Never Ending Thoughts…

In the article “Smarketing – The Perfect Blend Of Sales And Marketing“, I briefly touched upon the concept of smarketing and took it further in the article “Top Three Things To Watch Out When Combining Your Sales And Marketing Efforts“. Lately the term Marketing Automation has started picking up some steam. Many marketing companies have started using this term extensively in their product and service offerings. And there’s a very valid reason why. Besides many benefits of marketing automation, one key reason that I can think of is that it’s one of the ways to solve the challenges posed in implementing an effective and an efficient Smarketing Solution. In this article, I’ll explain how.

There is a ton of material available on the Internet that explains what Marketing Automation is; If you’d like a simple, unbiased and a quick 5 minutes overview of Marketing Automation, I strongly suggest looking at these two videos posted by Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of Annuitas Group and Executive Director of the Marketing Automation Institute.

What’s the Difference Between Demand Generation and Lead Management?

How Marketing Automation Support Demand Generation & Lead Management

Thanks Lauren for sharing these great videos! Now let’s see how Marketing Automation can help in making your Smarketing Solution more efficient and effective.

Better Integration Between Marketing Campaigns and Sales CRM Systems

One of the main advantages of a good Marketing Automation Implementation is that it bridges the gap between marketing and sales. For instance, good Marketing Automation can help you seamlessly push leads generated via a marketing campaign into your sales CRM system. It can help you set up more targeted campaigns by picking up data from your sales CRM and see which leads are at which step on the sales cycle and push relevant targeted marketing content to them.

Better And Holistic Monitoring of Marketing & Sales Efforts

Another big advantage of implementing Marketing Automation in your company would be that it will help you get a better and a holistic snapshot of your marketing and sales efforts. This means you’ll not only know exactly how much you are spending on each of your campaign, but also which campaign is generating how much sales, and how your campaigns are helping up-sell your products.

Better Marketing & Sales Process Change Management

Making any Marketing & Sales Process effective is a continuous activity that often involves making changes to existing processes, business rules and sometimes even the technology and core infrastructure of the company. Marketing Automation will help you streamline your marketing and sales processes so that they can be easily changed and made more in line with the the changing needs of both the marketing and the sales teams. For instance, imagine asking your sales team to run a campaign where-in you’d like to offer a deal to your existing customers if they gave you some referrals. Many times such campaigns are hard to implement and even harder to track without making significant changes in existing marketing and sales processes. Marketing Automation can help in aligning your existing marketing and sales processes so that such marketing, sales, and lead generation efforts would be easily implementable, track-able, and easily changed as needed.

And so, as you can see, marketing automation helps bringing marketing and sales team closer to each other in a much more efficient and scalable manner; something that’s one of the key goals of smarketing.

It’s not new to see Sex and Nudity in Marketing Campaigns. Sometimes it works, sometimes it works very well! But sometimes it just terribly fails because the audience felt that the company “crossed the line”. In this article I will share with you some practical scenarios that have worked in the the past in favor of companies and the ones that have terribly failed. In the end we will draw conclusion and try to find where to draw the line when it comes to using Sex and Nudity in Marketing.

Zappos – More Than Shoes!

Around six months back, Zappos, one of the leading online shoe retailers (now owned by Amazon), started this campaign that really turned every-body’s heads and eyebrows. They had their models wear tiny bikinis and thongs and took their pictures at various key locations in Manhattan. Later on the bikinis and thongs were digitally edited to be replaced by censor bars with the text “More Than Shoes!”.

Source: http://blogs.zappos.com

The pictures caught attention and went viral on the Internet. But the story doesn’t end there. The Ad was run both in print media and online. In the online version, when the viewer clicked on the picture (perhaps in the hope to see its larger version or read more about the Ad), he/she was taken to Zappos where the “actual picture” was shown in which the models were wearing bikinis and thongs. The print media also tried to give similar experience by using QR Codes. When the visitor liked the Ad and wanted to learn more, he/she could simply scan the QR Code using their smart phone and was instantly taken to Zappos’s mobile website where the actual picture with relevant deals and promotion message was shown.

