New Wave Marketing 101: Keeping It Above the Fold and Other Stupid Ideas

Just read an article by some crack designer (http://iampaddy.com/lifebelow600/) telling me that it’s no longer  “de rigeur” to worry about keeping web content ‘above the fold.’ People will scroll without a problem; so longer web pages are fine… fine, I tell you.

I’m about to blow a gasket.

For years… years… every tin pot designer and web expert has been SCREAMING about keeping copy above the flippin’ fold. That line was Gospel. I think Jesus said as much at The Sermon on the Mount.

I ask any of you who write copy, how many times have you heard that admonition? How often have you been asked to cut a story or change a paragraph or ruin a good subhead or make the font smaller all so you could keep it above the fold?

Hundreds. Thousands.

And here’s the worst part: we were stupid enough and weak enough to do it… to let a CODER tell us what sells… to change our story to fit a nonsensical idea.

People read books and magazines… and they have no problem turning pages. Case closed. The Internet didn’t change that. Write a good story, something compelling, and people will scroll and turn pages and click mice to follow along.

EVERYONE KNOWS THAT… BUT STILL WE PUT UP WITH A DECADE OF ‘ABOVE THE FOLD’ IDIOCY. (Ooo, it’s so elegant, so intelligent.)

I guess what’s making me sore (aside from thinking of all the unnecessary things I had to do to make things fit) is that the executives (VPs of marketing, supposedly) we worked for were so damned quick to believe… and so eager to trust a CODER. (Excuse me… they had numbers! Unfortunately, marketing and selling can’t be fully quantified with spreadsheets and algorithms.)

Copywriters, how low our stock has sunk. This idea of short, above the fold copy is a big reason why people now think anyone can write. Why pay for long copy and a good story when you don’t need to? No one’s reading more than one screen. Anyone can throw together a couple of sentences!”

Ah, I can hear it now… the sound of CODERS tap dancing around this new information… “Sure, it was good advice at the time but people have changed, blah, blah, blah.”

No, they haven’t. That’s why a good story is still called a ‘page turner.’

(What next? Are you going to tell me that keywording isn’t all it’s cracked up to be?)

New Wave Marketing 101: Overpaying, Over Doing and Over Estimating the Value of Social Media

If you saw the recent article about The State Department paying over $600K to raise its likes from 60,000 to 2,000,000 you should have laughed and then paused to reflect.

Here’s the takeaway: Most companies are over doing social media, over paying for the results and over estimating the value.

Here it is… short and sweet:

1. SM is a given for the vast majority of companies, but the simple basics are all that most need… because it’s expected – like a listing in the Yellow Pages was expected by consumers, even though no one saw results commensurate with cost.
2. CEOs and internal marketing departments in B2C and B2B are enamored of SM and frightened to be left behind, so they let any pretty face come in and sell them on likes and Google+ and tweets and you name it. Like taking candy from a baby… fools chasing numbers that don’t translate into sales.
3. Results are so poor that in any other media we would all run screaming from the field. But Google has us convinced that .75% is a pretty darn good return. I was a magazine editor/publisher for 20 years. If I had to sell that number to advertisers I would have been laughed out of the room.
4. Only two types of products/companies really benefit from the all out SM campaign: small, disruptive companies/products and huge multinationals. That’s it. Why these two?
• The big, big and maybe only significant effect SM has had on marketing is that for the first time consumers are finding you (78% find companies/products, not the other way around) and when they do, they’ve already developed an idea of who you are. You need to affect these preconceptions and this has traditionally been the realm of advertising; and if you can afford it, big ads with frequency still beat SM.
  
  But if you don’t have the bucks, SM allows you to disrupt markets, attack big market leaders and build status and belief with ‘minimal’ cost. This idea works with both B2B companies and consumer products trying to break through or disrupt an established market.
  
  But once you've hit mid-sized, SM is a minor necessity. You’re not disruptive, you have some media budget, you only need a basic presence.

