Picture yourself in this situation. You just installed the Magento Platform and you played around with the administrative panel. Hey you got some products on your page and it’s beginning to look like you might have this e-commerce thing down. So, what’s next you ask? Well how are you going to make your site, your site? We’re talking about that little something special, a secret sauce that will not only make a good first impression on your customers, but also make your site memorable.

The Magento platform has an entire community backing the development of extensions to its platform that they’ve dubbed Magento Connect. While extensions won’t make your site pretty, they offer you a lot in terms of customizing  and enhancing what the platform provides to cater to the needs of your customer. Remember that it’s all about the customer.

To install an extension: simply login to your admin panel, select System -> Magento Connect -> Magento Connect Manager. Plug in the appropriate extension key and then click “Install”.

The Review

This first Magento Extension Review will cover the Exploded Menu extension. Here is the extension key for reference: magento-community/Raptor_ExplodedMenu.

Exploded Menu is essentially a free version of Raptor Commerce’s SuperMenu, but without certain features and without official support. There’s not much information on the extension page of Exploded Menu besides a short description: “Replaces the standard single column drop down with a multi-column drop-down featuring 2nd and 3rd level menu items.” In case that description was a little bit confusing for you, the extension supposedly offers two features over the typical drop-down menu. It organize all levels of menu items in a single drop down (this will be illustrated later). It also offers the ability to create multiple columns in the drop down.

After playing around with the extension, we’re disappointed to say that the multiple columns feature is not supported in Exploded Menu and is only offered in the full fledged Super Menu product. The only real benefit of Exploded Menu is the multi-level drop down!

Now it’s time to walk through the grand gallery of screenshots! To begin playing with drop-down menus all you have to do is add some categories through your admin panel. Select the “Catalog” tab and click “Manage Categories”:

You can then proceed to add categories and subcategories that eventually show up on your menu. Note that selecting a category and click “Add Subcategory” will add another level of category below the current category. In our experience, we’ve managed to add 6 levels of subcategories beneath root. The assumption is that there is no end to the depth of subcategories you can add although you might want to think about customer experience if you’re adding more than 2 or 3 levels. Playing “how much patience do you have hovering over all these tabs” with your customers might not make you their favorite site.

Here is what our categories look like:

Before and After

Now here’s what the menu looks like on our test page before installing Exploded Menu:

Before

After installing the Exploded Menu extension, it does clean up the formatting of the menu quite nicely given that you have multiple levels of subcategories.

After

Conclusion

The Exploded Menu up does clean up the menu quite nicely, but suffers from a case of bad advertisement. Why surprise users with limited access to the features after they’ve gone through the trouble of installing it? If you’re up front and honest you may get better word-of-mouth advertisement. That being said if you want all the features, you could fork up $75 for the full version of Exploded Menu, Super Menu or even try a free trial. Exploded Menu is fun to play around, but we don’t recommend building it into your production site because of the lack of real support.

How to Optimizing your Apparel eCommerce Site

Viralogy is out to help eCommerce firms give their visitors a much better experience in finding what they want and generate more sales as a result to that. We have now created a Conversion Optimization Guide for Apparel Retailers. We also recommend the Magento platform as it allows you to mostly easily follow the advice in the guide. Feel free to provide feedback and share with your connections who have eCommerce sites so they can make it better for themselves and their visitors!

Photo by lavverue

“Social media” and “ROI” - it’s hard to find two bigger buzzwords among internet marketers over the past couple of years.* Yet the combination of the two of these fields create both a compelling, yet elusive industry. Literally dozens of social media analytics companies have popped up over the past few years. Radian6, Visible Technologies, Scout Labs, Meteor Solutions, Techrigy (Alterian) and 20 Decibels are just a few of the most well known professional social media analytics tools available. That’s not to mention the countless number of free measurement tools - a list that includes Social Mention, Twitalyzer, Monitter, Klout, Twendz, Twitter Grader, Trendistic, and more. The list goes on and on.
*I should know, two of the topics I write on most extensively for Viralogy are social media tactics and online ROI.

