Is it any wonder that the last four major programs rumbling through the corridors of Camarès have heavy print components? Is it any wonder that the major thrust of many of our clients’ 2011 marketing plans is to go to trade shows/events/conferences  and actually meet prospective customers? No. Having ridden the waves of Paid Search and Social Media since the early 2000‘s and discovered an unstoppable increase in pricing for paid clicks across all search engines and social media advertising there is no ROI left for mid-sized businesses in online marketing.

Did I just say that? I did.

Online advertising has quickly lost its promise. Why?

1. It over promised.

2. Google trained us all NOT to use Google. With a poor user experience (half a dozen tries to get close to the answer you needed) and dozens of vertical competitors. Now if you want to buy something you got to your brand name store with a smart online presence. If you want to get an answer for your homework, you go straight to Wikipedia. By pass Google, go direct. Why pay for search ads?

3. Facebook devalued the meaning of friends. Having snookered millions out of personal information, its ads simply do not return sales. Why? Facebook is boring. Most folks are self-censoring their posts or using FB for businesses and professional reasons. Dull Dull Dull! Facebook may have buckets of personal information but if users don’t use the service its got bupkis.

And all the misguided venture capital backed offspring of Google/Facebook: Foursquare, Yelp…you name it, are now twisting in the wind. Its not just the recession folks, we would have arrived here without it, it just would have taken more time to get here.
What are the indicators? Google is advertising about advertising on Google. Let me repeat that: Google is advertising about advertising on Google. Let that sink in. Oh, and they are not advertising about advertising on Google ON GOOGLE. No, they are advertising in print, on television and at trade shows.

And that brings it all back to Face Time: a true measure of a prospective customer’s engagement with your company, your brand is if they take the time to meet you face-to-face. And the value of that interaction is far more impactful than anything else you can do as a company.

What happens next? Online marketing will become far more complex and demanding: the place where those face-to-face relationships are tethered until the next face-to-face encounter.
That is the next chapter in online marketing. Stay tuned!

Late last night I downloaded Marketing Sherpa’s latest report: Social Media Marketing Benchmark Report EXCERPT.  I was particularly intrigued by one chart, pictured below. This morning as I pulled down a second copy of the EXCERPT, the chart was gone.

What’s the killer data in this chart?  Social Media is a total time sink. Lots of effort, little return.  It is no surprise that it disappeared from the EXCERPT, because it is pretty incendiary to all those Social Media proponents out there.

Thank you Marketing Sherpa for confirming what I have been saying for months on end — and teaching at Zebworks.com! Thank you! And here is the kicker, blogging — that old fashioned practice takes lots of energy BUT delivers much better return. This re-affirms the advice we have been giving clients for years. Center your social media program around blogging.  Yes! Booyah! Bravo Sherpa! I hope the rest of the report is as compelling!

Most of businesses don’t have the privilege of being a luxury brand. (And in this economy that may not be such a bad thing.) However, I cannot tell you the countless client meetings I have attended where owners and managers express their desire to “look” like a Mercedes or a Jag.  And I totally get it. Traditionally purveyors of luxury goods have been geniuses at surrounding their products in romance. Whether it be geek romance (tech gadgets) or bodice ripping romance (fashion).

This romance surround is created by implementing the highest production values. Great  imagery, with great lighting, superb sound and simply fabulous, to die for models. When done right, even an Imac is a super model. Images spill across pages of glossy luxe magazines too fabulous to touch, evoking wordless emotion. So it is no wonder that so many businesses hold up luxury goods as aspirational branding examples.

But the Internet has put a “spanner in the works” for luxury brands. The high production values they demand – rich media, flash and just plain sexy sites that are, really really cool but unusable – present a dilemma for those who aspire to higher production values: they are tough for search engine bots to crawl and tougher still for humans to shop.

Frankly, search engine indexing, is less important for a luxury brand, it is already well established. So luxury brands have the luxury of not really needing search. In actuality what they do require is a deftly produced social marketing program that propels their brand forward. Most businesses whose brands are less well known require both indexing and social media.

This presents a tension: how do you remain indexable while also presenting a rich experience? Sites must be developed with both needs front and center. And the best approach is often a hybrid. Enough rich media for sex appeal, just enough well-tagged text and regular updates to increase your importance to bots.  And here is where many non-luxury sites fall short. It is entirely possible to have rich media with great production values without spending a fortune. Its all in the planning and the choice of talent.

For non-luxury brands, social media must be produced to be repurposed across many vibrant platforms where brand influencers come to connect and play, it must engage, it must be relevant and it must be frequent. It must also be authentic. Here is where many smaller businesses can win big. Nothing beats the authentic voice of ownership, even if it is a bit packaged and polished by an agency, it still rings true.

As for shoppabillity, many luxury brands simply ignore any rational web conventions. I suppose they build in their exclusive attitude by being impossible to navigate. Businesses ought not to use them as aspirational shopping examples. However, they should build the most streamlined, elegant shopping cart possible, minimizing clicks and clutter, getting people to the submit button swiftly – now that’s luxury!

What’s better than being a luxury brand? Looking luxury but being elegantly facile to buy from.