Versus TV trailer

Versus Television ran this nice trailer during the 2010 Tour de France, highlighting the power of sports and competition as a vital element of human life. It makes its point well.

You can see a full length (2:16) version here

Nike World Cup

In a similar vein, Nike ran this outstanding ad just ahead of the 2010 World Cup. The storytelling is superb, and I can only imagine what kind of a budget was behind this effort:

Apple Facetime

Apple created this powerful ad to highlight the new Facetime feature in the iPhone 4. I really like how it feels. It makes me want to use the feature, which is the mark of a great commercial.

Livestrong/Nike “Engine”

Lance Armstrong’s new ad for Livestrong Foundation and Nike does an excellent job of creating emotion with what would normally be just a jumble of background noise. Works beautifully in this context.

Apple Think Different ad

When Steve Jobs regained the helm of Apple, he introduced this new message to remind people of what Apple represented. Great way to apply the emotion of a brand. Not everyone “gets” this message, and that’s the way it should be. Only those who get it will connect with the brand, and they will be loyal.

McDonald’s Larry Bird vs. Michael Jordan

Okay, it doesn’t have quite the same emotional power, and falls short of some of the great McDonald’s commercials from the 80’s, but not a bad effort to help the brand ward off its negative perception as a junk food provider and attempt to relate to the world of athletics.

What I particularly like is how the flow of it, despite being a single column, is organic. The eye keeps being surprised by new touches like a bar chart following a pie chart (as compared to two identical styles), images moving from one side to the other, icons like checkmarks next to bullet points and so on. Engaging enough that you want to read all the way down to the bottom. The colors are coordinated with those of the brand, and are always legible where they need to be.

Has just the right number of sections with calls to action where they make the most sense — not too many of them. I may not agree with the use of different colored buttons, but given the context it makes sense. The yellow one inside the “Unlimit Yourself” box is related to sales and the other is less self-serving. There’s an odd difference in spacing between the checkmarks in the top section and those inside the “Unlimit Yourself” box, but that’s nitpicking.

My biggest complaint is that the subject line is a bit misleading. It does indicate that this is a newsletter, but suggest there are “Survey ideas for your next event.” While that’s true to an extent, the three little bullet points they offer in the newsletter are not exactly what I would hail as ideas. I expected something more comprehensive.

Overall a good job. Here’s what it looks like:

FourSquare uses a concept of having people check into places they visit, and the one who visits most often is declared the “Mayor” of that facility. The Cactus Club clearly understands the power of talking directly with the people who use that social media environment, sending me the message simply because I was within walking distance of a Cactus Club location. Perfect! I had long been advocating that restaurants use the power of Mayorship for marketing, so I was thrilled to see that the Cactus Club was doing something with this.

The most common argument I hear about using social media is that the audience is relatively small, compared to such things as flyer drops into the community or running an ad. Yes, it’s true that there’s only one Mayor per establishment, and there may only be a few thousand FourSquare members in your city, with only a few hundred potentially in your community. So what? These are highly targeted people. They fight over becoming Mayor! When you lose a Mayorship because someone else passes you in visits, it’s a big deal for FourSquare users. Any business can gain repeat visits, and by definition, additional sales, by using this strategy. I believe that because of the nature of foodservice, restaurants can gain more than most other retail services.

The Cactus Club was offering a free gift card for whoever was mayor on a particular day, at a particular time. That’s extremely powerful, and a brilliant example of using social media marketing. I hope this is only the start of better use of social media.

Other restaurants are also starting to “get it” when it comes to the power of social media.

Morton’s gets it, too

Roger Drake, senior VP of the Morton’s steakhouse chain, explained that they make significant use of social media. One strategy they’ve applied with great success is bringing in celebrity servers for fund raising, then using Twitter to tweet their appearance. Followers on Twitter receive “inside” information that an NBA star or other celebrity will be at Morton’s, creating a buzz about the event.

Morton’s also offers Twitter followers bar bites in the bar. They encourage people to tweet from the event, to create powerful word of mouth awareness. They hold special events called “Burgers for Bloggers” where they serve mini Prime Cheeseburgers. This is great stuff!

They also use Facebook effectively. For Valentine’s Day, they asked guests on Facebook to send photos of their Valentine’s Day experience at Morton’s. “We got more than 50 photos,” said Roger. One couple got engaged in the restaurant, and this was mentioned on their Facebook page, providing powerful emotional appeal and creating a strong connection with fans. For Mother’s Day, they will have people go to the Morton’s Facebook page to post their favorite Mother’s Day Morton’s dinner photos.

