Chad Chandler » Free Advice | Strategic Marketing Consulting

All I really need to know, I learned after college

2012-05-19T11:31:17Z

I graduated from Auburn University in 2001 with a BS in Marketing. My graduation ceremony was so big that we gown-clad students were actually presented with empty diploma cases by the President. After the ceremony, we were led beneath the building like tasseled carpenter ants and were sorted into alphabetical lines to receive our paper diplomas. It wasn’t long after graduation that I realized my degree was as worthless as the hollow symbol of recognition I had been awarded with a smile.

Actually, worthless is probably a little strong–the degree did help me get through the doors of firms that were only interested in hiring recent college grads. But in a practical sense, my marketing degree did almost nothing to prepare me for the business world. If anything, it gave me a false confidence.

This wasn’t necessarily Auburn’s fault. At least, not completely. The Deans bore some of the blame in that they hired safe professors that, even though most of them couldn’t teach worth a damn, did in fact have experience in the fields they represented. The problem was that their experience was dated. Their ideas were stale. They taught antiquated techniques that, in retrospect, were being abandoned even as we were studying them. If they prepared me to be able to step directly from a classroom to a company, it was to a company stuck in 1985. By 2001, much of their advice was parochial at best, and shamelessly naive at worst.

In the case of my professors, safe was a bad thing. In a static world, safe is, well, safe. But in a dynamic one, safe is sorry. They thought safe was traditional. They thought safe was proven. But the proven, traditional methods were being supplanted by new, more innovative ways of marketing products and services to a more technologically savvy audience. The four Ps were losing their luster, and my professors didn’t even know it. Thanks to them, neither did I. My degree was a map designed to help me navigate the old world just as was I graduating into the new one.

In 2001, the business world was being overtaken by the internet, email, instant messaging, e-commerce, and the seedlings of social media. The way we communicate with people, businesses, and brands was fundamentally changing. I was utterly unprepared to work in a business world that was in a state of flux. I retrospect, we can see that sales and marketing enjoyed a mostly stable arc from around 1960-2000. What worked in 1975 also worked in 1995. Only those with market prescience predicted that the same tactics would start to fail by 2005.

The economy was terrible in the summer of 2011 and you took any job you could get. It didn’t help that I was living and working in a city where murderers were flying planes into buildings, mailing anthrax to politicians, and hunting people in the streets. Even when the rest of the nation limped out the recession, we had to endure Congressional reforms that crippled hiring. For several years, I droned through my work life like a disaffected worker bee. I did what I was told. I didn’t think to question why things were done the way they were, if they could be done better, or if those tasks were even necessary anymore.

It was late, but thankfully not too late, when I realized that change also brings opportunity.

I saw a chance to be the change agent that was so badly needed. I learned processes and systems that I had never used before. I read every marketing book I could get my hands on. I adopted blogging as a way to teach myself HTML and web design. I had gained valuable experience in advocacy, event planning, copy editing, and public relations, but I had never questioned whether the investment of time, energy, and money was worth the payoff. I started to weigh every action as dispassionately as possible in order to distinguish between what was actually working and what was mere habit. As I got better at mining my experiences for gems, I began to spot the difference between people who embraced the new way of doing things, and people who only suffered the new way of doing things.

Often, I worked for (and with) people who resisted the new way. They saw everything new as a passing fad–a wave of silliness they were certain would soon crest and recede, revealing the firm ground upon which they were standing. It never happened. The cheese had been moved, and they were waiting angrily for it to be returned.

Harry Truman used to say that experts never like to learn anything new, because that would mean they weren’t experts in the first place. In the years since my graduation, I’ve realized that some people will never move beyond what they already know. They want to be safe and rely on what’s proven. That’s fine by me. I’ve also come to realize that it’s not worth my time and energy to try to convince people about the new reality. They either get it or they don’t. They’re the slowest members of the herd, and you know what happens to the dawdlers.

There’s an old joke that says a consultant is someone you pay to tell you what you already know, only with pretty graphs and a spiral binding. I refuse be that guy. That’s why I only take on clients and companies who are small enough to shift their strategies and are willing to embrace change from the top-down. My best clients are the ones who are just starting out. They’re excited about the new reality, even if they’re not excited about the time and patience it takes to do things right.

Do you see how the world has changed over the past decade? Have you positioned yourself for the future?

Use social media to talk with, not at, your customers

2012-05-11T18:05:16Z

Some people are quick to label social media as a passing fad that time and ever-changing technology will eventually make obsolete. They couldn’t be more wrong. Technology will always evolve, and social media will evolve with it, but the benefits that make social media so popular will never go away.

