But Wait! There's More!

They are marketing's used car salesmen, but they work!  They make you question your sanity when you pick up the phone, but you make the call.  We've all fallen prey to them at one time or another ... the infomercial.

When we can't sit through a 30 second ad, what is it about this scourge of media that makes us sit through a half hour of "too good to be trues?"

I'm not saying that, as respectful marketing professionals, we should don the plaid jacket and start yelling at our audience.  But, I believe that there are lessons in everything.  And, since these 30-minute scream-fests seem to work, there are lessons we can learn from them as well.

What makes infomercials so damn successful?

Identify a Problem or Need
They may invent a need that I didn't even know I had, but man do I need a kitchen knife that can cut through an aluminum can!

We are all in business for a reason and that's because we represent a better mousetrap. If we didn't, we'd fold-up shop.  Especially my credit union and bank readers!  Most days, our members want us to just not screw up ... clear their checks and make sure that their balance is what they expect.  But when they need us, they REALLY care about us.  We are their gateway to that new house, new car or retirement! It should be no problem at all for us to identify a real problem or need.

Get Their Attention
Whether it's a Shake Weight, the Magic Bullet or the George Foreman Grill, people talk about infomercials.  Maybe it's because the product is so darn amazing or maybe it's just because that Sham Wow guy is so psychotically excited.

Have you seen most credit union and bank ads?  A little psychotic enthusiasm wouldn't hurt us!

Provide a Clear Promise
It's not that the product "melts" belly fat, it's about the way your spouse looks at you and the confidence that you now have.  The BENEFIT isn't in what the product does, it's in how the product makes you feel.  We need to remember that ... FREE checking is NOT a benefit.

Infomercials also make a clear and convincing case for the benefits that they offer.  Often through testimonials or before-and-after examples.  As financial institutions, we change people's lives every day. It should be no problem sharing how we can help others.

Strong & Immediate Call to Action
This is the cornerstone of all infomercials.  I've seen the same juicer offer for 3 years now that says I need to call in the next ten minutes!

If we've made a clear case for why they should choose us over the competition than we are doing the audience a dis-service if we don't encourage them to come in today.  Every minute they don't bank with us is another minute of misery.

Provide a specific, relevant offer and create a sense of urgency.

With a little more infomercial in our efforts, maybe we too can have our audience sit through our spots, be inspired to pick up the phone and create a little buzz.

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With nearly 195,000 visits worldwide, we hope that you enjoy this blog.  If you find it helpful, please share it with your colleagues.  Also, check out our YouTube Channel for short video blogs about financial marketing.  

We bring these marketing philosophies to credit unions and community banks nationwide, and would love to bring them to your institution too.  Contact us to see how.

MarketMatch is also a nationally and internationally requested speaker.  Contact us to bring our marketing ideas to your next conference.

Here are the conferences where you can find MarketMatch.

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937-426-9848

The Full Value of Mobile: New calculator and resources to estimate mobile’s value for your business in the new, multi-screen world

We live in a world of constant connectivity, where mobility is bridging the digital and physical worlds. With smartphones in hand, people are taking a variety of online and offline actions, like calling a business, downloading an app, looking for directions to a store, or starting research that leads to a purchase on another device. We’re working hard to account for these new paths to purchase in AdWords, like the recent addition of calls as conversions to AdWords reporting. Still, with more work to be done to improve measurement tools, most marketers still account only for sales happening on a mobile site and aren’t seeing the full picture. Today we’re introducing the Full Value of Mobile initiative to help marketers begin this discussion and better understand mobile’s impact online and offline. 

This new consumer behavior is now the norm, with a recent study showing that nearly three of ten mobile searches result in visiting a store, calling a business, or making a purchase online. Some smart marketers are already investing in understanding how mobile drives sales through these new customer paths. For example, adidas, in partnership with their agency iProspect, felt that mobile was converting in ways beyond their mobile website, so they created a simple yet powerful attribution model to understand how mobile is driving customers into stores. As a result, adidas found that each click on their store locator button was worth $3.20, which has changed the way they view their digital investment. See their full case study here.  

