Tweet

Jerry Bader Articles

Written by: Jerry Bader

Getting Noticed On The Web - Click To Read Article
Marketing is all about getting noticed, getting remembered, and motivating people to action. Whether it’s a website, display ad, or video, it must first grab people’s attention, it must stop the viewer from going on to the next website, turning the magazine page, or clicking the stop button. In order to accomplish that increasingly difficult task, you must understand the Caricature Effect.

Marketing By Method Versus Vision - Click To Read Article
The companies that make a real impact in the marketplace are not the ones that produce what people think they want, but rather the ones that produce what people will want but don’t know it. The ability to know what people will want before they know it exists is not a result of intensive market research, focus groups, or telemarketing surveys. Knowing what people want is based on understanding the human condition: the motivating factors that move people from disinterest to action. Steve Jobs was unrelenting in this philosophy and it resulted in changing the computer, music, movie, and telecommunication industries and more significantly how people live, work, communicate, relax, and in some ways, think.

Is Your Brand Worth Professional Treatment? - Click To Read Article
Web video production must be viewed as an investment not a cost. Doing it right means hiring the right company who knows how to develop a presentation that enhances your image and attracts attention. Homemade or semi-pro efforts may seem like a bargain at the time but they will ultimately turn out to be a costly waste of resources that can do more damage than good; then again if you sew your suits, act as your own doctor, and grow your own food, perhaps you don’t need a professional.

How To Develop An Iconic Web Brand - Click To Read Article
Marketing requires you to take the long-view; it’s an approach that demands a company to stake out a position and build a personality that customers can rely on to be consistent and ethical both in offering and in execution. Marketing is about building a legend, an iconic brand that explains who you are, what you do, and why anyone should care. Marketing is about psychological persuasion in order to improve the wellbeing of your audience. Marketing is about transformation, it communicates a brand story that acts as a metaphor that defines your identity, which in turn helps customers define and express themselves.

Make Your Brand Cool - Click To Read Article
Is your brand cool? Cool is the ultimate compliment your company or product can receive from it’s buying public. To be cool is to be special, superior, and of higher value than the competition, which is why coolness is such a sought-after marketing objective. And before you reject the idea that your business, product, or brand doesn’t have to be cool, think again. To be cool is to be desired and to be desired is exactly the goal of all marketing communication. Sure you want sales but first you got to be cool.

Case Study For Award Winning Video Micro Site - Click To Read Article
CallLimiter is a small software developer in Australia that has developed some cool little apps that it sells. They came to us to develop a video micro site for their mobile phone product that can be used to control how long you stay on the phone. This is something most everybody can relate to. The phone companies have managed to get many people to abandon their fixed cost landlines and use their cost-per-call mobile phones almost exclusively, thereby increasing almost everyone’s monthly phone bill. It’s a high price to pay for convenience and not everyplace in the world has discount pricing plans, opening up the market for CallLimiter’s product.

The Making of a Web Superstar Business - Click To Read Article
Being an expert is not enough, you have to be able to communicate your expertise effectively, and that means presenting complicated concepts in a way your audience can understand and remember. The art of ‘superstar guru-ism’ lies in your ability to simplify and entertain an audience with the culturally relevant connections between society and commerce.

Four How-To Video Requirements - Click To Read Article
In today’s fast paced environment tapping into the knowledge deficit is one of the best ways to grow your business. One common business tactic used to exploit how-to opportunities is to provide teaser videos so that people get a taste of what to expect. Anyone interested in learning anything has watched his or her share of teaser videos, but all too often these videos only lead to frustration and a quick click of the mouse onto the next website offering instructions.

Building An Online Brand - Click To Read Article
Big companies care about brands, small companies don’t, and that is a shame because any company that has aspirations of ever getting big, better figure out how to build and manage their brand. You can get sucked into all the hype about the latest social networking fad and waste all your time and money following this week’s Internet wunderkind or you can get your head out of your digital butt and build a business from the brand up.