The more things change, the more they stay the same

Generations ago, before the birth of computers and the internet, people had the same interactions they’re having today. They would go to a diner, read the morning paper, and talk politics with the patron at the next stool. They would see each other at the grocery store, look into each other’s shopping carts, and discuss what products they were buying and why. They would reconnect at parties and spread the latest gossip, brag about their vacations, and spar over upcoming sporting events.

From a sociological perspective, nothing has really changed. People still wake up, read the news over breakfast, and talk politics. The difference is that the news comes from RSS feeds and the discussion takes place on Facebook. Consumers still talk about the quality of the products they buy. The difference is that they do it via Amazon’s rating forums. And people still spread gossip, share vacation pictures, and talk sports. The difference is that they do it on Twitter, Instagram, blogs, and countless other social platforms.

It’s all about community

Social media is a virtual ecosystem. It is comprised of communities that form around common interests. The people using social media are invested in the sense that they have something to share or something they’re seeking. In a way, the shift toward social media is like a shift back to a sort of Rockwellian community where everyone shares everything. That’s what makes social media such a useful tool for marketing.

The old business adage says that you “go where your customers are.” Despite the fact that many people erroneously associate social media with young, urban technophiles, the truth is that all age groups at all socio-economic levels are active online. If you sell a product or a service to people with a cell phone or an internet connection, then many of your customers are using social media. But you can’t target them the same you would through older, more traditional forms of advertising. The secret to success in the virtual world is engagement.

Press releases are common and useful in the corporate world. But simply using Facebook or Twitter to trumpet your lastest press releases is like screaming over a crowd of people who are already involved in conversation. They’ll acknowledge you at best, and be annoyed with you (and your brand) at worst.

The rules of the game have changed

Older forms of advertising like print and TV was focused on interrupting the audience. Social media is all about engaging with the audience. Authenticity is the currency that buys people’s attention. Thanks to the internet, we’ve evolved into savvy communicators who can easily spot a sales pitch wrapped inside a random comment. And it’s never been easier to ignore what you find annoying.

How many times have you been polite enough to listen to a stranger’s sales pitch, knowing full well that you’re not going to buy anything, simply because you want to spare that person’s feelings? Well, that kind of thing doesn’t happen in social media. It’s just too easy to ignore and suppress unwanted solicitations.

When was the last time you clicked on a banner ad? When was the last time you even noticed one?

In order to get someone’s attention these days, you have to engage with them in a meaningful way. You have to ask them questions and be genuinely interested in how they respond, ask them follow-up questions to prove that you’re not just killing time before the sales pitch, and share stories of your own. You have to offer free advice that actually helps them with the specific problem that brought them to your attention in the first place. You have to imbue the conversation with meaning by actually being meaningful. A radical concept, I know.

There’s not much of a difference between education and entertainment in social media. Do whatever you can to be of value. Make them laugh. Laugh at yourself. You need to make them see you as a human being, and not just an lifeless avatar with a screen name.

If you take the time to do it, do it right

All of this engagement outreach comes at the expense of time, but it’s worth it. When a customer got good service in the old days, you’d be lucky if they told one or two people about you. Thanks to social media, one person’s comment about good service on Facebook or Twitter can reach millions.

Follow these simple tips to build a quality brand on social media:

Be considerate of the people you communicate with.
Be authentic in how you represent yourself and your brand.
Make your point as briefly as possible and follow up with interested people.
Be consistent in the frequency of your postings.
Avoid selling unless someone distinctly says they’re looking to buy.

Social media is about building relationships, not revenue. That might sound counter-productive, but it’s an organic process. The sales will come eventually, and those buyers will be very loyal customers who will do your selling for you. They’ll do it because they’re not just customers; they’re your new friends.

Don’t beg for traffic. Lure traffic with great content.

2012-04-16T18:34:29Z

Once again, The Oatmeal offers some pithy advice for e-marketers. I’m annoyed by the shameless parade of self-promotion that usually accompanies business’ attempts to build their facebook fans and twitter followers. I’ve pretty much tuned it out and only reward genuinely entertaining or educational content. The virtual world is a lot like the real world; if someone has to ask for praise, then they probably don’t deserve it. The Oatmeal demonstrates this maxim quite well:

Like I’ve said before, the customer experience is paramount. Happy customers take to social media to spread news of their satisfaction to the four corners of the virtual world. That’s not the kind of advertising you can buy. It has to be earned.

Everything worth doing is worth doing right. Like most things in life, in order to do it right, you have to continually work at it. That means remaining authentic in a marketplace that sometimes rewards dishonesty and gimmicks. It means consistently creating new content that offers value to your customers. It means going where those customers are with a custom message tailored to them at the time when they’re ready to hear it.

If you think you’re just going to beg everyone you know to “like” you on facebook and build an engaged audience, then you’re setting yourself up for a big disappointment.

Is your technology working for you?