These companies continue to pop up because nobody has done (or can do) a perfect job of social media analysis. Social media analysis and ROI measurement is a difficult thing to measure, and there are some who say it’s immeasurable. A once-common retort is “how do you measure the ROI of your telephone”? The plain fact is that measuring social media ROI is not (nor will it ever be) an exact science. But it can be measured and analyzed. The important thing is to be wary of and avoid the frequent pitfalls that come about when measuring it.

ROI Background

First off, keep in mind that when we talk about measuring ROI, we’re talking about measuring a dollar value - ROI (return on investment) a monetary metric. We’re talking about measuring the revenue (return) of a product compared with the cost (investment). In simple terms, the return on investment is equivalent to: (the final value minus the initial value of the investment) divided by the initial value of the investment. Or, r = (Vf - Vi)/Vi . This number is returned as a percentage.

So, in order to measure a return, you need to know how much money you’re spending on a campaign, as well as how much you’re making on it. Sounds pretty simple. So what are the problems we run into?

Calculating Monetary Metrics

Unfortunately, most of the numbers social media tools (especially free ones) measure are not monetary metrics - they’re impact metrics. Clickthroughs, impressions, followers and pageviews are not tied to a monetary value. They can be, but first you have to assign a dollar value to it. Is a clickthrough worth $0.01? $0.50? $1? It all depends on your individual business. How about impressions? How much value is it to you to get an additional impression? If your tweet or Youtube video reaches 100,000 people, what is that value worth to you? One way to value a web impression is to think of it like a billboard ad - how much would you be willing to pay to put a billboard (or any old media - TV ad, radio ad) up per impression? Obviously the way that you measure it depends on what type of campaign you’re running.

Saying “we spent $2,000 on a campaign and got 100 retweets, 200 replies, 10,000 Youtube views and 25 comments” may be great to tell your friends and a few other marketers, but it doesn’t do much to justify the cost until you calculate the value of those individual variables. If you want ROI, you have to convert your variables into monetary values.

Last year, eMarketer put out a statistic that 84% of social media users still do not measure the ROI of their programs. My guess is that the number of users measuring their social media programs’ ROI is even smaller than 16%. Some people who believe that they are measuring ROI are still only measuring impact metrics, which are often very superficial in nature. If you’re just measuring impressions, subscribers and clickthroughs, you’re not measuring ROI.

Confounding Variables

The beauty of social media measurement is that it is extremely easy to gather data and track your social media campaigns (especially on Twitter). Of course there is (as is always the case with data analysis) an issue of correlation vs. causation. If you are measuring data for a short period of time, you will run into a number of confounding statistics. Just because you see a 10% bump in sales during the week-long period that you’re tracking doesn’t mean it’s necessarily due to your social campaign. Same thing goes for a 10% drop.

The only real way for you to measure a change in sales and to positively tie it to a social media campaign is to have every other value be constant (no other marketing campaigns, no changes in your products sold, no change in the time of year, etc). Suffice to say, that is unlikely to ever happen. Make sure you’re tracking the right causes for your increase or decrease in revenue. People have a tendency to ignore any factors other than the ones they’re hoping to measure.

An Outlier Problem

If one major influencer picks up your social media campaign and promotes it to their followers, you have a big outlier problem (not the worst problem to have, to be sure). Sure, you can measure and report on the results of that individual campaign, but moving forward, you’re going to have issues duplicating and predicting future success.

The problem is with data extrapolation. If one user with millions of followers retweets your post, it changes everything. It’s just like if a new post or viral video you’ve made lands on the Digg front page - an event that provides an exponential boost in traffic.

Though you can measure that one event, it will be extremely difficult to account for that when predicting future events. So if you’re running a contest that costs $5,000, it’s certainly something to keep in mind. If you consider each impression on Twitter to be worth one tenth of a cent ($0.001 - due the relatively small number of people that actually *read* each tweet), a retweet by @aplusk would put you immediately at break-even when your campaign might have otherwise lost thousands of dollars.

