So says John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing in a recent interview with Business Week.

We agree.

All too often marketers stagger from one marketing “event” to the next, without having a clear plan, or integrated system in place.

This is as true online as it is offline.

Not only do you need to create an effective marketing and promotional system, but you have to take note of the sequence in which you execute it.

You’ll find a great deal of detail on this topic in our 15-step Marketing Blueprint 2006.

Jantsch goes on talk about the importance of differentiating your business from others, and not with something as vulnerable to competition as your price.

Again, we agree completely. This is precisely the ground we cover in our recently published brief, In Search of a Value Proposition.

In fact, these two briefs together make for a formidable combination.

If you were to read the value proposition brief first, then the blueprint...you would find yourself very well informed on how to create and market a business to outperform just about any competition.

In response to our teleconference clinic on headline testing yesterday we received numerous emails asking questions about how to determine the validity of test results.

(The audio for the clinic is now available here. When listening to it, refer to the clinic notes as you listen.)

Here are three of the questions emailed to us:

Was the winner higher by a statistically significant amount? i.e. 0.61% vs. 0.43?

Quick question – how much data was used for this? We’ve seen some similar tests jump around so much and even perform differently when re-tested...

What number of PPC ads/impressions do we need to get an accurate result?

There were many others asking similar questions.

In almost all cases, the answer is “it depends”. That is to say, the validity of test results depends on a variety of factors.

In part, you will find answers in our A/B Split Testing brief. You’ll find recommendations on what to include in a A/B split test protocol, in addition to some testing guidelines.

A much more detailed set of answers is a central part of our Online Testing Certification Course. The current course is filled to capacity and ongoing. We will be running the course again, starting June 15th, and there are still places available.

Here is a brief description of session two of the course:

Test Validity

This may be the most vital class in the program. Invalid tests lead to incorrect decisions. This session will give you a firm understanding of validity principles, so that you can be confident in the results of your test.

• The Six Most Dangerous Threats to Test Validity – You will learn the meaning and prevention techniques associated with terms like “histriocity effect”, “instrumentation error” “sample distortion”.

• The Key Mathematic Equations For Sample Size Validity – This session will include a concise but fascinating guest lecture from an innovative professor of economics, Dr. David Reilly. You will learn the key mathematical equations for determining test size.

• The MEC Simplified Validity Formula – After the theory, we will present a simple, easy to understand formula that works even for the less mathematically inclined. You will also be given a tool to automatically calculate valid sample size.

If you feel this is the kind of detailed information you need to conduct valid A/B Split tests for your company or organization, we encourage you to sign up for the June 15th course before all the places are filled.

Martin Lindstrom has written an interesting piece on branding.

He talks about three rocks, of similar appearance...one from his garden, one from the Berlin Wall and one from the moon.

Same looking rocks...very different cash values. I imagine the rock from the moon could fetch quite a sum on eBay.

Lindstrom then goes on to make a parallel with branding.

For instance, three manufacturers can make sneakers which look pretty much identical. But the prices being charged for each pair will vary, according to the story and provenance of the company.

He’s right.

But here’s a cautionary note. The rock from the moon has the highest value only if it really did come from the moon.

Telling a story about a rock coming from the moon is no good. It has to actually have come from the moon.

As marketers we can’t look at me-too products and try to improve their brand images simply by concocting stories.

The brand is not what you say about a product or service. It’s about what the product or service IS. And, of course, it has to tap into what buyers actually WANT.

You’ll find a deeper exploration of this topic in our In Search of a Value Proposition research brief.

Seth Godin is a strong proponent of big ideas. He likes it when smart insights takes a company into territory that is way beyond the ordinary.

So it was interesting to see his post this morning about the value of process.

He argues that while intuition will take you places that process never can...process will always be a more reliable way to increase ROI.

We think he’s right.

Our recent research brief on Marketer’s Intuition, while recognizing that intuition is vital to make those big leaps, demonstrates very clearly that a marketer’s intuition is generally very unreliable.

