About three years ago, Tropicana changed the design of its orange juice cartons. Because of this, sales of Tropicana orange juice fell significantly. At this point, Tropicana decided after a period of a couple months to transition back to its old logo.

The uptake of that is this – consumers trust established motifs.

Consider this comparison of the change over time of the Coca-Cola and Pepsi logos. Notice how each logo transitions smoothly and slowly as time passes on, the exception being the New Coke era Coke logo.

Let us embark on this thought experiment: a Coke or Pepsi executive from the year 1900 has a vision of his company’s logo in the year 2012. He then orders the entire company to re-brand to the new logo.

At first glance, it would seem that this would be a dramatic and successful marketing decision. The soda company would be releasing bottles which are for all intents and purposes from its own future. How better to anticipate the needs of the market?

I would, however, argue that such a decision would be a catastrophe. Tropicana’s new logo was more futuristic than its old logo – it had smoother lines and a cleaner look. It did not, however, preserve any connection to the old logo. Tropicana did not clean up its old logo, it tossed it out the window.

In view of this, it is not reasonable to assume that a 1900 to 2012 future-scaling would have any success. It is necessary for any process of re-branding take place in the context of a gradual, evolutionary process. Big changes are not only scary to consumers, but indicative of uncertain decision-making.

As such, it is necessary to predict what direction the future will take and then proceed in that direction, but to take slow steps towards it. Many successful brands have developed an ability to do this.

An advantage of the baby-steps technique is that it allows simple backtracking. The Tropicana re-brand drew heavy consumer fire, but no small evolutionary step can cause that degree of controversy. If there is a problem to be addressed with a minor re-brand or an incremental development, the user base is much more likely to behave in a civil manner, and it is must less likely to bring you embarrassment. It is simple to backpedal a step or pace, but nearly impossible to backpedal a plunge.

Each success that a brand has and each advertisement made under it increases the power and legitimacy of the brand. Brands are among the most valuable assets of any company, and to radically re-brand is to squander the brand asset’s value.a

There is one absolutely certain, fool-proof method of winning the lottery, which I will reveal at the end of this article.

Mean time, let’s talk about advertising online.

To spend money on a conventional online advertisement campaign is to buy a set number of impressions, where x number of users will be exposed to the advertisement. It is commonly accepted that about 1 in every 50 users will click on an online advertisement. How many of the users who actually make it do your site then act on the ad is almost completely a function of luck.

Do not allow luck to determine the effectiveness of your ad campaign. Rather, be proactive and draw users to your site through an advertisement-action process.

Advertisement is often thought of as a stand-alone process, its goal only to lead the user to the website and then abandon him, as though in the gift shop of a museum. Instead, any online ad campaign should have a counterpart, a custom-designed web landing page or set of linked pages to which the user should be directed on your server. Here is how to design a complete ad campaign in three steps…

1. Preach to the Faithful

Find specific ways to target users who are specifically interested in your message. Advertise on opinion blogs or forum communities that are related to your product or service. Here, you can feel free to use jargon or specifics in your ad and explain clearly and without marketing-speak why it is worth their money and time.

2. Engage the Interested

Once someone has clicked on your ad, they should not just be directed to a spread of your products or services. Create a splash page with a compelling visual message, a graphic or short movie. Follow this with a simple, one-option, call-to-action…

3. Rally the Troops

Like our page!

Follow our twitter!

Buy our product!

Attend our event!

Organize your community!

Share our message!

It should be clear and certain what you want the user to do. Provide the resources for them to do this, either by linking them directly to the action that they should perform, or by showing a simple numbered (and preferably illustrated) flowchart about how to engage in the process. Make it easy, certain, and helpful.

Current advertising theory might equate user collection to running around in a rainstorm with a teaspoon. Instead, stand below a waterfall with a bucket. Valuable potential users are best found in intentional online communities built around the market or your product or service. Provide these users with something engaging and informative and direct them towards a definite call-to-action.

Only in doing this can you avoid the tragedy of wasted impressions and useless clicks.

Oh yeah, how do you win the lottery?

It’s simple: don’t play.

The odds are bad and the house always wins. So why bother? Don’t play a rigged game. And by extension, recognize that the conventional online ad game is rigged as well.

It is a game best played by making your own rules and creating a better game.

Manuel dos Reis Machado, known as Mestra Bimba, was a South American martial arts master. When he was in his 80s, he was challenged to a fight by a much younger fighter, a man in his 20s. So the story goes, the young man wanted to demonstrate his dexterity and mobility, and began the fight by jumping around and doing several flips in the air. As his competitor was mid-air, Mestre Bimba rolled into a cartwheel and simply stuck out his foot in the trajectory of the younger man. The competitor smashed his face into Mestre Bimba’s foot and knocked himself out. When he came to, he had no idea what had happened and asked Mestre Bimba, “What was that?”

