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Archive for March, 2007
Anyone who’s been in marketing for more than a day understands the value of customer testimonials. Better than any other form of proof (logical argument, data, endorsements), they can prove particular claims that the marketer wants to make about his product.
But, like any marketing tool, the strength of a testimonial is greatly related to the effectiveness of its presentation. If you give your customers typical testimonials in a typical way, they will have very little effect, because they will neither attract attention nor deliver an emotional message. But if you can find a way to make the testimonial new – either with the language itself or with the presentation – the effect can be powerful.
When I teach young copywriters the power of proving their claims, I stress the importance of not using testimonials that “sound like” testimonials. When a customer tells you that your product is “far and away the leader in its field” or “the best thing since sliced bread,” you may be thrilled because it sounds like something you might have written yourself. But that’s precisely why you shouldn’t use it.
The best testimonials are those worded in a way that catches your attention, conveys a positive message, and does so with credibility. “Damn good eatin’ fish!” is a testimonial I’d much rather use than “Succulent and tasty.” The “damn” arrests my attention, the choice of words is believable, and the effect of making “eating” an adjective conveys an immediate benefit. It almost makes the mouth water.
So that is one thing – selecting, finding, or creating language that meets these criteria:
* attracts attention
* conveys a benefit
* achieves credibility
But that’s not all. To make your testimonials do their job, they need to be presented in a format that supports those three objectives. In a sales letter, for example, testimonials are typically presented as one- or two-sentence quotations that are placed either in the text itself or at the margins. If you have a bunch of one- or two-sentence testimonials, it doesn’t hurt to use them that way.
But if you have a really good testimonial, one that’s distinctive and believable and strongly conveys the chief benefit of your product, you should find a more creative way to present it. You can, for example, turn it into a big bold headline and bolster it with an eye-catching photo of the customer enjoying the benefit.
Perhaps the best way to achieve both powerful, unique language and a captivating presentation is to show actual customers in their natural environment speaking their own words. Infomercials selling wealth-building programs often present real customers talking about their success, but they are usually in a staged setting – in front of the beach or a swimming pool – and their comments seem to have been coached out of them. A much better approach would be to have these people walking around their homes or businesses, interacting with other people and talking candidly and in an unrehearsed way about how their lives changed by following the system that is being sold.
Home Depot just released three commercials that do a very good job of this. So good, in fact, that I’d recommend you study them to get an idea about what is possible – particularly nowadays, when just about every business should be working in mixed media, incorporating video into their advertising program.
Home Depot’s new commercials feature documentary-like accounts of customers who have fixed up their homes. One features an African-American mother, her sister, her daughter, and her son. Seated in front of her children and beside her sister, the mother is obviously proud of the painting and spackling job she did on the living room. She says something like, “Now my kids say Mom did this and Mom did that”… and is interrupted by her daughter saying, “At first we were, ‘Mom, you’re messing up the house.’” The commercial flashes back to the mother getting tips on spackling at Home Depot and features impressive before-and-after shots. It ends with the mother saying, “This is a building that I made into a home.”
Another one begins with a young mother saying something like, “I’m going to try to tell this story without crying.” And then, “Two weeks after I bought my house, Dad died. He remodeled every house we ever lived in.” And then she starts crying.
According to a review of the ad series by Stuart Elliott in The Wall Street Journal, the commercials were directed by Jeff Bednarz, a documentary filmmaker. “We started with the notion that nobody can tell a home-improvement story better than the customer can,” said Gary Gibson, creative head of the Richards Group, the ad agency handling the Home Depot account. “They tell them better than we write them.”
I agree. The message of these little films is empowerment and the effect is sentimental – but that sentiment is successful because it comes without a script and without professional actors. The cinema verite style that Bednarz chose to depict the customers’ stories makes them at once dramatic and believable.
The bottom line is this: Testimonials work well if they are true – and the closer you can get to truth, the stronger your sales message will be. When working with testimonials, ask yourself, “How can I show this customer experience as dramatically and truly as possible?” You’ll get a much better response.
