Marketing Atheism

Over the last few years there has been a surge in the Marketing of Atheism, led pricipally by The God Delusion author,  Richard Dawkins.

There is a lot, as marketeers that we can learn from this.

It is a very modern, 360 degree campaign including:

• A (very press worthy) atheist summer camp for kids (more at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/religion/5674934/Richard-Dawkins-launches-childrens-summer-camp-for-atheists.html)

• A high profile (and very press worthy – this picture was from the Daily Mail) bus advertising campaign letting the public know that there porbably is no God, so they should stop worrying and enjoy life
  
• Facebook groups with over 4,000 followers
• A youtube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/richarddawkinsdotnet
• TV Shows, such as channel 4’s ‘Faith & Belief’
• Talks on ted.com
• Twitter https://twitter.com/richarddawkins with over 17,ooo followers

And a whole lot more.

This campaign has had a lot of success and from a marketing perspective it is not hard to see why; a true cross-media campaign with a consistent message – “God does not exist. Science (and evolution) is proven, so you stop stop believing in God and put your faith in science” – and things that get people and the press talking.

The cynical amongst you may think that this is even cleverer than a good campaign to market atheism, and is in fact an amazing campaign to sell books, but for the sake of this I am going to take Richard Dawkin’s at his word in the ted.com talk – that he wants to promote ‘Militant Atheism’.

Taking the promotion of ‘Militant Atheism’ as the campaign goal I would like to point out where I think that Richard Dawkins could do better. The reason for this is not any desire to promote atheism, it just shows a very good example of how, in-spite of great media campaign the creative message can be improved to get better results.

There are 2 things that Richard Dawkins is doing wrong from a marketing perspective:

1)  Telling people that they are wrong

2)  Talking about the product, not the benefits

1. Telling people they are wrong

No one likes to be told that they are wrong and it is a bad way to convince anyone of anything. Taking the atheism example, people believe in God, most of them always have and you telling them they are wrong and proving they are wrong is not going to convince them because they will always have an answer for it, usually along the lines of ‘you can’t prove God doesn’t exist’ – which is a ridiculous argument, but people will stick by it.

So what should you do?  The best thing to do is to tell people that they are right to believe in God.

That may sound counter-intuitive, but telling someone that they are right to believe in God is not the same thing as telling someone that God exists. The next step is to prove from a scientific perspective why they believe in God. There are evolutionary benefits to believing in God; people who share a belief can be more easily controlled and led – This can lead to many evolutionary advantages, such as fighting together, building together etc. Therefore people who are genetically predisposed to believing in God would be more likely to survive and pass on the ‘believing gene’ to others.

Similarly many people believe that God helped them through an event/ recovery from an injury etc. These people have managed to use their belief to dig deeper within themselves. You cannot tell these people that there is no God, because they have proof (their recovery). To convince these people the best way would be to do some research into “The God Placebo effect” and explain to them that it was their belief that helped them, not the existence of what they believe in

If I were Richard Dawkins I would make the next step of my campaign “The Evolution of God” and say to people ‘You are right to believe in God, but let me explain to you why you do believe in God’ by explaining to people that their belief in God is an evolutionary trait to ensure survival you are helping them to understand that there is a difference between believing in something and it existing and you can explain how evolution does work, you nudge them in the right direction and then they can make up their minds with the facts presented in a “you’re right” not a “you’re wrong” way.

HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO MARKETING MY PRODUCT?

Here is a very simple example:

You are launching a new brand of health supplement “Product Q” there is already a market leader in the category “Product B”.

What you want to do it tell everyone “You are wrong for buying Product B, you should buy our Product Q instead. It’s better”, but this is not very believable, because you can be sure that the makers of Product B will say that that is better and you are giving consumers no reason to believe you over them.

Instead you could say “Product B is a really good product, we know it must be good because it has some of the same active ingredients as our product, Product Q. However our product also has other ingredients such as xxx, xxx and xxx, that offer the following benefits….”

This way you are not telling customers that they are wrong to buy Product B, you in fact are telling them they were right to buy it, but by educating them you get them to realise that they would be ‘more right’ to buy Product Q, your product.

