Do you remember the days when simply knowing your customers first name was sufficient? You could address them personally, you knew their preferences, their budget and if they wanted casual or formal conversations. Many of these interactions occurred face to face or via telephone. Today’s consumer still wants that personal attention. They want to know that you know exactly who they are. This shows that you value their business and care about them as an individual. In today’s digital world of marketing, you need to know much more than just their first name and phone number.

Online Identity

Along with knowing who our customers are in the “real” world, we need to know who they are in the online world. Are they on Facebook? Do they prefer Twitter? Perhaps they have a passion for writing and love to blog on a frequent basis. When we know the online identities of our niche market, our potential customers and our current customers, we can engage effectively. In truth, many of our customers feel more at ease online. They are able to voice opinions on forums and via status updates that they may not feel comfortable voicing to you directly. Social networking platforms have become the front line for customer service representation. The key is to know your customers online identities and to pay attention to what they have to say. Mrs. Jane Smith may not call you to tell you that she was not thrilled with her latest purchase, but @jsmith may voice her dissatisfaction on Twitter.

Transparency

Our customer’s online voice goes hand in hand with transparency. Meaning, consumers want to know everything there is to know about your brand. They also want to be heard. Online interaction allows you as a business to listen to what your customers have to say. This medium also allows you to direct the conversation into the “real world” with the goal of having a satisfied customer. What does this mean? Simply put, you must monitor what your customers are saying. If they are happy, be grateful and send out many thank you replies. If they are unhappy, give them a place to take their complaints to have them solved. Having a designated email address such as tweets@yourbusiness.com or facebook@yourbusiness.com are great ways to filter complaints and negative reviews to the individuals who can solve their problems.

As marketers, our job may seem easier with the amount of advertising and marketing efforts that are done from the convenience of a computer. What we need to remember is that while we can be much more visible and attract attention outside of our natural circle of influence, we must also be more vigilant. By paying attention and addressing our customers online, we are showing them that we value their business. This is how you will maintain a satisfied customer base, which is your number one goal.

Thanks!

Sean

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Pinterest has been the talk of the town in the States, but for the rest of us, the talk has been mild to non-existent. It isn’t that Pinterest isn’t available in the UK; it’s just that we are using Pinterest in a slightly different way.  What is Pinterest and what are the major differences between UK use and American use of this new social networking platform?

What Is Pinterest?Pinterest is a social networking platform where users “pin” images and videos to their personal “pin boards”. Users are encouraged to share, follow and comment on what has been “pinned”. From a marketing standpoint, Pinterest is a virtual visual playground. You can easily drive traffic back to your site to purchase goods and services. Pinterest appeals to businesses that are visual in nature. One can find a plethora of interior designers, fashion designers, jewelry designers and other niche fields where their products and services are photogenic.  For the UK audience, the realm of businesses that use Pinterest goes beyond the crafts and design realm. UK Pinterest users also leverage this site for SEO, marketing, content management, blogging resources, web stats, web analytics and public relations.  How can UK users fully maximize the Pinterest platform?

Demographic

Unlike the American audience for Pinterest, which is primarily female, the UK demographic is mainly male between the ages of 25 to 34. Most of these men are college educated and fall in the higher end of the socioeconomic scale. While the American audience sees 12,000,000 unique visitors, the UK sees only 200,000 unique visitors. What does this mean? If you have a business that caters to wealthy men between the ages of 25-34, you should consider using Pinterest for marketing ventures. Why? Because with a smaller audience you are more likely to have your goods and services seen by potential clients.

Engage And Make Money

If your business is a fit for the UK Pinterest audience, start pinning! I cannot stress enough that Pinterest is image based, thus make your images interesting. Each pin has a maximum width of 222 pixels with lengths that vary. You can have text, but it must be incorporated into your graphic. To turn these “pins” into actual dollars is based on how your website is set up. Can a potential customer visit your site and directly purchase an item or service? Similar to other marketing, your goal is to drive traffic to your site. Make sure there is a call to action on your site and an easy way for people to click “buy now”.  Pinterest, as is the case with other social networking sites, will work for you if you “work it”. The key is to know whom you are trying to reach and if your demographic is within those 200,000 Pinterest users. If they are, it is worth your while to start engaging.

Happy Pinning!

Thanks!

Sean

(Image Wikipedia)

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As marketers and business owners we are not strangers to the power of Facebook. We know that marketing on Facebook can be critical to our success. It seems like we finally became accustomed to the format of Facebook, how to purchase ads and how to use our business fanpages to effectively. Then all of a sudden, Facebook decides to change their structure with the introduction of Timeline.

