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Are you selling products online? Then you should check out Pinterest…. It gives you an opportunity to showcase all of your products, with photos, and Pinterest is fast becoming a buzzword in the social media world. It is driving more traffic to corporate websites than Youtube, Google+ and Linkedin together, so ignore it at your peril.
Why should businesses be interested? Pinterest offers a great chance to link your product photos back to your website, offering another traffic driver to your site. However, it is also social media and – the clue is in the name – the ability to comment on photos and share offers an additional opportunity to engage with users.
By pinning other people’s images on your boards, as well as your own, you can open up the doors for pins (rather like Facebook posts) to be repinned, shared or sent to other users, and also to go viral if an image is particularly good. The images you pin do not necessarily need to be directly related to your brand or products, as you can create multiple boards for different topics. In fact, Pinterest, unlike many other social media sites, puts subjects and topics before people in its search capabilities so you could create an artistic images board, photos of landscapes, funny shop names or anything that will encourage users to find you when searching on a specific topic.
As with all things social media, this is not a static site and requires engagement to reap maximum benefit. This means finding and following users or subjects that are of interest and interacting with those people. Pinterest is very much not about ’sell, sell, sell’ and anyone pursuing a purely promotional strategy on Pinterest will quickly lose ground. Social media users want engagement, they want conversations, they want dialogue not monologue, they want to be treated as people rather than as a potential customer.
This change in tack for marketing and PR teams has exercised many, who have been slow to realise what social media is and what it most definitely is not. There are few social media tools that work purely as a broadcast channel; yet many companies are still only using their Twitter, Facebook etc accounts simply to put out marketing messages. This works until one person complains on your wall, posts on Twitter that you don’t respond and then others will come out of the woodwork quickly to add their negative comments, whether or not they have any experience of the company, products, brand etc.
Agile responses are required and many social media crises can be avoided by monitoring your socmed accounts and responding promptly to any input, positive or negative. Pinterest gives a gentler arena, particularly whilst it remains new and novel, and is an ideal opportunity for you to use any images you have (don’t forget to also put them on your Flickr account and on your Facebook page) whilst also giving your company the chance to develop a personality through the boards you set up. Allowing your staff to contribute funny pics, or examples of great design, or quirky photos, will help you to attract more followers who will then share your pins on their boards and lead more traffic back to you.
As ever, content is king so choose your images and boards carefully to give the appropriate image of your company. You can optimise your descriptions of your photos with keywords so pick from your keyword list wisely and this should also help the Google and other image search results. Don’t forget to include your brand or product names in the description, and actively follow people so that you can easily engage with a wider audience.
Happy Pinning!
Google has launched a new initiative to get more small businesses using 360 degree and high quality images on search pages, G+, Google Maps, and Google Places and local pages. The new Google Business Photos site includes a list of Trusted Photographers in and around a limited number of UK cities, but Google are actively seeking businesses requesting photographers to join the program and help businesses to use images in search and on Google properties more effectively.
The resulting photos after a shoot are stitched together using panoramic technology to create a 360 image which allows zoom, pan, tilt etc and hence permits website visitors to get a great experience of how it will be to visit your business. This is not only suitable for retail outlets, museums, gyms and salons, but also for restaurants, cafes, hotels, B and Bs – infact, nearly every business could benefit from this.
The photos are stitched together – you can do this yourself with apps such as Photosynth – and can then be used on your own website, as well as on Google properties such as Google Places etc. You can also upload your own 360 photos to Google Places etc if you wish, and embed these photos elsewhere with a small HTML snippet.
There would seem to be a likelihood that Google is looking to add an extra dimension to Streetview by allowing users of SV to virtually enter businesses with these photos, which would be an interesting development, and make a useful marketing addition to SV for businesses.
AdWords Express vouchers are being offered to the first who take up this offer, but the vouchers expire on 31st March 2012 so you need to act fast.
We are increasingly moving from a search driven world to a social driven world. If your online marketing spend includes the vast proportion being spent on SEO and SEM, it is time for a rethink. Google’s development of Google Plus in an effort to ‘get social’ (against the behemoth in the social world that is Facebook) is based on a simple fact: that Facebook and social is beginning to dominate traffic on the Internet. And traffic = money. Not just for the big players such as Facebook and Google, but to those these giants serve. That’s you, and your business.