2012-04-16T16:15:39Z

I remember seeing a cartoon once where a father is yelling at his teenage son. He’s screaming that the music today is awful, and that all music stopped being enjoyable and meaningful about the same time that he stopped buying new music years ago. That joke came to mind when I read a recent editorial. In it, the author laments that Microsoft Word used to be a necessary and dynamic tool, but now it’s bloated to the point of being a hinderance. It seems he’s been too lazy to stay up-to-date with the new features and now he can’t figure out how to use it.

Today, [Word has] become an overbearing boss, one who specializes in make-work. Part of this is Microsoft’s more-is-more approach to adding capabilities, and leaving all of them in the “on” position. Around the first time Clippy launched himself, uninvited, between me and something I was trying to write, I found myself wishing Word had a simple, built-in button for “cut it out and never again do that thing you just did.”

Sadly, this mentality is all-too-common. I know people who constantly complain that iTunes is too bloated. They want a smaller, more streamlined system to manage their music library. When a new software system comes out, they complain that it lacks this or that feature that they love in iTunes. Lost in this debate is the fact that one man’s killer feature is another man’s useless bloat. Why should iTunes or Microsoft stop innovating merely because some people are unhappy with progress?

I agree that constantly learning how to use new or updated software is frustrating, but technological evolution is natural and necessary. Staying up-to-date is part of the price of doing business in a technological world. If you saw someone using a typewriter or a telegram service as standard operating procedure in this day and age, you’d laugh. It’s useful to remember that we didn’t jump straight from there to here. We improved slowly with these same kinds of small updates that annoyed everyone at the time. But we’re all the better for it, aren’t we?

The author’s main point comes here:

For most people now, though, publishing means putting things on the Web. Desktop publishing has given way to laptop or smartphone publishing. And Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing. Its document-formatting mission means that every piece of text it creates is thickly wrapped in metadata, layer on layer of invisible, unnecessary instructions about how the words should look on paper.

Everyone who uses a content management system (CMS) runs across this issue when they first start creating content for the web. They copy formatted text from Word and paste it into their CMS and all kinds of hidden code comes with it. This is the code in Word that makes your paragraphs indent, sets your font style and size, makes your bold words bolded, and so on. It’s easy to strip this code out. With WordPress, you just paste the text via the HTML editor versus the Style editor. How easy is that?

Even if you have a bare-bones CMS (or no CMS at all), you can copy the text from Word and paste it into Notepad on a PC or TextEdit on a Mac and all of the hidden code will be stripped out. This isn’t exactly a complicated process.

The author seems to think that having more options leads to less control merely because he hasn’t learned how to format his technology the way he wants it. In fact, he could reset the defaults in Word to follow his publication’s style guideline and automate part of the editorial process, thereby eliminating much of the “make-work” that he bemoans. Instead, he wears his ignorance like a badge of honor and mumbles about how everything was better back in the good ‘ole days.

Instead of making the technology work for him, he chooses to work for it. Color me unsympathetic.

Is your technology working for you?

More dashing of dreams of instant success

2012-04-23T11:30:16Z

Fast Company has a great piece out called The Dirty Little Secret Of Overnight Successes. It offers a reality check for people who think there’s an easy trick to making it big:

As Chris Dixon pointed out in a recent blog post, Angry Birds, the incredibly popular game, was software maker Rovio’s 52nd attempt. They spent eight years and nearly went bankrupt before finally creating their massive hit.

James Dyson failed in 5,126 prototypes before perfecting his revolutionary vacuum cleaner. Groupon was put on life support and nearly shut down at one point in its meteoric rise.

When looking at the most successful people and organizations, we often imagine geniuses with a smooth journey straight to the promised land. But when you really examine nearly every success story, they are filled with crushing defeats, near-death experiences, and countless setbacks.

Click here to read the rest.

There is no trick to success. There’s no secret sauce that will make a hamburger joint go from forgotten to famous. There’s no advertising tagline that will make customers flock to your product and forget your competitors’. There’s no secret management command that will make your workforce turn off twitter and turn on the charm. It just doesn’t work that way.

Like I’ve said over and over again, doing things well means doing them right. And doing them right takes time and effort. A lot of time. And a lot of effort.

That’s why it’s called work.

You can always get better, and there’s no shame in asking for help. If you’d like my help in auditing your marketing strategy and integrating your message across platforms, I’m happy to take a look. But don’t think that you cut me a check, I snap my fingers, and everything suddenly starts coming up roses.

Five easy blog post ideas to drive traffic to your site

2012-04-17T15:38:26Z

Generating new content via a company blog is a great way to not only attract new visitors, but also to show the searchbots that you’re actively improving your website. But you should never post content just for the sake of it. Your goal is to add value, not to just add words. As always, keep everything as brief as possible and focus on topics relevant to your readers (even if you don’t have many).

