Ellen Tsang

Continuing from my previous blog post about AdWords, today I will be talking about how to make the most of your budget and refine your AdWords campaign by calculating your Max CPC (cost per click) and benefiting from competitor intelligence. Eliminate wasted spend and save your dough for other good uses! Nobody has an infinite amount of marketing dollars to spend, but this is especially important for small companies and start-ups.

Calculating Your Max CPC

Before you can finalize your keyword list, you must first make sure your CPCs (cost per click) makes sense. This will prevent you from going after keywords where there’s no chance of being profitable. It’s better to run these numbers now before you’ve sunk time and money into a campaign destined to fail.

• Max CPC = (profit per customer) x (1 – profit margin) x (website conversion rate) – Use this formula to calculate your Max CPC. You need to know your profit per customer, profit margin, and website conversion rate to calculate your Max CPC. If you don’t know these numbers, then you’ll need to guesstimate, or set up tracking to more accurately calculate them.
• For example, let’s say your average profit per customer is $500, and out of 1,000 website visitors you convert 10 into customers. That means you have a 1% website conversion rate. If you are comfortable with a 30% profit margin, then here’s how you would calculate your Max CPC:

  Max CPC = $500 x (1 – 0.30) x 1% = $3.50

• Compare your business’s Max CPC to the estimated keyword CPC in the Keyword Tool – This is to see if you can afford to advertise using that keyword. For example, if your Max CPC is $5 and the estimated CPC for that particular keyword is$4, then you know there’s a good chance you can profitably advertise on that keyword.

• Choose keywords where the estimated CPC is in the neighbourhood of your Max CPC – To make sure you can afford a particular keyword, you should check the CPCs every time before you enable the keyword. Usually, choosing a keyword with an estimated CPC which is equal to or less than your Max CPC is a good idea. But sometimes, you can still choose a keyword with an estimated CPC which is slightly higher than your Max CPC, if you feel the keyword is very relevant and will be successful. Just make sure to keep it within the neighbourhood of your Max CPC, and you can even try balancing it off by choosing other keywords with a lower estimated CPC in the same campaign. Otherwise, you will ‘waste your dough’! For example, if your Max CPC is $3.50 and the estimated CPC for a keyword is $10, then you’ll need to first increase either your profit per customer or your conversion rate before you can profitably advertise on that particular keyword.

Competitor Intelligence

After you have a list of “buying intent” keywords that you’re confident you can afford, the next step is to reduce your risk by leveraging competitor intelligence. In most industries, you’ll find competitors who already have tested and optimized their AdWords campaigns. That means they have figured out which keywords, ads, and landing pages work and do not work in your market. Won’t it be great to find out what your competitors are doing? Well there is actually an awesome tool for you to do exactly this! This is a very useful and nifty competitive intelligence tool called KeywordSpy. KeywordSpy collects, organizes, and provides easy access to all of your competitors’ historical advertising information. I have found this tool very helpful in creating my own keyword phrases for my AdWords campaigns, arguably, even more useful than the Google AdWords Keyword Planner (read more about this in my previous blog post)! But shhh, don’t tell everyone though! 😉

• To use KeywordSpy, simply go to www.KeywordSpy.com and click on the Free Trial – This is in the right upper corner (see image below). This is apparently a  LIFETIME Free Trial! So that’s great because you don’t have to worry about your trial ending.
  
• You can search via specific competitors – Simply copy one of your competitor domains into the search bar and select the ‘Domains’ option as shown below. (To find your competitors, simply type your keywords into Google and then copy the advertiser domains. If you already have a few competitors in mind, you can also insert their domains into the search.)
• You can also search via Keywords – This may be useful if you want to quickly see what competitors are doing without having to Google up their domains separately (skips a step and saves time!). For example, if you were a property management company in Vancouver, you could search for the keyword “property management vancouver”. You can also see how many PPC advertisers there are for a specific keyword, its CPC, and other statistics. But it may be better to put the keyword through Google AdWords’ official Keyword Planner to double check, as that is probably more accurate.
• Make sure to choose the right Location – For example, if you are located in Canada, then choose ‘Canada’ in the drop down menu before you click the Search button. Otherwise, the results you see may not be as relevant to you!
• See the keywords your competitor is advertising on – Say you choose to search by a specific competitors’ domain. When the search is complete, click on the PPC Keywords tab to see all of the keywords your competitor is advertising on (see image below).In this example, the competitor is advertising on 50 keywords and you can see the date when they first started to advertise on each keyword. The longer an advertiser has been advertising, the better, because that implies the keyword is generating sales. If the keyword was not profitable, then a smart advertiser would pause the keyword. (Important Note: Not all advertisers are smart, so don’t blindly use this rule of thumb.)
  

