The top metric that most people are looking at is increasing their conversion rate. So how do we increase conversion rate?

1. Segment, segment, segment.

Avinash wisely pointed out that looking at a site’sA overall total conversion rate is not that easy to take action on. By using web analytics you can segment conversion rate into all kinds of groups. You can segment by referral source, segment by landing page, segment by search terms, etc. Working then to improve the conversion rate of these segments is easier to monitor and improve.

2. Conversion rate needs friends

Don’t look at conversion rate in isolation. Look at average order size, visitors, bounce rates, and other metrics in conjuction with your testing on conversion rate.

3. Don’t look at conversion rate in isolation

Similar to the above two points, you need to put context around conversion rate numbers. For example, by offering your product for half price you’ll most likely increase your conversion rate. That’s great right? Well, no, because you’re making less revenue.

4. Fall in love with abandonment

Abandonment is the only way people can leave your site and hurt your conversion rate, so naturally improving the abandonment rate on each page of your website will help your conversion rate.

5. Determine the true opportunity

It’s impossible to actually convert everyone. Part of your audience is going to be landing on your site by mistake, some of the users are just crud and will never be customers, but what real opportunity can you get? You need a good idea of your true audience to go after it.

So what is the golden answer to all this? Testing.

Avinash said people far too often use the HiPPO strategy on their web decisions. HiPPO stands for “Highest Paid Person’s Opinion”. The HiPPO for your website is just one opinion, no matter how smart they are. You need to test to let the real users decide what works best. 80% of the time the HiPPO (or you) are wrong about what’s going to work best on your site. And you must continue testing, what’s great today, is stale tomorrow.

What methodologies can you use to test?

Methodology #1: A/B Testing

Hopefully most of you are familiar with A/B testing, and Avinash outlined the pros and cons of this strategy, but said if you’re doing no testing today then you should start with A/B testing immediately. He gave a great example of how when he was at Intuit they tried out this amazing and sexy Flash shopping cart solution. Avinash thought it was great, it kept users from having to refresh pages, it was slick, it was easy to use, and he saw no way it could fail. In an A/B test with Intuit’s old normal shopping cart, it failed miserably. Why? Users apparently were used to the old normal way.

Essentially, A/B testing is simple, easy to do yourself, but it’s limited and you have to keep it simple to be accurate.

Methodology #2: Multivariate Testing

Multivariate testing is a testing format that allows you to test multiple parts of your page at once. It allows you to test alot, most tools provide great additional tracking, you can visual results pretty well, but it’s more complicated. Avinash gave an example of how multivariate testing improved the downloads of Picasa on Google’s Picasa download page by 30%.

The prime tools in multivariate which all have different strengths:

• Offermatica – The most marketing focused.
• Optimost – More technically focused.
• Sitespect – Don’t need to implement javascript code, they do it by packet sniffing between the server and user.
• Google Website Optimizer – The only free tool, but have to be using Adwords.

Methodology #3: Experience Testing

This is the art of testing sets of multiple pages independently. Such as funneling Windows users vs. Mac users. There are no current tools that do this, so you have to be sophisticated and do this yourself. However, this has the most power and can lead to the biggest results.

A great talk overall, and Avinash was fun and engaging while he spoke. I think he has a bright future as an analytics evangelist.

Recently, I was able to do an interview on the online radio show, Online Marketing with RSS Ray talking about an overall approach to using social media, blogs and online public relations.

Below are links to the audio segments from the interview. All of the tactics discussed provide benefits for search engine optimization as well.

The interview went about an hour including the rather generous ad spots. Thanks to RSS Ray for inviting me to do the interview. Past interviewees have included Mike Moran from IBM and Robert Scoble and upcoming interviewees include Aaron Wall of SEO Book and Rebecca Lieb from ClickZ and Search Engine Watch.

Segment 1 – Social Media Marketing:

What is social media? Why is social media becoming important for business marketing? How does the trust fostered by editorial visibility help marketers attract customers? How does social media affect search engine rankings? What businesses should use social media as a marketing tool? Are there certain channels within the social media space that are more attractive than others? Are certain industries more suitable to market via social media? What are some common mistakes people make with social media marketing?

Segment 2 – Blog Marketing:

When should a business use a blog for marketing? What is an online media room and what can it do for a company’s marketing or PR efforts? Why is a RSS feed important?

Segment 3 - Press Release Optimization:

Why are press releases so important for the 21st century? Consumers are viewing news sites and consuming press release information directly, more so than in the past. Are a lot of marketers understanding the power and effectiveness of press releases as marketing tools? Six tips for effective press release optimization. Can press releases be written to actually sell something? Should landing pages be used in conjunction with a press release? How can you measure the results from press releases?