It’s about relationships

When using social media, don’t spam people. Don’t think of it as a way to stream out one-way promotional messages. Use it to create relationships. Seek out the people who post frequently on your Facebook page, and offer them special incentives. You can even make them administrators of your page, an unpaid task that can have huge rewards because these are among your most faithful guests and their voice can serve more effectively than anything you say. With Twitter you can announce special spur-of-the-moment offers, perhaps a discounted appetizer or beverage special. Have your guests mention a phrase you use in a Tweet to get special treatment, and they’ll love you for it, because you’ll be making them feel special and creating that dynamic two-way relationship.

Starbucks applied a FourSquare strategy in which they offered the mayor of any location $1 off any of their new anyway-you-like-it Frappuccino. It was a reasonable strategy in some ways, but the $1 wasn’t a big enough draw, in my view, to be significant. There’s only one mayor of any location at any given time, so it’s not like you’re giving away the keys to the store by making the offer more meaningful. A screen shot of the coupon is shown at right.

Yes, Facebook and Twitter require an ongoing, consistent effort to be successful. That’s another thing often mentioned as a negative. Why would that be that any different from any other daily task, assigned just as you assign a day chef to start your food preparation? Approached with the mindset that this is a long-term process, a consistent effort to connect with people around you, social media will have a strong impact on your sales.

Some people might think of it as a book for advertising professionals, because John comes from an agency background. But it’s really just a book for anyone who ever makes any kind of presentation — business or otherwise. This common-sense view of the art of presentations focuses on how every presentation is essentially a conversation. It doesn’t matter whether your audience consists of one person or a thousand. Whether you’re presenting an idea, proposal, or your potential as a great employee, you’ll benefit from this viewpoint.

John gives the example of a meeting with Steve Jobs of Apple Computer, contrasting a briefing by Steve with an earlier one by two senior Apple marketing executives. The account is humorous and insightful. After the two executives attempted to bore the agency team to death with a bad, rambling Powerpoint presentation, Steve used a marker pen on a whiteboard to give an unforgettable, highly focused presentation that cut to the heart of the problem. He was transparent, clear and passionate. This is the essence of a great presentation!

Think of every ad, every brochure, and every website you create as a presentation. Then take it further and think of them as part of a conversation you’re creating with potential customers. What are the questions they’re asking when they begin to engage with the content? What do they need to know? What are their dreams? What’s their vision? What does a successful outcome look like?

Imagine yourself face to face with each one of them. How would the conversation flow? How would you make the same pitch if sitting across from them in your local coffee shop?

I’ve enjoyed a pretty good track record in new business presentations, with more than 80% of all my presentations leading to a business relationship. This success rate has been the result of having great mentors when I was first getting started, people who were honest and firm in forcing me to evaluate what I was doing from the customer’s perspective. It has also been the result, in many cases, of having a great team around me who did the rest of the work, from researching information I needed to building relationships with the prospective client. But I’ve noticed that one element has been consistently important: caring about the other party. You have to listen, really listen, to what the other person is saying. If you don’t, then nothing you say will be relevant.

I recall one presentation made after I started my young ad agency when I was just 24 years of age. The prospective client had already been pitched by four large agencies who wanted the account. Here I was, young and inexperienced, though passionate about what I could do with my small but talented team. I asked the company’s marketing team what they wanted to achieve, what their goals were and how they saw their business five years down the road. I mostly just listened, yet it was a conversation. A few minutes into the pitch, the company president stopped me and said something I’ll never forget. He explained that every other agency had come in and shown a bunch of work and talked and talked endlessly about what they could do. They were pitching without understanding. I was the first person who had even asked any of these questions. He awarded me the account on the spot.

Perfect Pitch is an excellent book and a worthwhile read for anyone, especially people who have to pitch new business. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. The heart of the message is to think of your presentation as a conversation.

The response in the SEO community has been to tell web designers to modify the links used on each page in your site, often to extremes. For example, Scott Smigler says we should remove site-wide navigation on sections like product listings.

This is where I get upset.

Web site design is first and foremost about usability. If people get frustrated with navigation and their ability to quickly get to the information they want, all the SEO tweaking in the world won’t help your site.

