Category Archives: Marketing
Sell More by Offering Less
One of my friends surprised me with tickets to a sold out Jason Aldean concert. Personally, I’m not a big country fan, but I thought it would be fun to go. Since I want to fit in with the crowd, I thought I would shop for a great pair of cowgirl boots.
The first place I always start my shopping endeavors is Google. So, I logged on and typed “cowgirl boots” and came across various western sites. At first I was skeptical to purchasing boots online, but I figured I would save myself some time in doing so. Most of the sites I came across carried the same boots and around the same prices but one site stood out to me more than the others. Why? The site was user friendly because it broke down the boots into categories i.e. by color, brand, style, etc.
Steven Krug, a conversion guru, provides a few key insights on the best user experience practices:
1. Motivate users by reducing the options available, or create categories on your site that break large groups of products into smaller groups.
2. Don’t make users think. Think about your consumer and make it as easy and clear for a purchase as possible.
A business owner depends heavily on the revenue generated from ecommerce (buying and selling of products over the Internet). These simple best practices should be implemented for the ultimate user experience. From a strategic standpoint, doesn’t logic suggest that consumers want options? Organizing a website by various categories, may not seem like the best plan of attack, but then again it made the experience easier for me, and what motivated me to buy my fabulous new cowgirl boots.
Ready for a Mobile Site?
As much as just a few years ago most businesses were not offering mobile-friendly website versions for the on-the-go cell phone users. While it was considered a “nice to have” feature, not many business were willing to invest in the dollars.
But things have changed – rapidly. In fact mobile web browsing is not just a quick passing fad; it has actually become a necessity for consumers.
Below is some interesting data from pingdom.com showing how mobile use varies between different parts of the world.
Before you start to build out a mobile site, you have to consider the overall user experience. You don’t want people to get to your site and instantly leave. Most people will leave a mobile site if they are unable to navigate easily and find what they are looking for.
Loews Hotels is a great example. They recently were awarded the 2012 Mobile-Web Award by the Web Marketing Association.
Click here to view their award-winning creative
It’s not easy to make your site mobile-ready and to make it work successfully. If you have the resources and the budget, that’s the first step, however, there are various options that have to be considered. You have to rethink everything – from the design, content and links, to the navigation and user experience.
Click here to read more and tips on how to create mobile website
LinkedIn Launches New Targeting Options for PPC Customers
As anticipated, LinkedIn finally launched 2 new targeting options on their Pay-Per-Click (PPC) platform.
NEW TARGETING
- School – This is still growing as many people still have yet to associate themselves with their schools on LinkedIn, so expect the estimated audience to be low. However, it is still a great targeting tool for campus wide targeting. Unfortunately, unlike Facebook, you can’t breakout targeting by year of graduation, expected year of graduation, Major, etc. (Atleast not yet…)
- Skill Sets – This was designed to make it easier for marketers to target people on LinkedIn with the skill sets needed for their product. For our recruitment & education clients, this additional targeting will allow us to target those niche skill sets required to fill a job or sign up for a higher education program.
Still have questions on how LinkedIn can help you in your recruitment/marketing efforts? Give us a call, tweet us @KRTweet, or email us anytime! socialmedia@krtmarketing.com
Source: LinkedIn Sales Representative
2012 Summer Olympics: 50% Will View Online and Watch All Day
The Summer Olympics Games are right around the corner, and more and more people are viewing the Olympics from their smartphones, laptops and tablets verses at home watching it on TV.
“The number of viewers in the U.S. is likely to top the 211 million who watched the 2008 Beijing games online per Adweek citing Nielsen data”.
It’s crazy to think about all the people who have access to mobile applications and with the quality of video becoming even better these days; videos are giving people more ways to watch the Olympics remotely. Whether people are at work, at the gym, the airport, a restaurant or virtually anywhere, they are able to access anything of interest at any time. I remember watching the games at home in high school with my parents over dinner and later in the evening catching the highlights from the events that happened during the day. Now, with online technology at our fingertips, we don’t have to miss any of our favorite events happening throughout the day.
Did you know that the most anticipated events include gymnastics at #1 followed by swimming/diving and track and field? What sporting event are you looking forward to watching?
To read more about this story, visit here.
You Can See The Possibilities – Clearer Than Ever…
In my last post, I shared some of my thoughts over the advancements in Augmented Reality due primarily to the resolution of the new iPad screen. The quality and resolution brings an even greater dimension to the whole concept of AR.
This led me to think about how the devices we use can be enhanced by apps and technologies in use, in development or in the minds of developers around the globe.