Understanding Web Advertising - Click To Read Article
More money is wasted on advertising then any other business function. That is not to say businesses shouldn’t advertise but rather people should understand how advertising works. There are many ways to characterize ads but for our purposes let’s make it simple and separate advertising into two distinct approaches: saturation and emotional.

Kinetic Typography: A Killer Web Video Marketing Technique - Click To Read Article
Kinetic Typography penetrates the consciousness because the dynamically presented spoken and written words act as mnemonic devices reinforcing each other. Don’t be fooled into thinking that the visuals alone will make up for any deficit in the script. Your words create a language framework that defines your brand; it creates the context within which you can communicate with your audience; and it allows you to take ownership of those words thereby limiting your competitions’ ability to feed off your marketing efforts. In short, words have meaning, words can move you, move you to action, and isn’t that what marketing is all about?

How To Deliver A Marketing Message On Your Website - Click To Read Article
If you want to be the market leader you have to control the conversation and you do that with the language you use. If you can control the words you can dominate the market. The words you use make a difference. Use the right words in the right way, and you’ll own the conversation, and put your competitors at a distinct disadvantage.

Occam’s Razor Solves Marketing Misinformation - Click To Read Article
The implications of Occam's Razor are a seemingly simple insight into decision-making and are quite significant for marketing executives: features are out; emotional and psychological benefits are in. Ah, but what emotional benefit, there's the rub. I will assume that if you are reading this you are interested in improving your business and that you are open to new ways of doing things, and that starts with new ways of thinking about things.

The Behavioral Targeting Promise Land? - Click To Read Article
You can use every trick in the book to attract people to your website in order to sell them something but if once they get there the experience is lame or the content is confusing then you've wasted your money. It's always nice to attract more people to your site and no one would argue against spending money to do it, but if once people arrive they find it confusing, irritating, ugly, non-functional, or boring then you've lost them for ever.

Assembling Your Web Video Marketing Assets - Click To Read Article
Now that just about everybody is a believer in Web video, it's time to figure out just how to use it effectively as a marketing communication tool. Oh sure, there are a few diehard holdouts filling their sites with thousands of words of densely congealed text in a vain attempt to attract 'Mr. GoodSearch;' and let's all encourage them to continue, especially our competitors, because as they stick to yesterday's marketing tactics, we can capture market share by communicating using techniques that actually lead to more audience engagement, more memory retention, and more sales leads.

How To Make Money On The Web - Click To Read Article
Before I decided on the title for this article I wrote down a list of options: how to engage an audience, how to affect change, and how to alter perceptions and change attitudes. All of which are valid, and all of which are important to you as a business owner or marketing manager. The trouble is, most busy, results-oriented business owners and managers want quick, simple answers to complex marketing questions that involve psychological and sociological issues. Buying a mobile phone, makeup, or a car is more complicated than which option provides the most features at the cheapest cost.

Web Marketing Ideas You Can Actually Use - Click To Read Article
If you're like me, always trying to improve, learn, and grow your business, then you've probably been frustrated in your search for truly useful information that you can actually use to improve your marketing, branding and sales efforts.

Creating A Successful Online Sales Strategy - Click To Read Article
You have a website, and perhaps you're even a professional salesperson, and as such you know that the best way to sell someone something is face-to-face, but have you seen the price of gas lately? So whether your customers are local, national, or international, the cost of getting to them is just too darn high to make any money. You could call them on the phone or email them, but with voice mail, spam filters, and all manner of gatekeepers, it is literally impossible to get to people, even when they're waiting for your call. It's never been easy to sell, but in today's jaded, cynical, frustrated business climate, the job is even harder.

How To Develop A Brand Story Communication Strategy - Click To Read Article
Marketing campaigns should always start with a communication concept: a conceptual premise and framework that attracts attention and engages an audience in a way that penetrates each viewer's mind, and captures the audience's collective consciousness. It is the foundation of your brand story.

How Sound Design Affects Customer Response and Action - Click To Read Article
If you've spent a small fortune on graphic designers, search engine optimizers, social networking experts and still find that your website conversions are low, then perhaps your website suffers from the marketing equivalent of Capgras Delusion, a failure to make a connection between your online content and your emotional value proposition.

