A doctoral student in Texas diagnosed a new ailment in 1999; a new quirk of the human condition. Jan Benway set up a series of usability experiments at Rice University in Houston to explore how people deciphered information on webpages. She set her test subjects simple tasks: find a book about preparing for the SAT, find information about coaching youth basketball.

Navigation to what they were asked to find came in a variety of formats, from plain text links to menus to banners, and the test subjects were timed to see how long it took them to complete the task.

Benway's discovery was "banner blindness".

Design something visually striking, place it at the top of a webpage, demand users' attention, and there is every chance it will be ignored.

Benway's research came just five years after Hotwired magazine sold the first banner ad to AT&T in a move that appeared to signal a new and lucrative revenue stream online for publishers – and a new way to measure the effectiveness of ad spend.

While her findings cast doubt over the effectiveness of online display, they in no way slowed its growth.

Figures from the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PwC published in October put online display spending at £738m in the UK in the first half of 2013 – an increase of 23% on the same period last year.

However, concerns remain about "banner blindness". Research last month by Dave Chaffey of Smart Insights revealed the click-through rates for different types of display ads in different territories.

"Display ads only gain around one click every 1,000 impressions. Shocking! It seems that banner blindness is alive and kicking," Chaffey reported.

He suggested that measuring "interactions" – users who expanded an ad, hovered over it for more than one second or viewed it in full screen mode – would show an "interaction rate" of about 2%.

Of course, ads have evolved. There's animation. There's interactivity. Echoing Chaffey's point about interactions with ads, there's a broader argument that display contributes to brand awareness whether or not a user clicks.

Most importantly, paid search and re-marketing ads speak directly to what people have been looking for online and target user intent. It's easy to see why search ads accounted for about 60% of the £3.04bn total online advertising spend in the first half of this year, according to the IAB and PwC research.

But the rise of content marketing poses publishers with a different problem. Brand storytelling often doesn't fit in a box in the margins of a webpage.

Smart brands are looking for ways to be useful to customers; to engage them with brand content they want to share.

They aren't looking to produce advertorial that masquerades as editorial – the old print trick of using similar fonts and laying out copy like a news story.

They are looking to produce content with editorial integrity.

Call it native advertising if you must. I see it as brands showing that good stories earn attention.

Good stories tell you something you don't already know that's worth knowing.

A good story can surprise, delight, shock or frustrate. It can be entertaining or illuminating; sometimes both. It's not just journalists who can do that.

Meredith Kopit Levien, executive vice president advertising for the New York Times, has revealed that a "branded content" advertising unit will form part of the company's website redesign, which is due to go live early next year.

"We believe that marketers have stories to tell and they're looking for atomised ways to tell those stories and ways to amplify their messages," Kopit Levien told Ad Age. She's right.

Nonetheless, many editors and publishers see it as a worrying development. "The clear delineation between news and advertising is becoming more and more blurred. We have to resist that," Gerard Baker, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, told New York University's journalism school earlier this year.

For my part, I sign up to the line often attributed to George Orwell: "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations."

So I'd ask any editor, how much of what your reporters have produced today is something that someone else does not want published?

There's always the Media Standard Trust's churnalism tool to help check if there's any doubt about the answer. It's not criticism: just a plea for pragmatism and engagement from editors to find alternative ways to help brands tell their stories.

So, 14 years after her PhD thesis, where is Jan Benway now?

After spells at Sun Microsystems and Intuit designing tools for software development and small business accounting, she now works at a life sciences software company called Ingenuity Systems making web-based software tools for microbiologists and geneticists.

Does she still think her findings about banner blindness hold true?

"Yes, I still think there would be the same response in users today, though the breadth of graphic design available to designers today has increased dramatically since the late 90s," Benway said.

"There are many more tools available to designers now, to incorporate attention-getting elements. On the other hand, the users themselves have changed. In many ways, they are more savvy, but in other ways less so, since most web users in the 90s were early adopters. 

"Simply, users are focused on their own goals, and those goals are rarely aligned with the goals of advertisers. They learn quickly where to look and focus their attention on the information that is critical to them."

A 'branded content' advertising unit will form part of the New York Times’ website redesign. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features

Paul Hill is content director at Further. You can follow him on Twitter@paulhill_biz

What’s the secret to a successful E-commerce site? Is it graphics; ease of use; loading time. or something else, something harder to define?

