• Nearly 60 percent of adults have looked online for health information in the past year.
• 35 percent of adults have used the internet to try to determine what medical condition they have.
• Of those adults who looked for health information online, 80 percent said they began their investigation at a general search engine.  Relatively few people said they started their search at a dedicated health website, at a specific physician’s website or at a social networking site.

The last bullet may be comforting to physicians who want to disregard social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.  But, if Pew’s data shows that healthcare professionals can safely avoid social networking (which is perhaps wise, given the constraints imposed by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), it also shows that American consumers are turning to the Web for their healthcare information.  They are using it to research maladies, exchange health info with one another and discuss healthcare providers they’ve consulted with.

Medical professionals already know they need to have a presence online, but if they are going to attract the attention of information-hungry consumers, they are going to need to have a website that meets consumers’ design and aesthetic expectations.  Given that 35 percent of consumers will abandon a purchase from a website if they deem the site “ugly,” having an attractive site is essential to your practice’s continual success.

Having a website that attracts consumers isn’t just a requisite to your practice’s continued business success, though; it benefits consumers by steering them towards reputable, trustworthy information. Kevin Pho, MD, an internal medicine physician and founder of KevinMD.com, told Digital Trends that “You can’t trust everything you read online.  For instance, consider that fewer than half of websites offered accurate facts on sleep safety for infants, or that pro-anorexia websites were shared more frequently on YouTube.”

In Pho’s mind, health professionals need websites that intrigue consumers because they have a responsibility to direct patients to legitimate information.   There is a lot of misinformation and misguided chatter online; the best way for healthcare professionals to cut through it is with well-designed, eye-catching websites.

Healthcare providers are increasingly coming around to Pho’s message.  Here are two of the most successful healthcare-related websites we’ve seen:

H Optics

H Optics, a full-service optometry practice located in the Lower East Side of New York, has a very striking website.  Its prominent slider features artfully-shot, evocative photographs.  These elevate the site and give it an elegant feel infrequently associated with a medical practice.

But there’s more to the site’s success than polished photography.  H Optics uses an arresting palette of gold and dark grey as its color scheme.  We’ve all noticed that medical professionals rely on blues and whites in their website designs and office decor.  There’s a reason for this: according to color psychologists, blue is an inherently calming color.  It even prompts the human body to manufacture soothing chemicals.  But while it makes sense for physicians to tranquilize jittery patients with “Periwinkle,” “Carolina Blue,” and “Celeste,” this strategy has been used with such frequency that consumers have come to expect it. We now see blues and whites as defaults, selected by healthcare providers without reflection or consideration.  H Optics, by using an unorthodox color scheme, stands apart from its competitors.  It actively draws attention to itself.

Yellow is infrequently used by companies and web designers.  This is a shame because, as Awwwards.com, a web design evaluation company, notes: “Yellow is a warm color and so yellow websites can provoke a feeling of happiness and joy. It’s a high energy color that can make your website seem comfortable and inviting.”

H Optics can also be commended for its restrained use of content.  There are relatively few pages on the site and each can be easily reached from its home page. Visitors can find what they are searching for with ease.  It would be hard for a visitor to become lost in extraneous information and material.

You can peruse H Optics’ beautiful site by clicking on this link: http://www.h-optics.com/index.html.

Benedetti Cosmetic Surgery

Benedetti Cosmetic Surgery uses a brown and red color scheme to communicate a combination of sophistication, warmth and reliability.  Dark reds, as Vandelay Design points out, are “strong and comforting – good for sites that want to suggest the lasting qualities of a brick wall.”  And a dark brown, like that which surrounds the content on Benedetti Cosmetic Surgery’s site, “feels wholesome and reliable, like a loaf of bread. It is associated with warmth and comfort.”

Vandelay’s designers add “Sites that want to demonstrate experience and reassurance often use brown.”

Benedetti’s web design is successful because, like H Optics’ site, it is surprising.  Brown is not a color typically seen in medical websites.  It’s more commonly associated with the brands that prepare our foods and drinks.  Here are some particularly lovely examples:

• Wawa Inc.: http://www.wawa.com/WawaWeb/Coffee.aspx
• FIG: http://eatatfig.com/
• Mayflower Brewing Company: http://mayflowerbrewing.com/

It makes sense that the people who prepare our nourishment would use brown to represent themselves; they want to suggest they are dependable and wholesome.  A plastic surgeon would likely wish to communicate just these qualities.  Framed in this way, it’s less surprising that Benedetti Cosmetic Surgery opted for browns and tans on its website and more surprising that its competitors haven’t done the same.

Again, like H Optics, Benedetti Cosmetic Surgery opts for a “less is more” approach to content. All of the site’s written content is easily accessible and tidily formatted.  The site makes it easy for would-be patients to find information on the services they are looking for.

You can explore the Benedetti Cosmetic Surgery website by selecting this link: http://www.benedetticosmeticsurgery.com/.

Consumers are turning to the Web for the healthcare information they need.  That means healthcare professionals need to be easy to find and contact.  Having a website is essential but it isn’t enough.  Your website needs to stand out: it needs to be remarkable.  GlobalWebHQ knows how to design websites that can get the attention of consumers.  Contact us to schedule a free consultation today!

