Yesterday I was surfing and found the following Google ad…

I was a bit surprised that someone (a rather large competitor) was actually advertising with our name in the Ad. I immediately saw things wrong with this as a marketing person; If own businesses never ever place your competitors names in your Ads, this means you are now advertising your competitor and not just yourself. The ad only competes on price and not on anything else. If you read our Keys to Success post series you know what competing on price is a recipe for disaster and will eventually put you out of business.

Click on the ad brought me to a page where I could order the $2.99 package. When you choose the features that you want (which of course are included free in your BlueFur packages) the price jumped. Not to mention they added a $10 sign-up and you can only buy yearly. You can see the total price bellow…

 

Our smallest package the Mini Unix is $6.95 a month or $70.89 a year. As you can see the ad clearly is false advertising.

What do you think of this type of advertising?

It’s always interesting to look at different companies within the same sector, because they can oftentimes take on very different marketing strategies. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than among Canada’s three major cell phone service providers. They’ve each taken a different approach in trying to increase their user base, but in my opinion, the best campaign is held by the company that is losing market share the fastest.

Let’s start with Telus Mobility. After buying Clearnet, Telus Mobility also adopted the marketing campaign of its new acquisition. Most Telus ads these days feature a plain white background and a variety of anthropomorphic animals, ranging from monkeys to ducks. This is largely a minimalist approach, similar to that deployed by Apple. Here is a sample TV commercial to illustrate this point. At this time, Telus has the most profitable wireless service on a per user basis and holds about 29.4% of the market share (as of 2003), making them the largest cellular provider in Canada.

Coming in second place with 28.2% (as of 2003) is Rogers Wireless. Unlike Telus with their animals and feel-good vibe, Rogers Wireless has gone with a more “real” advertising campaign, typically featuring college-aged young people in everyday situations. For example, this commercial describes a road trip wherein the students are equipped with multi-gigabyte music phones. Rogers has really been pushing the music phone segment and while their ads aren’t exactly innovative, they’re very direct in what they are trying to sell.

In third place is Bell Mobility, raking in 27.2% of the market (as of 2003), not including affiliates like Aliant Mobility (4.1%), SaskTel Mobility (2.1%), and MTS Mobility (2.0%). Bell makes use of animals, like Telus, but in a totally different way. Ever since the 2006 Olympic Games, Bell has used two new mascots: a pair of talking beavers named Frank and Gordon. I personally think that this is the most appealing marketing campaign out of the three providers, because the ad spots are incredibly memorable and they make you laugh. Humor goes a long way. Take this ad, for example, which parodies the Nintendo 64 kid.

Despite having what I think is the best campaign, Bell Mobility is the one that is most quickly losing market share and profitability. By contrast, Rogers Wireless is experiencing the fastest market growth out of the three (I think they have the least creative campaign). This goes to show you that great marketing can help you sell your products and services, but sometimes it still isn’t enough. I’d imagine that part of Rogers growth has to do with an increased interest in unlocked GSM phones. Rogers (which owns Fido/Microcell) is only major GSM provider in Canada.

Gift cards have proven to be very lucrative for businesses. There are several advantages to selling gift cards at your company and that would explain why they have surged in popularity in recent years. For example, many gift cards go unused, effectively letting these businesses profit from selling nothing but a piece of plastic. Moreover, the money spent on gift cards is immediately deposited into a company’s bank account, accruing interest until the value on the card is spent in the store. This is “free” revenue.

Further still, when (and if) the gift card is used, the customer typically makes a purchase of greater value than that on the card. For instance, Ticketmaster has started selling gift cards for as little as $25. You’d be hard-pressed to find an event ticket for less than that amount and even if you did, you would receive a refund for the difference.

The point of this post isn’t necessarily to point out how lucrative the gift card market has become for businesses — clothing stores, electronics shops, etc. — but the point is rather to indicate that clever marketing that has come behind the very concept of a gift card. The industry has convinced consumers that gift cards offer options and convenience to the recipients. They’ve told us how the best Christmas present could be a gift card. All the while, however, they’ve been enjoying the “free” added revenue. This further demonstrates the saying that perception is reality.