I recently came across a series of ‘visionary’ videos produced by Westernized Productions, a hot creative video firm in San Francisco. The videos for Corning reveal a vision for the future of glass technologies. The videos demonstrate how glass with companion technologies will help shape our world at home, in school, at work, in medicine, in our cars, outdoors, oh, and in entertainment.
Check out these two videos.
The first, “A Day made of Glass – Made possible by Corning” came out last year and has been seen by nearly 19 million viewers.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Cf7IL_eZ38&feature=relmfu
The sequel, “A Day made of Glass 2: Same Day” has been out for the past few months and has received almost 2 million views.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZkHpNnXLB0&feature=relmfu
It’s worth the 11 or 12 minutes to get a glimpse of things to come…. Let me know what you think of these advancements and about the creative minds over at Westernized Productions.
San Francisco Giants vs. Oakland Athletics – It’s the product, stupid!
Baseball is about to start and I was thinking about our two home teams, the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants; and how the two franchises market themselves differently. I decided to do some research:
The A’s in 2011 posted an operating profit of $23.2 million from $161 million in revenue. It grew its value from $180 million to $307 million in just five years but it ranks 29 out of 30 teams. Interestingly enough, they consistently lead the league in win per dollar spent.
The Giants on the other hand had $29.9 million in profits from $230 million in revenue in 2011 and is worth an estimated $563 million. It was worth $471 prior to winning the World Series. It ranks 7th.
Source: http://www.forbes.com/lists/2011/33/baseball-valuations-11_land.html
I confess I was surprised to find out the Oakland A’s were profitable at all. Of course the profits were only possible because MLB revenue sharing structure. So… if they are recording that kind of profitability how come they don’t focus on awareness and brand affinity?
As far as the product goes, the SF Giants are clearly superior. They have recently won a World Series and Ross Dautel, in a Bleacher Report article, predicts they will make it to the playoffs in 2012. The A’s in the other hand, haven’t been competitive for a while and, according to SFGate.com, most experts predict they will finish in last place in their division this year. From a baseball fan’s perspective, I ask where is the love? What happened with ‘feeding’ the fan connection by keeping their beloved players around? I have to ask: Are the A’s only interested in staying profitable despite having the lowest attendance in the league?
The SF Giants arguably have much more Social Media impact. Facebook likes on their official fan page are at just under 1.3 million while the A’s have 295,000. The disparity on twitter is just as great, as the Giants have 222,000 following @SFgiants as opposed to a little over 30,000 following @Athletics. The Oakland A’s have won awards for best TV and Social Media at the Sports Forum for their Green Collar baseball campaign, but that didn’t seem to close the gap between them and the SF Giants.
Bottom line is that you can be as creative as you’d like, massage the numbers to create success illusion, and you can score all the Social Media and Advertising awards, but the core of marketing still stands: the product quality is fundamental!
By @AdrianaK
Notes:
1- This is a very simplistic overview of the baseball business. You are welcome to give your take on the topic and help us celebrate the “boys of summer”.
2- This post would not have been possible without the help of Patrick Kevill (@pkevill). After all, what does a Brazilian native understand about the American pastime anyways 
What’s an Entrepreneur?
An interesting definition, but captures what an Entrepreneur is in the truest sense. I guess it confirms the adage: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, invest.”
Take a look at Inc.’s article “ What’s an Entrepreneur? The Best Answer Ever.“
How do you define an Entrepreneur?
Make the Logo Smaller
Jan 20
Posted by henrykrt
Anyone that’s a creative in the graphics/advertising/design field for any length of time has probably run into the request by SOMEONE to “make the logo bigger.” That request, along with “make better use of the white space,” has caused many designers to blurt out endless obscenities or fall to the floor writhing in agony. The pain is akin to being forced to use Comic Sans for every layout – forever. It’s not that we creatives want to downsize a company’s logo to a nano speck on the page or have all the copy positioned in one tiny corner in 2pt. Helvetica for the hell of it. It’s that we used our creative and aesthetic judgement to make a well balanced clean design that communicates well, only to have it junked-up, messed-up, cluttered, off-balance, noisy, sucky, effed up… you get the idea. “Bigger” or “more marketing content” usually isn’t better.
A few years ago, a video popped up on YouTube that illustrates the point well. It’s a spoof about what would happen if Microsoft designed the packaging for the Apple iPod. Who knows, maybe someday the popular design trend will be to “make the logo smaller”… nah, that’ll never happen… will it?
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Posted in Graphic Design, Marketing
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Tags: advertising design, Apple, Commentary, creative, design, design trend, inspiration, Microsoft, rant, spoof