Blogs, Facebook, Myspace, Social Networking … are all terms we hear every day, and all are things that need to be integrated into overall marketing strategy. There are several key components that make these Web 2.0 tactics successful.

Today many marketers are blogging, but quite often these blogs are not effective. Many marketers rush to place ads on social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace without adjusting ad creative to the user group or making the campaign social or relevant to the target audience. Green Acres Mall, property of Vornado Realty, is one EGC client who is successfully integrating social networking tactics to build conversations with the target audience, but more importantly, to drive traffic and build sales. This was best illustrated in Green Acres’ recent Back to School campaign. EGC implemented a brand ambassador program titled “MallStars,” in which teens and tweens from the local community were recruited, and shown shopping and enjoying their Green Acres Back to School experience. All Mallstars were asked to blog about themselves, their favorite shopping experience, and other relevant topics. They were also asked to send out e-postcards, hand out postcards to friends and family, and spread the word within their schools and circle of friends. The social networking community was invited to go online and vote for their favorite MallStar. Mall Stars were also featured in Green Acres’ Back to School ad campaign which included targeted inserts, radio and online marketing. The results showed the success of convergence marketing: The Mall Stars/Back-to-School program generated over 8,200 votes and 10,121 unique visitors to the MallStar blog. The YTD Back-to-School sales showed an increase of approximately 9%, and MallStars are being used to promote follow-up campaigns and continue to blog about Green Acres, becoming true ongoing brand ambassadors.

“I think this is a fabulous way to reach a completely new customer base than we’ve had.  As time moves forward, our audience is much more active on social networks.  As they become more tech-savvy, we’re going to have to grow with them.”
–Dawn Hamilton, Green Acres Mall

A recent Ad Age article notes the success that local auto dealers have been seeing with viral video.

Link to Ad Age article (subscription may be required)

We believe these videos are successful for a variety of reasons: You can personalize and customize a specific message. They can educate while giving your brand a definite identity. And by virtue of their entertainment value, they don’t have to be hard sell.

According to Bob Costabile, The EGC Group’s Creative Director, “for information in a non-intrusive, story-telling format, viral video is a great way to deliver a softer, more entertaining message yet still enhance a brands personality. While traditional 30-second commercials will always be important, viral web content is a terrific addition to the communications mix. The most successful viral videos stay culturally current and have a layer of humanity about them.”

Part 4

By Richard D’Amico

Got something to sell? Wanna find someone to sell it to? Welcome to the world of targeting. Even as children selling Girl Scout cookies, or a with a newspaper delivery route we practiced targeting – you remember—go to Mrs. Jones, she’s nice and she’ll certainly buy a whole bunch of boxes of cookies; or don’t go there, he’s a real grouch. Not real targeting you say, wrong! It’s the ultimate in targeting, and in today’s world we have come full circle, from broad demographics to on-on-one marketing.

Marketers and advertisers have always practiced some form of targeting, from the decision to sell a product here and not there ,or to advertise in one magazine or newspaper and not the other, but as media choices became broader, the need for a method of selecting who was to get the sales message became more and more important.

Consider, if you will, the benefits of targeting—delivering your brand or selling messages to the person or people most likely to buy your product, service or idea. While the cost of delivering your message to a good prospect or a bad prospect remains about the same, the results of that choice can have a significant impact on the success or failure of your entire program. And when times are tough, the better your targeting is the more efficient you become in your marketing, which results in a better ROI on your marketing and advertising dollar.

Today, we can look at targeting as an exercise in limiting who we reach, based on an intelligently designed system of options. On one hand we can use geographical limits—national, regional, a single market or DMA, a ZIP code, a single household. On the other we can use broad demographic groups—adults 25 to 49 years old, men 18 years+, or refine them to precisely defined segments based on lifestyles, lifestages, social groups, age-income-education- employment-household composition and more.

