With print seemingly near extinction, there are not many requests for marketing and design calling for this unique skill set. Is it a dying art? Or will it make a comeback? In Unimax’s case, it will definitely get the job done.

While working on a recent B2B marketing project for a software client, I checked out Splunk, a provider of operational intelligence solutions. And I must say, I was totally blown away by their messaging. I can’t say that I’m a IT Director or CIO (their prospect I’m guessing), but I’ve gotta say, their approach is dead brilliant. In literally under 30 seconds, I completely get what they do technically on two important levels:

1. Emotional (‘Listen to Your Data – It’s Trying to Tell You Something’)

2. Intellectual (showing their awesome dashboard in the video)

That’s pretty impressive. Plus they support their claim with business case arguments, which are also backed up with impressive big brand case studies. If I were a director or C-level prospect, I’d be picking up the phone, I’d want to know more.

Am I being overly naive here, or should we all be taking a lesson from this? Splunk simply follows B2B marketing principles to the letter. In my 30-second first impression, they did not mention a single feature, only big picture benefits. They told me what they could do for me (benefits), not how they do it (features).

I’m offering this short post here today, only becuase  it’s rare to see such well-executed B2B communications such as Splunk. While I don’t give them huge kudos for their aesthetic design, the brand approach from a messaging standpoint was literally flawless. I know nothing about operational intelligence solutions, yet in less than a minute I can see what a cool solution Splunk offers.

That’s a principle all B2B marketer should aspire to.

First of all, thanks to all of those who completed my 2011 Media Usage Survey. More than 60 of you clicked through and completed it, about 25 in the first hour alone. It was by far the most successful newsletter I’ve ever done in terms of clicks and engagement.

Analyzing the results, however, was a lot tougher than I thought. I guess the first thing I learned from doing a survey was to use a tool like surveymonkey that performs many of the calculations and analysis. But still, after plowing through Excel and trying to make sense of it all, I still was able to discern some pretty interesting stuff. Too bad it took six months. Download the excel file below, take a look at the data, and let me know what you think.

Click here to download excel file

Small sample size validates my assumptions, at very least.

First of all, to keep this project in perspective, I’m fully aware that a sample size of around 60 is pretty small. But it’s definitely large enough to spot a few over-arching trends about people and their media habits. As I stated earlier, these days I see people falling in two distinct groups – the tech savvy ‘haves’ and the technology squeamish ‘have nots.’ I broke down my group of 60 into five age groups:

• Age 60+ (6)
• Age 50+ (10)
• Age 40+ (19)
• Age 30+ (15)
• Age 15 – 30 (14)

Survey Scope: gauging our technical comfort zone.

As you can see by the number in parentheses, the largest number of respondents came from the 40+ age group (19), which says more about who is on my mailing list than anything else. Here are three things you need to know about the survey before any of my observations will make sense:

1. Primary objective was to discern peoples’ comfort level with using technology in their daily business and personal lives.
2. Yes/No questions were asked in sequential order from less technical to more technical; ‘reading a daily newspaper’ (less technical) to ‘posting a video to youtube’ (more technical) to ‘managing a network’ (even more technical).
3. Respondents could a score up to 26 points, which should approximate someone’s technical comfort zone.  The two highest scorers overall had 25 points. Each missed only one — one had never attended a webinar, the other didn’t use social media. Both were under age 40.

Observation #1: Newspapers may be around a little while longer — For someone like me who enjoys the feel of print newspaper in hands as I sip my coffee in the morning, I am relieved that over half the people survey indicated that they read a daily print newspaper. However, 26 of the 31 responses came from ages 40 and up. No surprise there, but don’t count Star Trombone out just yet.

Observation #2: people would rather email talk on the phone – The question was Which of the following do you consider to be the most effective or satisfying for one-on-one personal communications? Turns out that while 46% indicated Meeting Face to Face as their #1 preference (whew!), but 28% indicated they prefer email, which eclipses talking on the phone (15%). If I’m reading this right, it’s disturbing to discover that more people actually prefer email communications to Face-to-Face or telephone. Scary to say the least.

Observation #3: social media rules – Over 80% surveyed indicated that they currently use social media, facebook in particular. Twitter hasn’t quite caught on, and was most popular in 30+ age group (63%). Surprisingly four of six in the 60+ age group claimed to use Facebook.

Observation #4: more folks read books and watch TV – Now, I for one find this hard to believe. Really? I’m lucky if I read more that 3-4 books a year, but always watch at least an hour of tube each day. I guess it goes to show you, never overthink what you think people think. Or, it just may be there’s nothing good on TV, even though most of us have thousands of channels to choose from.

