Crazy Business Stunts: The Tale of a Misplaced Marketing Scheme

When you’re dreaming up e-commerce solutions for your website, it’s easy to get carried away. That’s what happened to Harold McAdam of NetDesign Associates. He is the webmaster for a company that develops unusual marketing campaigns. “We do all sorts of crazy things,” McAdam said. “The craziest thing we did one time was to drop thousands of pork rinds on the city of Austin, Texas. It was pretty successful I think, because sales went up by 50% that year.” McAdam says his company specializes in over-the-top marketing, so he had to come up with a way to market their website in an equally crazy way. 

Viruses: Not a Good Marketing Tool

What he came up with was a marketing blunder fit for the Guinness Book of World Records: worst web design e-business solutions ever! He decided to create a marketing website that would simulate putting a virus on the person’s computer. When a person surfed to the site, he would immediately be confronted with a large flashing warning icon: “Warning! Your Computer is About to be Flooded with Awesome. Loading software now!”. McAdam thought that his target audience would be amused by this prank, and he thought they’d be intrigued by such an edgy company. The bottom line? They weren’t.  He had made the classic mistake of assuming that people outside the company had already bought into the ethos of the company. It is a classic mistake. As a marketer, you know the company inside and out.  It is easy to lose perspective and start to think that all your customers do too, and just as important to avoid going down that road.

What happened? Panicked, most people shut down their computers to avoid the virus, and they never visited the site again. People wrote on message boards about the potential virus. Sales seemed to be lagging.  So, one day the company’s CEO finally logged into the website to see what was amiss. He was horrified to find McAdam’s senseless marketing ploy. He immediately fired McAdam (his brother-in-law) and hired a new webmaster with a little more sense for prudence. He produced a more straightforward campaign highlighting the company’s history. The real punch line to the story: their website is now back and running as a serious enterprise, using a strategy that is centered on making fun of how stupid the old one was.

When you’re designing your ecommerce marketing plan, it’s okay to be creative. But please, don’t end up like McAdam; make sure you get someone else to check your work before you go public.

Does Your Content Have the Right Attitude?

Your content may be interesting, engaging, and captivating, but are you packaging it the right way? Are you selling an attitude and a lifestyle with your content? If you’re not, you are missing one of the most powerfully effective e-commerce solutions available to you. And it gets worse when you try to sell an attitude that contradicts the attitude your product communicates. When you do that, you end up with customers that are confused about what they’re buying, and 9 times out of 10 they will buy from your competitors who have their ecommerce marketing strategy together.

Content Plus Attitude: The Wrong Way

If you don’t take a hard look at your site, looking at it as if you had never seen it before and you didn’t know much about the content, you might end up like Zack’s CD Shack in Port Myers, Georgia. He was a young white kid trying to sell specialized underground rap CDs out of his home. Since he was young, he thought he needed to maintain a more adult presence on the web, so he had his teachers at school help him design a site. What they created was a very carefully laid out design, with big labels for all the CDs, descriptions of all the records in terms that the teachers could understand, impeccable standard grammar, clear fonts, pastel colors, and a smiling picture of a mid-twenties teacher. Not surprisingly, Zack made only a few sales off his website. His personality, and the personality of his wares didn’t show through on the website, and he had no credibility for selling.

The Right Way

After 8 months of trying to make this model work, Zack decided to overhaul the site when one of his friends told him, in the appropriate lingo, that it was “wack.” He made extensive changes, writing personal statements about why he loved each one of the CDs he was selling, getting rid of the pastels for a more stark black and white theme, putting pictures in of the various artists, and even putting his own picture up with a biography. He wrote in a much more informal style. And, with little surprise, his sails began to grow. Soon, Zack was writing a blog and interacting with his customers and starting to turn a tidy profit.

So, be like the older, wiser Zack. Make sure your site reflects your personality or at least the personality you’re trying to project, and don’t try to fit some ideal. Authenticity is the best custom web design strategy.

