Archive for the ‘Brand Strategy/Creative’ Category
Tuesday, October 27th, 2009 by Christian Russo
With Halloween fast approaching this coming Saturday, along with it comes the usual wave of last-minute costumers eager to make a cleaver, funny or scary splash on the 31st. “Halloween” is consistently trending on Twitter, and there is an exponential jump in Halloween-related searches, so now is the time for savvy marketers to pull something out of their bags of tricks.
Zeta Marketing Solutions for the Halloween holiday
- Top seasonal retailers HalloweenMart and Spirit Halloween have a web-based retail environment in dire need of a refresh.
- HalloweenMart suffers from a bland layout, with no notable call-to-action, compounded with oversized images that further distract from the product listings.
- Spirit is at the opposite end of the spectrum, having an overwhelming number of category listings, field entries and a harsh color scheme.
- Create a revamped website based entirely on a dynamic usability study, whilst conforming to their established brand identity and product lines.
- To drive additional traffic, the retailers should create some branded content for distribution directly to customers
- Halloween-themed twitter profile templates (downloadable wallpaper, icons, color layout instructions, etc.)
- A photo-editing suite that “Creeps-out” a portrait you upload, inserting some Halloween-themed images (smoke, bats, pumpkins, etc.) on top of your picture
- While costume retailers seem to be fairly active on twitter (smart move) the other important aspect of Halloween (Candy) has gone unrepresented.
- Hershey’s, arguably the largest candy brand worldwide, has no active twitter presence. While they do have a corporate profile, there have been no updates at all.
- Mars also has failed to create a Twitter profile.
- Both brands should take obvious first steps (Create optimized twitter profiles, update constantly, and link to profile on website homepage, etc.)
- Tweets should highlight seasonal recipes created solely with their products.
- Costumeideazone.com; the first site that appears in organic search results on Google under “Halloween Costume Ideas” should make better usage of their company Twitter account to build brand awareness and drive traffic to their site.
- Currently the account has only 13 Tweets and 14 followers
- To foster fans’ creativity; Costumeideazone.com should host a Twitter based contest where users submit their most unique, original and creative ideas with the winning costume being furnished by costumezone.com or a partner
- The contest will be cross-promoted on the costumeideazone.com where users can submit their entries and ultimately vote on the winning idea
- Costumeideazone.com should offer weekly newsletters via email marketing throughout the month of October in anticipation of their highest traffic month
- Capture visitor’s email addresses by partnering with a site that actually sells costumes such as halloweenexpress.com to offer discounts and specials
Posted in Brand Strategy/Creative, Email Marketing, Online Advertising/ePR, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology, Uncategorized, Zeta Buzz | No Comments »
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 by Roy DeYoung
“Jazz That Dwells in the Present”
“Bluetooth Headsets With a Chic Factor”
“Slow Recovery Seen for Iceland”
Quickly scanning the Wall Street Journal website it occurred to me just why it is so easy to use this website and why it is so successful at converting people from scanning to reading—a significant conversion goal of any news/content oriented website. The reason for this success as that The Journal demonstrates a strong understanding of online eye-tracking and reading behaviors. This is apparent as their headlines act as engaging, truthful, relevant labels to the content that lies within.
Unfortunately many brands don’t practice this basic fundamental of online success and clutter their content with irrelevant, fluffy headlines and labels. Many of them invest a great deal in website redesign and revitalization when simply rethinking the content headlines and labels instead will measurably increase conversions, brand loyalty, and repeat site visits.
To increase online conversions brands must align with usability and messaging best practices. These best practices are derived from observing the behaviors of users performing specific website tasks. Some of my observations that every brand should know and implement in their messaging and labeling strategy includes:
• Get to the point
• Users tend to scan pages in an “F” shape pattern
• Start subheads, paragraphs, and bullet point content with information-carrying words that users will notice when scanning down the left side of your content
• Users will read the third word on a line much less often than the first two words
• Provide confidence and allow users to confidently predict what they’ll get if they click
• Users like numerals because numbers represent facts
• Do not be misleading or promise too much
• On the average Web page, users have time to read less than 28% of the words during an average visit
Posted in Brand Strategy/Creative, Conversion-friendly Design, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 by Hugo Guzman
As I read through Forrester’s recent Wave Report on listening platforms and think through some of the innovative conversations we’ve been having with clients and colleagues, a simple thought has begun to manifest itself.
