What Do Copywriters Do at Focus Groups? Part 1

admin    Web Marketing     Copywriters, Focus, Groups, Part

What Do Copywriters Do at Focus Groups? Part 1

This question comes up a lot. “What do copywriters do at focus groups?” And the answer is actually pretty involved.

But first, an advertising focus group primer.

Focus groups are gatherings of ‘very ordinary people’ who are paid a small amount of money (usually or so) for a few hours of their time to come to some very ordinary industrial park location in the middle of pretty much nowhere to share their feelings about advertising ideas BEFORE THEY ARE PRODUCED.

This is to make sure no HUGE mistakes are made. This is to make sure people keep their jobs…by and large.

Focus groups happen all over, but usually take place in certain places in the country that are considered good ‘litmus tests’ for the rest of the country. Meaning these are the people who are collectively supposed to give the ‘popular opinion’ as to whether the advertising ideas they will see are going to get them to buy the product or not.

And if not, WHY?

Big responsibility, no doubt.

In the groups, a moderator will usually get the people talking about advertising in general. He or she (usually a she) is hired to get to the bottom of what people really think. And to do that, some pre-group banter happens. All the while, the moderator is very clear to point out that she is INDEPENDENT of anything and any brand.

Eventually, she will show the creative ideas for the proposed campaign. (This is the point where everyone in the back behind the two-way mirror usually STOPS eating the M&M’s and pays attention!) This is the moment of truth. People back at the agency and back at the client headquarters have paid a lot of money for this next part. So all talk ceases.

“Shhh. She’s showing the boards!”

At the point where the creative work is shown, the moderator can either present the television ideas herself (usually poorly) or she can ask the copywriter to come out from behind the mirror and present the ideas to the group.

It then becomes the copywriters’ job to present the work objectively, as if he or she is NOT the creator of the ideas being presented. Meanwhile, he or she IS. In fact, good moderators usually go FAR out of their way to make the people at the focus group feel that they can be ULTRA HONEST about the ideas, even in front of the copywriter.

It can be brutal. Or it can be the best ego massage you could ever imagine. That’s the thing about advertising focus groups, they usually end either very, very poorly or pretty well (clients will always be suspicious of the ads that do well. It’s their jobs to be.)

So, what do copywriters do at focus group?

They pray. Mostly they pray.

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Leverage Social Media To Create Affinity Groups Online

admin    Social Media Marketing     Affinity, Create, Groups, Leverage, Media, Online, Social

Leverage Social Media To Create Affinity Groups Online

Intelligent research is the first step to launching (or not launching) any new business venture. Thinking like the individuals you are most hoping to influence is the key to developing a successful business model.

I’ve saved clients millions of dollars over the years by identifying critical threats (competitive, legal, moral, etc.) to their proposed new venture, simply by putting myself in the shoes of their target audience, and behaving as they would when presented with the new option being offered. In some cases, I’ve identified far better business models to pursue and directed my clients accordingly. But in many case, I’ve advised existing or prospective clients not to pursue the new venture at all, for reasons discovered through my intensive due diligence process.

Around Y2K, a top cruise industry executive asked my opinion regarding how I might rebrand their primary cruise line to better articulate their marketing message. The first thing I did was search the web to see how all other brands were attempting to sell me on the idea of a cruise, and how they claimed to be different from every other option available of the eighteen or so to select from. I quickly discovered that virtually every brand was claiming to be just perfect for me, without knowing anything about me or other people like me.

Every brand was speaking to me from their own perspective (selling me on their brand), while my own personal concerns centered around whether I would even enjoy cruising at all, regardless of brand. I decided that I might be compelled to cruise if it were with a ship full of other people like me, who I might most enjoy partying with for a week. I also quickly noticed that no cruise line gave me the option to search for cruises based on the types of people I might like to cruise with enough to tip me off the fence to pull the trigger and actually book a cruise.

