The BLU Group Blog | Advertising | Marketing | Branding

The U.S. Postal Service, attempting to slow the migration of first-class mail to electronic communications, says it will stick with an advertising campaign begun in September that tells businesses refrigerators and cork boards can't be hacked.
 
After losing 22% of its mail volume in the past five years, the Postal Service is using the nationwide ads to stem a decline in postage sales, its primary revenue source. It's also looking to plug its budget gap by closing 4,800 post offices, cutting as many as 220,000 jobs and eliminating Saturday mail delivery. The service has said it probably lost $10 billion last fiscal year.
 
Spending on advertising pays off, said Joyce Carrier, the Washington-based service's manager of advertising and media planning, who declined to say how much the campaign costs. Every 1% loss of mail volume equates to a $300 million decline in annual revenue, she said.
 
"If we can even stop 1% -- and that's the goal for this campaign, to slow it 1% -- it's a pretty big chunk of change," she said. "Hacked" is the second of two ads in a campaign that began in September and will resume after the holidays, Postal Service spokeswoman Darleen Reid said.
 
It shows customers handling mail by pinning it to a cork board and hanging it up with a refrigerator magnet. "Your refrigerator has never been hacked. An online virus has never attacked a cork board," the voiceover intones.
 

It’s all about goals, strategies, and tactics

Many “professionals” say they are Search Engine Optimization experts, but how do you know? Are they asking the right questions? Do they have insight and information they need to get you what you are looking for? Results!

The most important part of your SEO plan is having clearly defined goals. What do you want out of your site besides just “more traffic”? More visitors are great, but if you only serve “local”, then someone across the country looking at your site doesn’t help your bottom line. Are you looking for a certain dollar or percentage increase in sales? Percentage increase in traffic from a specific city or region? “X” number of additional contact forms filled out online? “X” number of additional sign-ups for your e-newsletter? Be specific so you can measure the success of your efforts and investment.

Once you define these specific goals, figure out what your strategies will be for achieving them. SEO experts and marketing professionals overall should be able to come up with a variety of strategies for each of your goals. And be careful not to confuse strategy with tactics.

Every once in a while I receive an e-mail that catches me a little off guard. The reason? It appears to be, well…rude. Managing client relationships as an Account Executive at an advertising agency can present several challenges on a day-to-day basis and like many other things in life, how you react is very important. To help with this, below you will find four tips to help you take the right steps when reacting to a less than polite e-mail message.

As the Groupon roadshow wears on toward Friday's planned IPO, the company's open kimono looks almost like a case study in effective online marketing: spend boatloads online, get more paying customers.
 
While online ad sellers cheer, this doesn't bode well for Groupon. The company must dial back its whopping half-billion in marketing spending to become profitable and, so far, those cuts have meant slowing growth in paying customers.
 
Groupon's $613 million in marketing expense for the first nine months of the year has largely gone toward bringing new subscribers to the platform, according to public filings. And it has: the company had nearly 143 million subscribers for its daily deals in September. All that spending has cut into profit and must come down to push the global giant out of the red for good. (Cuts so far have worked: Groupon is already profitable in North America and is almost there globally.)
 
But what's the real cost of spending less? It appears that as marketing spending decreased this year, so did the growth of paying customers.
 

Leadership tycoon Warren Bennis once said, “We seem to collect information because we have the ability to do so, but we are so busy collecting it that we haven’t devised a means of using it. The true measure of any society is not what it knows but what it does with what it knows.”
 
There is a wealth of information at our disposal today on the latest discoveries in brain science. While we enjoy reading about these findings and expanding our intellect, how many of us actually apply these concepts?
 
We can either drown in this information or turn it into a lifesaver by extracting its practical knowledge. This article offers several important tips based on discoveries in brain research that can help us improve our personal and professional lives, as well as help others in our sphere of influence.
 
Use visualization to learn a new skill
 
Neuroplasticity is the ability of the brain to continuously create new neural pathways. When we repeat a skill that we are trying to master, we strengthen the neural networks that represent that action. The same happens physically in the brain whether we perform the action, or simply visualize it—Your brain cannot tell the difference between an action you performed and an action you visualized.
 

Integrating social media into your web presence is not only a great way to interact with your customers, but also to get the word out about you and your business. When bringing social media into the mix, be sure to keep your brand and audience in mind.

Will your customers be more likely to have a Facebook account vs. a Twitter account? Will they be more interested in your YouTube channel than your Facebook page? Once you have those questions answered, design those social media pages around your brand platform. Today I’ll focus on Twitter.