As anyone who has ever attempted to find their place within the saturated E-commerce market will know, while traffic levels are indeed part of the battle to succeed; it is in fact a whole new challenge to convert that traffic into sales. Your products might be unique, crafted with quality and have an attractive price point for consumers; but it could be your website that lets your brand down leading, to lost sales.

Vouchercloud has collated the latest statistics and data within this new infographic demonstrating how consumers respond to various features within the checkout process and how they can lead to cart abandonment and lost sales.

Infografic Source: Vouchercloud

Tweet These Stats

• 57% of online shoppers will abandon a site after waiting 3s for page load, 80% won’t return Tweet this

• 92.6% of online shoppers say visuals are the top influential factor affecting a purchase decision Tweet this

• Offering multiple product views and alternate images leads to 58% more web sales Tweet this

• 57% of online shoppers have more confidence in purchasing a product after viewing product video Tweet this

• 52% of online shoppers say they are willing to stay longer on sites that use product videoTweet this

• 45% of online shoppers are more likely to return to a retailer who integrates video into the website experience Tweet this

• 85% of consumers read online reviews for local business before purchase, 79% trust them as much as a personal recommendation Tweet this

• 41% of online shoppers will abandon a checkout due to “sticker shock” Tweet this

• 29% of online shoppers will abandon checkout if asked to register (24% of ecommerce sites require reg) Tweet this

• Only 10% of online shoppers will abandon a checkout process they perceive as “too long”Tweet this

• 50% of ecommerce checkouts ask for the same information twice Tweet this

• 81% of online retailers pre-check newsletter opt-ins in registration (40% of consumers don’t want them) Tweet this

• 59% of consumers consider shipping costs when making online purchase decisions Tweet this

• More than 80% of consumers feel safer seeing logos of trustworthy payment options on a site Tweet this

• 40% of online shoppers say they have more confidence with sites that offer >1 payment option Tweet this

By BLUE

The Big Data revolution is benefiting marketing leaders the most.  It’s transformed numerous aspects of how we work and think. In many ways, the capability is the answers to every marketer’s dreams. When a problem surfaces, the first course of action is to solve it with data insights.

Today, I offer you a guest post from Brian Kardon, CMO at Lattice Engines.  Their tools leverage Big Data to help those market & sell intelligently.  In this post, he shares how Big Data uncovers key LeadGen insights.  Specifically, how Lead Development Reps can close more business by doing less.  Brian shows how to fix low lead conversion rates with insights from Big Data.   At the end of this post, download our Big Data Source Checklist.  Use this to make sure you are building a world-class data foundation.

The Folly of Persistence by Brian Kardon

Persistent sales people are praised, honored, and even given swanky “President’s Club” trips to the Caribbean.  As Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) famously said to Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) in the movie “Wall Street”:

“This is the kid, calls me 59 days in a row, wants to be a player. There ought to be a picture of you in the dictionary under persistence, kid.”

The rep that calls a prospect 50 times and stalks him on LinkedIn is the very essence of a modern, successful sales person.  Right?

An analysis of millions of pieces of data challenges the near universal celebration of persistence.  In fact, the data show that quitters, who know when to quit, win in the end.

There is a dearth of data-driven insight about the process of selling.  We wanted to apply data science to one of the last bastions of folklore and anecdote – sales.  Working with my colleagues Paolo Massimi, Ph.D., and Shashi Upadhyay, Ph.D., we looked at the performance of more than 1,000 sales reps over a thirty month period.  The call logs we analyzed had more than four million entries: number of outbound calls, messages left, completed calls, scheduled meetings.  We then looked at the actual deals that closed from those efforts.  Our hypothesis was that persistence pays off.  But the data told a completely different story.