A lot of people hate writing. Their minds drift back to double-spaced term papers and seas of red ink. Those days are long gone. It doesn’t need to be difficult or even very time-consuming to speak to your customers via the web. You probably have a dozen conversations each day with coworkers or customers that would make worthy blog posts. Think of the things you have to explain over and over again. Those things are begging to be written down and referenced later.

Whether you realize it or not, you’re an expert at what you do for a living. Or, maybe it’s safer to day that you’re more of an expert than your customers are. So if you’re struggling to come up with ideas for new content, write about what you know.

Talk about common mistakes
Don’t disparage your customers, but talk broadly about the common mistakes and misperceptions you encounter on a daily basis. Explain what the situation is and how your customers can better educate themselves to get the results they want as easily as possible.

Offer expert advice
Is there a lingo that some customers use that lets you know they’re experienced? Are there some questions they should know to ask but usually don’t? Share that information with your prospective customers. Everyone wants to feel like an insider.

Compile a list
Do you have a process or a tool you’ve developed over time that would benefit others as well? Share it with your readers. It sounds counterintuitive to business, but empowering your customers to do things on their own will earn you their respect. And when they need assistance, you’re the expert they’ll turn to.

Use pictures
You’d be amazed just how fast readers skim over content. They generally scan headlines, subheadlines, and images. Even if your posts occasionally consist of nothing more than an interesting smartphone picture with a title and caption, it can be a nice break in the monotony of text. Just remember to keep it professional and relevant.

Quote another blogger
Still short on time and ideas? There are countless people out there generating interesting content about your industry. If you see something good, link to it from your blog and copy and paste an excerpt. It’s your right to share and comment on others’ work under Fair Use. This kind of linking builds relationships and link juice. Just don’t overdo it.

Do you have better ideas? Feel free to add them in the comments below.

UPDATE: Right on cue, here’s a list of 40 ways to build a valuable relationship with your readers

Beware of black hat SEO scammers

2012-04-17T15:49:52Z

I recently wrote at length about the six pieces of simple advice I give to web-based entrepreneurs and marketers about laying a good foundation for success on the web. Like everything in life, doing something well means taking the time to do it right. There are no shortcuts that really work, or else everyone would take the shortcut and it would become the new path. So when people tell you they can do something fast and easy when it’s usually time-consuming and difficult, you should know that it sounds too good to be true.

For instance, if you talk to a marketer or a public relations firm that promises, “we’ll get you on the first page of Google or else you don’t pay,” that should be your cue that something is wrong. If it was that easy, everyone would be on the first page of Google.

Every industry has hucksters. When it comes to e-marketing, hucksters are the people who employ black hat tactics to get easy, but fleeting, rewards. The term “black hat” refers to old westerns where you could tell who was good and who was bad based on whether their hats were white or black, respectively. In marketing, black hat tactics include offenses like bait-and-switch, comment spamming, hidden text, forced info sharing, shady affiliate programs, overloaded meta info, content scraping, inappropriate alt tags, etc.

These methods are designed to cheat the search engines. They might work for a month or even a year, but the search engines are always changing their algorithms to combat deceptive practices. Committing one or more of these sins can get your site blocked from search results altogether.

Trust me, you’d rather have moderate traffic than none at all.

I jokingly tell people that the fastest way to get rich quick is to sell get-rich-quick fantasies via informercial between 2:00-5:00 am. Hopefully, you’re bright enough to realize that those shortcut schemes wouldn’t work in real life. Why would this be any different?

On “showrooming” and adapting to change

2012-04-16T12:03:07Z

The ubiquity of smartphones has resulted in a new phenomenon in commerce, the act of “showrooming” a product at a brick-and-mortar store before buying online.

In one of the starkest signs yet that chain stores fear a new twist in shopping, Target is asking suppliers for help in thwarting “showrooming”—that is, when shoppers come into a store to see a product in person, only to buy it from a rival online, frequently at a lower price. […] “What we aren’t willing to do is let online-only retailers use our brick-and-mortar stores as a showroom for their products and undercut our prices without making investments, as we do, to proudly display your brands,” according to the letter, which was signed by Target Chief Executive Gregg Steinhafel and Kathee Tesija, Target’s executive vice president of merchandising. Showrooming is an increasing problem for chains ranging from Best Buy Co. to Barnes & Noble Inc., at the same time that it’s a boon for Amazon.com Inc. and other online retailers.

I understand the logic at work here, but it’s a mistake. Target is asking manufacturers to create special products that are unique to their aisles. What’s going to happen is that some of these manufacturers will dilute their brands and offer alternately-labeled versions of their products that are only available at Target stores. Customers will quickly learn how to compare the common products with their Target-branded counterparts, and the problem will persist. Even if the producers create brand new products that are unique to Target, customers will quickly learn how to compare apples and oranges. There will no doubt be countless smartphone apps built specifically for this task.