Replied the master, “That was my foot.”

The lesson of this story is that applied elegance can solve any problem. We can apply this lesson towards a common problem: how to gain followers or interest in your online business.

One Message at a Time

It is important to always have one focus or message at a time. Consider woot.com, a website which sells one product a day. No consumer plans on waking up on February 12 wanting a digital camera, but woot is able to allow their potential customers to focus on the one item without being distracted by comparing models, looking up coupon codes, or digging through pages of unrelated products. A further advantage of woot’s model is that if a customer finds a deal to be good, he is much more likely to share it with his friends.

We have discussed how it is important to give the user a Hobson’s Choice, and this choice must always be facing the message that you are presently trying to promulgate.

Silence is Golden

When in the process of making one message known, you must direct all attention to it, and this is done through eliminating messages that contradict the central message. It is appropriate to hold a period of social media silence before a major announcement, which can then be touted on all social media channels, as well as through press releases or other appropriate means. If applied correctly, short periods (2-5 days) of social media vacuum will make your users eagerly anticipate major announcements.

“Jaws Moments”

Once you have established social media vacuums as the lead-in to a major announcement, try holding a social media vacuum for no reason at all. In the same way that religious services fluctuate from intense moments of worship or reflection to light moments of song or uplifting prayers, you may create fervor by shifting your mode of use of social media from constant to sporadic and back. Correct application of this type of technique will confuse users to the extent that they might pay greater attention to your posts or entertain speculation about future announcements based on your style of publicizing.

Per Merlin Mann, “Being consistent is WAY less interesting than being yourself. And if you’re not interesting? Good luck with your Big Consistency Project.”

Elegance comes from knowing when to speak and when not to.

Keep your users guessing.

Think about your top five reasons for making your most recent major purchase.

It is likely that at least one of these reasons will reflect a community-driven item of insight. Did your mechanic tell you how great a certain new car is? Did your IT person at work recommend a certain brand of televisions? Did a friend or relative tell you how much easier a certain household appliance made their life?

Surrounding any product or service’s value is the community of people who derive value from it. Though community is intangible, it greatly benefits the producer of the product or service to have a strong, active, and evangelistic community surrounding the product. Community-creation is a goal of any successful product line or company.

The purpose of asking questions if to create a format wherein posters (whether in blog comments, on Facebook, or on twitter through retweets) can engage in stimulating discourse or discussion. A question fails, however, when too many users post useless comments or negative griping answers. That is to say, a question can either lead to good vibes or bad vibes, and can either hurt or harm the community of users.

A well-placed comment, however, can get users thinking just as readily as a question can, but has less likelihood of backfiring. Think of a comment as a stealth question – intend your comment to provoke discussion, either by challenging your audience to think or by leaving something open for people to jump in on.

A few quick examples of stealth questions…

• Our company is moving towards a design philosophy of x.

• (Employee) just expressed admiration of (competing company)’s ability to do x.

• (Customer) has discovered a new use for product, x.

Note that in advocating comments, I do not suggest that questions are irrelevant. Questions best serve when input is being solicited, but comments better serve to initiate civil discussion. Also, in the context of a question, users are most likely to either answer the question or ignore it, whereas in the context of a comment, users can share their unique reactions or join in the discussion with no preliminaries.

In the interest of continuing discussion, you can ask follow up questions which drive at the heart of what you might have asked in question form, for instance by sharing a social media user’s reaction…

• In response to x, (user) said y, do you agree?

It can be easily understood from this type of question that a continuation of the discussion or intellectual debate from the previous post is called for. This type of question is non-pretentious, intellectually stimulating, and also serves the function of flattering the poster of the comment by highlighting it as insightful or significant.

Comments drive discussion, which drives community, which drives potential consumers to interact with your line of products or services. Questions have a place, which is to challenge users or solicit ideas, but questions disguised in the form of “stealth comments” are a less risky way of generating “good vibe” conversations and fostering a community around your product or service.

Around the year 1600, in Cambridge, England, there was a stable owner named Thomas Hobson. When a prospective customer arrived at his stable to rent a horse, he would not offer the customer his choice of the horses in the stable. Instead, the customer would be offered Hobson’s choice: the sole option of the horse nearest the door, take it or leave it.

In the world of 2012, the common thinking regarding social media marketing is to give the customer a wide range of different options: types of content to receive by email, channels to subscribe to on twitter, or pages on Facebook for different products distributed by a business. We are in a complex digital world, so why should we desire to keep things simple?

In point of fact, most customers favor simplicity in making decisions. Studies show that when faced with an online interface with many buttons, drop-down menus, and options, the user gravitates to the largest and most colorful button, regardless of what its function is.

