How do you make money off an app when you give it away?

At W3i we’ve been a champion of the freemium business model for more than a decade. But I’ll level with you, I understand the challenge developers face when choosing between a freemium or paid option for their web app. At face value, giving away a product you’ve dumped your blood, sweat and tears into seems preposterous. I get it. You wonder, “how can I make money with my app when I’m giving away free access?!” Look at it this way, if the product provides enough value, consumers are naturally going to desire the product and crave more access. That knowledge can drive your development to create a stellar product. Still not convinced, the explosion of mobile apps has helped drive freemium forward.

Freemium gets a push from mobile

In 2010, mobile apps helped shine the spotlight on freemium, in 2011 all signs point to major gains in the market. We’ve written alot about freemium models over the past year but I found a very candid post from Matt Mazur, the founder of Preceden, a web app that helps users create timelines, to be refreshing.

Okay Ryan, freemium is looking pretty good but . . .

Don’t just take our word for it, we know freemium models drive significant lifts in demand for your app. In Matt’s findings, those who tried the app under the freemium model were nearly 350% more likely to buy access than under no freemium option. Take a look at his findings.

Matt eliminated the Free plan from his Web App for a Month: Find Out What Happened

Ryan Ruud, Associate Marketing Communications Specialist, W3i, LLC
Ryan is a new media communicator with a decade of traditional and emerging mass media experience. He uses his passion for apps and connecting people in W3i’s marketing/communications efforts.

It didn’t take long for the Facebook game market to grow from a land of independent game developers to a land of billion dollar giants.  The leaders Zynga, DeNA, Disney (Playdom), EA (Playfish), and CrowdStar own many of the top hits on Facebook and on iPhone.  In this post, you’ll see how independent developers are thriving through a review of game rankings and successful strategies.

Game Rankings

According to Inside Social Games (September 28^th), FarmVille is down from 84 million monthly active users and 32 million daily active users, to its current 62 million MAU and 16 million DAU.

The top 250 Facebook games DAU (daily active user) growth for the past 12 months was graphed and it shows their decline since April.  However, after you exclude the top 5 developers’ games, you see that the remaining games actually continued to grow since April showing that the smaller developers are growing despite the top 5 developers decline.

Indy developers are flourishing on the iPhone App Store.

A look at freemium games ranked in the top 300 grossing games for June through August 2010 reveals that the 78% of high ranking games are coming from indy developers.

Thirty-six unique freemium games achieved a top 300 grossing rank during the period. 22% (8) of these were games now owned by Zynga (2) or DeNA (6) while none came from Disney, EA, or CrowdStar.  The remaining 28 games came from 17 independent developers;  developers such as Playforge, Storm8, Team Lava, and Brooklyn Packet.

Independent Developer Strategies

W3i attends game conferences, surveys developers, and speaks directly with large and small developers.  There are many common strategies.  Here are some of the top strategies we noted during our communication with successful independent game developers.

1. Focus on Serving Customer Needs

Games have a broad-range of appeal.  Successful games appeal strongly to a particular customer segment.  For example, two successful iPhone games Haypi Kingdom and Kingdoms at War have been successful by appealing to a younger male demographic interested in battle games.   These games compete not by having the largest number of friends playing the game but by having strong engaging game designs to improve user engagement.

1. Land-Grab in Mobile

Compared to a paid game, you can get 10x the number of downloads for a freemium game and generate more than 1/10^th as much per install. However, according to Distimo as of June 2010 just 4% of the iPhone games in the App Store are using in-app purchases.  Developers releasing freemium games for the iPhone are increasing their probability for success by having relatively few games to compete with.  Many of the top freemium, iPhone games have come from small teams (1 to 10 people).

Apple’s recently relaxed their policy on the use of 3^rd party development tools for creating apps. This led to an increase in the number of developers capable of building freemium iPhone games and decreased porting costs.  As of October 2010, Adobe reported that over 150 apps built using their technology were approved in the App Store.  Adobe’s web-site speaks to performance optimization and app design changes required to create an effective mobile app.  Thus, it seems that simple porting of the 30,000+ Facebook Flash games from the desktop to mobile is not going to happen.