This strategy is destined to fail. What’s worse, trying to force customers into a more confusing shopping experience can only harm Target’s brand. That being said, my main issue with Target has less to do with poor strategy and more to do with an overall lack of vision around the boardroom table.

The “showroom” door swings both ways, so to speak. Target is the beneficiary of the same phenomenon that they bemoan above. They just don’t see it.

We’re all guilty of showrooming to some extent, but the reverse is also true. Target is a store built for planned shopping, but they’re specifically laid out to spur impulse purchases. All good stores are. That’s why the milk is at the far end of grocery stores, the pharmacy counter is at the far end of drug stores, and the beer cooler is at the far end of convenience stores. We consumers don’t mind picking up an extra item or two on the way around the aisles. Wal-Mart actually sells some DVDs at a loss just to get you in the middle of their superstores. In that aspect, not much has changed about consumer behavior over the years.

But, in that same timespan, we shoppers have become very adept at mining the internet for quality reviews before spending our hard-earned money on what we consider to be large purchases. Large is relative to the individual shopper, but we all have learned to seek out third-party consent before making a decision. That consent used to come from a knowledgeable salesman, but it increasingly comes from the experiences of invested friends and strangers, also known as earned media.

If I go to Best Buy or Target to buy a HDTV, seeing and touching it in the showroom is just a part of the shopping process. It’s no longer a prerequisite, nor is it a decision-inducer. I pull out my smartphone in the store, find the item on Amazon, and browse through the customer reviews. If the virtual crowd has deemed it worthy of the price, then I’ll often buy it on the spot from the brick-and-mortar store. This is as close as it comes to a whim for savvy customers like me when large purchases are concerned. Amazon loses sales to “showroomers” like me because the actual showroom is fifteen minutes from my home.

Target and similar retailers should embrace showrooming. Being able to put tangible products into the hands of customers at the precise moment they’re motivated to buy is a competitive advantage over Amazon.com. A shift in messaging would make this difference clear to consumers. If Target’s management had the vision necessary to embrace change and tailor their offering to their customers’ desires, they’d be on the offensive rather than the defensive right now. As it is, they’re acting like Eckerd Drugs did when Walgreens came to town. You don’t see too many Eckerds anymore, do you?

The six most basic steps to SEO success

2012-04-11T11:34:46Z

I was talking to a few clients on a conference call the other day. I was helping them get their site integrated with Google services and optimize their copy for search crawls. As I was running through various tools like Bit.ly and Google’s Keyword Tool and URL Builder, I could tell that they were a bit frustrated. No one likes to learn new programs, and when you’re starting out with a new website, everything looks like code.

I calmly explained to them that their site was already well-positioned to climb in the search engine rankings. What I was showing them were additional tools and tips to apply each week to generate effective, new content and to strengthen the authority of their old content. They realized the benefit of tracking data and the value of experimenting with more unique keywords, but they felt like they were too far behind the curve to ever catch up to the leaders within their region and industry.

I responded that this is a fantastic time to be entering the market. I truly believe that. It’s never been easier for laymen to manage websites with little to no experience with HTML. It’s easy to get bogged down in the technical details of running a web-based business, but the keys to success are the same as with brick-and-mortar businesses. The most important thing you can do is represent yourself and your products/services as authentically as possible and offer your customers a positive experience.

A new era

We’re entering a new era in marketing where authenticity and personalized service are overtaking convenience and discount pricing as the determining factors in sales.

This is the age of the boutique business. Black Friday is followed by Small Business Saturday almost everywhere. Market leaders and category killers are mimicking their smaller, more nimble competitors. You see it with everything from microbrews to crafts to food trucks. The customer experience is paramount, and happy customers take to social media to spread news of their satisfaction to the four corners of the virtual world. That’s not the kind of advertising you can buy. It has to be earned, and that’s leveled the playing field to a certain extent.

As usual, Google recognized this shift. As a result, they’re changing their search algorithym to penalize sites that are “over-optimized.” As Google’s Matt Cutts recently explained:

The way that I often think about SEO is that it’s like a coach. It’s someone who helps you figure out how to present yourself better. In an ideal world, though, you wouldn’t have to think about presenting yourself and whether search engines can crawl your website, because they’d just be so good that they can figure out how to call through the Flash, how to crawl through the forums, how to crawl through the JavaScript, how to crawl through whatever it is.And, for the most part, most search engines have made a lot of progress on being able to crawl though that richer content.

And the idea is basically to try and level the playing ground a little bit. So all those people who have sort of been doing, for lack of a better word, “over optimization” or “overly” doing their SEO, compared to the people who are just making great content and trying to make a fantastic site, we want to sort of make that playing field a little bit more level.

