Blog, News and Articles...

Oct 2

Sell what people are looking for, it's easier

by 3 Comments

Lead generation on the web is as much about the visitor as the website.

If you had a sales meeting, and your prospect walked out half way through the conversation then you’d be doing some pretty deep soul searching.

Pitching the right thing to the right person is obvious isn’t it, when you think about it.

Yet, on your website, we come and go without offending anyone. In fact, most of us leave your website without doing anything. Are you thinking hard about that?

Curious businessman climbing wall and peering over

How can I help you?

For most companies, the website is a sales tool. And the place to start with any sales process is to ask “What are you looking for”?

And you can’t sell me anything unless you know what I’m interested in.

Business served up on a plate

What if Google told you what people are looking for….and offered to send them over? Would you then go ahead and build a page specifically addressing those needs?

That would be better wouldn’t it? That way, you’re only selling to people who are already interested, and you don’t need worry about covering a range of subjects, not yet.

Most people just guess when building a website. But you can find out what people are searching for with a very impressive service from Google – cunningly disguised as the Adwords keyword tool.

Before you put words on a website, use the tool to see what words people are using.

We’re always surprised at how many words people use to search for the same thing, and even more surprised at the variations within phrases.

Be Careful out there

The hidden catch, the one nearly everyone misses, is that the terms you look up on the tool, well, they’re like inside out russian dolls. The most important paragraph was that last one above – the one about variations of phrases.

One short phrase includes thousands of others. Intuitively, this is the wrong way round and we would expect that a long phrase includes plenty of short ones, but no, that’s not correct.

Upside Down Marketing

The term “shoes” gets 100 million searches. Only, it doesn’t, because although those searches include the word shoes, there are millions of variations – many of which will have absolutely no chance of converting into relevant business.

Why try and sell to them all?

This is upside down marketing. Get specific first and go for the low numbers.

As an aside, the numbers of people searching for ‘terms’ is amazingly consistent, and without being completely sure why, we think it’s something to do with the law of large numbers. Ironically.

So, although you’ll be pitching to low numbers of people this week. It does mean you’ll be doing that next week, and the week after that.

If you’re worried about the low numbers thing. We would recommend you sell to large quantities of small numbers.

At last, a proper website plan

Knowing that people are looking before you build your page, does motivate and give you great confidence that the effort you put in will be worthwhile. You’d be amazed how much difference this approach makes to everything you do on a website.

With search engines delivering over 90% of traffic to a website, it pays to know how to use them properly.

Sep 11

Bloggers vs Blaggers

by Leave a Comment

Blog technology has huge business benefits, but the best in business say it’s about more than that.

In the last few days, several people, in quite different industries told me they felt integrity was crucial to their business. Pointedly, they also said they were competing with people without.

Underneath I’m not sure they really believe that’s true, but what if all the good people wrote blog articles regularly? I like to think it would help us all rise above the blaggers – and in a very literal way, with Google in mind, it probably will do.

When you write stuff down, good things tend to happen.

A friend sent this to me, I’m guessing it’s because I’ve been too busy to write lately. Perhaps if they would be so kind as to send this over about once a week or so?

Aug 6

Inspirational HR?

by Leave a Comment

A collection of inspirational web content is building on a hidden page in the Conversationware Web Vaults.

This time, a strange source. Not some wacky software entrepreneur, or some compelling life lessons for us this week -

Oh no….. it’s a presentation from Netflix, a monolith that is a publicly quoted company – they just shared a slide deck (meant to be read online) about HR.

Link to Inspiration Page

Click image to Inspiration Page

Ok, so that shouldn’t be inspirational. But it sets out how it sees the development and most importantly the retention of talent within the company, and how to escape from HR as a business process…. their words, not mine!

It’s extremely interesting for those with 10 minutes to spare.

Mar 13

Spend less, get more with PPC marketing

by Leave a Comment

There is no such thing as a sales funnel with Google Adwords PPC marketing.

With traditional marketing, it is tempting always to contact a lot of people, and  by process of elimination the leads will eventually fall out the bottom of the funnell.

Yes – the sales funnell is deliberately upside down, and you don’t need to read it. Starting with awareness and ending up with a deal is the old way.

Starting with your best prospects and working outwards is the new way, at least it is for us here in marketing newtown (milton keynes).

Search marketing visualisation

Search marketing visualisation

The reality of the search marketing world is that it’s flat. Time starts as soon as you press the ‘go’ button.

Advertising on the most specific of terms, those best describing the product or service you offer, the more likely you are to get contacts.

So, widening the search, so to speak, as per the diagram above, can result in potentially less hits for your money. The balance is to keep juggling factors to keep the return on investment.

In other words, the less you spend initially, the more likely you are to get good value. (why not start then?)

Broad search terms could still be desirable, because you may still influence people earlier in their buying cycle. But the key is to reduce the non-relevant clicks as much as is possible. Negative keywords, restricting location or keeping phrases and adverts very specific are good examples of digital marketing to the niches.

Feb 23

Unfinished Websites

by 1 Comment

It is a state of mind.

How shall we improve it today?

Feb 20

Splitting the marketing atom

by Leave a Comment

You may know that physics has a rather interesting problem.

In layman’s terms (meaning I can get this ever so slightly wrong), there are;

a. well understood laws for large objects – bigger than an atom – called relativity, and
b. well understood (if not quite complete) laws for very small objects or particles in ‘quantum’ level physics.

And, these laws are mutually incompatible.

splitting the marketing atom

Up until 50 years ago, physicists were making brilliant progress, assuming that all was going swimmingly well, and but for a few pauses, discoveries of the 18th century were being developed and were informing the next logical theories right through to the point it all just….got really confusing, and nothing worked.