Source: http://blogs.zappos.com

I believe Zappos did a great job by identifying how far they should go with sex and nudity in advertising. Their Ad Campaign caught instant attention, it didn’t spoil the company’s image, and helped change their overall image as just an online shoe retailer.

Calvin Klein – Secret Obsession Perfume Ad

Around two years back Calvin Klein launched a new steamy Ad showing actress Eva Mendes writhing topless in bed. While Calvin Klein’s aim was to promote their perfume, the Ad nearly killed their product as many viewers found the Ad too sexual and vulgar for the most audience. What did Calvin Klein do wrong? I think the biggest mistake that Calvin Klein did in that campaign is not being able to focus on their real goal – that is conveying to the audience why they should buy the Secret Obsession Perfume.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com

The Conclusion

1. It’s OK to use Sex and Nudity in Marketing as long as you keep your focus on the message, not the model.
2. Understand your target audience before using Sex and Nudity when marketing your product.
3. Remember that many people would just know you by your advertisements. They might not ever buy anything from you, but they’ll create an image of your company based on the kind of Ads they see. That’s called “building a brand”. If you choose to use Sex and Nudity in your Marketing, make it absolutely sure that it wouldn’t in any way impact your brand.

Where to draw the line when using Sex and Nudity in Marketing

Before I start this section, let me be frank. If it were that easy, then there wouldn’t have been any marketing blunders related to usage of Sex and Nudity in Marketing. The reason this happens is because it’s really hard to find that fine line. Your best bet would be to focus on your audience and your brand; start with a small focus group and get feedback from your close customers before you run the campaign. That will give you and idea where to draw the line. What do you think?

Source: http://www.loc.gov/

Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday is the first holiday of the year in United States. It’s observed on the third Monday of January each year, which is around the time of King’s birthday, January 15. You can read more about it here. Being first holiday of the year, for many businesses it brings the chance to once again entice customers and keep their sales going on. In this article I will cover how small businesses can leverage Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday to generate more sales. This is just an introduction to a topic that can be discussed in much more detail and can be covered by taking lot of examples. So feel free to shoot me a mail or reply to this post and keep the conversation live!

Choose the Right Campaign on Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Weekend

Source: http://bargainbabe.com

Since this is not a major holiday, don’t expect people exchanging gifts. So you can leave the gift items out from your Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Promotion. You should rather focus on items that people would have missed buying during the holiday season.

This holiday comes after most people receive their first paycheck of the year. So many people would want to spend that money in things that are important or things they couldn’t buy during the holidays. So your best bet would be to run promotions on house hold items, perhaps giving away discounts on yearly maintenance subscriptions and so forth.

Choose the Right Time of the Day or Weekend

best-of-web.com

Keep in mind that Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday is mostly observed by US Federal employees. It’s not a mandatory holiday, so many businesses are actually open on that day! This means that many people would be actually working on that day and will only be able to come in the evening.

To get maximum results, start the sale on the day before the holiday (that is Sunday) and continue throughout the holiday.

Take logistics Very Seriously!

Source: http://openclipart.org

Why am I being so direct about it? That’s because as the well known saying goes “First Impression is the Last Impression”. This is probably going to be your first promotion of the year. If you fail to make your customers happy in this first promotion, perhaps due to delivery delays, misleading promotion message, or any other reason, this might become your last chance to promote anything successfully in the whole year! On the other hand, if you do a good job, you can pretty much consider yourself winning a jackpot! Now that the customer is happy he/she is definitely going to check back in on almost all (if not every) weekend/holiday promotion in the coming year. This is your chance to put your best foot in front of new customers, so take all the time to plan it right and make sure your logistics are in place.

By keeping these simple but very important points in mind, you can rest assured your Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Sale Campaign is going to be successful. But as they say “The Devil is in the Details.”; So feel free to share your thoughts!

Holiday Season is one of those times of the Year when you as a  Business Owner have an upper edge; the customer is in the mood to spend money! What can you do to take this rare opportunity and generate more sales? Of course we know it. Running holiday promotions and holiday discount deals are the most common methods. However, many businesses, specially the small and local businesses, still fail to generate outstanding sales during holiday season. The only ones that do generate good sales are the ones that have already built some reputation over the years and are able to take advantage of repeat business during holidays.

