When you think about most of the marketing campaigns that companies deploy to advertise their products and services, it seems that they are typically trying to capture as wide an audience as possible. They try to appeal to the largest number of people, maximizing their ability to reach as many potential customers as possible with a single campaign. This sounds like it would be the most cost effective.

Unfortunately, advertising is never a one-size-fits-all situation. While a certain advertisement may appeal to one person, it may not “speak” to another person in quite the same way. In this way, it may be worthwhile to consider catering several related campaigns to several different demographics, possibly broken down based on geography. Rather than have a nationwide newspaper ad campaign, does it make more sense to have customized ad creatives for different regions across the country?

This would increase cost, of course, because it means that the marketing team or ad agency hired for the project would be creating more than one marketing effort, even if they are inherently related. At the same time, the demographics and sentimentality of people living in Vancouver could be very different from the people who live in Toronto, Charlottetown, or Saskatoon. For instance, people who live on the West Coast tend to have more of a “green living” mentality, so it may be worthwhile to have an advertising campaign that speaks to that sentiment.

Rather than being faced with a generic campaign that tries to speak to everyone at the same time, many people like it when they see something that seems to be speaking directly to them, personalized in one way or another. If your name is John and you see an ad that says “Hey John! Check this out!”, you are more likely to actually check it out. At the very least, the ad will grab your attention. Hyperlocalization of ads can have the same effect. Instead of an ad that speaks to Canada, readers in Montreal may be more inclined to “see” an ad that speaks to the city of Montreal.

What do you think? Is it worthwhile to have hyper-local advertising?

A short while ago, I came across an announcement saying that I could download Peggle: World of Warcraft Edition for free. For those of you who don’t know, Peggle is a casual puzzle game developed and published by Popcap Games and it has seen a reasonable level of popularity both on the PC and on the other platforms like Xbox Live Arcade. Why would they offer a special World of Warcraft edition for free?

Well, it seems to act much like a “gateway drug” to give you a “taste” of what this game has to offer. By playing through some of the World of Warcraft-themed stages for free, you can better understand why the original Peggle puzzle game is so popular and you may be more inclined to buy it. Many titles in the casual game market offer free trials, but many people don’t know this. Peggle: World of Warcraft Edition is little more than a well-designed and well-positioned demo game. It does not limit the amount of playing time, however, and there is certainly more to be enjoyed here than with most demos.

After completing a session with Peggle: WoW Edition, players are then shown a splash page where they can click on one of two links. One of these directs them to a sales page where they can download the demo for the original Peggle, as well as buy the complete game should they so choose. The other link sends them to a sales page for a free World of Warcraft demo. One free gateway drug leads itself into two more gateway drugs.

While not everyone who downloads Peggle: World of Warcraft Edition will then proceed to buy the original Peggle and World of Warcraft, the assumption is that the developers will enjoy increased sales of both titles as a result of this free offering. No numbers are available at this point, so I’d be curious to hear about the possible conversion rates for this kind of strategy. How viable would it be to take on a similar strategy in other niches and industries? Can the music industry work on this model? Movie theatres? Restaurants?

One of the first things that you’ll learn in business or marketing school is that you should focus on selling the benefits and not the features. While there are definitely people who want to hear about every feature and specification, the majority of consumers just want a simple question answered: “What can this product/service do for me?” They want to know how this product or service will make their life easier, more efficient, or more enjoyable.

I caught a television commercial yesterday for Qwest High-Speed Internet in the United States. For most home high-speed Internet services, we will hear about how one service is faster or how another service is more affordable. Qwest certainly recognizes those necessities too, but this particular ad focused on something different altogether. We see a teen/tween boy re-staging a series of childhood moments, because his parents lost the treasured family photos on their home computer. The mother character wanted all of these photo opportunities to be recreated.

The point that the teen/tween was trying to make is that the parents should have opted for the Qwest High-Speed Internet service, because it comes with a free (automatic) online backup service. This way, the pictures that were stored on the family computer could be easily recovered, even if the computer itself started to fail. I see a similar service (Eee Storage) offered by Asus with their Eee PC netbooks, though that is only a free trial; you need to subscribe to the service after the trial expires.