These findings suggest that digital marketers are, to put it mildly, disappointed with their investment in social. But they are hard to square with a new report from Manta that shows almost half of American small businesses have increased the amount of time spent on social media platforms this year.  Manta’s research also suggests that than half say they plan to make these platforms their primary tools for either acquiring new customers or generating sales leads.

Manta’s findings, surely, would please the ever-growing community of social media evangelists.  Surely, business owners would not flock to a marketing medium that wasn’t benefiting their businesses. Would they?

There’s just one problem: Manta also found that more than 60 percent of small business owners say they haven’t seen any return on their investment in social.

Rather than complicating or disputing the picture painted by Awareness Inc., Manta’s data just confirms and bolsters it.

Much of the disappointment we are seeing among digital marketers can be attributed to misguided expectations.  Too many social media experts claimed that Facebook and would be the twin panaceas that would rescue small businesses from the ravages wrought by the Great Recession.  Ted Rubin, a professed social media expert explained to Forbes magazine why small business owners are being disappointed by social: “First of all, small business owners are being sold on the strategy of social by ‘experts’ who are trying to get them to pay to set up accounts.  But more importantly, their expectations are being set up in the wrong way.”

Rubin says that social media experts need to tell small business owners the truth about their chosen marketing medium: it can generate “engagement” and perhaps loyalty.  It cannot generate sales.

That’s a courageous thing for someone like Rubin to say but it ignores the intentions of many business owners. What if business owners don’t want to engage in the lengthy, time-consuming “conversations” and courtships social media experts insist are necessary to woo consumers? What if they just want to sell their wares online? How can these business owners, strapped for time and eager to move merchandise, use social media to serve their interests?

They can start by eschewing networks like Twitter and Facebook and making Pinterest central to their marketing strategies.  By focusing on Pinterest, a lot of brands can realize the kinds of quantifiable, measurable benefits they can’t on other social media platforms: they can see sales.

A case study from Boticca, an online marketplace for independent jewelry, fashion and accessory designers, found that Pinterest drives significantly more sales than Facebook. The company found that the social network was its number one social referrer, assisting in 10 percent of sales, compared with just 7 percent from Facebook.  In addition, Boticca found that Pinterest users typically spend more than twice as much as their Facebook peers and that Pinterest drives more new consumers to their website than Facebook does.

All told, Boticca found that Pinterest trounced its more established competitor when it came to generating sales.

Boticca’s findings could be chalked up to its goods.  As everyone knows, 80 percent of Pinterest users are women.  But Boticca’s findings resist easy dismissal.  They’ve been confirmed by other research organizations.  Bizrate Insights, for instance, has also looked at how consumers interact with Pinterest and found that, in general, Pinterest users are more explicitly brand-focused than Facebook users. They found that 43 percent of Pinterest users agree with the statement that they use the service to “associate with retailers or brands with which I identify.”  In contrast, only 24 percent of Facebook users say they use their chosen network in the same way.

In addition, Bizrate Insights found that 70 percent of Pinterest users say they use the network to get inspiration for future purchases.  Just 17 percent of Facebook say the same about Facebook.  Finally, Bizrate found that more than two-thirds of consumers who visit Pinterest report they have found an item they’ve purchased or wanted to purchase in the future.

There’s little wonder why researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of Minnesota found that there are four related verbs commonly associated with Pinterest in the consumer imagination: use, look, want and need.

Eric Gilbert, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s school of interactive computing, says “Words encapsulate the intent of people, revealing the motivations behind their actions. You can use the word ‘this’ after all of [the verbs referenced above], reflecting the ‘things’ at the core of Pinterest. Many press articles have focused on Pinterest’s commercial potential, and here we see verbs illustrating that consumption truly lies at the heart of the site.”

Gilbert added, “After conducting this research, if I had to choose where to put my money and marketing, Pinterest would probably be my first choice.”

Though many business owners have not, as of yet, realized considerable (or any) benefits from their investment in social, there’s no reason for them to wholly abandon the medium.  They just need to engage with it in a more discerning way and selecting a platform with a record for generating both conversations and sales: Pinterest.

At GlobalWebHQ we believe web developers and digital marketers have a responsibility to provide clients with responsible business advice informed by sound research.  We want our friends and clients to see their marketing efforts pay off.  If you want answers about social media or digital marketing in general, contact GlobalWebHQ and schedule a consultation with us today!

This was the essential thesis William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White presented in their 1918 prescriptive style guide, The Elements of Style.  Strunk and White were instructing their fellow scribes, but their insistence on the virtues of minimalism can be fruitfully applied to most other professions– including web designers.

Web designers are just discovering the wisdom in Strunk and White’s advice.  The web of the early to mid-2000s was dominated by busy, untidy and link-larded websites.  All of them appointed with Flash animations, fancy Photoshop graphics, splash pages and other examples of clutter.  Web designers paid scant attention to the usability of the websites they were making, excited as they were by the tools and technologies at their disposal.    They wanted every inch of HTML real estate to be occupied by something.