(I do appreciate the slight irony that this article is about what the Athesist marketeers are doing wrong, but I am not necessarily trying to convince them to do anything)

2. Talking about the products, not the benefits

Also known as ’selling the steak, not the sizzle’.

This is where a lot of people go wrong. It is not important to tell people about your product, it is important to tell people about what your product can do for them.

In the ‘Marketing Atheism’ example we are being told that God does not exist and science hold the keys to understanding our world. This is a great claim, but is nothing compared to the benefits that are being offered by the competition (organised religion); being part of a community, curing disease, life after death, absolution from sins, 24 virgins in heaven (this one is the product, the benefits are for you to imagine), caring, happiness!!

So what does atheism need to do to get someone to chose Science over Religion? Simply it needs to offer benefits. Let’s say you are selling atheism to a teenager, he already understands a bit about religion and has known about it all his life. He also knows a bit (hopefully) about science through schooling. You can say that he is at an imaginary cross roads, where he could choose to learn more about science. You tell him that ’science holds the keys to understanding our world’ – he doesn’t care. Instead you could tell him that by understanding science he could invent the next ipod and make a fortune, or develop a medicine and save millions of lives, or develop an alternative power source and save the planet whist making a fortune. Now science is competing in benefits with happiness and life after death.

HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO MARKETING MY PRODUCT?

When you know a lot about your product it is very tempting to tell people why it is so good… but they don’t care, they care about what it is good for them.

Taking the health supplements example once again. It is very easy to tell people about all the active ingredients that your product has and this will even work to some people who know about these active ingredients. But for those (the majority) that don’t know about these ingredients they need to know what your product does for them. For example if your supplement thickens hair, you could mention the ingredients and hope people know about them, better than that you could tell them the product makes their hair ticker, even better than that you could show a down-in-the-dumps person loosing their hair, then the same person with think hair looking happy – so you go from selling ingredients to selling happiness, and everyone wants happiness!!

I hope you have enjoyed this article as a very roundabout way of explaining 2 very common errors that you can see in marketing campaigns… and if you do know anyone involved in the ‘marketing’ of religion or atheism, please pass on to them.

10 Ways to make Social Media Marketing easy

Social media is arguably the biggest leap forward in the marketing world in 2009 – it is certainly the most cost-effective leap forward.

The 10 tips below are all free and all things that you should be doing to make social media marketing easy.

However, these only tell you how to communicate, not what to communicate – these tips will help, but what you say is most important.

1. Create a Facebook page for your business/ brand

As you seen on the screenshot crop below you can create a Facebook page for a ‘celebrity, band or business’. If you are looking to promote a brand using social media you should do this.

This feature was added to Facebook a while after it launched, so many businesses have simply set up Facebook profiles as though their brand was a person. Whilst this is not a bad thing to do there are a lot of benefits of creating the page as a celebrity/band/business page, which I will go into later.

2. Create a vanity URL for your Facebook group

This feature was added in around July 2009. Having a vanity URL means that instead of having a long URL for your facebook page full of random numbers such as (  http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/poochandmutt?ref=ts )and letter you have a short URL such as ( http://www.facebook.com/poochandmutt ) , which you can email to people, have in your email signature etc.

To set your vanity URL go to http://www.facebook.com/username/

3. Create a blog

There are very simple blogging sites out there such as www.blogger.com (owned by google) and www.wordpress.com

In my opinion blooger.com is better if you want a pure and simple blog, such as the Pooch & Mutt Blog ( http://poochandmutt.blogspot.com/ ) and wordpress.com is better if you want more detail about your company/products/promotion such as ( http://www.bluechipchallenge.co.uk ) and the blog you are reading now.

The benefits of having a blog external to your site is that when you link to your main site to it the links will count as ‘external links’, which will benefit your google rankings. I also assume that creating a blog in blogger.com means that google is more likely to index it quicker, as google owns blogger.com – however this is only an assumptio.

The benefit of having a blog on your own site is that you aree creating more content on your site, giving more people more resons to visit your site.

