As we have seen in previous installments of Killer Campaigns, the commercial broadcast industry, despite its economic and time constraints, has plenty of good examples of techniques that can be used effectively in Web video campaigns, if you understand how certain elements affect an audience.

It’s easy to misread a commercial’s true marketing effectiveness and assume the big flashy special effects and grandiose production stunts are what makes a commercial work, but in fact those kinds of things generally only make a commercial more expensive. True the big-deal aspects of a production may attract attention, but it’s the small things that are the most important, the most effective and the most affordable. It’s the things you hardly notice like writing, casting, music, performance, and campaign consistency that have the most impact on a presentation’s ability to communicate, influence and persuade. It’s the production techniques to which the audience pays little attention that maximizes sale-conversions and increases the bottom-line. Take nuts for example.

Color Me Nuts

Nuts, the edible kind, not the irritating relative kind, are about as generic as you can get. So how do you go about creating a marketing campaign for something as mundane as nuts?

The Wonderful Pistachio “Get Crackin” video campaign and micro site got a lot of things right. This series of videos use the same format, style, message, and color in order to turn a nondescript, seemingly unbrandable generic product into a hip, sexy brand. Each element of the presentation re-enforces the other leaving a lasting brand impression without blowing anything up, or spending a fortune creating animated baby skateboarders.

One element that turns this campaign into a great campaign rather than just a very good one is its use of color. What could be simpler?

Pistachios Newlyweds Do It

The campaign’s consistent use of a signature color palette, green and black, combined with a great tagline and a series of clever sketches deliver the kind of memorable impression that prompts instant recognition and impulse-purchasing when seen on store shelves.

Pistachios Dominatrix Do It

One video is not a campaign, so Paramount Farms had seven different videos created, all following the same formula so the audience’s recognition and retention was enhanced and re-enforced every time they watched a new video segment.

Pistachios Mobsters Do It

This technique is not new; in particular Danone uses color co-ordination effectively in their television commercials to distinguish their various brands of yogurt: Activa uses a green color palette, DanActive uses yellow, and Silhouette uses purple. The Danone commercials don’t have the edginess of the pistachio campaign but their use of color is well thought-out and effective even though the messaging is pretty standard.

The edgy style, consistent format, and color branding definitely qualifies the “Get Crackin” videos as a Killer Campaign.

The Color of Money

Another campaign that makes an impression by means of its clever use of color is the Edward Jones “Join Us” campaign. If you’re not familiar with the commercials they are available on YouTube but unfortunately the embed option for them has been disabled.

These commercials were shot on a white background in black-and-white, a technique that draws special visual attention to the yellow-and-black Edward Jones logo. The whole package is very clever from the way the videos are shot, to the dialog, the music, and of course the clever use of color, or lack-there-of.

The same visual style was repurposed for a companion print ad campaign further establishing and enhancing the brand image in the minds of the audience.

Signature Color Branding

Colorcom is a color consultancy located in Hawaii and New York. According to their website, color branding increases recognition by up to eighty percent; it aids memory processing and storage; and it attracts attention, increases comprehension and mentally engages the viewer. That’s pretty powerful stuff, and you don’t have to be a mega corporation with deep pockets to implement color effectively.

Color Affects, a London-based color consultancy, explains how color effects perception on a physiological level through the electrical impulses that pass from the retina to the hypothalamus area of the brain that controls our hormones and endocrine system. The hypothalamus controls behavior patterns, sex and reproductive functions, metabolism and appetite among others.

Color By Association

Color by itself is not enough to get the job done. The pistachio campaign added the format, style, messaging and performance elements in a consistent campaign that re-enforced the message and the brand.

In the end, Web videos are not as much about making a sale as they are about making contact: contact in the sense of connecting to an audience on an intellectual and emotional level. Web videos designed merely to flog some product or service have built-in limitations, and an abbreviated shelf-life, whereas video presentations designed to engage can become eternal.

Are you ready to engage your web audience?

If so, pick up the phone and call us at +1 905.764.1246. We can help give your business the edge it needs to succeed on the web.

Killer Campaigns Volume 4 is a post from: MRPwebmedia Articles

© Copyright. All rights reserved.

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You know you need to hire a firm that has the creative staff capable of not just shooting video, but professionals who can write, direct, edit, and add all the post production elements you need, including signature music, sound design and on screen text. But are there other things you need to be aware of in order to maximize the return on your investment? You bet there are.

There are lots of production companies that just want to crank out the work at the lowest cost without providing any marketing guidance as to what works and what doesn’t. Perhaps these firms don’t know the difference or perhaps they just don’t care. The company you hire should be willing to provide some advice as to the best way to present your message so that it delivers the best return on your investment. Too many Web videos are technically proficient, but lack any marketing impact. The last thing you want is a bland, boring, lifeless presentation that goes in one ear and out the other.

When you’re ready to add video to your marketing and sales tool kit make sure you avoid the following seven deadly video development sins.

Doing It Wrong – 7 Web Video Mistakes To Avoid

1.  The Need To Get It All In

Everyone wants his or her money’s worth. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that as a general principle, but getting your money’s worth means more than hiring the cheapest bidder or cramming every possible product, service, benefit and feature into a single video.

You’re better off creating a series of shorter videos each about two to three minutes in length, and each focusing on a particular aspect or sales point. Ten minutes is generally the maximum you can hold someone’s attention, but it will be more effective if you break that ten-minute presentation into a series of shorter segments. By creating a presentation that flows from one focused video to the next, you lead your audience logically through a voyage of discovery that is far more interesting and memorable than a single over-stuffed information-onslaught that overwhelms the audience. Each video becomes an opportunity to re-enforce your marketing image and embed your brand personality by consistent use of color, style, format, and message.

2.  The Desire To Appeal To Everyone

Whatever you sell, not everyone is going to buy it. No matter how good your offering is, there are people that you are never going to convince. We believe a properly implemented video presentation is the most effective method of delivering a marketing message, but no matter what the evidence, there are some people who just won’t buy into the idea. If you try to appeal to everyone you will end-up appealing to no one wasting a lot of time, money and effort in the process. Trying to appeal to everyone merely dilutes your message.

By concentrating on the most appropriate market segments allows you to fine-tune your message. And if you create a series of videos each highlighting a different aspect of your offering as described earlier, people will be able to pick and choose what they are interested in and what they want to watch. In this way your audience won’t get bored or frustrated by listening to things they may already know, or are just not interested in hearing.

3.  The Fear Of Commitment

Marketing is all about creating an identifiable, unique identity, a personality that people will recognize and remember: a brand. It’s what will set you apart from your rivals and give you a competitive edge; if done right, it’s the one thing your competitors can try to copy but will never be able to duplicate.

Success requires a commitment to your brand image and to the marketing strategy from which it flows. Strategy is the big idea that guides everything related to your business, and it should not be confused with tactics. Tactics are the ways you implement strategy. If you confuse strategy and tactics, you will find yourself running in circles never accomplishing anything.

If you commit to and successfully target one market segment, you not only establish and enhance your brand image but you also create a ‘drag effect.’ For example, the success of Apple’s iTunes and iPods dragged their computer sales along with it. Once people became Apple customers for one product they were more likely to buy another; and even though iPod advertising was originally aimed at a youth-oriented market, it’s success dragged both younger and older consumers along for the sales ride.