Observation #5: 30+ age group is the most tech savvy — The question: Are you comfortable troubleshooting simple technical issues with your desktop applications (ie., MS Office)? 100% of the 30+ age group answered yes to this question, compared with 61% for ages 15-30, 57% for 40+ and about 50% for 50+.Not only that, but over 80% of the 30+ group also have claimed to have operated a blog as well.

Observation #6: Internet #1 source of news – When asked their primary source of news, 45% chose the internet, with newspapers surprisingly getting 28%, followed by TV with 16%, and radio with a meager 6%. Somehow, I expected radio to be higher, but with ipods, smartphones and devices available to stay in touch with everything, it just makes sense. What is the future of radio anyway?

Observation #7: Smartphones have taken over – No big surprise here, as 72% of us now use iPhones, Droids or whatever. The smartphone has become an extension of the human persona, in all ages groups across the board.

There is so much more to share about this, but who has the time? I would really appreciate your comments and/or questions below.

In late October, it was nothing more than a pipedream. Today, YouthHockeyHub.com is a thriving new blog/website claiming over 12,000 engaged visitors during its first month of operation.

When someone starts a new blog or website, the goal is usually to generate a high volume of engaged visitors. So, if one generated over 12,000 in the first 30 days, it’s safe to say that would qualify as a rocking success. That’s precisely what has happened with YouthHockeyHub.com.

And it didn’t happen by accident.

So what is YouthHockeyHub, and why the sudden success? The site is a joint-venture between ZoselCo (Scott Zosel) and Multiply Communications (Tony Zosel, aka Tony Scott). Yes, my brother and I, both being youth sports enthusiasts, took a hard look at the marketplace for youth sports and saw some exciting opportunities looming. Our idea was to create a blog-style website covering Minnesota youth hockey, complete with feature stories and editorials. The primary drawing card would be weekly team rankings for both boys and girls hockey ages 9-14. Our long-term goal is to monetize the site via affiliate programs and advertising revenue.

However, you can’t just throw the site up and expect over 12,000 to beat a path to your door. If you want to generate big traffic numbers right out of the gate, be prepared to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty.

In a nutshell, here is our formula for success:

1. Find a large under-served market –  After exploring the marketplace for youth hockey, we saw that mnhockeyhub.com claimed some 70,000 visitors at its peak in March last year (see graphic below). This level of traffic volume will support several players. We wanted to be one of them.
2. Find a marked loaded with engaged customers — Simply put, youth hockey parents and coaches are insanely engaged, and will spend big bucks at the drop of a hat (sticks, skates, ice time et al). If your ultimate goal is monetization, your market must have this essential characteristic.
3. Connect with key influencers one-by-one – One of the chief reasons to offer weekly rankings was to attract visitors interested in seeing how their kids’ teams were doing. However, to offer rankings, we needed coaches and parents who would login to the site and rank teams in their division. Recruiting them meant finding them through their local hockey association website, individually emailing each one of them, and inviting them to become a ranker. To get the job done, we simply paid high school kids to plow through this tedious task. Once we had over 100 rankers in the fold, things became viral, as they invited many others and traffic really grew. One-on-one emails were critical; email blasting would have been futile.
4. Work the forums – Like I said, youth hockey followers are insanely engaged. There are a couple key youth hockey forums where hundreds of key influencers congregate daily to discuss a variety of topics, including team rankings. Over half our traffic comes from one forum, and will likely continue if we participate. We also have a forum on our site where participation is growing daily.
5. Contacting key influencers = exponential visits – Because we already have a personal dialogue with parents and coaches, it’s easy to create stories about the teams they’re connected with. And whenever we do this, traffic usually comes back tenfold. Let’s say we run a story on a Squirt A tournament preview, we’ll send a email notice alerting this particular group of 12-15 parents. This generates 300-400 visits.

Big thanks to entrepreneur Tamre Sutphen, owner of  baby blanket maven Shi-Shu Style. She hooked us up with her buddy Ric Flores from Cima Entertainment Marketing who specializes in the sales and development of strategic marketing, sponsorship, and advertising opportunities. They are experts in designing, packaging, and selling unique advertising and promotional opportunities.

Built a very simple and straight-forward wordpress site that tells their story and hosts all of their case studies. Fun to work with.

It’s true. With awesome template options available like those offered by Studiopress, it’s really quite simple to offer an organization like St. Lukes, an elegantly presented website with a ton of very useful functionality. Clearly, the day has come when internet design is more about aesthetic challenges than those that are technical in nature.