The number of freemium games launching in mobile is growing quickly but we think there still remains a land-grab opportunity for the next 6 to 12 months where average games can still be very successful and good games can excel.

The game rankings for Facebook and iPhone freemium games show that independent developers are thriving.  Contact W3i if you would like to discuss opportunities to grow your freemium iPhone game business.

You’re busy creating the next great, addictive app so let’s face it you don’t have a lot of time for chit chat or long blog intros. But how do you get seen in such a large pool? Here are three tips to employ over your lunch to bolster your application marketing efforts

Show us, don’t tell us, the power of video content marketing

All the collateral in the world won’t have the same impact as a quick tutorial. Folks are consuming online video in astronomical amounts. In June 2010, Americans consumed 10 billion videos online. How your app works has a chance to jump into that consumption pattern. There are a couple of options, you can create the video in-house, or if you have a large enough fan base you can crowd source the tutorial and give one of your users a chance to be the star. Make sure you check out some crowdsourcing tips first if you go that route.

Distribution Channels

• YouTube
• Vimeo
• Facebook
• Twitter

Screenshots also serve as a great source of promotion, fire up a Flickr account or Twit Pic tips or tutorial screenshots.

Get social: word of mouth marketing amped

This will be brief. If your app isn’t in social spaces, it should be. Monitor to see what is being said about your application and about your competitor’s application. Listen first, and then put together a strategy on how to join the conversation, or jump-start one. Take some time while you eat your chips. Head to Twitter Search and enter a couple keywords pertaining to you app, including your app and your competitors. Also look at what other brands are doing. Appy Entertainment does a good job on Twitter engaging their users.

• Listen first.
• Strategize message.
• Engage conversation
• Lather,rinse, repeat.

Brainstorm application marketing strategy

The best marketing strategy is having a strategy so make sure to take time to brainstorm things like price points, promotion channels and budget. All three areas are pivotal to success or disaster of a marketing strategy.  The key is to get your app in front of someone who is in the market for applications. Incented distribution or in-app advertising might be just the ticket. Let’s face it, billboard advertising will only build awareness, but not directly result in a measurable install. While you finish your milk think of a couple areas you’d like to brainstorm over lunch tomorrow. Brainstorming is a good way to get the juices flowing, invite someone to lunch with you, two heads are better than one.

For dessert, increased application distribution

If  just a few steps enacted over lunch can have an impact in your application distribution numbers just think what a full on application marketing strategy can do.  Share your thoughts, ideas and techniques in the comment section below. Enjoy your cookies now, and happy marketing, lunch is over. For lunch tomorrow? Why not tackle  just application discovery?

The advertising world is buzzing this week as thousands participate in the AdWeek 2010 conference. For those of us unable to attend, thank the Twitter gods for hash tags. These beauties are giving marketers and developers 140 character long golden nuggets of knowledge from the industry’s brightest minds.

One common theme from Ad Week 2010:

Mobile isn’t just big, it’s huge.

Here are three #adweek2010 tweets that mobile application developers and marketers should take note of.

RT @digitas: Laura Lang: Mobile and social are intertwined and they will redefine the nature of engagement with the consumer #adwk2010

This may not seem that groundbreaking, but for an application marketer, the rapid growth of social on-the-go is a growing goldmine that developers and advertisers should also take note of. The rapid growth of virtual goods in social gaming alone should make the wheels of your mind start squeaking. A new study out by the Inside Network points to 40% growth in this market in 2011. For application developers looking to increase distribution, this is a powerful marketing tool to drive installations.

RT @tomspano: Quality content and creative delivery will always be profitable. -Dan Abrams

No one ever said there was a lack of content in the world. An abundance of content relevant to a consumer is another story. Being able to intelligently recommend content to a user is the Holy Grail for both advertisers and publishers. Applying methods of intelligent content recommendation from a desktop environment to a mobile platform makes good marketing sense and would also open the doors for cross promotion in applications.

Getting an app recognized in an increasingly crowded arena becomes easier when the delivery of the recommendation is intelligent. Intelligence + content equals creative to me.

