marketing

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Calling all customers!

Published 31 May, 2011 | By TashWord

Have you heard of a call to action? Have you got any idea what marketers and the like are talking about when the use this term?

While many people find marketing a bit wishy-washy or over-the-top at times, things like a call to action are important to understand for anyone trying to promote something ( a business, a blog, an event, and so on).

So, what is a call to action? It’s simply where you tell people what you want them to do. Examples are ‘buy now’, ‘call us for a quote’, ‘visit our website for details’, ‘visit us on the day’, ‘book here’ and ‘enter your email to subscribe’.

Adding a call to action generally gets much better results than just giving information. A call to action reminds interested people to actually do something and makes it easy for them in that you have told them what the next step is.

For simplicity, one call to action is enough in most ads and emails although a secondary (unspoken) call may be included such as ‘call us on 1234’ being followed by a URL.

Does all your marketing material include a call to action?

Posted in marketing | Tagged call to action, promote, remind | 1 Comment

Meaningful posts that people love to read

Published 19 May, 2011 | By TashWord

I’m going out on a limb here but I assume you write blog posts and articles because you want people to read them for some reason (promote your business, share your point of view, etc). If I’m wrong, perhaps another post will be more meaningful for you!

I see two simple rules for getting people to love reading your posts/articles/newsletter:

providing substance is more important (meaningful if you like) than just stringing together relevant keywords
people who like what you write are more likely to come back to read more, and recommend it to others as well

I was prompted to write about meaningful posts by reading an article that sounded interesting. That is, the heading was about whether or not to build a website and it started by discussing the increased sense of needing a website in the small business sector in recent times. However, that’s as far as the article went – it gave a case study of someone struggling to get their web designer to finish a job and then learning building the website wasn’t the end point anyway.

From this example, I think we can learn

if you create a question or interest in a heading or introduction, you need to answer it within the article
each post/article should be on one topic – not reasons for website growth, optimisation and a case study rolled into one. One topic is simpler to read and understand, and splitting other topics out gives you more articles/posts to write anyway!
include something that makes it worth the time to read the article or post – generally this means give some information or insight, but it may mean entertain in some way. The article on building a website left me feeling I learnt nothing and therefore wasted my time – the result being I won’t be heading back for more of their articles

So next time you write for your blog, website or newsletter, ask yourself if you have made it meaningful and of value or if you have just put together some space filler. And then check if there is anything you can do to make it more meaningful.

Posted in blogging, marketing, newsletter content, web content, writing | Tagged blog posts, interest, meaningful, simple, write | 2 Comments

What is a niche?

Published 7 May, 2011 | By TashWord

Have you ever actually thought about what a niche really is? Can you give me a simple definition of a niche?

I’m tempted to write no more until I have some answers, but I won’t prolong it 🙂

I recently read a blog post that includes a section on marketing to a demographic rather than a niche and I found it really interesting. A demographic is group of similar people whereas a niche is a group of people with a similar problem – parts of a demographic may be more likely to have a problem but not everyone in a demographic will.

Not convinced? Think about all parents who run a business (demographic) – do they all need to find childcare to enable them to work? Of course not as some have teen or adult children, some have a partner who cares for the children and some have a business that can cater for the children. Do they all have to do things on the cheap because they have no money? Definitely not as many self-employed parents run very successful and profitable businesses. Do they all need a professional writer to help them with their website copy or blogging? Afraid not as some are excellent writers themselves, some don’t have or want a website/blog and others get family or friends to help.

That simply, there are three niches within the demographic of parents with a business. Marketing a niche is easier and more effective so who are you targeting? Do they share a problem you are offering to solve?

Posted in business info & tools, marketing | Tagged demographic, niche, problem, similar | Leave a comment

Influencing search engine results

Published 3 May, 2011 | By TashWord

Having a website is of little business value unless it is getting seen by people, and preferably the type of people will buy your goods or service.

The March survey of small businesses showed that about two-thirds believe search engines is the key means of finding new customers. Now that may be more or less applicable in your industry or in Australia vs the USA (the survey was in the USA only), but search engines do account for a reasonable amount of website traffic.