As you can see, Google is committed to matching searchers with the results that best meet their needs. If you’re new to the marketplace, or if you’ve had trouble establishing yourself thus far, this is a great time to rethink the way you tell the world about what you have to offer and why they should come to you.

Where to start

When people ask me where they should start when it comes to optimizing their site, I usually tell them to follow these six simple rules:

Let efficacy drive your efforts
The old adage that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” is as true as it’s ever been. Luckily for you, the tools you need to measure your progress are incredibly effective and, best of all, they’re usually free. If you don’t know what’s working and what’s not with your website and outreach, then how do you expect to get better? Change doesn’t happen on its own. Be diligent and dispassionate about putting numbers to everything. Focus your efforts where they’re working, even if it means following a direction you didn’t anticipate.

Be authentic
Don’t over-promise or under-deliver. There’s a common, natural desire to present your business as a one-size-fits-all solution to everyone, but too many details often lead to ambiguity. Be honest and direct. Specialize in one thing even if you’re great at many things. Once you get a customer’s attention, you can find out what he/she really wants/needs and establish your credentials all over again in that tangent. The important thing is to draw the customer to you in the first place.

Be concise
Oftentimes, less is more. Say whatever you have to say in as few words as possible. You might be tempted to go on at length about the features and advantages of your services, but the only thing your customers want to know is how the things you’re selling will benefit their lives. For instance, why would you spend ten minutes or 1000 words telling me about your proprietary process to protect and foster grass seed when all I want to hear is that I can cut you a check and my yard will eventually look better than my neighbor’s?

Be accommodating
Don’t try to force the sale. Don’t try to trap your visitors. Don’t try to capture information that you don’t really need. People are accustomed to getting information for free. If you hold back information, or ask too much from them, they’ll put up their guard. People operate on “feel” more often than they realize. If most of your customers expect professionalism, then try to come across as professional. If most of your customers expect casualness, then try to come across as casual. Don’t try to be everything to everyone or you won’t attract anyone.

Be entertaining
Successful marketers don’t draw a distinction between education and entertainment. If you can strengthen your message with images and properly authorized media, then don’t be afraid to add it to your arsenal. But remember, you’re looking to get the maximum possible output from the minimal possible input. Less is still more, unless more is more, if that makes any sense. In other words, don’t bloat your message unless you’re adding more value to it. It’s all about finding the right balance. Your traffic analytics should tell you if more is more or if less is more.

Make it easy for your customers to act
You should treat your website (and your overall marketing strategy) like a funnel. The mouth is as large as you need it to be. Everything else in your plan is working to direct customers from the top of your funnel to the narrow spout. That spout is a contact page, a shopping cart, or whatever call-to-action you’ve established to drive growth. Don’t oversell, but show them where to buy. Why would you make a prospective customer work to give you money? Get out of their way.

Still not convinced?

If you think your situation is different and you need more personalized advice, feel free to contact me and we’ll review your strategy and determine the best way to generate positive results. (See what I did there?)

The harsh realities of starting a web-based business

2012-04-05T19:17:53Z

Here’s a great piece on what happens when people’s idealistic expectations about online marketing are put to the test in the real world: 5 Harsh Realities of Making a Living Online

These are the points that most people don’t seem to understand.

Compete…or die

Traffic is never truly free

You’re a slave to technology

People don’t buy from strangers

You may never make millions

I highly recommend that you read the whole thing. It’s hard medicine to swallow, but you’ll be better off for taking all it in one gulp. This part rings especially true:

Free traffic. It’s enticing, isn’t it?

Too bad it’s a fairytale.

Yes, there are traffic strategies you can use to get traffic without paying money for it, but that doesn’t mean it’s free. You still have to pay for it. You just use a different currency:

Time.

Strategies like blogging and SEO and video marketing can indeed help you get all the customers you want without spending a dime to get them. Instead though, you’ll invest hundreds or maybe even thousands of hours of your time.

There’s a disappointing point I reach with just about every client. No matter how matter-of-fact I’ve been in managing their expectations, they imply or suggest outright that they didn’t get their money’s worth because it’s not working the way they anticipated. “It” usually refers to recognition, buzz, exposure, traffic, sales, etc.

I get it. They paid me to build them a website and integrate their brand with their new image and copy. Usually, they’ve also partnered with me to optimize their site for search crawls and integrate their outreach with the relevant social ecosystems. They see this as a transaction rather than a process, and they’re disappointed when the check clears and nothing much changes. When I give them an in-depth explanation as to why it takes time and work to create the inertia necessary to propel growth, they finally understand. But they don’t like it.

I don’t blame them. They’re already busy managing their business and trying to keep the lights on and here I come with another checklist of never-ending tasks. And I charge them for the privilege! After about a year, when the results start to bubble to the surface, they realize that I gave them the tools and knowledge necessary to succeed. But that doesn’t make the learning curve any less frustrating.