Real Time vs. Long Term

We’re really very good at calculating real-time metrics and analysis when it comes to social media. I can tell you how many new followers, retweets, mentions and clickthroughs I got in thepast week. Yet, when it comes to long-term tracking, marketerss are generally pretty bad at it. The trouble is, long-term analysis is the only way to measure change. You can’t measure change over time if you’re just looking at one data point.

If you really want to see how well a social media campaign is doing, make sure that you go back and look at it over time. Of course you should measure each campaign individually, but also measure your overall efforts over time. If you’re just setting up a social media account or profile, figure out what metrics matter most for analyzing your ROI, and make sure to set up times to take snapshots to monitor progress. Just tracking counting stats (followers, subscribers) is not enough.

Data Availability

Much more data is available for certain social media networks than for others. While you could build Twitter metrics until you’re blue in the face, you’re much more limited in gauging a social media campaign using a network like Youtube (subscriptions, views, comments).

The issue of data availability makes it very easy to value certain platforms much higher than others. If you tie every single metric to a monetary amount for Twitter, you will almost certainly double-count the value of certain metrics, and with a platform like Facebook, you won’t be able to track a great deal of the results of your campaign. Be sure to keep in mind which platform you’re using, and what metrics you may be ignoring or double-counting.

Conclusion

As far as we’ve come in terms of measuring marketing campaigns online, there are still plenty of issues we run into when measuring social media ROI. When faced with the idea of measuring ROI, many simply give up and claim it’s impossible. Many prefer to measure impact metrics. If you’re spending a significant amount of resources (time, money, energy) on social media campaigns, you owe it to yourself to measure your efforts in monetary terms.

By ignoring ROI entirely, you allow for the strong possibility that you’re wasting time that could be better spent elsewhere. There are hundreds of companies and marketers who embrace social media regardless of if it’s right for them or their customer. Ignorance may be bliss, but it’s still ignorant.

First time visitors are a double edged sword - marketers love them (they represent possibility) while website optimization specialists often hate them (they represent low conversion). Most of all, though, they represent a vital part of any business, and one that is almost always neglected.

Why First Time Visitors Are Bad

First time visitors historically perform worse than other segments of web visitors. On average, only 1.4% of first time visitors actually convert into sales. For all of your marketing team’s search engine optimization, social media efforts and viral marketing campaigns, less than 2 of every 100 visitors will even turn into a sale. That’s a tiny amount.

Not only do first time visitors underperform, but there’s relatively little data about them. With a repeat customer, there’s all sorts of demographic and psychographic data at your fingertips. For a new visitor, you have absolutely no purchase data, and no idea whether their intent is to buy, browse or otherwise. This is a big reason that first time visitors are typically stressed much less than repeat customers. For repeat customers you’ve already made the sale once. That first sale makes it much easier to sell the second, third, fourth and fifth time.

Why First Time Visitors Are Great

On the other hand, for most e-commerce websites, first time visitors represent over 65 percent of all users. That means roughly two in three of your users are accessing your webpage for the first time. A first time visitor has also most likely been driven to your website through some form of three-letter acronym marketing campaign like SEO, SEM, CPM, CPC or PPC (all campaigns created in an effort to improve your immensely important ROI). Which means that you may know more about them than you’d think.

New visitors represent a huge growth opportunity. Every percentage point increase in conversions for first time visitors is worth roughly two times that of a percentage point increase for repeat customers, due to the size of the segment.*
*Example: A website has 10,000 daily visitors. Of that, 65% are new visitors and 35% are repeat visitors. A 1% increase in conversions for new visitors (6,500 total) equals an increase of 65 customers. A similar increase in conversions for repeat visitors (3,500 total) only equates to an increase of 35 customers.

Every new visitor lost without a conversion is money walking out of the proverbial door. A new visitor may never come back again. So this may be your last time to convert them into a sale. First time visitors are an untapped resource ripe for the picking.

Why First Time Visitors Are Vital to Your Business

There are no shortage of reasons why it pays to have first time visitors converted into customers. You’ve succeeded in driving these users to your website. You’ve succeeded in showing them what products you have to offer. Yet if you haven’t converted them to a sale, or at least a second visit, how much of a success can your marketing have really been? Making a half-hearted attempt at new visitor conversion makes even your best marketing campaigns go to waste.