4.  The Need To Accommodate Everybody’s Agenda

As companies grow they hire new people, and wherever there are groups of people there are opposing opinions, and opinions can very easily turn into agendas. Your sales people want lower prices, your accountant wants higher prices, and your advertising people want something new; everyone has an agenda and they all conflict with each other. The result is compromise. And compromise kills brand personality and corporate identity.

Even big companies with deep pockets and access to any and every expert in the world are susceptible to agenda creep. Take the fast food giant McDonald’s for example. Their television advertising is all over the place. They use different themes, different approaches, and even different music in almost every commercial, each aimed at a different market with a different product offering. The only thing that seems to be consistent is the logo and signature jingle that is slapped on to the end of each spot. As individual commercials they may stand up, obviously they have high production qualities, but as a marketing message strategy, they become mere advertising noise rather than building on each other to form a coherent approach and brand message. What they seem to want to say is that McDonald’s is for everyone no matter what age or food preference, and that kind of approach only leads to a muddled message. McDonald’s may get away with it in the short term because they are McDonald’s and have a long history of effective advertising. Whether McDonald’s simultaneous multiple campaign approach is the result of a desire to accommodate different agendas, or just designed to appeal to everybody doesn’t matter, the result is the same – muddled messaging.

5.  The Lack Of Vision

And speaking of corporate identity, do you have one? Do you have a vision, a point-of-view, an attitude; a perspective on how you can best serve your clients. The idea of a corporate vision is something that is easy to ignore, after all, how much is a corporate vision worth? It’s not like you can go on eBay or Amazon and download one for a few bucks.

I recall seeing a documentary on a very successful clothing manufacturer. The founder of the company was reviewing the company’s latest line of running shoes. He looked at the shoes, looked at the product manager, and said, “Where’s the logo?” to which the product manager answered, “We can add it anywhere.” The company CEO in no uncertain terms told the executive that that wasn’t good enough. The logo represented the company and the company represented a particular lifestyle. The shoe being presented was just another shoe and that was not acceptable. The shoe needed to fit the ideal for which the company stood. The CEO had a vision and everything the company did had to conform to that vision. Developing and presenting a unified corporate vision is how you create a brand and how you build a business.

6.  The Fear Of Failure

No matter how good you are, you are bound to have some failures. These are learning experiences from which you can develop new and improved initiatives. Building a brand identity is a slow and continuous process and it doesn’t always move forward without some bumps in the road. Sometimes what initially appears to be a failure is not a failure at all, but rather the foundation for future more successful efforts. As long as your company has a vision of who it is, what it does, and why your audience should care, and as long as you stick to that vision, you will ultimately find a way to get your message across as long as you keep trying.

Like any kind of advertising program, whether it’s video, print, or anything else, one-shot efforts almost never show results.

7.  It’s All About The Features

The insistence on promoting features without tying them to an emotional benefit is one of the most common marketing mistakes made. You may be offering your customers the most features available but unless you also offer them an emotional value proposition, you will never get beyond the whose-the-cheapest kind of sale.

No matter what features you add to your product or service, you know your competitors will follow with something better, and probably at a lower price. It’s a game no smart marketing executive should play. Discovering the emotional value in your product or service is not always easy when viewed from an internal perspective. If you haven’t discovered what that underlying subliminal value is, and how to communicate it, then your producer needs to help you find it. It’s the most important element in building long-term marketing success.

Conclusion

There you have it, the seven deadly video marketing development sins. No one said this stuff is easy. It would be nice if you could just look at your analytics, and eureka, a marketing solution would appear, but that’s not the way it works. Marketing is a psychological marathon that takes time, commitment, practice, and a good coach you can call on to move you in the right direction.

Are you ready to engage your web audience?

If so, pick up the phone and call us at +1 905.764.1246. We can help give your business the edge it needs to succeed on the web.

Seven Deadly Video Marketing Sins is a post from: MRPwebmedia Articles

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Related posts:

1. How To Create A Video Campaign Concept
2. Web-Video Campaign Creation 101
3. HyperRealism As A Motivating Factor In Web Video

A good story has a lot in common with a good marketing presentation, and one of the best ways to deliver your marketing message is in the form of a story. It’s how you turn advertising into content, and content into a memorable experience.

Web marketing presentations must engage, enlighten, entertain, and above all be memorable. If you leave out any of these elements your presentation will suffer.

The Dog Ate My Homework

We’re all familiar with the kid who goes to school without his homework and blames poor Fido for his trouble. It’s familiar to the point of being hackneyed, but let’s give Fido a break and blame something else, like maybe the young man’s computer. Who hasn’t lost some important work because they pressed the wrong function key? Or maybe their laptop was infiltrated by HAL from “2001 A Space Odyssey,” or perhaps they just bought the wrong computer. That’s the story Apple tells in this very clever Switch Campaign commercial.

Apple Switch Campaign

Why The Technique Works

1. The Story

Using a story-style presentation provides a framework and structure for delivering a marketing message. All stories must have a beginning, middle, and end; in other words, they must take the viewer from one mental position to another. Marketing stories need to move your audience from curious to motivated. It’s a simple concept to grasp, but not so simple to execute.

One method of peaking an audience’s curiosity is to build your story around a relatable scenario or incident like the computer/dog ate my homework. It provides common ground between the seller and the buyer, and generating common ground is essential to all negotiations. And for online marketers, Web video presentations can be that first step in completing a successful sale’s negotiation.

2. The Storyteller

A story is only as good as the storyteller. It’s the storyteller’s character and style that engages an audience and connects to them on an emotional level, a level that brings believability and personality to the presentation.

There is a common misconception regarding the relationship between reality, acceptance, and motivation in advertising. It’s currently trendy to use client-generated content in advertising, and real employees as corporate spokespersons. Occasionally it does work but for the most part it is a mistake. Great advertising isn’t real, it’s hyper-real: hyperrealism is a communication approach that generates desire and motivates action by presenting a stylized version of reality through a more focused perspective that cannot be achieved by true reality. Reality is messy and confused; hyper-reality is concentrated and clear, and when it comes to marketing messages, concentrated and clear is the goal.

3. The Performance

A great concept, a well-written script, and superior production will still fail if the performance is lacking. The ability to communicate using verbal and non verbal performance skills in front of a camera is not something that should be left to amateurs – after all, it’s your identity and brand image that’s at stake.

The capacity to sell on a one-on-one basis, or even the ability to effectively deliver a speech in front of a live audience is not the same as performing for a camera. A video camera magnifies your appearance, your behavior, and any physical, verbal, or performance flaws you may have. But it’s not just a case of looking good, having a good voice, and getting through a script without stumbling over the words, it’s about leaving a memorable impression and that requires the unique ability to deliver a message with suitable personality and panache. On the Web, boring is as detrimental as incompetent.

4. Solve The Puzzle. Find The Gestalt.

Everyone has heard the expression “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” In the same way a pixel by itself is meaningless but viewed with a lot of other pixels it forms a picture. It’s a simplified version of the Gestalt philosophy that is the basis of a lot of creative thinking. The Gestalt approach stresses the human mind’s search for meaning in patterns. It’s a hardwired survival technique our ancestors needed to learn.

The human mind automatically wants to solve a puzzle, fill-in the blanks, or resolve a discrepancy. Those who couldn’t figure-out the sound in the bushes was something dangerous didn’t survive to procreate, and evolution did the rest. It’s something we needed to learn, and something that is ingrained in our psyche.

