MARKETING BLOG

MARKETING • TECHNOLOGY • RESULTS

I was reminded today when I read that Microsoft is providing a means for removing IE from Windows 7 that many may not be aware of the real reasons why HTML emails look bad are challenging to build for Outlook 2007.

The reason stems from the European Union’s (EU) assaults on Microsoft for for anti-trust violations. Seems like the EU are not the only ones interested in this case. For those who are unfamiliar with the case, the EU has repeatedly expressed concerns that Microsoft was essentially locking out browser competition by embedding IE into the operating system AND Outlook. Apparently in an effort to get its Office Suite 2007 to market, Microsoft appeased the EU by among other things, crippling the browser capabilities of Outlook. The unfortunate part of the story is, they never really replaced the IE functionality with any acceptable substitute.

As budgets continue to tighten, more and more companies will likely decide to build their own emails internally and use any number of third-party mailing services like ConstantContact or VerticalResponse to execute the mailing.

For those who do, here are a couple of tips for constructing an email that will look good in Outlook 2007 as well as other e-mail clients.

1. Use tables for layout. This is one case where a pure-css approach will not work
2. Put your styles inline (i.e. <p style=”…”> as opposed to <p class=”…”>)
3. Do not put padding into adjacent table cells. For some odd reason, padding from one cell ultimately shows up in an adjacent cell.
4. Do not use background images. If you have designs where background images are critical to the overall effectiveness of the piece, embed the text into the image itself.
5. Try to keep the styling as simple as possible… without going into detail, not all CSS will translate.

A List Apart published this article some time ago that still serves as a good set of guidelines for HTML email development. When added to the above guidelines for Outlook 2007, you’ll be well on your way.

Testing how well your email displays in Outlook 2007 is simple. From IE7, Select Page/Send Page by Email… If the resulting output looks good in your draft, it will most likely look good when it is sent… but go ahead and send it to yourself anyway along with the addresses of your other email test accounts.

Short answer: yes. Starting a blog is really quite simple. In fact, it is so simple you can literally have one up and running in a matter 5 minutes or less! Well, sort of. If you don’t care about branding and you don’t care about a private domain, 5 minutes may actually be about 4 minutes too long. Don’t believe it? A quick visit to blogger and you’ll see the proclamation: It’s easy, and only takes a minute!

So, why start a blog? Here’s a pretty good list of reason’s for starters: Top 10 Reasons to Start a Blog. For our technology clients, I recommend a blog as a great way to express thought leadership. And while whitepapers and case studies are great vehicles as well, blogs provide a lot more latitude in expressing onself as they can be a lot less formal, and they are bi-directional.

I do find it odd however that the article above fails to point out the importance of blogs to one’s SEO strategy. Blogs enable you to attract search engines with content and topicality that may not exactly fit on your corporate web site, yet deliver link juice through contextually relevant links. For example; imagine for a moment that you run a marketing agency that is located in the Philadelphia area. You can easily provide a link from your blog entries back to your Philadelphia marketing agency web site.

So, if you are serious about starting your blog, what are some of the key considerations you should be aware of?

1. Choosing a platform - In a just a few minute of search, you will find hundreds of options. Yikes! Just what you need when you are just getting started right? My recommendation… stick with the more reputable and proven platforms. Here’s a good article that reviews 10 of the more popular (installs) blog engines.
2. Hosting - do you have the wherewithall (or desire) to install and host a blog platform? You’ll need access to a server and the technical abilities to setup and install the neccessary software. Free hosted plaforms such as Wordpress.com and Blogger.com take all of the hastle out of setting up a blog. Your only real challenge here is grafting your visual identity onto the blog, which will require the services of someone skilled in design, CSS and HTML. Keep in mind, should you choose one of the free hosted solutions, you may run into issues down the road should you decide to move to another platform. Porting blog entries, while possible is riddled with challenges.
3. Capabilities - blogging may not be all you want to do; more mature blog platforms offer additional plugins for advanced functionality ranging from polling, forms, stock tickers and you name it. If you are like most, your primary interest is simply blogging and to that extent any of the more popular engines will more than suffice.

But when you really get down to it, starting a blog and choosing a good platform will ultimately be the easiest part for most companies. Updating it and maintaining it is by far the bigger challenge. While I haven’t been the most diligent at doing that here, I have plenty of ideas on how to make the process more manageable for our clients. It takes time and commitment but the benefits are numerous… it’s like the gift that keeps on giving.

Practically everyone is feeling the pinch of the current economic downturn. Marketing departments in particular are finding it more challenging than usual to justify expenditures in the face of shrinking sales.

If you happen to be in a market that is immune from the downturn; congratulations! For everyone else; you are probably trying to figure out how you are going to do more with less available resources. The American Marketing Association published the results of a study on the topic this past June, along with a series of recommendations.

