EdgeClix and Performance-Based Advertising

Directory publisher Easier to Read recently added value to their Yellow Pages book by putting it online using Dirxion’s look and feel digital directory product, EdgeClix. In doing so, they discovered a host of new marketing opportunities for their existing local business advertisers.

While some publishers choose to simply use our product in its most basic form, which is designed to highlight and give added value to your existing ads just as they are seen in their printed counterparts, others like Easier to Read, see our list of expanded advertising features and cannot wait to seize the opportunity to not only help their advertisers enhance their online presence, but also monetize their new investment.

Cover Banner Advertising

iPick link appears within Popular Categories in the Table of Contents

When clicked the iPick window pops up highlighting your advertiser

Both the Cover Banner and iPick programs were designed so directory publishers could offer their advertisers exciting ways to insert ads at any time of the year. By selling premium placements like these, publishers can guarantee advertisers additional exposure, while also giving them the ability to keep their promotions current.

Easier to Read is just one excellent example of how our customers are using their digital directories to capitalize on the strong relationships they’ve grown with local businesses. Even without large changes to their sales structure, digital directories can be equipped with many of our advertising programs to help generate new, steady, profitable streams of revenue.

Allow your advertisers to use one or many of our exciting, interactive features to get the most activity out of their ads.

Shoppers will do more of their holiday buying online this year

News from the E-tailing Group last week … “55% of frequent web shoppers plan to shop online this holiday season, up from 49% last year, and e-commerce will account for a 26% share of holiday spending, up from 21% last year.”

How about giving your customers something that’ll make their lives a little easier during the holidays? Create a digital edition of your Christmas catalog so your customers can shop from cover to cover online!

Long Live the Catalog

Advertising Specialty Institute®, the largest media and marketing organization serving the advertising specialty industry, just recently announced results of an end buyer study that shows paper catalogs drive 93% of purchasing decisions. Also mentioned is that paper and online catalogs are not only effective sales tools, but also assist buyers in sparking creativity, discovering new products and realizing the importance of customization.

We at Dirxion think that the components of a printed publication cannot be beat: the attractive layout, the vibrant images and the aesthetics neatly blended with content. And well, buyers agree. While everyone may appear to be going online to purchase, it’s still the look and feel of print that gets them there.

Search Engine Optimization & Your Publication; What is Dirxion Doing?

As a publisher looking to move your printed material to the web, you’ll find that the majority of the digital publishing options out there are fully Flash-based. To most people this may actually sound more than acceptable. Flash content is great as there are hardly any limitations to building interfaces, designing, animating and creating user interaction. It has all the elements that give a site the heightened experience that today’s users are looking for. Flash is used to break all those conventional rules associated with flat, lifeless HTML pages.

But with all of its pros comes one very large con – unlike HTML, Flash content can’t be indexed by search engines. And if people can’t find your content on Google, Bing or Yahoo, it’s up to you to put it directly in front of them. But even with Herculean marketing efforts, your content will never reach its full audience potential.

Dirxion understands that if you want to maximize your reach and circulation, it’s critical that the content of your pages can be properly crawled by spiders for search engines. It’s for that reason we have introduced a Search Engine Optimization method designed specifically for digital publishers. We call it Trax. When you send us files for your new digital publication, we not only convert your data into Flash but also run it through Trax making a search engine friendly format called ASP. ASP is a dynamic code that is first sent to an ASP engine, where the file can be read – line by line – and then returned to indexing spiders and browsers as plain HTML. So it works just like HTML. And with Trax laid, this data will run behind the scenes solely for Google, Bing and Yahoo to crawl and navigate through your pages. But on the front end of your publication, your readers will still have the rich media experience of Flash.

Our SEO efforts, in a nutshell:

–Presenting all of the pages in your directory in a format that can easily be indexed by the search engines. Search engine users can now find your directory by searching for business names, categories, addresses, phones numbers, and more. Not to mention, search engine results open up pages inside of your directory with searched keywords already highlighted!

–Creating dynamic, search engine friendly landing pages that are designed for intuitive the optimal user experience.

–Providing additional ways to share pages from your directory with friends and family.