The Switch Ad never comes right out and says buy a MAC, the young lady just tells us a story and let’s us come to our own conclusion. By making the audience work at coming to their own conclusion rather than hitting them over the head with an obvious sales pitch, the message becomes much more powerful, and makes a much more memorable impression.

5. A Story With A Twist – Not In This Weather

The following Mercedes Benz commercial is structured very similarly to the joke in the opening paragraph of this article: it tells us a story with a clever twist.

It never verbally mentions the product and it allows the audience to put the puzzle pieces together without coming right out with a sales pitch. It’s clever, it’s smart, it’s sexy, and it has impact. In short, it too, is a Killer Campaign commercial.

6. Where You End Is Where You Start

The next video illustrates how to combine a story scenario with a memorable tagline. The tagline is your brand destination: it’s the short form mnemonic that people use to remember your company. Finding the right tagline to end your video is the best place to start when developing a campaign.

In this case the campaign uses taboo language to punctuate the stories’ tagline. It’s funny, bold, and provides an unexpected shock. Like it or not, you’ll remember it.

Cause If It Ain’t Memorable, It Ain’t Content

The WaySpa.com campaign of a few years ago was a hysterically funny series of videos all based on presenting bold, relatable stories, superior storytellers, topnotch performances, and a “can’t believe he actually said that!” tagline.

In addition, this campaign squarely comes to grips with the idea that you have to give something up in order to gain something in return. Some people will absolutely hate this series of videos, but those that get it, will forever have the brand image embedded in their minds. All too often marketing fails because companies try to appeal to everyone, and that is an unachievable objective. It is a blueprint bound to lead to boring, uninspired, and instantly forgettable advertising.

Television has rules and broadcasters are licensed, so advertisers inherently lean towards the bland and innocuous so as not to offend anyone. Instead they rely on repetition and sound compression (make it loud) techniques to the point of psychological torture. The Web is different, your audience is not a captive of primetime programming and can choose what to watch and when, and most importantly, they expect you to provide a memorable experience, or they’ll never come back.

WaySpay Video Campaign

Conclusion

People are always willing to listen to an interesting, funny, or entertaining story, so if you have trouble getting potential customers to listen and remember what you have to say, then you should consider using the story technique as a way to get your message across. Wrapping your marketing message in a metaphorical story scenario is just one way a company can turn advertising in content and content into a memorable experience.

Are you ready to engage your web audience?

If so, pick up the phone and call us at +1 905.764.1246. We can help give your business the edge it needs to succeed on the web.

Killer Campaigns Volume 3 is a post from: MRPwebmedia Articles

© Copyright. All rights reserved.

Related posts:

1. Killer Campaigns Volume 1
2. Killer Campaigns Volume 2
3. Web-Video Campaign Creation 101

The issue is one of successful communication. What you say and how you say it are what motivates people to connect with your company, the solution provider. Websites, blogs, social networking, and mobile sites are merely venues for communication. All the Facebook friends, LinkedIn contacts, and search engine traffic in the world doesn’t mean a thing if you have nothing interesting, memorable, and persuasive to say to them.

In our view, Web Video is the most powerful communication tool available to businesses today, but if you don’t use it properly it isn’t going to help, and the same thing applies to copy, graphics, photos, and blog posts. What you say and how you say it are the critical elements of whether or not, people respond to your website presentation.

What Needs To Be Said

Marketing consultants have for years suggested the use of Mission Statements as one way to get companies to focus their thinking and communication efforts into something meaningful. They are intended to be a kind of ‘Rosetta Stone’ for corporate communication, but instead, they have become a graveyard for innocuous platitudes and inane statements of self-congratulation. It’s too bad because the idea of a core guiding statement that defines purpose and personality is central to developing a framework for marketing communication content and delivery.

If websites are about motivating action, what do we need to communicate to our audience to achieve that objective? If Mission Statements aren’t the solution, what is? The answer is not a price proposition or a feature proposition but rather a presentation of emotional value because it is the most persuasive motivating factor you can offer. It is something that your competitors can’t copy, undercut, or even compete with.

Your Emotional Value Proposition Is Your Brand

If you ever thought branding didn’t apply to your company, well now you know better, because branding is nothing more than the implementation and communication of your company’s emotional value statement: the core guiding principle used to formulate all marketing communication efforts, including website video presentations.

In Lee Eisenberg’s book, ‘Shoptimism’, he outlines four reasons people buy things: to make themselves happy, to transform themselves, to express themselves, and to achieve a sense of permanence. Each of these reasons is based on an emotional value, which is why all the features and price-cutting in the world can’t compete with a well-established emotional return.

Presenting Value In Marketing Communication

Eisenberg’s four reasons to buy are really a variation on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs that form a pyramid of need, want, and desire: the basis for everything we require and everything we crave, starting with survival and ending with self-fulfillment. Most of us have moved up the pyramid from basic survival and procreation needs to more sophisticated desires based on belonging, identity, and self-actualization, the elements that form an Emotional Value Marketing Proposition.

Most sophisticated marketers understand the power and importance of self-actualization as an emotional trigger upon which a brand identity can be established and promoted; however a distinction must be made between the audience’s desire for individual fulfillment and a company’s objective of meeting its marketing goals.

In a Web-based business environment populated with newly minted entrepreneurs who do not distinguish themselves from their businesses, it is easy to understand why this confusion exists.

A business is a living breathing entity unto itself and should not be confused with it’s owners, managers, and employees. It may be trendy to think you are your brand, but unless you’re Tony Robbins, with his personality, performance skills, resources and ’shtick,’ it’s best to implement a less egocentric strategy.

Where self-actualization in marketing plays out is as a basis for presenting the emotional value you offer your audience: a desirable value that motivates that audience to act, and thereby fulfill your corporate marketing goals.

An ego-based misreading of self-actualization has led to a plethora of self-promotion and do-it-yourselfism that works against business success. It’s the fulfillment of your audiences desires that management needs to be concerned with, not their own.

Perception, Reality, and Communication

Once you’ve figured out what your Emotional Value Proposition is, the next thing is to figure out how to present it, which brings us to the idea of hyperrealism, a term we use for developing effective Web-based video presentations.

Marketing communication is essentially a storytelling discipline that relies on shorthand reference and pattern recognition wrapped in the context of an idealized reality, what we call hyperrealism. In art, hyperrealism is intended to convey something deeper and more significant than what mere reality can convey, and the same principle holds true for marketing communication. Reality is messy, complex, and confused, while hyperrealism is simplified and focused, a prime directive in any effective marketing, branding, and advertising strategy. You need to simplify in order to clarify, in order to persuade.

Beyond-Real Realism

This E-Trade commercial demonstrates the principle. It tells a story and makes its point using a real-life scenario wrapped in a hyper-real context. They could have shot the same commercial with an adult instead of a baby, but it wouldn’t have been as effective. It’s the beyond-real realism that makes it work.

HyperRealism As A Concept Development Principle

Every sane human being understands gangsters and serial killers are bad, yet television audiences flock to consume episodes of the ‘Sopranos’ and ‘Dexter.’ In the same way most of us know the images presented by Victoria’s Secret bare little relation to reality. These examples may be obvious, but all effective commercial presentation is stylized, not because it’s an effort to mislead, but rather because it needs to focus and clarify a message aimed at engaging and connecting to an audience on an emotional level.

In order to connect to your audience your marketing presentation must communicate something more than the lowest price, or the latest feature, it must show the way to that idealized version that viewers have of themselves that only exists in their minds. Once you come to grips with that reality, you’re on your way to developing a successful marketing communication strategy.