In tough economic times, it’s extremely important to maximize all potential resources. You stand to lose a great deal of money if you don’t properly optimize the experience of first time visitors. Even though first time visitors offer low conversion rates and have suboptimal amounts of customer data available, they still hold plenty of potential and contain a surplus of beautiful underutilized data.

What You Can Do to Capture First Time Visitors

I can’t go into too much depth about how to best capture first time users, because that’s a big part of what Dynamic Insights does. If you want a demo of our product, feel free to contact us. However, there are a couple of things you can do on your own.

Offer promotions. Use coupons or other promotions to entice your first time visitors. While being careful not to look spammy, you can give a user a definite reason not to leave your website without purchasing. Whether that means offering free shipping, a discount at checkout, or a free offer, turning a new visitor into a customer may be well worth the minor expense.

Track your marketing campaigns. If you’re conducting your marketing campaigns well, you should able to track which users come from which marketing campaigns. Track those users through your website. Measure trends based on where your users are coming from. Do users coming from one website tend to purchase certain types of goods? How can you maximize profits from those users?

Improve usability. It’s entirely possible that your first time users do not convert due to problems with your website’s usability. If you think this is the case, then it’s really time to start usability testing. Study your navigation, checkout and site organization among other things to improve your customer experience. If all else fails, use the mom test. If your mom (or grandfather, or [insert electronically-challenged person here]) can’t do what you want your user to do, you need to fix the process.

Use your traffic data. If your first time visitors take a look at a few pages before leaving, you have an exciting opportunity to show them what they want while you have their attention. If you’re collecting the right data, you should be able to hone in on what your user wants within a few clicks. Use that to your advantage.

Work with us. Pardon the plug, but Dynamic Insights helps to optimize websites for both first time and repeat visitors. We collect and analyze your customer data and we provide in-depth insights and offer real solutions. By segmenting your users and allowing you to refine your website in real-time, we make it our goal to make first time visitors into first time customers.

Advertisements. Whether you like them or hate them, they are one of the means by which website owners are generating revenue. While for some the revenue from advertisements are enough to be the average American’s paycheck, for others it is just a nice way to get rewarded for hard work. Either way, even before thinking about what to do with the money you will make off advertisements on your website, what you should be asking yourself is if you are even ready.

One of the biggest misconceptions about making money off your website is that it if you follow the ’steps’ that the ‘experts’ say, you will be making money in no time. The first thing that website owners need to understand is that ’steps’ are different for everyone. Everyone has a unique website and to say that the same thing will work for every single one is impossible. Secondly, unless someone has a proven track record of monetizing multiple websites in different markets, they are not an ‘expert.’

Here are 4 questions that anyone thinking about having advertisements on their website should ask themselves:

1. Are Advertisements Right For Me?

While making money is an obvious reason for adding in advertisements on your website, it is important to determine if they are right for you. For example, if you have an e-Commerce website, it is important that if you do decide to incorporate advertisements on to your site that the advertisements shown are not taking way business from your own. Too often are websites focused on maximizing ad space that they forget that the ads themselves may be competing businesses.

2. Why Would Companies Want To Advertise With Me?

Here is a big part of the equation. If I am a sports organization for example and I am looking to place ads on particular websites, I will look for sites that are 1) relevant to my company and have 2) traffic value. The best way to think about this situation is as if you are a selling your car. If you want to get the most profit, you need to make sure that not only is it presentable, but that you have all the paperwork in order.

3. Do You Have A “Target”

If you finally do decide that advertisements are the right route to go with your website, you should develop a core group to ‘target’ as far as advertisements go. This means that you should focus on getting advertisements on your site that ‘compliment’ the content you have. A great way to find advertisers that are relevant to your site is to look at sites similar to your own. See what companies advertise on those sites and keep them in mind moving forward.