For certain media options the broad demographic techniques are still applied, with broadcast television or radio for example. But even these broad categories are being refined to permit the media planner to be more selective, and to deliver sales and brand messages to a better qualified prospect group.

Implicit in this increased level of sophistication is the need for understanding precisely who the key prospect is, thus the entire targeting process is really based on improved intelligence, of your customer, your market and your brand. Which brings us back to Jeannie, and her Girl Scout cookies, and Mrs. Jones across the street.

Jeannie knows that Mrs. Jones is mom’s friend, has a house full of boys (so there are no competitive salespeople there), and Mrs. Jones buys cookies every year, especially those chocolate mints. I guess that makes her a prime target. But what about Mrs. Smith down the street—she lives alone, and mom says she has diabetes too, so maybe she is not such a good prospect for cookies.

Pretty good targeting down to the household level, wouldn’t you say—but how does that relate to your business? Well, do you know that much about your customers or prospects? Can you give your media planners enough information to let them use the latest in media information to help you become more efficient in media selection and usage? You can, and in bad times you better.

Let’s explore some of the options available to help you identify and target your best prospects, from the broad demographic categories right down to your best prospect households.

 There are two basic methods and sources for developing targeting information. One is through national or syndicated marketing information services such as Nielsen with continuous tracking of product sales to consumers based on information gathered at the retail point-of-sale and Simmons consumer database which contains the most detailed usage information available on over 8,000 brands, over 450 product categories, which are critical tools for many marketers. The other is marketer developed information based on customer research and profiling techniques. (While there are many other ways of gaining this prospect intelligence, they can generally be grouped in one of these two categories.)

For those marketers who can and do use the Nielsen and Simmons services, targeting decisions can be made using the available data, but for the marketers that do not or cannot use those services, targeting options are still available that will provide them with very accurate and precise data on multiple levels.

Two of the favored techniques at The EGC Group are using direct customer research, and through a prospect profiling technique that links your customer data with consumer demographics, syndicated survey data and survey research to reveal exactly which types of consumers are most likely to use your products, called PRIZM NE .

The basis of the system is its ability to segment your customer-households into one of 66 different categories based on a wide variety of characteristics, divided by several main characteristics—income , age and household composition, home ownership, employment,  education, race and ethnicity, as well  a host of secondary data points. Then each segment is given a unique description and a segment nickname like Shotguns & Pickups or Beltway Boomers and Big City Blues.

Once categorized, the customer list can be indexed against the total population in the target market geography in each segment, and a determination of which segments contain a greater percent of your overall customers than the overall market population is made. Simply put, if New Empty Nesters represents 1% of the population in your total market, but are 8% of your customers, we can conclude that members of that segment are statistically 8 times as likely to purchase your products as the overall population. If you can target them with your messaging, you stand a much greater chance of generating sales in that group than in the overall population.

Now that we know who to target, the next step is how to find them. Well it is a lot easier than you might think—since we have a number of tools to help in that effort, including mapping, purchasing target segment household mail lists, evaluating television audiences based on both overall ratings and delivery of specific PRIZM segments, and more.  So from the data we have developed, we know that Mrs. Jones is not only a good prospect for Girl Scout cookies, she is also happens to be  our best prospect for that new car, or checking account or sewing machine or cosmetics your trying to sell. And in tough times information like that can your job a lot easier, and more fruitful…

Call us on it; we’ll even bring the cookies!

Introduction:

Typically, during recessions, marketers tend to become defensive or shut down completely. If, instead, you become aggressive and implement new tactics, you can gain share from your competitors and, when the recession is over, you will come out the winner.

You may be finding that the traditional advertising methods that worked in the past do not work as well as they used to—or, worse, they don’t work at all. Sometimes, the gut reaction to this is to cut advertising spend; however, this is the time when you should rethink your marketing, your brand approach, your value proposition and your advertising tactics.