Are you ready to engage your web audience?

If so, pick up the phone and call us at +1 905.764.1246. We can help give your business the edge it needs to succeed on the web.

HyperRealism As A Motivating Factor In Web Video is a post from: MRPwebmedia Articles

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1. Web-Video Campaign Creation 101
2. A Web-Branding Blueprint For The Experience Economy
3. A Website Without Video Is Like…

CSI begets CSI Miami, which begets CSI New York, which begets NCIS, which begets NCIS Los Angeles, which is just about as much as anyone can take. If something is successful you can be sure more of the same will follow.

Despite the occasional success story, most clones either fail completely, or never live up to the success of their groundbreaking predecessors.
Most of the copycats fail because the clone-masters behind them don’t understand why the original worked, and as a consequence, they clone all the wrong elements. This is as true of commercial presentations as it is with broadcast programming.

Cloning a successful format is not the same as Slipstreaming. Clone marketing is just rote copying of technical elements without any reference to why the original worked, whereas Slipstream marketing takes a familiar idea and plays off it like a great jazz musician reinterprets an old standard.

Kleenex “Let It Out” Campaign:
Recognizing The Emotional Value Proposition

What is more generic than facial tissue? A consumable paper product that you use once and discard; it is the very definition of a commodity, and as we all know commodity-sales are primarily based on price. Enter Kimberly Clark, one company that has managed to turn their commodity product into the industry standard to the extent that the commodity itself has become known by Kimberly Clark’s designated brand name – Kleenex.

The Kleenex, “Let It Out” campaign is just one example of a company that recognizes that in order to turn their commodity product into something of higher value, they have to link it to what we refer to as “an emotional value proposition:” the implied psychological or emotional connection between the product and the consumer.

The original series of Web videos was housed on a dedicated video microsite. The series of videos showed a casually dressed interviewer with an engaging personality asking people to sit down on a couch in the middle of a busy street to chat about some significant emotional moment in their lives. Some people talked about their children; one woman even discussed Katrina and the impact it had on her. People cried, and people laughed, until tears came to their eyes, at which point, the interviewer handed each person a Kleenex: Kleenex and emotions go hand-in-hand. Let It Out, the concept was brilliant.

The following version was created for television; it is a compendium of clips from various videos, and as good as it is, it doesn’t have the same emotional power of the Web video versions that concentrated on each person’s emotional response to the interviewer’s questions. It’s good, but not as good, but it does serves to illustrate the point. Unfortunately the individual videos are no longer available.

Kleenex “Let It Out” TV Commercial

Everything in the commercial works: the interviewer’s manner and personality, the visual imagery of the couch in the street, and the memorable music message. It’s all good, very, very good.

On The Other Hand…

Rogers Communication Inc. is a large Canadian communication company that provides digital cable TV, high speed Internet, and mobile phone services. Their primary competition would be Bell Canada.

In order to promote their new Home Phone service Rogers initiated a series of commercials featuring a man on the street interviewing people passing by, asking them to compare their phone service to their competitors. They used a red and blue couch in the street with the red side of the couch representing Rogers and the blue side representing Bell. They handed each person a blue phone and asked them to call a friend or relative; then they handed the person a red phone representing Rogers, and asked them to call the same person. Then the interviewer asked them to compare the service, which according to the commercial was the same. The difference of course was in the price.

Anyone who has seen both campaigns could come to only one conclusion, and that is the Roger’s commercials were patterned after the Kleenex, “Let It Out” campaign. Did it work? Take a look.

Rogers Home Phone Campaign

On a very superficial level, the commercials are eerily the same, both have a couch in the street, an interviewer, and a passerby; but on an emotional and psychological level, they are as far apart as you can get.

Kleenex tied the use of their product to people’s most personal feelings, their response to emotional reminiscence, while Rogers relied on price only. There service isn’t better, it’s the same; just cheaper – so the ad says. The Kleenex interviewer is courteous, interested, and responsive, while the Rogers representative is glib, and a bit smarmy.

The Technique and Why It Worked

The Kleenex campaign works for all kinds of reasons, the most important of which is that it engages the audience with an intriguing visual presentation that resonates on a psychological level by providing an emotional value proposition associated with their brand. On the other hand, Roger’s value proposition is price.

You may say, price is important, but pricing tactics are a dangerous game. Competitors aren’t just going to sit back and let you drive them out of business. If you fire a price missile across your competitor’s bow, you can bet they’ll respond, and that’s exactly what Bell did.

Whoops!

By not understanding what Kleenex had done in their campaign, and not following Kleenex’s precedent by associating their brand with an emotionally resonant value proposition, they laid themselves wide open to a slipstreamed response by their competitors, who created a campaign that riffed on their imagery, and one-upped them with an alternate price comparison.

Rogers Advertisement

Bell Advertisement

Conclusion

If a commodity product like facial tissue can become a major brand by employing marketing strategies that emphasize their emotional value proposition, then so can your product or service. Delivering a marketing message based on it’s underlying emotional value is a better strategy then price and feature selling, a tactic guaranteed to be short-lived. Features are forever being added and prices are continually under competitive pressure, but emotional relevance is sustainable.

For many companies, it is very difficult for them to see the emotional value their offering brings to the table, but the conceptual basis of any effective marketing campaign starts with discovering that underlying human connection your product or service has with its audience.

Are you ready to engage your web audience?

If so, pick up the phone and call us at +1 905.764.1246. We can help give your business the edge it needs to succeed on the web.

Killer Campaigns Volume 2 is a post from: MRPwebmedia Articles

© Copyright. All rights reserved.

Related posts:

1. Killer Campaigns Volume 1
2. Killer Campaigns Volume 3
3. Your Website’s Missing Ingredient

Killer Campaigns is all about marketing campaigns that are memorable experiences, but why is that important; why should you care? Well if you want to grow your business, create, establish, or enhance a brand, or just plain sell more stuff on the Web, then you have to learn how to turn “advertising into content and content into an experience.”

What We’ll Show You

Each segment will feature an example of what we consider a great campaign that achieves memorable experience status. It may be a television commercial, a YouTube video, or even a video microsite, but whatever form it takes it will be worth watching, or more to the point, worth experiencing.

But just watching excellent advertising is not enough to understand why and how it works. You have to understand the technique used, and why it’s effective. In some cases we may even show you failed examples of the same technique used, and explain why one campaign worked and one didn’t.

Our Perspective

We start with a particular point-of-view. You may agree with it or you may not, but by the time you’ve been through several segments of The Killer Campaign series you will at least understand how to think about great marketing concepts, and you will watch webmedia from a whole new frame-of-reference, and with a more critical eye.

Our perspective is deceivingly simple: we create marketing communication, that’s video campaigns, websites, and video microsites based on the notion that Web traffic is an audience, not prospects, clients, or potential suckers, but an audience.

The Technique and Why It Worked

The analysis we use to evaluate the effectiveness of these techniques is based on the preceding perspective of treating website traffic like an audience. Why, you may ask, don’t we do what everybody else does, and look at the numbers? And the answer is simple: numbers lie. Numbers themselves don’t tell you the whole story.

An effective campaign may fail because of poor implementation or faulty targeting, or any number of other reasons that don’t speak to the creation and effectiveness of the media itself. After all, one of the greatest commercials ever made, the introduction of the Macintosh computer, almost never got shown because certain members of the board of directors got cold feet.