Tips for writing press releases and the importance of using multiple media formats and social media with press releases. How to go about implementing a program of marketing with press releases. How should you approach influential bloggers and journalists? Should companies go outside for help to produce social media and press release content? How does TopRank help businesses improve conversions and brand visibility online?

Segment 4 – Hiring a Social Media Consultant:

What are some criteria for evaluating a social media marketing consultant? What does TopRank write about on it’s blog? What kinds of companies does TopRank work with?

Overall I thought it went pretty well but I am very open to any feedback Online Marketing Blog readers have about it. I’ve been kicking around the idea of doing a podcast or videocast as part of this blog and this interview is a sample of the kinds of things we’d talk about.

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About the Author

Lee Odden is President and Founder of TopRank Online Marketing, specializing in organic SEO, blog marketing and online public relations. He’s been cited as a search marketing expert by publications including U.S. News & World Report and The Economist and has implemented successful search marketing programs with top BtoB companies of all sizes. Odden shares his marketing expertise at Online Marketing Blog offering daily news, interviews and best practices.

The language of web analytics is driven, to a large extent, by the tool vendors. When you use a tool, you are naturally going to adopt the language of the tool – to do anything else would be cumbersome and probably ridiculous. But that language hasn’t always served the community well. In the post on Segment Reporting, for example, I noted how misleading and confusing the concept of time-period uniques (daily uniques, weekly uniques, etc.) is. There is a similar, though slightly less damaging confusion around visitor segmentation – one that obscures a serious deficiency in most analytic tools.

In the common language of web analytic tools, a visitor segment is taken to be the set of visitors who meet certain behavioral criteria (the segment definition). But this isn’t quite the way visitor segments are actually implemented. It would be more precise to say that a visitor segment in a web analytics tool is a set of filter criteria that can be attached to a report (possibly any report) to remove any visitors not matching the filter set. Is there a difference between these two definitions?

I think there is – and here’s why.

Suppose you want to track the behavior on the SEMphonic web site of visitors who viewed the webinar I did with Paul Bruemmer on SEO measurement and Process. Let’s say the link to the webinar was posted on the site in November and, presumably, will remain there for at least a few months. In January of next year, you sit down and build a segment of visitors who clicked on the link to view the webinar. You want to see their behavior before they viewed the webinar and you want to see their behavior after – and your main interest is in seeing if the webinar drove online lead generation and your secondary interest is in understanding how viewing the webinar changed visitor’s behavior.

This seems like a classic web analysis problem. It’s the type of problem web analysts’ are asked to study over and over again – with the only real changes being the qualifying behavior and the conversion behavior. And it seems like the kind of problem that visitor segmentation is going to solve.

Seemingly, all you have to do is a setup a visitor segment where the qualifying behavior is “viewed the webinar.” Start your segment in October (so you get behavior prior to the webinar) and either run it forward to whenever you’re doing the analysis or pick some “close” date like the end of January (behavior after the webinar). With that segment in hand, you can run a report of site usage for the segment. That gives you a profile of “webinar users” behavior. You compare that to overall site usage and you’ve got your comparison of “webinar” vs. “non-webinar” users. If lots of visitors view the webinar, you can create a negative segment of visitors with the qualifying behavior “did not view the webinar” to get a cleaner contrast. You can also compare how many of the webinar visitors generated a lead (a conversion event) vs. either all users or the “non-viewed” segment. That gives you a measure of how effective the webinar was in driving lead conversion. So it seems like you’re done.

Except that none of that is really right. It might work. Indeed, we regularly do exactly this sort of analysis. But we also regularly have to discount it because it contains serious problems. You can count on any behavior you look at in October as prior to the webinar – since the link wasn’t available then. But once the link is posted, you have a mish-mash of behaviors. Some of the behavior is prior to viewing the webinar – even if its behavior from yesterday – since the visitor may just have the viewed the webinar. Some of the behavior is after the webinar. And, here’s the crux of the matter – you have no way in any specific report using the segment to tell which is which. Indeed, you can’t even tell (without some extra work) how much of the conversion came before the webinar and how much came after. It might be that lead generation is driving webinar views and not the other way around. The problem is that the segment isn’t “locked” down to a specific group of visitors in a specific time.

This problem becomes especially acute for the many situations where you want to track long-term behavior after a key event. Suppose, for example, that you want to understand the behavior of new customers. You need to “lock-down” a segment of new customers and then track them over an extended time-period – almost like an online focus group. You want to know how they behave in month 2 and month 3 and month 4. But the more extended the time-period, the greater is the mishmash of before and after events – and the harder it is to separate out what you care about from the noise.