Those days are fast coming to a close.  Now, web pages are dominated by oceans of tranquil white space and by beautiful – and sparingly used – graphics and photographs.  Most designers and businesses now acknowledge that simpler websites offer a number of potential benefits:

• They load more quickly, which makes impatient visitors more likely to remain on the page.
• They are clearer and can be more easily scanned.
• They are easier to navigate, meaning visitors can find the content you want them to see more quickly and easily.

Simple websites make it easy for consumers to find information that matters to them.  This translates into additional profits for many businesses.  That these websites are also less costly to put up and maintain is an added bonus.

Relatively few websites have mastered the minimalist ethos.  The government of the United Kingdom’s website is one of them, though.  Its Gov.uk site launched earlier this year and, at a ceremony in London, was named the 2013 Best Design of the Year by the Design Museum.  It didn’t just beat other websites to gain that title.  Gov.uk bested a shortlist of buildings, inventions, and cars.  It’s the first website to win the coveted Best of the Year title.

The website’s straightforwardness – its radical simplicity and unfussiness – makes it special.  But this straightforwardness wasn’t done as an end in itself.  Nor was it done out of purely aesthetic considerations.  When the UK government redesigned its site, consolidating its myriad forms and dictates in a single place, it did so with the needs of potential users in mind.

Ben Terrett, the head of design at the UK’s Government Digital Service, told Dezeen magazine, “There were thousands of websites, and we folded them into Gov.uk to make just one. Booking a prison stay should be as easy as booking a driver’s license test.”

By utterly sublimating form to function, Terrett and his colleagues have made a model of usability.

The site has been getting rave reviews, aside from those issued by the Design Museum.  One commentator said, “To those complaining of its being ugly, I say this. Sure, ‘coz the last time I looked for a job/paid my road tax etc. I just spent ages looking at the pretty pictures. For once the government got it right.”

Another said, “As a web designer I always push for clean, uncluttered design that does it’s best to present the INFORMATION, what I feel users come to a website for, in a an intuitive manner. Of course getting clients to go along with this never works. I guess they think it’s easier to design something like this (I guess it is…) but really people aren’t coming to your website for pretty graphics unless you are an artist or something. They are coming for information.”

The UK’s government put the needs of visitors first, rather than its own ego.  It could easily have made a site bursting with lovely graphics and images.  Instead, it elected to build a site that could easily shuttle users to their intended destinations – to the information, documents and content they need.

Web designers could learn a thing or two from the Terrett and his colleagues’ radical plainness.  Of course, not every site can benefit from a similarly drastic overhaul.  Not every site would benefit from looking like Gov.uk or Craigslist.  But every site could benefit from the perspective these sites share: the considerate and obliging attitude they have towards their visitors.

If you plan to redesign your website in the near future contact GlobalWebHQ and schedule a consultation with us today!  We understand how a more usable website can augment and enhance your business.

In March 2012, he released a video of himself walking through a warehouse dispensing rapid-fire wisecracks, and bon mots.  He encouraged the warehouse workers he passed to purchase subscriptions for his razor blades.  It was not an ambitious, showy video.

And it went viral.  The video, which has now been viewed an astounding 10 million times, was so popular it crashed Dollar Shave Club’s server.  Within two days, Dubin had received 12,000 orders for his razors.  His business hasn’t been the same since he posted the video.  He recently received a tidy $10 million investment from Venrock, a venture capital firm that sees Dollar Shave Club competing with established personal care companies like Gillette.

To summarize: a single video vaulted Mark Dubin’s struggling company out of his apartment and into competition with Gillette, a company that controls 66 percent of the nearly $13 billion global market for men’s razors and blades.

Dubin knows he owes a lot of his recent success to good luck.  And he also knows that he can never replicate his initial triumph.  In an interview with the New York Times he said, “There’s never going to be anything like the first one that launched a new business that no one had ever heard of and did it in a fun way. That element of surprise and being new is something we will never have again.”

Just because Dollar Shave Club will not, in all likelihood, be able to capture the kind of attention it did in March doesn’t mean you can’t learn from it and attempt to replicate its success.  It wasn’t just luck that propelled Michael Dubin’s plucky video marketing campaign into the spotlight; there was plenty of strategy behind his success.  By paying attention to some of that strategy you can make it more likely that your video will be a viral hit.

What makes Dollar Shave Club’s video stand out is that its good-natured protagonist imbues it with easy, unaffected humor.  In the video, Dubin variously rides around a warehouse on a forklift, plays tennis and – inexplicably but amusingly – dances with a bear.  The video is bursting with zingers about razors and shaving. The Wall Street Journal interviewed men who watched the video, one of whom said, “From the moment it began, I was in stitches.”

Dubin’s affability made good business sense.  Humor demonstrably works in online video.  As Bettina Hein, the CEO of Pixability and the co-author of the upcoming book, Video Marketing for Dummies, says, “There are two things that people are looking for in a video: either help me solve a problem or entertain me.  As a company, being informative and solving a problem – that’s more in the comfort zone for a lot of people… You can create [informational] content; that’s easy to do. But being funny, that’s something else. Still, if you become really successful at it, you might actually get a broader audience interested.”

Hein’s point about the challenges of being funny explains why so few marketers actually make videos that try to entertain viewers.  It’s easier to be informative.  But when you forgo the opportunity to make people laugh, you are also writing off a large potential audience.