–Implementing URL strategies to optimize traffic to your site.

–Updating or adding more content when possible.

Our ultimate goal for customers is maintaining the familiar experience of print, while using the web to increase readership and engagement. Marketing is always going to be king, but there is no reason not to have SEO on your side. With the help of Dirxion and Trax, more readers will find your content. That’s already been the case with the customers we’ve converted.  Search engine directed traffic has been increasing drastically. Some publications are currently seeing up to 78% of their traffic coming from search engines.

Contact a sales representative to learn more about how Dirxion can have your publishing put in front of a larger audience now. Call 888.391.0202.

What Marketers Want

Since the introduction of moving type, never has the world of publishing seen so much refinement. Even if that may be a little exaggerated, you’d think it was true by the constantly breaking news and blog reels spinning out of control with stories of new websites, applications and devices that will change the way people read forever.

If you were following the events of the last month, you’d probably think the publishing industry was going to make a complete about face away from paper. It almost seems logical with devices like desktops, laptops, iPhones, smartphones, the kindle and a slew of new tablets and e-readers being introduced what seems like everyday. On the surface, it seems like the publishing industry could start saving the truck loads of money it costs to print and deliver mountains of books, magazines and catalogs to their large audiences. But what many articles aren’t considering is the actual driving forces behind print - advertising.

Subscriptions to magazines aren’t a publisher’s main source of revenue. It’s the advertising inside. Marketers believe that those physical pages of a magazine continue to prove enticing to potential customers in a way that computer text and images cannot. In the same way, catalog publishers keep showing statistics that by paying the price to mail catalogs they are actually helping advertise and drive more sales to their web sites. One study showed that consumers who received catalogs from a retailer spent 28% more on that retailer’s website than those who didn’t receive catalogs.

We believe that print and web are two elements that, when working in harmony, are stronger than the sum of their parts. Why not mail a catalog or magazine to subscribers, but also make yourself available in the same outstanding visual quality on the internet. A digital edition is the perfect medium between a printed magazine or catalog, and a website or e-commerce site. It brings the reader and/or customer that same intuitive look and feel that you spent such resources designing and editing, while providing them with a fully-integrated, media-rich web experience.

It’s finding that right balance between digital and print that’ll maximize your audience and appeal to advertisers like never before.

Customer Spotlight: Ballard Designs

Ballard Designs is the most recent of Dirxion’s clients to get a monitor-sized boost to their brand. In 1982, the home furnishings retailer got its southern roots in Atlanta as a one-woman start-up and has since become a premier multi-channel retailer of unique, European inspired décor.

Not unlike our other clients, Ballard Designs came to us seeking a different way to connect with their customers. What we created for them was a digital edition that mirrors the experience of their printed catalog while giving them the interactive bells and whistles of a website.

Ballard Designs is another great example of a digital strategy done right. Their catalog isn’t just a link to some eye candy. By making good use of our information rollovers (which on a mouse over highlights products and gives shoppers the ability to click on product images within each page), their customers can now more intuitively shop by flipping through their catalog and yet still go straight to their e-commerce site to place orders.

They also wasted no time in doing their viral marketing. Last Friday, Ballard Designs broadcasted the arrival of their new digital catalog with an email to customers and through the usual social media outlets:
From Ballard’s Facebook Fan Page:
“Attn: Ballard Fans! We are very pleased and excited to announce for the first time we now have an online version of our catalog! This is a great interactive online version that allows you to click on an item where it will then take you to the item on …our website. We appreciate you as fans and wanted to share this with you first! Enjoy and let us know your thoughts!”

Our work with Ballard Designs was a classic case of taking two channels of retail marketing, a website and a catalog, and no longer making the two mutually exclusive. Our digital edition was the only real way to offer their same unique look and feel while tying in the ease and interactivity of their website.

See Ballard Design’s digital catalog here.

Twitter Is All The Rage In The Small Business Sector

We thought it would be interesting to mention a few Twitter stats that we noticed over at MarketingProfs.com a few days ago. This is very brief, yet very interesting, especially for all of our customers who are taking advantage of the extremely popular micro-blogging service known as Twitter.