What to write in your blog is an entirely different subject, but a couple of simple rules are

• 1) Do not just sell sell sell
• 2) Write something that your customers will be interested in and that will help them
• 3) Write something that you thin people will forward to others
• 4) Use your keywords and link them to relevant sections of your main website (if relevant)

4. Create a blog feed

Set up an account with feedburner (www.feedburner.com) – also owned by google. This enables you to do a few things:

• a) Get your blog delivered directly to people’s email for FREE

The below screenshot is taken from www.poochandmutt.com – as you see there is a box on the right of the page where customers can enter their email addresses.

Feedburner provides you with the code to do this in its ‘Publicize’ section – it is very easy to set up

• b) Feed you blog into your site

If you have your blog hosted on a separate site you can use a feedburner feed to have a copy of it on your main site.

For example the Blue Chip feed blog is at www.bluechipchallenge.com (hosted by wordpress.com). However you can read the blog at http://www.bluechipfeed.com/blog.html – Feedburner gives you the code to set this up – all you need to do is put it in your site

• C) Get stats

In Feedburner’s ‘analyze’ section you can see how many people are reading and interacting with your blog – It won’t be many at first, but it will grow!

Feedburner has a load of other great features, but these are in my opinion the most important when starting.

5. Add a Facebook Fan Box to your blog

You can add a simple button to your blog (and to your main website) that peopl can click on to become a Facebook fan, as shown below.

To find out how to do this go to http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Fan_Box

6. Import your blog into your Facebook

The simplest way to ensure that you Facebook page has fresh content is to set it to import directly from your blog (assuming you write your blog regularly -if you are not it gives you a good reason to do so).

It is very easy to set your blog so that it automatically publishes within the notes section of your Facebook page – to find out how to do this click here: http://www.insidefacebook.com/2009/02/22/how-to-import-your-blog-into-facebook/

7. Create a Twitter account

Go to twitter.com and set up an account – it is very easy

Although you may not know what to tweet about at first you will learn as you read other people’s tweets.

Twitter is also a very good way to not only what you and your company is doing, what shows you are going to etc, but also what you are putting on your blog, website, facebook etc – driving people to those pages… and you can also set Facebook to automatically tweet to your Twitter account (see below)

8. Create a Hootsuite account

This is not essential, but is very useful.

If you set up a Hootsuite account and Tweet using its URL shortening feature then you can see how many clicks your tweets are getting – which is very useful to know.

9. Add your Twitter updates to your Site/ Blog

Just go to http://twitter.com/badges and follow the very simple instructions.

This can automtcally generate a widget for a blogger blog, as you can see below.

If you click on the other option you can get code for both flash and html widgets – for a beginner I would recommend the html, as less can go wrong

10. Get your Facebook page to Tweet

This is a very new piece of functionality, developed in the last month by an intern at Facebook.

Simply go to http://www.facebook.com/twitter/ and set Facebook to link to twitter – there are options of what you want to tweet, I would recommend that you choose all of them

There you have it.

Now everything is linked, so when you write a blog it will:

• Emailed to your email subscribers
• Published on your website
• Published on Facebook
• Tweeted as new content by Facebook
• The tweet will feature on your site and blog

All you have to do is think about what your customers want to read and what to say on your blog

P.S. Don’t forget to change your email signature to include all your social media, i.e.:

Website: www.poochandmutt.com
Blog: www.poochandmutt.blogspot.com
Twitter: twitter.com/poochandmutt
Facebook: facebook.com/poochandmutt

Social media marketing – The Facts Figures

Social media marketing – The Facts Figures

There is a lot said, guessed and guesstimated about social marketing.

All brands should be thinking about Facebook, Twitter etc…. but what do consumers think?

How useful is social media as a marketing tool?

The article below, taken from www.warc.com, gives you the facts and figures from Anderson Analytic’s survey and goes a long way towards answering these questions.

