Advertisers Tailor Messages To Address Economic Concerns

November 11th, 2008

This LA Times article was extremely interesting since it explores how different advertisers are tailoring their advertising messages to pitch value and savings during this harsh economic environment. Advertisers who have pitched themselves on platforms of luxury or convenience are now changing their tune since those qualities are valued less when money is tight. What is especially interesting is how luxury goods companies like BMW are changing their tune to promote value and savings while competitors like Mercedes are not. (Bad move, Mercedes.)

Even luxury brands are promoting value. The current ads for BMW’s dealer group, for example, focus less on performance and prestige and more on safety and savings. The campaign reminds potential buyers that BMW offers a four-year no-cost maintenance plan.

“The message we feel is most in line with the times is reminding people about our value-for-money equation,” said Shawn Ticehurt, BMW North America’s marketing and events communications manager.

The team at NETexponent brainstormed this very topic a few weeks ago during one of our townhall meetings. We discussed how our clients could tailor their marketing messages so they appeal to the current consumer mindset. The team came up with some great ideas and here are just a few:

• iChapters.com offers students textbooks at a fraction of the cost- a key marketing message to be highlighted.  They also offer immediate gratification since they are downloadable textbooks. Focusing more on the savings compared to print and less on the immediate gratification should prove helpful.
• audible.com allows people to purchase downloadable audio books one at a time or through their subscription plans. The subscription plans allow consumers to purchase books at a significant savings off the cover price. This could prove to be a much greater value proposition than the convenience of the download or their vast selection of 50,000+ books.
• The Financial Times newspaper provides great world news coverage, not just financial news as the name may lead you to believe. In this market more and more people are looking for news about the world abroad for financial and political reasons. It’s also great to get a world view on the US to see how others view us. FT’s messaging could benefit from a focus on this value proposition perhaps even more than a focus on price. Timely news with a world perspective is very important in this crazy environment.
• Even The Wine Enthusiast can pitch themselves on value if they promote their clearance section more as well as selling their own brand of products which can be much cheaper than pricier alternatives.

I am sure that some of our affiliates can also find interesting ways to pitch our clients and I encourage everyone to think about how products and services can offer consumers value and/or savings.

Posted in NETexponent Clients, Online Marketing by Peter Figueredo | | 0 Comments

Get Seth Godin’s New Book Free

October 29th, 2008

Our friends at Audible.com want people to hear Seth Godin’s new audiobook for free. Download it now and enjoy.

No Strings Attached!
http://www.audible.com/tribes

Posted in NETexponent Clients by Peter Figueredo | | 0 Comments

Google Assigns Branding Value To Search

July 21st, 2008

MediaPost has a short piece on Google’s recent study that shows the branding effect of paid search and SEO. Of course Google benefits from this data since it leads advertisers to believe they can afford to pay more for PPC search in order to capitalize on the “branding” value. The article seems to think that most advertisers do not take the “free branding” aspect into consideration when buying PPC search terms.

I don’t know about other advertisers but I can certainly say that NETexponent clients are ahead of the game in this area. Most of the clients using our search marketing services have already placed a branding value on key search terms. To this extent we even manage these terms differently than the rest of their efficiency driven search campaigns. Terms that are important to building our clients’ brand are typically placed in a bucket we call “brand critical” and optimized to different metrics and goals. The performance of brand critical keywords is evaluated on a revenue basis as well as their impact on brand building efforts.

The tolerance for CPCs related to branding vs. acquisition will always differ depending on the advertiser’s specific goals so our team uses a custom approach in every case. However, I thought it was important to note that NETexponent clients seem to be ahead of the curve according to how Google sees the PPC search marketplace.

This is yet another reason we love working with smart clients.

Posted in NETexponent Clients, Research, Search Marketing by Peter Figueredo | | 0 Comments

Feel The Love - Client Love

June 11th, 2008

At NETexponent we have a term to describe the feeling we get when our good work is recognized by clients, “Client Love”. Client Love can manifest itself in many forms such as a friendly email note praising our efforts to a smiling face and pat on the back during a client meeting.

Our team at NETexponent feeds on this Client Love and (since we are a team) when one person gets Client Love they immediately pass it around the company and share that love with everyone. For confidentiality reasons I cannot share many Client Love examples with you but I just wanted to let our clients know we appreciate their business…but we crave- their Client Love!

Here are a few public examples so that you can see what I mean by “Client Love”

1. One of our newest clients announced our relationship on their own company blog.
2. Another one of our clients praised our PPC Search Marketing services on an agency comparison site.
3. Of course we love when clients let us post testimonials on our own website.
4. Clients sometimes post testimonials to LinkedIn.
5. Many folks have even joined our Facebook Group and/or Fan Page.

Thanks again to all of our loving clients…the feeling is mutual!

Posted in Meet Us, NETexponent Clients, NETexponent Fun by Peter Figueredo | | 0 Comments