Dubin’s video was funny, and that accounts for much of its success. But Dubin did a lot of other things to ensure his video got the attention his business needed.  Dubin admits that “the timing of the launch was not accidental. Early March is great to launch something tech-related because there isn’t a lot happening in sports or otherwise, and it’s a lead-up to the South by Southwest festival in Austin.”

The lesson here isn’t that you need to release your video in early March in anticipation of South by Southwest.  The real lesson is that timing is important.  Regardless of your intended audience/s, you need to release your video at a time in the day, week, month and year when they will be the most receptive and attentive to your message and your business proposition.

It would be hard to replicate Dollar Shave Club’s success.  This doesn’t mean, however, that your brand can’t learn from it.  By making humor a bigger part of your online video strategy, by releasing your video at the right time, and by knowing your audience and its needs, you can set your video up for success.

If you want to produce an online video that will advance your brand and boost your business, contact GlobalWebHQ and schedule a consultation with us today!

Others within the organization said the prototype site was intended to be “a cleaner, more engaging design” and permit a “richer integration of photography, video and interactive story elements.”

You can see more from the redesign here.

The proposed redesign for “the Old Gray Lady” represents something quite radical: what was once cluttered has been simplified. The paper’s main stories are clickable across the top of the page and a “sections” button at the top left of the screen lets readers easily navigate the site. The individual stories shown on each page have changed too. They are infinitely scrollable rather than paginated, and their various interactive components like photos, videos and infographics have been embedded directly into the text of each. This both cleans up the page and makes useful content more readily available.

Overall, the site has a neat, well-ordered appearance. It’s getting high marks from reviewers. Mark Porter, the principal at Mark Porter Associates, says “The article pages look as if they will have a lot more space, and a lot of the clutter will be hidden away until activated,” he observes. “In most editorial websites the content on the article pages is swamped by navigation, links, promos and marketing material, which makes it hard work getting to the story, and after all, that’s what you came for.”

The NYT’s proposed design emphasizes content and accessibility, instead of tools and tricks designed to ensnare readers. Porter adds that “The NYT appears to be taking a lead from the kind of design we’re seeing on touch-screen tablets and smartphones, making the content the hero, and trusting the reader be smart enough to invoke the navigation, comments and links when they want them.”

The paper’s redesign may seem radical, but it is really just showing us where website design is headed in the near future. Web sites will become cleaner and simpler. The cluttered and untidy pages, the teensy fonts, and the skeumorphism – visual devices intended to lessen the jarring novelty of new things (think of the stitched leather borders on Apple’s iPad Notes application) – that were once digital standbys are finally being discarded.

In their place, we will see web sites that look like the Times’ redesign. Websites will soon have the following characteristics:

• They will have simple, unadorned landing pages. Designers have – sensibly – concluded that it’s best not to overwhelm people perusing a website. Landing pages will, in the imminent future, aim to give visitors only the information they need. They will provide only enough info to help a casual viewer know the essentials about the business whose website they are visiting. And they will prioritize content rather than extraneous filler.
• They will use words and typography as decorative elements, and they will employ full-page backgrounds with large photos or illustrations. Unlike the websites of yore (think Craigslist and other offenders), websites will aim for an aesthetic experience. Content will be delivered through elegant, eye-catching visuals and ornamentation. This trend should not imply that websites will become festooned with embellishments. Far from it. In fact, as the New York Times’ redesign suggests, sites will soon use white space in very strategic, thoughtful ways. White space suggests professionalism and creates a serene, calm sensation, which is precisely the feeling a business wants to provoke in visitors.
• Finally, websites will increasingly use single-page layouts. The single-page layout boldly asserts that all that needs to be said about a business can be said in a single page. Single-page websites can, if designed properly, improve the user experience by making navigation a less onerous, time-consuming process. And by giving users only the features and information they really need (and nothing more), businesses can actually reduce the amount of thinking and cognitive processing they subject visitors to. Visitors, with brains freed from the need to think about navigating a site, will be free to pay closer attention to that site’s contents. This is surely something any business would want.

The New York Times and other organizations that have accepted the mantra of “complexity is the enemy” are in the vanguard of a design revolution. Websites, which were formally bloated with content and features, are going to become simpler and more attentive to aesthetic considerations. But these organizations aren’t opting for pretty website as an end in itself. These organizations anticipate that earning some new grateful readers and followers by making their content easier to access and understand. They are probably right.

If you plan to redesign your website in the near future, or have a niggling suspicion that your current website is doing less to advance your business interests than you would like, contact GlobalWebHQ and schedule a consultation with us today. We understand where web design is headed and are eager to turn your website into a marvel of design and usability

In other words, future growth in digital marketing spending will come at the expense of traditional marketing mediums like print and TV.

This is a short-sighted strategy, and it’s unfortunate that it is becoming more prevalent.  Brands need to appreciate digital marketing and make it a priority, but they shouldn’t neglect wider, more comprehensive marketing strategies.  Digital marketing shouldn’t replace traditional marketing; it needs to augment and amplify traditional marketing.