There is no getting round it. We have moved into a new era on the Internet and there are now companies (and not just those who at first glance would seem most suited to the social world) where anywhere from 30% upwards of traffic comes directly from Facebook activity, and not from the search engines. Some companies, according to research published in 2011, are seeing nearly all of their traffic coming from social sites such as Facebook, Stumbleupon, Twitter etc rather than the carefully crafted SERPs.
Whilst it is unlikely that the world is suddenly going to cease using the search engines, and hence the need for SEO will continue, the reality is that social media marketing is becoming THE traffic driver and cannot be ignored.
“We don’t do Twitter or Facebook because we have banned all access to social sites within our business” sounded fairly ludicrous 4 or 5 years ago. But now it sounds more like a death knell for any company taking such a stance.
Ignoring the fact that Facebook is introducing new forms of advertising and using social signals amongst friends and networks to bring advertisers closer to potential customers would be plain daft. Google would seem to be deeply concerned about the Facebook threat to the display advertising market Google has held almost absolute power over this last few years. After all, that’s part of Google’s core business, and any threat to that level of revenue has to be taken seriously.
We are seeing the big advertisers exchanging www.ourdomain.com on TV and print ads, packaging, websites etc with Follow Us on Twitter and Like us on Facebook. Short status updates are so much easier to manage than redesigns and website updates. There is a level of immediacy about social media which is missing from websites; a layer of personalisation and response that is difficult to ’see’ on your bog standard, old school website. Whilst adding +1, Tweet, Like and other social sharing buttons to content on a website can help to illustrate the popularity, authority and quality of content, it somehow lacks the impact of a status update with 100+ comments, or a tweet that has been ReTweeted multiple times. A website also lacks the reach of social updates and it is easy to see how a simple tweet or status update can go viral, (mainly because of the lack of overlap between every individual’s personal network), at a cost – HR and cash – that is verging on impossible with more ‘traditional’ internet marketing methods.
Google’s Search Plus Your World is a clear indication that social signals are receiving more importance in the algorithms. And hence businesses need to pay more attention to the social space.
Are you still focussed on SEO and SEM? Or has your business decided to put more budget into social? What are your social media marketing plans for 2012?
Facebook is planning to give away around £4.2M of advertising to help SMEs, according to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, through the AdBoost programme. This campaign will offer £80 of Facebook ads to companies across Europe, hopefully encouraging more small businesses to use Facebook effectively for internet and social media marketing.
The new Facebook programme is being launched with the British Chamber of Commerce and businesses will be helped with the creation of Facebook pages, engaging with users, and using the ever-growing selection of Facebook tools for advertising on the network.
Small businesses can struggle to commit fully to social media marketing, often not grasping the importance of it for their business growth and reach, or finding it difficult to define a clear strategy for doing so. Small businesses also suffer from a lack of human resources and social media is, by its very nature, time consuming. However, this is where an agency can help, by offering additional resources, expertise and value for money marketing.
A simple Facebook page and associated advertising across the Facebook social network can help SMEs in many ways. For example, by allowing loyal customers to share their recommendations to others, including to their friends through posts on both their walls and the business page. For businesses who struggle to keep a blog updated, it can provide an easy, short form method for keeping customers in touch with new products, offers, sales, or events. However, it should be remembered that not all of the target audience of any business will use Facebook and so a more comprehensive internet marketing strategy will be required to attain maximum potential.
It is to be hoped that the free ad credits will not go to waste and that the 50,000 SMEs Facebook is intending to help across UK, Spain, Italy, France and Germany will benefit from the exposure. Start creating your ad today!
Possibly the biggest differentiator at present between Google Plus and other social networks are Hangouts – the chance to video conference at the click of a button with up to 20 other G+ users. Hangouts are moving forwards quite quickly now as the G+ developers and third parties realise the benefits of making recording G+ Hangouts a one click process with Hangouts On Air.
The Dalai Lama, the Muppets and a few others were the first to be permitted to record their Hangouts On Air, and now the facility to do so is being extended more widely. Hangouts On Air is being turned on initially for celebs, public figures and those with large G+ followings, but it is likely that a full rollout will not be far behind. The really cute feature is that once the Hangout is finished, a private video clip will be uploaded to your account at YouTube.
For businesses and marketers, this new feature, once available to all, offers an infinite number of possible uses to reach a wider audience, to offer one on one training sessions, for recorded customer support ‘calls’, to archive webinars, to preserve fascinating discussions, meetings or focus groups – the list truly is endless.
Until this feature is rolled out fully by Google to all G+ users, there are plenty of other options for recording Hangouts, such as Camtasia, Camstudio (an Open Source version of Camtasia) and Fraps (which avid gamers will know for recording their gaming moves).