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• Next, add them to your list of keywords – You can either manually search through the list, or you can export them all, remove irrelevant keywords, and then add them to the list of keywords you already found in Google’s Keyword Planner.
• View your competitors’ ad copies – When you’re done reviewing keywords, click on the Ads tab to review your competitor’s ad copy (see image below).
  

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  Again, you can see the date when the ad was tested, which indicates whether or not the ad is performing well. I recommend you review several competitors’ ads to see what types of offers resonate with your target market. Also, while you’re reviewing the ads, look for a way to differentiate your business from all of your competitors. Differentiation is critical to AdWords success!You can also directly search for ad copies by entering ad copy content into the search bar and selecting the ‘Ad Copies’ option (see image below).
  
  You can see important information to tell you how successful each particular competitor is to help you decide which one to look at and potentially emulate, such as: ROI, search volume, CPC, and position.
  

So folks, that’s it for today!

Best of luck to all your Google AdWords campaigns and feel free to comment to tell me about your experiences of AdWords, or any things you found useful to know when you were managing your AdWords!

Related Links:

http://blog.kissmetrics.com/profitable-google-adwords-campaign/

http://www.verticalresponse.com/blog/5-ways-to-eliminate-wasted-spend-in-google-adwords/

What Is Google AdWords?

Google AdWords is Google’s advertising system in which advertisers bid on certain keywords in order for their clickable ads to appear in Google’s search results. For example, if you search ‘Shoes’ in Google, various ads will show up on the top and the side of the page, like the ad for Clarks Shoes (see image below).

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Brands should be aware of the power of AdWords. When set up and managed properly, AdWords is one of the best sources for new customers. Launching a new AdWords search campaign can be an exciting process! But it can also be confusing, or even frustrating, for first users (as I had experienced myself while setting up my first AdWords campaign). So here I am to discuss how to best create and manage a profitable Google AdWords campaign! Here are the key components to a successful and rewarding AdWords campaign:

1. Choosing The Right Keywords
2. Don’t Waste Your Dough! – Calculating Max CPC (cost per click)
3. Competitor Intelligence
4. Powerful USP (unique selling proposition)
5. Irresistible Offer
6. Compelling Ads
7. Congruent Landing Pages
8. Conversion Tracking
9. AdWords Settings For Success
10. Optimization

Choosing Suitable Keywords (Customer Demand)

Today we will be talking about Customer Demand, basically, key tips and tricks to choosing suitable keywords for your business. Below are some essential factors you should consider when setting up your Google AdWords campaign:

• Verify that there is search volume for what you’re going to offer – Adwords search advertising is useful when your customers are searching for your product or service in Google. But before you get too excited about creating your first campaign, you need to first verify there is in fact search volume for what you’re going to offer. If there is no search volume, then that tells you no one is typing that phrase into Google. There is no point in advertising on keywords no one is searching so choose keywords carefully based on search volume.
• Use the Google AdWords Keyword Suggestion Tool (https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal) – The keyword tool acts much like a thesaurus. You enter in phrases you think your prospects are searching, and Google tells you other similar, relevant phrases. Google will also tell you how often people search these phrases, how competitive the keywords are in AdWords, and how much it’ll cost to advertise on each keyword. All of this information will help you determine which keywords you want to use in your first campaign.
• Make sure the Advanced Options are set – If you’re in Canada, then set the Location to Canada and set the Language to English. The Device should default to desktops and laptops, which is what you want unless you’re targeting only mobile devices.
• Click on the Columns drop down menu – Make sure to check Competition, Local Monthly Searches, and Approximate CPC (cost per click).
• Use keyword Match Type setting called “Phrase” match – When looking for keyword ideas, it gives you an accurate sense of how many relevant phrases there are per month. Also use Phrase match in your own keyword settings for more relevant ads and much more control over your ads than Broad match (default setting). Phrase match keywords will trigger ads when the EXACT phrase is part of the keyword typed into Google, unlike Broad match, which will show your ad to ANY search phrase Google thinks is relevant to your keyword. To change your keyword to Phrase match, simply add quotes around the keyword, or you could also change it easily by going to the ‘Campaigns’ tab →  ‘Keywords’ tab → Click check box to select all keywords → Click ‘Edit’ → Click ‘Change match type’ → Change from ‘Broad match’ to ‘Phrase match’ (see screenshots below).
  