Jeremiah Owyang, an Industry Analyst at Altimeter Group, wrote a blog postsome time ago making a similar point.  Owyang argued that “As an industry, we should dispel notions that social marketing and it’s subsequent tools should operate in a silo, but instead sit horizontally in the marketing organization as they impact so many different forms of marketing tactics, approaches, and mindsets.” Though Owyang may be talking about social media, his point applies to digital marketing more generally: marketing efforts, regardless of their medium or channel, shouldn’t be compartmentalized.

Owyang’s cautionary point still represents the minority view. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t without adherents.  Gary Stein, a writer at ClickZ, wrote a cantankerous piece about the state of digital marketing, titled “Sh*t Digital Marketers Say.” Though his attacks were wide-ranging, he made an argument similar to that made Owyang in 2010.  Stein wrote, “Social means that we consume content in the context of our connections. Mobile means we are in touch with data and information constantly and always able to interact. But these are simply channels by which people engage and communicate with each other and brands.” From this common sense observation, he concluded that brands don’t need to develop digital marketing strategies divorced from their wider marketing agenda.  A multitude of strategies, in Stein’s view, is, at best, unproductive and, at worst, counterproductive.

He writes, “No one needs a separate social and/or mobile strategy… You can have a plan for everything under the sun: social, mobile, and skywriting. But please only have one strategy.”

Stein’s point doesn’t differ from Onwyang’s, except in the particulars.  Both authors allow that different marketing mediums will require different tactics to be successful, but they don’t think differences between tactics necessarily imply differences in strategy.  And both authors think that a brand’s wider marketing strategy should embrace a number of different mediums, each of which will demand different approaches if it is to contribute to that wider strategy.

This approach is very different from the one a lot of brands plan to make.  Econsultancy and SoDA Digital Marketing’s report suggests that brands intend to sacrifice holistic, coordinated marketing strategies in an effort to make their digital marketing efforts more successful.  They are confusing a means with an end.  Having a strong digital marketing presence is not an end in itself.  It’s just a novel means for attracting customers.  Brands should want to have a strong digital marketing presence because it will contribute to their overall sales efforts.

A few companies that divorced their digital efforts from their larger marketing departments have discovered that the benefits of doing so were far less than the costs.  An ad agency in Stockholm, Sweden called Honesty recently announced that it plans to abandon all titles with the word “digital” in them.  The company wants every one of its employees to, going forward, feel like they are responsible for and can participate in the creation of all its creative output.

Honest’y CEO, Walter Naeslund said the following to justify the seemingly radical move: “We’re upgrading Honesty 1.0 to version 2.0, and in doing so we remove all digital roles from the agency. It just doesn’t make sense anymore to have separate staff to handle a separate area which is inherently impossible to separate from anything else.”

Naeslund reported that, after the announcement, he found his staff more willing to work across the artificial boundaries that had formerly demarcated employees from one another: “After the announcement this morning the entire agency was suddenly on their feet devouring blogs, podcasts and whitepapers when they realized [creative content] was going to be their own responsibility.” By subsuming digital into its overall creative process, Honesty was able to cultivate an environment where everyone felt like they were contributing to the company’s overall agenda.

No one is suggesting that businesses should abandon digital marketing, or that digital marketing produces defects in a business or organization.  What brands need to remember is that, by cordoning off digital marketing from other marketing channels, they risk developing an uncoordinated overall marketing strategy.  Brands need to spend more on digital marketing, but they need to do so without letting old-school marketing techniques go by the wayside.

Digital marketing is important, but brands should always remember that it’s just a new means of reaching an old end.

Alpenglow has found a lot of success with its recalibrated approach to SEO strategy.  Their new content – bursting with information and keywords targeted towards people looking to have specific questions answered – has helped them rise in the search engine rankings.  They are now being found by people entering phrases like “Sandy Dentist” and “Bountiful Dentist,” meaning they are now being found by people looking specifically for the services they offer, rather than just people looking to explore the exciting world of, say, malfunctioning temporomandibular articulation.

Focusing on information seekers has helped Alpenglow better reach people who are likely going to pay for its services.  There is a lesson here: don’t ignore information seekers when devising an SEO strategy.

The logic of optimizing your web presence around information seekers is counter-intuitive, of course. You’d be right to ask, “Why wouldn’t I focus on trying to reach people who are actually going to buy purchase my wares?” But focusing exclusively on buyers, as the prevailing SEO paradigm demands, produces limited returns.  As Alpenglow Dental’s success suggests, a business can reap considerable rewards by reorienting its SEO strategy and catering to information seekers.

The current vogue for optimizing websites around buyers probably dates to the release of a study by De Vos & Jansen Market Research and Checkit that looked at how buyers and information seekers find and use data on the Web.  The study found that buyers tend to view more search results and spend more time viewing each of the results they look at.  It found that information seekers did the exact opposite: they viewed fewer search results and spent less time on the ones they did end up viewing.

De Vos & Jansen’s research painted information seekers as a dilettantish bunch.  They didn’t come out looking like the types of customers one would like to court or base a business strategy around.

But more up-to-date research has since come out about the prevalence of information seekers relative to buyers.  Brent Chaters, writing in the Search Engine Journal, that 10 percent of internet searches are 10% of searches are “transactional in nature,” 10 percent are purely navigational, and fully 80 percent are “informational in nature.”