Lately we’ve been fielding a number of questions concerning the prioritization of resources for the coming year. One of our primary recommendations is to continue brand-building efforts, a point that is supported in the AMA study. However, we are being a bit more specific in telling our clients to focus much of their efforts around the web. Regardless of market or target industry, the web continues to be the leading sales channel for most companies. Even in the large enterprise sales space, the web is the primary source for prospects to gather information and perform an initial vetting of potential solutions. With less leads to go around, you should use this opportunity to take a good hard look at their corporate web site as well as their overall Internet marketing strategy.

If you’ve not already done so, make sure your web presence conveys an accurate representation of your brand and does an effective job of communication your value proposition to your respective audiences. If you already have a strong web foundation in place, make sure it is optimized for search. With less cash to go around, it is more critical than ever that you boost your organic search performance rather than relying on pay-per-click initiatives. My recommendation is to find someone to assist you in your initial SEO efforts. In the process, learn as much as you can about the discipline of SEO, then spend a little time each day or so on the care and feeding process. Our approach to SEO, is a combination of “give a man a fish” and “teach a man to fish”, hence we tend to do a knowledge transfer as the process goes on.

I’m also a huge believer that thought leadership is a critical ingredient in the sales process. Slowing markets mean that your thought leaders may actually have a bit more time on their hands. Now is a great time to tap into that and develop white papers, case studies and other thought leadership materials. These materials are relatively inexpensive to produce and provide great fodder for cost-efficient email campaigns as well as blogs. On this last topic; blogs - either your own or others in which you participate, are a great medium for expressing thought leadership and an effective tool in building organic search rankings.

So, while nobody likes an economic downturn, look at it as an opportunity to get caught up on all of those things you’ve thought about, but never found the time.

Over the years, Vovéo has done a lot of marketing work for b-to-b technology companies. One of the reason’s we’ve been so successful is our ability to take a complex product or service offering and distill it down to a few simple concepts that the average business person can understand and appreciate. I often find myself in the same position when offering SEO services. Clients hear a lot about it - and believe they need it, but generally don’t understand the concepts involved. So here is a simple analogy of how search works.

Google and other search engines perform a service, and not unlike other service businesses, their reputation depends on how well they do so. Their goal is to satisfy each search request with the most credible, or “relevant” information thereby ensuring the loyalty and satisfaction of their customers.

Finding the most relevant web page is a lot like finding anything else. Imagine for a moment you are walking the streets of your favorite city, shopping for an engagement ring. The first thing you might look for would be a sign such as “Jeweler”. On the web, a storefront sign is somewhat analogous to a page title. If you were in Philadelphia, you might wonder over to Sansom street, otherwise known as Jeweler’s Row - street addresses are analogous to URLs on the web. Once you had identified a potential jewelry store, you would most likely look in the window and peek at some of the inventory - i.e. meta description. Somewhat convinced you’d found a reasonable place to buy a ring, you probably enter the store to have a further look.

Once inside the store, you’d begin to look around for additional signs - i.e. heading tags. At some point, you may even ask a store clerk for assistance or directions - i.e. internal links to the ring section. Once you had located the rings, you begin to look through the inventory - or content. OK, so now that you are properly oriented, you can get down to the business of purchasing a ring, right? Wrong! Choosing an engagement ring is a big decision. How do you know that you’ve found a credible jeweler - one that will sell you the highest quality engagement ring at the best possible price and support you after you’ve made the purchase? Simple, you check references - i.e. inbound links. As the opinions roll in, you begin weighing them - assigning high value to those received from credible sources - i.e. high page rank, and progressively lower value to others. Properly armed with all of the necessary information, you proceed to make the right decision… and break off your engagement.

So there you have it. In practice, SEO is more involved than this article would illustrate, but the concepts are really quite simple. Google and other search engines seek to find the most relevant information they can, your goal is to give them the information they need to make that determination.

Not so long ago, owning a content management system (CMS) was a luxury available to only a privileged few organizations. In the early 90’s, most commercially available CMS’ were priced in the tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. To most, a CMS simply didn’t make sense economically or otherwise. As a result and as a matter of course, we would inform our web clients that their basic needs could easily be met by something we called “poor man’s content management” – a rudimentary collection of data-driven pages and associated administration tools written in ASP or PHP. Unlike modern content management systems, PM-CMS (my new acronym) focused only on those sections of a web site that were most likely to change over time such as news and press.

Fast-forward 15 or so years and there are literally hundreds of documented content management systems available, the vast majority of which are open source and free of charge. There are as many variations of CMS as there are colors in the rainbow – so many that a cottage industry sprung up just to help you determine which CMS best suits your need. Not satisfied there were enough, we even decided to build our own CMS.

