Tag: business to business

Why the URL is less important every day

I remember reading, in the early days of the Web, how large companies were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to purchase meaningful URLs. For instance, McDonald’s wasn’t the first owner of www.mcdonalds.com.

About 9 years, ago, I tried to sell a URL that I was abandoning. I found a broker who promised to auction it off, estimating that it might be worth $15-20 thousand. The bubble burst, the auction never happened, and the URL simply expired — sitting unused until sometime in the past year when another company started using it.

The URL remains a most important locator for online information. But the importance of branding a URL — or of obtaining a URL that perfectly matches your brand — is declining.

Jonathan Richman at iMedia Connection offers 4 technologies that are responsible for its declining importance.

They are:

Search engines: The power of search is well-known. More people find websites through search than by typing in the URL;

Browsers: New-generation browsers like Google Chrome and Firefox skip the need for going to a search engine; just type a search term in the address box and they deliver search results;

URL shortening: Sites like Twitter, with strict limitations on size, force URLs to be shortened dramatically. Tools like TinyURL and Bit.ly exist to do this. Which means the URL for this page, as an example goes from https://themarketfarm.com/themarketfarm/wordpress/2009/09/08/why-the-url-is-less-important-every-day/ to http://tinyurl.com/nq6d2y — which is pretty efficient, except any unique branding disappears.

The QR code: Popular in Asia and Europe, you take a picture of the QR code on your smart phone, and it will take you directly to the related website.

Overlooked in Richman’s blog, which is more detailed and well worth reading, is a fifth technology of social networking. More and more businesses are using Facebook, Twitter and other sites to attract audience; these work based on the names of companies and communities — not web addresses. So the brand of the company once again becomes more important than the brand of its URL.

The ultimate point, though, is that if you have a URL you like, don’t spend too much to brand it. And if you have a URL you don’t like, you can work around it.

BPA Worldwide freezes rates, remains arrogant and irrelevant

BPA Worldwide, a leader in providing third-party circulation audits, has announced that it’s freezing membership dues and audit rates at their July 2008 levels — good through June 2010.

If you’re in the business, you know that BPA is especially strong among magazines with controlled circulation. If you’re not in the business, you need to know that third-party circulation audits are how publications validate their readership claims to advertisers.

BPA is facing obsolescence at an astonishing rate. If BPA is a dinosaur, then the killer meteor has already hit the Earth and the toxic cloud of extinction is on its way. Holding rates will make as much difference to the organization’s future as putting on a sweater.

Am I being a little harsh here? Perhaps. But set aside the fact that for the previous 20 years of my career BPA was one of the most sluggish, obstinate, arrogant and regressive entities I had to deal with. Set aside the fact that — even though it was owned by its customers — it always, without exception, acted as though its role was to prevent me from innovating in my job. Set aside that I don’t know anyone in publishing (though I’m sure there are a few) who doesn’t take some quiet pleasure at seeing BPA suffer.

What BPA faces aside from all that is the fact that its member magazines must find ways to radically reduce distribution costs. That’s required to offset declines in two key performance indicators: advertising pages sold, and cost-per-thousand (CPM) paid for an average page of advertising.

In other words, advertisers are reaching readers less often, and every reader they reach is worth less to them today than it used to be. The only thing advertisers care about is how many people take a measurable action as a result of seeing an ad.

And what is BPA’s ultimate value to publishers? Proof of readers reached. There is nothing that it does, or wants to do, to measure the responsiveness of those readers.

In my last year running business-to-business magazines, I withdrew two of them from membership in BPA. Not because I was so frustrated with the deplorable service BPA provided; but because my advertisers no longer cared about BPA audits. They told me they wanted to know how my audience would respond to their advertising; if I could provide better response per thousand readers than my competitors, nobody cared to see the expensive and painstakingly designed BPA audit statement. (To be fair, advertisers had been telling me that with increasing urgency for about eight years; it just reached a watershed last year — probably brought on by the recession.)

Since that time, I’ve heard of about two-dozen magazines that have terminated their BPA membership — something that used to be as acceptable in media circles as, say, passing gas in an elevator. Entire divisions of media companies have simply walked away from BPA because the organization’s work has ceased to be of value.

I suppose that freezing rates is a reasonable first response. But I don’t give BPA enough credit to understand how inadequate that step will prove to be as its irrelevance grows like a toxic cloud.

The new phone books have arrived and been duly discarded

Two large, orange bags just appeared on my front porch the other day. Each contained several pounds of phone books. There was the Yellow Pages, the White Pages, the Business-to-Business Yellow Pages and the Yellow Pages Supplement. Two complete sets of them.

Without taking them out of the bag, I put them on the curb for recycling.

“Hello, AT&T? It’s Alexander Graham Bell calling and he wants his business model back.”

Seriously, this is just one of at least three sets of phone directories I’ll receive this year. Two other companies produce similar volumes of phone books and surreptitiously drop them at my front door at various times during the year.

It’s been about five years since I’ve even opened a phone book.