While every brand in the industry was touting their destinations, size of ship, amenities, service, price, etc., the one thing I was most interested in – cruising with a bunch of other people that I would actually enjoy spending a week with – was not a searchable option. When every brand in an industry tells you they are just perfect for everyone, the entire industry is actually telling you that they don’t know you or care about your wants and desires.

So there it was – the reason why more people weren’t cruising was staring me right in the face, and the ramifications of this revelation were not only significant for the single brand for whom I was consulting, but for the entire cruise industry. An industry that was accustom to broadcasting their marketing message in one direction was about to be confronted with a new paradigm, the requirement for a cultural shift toward two-way dialogue as a marketing necessity.

Under my guidance, the results of these early revelations led to a cultural transformation not only at this Fortune 500 cruise line, but across the entire industry as their competitors responded to our online initiatives. Consumers had found their voice through online social media, and began configuring their own cruises not around brands or itineraries per se, but around groups formed online by others like themselves. We eavesdropped on their conversations as the groups were forming online, anticipated their wants and desires, and delighted them once on board, by honoring their group with a party and memorializing their time together in pictures.

My theory went as follows: Once groups form, and vacations are enjoyed, they plan another cruise, together, with even more of their friends. As the trend develops over the years, groups will double in size each year, and eventually grow large enough to charter entire ships (saving the cruise line 15% on travel agent fees and 100% on marketing costs), and they won’t even care what brand name is on their ship.

As group leaders emerge and find their voice, they may select a different ship or different itinerary for the group’s next cruise, but it was highly unlikely they would opt to switch brands – as such a move is too disruptive to the group. Brand loyalty is a happy byproduct in this case – not as a result of the superior service delivered, but because the switching cost (disruption and angst within the group) is simply too high. As “the group becomes the brand,” the industry can spend less on brand marketing (reduce or eliminate television advertising), and more on delivering the experience at a better value to these devoted groups.

The world of information is at your fingertips, provided you bother to commit the time and effort, and ask the right questions. Before I embark on any new concept, whether for myself or my clients, I’ve been known to spend several days with as many as 15 Google tabs open at one time, in search of total information awareness on all aspects related to the target concept. Every Google search can open a door to new elements that may not previously have occurred to you, many of which are critical to understanding whether your new venture is actually going to be perceived by the market in the way that you think it will be.

Unless and until you are willing to step out of your own shoes and into those of the people you are most trying to influence (at every level of the value chain), you can’t really know whether your product/service, messaging, price point, delivery method, etc. is truly going to result in the only thing that matters, profit.

http://newventurestrategies.com

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Knitting Bible Study – A Bible Study For Knit Groups!

admin    Twitter Marketing     Bible, Groups, Knit, Knitting, Study

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Using Facebook Groups For Marketing Research

admin    Web Marketing     Facebook, Groups, marketing, Research, Using

Using Facebook Groups For Marketing Research

Many businesses have developed strategies for promoting their business through Facebook.  But another way that they can use Facebook is to conduct research to better understand their target market.  The most obvious way to begin would be to observe discussions in Facebook groups that closely match the topic they are researching.  Facebook groups are similar to forum discussions in that there are millions of them covering just about every topic imaginable, making them an ideal source of information for niche market research.

Facebook groups can be a much more reliable source for market data than forums or blog posts.  One of the problems with using forums is that the information provided in them is difficult to validate.  It can often be hard to determine who is actually responding.  In terms of credibility, anonymity on the Internet can be a double-edged sword.  Respondents have no incentive to lie but no incentive to tell the truth either.  When individuals participate in Facebook groups, they know their name is going to be attached to their posts.  This may encourage them to grandstand a little, but overall they will try to participate in discussions honestly and maturely.