During a teleconference call on this topic, we asked our audience to look at three headlines we had already tested, and tell us which of the three they thought delivered the highest conversion rate.

Over half of our expert audience picked the worst-performing headline.

This is a difficult subject to address within any organization.

On the one hand you want to encourage creativity and bold thinking, while on the other you need to quietly remind people that their intuition is very likely to be wrong.

And that, perhaps, is the true nature of intuitive thinking. One is wrong most of the time. But when we’re right, amazing things can happen.

There’s an interesting article in Advertising Age which looks at the failure of large companies to use keywords in their broadcast and print campaigns.

The ideal scenario is that a TV commercial would repeat a certain keyword sufficient number of time for it to stick in the viewer’s mind.

That viewer might then decide to do a little research on your product online and type the keyword into Google or some other search engine.

And at this point you had better be sure that your agency, in addition to producing the commercial, also added that keyword and its variations to your PCC campaigns.

When you have the keywords in place, it’s an important support, just in case you don’t get a high, organic search listing.

This is an obvious idea...but is likely hamstrung for now by poor communications between different advertising groups and agencies, all serving the same client.

If you have worked in the ad industry, you probably have a good sense of the likelihood of the broadcast group calling up the search guys and coordinating the script of the commercial with the PPC ad buys.

In the meantime, you’ll find some useful information on how to use PPC with any new product or service launch in our 90-Day PPC Plan Tested brief.

In her opening remarks at the MarketingSherpa Email Summit in Chicago Anne Holland put up a few slides to show how email marketing continues to be a force online, in spite of the much publicized problems of deliverability and spam.

Dr. Flint McGlaughlin and I spoke on the opening panel yesterday and, as I listened to the questions from the attendees, it struck me just how much there is still to learn about email marketing.

There were hundreds of people there, all of whom had come to learn from the many case histories being shared by the speakers.

In fact, that was perhaps the most powerful aspect of the conference: every speaker shared data on various aspects of their email marketing campaigns and practices. Instead of listening to opinions, the attendees were able to see what companies were actually doing, and the results they had achieved.

For me, what struck me most was how email marketing allows us to learn. By tracking click-throughs from your emails and newsletters, segmenting your lists and tracking again...you can learn an enormous amount about what your subscribers are really interested in.

The learning opportunity is different from what you can achieve through your web site. Your subscribers are a very particular segment of your audience. They have expressed a higher level of interest in what you offer by signing up in the first place.

Also, with your emails and newsletters, you have a very controlled environment in which you can decide which messages to deliver and which links to include.

This allows you not only to promote your products or services in a very direct and personal way, but also gives you a very fine-tuned opportunity to learn more about how your subscribers behave, and what they really want.

The second thought that came to mind was a suspicion that very few companies and organizations use email marketing as a learning opportunity in the way I have described.

Too often emails and newsletters are used simply as blunt instruments to promote products and services.

If I learned anything yesterday, it was an appreciation of how valuable one’s email lists are, and how much we can learn from the actions of our subscribers.

At Marketing Experiments we have done plenty of research on the topic of click fraud.

Companies hire low-wage surfers to click on competitive ads, thereby spending the competition’s budgets on useless clicks. Software is developed to do the same thing. And then there are the content publishers who get people to click on ads on their sites, to increase their ad revenues.

That’s the kind of fraud we think about when we talk about click fraud.

But there is another kind too.

This “fraud” is when marketers mislead their readers.

A recent Business Week article talks about various aspects of PPC advertising, and features a campaign for the Honda Element. Here is an excerpt:

The current Element campaign features the vehicle "talking" to sundry animals -- a platypus, a possum, a burro, and a crab -- in cartoony spots. Honda's agency, Rubin Postaer & Associates, bought those keyword terms and uses search ads as invitations to "see the platypus in its Element." That link leads consumers to elementandfriends.com, which features Element ads and a related game. RPA also bought variants of "funny video" and "funny commercials," which, says Mike Margolin, RPA's vice-president/associate media director, are search terms that have demographic profiles compatible with likely Element buyers. In many cases, the search terms cost just 10 cents or 15 cents per click, he says, and drew about 40% of the Element's Web site traffic. "It seemed a little quirky, but the more you thought about it, the more it seemed to resonate well with the campaign," says Tom Peyton, Honda's senior manager of marketing.