Original text taken from article on: http://www.warc.com/News/TopNews.asp?ID=25383&Origin=WARCNewsEmail

STAMFORD:

More than half of US consumers who regularly use social networking sites have signed up to become “friends” with a brand, and a fifth would like to receive more communications from their favourite products via this medium, Anderson Analytics has found.

According to the market research consultancy’s figures, around 110 million people in America use social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace at least once a month. Based on a survey conducted among 5,000 adults – and detailed interviews with a quarter of this panel – the company found that 52% are “friends” with at least one brand.

Some 17% of this sample also said they viewed products with a presence on these portals more favourably, while 19% took the opposite view, and 64% were essentially ambivalent on this measure. A further 20% of contributors stated they would like to receive more information from brands via social media services, with 35% disagreeing with this idea, while 45% were “neutral”.

Overall, the average user of web properties like Twitter and LinkedIn visits these sites on five separate days each week, typically doing so four times a day for around 15 minutes at a time. Within this group, 9% of netizens stay signed in to their portal of choice throughout the day, and are “constantly checking out what’s new.”

In terms of selecting their online “friends”, 45% accord this status only to their family and users they know well, while a further 18% solely link to people they have met face-to-face. However, some 10% of Anderson Analytics’ respondents admitted they would agree to become the “friend” of anyone willing to do the same with them. Facebook was said to have 77 million regular visitors in the US, with the typical member having 121 “friends”, as well as an average income of $61,000 (€43,399; £37,345).

Some 80% of its users are white, while 40% are married and 6% are retired, and 75% agree that the self-defined “social utility” is their favourite website. In all, 59% of the people registered with the Palo Alto-based service increased the amount of time they spent using it during the last six months. Members of Twitter have an average income of $58,000, and are more likely to buy products such as books, coffee, cosmetics and films online than users of other social networks. Typically, they have 28 “followers” and are tracking the posts of 32 other “tweeters”, but 43% of users also said they could “live without” the social messaging platform.

MySpace currently has a regular audience of 67 million Americans, many of whom have become less active on the News Corp-owned asset in the last six months. The material they post to the site is typically centred around their personal interests, friends and family. Overall, MySpace also has a higher proportion of black and Hispanic users than any other of the major social networks, at 9% and 7% respectively. Furthermore, some 60% of its regular visitors are single, while 23% are students, helping distinguish it from Facebook and Twitter.

LinkedIn, by contrast, is the only social network where men outnumber women, with 57% of users belonging to the former category. With an average income of $89,000, users are interested in networking with business contacts, alongside broader concerns from news and politics to employment-related issues.

eMarketer has also recently predicted that adspend levels on social networks will fall by 3% in the US this year, to $1.1bn, compared the growth rate of 10.2% it predicted in December 2008. MySpace will see revenues decline by 15% to $495m, while Facebook will register an increase in revenues to $230m, and will surpass its main rival in revenue terms by 2011.

5 tips to for google-friendly website

Search Engine Optimisation is not the ‘Black Art’ that many people make it out to be, it is simply helping search engines find you.

It can take just a small amount of understanding and a few small changes to make a huge difference to your search engine rankings, and potentially your sales.

Search engines read the content on your pages (all the words). They assign more value to certain things such as headers, titles, URLs etc as well as the repetition of keywords in the text (key word density).
Google sees each page individually (not the site as a whole).

You need to work out the key words/ phrase for each page and repeat it as many times a naturally possible in the copy, the titles, the URLs etc

Here are 5 simple things that you need to do (or get your programmer to do) to make your site more search-friendly. They will not get you straight to the top of google, but they will get you on your way there.
1) Include your keywords/ phrases/ brand names in the page URLs

i.e.  a URL for the active ingredients of Pooch & Mutt’s Mobile Bones should be (and is):

http://www.poochandmutt.com/mobilebones/active-ingredients/

NOT something like

http://www.poochandmutt.com/default.asp?page=33

As well as helping search engines know that this is a page about Mobile Bones, Active Ingredients and Pooch & Mutt it will also help you identify in google analytics which pages people are looking at on your site

2) Make sure you have keywords and meta descriptions.

These are things that google looks for.

You can check these by going to ‘view’ – ‘view source’ on any web page.

