After spending 3 inspirational days representing WebVisible at the DMS 2011 conference in Denver (put on by BIA/Kelsey), one thing seems more true than ever: SMB owners have their hands full. They recognize the importance of internet advertising, but often wear multiple hats, juggling sales, marketing, and branding in one hand, and customer service, retention and innovation in the other hand. Outsourcing is often the only viable solution for many of their day-to-day business processes, including lead generation and marketing on the Internet.
As a company founded and known for excellence in supporting reseller and partners with small business advertising solutions, WebVisible manages many of the same processes upstream. Pay Per Click online advertising, lead generation, SaaS driven marketing solutions and Reputation Monitoring are all part of our value proposition. Our goal is always three-fold: deliver easy to use marketing solutions for WebVisible clients via an automated advertising system, provide scalable solutions for our partners, and innovate, innovate, innovate.
I read an article recently about Steve Job’s formula for success at Apple, who lists the following as one of his top mantras for success: “Make it all one platform”. Apple’s commitment to blurring the distinction between software and hardware with respect to providing a singular user experience has driven every-day consumer experiences with mobile devices into the cloud. iPhone is iTunes is Mobile.me (now iCloud). Their customer loyalty is unparalleled, and it’s largely due to their commitment to platform integration and unified user experience.
WebVisible recently unveiled a cutting edge Reputation Monitoring product. It stood alone with a separate log-in for a short while, but is now baked into our Merchant Center Dashboard alongside Geneva, KPEye and all of the other behind-the-scenes technology that our customers, partners and resellers benefit from on a daily basis.
Steve Jobs’ desire to make Apple ‘just one thing’, with no distinction between hardware, software, products and services is largely paralleled with the Reputation Monitoring iFrame integration for two reasons:
1.) Fusing access to our Merchant Center and Reputation Monitoring dashboard effectively turns two activities into one, making it easier for a business owner to keep track of online advertising and reputation. If you’re wondering how or why this is, think about the area code of your cell phone. Area codes are perceived as a single unit of information, not three separate numbers. Single sign-on access for a dashboard benefits from the same psychological principal.
2.) The second is a bit more of a game-changer, as it leverages the well-known statute of negative word of mouth, and that it travels 10 times faster than positive word-of-mouth, albeit in reverse.
Delivering world-class results to our advertisers is easy. Helping them to carve time out of their busy schedules to spend time engaging with our Merchant Center to revel in the success of their SEM campaigns is a bit more challenging. If an advertiser invests in a successful advertising platform that delivers dynamite results, if they don’t engage with the platform, they might not recognize the success of the campaign even when we are exceeding their expectations.
Business owners are busy, and they don’t know what they don’t know.
To this end, the real magic in platform integration is that by giving our advertisers the ability to identify and respond to negative (and positive) reviews in a unified dashboard, their retention rates increase.
Why is this?
How do negative reviews relate to lead generation, advertiser retention and platform engagement?
By putting Reputation Monitoring right alongside the ability to track SEM campaigns simultaneously, something remarkable happens. Marketing and Reputation Monitoring merge into the same platform and become synonymous in terms of the mental energy it takes for advertisers to set aside on a daily, weekly and monthly basis. Advertisers’ log in to their Merchant Center dashboard more often, and retention increases alongside client satisfaction.
According to the principle of the speed of word of mouth, the desire to vet out and respond to or eliminate negative reviews online is also far greater than the desire to read positive reviews. Since advertisers are already online and logged in checking their reviews, they naturally check the results of their advertising campaigns since it’s only a click away. Merging these previously separate platforms together drives advertisers to engage more frequently, for longer, and with greater attentiveness. With platform integration, the distinctions between marketing Reputation Monitoring blur into a singular activity, encouraging more frequent and increased platform engagement with our advertisers.
Lead generation services and reputation monitoring tools are now interrelated, interdependent and act as drivers and motivators for one another. The power of harnessing innovation via platform integration is gestalt-esque, resulting in a downstream increase in both perceived and objective value in the eyes of advertisers, and an upstream lift in retention rates for resellers.
1 + 1 now equals 3.
Apple isn’t Apple because of it’s product mix alone.
Apple is Apple because of it’s unified user experience.
When it comes to the complexity of Internet advertising for small businesses, platform integration is as crucial as ever for today's SMB.
If I was a betting man, I ‘d say that Steve Jobs would be proud of us :)
Eric Rosen
Manager of Business Development
WebVisible
To learn more about why online advertising agencies worldwide make WebVisible as their Interactive Advertising Software Platform of choice, click here.
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