Now, a reasonable response to this data would be, “Just because there are a lot of information seekers trawling the Web doesn’t make them valuable as prospects for my business.”  That, however, is a somewhat simplistic way to approach Chaters’ data. It ignores the possibility that information seekers can become buyers and can be persuaded to buy a product or service.  Similarly, such a view doesn’t appreciate the possibility that people looking to buy something often end up looking for information related to that product.  Someone may be looking to buy, for instance, a set up flavored wood grilling planks but end up looking for details about the specific flavor alder imparts to dishes.

Chaters, himself, made this point.  He wrote, “users who are looking for information may convert to transactional at some point, so what about this 80 percent?”

Chaters then makes the case for why businesses need to focus less on dedicated buyers and more on information seekers, flighty, fickle and erratic as they may be.  He writes, “When looking at the 10% of transactional which will be critical to closing the deal, the other 80% is your opportunity to open doors and create opportunities.  Targeting users so late in the purchase cycle ultimately means you are not building your brand, or impacting long term opportunities.  When establishing search programs don’t forget about the bigger picture, and how you can impact the full customer experience.”

When creating content for your website, you should consider catering to information seekers rather than buyers.  Yes, they are likely to just skim your materials before moseying on to the next source of information, but there are a lot of these wanderers stalking through the wilds of the Web.  Who knows, your content – if it is helpful and informative enough – may entice them to stay on your site and look around for a while.  And who knows – they may even buy something.

This is undoubtedly true.  We live in an era when 60 hours of new videos are uploaded to YouTube and four billion videos are streamed each and every day.  People are clearly looking to contribute to the entertainment and popular culture consumed by their peers.

But marketers should not, a priori, take this development to mean that online video marketing must appear as if it were made by amateurs.  Professionalism is still the best way to connect with consumers and potential customers.

We can be happy about the era of participatory video.  As Mark Suster rightly points out, this new video production paradigm “will enable the naturally creative but geographically and socially disenfranchised to make money doing what they love – participating.” But that doesn’t mean video marketers need suddenly abandon professionalism in some vain attempt to emulate the Harlem Shake.

But a recent piece on OnlineVideo.net demanded video marketers do just that.  Aside from asking marketers to relinquish control of their identities and cede some of this to their audience, the piece suggested that brands could be more successful if their video offerings exhibited some “rough edges.”

The authors insisted that video marketers “Keep it human. Humans have rough edges. We aren’t perfectly on-message, we don’t go through life with scripts, and we don’t always turn your logo toward the camera.”

They then further clarified their thesis, saying, “We’re suggesting that you keep your brand presence natural and personal. Let it be imperfect so that it can be more contagious. Which would you prefer: a perfect video that delivers 100 percent of your corporate message and gets 20,000 views, or a more human video that focuses on giving the viewer a great feeling about your brand and gets 2 million views?”

Every video marketer would like to see his/her video go viral.  We’ve been conditioned to see number of views as the chief marker of success, though YouTube itself no longer does so.  It’s instructive to note that YouTube, late last year, added “Time Watched” reporting to the search ranking algorithm that determines how its videos are ranked.  Number of views is, according to the video sharing behemoth, not the most important thing to consider when evaluating a video’s quality and value.

YouTube now prioritizes engagement.  When the company adjusted its search ranking algorithm it said that it wanted to “reward engaging videos that keep viewers watching.”  According to a statement from YouTube, the company wanted to “better surface the videos that viewers actually watch, over those that they click on and then abandon.”

It turns out that a video that engages viewers differs substantially from a video that just entices them to watch its first 30 seconds.

Invodo, a video production company based in Austin, Texas, recently released a study looking at a number of common perceptions those of in marketing have about online video.  Invodo discovered that many of our perceptions are, in fact, misperceptions.

Invodo found that online video matters a lot to consumers and can make them more likely to purchase a product.  When asked, more than half of consumers reported that watching a product video before purchasing an item made them more confident in their decision and less likely to return it.  But Invodo also found that more polished, professional videos are more likely to interest viewers than ones that are a little “rough around the edges.” In a stunning refutation of conventional wisdom, Invodo found that more than half of consumers prefer watching professionally produced videos to “YouTube-style” offerings.  Almost half of consumers said that professionally produced videos were “more reliable” in helping them select and purchase products.

Less than one-third of respondents said user-generated videos would make them likely to purchase a product.

Invodo’s research demonstrates that, when it comes to marketing, professionalism needs to be equated with engagement.  YouTube may thrive – and indeed exist – because of a paradigm shift in terms of media production and consumption, but viewers’ expectations of what advertising should look like haven’t changed all that much. Consumers still reward spit and polish.

The AH&LA’s President Joe McInerney said, “After a long economic downturn, in 2011, the lodging industry turned the corner.”

The restaurant industry hasn’t fared quite as well.  The NPD Group, a global information company, released its 2012 forecasts for the restaurant industry, finding that restaurant visits ended up flat in 2012 and consumer spending on restaurants increased an anemic 2 percent.

