In the Entertainment Software Association's 2008 report...
Audience Sample:
1,200 nationally representative households identified as owning either or both a video game console or a personal computer used to run entertainment software
Notable Stats:
- 65% of American households play computer or video games
- 35 is the average game player age
- 26% of gamers were over the age of 50 (in 2008)
- 13 years is the average number of years adult gamers have been playing computer or video games
Best Selling Video Game Genres, 2007:
- 22.3% Action
- 17.6% Family entertainment
- 14.1% Sports
- 12.1% Shooter
Best Selling Computer Game Genres, 2007:
- 33.9% Strategy
- 18.8% Role-playing
- 14.3% Family entertainment
- 11.6% Shooter
Read more?
So, how is this relevant to marketing? CRM strategy is one aspect that comes to mind. It is a marketer's ability to define, track, and market to specific demographic sets of customers who frequently buy certain game genres. Customer relationship management, CRM, is more than just a collection of people who bought your products and services at some point. A few challenges exist for anyone entering or playing in this industry:
- to create a substantial revenue stream of recurrent purchases from new or existing customers
- to maximize ad and marketing spends in the promotion of sales
- to anticipate what customers want to play next based on purchase behavior
A good CRM system helps marketers keep the customers populations in the right buckets, and by doing so, we're able to direct appropriate messaging and content to those customers. Just having software in place isn't going to tell you how or where to market, that's what marketers are for.
Oooh! I'm so excited. My copy of Get Content. Get Customers. by Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett just came in the mail. I'll be posting a review of this soon and x-posting it to Amazon.com. The inside flap reads:"Get Content. Get Customers. shows you step-by-step how to create and execute a content marketing strategy that works regardless of the size of your company or type of business you are in. This book provides dozens of examples of how large and small companies, associations, entrepreneurs, and international organizations are leveraging the power of content to drive their businesses."I wholeheartedly agree with the authors' suggestion that all the rules have changed and marketers need to relearn the marketing game with a brand new marketing mindset.This book pairs with the Right Content. Right Response. webinar hosted by BeGreeted.Com, Junta42, and Conversion Sciences.
I went to the Healthy Harvest tradeshow in Long Beach last weekend, mostly out of curiosity, but also to see what level of marketing noise retailers are exposed to when being presented with hundreds of different vitamins, supplements, and everything else under the "natural health" spectrum. I attended as someone's guest and was able to pose as a retailer for the day. One manufacturer's rep I spoke to went so far as to explain the life science mechanisms behind their products and I'll admit, it was too much information. Seriously, my eyes glazed over once he started talking about molecular protein energy cycle actions that go on inside the body, or something. Sure, I had three years of life science coursework at the undergraduate level; but none of it prepared me for the drivel I had to endure over the next several hours as I visited other exhibit booths. Though, not all of it was that bad.
If it's this hard for a retailer to understand a manufacturer's product when this group has the most amount of product data available to them, I can't imagine that this would be an easy task for a consumer seeing these products on a store shelf for the first time.
It takes something spectacular to catch the attention of a marketer at one of these shows. If you don't have a background in life sciences, medicine, or alternative health, you're about at the same body of knowledge as the average consumer who shops for these products. With that said, only the truly whacked out marketing concepts made it past my if-I-were-the-end-user filter...from both well known and obscure companies. I'll post pictures of these samples soon.
It would appear that there are booth hosts who know how to run and organize a tradeshow booth and actively engage future business partners, and there are those where you pretend to avert your eyes as you pass by their booth because you don't want to talk with someone who looks more bored than yourself. The mix of booth hosts varied from distributors, manufacturers' reps, owners of niche product lines, and marketing affiliates. I didn't have many preconceived notions about what I would expect.
I looked at this show from a marketer's perspective, taking in how detailed vendors had setup their booths, product packaging, what types of marketing collateral were being used to pitch a product, how engaging the booth's host was, and what level of knowledge these people had about product and pricing.
Overall, it was a decent experience from an industry outsider's point of view.
All this hubbub about social media marketing has prompted me to scour the web for what organizations are doing about implementing this as part of their customer life cycle management strategy. If this scenario hasn't happened in your workplace yet, it might some day and it's best to at least have a body of knowledge when your boss or client asks for your insight about this very topic.
For a top-level overview, poplabs has put together a pretty succinct presentation about social media metrics. The premise behind the slides is: how do you measure the impact of your social media marketing campaign?