Efficient and umbral use the feedbacks on your site has very important? for Google. For this you may use this interesting resource.
? 
The advantage to this technologies founded in that that you manage themes of the feedback themselves. This much useful and is directed on thematic sites, which uses Google.
Also here there is possibility to sell text. There is two modes: direct and assotiative. The First enables most sell the links and fix a price. The Second has already installed price. This will spare your time, but price enough low 
One defect of this place in that that not all sites will be able to take part in this project. Here, there is minimum restriction – 3 Page Rank.
Judge themselves and arouse themselves.
As Web-video presentations ?ncrease in popularity as a means of delivering marketing messages over the Internet, there will be the inevitable major successes and unfortunate failures. It is only a matter of time before Web-video becomes the dominating vehicle for businesses that are serious about marketing communication. The businesses that will be successful will learn how to use the medium beyond its technical implementation, focusing instead on the psychological elements that communicate beyond mere surface meaning.
Multimedia Modeling and Vicarious Observation
Albert Bandura, distinguished psychologist and expert in the field of social learning theory, points to television commercials as an important influence on social learning through multimedia modeling and vicarious observation.
We often forget that like all creatures human beings are subject to our hardwired instinct for survival, one of the most important being our ability to learn through vicarious experiences rather than just direct encounters. We may learn not to touch a hot stove by putting our hand on a hot heating element, but it is far less dangerous to learn the same lesson by watching someone else do it, even if that observation is simulated as in a commercial.
Marketing Campaigns Are Learning Experiences
All marketing campaigns are learning experiences for the target audience in that advertisers are attempting to manipulate viewers’ behavior by vicarious demonstration of brand benefits resulting from product or service use.
Cost has limited the use of broadcast television commercials to all but the most deep-pocketed of advertisers, but the broadband Web and digital technology has changed all that. The means to produce reasonable-cost Web-video is at hand, witness the explosion of numerous video sites like YouTube and Google Video, plus the advent of Web-commercial venues like Google Video Ads. Unfortunately many businesses cannot see past the proliferation of uneven quality viral videos that lack any serious commercial purpose to see the real opportun?ty that exists.
It is inevitable that a period of DIY (do it yourselfers) will ensue, as businesses that don’t understand the medium will try to implement video campaigns without taking the time to learn that mastering the technical use of software and hardware is not what makes vicarious-experience video-observation work.
The Four Communication Elements of Web-Commercials
If businesses are to be successful in getting people to do what they want them to do through the implementation of Web-commercials, they will need to learn that success ultimately depends on an understanding of the psychological influences behind the four communication elements that constitute effective Web-presentations: scenario, sight, sound, and score.
Scenario: The Brand Story
Every business has a brand story to tell, but often that story gets lost in the minutiae of product specifications, service details, and self-congratulating biz-speak. There is no point in spending time telling your audience that you have the highest quality, lowest price and best staff. Nob?¶dy cares, and if they do care, few will believe you, and if they do believe you, your competitor is saying the same thing. Have you presented anything that defines you, makes you different, or provides something memorable?
People remember stories, linear narratives that are constructed with a beginning, middle and end. This enables an audience to process the information and retain the essence of the message for future reference. In developing your brand story, less is always more. It’s your brand story that creates the position you will hold in your audience’s mind.
Sight: Visual Context and Reference
A moving picture conveys a depth of information that cannot be delivered with text, no matter how clever, or with a still image, no matter how skillfully composed: the nod of the head, the folding of the arms, the look in the eye, in fact, every subtle movement of the presenter communicates something. These subliminal subtleties make it vital to have a professional presenter who understands how to act in front of a camera. Business executives familiar with face to face selling, or even speaking in front of a large audience may think performing for the camera is easy, but it is not.