Let’s think about this for a moment.

Google, Yahoo! and other PPC providers position their ads as being contextual. One of the benefits they talk about is that a contextual ad delivers value to a searcher or site visitor, by serving an ad which helps them find what they are looking for.

So I go to one of these search engines and type in “platypus”.

I then see a PPC ad that invites me to "see the platypus in its Element."

I’m interested in the platypus, so I click the ad. What do I get? A sales pitch for a car.

This may not be click fraud in the way we usually perceive it. But as someone using a search engine I have just been hoodwinked and misled. A supposedly contextual ad has proved not to be contextual at all.

Maybe it’s not fraud. The only thing I have lost is some time.

But here’s something to consider.

What if this same kind of thing happens to me a few more times?

What if I lose all trust in these supposedly “contextual” ads?

What if I start seeing PPC ads and hesitate before clicking, because I am no longer confident that I’ll be taken somewhere relevant to my search?

Genuine click fraud may well be a problem for the PPC advertising business. But losing the trust of the people viewing those ads may prove to be an even bigger threat.

If you ask the question among a group of web designers and developers, the most frequent answer you are likely to get is, “Not me.”

A recent piece in emarketer waxes lyrical about the continuing growth of broadband. Here is an excerpt from the article:

This year broadband users as a proportion of all Internet users increased an impressive 13 percentage points over the previous February, as 68% of all US Internet users reportedly connected via broadband.

Yes, 68% is a big figure. And broadband is great when you have big page files, want to show large images and have some streaming videos to share.

But if you subtract 68 from 100, you get 32.

That’s 32%. Just a hair’s width away of one third of all Internet users.

To state it bluntly, one third of web users still access your site through dial-up.

How well do you serve them? Is your site fully accessible to users on dial-up? That is to say, can people on dial-up enjoy your site and find what they want as easily as those with broadband?

If not, you may want to consider the likely losses in revenues when you effectively turn your back on one third of all your potential readers and customers.

You’ll find a lot of useful information and resources on page weight and download times, on dial-up and broadband, in our Page Weight Tested brief.

There’s a piece on the BBC site about a recent survey by Jupiter Research and marketing firm iProspect. They came to some not very exciting conclusions about how people use search engines.

The basic finding was that if people don’t find what they want within the first three pages of results, they change their search term, change search engine or simply give up.

Three pages? It seems most people are more patient than I am. I don’t recall the last time I even tried page two.

More interesting, I thought, was this comment from Robert Murray, president of iProspect.

“They [users] know what they want, and they want to find it immediately, and the majority want to find it on page one.”

They know what they want.

This raises an obvious but important question. Does your web site give people what they want? Or is it more focused on what you, as a company, want to communicate or sell?

The bigger the disconnect between what you want to communicate and what your visitors want to find, the more worried you should be.

This brings us back to the issue of your value proposition.

If your value proposition is strong, it will be naturally aligned with what search engine users want and are looking for, simply because your business will be based on giving people what they want.

It is interesting to see how the Web, and search engines in particular, play a role in identifying the underlying strengths, and weaknesses, of companies online.

Before the Web, weak companies could remain undetected for a long time. Online, their weaknesses are identified a lot faster.

As some of you know, Session 1 of the Marketing Experiments Online Split Testing Certification course takes place tomorrow, Thursday April 13th, at 4:00PM EST.

Dozens of people have already signed up for the course, including online marketers from:

T-Mobile, TigerDirect.com, Dallas Morning News, Orbitz, Cinergy, True.com, Encyclopedia Britannica and many others.

