BSM Media founder Maria Bailey recently conducted a study "Marketing to Moms: Getting Your Piece of the Trillion Dollar Market". The study focuses on advertisers missing the mark when targeting mothers. The study finds that over 75% of the 600 participants felt marketers and advertisers aren't acknowldeging their needs as mothers in ads. Why Are Advertisers & Mothers Missing Each Other? I don't think the advertisers are all to blame for this phenomenon. Mothers roles today are probably more unclear than they ever have been. If you compare men to women the problem becomes much more clear. Within the 18 - 34 male demographic you have professionals, fathers who are professionals, single dads, etc... and the same is true within the same demographic for women. However, what percentage of the women in that age demo are stay at home moms? What percentage are single parents that don't work and which percentage are single parents that do work. I think the female demographic is much harder to decipher and that won't change for some time. My own story down this path. I built a maternity directory web site for my wife when she was pregnant with our first child. The purpose was two fold. First I wanted to fully understand parent child relationships when stored in a single sql table and a directory application was perfect for that. Secondly, I wanted to help my wife keep an easy to maintain list of sites she found useful without creating a bookmarks file the size of Florida. Thus, gogomama was born. A few months ago she mentioned to me that she was shocked at some of the sites I had placed on the site. She said "I hate that site, why did you ever put that in there?". Like any man does, I said "I don't know, I guess I thought you liked that site". Obviously I was completely wrong with many of the sites I chose but I was dead on with some of them as well. The funny part is how her preferences and online shopping style/behavior have changed from the first pregnancy to the second. Things she liked before like Baby Gap may still be on her good list but have fallen in favor and have been replaced by sites like Petit Patapon, Tuti Bella, and Childish Clothing. My point is that women are constantly evolving and changing as are mothers today. Unless advertisers and marketers hit women in a specific time frame they're going to continue to miss the mark and not connect with their target. It's like trying to fish for Salmon out of season. The message is fine but the target is nowhere in sight. More on this can be found at Media Post.

I couldn't help but post a pic of the giant John Kerry Waffle float sent my way. Check the site for more pics and a detailed explanation of how it was built, who built it and why.

"The giant John Kerry Wafflehead made its maiden voyage out from its secure, undisclosed location in Columbus, Ohio, on Wednesday morning, October 27th, in order to attend a Flip Flop and Waffle Breakfast at Capital University, organized by Students for Bush."

David Berkowitz of MediaPost did a great job debunking some extremely popular myths regarding b2b companies and their search engine marketing theories. I'm amazed at the mysterious nature of search engine marketing that pervades companies even still. Here are some of his b2b search marketing myths exposed.

B2B Search Engine Marketing Myths
MYTH: "People who see our ad can find our Web site."

REALITY: Wordtracker.com recently reported the top 10 searched terms for the day included "google," "yahoo," and "ebay." Also high on the list were terms such as "ask jeeves," "yahoo.com," "mapquest," "hotmail.com," "ebay.com," and a Web site that appeared to be a strange mix of literature and erotica. People search for search engine Web site URLs in search engines.

MYTH: "People don't do searches for big ticket B2B products and services."

REALITY: Let's go to Overture's Keyword Selector Tool. Below are tallies of searches conducted in Overture in September 2004:

*Enterprise asset management - 1,341 *Supply chain management software - 1,692 *Telecommunication infrastructure - 1,052 *Security management - 5,290 *Product life cycle management - 6,294 *Wireless solution - 3,409 *Document management services - 1,644

MYTH: "Search is just for small businesses, and it's taking money away from the Yellow Pages. It's for people who can't afford advertising."

REALITY: Just how many established brands do I need to name here to show how ludicrous that line of thinking is? Such brands should either be insulted for the slap in the face or relieved that some normally fierce competitors are sitting this round out. It's like saying radio is solely for companies that can't afford television ads.

My Thoughts on B2B Search Marketing Today
It's amazing how this "I don't get it" attitude pervades every level of IT and marketing in large companies. It would've been great to be on that b2b marketing panel and to debunk every one of their silly conclusions with data and experience. Especially if it came from someone they'd never heard of, like me.

Search engine marketing is as important to branding and lead generation as any other form of marketing and even more so today than it has been in the past 5 years. I'd say it's analgous to companies that didn't want to go online during the dot com boom only to find they were losing market share and brand recognition because they failed to change with the times. Companies not willing to incorporate search engine marketing into their marketing and web initiatives will find themselves in the same position... Gone!

I just received an email from eMarketer chocked full of good data. While the email contained some good data it failed on a few general rules about email marketing. Here are the two rules they failed to abide by.

eMail Marketing Dont's

1. Don't bog down the email with lots of graphics requiring a high speed internet connection. eMarketer's Election Day Special email took forever to load, even on my high speed internet connection. The cause was their server running slow and because the email had a ton of navigational graphics it took quite a while to load and thus I lost interest.


2. When providing data, don't put it in an image format. Put it in text format so that in the event of a bandwidth issue by your email hosting provider the user is able to immediately parse through the data and you've immediately peaked their interest.


3. Lastly, don't make your email an exact copy of your website. The email is not meant as a full replica of your web site but rather a snapshot of important data the reader is interested in. Thus, make the format of the email minimalistic so as to not distract the reader from the original intent of the email, which was to tell them something. eMarketer took up over 75% of my preview window in Outlook with a banner ad (advertisement) and their nasty looking graphical navigation. Man that's annoying.

Remember what you were taught in school. K.I.S.S. - Keep It Simple Stupid!

Today's an important day for the future of America and I did my duty now you do your's. Get out there and vote!