Many of us switched to Timeline on our personal pages and the reaction was dramatic. People either loved Timeline or they hated this new format. Unfortunately, Facebook didn’t give us the option to switch or stay with the old layout. As of March 30^th, all business pages switched to the Timeline format.

Timeline Rules

Facebook has issued specific rules for using Timeline as a business. The first rule deals with your cover image. At first it may appear that these new guidelines work against those that are trying to market their business via Facebook. If we take a look at the specific guidelines, we can discover ways to work around these strict rules. According to the new guidelines, your business page cover may not:

• Include any monetary information. This includes % off, download your free copy of or advertise a special or specific price of an item or service.
• List your contact information. Your cover image cannot display your URL, email, mailing address or phone number.
• No suggestions to “like”. You cannot say, “like this” or “share this page” with an arrow showing the fans how.
• No calls to action. Your cover image cannot give any directives. This includes “get this product now” or “share this amazing product with your friends.”
• Your cover image cannot be misleading or break anyone’s copyright.

Despite these strict guidelines, you can still create a cover image that attracts attention. While you cannot give a directive in your cover image, you can still have sales and offers within your app array. Your profile picture can display your logo or the special that you are offering at the current moment. Another important features is the “about” section.

Timeline About Section

Once fans realize that they have to dig a little deeper on your fanpage for information, it will become second nature for them to automatically click on your “about” section. Therefore it is important to make your “about” section count. One tip is to use the 255 characters that you are given in the about title to succinctly describe your business. These 255 characters are the only thing that the fans can read in your “about” section as it is displayed when they first arrive at your page. The key is to think of these 255 characters as your elevator pitch. If you had just a few moments to describe who you are and what you offer, what would you say? This is what needs to go in your “about” sections first line.

Knowing the rules for your cover image and maximizing your “about” section will help you maximize Timeline for business pages to achieve better results.

Thanks!

Sean

 (Image by Scott Beale)

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Every internet marketing out there is probably spending more time than they should be to create great tweets, website copy, and blog posts. Now, I’m not here to tell you that you should do the opposite. In fact, the more quality content you’re regularly adding to your site, the better. You know my feelings on this subject – quality content drives a successful internet business.

However, by learning how to stretch out your blog content a bit, you could end up with the same effect, all while not actually creating any more content. What you choose to do with the time you’ll save is up to you…

Reuse Audience Favorites

When you’re digging through the analytics for your blog, you’re sure to notice that some of your articles (based on repostings, indbound links, and page views) are markedly more popular than others. Take a few of these crowd favorites and republish them via different accounts.

So, while I wouldn’t advocate posting the some article multiple times on one blog, you can tweet out a link to a crowd favorite article every now and again, especially if its relevant to something that you’re talking about on your website or something that’s been popular later on a social media platform.

Take Advantage of Related Content

This is especially pertinent for customers who may find one of your blog postings via search engine. As you want to keep these readers on your site for as long as possible (every additional articles that they read dramatically increases the chance that they’ll become a long-term readers and ultimately a paying customer), you should provide links for them to easily navigate to other articles that you’ve written on related subjects.

There are two great ways to go about this. First, you can include a widget which posts links to related articles at the bottom of the articles. However, its even better to include the links within the body of your articles. So if you’re writing an article about SEO, include a sentence about keyword selection, and link it to the article you wrote last month detailing the basics of keyword selection.

Best of all, use both of these methods. The more interwoven your site it, the longer people will spend on it, and the more readers (and customers) you’ll ultimately acquire.

Thanks!

Sean

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Every small business owner should know the value of analytics. Whether you’re using Google Analytics, or one of the more advanced programs that we’ll look at later today, it’s essential to track what your readers are doing on your site, what pages they’re looking at, and how long they’re spending.

The first step to properly analysing customer behavior is thinking analytically. Every page, every button, ever link, represents a step into or out of s ales funnel. If you’re not looking at your site this way already, you need to start doing so.

A supermarket provides a great analogy. Every aspect of the store has been generated in order to drive the customer to buy more items. Item placement is tested, and if it makes a particular item start selling better, the new position will be retained. Supermarkets even test whether the temperature of the air in the store makes you buy more items. They’ve found that colder air drives higher sales, and have lowered thermostats accordingly. That is analytical thinking.