The following are some tactics that have helped The EGC Group’s clients and other companies succeed when most others are adopting a defensive stance by discounting, cutting budgets and reducing services. When the economy rebounds, you can emerge the market leader. This is the first installment in our five-part series that will show you how.

Part 1: Current Customers can Fuel Growth

August 1, 2008

There is no question that those who have some relationship to your brand, product or service are more likely to buy, visit or recommend you. It’s something that we at EGC have been saying for quite awhile; in fact, we even reported on it in our Fresh Report.

In July, Ad Age (subscription required) also reported on the trend, highlighting Hilton Hotels, which just enrolled the 25 millionth member into its 21-year-old Hilton HHonors Loyalty program. “Like a lot of people in the [hospitality] industry, we’re starting to see some slowing,” said Adam Burke, senior vice president of customer loyalty. “Our HHonors members tend to be the group that buoys us through a downturn. They are the core audience and tend to stay loyal and sustain the business especially through those downturns.”

Hilton is one of the many companies that are embracing their current customers and enhancing their loyalty programs; but, if your product or service does not rely on frequency of visit/purchase like Hilton’s does, how can you maximize your customer database? Very simply: referrals. Referrals are easy to implement and can mean an increase in response of 20%.

EGC has recently implemented a successful email and direct mail referral program that awarded a gas card to each customer/client who referred another to our client’s brand. The cost of this program was a fraction of that of a mass media campaign, and the result was a higher ROI and increased brand loyalty.

So, when other marketers are discounting, maximize your customer database…bring buyers back to buy more and use them to refer more customers your way.

Part 2: Focusing your brand to be more competitive

August 8, 2008

Richard D’Amico, Brand Strategist

The onset of any business downturn sets a new dynamic in play that helps the aggressive marketer to benefit at the expense of their more defensive competitors.

When a marketer uses the excuse of a impending (or actual) business downturn to ‘go turtle’ and tuck in everything from their sales and service staff to their communications spending in a futile attempt to preserve a bottom line. The results are often not what was planned, and as a result, the competition often stands to gain. But those gains are not without work, investment and some risk. But downturns don’t have to be bad times.

Look at the marketplace—it still exists, albeit somewhat impacted, and the consumer groups (and businesses) who purchased your products in the past are still there. They become more selective, may take more time in the decision process and may even try to do without, but the marketplace still exists, and will remain there.

Since your competition has decided to back away from the market by acting defensive, your opportunity for actually growing share (even of a smaller business segment) is better now than when all competitors were competing at full throttle.

Now is the time for prudent action—and we are not suggesting that you can pull a whole new set of competitive tactics out of the bottom drawer where they were saved for the next downturn—they don’t exist.

What you can do however is to maximize your current assets—your brand, your products, your competitive advantages, and your relative market voice, all without increasing spending, but by continuing to spend at appropriate levels to support the best tactics.

First, let’s examine your assets, starting with your brand itself. Are the promises you’re brand is making to prospective buyers the same as is being delivered? You think so—have you checked lately. When was the last time you polled your customers to see what they think? After all, they are the ones who know what your brand is. No it’s not a logo, nor is it a tagline, it is an emotional connection between your customers and your product, based on their acceptance how well you and you company and products deliver on your value proposition and the benefits they see in your products.

So maybe a little research is appropriate here to make sure all those hard-earned dollars you’re spending on talking to prospects are delivering the right message.

And, while we are learning why our customers are buying our products, we can also learn why category purchasers (read that as our competitors’ customers) are buying their products. Now that the competition has become invisible, we can set a strategy to bring their customers over to our brand with some compelling messaging promoting trail. If our products measure up to our new customer’s expectations—which they will because we only promise what we can deliver, they become our customers—an increase in share in a down market, which we will hold on to when the market recovers.

But the dynamic doesn’t stop here—Oh No! The turtle is suddenly coming out of his shell, and going to try to recover those lost customers. Their first course of action—lower their price.