• Then, there are a few, just a few, huge companies that need to present a human face: Wal-Mart, General Electric, GM, etc. -- companies that most people see as cold and faceless. Intelligent SM works well for them as branding, not sales. 

But most companies are not this big and do not need to be humanized. I don't expect Big O tires to show me their human side -- I do expect or at least appreciate a bit of humanity from Blue Cross Blue Shield or Shell Oil, etc.

If you’re not in one of these two categories, then SM is a small part of your marketing efforts these days. The blush is off the rose. For you to expect big results (and for you to pay big bucks to the plethora of SM pundits and overblown, egotistical coders and SEO ‘liars’) from minuscule return rates is just silly.

Look, say hello and thanks to your customers, explain what you do, offer a sale, improve your customer service, attract good people to hire, then get the hell out of SM.

The rest is plain nuts!

Another Company Bites the Dust – But Internet ‘Gurus’ Get Their Money

This is a very unhappy ‘I told you so’ on my part.

But it’s like clockwork… sad, fatalistic, inevitable... a warning from Cassandra that goes unheeded.

A very promising company has just gone under. Sure, there are a lot of reasons, but primary was the decision to spend big bucks on Internet/SEO/Adword gurus. These Net guys got a relatively large sum to build an online presence that would virtually ‘guarantee’ sales and top-of-the-page organic SEO.

Remember, these were the guys who proudly boasted that they had built 159 landing pages to make sure the word got out to every corner of the digital world. (See The Big Lie: Software Is Eating Marketing).

Problem was, these guys weren’t marketers. Problem was the owner believed that metrics could boost sales rather than solid marketing. Problem was the owner paid good money for his web presence but did very little and spent very little to develop a coherent message/story for his product.

But the web guys were so confident their strategy would work – the same strategy they use for every company regardless of product.

As predicted, the 159 landing pages and blogs and tweets and Facebook pages all went for naught. No story, no sales. Period.

So the company goes bust, good friends are out of work… while the Internet guys move gleefully to yet another company, making the same promises and taking the same large chunk out of the budget.

In a letter to the company president sent six months ago, here was my warning…

There is so much chatter about new algorithms, the decline of keywords, the rise of unique content, the decline of multiple sites, etc., I focus on the long-term narrative and customer expectations. If that messaging is right, Internet professionals will know how to break the copy above the fold and those types of things. 

But… If people don’t understand or believe your message, or don’t see the need for your product, all the CTRs and CPCs and closing rates and page hits won’t really translate into the type of sales you’re looking for.

Again, simple advice that went unheeded.

Digital Catch-22 Has Stolen Marketing… Right from Under Our Noses

Let’s be honest -- marketing as most of us know it no longer exists.

There are several reasons for this and many of them lie at the feet of marketers themselves: poorly conceived campaigns, slow delivery of the creative, the attitude that we are ‘ar-teests,’ the derivative nature of most of our work these past two decades and agency billing procedures that are a micrometer short of highway robbery.

Marketers have been replaced by IT and software guys who have redefined our art/craft so that they can claim to be marketing experts. They define the job so they are the job. And that job is numbers, numbers, numbers.

Better still, here’s the new marketing task in a nutshell:

Trick consumers into seeing ads for products they don’t want and don’t believe in.

Sure, larger, more sophisticated companies still understand the need for marketing in the sense of defining a market, positioning a product and telling an emotional narrative that drives sales. Please look at the Samsung Galaxy III spot… the story it tells, the images it uses and how it’s positioned Samsung as superior to the iPhone. That’s marketing.

But most medium to smaller companies have been convinced by the plethora of Internet/SEO/automated sales people that they have no need for this type of marketing and storytelling. Instead they willingly spend on software and analytics and email lists and multiple landing pages. Numbers, numbers, metric, metrics.