Killer Campaigns: Words & Music

As powerful and important as visual communication is, without finely crafted, supportive words and music, the visuals will fall flat; they will lack the emotional impact that connects you the advertiser, with them, the audience.

The Visa Pizza Twirler Commercial with the Morgan Freeman voice-over is a tour-de-force of commercial communication. Take a look and listen:

Visa Pizza Twirler Commercial

But what would this presentation be like without words and music? Here’s a video of the filming of the pizza-tossing scene without any voice-over or music. The pizza-chef is brilliant but without the words and music it’s merely a pleasant distraction without emotional or commercial relevance.

Visa Pizza Twirler – No Words and Music

The Web and television are both multimedia communication venues that rely on visual impact and sound design combined with the element of performance, but at least one major difference makes commercial presentation on the Web a more difficult challenge: television watching is a passive exercise, while Web surfing is a proactive activity. You’ll suffer through bad television commercials to watch your favorite program but on the Web, people won’t tolerate it. That said, there are some great commercials that do get it right.

HTC You Campaign

The HTC You Campaign hits the proverbial marketing nail right on the head. This is a company that communicates the right message in the right way, because the message is not about the phone, it’s about what you need in a phone. Just listen to the tag line: “You don’t need to get a phone, you need a phone that gets you, and you, and you, and we are HTC.”

This is a presentation that transcends commercial status. At the heart of the video are words and music that form a hypnotizing poetic social commentary on our over-stimulated hectic lives, and it provides a human solution, not a technical one. The concept is brilliant: this is not a product, it’s a life enabler, and who couldn’t use one of those. There is no discussion of features or price. It’s not even about the phone; it’s about making life easier for you, and it does it with a brilliant script and a hypnotic musical score.

Conclusion

In order for a commercial, a website, or a webmedia campaign to attain the level of an effective content experience, it must connect with an audience on an emotional level, the level at which decisions are made, and actions approved.

The HTC You Campaign illustrates how poetic words, delivered in an inspiring voice-over, supported by a hypnotic musical score, with associated images, turn advertising into content and content into an experience.

Does your website presentation or webmedia marketing strike this kind of cord with your audience, or are you still trying to win the hearts and minds of your audience with just another feature or price adjustment?

The Web is a different kind of communication venue. The old broadcast scenario of repeat, repeat, repeat, until they say your brand name in their sleep, just won’t work on the Web. You may only get one shot at any individual audience member, don’t screw it up.

Are you ready to engage your web audience?

If so, pick up the phone and call us at +1 905.764.1246. We can help give your business the edge it needs to succeed on the web.

Killer Campaigns Volume 1 is a post from: MRPwebmedia Articles

© Copyright. All rights reserved.

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2. Killer Campaigns Volume 3
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Developing an appropriate communication concept is the first step in creating your own distinctive marketing strategy: a strategy that employs the signature audio-visual-performance vocabulary needed to create an identifiable brand-associated campaign presentation. It is this presentation idiom that provides the communication tools needed to make your brand unique and memorable.

Technology Without Understanding is Like Coffee Without A Cup

The availability of sophisticated technology at relatively low prices has brought about a communication revolution. Websites, blogs, and social networking sites have given every marketing manager and entrepreneur access to communication options that were hereto reserved only for major corporations with million dollar budgets.

Unfortunately the ability to use easy-to-learn software applications and high tech digital hardware, combined with access to an exponentially increasing Internet audience, doesn’t mean the average businessperson has the necessary skills or understanding needed to communicate effectively within those available Internet channels.

Mommy, I Can Do It Myself!

Like the toddler who claims absolute self-sufficiency only to need mommy to come to the rescue, so too the do-it-yourself Web-media narcissist ultimately requires expert marketing communication help, if he or she wants to survive business-growing pains.

Having an e-commerce catalogue and lots of search engine optimized traffic doesn’t make your website an automated online bank machine that takes search engine traffic in one end and spits out money from the other. Having a blog doesn’t automatically make someone interesting or articulate, nor does owning a video camera make an entrepreneur a creative director or media star.

Marketing campaigns are about brands, not products or services, and they are definitely not about features. They are not about the owners, managers, or corporate directors who run things. No, they are about the story, the brand story, told in a compelling fashion so that it resonates and impacts the audience in some meaningful manner.

What we have in the Web is a communication venue open to any and all comers, most of whom lack the prerequisite understanding of how to communicate a branded message.

The Language of Branded Presentation

In the ‘Fast Company’ article ‘When Great Design Becomes Its Own Language’ Joe Duffy talks about “visual and verbal linguistics.”

“The brands that have been designed in the best possible ways have their own proprietary language that tells their story, sets them apart from all the brands they compete with, and connects them in a very meaningful way to their audience.”
- Joe Duffy, graphic designer and AIGA Fellow

In order to achieve this kind of sophisticated communication you must understand the language of presentation. In a TED Conference speech, “The 4 Ways Sound Affects Us” given by sound expert Julian Treasure, he outlines how sound affects people physiologically, psychologically, cognitively, and behaviorally. The same can be said for visuals and performance, the communication elements that collectively with sound creates the language of brand presentation.

As Julian Treasure points out in his speech, “inappropriate retail soundscapes can reduce sales by 28%”. If it’s true in-store, it’s also true on the Web. Add to that inappropriate dialogue, visuals and performance techniques, and you have a branding, marketing, and sales disaster on your hands.

Core Concept Development

Management consultants will advise managers to create a Mission Statement in order to serve as a strategic guideline and tactical decision reference; but if that statement is filled with pointless platitudes and carefully constructed euphemisms, it is managerially useless and publicly inane.

The answer to the problem is to start with the one thing that makes you special. Marketing strategy, the high concept behind your business, and tactical implementation, the various advertising and promotional initiatives you choose to pursue, need to be based on that element of your business that makes you different.

The problem is most companies are not different; they sell the same things, in the same way, as dozens if not thousands of other companies. It is the job of companies like ours to help businesses develop a distinctive mark of differentiation, and come up with effective ways to implement it. In most cases the solution is found not in the product, service, or operational procedures, but in the way the emotional and psychological value proposition is presented.

Brand Story Sustainability

What we are developing here is a five-point plan for creating a sustainable brand for years to come; a methodology that creates a unique brand image rather than an also-ran product, or me-to service that becomes outdated with your competitor’s next upgrade or price cut.

So far we have four of the five elements: an Emotional and Psychological Value Proposition; a Mark of Differentiation; a Communication Concept, and a Presentation Language. The fifth element is your Concept Arc. The Concept Arc is how your campaign leads your audience to where you want them to be, and believe what you want them to believe?

Put another way, you have access to website traffic, an audience that is searching for something, it is the job of your brand story to reach deep into that audience’s psychological makeup, and give them a jolt of desire for what you offer. Your brand story scenario and characters vicariously represent this audience, and as your onscreen brand representatives move through the plotted arc from skepticism and mistrust to acceptance and desire, so too will your audience.

Your brand story can be built on any number of scenarios, including a quest, adventure, pursuit, rescue, escape, revenge, riddle, rivalry, underdog status, temptation, transformation, maturation, love, forbidden fruit, self-sacrifice, discovery, achievement, and conflict, (based on research scientist, Dr. Melvyn P Heyes discussion of plot at screenwritingscience.com).

A Web Audience Must…

Linda Cowgill in her book “The Art of Plotting: Add Emotion, Suspense, and Depth to Your Screenplay” states, “They [the audience] must be able to understand it [the presentation] with eyes and ears as they watch the scene unfold. … drama requires more than the sum of a number of incidents.” In the same way branding requires more than the sum of features.