The other advantage that market researchers have using Facebook over forums is that they can establish the demographics of the individuals participating in the discussion much more easily.  Some of the respondents have public profiles, which means that researchers can easily access all of the data they would most likely need to assess correlations or observe patterns between demographics and consumer behavior.  Even if the participants do not have public profiles, market researchers can still extrapolate demographical data in other ways.  First of all, they can look at the participants profile pictures to make approximations of their age, gender and race.  Market researchers can also look at the networks in which the participants belong to identify geographical locations, colleges or universities they belong to and determine their approximate age based on date of graduation.  Even though Facebook has recently made changes to its privacy policies, many members still display this information.  Finally, since Facebook is a more expressive community than most forums, participants are probably going to be more descriptive about their demographical information in their posts.

Facebook also can be advantageous for marketing research for more practical reasons as well.  Even with carefully selected keywords, it is tedious to go through all of the forums on a given topic with a simple google search.  This market research would involve going through each forum individually and eliminating any from consideration that is not relevant, does not have the right number of participants or does not provide quality discussions for market research purposes.  It is much easier to search for Facebook groups and screen them based on their relevance and the number of members in the group.

Unfortunately, there are some limitations to using Facebook groups for market research.  Despite the number of people that use Facebook both socially and for professional networking, it is still a single platform out of millions on the Internet.  Some niches are so small that they do not yield enough Facebook data to satisfy most market research objectives.  This is especially true when identifying a controversial or embarrassing topic that people are not going to want to discuss publicly.  Market researchers must also consider the fact that most of their research subjects are going to be of younger demographics, although this is slowly changing.

Nevertheless, Facebook groups remain a stellar starting point for most market research programs.  As long as adequate data is available, they should be considered a strong source of information.

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Privacy groups want FTC to investigate advertisers’ use of digital data

admin    Web Marketing     Advertisers, Data, Digital, Groups, investigate, Privacy, Want

Consumer advocacy groups the Center for Digital Democracy (CDD), US PIRG and the World Privacy Forum filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission on April 8, asking it to investigate consumer privacy threats from data-targeting auctions and online exchange marketplaces.

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PRC approves and trade groups praise USPS ’summer sale’

admin    Web Marketing     $/sale, approves, Groups, praise, Summer, Trade, USPS

The Postal Regulatory Commission approved the US Postal Service’s plans to hold a second “summer sale” this year, offering rebates to corporate mailers. Trade groups the American Catalog Mailers Association and the Direct Marketing Association praised the decision.

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Using Blogs, Forums, Google Groups to Drive Traffic to Your Site

admin    Google Optimization     Blogs, Drive, Forums, google, Groups, Site, Traffic, Using

There are powerful methods to generate quality long-term traffic by simply helping others and in a way helping your site get exposures. This is often considered as a technique which will do good both for your soul & your bank account. By using blogs, forums, and Google groups, there is no doubt you will drive traffic to your site without having to spend a dime for site promotions. Read on and learn more about these methods. By setting up an effective link building campaign, you will be able to obtain backlinks from a wide variety of highly ranked and relevant sites. A great way to build backlinks is through blog commenting. Blog commenting is not only good to drive traffic; it is also good to establish a name. What you need is to find blogs that allow do-follow comments in your niche. You are given the chance to leave insightful and relevant comments on their blogs, and getting some useful links back to your site. You can download a free extension like nodofollow if you are using Firefox, this way you can easily check if a blog is dofollow. You can also do a Google search for do-follow blog and use them to find blogs in your niche where you can comment on. Don’t spam your comments so that they will get approval from the blog owner. Commenting regularly on relevant blogs will let other people know and recognize your blog as well as trusting your information. Remember to leave useful comments and comments that will generate response and reaction from other bloggers. Another great way to get backlinks and get traffic is through forum posting. Forums and forum posting is proven to work whatever your site is all about. Successful Internet marketers used this technique to gain exposure to their sales page, squeeze page, landing page, and money sites. The goal of every forum post is to get as many people who will subscribe to your lists. Google Groups, on the other hand, is Google’s free groups and mailing list service that can aid you in collecting information for search engine optimization such as topics for articles, topics and chapter themes for e-Books and keywords. It is a way of searching for and bringing people of the same interests together. So if you have a website that is selling collector’s item then joining and creating groups about collectible is a great idea. Using Google Groups, you can find groups related to the interests of your business and give you the chance to join in threaded conversations. The idea is to link these to your site. You can also search for groups of people who are just engaged in different hobbies and then create a viral informational product to be distributed for free. Or another thing is to create a sense of community by asking people who visit your site to join your group. Asking people from other groups to join yours using online invitation is a way to increase your customer base. Besides posting to the group, users can also post to group by sending out an email to groups’ email address. If you prefer not to spend money, you can go about searching for online marketers who have already established a presence. This doesn’t mean hunting for the super successful marketers but those who hangout at message boards and forums. Some of these people have put up a decent website; they even have a newsletter perhaps. Since they have been around erstwhile, they are quite familiar with blogs, forums, and Google groups then you can join their list and ask for some invaluable guidance.