According to poplabs, social media is supported on the techdev side by entities like YouTube, Technorati, FeedBurner, Wikipedia, LinkedIn, Facebook, VIRB, MySpace, twitter, Pownce, digg, del.icio.us, etc. There is a growing trend in the number of companies willing to adopt conversation marketing as a means to include customers in a product or service life cycle. Ultimately, this creates solid customer relationships because the customer believes they are not only being heard, but something is being done about it. Social media is an interrelational strategy that collaborates with and connects to web and internet marketing strategy.
Web strategy encompasses where customers get their news and information about a company's products and services. It should first be a solid, well developed website with all the necessary details a customer needs to perform a transaction, or as marketers call it, to respond to a call-to-action (e.g., customer fills out a contact form, requests more information or a demo, or purchases directly from the website).
Internet marketing strategy covers how the customers are pushed or pulled to website properties, whether it's by affiliate networks, banner ad exchanges, pay per click (PPC), search ads (SEO, SEM), or through online public relations efforts.
Social media enables customers to have an open feedback channel with a company, its core product groups, or with specific brands. It is supposed to use one-to-one relationships and personal-or-business social networks to succeed.
Influence and Engagement are two metrics that poplabs identifies as being the most important for social media. These concepts have always been around since the dawn of marketing where a person's influence traditionally drives referrals and cross-sell opportunities; and engagement is how far a referral is willing to become a lifetime customer of a particular product or service.
Tracking and measuring social media is also nothing new. This involves classic competitive intelligence where you look at key employees and CXOs, relevant industry sites, domains and urls, product/service names, product/service urls, tracking competitor activity for like products/services, insider activity, newsgroups, blog comments, etc.
Since Blogger / Blogspot are Google domain properties, the work for a blogger is fairly easy when it comes to getting indexed by Google's search bot. One would think that these sites are already optimized for this purpose. The real task is funneling the appropriate audience for the content that is being hosted or written about.
For this example I am using a recipe that I cross-posted to the LiveJournal Foodporn community site and to my own blog where I host the pictures of various cooking experiments. In my initial research into the recipe, I found that while most of the ingredient ratios were the same across Mexican and Latin American cultures, it was known by different names. Hence, the label tags that I used for identifying this recipe were: desserts:fruit, guava, pasteles de guayaba, pastelitos de guayaba y queso, pastry. In the body of the recipe, I have additional keywords: pastelitos de guayaba y queso, guava and cheese strudel.
The top 10 keyword sets (July 24-Aug 25, 2008) users typed into their search engine of choice (Google, Yahoo, AltaVista, or Dogpile) to get to this recipe page:
(click for larger image)
Now, I'd always thought of creating a recipes to match what people were looking for since there would be at least one user out there who might be looking for that recipe again. But, I'm really not sure how chipotlé and guava flavors really mingle together. They might work out quite well.
The marketing take-away: Know your audience. That's really the best way to market products, services, and informational content to prospective consumers and businesses.
In terms of SEO, all these keywords were the result of organic searches. Can the keyword phrases be purchased or used for AdSense? Certainly. TheFoodening site is as optimized as it's going to get with respect to Google site indexing. So what's next to boost traffic? More recipes based on keyword phrases that resulted in null content? More cross-posting of recipes to food and recipe sites to piggyback on search traffic? I suppose the real next step would be to select another recipe off my recipe experiment queue, do something creative with it, and post the results.
Related words:
guayaba = guava
queso = cheese
pastelitos = tarts, "pastries"
con = with
de = of/from
y = and
Strategy Analytics estimates that revenues from online games will reach $11.5 billion by 2011, a 25.2 percent compound annual growth rate (source: arstechnica news). In 2006, the North American subscription market hit $576 million, and Europe rose to $299 million. Europe has seen the fastest growth over the last few years, rising from $74 million in 2004, and is expected to see the most growth over the next few, as well (source: IGN).
There are two main methods that game developing software companies use to create revenue. These two methods aren't exclusive to graphic-based online games, the second option is also used by text-based online games such as MUDs.
Method 1. Retail the game client program for $30-60 per user account, and
1a. Either elect to have server game play for free: Guild Wars, NWN, etc.