Navigation is a very sensitive issue. You can’t remove site-wide navigation from any page on your site, regardless of how important you think that might be for search engine optimization. This navigation acts as a road map, guiding people through the site. It must be consistent at all times. There is no other option! Studies since the web began have pointed out the importance of consistent site-wide navigation in user satisfaction. Even as people have become more familiar with the web and have taken some things for granted, this dependence on consistent navigation has, if anything, become even more critical. Competitor’s web sites are just a mouse click away. You can’t afford to frustrate or annoy your visitors.

To be fair to Scott, whom I respect, he does say that it might not work. I’ll go further than that and say this solution can’t work. It’s so bad that it has no place on the list.

I’ve encountered this kind of aggressive off-the-hip tactic before, and it was ugly. When a Google loophole allowed page ranking to be increased by using keywords in image file names as well as “alt” tags, an SEO consulting firm talked one of my clients into letting them optimize the website. The result was an unholy mess, in which every image file name and “alt” tag became a long, cryptic flow of keywords. Not only was it unmanageable from a web design standpoint, but it was unusable for visually impaired people. As they would mouse around any page on the 1100-page site using the aural navigation tools, they would hear long nonsense sequences of hyphenated words that made no sense at all. Changing this later took dozens of hours of unnecessary work.

Allowing an SEO tactic like this to be employed at the expense of navigation reality is no different from people who ignore other realities of marketing communication. I recall one young art director showing me a brochure he had created. He was sure it would win awards, because it was so “creative.” Unfortunately, it ignored the realities of usability. The entire brochure was printed with nothing more than high gloss varnish on a solid black background. To read any of the copy, you had to hold the pages just so in the light, moving the paper so that each new line would catch the light. I asked him, “How many prospective customers do you think will take the time and effort to read this?” He hadn’t thought about it that way.

SEO is a science, and deserves respect from the marketing community. At the same time, we need to be careful to understand that online communication is a symbiotic relationship between a number of expert elements. SEO is only one of them. Another element is usability and navigation. Equally important are graphic design and the science of eye flow. Still another is copywriting. We should never take any one of those elements by itself and place it on a pedestal, looking down on all the others. You can’t sacrifice any one of them and still have an effective end result.

Problems exist in SEO and we’ll have more of them down the road. It’s nasty out there, with unscrupulous players making things more challenging for everyone else as the search engines try to maintain order. But sudden, extreme solutions cause more harm than good. Clients will hear about them and make demands that end up being unreasonable and unworkable. Let’s have clear, meaningful dialog with all the parties to make sure that we build truly successful web sites for our clients.

I love how cleverly the Facebook information was used. You see images from the profile dimmed behind the water, and even the use of the person’s name in an obituary. At the end is a posting showing that the position they held at work is now vacant, with the company seeking to have it filled. Really brilliant stuff. Not overplayed or heavy-handed, but just right.

You can see what the experience looked like for one user, Nick O’Neill, right here.

This promotion was dreamed up by Campfire, with the actual code and strategy developed by Your Majesty and The Advanced Guard. Kudos to everyone involved.

Another attempt to use this approach was the promotion by 20th Century Fox on the rollout of the 10th anniversary edition of the cult classic film “Fight Club.” In this case, Facebook profile information was accessed to produce a trailer. It was ridiculously slow and not nearly as well made.

This brings me to the point of the article. Along with the power of social media to create amazingly effective stuff come several big challenges. These aren’t new, but in the frenzied excitement of trying to push the bleeding edge (sorry) of marketing, many people are forgetting to address these basic foundational issues.

Getting in the front door

Every savvy Internet user is well aware of privacy and guards it well. For any social media tool to play down these concerns would be suicide (and usually illegal), so Facebook asks for permission before an application like these can access your profile.

Obviously, only those who are totally blown away by your creative will be interested in granting such access. But how will they know that it will be good? Most people won’t have a clue what your Facebook Connect app is going to do. As a result, they aren’t going to grant access. Nobody wants to have an application post something stupid or annoying on their public profile!

This creates a whole new element of complexity for those who produce the campaign. It’s no longer enough to simply express excitement and hope people will come along with you. It’s absolutely critical to tell them what they’ll experience ahead of time. You have to show what a typical Facebook wall posting looks like, tell them why your application is worth loading, and find ways to add extra value to the equation.

I think the Discovery Channel promo was quite sensitive. The Facebook postings were smart enough that they wouldn’t serve as an embarrassment to anyone.

Adding value

People will add your app if there is sufficient value for them. If you’re a major coffee company and want people to post their favorite drink to their profile, fine. But what’s the point, really? What’s in it for them? Why not raise the bar by giving them a free beverage each time they do so? Now you’ve got a true partnership and that’s what social media marketing is all about.

