Online Marketing Effectiveness: Affinity Express Survey Results

June 21, 2011 by 1 Comment

In my last post, I shared some of the results of our recent survey of our SMB customers. While I found the number of respondents using online marketing surprisingly low (63%), it informed us that SMBs (or our respondents in particular) aren’t very well-informed about online advertising and marketing, which is reflected in their low use of relatively easy and affordable channels such as online ads and blogging.  

Therefore, I was less surprised at their assessment of the effectiveness of online tactics. While 56% found online advertising and marketing somewhat or very effective for their businesses, fully 44% found it ineffective. I believe this is less an indictment of online marketing and more an indication of the need to educate SMBs about these tactics.

Effectiveness of online advertising or marketing: Affinity Express survey

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Only 63% of SMB Respondents Have Used Online Advertising or Marketing: Affinity Express Survey

June 10, 2011 by 5 Comments

In our recently concluded survey of our small business customers, we asked them about their use of online advertising and marketing tactics.

63% respondents have used online advertising and marketing: Affinity Express survey

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Why Commenting On A Blog Is Like Going To A Dinner Party

June 7, 2011 by 1 Comment

Don't forget to use coasters!As several commenters pointed out on this post, there’s not much difference between virtual and “real” face-to-face communication except for the medium you use. The same rules apply: remember your manners, put the other person at ease, be cheerful, be gracious.

That is the premise of my post over at Search Engine People. In my several years of exploring the blogging medium, I’ve realized how powerful commenting can be as a way of making new contacts. If you leave witty insightful comments on someone’s blog, they or their readers may want to follow you back to your blog and see what you write. You can find people whose views you agree with, and a blog comment saying so might even lead to a friendship. (I have several friends whom I’ve got to know through blogging, and I know that’s pretty common.)

You can also get business opportunities. The reason why I was invited to post on the Search Engine People blog in the first place is because the editor liked a comment I left on a post there.

And if that’s not enough to get you to go over and read my post, here is one of the tips I share:

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Advertising and Marketing in the Digital Age

June 2, 2011 by 1 Comment

Twitter designed by Affinity Express

Twitter background designed by Affinity Express for a client

Interactive services is such a dynamic, interesting space. I recently interviewed Marisol Oberzauchner, director of interactive services at Affinity Express, to pick her brains about what she thinks of the space and what Affinity Express is doing in it. Here you go. 

KG: You help lead interactive services for Affinity Express. This is a dynamic category and it seems to change almost daily. How do you stay current with the latest trends?

MO: Our clients are looking for informed guidance. In my role, I have to continually stay abreast of what is happening in the industry, so I connect to social media portals that cover these topics, track new technologies through communities on LinkedIn and access creative groups. Outside of work, I read technology books, computer magazines and daily digests. At times, I attend demonstrations of new products. The information is available; you just have to stay current and make it a daily priority. 

Of course I follow the leaders in the space but also keep an eye out for the smaller firms who are trying to depart from the norm and solve problems in new ways. Breakthroughs seem to come frequently from these smaller guys and then the Apples and Googles buy them out. YouTube is a great example. I also found the acquisition of Radian6 by Salesforce.com interesting. A bigger recent event was of course Microsoft’s acquisition of Skype. Read more of this post

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SMBs and Online Marketing

May 26, 2011 by 3 Comments

Facebook Page designed by Affinity Express for BNOW DentaleMarketer recently reported results of a survey of online marketing tactics by SMBs with the headline: “For Small-Business Marketers, Are Fewer Channels Better?”

The gist of the article is that use of online tactics by SMBs has increased tremendously since 2010, but the effectiveness of these tactics has decreased. For example, 86% have a website in 2011 compared to 52% in 2010, but the reported effectiveness of the company website has gone down from 68% to 64%.

eMarketer explains this phenomenon thus:

A rush of small businesses to new marketing channels can mean that less experienced respondents are now reporting on the effectiveness of their efforts, which would naturally be lower than those who have been using a channel for many years. In addition, some small businesses could be overreaching by trying to tackle too many channels at once, without the necessary time and resources.