Seven Deadly Video Marketing Sins - Click To Read Article
So you want to develop a Web video campaign to put on your website and add to YouTube and all the other Web video directories. Maybe you even want to create a new video micro site to promote that hot new product or service you're about to launch. You want it done right, professional, slick, and you want it to be effective. Well of course you do.

HyperRealism As a Motivating Factor In Web Video - Click To Read Article
If there is one thing every Web business executive can agree on, it's that websites need to motivate people to act. That action can be to place an order, send an email, pick-up the phone, or maybe just join a mailing list, but whatever the intended response, your website must cause a reaction. It's a case of simple cause and effect.

Your Website Doesn't Need A Traditional Call To Action - Click To Read Article
Sales people are taught, you always need 'a call to action,' a request to act or lose the opportunity of a lifetime. I'm sure you've seen the infomercials, website presentations, online direct marketing come-ons, and even high-pressure seminar and tradeshow presentations that will never be repeated, so you better act now. You're familiar with the language used: "act now and we'll send you two pieces of junk you don't need, but wait there's more, call in the next ten minutes and we'll add a third useless item."

Your Website As Persuasion Machine - Click To Read Article
The combination of the Internet, the Web, and technology has democratized business almost beyond recognition. Today the small, nimble, clever adaptor has the competitive advantage over their bigger, slower moving, 'we've-always-done-it-this-way' competitors; but the confluence of the Web environment and digital technology is one thing, how to use it effectively is another. Not every trendy social networking gimmick, user generated irrelevance, and pointless viral voyeurism is a productive business communication tactic.

Your Website's Missing Ingredient - Click To Read Article
"My mechanic told me, 'He couldn’t repair my brakes, so he made my horn louder.'” - Comedian, Steven Wright We all want our websites to be more effective, and if you're like most business people you are constantly searching the Web for anything that will help. What you find is a cabal of experts armed with statistics, analysis, charts and graphs all pointing to how they can get you high-up on the search engines and drive more traffic to your site. The problem is that like Steven Wright's mechanic these guys are adjusting your horn when it's your brakes that need fixing.

Why Feature-Selling Fails - Click To Read Article
When customers buy your product or service, what exactly are they buying? Are they buying the features that you offer, or are they buying something else, something you may never have mentioned in any of your marketing and advertising material?

What's Wrong With E-Commerce Websites? - Click To Read Article
What is going on with e-commerce websites? It appears that online entrepreneurs spend so much time worrying about website traffic that they ignore the customers who actually want to buy something.

What Makes Your Business So Special? - Click To Read Article
The one question every business, branding, and marketing consultant asks is "what makes you special; what makes you different?" If you want to grow your business and get to the next level, defining what makes you special is a good place to start. Most businesses are copycat companies, selling the same thing, in the same way as most of their competitors, making for a real challenge in providing an adequate answer to the "what makes you so special?" question. But fear not, it is easier than you think.

Which Website Visitors Are Potential Clients? - Click To Read Article
With today's website tracking software and services you can find out a lot about the people who visit your website. You can learn where they're from, what kind of browser they're using, how long they stayed on your site, and a whole lot more. But what all this high tech intelligence won't tell you is what kind of people they are, and how likely they are to be transformed by your Web presentation from viewers to customers.

Viral Marketing, Let's See How it Works - Click To Read Article
The biggest problem most websites have is that they are instantly forgettable. They sell or say the same thing as hundreds or thousands of other sites; to an audience that is so quick to click-away that a large percentage of their traffic never appreciates why they should buy anything or listen to what's being said.

Website Content - It's All About The Why? - Click To Read Article
Every week I get asked to look at business websites and tell the owners why they're not getting the results they want. Some of these sites are straightforward brochures, others are e-commerce catalogs, and some are those direct-mail-style pitches reminiscent of old mail-order magazine subscription schemes ported-over to the Web. Some have incorporated do-it-yourself audio and video and some even had this media professionally produced; still the results stink. Why?