While savvy marketers like adidas are already defining the full value of mobile, most marketers have struggled to get started. To help marketers better understand mobile attribution, we’re launching the Full Value of Mobile initiative, which includes:

• A calculator tool
• Videos that illustrate each mobile conversion path
• Case studies highlighting successful mobile strategies
• Tips for measurement

The Full Value of Mobile Calculator provides simple equations and benchmarks to help you estimate of the value that mobile drives for your business through calls, apps, in-store, mobile site and cross-device. In about 30 minutes, you can follow the step-by-step wizard to upload data from AdWords and your mobile website, and make some key assumptions to create your Full Value of Mobile estimate. Through the exercise, you’ll see the total value, value per click, and ROI that mobile is driving for your business across all mobile customer paths, not just your mobile website. You’ll also see how cost-effective your mobile CPAs are.

We hope the Full Value of Mobile Calculator helps marketers begin to investigate mobile’s impact online and offline, whether they use it as a directional estimate of mobile’s value or to spark ideas on how to build deeper and more customized models. To learn more about the Full Value of Mobile and how to use the calculator, please join us for a webinar on March 28 at 1pm EDT.  You can sign up here.

Mobility has forever changed the way consumers live and shop, giving rise to these new customer paths as the lines between digital and physical experiences blur. Understanding what each of these mobile pathways means for your business is a critical piece of the larger attribution challenge that every marketer needs to meet head-on. This requires thinking about the full customer journey and acknowledging the interplay between various devices, channels and media influences along the way. Only then can marketers give credit where it’s due – both between and within channels. In other words, rethinking conversion paths is not only key to unlocking the full value of mobile, but also to unlocking the full value of digital.

Posted by Johanna Werther, Head of Mobile Ads Marketing

DoubleClick Search at SMX West: Search marketing is now faster, smarter, better

(Cross-posted from the DoubleClick Search blog)

Last week on March 11 and 12, our DoubleClick Search team spent two demo-packed days on the floor at the Search Marketing Expo - West, to connect with those of you who manage some of the largest search campaigns.

We set up an interactive lounge featuring demos, videos, games and product experts -- allowing us to show you how we help you go faster, make smarter decisions, and get better results to solve the most complex and demanding digital marketing challenges. Today, we wanted to share some of the topics we covered and the insights we heard from attendees. To kick off the discussion, we’re sharing a DoubleClick Search overview video, which we debuted at SMX West -- with more details that follow.

 

Go faster with tools for automation

Many of you told us you’re looking for ways to go faster with tools that streamline and automate your workflow across large search campaigns. Especially for marketers with large product inventory, staying on top of changing products, promotions, and seasonal trends can be cumbersome. At SMX West, we demoed inventory-aware campaigns, which integrates with your Google Merchant Center Feeds to automatically update search campaigns, based on your physical inventory. We got great feedback on the seamless workflow that cuts out repetition.

Make smarter decisions with all your data in one place

We also heard your growing need to measure digital marketing holistically -- within search, as well as across channels. So, on the SMX floor, we highlighted the different ways DoubleClick Search powers your business with the insights you need:

• Integration of Google Analytics metrics (beta), which incorporates statistics including bounce rate, page views, transactions, and revenue from Google Analytics, to get a clear picture of how search influences customer interaction on your website.
• Fast and accurate cross-channel reporting thanks to native integration with the DoubleClick Digital Marketing platform, to enable faster decision making, without reconciling reports or worrying about potential data drop-off from reporting on disparate tools.
• Enhanced campaigns support, which makes it easier for you to promote marketing messages across varying user contexts like location, time of day and device type, within a single campaign. In addition to basic support, we’ll soon help you take advantage of enhanced campaigns in unique and powerful ways, through bulk tools, custom-tailored mobile bid adjustments, and consultative services offered only by DoubleClick Search.

Get better results with tools that drive performance

As a performance marketer, you know it’s ultimately all about results. Over the past few months, we’ve focused on enhancing our Performance Bidding Suite for automated bidding -- understanding that smart bidding technology is the engine that drives campaign performance. At SMX West, we demoed our intuitive bidding UI, which lets you easily express flexible goals that align with your business objectives, and highlighted how fresh data, smart algorithms, fast operations, regular software updates, and the right transparency and controls help you achieve those goals.