Ok, so now that I got in that shameless plug, let’s get back to the topic at hand… search! Wait a minute. You thought this was about CMS? Well, if you’re really interested in comparing CMS’, check out this site which does a great job. But before you do, I would suggest that you put SEO at the top of the list of evaluation criteria – because when it comes to SEO, CMS’ are definitely not created equal. Here are a few of the key search features you should look for:

Title overrides – a large number of content management systems simply re-purpose the menu titles and use them to generate page titles. While adequate in some cases, these short titles don’t fully take advantage of a key ingredient to SEO success. Google provides for titles up to 66 characters in length to be displayed in the search results. Title overrides will allow you to maximize your titles, making them keyword rich and more enticing to potential visitors.

SEO-friendly URLs – avoid any CMS that uses cryptic URLs. Visitors can’t read them and Google doesn’t like them either. If a CMS doesn’t have SEO-friendly URLs built in, there may be a possibility that a third party add-on exists. If you are migrating from an existing CMS or even a static site, you will also want to consider how to migrate your old URLs to the new URLs. In addition to automatically generating SEO-friendly URLs, our in-house CMS affords users the ability to build a lookup table of friendly URLs so they can create aliases for pages on their site or redirect to pages on remote sites.

Meta tags optimization – Make sure the CMS you choose has the ability to create and modify the meta keywords and description fields. While few search engines these days rely on meta keywords, the meta description is what Google displays when your page shows up in search results. When you do manage to come up high in search rankings, you want to present a message that speaks directly to your target audience. Without a meta description, you’re leaving this to chance.

Standard Sitemap Generation – Sitemaps are XML files that provide a way of informing search engines about pages that are available for crawling. Once fully indexed, search engines will periodically re-index select pages on your site at periodic intervals. By informing search engines like Google of the pages that exist on your site and more importantly, when they have changed, you’ll make their work easy for them and they will love you in return. Within the Sitemap 0.90 protocol, a protocol widely supported by Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft is a tag, <lastmod>. The lastmod tag indicates when a page has changed and hence, informs search engines which pages are candidates for re-indexing. While a standard sitemap doesn’t ensure your site/pages will rank high, it does ensure that search engines will re-index your site early and often. How often you ask? Well, as of the writing of this article, I see that Google last peeked at my sitemap 13 hours ago – that’s approximately 20 minutes after I made the last update to the site.

So don’t forget to emphasize search the next time you search for a CMS!

I’m often asked the question, what’s the difference between an advertising agency and a marketing agency. Clearly we have opted to position Vovéo Marketing Group as the latter so what better way to kick off our corporate blog than with a discussion of the topic.

A simple place to begin is Webster’s definition of the terms advertising and marketing. Advertising is defined as the action of calling something to the attention of the public, especially by paid announcements. Marketing is defined as the act or process of promoting, selling and distributing a product or service. From this simple description, one can quickly surmise that advertising , presuming the ultimate goal of gaining one’s attention is to sell something, is a single component of a broader range of strategies and tactics that comprise the marketing process.

From the above description, one might conclude that advertising agencies are very narrowly focused, whereas a marketing agency like Vovéo might offer a much broader range of services. While the latter is true in our case, it is not necessarily an assumption that you should make - and I’m sure it is one that most advertising agencies would take exception to. In fact, frequently agencies will use the term “full service” in describing their offerings. In Vovéo’s case, full-service means everything from branding and web design & development , to collateral and lead generation. With the exception of the lead generation, which very few ad agencies offer, marketing agencies and advertising agencies tend to offer a lot of the same range of services.

Ok, so I know what you are thinking. The premise of this article is to answer the question, “what’s the difference between an advertising agency and a marketing agency” and I’ve led you to conclude… nothing. Well, not exactly. My 25 years of marketing experience have taught me that the differences are less tactical and largely philosophical.

During my years in the corporate world, working in director roles at SAP, Sun, and HP, I had the opportunity to work very closely with sales executives and their staffs. I also had the opportunity and sometimes misfortune of working with a number of outside firms including some of the most prestigious multi-national ad agencies. It was then that the differences became crystal clear to me. While my advertising agencies were focused largely on developing award-winning creative, my sales execs needed something that would immediately translate into results for the next quarter. I often found myself frustrated that my advertising agencies cared very little about the sales process, offered little or no help around strategic messaging, and would refer me to third party telemarketers any time the topic of lead generation popped up.

When I finally left corporate America in 1995 to start my own agency, I was bound and determined to offer my clients an improved agency experience. I began with a simple philosophy; that as an agency, we would work toward a single common goal – results. Having now walked in my clients’ shoes, I recognize that a sensitivity to the needs of sales people is critical to delivering value. Oh yeah, and as for my agency… I chose the name “Vovéo” – meaning a commitment, vow, or to promise to God, and of course, “Marketing Group”. Need I say more?