St. Lukes, a small California Episcopal Church, no has a great website they can use to easily communicate with members, connect with Facebook and Twitter, and update with ease. The site can grow as the community does, and if they get tired of its look, well they can hire us, or anyone for that matter, to redesign it.

Very soon, we will likely be doing some serious brand integration for Red Lambda, who is touted as the foremost provider of security and operational intelligence software for the world’s largest network infrastructures. I think you can expect great things from this up and coming company as security and network operations teams struggle to analyze everything, everywhere, every moment hoping they can quickly detect issues or anomalies.

Red Lambda provides some timely solutions, not only by helping detecting operational threats, but also offering capabilities to reveal opportunities to increase operational efficiency and unlock enormous business potential. Watch the video below to learn more.

The 1990′s was the golden age of database marketing — direct mail, catalogs, Val-Paks, and dozens of other marketing vehicles designed to deliver an offer to a targeted list in hopes of snagging a new customer. It was an era was all about the direct mail package — the offer, the message, the teaser, the buck slip. Copy was king. The mantra was test, test, test until you optimized the elements that would deliver ROI.

Copy is still king. The messages, offers, and teasers you used to see on direct mail envelopes are still alive and well. The same proven fundamentals of outbound database marketing are now used primarily in Google adwords campaigns and custom landing pages.

When John Q Consumer is searching for polo shirts, pool supplies, or the cheapest tree trimmer, he turns to Google. In the old days, he might have turned to the yellow pages or had a coupon he received in the mail. Now when searching google, it’s your 95 characters of copy in your ad that persuades a prospect to click through to your custom landing page whose job is to close the deal.

Hook, persuade, close. Same fundamentals, new medium.

Briefly, here are the basic similarities between direct mail and Google adwords campaigns, and how to make them work for you:

1. Hook with Google ad copy (the envelope teaser) — Envelope teasers like ‘wake up and see the world’ are akin to your Google ad copy, because those few words will determine whether the offer resonates with your prospect enough for them to take the next step, open the envelope. With Google, your teaser, or ad copy has to hit a little bit harder. So, for the same product, your offer with Google may be a little more straightforward such as ‘eliminate dependence on glasses or contacts.’ With Google ads, you only have text, no pictures, so simpler is better.

The direct mail envelope teaser.

The Google Ad Copy.

2. Persuade with your Landing Page (the direct mail letter) – Once a prospect clicks your ad, they have essentially opened your envelope, and are considering your offer. In the 80s and 90s, marketers tested direct mail letter formats in much the same way search engine marketers test landing pages. The layout, bullet points, copy, headlines, captions and graphic elements are mixed and matched until the right combination steers prospects to take action. Marketers use arrows, bursts and testimonials much the same way on landing pages as direct mail letters. The goal is always to use enough elements with enough persuasive copy to get the prospect to take the next step.

Example of landing page coming from PPC ad.

The direct mail letter, full of promises.

3. Close with you Conversion Form (the BRC) — In the old days, you had three ways to get a prospect to convert — the business reply card (BRC), the 800 phone number, or god forbid, the fax form. Today, it’s still the same mentality. We walk the fine between asking the prospect to give just enough info so we don’t turn them off, but just enough so we know they’re a qualified prospect.

The BRC - business reply card

It’s a common phenomenon among marketing folks: over-thinking, over-analyzing details based on personal preferences.

You’ve probably heard the phrase, ‘I don’t read junk mail’ or ‘I never go to sites like that’ or ‘I would never click on that.’ Well, the reality of whether you don’t read junk mail, or what your particular clicking preferences happen to be, are largely irrelevant when it comes to making strategic marketing choices. Successful strategies are built on facts, metrics and reliable consumer behavior data, not your personal preferences. Over-thinking strategic details based on how we feel consumers will respond can potentially waste thousands in ad spending, and cause major campaigns to crash and burn.

Welcome to the age of reason, and ROI.

Because the majority of advertising and marketing is conducted on the internet these days, pretty much all marketing is measurable, or can be tracked — marketing dollars spent to revenue generated. Every marketing initiative — email marketing, pay-per-click ads, social media, et al — can be tracked. If the media choice doesn’t perform, it gets the axe. Pure and simple.  So why would anyone make strategic decisions based on personal preferences?

Any strategic media choice, online or other, can and should evaluated on it’s potential merit. The media market has never offered more choices, and has never been more competitive. Yet some marketing folks commonly shy away from solid strategies based on numbers offering promising results and ROI because they ‘would never click on something like that.’

Newsflash: your personal preferences are irrelevant. Put more of your trust in numbers, and less on your gut.