In this series of articles we will discuss some of the things that small and local businesses can do to generate more leads during holiday season and thereby increase their probability of generating more sales. Since every business is unique we can’t come up with a “one size fits all” solution. So in this article, I will cover some of the basic and common tactics and ideas that would apply to most (if not all) businesses, and in the next few articles I will touch upon specific businesses. I will try to cover as many local businesses as I can. If you can’t find ideas that are relevant to your business, please do write back and I’ll try to cover them!

Start Your Holiday Promotion At the Right Time

Start too late and you’d probably have very less time for the information to spread. Many people would have already bought what they were looking for. Start too early and either most people will forget about the deal (remember many people wait until the end to do their shopping), or you’ll fall into the risk of your competitors copying your promotion idea! Generally a good time to start a holiday promotion is one month before holidays. This gives the campaign enough time to spread and at the same time gives people just enough time to take advantage of the promotion.

Schedule a New Product Launch during Holiday Season

Many businesses launch products on their predefined time lines that sometimes don’t match with key holiday dates such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc. And when the holiday season comes, the only approach they have is to reduce the price of their existing products. That is not the smartest of the moves.

Remember that customers are in the mood to spend. You should leverage this opportunity to release new products and if possible at bare bones discount price. Keep in mind that during holiday season people are in the mood to buy gifts, they want to buy something that’s new and has just arrived at the stores; and many are willing to pay a premium for that one gift that has just hit the market. Why not leverage this rare opportunity and introduce new products instead of reducing price of the old ones?

Give Special Deal to your Existing Customers

This one just makes sense. Getting repeat business from your existing customers is easiest during holiday season. If they are already happy with you, then it’s even more easy! All you have to do is come up with some deal that would make sense for your customer and offer them during holiday season.

This could be a contract renewal with some new added features for free for first three months, 5% extra shipment on the next order, free shipping, or anything that you can do to get repeat business.

Find Your Niche and Remain Focused

Even though there are more people ready to spend money during holidays, there is still more competition. Just like you, your competitors are going to try every single bit to attract attention. The fact is that in some cases your competition is going to outbid you and in some cases you are going to outbid your competition. The best thing to do in this case is to carefully identify your niche and remain focused. For example, you could be selling custom design apparel and as part of this holiday season, you might want to focus on what would work best in your favor instead of running promotions all across the board. For instance, if you have a new line of children clothing ready to hit the shops by around Christmas, then you should focus on running a promotion just for that. The idea is to carefully evaluate what type of promotion you’ll be able to run most successfully and keep focused on that. This will help you limit your competition and get the maximum out of your promotion.

Get Your Customers Involved at the right time and Reward Them for referrals

Holiday season is one of the best time to get new business based on referrals from existing customers. Again, for the same reason – there are many deals going on and customers are in the mood to spend. Your existing customers are the best sales team you can have. They not only pay for your product, they evaluate it for you, give you feedback and if rewarded appropriately they can bring lot of new business to you! However the trick is to get them involved early in the game. Discuss upcoming promotions with your key customers and get them involved. Give them enough time to promote your holiday deal and reward them nicely for their efforts.

So here are five basic things you can do irrespective of what kind of business you are in and generate more leads and sales during holiday season than you had been doing so far! In the next post I will pick up one local business and discuss ideas of how to grow sales during holidays. If you have some business in mind that you’d like to discuss please feel free to let me know!

Social Media Marketing has become an integral part of any web campaign. In fact it’s striking to see that it took over two decades for Social Media Marketing to catch on the Web. It has been there ever since, through conferences, meet-ups, focus groups, etc.

In this article I’d like to talk about two great technology tools that has changed the way Social Media Marketing started on the Web. These are the Twitter Sharing Button and Social Bookmarking Sites. Both these technologies started at almost the same time and greatly complement each other. If carefully used together, they can help you create a great viral campaign within minutes!