The Meta description is what google reads and also the bit that is displayed.
Type ‘pooch and mutt’ into google you will see the page description
Natural Dog Supplements including Bionic Biotic for digestion, immunity skin & Coat and Mobile Bones for mobility, agility & joint health.
That is the meta tag. It should be something that makes you want to click on it and visit the site.

The Keywords should be relevant to the individual page (not the whole site) so you will see that Pooch & Mutt’s Bionic Biotic has the Keywords ‘dog diarrhea, dog diarrhoea, dog coat, dog skin,’ whereas their Mobile Bones has the keywords ‘glucosamine, glucosamine for dogs, dog, dogs, dog bones, dog agility, dog hip, dog arthritis,’. The Keywords match the benefits of the individual products.

3) Set page titles. To contain keywords and phrases

If you look at any of the testimonials pages on Pooch & Mutt you will see useful search information in the Page title.

i.e. on http://www.poochandmutt.com/bionicbiotic/bionic-biotic-testimonials/daisy/ The Page title is “Yorkshire Terrier | Dog with Stomach Ulcers | Natural Dog Supplements | Pooch and Mutt”

Unless you are a big brand you should put your brand last – in the case above, far more people will search for ‘Yorkshire Terrier’ or ‘Dog with Stomach Ulcers’ than they will ‘Pooch and Mutt’. However if your brand is well know, like Nike, Apple etc then your brand can go first, as that is what someone will search for.

4) Repeat keywords in your copy

When you are writing copy for anything it is always best for a reader if you paraphrase rather than constantly repeat the same phrase, however for google it is better if you repeat the same phrase – this makes the page ‘keyword dense’.

However, if you take this too far the page will make no sense to either google or your audience.

5) Link building

When people link to your site this is like getting an approval in google’s eye that you know what you are talking about. The easiest way to get links is to set up a links page on your site, then contact other people in your industry and say I will link to you if you link to me, then add their link in your links page. The links need to be from relevant pages, a more long term approach is to become a ‘thought leader’ in your field, so that people link to you… more about that another time.

Comparative Advertising

Comparative advertising, for those who don’t know is where one brand does a direct comparison with one of its competitors – featuring the competitor in the ad.

This is a popular technique in the US, but not so popular in the UK – which can make it even more effective.

Many people still believe that you are not allowed to do comparative advertising in the UK. You can. But there are strict rules. The main ones being that you have to do a like for like comparison, the comparison has to be factual and it has to be fair.

Increasingly supermarkets are using these techniques as it is very easy for Asda to prove that they are selling a loaf of Hovis bread for less than Sainsbury’s.

With other products it is a lot harder. The above ad for Roundup created by Flint took a lot of time and effort, not only to create, but also in working with the good people at the Clearcast (which used to be the BACC). Clearcast are the people that approve all TV ads before they go on air and it is they who enforce the rules and make sure that all ads on TV are fair, true and do not mislead the consumer.

The effort taken to create a comparative TV ad is one thing that puts people off, the other is people’s opinions. In order to get BACC approval you need legal confirmation. In the case of Roundup ad the lawyer told us that we were perfectly in our rights to do this, but he didn’t recommend it because we were paying to put another brand’s product on air. This is a popular criticism of comparative advertising… but…. thank you very much Mr Lawyer, why not stick to the day job?!

In the case of the Roundup comparative advertising was a very successful strategy for many reasons, which I won’t go into in this blog for fear of both boring you and giving away too many of my client’s secrets.

This ad has helped to increase Roundup’s sales by 30%, which is 12% above market growth. It is by far the best selling weed killer in the UK and had the biggest jump in sales this year.

The Adwatch table from Marketing magazine shows the high recall levels of the ad – Being in this table is particularly impressive as they ad was relatively niche-targeted and had a limited media budget.

So, in summary. If you are thinking of running a comparative ad, it’s not the easiest thing to get on air, it’s not going to win you a Cannes Lion, but it could have very good results on your clients sales. And in the words of Sir Alan Sugar advertising is all about “shifting gear”.