Web-Content Conundrum - Click To Read Article
The Web consumes content like a teenager at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Lots and lots of content makes you more search engine friendly, helps establish your knowledge and expertise, explains in detail what you offer, and justifies that offer with all the explanations, statistics, and rationale you can muster. The problem is nobody reads it.

Web-Video Campaign Creation 101 - Click To Read Article
Maybe it's just us but I'm finding more and more clients open to the idea that Web-commercials need to be something different, something entertaining, something informative, and most of all something memorable. It isn't about creating something viral for the sake of being viral but rather something that is worth the time and effort to sit through.

Web-Marketing Analysis Questionnaire - Click To Read Article
Your website presentation is how you tap into your audience's subconscious desires. If the feature-benefit approach hasn't yielded the results you want, perhaps it's time to try something different, and that starts with asking the right questions.

Upgrading Your Company Website - Click To Read Article
Dealing with website development issues can be an overwhelming task. There are many things your marketing team must consider, in fact, there are so many things to bear in mind that many of the most important ones never get dealt with, or are buried under competing interests.

Video Microsites - The Brand Story Campaign Solution - Click To Read Article
Everyone wants to do more business. Everyone occasionally runs a promotion, a new marketing initiative, a product launch, or a new seasonal lineup. Everyone has a website stuffed with all kinds of content ranging from the important to the useless. But only the truly smart business minds understand that campaigns require their own space and identity if they are to succeed. And when it comes to using the Web as your vehicle for such a campaign, the obvious solution is a Video Campaign Microsite.

The Plan 4 Steps To A Website Brand - Click To Read Article
You read all the blogs on website design, you know all the ins-and-outs of search engine optimization, and Google Adwords. No one is going to pull a fast one on you. You know your business, your market, and your needs. Or do you?

The Art Of The Sale: Developing Website Content - Click To Read Article
The questions you need to ask yourself are why do I have a website; what purpose does it serve, and what do we expect to achieve? Only after you've answered these questions can you develop appropriate content for your site.

The Brand Story, A Tale Worth Telling - Click To Read Article
Everybody likes a good story and why not? Stories are entertaining, instructive, engaging, and above all human; they connect people to people, and businesses to customers. Stories are about communication and communication is the essence of marketing.

The Brand Story Web Marketing Process - Click To Read Article
If websites have one overarching goal it is to create confidence in whatever the website is promoting and who's promoting it. It doesn't matter if it's a product, a service, a sales campaign, or an idea, if the presentation is not minimally credible or optimally motivational, then it fails as a means of marketing communication.

Seven Words That Will Make Your Website Worth Viewing - Click To Read Article
What are the seven most important words associated with Web-marketing. I'll give you a hint: Search, Engine, and Optimization don't make the cut. So what words do make the list? What are the seven words that will make your website worth viewing?

SEO ROI & The Conversion Rate Dilemma - Click To Read Article
What do legitimate search engine optimization firms charge? Like most things involving the Web, prices are all over the place but if the price is extremely low you can be assured that the quality of the service will match the price.

Search Engine Optimization, Google, and The Reptilian Code - Click To Read Article
Search engine optimization dominates the thinking and to a large degree the marketing efforts of many small and medium-sized companies, but have you ever noticed that many of the largest and most profitable companies in the world ignore many SEO techniques.

Shaping Web Audience Preference - Click To Read Article
Wouldn't it be wonderful if you had the power to convince people that your product or service was exactly what they needed, and as a consequence your in-box was filled with inquiries and your e-commerce site was stuffed with orders. Wouldn't that be great? And isn't that exactly what you want to achieve with your website?

Priming The Mental Pump: A Branding Experience - Click To Read Article
It appears that creating a well thought-out experience for an audience triggers actions and reactions buried deep in the primitive area of the brain that is related to our most basic survival instincts that override the areas of the brain associated with more modern rational analysis.