Social Bookmarking

The concept behind social bookmarking is really very simple. You probably are aware of bookmarks in FireFox, IE, and other browsers. People bookmark their favorite websites and pages in their browsers so that they can quickly come back and have a look. Social bookmarking gives a more “social” angle to it. Instead of bookmarking in your local browser, social bookmarking allows you to manage all your bookmarks from a single website. This way you can access your bookmarks from anywhere! In addition, you can follow other users and stories and share your bookmarks. This is an excellent way to spread some information, share a link with others, and gain knowledge in the topics you like!

Social bookmarking really became a “must have” in the Social Marketing space when companies realized how important it was for them to be discussed by various users on a bookmarking site. The more users on a bookmarking site were sharing and bookmarking a company’s news, the better it was to be able to reach out to more visitors. As companies realized this immense potential of social bookmarking, they started paying more attention and looking at trends of what gets shared and what quickly spreads, and what just dies out.

Today there are hundreds of thousands of social bookmarking sites. So you must first find out the bookmarking sites that are relevant to you; where your visitors go and would possibly share your posts or links with their friends. Once you have done that, you must closely monitor the activity and see how users react to the information you release, at what time are you able to create the maximum impact, what gets shared more, etc. Remember, Social Bookmarking is Not Web Directory Submission. If you will just add a link there it will get buried under the thousands of new links that get added to a social bookmarking site. So instead of wasting time adding links to hundreds of social bookmarking sites, simply pick the ones that are relevant to your business and post relevant content.

http://www.social-bookmarking.net/

I recommend looking at http://www.social-bookmarking.net/

Twitter Sharing Button

Twitter Sharing Button is another marvelous tool in the hands of a Social Media Marketer. Unlike bookmarking, the sharing button allows throwing a quick tweet on your twitter home wall. From there it further percolates to your twitter followers and to their followers (if they re-tweet it) and so on. The important difference here is that Twitter is Not a Social Bookmarking Site. It is only a medium to quickly share some information with others; something that you’d probably not go back and search for in your twitter account. It’s typical use is to spread some real time information quickly amongst your “Twitter followers”.

Business use Twitter Sharing Button in their blogs to allow readers to quickly share the blog or a post with their followers. This is an excellent way to quickly spread some information and has become a default tool in the hands of marketing managers.

Using Twitter Sharing Button along with Social Bookmarking

Using Twitter Sharing Button along with great Social Bookmarking can create a lot of marketing buzz for your business, sometimes even for free! Imagine this: You post a great blog and book mark it so that your friends view and like it and book mark it too. In addition you put a Twitter Sharing Button on your post. This way, the readers who like it quickly share it with their other Twitter Friends. When the friends read it, they book mark it on their preferred social bookmarking sites and that way your post not even spreads within hours, at the same time it’s gets persisted and bookmarked by more people than you could ever do with a limited budget. Think about it!

Courtesy: SachinWalia.Net (http://tinyurl.com/3dpyb53)

In one of my previous posts – “Smarketing – The Perfect Blend of Sales And Marketing” – I tried to put a new perspective on the way Sales and Marketing can be done. I provided my justification on why it makes lot of sense for Sales and Marketing efforts to merge and complement each other. However, I realized that even though it all makes sense and looks simple, it’s still really hard to implement in real life. In this article I will try to cover the top three reasons why such an endeavor could fail.

Are Your Sales and Marketing Teams “Doing Each Others’ Job” Or “Helping Each Other Out”?

Take for example an Email Marketing Campaign. When designing an Email Marketing Campaign, there is a lot that the Marketing Team can borrow from Sales. For example adding details of an upcoming promotion in the email, or perhaps using marketing technologies that seamlessly integrate with the company’s Sales CRM solution. However the “design” and “template” of the Email, or the “Marketing Slogan” & “Punch Line” is really something that Marketing Team should be doing. It’s not that a Sales guy cannot come up with a good marketing punch line; but get this: If the sales guys start spending too much time on thinking about marketing slogans and marketing strategies, who is going to “actually sell” the product!

One way out of this is to simply “use common sense”. See where to draw the line. Of course it’s not going to be easy. So use time management tools for the first few months to figure out where exactly the line exists in your company and then use that knowledge to teach your sales and marketing teams about how to effectively work with each other but not work on each others’ tasks.