Which means that making your website as attractive as possible to search engines is important. You can pay SEO (search engine optimisation is the term for making your site perform better in search engine formulae) or marketing companies to improve your site rankings, but there are also things you can do quite simply. In fact, I’d say some of the simple tasks should be done even if you are paying someone else to help you with SEO.

Here is a quick list of the easy SEO tasks you can do to increase your chances of being found in relevant searches:

use relevant keywords in your web and blog content
provide quality and relevant content on your site – a blog is excellent for this
aim your web and blog content at humans – search engines are getting more sophisticated at picking out fake pages of keywords
make your content web friendly – search engines read headings, too so make use of them
add links to relevant information (on your site and elsewhere)
encourage links to your site as much as possible without getting into link farms or spam
ensure your web pages and blog posts have relevant meta data (background information about the page) – which means it shouldn’t the same for every page
update your site and blog as often as you can to keep it fresh and give people a reason to come back for more – fresh content and visitors both help your search engine rankings

Posted in marketing, web content | Tagged content, fresh, influencing search engine results, keyword, search engine, seo, traffic, website | 8 Comments

Images in email marketing

Published 21 April, 2011 | By TashWord

A picture says a thousand words.

It’s true that a picture can convey a message very quickly and sometimes better than words, and can make any document more appealing. However, you need to be careful relying on images in your marketing.

Before making an image the central part of any email message, remember the following:

many people (I’d guess the majority, in fact) have images turned off so they won’t see the image by default. If your email relies on that image, your email is not going to work very well.
Yes, sometimes people will accept images and then be able to see your message but I rarely do that if the image is pretty much the entire message as I want to know what it’s about before lowering my security – and I guess I’m not alone in that.
including a number of images, even if they aren’t the key message, can lead to a poor presentation of your email if images are turned off – not only are there lots of red crosses on view, but it may distort the layout of text, too
people have different perceptions and ideas, and some see a half empty glass so think carefully about about how your image may be seen. It’s not so bad if a supporting picture is misinterpreted as if it is a key part of your message
including many and/or large graphics makes your email much larger which may mean higher costs for you and again may limit it’s acceptance by all email servers
text in graphics and images themselves won’t help your search engine efforts (for emails online as well as sent out) although it does hide words from spam filters. Technology may be changing this but for now it still matters!

So what do you think when you receive an email that is based entirely or predominantly on graphics? Are they as effective in getting your interest as text based emails?

And don’t forget to support your email marketing, too.

Posted in business info & tools, marketing | Tagged email, graphic, image, marketing, message | 2 Comments

Gift certificate for business services?

Published 18 April, 2011 | By TashWord

Leading up to friend’s birthdays and Christmas, gift certificates for product-based stores and personal services (eg a massage or facial) are often considered as a convenient gift the recipient can redeem for whatever they want.

There is also value for the business giving out gift certificates – quiet promotions, value add, follow on sales and cash flow in particular.

So would you give a business service gift certificate?

Here are a couple of situations where I think it could work:

1. a friend has just started their business and is overwhelmed with the things to do’ so you give a voucher for a VA’s services

2. as a web designer you know there is more than good design required for success so with all projects above $x you give a gift certificate to a professional writer to kick things off

3. instead of giving a bottle of wine or box of chocolates, a business gives out vouchers for a business service to enhance clients’ business. Obviously they need to be complementary businesses with a similar market so a business coach could give out vouchers for bookkeeping, a designer could give a voucher for a printer and a writer could give gift certificates from an IT support business.

4. you want to give a friend/client the means of improving something about their business, just because you like them or you can see their business really needs the help

5. it is the anniversary of your business relationship or someone starting their business so acknowledging that with something that will further their business (rather than a hamper or bunch of flowers) gives more meaning to your gesture

Have you ever thought of giving a gift voucher for a professional service? If you’ve done it, how did it go?

Posted in business info & tools, marketing | Tagged business, gift certificate, services | Leave a comment

Choosing a newsletter format to suit

Published 14 April, 2011 | By TashWord

As a communications person, I do more for clients than just write. Recently, I reviewed the newsletter process for a client.

Initially, they were sending out a paper based newsletter but introduced an email version a few years ago. About a year ago, I helped them make the html (email) version shorter and more suited to emailing. The purpose of the recent review was to consider how to present their newsletter moving forward.

