Straight to the Point

Volume 4, Issue 4

This Issue's Contents:

Online Search Terms vs. Approved Messaging: Which is Most Important?
Think about your company’s main product line or service offering. Without saying the product’s actual brand name, what do you call it? How do you tell someone what type of product or service it is?

Case Study (Epiphan)
It’s not often that we get to tie marketing content directly to sales, but one of our clients, Epiphan, has found a way to do just that.

A Sign of the Times
At Kaszas, we interact with companies of various sizes and from a variety of industries. Over the years, the nature of the marketing/communications needs and projects that we are engaged for has shifted.

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Marketing Communications Smarts from Kaszas Communications

Summer 2009

Online Search Terms vs. Approved Messaging: Which is Most Important?

– by Maria Ford

Think about your company’s main product line or service offering. Without saying the product’s actual brand name, what do you call it? How do you tell someone what type of product or service it is? For example:

• A Mac PowerBook is a laptop (or is it a portable computer or a notebook?)
• A Subaru Forester is a sport utility vehicle (or is it a truck or a van?)
• A local firm provides a mediation service (or is it dispute resolution?)

For any given product or service, you will face choices in how you describe or categorize its position in a chosen market. With the web and search engines today playing a dramatically increasing role in the research that your target customers perform to find products and services, the terminology they use to search for solutions has begun to influence how companies describe their offerings.

If you are familiar with the concept of search optimization of websites, the statement above will probably seem obvious. What’s often less obvious is that there may be a direct relationship between how products and services are described in off-line media and how they are searched for online. You should think about whether that’s the case in your business or industry – and if it is, your marketing content may need to change.

To illustrate this point, we’ll look at two clients of ours who are addressing this reality.

Example 1: Voice-Over-IP-Based Business Phone System Provider

We’ve been writing marketing content for a variety of VOIP-based phone system companies for many years. One of those clients offers a VOIP-based business phone system without any hardware – that is, the service is delivered completely over the web in what is called a “hosted” business model. Their customers need VOIP-enabled telephones and nothing else – no servers or phone switches or PBXs.

Customers for these types of phone systems tend to be web-savvy, so online marketing and our client’s corporate website is important to their marketing efforts. For the company’s first few years in business, it targeted web searchers who were typing in terms like “VOIP” and “voice-over-IP”. More recently, a shift in this behaviour has changed the company’s game plan.

Larger service providers like Primus (formerly Magma) and Bell started to market “hosted PBX” phone services to homes and small business. Three years ago, “hosted PBX” was a practically unknown concept to most non-technical people. Now, with large companies spending a lot of money to advertise and brand “hosted PBX” – primarily through print-based mass mailings – online search habits have changed. As the term has become part of mainstream language, we have worked with our client to repurpose its website navigation and content to capture web users who now search primarily for “hosted PBX” solutions.

Example 2: Lumber & Building Supplies Company

The construction/building supply industry is in many ways very different from the VOIP market. This industry tends to be less web-savvy, with business interactions still conducted primarily on paper, face-to-face, and via fax.

Yet, the clients we work with in this sector recognize the importance the web plays in reaching home owners and do-it-yourself retail customers. While trades people and suppliers may not yet be frequent web users, middle-class retail customers are.

As part of the search engine optimization (SEO) and website content writing services we provide, we have learned an interesting fact. What one of our clients was calling building “packages” web searchers are calling building “kits”.

On the day we presented our SEO research and content recommendations to the client, they were about to go to print with tens of thousands of flyers advertising their building “packages”. The President of the company asked, “Does it matter if our fliers say ‘packages’ and our website says ‘kits’?”

Our reply was YES, it does matter. We advised them to make a last-minute change to their print materials to use the phrase “building kits” rather than “building packages”. Our client wishes to attract the people searching for building kits to its website, and we will ensure that its website is optimized to do that. By changing its print materials to match, our client will build on the existing momentum and will create local brand awareness for the same key term.

Key Take-Away Think about where your product or service fits within your industry then think about your company’s branding power. Do you have the resources and the heft to put behind the branding of a new or unpopular term to describe what you have to offer? If not, it pays to factor in online search habits into more than your website content – it pays to factor it in to your core messages in all their forms.

 

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Case Study

Epiphan

It’s not often that we get to tie marketing content directly to sales, but one of our clients, Epiphan, has found a way to do just that. Epiphan develops, markets and sells a unique line of USB framegrabbers and conducts 100% of its sales over the web. All of the company’s advertising and promotion is done online, and they have developed a sophisticated, custom e-commerce/web stats analysis tool to track the results of their efforts and tie specific marketing and advertising initiatives to sales.