Even Einstein spent his last thirty years looking for something that would bring it all together, but ultimately he came up blank.

Marketing has similar issues.

As our friend Seth Godin says, mass marketing has worked fine, making its inexorable progress through the TV industrial complex, right up to the point where things got very small. Channels, readership, circulation, user bases, blog posts (twitter) and attention spans (I must get to the point), well, they have all shrunk immeasurably.

Suddenly, the old rules don’t work any more – in fact they’re more confusing than anything we could have possibly imagined. Just like our physics.

We’re dealing in fragments.

Fragmented tasks, fragmented communications, markets, job descriptions, jobs, economic realities, projects, product life cycles and fleeting fads, microscopic opportunities. Higgs Boson PR anyone?

Are we truly going to end up marketing on a one to one basis? Hasn’t anyone got a chaos theory we can use to put this together? Well, there have been a few viewpoints around one aspect – SEO vs PR. All from one conversation on a social network. Now there’s a promising start.

Jed Hallam, SEO and Public Relations

Stuart Bruce, Public relations is about reputation

Stephen Waddington, good summary from a technical PR perspective

Wom on Socnets from Rob Brown

Julia Shuvalova, you need every digital marketing skill in a perfect world (including the higgs boson perhaps)

My two penneth, at this stage, is that this seems like a classic big bang confluence of ideas, skillsets and job descriptions. A Large Hadron Collider…especially when you include communications technology, which is driving all this together (in circles perhaps). Convergence.

Industry vs techniques, pah, so much fluff to me. Where do we all come from, and what is the meaning of life? Is there a dog after all? Which particle of the marketing atom are you?

Forget whatever industry you think you’re in, it is about sales, marketing and relationships. But not necessarily in that order.

As an aside to my PR friends, isn’t reputation management only necessary when you’re not able to control your product or your people….oh wait, what? we can’t do that?

I do have some string theory, I’ll have to post soon, but I’m getting the feeling the attention span is ‘gone’, and we’re all moving on to the next big passing phase. So I’ll stop for now.

Any more views you can point out, the more the merrier.

Dec 7

Google's tough tactics for tough times

by 2 Comments

A timely page from Google for people thinking of reviewing their Adwords tactics.

I did chuckle at one stat they used to support the Adwords business case.

Marketing is more important than ever. Ninety-four percent of CMOs believe that “a tough economic period is precisely the time when marketing plays a key role.”

Source: Epsilon, “Epsilon CMO Survey,” September, 2008.

What I want to know is, which 6 percent of CMO’s don’t think marketing will play a key role.

Nov 3

Internet marketing numbers, quick look

by Leave a Comment

If your website isn’t working as well as it might, how much do you have to improve to make a significant impact on the numbers?

Without measuring, lets say the poor site is converting visitors to prospects at perhaps just .5% – lets go with that low figure for the moment.

By the way, when you look, exclude people who search for your business – this includes referrals, existing customers, suppliers and competitors and so forth -they already know you, so you’ll get those prospects anyway. Also exclude any possible robotic visitors….this is about potential new internet customers.

At half a percent, just a 1 percent extra conversion rate could triple your prospects.

Once you improve the conversion rate, lets say we doubled the number of relevant visitors, or tripled – wouldn’t that mean we were adding 6 to 9 times as many prospects?

It’s not difficult.

If you don’t know how your website is working – that would be the first step.

And yes, ok, lots more questions to be asked, but it’s useful to keep in mind how a little effort can go an awful long way.

Jul 4

Unlimited google email storage

by Leave a Comment

Talk about email storage to IT managers and they tend to start going this funny colour. Users can’t seem to manage their Inbox apparently, although not the exact words they use.

This has come up time and again, where, on behalf of the user experience, it is up to me to persuade I.T that voice messages have to reside in the email store.

During the conversation you can see this assume huge proportions in the minds eye, and I always used to show my own mailbox to calm them down……a bit.

So its an area of interest.

I just saw that in my personal email, on Google, that I’ve used 93MB of 6 Gig. In a year and a half.

gmail storage

So I check my Exchange work mailbox, I now have ALL historical emails saved locally – although I’m good at deleting very large emails first – I have 2.5 Gig, in 3 years. Including unified messaging.

By my calculations then Google are effectively giving me unlimited storage. They seem to put it up every month, I could easily have 7 years of email before deleting anything at all. Which is surely what most people would ever need. Or am I behind the multimedia times.

You gotta love that.

Feb 25

Recalling emails doesn't work

by Leave a Comment

It’s Funny when you see someone try to recall an email.

Of course, the recall function serves only to highlight the original email to be read more closely, just to see where the rickett has been dropped, and how loud the clang was.

Another example of a terrible email mistake here at email tide

There are three Matt Lambert’s in the UK around the technology field, one at Microsoft and one at a telecoms company. So, I do get voicemails from people I’ve never heard of every now and again….although nothing interesting. But the more people you are ‘acquainted’ with, the less well you might know them, and this is going to happen more often.

In the comments in the linked article, there is a Thunderbird plugin that is designed with the ‘are you sure you want to send this’ button built in. Not bad, but possibly subject to the similar address blindness after a while.

What this highlights (again) is the fact that Email is a fairly blunt tool with which to be handling sensitive documents.

Surely there must be some enterprise 2.0 software that could handle a central repository, and sharing mechanism for messages, without overloading the user with yet more passwords. It makes you wonder if any other legal companies have gone with Google Docs for this?

Is Sharepoint the right vehicle – I’ve heard varying reports. I’ve got another Avanquest training session on this next week, perhaps it will sink in this time.

Talking of Passwords, methinks it is worth another look at OpenID again.