1b. Or, have users also pay for a monthly subscription: WoW, City of Heroes/Villans
Method 2. Allow users to download the game client for free, and
1a. Have an in-game "store" that users use real world money to buy items for their in-game characters
1b. Exclusive use of special items and character equippables that greatly enhance playability for a fee
1c. Examples
MMOs aren't immune from the 4 (or 5, depending on who you consult) P's of marketing, otherwise known as the marketing mix: Product, Price, Place (distribution), Promotion, and entrepreneurship. Customer acquisitions and retention are key issues for MMOs, just as with any for-profit business. The MMO facet of the gaming industry is beginning to see the emergence of a high barrier to entry: Price, and I'm not talking about standard purchase fees, but rather how much it will cost a game developer and its VC investors to bring an MMO to market.
Who would have thought that when games made it to the online realm that bringing a game to market would cost $25+ million?
Read more?
Wikipedia definition of MMORPGMMO ProfitabilityGames with strong online components outsell the competition
Why the MMORPG subscription based business model is broken
Free-To-Play MMO Creators Should 'Show Us The Money'
I manage a few sites with varying degrees of slackerdom (what one does when not at work). Of the ones where I have embedded with Google Analytics code, I can see that the general audience would rather goof off than read content that's applicable to B2B/B2C marketing.
The Foodening, a food blog about cooking for one, making mistakes in the kitchen, and blathering about food. This site is advertised through my profiles on: LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Facebook, ResearchInfo.com, and Experts-Exchange.com.
Jul-Aug 2008 stats
visits: 150
absolute unique visits: 147
pageviews: 232
pages per visit: 1.55
avg time on site: 53 sec
bounce rate: 78%
Bounce rate is normal, after all, the posts are just recipes with kitchen notes. If you hit this site from an organic web search and don't find what you're looking for, would you stick around? Nearly all users come from the US, other countries that show up on the site usage report are Canada, Philippines, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, S. Korea, Bahamas, Romania, and Taiwan.
Ramblings of a Marketing Gurl (this site), a personal blogging site about marketing. It is advertised on my profiles at: LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Facebook, Experts-Exchange.com, my portfolio website, and just about every potential employer that I've applied to. Goal conversions are setup for this site and I am primarily seeing if visitors hit my marketing portfolio; of course this doesn't always track that well since I give the direct url to my work samples and visitors aren't funneled in from the top index level. Majority of visitors are from the US, but there are people from the UK, India, Germany, New Zealand, Pakistan, Sweden and Venezuela who also visit. This site isn't indexed with Google's Blogger.com.
Jul-Aug 2008 stats
visits: 27
absolute unique visits: 27
pageviews: 44
pages per visit: 1.63
avg time on site: 1 min, 22 sec
bounce rate: 62.96%
And, last of all, my personal/portfolio website on Googlepages. This site is not advertised at all, contains anti-spider code, isn't indexed on Google, and basically, the only visitors are those that I know personally whether by social group, networking, or job hunting. Why? I like my privacy even though I am on at least a half dozen personal and business social networking sites.
Jul-Aug 2008 stats
visits: 26
absolute unique visits: 17
pageviews: 90
pages per visit: 1.63
avg time on site: 4 min, 53 sec
bounce rate: 38.46%
Similar stats to my marketing blog? The two are usually packaged together. The biggest difference is average time on site where visitors are definitely spending a lot of time reading on my portfolio site. I've only recently discovered that my name isn't visible in large bold type on my personal/portfolio website nor on my marketing blog. Hmm, I shall have to fix that.
This is Latin for "seize the fish!"
In this every increasing world of global diversity where goods and services transfer across different cultures and socioeconomic demographics, it's important for homeland marketers to understand the prefixes that their marketing messages may hold or translate to when selling into another trade region.
Here are some of the most talked about classic cross-cultural marketing blunders:
The Japanese company Matsushita Electric was promoting a new Japanese PC for internet users. Panasonic created the new web browser and had received license to use the cartoon character Woody Woodpecker as an interactive internet guide. The day before the huge marketing campaign, Panasonic realized its error and pulled the plug. Why? The ads for the new product featured the following slogan:
"Touch Woody - The Internet Pecker." The company only realized what it had done when an embarrassed American explain what "touch Woody's pecker" could be interpreted as!
The word "mist" seems to get many companies into trouble. Poorly thought through uses of the name in Germany has resulted in "Irish Mist" (an alcoholic drink), "Mist Stick" (a curling iron from Clairol), "Cashmere Mist" (deodorant from Donna Karen) and "Silver Mist" (Rolls Royce car). "Mist" in German means dung or manure.
Traficante, an Italian mineral water found a great reception in Spain's underworld. In Spanish it translates as "drug dealer".