If you think you’re just going to put up a shiny, new website and paste your boilerplate press releases around the internet to spur traffic and create conversions, you’re setting yourself up for a big disappointment. More to the point, you’re setting yourself up for predictable failure. The good news is that it doesn’t take an advanced degree to be a good e-marketer. It just takes time and a little experience.

Don’t reinvent the wheel. Start with these tips I’ve posted before to get your ball rolling in the right direction: Free Advice | Strategic Marketing Consulting

The ten most annoying website mistakes

2012-05-01T15:36:22Z

Your website is the virtual ambassador for your brand. It may be a storefront, an engagement platform, or a mere informational portal, but it’s meant to attract users. The best way to have your users bounce away is by annoying them. Web 2.0 has seen the demise of most of the annoying gimmicks of the 1990s and early 2000s, but there are still some bad habits that won’t go away.

In my opinion, these are the ten worst sins that well-meaning websites can commit. If you’re doing any of them, you need to stop.

Disabling the back button
Remember when Christopher Walken played The Continental (video) on Saturday Night Live? Every time his date would try to flee his apartment, he would race to the door and block it. If you’re disabling the back button, you’re creepy like that. Forcing people to stay on your site just makes them even more leery of your brand. Stop doing it.

Auto-playing audio
It doesn’t matter if you’re managing a website for a band and you want to promote their newest song. You don’t take control away from your users. Thanks to WI-FI and mobile, people are accessing the internet from countless devices in every setting. What makes you think they want you to drop a sound bomb on them in the grocery line? How about a public restroom? Stop doing it.

Auto-playing a flash intro
I don’t care how casual and cool you think your brand is, it’s not cool to monopolize users’ time with a needless intro. If it’s really cool, users will opt to play the flash on their own. Force-feeding animation and/or making users overcome a superfluous start page is just another annoying hurdle. Stop doing it.

Mystery meat navigation
Yes, this is a real term. It’s when developers are too creative by half, or make the mistake of thinking everyone understands their bizarre thought-process. They inadvertently create an interface that confuses users. For example, a webpage that describes your organization should be labeled “about” or “our story” or something along those lines. Linking the “about” page through an animated gif of a puppy is annoying, even if you’re an organization centered around dogs. Stop doing it.
Incorporating random advertising links into your content
If there’s a link in your content, then users expect that link to enhance their experience and their understanding of a topic. When that link opens to reveal an ad that usually has nothing to do with the content, it’s annoying. Bait-and-switch is one of the worst mistakes you can make in the world of marketing. Stop doing it.

Too much text
If you send a two-sentence email to a dozen friends asking for a response, you’re likely to get responses from most of them, and get them quickly. If you send a 2000 word summary of your life to a dozen people and ask for a response, few people will read deep enough to even see the solicitation. Fewer will actually reply. The same is true with copywriting. Your website should speak to the needs, desires, frustrations, and uncertainties of your users. It should do so in as pithy a message as possible. If you’re going on and on about yourself, then you’re doing it wrong. Stop doing that.

Using graphics to make your case
If you have a message you want picked up and spread around the world via the search engines, then you need to say it in writing. Don’t say it in pictures or flash. Unless you know what you’re doing (and you wouldn’t be reading this if you did), you’re making your case in a way that will be completely overlooked by the search engines. Searchbots crawl copy and links. They don’t really scan images for words yet, not well anyway. More importantly, users are accustomed to consuming content in a certain way. Sometimes, disruptions, even intentional ones, just make you disrupt otherwise-engaged users. Stop doing it.

Hiding content behind a temporary lightbox (interstitials)
Luring users to your content only to keep them from accessing it makes many of them bounce back immediately. Sure, you want to hawk your newsletter, RSS feed, and deals/coupons, but how are users supposed to know if they like your content enough to commit to anything if they can’t see your content in the first place? Stop doing it.

Making users register and double-opt-in just to make a transaction
Like The Oatmeal satired so well recently, there are lots of third-party platforms out there that will enable users to simply and almost seamlessly trade their money for your products and services. Why would you make them jump over unnecessary hurdles to give you their money? Stop doing it.

Headache-inducing contrast
What makes you think users want to read highlighter-yellow text on a black background? How about light gray text on a white background? If users have to strain to get your message, then you’ve already started losing them. There’s a trend right now to make websites as clean as possible by focusing on “white-space.” But clean should mean minimal, not literally as-close-to-white-as-you-can-get. Going all dark is even worse. Stop doing it.

For some examples of these sins, go to Web Pages That Suck, where they urge you to “learn good web design by looking at bad web design.”

Did I miss anything? Let me know in the comments.