From a tool perspective, it’s not as if the way vendors have usually implemented visitor segments is completely off-base. There are plenty of times when an open-segment – one that constantly introduces new members when they meet the qualifying behavior – is ideal. But, you really need to be able to “lock-down” a segment as well – to say that this segment is no longer a set of criteria, now it’s a set of visitors. And you want to be able to see the behavior of just those visitors for any time-period – whether it be a year ago or two years from now.

Once you see the difference between “locking” down a visitor segment and the standard implementation in web analytics, I think you’ll immediately grasp how important this feature actually is. Having it allows an analyst to do clean analysis against many of the most common real-world web analytics problems. Without it, you’re constantly going to be trying to adjust for all the noise in your data. That’s makes for lots of work and lots of very uncertain – and therefore pointless – analysis. Organizations don’t like to act on analysis when all you can say is “well, it looks like it might be this way though I can’t really tell for sure.”

What if your tool doesn’t support this kind of analysis? There are some work-arounds we’ve developed. And even though this series is ostensibly about tool evaluation, it’s worth discussing our two favorite solutions to the “lock-down” problem.

Solution number one has a single big drawback – it’s a tagging solution. Here’s the idea: you setup cookie logic that tags a visitor with a date when some key action is performed for the first time. It might be registration. It might be a PPC referral. It might be a purchase. It might be a class. Regardless, you write a permanent, non-expiring first-party cookie that says the event occurred. You use that cookie to write (once or every time) a custom variable in your analysis solution that contains the event date – formatted consistently and logically. Now, you can build visitor segments using the custom variable. You could, for instance, select all visitors who took the webinar in a specific week. But you could select a much wider date range for analysis – the month before or the month after as an example. This will provide a classic before and after analysis of the segment. And the only noise is the behavior immediately surrounding the week.

For some events, that’s still too much noise. But particularly for solving long period analysis problems like how new customers behave over time, this method is quite powerful.

But there’s no denying the tagging aspect is daunting. Getting a tagging change is too big a deal to realistically expect it to happen for something like tracking a webinar. So this technique is mostly useful for tracking behaviors that are of obvious and enormous importance to the business (like buying for the first time or signing up for an account).

Fortunately, we have workaround number two for situations like the webinar. This technique depends on the fact that vendors have to support online campaigns (which change often) – so they frequently provide good ways to define campaigns based on web site behaviors without having to fuss with the tag. You can take advantage of this capability to build a campaign that is only in-place for a specific period of time. Suppose, for instance, you created a campaign for the first week in November – and made clicking on the webinar link the defining behavior. Then you did another campaign for the next week. And so on. Now, you can construct a segment of visitors that responded to the campaign in week one of November. And, just as with the tagging solution, you can study the behavior of responders before the week and after. You can even study the behavior during the crucial week – though, of course, you’ll have all the old issues about did they take the webinar on Monday or Friday.

The “campaign” method has the very considerable advantage of not requiring a tag – and it’s the method we use most often to solve the “lock-down” problem. But there’s no denying that it’s a lot of work – since the campaigns have to be created on an ongoing basis.

The existence of these work-arounds can certainly help. But, both methods have serious drawbacks, not the least of which is that you have to plan for them. That means you can’t back-engineer an ad hoc analysis with them. Unfortunately, back-engineering is the way most analysis actually happens. It’s heavy weather to tell your boss or your client they’ll have to wait three months while you put the analysis infrastructure in place and then wait for enough before and after behavior to accumulate. Clients (and bosses) expect better – and they are right to do so. Which is why I put this ability to “lock-down” segments quite high on the list of features to look for when evaluating the visitor segmentation capabilities of a web analytics tool!

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Gary Angel is the author of the “SEMAngel blog – Web Analytics and Search Engine Marketing practices and perspectives from a 10-year experienced guru.

There is nothing more misleading when thinking about tools than the notorious “checklist” of features used by analysts and companies. Checklists get created by people running down a list of features in a product: Report on Geography. Check. Report on Screen Resolution. Check. Show Average Page Time. Check. Visitor Segmentation. Check. Dashboards. Check.

For fully commoditized goods, the old checklist approach is indeed pretty useful. But it depends for its usefulness on two huge assumptions that just don’t apply in web measurement. The first is that you know exactly what you need and want so you can decipher the relative importance of checks. The second is that a checkmark is all there is to say about a feature (a megapixel is a megapixel – but Visitor Segmentation is not one single thing).