To extend the conversation, DoubleClick Search will be at SES New York next week, and we look forward to another great opportunity to show you how we can help make search marketing faster, smarter, and better. We hope to see you there!

Expanding Universal Analytics into Public Beta

A typical consumer today uses multiple devices to surf the web and interact in many ways with your business. For most large businesses, already swimming in many sources of data, it’s an enormous challenge, but also an incredible opportunity. 

Back in October, we announced the limited beta release of Universal Analytics as a way for businesses to understand the changing, multi-device customer journey. Today, we’re excited to welcome and invite all Google Analytics customers to try Universal Analytics.

The benefits of using Universal Analytics to businesses are: 

• Understanding how customers interact with your businesses across many devices and touch-points, 
• Insights into the performance of your mobile apps, 
• Improvements of lead generation and ROI by incorporating offline and online interactions so you can understand which channels drive the best results,
• Improved latency on your site by reducing client-side demands.

Testimonials from the initial beta release

Our initial beta customers using Universal Analytics and are pleased with their results. Rojeh Avanesian, VP of Marketing at PriceGrabber.com reports:

"At PriceGrabber, we know it’s important to understand consumer shopping behavior so we can provide a more customized experience to our users. Google’s Universal Analytics will solve this problem for us and many sites that are facing this challenge and help us serve our users better by providing them with more relevant content and shopping results. We can use Google Analytics’ metrics to segment our users in a way that improves and simplifies the shopping experience for consumers. That’s what we strive for at PriceGrabber, to make shopping and saving money as easy as possible."

How to get started using Universal Analytics

If you’re new to Google Analytics, you can choose Universal Analytics when you setup your account. Already using Google Analytics? Create a new web property in your Google Analytics account to set up Universal Analytics and explore the new features. 

Here’s what you’ll see when you create a new web property. Select the Universal Analytics column to get the new analytics.js code snippet you can implement on your website:

You can implement Universal Analytics with the new analytics.js JavaScript for websites, our iOS and Android SDKs for apps, and the new Measurement Protocol for all other platforms. 

Find more details on how to set up using our help center or developer guide. (Migration guides for properties using ga.js coming soon. Until then, set up a new property in your account for Universal Analytics).

To tag in the most flexible way possible, you can also take advantage of the Universal Analytics template available in Google Tag Manager, which allows you to make additional changes and enable new features to your analytics setup without changing the hard-coded tags on your website. Learn more about how to implement Universal Analytics through Google Tag Manager. 

For more information on Universal Analytics, visit our help center and developer guides. 

Happy analyzing - in the new and innovative ways you can with Universal Analytics!

Posted by JiaJing Wang, Product Manager, Google Analytics

Will A Klout Score Damage Your Business Brand?

With news that Klout launched scores for businesses, how will that impact your brand?

Will it decrease engagement? Will people think that there is no longer a reason to promote a brand to friends and family if a business has a high Klout score?

Will people trust the Klout business scores? Consider all the things in the news recently about Yelp, and how positive reviews for businesses mysteriously disappear.

Will a high Klout score actually damage a business because it will dissuade fans from becoming enthusiastic brand advocates? Could this result in a loss of fans? Could a Klout score also result in a decrease in a brand's engagement across all social channels?

According to the company's announcement, "Klout for Business will continue to develop into a portal where we intend to help brands and agencies streamline their understanding, management, and engagement with this important segment of the digital population," explained Matthew Thomson, Klout VP of Business Development, "Our goal is to help brands and influencers build relationships that transcend the current advertiser-consumer dynamic."

I don't know about you, but that doesn't address any of my questions about Klout business scores.

Back in October of last year, Klout integrated Facebook into Klout scores. According to a press release at the time, "Klout integrated Facebook pages into its Klout score calculations, which should result in higher scores for page users." But consider this, if higher scores are the result by linking social profiles, then the score is just a combination of connections among all linked profiles - and that is not an accurate reflection of actual klout. How many conversations are ongoing? How many retweets are shared? How many other variables are not considered that should be?

With all of these unanswered questions, it makes one wonder how long the strategy sessions lasted at Klout before launching scores for businesses.

So, here's the question of the hour: will you promote your Klout business score? Please chime in.

Learn from Google at #SESNY 2013

SES New York (#SESNY) is coming up next week, and just like last year, we hope you’ll join us again in the Big Apple.