Honda introduced their new car "Fitta" into Nordic countries in 2001. If they had taken the time to undertake some cross cultural marketing research they may have discovered that "fitta" was an old word used in vulgar language to refer to a woman's genitals in Swedish, Norwegian and Danish. In the end they renamed it "Honda Jazz".
When Pepsico advertised Pepsi in Taiwan with the ad "Come Alive With Pepsi" they had no idea that it would be translated into Chinese as "Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead."
Read more?
and more?
and still more?
even more examples?
Ok, so you get the point. Plenty of companies have made a lot of cross-cultural mistakes when advertising to cultures outside their primary. How do you avoid such marketing catastrophes? Don't put up a trophy of a cat ass, for one. (Btw, this pun reference comes from the Piers Anthony Xanth novel series.)
Har har, for real...
1. Hire a translator who has lived and worked in the country/region you want to sell to.
2. If you're in a tough squeeze (e.g., no marketing budget), at least look up the phrases you want to use in a multi-language dictionary such as the KudoZ Open Glossary which offers up a field to search for slang definitions.
3. Read up on multicultural practices.
4. Visit a cross-cultural event in your area, observe and interact.
5. Don't become a case example for college students when your marketing campaign fails due to a cultural misunderstanding.
Disclaimer: This blog posting is intended to make new and existing SEO users aware of known Black Hat techniques and does not advocate the usage of such search engine optimization strategies.
In an earlier post, I touched briefly upon White Hat SEO basics and alluded to how ethics really doesn't play a part in whatever technique is employed when using search engine optimization. To brand ethics with SEO concepts is just silly. That's like saying everyone else is breaking a moral or legal requirement for the mass acquisition of inbound traffic and prospective customers. When in fact, no US laws are being broken here unless you're using the domain for cybersquatting and you have to prove that you own the website for legitimate purposes; which still might be construed as illegal with regard to the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act.
Black Hat techniques attempt to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. These include link buying, spamdexing, cloaking, keyword stuffing, creating doorway pages, link farming, link baiting, misrepresenting content, using hidden text to manipulate page rankings, etc.
And, there are significant penalties from using Black Hat techniques:
* Your sites get delisted from major search engines
* Your IP address gets blacklisted
* Your page rankings are significantly reduced
* Your urls become eligible for manual review prior to a search engine crawl
I'm not sure why any company with a legitimate product or services offering would consider employing BH methods to gain higher page rankings. Ignorance? Greed? It does happen, albeit infrequently, to large brand-driven companies.
Related Links:
Black Hat vs. White Hat Search Spam Debate
Google Webmaster Guide for SEO
Black Hole SEO: The Real Desert Scraping
Glossary:
Black Hat
Keyword stuffing
Marketing needs come in all sorts of flavors:
- I'm a chiropractor working 12 hour days. When do I have time for marketing?
- I'm a CPA and I can only take on clients within an X-radius driving distance.
- I'm a licensed psychologist looking to get new customers in the [region] area.
- I'm a writer for the entertainment industry and I have a script to pitch.
- I'm a wellness health professional with a small retail storefront, what's the best way to attract new and retain old customers?
The way marketing has evolved with the digital landscape has made it easier than ever for small businesses and sole proprietorships to market their products or services to new, undefined customer segments.
Budget has always been a factor for the type(s) of marketing programs used to acquire or retain customers. The deeper the pockets, the better the program? Not necessarily so. You can always use a "no-frills", open source application to handle some of the marketing. You could use Microsoft Word to design a sales brochure in-house and either print it yourself or at a local printshop. A marketer can help you craft the right message and what to say that sells your services to a new customer.
People have to make the time to seek out marketing best practices for their industry and to utilize that knowledge that separates them from the competitors who attended the same seminar on how to market their business.
No one knows a business like the owner of a company. This is why effort is a key factor for marketing success. If you're not working with an outside marketing consultant or have one in-house, you'll be doing all the marketing yourself in addition to everything else your company does. It takes an active understanding of what marketing tools are best for your line of business. The days of flat advertising in the "yellow book" are no longer relevant.
Here's a tip on competitive intelligence:
Find a company that's similar to your own and search for them with all the methods you know. Telephone book ad, online listing, local flyer/message board ad, or where they appear in a search query on your favorite search engine. What is it about their marketing message that caught your attention? If you were their customer, would you respond?