How To Make Web-Advertising Worth Watching - Click To Read Article
It has become an article of faith that the Web is all about content; content is King on the Web as opposed to television where commercials are king. It seems that television networks just can't wrap their heads around the Internet and fit it into their standard commercial box. The traditional media's tactic of last resort, buying-up the competition and imposing its commercial will, just won't work with the Internet. Businesses that want to succeed on the Web must learn how to turn their commercial message into content as a seamless entertaining presentation.

How To Construct A Web-Video Advertisement That Works - Click To Read Article
More money is wasted on advertising than other business function. Small and mid-sized businesses in particular throw money at advertising in a vain attempt to establish themselves in the marketplace. However, there is hope that the democratizing nature of the Web environment can even the playing field and allow smaller companies to deliver their marketing messages effectively. But before that can happen, the potential advertiser must understand what the big boys have spent a considerable amount of time and effort to find out: how to create an advertising campaign that motivates and persuades customers to do business with you.

How Much Face-Time Does Your Website Need? - Click To Read Article
How much time does it take your website to deliver your marketing message? Assuming the site traffic you generate is the least bit interested in what you have to say, how much of what you're saying do they remember, or more to the point, how much do they need to remember?

How Far Can You Push A Talking Head - Click To Read Article
Let's talk about talking heads, and why adding one to your website might just be the smartness thing you've done since dumping the SUV and fast-food, and opting for hybrids and salads. Okay - perhaps that's asking too much, but you get the point.

Giving Voice To Your Marketing Personality On The Web - Click To Read Article
Every company has a personality whether they know it or not. If you don't develop and foster an appropriate marketing personality for your company, your employees and customers will do it for you, and that could be disastrous. Successful companies pay serious attention to creating and implementing a dominant corporate identity; and use it to deliver a consistent, coherent and cohesive Web-presence in the methodical and persistent pursuit of the company's core marketing objectives.

Enhancing Web Effectiveness With Audio Sound Design - Click To Read Article
The average person is exposed to an assault of stimuli each and every moment of our waking day. Some of this stimulus catches our attention, but much is filtered out as extraneous, useless, or unimportant. This filtering is our way of handling the constant barrage of information we endure. As marketers it is our job to cut through all the meaningless, random white noise of life and penetrate the consciousness of our targeted audience with our marketing messages.

Does Your Website Need a Magic Act? - Click To Read Article
Most companies sell a variety of products or services, but they are not all created equal, some are more important, and more profitable than others. At the heart of any website design project is the underlying goal of attracting attention, and directing that attention to the product, service, or concept that is being marketed. In that regard, an effective website sales presentation is a lot like a magic act

Create A Branded Website Host - Click To Read Article
For those businesses that really don't know how to effectively use the Web, or those that are interested in actually using their websites for more than a digital brochure, the answer is clear: your website's most important marketing objective is to connect with a relevant audience and build a productive relationship.

Brand-Personality Self-Analysis - Click To Read Article
Marketing is difficult because it is unlike any other business discipline. Most of our business day is filled with left-brain tasks that may be complex but are for the most part logical and procedural in nature whereas marketing and branding are right-brain activities governed by that hated enemy of rational business thinking, psychology.

Awaken Your Brand's Cognitive Itch - Click To Read Article
The term 'cognitive itch' was first used by James Kellaris of the University of California to describe the experience of music that gets stuck in your head and you just can't get rid of it. This same phenomenon can result from watching commercials, Web-videos and even full-featured multimedia websites.

7 Tactical Reasons To Use Mini Campaign Websites - Click To Read Article
How many websites should your company have? That's a question that comes up often in discussions with clients, but perhaps the idea never crossed your mind. Why would any company need more than one website? Not to be glib but the answer is as many as you need, but how many is that?

8 Things That Motivate Web-Audience Response - Click To Read Article
It's always a good idea to stick to the basics. When businesses stray too far from the fundamentals, problems arise, but sticking to the basics doesn't mean boring people into a state of unconsciousness. If Web-visitors' eyes glaze-over upon entering your site, you've lost them before you've begun.