4. Figuring Out Advertisement Costs

Another big question that needs to be asked is how much you could potentially make. This ties into #2, in that your site traffic will play a big part in this.

To help you understand how much you can potentially charge/make off of advertisements on your website, here is how you can figure it out:

CPM = Cost per 1,000 Impressions, Page Views: Impressions

Question: How much will you charge for every 1,000 impressions (page views)?

Sitution: If I have a 125 x 125 pixel advertisement space with 10,000 page views a month, I am thinking about charging $10.00/month.

Advertisement Cost/Page Views x 1,000 = CPM

$10.00/10,000 x 1,000 = $1.00 every 1,000 impressions

Your CPM tells you how much advertisers will be paying you per 1,000 page views. After you have this number, find websites similar to your own and work out their CPM based on their own advertisement rates. Be sure to take into account how much traffic they have. If you are charging the same amount ($1.00 per 1,000) as a site with four times your traffic, adjust your rates accordingly.

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After asking yourself these four questions you should be able to determine whether or not your website is ready for advertisements. Remember to always ask questions if you are unsure and that your website ’space’ is valuable and that you should never give it up unless it’s for a good reason.

You need to give your consumers a reason to become a fan or follow you on Twitter.  Small and medium-sized companies often make the mistake that the simple action of building a FB Fan Page will instantly allow them to have tens of thousands of fans.  Depending on your company brand and culture, a strategy that you might want to engage in is to be bold, controversial, and sexy.

American Apparel is no small brand.  They are well known and have an excellent following.  At the same time, they are a perfect example of how to push the envelope and generate buzz by using “sex” as the hook but always making sure that the campaign is true to their company culture and brand.

Their latest campaign, Best Bottom in the World, is one of my favorite campaigns that I’ve seen in a very long time.  Lets dive into the campaign to see how they’ve marketed it and how I would improve the campaign.

Buzz and traction through large online publications

American Apparel has reached out to large publications to post the news of their competition.  These large publications include:

1. Style List
2. The Frisky
3. New York Fashion

Value: The most obvious value is that you’ll reach a large, targeted audience by having your competition posted on these large, highly trafficked publications.  The residual value is that smaller fashion and entertainment blogs, such as Street Level, will pick up the news and post it on their site as well because they want to keep their community in the know.  In essence, you pay for the big boys and you also get the little boys to post about you as well.

What about Sugar Inc, Mashable, Elle, and Glamor?  Heck, I’d sponsor Fashion Toast first and foremost

I did not find the American Apparel contest featured on Fab Sugar, Mashable, Elle, or Glamor online.  But I think one of the biggest opportunities that they are missing is the personal fashion bloggers niche.

The first thing that I would do is sponsor Fashion Toast. She is a hugely trafficked fashion blog who advertises on her sidebar for American Apparel.  Furthermore, she is well connected to the other fashion bloggers online, so there is a strong way to leverage her sponsorship to influence others to participate.  I would have made the marketing of this campaign focus purely on the fashion bloggers.  By getting them, Sugar, Elle, New York Fashion, and Glamor would all follow.

Reach out to the YouTube pop culture through a web celebrity

American Apparel was recently featured on the Philip Defranco show.  I’m not certain whether this was a paid sponsorship or not, but what is important is that Philip is a hugely watched show that hits a targeted audience.

Value: People love to watch Philip talk about Pop culture.  He has a die-hard community and that will take action to do whatever he tells them to do.  By becoming featured on the show, American Apparel reaches not only reaches an audience that would vote for nice bottoms, but more importantly, submit their own image.

Facebook and Twitter

I think American Apparel dropped the ball on FB and Twitter.  Yea they wrote a note on their Facebook Fan Page and made an announcement on Twitter, but they could have made it so much more engaging!

Facebook Application:

AA should have created a Facebook Application that allows fan to upload their image directly to the FB page.  Fans can then vote through the Facebook Fan Page and tell their community who they voted for.  I think this would greatly spread across Facebook.

Twit Pic Submission:

Twitter users should be able to upload an image directly from Twit pic to the AA main site.  In this way, you’ll generate more buzz from the Twitter community and allow for an easier submission process.