Here’s the cool part: the metrics are meaningless. They were created by digital guys to match the capabilities of the software. It’s a shell game: we measure those measurements that we can measure. Catch-22 if there ever was one.

Do these metrics equate to sales or profits? Rarely, if ever. But by God they can show their clients digitally-generated numbers, so they must be true.

They toss a bone to ‘content,’ but don’t care, really. Had Google not mentioned that new algorithms would be driven by content, these Net people wouldn’t give marketing narratives the time of day.

You know that old line about ‘sell the sizzle not the steak’? These guys sell neither.

Again, they have one goal: To trick consumers into seeing ads for products that consumers don’t want and don’t believe in.

That’s Marketing 101 in 2013. Live with it.

Amazingly, these guys preach the need for a personalized message but then send unwanted and totally impersonal junk to any name they can get their hands on. Personalized? They can’t spell it.

Now here’s the real Catch-22. Because these automated mavens have the numbers and count the numbers, they never fail.(Remember what Stalin said about elections? He didn’t care who voted as long as he got to count the votes.) If a product doesn’t sell it’s because of a weak story -- fire the $20 an hour copywriter. But, if the product does sell, it’s all in the software and programming.

And gullible CEOs are lining up for the privilege.

Did I just read that 83% of company execs think that marketing has ZERO effect on sales and/or profits? Ask these same men and women about the value of automated, integrated, digital, analytic programs and they’ll virtually wet their pants with glee.

At a time when smart marketing is desperately needed, it’s been co-opted, vilified, scorned and ignored in favor of software, metrics and meaningless numbers.

SEO IS FOR CHUMPS

Geeks Are Not Marketers… Don’t Encourage Them

What a racket… what a racket!

They claim to understand Google’s algorithm. There are some ‘secrets’ to search engine success that only they and a few of the cognoscenti understand. These secrets are constantly changing, so pulling off this SEO black magic takes effort, a lot of it… and everything a company does, let me repeat EVERYTHING THAT YOU DO must aim at this one prize: SEO domination.

Who’s telling you this is either some geek with the creativity of a snail (and the same riveting personality) or a charlatan who makes the famous headline “Lose Weight Overnight While You Sleep” look to be spoken by one of the Apostles.

Yet so many companies fall for this crap… and worse, they let these ‘coders’ direct the marketing with these fake SEO rules in mind. Look, if you change your copy to have 13 magic words in the headline or the menu bar, if you change your web design to suit some formula that’s made up – MADE UP – then you deserve whatever failure the market delivers to your doorstep.

Letting anything other than common sense SEO methods affect your marketing is suicide; letting geeks who claim they understand SEO have any influence on your message, your look, your brand is like letting the referees play for an NBA championship while Kobe and LeBron sell beer in the stands.

Look, I’m not saying SEO isn’t important – more so to some than to others – but to listen to a geek who couldn’t sell you tomorrow’s winner at Santa Anita is lunacy. Is this ‘coder’ a marketer? Has he or she ever sold anything? Can he write a coherent sentence, tell a compelling story or use images and type to build emotion or guide customers to the information they need? No, no, no, no, no... ad infinitum.

Search engine algorithms are unknown and unknowable – start there. Even the guys at Google can’t tell you what drives one site to the top and another to the bottom, other than common sense: key words, a good description, tight code, clear, self-explanatory text, a quick loading site, etc. Get the picture? SEO is what goes on behind the copy, behind the design and after you’ve created your message – it has nothing to do with the message itself -- the look, the feel, the tone NOTHING!

And what do you want: a site that comes up first but looks and reads like crap and confuses the consumer? What good is that?

Here’s a test: Google recently changed its algorithm. How many of your web design geeks, the guys you paid thousands to for SEO, told you about the change and/or suggested new code? I’m waiting.

GEEKS ARE NOT MARKETERS – THEY SHOULD HAVE NO INFLUENCE ON YOUR WORK. PERIOD.