All Websites Are International - Click To Read Article
Tip O'Neill, the late Speaker of The House of Representatives is often quoted as saying "All politics is local," meaning a politician that helps a constituent with a problem is likely to win that vote based on the personal assistance provided, irrespective of that politician's stance on the larger, more weighty, geo-political issues. What then of business, is all business local or international?

A Web-Branding Blueprint For The Experience Economy - Click To Read Article
Change is inevitable; as an economy matures, ages, and ultimately evolves into something new, adjustments must be made to our business development, marketing and branding. Failure to adapt to new realities results in potentially unwanted dramatic consequences.

A Website Without Video Is Like... - Click To Read Article
Do you like Jell-O? It's okay I guess; I mean it's not a hot fudge sundae is it? But if you add a little whip cream, then my friend you've got something worth calling dessert. My question to you is, does your website have that something extra, that dollop of whip cream on top that says, "oh mama let me at it," or does it just lie there squirming in your dish with the sound of Peggy Lee's voice ringing in your ears, "is that all there is?"

9 Practical Reasons Why Web-Audio is a Necessity - Click To Read Article
Many business people are scared-off by an assumption that multimedia solutions like audio are expensive - but that is just not the case. Audio is far more cost-effective than video, animations, and other labor intense rich media creative. If you hire the right people who know what they are doing, you can have an audio presentation professionally produced and incorporated into your website for a budget within the reach of any serious marketer.

Advertising's Most Important Word - Click To Read Article
If you had to guess the single most important word in advertising what would it be: free, special, discount, sale, new, improved, bigger, better? So many words have lost their meaning or been corrupted by misuse or abuse that it is not an obvious choice. The words luxury, exclusive, and world class have been rendered meaningless after being applied to everything from eight hundred square foot condos to restaurants that serve microwave frozen dinners. We can't even rely on light, diet, or low carb to actually describe what's inside a package.

6 Critical Elements in Creating Successful Web-Marketing Campaigns - Click To Read Article
Marketing can be an extremely frustrating and expensive exercise if we mistakenly view it as merely an advertising function. Any discussion of marketing should be preceded by a definition of exactly what we mean by marketing: marketing is not just sales, or advertising, or promotion, but rather a combination of all these functions plus more.

A Case for Marketing Experimentation Making Failure Work For You - Click To Read Article
We all know what success is: it's meeting goals and expectations based on how we define them. But do we learn from success? In most cases no. In fact success establishes the status quo, ingrains conventional wisdom, stifles innovation and creativity, and promotes the repetition of the same methods, technologies, and ideas that have always been used, even when those methods no longer work.

8 Brain-Branding Website Techniques Part I - Click To Read Article
According to eMarketer August 2008 video ad spending will increase a thousand percent over the next five years. This means Web video is on the way to becoming the must-have Web presentation tool.

8 Brain-Branding Web Presentation Concepts, Part II - Click To Read Article
In '8 Brain-Branding Web Presentation Concepts, Part I' we discussed the first four brain-related marketing concepts that if incorporated into website presentations help generate brand preference purchase decisions. Part II continues with the next four concepts.

18 Web-Marketing Concepts That Make A Difference - Click To Read Article
If you've been looking high and low for the secret of Web success, today is your lucky day. We've put a little something together that we call '18 Web-Marketing Concepts That Make A Difference.' Eighteen concepts to think about that may just give you an edge on your competition; in fact these ideas may give you an edge, period. So if the same old left-brain thinking that everybody else is using just doesn't get you where you want to be, try these creative concepts on for size.

11 Ways To Drive Traffic Away From Your Website - Click To Read Article
While watching a Toronto Raptor basketball game I saw T.J. Ford, one of the fastest players in the league, rush down the court like a man possessed and proceed to throw the ball behind his back to a trailing Andrea Bargnani. The trouble was the ball sailed over the head of the seven-foot Bargnani into the second row of seats. Ford, himself, ended up with a beer and popcorn facial after landing in the lap of a front row patron. So what does this have to do with website design and marketing you ask? A lot.





Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

Ten Reasons to take Notes during Sales Meetings

What I Really Want Is...

Creating a Better Place to Work

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.