  

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• Is the person searching this keyword likely to buy my product or service? – Or is the person more likely just doing research with no intention of making a purchase? In other words, what is the intent of the keyword? When starting out, you’ll want to advertise on what I call “buying intent” keywords where the person is clearly looking to buy. Also, choose specific keywords targeted to your specific target market to avoid wasting your budget on people unlikely to buy. For example, if you were a property management company only for the Vancouver BC area, you may want to use a keyword such as “property management vancouver bc” instead of simply “property management”. A more generic keyword also tends to be more competitive, hence have a higher CPC (cost per click).
• Can I afford to advertise on the keyword? – This leads us to my next blog post on this topic, “Don’t Waste Your Dough!”
  which will be about calculating Max CPC (cost per click) for each keyword.

Stay tuned! 🙂

Relevant Links:

Profitable Google AdWords Campaign

Understanding Google’s Quality Score

What The Heck Is AdWords Quality Score And Why Does It Matter Anyway?

Revisiting the Economics of Google Quality Score: Why QS Is Up to 200% More Valuable in 2013

There are many free tools, apps and features on Twitter that will help different businesses boost their income and reputation.

Among these are Twitter contests where people can learn more about your company while increasing your engagement volume. These are also free and you can gain a huge following in just a few days, sometimes even just minutes.

So How Can Twitter Contests Help Maximize Business Growth?

1. Strengthen brand awareness – Get your name out there! Holding a contest will usually induce people to talk about you and promote earned media. This will increase the chances of your company being in a consumer’s initial consideration set when they are on their consumer decision journey to purchase a product or service.
2. Boost your reputation – Twitter contests will put businesses in the spotlight temporarily and set you apart from competitors in the same industry.
3. Personalize your account – Twitter users are more attracted to companies with personality. Show off your unique brand personality through the contest and at the same time show that there are real human beings behind the account! This will make your company more approachable and the contest more fun and interactive.
4. Gain more followers – When people join your Twitter contest, one of the requirements will usually have them follow you.
5. Increase revenue – Long term benefits include bringing in more customers even after the contest has finished. Be sure to give them relevant content each time to maintain their interest and keep them joining the next time you launch a contest online. If you introduce your company and products to the right customers,, sales often increase significantly after!
6. Take advantage of freebies – One of the best things is: starting a Twitter contest will not cost you anything! Although you might have to give out a few products or freebies depending on the mechanics of the game. This allows you to maximize your budget and spend on other potentially useful Twitter advertising products if you wish.
7. Have FUN while building your brand! – Hosting a Twitter contest will give the impression that your business is highly concerned in catering to and serving customers, not the other way around. Make it appear that your primary objective is to offer useful and reliable products, as well provide good customer service to gain a huge following. People will be attracted more to companies that do not seem only interested in making a quick sale. A Twitter competition is one of the best ways to target customers without being invasive or being a hard-sell.

Relevant Links:

http://www.hashtags.org/platforms/twitter/how-twitter-contests-help-maximize-business-growth/ (Also see ‘Related Articles You May Enjoy’ at bottom of page)

http://www.hashtags.org/platforms/twitter/twitter-contest-guidelines-101/

http://www.vtldesign.com/inbound-marketing/social-media/twitter/five-things-that-make-a-great-twitter-contest/

http://socialmediatoday.com/bryannagy/1211641/coca-cola-s-twitter-contest-heart-truth

http://beeliked.com/social-media-buzz/5-awesome-twitter-competition-ideas/

http://maximizesocialbusiness.com/twitter-contest-ideas-7457/

http://www.cleverwood.be/blog/2011/04/twitter-contest-ideas/

My team and I have recently come across a little hurdle: our client was hesitant to utilize social media, despite the fact that many of his competitors had already dived in. Why? Fear for lack of control. His concern was: “If there are negative comments, what should we do?” The first step to this? Plan ahead with a social media response triage!

Definition:

Social Media Triage – a simple form of decision tree that allows us to take a systematic approach to how we go about assessing and responding to messages, posts, etc.

Example:

One social media triage I quite like is Air Force’s Blog Assessment flow chart:

The fact that ‘Trolls’ is used as a category is a good enough reason for me to like it, but I also like how the Air Force’s social media triage highlights 5 key considerations when conversing and responding: Transparency, Sourcing, Timeliness, Tone, and Influence.