Here are some of the key points I considered before making a recommendation that suited the client’s needs:

their subscriber list was about one third postal addresses so stopping the paper mailing wasn’t an option in the short term. The break down of the mailing list is a critical factor in such decisions
the people my client sends newsletters to are literate and technology friendly so emails are acceptable, although an older sub-set still prefer paper-based communications for important news
my client wanted to maintain a copy of the newsletters on the site for 2 or 3 years so we couldn’t purely do html emails in an email program (ie we had to make a version available on the website)
sending an email costs a lot less – for my client, it is about $0.15 per email and $2.00 per letter, and that’s a typical price range
emails and pdfs can contain hyperlinks to make the newsletter more interactive, but they are easier to insert and adjust in an email
an html page can be emailed easily but doesn’t print so well, especially if you want to print to the edges of the page for a professional finish
for branding, a paper/pdf newsletter must match the email version so having them designed at the same time will give the best results
creating multiple pages on a site (ie one article per page) for email links is time consuming but it is difficult to direct readers directly to an article within a pdf
there is software (and free to use websites) that can convert pdfs into html so creating a pdf for print and having it converted into html for emailing is an option. However, the I found the final product is not polished or professional enough for me to recommend it to a client
a pdf attachment on a website is ok but sending a pdf attachment as an email newsletter is not – many spam filters will stop it, it looks messy and is larger than necessary so a pdf that can be printed, put on the site and emailed is not a solution

There is no one size fits all answer to the question of paper or html newsletter, but the above points may help you decide. What other factors do you think are important?

Posted in business info & tools, marketing, newsletter content | Tagged html, newsletter, paper | 2 Comments

What other small businesses are doing online

Published 13 April, 2011 | By TashWord

About two thirds of small businesses using online marketing in some way say that new customers find them through search engines. Would you agree that is a key way that customers find you? If so, what are you doing about your search engine results?

The American Express OPEN small business search marketing survey (March 2011) has a number of statsistics to show where small businesses see online marketing impacting their sales.

While it is a list of survey results (yawn, yawn!) it is a summary so easy to read and can give some useful insights for trends within small business which is useful for comparisons and particularly useful if you sell to that sector. My opening questions are also examples of how you can use this information to assess your own online marketing.

Read the report and let me know what you learn from it…

Posted in business info & tools, marketing | Tagged marketing, online, results, survey | Leave a comment

Advertising dates

Published 1 April, 2011 | By TashWord

Just a quick reminder to keep things up to date – or avoid anything that makes the date obvious.

Today I heard a radio ad offering 10% off everything until the end of March. Two days ago, that would have been an effective call to action; today (being the 1st April) means I have 12 months to take up the offer.

My assumption is that the business didn’t mean the ad to be run today and don’t really want to run their sale for 12 months! Whether it was error or belatedly providing the required airtime by the radio station, it is a good reminder to check dates carefully!

Have you come across any funny faulty dates?

Posted in business info & tools, marketing | Tagged ad, current, date, radio | 1 Comment

Have promotional articles seen their day?

Published 29 March, 2011 | By TashWord

On Sunday I wrote about the value of promotional articles, but I thing there is another important question – have they be over used? are they just a waste of time?

My answer – no!

There are certainly a lot of promotional articles available, and many are not worth the time to read (or write!), but for a well prepared article there is definitely a return on the investment of preparing promotional articles.

A couple of reasons promotional articles are still worth considering to promote a business:

people still want content for sites, ezines and blogs – promotional articles save them time and provide a variety of information for their readers
things change so there is a need for current articles to replace out dated ones – for example, articles about employing staff in 2010 would not cover paid parental leave responsibilities
each topic has many angles so even if there are 50 articles on running a business as a parent, you may be able to suggest a different perspective or a new method
search engines and people want fresh content so even if Joe Blogs wrote a fantastic article on email marketing it could be time someone else wrote one so we don’t read Joe’s article in five different newsletters
we all have different approaches to learning so the way you explain something in an article may be a better way for some people to understand it

In short, the internet has put us into an information age and there is power to those who provide quality information. Promotional articles are an excellent way to share information so we have not seen the end of their value.

If you’re still doubtful, think about the last time you searched for information online – what were the most useful sources?

Posted in business info & tools, marketing, newsletter content, writing | Tagged article, content, fresh | 1 Comment

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