I have two iPhone apps which represent opposite sides of this reality. One lets me track my running or cycling workouts using the built-in GPS, and posts the results to my FB profile and wall. It’s very cool because the social media posts it creates are subtle, not too promotional or “pushy” in style. When people click the link in the post they can see the details of my workout, including an actual GPS track and stats. This is useful! My friends can compare their results against mine. These guys get what social media is all about, letting me become a “trust agent” as Chris Brogan calls those who influence through their posts. The other app is nicely designed and lets me design and track my gym workouts. But these guys don’t get social media. The postings the app creates are purely promotional. The links in the posts are only designed to sell the product itself to others, with no “added value” for my friends. They can’t see any further info about my workouts. So what’s the point? I’m embarrassed about what it posts to Facebook and am feeling great pressure to turn that posting feature off. (Update: I did give in to embarrassment and turned off that feature. My desire when I let apps post info is to add value through those posts, not to boast about my workouts)

No matter how creative your promotion, if it’s self-serving and offers no real value to those you’re trying to reach, they won’t bother with it and all your effort will be wasted. So spend time figuring out what will make it useful for those who see the postings.

In the case of Discovery’s Frenzied Waters campaign, the value was inherent in the video production itself.

Load time

Another factor with apps like these is load time. Some, like the Fight Club promo, simply take too long to load. People are busier than ever, trying to fit more stuff into the same 24 hour days we’ve had since the first loin cloth was sewn from fig leaves. If your app doesn’t load in 8 seconds, you’re toast. Women are even more impatient than men when it comes to online activities. Their timeout ratio is 3:1 compared to men, so you better plan on a load time of 3 seconds if you don’t want to lose huge percentages of the female demographic.

The Discovery campaign loaded very quickly, just 3 seconds, while the Fight Club promo took over a minute, rendering it essentially useless.

Regardless of how effectively your creative applies the powerful tools available through social media, you better make sure it meets the real-world people tests or it will fall flat on its Facebook.

Advertising has gone through many transitions during the four decades since the ground breaking creative headline of the “Lemon” ad changed marketing communications forever. There were periods when many ads had no headline at all, and times when headlines were so long they took up more space than the rest of the ad. In an effort to move away from what might be seen as ‘too traditional,’ it seems that many copywriters have forgotten the value of the headline.

Research has found that the headline represents 84% of the effectiveness of any communication. 84 out of every 100 people who read an ad, web page or E-mail message will do so only if the headline or subject line does its job. No doubt some people will say, “But what about [insert dramatic exception here]?” Of course there are exceptions. There are no hard rules in advertising. But there are patterns and realities of human behavior. Research is useful for finding out what is most likely to be effective.

I’ve seen many A/B tests where one headline would pull far better than another, when everything else about the message was the same. In one dramatic case, changing a single word in the headline drew four times as many responses. Headlines matter.

So, if the headline is as important as all that, it makes sense that copywriters should spend time on it. Far too many don’t give it enough thought. And far too many clients don’t think they should. In fact, you should actually spend four times as long writing the headline as the rest of the copy!

A great headline is short, concise, and powerful. But it rarely starts that way. It takes time to cut away and edit and painstakingly reshape until you have something that can’t be reduced any further without changing the message.

Carmine Gallo, in his excellent book “The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs,” writes that the best headlines need to be short enough to fit into the 140-character limit of a Twitter post (known as a “Tweet”). It’s good advice. Twitter is an excellent tool for copywriters. It forces you to think in short sentences, compelling you to write copy that does the most with the least.

Gallo goes on to illustrate his point with real examples from Apple:

• MacBook Air. The world’s thinnest laptop. (42 characters)
• The iPod. 1,000 songs in your pocket. (37 characters)
• Apple reinvents the phone. (26 characters)
• The industry’s greenest notebooks. (34 characters)
• iPhone 3G. Twice as fast at half the price. (43 characters)

You might think that these apply well to Powerpoint, but won’t prove as creative or effective as the headline of an ad or E-mail message. Not so. Apple actually ran these same headlines in all their communication channels, and even used them in interviews. They appeared on their website as the feature headlines found on the home page, in the subject lines of their E-mail promotions, in press releases and in their magazine ads.