In every industry I know, printed directories are disappearing faster than money from the cash-for-clunkers program. For the companies that produce them, printed phone books are like crack; they’re addicted to the revenue, but it’s not doing anyone any good. The effort to keep phone books alive is distracting their publishers from the need to find a more useful business. And you don’t have to be a tree-hugger to cringe at the tremendous waste in resources these unwanted products represent.

OK, I confess that having a residential phone book is a small comfort (though I still don’t remember the last time I used one). But if you’re running a business I wouldn’t spend much on Yellow Pages advertising. No matter how small or local the business might be, your resources would be better spent building an affordable little website and making sure it’s listed on every free online directory you can find.

New study says consumers like ads. And it won’t change a thing.

Adweek Magazine and its parent company, Nielsen, have released a study that shows consumers believe in advertising, they accept adveflo-progressivertising as a way of subsidizing other content and, in some cases, they actually like it.

They’ll use this to try to change the rush of money out of traditional advertising, and they won’t succeed.

In an article announcing results of the study, Adweek states that: “67 percent of respondents agree …. (including 14 percent agreeing “strongly”) that ‘Advertising funds low-cost and free content on the Internet, TV, newspapers and other media.’ Likewise, 81 percent agreed (22 percent strongly) that ‘Advertising and sponsorship are important to fund sporting events, art exhibitions and cultural events.’ ”

The only thing startling about this is that such a large percentage of people seem to understand the media business model.logo_adweek2

Adweek also wrote: “Respondents also acknowledged that advertising is useful to them personally as they navigate the marketplace. For example, 67 percent agreed (14 percent strongly) that ‘By providing me with information, advertising allows me to make better consumer choices.’ Respondents even confessed to enjoying advertising, at least some of the time, with 66 percent agreeing (13 percent strongly) that ‘Advertising often gets my attention and is entertaining.'”

This means two things:

1) Adweek is doing its job; it is, after all, a magazine for the people who produce ads, plan campaigns and buy space for them.  This study will be a tool used by readers to convince advertisers to shift money back from the new and social to more traditional ad campaigns.

That’s especially evidenced by this finding in the article: “And there was a lackluster rating for ‘ads served in search-engine results,’ with 4 percent trusting these completely and 37 percent somewhat. Ratings for old media were closely bunched, with TV getting a typical rating for these of 8 percent “trust completely” and 53 percent “trust somewhat.”

In other words, Google’s astoundingly ascendant paid search model — traditional media’s Great Satan — isn’t as effective as many believe. At least, that’s the kernal that media reps are likely to grab onto and use.

Which raises the second meaning of the information:

2) There are lots of highly respected voices in media and advertising who still don’t get it. The epochal media meltdown we’re experiencing has nothing to do with the opinions of consumers.

Advertisers aren’t pulling campaigns because they don’t work; they’re pulling campaigns because they can now do what they’ve always wanted to do: reach consumers directly without an intermediary media.

Back in another era — the Internet bubble of the late 1990s — this was called disintermediation.

Disintermediation is why people book flights directly with airlines rather than through travel agents; it’s why Progressive and Geico have a higher profile than the independent insurance agents who used to do most of the selling in their industry; it’s why people will visit a magazine advertiser’s website instead of filling out a reader-response card in the back of a magazine.

Disintermediation is a simple process of applying new technology to eliminate an old and costly middleman. Heck, media is the root of the word; is it really a surprise that media is now a target?

So it doesn’t matter if old advertising works; it ads a layer that is no longer necessary. Just as there are still travel agents and insurance agents, there will still be media — as we recognize it today — far into the future. But it will be smaller than it used to be, and it will find its success by serving niches.

You can download the full Nielsen study here: http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/trustinadvertising0709.pdf

Selling what your customers want v. what they need

Content marketing guy Newt Barrett turns around conventional wisdom, suggesting that instead of working to develop a unique selling proposition, you develop a Unique Buying Proposition. This is more than a semantic turn. The UBP forces you to think like your customers. It changes the question from “Why should they buy from me?” to “Why do they WANT to buy from me?”

You can read Newt’s complete case here.

Be honest: Would you spend more time buying this...
Would you do a better job buying this...

In the meantime, I’ll add this thought on selling: People will spend more to buy something they want than something they need. The corollary is that they’ll do whatever they can to avoid buying what they need, whereas they enjoy buying things they want.

So even if you’re offering business-to-business products or services, there is a benefit to communicating in a way that helps people WANT to buy what you’re selling.

... or this?
... or this?

If they feel the product has value-added benefits, some kind of cache, or is exciting and transformative, they’ll buy more readily (and tend to be more pleased) than if they buy something because it has the lowest price or simply fills an urgent need.

That’s the beauty of Newt’s concept of the UBP: It helps your prospects to see your product as something they WANT to buy.

Most small biz doesn’t qualify leads or track marketing ROI. Surprised?

