Changing the mix

I once attended a Dale Carnegie introductory training course on leadership and management. It was a few years ago and I took one or two useful things out of the course, not least the knowledge that I would love to have the confidence and energy the course leader overflowed with.

But one pearl of wisdom that’s stuck with me and that I think of frequently is simply:

“if you always do, what you’ve always done, you’ll always get, what you’ve always got”.

So how does that apply to your marketing programmes. Well, basically, if you want to achieve greater results, don’t just stick to what you know. If you’ve always just advertised in the local paper, try paid for search advertising on the internet instead. If you’ve always sent out direct mail, try following up with telesales to back up your efforts.

Putting it simply, if you always market, the way you’ve always marketed, your business will always perform, the way it’s always performed – at best that is. Why not try something new, test it first and if it works carry on. If it doesn’t, then try another route. If nothing else, you’ll be adding other dimensions to your marketing skill set.

Microsoft adCenter

Those of you that use payperclick systems for online advertising will be pleased to hear that you now have a new delivery channel to think about. Microsoft has offered its new adCenter product to the market place to compete with Google et al. As with all Microsoft products it has had it’s fair share of glitches, much written about by tech bloggers (put adCenter into Technorati and you’ll find plenty), but from my early trials it seems to offer a competitive alternative to the more established players.

So what’s the difference?

Not much in reality. Microsoft has entered the market late with a product it claims is a hybrid, a best of the best of its competitors solutions – more or less a quote from Microsoft’s adCenter stand at London’s Ad:Tech show last week. The management suite is fairly intuitive in that everything is where you’d expect it to be. The main advantages come with the advanced targeting and incremental pricing options you can choose. For example you can add extra weight to advertising based on gender and age, or time and day of the week. Google also offers the time and day options, but not age and gender. adCenter also allows you to channel more of your budget to a particular gender or age group. Useful if your target market is fairly niche, or targeted around particular market segments.

Microsoft claims that it’s audience is also 70% more likely to convert, i.e. once it’s clicked on your advert, it will complete a transaction you could define as a result. That might be making a purchase, or registering for your email newsletter. For the travel sector Microsoft claims it’s searchers are 60% more likely to convert than those coming from Google. These are pretty impressive stats, backed up by third party research.

So what are the drawbacks?

adCenter runs adverts through searches on Live Search, the engine on MSN.co.uk. This currently only has around 5 million users compared to Google’s 18 million in the UK. The gender and and age categories are based on registered users of Hotmail.com email and MSN chat services. It’s likely therefore to be heavily skewed to younger web browsers, not a problem if that’s your target market. For those of you that run multiple client accounts, I can’t yet see a tool for viewing all your accounts easily in one management center, which would be useful for ad agencies in particular.

With that said, I believe this is worth trialling. At the moment it is not as heavily subscribed as Google et al so you can grab a few bargain clicks – until everyone else jumps on the band wagon that is. And I’ve saved the best bit until last. If you have any problems just call the adCenter free phone support line and they’ll talk you through how to resolve your issue. Now that’s far better than waiting for an email response, especially for the small business owner.