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Picture yourself in a crowded mall when an announcement comes over the public address system: “There’s a car in the parking lot with its lights on.”Don’t stand near the door, as dozens of people stream out to make sure they weren’t the ones who’ll have a dead battery when it’s time to leave.

But, what if the mall announcement was a bit more specific: “There’s a white car in the parking lot with its lights on”? Well, you can be sure only those folks who drive white vehicles will be heading for the doors.

You can play this game to even greater granularity. “There’s a white Mazda in the parking lot with its lights on” will probably single-out only a handful of respondents. The others, not owning a Mazda, let alone a white one, will just keep walking around the mall.

By now you should have learned the first lesson of keyword metadata: The more specific you are, the less response you’ll get.

True, but let me rephrase that. The more specific you are, the more qualified response you will get. You see, sometimes getting less traffic is a good thing. Why? Because you probably don’t want to be spending your precious P4P budget paying for clicks from people who don’t fit your target audience, and who will probably never have an interest in doing business with you. If you have that broad an audience, traditional “mass media” will be your game. But if you’re looking for a specific target group, a particular interest, a very segmented market, or a savvy customer, less is more.

Yet, from what I see when I look at metadata from sites I visit, not a lot of marketing folks have gotten the message. You see metadata is often an afterthought. “Let’s think of every word that applies to our business / company / product and put it in our keyword metadata.” So then, you get a theatrical lighting company putting up keywords such as “light bulbs” and “light fixtures” which, technically, is correct. However, if the search engines index you at all, you’ll be getting traffic from people who want to know where the nearest Target is so they can buy a 4-pack of GE 60-watt bulbs.

Congratulations, you’ve just paid for a useless and unproductive click.

In this illustration, we’ve told the audience the equivalent of “there’s a car with its lights on.” So, you can easily figure out that “theatrical lighting fixtures” might be a better fit. So would, “professional stage lighting,” or “klieg” and such.

Okay, that was easy enough. But I still see metadata on sites that seems to resemble a laundry list of one-word services, products and descriptions that could apply to just about any company. Problem is, they’re practically useless when it comes to helping you gain search visibility. Even worse, because of their high search rate these keywords usually cost a small fortune to purchase.

If you want to build a good foundation for proper SEO and search practices, look at the page you’re building and pull-out only the very specific descriptors that apply. Your product’s brand names are useful. A qualifier to your industry (i.e. theatrical lighting fixtures) is essential. And by all means, make every keyword relative to content that’s on the page. Sometimes marketing teams go back and re-write page text in order to optimize it for keywords and density (how many times it appears on the page). What ever you do, do not create one set of metadata and apply it to the entire site. Search bots don’t like it because (among other things) they look for relevance of keywords to body text. Go look at your site right now and see if you have the same data from page to page (in your browser just “view source” and look near the top for “keywords.” ) If every page is the same, send whoever is doing your optimization back to school; it’s plain wrong.

Finally, avoid glowing adjectives in your keyword list. Again, bots look at “the biggest light bulb supply in the universe” as marketing fluff. Think like a searcher. How would s/he go about finding you and/or your product? What would they type-in to GOOGLE? What words would they use to describe / find your product? Try it yourself. Make a list of keywords, do a few searches and see what you get. Look at the number of results in the search. Then, start entering more descriptive and narrowly-focused keywords. Watch how the results change. Uncover the opportunities. Learn the landscape of what works.

Suddenly, you’ll see that the “white Mazda with its lights on” speaks directly to the people who care, who respond, and who engage.

Agree? Disagree? Have a success story? Have a question? Share it with me at: bob_chernet@viewmark.com

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© 2007 Bob Chernet
Reproduction in any manner is unlawful, without the written permission of the author.

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Sometimes there’s nothing worse than having an annoying interstitial pop-up or appear on the screen, completely obstructing the view of what you’re trying to read.

Of course, THAT’S THE PURPOSE of the interstitial ad: to get your attention. In these days of businesses trying to figure out better ways of bringing in revenue from their web sites, an interstitial is a tempting way to go.

However, I look at these kinds of ads as “crowding the aisles” of an already over-crowded department store. Throw more stuff at ‘em, and maybe they’ll buy it. “It’s a competitive world out there… we have to shout above the others.” Why does it take marketers so long to figure out that, done without some forethought, these approaches rarely are considered “best practices” and usually do more damage than good. In my opinion, obtrusive marketing gets temporary headlines for “creativity” and “outside-the-box” thinking, but usually alienates the audience.

Here’s a recent example to illustrate my point, that ran on the Associated Press**:

“Mobile phones are a potential gold mine for advertisers, the most personal and intimate way to communicate and engage with subscribers - more than 2 billion of them and counting worldwide. Yet the advertisers’ two-liner text pitches have largely fueled a growing hate club, with recipients quickly equating the messages with spam they abhor on desktops.”

Does that really surprise you? Interrupt a mobile user… with ads? (Now, if it was an opt-in, personalized ad that I indicated that I wanted, that’s another story.)

Executed poorly, or for that matter, done for the wrong reason these types of ads can be detrimental to your marketing objectives and cause more negative feelings than good (note the words “hate club” in the above excerpt). Unlike, for example, commercial television, Web interstitials are intrusive. With TV, newspapers, magazine and radio you expect your program to be interrupted by an advertisement. With a Web page, you have grown to expect ads surrounding your content.