This will be just the first in four 90-minutes sessions. At the end of all four, if you achieve a passing mark in the various tests and sample Test Protocol project, you will receive a full “Certified Split Testing Expert” Certification.

However...

If you don’t take Session 1, you won’t be able to take any of the other sessions.

So it is essential that you sign up and make full payment today...before midnight. After that, enrollment will be closed for the duration of the course.

You can find out more about the course, enroll and make your payment here.

Here’s a question that was sent to us by one of our subcribers:

“I listened to your value proposition segment online. I found it very helpful as I have been struggling with my value proposition for quite some time. I have read books on branding, etc. and still struggle.

Do you have any feedback on my value proposition? If so, I would greatly appreciate it!”

Our answer:

You have some excellent questions here, and seem to pretty much recognize most of the weaknesses inherent in your business.

In terms of creating a strong value proposition, your biggest weakness is that you have a business which is wide open to competition. Any company that has an existing presence in the pet market can jump in at any time.

As can regular jewelry companies, custom jewelry companies and individual crafts people.

Will creating custom jewelry defend your position? Probably not, as it is something any of your competitors can choose to do also.

Will creating one-of-a-kind pieces help you? It might. But each piece had better be very, very good. Why do they have to be so good? Because creating one-off pieces simply shifts your market focus, and you will still be faced with plenty of competitors...many of them being talented crafts people.

On the face of it, there are two ways to go forward from where you are now.

1. Create a huge business that makes money through high volume sales with slim margins...by getting your products on the shelves of Wal Mart and the like.

2. Do the opposite and establish your name in one or more tight niches.

Assuming you don’t have deep enough pockets to choose the first option, I’m going to let my imagination run wild here on option two...just to illustrate the point.

Here are some niche ideas for you:

a) Pet jewelry for golf fanatics. (Where the designs reflect the passions of the owner.)
b) Pet jewelry for fans of Oprah Winfrey (check out her earrings)
c) Pet jewelry for gardeners (All those nice flowers)
d) Pet jewelry for rock star fans
e) Pet jewelry for motorcycle fans
f) Pet jewelry for computer geeks (A good use for old computer chips. They’re shiny too!)

You get the idea. The jewelry for the pet becomes an expression of the owner’s passion.

When you work within a clearly defined niche, better things start to happen.

First, you reduce the size of the “pond”...so you can be a big fish in a small pond, rather than a small fish in a big pond.

Second, you can start adding a forum and customer photos to your site and build a real community.

Three, you can do your level best to get a celebrity or two to buy your jewelry. (A celebrity sportsperson, entertainer, gardener.)

Four, you can create designs that are funky enough to get attention from the media...through press releases, radio interviews etc.

And so on.

The thing is, with a niche you can separate yourself from the generic pet jewelry business and become known as THE source of pet jewelry for one or more niche markets.

Suddenly, you are no longer bland, but exciting.

People start talking about your site, blogging about your site and so on.

In addition, when you match pet jewelry with some other niche theme, such as golf...you are opening up whole new promotional opportunities with regard to search engine optimization and PPC advertising. Not to mention placing ads in golfing magazines etc.

As I mentioned...this is simple “imagination run wild”.

But the core message here is that you would find it easier to create a strong value proposition for your business if you worked within one or more niche markets.

It will always be hard for you to prosper in the very competitive and generic field of “pet jewelry”.

It will be much easier for you to become known as THE place to get pet jewelry for people who have a passion for golf, for example.

We hope these ideas help spark some productive thoughts for you. Keep us in touch with your progress.

One of the problems with Google’s results-found figure is that it includes a vast number of trash content sites.

So when you enter the keyword “online marketing” in Google, you can be sure that a huge proportion of the 48,300,000 results listed points to trash content.

These sites are often domain parking pages or skinny content sites filled with syndicated or low-cost content that can also be found on hundreds of other sites. The motivation for creating these sites is usually to generate income from Adsense ads or affiliate links.