The Pareto principle (a.k.a the 80-20 rule, Haddad's Theorem) states that 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes. In the business world, this has come to mean that 80% of your revenues typically comes from 20% of your customers. Businesses have long sought after more customers who are akin to the 20% that generates the most revenues. How is it done? One method is to use customer segmentation.
Is this scenario familiar to you?
You're putting together list acquisition specs for business unit of your company (or your client's). The BU manager wants to launch a customer acquisition campaign that targets all small and medium sized businesses which have 100-500 employees, have $XX+ millions in revenues, and are geographically located in southern California. Their best repeat business customers comes from professional offices such as engineering, architectural, CPA, and law firms.
Do the specs and requirements match?
Traditional segmentation used to mean that you'd take a database (or list) of customers and carve them out into customer groups based on demographics or socio-psychographic data (e.g., Claritas). Value-based segmentation looks at groups of customers in terms of the revenue they generate and the costs of establishing and maintaining relationships with them. ROI is not just a financial statement hot item, it is a typical key performance indicator (KPI) to gauge how useful customer acquisition strategy is by comparing what measures it took to get that customer's business, how many units of X they purchased, and how many more units of X they intend to purchase.
Just who are your customers anyways?
The basics of customer segmentation answers the following parameters of any industry its applied to: Who, What, Where, Why, and How.
Who
Consumers? Businesses?
What
Your products or services.
Where
Not just for postal recipients. Did they respond to web or email advertisements? Attend a webinar? Buy directly from you or from an affiliate merchant?
Why
The reasons(s) why your products or services won the sale. Is your product or service better than that of the next best substitution product/service? Cheaper? Easier to use? A simple followup with a customer survey usually answers this and keeps the feedback door open.
How
How was it purchased? online? at a physical storefront? at the company store? at a tradeshow/seminar event?
For the first time, my other blog has received organic traffic from AOL. This is both interesting and significant because I don't advertise at all through any of AOL's networks. I don't get a whole lot of traffic, but it's steady and worthy of consideration to monetize the blog. I haven't done so in the past because it doesn't cost me anything to keep the site up.
I really don't see why people are so obsessed about keyword ad buys and bidding on short- and long-tails for that 15% or so paid search traffic that will get them placed higher up on the food chain. SEO is a concept, a lot like modern day IT practices, where the concept has to adapt so rapidly to changing technologies that you have to have employ specialists to cope with such trends to stay ahead of competitors. I don't feel that it adds any value to a company's business model and it detracts from the resources necessary to generate positive net income. I can have this opinion because of the 89 visits (83 absolute unique visitors) to the food blog in the last 30 days (May 10 - June 9), 72 visits (80% of total traffic) were Google organic.
This means that people got to my site through natural means. Either because they saw a recipe I posted to a large recipe swapping/journalling community, or they had typed in keywords that match the keyword tagging that I use on my food site. I might have mentioned in a previous post that I dislike tags; it is only because people mistag articles, blogs, and RSS feeds all the time to redirect traffic to a misrepresentation of a tag's keywords.
For all the sites that I manage (2 blogs, 1 personal site, 1 game info site), I use Google Analytics, but I also have Stat Counter and ClusterMap on the ones where I know I will have international traffic. ClusterMap provides a wonderful display of frequency by location, representing website hit population by a visitor's IP address but at a bird's eye view.
This is where my international visitors came from (June '07 - May '08):
My two largest visitor populations are located in Florida and California. I have two recipes that generate consistent monthly traffic. Can you guess which ones? I'll give you a hint. One is a Cuban dessert recipe (majority of hits) that I was inspired to make from scratch after tasting it from Portos Bakery; the other is a Chinese appetizer (2nd most frequently visited posting) that is probably one of the priciest items you could order at a restaurant that has it. Both of these are made from basic (to that food culture) ingredients.
So, why do you suppose I have so much traffic from these two US states for that one Cuban recipe?
I had originally thought about writing about nifty web tools that would be useful to small business owners, but in my research I had discovered that there were a lot of tools that people could use to make their day more efficient and a lot more that is a waste of time. I looked at these tools from two perspectives, one from my own, a marketing perspective -- how effectively the vendor generated buzz about the product and the second, from a clients' perspective in how they might perceive use of the tools and integrate it into their daily business practices.