But, covering content or displacing it until you click it away? What a pain! (I’m sure I’ll be bombarded from agencies citing the success rates of those who click the ad, compared to those who click-away the ad. What, a 2% clickthrough? So, let’s annoy the 98% who don’t want it? Seems like we should be appealing to the 98% instead of going for the “low-hanging fruit”)

When it comes to all-things-Web, it seems that we do things because we can, not because they make sense. I scan sites from all over, and the ones that annoy me the most are the rich-media inserts that automatically expand over the page when you mouse-over the collapsed ad. Often, the ad is placed so that you have a high probability of accidentally mousing over it.

For example, this television station has a handy “weather dashboard” that appears and covers a large portion of real estate (it also contains an ad). There’s so much going on that you have a hard time finding the “close” button (it’s in the upper left corner). You can go through this cycle of accidentally opening and closing it several times during just one pageview!

Seems to me that if I wanted to see the weather I would select it on purpose. Yet the way they have it configured, it’s very easy to accidentally open it again, and again. I have completely stopped going to USA Today (online) because of their constant bombardment of cover-up ads that I have to view and click away. Yes, ad revenue is crucial for supporting the Web component, but c’mon; there has to be a better way than to annoy your users so much that they stop coming to your site.

On the other hand, there are good reasons to insert some Flash on the page. New York’s WPLJ-FM has several of their “jocks” appear and do a little shtick about the station and their show (in the lower right corner). It’s actually fun to watch, and the target audience expects this rather in-your-face approach (that’s what they do on-air). In fact, this Flash piece actually supports the brand personality. They have several versions, so visit www.wpljfm.com/home.asp and refresh the page a few times.

My purpose is to have you step-back and think about why you’re putting an intrusive piece of media on the page, and what the repercussions might be.

Your visitors are smart, and a purposeful ad, which supports the site’s personality and audience will far outperform one that is just stuck on the page to be in-your-face. And, I’m willing to gamble, it will be more successful as well.

Agree? Disagree? Have a success story? Have a question? Share it with me at: bob_chernet@viewmark.com

View a complete list of Bob’s Marketing Insights articles.

© 2007 Bob Chernet
Reproduction in any manner is unlawful, without the written permission of the author.

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As marketers we spend so much of our time concentrating on attracting customers. We make the plans. We build the budgets. We arrange for the execution. But, often we forget about the very last step in the marketing chain that can either make or break the customer engagement: the person who answers the incoming call to your business.

Think of it. You’ve spent countless dollars and hours developing and supporting your brand. Your ad campaigns have worked, and people are reacting. They want what you have. They call you to begin the transaction (don’t forget, not EVERYBODY does business online quite yet!). Is that person who answers the phone skilled, trained and ready to close the deal? After all, you’ve got a customer ready to hand you money! But that’s where things can go dangerously wrong.

A reader of this column asked me to consider the outcome of her recent need to book a vacation stay. Calling a big nationally-know resort, the obviously inexperienced person who handled her call projected a rather flippant attitude from the beginning. He had little knowledge about his properties and inventory, and offered little or no suggestions about options or alternatives to her. The feeling our reader got was “they really don’t seem to want my business. They weren’t helpful, didn’t seem to focus on the my needs, and were anything but proactive.”

Within minutes of ending the unproductive call, another was made to a much smaller outfit. A cheerful woman answered with a spirited “how can I help you?” Good start. After listening intently, she had a number of suggestions (”this room overlooks the golf course, and is very quiet…”) and even recommended saving a few dollars by booking one day later. Needless to say, she got the business.

So, why the disparity? It appears that the latter company makes sure they train everyone who interacts with the public (their customer) what their brand values are, and how to “live” them throughout their workday. They completely understand that a brand is “a set of expectations” on the part of the consumer. The way you set those expectations is to live them.

You do this by being there when the customer wants you (ever try to get an oil change at your dealer at 3pm on Saturday?) You do this by being helpful and knowledgeable. You do this by being the customer’s best friend.

But in reality it takes the influence of the marketing department to upper management (and across the organization) to not only stress the importance of proper customer-facing interactions, but be the traffic-cop to make sure the brand promise is consistently delivered.

I once spent nearly 50 minutes on the phone with a (very) helpful call-center operator at Continental Airlines. I had an emergency and needed help. This person not only was able to get me on the flight I wanted the next day, but came up with creative ways for me to address the exorbitant fare. Needless to say, I’ve flown Continental loyally for years.

So, you can see that for all the planning, creative production, media expense and marketing communications you handle, sometimes success comes down to a single individual who has the enormous power to enable or derail a sale.

As marketers we must remember that customer service agents, phone operators, and call centers are also marketing vehicles. They’re not there just to “take orders” from customers, but to reinforce and support your company’s brand values. They are there to clear a path to successful purchase and repeat business. In a perfect world, they are there to add value and increase order totals.

Obviously, some companies still don’t get it. I’m here to encourage you to include “human interaction” as an important tool in your marketing arsenal.

Agree? Disagree? Have a success story? Have a question? Share it with me at: bob_chernet@viewmark.com

View a complete list of Bob’s Marketing Insights articles.

© 2007 Bob Chernet
Reproduction in any manner is unlawful, without the written permission of the author.