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Google Group Advertising: Secret to Generate Free Website Traffics From Google Groups and Forums

admin    Website Marketing Companies     Advertising, Forums, Free, From, Generate, google, Group, Groups, Secret, Traffics, website

In this article, you will find out the secrets of generating free website traffic and website marketing, online promotion, business marketing, how to get website traffics, free website traffics, forum traffics, website sales secrets, internet advertising secrets, online business promotion that works.

It is an open secret that about 95% of small business owners and individual online business owners have not been making serious money online for about 4 years now because all the traditional website marketing strategies that used to work 6 yrs ago do not work anymore.

Some people have dabbled in Pay per Click (PPC) advertising squandering $1000-$10,000 weekly to make $1000-$10,000 monthly!

Do not get me wrong.

Pay Per Click advertising works, but not for every product or service.

You must have a very unique product/service that very few people are selling which is very difficult to find offline for you to succeed in a big way with Pay Per Click advertising.

It is not effective anymore to depend on the search engines to send traffics to your websites because you must optimize your websites correctly and then compete with billions of websites to get top 10 search result position for anyone to find your website.

Some people have squandered thousands of dollars paying Search Engine Optimization (SEO) services to optimize their websites and submit them to search engines and also get top 10 ranking for them.

There are a few SEO services that are good who could really get top 10 rankings in your keywords and so help you generate sales.

However, the good ones are very expensive.

Some will charge you about $2000-$15,000 upfront fee (depending on the size of your website and the competitiveness of your keywords)

In addition to the upfront fee, they would charge you a maintenance fee of about $100-$500 monthly.

If you agree to these horrendous fees, yes, they can get top 10 rankings for you and you may begin making a lot of sales.

However, there is a problem.

The top 10 rankings do not often last a long time.

The major search engines change their algorithms and the coding of their search engines about every 3 months and when they do, you would lose all or most of your search engines’ top 10 rankings in your major keywords and your sales may vaporize overnight.

I have had the experience where after one of the major search engines changed their algorithm, two of my websites were completely removed from their search engine!

I was wondering what was going on because for about 2-3 yrs, these websites had top 10 rankings in this particular search engine.

Since I am not a search engine expert, it was a conundrum to me.

I decided to phone the search engine company to explain to me what was going on.

How could two of my websites suddenly disappear from their search engine overnight?

After about 45 minutes of giving me a run-around, I finally reached one of their staff who told me that they do not have any technical support for their search engine!

Be reminded that this is a $500 billion dollar company!

In addition, as if that was not enough, he told me that they charge $3.95/hr for any general technical issues that I may be interested to bring up!

I could not believe what I was hearing.

They sell inferior operating system and softwares to you, which are very vulnerable to viruses and malwares.

When you start having problems with it and phone them, they would either give you a run around and refuse to help you or they may give you misleading information after you pay them a fee.