Now, when I say design I fully understand that you will have to keep within the guidelines already set forth by those specific social media outlets you choose. This just means you have to get creative. With Twitter you get to pick the colors for your page, your profile picture, and add a background. These guidelines are the same for everyone, this way Twitter pages stay the same in layout, but design wise they can get pretty creative. I’ve seen some backgrounds that are just beautiful mosaics of color and design, while others contain contact information, photography, and maybe some more information about the person or company.

When getting ready to design your Twitter background keep in mind that the Twitter content area (where all the information and tweets are) is always centered on the page, and that there is always the possibility that your background will be viewed on different screen sizes. So the width around the content area can and will change by screen size.

Everybody wants to be liked. The question for Facebook Inc. is how much advertisers are willing to pay for the opportunity.

The centerpiece of Ford Motor Co.'s online campaign for the 2012 Focus was a free Facebook page hosted by an orange-colored puppet that in a few weeks won over a new, younger audience for the once-stodgy compact.

 
Ford spokespuppet "Doug" drew crowds to online conversations and videos that starred him clowning around the new Focus. Doug inspired more than 43,000 Facebook users to click "Like," the icon that broadcasts to friends a thumbs-up approval of a brand or product.
 
While Ford shelled out an estimated $95 million to advertise the new Focus across a broad range of media, it spent just pennies on the dollar for Facebook ads.
 
Facebook's estimated market value, now in the neighborhood of $70 billion, is founded on the belief that companies will spend big to advertise on the site. Facebook's revenues, which come largely from ads, were $1.6 billion in the first half of this year, up $800 million from a year earlier.
 

The latest customer service incident to go viral is the snub of a bride-to-be and her bridesmaids by Australian bridal retailer Gasp. A store incident sparked an e-mail exchange in which a shopper politely, yet pointedly, complained about her experience with a rude sales assistant. Instead of apologizing, however, the area manager criticized the shopper as “undesirable” and defended the employee as a “qualified stylist,” who is so good at what he does that the manager does not tolerate having his time wasted by those who can’t afford its exclusive product lines.

Judging from news accounts, Gasp expects to not only recover from this situation but also profit from the publicity. However, spokespersons may be confusing temporary fascination with long-term elevation of its image. In fact, the company may never recover from this very public mistake.

Serious customer service failures are not always so blatant. But even subtle miscues can be dangerous to the long-term health of your business. Here are a few to avoid.

Carelessly responding to customer inquiries

Answering customers’ questions is time-consuming and often tiresome. Most customers do their own research but generally want to tap your company’s expertise at some point. They may need guidance in finalizing a purchase decision, clarity about the best approach to a complex problem, or assistance with real-world applications.

Since launching a program to put products in the hands of influencers a year and a half ago, Klout has done more than 100 deals with brands such as Starbucks, Audi, Secret and Microsoft. And now it's ramping up the program, its main revenue stream for which it charges between five and six figures per program -- it did 25 deals in September alone.
 
But brand beware: such tactics are subject to disclosure regulations and the program could potentially have legal implications for brands if people tweeting and posting on Facebook about their products don't disclose that they've gotten a freebie.
 
The Federal Trade Commission's 2009 revision to its guide to the use of testimonials and endorsements in advertising cracked down on the kind of gifting that became commonplace as bloggers became central to marketers' plans. Klout addresses the FTC rules by sending a card along with the "Perk" -- or free sample -- that states that recipients aren't required to do anything at all, but they should disclose that they've received a sample if they decide to write about it.
 
Through the Perks program, Klout, which measures social-media influence (a.k.a. Klout scores), brokers deals with marketers to send free stuff to "influencers" presumed to have a higher likelihood of igniting social buzz around a product.
 

The global recession has devastated many industries and left millions of Americans without a job or underemployed. The negative impact on consumers' spending power has been brutal. Average U.S. household income fell by 10% from December 2007 through June 2011, according to Sentier Research, and even for households headed by a full-time worker, median income has fallen by more than 5%.
 
How can we quantify the impact that this loss of spending power has had on brand choice? Since 2008, comScore has been tracking consumers' response to the question: "Do you buy the brand you want most?" We have examined brands in health & beauty aids, over-the-counter (OTC) medicines, food, household products and housewares.
 
The results aren't pretty. In 2008, about 54% of consumers said they bought the brand they wanted most. By 2010, this had dropped to 45%, and 43% this year. Declines were observed in every category, with the most severe drop (17 points) in over-the-counter medicines and the lowest in the household category (6 points).
 
If consumers aren't buying the brand they want most, what are they buying? Often they are switching brands when a "peer" brand is on sale, with 38% in 2011 saying they did this compared to 33% in 2008. But they also turn to a cheaper product. About 19% of consumers switched to private-label products in 2011, up from 14% in 2008.