Popular marketing and public relations news resources

2012-03-15T17:32:35Z

In a meeting a few days ago, I was talking about facebook’s implementation of the timeline format for brand pages. A colleague asked if I could direct her to a few resources where she could stay up-to-date with the ever-evolving trends in social media and strategic marketing. I thought I’d just go ahead and blog it since I’ve gotten the question before.

I’ve already explained how to import and manage RSS feeds, so I’ll just direct you to the resources. These are 20 feeds that play big parts in my PR, SEO, and Tech lists. How useful you’ll find them depends on what you’re looking to know. (links open in new windows)

You’d be surprised how much you can learn about what’s happening in the tech marketing world just by browsing the titles of these feed items while waiting in line at the grocery store. If you want to look around for other feeds on this or other topics, you could a lot worse than browsing through AllTop.com to see what’s already popular. AdAge has a list too.

Do you have some go-to resources that you think I should add to my feedreader? Let me know in the comments.

	The Thank You Economy Social media isn’t a fad; it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate. Through technology, social platforms allow us to transition easily and often between the roles of audience, author, expert, and advocate. These communications are having an impact on our lives whether we choose to engage in them or not. This book dives into the world of social media and offers several success stories explaining how and why you should be engaging with your base.
	Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (P.S.) When I was in college, I suggested to some advisors that the University should offer casual, non-math, ‘principles’ classes on topics like economics and physics. That’s pretty much what this book does. The authors share statistical extrapolations through a variety of case studies in a way that’s situational and relatable. Topics range from why drug dealers usually live with their parents, why realtors get more money for their houses than they get for yours, and how people at the top of the corporate ladder are more likely to steal bagels than those at the bottom.
	Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions This book should be required reading for everyone. It delves into the nexus between marketing and consumerism, outlining trick after trick that sellers use to make you pay more for products and services while thinking you’re the one getting the better end of the deal.
	Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking The first half of this book is better than the latter, but it’s worth reading the whole thing. It dives into cognition and intuition and why some snap judgments are good and others are bad. The case studies are informative and entertaining, especially the one about the spaghetti sauce taste tests.
	Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us I thought this book was a little over-hyped, but it’s worth reading to see if any of the strategies mentioned might be useful to increase productivity in your organization. A lot of the basic lessons in this book are covered in other books on this list. Is there a business book out there that doesn’t mention the management philosophy at Zappos.com?
	Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t This is probably the most academic of the books listed here. It’s about forecasting and adapting to change, recognizing competence and incompetence, and identifying what makes some change agents succeed where others fail. The section that compares Walgreens to Eckerd should be passed around the executive offices throughout the entertainment industry. Talk about leaders who are failing to adapt… There’s a companion out there that translates the book’s principles to the nonprofit sector.
	Chasing Cool: Standing Out in Today’s Cluttered Marketplace This book is hit-and-miss. Some of the stories are useful, but others are about catching lightning in a bottle – a feat that’s barely manageable, much less plotted. It’s about establishing authenticity and protecting the brand. If your organization targets young influencers, then it’s worth checking out.
	The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich There are some pretty good time management tips in this book, and it does help you think about how you measure success in your life. I should add that it makes for a terrible audio book, so you need to pick up a paper copy, lest you be forced to listen to an actor read through tables of HTML links and lists of reader resources.
	World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers that Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories This was the first widely-read book to trumpet the indicators that The Thank You Economy recently went on to document with such success. It’s a bit dated now (it was only published in 2009!), as most people are more than familiar with the technological platforms and social ecosystems that were emerging at the time. Still, the marketing concepts are broad enough to be relevant for years to come.
	Integration Marketing: How Small Businesses Become Big Businesses and Big Businesses Become Empires This is probably the least readable of the books on this list, or at least it was for me. I get bored easily with books. It’s about the art of the upsell and it includes some pretty good examples of companies that have used simple calls-to-action to generate growth with minimal added cost.
	The Leader In You I listened to this on the way to and from Tuscaloosa, Alabama for a funeral, which just so happened to be the day that the tornado hit. The actor reading it sounds like Phil Hartman when he did the Troy McClure voice on The Simpsons. If you can get past that, and the hokiness of the presentation, it’s actually a great series of case studies highlighting effective management practices and motivational strategy.

Chad Chandler » Free Advice | Strategic Marketing Consulting

All I really need to know, I learned after college

Use social media to talk with, not at, your customers

The more things change, the more they stay the same

It’s all about community

The rules of the game have changed

If you take the time to do it, do it right

Don’t beg for traffic. Lure traffic with great content.

Is your technology working for you?

More dashing of dreams of instant success

Five easy blog post ideas to drive traffic to your site

Beware of black hat SEO scammers

On “showrooming” and adapting to change

The six most basic steps to SEO success

A new era

Where to start

Still not convinced?

The harsh realities of starting a web-based business

The ten most annoying website mistakes

Popular marketing and public relations news resources

Suggested Reading: Business Books