Let’s look at the facts:

• Unemployment in America is staggering
• This Week Obama Recognized Small Business Needs Help
• Google dominates the market (aka – no need for brand marketing)
• 2010 Super Bowl ads went for 2.6 milion for 30 seconds
• You can be an idiot and still derive value from Google.
• The Super Bowl Has Little Significance outside of North America

Super Bowl 44 provided sports fans what they expected.  Sunday February 7th gave viewers nail biting sports drama, nostalgic music, and a line up of commercials for all to enjoy.  One of those commercials was the first Super Bowl commercial ever produced by Google.  Upon its airing, Twitter lit up with energy and the blogosphere proclaimed that Google had produced the greatest commercial of Super Bowl 44.  The problem is that Google failed America.  Here’s why.

Google dominates the Internet.  So much so that they can actually entertain an action that no American business has ever considered–pulling out China.  While Americans are being displaced from their homes in the largest foreclosure market to hit the United States in decades and small business owners struggle to operate in the worst credit conditions since The Great Depression, Google employees are bathing in stock options and bonuses that were last seen in the dot.com bubble.  Don’t get me wrong as I think it is great that Google is doing well as a business and that the careers of their employees are secure.  Still, when you decide to spend 2.6 million dollars, you would think that Google would make some sort of attempt to connect with the reality in this country.  It is a Web 2.0 kind of thing to do.

Google’s Super Bowl ad accomplished the equivalent of a “How To Use Google” in the context of finding services in Paris, France.  Let’s work through the facts again:

• Paris has nothing to do with the Super Bowl and Americans really can’t afford to go Paris this year.
• People use Google by default and with suggested search they need no additional help
• At .44 cents per stamp, Google sent letters to every small business in the country trying to explain their Local Business service.

Let’s skip forward to the last point.  Google had the opportunity to highlight its Local Business service during Super Bowl 44.  The 2.6 million dollars it would have cost to accomplish this would have been a fraction of the price tag it cost to “snail mail” letters to every small business owner in the United States.  In doing so, they could have inspired small business owners to update their listings and at the same time educated consumers as to how to search for local services.  They could have also focused on searches, products, and services that were relevant to the Super Bowl’s host city Miami.

The Super Bowl has historically been the advertising platform for advertisers to mark their place in brand and creative history.  With a brand that is as solid as “Kleenex” and creative that is becoming of a company full of mathematicians, one has to ask what Google’s Super Bowl 44 advertisement accomplished.  A naysayer would quickly point out that they are filthy rich and that 2.6 million dollars is a drop in the bucket.  My response would be that their approach was very Web 1.0.  Google shouted at people versus providing them with information that they needed.  Somewhere in New Orleans there is a small family owned business who is faced with an invoice from a telephone company who is trying to impress upon them that the phone book is their avenue to connecting with customers.  In their Sunday afternoon attempt to take a break from the reality of business in a tanking economy, Google could have provided them with insight that could have changed their small business course tomorrow morning.

Google Marketing, you failed America on February 7, 2010.

Catch phrases are helpful in marketing, but if a brand can move beyond just a catch phrase to a point of sale, it is even more valuable.  Consider Nike’s “Just Do It” slogan from years ago. It still rings in the minds of athletes and non-athletes alike.  “The best part of wakin’ up, is Folgers in your cup” has been sung by both the caffeinated patron and the non-patron.  Slogans such as these run through our minds and bring back a sense of warmth and wonder of a particular season of life when we were watching the commercials and seeing the billboards.  They influence our choices as we peruse the aisles, guiding us to the brand that we purchase.

When considering service companies, branding can go much further than a catchy slogan and drive the potential client to initiate a phone call to your company.  What is your point of sale and how quickly can you get an interested buyer involved?

A great example of this comes to mind when ordering flowers.  When an unexpected occasion comes up and you need to find flowers, what is the first slogan that pops into your head? Is it a slogan, or is it a phone number? I couldn’t tell you the slogan for 1-800-FLOWERS (if they even have one), but I can tell you their phone number. I know that when a last minute floral need arrives, that is the place I’m going to call.  In other words, “Cha-ching!”

Vanity numbers can be one of the most effective ways to drive a point of sale to your business.  They work excellently for generic service needs.  There are other service companies that are using this technique of branding their businesses including: 1-800-Plumber and 1-800-Lawyers.

In writing this article we spoke with Keith Glass of 1-800-Plumber.Com, a national based plumbing company that just recently launched franchises offering plumbing services in Naples and plumbing repair in San Antonio, who commented, “People only call a plumber when they need one and many times it is a flat out emergency.  We built the 1-800-Plumber.Com brand on the premise of being a nationwide, one phone number to call for all your plumbing needs.”