Many companies underestimate the tone in a brand message and sometimes even tarnish brand reputation as a result. Take a look at this Cineworld Twitter spat example:

Read the full conversation here.

Even if the customer may not be completely correct, what they may not realize is that, people often judge an individual or brand on social media based on HOW they do something, sometimes even more than on WHAT they do. Publicly arguing with a customer is a big nono, regardless of whether it is on the social sphere or in real life. Tone and a consistent brand voice are incredibly vital factors on social media and should not be taken too lightly! One possible solution to misguided customers is to offer to take the discussion offline, e.g. offer a phone number where they can contact you, and comment online afterwards to say that the problem has been resolved. A company can customize a social media triage to include guidelines such as this according to their needs.

Looking to create a social media triage for your personal brand or company? Here are some useful tips on how you can make the social media triage work for you!

Key Takeaways:

1) Learning to participate in the social web – not just listening and monitoring, but responding as well – involves understanding that a level of freedom must be given to any staff member using social media.

If you don’t give them a level of freedom, it will become very tedious and take a long time before tweets, posts, or responses can be pushed out. But some restrictions or guidelines should still be put into place, for example, distribute a ‘Tone of Voice’ guideline to staff in charge of social media.

2) Social media triage goes hand in hand with a crisis communications plan, but doesn’t replace it.

While a triage system can be helpful for novice social media programs, make sure your communication process isn’t complicating problems. After all, social media is meant to make communications easier, not more tedious.

3) Sometimes it’s okay to step back and wait to see if your community steps in.

You don’t always have to respond to everything, even if someone says something bad about your brand, product or service, especially if they are a ‘Troll’ or a ‘Rager’ (see Air Force social media triage above). Sometimes, other consumers may realize that the poster is a ‘troll’ and simply disregard their comment, or sometimes, they may even defend your brand for you!

4) You can establish a time-frame for response.

This can ensure timeliness of your response.

5) A triage chart is a concrete way to show staff how your social media policy works.

Not all staff will know what to do when your brand first sets out into the social media universe. Having a social media triage will ensure better control over the consistency and quality of posts. This is especially useful for companies who have had little prior experience in social media.

6) Be mindful of Tone, as well as Transparency, Sourcing, Timeliness, and Influence when conversing online.

The tone of voice should always be professional and reflect a brand’s personality. Hence, be careful when outsourcing social media management.

7) When delegating tweets to outside agencies, contractors or even junior employees, assign them limited permissions.

The right social media management tool, such as HootSuite Teams, will let you designate which team members can draft and which can actually publish tweets. Drafts can be fed into an approval queue to be vetted by senior management before publishing, avoiding PR disasters. This may take a longer time, so you may want to skip this for routine tweets and only review ‘irregular’ tweets, for example, tweets in response to a customer complaint. It’s all about finding a balance, so companies may have to explore a bit before they find what’s best for them.

Relevant Links:

10 Reasons to Have a Social Media Response Triage Flowchart @ SocialFish

YMCA triage chart

Air Force Blog Assessment

5 Tips for Creating More Efficient Social Media Processes @ Mashable

When Crisis Strikes: Four Do’s and Don’ts of Social Media Triage

If you are a YouTuber, blogger, curater, or any other type of content creator in today’s vast social media universe, you will know that a viral hit can mean everything. Creating viral content isn’t easy no matter how you look at it. (Though sometimes, if you are lucky, you may create viral content by chance.) The larger and more active your following is, the greater your chance of having your content go viral. So how does one create viral content? The following infographic, The Anatomy Of Going Viral, presented by SingleGrain, gives us insights and tips into how exactly we can do this.

The infographic takes you through the key parts of what has become viral in the past, and what you could incorporate in order to reach the same status. Also on the infographic are a couple of examples that will help push your inspiration level further so that you can shoot for the stars!

Click Infographic To Enlarge

Additional Key Takeaways:

• Look inside yourself for inspiration – What catches your eye? What makes you sit through a whole clip without moving an inch? Where do you usually find viral content?
• Don’t only constantly think about making viral content – If you were constantly thinking about creating viral content, you would most likely have a hard time producing the on-the-edge content constantly. Instead, spend your time building a strong following.
• Build a following that enjoys your content – With time, that will serve as your engine to project your content into the Internet stratosphere, where it will be picked up by hoards of blogs and websites all around the globe. The larger and more active your following is, the greater your chance of getting a viral submission or post.
• You never know prior to posting whether something will become viral – So just go for it!
• Enjoy what you create – If you don’t enjoy it, how can you expect others to? Have fun. Be creative and stay hungry. That’s all it usually takes.