The media found they couldn’t write more effective versions. This meant that editorial coverage on these product announcements ran with exactly the same headlines. When Apple introduced the iPod, the Associated Press ran their story with the headline, “Apple’s new iPod player puts 1,000 songs in your pocket.” When the iPhone was launched, PC World ran the headline that Apple would “Reinvent the Phone,” using language provided by Apple. It doesn’t get any better than that.

In his book, Gallo points out that this rule is equally important in other presentation settings. For example, your pitch about a business concept given to potential investors also needs to meet the “Twitter” rule or it won’t go anywhere. Google pitched its concept using the following headline: “Google provides access to the world’s information in one click.” Gallo mentions that one investor told him, “If you cannot describe what you do in ten words or less, I’m not investing, I’m not buying, I’m not interested. Period.”

If you write copy, create a Twitter account and start using it. You’ll be amazed at how it could improve your headline writing skills.

Since most headlines are short enough to fit within the limits of a Tweet, ask yourself if the headline will actually mean anything if that’s all you saw. When you strip away the graphics and other parts of the message, is it still compelling? How well do your headlines meet the Twitter rule? Will they stand out in the ever-changing stream of a Twitter feed? If not, they won’t stand out in the stream of consciousness that impacts all media.

What do you think? Your comments are welcome.

“At first, it was pure passion,” she whispered with a silky voice I was still getting used to, her sapphire-blue eyes flashing in the shadows. She leaned forward, glancing around before continuing. “I couldn’t help myself,” she added lustily. “I’d never experienced anything like it. Nothing else mattered. I just wanted more and more of the same.”

Her face slid back into shadow. Silence, except for a sultry jazz tune working its way from table to table as I pondered her confession. Blue smoke curled slowly in the air like the lazy circles she made with her finger in blonde locks flowing to her shoulders.

“How long did it last?” I asked. Her eyes drifted away, remembering, then came back to mine.

“It was a couple of years until the magic stopped. After a while I realized my needs were no longer being met. Now I was more concerned about time. I wanted it faster.”

“Faster?”

“Faster or not at all,” she responded. “Ten seconds or less was the magic number for me now. It began to feel so superficial. Meaningless. Maybe I just got bored, but it no longer seemed to be about satisfying my needs. It was just motion and sound for the sake of entertainment.” She downed the rest of her drink in a single gulp. I waved for another round.

I was investigating the disappearance of web animation. What had once been proclaimed the future of advertising on the Internet was now a mere shadow of it’s original promise. It had all but disappeared from the landscape, especially from corporate or brand-related web sites. Yet there were few answers. Flash designers didn’t think anything had changed. Corporate marketing types didn’t want to talk about it. Nobody wanted to share their experience, or were too busy to give it much thought. Then I found her, someone who valued the ability to interact directly with the brands that mattered to her. We had met in the rain outside the bar and went in without a word spoken.

“I began to resent splash screens and animated intros,” she sighed, leaning back against the hard wooden frame of her chair and twirling a plastic swizzle stick between her fingers. “They no longer seemed honest,” she explained. “All that razzle dazzle. It was too often manipulative. It took extra time and seldom added anything of value to our relationship.”

“I no longer cared,” she said. “We saw less and less of each other. I thought the relationship was over. All that mattered was the information. I wanted it fast and simple. Flash was dead for me. Forgotten.”

She suddenly leaned forward and gripped my arm. Hard. Almost hard enough to hurt. “But I was wrong,” she exclaimed passionately. “It’s back!”

That got my attention. She must have noticed the look in my eyes. When she spoke again, her voice was barely a whisper. I strained to hear.

“Flash MX,” she gasped.

A computer monitor throbbed in the corner. She continued. “Just when I thought life was returning to normal, it’s starting again. Flash is back. Now with video. And an application architecture that can give me everything I ever dreamed of in a brand relationship. More interactivity. Database management. All combined with the motion and streaming audio that started it all.”

Flash MX. So Flash wasn’t gone after all, I realized. Just the victim of inappropriate use. Instead of using its power to provide an experience that mattered to the audience, Flash had typically been used as a self-serving instrument that wasted people’s time offering nothing of value in return for their patience. Flash revived. Would it now be used the way it should have been all along? Would it truly enhance the brand experience? Would it make the experience worthy of the extra download time? What would the future hold?

A saxophone wailed its plaintive notes as a drop of condensation slowly traced its way down the side of her glass. Her blue eyes pierced mine, the same question deep within. Have marketers learned? Will it be different this time? Outside the rain slapped at the windows with streaky wet fingers. The waitress brought a new drink.