In B2BOnline, Christopher Hosford reports on a study by the Sales Lead Management Association that indicates “nearly 63% of small-business marketers say they can’t track the return on investment of their marketing programs.” And 56% say they don’t qualify their leads before sending them to sales. SLMA observed the prevailing attitude among marketers that sales should qualify their own leads.

The survey was conducted online, B2B writes, and of the 140 respondents, all had fewer than 250 employees and three-quarters had fewer than 25. The conclusion of the study: these companies are allowing sales and marketing to operate independently of each other without aligning their objectives.

I’ve observed it myself at one industrial business after another over the past decade, when interviewing marketing teams as part of the media sales process. The vast majority will say that leads remain their primary metric for measuring the effectiveness of their work.

And yet, they will also admit to doing nothing with the leads because:

  • They aren’t very good;
  • Their distributors don’t follow up on them anyway;
  • There is no mechanism in place to qualify leads for sales.

What a cynical way to do a job: on one day demand that your media partners provide more leads to improve your ROI, and on the next day hide that “ROI” into the bottom drawer, pulling it out only when your boss comes around and asks, “What exactly do you do around here?”

It was just such a prospect who once told me, “I don’t think our marketing efforts are half bad.” Now armed with an actual benchmark, I could now reply to him, “Actually, they’re 63% bad.”

A shocker about ad budgets – and why

According to a consortium of advertising agencies, ad budgets are down this year. Who woulda thunk?

Seriously, according to B2B, a survey of 40 ICOM agency members indicated that more than half the agencies have seen client budgets drop at least 21% this year.

That seems to have translated directly to the magazine sector. The Seybold Report cites  data that consumer magazine pages were down 25 percent in Q1, with a corresponding decline in “rate card revenue” (that is: it’s just a calculation) of more than 20 percent.

According to the Magazine Publishers of America, this is just more of the same; pages were down about 12 percent in 2008. And various reports put them flat or down slightly in ’07.  So this isn’t just about the recession.

According to Seybold, more than half the respondents to the ICOM survey agreed with this statement: “Budget cuts and new challenges have served as catalysts for clients to come up with new ideas and experimentation to market their products.”

Again, this isn’t just about the recession. This is about businesses deciding that their marketing departments can and should play the role of publisher.

I started observing this bypass about 10 years ago, as my biggest and most sophisticated advertisers  literally started publishing their own magazines. Since then, it’s become easier and less expensive; today you can become a publisher with a website, a blogger and some folks who are really good with Facebook and Twitter.

What B2B advertisers really want from media

I’m not an advertiser, but I’ve spent the last 10 years selling to them.

I think my first day selling was the last day of the golden age in B2B media — back when magazine people spent all day bending over to pick up money, and then marveled at how hard they were working.

On my second day the balance tipped; customers by-and-large stopped looking for reasons to advertise, and started looking for reasons not to advertise. This has been documented and discussed. What’s missing from the discussion is why industrial advertisers might actually want the trade media to fail.

Start with the assumption that as much as buying marketing, these advertisers were buying security.They followed a  simple formula, perfect for the engineering mindset that drives these companies. It was this: Advertising with trade media is the only reliable way to reach a targeted audience. So by doing whatever the competition does you will achieve similar results.

Feeling aggressive? Spend a little more and you’ll do a little better. There were few variables, like the strength of your creative, and the novelty of your logo-ed novelties. It was neat and simple and let companies get back to the business of making stuff — which was their true DNA.

Then came the Internet, which replaced measurement by lead-generation with measurement by click-throughs and unique visits. It put a premium on speed and courage; and it created so many variables that there was no longer assurance you could match your competitors’ results by matching their spend.

Suddenly, buying print meant spending a lot of money without getting any security.

That would be enough for marketers to resent the media. But there’s another piece.

The traditional media model is sponsorship: Media creates content, which advertisers sponsor to reach a targeted audience. As friend and former boss Teri Mollison now at F&W Media, likes to say, this is the “We talk, you listen” model of marketing.

The Internet? That’s more like, “No, you listen.”

This is an uncomfortable thing in industry, where blunt and scratchy feedback didn’t always have to be tolerated. Nonetheless, it emphasizes how little feedback print really offers. That’s troublesome because of print’s other historical value proposition: distributing product information.

What good is that function in the Internet era if the information takes a a month to get out; doesn’t provide a lot of feedback compared to emerging alternatives; and inevitably gets filtered by a team of trade press editors.

It’s not news that cuts in ad spending have been offset by increased expenditures by industrial marketers on videos, articles, e-books, blogs and other original content. The Internet empowers them to do something the trade press won’t: get information to the market quickly, with no strings attached, and without a filter. There’s no begging, no pitching, no sending of gifts (which never really works, by the way), no threats to the publisher. The media’s old customers like being able to do their own media work. They don’t want to give up the flexibility and the freedom. They don’t want to see the power move back to the edtors.

Media companies are suffering terribly in this recession, but I’m not sure if many of them really understand why. It’s not just because there are too may other choices. It’s because industrial marketers aren’t interested in their survival.