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Using Design to Differentiate a Small Business

March 21, 2011 by 1 Comment

To a creative person, there is nothing like getting a new assignment: the possibilities, the potential and, of course, the deadline. While it is exciting, it is also finite. The deadline must be met and the message must be served. That’s why a creative brief is so crucial. I wanted to share with you a campaign I created and take you through the thought process.

The client is Sakura, a Japanese steak house located in Columbus, Ohio. For years they have been running ads featuring some sort of price and item special, just like everyone else in the category. When the sales rep came to me she explained she wanted to bring them something new, more of a branding campaign—a campaign that would separate Sakura from all the other Japanese steak houses, as well as other restaurants in their price point in the area. Read more of this post

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100th Blog Post

February 4, 2011 by 4 Comments

100We started this blog back in May somewhat tentatively, wondering what we would ever write about. Turns out we are much more voluble than we thought: this is the 100th post on the blog!

Thank you all who have been reading. If you are a regular reader, or if you just dropped in today, do comment and tell us why you come here. Or just say hi. We want to know you better.

And here are some of the posts I like best on this blog. Have you read them yet? Read more of this post

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Click Asia Summit in Mumbai, India: Social Media Edition

January 25, 2011 by 7 Comments

The first post is here.

I was less impressed by sessions that were more of a product demo or a sales pitch. I’m going to take an easy shot here at the session by LinkedIn’s Sandeep Suvarna that was ostensibly about “B2B social media” but was only about LinkedIn. Really, if you use LinkedIn more than casually, you know of the existence of LinkedIn’s Company and Product pages. It might be more efficient for LinkedIn to make videos demonstrating these features instead? However, I did find a few things to work on, so I definitely wouldn’t say this one was a waste.

Apart from LinkedIn, we also had special sessions for Facebook and Twitter. Both were conducted by Pradeep Chopra from Digital Vidya, and both focused on strategy and tactics as opposed to features. The one on Facebook, in particular, was extremely interesting, and Pradeep used several case studies to drive his points home.

Here were some of his tips for driving engagement from your Facebook fans by tweaking content: Read more of this post

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Why the Internet is Good for You

January 10, 2011 by 1 Comment

Customers can easily access third-party reviews and opinions and don't have to rely on the business to educate them. Kelly keeps sending me these print publications to read, and I love that. Even though I read most of them online, I’m still enough of a technophobe to like going through the print versions and always find that I’ve missed some of the articles. So I’m often a month or two behind on the magazine editions.

One of the magazines I regularly read is BtoB: I learn so much about marketing from reading that. But last week, as I leafed through a two-month-old issue, I read something that surprised me (and not in a cake-and-balloons way).

The writer claims that a friend who is a car dealer is having a difficult time, and then goes on to say that consumer electronics is a “horrible business”. Now that phrase caught my eye, so I went back and read from the beginning to see if I’d understood wrong. But no, the reason why these businesses are so bad now? It’s that customers have information.

But as a consumer, the easy access to information we have right now is an amazing boon. As Gillin points out, if I want to buy a new laptop, I won’t go to a shop to decide what to buy: I will compare not just specs but also reviews and prices right from home. I’ll find out what shop to buy from, and if I can get it cheaper in another city (or really, another country: the laptop I’m working on right now came from the US when my husband was over there on a business trip and he ordered it online and brought it over). Read more of this post

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What Does Facebook Mean for Newspapers?

December 5, 2010 by 7 Comments

Sharing Newspaper ContentHaving established our own Facebook page earlier this year, Affinity Express is well aware of the site’s incredible popularity.  In fact, Facebook is the most visited site in the U.S., with more than 500 million users worldwide.

One of our key market segments is newspapers and multi-media publishers.  We’ve been providing print and online ad production for several years and, more recently, launched social media services.  The implication for our clients and prospects is that Facebook might already have more reach in the community than any other media outlet, including local newspapers.  But rather than competing, Facebook can be used by newspapers as a very viable (and affordable) short-term solution to boost traffic and page views for their websites and generate new revenue from advertisers). Read more of this post

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