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The web has complexity equal to our brain

June 5, 2009 by Marc Leave a Comment

I add this post as an extension of the post below. The web is so large and complex and is changing our communication and information pathways so fundamentally that it shows how important it is for your web presence to integrate into the web in as many ways as possible.

Below are the two points that I think are most relevant, but please read the entire article – From New Scientist -

World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee wants to put the web under the microscope to investigate how it changes our behaviour. Paul Marks asked him what he hopes to achieve …

What do you hope to achieve with the Web Science Research Initiative?

The web is now a massive system of connected people and technology and we have to study it as one. It connects people as they make and follow hyperlinks to a degree that results in complex properties no one expected. It has something like 10¹¹ web pages in it and there are a similar number of neurons in the brain.

How does understanding these emergent systems affect society?

Because if you get it right, you can create a new social phenomenon that changes how people operate. Take designing an online market for second-hand goods: if you get the website’s balance of social and technical wrong, or mess up its trust and reputation model, it won’t work. But if you get it right, you create a market for used goods internationally that can affect the price of products around the world because it provides the price of the second-hand alternative. It is a web phenomenon that changed the way society works …

So if any one tells you they fully understand the web … well now you know, they don’t. I think that even goes for selected fields like SEO, search marketing and social media marketing. We don”t know it all, and the parts we do know change often. That understood, it is certain that we should take every meaningful effort to have our website presence able to function and participate while marketing our goods/services. For every field, the era of static, old style “brochure” informational marketing websites has passed.

Filed Under: Internet Marketing, Search Engines, Social Networks, Websites Tagged With: communication, internet, marketing, networks, pathways, Social Networks, web, Websites, world wide web

Teleseminar recording with exceptional wedding/bridal marketer Lori Osterberg

June 27, 2008 by Marc 1 Comment

A lot of people have asked when this recording would be available and I just finished the editing and upload. I think it was the best, most valuable teleseminar for wedding/bridal marketers yet!

This last Wednesday evening was our regular monthly Great Wedding Network wedding/bridal marketing teleseminar.

Guest expert Lori Osterberg CEO of Vision of Success and author of “Six Figure Wedding Photographer” provided some great advice and insights. Our discussion ranged from how she grew her wedding photography business to the marketing power of blogs as websites to improving direct email marketing to understanding how to use social networks for business. Lots of useful information from someone with first hand experience.

I invite you to download and listen to the mp3 at your convenience. Here is the link (mp3, 9.9mb) to the teleseminar recording.

Filed Under: Advertising, Blogs, Leads, Profits, Sales, Teleseminar, Websites, Wedding Marketing Tagged With: direct email, SEO, Social Networks, web

Help for the color scheme challenged, like me!

June 13, 2008 by Marc Leave a Comment

I love color! Unfortunately putting together innovative and attractive color schemes is a talent I do not have. One needs only to take a look at this blog for evidence. But, I have found help.

Colorschemer.com is sublime! Good for both wedding professionals and brides-to-be. The site has over 3,500 color schemes all tagged for searching. Plus tools to determine the colors of almost any webpage or the explore your own color grouping in a gallery type web-browser widget. They even have a professional color wheel based “color-matching application that will help you build beautiful color schemes quickly and easily” for only $49.00 in either Mac and PC versions.

If you are trying to find just the right color scheme for a wedding reception or a web-page a few minutes on their site will be time well spent. You could even use some of the tools to show a bride-to-be your ideas.

May everyone enjoy a great weekend!

Filed Under: Wedding Marketing Tagged With: web, wedding planning

The perfect wedding professional website is a …blog?

June 11, 2008 by Marc 4 Comments

But, probably not your father’s blog.

Web technology and, more importantly, web users are continually changing. We all realize the importance of our websites, and there is a range approaches from simple static text, dynamically generated pages to gorgeous flash presentation sites. They all have had a place in the evolution of the web and web users.

To understand what’s the best answer for today we need to examine two perspectives; 1) what our target market web users are seeking in their web experience and 2) what search engines value or rank highest. The good news is that these two perspectives have very similar and compatible objectives. They both seek; fresh, relevant, easy displayed and read content. And in these objectives contemporary blog platforms excel for the services business owner. Some of the fastest growing wedding professionals I have observed began with a simple blog that the used to regularly share their work and philosophy with prospective clients.

A blog is; content rich, easily updated, personal, search engine friendly (unlike flash), browse-able on virtually all devices including mobile (again unlike flash) and fast (once again …). And today’s blogs can be attractive. Many of them don’t even look like blogs, but they are. Take a look at the low-cost, easily adaptable WordPress themes available from Revolution. And, realize that you can easily post new images and stories about your work into those blogs almost as easily as sending an email.

I am beginning to think that over the next year new well designed blog platforms will become the standard for wedding professionals who want to have the highest website return on investment. If you would like more info just drop me an email. I can also refer you to web professionals who are familiar with these new style blogs. Look forward to your comments.

Filed Under: Advertising, Search Engines, Wedding Marketing Tagged With: SEO, trends, web

Today’s brides-to-be want your email

June 6, 2008 by Marc Leave a Comment

If you still think that email doesn’t work, please read this very recent article from eMarketer. It is an excellent summary of recent consumer direct marketing channel preference.

Some important information from the article:

“Asked to judge the acceptability of various channels for marketing purposes on a scale of 1 to 5, respondents gave direct mail an average score of 3.9, followed by e-mail at 3.7. All other channels averaged under 3.

Nearly two-thirds of those surveyed said they had made a purchase because of a marketing message received through e-mail. More than three-quarters said they had made such a purchase in response to direct mail. …

About two-thirds of respondents to that survey said they preferred e-mail when dealing with businesses, and about as many said they expected to continue to prefer e-mail in five years.”(emphasis added)

The article has more info and very useful tables showing preferences by age groups. Please take a short read of the full one pager.

