posted by Nicolette Beard @ 5:43 PM
Five years ago Kodak sold $15 billion of film. This year consumer film sales will be less than $200 million, according to Jeffrey Hayzlett, CMO, speaking at a recent HiMA luncheon. How does a 100-year-old company make a comeback when it was identified with a dying consumer product?
Hayzlett started with their core brand message: trust and reliability. He fused that with their historically superb science to a new mission – delivering the soul and science of imaging.
Hayzlett called it “Emotional Technology.”
Their’s a resonance behind that phrase that people can feel. With that value proposition, he captured the hearts and minds of his customers. From there, his team’s purpose was to engage, educate, excite and evangelize its product through every marketing channel, but particularly through social media.
This brand strategy has paid off. With Hayzlett’s laser focus, Kodak has reduced its product-to-market cycle to five months, and 13 of their products rank #1, #2, or #3 in their respective categories, half of which didn’t exist two years ago. One product was launched solely using Twitter at a $70 higher price point and there’s a waiting list to purchase.
Hayzlett said that there’s a lot of talk about ROI when using social media, but his definition is a little different. He measures the “Return on Ignoring.” There’s an old saying, “If you continue to do what you’ve always done, you’ll continue to get what you’ve always got.” Hayzlett, a supreme marketer to be sure, understood that he had to radically re-engage his customers using technology as his driver.
Ironically, having reinvented itself as a digital imaging firm, 80% of Kodak’s business comes from B2B companies today. Consolidated Graphics, a long time client of Savage, is one of their success stories.
Hayzlett admitted that he has “a seat at the table” and his job is “to create tension inside the company,” so you may be skeptical about your ability to create structural change within your B2B organization.
But, if you knew you would enjoy $10 billion in sales, see record profits and double-digit growth, then would you pursue a bold re-branding strategy? Because that’s exactly what Hayzlett got.
Hear Kodak’s Marketing Transformation talk with Jeffrey Hayzlett. Starts about 19 minutes into the video. (Registration’s required, but the video is free.)
3.02.2010
posted by Nicolette Beard @ 4:57 PM
Bing will soon be powering Yahoo! search results, leaving advertisers with just two search networks from which to drive traffic. The European Union and the U.S. Department of Justice, by eliminating one of the Internet’s biggest search competitors, have ignored the costs this decision will impose on businesses as they continue to acquire new customers online.
On one hand, I suppose this is good news for search optimizers because now we have only two search engines for which to optimize. While the vast majority of B2B marketers use Google, driving more advertisers into fewer networks increases the price of traffic acquisition. Bidding wars over finite inventory were a complaint in the early years of paid search. I suspect we’ll hear howling soon.
It’s consumers and businesses, small business especially, who really lose. Consumers lose a unique Yahoo! search brand and point of view and the cost to market online can only increase over time.
The days of 10-cent clicks are long gone. To compete effectively online requires not only the internal fortitude to embrace the new, but also an understanding of the underpinnings of the Internet.
Links = Relationships
The rise of social media underscores the importance of developing relationships online. It’s no surprise that Google and Yahoo! have started indexing content from Facebook and Twitter. Those links to and from followers, bloggers and websites represent millions of conversations. I don’t think people will stop using search engines any time soon, but I do believe that with the Microhoo deal, we’ll see search market share decline and with it profits. When you take away choice, consumers can be fickle.
People, through their desire for connection, have provided an avenue for businesses to reach out like never before. Will the day come when companies will reach out to online communities directly and bypass the search engines?
We may have come full circle in our sales and marketing efforts. Every business is now a door-to-door salesman: engaging prospects, building rapport and following up.
Is your website up to the challenge?
Source: SEO Theory
UPDATE: Steve Ballmer, CEO, Microsoft, states at SMX West that Microsoft does *not* now intend to “kill off” Yahoo! Search – he further stated that within the deal agreement, Yahoo! may increase their search share via a wide number of initiatives.
Thanks to Chris Smith for the counter argument.
2.28.2010
posted by Robin Tooms @ 11:57 PM
A great idea, executed well, really can be done on a budget.
Case in point. Artist Rebecca Ward uses everyday materials, such as fluorescent gaffers tape, in an unexpected way to create something memorable. Granted, there’s a LOT of tape that got sacrificed as part of the Kate Spade Broome Street New York store installation, but it’s easy to see how the finished installation transcends the actual cost of the tape rolls. It’s how the tape was used that makes it worthwhile.
Creatives tend to look at challenges in different ways. Where one person may just see a roll of tape for its utility – a way to attach or mark off something – a creative sees the possibilities. It’s what is often called “thinking outside the box,” and it’s what we, as designers, do for a living everyday, so we’re rather good at it.
kate spade ny party from Jessica J Schroeder on Vimeo.