Good, not only are their sales down because the market is shrinking during the downturn, plus they are losing customers to a smarter and more aggressive (relatively) you, but now they are delivering even less to their bottom line, making their business even less profitable, and making them less able to be competitive as the market returns, which it invariably does.

And we haven’t even started exploring how to better target your best prospects, in good times or bad.

But that’s for next time.

Who said downturns have to be bad times?

PART 3

Remember the Mary Tyler Moore Show and her character Mary’s parties? They had a reputation for being bad. When guests arrived, there was Ted crooning off key at the piano or someone else having a fight or Mr. Grant taking too much veal Prince Orlaf. Something always went wrong. When Johnny Carson arrived, all the lights went out.

People just dreaded opening her door. Mary understood why people didn’t want to come but didn’t know how to fix it.

For good-looking (and some might say sexy) Mary Richards, all the sparkling, peppy invitations and assurances of fun didn’t change the fact that her parties were always disasters.

Likewise for you, all the advertising money in the world cannot make up for a shoddy experience with your company.

Don’t invite them to a show that’s no good. It’s the first rule of entertainment. You have to have a dynamite product.

Why is it then that CEOs continue to pour money into the advertising business looking for the NBT while looking the other way to how their business is actually being performed?

I’ll tell you why. It’s tougher. It’s more complicated. And it isn’t sexy.

Case in point. I was invited to NYC to appear on MSNBC’s Your Business last week and needed a new tie. I stopped at Lord & Taylor where the clerks were only visible at the fringes of the merchandise. No help. I stopped at Saks where the clerks were dressed to the 9’s, stationed at the head of their departments, judging everyone who passed, but unable to move to talk to anyone.

Finally, I went to Macy’s Herald Square. That’s when I noticed the power of threes. Everywhere you looked, there were three employees gathered and talking. Three in front of the Clinique counter, three in front of the Levi’s, three in jewelry and two sets of three in ties.

Mind you the store was FILLED with shoppers. I had to actually ask one of the three leaning on the tie table to please move so I could look at one. Their response? Not a word.

You want to know how to find the NBT? Get out on your floor, mystery shop your call center, or go along on a ride along. See what you assume is going great and I’ll guarantee some surprises.

Because only if you are willing to connect the dots from the promise you pay megabucks for agencies to create and the actuality your customers experience, is your money wisely being spent.

If not, you’re just Macys with a different widget to sell putting lipstick on a pig.

Best-selling author and speaker Bob Phibbs has helped thousands of independent businesses compete by using his sales approach and not discounting. His Book, You Can Compete: Double Sales Without Discounting is the backbone of several companies training programs and teaches his methods for making over a business. Download more free tips at http://www.retaildoc.com/

©Bob Phibbs 2008

Yahoo just launched the next phase of its open strategy by releasing BOSS or “Build Your Own Search Service”.  This new service allows developers to use Yahoo’s search technology and build upon it to create search engines on their own sites. This begs the question: Why would Yahoo open its technology to allow others to take its market share?

The answer, quite simply, is advertising. In order for developers to use Yahoo’s search technology, they must agree to place Yahoo’s ads next to or within the site’s search results. This appears to be a very bold move by Yahoo to help it compete with Google but, when you are lagging so far behind in the search race, it takes an out-of-the-box idea to get you back in.   

What does this mean for advertisers? In the short term, not too much; Google owns the market right now, and Yahoo and MSN are a very distant second and third. What could it mean in the long run? If enough developers take Yahoo up on its offer, the long tail of the Internet could start to be dominated by Yahoo, thus increasing the reach of its advertising.

Meanwhile, EGC will be keeping an eye on BOSS as this bold step could, in fact, help Yahoo make inroads on Google.

