Tag Archives: positioning

How to use Linked In effectively

By Clinton Posted on by  | Posted in Building an online brand, Social Media, social media for sales |  |

I was recently at a bar with someone I had only met that day at a meeting and he introduced me to four other of his industry colleagues. The first made me feel like he had me by the ankles and was turning me upside down to empty my pockets. Despite the fact that I wasn’t in the market to buy from him he pestered me and completely alienated me. However by the end of the evening, of the other three people I had gained two business cards with an interest in what I had to offer. The secret- drinking beer and forgetting about buisness. It’s about making a connection and bringing business in at the appropriate point and not that being the point.

And that is the same with Linked In. Go in measured and targeted and helpful. I get put off by linking with people with multiple hundreds or thousands of connections because I don’t feel that they would have time for me and they are looking to maximise their benefit at the expense of others.

Choose carefully who you link to and approach them with a benefit to them rather than treat them as a just sales opportunity for you. In much the same as you would in a business or social networing situation.

Key rules of online networking

  1. Be the one who can be helpful.
  2. Focus on the right types of contacts not contact to build up a massive list
  3. Engage in groups and become a trusted source of good knowledge

Starting out with a social media strategy – step 1

By Clinton Posted on by  | Posted in Building an online brand, Online marketing |  |

Social media is now seen as a must have online marketing tool, but there is a lot of misplaced enthusiasm about it. Just randomly tweeting or having a facebook page  won’t help you very much. You need to really understand how facebook and twitter will help your audience and why they will either “follow” you or engage with you on facebook.

Instant social marketing with business benefits

I’ll deal with facebook in another post, but for now I want to give you an instance guide to benefiting your business with social media tools.

  1. start with a good understanding of how your users find your services or products and the key phrases they use to find them. This involves key word research which you can do yourself or get a reputable search engine optimisation company to undertake this for you.
  2. start blogging with WordPress – Google loves WordPress – in principle, posts get indexed quicker and higher than pages from your site.* Blog about useful topics that your targeted audience is interested in and optimise your posts for your specific key phrases identified above. Include a link(s) in your copy under your key phrases to your main content
  3. tweet about the blog post using the key phrase and include a link to your blog post

The TAKEAWAY from this is that you create a piece of copy once that is targeted towards your audience and promote several times. so write good copy on your site about how your services and products benefit your target market, blog about it then tweet about the blog.

*To get the most benefit from a WordPress blog, you need this to be on your website as a folder and not under a separate domain or a sub-domain. The reason being is that all the google benefit you accrue from your blog is then passed to your site as a whole and vice versa.

An integrated approach to social network marketing

By Clinton Posted on by  | Posted in Building an online brand, Online marketing |  |

 

 

Social marketing means many things to many people and with the growth of blogging, Twitter, facebook, LinkedIn etc, there is a move to exploit these for commercial gain. However, it is is not as simple as setting up a facebook profile and waiting for the good times to roll. Facebook is not necessarily right for every business and you need to have an integrated strategy to understand how any of these tools can work for you. We can help you.

How we can make social networking work for you.

Every business will have different needs, because their customers will also have different needs. Some audiences will not respond to joining a facebook group but are happy to be alerted by tweets or will read a blog. We can help by identifying the right approach for your business and your customers. In particular, we can help identify which tools to use to better engage with your audiences and whether they are on-site, off-site or a mixture. Often engaging with your customers on your site can be very powerful and you can create compelling advocates out of your existing customers.

We can advise on:

  • what to tweet, how to maximise exposure in Google and how to build a following
  • how to use blogs to improve search results
  • how and why people engage with businesses on facebook
  • how to benefit from user generated content on your site and make your customers your sales people…

And don’t forget…

Don’t try and just connect with your audiences off your site. Customer reviews, comments, opinions, feedback and discussions can be incredibly powerful ways to improve search rankings and conversions on your site. Good social networking is about connecting and engaging with your audiences where they congregate and using their enthusiasm to spread the message of your business.

PPC management Google Adword management

By Clinton Posted on by  | Posted in News |  |

It is very easy to set up a Google adword (PPC) campaign, and Google is very adept at getting you to part with your cash. However the real art to setting up an effective PC campaign is in getting the maximum conversion for the minimum cost. To run an effective Pay Per Click campaign you need to look at the following aspects:

Ad copy

Ad copy is one of the single most important aspects to running an effective adwords campaign, poor ads produce poor results. It is essential to create effective compelling and succinct ad copy targeted at the specific people you want to engage with. Key emthods of creating good add copy include:

  • Push the benefits not the features: A common mistake and easily done, but push the key benefits, what it does for someon not how it does it
  • Grabing  attention: Include your keywords in the ad copy, particularly in the title line.  But make sure it makes sense
  • Appeal to an emotion: People buy on emotion and much more so than they are willing to admit to
  • Appeal on quality and/or price: but only appeal on price if you can be the cheapest otherwise appeal on Best service, best guarantee etc.
  • Include a call to action: Asking readers to do something now is especially effective when combined with an urgent price appeal, such as ‘See us Right Now for 10% Off’, or ‘See Us Now for Limited Offer’.
  • Capitalise important words: Did you notice that the examples I’ve used here use an upper case letter to start each word? This may not be great English, but it tends to be the best way to go within a Google ad.

