navigate Web sites with accurate, detailed product and pricing information
2. Companies that are easy to find and have a strong Web presence
This shouldn't really be news to us B2B marketers...but after ten years, we may have grown complacent about our websites. From the details of this survey, I say our target audience has become even more discerning and faster to pass on poor (to them) websites. We can't become complacent!
Read more: It's Not Who You Know. It's Who Knows You (07/29/06 02:28 PM) - Is CPA helpful to B2B AdSense campaigns?. Perhaps you've heard of Google's mantra, "do no evil". I was concerned that their going-public would shift the focus of their company towards profiteering, if not evil. As it turns out, they seem to have been too clumsy (and blessed by Wall Street) to be digging for profits.
Staying squarely in the 'no evil' category, the big story this week is that they are testing AdSense payment based on "Cost per action", or CPA. A click-thru would not be enough, the visitor would have to 'convert', or achieve a goal on the website. Advertisers using this model would only pay for traffic that matters, and risk of click-fraud (i.e. evil) would go away. For the sites hosting the ad, a potentially higher pay-off should offset their PPC income.
This sounds great, but there are questions that seem hard to resolve, especially for advertisers like me (which is maybe why Google is only 'testing' CPA).
The obvious technicality is that for a lot of smaller & B2B businesses, the most common 'action' coming from their website is a phone call. And these are the people who also are paying much more per-click in their current PPC campaigns. Which means they have a lot more at risk for click-fraud yet cannot rely on CPA to help due to the untraceable phone call.
The other problem is simply numbers. AdSense needs thousands of impressions just to create PPC activity worth mentioning. And of those clicks, only another 1-2% are going to convert. And because that conversion for small or B2B businesses is not a sale, we aren't going to want to pay a high bounty for 'just a lead' (unless quality can be determined).
Russ Perkins, at InfoCommerce Group, points out a deeper issue in this week's newsletter, titled Does CPA Add Up To Trouble? that this would once-again upset the apple cart regarding the job of advertisers and the publishers carrying the AdSense ads:"If CPA takes off with advertisers, and I think it will, we have to watch it closely. If it remains limited to publishers getting paid (hopefully a lot) for generating hard sales leads, that's one thing, and a number of us could do quite well in this environment. If it morphs (as I predict it will) to advertisers demanding to pay only when they make a sale, we as an industry have to draw the line. The purpose of advertising is to stimulate interest, not guarantee profits."
While the CPA program may flourish with e-commerce businesses, I don't see it gaining a foothold in the B2B sphere.
In addition, I will go one further: As B2B advertisers look closer at their spending and conversion rates with AdSense (as compared to AdWords), they will start to pull out of AdSense.
The next smart place to try is Google's Site Targeting, which is paid on a CPM basis, but allows you to choose what sites to run your ad. That kind of human selection should provide a greater chance of clicks and conversions. (07/29/06 02:28 PM) - Don't miss Candlebox.... I went to see Candlebox last night in Baltimore (at Rams Head Live) - the show was AMAZING! They have about two months left on their tour, check them out if you can. Here are some pictures that I took with my camera phone... not the greatest quality, but you get the idea. The good news is that they are working on a new record!...
(07/29/06 02:28 PM)