1. Sales reps are simply too persistent.  There is a point of diminishing returns after which the conversion rate drops quite dramatically.  Reps should call a prospect less than seven times.  The effort beyond seven outbound calls, on average, does not correlate with better win rates.
2. Sales reps spend too much time with accounts that will never close.  97% of effort is spent with prospects that will never close. Reps should stop calling a prospect after a certain point and focus on their uncalled accounts.  If you ask a sales rep what their biggest time-waster is, they will likely say some variety of “administrative tasks” – entering data into the CRM, doing expense reports, booking travel.  They hate that stuff! But the real time-waster is time spent with the wrong prospect: one that will never close.
3. The best performing reps instinctively know when to quit.  In our study, the reps having the highest quota achievement came closest to the “optimal” number of outbound calls.  They knew when it was time to move on.  Poor performing reps spent too much time trying to connect with accounts with low conversions. The long tail of effort (phone calls beyond the ninth) accounted for 50% of their time.
4. The number of days between calls matters. Concentrated calls to a prospect are more effective than spreading calls out over more days.  Some reps talk about a “drip call” strategy: they call once a week, or every 2 weeks.  Our analysis shows that this is a poor strategy.  The best call strategy is a concentrated one – focus calls for multiple days in a row.  A fast pour beats a slow drip every time. Bud Fox got it right when he persistently called Gordon Gekko every day. Of course, data science would have advised Bud to stop calling after seven attempts, not fifty nine.

Most sales professionals face the “curse of abundance” every day. There are too many people to call.  How do you prioritize?  Ironically, reps can close more business by doing less.  Sales reps should be “intelligently persistent” by knowing when to stop trying to connect with an account.  Companies can help their sales teams by analyzing their own big data to find the right moment to quit.  Data science can help figure this out.

For peak sales performance, the true winners are often quitters. To all you quitters out there, see you next year at “President’s Club.”

Posted by John Koehler on Sales Benchmark Index

A few weeks ago, I stayed at Club Mahindra’s resort in Varca, Goa, taking a much-needed yearly break and visiting relatives in Goa. As a happy customer, enjoying their world-class service and ambience, I shared a few holiday photos of the resort on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.

 

By posting a few photos with the @ClubMahindra tag, I became a brand advocate for the company – one that would happily recommend them as being responsible for many happy family memories.

 

Today, social media has become one of the most powerful channels for Word of Mouth (WOM) marketing. Here are some facts about social media that demonstrate just how powerful it can be.

 

• Social media users who receive great service tell an average of 42 people (compared to just 9 for social absentees). (Source)
 

• Approximately 40% of all Twitter users regularly search for products on Twitter. (Source)

 

• More than 88% of consumers are influenced by other consumers’ online comments. (Source)

 

• 44% of Indian consumers have bought a brand because their friends like or follow the brand on a social network. (Source)
 

This is a very convincing argument about the power of social media in creating brand advocates. But just how do you go about creating brand advocates through social media? Here are a few steps to go about doing that.

 

1. Listen to what your customers are saying.

 

Use social monitoring tools, such as SocialMention, Hootsuite, Google Analytics, Klout and Buffer, to listen to what people are saying about your brand across multiple social media channels, and then respond to them individually. All these tools are free and they will help you monitor the sentiment about your brand across the web.

 

2. Have efficient social customer service.

 

Customers on social media have come to expect speed and reliability in brands responding to their queries and complaints on social media. Social media users tell three times as many people about positive service experiences compared to the general population. (Source)

A majority of social media-savvy organizations in India respond to fan queries within 30 to 60 minutes on Twitter and within 30 minutes to a few hours on Facebook. (Source)

Having an efficient customer service program for social media fans will ensure that you respond to complaints quickly and avoid negative comments from escalating to become a crisis.

 

3. Create incentives for brand advocates.
 

A well-designed social media incentive campaign, coupled with excellent social customer service, can help you create strong advocates for your brand and give you the benefit of excellent word of mouth recommendations from your customers and their peers.

Offer your fans and followers discount coupons, free downloads or any kind of incentive relevant to the product or service that you’re trying to sell. Introduce an element of exclusivity in the incentives you offer.

 

See how Jacksonville Jaguars incentivized their brand advocates in the campaign here.

4. Make their actions public.

 

Create an application on Facebook that posts your customer’s actions to their Facebook newsfeed or Twitter stream every time they redeem a discount campaign or complete a successful purchase on your website.

This would tell all their peers about their interaction with your brand and give you amazing word of mouth publicity. According to studies, this kind of marketing-induced consumer-to-consumer word of mouth generates more than 2X the sales of paid advertising. (Source)

 

See again how the Jaguars did it here.