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There is so much potential with this campaign!  Remember, if you’re building a social campaign, make sure to leverage the power of the personal blogging community and to build a Facebook App when relevant.

Every user that visits your site, whether through search engine, grassroots marketing or an advertisement, is a potential customer. They came to your site for a reason that was (hopefully) somehow related to your core of business. If they leave your site without even knowing what you are offering, you’ve failed. Once you know what it is you want from your user (and just as importantly, what your user wants from you), it’s a matter of carefully crafting the message. Since not all customers are the same, you probably want to offer a different message to certain visitors rather than others (that’s part of what we’re developing). No matter how you do it, though, take advantage of your users’ attention while you have it.

There are a number of tactful ways to do this. For instance, on Neil Patel’s blog, he draws attention to QuickSprout Pro, a service that he’s selling. Or take a look at the Google.com fade in that they’re testing – which emphasizes Google’s focal point even more while calling attention to its other services with an unobtrusive fade. Alternatively, look at an article on The Seattle Times. Where are they trying to drive you? In what way are they trying to convert you into a customer? Even though it’s an ad revenue-based business, they’re wasting an invaluable resource: their user’s attention, and getting nothing out of it. Are you?

When a user visits your website, there is a very limited time to convert that user into an customer (email subscriber, sale, whatever a customer means to you). Even if you can convert just 1% of those lost visitors, that’s often enough to make a significant difference. You owe it to yourself, and to your business, to do whatever you can to take advantage of your users’ attention. Before they’re gone.

While optimizing your site for keywords and search engine traffic is important, another aspect that few have taken advantage of is generating traffic through comments left on forums and blogs. By leaving comments on blogs and forums, you are not only building a relationship with the blog author or forum community, but you are essentially leaving your ‘business card’ with them.

Just how networking is essential in business, ‘networking’ with other bloggers and communities is important in generating interest and traffic to your website.

Why You Should Comment

In regards to the question of “why you should comment on blogs and forums,” the best way to answer this is to put yourself in their position. As a blogger, feedback on your blog and work is extremely important. In essence, comments can validate the hard-work that one puts into writing articles. For the most part, bloggers and forums are not created with the intention of selling a product or service, but rather to create a community. By commenting, you are joining that community and becoming an active participant.

As mentioned earlier, by commenting you are leaving your business card. When you leave a comment on a blog or forum, your profile is attached to it. Aside from including your name or handle on the comment, you are given the opportunity to leave your website and contact information as well. Imagine if networking in person was this easy?

Be Effective, Be Efficient

Although commenting on a blog or forum and getting traffic may sound easy, it is important to always be effective and efficient. Just how there are certain ‘best practices’ when it comes to writing a letter, commenting on a blogs should be effective and efficient.

The first is to always be relevant. By this, it means to choose blogs and forums that you can build a relationship with. If you decide to comment on blogs with the sole intention of driving traffic back to your blog, you are doing it for the wrong reason. A good strategy when commenting on blogs is to pick blogs or forums that write about similar topics as your own, or that you have a genuine interest in. Just how you wouldn’t take a class in school you didn’t like, don’t pick blogs you don’t enjoy.

Aside from choosing blogs and forums that are relevant, the second is to actually build the relationship. Your comment already has a link-back to your site as well as your contact information. There is no need to repeat it again in the actual comment. The more value that you can provide to the author or forum, the more likely they are to check out your site.

Optimize Your Own Site

Just as important as it is to participate in blog communities and forums, be sure to optimize your own site for others. Here are some key elements that are helpful in creating a great experience for your visitors:

1. Clearly defined “add comment” section on your articles
2. Ability to share content on social network sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Digg
3. Contact information: Be sure to always be accessible to your readers/visitors by having your “Contact Me” information clearly marked on your site

My attention was drawn by a simple commercial:

I think the beauty of Old Spice’s traditional and new media campaign is that the brand isn’t afraid to stay true to its roots, try new things, and push the envelope to capture your attention and ultimately buy their product.  Lets take a look at how Old Spice has been able to capture a large social following and entertain people while selling their product.