What the surveys used in the article should reveal is that if you are not getting good results from your email marketing it is probably the result of the marketing message. Don’t settle for poor results.

With the cost of direct email being less than 10% the cost of direct mail while nearly as acceptable to the customer (and the fact that I also offer a unique quality targeted bride-to-be leadstream) one of my objectives is to help wedding professional clients refine their marketing message to reach today’s brides. I do that not only through this blog, but also a weekly ezine newsletter, frequent teleseminars, dedicated small online groups and individual review.

The marketing messages many of us have relied upon have seemingly lost much their effectiveness as our prospective Internet savvy bride-to-be clients have become more sophisticated. Thankfully it usually only takes a minor rethink and some simple changes to recapture marketing success. Direct marketing still works and direct email has the best return on investment.

Filed Under: Advertising, Profits, Sales, Wedding Marketing Tagged With: direct email, GenY, Millenial, statistics, trends, web

Indeed – Email Marketing Still Works!

May 28, 2008 by Marc Leave a Comment

For another insight into the value and power of well managed direct email marketing read this recent eMarketer article.

A few important grafs -

Half of US adult e-mail users surveyed in April 2008 for Merkle‘s “View from the Inbox” study, conducted with Harris Interactive, said they had made an online purchase in the previous year as a result of permission-based marketing.

In addition, e-mail was second only to customer reviews on Web sites for influencing online purchases, according to DoubleClick Performics‘ “Green Marketing Study,” conducted by Opinion Research Corporation in February 2008. E-mail was roughly equal to search results in terms of influencing online purchases.

“There is a substantial gap between what marketers believe is relevant to the consumer, and what consumers rate as valuable,” said Lori Connolly, director of research at Merkle.

This last point contributes to what I have been stressing in our weekly newsletters as we are attempting to help wedding professionals redesign their marketing communications.

There is a lot more info and statistics in the article. Worth the read.

Filed Under: Advertising, Leads, Profits, Sales, Wedding Marketing Tagged With: direct email, web

Death Watch for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

May 25, 2008 by Marc Leave a Comment

I haven’t wanted to say much on this topic because the SEO voice is so loud. And for good reason, SEO had some great results and every website should still always have good search engine management and “hygiene”.

For the last few months I have been watching SEO consultants enhancing their marketing efforts at the same time SEO results are becoming less productive and reliable. But as a non-SEO expert I felt I didn’t have the “footing” to express my observations and ideas.

Then I came across this article by Chris Copland of SearchInsider titled the Last Days of SEO. To me the take away graf is – “So, the future of SEO as defined today is a bleak one. Whether we merely change the description of SEO or use a new acronym like DAO, the days of success being optimization for 10 text links on a standard results page is going to end up just like our old description of the engines: as dinosaurs. Extinct dinosaurs.” Please read the entire article.

To me it is the growth of the internet combined with the increasingly sophisticated users and search engine providers that makes it difficult to rely on old style SEO.

Particularly in light of these points;

• Increasing and increasingly sophisticated users. Look at your website logs and see how specific many of their search terms have become. Generation Y has excellent, focused search skills that I respect.

• Increasingly sophisticated search engines, looking to deliver precise valuable results to their users. And at the same time seeking to maximize their sponsored link income.

• Overwhelming size of the commercial WWW. With 200 million websites and over 10 billion webpages and an almost infinite variety of search terms how can SEO reliably assure that one particular site will be in the first 10 results returned for any period of time?

Marc’s tip to wedding professionals –
Use a balanced approach. Continue to follow good SEO practice and hygiene while utilizing other low cost ways to get your company’s website in front of your target market. Don’t be consumed by getting a particular search rank result. Most importantly, shift to concentrating on having an effectively persuasive website thereby converting your visitors to clients.

Filed Under: Advertising, Sales, Search Engines, Wedding Marketing Tagged With: Branding, GenY, SEO, trends, web

Comparing three web marketing options on your profits

May 21, 2008 by Marc 1 Comment

As a wedding professional you have three major channels for business development and marketing on the web, in addition to your website.

They are

Paid Search like Google Adwords,
Display Ads/Banners on placed on wedding directory websites or other sites either directly or with a service like AdSense
Direct Email.

All three are used to inform people of your goods and services, encourage them to visit your website to learn more and hopefully become your customer. Importantly for your business and profit decisions they also have different success rates and costs.

Fortunately on the internet there are ways and firms that measure the success rates of these different methods. Below is a table complied by Datran Media from DoubleClick, Morgan Stanley and WebSide Story for 2006-2007

Comparative marketing performance for Paid Search, Display Ads and Direct Email

Click-to-Conversion (sale) Rate:

Paid Search – 3.4%
Display Ads – <1%
Direct Email – 13.46%

So what does this mean? In short, display advertising is the worst, search is better and direct email is almost 4 times better than paid search. Out of 100 click throughs an average web marketer could expect over 13 new clients from direct email, over 3 new clients from search and fewer than 1 from a display ad.

Marc’s tip to wedding/bridal professionals:
To be blunt, unless your conversion rate to sales is very high, don’t buy display ads and do the math for paid search and direct email. From the measurements above you could spend 3 times as much for direct email as paid search and still, direct email would be the most profitable choice.

So explore what your Google Adwords are bidding at and what quality leads might cost then make an informed choice for the lowest cost and your highest potential profits.

For more assistance or questions just comment or send me an email.

Filed Under: Advertising, Profits, Wedding Marketing Tagged With: statistics, web

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