800 vanity branding also sets an expectation of high quality service levels and immediate response.  “Prior to launching the brand, our focus groups confirmed that our phones would need to be answered 24X7 and that our franchisees would need to be outfitted with the most modern technology in the plumbing business.  We had already committed that level of service; yet, the brand expectations re-enforced our need to deliver upon it,” commented Glass.

The one downside with vanity phone numbers in general is that the numbers and letters in today’s modern phone devices do not line up on BlackBerry hand helds and other phones that have computer style keyboards like they did on the old rotary and standard key pad phones you found hanging on the wall in your Mom’s kitchen.  I bring up this point not in an effort to steer you away from vanity branding but it is a point that should lead you to ensure fine details such as including the actual numerical version of the number in your marketing as well as having hyper-link clickable versions of the phone number on your website so that modern phone users can Google, click, and call.

Marketers are finding that vanity 800 numbers are effective in information retention for potential clients and are  training people to look for vanity numbers.  Vanity 800 numbers such as 1-800-Call-ATT make ATT customers feel at ease, knowing that they won’t have to shuffle through numbers in order to find the customer service line when they have account problems. The goal of every successful marketing campaign is to make systems simple and your company, where they’ll spend money easy to reach.  Vanity 800 numbers are one excellent solution to reaching that point of sale.

The title of a blog post is extremely important.  Most blogging software takes the title and uses it both internally and external in the management of content.  Some places where the title of the blog appears are:

• The URL of the post.
• The H1 title or the actual post titles that a reader sees.
• The HTML title tag

The problem you will find in most blog posts is that the HTML “title tag” is the single most important piece of content to a search engine but is often written to target human interests.   HTML title tags should be strategically used to drive search engine traffic versus copy that entices human readers.  According to a post in High Rankings, Title tags are considered to be in the big three which also includes visible copy and inbound link anchor text.  Still they are often overlooked by web masters and amateur bloggers.

Most blogging software and websites will allow title tags to be defined independently of content.  This is very important as humans and search engines are two different audiences.  I’m going to use a post on the website/blog of McCuistion TV as an example.

On October 25th, 2009, McCuistion TV broadcast a show on addiction which featured Chris Lawford Kenedy.   The title of the show was “The Causes of Addiction”.  The title of this show is excellent for human beings in that it is a teaser eluding to the fact that the show will reveal some of the causes of addiction.  From a search engine perspective, however, this title leaves a lot on the table.

The 2 word keyword pair “addiction causes” gets about 5,400 searches a month in Google.  The downside is that there are over 10 billion pages associated with this keyword pair in Google’s index.  Chris Lawford Kennedy gets about 2,000 searches per month and Chris Lawford Kennedy adiction only has 38,000 pages associated with it.  Though there are more searches associated with “addiction causes” the real opportunity is around Chris Lawford’s name the competition is much more approachable.  Thus, we published the McCuistion TV post “The Causes of Addiction” with a title tag that read “The Causes of Addiction – Christopher Lawson Kennedy”.  The result is that this post ranks in the top 4 hits in Google for both Lawford’s name as well as his name combined with the keyword “addiction”.

Title tags are very important as they are a blogger and/or webmaster’s interface to search engines.

Marucci Baseball Bats

Name a company these days that doesn’t have to market?  There aren’t many.  Even the toll road system in the State of Texas is advertising and marketing.  One that isn’t and has seen a 45% increase in sales this past year is Marucci, a baseball bat company out of Baton Rouge.

I learned about this story through an episode on NPR’s Marketplace called “High Def A Home Run Bat Maker“.   The angle on the story was that Marucci doesn’t advertise.  However, they are used by a long list of major league players and with the onset of High Definition Television, views can now see the logo and names on a baseball bat.  Yes, viewers are that in tune.  In an industry that is now selling advertising space on practice jerseys, free advertising real estate such as this is an exception to the norm.  On television that is!

Google’s unified search provides natural search engine results that includes both video and images.  This advertising is free!  Here are my recommendations for taking advantage of this:

• Have your web developer use ALT tags on all of your images with a one, two, or three keyword pair. (e.g. Marucci Baseball Bats)
• Name the actual file after your keyword with images (e.g. marucci-baseball-bats.jpg)
• Create a hologram version of your images that includes something such as a phone number or web address.
• Try placing your images on your website as well as others (E.g. vendors, article directories, flickr, press releases, etc)

Images do catch the human eye and they do sell.  Not all of us can be as lucky as Jack Marucci; yet, most of us can still take advantage of Google images today!  For more information, see Matt Cutts official post and video on the topic of images and search.