Are you ready to create your own viral content? Well, what are you waiting for?

The world is your oyster.

Relevant Links:

http://www.bitrebels.com/technology/ultimate-viral-content-guide/

What is Membership Marketing?

Membership marketing is the acquiring, engaging, upgrading, and renewing of members – it is the cornerstone for associations and relationship driven organizations.

These can include clubs such as the Kowloon Cricket Club (KCC) in Hong Kong, where members have to pay an annual membership fee to use the club facilities and go to its events. I believe the insights below would be truly helpful for them, as well as countless other associations and businesses which have a membership program.

Top 25 Insights From Marketing Pros

Membership Marketing Blog have asked 200 membership professionals to share in their own words what were the most important or successful lessons that they have learned in membership marketing. These direct quotes have been distilled down to the top 25 responses below:

1. A multi-channel approach is best. There isn’t any silver bullet. A variety of techniques, well executed elicits success.

2. You can’t spend too much time or money on marketing.

3. When you actually do a recruitment campaign, they join. When you engage with your members, they stay. When you analyze the data, you find a nugget of information that can change all of your preconceived ideas.

4. There is no such thing as a Non-Member….only potential members. You must keep trying and promoting; they will never buy – if you do not (personally) believe in what you are trying to sell; this includes the Association itself…not just the ‘goods’ that the Association offers.

5. Members need to be reminded multiple times about their membership dues. It always amazes me that you can contact a member 7 times and then 1 year later, they are “surprised” they are no longer a member of our Association.

6. Personal contact with people. Connecting with individuals at conferences, meetings, in their workplace, or on the phone has been the most successful for us. Staying connected through e-mail was second in our marketing plan.

7. Market early, market often!

8. Like the economy, membership marketing goes through cycles. You need to make sure your message speaks to what is motivating people in tough times and be prepared for when the changes come.

9. Focus on what makes your association unique. What niche do you fill that no one else can – market that to potential members?

10. Positive word-of-mouth is worth its weight in gold. If you can get your existing members to recruit new folks then you can just sit back and count the cash.

11. That the membership model is rapidly changing as a result of increased access to free information.

12. 80/20/10. Staying motivated even when you see low membership involvement. Remembering that 80% will not be active members, 20% will be active participants and 10% will take on leadership roles.

13. It’s not easy.

14. It is incumbent upon any association to first provide value to its membership and then to communicate that value to the members on an ongoing basis. Building community and member engagement is the key to successful membership marketing.

15. Membership marketing is not a silo unto the membership department alone. It requires coordination across multiple departments, lest it appear that the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing. This remains an ongoing challenge in my association.

16. This survey has reminded me of what I have learned, and ashamed to say not implementing half of it. I’m the only full-time staff, but I know better.

17. That there are very few “new” ideas and listening to what others are doing is the best way to improve your business.

18. The most important lesson I’ve learned is test EVERYTHING! Also, agility is paramount. You have to be agile enough to change your strategy, approach or messaging quickly.

19. Never stop doing it. We are seeing results today of marketing we continued to do through 09 even though there was a downturn.

20. Direct mail works for our association. And it works especially well if you continue to test your campaign ideas. The process to change is constant and important. We’ve learned what works well with young members, what works well with older members, whether advocacy is important to certain contingencies, and more.

21. I have learned to apply the same discipline in marketing as we do in software/standards development.

22. You must continually examine your marketing mix to ensure that you are maximizing ROI, utilizing the most cost-effective channels for different audience segments, and placing retention and acquisition efforts and expenditures in the most appropriate balance to meet organizational goals.

23. Without accurate and comprehensive performance data and statistics on membership activities (financial, marketing, costs, lifetime value, recruitment, retention, on boarding, etc.) it is virtually impossible to determine the health and success of the membership program.

24. 1. Test new things and track everything–it’s the only way you’ll know what works and doesn’t work. 2. Recruiting new members by direct mail trumps e-mail marketing 100 times over. 3. Many of those in management do not understand the value of marketing–or the difference between good and bad marketing efforts/techniques. So, it’s important to educate them and toot your own horn to help them understand. But don’t get your feelings hurt if they do not! 4. Member testimonials add considerable value and spark to all.

25. The right list and the right offers are key to prospecting. Retaining members is the work of the organization. Delivering the value promised through marketing is key to renewals.