If you haven’t already figured it out, the best way to implement such a brand strategy is with an ongoing Web-video campaign, but if you still have doubts consider that a Web audience must relate to your brand in a way that conjures life experience, values, attitudes, and preconceptions. That audience must identify with the characters and relate to their problems, concerns, issues, and/or needs. That audience must be affected and subconsciously influenced by the performance, as well as visual elements, sound design, and mnemonics. That audience must relate to and interpret the verbal and nonverbal messages on both a conscious and subconscious level. And an audience must be able to remember and recall the brand personality established so that it becomes a life style choice rather than a mere commodity purchase.

What it all comes down to is connecting with customers on a human level. Maybe you have substantial website traffic, or maybe you don’t, but whatever the number of visitors, what is important is that nobody who visits your website should leave without understanding what you do, and remembering why they should care.

Are you ready to engage your web audience?

If so, pick up the phone and call us at +1 905.764.1246. We can help give your business the edge it needs to succeed on the web.

How To Develop A Brand Story Communication Strategy is a post from: MRPwebmedia Articles

© Copyright. All rights reserved.

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1. The Brand Story Web Marketing Process
2. The Plan – 4 Steps To A Website Brand
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And when it comes to using the Web as your vehicle for such a campaign, the obvious solution is a Video Campaign Microsite.

Example of a Client Mircrosite With Web Video Campaign

What’s A Video Campaign Microsite?

Video Campaign Microsites are websites that employ a series of highly focused video presentations designed specifically for the purpose of promoting a single marketing initiative aimed at a highly targeted audience. Video Campaign Microsites are dedicated to delivering an engaging online experience that compels an audience to act by taking advantage of the marketing initiative’s offer. These sites benefit from removing all the corporate clutter and irrelevant information that inhabits most business websites and generally gets in the way of an effective marketing presentation. Video Microsites are often implemented by means of a direct email campaign or depending on the budget, magazine, television, or radio advertising. You can also channel corporate site traffic by means of a graphical home page link.

There are different styles of video Microsites that you can employ depending on your brand personality and the goals of the campaign.

1. New Product Launch Video Microsites

The launch of a new product or a seasonal line should be an event, and there is no better way to attract attention and generate public and media interest than to create a brand new website environment dedicated to that launch.

2. Promotional Campaign Video Microsites

A sale is just a sale, and today’s sophisticated buyers have seen it all before, so unless you make a big event out of your promotion, all you’ll end up doing is selling your regular customers the products they would have bought anyway but at a lower markup. A big media splash attracts new customers, new media attention, and old customers you’ve lost.

3. How-To Video Microsites

There is nothing more damaging to your brand or your bottom line than customers who hate you, and who tell their friends and colleagues. A surefire way to make people angry is to sell them something they can’t figure out how to use properly, and a buried FAQ, or a complicated list of instructions in twelve languages and 9 point Times Roman is just not going to cut it. A how-to video site can show people how to use and get the most out of your products or services in a way they will understand and appreciate.

4. Video Mocusites

There is one thing that you definitely cannot be on the Web, and that is boring. Boring websites are the kiss of death. The Web is a crowded place and no matter what you’re looking for, there are probably dozens if not hundreds or thousands of other companies doing the exact same thing, the same way, and probably for less money. You may think you’re different but your Web audience won’t, unless you present yourself in a whole new differentiating way; and one way to do that is with a Video Mocusite. A great example of a Video Mocusite was the Chili’s restaurant chain’s PJ Bland’s campaign.

5. Video Docusites

Where the Video Mocusite takes an entertaining, humorous, and satirical approach to communicating your marketing message, Video Docusites takes a look at the history, longevity, innovation, and success of a company in order to build confidence, loyalty, and brand identity. Ford’s Bold Moves Docusite was a good example of this kind of campaign.

6. Concept Video Microsites

A Concept Video Microsite is about presenting an idea. Some products and services are so innovative or different that they can only be sold if you communicate the concept behind them. Other products may be similar to competitors but the way they are sold is different and creative. In these types of instances the Concept Video Microsite is the answer. The SonicPersonality and 136Words sites are examples of Concept Video Microsites.

7. Sponsored Video Webisode Microsites

Sponsored Video Webisode Microsites are a great marketing vehicle for those companies with the guts and foresight to recognize what the Web is all about. These types of campaigns attract an ongoing loyal audience because they are bite-sized mini programs or episodes designed to entertain and/or educate without an overt sales pitch. If conceived and designed properly your program content delivers your emotional and psychological value proposition while the accompanying pre- and post-commercials deliver your direct pitch. Think of it as sponsoring your own private online mini television series.

8. Demographic Video Microsites

When a company has different campaigns for different demographic markets, it should present them separately to avoid confusion, mixed messages, and a dilution of the brand identity, image, and personality.

Microsites Help You Avoid Information Overload

Fashion and apparel companies, for example, all have seasonal product lines that need to be promoted in a current, if not trendy, manner. Dumping such a campaign into your regular corporate Web environment gets in the way of achieving the campaign’s marketing goals: the audience looking for new products and promotions is not interested in your Investor Relations or Career Opportunities, and likewise, the people looking for jobs and investment information aren’t interested in your holiday specials. It doesn’t matter how good your presentation is if you bury it so nobody ever sees its. If website visitors can’t find what they’re looking for fairly quickly, they’re gone.

And why should a fashion or apparel company use video at all? The answer is simple: there is just no better way to present how a garment looks on a real person from all sides and angles, and when they move. Add a little voice-over description and you’ve got your own little fashion show designed to move product whether online or in-store. Too many companies, especially e-commerce companies, still ‘think print’ even when they are using the Web as their main marketing communication vehicle.

Microsites Help You Avoid The Confusion of Mixed Messages

If there is one thing that will kill your marketing, branding, and positioning faster than anything else it’s sending mixed messages to multiple audiences using the same venue or vehicle. Fast food companies are continuously running promotions and they use television as their primary marketing communication vehicle. The problem is television commercials are a shotgun approach: you broadcast a commercial and whoever sees it, sees it. Sure there are sophisticated demographic analyses of those who watch what and when, but even with that knowledge the perception-leakage is substantial.

Just because it’s a football game doesn’t mean there isn’t a substantial female audience, and just because it’s a chick-flick program doesn’t mean some guys aren’t watching whether they want to or not. Television viewing is a shared family experience resulting from direct and indirect group negotiations. As a consequence, if a fast food company runs multiple ads aimed at different audiences, children, parents, and teenagers, all viewed by a demographically diverse audience, the result is a confused mixed message, and a deterioration of the brand personality.

Different Strokes For Different Folks

The Web is a whole different animal. Where television is a negotiated group viewing experience, enjoyed or at least tolerated by different family members, the Web is an individual viewing experience, not usually shared with others. That means different messages can be delivered to different audiences without the concern that each message is polluting the others or the overall brand image.

So What’s The Big Deal With Video?

Why do we stress video so much, well that’s what we do, so what do you expect, but more importantly we do it because it is the most effective and efficient tool you have to communicate your marketing message to your audience. The thing you have to remember about video is that it’s easy to do, but hard to do right.

Delivering Meaningful Content: It’s About Context and Subtext

Nothing exists in a vacuum, especially when it comes to marketing and advertising. The direct marketing message you deliver must exist within a physical and cultural framework, while the indirect marketing message you present must resonate within the mind of the viewer. A properly conceived video microsite takes these things into consideration and communicates a memorable concept informed by them.

