Speaks to the article I tweeted earlier today: brands need to realize their apps/ads should be more than marketing—they should be useful.
Also, although I’ve been a vegetarian for 10 years, I remember eating McRibs. And thinking they were delicious. Love the Simpsons episode about their addictive qualities.
Rich media ads that don’t interrupt the user experience, like VideoEgg and iAds, are the future of online advertising. The fact that the ad unit can find a McDonalds that’s close to the user is a huge benefit of this mobile ad platform. It makes it immediately actionable.
“Along with our agency partner, Tribal DDB, we came up with the idea of offering some new and unique experiences in the iAd platform, including giving users the chance to test their McRib knowledge with a quiz, offer fun wallpaper images, as well as an interactive map to find the McRib nearest them,”
On a side note, the McRIB has become this mythical sandwich that everyone seems to love. The Simpsons even did an Aronofsky style parody of how addictive it was. I think that I need to have one. The elusive nature of the burger has even spawned a McRIB watch on Twitter where users let everyone know where they found them and when.
Even this new nation wide campaign is only available until Dec 5 and I’m sure that the demand will result in a huge spike in sales. Scarcity is a powerful tool, even when it’s fabricated.
Click the link below to see more screenshots.
McDonald’s taps iAd to support multichannel McRib campaign - Mobile Marketer - Advertising
Making Freemium Work
Freemium has always been an appealing solution to the million dollar question of how to make money online. But with an internet filled with free content and services, how can you get enough people to actually pay?
I attended MediaBistro and Charles Hudson’s Freemium Summit East this week in New York City to explore that question. And while there were lots of good presentations and takeaways—you can check some of them out here (highly recommend looking through Jonathan Boutelle’s)—my recap will focus on how a few themes of the conference supported one key lesson:
If you’re going freemium, you have to go big.
Freemium is a model that only works at scale. A good conversion rate from free to paid is anywhere from 1-4%; fully 95% of your users will probably never give you a dime (directly, anyway; more on that later).You’re going to need a huge number of users to make the economics work.
The most obvious way to get there is through viral and word-of-mouth marketing, which freemium lends itself to beautifully. As YouSendIt Founder and CTO Ranjith Kumaran put it, you catch mindshare with that magical word, “free.” The challenge is to make sure everything that brings you more users is free. For instance, logically it makes sense to charge the users who use the most bandwidth, but in most cases power users are also your loudest advocates. If they abandon ship, you’ve got a problem. Similarly, balancing your investment in integrating with social media—Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn—with the value you’ll get back should always be top of mind. And while time is money, you’ll have to be patient. Seeding virality is hard and takes time: big players like SurveyMonkey have been at this game for 5+ years.
While you’re growing, pure 95/5% economics may not work. Enter multiple revenue sources: consider how you can monetize your unpaid users through advertising, whether that’s display ads like Slideshare has, promoted tweets in Hootsuite, sponsored newsletters, or another solution. Paid user revenue tends to be fairly predictable, if slow, while advertising revenue varies with traffic but can be immediate; together they can help create a steady upward curve that allows you to invest in and plan for the future.
Key to supporting viral growth is to cultivate happy users (especially if you’re exposing them to ads), and that demands customer support. Customer support can be very resource-intensive, but an elegant solution, laid out by Get Satisfaction’s Thor Muller, is to empower your users to help each other. Create a public Q&A and support community and make it front and center to your UI. As Get Satisfaction’s deck showed, help people help each other and you should see the number of support tickets drop dramatically. Of course, for your paying users, it’s important to supplement the help community with additional, personal support options.
Finally, a great way to help make big happen is to expand your business globally. Not only does North America only represent 15% of world internet traffic, it’s also the slowest-growing market. The more you can enable and empower international use of your service—through multiple languages and diverse payment methods—the better your chance of quickly growing your userbase.
Continuations: Brands Don't Seem to Understand the Power of Direct
Great post from my former boss Albert Wenger about what brands should be doing online. And I don’t mean to get all self-promotional here, but what I like about Velocidi, the digital agency where I work, is that we’re of the same mind: the consulting and creative services we provide are designed to educate and empower our clients to take advantage of the incredible opportunity they have to connect with their customers online. The best marketing comes from the people at the brand itself, not some “PR flack.” Our mission is to help brands come to life online.
Occasionally I take time out from talking to startups to meet with folks from big brands. What keeps surprising me is that many of these brands don’t seem to understand the power of direct. By direct I mean any communication that is direct between the brand and existing or potential customers without requiring the use of a “medium” to carry the message. Instead, many brands treat the Internet as if it were just another medium that is similar to previous ones. The logic seems to be mostly around “I am going to shift my advertising from offline to online” with some “social” thrown in for good measure.
This type of thinking completely ignores the fact that the Internet is not at all like what came before it offline. With the exception of direct marketers (catalogs, postcards), pre-Internet everyone needed a carrier for their message. There was no way to deliver a brand’s message without embedding it in a magazine or radio segment or TV show. But today that is possible and yet brands for the most part behave as if nothing has changed. Imagine sitting at a table with three people. One is the brand, one is a potential customer and the other is an actor. Brands are behaving as if in order to talk to the customer they each time have to turn to the actor and tell the actor what to say to the customer. In real life with three people at a table that would be incredibly awkward. Well, with the Internet we are all sitting at the same table.