The first assumption (you know what you need) is rarely true in web analytics; the second (a function is a true commodity) almost never.

Let’s start with one of the biggest items on your checklist – a core capability to all serious web analytics – visitor segmentation. Almost every tool now offers some form of visitor segmentation but they differ wildly in flavor and capabilities. Visitor Segmentation, you see, isn’t one capability. It’s a whole matrix of capabilities necessary to solving a variety of fundamental web analytics tasks.

So here’s a more detailed subset of aspects of Visitor Segmentation:

Segment Creation

• Can Segments be created without tags
• Segmentation Logic: can full logical operators be used to define segments
• Segmentation Variables: what data can be used to define segments
• Can external data be used natively and combined with web data in segment creation
• Can Segments be created via data-driven techniques like neural networks
• Can segments focus on visit or visitor behavior
• Can segments be defined based on time and event sequences
• Can distributions be produced on key behaviors to assist in segment creation

Segment Methodology

• Are segments samples or against all data
• Are segments created in real-time or delayed

Segment Reporting

• Are all data cuts available from segmentation or just some – and which ones
• Can Segments be cross-tabulated

Segment Usage

• Can segments “lock-down” a specific set of visitors that can then be tracked regardless of any segment criteria
• Can visitors from a segment be exported to other systems

I’m going to talk about each of these four items in separate posts – beginning today – because if I tried to tackle all four of them at once your Monday morning would be shot!

Segment Creation in Web Analytics

The ability to create Segments without tags is a fundamental capability. Its importance cannot be overstated. Any tool lacking this capability should not be on your short-list. Why? Segments are the analyst’s primary tool. But they change for almost every single analysis. You won’t use the same segments over and over – you’ll need new segments every time with highly specific behavioral definitions. And if you think an Analyst can get a tag changed on a site to explore an analysis – think again. Even if this was possible, imagine the cycle time: identify a segment, change the tag, rollout, wait for results (no back-history here), see it isn’t what you need, try again. Impossible. Tag-based segmentation is garbage and fortunately is no longer the standard.

Segmentation logic has less obvious impacts than tagless segmentation. It is, nevertheless, the area where most of even the best analytic tools have serious shortcomings. In an effort to protect you from your presumed stupidity (or their performance problems) most analytic solutions have a simple way to build segmentation logic – the set of behaviors that defines a visitor segment. By far the most common method is this: you can define multiple conditions; each condition is an AND that must be met for the visit/visitor to be included; within each condition you can set multiple values that meet the criteria. These values are implicitly OR values – if the visit/visitor meets any one of them then the condition is satisfied. This sounds pretty powerful. You can build logic like this: I want any visitor who viewed 5 or more page views in the Product section of the site AND started and order AND didn’t place an order. But as powerful as this seems, there are many, many conditions that can’t be created. Here’s one common one: I’d like to create a Visit based Prospect segment defined as anyone who has 0 Purchases OR who became a customer in this session. Oops. That OR is between two types of conditions. Can’t be done with this type of criteria definition. Or suppose I’d like to say that my Engaged Prospects are any visitor with 5 or more Page Views OR 2+ Visits. That’s an OR across conditions. Again, can’t be done. There are a range of different criteria builders out there, but there’s only one that would really make sense – full logical control including AND and OR plus parenthetical grouping. And I’ll venture to suggest that no single deficiency in web analytic tools is as consistently frustrating as this seemingly small feature that isn’t even on most checklists out there.

A related but less ubiquitous source of frustration is the types of data that can be used for segmentation. The truth is, you never really know what type of data you’re going to need to create segments on. In just the last thirty days I’ve had reason to want to create segments based on screen-resolution (for an online video site) and on average page time (for targeting live chat). Most tools that provide segmentation do a fairly reasonable job of opening up variables. But I’ll be darned if most of them don’t have peculiar limitations that drive you crazy. There is really only one right answer here: every variable should be available for filtering segments. But unlike segmentation logic, I’m willing to live with a fairly generous set of alternatives – I just don’t understand why I have to.

The use of external data (especially when combined with native web analytics data) to drive segments is a growing trend and underscores many absolutely essential methods of analysis. Some systems let you create segments based on External Data, but then you can’t combine those segments with additional behaviors. Some systems make you do this differently – create a variable based on the external data – then segment the variable along with whatever additional criteria you need. That’s actually fine – but you may run into a second limitation here – since many systems place severe limits on how you can subset variables – limiting you to string operators, for example. This won’t work at all if you are importing numeric data and need to be able to use it as such. All in all, this is a capability that not every company needs – but when you do, it’s often absolutely essential.