I came across this interesting example of how moving simple punctuation around can totally change the context of a story. It’s pretty funny.

The first letter:

Dear John: I want a man who knows what love is all about. You are generous, kind, thoughtful. People who are not like you admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me for other men. I yearn for you. I have no feelings whatsoever when we’re apart. I can be forever happy — will you let me be yours? Gloria.

The second letter:

Dear John: I want a man who knows what love is. All about you are generous, kind, thoughtful people, who are not like you. Admit to being useless and inferior. You have ruined me. For other men, I yearn. For you, I have no feelings whatsoever. When we’re apart, I can be forever happy. Will you let me be? Yours, Gloria.

Many online sales channels are simply cannibalizing offline sales. In 2005, a study showed that only 6.5% was actual incremental sales. At the same time, five times as many young people were going online to make their purchasing decision than were doing so just five years earlier. 70% of all purchasers go online to conduct buying research. In one study from 2002, a staggering 12% indicated that they switched brands purely because of what they learned online. This is unheard of in traditional media!

What does all this mean? It means that what you communicate matters more than the media you use.

Instead of using your site to scream at people to BUY, BUY, BUY! you should be using it to talk to them, educate them, and tell them more about your company or products. The sales will come as a result, especially if your site becomes a trusted source of meaningful information. These same principles apply to social media, as these channels are even more influential as a form of educational interaction with customers.

Relationship marketing may be a buzzword that’s been overused in the past couple of years, but it is a valid concept and works very well online when done right. Those who engage in a digital RM program show more than 600% increase in conversion to purchase when compared to traditional RM relationship marketing programs. The web is an information place and should be used as an information source. People expect it.

Many CEOs who spend hours working on their brand message have no idea of the value of their brand when people actually type the band name into a browser’s address bar. People come to your web site, or sign up as a Facebook fan, with a genuine desire to interact with your brand. How much better can it get?

The single biggest advantage of the internet is the ability to educate your target audience. Think about how this compares to other media. This is almost impossible with a television commercial.

Invite your audience

On the web, sites are most successful when they invite people, treating them like intelligent beings who can make their own decisions. You never shove stuff down their throats. This doesn’t mean you can’t be aggressive. Mercedes only allowed people to get info about the C class online. There was no other way to get information during the pre-marketing process. But the web can appear to be disrespectful more quickly than other media, so you have to be warmer and more gentle in your approach.

Once you invite, you have to engage your audience or you’ll effectively kill your brand. If you invite them to a party, make sure a party is what they find. Competitors are one click away, and if they do things right while you don’t, chances are very slim that the online audience will give your site another opportunity in the future.

Treat people like, ah, people

Give your audience the facts they need to compare. You can’t be successful online without providing real information. There are never enough facts! Find things you can point to, like independent third party comparisons. Allow people to sign up for news or to join membership programs. They want you to assist them in making a purchase, and things that make them feel like insiders to information not available elsewhere works wonders. Mercedes dealers allow people to register online for a test drive, indicating ahead of time what kind of car they wanted to test. This allowed the dealers to be fully prepared. But with 3000 daily requests for a test drive, responding efficiently can be a challenge. You can’t delay. Dealers who didn’t respond in 48 hour lost their status as an online retail link. Nike ID was actively used as a test bed for future shoe designs. It wasn’t meant not to make a profit online, but as a research tool.

Getting to yes

All of this leads to the transaction. The interesting thing is that while 95% of all purchases are still made offline, those customers have already made their decision online because they’re empowered by what the web offers them in terms of information. Automobile companies like Mercedes have found that customers no longer ask any questions from salespeople. They walk into the dealership already knowing as much or more about the cars than the people who work there. They’ve been empowered by e-communications.

Defend your brand with conviction

If you know that 70% of your customers are making their buying decision online then why is your online budget only 3%? You can’t expect to have a successful site if you don’t support it. The best companies spends at least 10% of their marketing budget in online initiatives. Non-tactile products are easier to sell online, but the principles are the same.

Your customers are friends

In the past, we called them the “target market.” Then we called them customers. Today, you have to call them friends. That means you have to treat them as friends. E-Communications means carrying on a two-way dialog. Feedback channels are critical. Being respectful of even the most critical comments goes without saying. Don’t sweat it so much when people bad mouth you, because they were always doing that, just not so directly in your face. This happens in friendships. It’s the result of people who care enough to let you know when you let them down. Listen and respond.

Don’t be so bent on building an online store. Instead, focus on building an online community if you want to watch the sales climb.