Advertising at MaineStreet

We want to be far enough ahead of the curve to be ready when the marketing industry realizes that the Internet is neither a broadcast nor an advertising medium. This general awareness is growing within the industry (see the online marketing and online ads lists, as well as the search-engine watch material). The Internet is a publishing medium with the special attributes of the access, storage, hypertext and findability inherent in a super-giant computer network. Treating it like low-grade television or an entertainment channel is like trying to use a greyhound bus to haul water when you should be using a tank truck - you might get some results but you're certainly not getting the job done right.

We have sites with plenty of traffic, sites with no traffic at all, sites that make good money and sites that aren't event trying to make money. Some of these get good traffic because all they do is provide information. We've learned a bit from watching what happens with these, and it informs our plans and strategies.

What is also important is that industry-wide, the promise of click-throughs, page view counts, one-to-one customization of advertising, a high level of dependable knowledge about viewers, and all the other over-hyped possibilities that have been talked about since the inception of the Web have not panned out. Search engines are pretty much useless for a marketing vehicle - - you can fight for position, but then what? With 400 million web pages and goodness knows how many spiders and robots looking at them, how can you either reliably know who is there or how the got to you? Most banners on places like Yahoo are more for brand association than actual customers, like Absolut on the back cover of Vanity Fair.

Web rings are useless except for groups like poodle fanciers, and reciprocal linking is both impossible to maintain and unreliable. Click-through rates are down below one percent of views, depending on whose statistics you use, and conversion rates often hover around 0.5 percent. Considering the best estimates of traffic we will get in this market, that doesn't butter many parsnips.

We maintain that the best way to get good, qualified traffic on a Web site is to:

Offer something of value. We have one site with a rather primitive design but a great, special-interest FAQ, and they have beaucoup traffic. They aren't even selling anything.

Find the market niche and offer the visitor something that can't easily be found anywhere else, either as a money transaction or by offering something like useable information so they stay around while they're learning about the client's business.

Have a site that is constantly, or at least regularly, refreshed. Return visitors are the most qualified contacts you can make. How much more is a regular visitor worth than, say someone who opens the top page once and moves on? That counts as a hit, but what is it worth? We figure ten hits to one page view, but how good is that? Repeat visitors are loyal. That's why we have gone out of the "Web Page" business and into the publishing business - clients can update their own pages, post newsletters, elicit responses, etc.

There is a direct correlation between the client's conscious engagement with their Internet presence and the returns gained therefrom. The client knows more about his or her customers than we do. Those who are in the game do well, those that aren't do poorly.

Use text links. Click-through rates tend to be higher by a factor of anywhere from 100 to 300 percent over banners. Where a banner gets 1 percent, the same link in text might get 3 percent or even more. Your mileage may vary, but that comparison has been found by one consulting firm that tracks many online publications.

Use correlative advertising, making the Web site part of an integrated advertising and marketing campaign. An advertised Web site should add more value that is available in paper or radio ads. In many cases the site can provide good value by being coupled with a simple, relatively inexpensive newspaper ad that simply lists the the business and url.

The MaineStreet Program, with its Internet Brochure, Boxed Ads and a couple of other products in the pipe, are ways to get around some of the above difficulties and exploit some of the possibilities uncovered by experience. For instance, an Internet Brochure can be tell the story of a site, qualify the visitor (does the visitor have a real interest in Acme widgets?) and provide a text link to move on to the major site. With design graphics it can also project personality.

Vacation in Maine with your Family on Sebago Lake: www.aimhilodge.com. The key is that the site offers real value (detailed information about Aimhi Lodge) without the visitor having to do anything other than go there, so the site itself becomes a central kernel in the marketing.

On the site, use sensible design: no animation, no shockwave, no frames (unless there is a very compelling reason, like searching through a large selection of attributes for an item in a catalog).

On the site, use traditional marketing like testimonials, things that can move a visitor to a desired action when they haven't quite made up their minds. Desired action being filling out a form, ordering a widget, whatever.

Remember that a Web site trying to be an advertisement is doomed to failure. Who wants to voluntarily visit a commercial?

For the price of a Brochure one gets to be part of a system that owns the Maine.Com domain and thus is high on Maine searches on any search engine, gets in a system that collectively has a great many page views per day (six figures) and has a growing number of content providers whose information is updated regularly and who provide context for ads.

This for a cost of $500 per year. Find me a better marketing value than that and I will think about a new line of work.

Ken Greenleaf

MaineStreet Communications, Inc. 208 Portland Road Gray, ME 04039
Tel +1.207.657.5078 Fax +1.207.657.5048 admin@maine.com

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http://www.mainestreet.com/publishing/advertising_online.html rev 2005-11-01