All media is social media.
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Posted in Brand Strategy/Creative, Email Marketing, Online Advertising/ePR, Online Marketing, SEM, Social Media, web analytics | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 by Hugo Guzman
The transition from legacy, offline marketing to a more metrics and ROI-focused online marketing approach is well underway. There are examples of this shift all over the place, but one of the true trail blazers is Century21 Real Estate.
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Posted in Brand Strategy/Creative, Online Advertising/ePR, Online Marketing, Rich Media/Video, Technology | 4 Comments »
Monday, March 30th, 2009 by Al DiGuido
The stats tell the tale in dramatic fashion. Over 525 print magazines were shut down in 2008 and thus far this year through the first quarter, over 87 magazines have been shuttered. Closed – not because consumers have stopped reading news and feature related material – but because these print vehicles, whether they are newspapers or magazines, failed to make the shift to the digital publishing platform in time.
Besides the costs of paper, printing and postage growing each year, there was also a shift of the behavioral and media consumption profiles of their subscribers from corner newsstand buyers to internet newsstand buyers. The dramatic shift of advertising revenue away from legacy offline channels to the interactive arena all impacted the balance sheets of these hordes of magazines.
It didn’t need to happen.
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Posted in Brand Strategy/Creative, Online Advertising/ePR, Online Marketing, Rich Media/Video, SEM, SEO, Social Media, web analytics | No Comments »
Thursday, March 26th, 2009 by Al DiGuido
It seems to me as though the folks leading the US Postal Service have been living in a cave for the last 10 years. Is it possible that John Potter, the Postmaster General of the United States, has not seen the rise of the Internet as a potential threat to the US postal system? Can he really head up to Capitol Hill with hat in hand… asking for the US Government to save this “venerable institution that is older than our country” with any credibility? Can Potter really claim that he hasn’t witnessed a significant drop in first class mail as “bill presentment and payment” occurs online? Can he really believe with the skyrocketing costs of paper, printing and postage over the past 10 years that printed communications—whether they be personal or commercial—would not be impacted? Dramatically?
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Posted in Brand Strategy/Creative, Email Marketing, Online Marketing | No Comments »
Thursday, March 19th, 2009 by Christian Russo
How the current generation of College graduates has taken possession of Social Media
After a recent post here on the Zeta blog spoke to the wide sweeping assertions some major news publications and traditional media channels have been making about the rising popularity of online networking channels, it got me to start thinking about my personal role in that rise.
I came to Zeta straight out of college because I was fascinated by the idea of an integrated online marketing agency; all of these seemingly independent fields of online marketing combined into something greater than the sum of its parts. “Cool” was probably the most apposite descriptive term that I would apply to my mindset at the time. However, before my initial interview I was under the impression that I might not have full technical expertise. While in some cases this turned out to be true, I was taken aback by some of the experiential questions being asked of me.
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Posted in Brand Strategy/Creative, Online Advertising/ePR, SEO, Social Media, Technology | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, January 28th, 2009 by Hugo Guzman
A colleague of mine recently passed along a Forbes article that talked about Omniture’s recent troubles with outdated or outright inaccurate data. That got me to thinking about just how valuable a comprehensively implemented Google Analytics platform can be.
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Posted in Brand Strategy/Creative, Email Marketing, Online Advertising/ePR, Online Marketing, Rich Media/Video, SEM, SEO, Social Media, Technology, Web Development, web analytics | 8 Comments »
Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 by Hugo Guzman
In a matter of weeks, Google has put the maneuvers on two of their largest rivals in terms of market share. Their first target was user-generated-content giant Wikipedia, which garnered a large percentage of their traffic from Google searches. Their second, much larger target is Microsoft.
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Posted in Brand Strategy/Creative, Online Advertising/ePR, Online Marketing, SEO, Technology | 3 Comments »
Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 by Chance Bliss
I saw the media blitz about Borders® launching their new site the other day. Interested, I went to check out the new interface. Being a search nerd and a former employee of Audible.com (digital audiobooks), I was curious to see how they would handle navigation and search.
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Posted in Brand Strategy/Creative, SEM, SEO, Web Development | No Comments »