RT @digitas: Lang: The mistake is thinking marketing is about the messaging. Marketing is about inspiring people to engage wherever they are. #adwk2010

As much as omnipotence would be a great characteristic to have for someone trying to market an application, it’s unattainable, or is it. Lang’s thought here screams: applications.

Traditional methods of marketing struggle to reach people where they are, as more and more people are on-the-go. The one constant from online to on-the-go, however, is applications. Applications are consistently present with an increasing mobile consumer.

I believe the tweets coming out of AdWeek 2010 are dead on—intelligently connecting content through applications is the future.  What do you think?

MinneBar 2010, an (un)conference aimed at getting Minnesota tech and design communities together, was held on May 22^nd at Best Buy Headquarters.  Here’s a short recap of the event and what’s new on the Minnesota tech scene:

Opening remarks were by MinneBar co-founders Luke Francl and Ben Edwards. They thanked sponsors, including W3i.

The first session I attended at MinneBar 2010 was “Legal Implications of Limewire on File-Sharing Business Models” by Ryan Miest of Robius Kaplan Miller Ciresi, which described how most of the copyright concerns involving file-sharing networks go back to the Sony BetaMax VCR law suit from 1984. No one thought Napster had a leg to stand on. Others like Grokster andLimewire were able to continue after learning not to be centralized like Napster. The Limewire decision is likely to be appealed with respect to the courts findings of personal liability of their CEO. I didn’t think they sufficiently covered veil piercing.

Graeme Thickins briefly introduced me to Rick Mahn founder of Social Media Breakfast Minneapolis and Myke Roventine. I joined about 75 others to hear Myke’s MinneBar session, “Social Web Design: One Step Forward, Two Steps Back”. Myke pointed out what he felt were flawed design strategies by the market leading social media players like Facebook, Twitter, Google and Yahoo. Does everyone need to put their Twitter feeds on their blog? The Twitter feeds miss the context of the conversation, and aren’t making the web better when being on others’ blogs. He also commented that Facebook has changed functionality multiple times unnecessarily, such as moving the search box several times over the past couple of years. These unnecessary changes caused confusion for users. He also commented how Twitter’s “infinite scrolling” for tweets could be improved by adopting additional UI controls such as those found on BlipFM. He said the big guys are trying the changes instead of user testing. Phil Wilson remarked during the session how this was “try fast, fail fast.”  Also during the session Steve Borsch announced that he just deleted his Facebook account due to privacy concerns.

Next I went to “Bowling for Market Share- How to Grow Your Startup by Narrowing its Focus” by Curt Prins. Curt provided very good start-up marketing advice. Curt laid out his very pragmatic approach to B2B marketing for tech start-ups, and the developers in the audience definitely seem to embrace his methods.

Over lunch, Robert Stephens who was so gracious to advocate for Best Buy to allow Minnesota techies to use their space, briefly remarked on Best Buy’s strategy around digital televisions, and his recent trip to Google IO.

Next at MinneBar, I caught Aaron Kardell’s iPhone app marketing session entitled, “Getting started with iPhone & iPad Development.” Aaron is the founder of Performant Design and developer of the popular iGarageSale app.  Aaron shared his lessons learned in iPhone app marketing, such as the importance of getting on the top 100 lists, requesting app store reviews within your app, ideally after the user has been using it for about a week, some ideas on how to get noticed by Apple (such as taking out ads in Cupertino on Facebook), using roadblock ad campaigns at popular Apple/Mac blogs, using incentive app downloads to burst your downloads, and using vendors like Tapjoy and Flurry App Circle.  After the business discussion, Aaron coded an Italian food finder iPhone app using Yelp’s API and Mapkit.

The next MinneBar 2010 session I attended was “How to Measure P&L When Your Price is Free” by W3i’s Product Manager, Kristin Oberhaus. With users wanting free apps on the Internet, you need to balance the demand gained for free app versus paid app promotion.  Kristin pointed out various models to drive revenue for free applications, including cross-subsidy, three-party, freemium, and nonmonetary.  When free is your model, your P&L must be based on the value driven by your free app and not the price.   

