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The world just got smaller (again!)
July 02, 2009
When I tell people I blog, I use Twitter and actively work on growing my online network they usually respond in one of two ways. The first is that they launch into a conversation with me about the social media revolution we're experiencing - usually ending with useful URLs being swapped - and a post-conversation tweet or two. The second reaction, and one usually reserved for the - well let's just say more mature generation - is that of shock and fear of things world-wide-webish.
Before the boom of social media started in late 2005, people held a much more reserved approach to where and how their name, picture, and email could be used online. As time went on and online networks grew out of sight, people (en masse) became a lot more likely to share their details to others online.
Nowadays, to not have your foot in a major online network is madness – the effect it can have on your business is phenomenal.
If you want to get involved in at least one network, choose Twitter. Get yourself an account, link to your website, do some tweets and experience the benefits of what it can bring. Mark Shaw has recently recorded his Twitter for Business TV series, a collection of the best twitter tips - just perfect for those starting out. If you haven’t already seen them or read his blogs, you should.
I'd also highly recomend his free ebook which you can download directly from his blog.
Marketing Donut's Twitter conference - a great success!
July 02, 2009
No one knows when it might happen again but one thing is certain, the first Twitter Conference hosted by Marketing Donut, under the #mydonut hashtag, was a fantastic event and great success on many levels.
On Tuesday, 30 June at 0930 GMT the event kicked off with a flurry of activity. Overall it could be said that the conference was a piece of organised chaos where ideas were exchanged, views were shared and conversations were had. The event was organised with help from Twitter for business expert – Mark Shaw – who shares the Marketing Donut goal of helping small businesses get the best from their marketing activities.
Early estimates made by expert Twitter analyser, Andrew Fielden, indicate that the conference saw over 1,800 tweets exchanged in the 90 minute marathon session. Andrew said: “Wow, it was manic wasn't it and just goes to show how popular something like that can be. Well done to you guys for the effort being put in.”
The biggest result, in Twitter terms, was the 4th place positioning in the trending topics chart for a sustained period of time. The best part of the conference was the real reach that the event had and saw small business owners exchanging ideas, questions and views in one place with experts. As you can imagine, Marketing Donut site traffic was on the up and the overall reach of Twitter users who could have seen any one of the tweets was 67,562.
The range of topics covered was vast and we hope that it was a gainful experience for all involved – as a trial event we did not know what might happen; but there is a definite working idea, which can be adapted for another time, in order to help small businesses maximise their marketing activity, and to get them connected with experts in one place for free!
Thank you to everyone who took part.
A selection of tweets by experts, small businesses and the Marketing Donut during the event:
yBCmels RT @simon_editor: Phew! Thanks for you question and comments, everyone. Good event! #mydonut// Solid effort!
Tuesday 30th of June 2009
Signposter Great conference #mydonut people. Have a fantastic time. Now back to work ;-(
Tuesday 30th of June 2009
MarkPocock Are you building your list on your web site? No, don't offer your damn newsletter.Offer something of value. #mydonut
Tuesday 30th of June 2009
ThePodCompany RT @Firzzy: Do facebook pages really work? #mydonut
Tuesday 30th of June 2009
MarketingDonut Today a twitter conference-tomorrow..some kind of Glastonbury for Twitter? #mydonut
Tuesday 30th of June
The Real Thing?
June 22, 2009
You can argue that the aim of marketing is to build momentum. You need to raise awareness and establish how people perceive your brand. Traditionally this worked well, but I have news for you -- attempting to set perceptions is becoming an increasingly dangerous strategy.
You may recall a marketing campaign that had the sole intention of altering your perception of a brand. A soft drinks manufacturer who specialised in blackcurrant-based drinks had complaints about the sugar content and related tooth decay. This caused it to launch a low sugar version. It even had the cojones to sell it as “Toothkind”. The rebranding promoted health benefits and claimed four times the vitamin C levels of rivals.
The inconvenient truth proved the product wasn’t good for your teeth and one drink in the range had negligible vitamin C! This little oversight cost the company significant sums of money. But the real stinker was the “corrective advertisements” it was forced to run on national television.
It’s always been dangerous to try to build a false perception. Now the rise of social networking has upped the ante. There has been a seismic shift in our abilities to interact and talk to each other, and to build or rubbish brands that annoy us. We are the mob, and the mob is now all seeing. If you are bluffing, it won’t take long for people to find you out.
It’s simple; the quality of your offering builds the perceptions. These will be based on fact and customer experience, not marketing spin. Ignore this at your peril.
Create local landing pages and gain new customers
June 14, 2009
If you have a website and want to gain new customers, why not build landing pages optimised for search terms with geographic modifiers. If that sounds like gibberish, I’m talking about creating special pages to attract potential customers who enter (for example) ‘copywriter Norwich’ instead of just ‘copywriter’ into search engines.
Because location searches are more specific, there’s generally less competition for them, increasing your chances of achieving good SEO results.
For example, as I write, my page on Copywriters in London ranks at #4 in Google and #1 at Yahoo, outperforming the sites of dozens of other copywriters who really are in London!
When visitors click through to the page, it explains that they could get practically the same level of service from a copywriter in Norwich and save money, since our overheads are inevitably lower.