The Brand

Old Spice is a man’s deodorant.  Everything about the brand exaggerates the fact that only real manly men wear Old Spice. Take a look at how each social profile and outlet further pushes the brand:

Videos

I absolutely love the videos.  They’re funny, clearly use and advertise the product, and push the “man” brand.  Take a look at the Arm Wrestling one below:

Facebook

I just checked out the FB Fan Page for one of my favorite quotes of all time!  Too bad they took it off.  The description on the FB Old Spice Fan Page used to read:

“If your Grandfather never wore it, then you would never have been born”

Now it reads:

“Old Spice has 71 years of experience helping guys improve their mansmells with deodorant, antiperspirant and fragrances.”

Definitely not as fun, but they had to change it sometime.

Close up on Facebook

With over 400,000 fans, the Old Spice Facebook Fan Page is very active.  When you look at the wall, you’ll notice that each wall posting has over 400 Likes and 200 Comments.  This is excellent for a company and you pretty much can’t get anymore community participation.

I feel that a key element to notice is how far apart Old Spice’s wall postings are spread apart.  Today is January 23rd, 2010.  Since January 1st, Old Spice has only had 2 wall postings:

1. January 15, 2010: If manliness were a color, what color would it be? Probably grey or brown or something. Or dark blue.
   • 455 Likes
   • 493 Comments
2. January 7, 2010: Keyshawn Johnson is going to tell us which NFL teams have the most Swagger. Swagger the attribute, not Swagger the Old Spice product. We don’t know which NFL team uses the most Swagger product, because we’re not invited into the locker rooms anymore. Watch Keyshawn on FOX & Friends this Friday morning.
   • 207 Likes
   • 120 Comments

Old Spice is keeping its community engaged once per week and not posting daily so that its community is not bombarded with information.  At the same time, I feel that Old Spice could greatly improve engagement by consistently showcasing and promoting sweepstakes that fans can participate in.

For example: The Swaggerize You Wallet Competition

This is an excellent competition where users submit a video to participate in a competition and the winner gets money.  The Swaggerize Your Wallet page seems to have a lot of video participation; however, I don’t see any mention of the competition on Facebook (besides the two video winners) or on Twitter.  It seems that with such an involved community, Old Spice can take advantage of it and make the competition a user-votes-for-the-winner competition.

Old Spice could easily create a Facebook Application where a user can upload a video and then vote on his or her favorite participants.  The user is then able to share her favorite videos with her friends on Facebook and thus get more eyeballs on the competition.

Yes, I know that this was more of a Summer Competition, but where is the follow up competition that builds on top of the buzz created by the first one?  It’s great for Old Spice to enter the game and keep people excited, but if Old Spice doesn’t continue to push the envelope and give their fans something to participate in, its competitors (like Right Guard or Axe) can swoop in with a competition of their own.

Awesome, transparent products

Old Spice is doing an excellent job with its product pages.  As you can see from the link, Old Spice posts all Positive and Negative reviews on its site no matter what (of course if you’re belligerent, they’ll go ahead and remove you).  This kind of transparency only encourages the viewer to find out more about the product and has a higher possibilty of turning into a sale.

Useless Blog

You would think that a company as fun as Old Spice would have a vibrant blog that captivates its readers and brings them something of value.  Nothing could be further from this than the Old Spice Blog.

It’s really a wonder why they have given their blog such a prominent position in the top menu of their site.  It’s even slightly colored yellow so that people will notice it and click on it.

When you read the content, it’s boring and bland with no multi-media images or visitor participation.  My recommendation to Old Spice is that if its not going to effectively use its blog, then it should remove it from the top menu of the site.

Useless Twitter

I know that numbers don’t matter on Twitter; however, to only have 215 followers means that Old Spice is definitely not providing any value with its Twitter.

Do you know what I would be doing if I were Old Spice?  I would be monitoring the Twittersphere for anyone talking about the following topics:

1. Deodorant
2. Body Odor
3. Right Guard
4. Axe
5. Smelling good

These are just some of the keywords that Old Spice should be monitoring and responding to in order to build a conversation.  They have completely missed the mark with their Twitter.