As far as I know, not a single tool in circulation today let’s you build data-driven visitor segments using tools like neural segmentation. That’s a shame, because the truth is that any rule-based segmentation is deeply flawed when it comes to combining complex constellations of behaviors. Someday, this will be an important capability. But for now, just assume that this is an empty checkbox on every tool in the marketplace.

Web behavioral analysis is somewhat unusual because it does often focus on two very different levels of analysis – the visitor and the visit. Of these, visitor segmentation is probably more important. Segmentation over time across sessions is absolutely essential to many, many types of analysis – and any tool that doesn’t support this capability shouldn’t be your short-list. That being said, the visit is often an interesting unit of analysis in its own right. Segmentation criteria should be definable for both Visitors and Visits – and ideally should be able to isolate segments like this: I want all visits without a purchase by Visitors who have made a purchase.

Which brings me to my last point – and a real pet peeve of mine. Virtually every single web analysis you might actually need involves a time component. What did visitors do in the week after they signed up for a class? What did visitors do in between registration and purchase? What did visitors do in the three days after downloading a trial? What did visitors do in the two sessions prior to buying a video? What was all of the behavior of a Prospect up to an including a Purchase but not after? Do all of these questions seem basic, simple and obvious. They do to me. But answering them is nearly impossible unless a web analytic tool lets you define segments based on a time component that allows you specify criteria relative to dates and or specific actions on the web. How many tools do this? Do any? How vendors have been so negligent in handling time-based analysis is utterly beyond me. This capability is the closest thing to a truly crippling lack in today’s toolset – and the remedy of it would vault a tool firmly into best in class in my view.

I couldn’t end on such a downer, so I went back and added this little gem – the ability to view distributions of behavior (as in how many visitors viewed this page 1 time, how many 2 times, how many 3 times, etc.). Why is this a segmentation capability? In one sense it isn’t. But just because there are no data driven segments, the analyst is stuck coming up with segment definitions. Take an operations site with a key page – submit a form. What’s a heavy user of the form? You can look at the average page views and see that’s its 3.5 views per visitor. But what’s the distribution? It makes a huge difference. On many customer operations sites, the distribution may be a radical U – with high spikes at 0 and 1 and a shocking spike somewhere out in the 100+ range. But if you don’t know what the distribution is like, you have no way to build appropriate segment definitions. So you have to experiment – how many visitors do I get if I say 5+ form submits. Too many? Let’s try 8. And so on. The distribution of visitors (and visits too for that matter) around a behavior is an essential descriptive view for an analyst. And unlike time based segmentation criteria it is not totally without support in the tool world!

It’s getting on toward the end of the afternoon and I’m about ready to wrap up work for the day – so thankfully I’m pretty much finished with this first section. Here is the recap – you can’t buy a web analytics solution like a digital camera – there is too much variation in function and need. It is, I’m afraid, a process of matching your real needs with actual tool capabilities. That’s a lot harder, but it’s the only right way to do the job. And it’s an answer well illustrated by Visitor Segmentation.

I listed about twenty important aspects of a visitor segmentation implementation – and I probably left off a bunch of others. After all, I pretty much write this stuff off the top of my head! Within Segment Creation capabilities I listed eight different factors to consider – some of which are widely but not universally adopted, some of which have not yet seen the light of day, and most of which are in various states of play. How important these are to you is going to vary – but chances are that most of them should at least be considered if you’re evaluating a product.

So how do products in the marketplace actually stack up? That’s another very long discussion – one I’ll take up at the end of this series. Meanwhile, in the next post, I’ll take up Segment Methodology – an interesting and, on the whole, less depressing subject!

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Gary Angel is the author of the “SEMAngel blog – Web Analytics and Search Engine Marketing practices and perspectives from a 10-year experienced guru.

Recently I came across a company who invested a lot of effort (time and money) in behavioral ad targeting. At the end, they were not happy with the results and were wondering if it was worth continuing with this effort. Further discussion revealed that they did not get enough clicks on their behaviorally targeted ads and hence their discontent. Since they were paying for clicks only, money was not an issue, but the clicks on behaviorally targeted ads were not enough to justify the efforts they were putting.

So what happened, isn’t behavioral ad targeting suppose to provide you more click-throughs?

The problem was that their behavioral targeting vendor showed them great case study but did not set the realistic expectation about what this customer should expect. I am sure; there are a lot of companies in the same boat. So, in this article, I will explain how to set realistic expectations about what to expect in terms of clicks on your behaviorally targeted ads.