So what should brands be doing? For starters they should completely own their names online. For any of their products, their own site should come up top in google. Once I go to the site it should be a landing page optimized for establishing a direct permission relationship. In the extreme that could be a reason for me to provide my email address or to sign in with Twitter or Facebook. At a minimum it should be a call to follow on Twitter or Foursquare. The products themselves should carry clear calls to action to come and establish a direct contact. After all, if I am already a customer I am likely to look at the product frequently.
Why would people allow brands to speak to them directly? Well that’s where the real challenge lies. Rather than paying agencies to figure out how to shift ad dollars more or less “mechanically” online, brands need to really spend time understanding what their authentic message can be that people will voluntarily want to hear directly from the brand. These can be overarching messages and they can be messages for each product or service. But in every case they must deliver some kind of value for people to want to receive them directly. That value could be in the form of utility (alerts), pleasure (entertainment), inspiration (doing good) or most crudely and least effective in the long run dollars and cents (coupons/offers).
The beauty of this approach is that it takes care of “social” all by itself. If people voluntarily receive messages that they like, they will share those message with their friends. There is no such thing as a separate “social strategy” online. There is either a core strategy of value combined with direct communication (and social will take care of itself) or there is nothing. That is the power of direct.
Beyond the Numbers
The value of engagement marketing—social media, blogger outreach, etc.—can be hard to capture because so often the metrics are “soft.” To add some legitimacy to engagement efforts it’s tempting to rely on the numbers that we do have: followers, retweets, etc.
But as this interesting Vocus study about perception of online influence shows, that’s kind of missing the point. This marketing is about influence—about quality, not quantity.
The key finding here is that there is a clear difference between “influence” and “popularity.” About 90% of respondents noted this distinction; however, 84% also said there is a correlation between “reach” and influence,” which adds a bit of ambiguity.
According to the survey, the top contributing factors that make a person or brand influential were all based on quality rather than quantity. Around 60% of respondents cited the “quality or focus of the network” (e.g. 4chan) and 55% cited the “quality of content” (e.g. Andrew Sullivan) for what defines an influential.
Digital marketing success doesn’t come from “making viral videos” or getting a million Twitter followers overnight. It’s the real work of building a trusted brand presence through quality content and real relationships with influencers. The internet moves fast, but (as ever), slow and steady wins the race.
(Hat tip to Debbie Stier and Swiss Miss for the link)
debbiestier: One Fan Per Day
Love this. Patience is a virtue in the high-speed digital space. There’s a lot of noise; it takes time to get traction. And there’s a lot you’ll get wrong before you get right—but given the time to correct, refine, and grow, a digital presence can make a world of difference.
If you are a writer, or an artist of any kind, you MUST read the blog post 1000 True Fans. In fact, if you’re a marketer of any kind, you must read it too.
I first read the post a few years ago, and I’ve since read it over and over and over again, and I’ve recommended it hundreds of times because I find it empowering, and hopeful.
I work with a lot of writers on their digital strategy, and I very often hear that they don’t feel their hard work and engagement online is making a difference. @garyvee would say HAVE PATIENCE. And he’s right. If you’re a writer (and I would encourage you to do ANYTHING else if you can, because it’s really really hard to be successful as a writer), you are building a long-term relationship. It’s not just about THIS book; it’s about your career.
The take-away from the post that I’m always left with, is: ”If you added one fan a day, it would take only three years.” One fan per day just seems so doable, right?
I’ve never taken the 1000 number literally, and in fact he says he has no idea what the actual number of fans needed is:
“…..the actual number may vary depending on the media. Maybe it is 500 True Fans for a painter and 5,000 True Fans for a videomaker. The numbers must surely vary around the world. But in fact the actual number is not critical, because it cannot be determined except by attempting it. Once you are in that mode, the actual number will become evident. That will be the True Fan number that works for you. My formula may be off by an order of magnitude, but even so, its far less than a million.”
But again, the gist for me is ONE FAN PER DAY. LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIP.
Now here is something that I hadn’t noticed before in my reading of the post:
“Same is true in book publishing. When you have corporations involved in taking the majority of the revenue for your work, then it takes many times more True Fans to support you. To the degree an author cultivates direct contact with his/her fans, the smaller the number needed.”
I have to think more about that, but it does remind me of a new company I’m intrigued by, The Open Sky Project. Seems to me a company worth an author exploring.
‘Where can I fly for this much money’ by Kayak.com
Brilliant. Start from the customer and work backwards.
The emergence of a new media system is typified by a period of transposition, where the behavioural grammar of the previous system remains dominant. The first television shows were radio shows with people talking directly into camera. The first films were stageplays that had been filmed. And the first marketing forays online took what we knew about media and branding from broadcast media and applied it to a whole new space.
But digital is different. Digital is not a channel. It’s a suite of platforms, channels and tactics that will, ultimately subsume its parents entirely. Digital marketing is not simply a new place to disperse persuasive symbols, but the emergence of any entirely new behavioural grammar, as companies and their customer begin to engage with each other in entirely new ways in entirely new spaces, where everyone has an equal voice.
” Faris, ”A decade of digital: 10 things for 2010” (via digital-marketing-diva, alexjcampbell)
