Are you becoming Internet savvy?
by Clay Campbell
Are you becoming Internet savvy? (Savvy: Well informed and perceptive, practical understanding or shrewdness.)
We may have to do some things we’ve never done before. We are becoming a more and more Internet accessing people. Read Jane Frazier’s Is Your Website Up to Snuff? I am a good example of what Jane is talking about.
I just went to the AT&T store and bought an iPhone. It is an amazing piece of equipment.
At the slight touch of my finger in the palm of my hand, is access to my emails, my
contact list of friends and clients, pictures of my kids, calculator, Yahoo, Google,
any newspaper in the world, any movie I want to watch, a camera that takes great
pictures, any songs I want to hear, a GPS System, I have access to my home computer
and my laptop, my calendar and appointment book are in sync right there, and I can even
make phone calls on the darn thing.
I am going online today to purchase Microsoft Office Professional so I can
sync up my emails and calendar with my laptop and iPhone. I’m a guy who just 8
years ago couldn’t type a letter, or use Microsoft Word and had just got my GED
in 1990. (I had quit school in the 9th grade to go to Nashville and become a big
country music star.) I didn’t even know what email or the Internet was. Today my
company builds websites and do we email newsletters. It’s amazing what a person
can do if they are willing to change.
Now in 2008, who knew, besides Jesus, that the stock market would crash and gas
would be over $5 a gallon? Even when gas was so high this summer, the Internet was
booming.
The Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce announced on Nov 19th 2008 that
the estimate of U.S. retail e-commerce sales for July, August, and Sept of 2008,
was $34.4 billion.
The third quarter 2008 e-commerce estimate increased 5.7 percent (±1.5%)
from the third quarter of 2007.
The third quarter 2007 e commerce estimate increased 19.3 percent (±2.6%)
from the third quarter of 2006.
This may be a down time in the economy, the stock market maybe on a Six Flags
roller coaster ride, and the auto makers, car sales people and dealers may be in
trouble, but the use of the Internet is anything but down. I ran into a woman last
week and she told me she lost her job a year ago, because her company got bought
out. I asked her what she was doing now. She said, “Ebay”. I said, “How is it going?”
She said she was making just as much and sometimes more, as she was before. As the
media stokes the fires of fear, in the mind of the folks in our country, the
self-sufficient, pioneering, hard-working, can do attitudes of some people will
move them ahead and they will do very well; even if they have to do something
they have never done before.
Are you willing to do something you have never done before? Many business owners
today need to go back and re-read the little book from a few years ago that
sold 21 million copies, Who Moved My Cheese? By Spencer Johnson. Read about it.
How Retail is Changing
Part One in a Three-Part Series
by Roy H. Williams
The old assumption in advertising was that the customer didn't know, and wouldn't know unless you told them.
This is no longer a valid assumption. Today's customer enjoys access to information far beyond what any of us saw coming.
You're aware of how quickly and easily you gather information online each day, but has it occurred to you that your customers expect information about you and your products to be found just as quickly and easily?
What do your customers find when they enter your category and town into a search engine? Do they find the answers to their questions?
What do they assume when you provide minimal information and someone else provides much more?
Better Question: What do you assume when minimal information is provided by a company you're researching online?
What about those times when you're researching a purchase and the seller chooses not to put prices online? How does that make you feel? What do you assume about the seller?
Are you likely to:
- call them,
- email them, or just
- search for that product from a different provider?
The first time we designed a promotional plan for a website was in June, 2000. I'll
never forget it. We put together a great product, a catchy name and a media plan we
knew would drive traffic to the site. That was where it all fell apart.
The client decided it would be best to "capture all the contact information"
before revealing the price of the item. In essence, a customer had to commit to purchase
the item before the price was revealed. That website had hundreds of thousands of
visitors but made very few sales. The company is now defunct, even though their
product was excellent and their prices were great.
The best websites answer all your questions.
Does your website answer all your customer's questions, or is your plan
to "make them" contact you so you can "get more detailed information" about their
budget, their preferences and their requirements?