Design your marketing efforts to encourage further sales. As I said, people will spend more on their purchase than the value of the gift card. The same can be said about coupons you may distribute that, for example, offer a discount if the total bill exceeds a certain amount. This gets people to spend more just to take advantage of the deal and this money that they may not have spent otherwise.

And I’m not talking from a blogger’s point of view.

Part of PayPerPost’s appeal with advertisers is the ability to request rather specific linkbacks to your site. For example, if Gary decided to purchase a few paid posts in the PPP marketplace for BlueFur, he could say that he wanted linkbacks to the main BlueFur site using the anchor text “Canada web hosting” or perhaps a link to the business page using “business hosting packages“. Whatever he wants, he can put in the request.

Of course, it’s still up to the individual publishers whether they want to snatch up the paid post opportunity or not, so if they believe that the content or linkback requirements are too stringent, they’ll pass. That has been part of the attractiveness of PayPerPost both for bloggers and for advertisers. With Google’s recent attack on PayPerPost, these linkbacks may not be nearly as valuable. You may have heard that just about every blog that has ever taken a PPP opportunity is now rocking a Google PageRank of zero. My blog is one such target.

I don’t take advantage of PPP opportunities on my blog anymore, but because I have a few in my archives, Google has decided to drop my blog to a PR0. From an advertiser’s point of view, the paid links are no longer on a PR5 site and as such, they don’t hold as much value in terms of improving their search engine ranking for the chosen keyword or keyword phrase. In this way, blog contests that involve linking back with a specific anchor text may not work anymore either.

So, what does this mean for advertisers? If they want to hit the first page of results for a chosen keyword phrase, they’ll either need to get it through “legitimate” and unsponsored links from other websites or — and this is why I suspect Google has decided to attack PPP — they could opt to buy a sponsored link from Google. You’ll notice that every SERP (search engine results page) has sponsored links and Google obviously wants more money (as we all do).

Will the PayPerPost marketplace suffer from these recent changes? I have every reason to believe so.

Ready for the next evolution? We continue to evolve based on our users needs, wants and requests.

We are still tweaking our article and customer blog portion of our site but it is online and about 90% done. You can preview this new section of our site and provide us with feedback on what you like or don’t like about. The article and customer blog area will let you post your own articles or blog posts for our community to share in your knowledge.

I can tell you I already don’t like the name article area for it. Anyone have a better suggestion?

Are we missing any topics?

You may remember back in May when I talked about the four Ps of marketing. Well, when those guidelines were developed, they were designed to address a conventional marketing perspective. They were meant to address a marketing situation where you had a physical good or some sort of service, and you were attempting to market it in a conventional kind of way. For example, your product could be a bar of soap, accident attorney services, or a hot new music player.

However, some people have said that these four Ps — Product, Pricing, Promotion, and Placement — are not adequate to account for all the factors that take place with Web 2.0. Blogs, social media, and other websites exist under an entirely different framework than a brick-and-mortar store. For example, a competition between blogs can very easily be mutually advantageous. Both blogs can gain RSS readers without taking away any subscribers from one another.

The Web 2.0 Four Ps are:

Personalization: Web 2.0 users are less interested in products that are just “off the shelf.” They want solutions that are fully catered to their specific needs. A great example of this are built-to-order computers, like those offered by Dell. Instead of walking into a store and being offered a pre-selected configuration, a user can pick and choose the individual components. The iGoogle personalized homepage works much the same way.

Participation: No longer restricted to passive consumption, Web 2.0 allows consumers to fully participate in the development of a brand, what it offers, and what it stands for. The BlueFur blog, for example, provides an open forum where users can make specific requests for what BlueFur should offer and how the web hosting service should be run.

Peer-to-Peer: Also known as Social Computing, the P2P phenomenon pushes customer participation even further. There is definitely a push toward collaboration with the consumer. Group programming projects are a good example of this.

Predictive Modeling: Wikipedia defines this as referring to “predictive algorithms, such as neural network, that are being successfully applied in marketing problems (both a regression as well as a classification problem).”