Portland marketing – Page 2 – Phil Bernstein's Advertising, Marketing, and Sales Training Blog

Email Marketing That Misses the Mark

I received an email this morning from a woman named Ophelia, who works for an SEO company that offers “professional link building” services.*Excerpts follow:

Hello, my name is Ophelia and I am an Internet Rankings Engineer. I performed a Google search for the keyword pedicure portland oregon and upon perusing past the first page, i ran across your website philbernstein.com. I see that your website is currently not listed on the first page for this keyword search.

The fact is that your ranking and search engine positioning is easily correctable. There is no reason that your website cannot be ranked in the top three positions for the keyword pedicure portland oregon based on your website’s very quality content and solid structure. You have a very good website that is built to convert when it can be found.

I was baffled as to why an advertising and marketing blog would want to be ranked well in the pedicure category… until I remembered that in 2008, I’d written a facetious post about the short-lived phenomenon of fish pedicures.

My new friend Ophelia — or more likely, her automated system — had searched for the word “pedicure”, found my post, scraped my email address, and offered me a service I neither wanted nor needed.

Had she bothered to look at my website, she would have realized that I write about advertising and marketing — quite well, I might add.

I don’t mind a well-directed piece of direct mail, whether it’s via the postal service or a digital channel such as email. But online or offline, you need to at least attempt to match the message to the market.

If you don’t, you’re not a savvy online marketer — you’re a spammer.

*I’ve redacted her last name and will not name her firm here, since it would either embarrass her, give her firm a link it doesn’t deserve, or both.

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Safeway Print Ad Fail

Today’s lesson: make sure the folks in Marketing and Operations are talking to each other.

This ad was on the front page of today’s Sunday Oregonian:

As an ad professional, they had me at “$15 off plus free delivery”.

A nice, simple offer. Strong call to action, with a reward for taking it. Although the print on the deadline is way too small — they would have been better off making the deadline font every bit as big as the rest of the copy — but there is a deadline.

As a person who consumes groceries, I was interested, so I went directly to my computer and logged onto their web site. This is what I found:

We are sorry for the inconvenience, but our site is currently down for maintenance from 9 PM until 7 AM (PDT).

It was 8:35am. In an effort to take care of delivery customers, there was a link, but it went to this:

Our home delivery system is temporarily unavailable due to a scheduled system maintenance. Thank you for your patience.

While the folks in Advertising were arranging to spend thousands of dollars to invite new customers to their web site, somebody in IT was scheduling a maintenance activity that took the site down. And if they figured that the maintenance would be over by the time most Oregonian readers were up and reading the paper, they figured wrong.

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Swipe-and-Deploy Marketing: Shelter Borrows From the Car Dealers

I’m one of those who’s come to the conclusion that there are no new ideas. Sometimes when you’re looking for a hook, the most “creative” thing you can do is move a technique from one industry to another.

Multnomah County Animal Services in Oregon, recognizing the fact that there is more demand for kittens than for full-grown cats, has come up with a nice little bit of swipe-and deploy: the “Certified Pre-Owned Cats” campaign.

With hundreds of cats crowding the Troutdale shelter, the county plans, effective immediately, to temporarily eliminate adoption fees for mature cats (over one year old). The “Certified Pre-Owned Cats” campaign aims to place as many cats in homes as possible in the upcoming summer months.

Multnomah County took the concept a step further with this inspired touch:

All Certified Pre-Owned Cats adopted from the shelter come with a free “multi-point inspection”: the cats have received a complete health exam, all their current vaccinations and a microchip, and have also been spayed or neutered.

There’s nothing particularly newsworthy about an overcrowded shelter; and because the older a cat gets, the less likely it is to be adopted, reduced-fee adoptions for older animals are fairly common. Meanwhile, certified pre-owned programs are a-dime-a-dozen in the car business.

But when an animal shelter borrows the certified pre-owned concept from the car business, it becomes a “man bites cat” story.

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Microsoft Takes a Page From the Singer Playbook

Knit blogger Pdxknitterati writes today about an old Singer miniature toy sewing machine that she encountered recently at her mother’s house. From about 1926 into the 50’s, Singer marketed these to little girls. They likely made a little money on each toy sewing machine. More important, Singer established the Singer brand early with these girls, and made a lot of money when they grew up and bought full-size Singers for themselves.

Microsoft is likely to get similar results from a new program they’ve established with the Employment Department in my home state of Oregon. Under the Elevate America program — which is also operating in other states — Microsoft will give out 16,000 vouchers good for free online training in the programs of the Microsoft Office Suite. To be eligible, recipients must have been unemployed for 45 days or longer.

Here’s the beauty of this program: not only is it genuinely helpful, but it also gives Microsoft the opportunity to use three of Robert Cialdini’s six “Weapons of Influence”:

Authority: Microsoft’s products get an implicit endorsement from the Employment Department, and the Governor
Social Proof: people will be more inclined to do something — like buying Microsoft software instead of using, say, Google Docs — if they see other people doing it
Reciprocity: when these people re-enter the work force, they will feel a debt of gratitude to Microsoft. If any of them wind up having responsibility over purchasing, Microsoft has the inside track.

Like the girls who learned to sew on Singer machines, there are 16,000 Oregonians who will be most comfortable with Microsoft Office when they get jobs again. So Microsoft isn’t just doing good — they’re going to do well.

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The Keyword — The Gift That Keeps On Giving

I’m no longer selling radio advertising in Portland — I moved into a new role as a nationwide advertising and marketing consultant with Jim Doyle & Associates about six months ago.

So it was with a bit of surprise that the term “KXL list of advertisers” appeared in my blog’s keyword list today. From that list, I knew that someone had entered the term “KXL list of advertisers” into a search engine, and wound up on Portland’s Finest Advertising Blog.

So I duplicated the exercise in Google to see what the reader may have found. Turns out that I had mentioned 750 KXL — a news/talk competitor of my former employer 1190 KEX — in a couple of posts.

In 2008.

Two years later, those posts are still bringing me a little bit of traffic.

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