Audiences are experts at decoding video presentations; we have all learned from years of watching television how to detect deception and fear in a performance. Acting for a camera requires what Marshal McLuhan called a ‘cool’ personality. Howard Dean’s bid for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination was disastrously stalled when a speech he gave in front of a large boisterous audience was captured by television cameras and broadcast on the small screen. When transferred to television, his attempt to speak above a thunderous crowd of supporters made him sound like a wild man, an unfortunate situation that would make one wonder about the integrity of network broadcasters who understand the medium and decided to misrepresent the circumstances for effect. In delivering a commercial message, it is imperative to have professionals who understand the psychology of small screen presentation.
Sound: Sonic Familiarity and Personality
If what people see on screen is important than what they hear is profound. The audio portion of a Web-presentation can be broken down into three separate elements: the on-screen actor’s voice, the voice-over announcer’s voice, and the music and sound effects.
The sound of the human voice provides focus, emphasis, familiarity and personality, all of which are necessary in the creation of a meaningful, memorable experience: the ultimate goal of any Web-commercial or presentation
As much as the business focus of advertising is to motivate people to act immediately to buy, you are bound to have more people view your presentation than will respond to it. If your message is constructed only for immediacy, you are losing the vast majority of potential customers. The more memorable you make your presentation the more likely people will ultimately contact you when they are in need of your product or service.
It is the sound of the human voice with its quality of tone, cadence and delivery, combined with a finely crafted scr?pt that emphasizes rhythm, rhyme, and repetition that gets embedded in people’s minds.
Score: Music, Emotion and Focus
One of the most important, but perpetually misused elements in Web-video is music. Often music is just slapped onto a finished video as an after-thought without any real meaningful purpose or design.
A musical score creates an appropriate emotional atmosphere providing audio cues that direct attention and re-enforce memory recall. When we watch a television show, movie or commercial we are rarely cognizant of the music, but the musical score has an enormous impact on the viewing experience: it not only creates the mood and sets the emotional context, it tells the audience what to pay attention to and how to react.
? Most online businesses make a half-hearted attempt to get better search engine rankings, but rarely implement anymore than one or two things that could really help make their site a success.
Which of the following does your website have?
1. Unique Page Titles.
Take a look at a selection of web pages that come up high in the search engine results for any search term and you’ll notice they all have one thing in common: unique page titles. Denoted by in HTML, page titles tell the search engines what your web page is about, and are thought to be a critical factor in how search engines determine the order in which pages are displayed in the search engine result pages (SERPS) for a specific search term.
2. Descriptive Keyword Links.
How do search engines find and index your site? They follow links from one page to another, indexing content as they go. If the links they follow contain keywords and phrases that are relevant to the page content, the search engines will boost the ranking of that page in their results. You should also use keywords and phrases in the site’s navigation (menu), as those terms are (or should be) highly relevant for the page they link to.
3. Keywords in Your On-page Copy.
If you want the search engines to know what your page is about, and rank it appropriately, you must scatter keywords throughout your on-page copy. Keywords in your copy establish your site’s relevance for words searchers use when they’re looking for your product or service.
4. Clean, Accessible Website Design.
Messy, bloated HTML code, 404 errors, re-directs, too many graphics, content hiding behind forms etc., all hinder the search engines’ ability to index your site. And if they can’t index it, they can’t rank it. Follow W3C’s accessibility guidelines when building your website. Better yet, ask your website designer what he knows about standards compliant website design. If he or she can’t answer, find someone who can.
5. Focused Site Topic.
It seems logical that the more focused your site is, the higher it will rank for related search terms. For example, a site that is focused on the sale of exercise mini-trampolines will probably do better for the search term “mini trampolines” than a site that tries to sell a number of unrelated or a selection of different exercise equipment. In addition, it makes sense to create specialty websites whenever possible. That way, you don’t fall into the trap of trying to do too many things and end up doing none of them well.
6. Relevant Incoming Links.
The number of other sites that link to your site’s pages is important but the quality of those sites, and the text used in the link, carries much more weight with the search engines. For example, one relevant link from an “authority” site such as a .org, .gov, or a site that’s proven itself as a reliable source, provides more value than several links from unrelated or “unproven” sites.