Taking analytical action then requires looking at where you customers are dropping out of your sales funnel. For testing purposes, you should design your site so that each page represents one step of the sales funnel. You don’t want to present people with five or six options on each page, because if they leave the page after seeing those options, you won’t know which choice drove them out of the funnel.

Instead, keep it simple and testable. Have your products on one page, and your prices on the next. That way you determine separately whether the item has sufficient draw and if the price is appropriate.

Which brings me back to the top – Analytics programs. Google Analytics will provide you the basics – how many visitors are coming to your site, which subdomains they’re visiting, how long they’re spending on the site, etc, etc, etc. However, what you really want are more detailed metrics. I counsel marketers to take a look at programs like Kiss Metrics and Mixpanel in order to get the kind of metrics and analytics that really drive companies forward.

But whichever program you go with, remember to test and analyse everything that you do.

Thanks!

Sean

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Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a potent weapon in the advertising arsenal of any business owner or internet marketing, but it is crucial to your bottom line that you really understand how to use it effectively.

While you can simply sign up for a Google AdWords account and start throwing money at it, you’ll make your advertising campaign much more cost effective, much more effective, and much more sustainable if you integrate your PPC campaign with the advertising efforts that you already have underway. Read on to learn how you can do just that.

Before you can get started with PPC optimisation, let me discuss briefly what PPC exactly is, and what it is not. PPC advertising is advertising whereby you pay a fee, typically somewhere in the range of a pound but often considerably more, dependent on the popularity of the keyword in question, each time someone visits your site by clicking on your advertisement. Google AdWords is the leading provider of PPC, but all major search engines offer a similar service.

So long as you understand the basics of how it works, PPC can be an effective way to quickly drive a large amount of traffic to your site. However, it is not the most sustainable business model, as you have to pay a set amount for each customer sent to your site. Obviously, it’s much more cost-effective to draw these customer through unpaid search results (SEO) and social media marketing.

With this in mind, one of the most effective marketing tactics today is to use PPC advertising to help build your brand. So when you’re just starting out , or you’ve just released a new product, you ramp up your PPC advertising considerably. This drives traffic to your site, and creates buzz on the social networks. This, in turn will drive more people to your site.

Over time, the high quality content that you’ll continue to add to your site, combined with the social media attention and the additional traffic that continued PPC advertising will cause your user base to reach a critical mass, a tipping point, if you will, and drive it into self-sustainability. Once you reach this point, you can start the phase out the paid advertising in order to usher in a more sustainable advertising model.

Nothing breeds success like success, as they say. Use PPC advertising to get success in the first place, and then once your site gets noticed, let it roll on its own from there.

Thanks!

Sean

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Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is one of the biggest things that business owners and web developers have to think about. Not only is quality SEO essential for website recognition and promotion, but the search engines themselves seemingly do all they can to make SEO as difficult as possible for us.

Naturally, they are not actually trying to make SEO difficult. They are just trying to make their search engines as effective as possible. Unfortunately for us, that means constantly updating the search algorithms.

Google has just recently announced that it has a major update in the works, which means that the other major players in the industry will be likely to follow. Today we’re going to take a look at what changes Google has indicated are likely to come, as well as what you can do to change your SEO strategy in anticipation of the changes.

For the last few years, Google has been moving in the direction of trying to ensure that its algorithms match the wants and needs of the people who are actually reading the sites. While this is obviously not completely possible, they are doing their best to  try and make the algorithms much more flexible.

In SEO terms, this means that sites which have seen excessive levels of optimization are probably going to be penalized. In essence, if you don’t have much quality content, but you’re writing it specifically so that search engines will like it, then you’re probably going to see a drop in your search engine rankings.

On the other hand, if you’re consistently creating valuable content with your readers in mind, then you probably won’t see any problems with the new update. In fact, you may see you rankings improve as other, more heavily-optimized users drop down in the rankings.

What Google is doing here is hammering home a point that I talk and writing about constantly. Even in the modern internet marketing business, its all about the customer. When you are making your site, the first thing in your mind should be “how can I serve the customer?” If you are serving your customers and reacting to their needs and desires, then you’re in the best place that you can be.

A well planned and well executed  Twitter presence can go a long way towards fulfilling your social media marketing obligations. However, what exactly you should do, what you should tweet, and how you should manage the direction and strategy of your campaign are some of the biggest points that I see potential marketing mavens struggling with day in and day out.

Today we’re going to talk a bit about that last bit – how to structure your campaign.