Are You Merging Your Sales and Marketing Charts?

Another thing to watch out when working on a combined sales and marketing strategy is forgetting that at the end of the day these are two different tasks. At a granular level both these tasks run on different parameters and are measured by different parameters. For example using marketing related parameters to define and monitor your sales process will most probably make it worse and vice-versa.

Is Your Smarketing Effort Turning Into Resource Optimization?

Many people have this misconception that by effectively combining sales and marketing efforts they’ll be able to work on the same goals with lesser staff. That might come out to be true as you stern ahead and put new processes and p0licies in place to make smarketing work, but it definitely should not be your first (or even any) goal. Smarketing helps sales and marketing teams work in coherence. It does not, in any way, aim at delegating tasks between sales and marketing in an effort to optimize resource allocation. As explained earlier too, the last thing that you want to do is get sales work done from marketing folks and marketing work done from sales folks.

Have you tried combining sales and marketing efforts in your company? What was the reaction? What issues have you faced? Feel free to share!

Google DFP, as we all (well… most of us) know, is the “Self Service” Ad platform by Google. It was originally called DART and was part of the suite of products by DoubleClick (the company that Google bought… uh… Of Course!). Unlike the Google AdSense service, with DFP, you as a publisher get full control over when, where and how your various Ads would be displayed. DFP comes as a hosted solution for small businesses and a fully in-house deploy-able solution for big corporations.

In this article, I’d like to share my thoughts on the basic essence of a product like Google DFP, and see if it’d make sense have something similar in Facebook. I’m very new to DFP though; so if you have some great thoughts, please feel free to pitch in!

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The Need For A “Self Service Ad Server”

There are several reasons why someone would want to host an in-house server and manage all his/her Ads through that instead of going with a hosted solution. One of the main reasons that come to my mind is the ability to store all the traffic data in-house. Many companies for example would be paranoid about Google acting as a middle man and storing all their website analytics on their cloud. While ellipsis AdNet does the same too, but the difference is that we give the traffic history back to the publisher.

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Another main reason why I think someone would want to host an in-house Ad Server is that when the traffic processed by the publisher is large enough to the point that it makes no sense for a third party like Google to route and manage it. Personally I feel that it isn’t true and the only justification I can see is that after all Google needs to make some money to keep the product running and keep themselves profitable. And after some point there is just not enough ROI and Google would rather have the publisher themselves take care of all the traffic in their data center. So this is another reason, which is perhaps imposed by the Ad Solution Provider and not the publisher.

Advertising on Facebook

Now let’s talk about advertising on Facebook. I think to better understand the philosophy of how advertising works on Facebook we’ll have to step back a little from our current discussion of DFP and Self Service Advertising and understand the concept of Internet Marketing in general. Let me start with this: The one thing that people forget when using Facebook or Google is that they “just another website” on the Internet. In other words, they are a “private property” on the Internet – and so is just about any other website. And thus, if you are “advertising on Facebook”, or for example “advertising on Google”, you are really advertising on “a website” – not really on the Internet!

Having said that how is Advertising on Facebook different from say Self Service Advertising? It’s pretty different. As you can imagine that when you Advertise on Facebook, Facebook owns the rights of all the artifacts. It’s their website, it’s their area. Yes, they do allows “loaning/leasing” portions of their website for advertising, but that doesn’t mean that the area is yours for ever.

I think this is the basic essence that many website publishers forget when using Facebook for monetizing via advertisements. For example, imagine a fan page on facebook that you have started and have been really successful building a good fan base. Now you’d want to “advertise” there and would like to monetize from it. But guess what. It’s not “your domain”. It’s still Facebook’s domain. Facebook is paying for all the servers and maintenance to make sure that your fan page remains live. And so they have all the right to control what kind of advertisements show up on your fan page (if any).