Let’s take an example of a Cruise site which sells cruises packages for travel around the world.

This site participates in Behavioral Ad network to target visitors who had shown interest in cruise package to Alaska when they visited their site but wandered-off without making a purchase. These visitors will be targeted when they arrive at other publisher sites participating in the behavioral ad network.

Here are some stats on this site and target audience (visitors)

Traffic: Let’s assume they get 1,000,000 visitors a month (This is for illustration purposes and you can use your own multiplier to see the effect on your site).

Target: Visitors who viewed details and prices about cruises to Alaska. Let’s assume this customer base is about 250,000, 25% of the total site visitors. (Most of the segments I have seen actually are way less than 25% of the total visitors)

Behavioral Ad Network Reach: For this example, the network, the site is participating in, only reaches 30% of the internet population. Let’s assume the site’s visitors are a good sample of the total internet population.

By participating in this network the customer will able to reach 75,000 visitors (30% of 250,000), assuming you were able to get impressions on all the sites participating in the network. Note: This is a big assumption because even if you network reaches 90% of the internet population you will not reach 90% of your target audience. You will be competing with other advertisers (both participating in this network as well as the advertisers directly advertising on the publisher’s site) for the available inventory. Most of the network do not get premium inventory, what they get is Run-of -Site or Run-of-Network inventory which further reduces the reach.

Click-Through Rate: Assuming the click through rate without targeting is .5%. With behavioral ad targeting it is expected to increase to 1.0% (100% increase, this has yet to be proven the % increase is all over the board and one study even said that click through rate declined)

So let’s say you show 75,000 impressions to these 75,000 visitors (1 impression each). So the clicks you get will be 750 visitors (1% of 75,000)

So For every 1,000,000 visitors on your site you can only expect 750 visitors from Behavioral Ad Targeting (.075% of your total site visitors, not a huge number).

No let’s assume your network reached 80% of internet population. In this case you will be able to reach 200,000 (80% of 250,000) visitors and with 1% click through rate you can expect 2,000 clicks (167% increase). 0.2% of your total site visits, still not a huge number but still better than a network with 30% reach.

By choosing the right network marketer would be able get more clicks for the same efforts.

Your Behavioral Ad Networks (vendor) should have a way to forecast the clicks you can expect. Talk to your account representative; get all the facts, talk to their customer (not just read case studies) so that you have realistic expectation about the clicks. If they can’t provide you this information then time to move on to a new vendor.

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http://www.webpronews.com/?p=30318 What does it take to for Net Neutrality to get national television coverage? It takes an asinine explanation of the Internet by the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. Was this picked up on NBC, Fox, CNN or another major news network? Nope. Comedy Central.

A short while ago, Washington Post Online columnist, Richard Morin, brought up the concern that Comedy Central’s The Daily Show host Jon Stewart was breeding a political cynicism among young viewers that was “poisoning democracy.”

Even if Morin missed the concept of “demystification” in media and communication theory that has been around for decades, Stewart showed the world last night that politicians are quite adept at breeding cynicism on their own. Stewart’s just there to pull the punch line out of the air for us.

The July 12, 2006 broadcast of The Daily Show began with a long segment dedicated to exploring the concept of Net Neutrality. After Stewart gets bogged down trying to explain the complicated topic (probably to an audience who’d never heard of it), he defers to 82-year-old Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK).

If you’ve been following, you’re familiar with Stevens’ diatribe about dump trucks and tubes and “internets” and the internet that took five days to arrive. Just to move things along without describing the entire segment, here’s the juicy part:

So maybe Morin and the East Carolina University study he cited was right. Stewart’s cynicism is an “enemy of democracy.” Or maybe it’s the politicians that keep youngsters away from the polls. Would you like a glass sandwich or a cactus washcloth? Um, neither, thanks. But you go ahead. I’ll hang back and laugh with Jon Stewart.

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Over 93% of the live audience (200 sellers and marketers) strongly agreed or agreed that they found value in attending this session. I sure you will too.

Segment 1: Selling to BIG Companies (17:46 min 4.1 MB)

• Why has it become more difficult to sell to large organizations?
• Who is the seller’s toughest competitor?
• What can a marketing do to help this?

Segment 2: Selling to BIG Companies (11:29 min 2.7 MB)

• What’s the proper role of marketing? Who should do what?
• Where’s the best place to start when selling to a BIG company?
• What tactics work and which don’t?
• What’s your view on the use of email? Does it work?
• How can you make sure your e-mail message gets a response?

