8 key issues to review to make sure your blog supports company goals
This is the second in a series of blog posts aimed at helping business bloggers. The first post explored getting started and avoiding writer's block, sometimes an issue at this time of year. In this post, René Power examines the key elements of a successful business blog.
If you're running a business targeting other businesses in 2012, it is likely you have either read about or been advised to introduce a blog to your website. The benefits of business blogging are much chronicled - Dave and Chris both covered it from a commercial and SEO viewpoint.
But with a bewildering choice of over 250 million websites and 130 million blogs (with five million new ones coming online every year), your customers don't have a lot of time or attention. How does a corporate blog attract and retain readers? (Statistics…
5 actions to minimise the impact of an address change
In my last post I summarized 9 common headaches to watch for when you change email service provider. This time I'm drilling down into the first of these, guidance to manage changing your from email address.
This guidance is valid too for other occasions when you change your from email address. Such as a change in branding, company mergers and acquisitions, moving transaction emails from your eCommerce system to your marketing system, or simply sorting out some historical oddities in your identity.
Your from email details are made up of the from display name and from address, such as 'Acme Offer <
[email protected]>'. The display name is 'Acme Offer' and from email address
[email protected].
In this post I'm concentrating on deliverability issues connected with change of email address, rather than consideration of what makes effective from email information, as this is a subject…
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05 Jan 2012
6 personal resolutions that apply to all online marketers
Just before the New Year, I had the pleasure of participating in a Focus.com webinar with Andrew Kordek of Trendline Interactive and Stefan Eyram of ClickMail, regarding email marketing trends for 2012. Below are five resolutions for the coming year which either came directly from that webinar or were inspired by it. Thanks to Stefan and Andrew for the insight and inspiration for this post!
1 Stop talking like a rocket scientist
We keep telling people social media marketing isn’t rocket science and then we use words like “integration” which sounds exactly like what a rocket scientist would say! It’s not that the words or terms are inherently bad, it’s just that we assume people actually know what they mean.
What we should be focusing on is putting online marketing (regardless of the channel) into context for people. This means using a little more…
New infographic showing the top 12 countries worldwide
We all know the importance of Facebook to our own lives and in our country, but what about international usage?
We found there were some surprises in this data that Michele Caivano, the creator of this infographic, alerted us to. Did you realise the importance of Facebook in Indonesia and Latin America or how the male/female popularity varies?
Source: http://www.fortunecat.it using Facebook Advertising figures…
6 E-CRM Trends to consider for 2012 planning
I've recently asked several CRM specialists including Paul Greenberg and Shaun Smith to describe how they see the key ECRM trends from 2011 which will also be important in 2012. I've picked out 5 key trends
E-CRM Trend 1. Brands as curators
Shaun Smith, founder of Smith+co believes there are a number of innovations that have become more popular this year as businesses seek to deliver deeper customer experiences. This includes brands positioning themselves as curators to ensure that they provide added value to their customers.
“Increasingly, brands that are really clear about what they stand for have the credibility and the authority to be able to recommend other things associated with that brand,” he explains. “So Nike, for example, has an app called True City that will recommend all the best places to go to in a city you are unfamiliar with. If you like driving, BMW…
5 Examples of Facebook Brand Pages to learn from
As marketers constantly look for better ways to use social media to engage with customers and generate positive word-of-mouth and sentiment, a well-designed, thought-out Facebook page is a key platform to target consumers. Facebook brand pages can offer businesses, both large and small, an excellent opportunity to create a presence and a brand experience, but only if this experience is well planned and executed.
In this post I'll look at some examples of companies that I think have created a great experience on Facebook that fits their brand well. I hope these "best practices" give some ideas of improvements that could work for your Facebook presence. These examples all show these key ingredients of a great Facebook brand page including:
A clear objective and raison d'être for the page
A good, professional design which is consistent with all other marketing communications
An impactful welcome page with a clear…
A simple way to compare the engagement of customers on email and social networks
In 2009, Dave Chaffey wrote a blog post on Smart Insights in which he introduced the concept of the EFT Ratio.
EFT stands for Email: Facebook: Twitter Ratio and, as an example, he used ASOS. Dave was explaining that, at the time, it showed how email gave a capacity to reach many more customers with tailored messages. It also showed how ASOS used Email for a combination of engagement and driving sales as shown by their current email signup page:
ASOS EFT ratio
I thought it would be interesting to see how this looked today since ASOS has been very active in social media marketing. This is how it looks:
2009 ASOS EFT was 100 Email : 8 Facebook : 1 Twitter
This was calculated from a total of two million…
A B2B case study (with learnings for B2C too)
Here's an interesting case study about how Eloqua ran a project on Facebook company page optimisation.
We've summarised some tips based on this project run by BrandGlue, which grew the Eloqua Fan page by 2,500 percent, increased Facebook-referred traffic by 150% and increased Fan engagement to about 3x industry averages. The creative was executed by JESS3 and PageLever supplied the data. These are main learnings we took from the case:
1. Know Facebook's "Golden ratio"
The overall Facebook ratio for status updates is:
27% have a comment
73% have a like
The study show the breakdown for B2B and B2C; they're similar:
2. Start by stopping.
If you fall behind this target avoid:
Declarative status updates
Text-only status updates
Inconsistent posts
Repetitive topics
Back-to-back frequency
Don't forget referral sources - 92% of referrals within Facebook…
Latest statistics reveal the importance of the primary inbox
We talk a lot about getting delivered into THE inbox. But the days of "one person one inbox" are long gone.
If you make it into my Gmail account, you join the 2,432 unopened mails filtered automatically into the bulk folder:
If you make it into my work account, however, it has only one other unopened email competing for attention:
Gulp.
So is the real challenge with email response about getting delivered to the right inbox?
Fact is, multiple email accounts are the norm. An April 2011 UK consumer survey revealed 65% using more than one email account.
There are several questions we need to ask here to get better email engagement:
Does it really matter which email address you get?
If it does, how do you make sure you get the right one?
Does it make sense to block certain…
User features get serious enhancement
Value/Importance: [rating=5]
Recommended link: Twitter video
Twitter has unveiled a major redesign today which will be rolling out slowly. There are four key elements to the changes:
New homepage timeline
Better way to see anything related to you
Interface for easily finding context for hashtags
New user profile
Is this all in Twitter's attempt at trying to become more mainstream and accessible? A move away from the niche knowledge sharing tag it's gained? It looks good at first glance, this official video is useful to demonstrate the changes: http://fly.twitter.com/
Brands also get Brand Pages
There's a really big change for brands too, new brand pages, as Twitter looks to strengthen its relationship with marketers. Twitter's brand pages have been low key compared with the excitement around Google+ brand pages, which…