This vastly inflated results-found figure causes a number of problems. Not least of these is that it hampers one’s ability to truly identify strong keywords for one’s own site. If the supply figure for a search term is inflated, then trying to work out an accurate index by comparing it to the corresponding demand figure gives you an inaccurate result.

It now appears that Google may be on its way to addressing this problem through its purchase of a new search algorithm, Orion. According to a recent article in Haaretz Daily, Orion can identify the quality of content on a site.

If that’s true, it’s good news for legitimate online marketers and very bad news for all those people making money from trash content.

It’s also good news for users of Google, as they will be more likely to find quality sites when they search.

Finally, to give credit where it is due, if Orion does help cut back on trash, Google won’t be the first to have achieved this. Ken Evoy of SiteBuildIt already has a module that does exactly the same thing – it delivers supply figures based on quality content sites only.

Unfortunately for most of us, this module is available only to people who use his site building and marketing system.

Benjamin Edelman, a Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Economics at Harvard University, has been doing some interesting work on detecting click fraud.

For a while he has been tracking the obvious frauds...clicks by competitors and clicks by content publishers. But now he has gone further and identified cases of click fraud where no click has actually taken place.

Here is part of his claim:

"My August examples demonstrate what I call "syndication fraud" -- Yahoo placing advertisers' ads into spyware programs, and charging advertisers for resulting clicks. But Yahoo's spyware problems extend beyond improper syndication. In my August syndication fraud examples, an advertiser only pays Yahoo if a user clicks the advertiser's ad. Not so for three of today's examples. Here, spyware completely fakes a click -- causing Yahoo to charge an advertiser a "pay-per-click" fee, even though no user actually clicked on any pay-per-click link. This is "click fraud.""

This is fascinating stuff. You'll find his full article here...

I came across an interesting set of statistics in an article by Jim Barnes.

Here’s an excerpt from his article:

A study by Bain & Company found that 80 percent of companies surveyed believed that they delivered a "superior experience" to their customers. But, when customers were asked to indicate their perceptions of the experiences they have in dealing with companies, they rated only 8 percent of companies as truly delivering a superior experience (James Allen, Frederick F. Reichheld and Barney Hamilton, The Three "Ds" of Customer Experience, Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, accessed Nov. 7, 2005). Do you sense just a little bit of disconnect?

In other words, "customer experience" is in grave danger of becoming yet another management buzzword that many business people bandy about without fully understanding its meaning or its potential.

As Jim points out, that’s an interesting disconnect.

His article addresses the broad issue of customer experience. This covers the complete experience with your company.

In the case of a restaurant, for example, the experience will include how your reservation is handled, how you are greeted at the door, the quality of the service you receive at your table and the way in which you are thanked when you leave.

Online, however, the world of customer experience is a little different.

The entire experience usually takes place without any contact with people. How customers feel about your company, and the experience they remember, is determined by a series of web pages. It’s a whole different challenge.

That experience is determined by how simply and clearly you help them achieve the tasks they wish to complete. The language you use will also impact how they feel about you.

However, online customers will often expect a direct experience with a living, breathing human being if and when they have a problem or question.

So here’s the question: how well do you handle your online customers when they want to talk with you to resolve a problem?

My guess is that if a survey were done on the quality of customer experience when it comes to customer service offered by web-based companies, the percentage of happy respondents would be even less than 8%.

All too often, we try to automate customer service. Instead of giving customers an immediate opportunity to speak to a trained customer service representative, we try to save money by presenting them with FAQ pages, knowledge bases and automatically generated emails.

This practice may appear to save money. However, you can be sure that it doesn’t make your customers feel good about you. More often than not, they WANT to be helped by a person. Instead we give them more web pages and awful, automated telephone answering systems.

The irony is, as one of our research briefs has demonstrated, you can make more money by giving online customers immediate access to a customer service agent.

By speaking with your online customers, you will resolve their problems faster, you can take the opportunity to upsell and cross-sell...and, perhaps most important of all, you can dramatically increase the overall quality of their entire customer experience with your company.