The Honey Pod

Digital Branding & Repetition

2007-11-18T21:20:00.001-07:00

When asked what makes a digital brand? The most common answer is Consistency. Most people know that all the digital elements should have recognizable elements. The color scheme, the logo and the font should be the same they use elsewhere. Consistency is certainly a good answer.

Do you know why?

Repetition. It makes it easier for people to learn and recognize your brand. People learn through repetition. Right?

Sure. But there's a much easier way. As an example, I've told my kids to brush their teeth before bed a gazillion times. Have they learned that? No, another 10 years should do the trick. But, they learned the Wii in about 3 minutes. Which is amazing since they'd never seen it before. They learned the Wii because it was exciting, interactive, and relevant. In short, they really cared about it. Repetition is the method of learning you use when you don't care or it's irrelevant. When something is relevant, learning is easy.

So, let's learn from my kids. If your digital brand is something your target audience cares about, you won't need to drill it into their forehead like a woodpecker on a Sequoia. I'm not saying your message shouldn't be consistent, it should. But interactive spaces have very tangential experiences with fickle commitment. You can't force everyone to drive past the same billboard for 30 miles in interactive spaces. It's much more efficient to find relevant elements of your brand and deliver it directly than to bombard irrelevant messages repeatedly. This may sound easy, but it's not. Focus on the quality of the message by asking some questions like these:

What do you have the audience cares about?
How do they want it given to them?
How is what you have unique?

Perhaps when you have these answers a word to the wise will be sufficient.

2008 Internet Marketing Planning Guide

2007-10-27T13:53:00.000-06:00

We made a video to explain some concepts. We also made a to do list. You can see it here:
http://internethoney.com/2007endOfYearPlanner.php

2006 End of Year Planner

2007-10-27T10:17:00.000-06:00

To help Travel and Tourism clients plan for 2007, we've made this video and the to do list.

Digg's importance in promotion

2007-10-27T10:03:00.000-06:00

Digg has a unique way of allowing you to promote yourself.

Mobile Search Usage

2007-10-27T09:55:00.000-06:00

Mobile Search has a large overseas audience. Google's universal interface has a great presence online.

Moving Downtown

2007-02-03T06:19:00.000-07:00

Internet Honey has taken space in the Hangar Lofts in downtown Colorado Springs. Although the space is just a shack, it's what we need. Originally the building was a dairy and you can still see many of signs painted on the exterior. When the dairy carts arrived they parked in a shed to one side so the dairy products could be loaded. An architect, Michael Collins, purchased the dairy building and converted it to office space leaving most of the character in the space. Our building was the shed where they parked the dairy carts, horses and all.

.mobi Domain Names

2006-11-28T20:53:00.000-07:00

Mobile domain names are here. It's still first come, first serve like .com TLDs (top level domains). Your domain may be gone. You can check on register.com for availability. But, the big idea is to determine why you'd spend the extra money to register the .mobi domain name.

This depends on who the audience is and what is the target user experience. If the answer to any of these questions is 'yes', your content is a candidate.

Do your users have smart phones?
Do your users travel?
Are your users sophisticated?
Do your employees need access to information on the road?
Are you in the Travel & Tourism industry?
Do people drive to your location?

Here's an example of Google's mobile content which is where google.mobi goes. Internet Honey has mobile content here. As you can see the content is very short and designed for a small screen and slower connections. The good news is that creating these webpages isn't tough or expensive. It's often re-purposing (I love that word) what you already have.

Banner Ad Relevance for Customer Acquisition

2006-11-26T19:59:00.000-07:00

Recently banner ads have become more sophisticated in their ability to deliver. From the outset banner ads have had trouble with relevance. For example, an ad for shaving cream is shown on oxygen.com (a website for women). The ad isn't relevant to the audience that is coming to that website. So, the audience has become accustomed to ignoring banner ads. To make matters worse, many website owners piled all the banner ads into one area creating a nascar effect. This makes it easy for the user to ignore all of the ads at once and deem them all irrelevant.

Over time banner ad performance for Internet marketing has decreased. It's required many Internet marketing agencies to contract with specific websites for targeted positions. Recently, many of the banner ad networks, listed here, have added features helping to target the ads. You can show ads only to those people who have already been to a particular website (indicating likelihood of relevance) and repeat buyers.

However, the same problems plague many banner ad networks. They don't have the control needed for customer acquisition. Search engines continue to provide a very relevant environment for customer acquisition. And until the banner ad networks can solve this problem, they will continue to perform poorly for customer acquisition.

As a branding exercise and for brand awareness, banner ads can still provide an effective choice. And if you can find the correct destination website, they can provide a source of traffic that search engines can't match. When they provide better insight into their network and segmentation of the users in the network, I'll let you know.

Performance Marketing Defined

2006-11-26T05:18:00.000-07:00

Performance Marketing has been bandied about lately and needs some clarification. It's a collective term for any marketing effort that can be measured and the results can be compared to the costs. It's closely tied to direct marketing but more strongly associated with new media. Direct marketing has been tracking marketing performance since it could track results of individual campaigns. Direct marketing was pioneered by Wunderman, see more on this guy here, in the 1970's and his group is still a leader in that field.

So much of Internet marketing has a measurable component that it's very similar to direct marketing in that regard. Email campaigns, for example, follow the direct marketing cycle in many instances. They're planned, launched, measured, adjusted, and re-sent. Then this process is repeated for as small an audience segment as possible.

For some reason the industry felt it necessary to distinguish the larger discipline of direct marketing from what was happening in Internet marketing and call it performance marketing. Since direct marketing has been tied to some more traditional media like direct mail, performance marketing has come to represent the newer media that can be measured. For example, there are some opportunities now for pay-per-call marketing. Leads on the Internet are directed to call with interest. Marketers only pay when the call is generated. This can be woven into a direct marketing campaign. But, its newness would lump it in with performance marketing.

Welcome to the Internet Honey Internet Marketing Blog.

2006-11-18T06:34:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the Internet Honey blog. Our conversations will be posted here to build a guide and reference for our clients. Many clients have similar thoughts and questions regarding Internet marketing. We'll post the responses to those questions. By searching the blog you may find what you need.

As you may know, we talk with contacts in the industry often. We attend trade shows, conventions and the sort. We'll post our findings from those as well to share with you here. We hope you will talk with us directly in the event you don't find something here. You can always find more at our website http://www.InternetHoney.com

Thank you.
R. A. Burrell