If a large, colorful, “call-to-action” button is the focus of any user’s experience, all the other information on the web page surrounding is mere peripheral information, and plays a minimal role in the user’s experience of the page, besides to distract him from the main focus. Consider these examples of prominent call-to-action buttons.

Four hundred years ago, an English stable owner had the Arby’s moment that the call-to-action of a stable customer was to obtain a horse. So Hobson cut out all the chaff and pared the experience down to its basic function. And he remains a household name to this day.

The late visionary Steve Jobs also realized this. He ordered the iPhone (and the subsequent iPad) to be designed with only one button, which had the call-to-action of returning the user to the home screen. No matter where you are in any app, the single call-to-action button will quickly and simply take you home. Note how this radical and simple design decision took root in the entire mobile market, such that after the 2007 launch of the iPhone, almost every other mobile device on the market came to look like a clone of the iPhone.

How can you integrate Hobsonian simplicity into your social marketing strategy?

Easy. Just define your priorities in your marketing scheme and create a simple call-to-action for your customers. Do you want them to Like your Facebook, enter a sweepstakes, follow your twitter, or attend an event at your place of business? Make this the entire purpose of the splash page of your site. Make a big, giant, eye catching button linking to that page or action. Give it the 5/5 test: if a five year old cannot figure out the purpose of your social media campaign in five seconds, you have failed.

A real world example: Red Bull’s Facebook strategy. A bunch of colorful arrows leading straight from a Red Bull can to the Like button. And does it work? Red Bull has an obscenely simple call-to-action, backed by creative content and the popular platform of Facebook. These element combine to allow the company to have more than 25 million initial impressions for every post on their Facebook page.

Simplicity in business is a tried-and-true idea, hundreds of years old, and no less revolutionary on today’s internet than at Thomas Hobson’s stable.

There is so much more to owning and running a small business these days than there has ever been before. Especially since America’s economic downturn started, being an upstart entrepreneur is exceedingly difficult and, in some cases, impossible across the country. For those people that do make it to the point where they see their dreams come to life, it is important to learn the many tricks of the trade in regards to saving your infant company money. The internet provides limitless opportunities for small business owners to promote their companies without the hassle of having to pay someone else to do it and worrying about whether or not your ad is reaching as many people as it possibly can for the time you are paying it to run.

 
The most important tool available online for a young business is the ability to create and run your own website. Having some kind of home-base site is imperative to bringing in and developing a customer base that may not be geographically close enough to become regulars at your physical store or may do the majority of their shopping online. Professional websites though are difficult to create and expensive to have someone design for you. After that, there is the maintenance and the regular updating of any additional pages you have as well as you having to provide a reliable and secure way for online shoppers to pay. It becomes more of a headache than it is worth if you are unable to create a page that is not only visually appealing to customers but also easy to navigate.
This is where fellow internet users have joined in the fight to help small business owners and entrepreneurs create a home page that is not only easy to use but free to initiate. Their ingenious plans brought about the birth of the professional blog.

Blogs have been around since the mid-90s but originated as merely an online diary for those looking to talk about any feelings they had or any opinions they had on the views of the day. While the majority of blogs are still used for personal reasons, more and more often small businesses are creating them as ways to avoid having to pay other people to create them. There are two major blogs sites (Blogger and WordPress) that professionals use to promote their business with the ability to provide a secure means of payment for their online customers and answer any questions their regular or new customers may have about services they offer or products they carry before they come into the store.

It used to be that the only means of reaching customers for a new and blossoming business were paying for expensive and often ineffective advertising or relying on word of mouth. It is still true in all industries that word of mouth is one of the most influential factors in deciding whether a business takes off or crashes.
Customer experience is based on more than whether or not they are pleased with the product they purchased. It is about getting the help they need including, but not limited to, the following: getting any questions they have answered in a way that they can easily understand, being offered recommendations on different products you provide that can meet their needs, and any services your company offers that can help them after they leave the store.

Customers who have a good experience are almost guaranteed to come back to your business the next time they need one of the products you carry. Customers who have a great experience will usually tell their friends and family or their co-workers about how helpful your staff was which will expand your potential customer business. Both of these are the best case scenarios when it comes down to how your customers interact with your staff. It is estimated that each person will tell 3 to 5 people about a good experience, but on the other hand, it is estimated that a person who had a bad experience will tell 5 to 10 people about it and they in turn will 5 to 10 people when asked about recommendations on where to buy products in your industry.

When it comes to expanding your small business, there are many means of drawing people into your store or to your site but when it comes down to it, it is important that you focus on the basics. Your customer base can help your business to blossom or just as easily help it to come crashing down around you.