After going through this sordid experience with this nasty company, I decided to give up on them.

I removed Explorer from my computer and installed Firefox, and Yoohoo, 99% of all my computer problems vanished overnight!

I also decided to ignore their search engine.

However, about a month later, suddenly some of my web pages that had been missing for about 6 months began to re-appear in this same search engine. Go figure.

It was at this point that I realized that it was time to consult a search engine expert, someone who owns a search engine to give me the inside SECRET scoop about how to really generate massive traffics to my websites.

One of the tips he gave me blew my mind because I have known about it for 6 yrs, and have used it a few times but later I stopped.

So, what is this all powerful website traffics secret tip?

Posting messages at selected high power forums!

Yep. It works.

But not with every forum.

Some forums do not promote their forum sites.

Therefore, you must choose forums that promote their forums to post your ads.

And one of the most powerful forums is Google Groups.

At the bottom of this article, I have the link of a Google Group forum.

You may start there.

(1) Click on the link to go to this Google Group forum.

(2) If you have not yet created a Google Group account, then do so.

It is easy.

(3) Go back to the link of Google Group forum (listed in the author’s resource box below at the end of this article) and click = sign up= to join in this forum. (See the Google Group link at the bottom of this article)

(4) Then afterward, begin to post your ads about all your online businesses and websites.

Also read and comment on other forum members’ offers as well as post messages about any internet marketing secrets that you may know.

The more messages, tips, ads that you post, the more links you would get in the search engines and the more FREE TRAFFICS you would start getting!

Within a week of doing this, all of your ads, messages and postings would begin to appear in Google search engine and the other ones!

Google indexes all postings in Google Groups fast, so your ads may begin appearing in Google Search engine even in less than a week!

(5) The next step will be to contact us so that we can send to you our FREE WEBSITE TRAFFIC SECRETS e-book (PRAGMATIC ADVERTISING MARKETOLOGY, PAM) which would reveal to you the rest of the WEBSITE TRAFFICS SECRETS that would blow your mind.

Alternatively, you may search for this POWERFUL FREE WEBSITE TRAFFIC E-BOOK in any search engine to go to our website (MAYCHIC) to download it FREE!

THIS FREE WEBSITE TRAFFIC SECRETS WILL REVEAL TO YOU ALL OF OUR WEBSITE TRAFFICS SECRETS WHICH WE OBTAINED FROM ONE OF OUR ASSOCIATES WHO IS A SEARCH ENGINE OWNER, AND WHICH ARE JEALOUSLY GUARDED BY THE FEW WHO KNOW ABOUT THEM, BECAUSE THEY CAN EXPLODE YOUR WEBSITE TRAFFICS AND SALES AND MAKE YOU VERY RICH.

May these POWERFUL, JEALOUSLY GUARDED WEBSITE TRAFFIC SECRETS open your eyes to the possibility of the PROSPERITY, SUCCESS and HAPPINESS that could be yours.

Copyright Info:

This article is copyrighted and you may publish this article at your website, in your e-zine (newsletter, blogs) or send it to a friend as long as you retain the author’s resource box, including the website address, and refrain from altering the content or using it in any re-direction manipulation scheme.

If you do not agree to these conditions, please do not copy and use this article.

Anyone who violates this condition will be subject to legal action and payment of damages for violation of our copyrights.

Thank you.

Maychic.com

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Are There Any Yahoo Groups, Or Web Sites On Marketing?

admin    Website Marketing Companies     Groups, marketing, Sites, There, Yahoo

Do you know of any yahoo groups or web sites where you can ask more experienced business people questions about marketing / advertising and beginning a small business?
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Why Does The Media Portray Social Groups Negatively?

admin    Social Media Marketing     Groups, Media, Negatively, Portray, Social

I’ve noticed that in most areas of communication the famous, the powerful, and the media tend to give people of various social groups a negative image. Why is that?
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