Is it ethical? Am I bending the truth? Believe me, I’ve agonised over this. But I only considered it when I saw competitors doing the same thing. And all I’m really doing is creating a page about finding copywriters in London, not masquerading as a London copywriter.
Does it sell? I believe so, although I don’t always grill my new clients on how they found me (I know I should). You’ve got to be realistic. Drop-off rates will inevitably be high when people seeking local suppliers twig that you’re 100 miles away. But some are bound to be convinced.
If you want to do something similar, just create a web page with 300-500 words of text talking about finding your product or service in your target location and linking that to your own offering. Explain how you can easily reach customers in the location and, if appropriate, mention any clients you already have there.
Make sure you use your keywords in your HTML page title, heading tags and throughout the text. Aim for a keyword density of around 5% - you can check it here. Use keywords in the document name too (Yahoo likes this).
The ‘description’ meta tag carries no weight for SEO, but may still appear in search results. So you can use it to grab searchers’ attention with a punchy message like ‘Looking for an electrician in London? Call our national helpline to find a reliable, affordable contractor.’ (For more help with SEO writing, see this guide to SEO Copywriting.)
Remember, your page is primarily aimed at search engines. You don’t really want people to read it! So make sure people who arrive at it can easily click through to your home page, perhaps via a link in the first sentence.
To boost rankings further, link to your page from blog posts and online PR articles. The only thing you can’t do is get listed in local online directories for your target locality - although you could always make that possible by investing in a virtual office.
A final word of warning - if people do choose you, they’ll be expecting you to match the service a local supplier could provide. Make sure you can keep your promises!
Ever thought to export?
June 10, 2009
If you’re looking for a new pool of customers to target, you might want to consider marketing your product or service overseas. However, people are often deterred from buying products from or selling to other countries due to language barriers and payment security, as well as logistical issues like how a product will be delivered from A to B. These barriers were highlighted by a recent survey on e-commerce by the EU.
Although admittedly a challenge, starting out in exporting might not be quite the big headache that you expected it to be. A new website launched by Google in partnership with UK Trade & Investment, Royal Mail, HSBC and translation company Applied Language Solutions aims to help small firms overcome all these perceived issues, giving customers abroad the confidence to buy from them. It’s free for you to register and to work out where in the world you could take your business, how much you should sell your product for, how much profit you could make, and how much it will cost you to market it to those customers online. In short, you can work out whether it’s worth your while before you dive in.
Google spokesman Gareth Evans told me: “You just have to put a product into a search box, for example marmalade, and it will tell you where there is a market for marmalade. The tool will then tell you how cheap it is to advertise online relative to the UK – so if it costs you 50 pence per click to advertise marmalade in the UK, it might tell you it costs five pence per click to advertise marmalade in Turkey.”
Go to http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en/exportadviser/ to try it.
Will this encourage more small firms to take the plunge?
Twitter: Will it really help your business?
May 27, 2009
So I’ve finally given in and opened a Twitter account (follow me here). But I remain ambivalent. And many of my contacts, including some seasoned digital professionals, share my doubts - as do some high-profile commentators.
Why am I bitter about Twitter? Here’s a handy bullet-point list of my issues with it.
- As a copywriter, I dislike the telegraphic, SMS-like brevity of the Tweet, and the incomprehensible stuff that sometimes gets Tweeted.
- As a tired thirtysomething, I’m wearied by its jittery fragmentation and grating, self-conscious ‘Hey there!’ chirpiness.
- As an SEO, I resent its ‘nofollow’ links, particularly when LinkedIn (a PR7 site) grants me backlinks with editable anchor text.
- As a business person, I’m irritated by its founders’ arrogant ‘not for sale’ posturing, despite the manifest lack of a business model (unless we count making TV shows).
- And finally, as a human, I question whether we should be measuring our worth by all this virtual interaction.
‘Forget that,’ you say. ‘How can I make money from Twitter?’
Future ways to profit directly from Twitter might include charging for your content, pimping it out to third-party advertisers or using it to promote exclusive special offers.
Indirectly, it’s all about getting yourself noticed, building credibility and educating potential customers about your offering, which should drive interest and therefore sales.
For those who have a large base of users or contacts they need to keep updated, it’s indispensable. But for marketing, it remains to be seen whether you really do reach potential customers, or just other Twitterers who are looking to sell rather than buy, or to Tweet rather than read.
For example, a survey reported in Marketing Week (print only) found that just six out of 2600 followers responded to a Tweet saying 'has anyone seen this tweet, please answer yes'. Is anyone listening?
Even so, sheer weight of numbers means the risks of being left out outweigh the hassle of getting involved. But I still suspect that many businesses are just following (as it were), without being 100% sure why. And I include myself in that.
Will Twitter itself make money? It’s a truth universally acknowledged that anyone with tons of users will cash in, and Twitter certainly is a big hitter. But a large user base is no guarantee – look at Facebook’s spiralling costs (storage alone is $100m pa), funding worries and struggles to generate clickthrough from its advertising. It's a victim of its own success: people visit Facebook to socialise, not to buy things.
With 60% of Twitterers drifting away within a month, it could be a challenge to get advertisers to do more than fling some content at Twitter in hope rather than expectation. (Twitter Search could be part of the answer.)
It all reminds me of that other flash-in-the-pan site that appeared a few years ago. Very plain interface, childish colours and a silly name - something like ‘Google’…
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