This was also interesting. During the event, there was a “tape bar” setup where attendees could get into the spirit of the installation by creating their own keepsakes of custom decorated journals. Kudos on the event marketing committee for extending the theme in a relevant way that appealed to their fashion-conscious attendees while reminding them of the Kate Spade brand. Living colorfully is good!
2.19.2010
posted by Nicolette Beard @ 12:27 PM
One of the most challenging aspects of owning or managing a website is the consistent need for new content.
Unless a website is frequently updating its pages with new product information or service offerings, it will see its influence, with both readers and search engines, decline over time. We talked about the hazards of becoming a “tombstone” web property in a recent post.
I’d like to share ways to generate content that not only will help you maximize your website’s visibility, but also improve its usefulness to your visitors.
Leveraging Your Digital Assets
I’ve borrowed a page from the so-called “Internet marketing gurus,” who’ve mastered the art of re-purposing their “must-have” e-book. You, too, can leverage your existing content and enjoy better search results at the same time.
There are portions of your site that are easy to forget: a letter to shareholders, pictures of the company sales convention, a podcast of a new product demo, etc. You may not realize that this content can be optimized for more search value. These are your digital assets. They took just as much time and money to develop as your user-friendly navigation or your killer app.
Optimizing Images
If you’ve paid for professional photography and own the rights, you need to start earning back the money you paid by optimizing those images for search engines. Allow the search engines to reach the directory they live in, and offer a plain image behind any that are displayed in Flash enhancers, so they can be indexed.
You can also leverage your images in social media profiles such as Flickr or Photobucket. I knew a photographer who had a limited budget but wanted to showcase his fabulous portfolio. His web developer set up an account and linked the website directly to Flickr. Unfortunately, the images were named 0700154scl.jpg – not search friendly at all.
Ideally, you want to include alt tags, a link title tag, a proper title (not some number useful only for filing) and metadata inside the images to better associate them with branded and non-brand keywords.
Re-purposing PDFs & Documents
Besides being a great B2B lead generation tool, white papers can enjoy a shelf-life beyond their initial post date. Most companies spend hours developing sales materials, press releases and collateral material as well. Not only do your visitors see this as valuable content, but search engines do too! They are capable of crawling and indexing this content if you provide a pathway to it.
When you post your PDFs, or similar documents, to your site, make sure they contain at least one link back to your site inside the document, preferably with anchor text pointed to specific pages. This is a great way to leverage “free” downloads of your case studies. You’ve now created an incoming link from web properties that have downloaded and shared your content, which helps lift your pages in search engine results.
YouTube No Longer “Kids Only” Content
YouTube is the world’s second largest search engine and a marketing channel not to be ignored. The Diet Coke & Mentos experiments went viral with 11 million views in 3 years. I’m sure every B2B has a “how-to” video just waiting for an audience.
Post the video to your website, and let the search engines get to the files. Give your video its own page with corresponding copy, and submit a simple video sitemap via your robots.txt file.
With these three tactics, you’ve solved the problem of creating new content on a regular basis. Make re-purposing your digital assets a way of life for your business website.
Additional Resources: Optimizing for Universal Search
2.15.2010
posted by Nicolette Beard @ 6:27 PM
With 82%* of consumers using a search engine as their first step in researching a product or service locally, developing a company website is critical to long term business success.
But what happens once the site is launched? Without a content strategy or goals for building and maintaining a web presence, your site will become a “tombstone,” as Lee Odden so aptly phrased it on his online marketing blog.
A tombstone website is one in which the content is static. In other words, DEAD.
Search engines don’t visit static websites often, which hinders your search visibility. Google likes sites with fresh, frequent, relevant content. They’re in business to serve up the best, most accurate and authoritative results. When you stop feeding their “bots,” you are invisible to them.
More importantly, your customer or prospect won’t stop by either, limiting your ability to engage, communicate and convert that visitor to a buyer.
Worse than dated content, however, is an out-of-date design. If you spend any time online, you may have noticed that websites today are less cluttered, easier to navigate, incorporate social aspects and take advantage of the wider computer screen widths and crisper resolutions.
If you think of your website Home page as your “front door,” ask yourself if you’d be embarrassed to invite your boss or coworker over for dinner. What would they encounter? Rusty tools leaning against the doorjamb?
Not having a website is no longer an option for businesses today. Having a website that works is crucial to your online health and longevity.
If you want your visitors to feel welcome and prolong their visit, make it easy for them to stay. Slow loading pages, poorly laid out navigation, flash intros, dated material, all point to a tombstone website.
And if you don’t want your visitors hitting the back button, please don’t have your brother-in-law’s mother’s cousin redesign your website.
*Source: LocalConnex