Next I spoke on a panel of Minnesota tech thought leaders, and discussed “How Can Minnesota be Better”. Thank you to Jeff Pesek and Mike Bollinger for inviting me to participate. The session was largely centered on the culture of risk aversion in Minnesota, how Minnesota tech start-ups need to focus on home runs and not just niche singles and doubles, and funding. Jon Dahl, co-founder of YCombinator-backed, Zencoder said that if Minnesota was going to try an incubator concept like YCombinator or TechStars the incubator would need a lot more cash, given the lack of local angel funding and VC activity, and a mentorship program– both essential elements of YCombinator.

MinneBar 2010 proved to be a great place to network with top Minnesota tech experts. I spent a couple of hours after the sessions ended schmoozing with several new faces, including Derrick Shields & Dylan Petersson & of WebproLeads, Matt Bauer of Pedal Brain, and Thomas Grabowski, co-founder of LogLogic. I also listened in as the first ever Minnespark award winners were announced. 

Further, it was refreshing to hear a lot of buzz about Minnesota tech jobs. I gathered that W3i is not the only company hiring right now. It seemed to be a common theme that Minnesota tech jobs are in abundance as many of the companies present indicated they have positions available.  Minnesota Recruiters survey indicates that there is optimism for job growth in 2010 and an increase in personal job security. Minnesota’s tech scene has a large, highly skilled, and growing workforce demonstrated by the energy and attendance at MinneBar and the tech job buzz being generated there.

Thanks to the organizers and attendees, along with Best Buy for allowing us to use their campus (which is absolutely cool) to promote Minnesota tech and design.  As evidenced by the increase in attendance over the 2009 event, MinneBar rocks.

Rob Weber, Vice President of Business Development and Co-Founder, W3i, LLC
Rob is an Internet marketing pioneer with over ten, profitable years evolving W3i in the consumer application industry.

If you didn’t get a chance to go to San Francisco, here are some of the Ad:Tech 2010  trendy topics that the W3i team picked up on:

Data Collection and Privacy Concerns:

• Data Collection – Nearly every speaker addressed the importance of data in targeting and optimizing.  In The Changing Business Landscape M&A overview, Gus Tai made a strong point that the companies that connect with the audience and know them intimately will win.   Quantcast’s Adam Gerber stated, “there are only two parts of the funnel that matter: the top (audience) and the bottom (conversion).”  Also for social advertising to become more of a brand marketer’s focus, brands need to move from measuring impressions to measuring engagement.   
• Interest Based Advertising  Icon – With 2/3 of online consumers concerned about privacy, IAB is rolling out interest based advertising, a self-regulated program that allows consumers to click on the icon shown with an online display ad and see how the ad was targeted to them.   This is in direct response to calls on the Internet ecosystem by the FTC to develop more robust and effective self-regulation of online behavioral-based advertising practices.

Mobile Marketing:

Advanced Mobile Marketing, Japanese-style:

• Due to 3G penetration and because most users pay for unlimited usage, Japan is a great testing ground for technical advancements in applications, including augmented reality.
• iButterfly, created by Mobile Art Lab,  is an augmented reality application that makes collecting coupons fun.  The app tasks its users with catching virtual butterflies, each representing one or more coupons.
• More social page views in Japan are mobile.  Mixi, Gree, and Mobagetown are the three largest social media sites in Japan.
• Coca-Cola Japan is designing their vending machines so that thirsty customers can use an embedded payment chip found in their cell phones to pay for their purchases, also enabling point-of-sale coupons.

Group Buying

With the success of Groupon.com, other group buying services are popping up.  Homerun.com is combining social, local, simple, and value into their group buying site.  The site encourages you to interface with Facebook and includes a loyalty program that rewards user invites and offer uses to accumulate cash-bonuses.  They are also leverage a psychological tactic of the exclusivity of “Private Reserve,”    a collection of exclusive high-end offers presented to most valued members. 

The W3i team enjoyed meeting with so many partners and networking at Ad:Tech SF.  Marketing with apps is thriving as engagement with the audience skyrockets.   We’d love to talk more about how to make your application business successful.

Rob Weber, Vice President of Business Development and Co-Founder, W3i, LLC
Rob is an Internet marketing pioneer with over ten, profitable years evolving W3i in the consumer application industry.