Choosing a Killer Font for Your Webstore

Fonts are important. That’s why choosing an effective font can make or break your ecommerce marketing strategy. God help you if you’re trying to create a cool look for your website and you go with Times New Roman or Courier New, or worse, something like Comic Sans or Curlz MT—the horror, the horror.

If visual design isn’t your forte, paying someone with the proper experience can be wise.  But you’ll want to know a few things before you shell out any cash to some custom web design guru in Helsinki who’s going to tell you what’s best for your business.

Fonts: The Least You Need to Know: Serif and Sans-Serif

There are two main classes of fonts: serif and sans-serif. Times New Roman (font of the New York Times) and Courier New (which looks like a typewriter) are both serif fonts. The serifs are those little feet and other protrusions you can see sticking off the letters. Sans serif, naturally enough, translates literally from French to “without serifs”, so they don’t have feet and other protrusions. They look a bit sleeker, but some people find them difficult to read. So, in general, the more normal serifs will portray your site as more old-fashioned and classical--and possibly more legible.  Serifs also tend to give your site some real pop.

You should also know the difference between proportional and non-proportional fonts. Non-proportionals are like Courier New, where each character takes up the same amount of space, like a typewriter. That’s why students use Courier New when they want to make a paper look longer.  But you’re not a desperate student, you’re a professional, so stick to the more professional looking, proportional fonts, which space the letters in a more aesthetically pleasing way.

Fitting Font to Site

So, obviously you should know the difference between serif and sans serif before you start hunting a font, but that can only get you so far. A few basic things to always keep in mind: the match between the font and your company’s products, and the match between your products and the lifestyle they promote, will enable you to make smart choices about which font to ultimately settle on.

When in doubt, get a second opinion.  The way your site looks can be an important solution for bringing your business success. And you can never be too precise in setting up any kind of ecommerce solution.

Figuring Out Your Process is the Key to Creative Web Design

Website design is all about finding creative ways to reach your target audience. Say you’re designing a website around the keyword e-commerce marketing New York, and you’re completely stuck. What should you do? Throw in the towel? Give up? No way! There are plenty of ways to get those creative juices flowing. Just follow these tips, and you’ll be pumping out one ecommerce solution after another.

Freewriting

Sometimes you just need to let it flow. Turn all your censors off, and just write the first things that pop into your head. It doesn’t matter if it is terrible writing, your task when you freewrite is simply to get words on the page. Just keep typing. If you have to type “the, the, the” for 10 minutes until something else comes out, do it. Don’t worry about punctuation and grammar either. That’s what editing is for. If you just start to relax, the ideas will begin to flow. Once you’ve done this for a while, you may want to leave what you’ve written and come back to it later to organize. Often a little time away will allow you to really get at your meaning when you return to your project. Or, you may feel so energized that you just want to keep plowing through the project until you’re finished.

Brainstorming: 3 Different Approaches

Everybody knows what brainstorming is, and a lot of people underestimate its ability to really work when done properly.  The best ideas often come near the middle of a long session. So, you can just write a long list if you like, or you can be a little more organized and write yourself different categories as you go; maybe you want to use different keywords to section off your ideas from each other. The important thing is to not be afraid of your ideas: Go for it! The creative process is all about doing what’s most productive for you. A final take on the simple brainstorming process is called clustering, or webbing. This one is great for visual learners. You can harness the power of the doodle for this one, because you take your brainstormed ideas and connect them to sub-ideas by circling the idea and drawing lines to subordinate ideas. This way, you can really start to see the hidden structure behind your thought.

And that’s what creativity is for, revealing to yourself what you thought all along. That’s what Socrates said all of education is: an act of remembering. So try to remember some great ideas today, using brainstorming and freewriting techniques to unlock the inner advertising guru that’s trapped inside you. If you do, your ecommerce marketing will make a huge leap forward.