Marketing Science Blog

The other day I was networking with a fellow marketing consultant and he asked me the following question:

“Do you think a business website should have a physical address and pictures of the owners? In other words, should you provide personal touches? Or could people care less and are only concerned with quick and valuable service?”

We get bombarded on a daily basis with hundreds up to several thousand marketing messages. Because of the pounding people take from these messages, I believe it takes a more intimate approach to break through the clutter and command attention.

A photo is a great start in establishing trust and what’s called marketing intimacy. A photo associates a real person with the your web site and tells the world that you are confident about your product or service. This bumps up credibility and trust.

For even more effect, add an audio clip below your picture and benefit from the marketing synergy of your picture and voice together.

Here’s an example:

“A Special Welcome From Our Founder”…

This can really help establish marketing intimacy, credibility and trust with web site users. Even in a world of give-it-to-me-now instant gratification, the personal touches add real value if not on a conscious level, a sub-conscious one.

What else can you do you create marketing intimacy with your visitors/prospects?

Well according to marketing genius Alex Mandossian, you engage your prospects and customers on as many sensory levels as you can (tactile, audio, visual) in order to build trust, credibility and a positive, enduring business relationship.

Alex opines the most important dynamic e at work for establishing marketing intimacy is the power of your own voice. I agree with him completely.

When you use personal photos of yourself, vocal audio clips and web videos in your site, you are engaging your prospects in a way a regular sites do not.

After all, text is text and having to read volumes on the Web can get very tiringt. Audio and video are fun, easy ways to learn information. This is a big opportunity for smart businesses who can provide information, products and services to people in the exact forms they desire.

Other media and methods you can use to establish marketing intimacy (without having to physically be there) include:

teleseminars, webinars, web casts, video conferencing, social networking sites …

As for having an address on your site, I firmly believe you should. It will help with trust and credibility. I know that when I cannot find an address on a site, especially one trying to sell me something, it’s a concern. I feel like the owner wants to hide behind an email address.

By having your physical address on your web site you help prospects eliminate some of the uncertainty and objections about you and what you’re offering. It certainly can’t hurt.

Posted by Bob T.

Ok, so everybody and their brother is handing out marketing advice for 2008. I would like to provide my own list of things to recommend based on my own experiences as well as some of the things I’ve learned myself recently from my own research and from Alex Mandossian’s training.

#1 Marketing Strategy for 2008: Start a Blog and Post Regularly

A blog (web log) is a great way to add interesting and valuable content to your website without the usual formalities and pressures of writing, refining and publishing articles.

It’s just a lot easier to write when you’re being informal. You don’t have to creatively spit out paragraph after paragraph or obsess over grammar and style. After all, it’s YOUR blog. You write as little or as much as you want.

The marketing benefit of blogging is enormous. Search engines look favorably on blogs (over websites) because the content is usually updated regularly.

Some blogging tips… Try to update your blog at least every 2-3 days. Even better if you can update daily. The search engines will give preference to blogs that update frequently.

For great free blogging software, just click the WordPress link at the bottom of this page. Have your webmaster install it, configure it and you can start blogging right away!

#2 Marketing Strategy for 2008: SEO Search Engine Optimization

I am amazed at the large number of business websites which have poor (or no) search engine optimization. I believe part of this problem comes from the fact that many businesses have relied heavily on pay per click advertising as a quick fix to their search engine traffic woes.

As a result SEO gets passed over or a belief develops within the company that SEO is only for big companies with deep pockets. Nothing could be further from the truth. For a modest investment of say $75 -100 per page most small or medium businesses can enjoy a nice return on investment.

For example, I recently built a new website for one of my home care clients. I optimized it for mostly local search traffic using long tail keywords and many keywords which don’t even appear in the keyword inventories of search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo.

This may seem somewhat contrarian to the normal keyword research a company or SEO consultant might recommend i.e. “only select and use keywords you find from the keyword tools of search engines”.

But my clients are benefiting from good traffic to their local businesses with these “invisible” keywords. In order to find these keywords you have to work closely with your clients and their prospects to figure out what’s most important to them and what’s “top of mind” when they do a search. Often times they use phrases which aren’t popular enough to be listed by the keyword tools. They add a town name or a city to a phrase for example. When taken collectively, all these invisible keywords can bring substantial traffic to a website.

If you do anything this year to improve your website traffic, have your site optimized and try to update your content regularly.

#3 Marketing Strategy for 2008: Video Content on Blogs and Websites

As most people have already figured out, video is “white hot” on the Internet right now. And there’s no end in sight. What’s especially great about this is the fact that search engines are currently giving priority to sites which contain video. Even more priority if you update with new video regularly.

In fact I believe this is NOT a fad, but web videos are here to stay. A lot like reality TV, video captures and commands people’s imagination and attention. It’s addictive. We are all voyeurs to some degree and video plays on this natural human characteristic.

Admittedly, I’ve been behind the web video curve, but no more. I went out and purchased a Flip Video camera that will create high resolution “how to” videos that I can place in my blogs and websites.

So my recommendation to anyone reading this post, is to just get started with video. You don’t need an expensive video camera, you can pick up a decent DVR (Digital Video Recorder) for as little as $100. Once you’ve done that, start creating some video tutorials or “how to” videos for your area of expertise.

Not only will these videos showcase your talents, they can create a “viral video effect” if you are providing something of real value and give people the opportunity to share the videos with friends at social bookmarking (like Digg, Stumble Upon) and networking sites (like FaceBook and MySpace) or by using a good TAF (Tell a Friend) script. If done correctly, the results could be a flood of new traffic coming to your site on a regular basis.

Part II in tomorrow’s post.

-Bob