Web Video Context is the emotionally relevant scenario created for the purpose of delivering your marketing message, while Web Video Subtext is the subconscious psychological message that strikes a nerve, triggers desire, and motivates action. Together context and subtext create a meaningful, relatable experience that defines your brand personality and leaves a lasting memorable impression.

It all starts with a relatable scenario that draws upon an audience’s life experiences, preconceptions, and attitudes. Done correctly, an audience will relate and identify with the characters presented, the language used, and the performance delivered, with each element enhanced and embedded in memory by visual and non-verbal cues combined with sophisticated sound and music design.

Are you ready to engage your web audience?

If so, pick up the phone and call us at +1 905.764.1246. We can help give your business the edge it needs to succeed on the web.

Video Microsites is a post from: MRPwebmedia Articles

© Copyright. All rights reserved.

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1. What is a Microsite?
2. How Much Face-Time Does Your Website Need?
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“My mechanic told me, ‘He couldn’t repair my brakes, so he made my horn louder.”
- Comedian, Steven Wright

We all want our websites to be more effective, and if you’re like most business people you are constantly searching the Web for anything that will help. What you find is a cabal of experts armed with statistics, analysis, charts and graphs all pointing to how they can get you high-up on the search engines and drive more traffic to your site. The problem is that like Steven Wright’s mechanic these guys are adjusting your horn when it’s your brakes that need fixing.

There is little point in attracting more visitors to your site if your site has little of interest to say. Even if your site is jammed packed with useful products, services and solutions if it doesn’t connect with your audience, they will never invest the time necessary for you to make your case.

When websites fail it’s most often because they do not function effectively as your primary communication tool. The Web is overcrowded with options and unless you’re prepared to deliver a compelling differentiating presentation you will be quickly dismissed as irrelevant. Let’s face it; business is tough, probably tougher than it’s ever been before.

Something is Missing

You’ve done all the technical tweaks and responded to all the research and analytics. You’re blogging, micro-blogging, social networking, and search optimizing, but still something is not quite right, something is missing. What’s the missing ingredient? You know it’s out there, but you can’t for the life of you figure out what it is.

You know the Web offers the potential to access new markets, find new customers, and reach new heights, but with all that opportunity, the results always seem just out of reach. If research and analytics were the answer you’d already be rich. Of course it was an over-reliance on research that brought us the Edsel, New Coke, and that wonderful Wall Street goody called Derivatives, one of the greatest investment boondoggles of our time.

There is something artificially comforting about putting your faith in seemingly logical yet unfathomable solutions based on indecipherable scientific modeling and over-hyped research analysis, all brought to you by computer scientists and mathematicians who never ran a marketing department or launched a new product or business.

Business leaders have adopted the attitude that, “It must be right, because I sure as heck don’t understand it.” And when it all goes wrong, or results are anemic, well, “What are you going to do? It’s not my fault, it all looked good on paper.” Ad agencies and Wall Street have been getting away with this kind of bunkum for decades, and look at the mess they’ve made of things.

What’s It All About, Alfie?

Business success is all about your ability to engage your audience with a message that compels them to action. Simply put, your business relies on your ability to communicate. Eureka!

And your website is the best communication vehicle you have. The question is how do you use your website to communicate your marketing message in the most engaging, compelling, and memorable manner? What is the missing ingredient that will turn your scientifically sterile online cookie-cutter presentation into something that cuts through the massive sameness of Internet clutter, and makes a statement that your audience will respond to?

Finding Your Emotional and Psychological Value Proposition

One of the hardest things for tough-minded business people to accept is that sales and marketing success is based on the subconscious emotional and psychological appeal of a brand. That’s the reason, reliance on feature selling rarely works, and only tends to commoditize a product or service – the guy with the most bells and whistles for the least amount of money wins, and why would you want to play that game?

Even the most casual market observer must recognize that all leading brands have one thing in common, no matter what they sell: the promise of their brand is based on a concept that is established through an emotional or psychological appeal. Apple is about thinking and acting creatively without the worry of technical issues; Starbucks is about reconnecting to the original coffee break ideal of a relaxing oasis away from the hustle bustle of everyday life; and Ikea is about stylish living on a budget. Each concept appeals to the deep-seated desires of the targeted audience. It is this singular concept that makes each of these companies special and different from their competition; it is the message that all their marketing, advertising, and promotion is based upon, and it is the true value they offer their audience that attracts interest, holds attention, and delivers promise.

Implementing Your Emotional and Psychological Value Proposition

In order to implement a company’s emotional and psychological value proposition, we use a process called the ConceptCreator. It starts with various sales’ points that need to be covered. Based on the supplied information, we develop a focused marketing concept using the Law of Dissatisfaction that enables us to discover the experiential human subtext of why people will want what you sell. The presentation concept is boiled-down to a movie-style logline that states the brand story to be presented in the Web Video campaign.

How Much Is A Concept Worth?

“Wait a minute – did he say a movie-style logline? That sure doesn’t sound business-like, and I never heard any corporate CEO or MBA talk about movie loglines.” Maybe so, but think about it. Hollywood studios spend enormous sums of money to produce a movie with the potential of making hundreds of millions of dollars, and each financial investment starts with someone coming up with a clever logline that captures the imagination. Television commercials can cost ten thousand dollars a second to produce and without a guiding conceptual premise they become DOA when implemented. So why wouldn’t you start your Web Video campaign using the same proven formula.

The logline, mission statement, or elevator pitch if you prefer needs to state the characters, goals, obstacles, differentiating factors, and resolution within the context of a story scenario.

For Instance…

If it works for the movie industry will it work for the advertising and marketing industry? Let’s take a look at one of the most successful, popular, iconic marketing campaigns of the last number of years, The MAC versus PC campaign.

Example Logline Concept: A stylish, pleasant, mild-mannered young man verbally spars with his geeky competitive opposite (characters) in a series of humorous, relatable incidents (story scenario) that illustrate the people-friendly advantages (resolution) of the brand compared to its rigid, unbending competitor (differentiating factor) whose sheer size dominates the market (obstacle) in an effort to win the hearts and minds of the computer buying audience (goal). – The MAC vs. PC Ad Campaign.

“The Time Has Come The Walrus Said…”

- Lewis Carroll from ‘Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There,’ 1892

The time has come to realize that Web Video is the best communication tactic available to deliver your marketing message to a worldwide audience; an audience that craves answers and resolution to their every need, concern and desire. It is not good enough to list a bunch of features and hackneyed bulleted points or even to dump pages and pages of search engine optimized hard-to-read text, especially when it’s aimed at an audience raised on television, movies, music and video games. We must learn to speak the language of the audience, and use the appropriate communication tools they can understand in a way that connects on a human level.

It all starts with finding the emotional and psychological value proposition your product or service promises. In a world of frustrated, cranky, attention deficit consumers, the onus is on you to present what you offer in a way that relates to the human elements that make your brand relevant.

Are you ready to engage your web audience?

If so, pick up the phone and call us at +1 905.764.1246. We can help give your business the edge it needs to succeed on the web.

Your Website’s Missing Ingredient is a post from: MRPwebmedia Articles

© Copyright. All rights reserved.

Related posts:

1. The Plan – 4 Steps To A Website Brand
2. Your Website As Persuasion Machine
3. How Much Face-Time Does Your Website Need?