Soon after Epiphan first launched its business some years ago, they had Kaszas Communications write customer application stories for the company’s website. Recently, Epiphan approached us to write more of those stories on a regular basis. This time, however, Epiphan’s CEO, Mike Sandler, added a twist to the project: the stories would be tracked to monitor their role in the online sales process.

Sandler says he’s learned a surprising and important lesson from this ongoing activity: “I was most surprised to see that writing honest, informative content is as valuable as it is. In the early days we tried a lot of different ‘tricks’ for getting more traffic to our website – there are so many people and companies out there who promise to do all kinds of great things for your website. But those tricks didn’t work for long. The web and web users are so sophisticated these days. We’ve learned that having the best content is the one most important thing we can do for our website.”

Buyers Like to Read About Other Buyers

Epiphan had built and launched a new website with every page of content tied into a purpose-built analytics system. Sandler was able to see – by the numbers – that the handful of initial customer application stories played a role in sales. Specifically, a vast majority of customers who purchased an Epiphan product had clicked on and read one or more of the customer stories prior to purchase.

Sandler’s analytics engine also made it evident that on the web, content is king. As the number of informative web pages posted to the Epiphan site that incorporated important keywords rose, so did the frequency with which web users conducting searches for frame grabbers and other relevant keywords found the site.

We worked with Epiphan to develop a process that would make customer story writing simple and fast. A customer service specialist (CSS) at Epiphan contacts customers to check in on their satisfaction with the product they purchased and to ask if they are willing to have their application profiled on the Epiphan website. Often, the answer is yes and the CSS gathers the customer’s answers to five key questions that we have provided.

Based on those responses and some simple online research, we can quickly write brief, keyword- and link-optimized application stories. They are posted to the website and linked to the relevant product page so that web visitors can easily access stories about other companies using the product they are researching.

Online Content Delivers Bang for the Buck

The tight relationship between sales and visits to customer application stories has held true, and Epiphan has also been able to assess the cost-benefit of the stories that we write. Epiphan reports the following ROI:

• After the first few months, the cost-benefit of having the stories professionally written was about equal to the cost-benefit of Epiphan’s extensive pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
• Epiphan tracks an additional 12.5% of revenue each day back to a visit to a customer application story that we wrote – i.e. revenue generated by web visitors who read a customer application story and then purchase a product.
• Epiphan has begun translating the stories into seven other languages and says that the cost of doing so is recouped in related sales within two weeks.
• Epiphan is now encouraging its resellers to publish customer application stories on their websites as well.

That’s impressive, but there’s more. Unlike a PPC campaign, the value of each page of website content increases overtime and with each click to the page the cost-per-story decreases. And, as frequently updated keyword-optimized website content, the new stories continue to keep search engines interested in the website and expand the site’s relevance on target keyword searches.

“I was most surprised to see that writing honest, informative content is as valuable as it is. In the early days we tried a lot of different ‘tricks’ for getting more traffic to our website – there are so many people and companies out there who promise to do all kinds of great things for your website. But those tricks didn’t work for long. The web and web users are so sophisticated these days. We’ve learned that having the best content is the one most important thing we can do for our website.” – Mike Sandler, CEO, Epiphan

Learn more about Epiphan at www.epiphan.com

Read one of the customer applications stories we’ve written for Epiphan by clicking on one of the available stories in the right-hand column of this page: http://www.epiphan.com/solutions_new/?arid=43.

 

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Lesson Learned

Sign of the Times

At Kaszas, we interact with companies of various sizes and from a variety of industries. Over the years, the nature of the marketing/communications needs and projects that we are engaged for has shifted.

Just six years ago, most new clients sought us out for help developing print brochure kits. Today, almost all new clients come to us with a web-based project. Be it website content writing, search engine optimization, Flash video scripts, a wholly new online presence, pay-per-click campaigns, or questions about using social media like YouTube and Facebook, the need to “be found on the web” drives today’s marketing and communications agenda.

The More Things Change…

While the primary media have changed, our fundamental approach has not. In any new website, video or social media project, we ensure that our effort focuses on the effectiveness of the message and quality of the content - no matter what the medium is. While each online vehicle may require a unique set of marketing tactics, content variety and  writing style, the fundamental rules of effective marketing communication remain the same.

All marketing communications vehicles must:

• Speak directly to the target audience in a way that they will care about enough to want more information or to act
• Convey the difference and value being offered by the company, the service or the product
• Work in concert with all other marketing tactics and media to maximize a message’s power through consistency, frequency and volume

The World is Getting Smaller

While there are more online media tools to choose from than ever before, they all share a common bond – each is intricately linked by the web. In addition to crawling your website, Google crawls YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn and all other online media. Flash media is also becoming search-optimizable. Today’s online media are inseparable and our ability to take a global view of marketing content helps clients to keep all of these related, moving parts on message and in sync.  

If you are looking to increase your reach online and create searchable marketing content, contact us!

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