So the best model for advertising on Facebook that would work will be perhaps the one where in Facebook would collaborate with high traffic fan page owners and perhaps let them have share of the pie. I don’t think such a solution exists right now but that’s something that Facebook should think about (if they aren’t right now). Won’t that be pretty much similar to the “Google Content Network”? I believe so; perhaps its smaller version in some sense because Google Content Network pretty much spreads all over the Internet and allows third party domains to leverage Google and host Ads using their AdSense technology. I don’t think that is relevant to Facebook, because Facebook.com is Facebook’s property. The only way Facebook can perhaps make a “true Content Network” is probably by partnering up with other Social Media companies, but that’s a totally separate discussion.

Is “Self Service Advertising” possible in Facebook?

Now that we have understood the fact that when you are advertising on Facebook, you are really advertising on a private domain, and so Facebook has all the right to own every thing that is displayed there; the question is: Is “Self Service Advertising” possible in Facebook? I think the answer (based on the solution and the infrastructure that Facebook has right now) is No. Feel free to correct me if I am wrong! but I think that the only reason “Self Service Advertising” was introduced in this World was when there was a need to move the Ad hosting infrastructure to the publisher. This is typically done when the publisher is processing enormous amount of traffic (as discussed earlier). However, as we know, in case of Facebook, it doesn’t even make sense because you are not really moving out of the Facebook.com domain. What do you think?

A true “Google DFP Like Solution” for Facebok: How would it look?

While this discussion needs a whole lot of time, I think in a nutshell, if Facebook opens up its channels and provides APIs to easily integrate the World outside their domain (and I’m not talking about the OAuth Integration), there are several ways by which Facebook should be able to off load the enormous bandwidth that some of their fan pages must be eating up today, and provide some sort of “Self Service Platform” to their “premium publishers”. Of course such a technology solution doesn’t exist as of now and at the same time when it comes it’s going to change the way people look at “Self Service Ad Platforms”. Until then we’ll have to live with what we have!

There are over 100 social media networks in the World. Let's forget the bottom 97; and you are left with the two main networks that pretty much define the current social media landscape. Yes I'm talking about facebook and twitter. And now we have Google with the Google+ creeping into this landscape.

In this article I will show some of the examples of how the growing number of Social Media Networks is causing headache, confusion and (for lack of better terms) lot of wastage of money in marketing.

While I have some ideas of how this can be minimized, but hey, I'm no "guru" here. So if you have a better idea, please do share!

The "What Message Goes Where" Problem

The biggest problem that marketing managers face is that how do you figure out what message goes on which Social Media Network. Simply copying and pasting the same message on all the networks might not be the best idea. The reason is that all Social Networks have their own "theme" and if your actions are not in sync with that "theme", you are bound to fail on that network. Starbucks for example does a wonderful job in managing their facebook and twitter pages. They use facebook for mainly having their fans share their thoughts about the company and their coffee. While they use twitter to mainly spread information about various company promotions and events. This works perfectly because they fall in line with the basic them of these Social Networks. For example, facebook is perfect for sharing ideas between friends while twitter is perfect for sharing quick information and running viral campaigns. Starbucks surely understands this and uses both the Social Media Networks accordingly.

The Problem Of Finding The "Non-Followers"

Managing hundreds of thousands of comments in various Social Networks can become an involving activity. Due to this many companies end up just barely managing their own company pages and Social Media accounts. There are hardly any good solutions available right now that allow companies look around in other forums and groups in various Social Networks where people might be talking about anything negative about the company. In essence, the problem of managing the followers is so involving to solve that companies hardly get a chance to follow what the "non-followers" are saying about them. Unfortunately, there are no good solutions available to solve this problem. My best advise to solve this problem is to perhaps provide incentives to your "followers" so that if they find something negative going on about your company, they can be rewarded to inform you about such instances.

The Problem Of "Consolidated Reporting"

Twitter sends out a notification whenever a new person starts following you. facebook sends out weekly statistics about your Ad spending. Every Social Media Network has its own reporting mechanism. This creates a very annoying problem of reconciling and consolidating all these reports. As per my knowledge there are no good solutions to solve this problem. Most companies have their own home grown methods to reconcile and consolidate reports. Obviously this comes with its own associated costs and the problem of keeping up with ever changing reporting formats. Perhaps all Social Media Networks should come up with a common reporting format so that consolidated reporting solutions can be built on top of that.