Both hotels and restaurants can benefit from online video, though for different reasons.  Hotels, which now find themselves participating in a profitable industry, need to differentiate themselves from their competition.  And restaurants, which are still fighting for survival in an industry in the doldrums, need to stand out from their competition.  Both can use online video marketing to do this.

And a few particularly enterprising participants in these respective industries have already made online video marketing into integral parts of their overall marketing efforts.

One Hotel’s Experiment with Online Video

Hotels have long understood that online video marketing can bolster their websites and lead to more reservations.  The Marketing Manager of the Broadmoor Hotel, in Colorado Spring, Colorado, said in an interview that “We have seen a 25% increase of online bookings this summer compared to last summer before we had [video.]”

Similarly, representatives from the Key West Marriott Beachside Hotel reported that “We are up 72% in group bookings for 2010 and up another 30% for 2011 [since incorporating online video marketing into their website.]”

Clearly, online video marketing doesn’t represent unfamiliar – or untested – territory for hotels.  But a few hotels are going beyond just incorporating video into their web content.

The Cavendish London, a 4-star, 230-bedroom, luxury hotel in Central London, recently launched its #ValentineVine competition for a brief stay for two at the hotel, complete with all the necessary Valentine’s Day paraphernalia, including: champagne, chocolates, dinner, breakfast –and a late check-out time.

The campaign, as you can likely guess from its name, uses Twitter’s Vine app, a novel social media platform that permits users to record six second of video, which they can then post to an Instagram-style feed. To participate in the #ValentineVine competition, users need only record a romantic video using Vine and post the final product to the Cavendish’s Twitter account.  The videos will be judged and the one found the most romantic will be awarded the prize of a romantic Central London getaway.

The Cavendish is one of only a handful of hotels to have assimilated Vine into its digital marketing efforts.  The app offers hotels (and any other businesses, for that matter) a number of benefits, the most obvious of which is that it outsources the video production process to consumers, saving businesses money and giving them access to videos consumers will find more authentic and legitimate.

The Cavendish’s canny use of Vine demonstrates that hotels can do a lot of things with online video marketing.  The hotel’s success also suggests that online video encourages creativity and invites consumers to better connect with businesses.

In the event you need some incentive to submit something to the Cavendish’s #ValentineVine competition.

An Inside Look at One Restaurant’s Kitchen

Like their counterparts in the hotel industry, there are plenty of restaurants that are bolstering their web presence with online video marketing.  The Radisson Edwardian, in Manchester, England uses QR allows diners to simply scan a QR code on one of their menus to watch a video of how its dishes are prepared.

Most restaurants probably aren’t using online video marketing as creatively as the Radisson Edwardian but that shouldn’t detract from the fact that restaurants, as a group, have been remarkably receptive to online video.  According to Kantar Media, restaurants are the businesses most likely to use both TV and online video advertising.

Some, however, are exclusively using online video marketing and, like the Cavendish, are using the medium to collapse the distance between themselves and consumers.  Sons of Essex, a new eatery on New York’s Lower East Side, is using online video to show consumers how its signature dishes are made.  The restaurant is – to mangle the great Prussian statesman Otto von Bismarck’s famous quote – disputing the idea that “meals are like sausages – it is best not to see them being made.”

Sons of Essex’s videos show how its food and its menus are made.  One of their videos details how the restaurant designed its brunch menu. While their subject matter may differ, these videos are alike in one regard: they are made cheaply and are intended to communicate authenticity.  Matt Levine, speaking in an interview with Mashable, said, “We live in a society where information travels fast, and the entertainment value and visual stimulation of videos seemed like a great way to get a creative and innovative message to our guests.”

He added, “I believe every business has a message to convey, a story to tell; to paint the picture through video for your consumers in a creative manner can be an important marketing tool.  The use of these videos give companies the opportunity to reach out to their consumers at a more personal and interactive level.”

Levine manages to create personal connection with the audience by populating his restaurant’s videos with his staff, many of whom make and edit the videos themselves.  What he loses in professionalism he certainly gets back in terms of genuine connection.

Sons of Essex’s “How to Make…” videos, which feature bartenders and cooks deconstructing cocktails and dishes from the restaurant’s menu, aren’t going to get awards for creativity; they aren’t analogous to Cavendish London’s super original use of a brand new technology.  They are similar, however, in that they are being used to make businesses and their staffs seem more personable and more welcoming.

Conclusion

Hotels and restaurants both need to make online video marketing an essential ingredient in their digital marketing.  Many hotels and restaurants have already done so – and as the businesses described above demonstrate – have done so in imaginative ways.  This shouldn’t intimidate those hoteliers and restaurateurs who haven’t started filming their first videos – it should have the opposite effect, in fact.  The sheer versatility of online video marketing as a medium should encourage them to begin making online video marketing pieces that will set their businesses apart from their competitors.

This, sadly, is what we commonly think of when we hear the words “mom and pop stores.”

Mom and pop stores in the United States eke out precarious existences.  While almost 70 percent make it at least two years, just a little more than half survive for five years or more.  Many are undercapitalized from the outset; others succumb to changing economic conditions; others are swallowed up by bigger businesses.