And here is a 26th bonus comment!

26. Most important lesson is how critical membership marketing is to our success (and how frustrating it is that we don’t have enough staff to do it well.

Relevant Links:

http://membershipmarketing.blogspot.ca/2010/11/top-25-lessons-learned-in-membership.html

To give us some ideas of how we might integrate social media links in our next project, Gisele Muller @ Web Design Ledger has kindly put together a collection of 55 Examples of Well Integrated Social Media Icons in Web Design for our inspiration.

“I believe that everybody already understands the importance of social media, and incorporating it into a web design. To get the attention of your viewers to your social media links you need to use both strategy and good taste. To design a good call-to-action social media icon/link you need to think about its positioning, its color, approach, style, size, everything. You also need to keep in mind that you want to get the attention of your viewers to the social side of your website without distracting from what’s important, such as the content. In my opinion, a good social media link is one that you have no trouble to finding and when you find it, you like what you see.”

– Gisele Muller @ Web Design Ledger

What’s Up Cupcake?

See More Here @ Web Design Ledger

For too long, e-commerce has been all about how fast a customer can get in and out of a site to complete a purchase. Immediate gratification has helped turn Amazon into a retail giant. But now, companies are trying a new approach — social commerce.

Social commerce is all about inspiration and product discovery. As shown below, sites like Pinterest, Wanelo, OpenSky, and others belong in the Top-Of-Funnel category, and are more like digital catalogs or virtual malls where shoppers can browse and connect with people interested in the same products and brands. But entrepreneurs and retailers are anxious to transform that interest into sales.

The new report from BI Intelligence analyzes how companies are adding value at different stages of the retail and e-commerce process. To do so they’re building social networks around e-commerce platforms, partnering with brands, or otherwise transforming social commerce’s strengths in Pinterest-style digital window-shopping into a clear value proposition.

Key Takeaways:

Here’s how social commerce companies are driving sales:

• It’s not about click-to-buy: Social commerce is not simply transactional — it’s not just about offering a click-to-buy link next to an offer on Facebook. Social commerce will never be what some have wanted it to be, an “Amazon killer.” It will be about enveloping the shopper in an experience, akin to a digital catalog or a virtual shopping mall.
• What will help social commerce grow as a sales driver? The key is to help connect the funnel end-to-end, or to connect different mediums — say, social media and TV — to help coax a consumer down the funnel. The shopper may not buy the first time, but social commerce will become a valuable link in the chain.
• There are a few ways to encourage purchases: Re-targeted advertising may be one missing link. It enables social commerce to connect the sales funnel from end-to-end by serving ads that remind users of products they have browsed across the Web but have not yet purchased. So far, only Facebook has developed this capability.
• Also: Clever merchandising and user interfaces allow for sticky merchant-to-consumer relationships that can help nudge a consumer toward purchase over time.
• Referrals shouldn’t be discounted: Another solution is for social commerce to develop as a sales referral engine, and take a cut of the sales. If social commerce sites have a large enough audience, even a low referral and conversion rate will result in a good revenue stream. But tracking needs to improve.
• Facebook has the largest share of social-generated e-commerce sales: But Twitter, Pinterest, and Email are catching up in 2013.

The Social Commerce Web by Killer Infographics

Related Links:

Read More @ Business Insider

The Social Commerce Web @ Killer Infographics

How can marketers make their brand STAND OUT in a world where global advertising generates roughly $475 billion every year, and the average city-dweller sees 5000 advertisements per day? Minute MBA shows us some of their insights.

Key Takeaways

1. Product Placement – For example, Apple’s products appeared in 891 television shows. How did they do it? By simply sending free products to the right places.
2. Tapping Into New Senses – Scent dispensers can be found at train stations, on buses, and more, dispelling scents along with advertisements. Dunkin’ Donuts reported a 29% sales increase at locations situated near scent marketing dispensers.
3. Entertaining Where No-one Has Entertained Before – Captive Media has developed urine-controlled video games at men’s urinals which are installed in washrooms to entertain and advertise to men who answer nature’s call. A hilariously unique way of advertising!

In today’s marketplace, every company needs an effective website. Of course, the purposes and needs of each company’s site will be unique, but every company should have a site that presents a professional image to visitors. That image should also be an accurate representation of the company and should work with other branding efforts to present consistent messages to customers. Vandelay Design features 40 well-designed corporate websites in their blog for our inspiration.

Blackberry:

See More Corporate Websites @ Vandelay Design