These are obviously some of the problems of Social Media Marketing. What are your thoughts?

What do you see in the picture above? The article is about “Excess Skin After Weight Loss. The Ad on the header is from WeightWatchers. While the Ad on the side if from Febreze! While WeightWatchers Ad still makes sense to me, I can’t think of any reason why Febreze would want to advertise on this page!

In this article I’d like to take this above picture as an example and show how context sensitive advertising is great but when mixed with bid based advertising, it can go a little ugly.

Keyword Ranking and Keyword Bidding in Context Sensitive Advertising

Context Sensitive Advertising is heavily based on the the relevance of keywords associated with the Ad and the content on the page where the Ad is being shown. There are lot of algorithms to make this happen. But in essence, the logic is pretty much based on coming up with some way to rank the keywords associated with the Ad against the content on the page. So for example the keywords of a given Ad might rank higher on one page and lower on some other page.

But what happens when there are two advertisers with almost similar products and almost similar keywords? That’s where things become hard. The only way to decide whose Ad should show up is based on who would be willing to pay more for the Ad! And that’s when bidding comes handy.

Is Bidding the only justified method to resolve whose Ad should show up?

In my opinion, the answer is No. To me bid based advertising looks like a “short cut hack” to the actual problem. Instead of the system deciding which Ad should show up based on who is paying more, it should really be left to the content provider as to whose Ad should show up. Of course, the content provider might choose to pick the highest bidder, but in my experience most content providers are very protective about their content and what kind of Ad shows up on their blog or website. And so it would make more sense for the content provider to pick the right Ad.

How Content Provider can be given more control in Context Sensitive Advertising?

Unfortunately, there’s no easy method available right now. One method that comes to my mind is perhaps an open and transparent network of merchants and publishers who come together to collaborate with each other for the purpose of advertising.

OK so you have put together a brilliant team of techie folks who have huddled together and turned your great idea into reality. But when it comes to going out there and selling it, you realize how hard it is to make even a single sale. You think that the idea is so cool that it should sell all by itself! As every day passes by you start to realize how difficult it is to sell even the most brilliant idea; and you start envying those crappy products that make no sense to you but are supposedly selling just great!

That’s when you sit back and think what’s missing. Yes if you have been there, or are there, you know what I am talking about. I am talking about “The Marketing Plan”. OK, so now you know what’s missing. What have you done to solve this problem? Perhaps start coming up with a marketing plan; talk with few marketing agencies in your area? Or check out what has worked in the past.

But here’s the interesting problem. A marketing plan that worked in the past for some company that’s doing something similar to what you are doing, might not, and most probably will not work for you! What will make you crazy is the outrageous money you are going to spend in coming up with “that perfect marketing plan”; and to your surprise it won’t give the kind of results you were looking for! As long as your marketing efforts don’t recoil back and hit your image (God that would be a mess), you should take it positively and learn from it.

So how do you solve this problem? Well, the real answer to be frank is that you don’t solve it! You just don’t take it as a problem and don’t try to solve it! In other words, think outside the box. Think about who is going to use your product and how. Remember that story of a boy who, when asked about the benefits of a news paper, told that you can make a boat, a hat and a frog out of it?

A marketing plan doesn’t have to make sense to start with. Many great marketing plans evolve just like a great solution does. A great marketing plan is one that changes with time and morphs itself into what clings on in people’s minds. It might not make sense to start with, but eventually it will.

That doesn’t mean that if your plan it completely outrageous and bold it is going to be a definite hit! What it means is that dare to think outside the box. And try it out on a small scale to test the waters so to say. Don’t throw your current idea down the drain. A great marketing plan always morphs. If you completely change it you are throwing out a message “I messed up” or even worst “I didn’t know what the heck I was doing”. That’s one message you shouldn’t be conveying. A morphing message would convey “Hey what I wanted to say means this too!”.

Have you tried to go out of the box and came up with a marketing plan that didn’t make sense but then eventually took off and everyone said “I kind of knew it’s going to rock the first time you told me…”.

Happy Marketing!