Not just ecommerce but building your brand online to sell more

By Sandra Posted on by  | Posted in Building an online brand, ecommerce, Online marketing |  |

Very often we get asked: “Do you do ecommerce?”

The answer is “yes, but it’s not as simple as that.”

What we ask back is:

  • Who buys from you?
  • Why do they buy from you?
  • How can you find more of these people?
  • How can you make their life easier?

For us a good ecommerce site goes beyond the design, accessibility, usability and programming of the website. What we are about is getting under people’s skin, creating a tribe to sell through, a community to which we talk about the products, the usage, the lifestyle.

Positioning, Promotion, Sale

Positioning is key: Let us help you look at the key audiences, the segmentation, where they are, where they communicate, gather etc. There may be more than one identifiable audience.

  • What is the language we need to use to talk to them?
  • What are the benefits they can get from a product?
  • What are the differentiators? |What is your niche?

A little detail may create a niche. We recently looked at improving one of our client’s ecommerce and rather than spending money on the programming we suggested to look at positioning and promotion. We undertook a workshop with them to identify the key visitor types (personas/profiles) to the site. We found that by introducing just a few new products, some new key audiences could be introduced, whilst still catering for the old audience groups.

How to talk to niche groups/ interest groups? – promotion – direct and indirect

After identifying the personas, it is then essential to identify how you engage with them. Are they just looking for a “quick fix”? Do they want to find a branded product and then leave the site? DO they want advice? Do they want to advice from you? Do they want to discuss with other members of their tribe?

We create online marketing campaigns which set out to reach your defined persona groups. We do this by creating a narrative, an interest and then meeting their needs. This typically starts by:

1. Researching what they are looking for and how they search for it

2. Ensuring your site is structured around these real world needs

3. Making the finding of information through professional and peer reviews easy

4. Making the buying process a seamless process from there

By studying these profile groups we understand how they purchase. What products are related to each other, what calls to action drive sales. Ecommerce is not just about selling from an online catalogue. You have an unparalleled opportunity to really get under the skin of your audience. To find out how they get to your site, what makes them tick, what encourages them to buy.

We can help you do this through deep analysis of your user statistics and then testing small aspects of your site to improve conversion. Once people get to your site we can help keep them there and make more visitors into customers.

The next stage is to build on this and make your customers repeat customers and loyal customers (following the brand – creating a tribe) When they want to know about their tribe, they come to you, when they want to tell their friends, they tell them about you. There are various tools and techniques to make this happen and all are centred around engagement, interaction and giving control back to the end user. This can include effective blogging, effective use of social media, effective newsletters and the efficient use of promotions to drive traffic and sales.

Analyse

Analysis is king, without it you know nothing. The web gives you what you need to improve in an unparalleled way. You can identify weaknesses in your site, and improve them incrementally. Analyse your newsletter and see how many people actually clicked into the website from specific link phrases. Make new newsletters with promotions just targeting these people.

They will start to establish the trust to return to your site to look for new products and information. They will also start talking about their experience to others and a community will start to blossom.

Don’t underestimate the old ’word by mouth’. Started off with a simple promotion this can be a powerful way of getting into communities and assure that your client base grows. Which in turns may give you more sales. Analysing your clients journeys is critical. And these may change through the seasons, so be assured to adapt and change the strategies as you go along.

Selling products

Once you actually have the user at your site and she/he is looking at your product make sure you capture them and turn them from browsers into customers. The key is engagement. We can help drive this by decreasing “bounce rates” (the numbers of people who immediately leave your site) and increasing click-throughs in to your site.

Effective information at the right places encourages more engagement with the user. Effective use of rollovers to reveal more information and more media rich information without the need to click through on to another page does exactly this. It allows the user to browse without navigating away from the page and assures she / he will browse through more products than in competitor websites. These little boxes allow you to add a ‘buy button’, which assures the user that this is an ecommerce site ready to sell.

Test it

Every product you sell is ready to review, ready to recommend, ready to put on wish list. Make sure you give the user this functionality every time.

We can help you to test your site with A-B testing which offers alternative elements on the page to different visitors and records which is most effective. By continuous testing you improve your conversion process and increase sales by giving people the seamless and intuitive buying process that they want.

We gave you some advice – now to practicalities

How can we help you?

We love talking about online marketing and sales because we know it works and know how we can help people like you be more successful online. We can help you with your marketing plans, internally and externally. With the right communication strategy we can help you develop and grow your business over the next 6 – 12 months.

The main thing is to stay on top of your online marketing. Although this may seem like a daunting task, with our help we can help you plan, implement and achieve the objectives that will drive and grow your business.

Start today by calling us on 01273 384287, asking for Sandra or Clinton. Or email us