Take a look at what they’ve found:

According to this survey Twitter users, most of whom represent small businesses expect their company’s use of this microblogging tool to increase in the next six months.

• 84% of respondents say their company’s use of Twitter will increase
• 46% say it will increase by a “significant” margin
• 66% of respondents consider Twitter either extremely” or “somewhat” important to their company’s business/marketing operations.

Rating the value of social-media business tools, respondents replied that the following gave “great value” to their company:

52%, corporate blogs
41%, Twitter
25%, LinkedIn
17%, Facebook

As we’ve talked about in earlier marketing posts, there is quite a bit of opportunity for all of our customers to promote their digital publications through Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and all sorts of social media outlets. It’s never too late to start, and if you have any questions, just drop us a line in the comments below or you can use our contact form.

Moosejaw Launches Summer Gear Catalog

As reported yesterday on MultiChannelMerchant.com, Moosejaw Mountaineering launched their first catalog that focuses completely on climbing and backpacking gear. MCM mentioned that the catalog will be sent out via mail and have a home online in digital form, which we’re quite proud of if we do say so ourselves. (Moosejaw is one of our customers!)

Congrats to the Moosejaw staff for the mention on MultiChannelMerchant.com, and we’re proud and excited to to have the opportunity to publish Moosejaw’s digital editions. You can find the Summer Gear catalog online here: Moosejaw Summer Gear (or you can click on the catalog cover below)

If you haven’t been to Moosejaw’s site recently, make sure you take a few minutes and experience the madness.

Social Media Marketing Is Jumping Off The Charts

Recently, Michael Stelzner from WhitePaperSource.com, released a social media marketing report that will blow your mind, even if you’re not a marketer yourself. Some of the important questions he asked about the exploding trend of marketing in the social media world include:

1. The top questions social media marketers want answered.

2. How much time marketers are investing in social media.

3. The benefits of social media.

4. How time invested impacts results.

5. The top social media tools.

There are many more, and if you’re interested in learning how social media, which is quickly shaping and transforming marketing as we know it, would be beneficial to your company, then it would behoove you to take a moment and check out this article (which includes a video recap of the report).

Over 225 people have commented on the report, and many hundreds (maybe thousands) more have downloaded, so make sure you get it before their server goes down!

Promote Your Digital Publication With Twitter

Twitter, if you haven’t recently heard, is a micro-blogging service that is currently one of the hottest forms of communication on the internet right now. World news breaks on Twitter faster than it does on any cable news network out there, and the Twitter madness has only just begun.

Twitter was born a few years ago, but just recently (as of late ‘08, early ‘09) it has really skyrocketed in popularity, and make no mistake, it’s not just for people to talk about what they had for breakfast or what’s happening in the world - it’s also a highly powerful and effective form of online marketing.

Every single day, hundreds, if not thousands of new companies are jumping on the Twitter wagon, and rightfully so. With the ability to “follow” specific groups of people (for instance, if you’re in the clothing industry, you can do a quick search and follow anyone that talks about clothes) the marketing reach and potential is huge. Dell, one of the world’s most popular computer manufacturers, is now known to offer spectacular “Twitter only” sales, and these sales have such far reach, that they make a difference in Dell’s bottom line.

Marketing on Twitter is not limited to any specific industry, anyone can take advantage of it. If you have a digital catalog or any kind of digital edition, by all means, start a Twitter account (if you haven’t already). It’s free, and doesn’t take much in the way of resources to maintain it. “Tweet” out updates about your company on a regular basis, and trust me, your customers WILL find you and follow you.

Once you have a respectable following, make sure you “tweet” about any new digital issues that come out for instant traffic to them. If you have 2000 of your customers following you, and you maintain an active Twitter presence, announcing a new product could bring a large percentage of them to your digital publication immediately, and of course, a percentage of those could and probably will turn into sales.

Get the picture?

So again, if you haven’t started a Twitter account, head over there right now and sign up. It literally takes a few minutes of your time, and if you treat it like you would any other online marketing channel, the chances of it paying off are really good right now.

While you’re at it, you should definitely follow Dirxion on Twitter.

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