In the 1980s and 1990s, big box mart stores – Walmart, Kmart, Target, Home Depot – and large media retailers – Borders, Blockbuster and Tower Records – gobbled up many of America’s mom and pop stores.  While the collective impact of these behemoths can be overstated, it’s hard to argue that the big box stores, equipped with their “loss leaders” and their vast marketing budgets, didn’t make life more difficult for America’s mom and pop stores.

Now, however, the very massiveness of the big box retailers is working against them.  Borders, Blockbuster and Tower Records proved no match for the Internet; Best Buy is struggling vainly and feebly against Amazon and other Web retailers.  The downfall of these giants demonstrates that characteristics that are valuable in one economic climate can become detrimental in a different one.

Conversely, the smallness of America’s mom and pop stores is now – in an age dominated by the Web – an advantage; the business world’s intelligentsia are heralding “The Rebirth of Mom-and-Pop Shops.”

Blue Point Trading recently wrote:

[Here] comes retail 3.0. Yes the mom and pop stores return – online!!! For those online entrepreneurs ready to venture out with better niche product understanding, super targeted search/social media marketing, personalized customer service and small back office costs (that the Internet can provide and that large bulky brick and mortar organizations cannot provide), new opportunities are at last here for mom and pop.

Mom and pop stores need to capitalize on opportunities afforded by the Web and other digital technologies.  They can thrive even in our current economic climate and they can do just what a lot of other businesses have done: beat the big guys.

Thriving in an Online World

It’s not controversial to point out that mom and pop stores without brick and mortar establishments are now causing larger retailers all manner of headaches.  Borders was defeated by online book sellers in 2011; more recently, Sears Holdings Corp and Best Buy announced they would be either shuttering or selling a number of stores.  Like Borders, these dinosaurs have been badly hurt by online competitors who sell the same wares they do – but do so at reduced prices.

Big box retailers are suffering because online retail is becoming an increasingly important part of total retail sales.  While online sales amounted to just a little more than five percent of total retail sales in their third quarter of 2012, they were up more than 17 percent from the same quarter a year earlier.  To put this growth in perspective, total retail sales over the same period rose an anemic 4.6 percent; it would seem that more and more people are flocking to online retailers and giving up on the brick and mortar shopping experience altogether.

Marshal Cohen, a retail analyst at the market research firm NPD Group, puts the growth of online retail in perspective, saying, “Online a decade ago didn’t even represent 4 percent of [total retail] sales.”  In most retail sectors it is now about 16 percent.

Small businesses that dwell in the empyrean of the Web aren’t the only ones benefiting from it, though.  Retailers with brick and mortar stores are using the Web to augment and bolster their traditional selling techniques.  BIA/Kelsey’s Local Commerce Monitor research, a longitudinal 15-year tracking study of small businesses approaches to marketing and media, found that more than one-quarter of mom and pop stores are planning to spend money on digital marketing campaigns in the coming year.  What’s more astounding is that the survey found that almost half of all mom and pop stores are currently buying online advertising.

This mountain of data shows that small businesses have adapted to the Web with stunning alacrity.  Mom and pop stores – far from being hidebound traditionalists trying desperately to avoid the great galumphing feet of the ‘marts – are using digital marketing to outmaneuver them.

Mom and Pop go Social

Walmart, if you are reading, these people are trouncing you at social media marketing.

One technology that smaller retailers have taken to with particular alacrity is social media.  Greg Sterling, who studies the Web’s influence on business’ behaviors, said in an interview with The New York Times, “We think of these social media tools as being in the realm of the sophisticated, multiplatform marketers like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, but a lot of these super-small businesses are gravitating toward them because they are accessible, free and very simple.”

Small retailers like Silver Barn Antiques in Columbus, Texas have used Twitter and other social media platforms to engage with customers and suppliers beyond their restricted and relatively small ecosystem. Cynthia Sutton-Stolle, the store’s owner, said “We don’t even have our Web site done, and we weren’t even trying to start an e-commerce business… Twitter has been a real valuable tool because it’s made us national instead of a little-bitty store in a little-bitty town.”

Mom and pop are actually having considerably more success with social media than their larger competitors.  The social media metrics firm Recommend.ly. compared the successes of Walmart stores’ fan pages and the fan pages of small local businesses.  Of the nearly 3,000 Walmart fan pages Recommend.ly. found fewer than 4 percent had more than 1,000 fans.

In contrast, when Recommend.ly. studied almost 2,000 local business pages on Facebook, it found that more than 22 percent of them had more than 1,000 fans.

It’s easy to explain this fairly dramatic disparity; locally owned businesses tend to be better connected with their fans.  “Walmart local stores tend to be posting what is centrally controlled…We see very little that’s localized,” Recommend.ly.’s CEO Venkata Ramana said.  Mom and pop stores are able to better leverage social media platforms because they can project authentic and distinct personalities; it’s hard for big box retailers to do the same.

Conclusion

Mom and pop stores around the country can take heart from the opportunities afforded by the Web – although it looks like a lot of them already have.  Small businesses can use digital marketing technologies to compete effectively in the current economy.  Those businesses that haven’t started exploiting digital marketing technologies need to begin doing so immediately if they want to avoid being either squashed by the Goliaths of the retail world or outfoxed by cagey mom and pop stores.