Despite popular opinion, Facebook is more than just a time sink that kills productivity and melts the mind of the uninformed masses. For small businesses and upstart entrepreneurs, Facebook is less of a black hole for time that could be used for working and more of a free means of reaching your target audience and all others that could have interest in your products.

Social media has not only changed the way the average person stays in contact with their friends and family, but it has also changed the way people shop and explore new interests. This is why it is so important in this day and age to be connected to your customers not only through a personal business website or blog but also through the many different social media sites that draw in more traffic daily than personal emails sites such as Yahoo! and Gmail. Of the multiple social media sites to choose from, Facebook is arguably the easiest to use and most effective in drawing customers from your profile on the site to your personal website and, in some cases, directly to your store.

Facebook was created as way for people to connect with friends and family that they may have lost contact with over the years. Think of it as a massive community pool: people go there willingly, even eagerly, to play around or get some exercise aka get some work done. It was only a matter of time before people started seeing this as a financial opportunity.

It started with the site itself. Facebook moderators could not resist the idea of getting money from all of those people gathered in one place. They started with games to see how the users responded and eventually started allowing gamers to buy things they needed on their virtual farms or in their virtual cities with real cash. Seeing how the public responded, they upgraded their site to include Facebook Business which allows companies to create profiles for their businesses at no charge to the user.

With the business profiles, small companies and entrepreneurs are able to draw their customers to themselves by simply using the same keywords in their profiles that customers would search for when looking for information in search engines such as Google or Bing. For example: If you sell power tools, by listing words and phrases such as “power tools” or “home improvement” on your profile, when people list those phrases or similar ones in their interests, Facebook’s engines will automatically list your profile under suggestions of pages they might like, doing all the advertising for you.

When it comes to expanding your small business and ensuring its survival through the stormy seas of the first year, there are multiple tactics commonly used to make the going a lot easier on the business owner. The easiest of which would be advertising via the various media sources. There are the traditional advertising methods including television, radio, and newspaper. These media outlets will make sure that, if the price is right, your ad will reach as many consumers as their channel, station, or paper distributes to.

The most difficult part of advertising using the traditional methods is designing your logo and choosing how your advertisement will look or writing a script for what you want your advertisement to say. This is a good activity and also a difficult one. It gives the business owner the chance to bring their own voice to their products. But for those who do not have any interest in discovering the new and exciting world of consumer-directed media, there are companies that you can hire to design or write the advertisements for you by simply giving them the basic information on how potential customers can reach you and the overall concept you are aiming for.

Again though, this can get pricey. No matter which path you decide to take, designing it yourself or paying someone else to do it, you are spending a lot of money up front that may or may not be successful in bringing a large customer return rate. That is not including purchasing the air time or the page space and continuing to pay to keep the ad running once your initial allotted time over with. When it comes down to it, traditional means of advertisement are not always the best way to go for a company that is just starting up especially if it is a small business that is not a part of a chain or a branch off of another company.

Online advertising is not only cheaper, but with the numbers climbing in regards to how much time people spend online over how much time people spend on the internet, it has a greater potential to reach a larger audience especially if your small business has an online aspect to it. Creating a banner ad is a simple as uploading a picture from your computer or another site and adding some text. That banner ad will then appear on the side or at the top of a site that you can choose based on site traffic or how much it relates to your product.

When it comes to expanding a small business, there are many different opinions as to what exactly is the most efficient and least costly method of reaching customers. Some small businesses are lucky in that they had money left over after their store was built or their site was set up, after their inventory was collected, and after their staff was hired that they can spend the extra hundreds of dollars on traditional means of advertising. The truth is that most small businesses barely have enough cash left after all the necessities are out of the way to even think about spending another dime no matter important it is to their company to let their customers know that they are there and ready for their business.

This is where social media comes in. The beauty of social media is that not only is it free to join, promote, and maintain, it allows you to create a presence on sites where the customers already exist. Websites such as Facebook and Twitter as like magnets for your target customer base in addition to being black holes for their free time. By creating a profile under your company page, searching for customers in your area that list interests in the same industry as your business, and sending them friend requests, you are starting give your company an online presence that will not only reach your potential customers but will reach any potential customers they have on their friends lists.

The best part is that these sites are completely free and offer you the chance to advertise in the future if you wish to do so. The same banners that you could buy for other sites are still available on social media sites but at a much lower price and the moderators on the sites will make sure that your ad is shown to those who could fall into your customer base. They decide this by looking at the keywords you list on your advertisement page and the interests and common terms used on the profiles of those in your target audience.

This is the main benefit of using social media: not only is it free to create a presence on the site and with your customer base but all the customers you could possibly want and need are already there. You do not need any additional advertising to draw the majority of people into your store or onto your website because they are already drawn to the social media site itself and from there are just a click away from your products.