1. LinkedIn - for business networking, pick one and stick with it. Having multiple profiles across different business networking sites just means that you have to update them all whenever a change occurs. It's better than Plaxo in maintaining current information on networked contacts. Plus, your personalize LinkedIn url is search engine indexed, so that's like free bio advertising without having to do anything other than create a basic profile. Users can easily import/export, add or remove contacts. It has a clean, easy-to-use interface that turns click-throughs into converts very quickly. It's good for creating rapport and building a reputation online through recommendations.
2. LuLu.com - a self-publishing site for hardcover or paperback books, calendars, etc. Haven't used this site yet, but they essentially remove all the barriers to entry for the publishing industry. Anyone can self-publish now, with their service offering.
3. Walk Score - originally developed for the real estate industry, this tool helps users find local-to-an-address businesses, schools, parks, libraries, etc. It's not just for people in town or the recently relocated, any traveling businessperson can find a local restaurant wherever their company sends them. The site programmatically ranks sites based on how far it is for a person to walk, point to point. All the locations feed directly from the Google Maps API, and adding a location fairly easy too. (Update: 2018-04-02, WalkScore acquired by Redfin)
4. Any blogging site like Blogger, TypePad, or WordPress - use for personal or business or both, promote products, introduce new services, keep an open window with your customers. Blogger.com allows you to manage multiple blogs under one master account. This is the "new" corporate newsletter. Many blogging sites have their own built-in RSS feeds, so your viewers can subscribe and be updated whenever you publish a new post.
5. Podcasting - MP3s for on-the-go listeners. Podcast Alley has both a genre directory and how-to resources for setting up podcasts. This is one media area where format standards have not been an issue. Podcasts can often be downloaded to one's iPod, Zune, desktop, or other MP3 player. Businesses are catching on and publishing seminars, tech conferences, and interviews using this web enhancement for distribution and delivery.
Professionals don't have a lot of excess time on their hands. This next short list are tools that didn't make the cut because they add more micromanagement steps, they're hard to use, are not the right advertising medium, or they simply don't make sense in blended media business marketing strategy.
Twitter - A dispatch service for micronets, if you really wanted people to know what you were up to 24/7. It's not just for people. The service can be hooked up to plants (water me), tamagochis (pet me), and vending machines (feed me).
Facebook - This site is slow to change to capture the benefit of having business tools available; also their site policies regarding privacy and user-generated content aren't all that great. It's very limited, and speedwise rather slow. There are plenty of competitors of similar flavor, e.g., Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, etc.
MySpace - purely for personal use unless you work in the entertainment industry; the on-site tools just aren't up to spec for professionals. Sure it's free, but in this case, having a blog or your own web domain would be better than a MySpace account.
SecondLife - a virtual "3D" world environment that allows users to create their own virtual content (clothing, furniture, cars) of various themes, buy virtual real estate (with real US dollars), offers a currency in Linden (game) money. B2C ads from real-world businesses are flat, two-dimensional billboards that are gaudy and distasteful to look at. Slow pixelated movement may give some users vertigo when traveling throughout the SecondLife world.
This was once known as customer behavioral profiling, although some I/O psychologists would probably have you believe otherwise that there are far deeper sentiments that consumers attach to the everyday and ordinary that surprisingly have monetary value. The most common example of predictive modeling in the financial services is credit scoring.
In the USA, credit scoring is a basic data analysis of a person's (or business') ability to maintain good credit standings and pay off debt. The higher the rating, the lower risk the person is to taking on more debt, or so the working practices go. Such factors like how many lines of credit a person has, what the revolving balances are, how much is paid off at the end of each billing cycle, are there any missed or late payments, current balance on your primary savings account, etc. Oddly enough, you actually have to take on more debt and faithfully pay it off to raise your credit score. The top major credit bureaus that amass credit data on individuals are Equifax (ScorePower), Experian (PLUS score), and TransUnion. If you are responding to an online ad about getting your free credit report, it's very likely that it's a consumer program managed by one of these companies.
So who uses this scoring methodology? Banks, of course, so they can lend you money for a home loan or extend credit to you for a HELOC; Utility companies (Gas, Electric, and Water services often require $25 deposits for customers who have poor credit); Apartment managers; Cable service providers; Private and public companies who look at a job applicants' credit history.. the list goes on.
Consumers are kind of screwed to begin with since each "hit" on their credit report influences their scoring as well. There isn't enough transparency with how scores are calculated to see if the report was accessed for financial reasons (buying a new house or car, applying for a platinum credit card) or for living reasons (relocation to a new city, getting gas service hooked up to a new apartment). And, there are hardly any resources for consumers to realistically "fight the system" when bad credit history is slapped onto their virtual account. I digress.