Consumer apps were everywhere at the 2010 CES show.  Here are five of the application trends for online application marketers that I noted from my attendance at CES:

1. Optimism rules at 2010 CES show.  Gary Shapiro, Chief Executive of CES, said the CES show “seemed more upbeat than a year ago, reflecting a return to optimism for the industry,”  reports Dean Takahashi, lead writer for GamesBeat by VentureBeat. Attendance at the 2010 International Consumer Electronics Show reportedly reached 120,000 visitors this year, an increase of about 6 percent from last year.  Participants were reverberating with the latest device and the latest apps to go with it. 
2. Apps will be everywhere.  Thanks to Apple, apps are now sexy and offer the consumer more value from their device, and the marketer the ability to enhance their device with little effort, as well as a potential new source of revenue.
   • Apps in television set-top boxes: Samsung announced the launch of Samsung Apps, a multi-device application store with content partners, including Blockbuster, USA Today, and others.  Samsung plans to make apps available for a range of devices from mobile phones to HDTVs.
   • Apps in car electronics: Ford recognizes that users want information on demand.  Ford’s Sync feature uses an 8” touch-screen in the dashboard as well as voice commands.  You can catch up on Twitter, listen to Internet radio, check movie times and get free online maps with turn-by-turn directions.
     
     http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-ces-ford8-2010jan08,0,4905917.story\
   • App Store for Netbooks - Intel launched a beta version of its app store, called the Intel AppUp center for netbooks.  Currently offering about 100 apps.
3. Integrated, multi-platform app strategies are being considered. Brands should create apps that are integrated across multiple devices:  mobile, desktop, social, browser, and other emerging platforms like television set-top boxes and car electronics.  Cooliris bases its success on building its app for both mobile and desktop platforms.   They were recently selected to develop Media Gallery for the Nexus One Device.
4. There will be a mobile app for almost everything, but adoption outside of iPhone is still low.   With the phenomenal growth of the Apple AppStore fueling over 2 billion downloads from some 100,000 plus apps, the race is on from other mobile device companies to woo app developers. (Living in Minnesota, one of my favorites announced at CES is the SmartStart app by Directed for remote starting a car from a smartphone.)
5. Top app marketers will start focusing on improving their key operating metrics.  Most app marketers are doing a poor job of developing key operating metrics and reporting surrounding their app marketing initiatives and campaigns.  There is a lot of emotional decision making rather than data driven decision making. This appears to be starting to change, as better analytical thinking and tools are starting to take root with top app marketers.

If you identified other app trends, share your thoughts by submitting a comment.  

Rob Weber, Vice President of Business Development and Co-Founder, W3i, LLC
Rob is an Internet marketing pioneer with over ten, profitable years evolving W3i in the consumer application industry.

When looking to distribute free consumer software, there are many different methods of distribution.  Some of the more successful distribution methods are:

• Online marketing promotions
• Affiliate programs
• Physical distribution through retail
• Word of mouth

If you can get all the software distribution you need from the latter, then this blog post probably isn’t for you. But for the rest of us who can’t ever get enough, here’s a tactic that tends to get overlooked -software aggregators. 

There are many benefits to hosting your free software or trial software on sites like Download.com, Tucows.com and Softonic.com.  One of the most important things to look for when researching software aggregators is reputation, look for companies like Softonic.com that are a trusted source of downloads. If it’s not a trusted site don’t use it!  Many software aggregators  offer multiple benefits such as:

• Free listing programs
• Pay per download (PPD) programs at very reasonable rates
• Scalable bandwidth  

Listing your downloads with software aggregators can free up bandwidth.  If your product has a large file size or high traffic influxes, these sites have the ability to provide unlimited downloads to potential users without the worry of servers crashing and bandwidth overage charges.

Working with software aggregators does come with a couple of caveats.  The first is turnaround time.  This problem is mostly caused by us–marketers, developers, etc.  Due to the high volume of requests for listings on these popular aggregators, turnaround times can be days or weeks.  It can also take the same amount of time when you’re trying to remove a product from the site.  Be sure to plan ahead.

The second is the lack of reporting.  You don’t get much visibility into reporting, so before adding this method of distribution to your marketing strategy, be sure to know your Key Performance Indicators (KPI) so you have the ability to optimize.