5. Create a rewards program on multiple levels

 

Reward your customers with a bigger discount for purchasing from you consistently and get them to post about it to their peers. You can design a number of levels, such as Gold, Platinum, Diamond, and increase the discounts awarded as they work their way up the rewards program.

 

If you design the rewards well and make them look good when they share about it, they will readily tell all their friends about it. You could even give them additional benefits for sharing about it to all their friends and for any friends that sign up through them.

 

6. Showcase your brand advocates on your page.

 

Starbucks does this very well on Instagram by inviting users to send in their coffee photos tagged with #Starbucks. Many brands invite their customers to send in photos engaging with their product and then showcase the best ones as a cover photo or even on a hoarding. Give your fans and followers some love and they will return it multifold.

 

Again, the Jaguars did it really well here.

7. Respond to damaging posts quickly

 

Remember the crisis Dominos faced when a couple of their employees posted a damaging video on YouTube performing “unsanitary acts” with their pizzas? The failure of Domino’s management to respond quickly resulted in the video getting over 1 million views within two days.

The crisis cost Domino over $50 million in sales and 65% of respondents who would previously visit or order Domino’s s Pizza were less likely to do so after viewing the offending video. (Source)

 

Had Dominos responded quickly and had the video taken down, it might have mitigated some of the negative press and loss of business. It was a lesson for all brands to take customer sentiment on social media more seriously.

Creating brand advocates can help your company weather the ups and downs of the social web and actively respond to any negative press that might come your way.

 

© Priya Florence Shah is a published author, online publisher, blogging and social media consultant and digital marketing trainer. She uses the power of blogs and social media to help her clients build communities and nurture loyal customers online. Her deepest desire is to help her clients create more... View full profile

I’ve had a few prospects getting in touch over the last three weeks – through client referrals and also finding me via Google with blog posts I’ve written. They were all looking for examples of successful social media marketing.

What’s been interesting, however, is the common question all the prospects asked – namely, what can social media engagement actually deliver? They’ve all been keen to see examples of successful social media marketing in action.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The first question I ask in return is “What’s your definition of successful social media marketing?” and the reply always, always, always includes an element of financial ROI for the activities delivered through social media engagement and blog marketing.

Successful social media marketing usually includes one or more of the following elements for my clients:

* Financial ROI

* Reputation ROI

* Engagement ROI

* Web traffic ROI

* Google ranking ROI

* Competitive ROI

So, here’s six proven, measurable, concrete examples of successful social media marketing from recent client campaigns – to highlight the value and benefits of professional social media engagement, blogging outreach and content marketing:

* How one blog post generated £1,600 in 60 seconds

 

A superb example of successful social media marketing, where a client wasfound on Google from a blog post, and a new customer was secured in 60 seconds. Social media engagement should deliver cash in the bank. Solid financial ROI.

* How blog marketing delivered 18 Google Page One rankings in 12 weeks

 

A brilliant example of successful social media marketing, whereby a client dominated industry search terms for their business using professional blog marketing and social media content. Within 12 weeks, they had secured Google ROI for all services.

* SEO Copywriting delivers 700% ROI in four weeks

 

A solid example of successful social media marketing, with a client using SEO Copywriting and blog marketing to drive more web traffic to their new website and generate interest, leads and Google domination for their business.

* How to use content marketing to sell 100 products per week

 

A great example of successful social media marketing, where a client used a combination of targeted social media content and an eNewsletter to sell 100 products per week. Financial ROI and reputation ROI in a single campaign.

* How to create cash from blog marketing – within 36 hours

 

A powerful example of successful social media marketing, where a client’s blog post delivered financial ROI, web traffic ROI and competitive ROI within 36 hours of uploading. Sceptics of blog marketing need to read this case study.

* How to get 20 customers in 20 days using eNewsletter marketing

 

A fantastic example of successful social media marketing, with a client using a combination of social media engagement and eNewsletter marketing to drivefinancial ROI in a short space of time. A massive increase in reputation ROI delivered, too.

If you’d like free social media marketing hints and tips delivered monthlyto your email inbox, simply sign up here.

Did you know that videos provide a 74% increase in your visitors’ understanding of your product or service compared to pictures and also increase the likelihood of your visitors purchasing your product or service by 64%?

If you’re not currently using video and that doesn’t convince you to start, maybe the infographic below will.