Predictive modeling helps companies identify their prime target for new or existing products and services based on current or historical purchase behavior the customer has exhibited. Looking at aggregate data (multiple consumers, multiple purchase points), you'll start to see trending in what products or website areas are more popular with consumers who bought X and are considering the purchase of Y. Amazon.com
already does this and their metrics are a value-add for everyone looking at it. The consumer is given a feed of popular products purchased by other registered site users. The company's marketing team has a lot of supporting data statistics to provide to affiliate merchants and advertisers, and guest users can see where else on the site to look for things most similar to their search.
Let's say that you already have a website because if you didn't, I'd have to write a series of blog posts explaining how to do it or refer you to one of several tutorial sites that can help you build one from scratch. At some point you'll be pitched by an SEO vendor to improve your website's rankings with various search engines. WhiteHatSEO.org offers some guidance for "ethical" SEO practices in its member codex. Here are a few of their tips.
- Don't use shadow domains.
- Don't use doorway pages.
- Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase clients site's ranking or page rank.
- Don't use hidden text or hidden links.
- Don't employ cloaking or sneaky redirects, which is used to deceive users or present different content to search engines than it display to users.
- Don't send automated queries to search engines.
- Don't load pages with irrelevant words and phrases.
- Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content.
This all good, but if you're a sole proprietor or a company looking at SEO for the first time, how would you know who was legit and who wasn't? And, given how diverse SEO methods are these days, which ones are the right ones to use? Is this a task that can be handled in-house or does it need to be outsourced?
Key SEO goals are intended to make sure that:
* Pages are indexed and a good site map exists
* Pages are well-structured with headers and subheaders, content-appropriate meta tags, etc.
* Descriptive page titles are used
* Keyword-rich inbound links are used
It looks a lot like a new spin on basic webmaster duties.
The easier you make it for a user who knows almost nothing about your business to find your website in the myriad of millions of sites, the better. Unlike the big yellow book from the telecom company that shows up every year to unreceptive household doorsteps, SEO allows you, the web domain owner, to be in control of advertising, product or service positioning relative to next best complements, and manage who visits and how. In that respect, SEO is more cost-effective than print advertisements. Opting for paid SEO is entirely up to your company's customer acquisition strategy.
At some point I'll follow-up with a post about black hat SEO and why ethics has nothing to do with whatever technique is used but how it is used that can get sites delisted from search engine indexes.
Remember: The only good SPAM is when its fried up with rice.
Related links:
White Hat SEO tips for bloggers
Questions to Ask a Paid Search Vendor
Questions to Ask SEO Consultants
Glossary:
White Hat
Shadow domains
Doorway pages
Link Farms
Here's a cheer for all the consumers out there. *Yay!* Finally, it seems that someone has been reading all the FTC complaints and companies will have to comply if they are to stay compliant with these new proposed operating rules with regard to how a customer unsubscribes from a list. I'm sure at least one of these scenarios has happened to you when you tried to subscribe from that bacn list.
The new rule provisions address four topics:
(1) an e-mail recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page to opt out of receiving future e-mail from a sender;
(2) the definition of “sender” was modified to make it easier to determine which of multiple parties advertising in a single e-mail message is responsible for complying with the Act’s opt-out requirements;
(3) a “sender” of commercial e-mail can include an accurately-registered post office box or private mailbox established under United States Postal Service regulations to satisfy the Act’s requirement that a commercial e-mail display a “valid physical postal address”; and
(4) a definition of the term “person” was added to clarify that CAN-SPAM’s obligations are not limited to natural persons.
More details - http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2008/05/canspam.shtm
Think I'm taking about green initiatives or energy? Think again. These concepts can be applied to marketing programs.
A sustainable marketing program not only pays for itself, it does so regardless of the market economy--whether we're in a boom or recession. It shouldn't matter if you're a non-profit organization or you have deep pockets for marketing programs, the basis of company survival has always been a positive figure (that's a positive net profit for you sales revenue junkies) for the bottom line.
Renewable means that the marketing concepts of a successful campaign can be applied to another, or to other business units within the company.
Adaptable means that the metrics used for measurement in a marketing campaign can be used for different audiences (business or consumers) because the underlying data sets and the acquisition goals (get new customers, pitch new technology, affirm customer loyalty to product or service brand, etc) are the same.