And now the W3i plug! Apart from software aggregators there is another tool available to you to increase distribution; it’s advertising in the installer.  W3i has created a proprietary Application Network where the advertiser’s popular consumer applications are offered during the installation process.  This distribution method is performance-based and user generated.      

Just like when football coaches tell their players to keep their heads on a swivel, the same can be said for marketers of this generation.  There are many different vehicles of software distribution that you can use to get your software in front of consumers. Just make sure the vehicle you choose fits your marketing strategy and instead of telling you to think outside the box, because I hate that cliché, I will suggest that you work smarter, not harder, when trying to find new vehicles of distribution.

Mitch Bain, Marketing Manager; W3i, LLC
Mitch has 4 years experience focusing on Display Advertising, Search Engine Marketing, and Mobile Marketing, in the Integrated Interactive Media industry.

On November 21st over 600 developers and entrepreneurs got together to discuss what’s important to Minnesota tech start-ups. The halls that Best Buy legendary founder, Dick Schulze, built made for a great location for the next wave of Minnesota entrepreneurs to begin spreading their wings.

Several Minnesota start-up thought leaders were on hand including Graeme Thickens of Minnov8, Robert Stephens, founder of GeekSquad, Justin Porter of the University of Minnesota Venture Center, and John Roberts attorney at start-up friendly New Counsel. There were many young Minnesota entrepreneurs on hand including Mynul Khan, founder of FieldNation, and Adam Sellke of Evolve, who was a recent semifinalist at The Minnesota Cup. I was surprised that there were several Minnesota entrepreneurs who had multiple successful companies with exits.

Minnebar co-founder, Ben Edwards, led a very interactive roundtable discussion for web app builders. Ben’s leadership was clearly on display as a large group of primarily independent developers came forward with their questions on how to market the technology they built. It was very interesting to hear a group of developers discuss marketing issues. From my first hand experience as an internet company founder, I know you need to wear a lot of hats.

The most heated discussion of the day was “Bootstrapping Your Tech Start-up” led by Kevin Spreng of Robins, Kaplan, Miller & Ciresi. Kevin provided tips for bootstrapping entrepreneurs such as hire contractors rather than employees, go without an office, and focus on execution. Near the end of his session, Kevin stated that marketing agencies were a black hole because marketing agencies spend a lot of money, and he advised start-ups to handle their own marketing.  Curt Prins, Executive Director at District 202 and marketing guru, responded with his disagreement and said not all marketers needed a large budget to accomplish results for start-up entrepreneurs.  A rather lively debate ensued (see tweets under #minnebar). Nice work Kevin and Curt in driving a stimulating discussion on the topic of bootstrapping.

Justin Grammens led a packed session on how to develop Android applications.  Justin explained how, unlike iPhone apps, Android apps require no certification or approval. He also created a simple “Mobile Twin Cities” app during the session. I was amazed at how simple creating a basic Android application can be.

Dan Frankowski and Max Harper from Blue Shift Labs led a discussion on coding with Google’s App Engine that intrigued a number of developers. The crowd was very engaged. The scripting seemed pretty straight forward.

Mike Bollinger provided an introduction to HTML5. The tweets that followed said that HTML5 looked “amazing” and that users should stop using Internet Explorer 6 to increase the adoption rate.

Ryan Weber and I provided a summary of the top trends and winners in the application industry. Ryan forecasted that the integration of social and location-based mobile technology would be one of the most significant drivers of growth and change in the mobile app space.