This online backup from Qwest sounds like it could be an excellent bonus and it’s clear that Qwest is selling the benefit. However, if you watch the commercial a little more carefully, you’ll notice one of the major features is mentioned very briefly and is not at all highlighted: storage capacity. The online backup service only supports up to 2GB per computer. Given the size of today’s digital pictures (and other media), two gigabytes is nowhere near enough for the modern family. You can easily buy a cheap SD card with more capacity than that.

In this way, you can see how selling the benefit can be more effective in attracting customers than selling the features. However, I found the Qwest ad to a little misleading and this may hurt them in the long run. What do you think?

Many small business owners feel that all of their marketing efforts must originate from within. They feel that they have to launch their own websites, market those websites, advertise in the local paper, and so on. While these are all very suitable and very valuable ways to market your company, you also have to realize that potential customers can come from a variety of avenues and one of these is Google.

This goes well above and beyond search engine marketing and search engine optimization. As it turns out, you can get some “free” advertising through Google Maps. Many of us have come to rely on Google Maps for directions, as well as information about local businesses. In this way, you want to make sure that the information Google Maps has on your business is accurate and up-to-date. Thankfully, the process to claim your local business listing is quite simple and straightforward.

The first thing you’ll want to do is search for your business in Google Maps. Assuming that you are not too new, there is a good chance that you have already been indexed. Say, for example, that you own John Doe’s Coffee Shop in Vancouver, BC. You’d search using something like “john doe coffee shop vancouver” as your search term.

When you see the result, click on “More Info” and this will likely bring up your mailing address. On this page, you’ll see an “Edit” link. Click that. The resulting page will a link to “Claim Your Business.” Upon clicking on this link, you can log into your Google account (Gmail, Google Adwords, etc.) and edit the information related to your local business. This can include a mailing address, phone number, website, business hours, accepted forms of payment, and so on.

Even if you don’t expect a lot of business to come via Google Maps, you should claim your local business listing if only as a defensive tactic. You don’t want someone else to claim your business, right?

Thanks to SearchEngineGuide for the inspiration and information for this post.

I came across a video on YouTube the other day where they asked some random passers-by in Times Square whether they knew what a web browser was. The vast majority could not differentiate between a web browser and a search engine, saying that their web browser of choice was (mostly) Google and (sometimes) Yahoo! Obviously, both of these are search engines and not web browsers.

Not surprisingly, the vast majority of the people interviewed in the clip knew nothing about Google Chrome, Google’s official entry into the web browser market to compete against the likes of Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and others. In this way, Google really did not have much of a chance of converting many of these people to Chrome, because they not only did not know about Chrome; they did not know about the difference between a search engine and a web browser.

In developing your marketing efforts and campaigns, it may be very much worth your while to take on the role of an educator. While industry-specific knowledge may be second nature to you and your direct associates, this knowledge may not be quite as common among your customers and potential customers. They may not exactly understand what you are offering, not understanding how your product is different from an entirely different type of product.

For example, the people behind Google Android could stand to spend some advertising dollars in educating the public on the nature of a smartphone, what it means to have an “open source” operating system, and the advantages of these kinds of devices. Auto manufacturers have long since taken on the role of educator too, teaching us about safety innovations and the benefits that they can provide.

Do your customers really know what you are selling? Help to educate them and your business may grow.

I think that most of us are perfectly aware of the current situation in the economy and how so many companies (and people) are suffering greatly as a result. As such, several companies have started to tighten down their budgets, looking for places where they can cut costs in order to maintain the long-term viability of the business. They may have to lay off some staff, for instance. Other companies are clamping down on their marketing and advertising, seeing these as costs that can be cut.

While you may want to reduce some of your spending on advertising, it would not be appropriate to cut out too much. That is because marketing is not an expense, per se. It is better perceived as an investment. With each marketing dollar that you put out, there is a certain expectation that the dollar will come back to you in the form of new or continued business with new or existing customers. That’s why you advertise in the first place, right?

To ride out this recession and to see your company survive through to the other side, you may have to make some adjustments in how your business is run. You may need to revamp your product line to better suit the reduced budgets of your customers. These lower-priced solutions can keep them attached to your company as a supplier and these solutions may even attract customers away from your competitors. I’m not saying that you should compete on price, but you should be thinking about how you can compete on value.

In this way, you want to maintain most of your marketing efforts, although in a slightly different form. Even if the advertising dollars do not result in immediate sales, they will help with maintaining your brand’s presence in the marketplace. When the economy takes an upswing and more people are in a spending mood again, your name will be one of the first that they’ll remember, because it’s been there all along.