Mad 4 Blog

It always makes sense to ask successfully acquired clients and customers how they came to hear about your business. By carefully comparing how well each of your advertising efforts performs, you can bulldoze past a lot of trial-and-error and simply direct your budget toward what works, both in quantitative and qualitative units. For example, if no one’s seen that ad in the newspaper but everyone heard about you from a friend or relative, you may wish to pull your print ads and focus on buzz-generating word-of-mouth campaigns–or even reward former patrons for referring a friend. And if you’re reaching a higher caliber of clientele via brochure than billboard, you’ll certainly want to bring your message down to the smaller scale, which can also cut back cost.

These days, tracking is everything when it comes to building successful campaigns. Online, it’s perfectly easy to determine how a person landed on your page; analytics mark each click-through by its referring links, search engine source, browser type and even the viewer’s physical location—it’s not only effortless, but also automatically built into most website content management systems. But even online there’s always more you can do; when it comes to e-commerce, many shopping outlets utilize codes. Asking buyers to enter a code before they take advantage of a sale helps marketers to track which sales and campaigns were more successful than others, and to help determine if shoppers heard about it from a newsletter, referral or ad. This is why you might see several usable codes available for the same sale, depending on where you hear about it.

In what other ways can coding and tracking be used in your business endeavors? Mad 4 Marketing recently posted job listings on several career search websites. But each posting required us to pay a fee, and since we weren’t sure which websites or which wording would be most successful for attracting the best new teammate, we decided to generate a few different ads. We asked job candidates on each board and posting to reply with a different subject line. This took a little more time and thought, but we were able to see from where we were getting hits, and what kind of prospective employees were nipping the bait. After the first week we cut our ad placement (and cost!) in half and only used phrasing that was clearly expressing our desires to the most qualified candidates.

Another example is Satori’s text message campaign. In 2008, we used a lot of on-the-scene guerrilla marketing to advertise for the newly opening apartment rental community in Fort Lauderdale. We wanted to reach out to those who already lived in and loved the surrounding area of South Florida. At each event (such as street fairs, art shows and the boat parade), we advertised the chance to win six months’ free rent by texting a code to a given phone number. At each event, the code differed. That way, we could see which community event had directed the most participants to our giveaway, as well as which regions or crowds were most interested in Satori. This information turned out to be extremely valuable in later marketing endeavors, such as choosing local ad placement.

The bottom line is that tracking efforts are a smart investment in the future. It means looking past today’s brochure or even tomorrow’s website, toward next year’s entire marketing strategy. Tracking provides you with the tools to always understand and surpass prior tactics–and no matter what, this means that you will ultimately succeed.

We have previously mentioned the importance of being transparent when advertising on the Web. As page viewers become increasingly frustrated by pop-ups, covert ads and run-arounds, they reciprocally appreciate websites that are up-front about what elements are sponsored–as well as those that tailor advertising to most accurately reflect products and topics that readers may actually want. When distrust brews toward online advertising, the entire framework of interactive marketing–and how it can positively impact and support websites and businesses–is compromised. Earlier this year, popular review site Yelp.com came under fire for practices that walked too close to the fine line between acceptable and deplorable ethical behavior.

Yelp is a website that features every kind of business (from restaurants to dental practices) and allows anyone to sign in and post a review about that business–good or bad. That way, interested parties can get an unbiased, comprehensive overview of that company. Yelp offers free listings as well as paid memberships which come with additional features such as enhanced content control, videos and photo slide-shows. Paid accounts may also add sponsored posts–which means that their business page can come up first in a search for chosen key words, or an ad can even show up on a competitor’s page. Cost may depend on impressions or clicks, according to individual account terms.

Problems began to arise when it seemed like Yelp was ‘selling’ positive reviews to paid members through ‘Favorite Reviews.’ This feature pushed better reviews to the top of the page, and confused the matter of what were reviews and what could be constituted as advertisements. Even when these were genuine reviews–that is to say, not written by a company exec–the confusion and doubt that page visitors experienced when they saw positive reviews highlighted was enough to draw ire and attention to the site’s other questionable policies.

Another practice that bore review was Yelp’s filter, which automatically removed some reviews according to a quality control algorithm. Because only paying members had the filter in place, which most often managed to weed out negative reviews, this device made business pages seem even more like ads in disguise. For example, when soliciting paid accounts from businesses that were currently listed for free, Yelp made offers that essentially said negative reviews could disappear…for the right price. Many of the businesses that were contacted found the offer extortive, and some went so far as to contact authorities. The wording seemed to take advantage of a not-quite-illegal loophole–but one that could still be considered immoral.

In the spirit of total transparency, Yelp now offers readers the option to view every single review written, regardless of relevance or content–but only through a special, segregated link. Some critics have frowned upon this compromise. They believe that all posts should be shown at all times–or that the filter removal should be more prominently feature on the site (it is currently tucked into the bottom of review pages). However, having this option—and other changes that Yelp has made in recent months—have thus far been enough to satisfy contemporary ethical guidelines for transparency on the Internet.