Ideas for boosting your email subscribers
Wouldn't it be great if every visitor to your website purchased from you? That's clearly a dream world.
There are many reasons website visitors don't buy; not yet ready to purchase, researching product choices, planning to buy in the future, unsure whether to trust you, currently comparing products, comparing suppliers, need to confer with other family members before buying, getting an idea of budget for a future purchase and so on.
The next best thing to getting a purchase is getting an email address with opt-in permission, a lead.
Being given the privilege to keep the conversation going through email is your chance to tilt the odds in your favour of them coming back to you and purchasing in the future. However, getting an email address is easier said than done.
I recently completed a benchmark study 'Leaping over the subscribe hurdle'. This study researched the top 100 UK…
Use Social Crawlytics to compare social sharing with competitors
Following on from our post last week showing tools for comparing competitors' use of online marketing, Dan Barker recommended I take a look at Social Crawlytics, a tool for benchmarking social media that I hadn't seen. I've completed a quick review, so this alert gives some background on the tool and you can decide whether it's relevant for you.
Our review of Social Crawlytics
Value: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Social Crawlytics
This is a free, simple tool that is aimed at showing you how popular your content based on how much it is shared across the main social networks as Likes, Tweets and +1s. It’s produced by Brighton-based SEO Yousaf of Elevate Local (@yesekand) and I think is a great effort given it doesn't have the backing many services have.
Although it’s free, it’s based on credits and I found myself…
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09 Jul 2012
H&M show how to engage an audience with Google+
Google has just produced a great new case study on how H&M are using Google+.
H&M are a useful example to look at to learn approaches to marketing in Google+ since it has been successful in building a relatively large audience of nearly 1 million followers.
Miriam Tappert, Global Social Media Manager at H&M, explains the objectives for setting up the brand’s Google+ page were simple;
“To be where our customers are, have a dialogue and share the latest fashion.”
This case illustrates a couple of core digital marketing principles:
1. Ensure you track your target audience's media consumption patterns and establish a strong presence in those media
2. Tailor your content to each medium, while maintaining integration with the wider communication strategy. Following the media neutral planning rule 'play to each medium’s strengths' optimises message relevance and effectiveness.
H&M uses Google+ to engage its audience
H&M has integrated…
4 techniques to reduce duplicate site content
Although we still hear a lot of recommendations on how to optimise pages and the importance of links from other sites to improve rankings, we don't hear so many recommendations about reducing the amount of duplicate content. This seems to be a neglected area of SEO advice, so this refresher highlights some of the techniques to avoid duplicate content.
What is duplicate content?
Duplicate content is where different pages on a site are interpreted as similar by Google. As a result, pages can be discarded or down-weighted in Google's index so that they won't rank. In its webmaster tools guidance, Google says:
Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include: discussion forums that can generate both regular and stripped-down…
Bing Updates Webmaster Tools & Brings Back Site Explorer
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Bing Webmaster Tools
Bing have made a huge number of updates to their webmaster platform in an update they have called Phoenix (original). The changes cover the following areas of their platform:
New : Link Explorer
New: User Experience
New: SEO Reports
New: SEO Analyzer
New: Fetch as Bingbot
New: Canonical Alerts
Updated: URL Removal Tool
Updated: Keyword Research Tool
Updated: URL Normalization
Safe to say the Bing Search team have been busy. The highlights for me, from an SEO perspective are the SEO Analyser & Link Explorer which I look into more below.
The new look interface, displayed below makes using the platform much easier and makes great use of simple data to create the powerful dashboards.
Marketing implications
Great insights at no cost
A lot of SEO…
A new social commerce report shows the potential
UK retailers that do not offer customers recommendations could be missing out on £9 billion in extra revenue according to a new report by nToklo. It seems that although 'social commerce' is an established concept, many retailers aren't fully tapping into it.
There's no question that social commerce from a 'vendor' perspective (or social shopping from the 'consumer' perspective) is a hot area since:
So many people have an online profile in one or more social networks
Social graph APIs and tools have become available and it's getting easier to use the data within those profiles and encourage sharing
According to the social commerce gurus at nToklo, the use of user generated content at multiple stages of the sales funnel could account for up to a 27 percent uptake in sales, and despite this only half of the…
New report shows the level of amplification you should expect from Facebook
I’ve written before that “fans are vanity, engagement is sanity” in relation to Facebook brand pages. A new joint report, The Power of Like 2: How Social Marketing Works produced by comScore and Facebook has been published that further stresses the effectiveness of engaged fans to a brand’s return on investment. It states
“While the vast majority of large brands today have an active social media presence, there continues to be an over-reliance on simple counting of Facebook Fans as a key performance metric.”
Whilst I am inherently sceptical of any report funded by a platform which stands to benefit financially from many of the activities it recommends, there are some genuinely useful data and insights in this report. It also digs a little deeper into Facebook’s Insights data – available to any Page owner and specifically references the metrics that…
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04 Jul 2012
Don't act too corporate against negative posts on social networks
I was recently asked by a PR person working for an oil company about the best way to prevent bloggers posting inappropriate comments on their social network pages.
The company is worried that it can’t control what is being said about it - a major management challenge for many brands today.
Here is my response... It's a set of practical changes to make which often need a change in mindset rather than updates to the social governance policy, although it's worth looking at that too.
The five ways to avoid sparking a social media bushfire
For social networks to flourish they have to be open, transparent and honest so, inevitably, you will get negative comments. When you do, there are ways to respond, and resources you need to have in place, to best handle the situation to your advantage:
Act on and respond positively to…
Takeaways from IBM's global survey of marketers
Each year IBM interviews several hundred marketers to get a flavour of what the collective challenges, successes, fears and opportunities are.
It's interesting reading and always somehow comforting and inspiring to know you're not alone :-)
In this post I've picked out 7 of the key takeaways. You can view the presentation on SlideShare here and see the background on the study here, though I've summarised the salient points in this post and added the key charts below.
Here are our 7 key take-aways
1. The more successful companies expand the role of marketing in order to lead the customer experience - the success factors here are born around having influence across the 4P's and so being able to optimise their company's purchase cycle more effectively.
…
8 top tips and examples of producing great low cost video from scratch
If you are new to marketing with video, starting simple could be the key.
Throughout the process of creating less expensive and less challenging video content, you will learn the ropes and be inspired to build upon the basics.
The learning process will generate ideas that will contribute to developing a more thought-through video marketing strategy; putting you in the position of being able to justify bigger budgets in the future.
Examples of successful video using a bootstrapping approach
Here are some great examples showing just how effective low cost videos can be.......
This example shows screencasting in action - as well as showing you how to use Screenflow as a tool for yourself!:
The production of this video animation was definitely not inexpensive. However, it shows how mobile phones can produce great results:
Finally, this video…