Awesome Store

I must admit, Old Spice has a really cool online store.  They have manly products for real men, which keeps in line with the brand.  I feel that a great opportunity here is to give out these products as prizes for competitions.  Most people have no idea that Old Spice has other “fan” oriented products.  By giving out the products to fans that participate in competitions, Old Spice will further spread brand awareness and get more people to promote their products.

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Conclusion

Old Spice has a terrific brand.  People are obviously fans of the product, and Old Spice only needs to mobilize them in a specific direction to harness the power of the community.  Facebook is their best bet, and the addition of more competitions will encourage user interaction, user generated content, and the continuous domination of the male deodorant product.

Proper targeting and segmentation is one of the biggest inefficiencies in marketing and advertising. It is extremely important to increase your customer base while maintaining (or increasing) your rate of conversion. Otherwise, you quickly waste money by expending energy and time on non-profitable consumers. Due to the relative ease of mass social media marketing, many marketers mistake the ability to appeal to the largest audience possible as a necessity. Because, “why not”? The reason is there are costs (even online) of time, effort and resources that add up and could be better spent targeting customers better to increase conversions rather than building up the base that you’re pitching.

Case Study: Twitter

Twitter is the most prescient example of marketers who choose to cast a wide net rather than targeting. For the majority of marketers, the end goal is one number: how many followers do you have? Not only is that number the wrong metric, but it’s the wrong approach.

Take @BlueMoonBurgers, a local Seattle burger joint. It is unrealistic to think that Blue Moon could convert anyone out of the Washington (or at least Pacific Northwest) area into a sale or consistent customer. Spending time pitching those users would be crazy, and a waste of time. Yet if you scroll down the list of their 800+ followers, it’s clear that at least 20% (conservatively) are not from the area. A list of 650 Seattle-based followers is actually more relevant (and profitable) to Blue Moon than an 800 person list, 20% of whom are unlikely customers.

What it Costs You, and What You Can Do

Blue Moon Burgers does not actually spend its time trying to add these followers from places like London and Arizona. But there are thousands of individuals and companies that go around following everyone they can and replying to everyone possible just to increase their number of followers, regardless of whether they are a possible conversion. I’m sure you can name quite a few yourself. Sure, you never know where you’ll get your next conversion from, but doesn’t it make more sense to spend your time trying to pitch customers with a much higher likelihood for conversion?

Every hour you spend on a campaign that targets the wrong users, or dollar you spend advertising on an irrelevant website cuts into your profits. Find better customers and you will maximize your resources and improve your profits. Every time.

So how do you find those “better” customers? You know your customer better than anyone else. If you’re making t-shirts for 20-somethings, you have no reason to target baby boomers (unless you’re looking for gifts for said 20-somethings). If you’re a local art gallery, you should be targeting people locally, not halfway across the globe.

You can target your customers on any platform. With Twitter, you can use geolocation services or Twitter Search. On advertising platforms, unless you’re Coca-Cola, you shouldn’t be targeting *everyone*, you should be looking for your own potential customers. A yarn company wouldn’t advertise on TechCrunch in the same way that Major League Baseball wouldn’t advertise during a soap opera. It’s the wrong audience.

Targeted advertising is the best way to increase clickthroughs and conversions through an ad – find the right place, or right segment, first and foremost. Sometimes when an ad fails, it doesn’t mean the messaging or the product is bad, sometimes it’s just pitched to the wrong person. It really helps to do in-depth evaluations of all your marketing campaigns.

What We’re Doing

In case you didn’t already know, Viralogy is doing its own part to help companies segment and target their visitors. A little over a 2 weeks ago, we allowed users to vote on what direction we would take with the Viralogy platform. They chose Viralogy Dynamic Insights, a platform designed to increase conversions by optimizing websites dynamically for visitors using an easy-to-use application programming interface (API). If you’d like to learn more about how our API can help your customers, we’d love for you to contact us.

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