Segment 3: Selling to BIG Companies (13:58 min 3.2 MB)

• Why do you hate unique selling propositions?
• If they don’t work, what do you recommend?
• How do you develop an account entry plan?
• what’s causes sellers to have difficulty getting into BIG organizations?

Segment 4: Selling to BIG Companies (7:31 min 1.7 MB)

• What’s the best way to get a meeting with someone in a big company?
• What are trigger events?
• If you were to give a seller one piece of advice on what it takes to get into big companies, what would it be?

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Brian Carroll is the CEO of InTouch Inc. InTouch is a 50-person company focused on delivering effective lead generation solutions for “the complex sale.”

Brian authors the very interesting B2B Lead Generation Blog which focuses on B2B lead generation, sales leads, and marketing for the complex sale.

Daily Show – Even Stevens segment

MadTV sketch

As an aside, it took me less than a day to give up on Firefox. I’ve been trying to switch, at least temporarily, if only to have a good basis for comparison, but I’m already switching back. I tried to play videos with the Google Video Viewer, and despite the fact that I already installed it in IE, FF asks me to do it again. Far worse, when I attempted to install it, Firefox refused to open the file, insisting on saving it to disk.

That is annoying enough to get me to switch back. If anyone can fix that setting for me, I’ll be willing to give it another shot.

Brad Hill’s Post

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Nathan Weinberg writes the popular InsideGoogle blog, offering the latest news and insights about Google and search engines.

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In your own best interests, here’s what you’d better be doing about them.

Accept the fact that the right PR actually CAN alter individual perception that leads to the kinds of changed behaviors that can help you succeed.

That confidence will position you to do something positive about those behaviors. Specifically, to create actual behavior change among your key outside audiences which leads directly to achieving your managerial objectives.

But is there a roadmap available that will get everyone working towards the same external audience behaviors, and that insures that your organization’s public relations effort stays sharply focused?

There sure is, and the blueprint goes like this: people act on their own perception of the facts before them, which leads to predictable behaviors about which something can be done. When we create, change or reinforce that opinion by reaching, persuading and moving-to-desired-action the very people whose behaviors affect the organization the most, the public relations mission is accomplished.

What sort of results would you expect from such an approach? You could see membership applications on the rise; new proposals for strategic alliances and joint ventures; rebounds in showroom visits; enhanced activist group relations, and expanded feedback channels; as well as community service and sponsorship opportunities; not to mention new thoughtleader and special event contacts.

As the effort takes hold, you might see improved relations with government agencies and legislative bodies, stronger relationships with the educational, labor, financial and healthcare communities; prospects starting to work with you; customers making repeat purchases; and even capital givers or specifying sources looking your way.

The people running PR for you – agency, staff or freelance — really have to be dedicated team members and committed to you, as the senior project manager, to the PR blueprint and its implementation, starting with target audience perception monitoring itself.

Think for a moment just how crucial it is that your most important outside audiences really perceive your operations, products or services in a positive light? Then question your PR people to assure yourself that they buy into that notion wholeheartedly. Be especially careful that they accept the reality that perceptions almost always lead to behaviors that can help or hurt your unit.

Take the time to go over the PR blueprint in detail with your team. Discuss your plan for monitoring and gathering perceptions by questioning members of your most important outside audiences. Review questions like these: how much do you know about our organization? How much do you know about our services or products and employees? Have you had prior contact with us and were you pleased with the interchange? Have you experienced problems with our people or procedures?

It’s obvious that professional survey people can handle the perception monitoring phases of your program, IF the budget is available. However, remember that your PR people are also in the perception and behavior business and can pursue the same objective: identify untruths, false assumptions, unfounded rumors, inaccuracies, misconceptions and any other negative perception that might translate into hurtful behaviors.

Be careful as you set your public relations goal. You will need one that is well-defined, and one that responds to the aberrations that appeared during your key audience perception monitoring. The new goal could call for straightening out that dangerous misconception, or correcting that gross inaccuracy, or doing something about that damaging rumor.

As night follows day, your new goal will need a strategy to show you how to get there. Fortunately, you will have just three strategic choices for handling a perception or opinion challenge: create perception where there may be none, change the perception, or reinforce it. Unfortunately, a bad strategy pick will taste like sauteed onions on your pecan pie. So be sure the new strategy fits well with your new public relations goal. For instance, you don’t want to select “change” when the facts dictate a “reinforce” strategy.

Because bringing people’s minds around to your way of thinking is a tough assignment, your PR team must get busy immediately crafting the needed corrective language. Words that are compelling, persuasive and believable AND clear and factual. You must do this if you are to correct a perception by shifting opinion towards your point of view, leading to the desired behaviors.