As most everyone knows, the Apple iPhone 3G releases tomorrow. To support its launch, Apple has offered a 30-minute “guided tour”of the product. However, AdWeek reports that this is not simply a product tour, but more of a half-hour product advertisement

Though it’s not the first time the company has used long-form videos to tout the virtues of its products, this is its longest video thus far. Despite that, we speculate that users are staying tuned in—right through to the end of the thirty minutes. We know this to be true as EGC’s Senior Art Director, and iPhone fanatic, Steve Comando watched the full thirty minute video – TWICE!

We asked Rich D’Amico, The EGC Group’s Brand Strategist, what he thinks of Apple’s online video effort: “Winning and keeping the hearts and minds of broth brand loyalists and newcomers is the key to brand growth. Nothing does this better than the launch of a leading edge new product, so rewarding [the public’s] interest with an informative sales message is a win-win strategy for both the brand and the consumer.”

With that in mind, why not take a lesson from Apple? Because consumers have loyalty to brands, your brand’s website offers a place where you can display video that will help sell your product.

Anyone who has built a website—or searched for anything online, for that matter—knows that those great rich media or flash websites don’t tend to appear in results of major search engines. As of today, that will begin to change.

Adobe has just announced it will be offering optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo to improve the search engines’ ability to index the Flash file format (SWF). The new technology indexes through each runtime of a Flash application and translates it into something that can be read by the search engines. Google has already adopted this capability, so its users will immediately start seeing Flash files in search results.

At EGC, we have worked around the inability of search engines to read Flash files by integrating Flash presentation areas into HTML-based websites, for a combination of rich media and search-engine friendly content. Rob Cortigino, Interactive Manager at EGC, reports that this new technology can assist those all-flash websites in getting some rankings on the search engines. But, he cautions, it’s still best to keep your navigation and most copy elements outside of Flash.

Students are strongly encouraged to obtain internships to enhance our chances of securing jobs after graduation in an increasingly competitive market, as well as to give us a solid foundation in a particular area of interest. I agreed that getting hands-on experience in the field I am studying was crucial, and I was fortunate enough to secure an internship at EGC.

Although I’ve been here only a few weeks, I have already learned a great deal about advertising and about working at an agency in general. The atmosphere here is great—everyone has been very welcoming, which I think is of the utmost importance for a newcomer. The staff has gladly answered any questions I’ve had, making sure I am confident in the projects I undertake and keeping me busy—something not all internships do. It has been reassuring to see how dedicated every member of EGC is to their work. At the same time, they make this a very fun and amiable environment to work in.

My first project here was very interesting. The task I was given was to take part in a mapping project. It required using the Internet to conduct a significant amount of research about a client’s competitors, including the names and locations of all the locations that sell competing products nationwide. Through this project, I’ve learned the importance of gauging one’s competition and the amount of research that goes into doing so.

Aside from that, I have gained a true understanding of the amount of time and work that goes into advertising—between research, strategic planning, production, media planning and everything else that takes place here. I’m also getting a solid grip on what I can expect as a member of the workforce…and I’m having fun!

I look forward to continuing my internship here for the weeks to come and am confident that this opportunity will help me succeed in the advertising field.

The New York Times reported this week that newspapers are seeing a double-digit loss in ad revenue so far this year, coming off a decrease of nearly 8 percent the prior year. The losses have been attributed to a variety of factors, including the slow economy, decreased circulation, increased costs for newsprint and a sluggish real estate market that has translated into a loss in classified advertising.

However, despite their newsstand woes, newspapers have seen online ad revenue grow between 20 and 30 percent a year for most of this decade, according to the report. This did not surprise us. It has been our experience that some of the websites belonging to local newspapers can perform as well as—if not better than—the printed versions.

In fact, during the recent World Newspaper Congress, observers noted that newspapers still have several opportunities to connect to the online community, thereby reinventing themselves. The fact that local newspapers may rethink the way they do business—and, in doing so, become more accountable for advertising results—is not necessarily a bad thing for local advertisers.

EGC has seen advertising programs in print work harder and perform better by offering packages that include, online components, targeted local programs, and packages that include better placement and positioning.