My favorite discussion was the one facilitated by co-founder of Minnebar, Luke Francl, entitled, “Midwestern Startups: What is Possible?” Luke started by asking for those entrepreneurs that had worked in Silicon Valley to compare their start-up experience there versus their Minnesota start-upexperiences. One such entrepreneur answered Luke’s question by saying Silicon Valley start-ups aren’t as afraid to fail as those in Minnesota. Another entrepreneur said the biggest difference was how much deeper the talent pool was in the valley. Finally, someone joked that when he was in Minnesota, whenever someone asked where he worked, he responded with “I work for at a start-up.” When asked the same question while at an iPhone meet-up in Palo Alto, the response was met with laughter. Why? In Silicon Valley, everyone works for a start-up. The discussion next turned to several ideas on how we can make Minnesota a better place to create a tech start-up. Among the ideas identified were creating an incubator fund modeled after Y Combinator, getting the University of Minnesota to raise money to fund local tech start-ups similar to what the University of Wisconsin started a year ago, the creation of a new TechCrunch-like Minnesota focused community site, and taking advantage of Minnesota’s significant number of Fortune 1000 companies to provide a distribution channel for Minnesota-brewed new tech. Michael Gorman of Split Rock Partners, one of the sponsors, closed Luke’s discussion by saying he was looking forward to seeing where we would be in another year. Judging by all of the energy, and the way the Minnesota developer and entrepreneur crowd is starting to support each other, I am confident we will see continued growth in the Minnesota tech start-up community. I am looking forward to Minnebar 2010.

Rob Weber, VP of Business Development and Co-Founder, W3i, LLC
Rob is an Internet marketing pioneer with over nine, profitable years evolving W3i in the Integrated Interactive Media industry.

Please pass more turkey and mashed potatoes!

I am an art lover and an art creator.  Unfortunately, these aspects of my personality often clash with my job, designing banners, much like blaze orange clashes with pea green.  (Shudder!)  In an industry where user “clicks” are the goal, we are sometimes asked to do things that should be illegal; such as using designs that are copy-heavy and garish in color.  Why are users more likely to click on the least artistic banner on a webpage?  Are they honestly more attracted to tacky and gaudy?  Or maybe, just maybe, that designer has figured out how to lure in the unsuspecting user with the use of subliminal messaging saying, “click me… click me… click me…”  (Note to self: search “subliminal messaging conferences” and sign up.)

In the midst of all of this thinking (and contemplating Thanksgiving at the same time), I have come to a conclusion.  Designing “clickable” banners is a lot like planning for Thanksgiving dinner… add as many salads and gourmet goodies as you can, but stop fooling yourself!  People are really only coming for the turkey and mashed potatoes.  They do not care that Great Aunt Ermintrude has outdone herself in her use of Jell-O in the salad this year.  All your family wants is a chance to overdose on grilled turkey and gorge themselves on mounds of creamy mashed potatoes.  This is what I mean: users are looking for the meat and potatoes (the hearty stuff) of an advertisement.  Let them know exactly who you are and what your product is as quickly as you can.  Take out the fluff, take out the pretty.  Get to the heart of the matter so they can decide immediately if they are interested or not.  People don’t want to stare at the Jell-O salad for five minutes, trying to figure out exactly what surprises are in it.

Let’s take, for example, two of our display banners:

Version 1:                                                                      Version 2:

Version 1 outperformed Version 2 by nearly 100%!  At first glance, this may not solidify the point that I’m trying to make.  But what you can’t see in the screenshot is that Version 2 needs time to scroll through the different screensavers and features available before finally getting to the screen that is shown above.  Conversely, Version 1 shows everything from the get-go.  No waiting needed.

Do you see what I mean?  Beautiful is not always better in designing banners.  It may be easier on the eyes.  It may prompt us to hang it on our wall.  But it does not always translate into user “clicks.”  I can only speculate on the reasons for this behavior… Perhaps the user likes to see the branding and product throughout the whole process.  Possibly, loud colors naturally draw the eye and compel users to click on them.  It could even be the voices in their head telling them that the world can be saved by clicking on that banner.  (Have you come across other reasons for users’ actions?)  Whatever the motivator, it doesn’t mean that you should stop fighting for gorgeous designs.  What it does mean, though, is that there should be a way to mesh these two taste palates together.  How can that sprig of parsley be added to the turkey?

Keep in mind when designing banners what the user is looking for; hook them with straight-forward facts and a strong call to action!  Art will not always need to be sacrificed for a concept that works, but strive to simplify your designs and feed your users’ need for information quickly.  In the words of Thoreau, “simplify, simplify.”  Take away the funky Jell-o creations and give them what they want – the hearty stuff that will keep them content and satisfied.

Jessie Schroder, Marketing Specialist, W3i Holdings LLC
Jessie uses her experience in internet marketing, graphic design, and testing to guide W3i’s focus of marketing promotions.