To begin with, make sure that your Twitter campaign has a target and a direction, and that all of your tweets should move with the central strategy. This sounds obvious, but it can be difficult to implement.

For instance, if you’re going to make a campaign to publicize the launch of a new version of your product at the end of April, then every post you make should be moving you towards that goal. This doesn’t mean that your Twitter has to be totally co-opted by the marketing campaign, but whatever hashtag you’re using for your marketing campaign should not be used for everything else. You do not want to dilute the focus of your campaign.

This should basically go without saying, but make sure that whatever your campaign is, it has a reason for people to participate, and a reason for people to fall in love with it. People have more inertia than you would expect. They are not interested in getting motivated to participate in your Twitter campaign unless you give them a good reason to do so.

A lot of the most successful Twitter campaigns today are including a certain number of prizes, and offering everyone who participates a chance to win a prize. Offer a year’s free subscription to your service to a certain number of people who follow your campaign, or who visit your website from your Twitter and fill out a quick form.  When people stand to gain something, they’re much more likely to act.

Thanks!

Sean

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The key to the success of any business is customer traffic. On the internet, that means driving readers and users to your website, and then hopefully interesting them enough so that they stay and possibly even make a purchase.

However, the whole process begins with traffic, and where you are driving your traffic from. After all, if you aren’t sending quality visitors to your site, then you’re just wasting your time. Read on for three of my favourite places from which to draw immediate, high-quality traffic.

Forums and Message Boards

Forums are far from being the “cool new thing,” in a large part because they’ve basically been around since the beginning of the internet. Hence, they’re often forgotten or overlooked when considering ways to drive traffic to your site.

However, a lot of people still use forums and message boards every day. Perhaps even more significantly, when a user is on a message board, they are typically looking for an answer to some question or problem that they have. Which means that if you’re posting answers in the right places, you are going to be attracting users who are not just passively browsing your site out of boredom, but actively searching for a solution, which very well may be your product.

Popular Blogs

Engagement with blogs is an absolutely crucial way to drive inbound links to your site. Follow the blogs of thought leaders within your industry, and read them regularly. When you see a relevant article, make a comment, and include a link to your site if your think it warranted.

For instance, if you’re reading an article about how to drive more traffic to your site, and you just recently wrote an article about high quality places from which you can draw traffic, you might want to think about making an intelligent and thoughtful comment, and leaving a link to your article. There’s a fine line to walk here between adding value and spamming. How the link is construed depends upon your relationship with the original poster, your place in the industry, the relevance of your comment, and the aptness of the link. You’ll have to be the judge.

Thanks!

 Sean

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Successful internet marketing is all about adding value. Adding value for your readers, your followers, your customers, whoever. It’s not enough to simply tell people that you product is out there. So much can be had for free on the internet these days that you need to first offer something to your customers to draw them in (value!) and then make them a sales offer.

Of course, landing pages are no different.

But, too often when the conversation turns to landing pages marketers’ thoughts turn immediately to conversion rates and analytics. While the main purpose of the landing page is, of course, to move people farther into the sales funnel, it doesn’t mean that it can’t also add value.

And how do you add value to the landing page? The same way that you add value to any other page. With great content. Read on for some of the best ways to improve your landing page.

Speak in Terms of Value

Think about the typical person reading your landing page. They are already interested in your product. You know that. They’ve indicated their interest by clicking on your advertisement, or searching for your site. So you don’t need to sell them on generalities of your product. They’re already in the market. You need to sell them on why your product is better than everybody else’s.

Do this by using value-driven language which clearly and explicitly emphasizes the strengths of your product. Never focus on the weaknesses of your competitors’ products.

Use language such as “Increase site ranking,” “Double your monthly page views,” and “market leadership guaranteed” in order to drive home the point that your product is the best on the market, and that users of your product stand to benefit dramatically by using it.

Use Customer Testimonials

Customer testimonials can look outdated when they’re placed in print or static advertisements, but they’re the perfect fit for your landing page. As mentioned above, people who come to your landing page are already interested in buying. They’re already in the market. They’re just trying to determine who is offering the highest quality product at the lowest price.

Which is why it’s a great place to offer testimonials. Reach out to some of your best customers, and ask them to write a quick review of your product, or to give you a phrase that you can use as a testimonial. This will help you convince potential customers what you and your customers already know – that you’re offering the best product on the market.

Thanks!

 (Image by Salvatore Vuono)

Sean

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