Web product copy

When you’re writing about an individual product, the ‘formula’ or framework is the same as for catalogue copy or indeed any written piece of sales material.  Start with a key benefit or statement of superiority, describe the benefits and end on a call to action. You all know AIDA -  Attention, Interest, Desire and Action). The main differences between web product copy and catalogue product copy are: Copy for the web can be longer but ensure it’s written and laid out so it can be ‘skimmed’ quickly and easily. Sometimes longer copy can bolster your natural search engine rankings. Be careful! as some individual product pages have a restrictive word count in CMS. Websites often have a specific format including bullet points and paragraphs with headings.  These are known as H1, H2 and so on down to H6 and can be limited in characters.  As well as these, the bullet points…

Five Powerful PPC Tips to Get More from your Google AdWords Campaign

Optimising PPC campaigns can seem daunting, especially for beginners. But when you know how to get the best out of Google AdWords, optimisation suddenly seems a whole lot easier. It can take years to learn the nuances of Google’s advertising platform, but by keeping a few key principles in mind, you can seriously boost your efficiency and ROI. In this post I'll share my five tips are my PPC ‘golden rules’ – the key things that everyone involved in campaign optimisation needs to know. Every paid search account is different. But with a bit of brain power, patience and attention to detail, you can apply these principles to any campaign you’re working on.

Auditing your AdWords account with BidCops

To help marketers audit their PPC as part of optimisation, we've developed BidCops, ClickThrough Marketing’s free AdWords audit tool. The 5 auditing and…

7 ways to provide excellent customer service for e-commerce

The Salesforce infographic provides 7 actionable steps on how companies can overcome some of the failures of customer service which are centred around 'timeliness and being 'personal', within their social media channels: 1. Offer multi-channel support. 2. Social media Listening strategy and meeting your customers' expectations. 3: Track customer interactions. 4. Create a customer support centre. 5. Provide online chat. 6. Timely response to customers. 7. Deliver the 'Wow experience' - empathy and understanding.

Bluewolf have also created an Infographic, sourcing data from Gartner and Aberdeen, to address how people respond to their encounter with social media  - 40% of customers leave the company after two annoyances and 59% will switch brands for better customer service.

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Ideas to keep your marketing aligned with future customer expectations

For many companies, 2020 acts as a symbolic deadline, with many strategic plans working towards that date. Everyone is convinced that the face of marketing and entrepreneurship will have changed profoundly by the time 2020 rolls around. Based on my discussions with experts, literature and my personal vision and experiences with customers, I have compiled an overview of what marketing 2020 might look like. Get ready for Marketing 2020 from steven van belleghem This blog post summarizes the main elements of the presentation.

The 2020 Consumer

To develop the marketing philosophy of the future we also need to understand the 2020 consumer. Three factors will continue to influence consumer behavior: 1. Full adoption of new technologies:…

Keeping up-to-date with the latest Adwords innovation

Importance (to AdWords users): [rating=5] Recommended link: AdWords announcement of Enhanced campaigns This year Google have been shipping enhancements to AdWords at a feisty pace. We thought that it would be helpful to take stock and review some of these key changes. We notifying this update now since from July 22nd 2013 Google is automatically migrating all users to the new Enhanced campaigns feature. Google notes that a fair proportion of campaigns have still not been migrated since the announcement of the new feature in February... "Advertisers have upgraded over 6 million legacy campaigns, representing almost 75% of active campaigns". This blog post covers these 4 main additions for which I give more detailed advice in the newly updated Smart Insights Guide to Getting More ROI with AdWords. 1. Enhanced campaigns 2. Auction Insights tool 3. Automated rules 4. Dynamic Remarketing ads.

1.…

Which are the KPIs to monitor for customer service delivered by social media?

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Social media may be a new set of channels over which customer service can be delivered, but that doesn't mean that some of the old rules don't apply. For instance, the old adage 'you can't manage what you don't measure' is still highly relevant.

In fact, with the jury still out on social customer support, you could even argue that nowhere is it more appropriate than in this field, as businesses are still feeling their way and desperately need visibility into the effectiveness of their efforts to be able to steer future investment.

There are, of course, a great many key performance indicators (KPIs) that can be…

A briefing on the options to turbocharge your Wordpress Blog

With more blogs and company sites hosted on Wordpress today, it's important for marketers and agencies to understand the options available to optimise Page Speed for this key platform. Marketers need to ask providers or their technical team about page download speeds and optimisations used such as content distribution networks (CDNs), caching and code minimisation. In this post I'll explain some of these concepts and give some practical examples of how to implement these features.

The need for a focus on Page Speed improvement

In a digitally connected world, the speed of websites is becoming increasingly important for consumers. In 2006, Amazon.com reported increases in revenue of 1% for every 100ms of page load improvement. Reports by the Aberdeen Group in 2008 stated that a one-second delay in load time…

Daily Mail embraces affiliate marketing

Mail Online, the world's most visited newspaper website is embracing affiliate marketing to help convert the 8m daily visits into a new revenue stream for the publisher. According to Experian Hitwise, Mail Online leads the way in terms of market share when compared to Guardian, Telegraph and Sun Online. Although a very different target market and editorial content to the Daily Mail newspaper, Mail Online has deliberately focused on the showbiz, celebrity culture fine-tuning its content tailored to this online audience eager to return for more on a daily basis. With the appetite for celebrity gossip - it provides a perfect digital content marketing plan geared around a global publishing brand.

Migrating to an online channel

There has been mounting speculation as to how the traditional newspaper sector can embrace and can create a viable business model in sustaining healthy revenues through a digital platform. The dramatic…

Does the Conversation Prism help or hinder understanding of how to manage social media?

You might have seen the Conversation Prism has recently been updated to version 4 by Brian Solis? It’s always been a very useful reference to me - if only to help realise the potential of social media marketing, and the opportunity beyond that of Facebook and Twitter, the platforms that dominate social media plans.

Is it useful or confusing?

I read this post where the author, Richard Stacy, implies that graphics such as the Conversation Prism add to the confusion somehow. Stacy’s argument is a great insight that social media is an opportunity to evolve your marketing away from ‘channel and message’ (traditional media) and instead to a ‘behaviour identification and response’. Stacy identifies 4 simple options for how a brand can be mentioned in social media: People saying nice…

What are the most common, most heinous online marketing mistakes?

More people are doing marketing badly according to Seth Godin’s recent post.

It got me thinking that with the Content Marketing Avalanche, more people are now also doing online marketing badly. It’s inevitable with the need to reach customers across more and more touchpoints across paid, owned and earned media. So what are the most common mistakes. Here are 10 I see all the time, from more strategic to practical, in the economic, inimitable Godin style… Not having a strategy for digital channels - here’s 10 reasons you do. Not setting goals, not measuring or optimising site performance . Thinking that online success is about following the latest shiny marketing tools like Vine or Instagram video when it’s all about building a brand online. Creating product-centred, not…