With today’s website tracking software and services you can find out a lot about the people who visit your website. You can learn where they’re from, what kind of browser they’re using, how long they stayed on your site, and a whole lot more. But what all this high tech intelligence won’t tell you is what kind of people they are, and how likely they are to be transformed by your Web presentation from viewers to customers.

Your ability to convert website visitors into clients depends on your ability to find the soft underbelly of their subconscious desire. After all, if someone is happy with what they’ve already got, they don’t need you, but if they were truly one hundred percent happy, they wouldn’t bother coming to your website. Therefore every visitor that comes to your site is a potential client whether they know it or not.

The Setup’s The Thing

Your website presentation has to find that annoying little subconscious scab just under the surface and pick at it until it becomes a full blown irritation that fosters discontent and a desire for change. That discontent is your opening to make your value statement.

We refer to this process as The Setup. Like any good presentation you cannot, or rather should not, just blurt out how great you are, but rather you have to set the scene. Like any good story, the punch line, moral, or payoff only works if it is properly setup. Far too many website presentations suffer from premature pitch climax.

The ability to transform viewers into customers requires patience. Entrepreneurial companies tend to view the setup as a waste of time, and they fear losing viewers before they ever get to the so-called “good-stuff.” But without a proper setup, an audience is just not primed to accept what you have to say.

You can’t sell anybody anything unless they understand they’ve not been getting everything they need and deserve. That understanding creates dissatisfaction with your competition and opens the audience’s minds to what you have to offer. In short, the setup needs to touch a psychological nerve.

The Customer Is Always Right – Not Quite

We’ve all heard the expression, “the customer is always right.” The fact is the customer is not always right, and in many cases they don’t really know what they want or what they should have; and sometimes even when they do, they resist it because of a variety of misinformation, misunderstanding, self-doubt, and preconceived notions of conventional wisdom. It’s your website presentation’s job to set visitors on the right path.

Being The Expert Inspires Confidence

You’re supposed to be the expert in what you do, and if you are, you need to have the ability to dig deeper into what people really want, need, and desire. I am always reminded of friends of mine who hired an interior decorator to furnish their new home. The decorator asked them what kind of furniture they liked. They answered that they were looking for Colonial, to which the decorator answered, “No you aren’t. What you want is Country French.” And after he showed my friends what he was talking about they quickly agreed. The decorator knew his business and understood the clients. Yes the clients liked the idea of the homey Colonial look they’d seen, but not being furniture experts they didn’t understand what the options were, and what kind of furniture best suited their lifestyle and budget, while still providing the homey rustic but comfortable aesthetic they wanted. Customer satisfaction is about providing what the client really wants and not necessarily what they say they want.

Learn How To Communicate So Audiences Get It

Let’s face it; we all like to read about how the digital revolution has opened up the business world to more audience influence, but the fact is people are influenced and manipulated and desires created through marketing and advertising as much as ever. How many website owners actually benefit in any meaningful way from social networking and search optimization, or do they do it because it’s expected and promoted by proponents as the tactic du jour.

If you think a particular song you like is played on a thousand radio stations because it’s good, or even because it has a following then you are living in a fantasy world. If you thing the vast majority of viral videos produced by corporations go viral all by themselves then think again.

Audiences are being manipulated and transformed into customers all the time, not because companies responded to what the public says, but rather to how the public reacts to various communication and marketing stimuli. What’s truly amazing is how bad companies are at doing it. With all of the television industries’ research into viewers, they still fail to deliver consistent quality programming that people want to watch. Every Fall new shows are yanked faster than a Nolan Ryan fastball, but the same crappy commercials live-on for what seems an eternity. Television viewers are a captive audience and if they want to watch their favorite show they have to tolerate the commercials (PVRs aside), but the Web is different. If your website presentation stinks, nobody is going to stick around to absorb the smell.

Web Television Convergence Has Arrived

If you think of your website presentation as nothing more than a digital brochure, you’re already behind the curve. Welcome to the Web on TV.

All you need is a laptop computer or one of the new gaming consoles attached to your big screen TV to access the Web on television. And as network programmers scramble to get their acts together more and more people are opting to spend their television time on the Web. Kind of makes you rethink what kind of website presentation you should be offering. It’s time to start thinking of your website as your own business channel and the content on it as programming. It’s the future and it’s here, now.

Who Visits Your Website?

Before website visitors can be transformed into clients, we have to understand who they are in terms of their mental outlook or frame of mind when they first arrive at your home page.

1. Accidental Tourists

Accidental Tourists are website visitors who find their way to your website by serendipity. Your company’s link may have come up in a search for something mentioned on your website, but not something that’s a core element of your business. But just because these people didn’t really intend to visit a site like yours doesn’t mean they’re a waste of time. Perhaps they never thought of using your product or service, or perhaps they never realized how much they really wanted what you have to offer. If your website presentation is exciting, meaningful, and entertaining you at least have the opportunity to plant the seed of desire for your product or service.

2. Brain Pickers

Brain Pickers show up at your site with little intention to buy anything, in fact they’re there to pick your brain and find out how to do what you do for themselves. But if you’re truly an expert at what you do, you at least have the opportunity to show these people that what you offer is special, and doing it right requires a company with your skills and resources.

3. Penny Pinchers

These guys are looking for a bargain. You are on a list and they are checking out who is offering the cheapest solution to their problem. But not all Penny Pinchers are penny-wise and pound-foolish, some, just need to understand why you’re the best at what you do, and why what you are charging is the real bargain.

4. Tire Kickers

The Tire Kickers love to look but rarely buy. They want what you’ve got but they just can’t make the commitment to buy it. They visit your website a hundred times, each time pressing their noses against the virtual storefront window trying to make a decision that rarely comes.

It’s up to your website presentation to push them over the edge. If they want what you got, you can sell it to them. All you need to do is find that soft under belly of desire that gets them eager to spend their money.

5. Missourians

These guys want what you offer but need the reassurance of some practical input to get them to buy. The desire is there, but it’s frustrated by their mental need to justify the purchase with practical excuses. “But Honey, I know little Johnny is only three, but think of the eye-hand co-ordination he’ll learn playing these video games.” People ultimately buy what they want, and rationalize the purchase with logic and reasoning, but without desire, no amount of statistical evidence will work.

6. The Enemy

If you’re any good, you’ll have plenty of competitors hanging around your website looking for ideas they can use. It’s all part of the game. Better to be out there showing people what you’ve got than hiding, afraid someone might take advantage. Besides if you’re really good, you’ll always be at least one step ahead of the competition anyway. That makes you the leader and them the follower. And everybody wants to do business with the leader.

7. The Needy

The Needy crave what you’ve got but need a lot of reassurance, handholding, and customer support. These guys have the potential to be good customers but your presentation has to make it clear that you’ll be there to answer questions and concerns and not just leave them in the lurch like so many other Web-based businesses do after they’ve got the sale.

In The End

If you’re fed-up with social networking self-gratification, frustrated by ever changing site optimization requirements, and ineffective advertising then it’s time to re-evaluate what your website presentation says and how it says it.

In the final analysis it’s all about communicating your emotional value proposition using your most important venue, your website; delivered in the most engaging, informative, and memorable manner that compels your audience to pay attention to your marketing message, and act upon it.

Are you ready to engage your web audience?

If so, pick up the phone and call us at +1 905.764.1246. We can help give your business the edge it needs to succeed on the web.

Which Website Visitors Are Potential Clients? is a post from: MRPwebmedia Articles

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