A case study of how a family-run business gets an edge by using the latest social media tools
I love this recent campaign pointed out to me by Pritesh Patel. It shows you don’t have to be a big business to run big campaigns in social media. You just need to think big!
McKay Flooring are a family business established for 40 years. I think they give a great example of how smaller businesses can be creative in using social media marketing to expand their reach.
What caught my interest was the way that they use some of the newer social media marketing platforms like Pinterest and Instagram for competitions. These are all promoted through their blog, which is also a great example of how a specialist blog can act as a social hub for campaigns, while also building the credibility of a company by using testimonials and linking to product categories…
Google Social Analytics - an in-depth review
Value/Importance: [rating=4]
Recommended link: Google Analytics Blog summary
Our review of Google’s new Social Analytics features
Avinash Kaushik, now Google’s Digital Marketing Evangelist announced this new Google Analytics feature at his keynote at SES New York in March 2012, showing this is a major update that Google want to promote.
August 2012 update
At the time it was part of a beta referred to as "Social Analytics", but it is is now available to all Google Analytics users and as is shown in grab of the menu on the right it's
The majority of the reviews of Social Analytics so far have simply included the screengrabs available from the Google Analytics blog summary, so I thought I would go into a bit more depth and give my view on what’s helpful and what’s not so…
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14 Mar 2012
How to control social media ‘bush fires’ to protect your brand
Prior to the digital social media era, brands could control most marketing and communications channels.
Marketers could determine which messages were conveyed, to whom, where and when, thus ensuring their precious brand image was preserved intact.
Enter social media - the tinder to set fire to a previously dry marketing environment.
Social media’s power and reach deliver real power to consumers
Social media lets consumers refer, recommend, vote, score and comment positively or negatively on anything they feel or experience about a product or service.
A particularly big dose of fuel is added to the 'brand communications bush fire' by social media’s interactive real-time capacity to broadcast messages. Reach is potentially unlimited, extending through compelling multi-media formats, such as pictures and videos ‘taken on the go’ with smartphones.
Brands must be…
Ignoring customers will cost you revenue
Marketing emails from major and minor brands alike are often sent from a noreply email address - you will have seen them.
Either quite literally an address noreply@, or the email footer carries a statement like; "Please do not reply to this email, the account is not monitored, please contact customer support at ...". I think there's a lot more to them than meets the eye...
If a shop assistant failed to answer your questions you would shop elsewhere. So why are brands ignoring customers, in their millions, through email and social media communications?
Ignoring customers in social media
Interestingly, the social media marketing world is following the same approach as email marketing. This article notes that only 5% of wall questions from consumers on brand pages ever receive follow-up interactions from the brand.
The key to answering the…
What makes the perfect email call-to-action (CTA)?
The recent post by Kath Pay discussing what makes an effective call-to-action in marketing emails showed how it's easy to get this wrong. No excuses now! Check out this new + useful infographic from Litmus that shows every issue about CTAs you could possibly want to know about.
A lot of the ideas are obvious, but the obvious isn't always obvious, particularly when there are other design constraints. Of course, colour and size get a mention, but did you know there is even a law to back this up; this Fitt's Law states that:
"The time required to rapidly move to a target area is a function of the distance to the target and the size of the target".
I also enjoyed the snippet that showed that buttons with arrows encourage more clicks than those that don't - collectively these small tweaks can make a…
How E-retailers can make a sustainable ‘price match promise’ to grow business while protecting margins
As recession continues to bite, forcing even well known and loved names into receivership, we all know it’s essential to keep customers buying from us. And, in order to achieve this, you have to be absolutely certain you are offering the best price around.
Of course in any market sector, there are many online retailers, all competing for the same customers and, more importantly, their money. To triumph in the face of such intense opposition you’re going to need an angle or edge; something to make sure you’re ahead of the competition and that allows you prove it too.
This is where services like Competitor Price Watch (CPW) can help. In this post I'll describe the concept behind these services and finish with three…
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01 Mar 2012
A new adoption framework for social media strategy
There are now enough examples and evidence to know which social media marketing strategies and tactics work and which don’t. Enough for organisations to move beyond the baby steps of adoption that typify where about two thirds of the UK remain today.
The board of directors is usually culpable
The key issue in most organisations, particularly at board level, is they are still being held back by their failure to gain a fundamental understanding of the medium. Neither, perhaps as a result of this failure in understanding, are they recruiting the right calibre of skills into digital and new media roles.
I have interviewed and worked with scores of organisations concerning their plans for social media. Many say they now want to make social media strategic.
However, they put their hands up and say the issue is they don’t know what ‘strategic’ means when it comes to…
What is the objective of your SEO program? Actually you will have many but at the heart will be the desire to increase the amount of relevant traffic that hits your website(s) from natural search.
The total number of potential keyword searches that could drive traffic to your website is enormous. Some web owners get traffic from hundreds of thousands of different keywords. However, not every keyword delivers high quality traffic that adds value to the bottom line of the business.
One of the biggest challenges for SEO is to learn which keywords are contributing to ROI, focusing efforts where they can deliver the most reward. To achieve this you need to separate the wheat from the chaff and that means using the data available to discover what doesn’t work.
This article takes a look at some of the techniques you can use to identify and screen poor performing keywords, enabling you to…
How to use Facebook for a friendly B2C 'webinar' alternatives
Facebook is 'the' social media platform for communicating with consumers in 2012 and looks set to continue well into the future. Many brands have moved away from microsites and instead have invested heavily in a page presence on Facebook.
There are so many options available - Facebook's opengraph technology offering has not yet fully hit the mainstream.
Facebook webinars
One technology option I've seen in recent months and adopted for my own businesses is the use of Facebook events as a form of webinar- it impressed me so I thought I'd share it.
Here are two examples of the Facebook webinar; one for my own business, Musicademy, and the other for Vets Now, which I described in a previous post showing the awesome ways they encourage interaction on their pages.
…
A call-to-action at the wrong time in the wrong place?
How do you feel when a pushy shop assistant approaches you the minute you enter a shop?
When an email consisting of nothing but a hard-sell call-to-action lands in your customer's inbox, this probably makes them feel the same way.
“Register Now”
I recently received an email to promote an industry event out of the blue:
The “Register Now” link took me to a landing page that contained little information besides ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘when’ and ‘where’.
On the basis of this scant information I had a choice - register or leave the page. As I had never heard of the brand or event, I left.
Give email recipients compelling timely reasons to respond
Using "Learn More" instead of "Register Now" might have encouraged me to spend some time checking out the company, perhaps ending in a conversion after all.
A landing page featuring in-depth information,…