The customer is far more likely to contact you after they've found the answers
to all the questions you didn't have to have their personal details to provide.
The hardest part about crafting a website is anticipating the unspoken questions
of your customers.
The most successful of the Wizard Academy websites is FreeWeddingChapel.org.
Miraculously, it took us only about 6 months to bring that website to its current
level of seamlessness. Our advantage was a daily telephone-parade of anxious brides
calling with nervous questions. Few decisions are accompanied by the degree of
anxiety as the decisions that accompany a wedding. These daily questions allowed
us to quickly refine our info-stream. Any time we answered a new question by
telephone, we'd instantly add the answer to the ones we provided online.
That website now functions like a well-oiled machine. Brides comment the
website "felt like it was reading my mind."
This is what happens when you diligently:
- harvest the questions of your customers, and then
- insert all the answers into your web copy.
Now get to work on that website.
An Interesting Look at a New Style of Celebrity Ad
by Jeff Sexton
Jeff Sexton, is a brilliant guy, and one of my Wizard of Ads partners. Check him out at GrokDotCom.
Before this, I’d never seen a Celebrity ad that wasn’t either an explicitly stated or implied endorsement.
You know: something along the lines of "Hi, I´m Tiger Woods and I drive a
Buick [because **cough*** that’s what I´d naturally pick to drive even if I
wasn´t being paid enormous amounts of money to do so ***cough***].” "
Or something “lower key” like a picture of Pierce Brosnan wearing an Omega dive
watch, and the ad itself utterly without any kind of explicit claims but implying
something along the lines of “masculine manly-men like James Bond wear Omega watches,
and you can show [or get] your he-man qualities by doing the same.”
This ad was different. Take a look:
This is the first ad I’ve ever seen where the celebrity was nothing more than a
reality hook. Sure, one can’t help but seeing Beckham amidst the sea of copy
surrounding him. But the ad is for a Sharpie pen, and Beckham is neither using
the pen nor explicitly endorsing it.
Placed in a women’s magazine, the ad does nothing more than refer to Beckham as
what he obviously is, a male sex symbol. And then it uses that shared reality to
poke fun of the reader for reading the ad copy about the Sharpie pen instead of
enjoying the picture of Beckham.
That’s it. No endorsement. Just a way to grab the reader's attention while
connecting with her (through a humorous reality hook) and to very subtly make
the message seem more important than it is – because it has to be pretty
important if she’ll ignore Beckham’s picture to read it, right?
Genius.
But more than that too; this ad talks to you like a friend; it borrows the
language of intimacy and uses it brilliantly.
And it does all that while expressing a profound shift in societal values from
an Idealist generation to a Civic one. So if you haven’t read Roy Williams
explanation of this phenomenon – of how 2003-2008 was a societal tipping point
equal that of 1963-1968 - then go read those memos now.
In terms of the ad, the Civic outlook approaches Celebrity differently.
Celebrities aren’t idolized. They’re not larger than life. And no, their
appearance in an ad doesn’t contain magical powers that they can be transferred
onto the product.
In a Civic Generation, celebrities just acknowledged for what they are: famous
for something. Beckham is famous as a Soccer player, but even more so as a sex symbol.
So the ad simply acknowledges that. To do otherwise would be passé, and so
NOT ‘keepin’ it real.’
Is your marketing in touch with this societal shift? Are you using the
language of intimacy and keepin’ it real?
"It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."
Charles Darwin
Perhaps now would be a good time to have a complimentary meeting with a Wizard of Ads Partner. Links to their websites and blogs are listed down the right side of The Wizard Times. Hundreds of their articles with free insightful advice can been seen at www.americansmallbusiness.com 2009 would be a great year to attend a class at the Wizard Academy 21st Century Business School in Austin Texas. What is the Wizard Academy?
See you next week.
Clay Campbell
Wizard of Ads
PS. Need help to attract more customers and grow your business?