Review your message for impact and persuasiveness with your communications specialists. Then, carefully select the communications tactics most likely to carry your words to the attention of your target audience. You can pick from dozens that are available. From speeches, facility tours, emails and brochures to consumer briefings, media interviews, newsletters, personal meetings and many others. But be sure that the tactics you pick are known to reach folks just like your audience members.

You might introduce your message to smaller gatherings rather than using higher-profile tactics such as news releases or talk show appearances. Reason being that the credibility of a message can occasionally depend on its delivery method being acceptable to each audience. Everyone will want to see progress reports. For you and your PR colleagues, they sound the signal for you and your PR folks to return to the field for a second perception monitoring session with members of your external audience. Using many of the same questions used in the first benchmark session, you must now stay alert for signs that the bad news perception is being altered in your direction.

Things not moving fast enough? You can always accelerate matters with more communications tactics and increased frequencies.

Clearly, those important outside audiences constitute market segments that are exclusively yours, and you must do something positive about the behaviors of those outside audiences that MOST affect your organization. Thus, they are segments you will need to persuade to your way of thinking, then move to take actions that help your department, division or subsidiary succeed.

Bob Kelly counsels, writes and speaks to business, non-profit and
association managers about using the fundamental premise of public
relations to achieve their operating objectives. He has been DPR,
Pepsi-Cola Co.; AGM-PR, Texaco Inc.; VP-PR, Olin Corp.; VP-PR,
Newport News Shipbuilding & Drydock Co.; director of communi-
cations, U.S. Department of the Interior, and deputy assistant press
secretary, The White House. He holds a bachelor of science degree
from Columbia University, major in public relations.
bobkelly@TNI.net Visit:http://www.prcommentary.com

Segmenting your target audience is a very common practice almost expected even. Let me explain. Perhaps you sell a nutritional supplement. Think of all the people who might use your nutritional supplement. There are adults, pregnant women, growing teenagers, children, senior citizens, athletes, and many others. While all of these may seem to be entirely different target markets, they are actually just segments of the same nutritional supplement market. These people all have a need and an interest in nutritional supplements, but for very different reasons.

While some of the information you provide to each segment will be general and apply to everyone, other information will be specific to that particular segment.

Information Specific To Each Segment

For instance, everyone will want to know the overall benefits of taking the nutritional supplement you offer. Perhaps they can expect to have more energy, lose a little weight, or prevent or cure certain diseases. Everyone cares about these benefits. But your nutritional supplement may offer other benefits that only certain customers would have a need/want for.

Pregnant women want a nutritional supplement that has high levels of folic acid and other nutrients that will aid their developing babies. Senior citizens may have a need for supplements that contain higher levels of calcium (and in a more readily absorbable form). Athletes burn a lot of nutrients and have a higher chance of getting injured so those things are important to them.

Make the information about your product or service specific to whatever the needs of each segment are. You can do this in specific ways through a variety of different advertising mediums.

Segmenting In Brochures

Create one brochure with the general information laid out within its panels. Then create a separate, single panel addressing the needs/wants of one specific segment of your market (seniors, athletes, etc.). When you mail or give out your brochures, simply slip the correct insert into the regular brochure, and you have a custom-designed marketing piece.

Segmenting On The Web

Web sites are also an excellent place to make use of segmenting. Starting with your home page, give general information that is applicable to all your site visitors. Then break out the information specific to each segment of your market. Give a brief description of the details that this segment can expect to find and a link to the page where they’ll find them.

When your customers click to the various pages, they’ll find specifics on how your product will benefit them and their special needs.

NOTE: When you segment on the Web, you also have a great opportunity for search engine optimization. Many excellent keyphrases come from highly specific phrases. So, instead of “nutritional supplements,” you might find that “nutritional supplements for seniors” or “nutritional supplements for athletes” will give you the high rankings you want.

Segmenting In Print

Are you running newspaper ads? If so, ask about multiple placement discounts. Many papers will give you discounts for running ads in various sections of the paper at the same time. This gives you greater exposure and also allows you to segment your market through the use of the different sections.

Before you lump all your customers into one category, take a good hard look. Do they have different needs? Do you see various groups immerging from the crowd? Is there a way to segment your market? If your market is already broken into various segments, what is the best way to reach each group?

Once you determine the needs and wants of each segment of your target audience, you’ll be better equipped to write copy that appeals to them. When you accomplish this through your copywriting, you’ll find yourself with higher conversion ratios and more sales.

by Karon Thackston 2004
http://www.copywritingcourse.com

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