During day 1 of SES New York, we’ll be on the expo floor with a custom-built Google classroom as well as part of the main conference sessions. Join us where you’ll learn about the newest need-to-know tools, features, and solutions from Google Analytics, AdWords, Mobile, GDN and DoubleClick Search to help you win in a constantly connected world. Following is a listing of our sessions to help you plan your SES experience. 

Google Solutions for a Constantalny Connected World

Day 1 - Tuesday, March 26th all day in the Expo Hall

10:30-11:30am: Reaching customers whenever, wherever, across any device. Surojit Chatterjee, Lead Product Manager for Enhanced Campaigns

11:45-12:45pm: Understanding the Full Value of Mobile. Brendon Kraham, Director, Global Mobile Solutions

2:00-3:00pm: Engaging with your audience in a multi-screen world. 

3:30-4:30pm: Using DoubleClick Search to manage campaigns across channels and devices. Anthony Chavez, Product Manager for DoubleClick Search

Don’t have a pass yet? Don’t worry. Expo Only passes are free and get you access to our Google classroom. You can also use the code NYGOOGLE which is redeemable for up to $700.00 off a full conference pass.

For attendees of the main conference, Google Analytics team members will be participating in the following sessions:

Landing Page Optimization

Day 1: Tuesday, March 26 from 11:45-12:45pm

Are your search landing pages working hard or hardly working? Landing pages can be the hardest-working part of your search campaigns, or they can kill your lead generation and sales conversion rates. Testing insignificant details such as button colour and headline size won't lead to real lift in your conversion rates. This session will show you what to test, how to analyse your landing pages, and how to get significant revenue lift quickly.

Moderator:

Andrew Goodman, SES Advisory Board; President, Page Zero Media

Speakers:

Justin Cutroni, Analytics Advocate, Google

Angie Schottmuller, Director of Interactive Strategic Planning & Optimization, Three Deep Marketing

The Dawn of Convergence Analytics

Day 1: Tuesday, March 26 from 3:30-4:30pm

The combination of "big data," access to cloud computing, powerful algorithms, and unprecedented visualization capabilities has created an emerging new class of analytics tools for the marketer. It's being called "Convergence Analytics". It's the marketing equivalent of "one ring to rule them all." Though still in its infancy as a discipline, there are many vendors in the market, and their goal is to pull together data sources from multiple touch points from the web and beyond. They're also using advanced data gathering and data regularization strategies to create a correlative dashboard-like experience for the marketer.

Moderator

Adam Singer, Product Marketing Manager, Google Analytics

Speakers:

Andrew Edwards, Managing Partner, Efectyv Marketing

Rand Schulman, Managing Partner, Efectyv Marketing

We hope to see you out at the event, you can find out more details on the conference site. 

Can’t make it to NY? Be sure and follow Google Analytics on Twitter and Google+ for real-time updates on sessions throughout the day sharing interesting bits from the conference.

Posted by the Google Analytics team

SES New York: Google solutions for a constantly connected world

SES New York is coming up next week, and we hope you’ll join us in the Big Apple!

During day 1 of SES New York, we'll be on the expo floor with a custom-built Google classroom. Join us for a full day of learning about the latest solutions from AdWords, Mobile, Google Display Network, and DoubleClick Search to help you win in a constantly connected world.

Where: SES NY Expo Hall, 5th Floor Marriott Marquee
When: Day 1 - Tuesday, March 26th
Sessions:

• 10:30-11:30am Reaching customers whenever, wherever, across any device. Surojit Chatterjee, Lead Product Manager for enhanced campaigns
• 11:45-12:45pm Understanding the Full Value of Mobile. Brendon Kraham, Director, Global Mobile Solutions
• 2:00-3:00pm Engaging with your audience in a multi-screen world. Speaker TBD
• 3:30-4:30pm Using DoubleClick Search to manage campaigns across channels and devices. Anthony Chavez, Product Manager for DoubleClick Search

Don’t have a pass yet? Don’t worry! Expo Only passes are free and get you access to our Google classroom. You can also use the code NYGOOGLE which is redeemable for up to $700.00 off a full conference pass!

Posted By Derrick Djang, Product Marketing Manager, AdWords