Of course, there are other several other factors that go into determining a site’s ranking (far too many to go into here) but these are some of the most important.
They’re all easy to implement, so there’s really no excuse for not taking advantage of them especially if you want to make sure your site is found and visited by as many people as possible. Then all you’ll need to worry about is getting those people to buy something from you on a frequent basis.
Link popularity is by far the most important factor for determining your search engine ranking. You need to know what link popularity is, why it is so important, and how Google measures your link popularity (over 50% of all search engine traffic comes from Google, and if you can rise to the top of Google, you will rise to the top of all the other search engines as well). But, before we talk about how Google measures linking, we need to cover some basics.
Link popularity is defined as the number of sites that are linking to your site. Some websites have thousands or even millions of sites linking to them, while others might have only a few. The search engines use the number of inbound links your site has as a measure of how important your site is, which translates into your search engine ranking.
The actual number of links to your site is not the only variable used to calculate your link popularity. The search engines also examine the relevance of the links to the subject matter of your site. For example, if a website that sells vitamins has 4,000 inbound links, but the source of most of the links are websites that have nothing to do with vitamins, then the algorithm that search engines use to determine link popularity will take that into account, and the link popularity score will not be very good.
It is possible for a website with a relatively small number of quality inbound links to be ranked higher than a site with a bunch of irrelevant or insignificant links. If I have a website that offers quotes for auto insurance, and I have 800 quality inbound links, then I might receive a much higher search engine ranking than another mortgage site that has 3,000 links that stem from link farms or Free For All (FFA) pages.
If you try to acquire inbound by using link farms or FFA pages, not only will it hurt your search engine ranking, but you might get permanently removed from the search engine listings. Links farms are sites where you can instantly exchange links with all the sites listed in that directory. FFA pages are pointless link directories. The search engines usually discount any links that come from either of these sources.
Now that we understand what link popularity is and how it works, we need to look specifically at how Google measures it. Google uses a number of variables in their algorithm to calculate your overall link score. The higher your score, the higher you will be ranked in the search listings.
One factor that Google uses in their algorithm, obviously, is the total number of sites linking to you. The more links you have, the higher your score will be. However, their algorithm is a little more complicated than that, and it is possible for a website with fewer links to be ranked higher than a website that has more links.
The reason for this is because Google also measures the quality of your links. If your website is about vitamins, and the site linking to you is a video game site, then that is not considered a quality link. The link still helps your score, but the link would help your score much more if it were from a website whose subject matter is the same as yours.
Also, Google gives a higher score to a link if it comes from a page that has actual content that relates to your keywords. For example, if your site is about jewelry, and another jewelry website has posted a link to your site on their links page, that link is not as valuable as a link to your site coming from a blog or a message board where a lot of information about jewelry is being written or discussed.
Also, Google gives an even higher score to a link if it contains anchor text that matches one of the keywords that describes your site. For example, if I have a site that sells lawnmowers, and a blog about lawnmowers has posted a link to my site, it helps my score even more if the link text (also known as anchor text) is LAWNMOWERS. To learn more about anchor text, go to a search engine and look up ANCHOR TEXT and you will be able to learn about it.
Another factor used by Google to score your link popularity is the diversity of keywords contained on sites linking to you. For example, if you have a site that sells handbags, and all the links to your site are from other sites that contain nothing but the keyword HANDBAGS, Google considers that to be abnormal. To get a higher score, you need to have links coming from sites that contain a variety of keywords related to handbags, such as BUY HANDBAGS, LEATHER HANDBAGS, etc.
It is difficult to increase your link popularity, but now that you understand how your score is calculated, you can devise a plan to improve your score. You might want to consider posting to forums and blogs that contain information that is related to your site, and when you post, include a link to your site. As long as you are persistent and tailor your strategy towards Google, you will do fine.