The benefits of Hangouts for businesses do not yet seem to be being explored by many businesses, large and small, and yet the content and collaboration and discussions created within Hangouts by those who do use them can be seen all over G+. Are you using Hangouts? For what purposes? Have you experienced any problems? What do you feel is the potential for this type of application within your business?
There are now only six months (162 days) left until 25th May 2012 to ensure that if your website asks for cookies there is an opt-in policy for your site visitors to accept any cookies your website places on their computers.
UK is one of only 5 countries requiring website owners to conform to this EU Directive – the others are Austria, Latvia, Lithuania, Sweden. Many other countries have also passed the legislation for the ‘cookie law’ (in particular, Article 5(3) of the e-privacy directive) but are not enforcing opt-in.
The article states:
‘3. Member States shall ensure that the storing of information, or the gaining of access to information already stored, in the terminal equipment of a subscriber or user is only allowed on condition that the subscriber or user concerned has given his or her consent, having been provided with clear and comprehensive information, in accordance
with Directive 95/46/EC, inter alia, about the purposes of the processing. This shall not prevent any technical storage or access for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network, or as strictly necessary in order for the provider of an information society service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user to provide the service.’;
It is a LEGAL requirement for all sites using cookies to understand the full reach of the law and ensure their sites are compliant. The Information Commissioner has said this week that websites must try harder, and has published updated guidance on how to comply. Depending on the amount of information requested, and the level of ‘tracking’ that a cookie may seek from a user’s activities, the penalty for non-compliance could be severe – up to £500,000 for a serious breach.
There is a whole host of information about making your website and collection of data compliant with the new law before May on sites such as Cookielaw.org. This website includes a DIY Cookie Audit as well as Cookie Toolkit to help you resolve any issues that your website may face under the new law. There are also ebooks, FAQs, and much more information, online.
You will need to check every page that your visitors will visit, and try out all functionality. If your company has a large website, this may take a few people to ensure a full check has been carried out. It also gives you an ideal opportunity to check that all your forms etc are functioning as you would expect them to. Unless some kind visitor lets you know that part of your website is malfunctioning, you may not realise unless you have Objectives and Goals set up in Analytics and notice a sudden drop-off of completions of goals.
The use of cookies is sensitive – for some privacy advocates, cookies are an intrusion. For companies looking to gather additional marketing information, they are simply a tool to do a job. For instance, Google, Amazon, Facebook and most online ad agencies and brokers use cookies to target and push information to users based on the tracking information gathered.
Whichever side of the fence you sit on about cookies, as a website owner you will need to comply with the law so check out the Cookie Law on the Information Commissioner’s website today.
Retail sales are already down 1.6% and high street stores are slashing their prices with the Boxing Day sales starting 21 days early. So, as a company looking to cash in on this seasonal spree, what do you need to be doing *today*?
BBC News had an interesting piece with a shopper this morning, who said she was doing plenty of window shopping and then going home to check out the prices online for the items she wished to buy as Christmas presents.
“The deals are online. You can tell your friends about them, shout about them.”
This highlights in itself a human trait: people love to boast about a bargain, and social networks have made this very simple.
So, firstly, give your web presence a once over and make sure that the items you most want to sell during the coming 3 weeks are easy to find – on your site, on your Facebook page, on Twitter, and on the search engines. You will struggle to change your search engine rankings in this short time period (Note to self: start preparing the website for the Christmas season in July/August) but there are plenty of quick ways to promote your site that will get instant exposure using social media and alternative methods such as optimised photos and video, which are often listed more quickly by the search engines.
Next, check your backend systems. If you promote items, will you be able to ship and deliver in time? Are these items already in stock? A failure to deliver on time, which could be hampered by unforeseen circumstances such as this week’s snow, will have long reaching consequences for your brand and reputation so don’t raise expectations. Be realistic in your promises to customers about delivery time. If the item is likely to be late, issue a beautiful gift card or voucher, along with expected delivery date, so that the recipient can be given that on the day. Don’t lose the sale – it is simple touches like this that will make the purchase decisions easy for the customer.
Next, work on your social media presence. Build up your following by offering your existing friends and followers special deals to ’shout’ about to their friends. And put someone in charge of your Twitter and Facebook accounts for the next week at least to get people engaged and talking to you.
You need to get a dialogue going and not just people with large numbers of followers. You cannot know what people do offline. We all know plenty of people who don’t tweet but who know people who do, and that chance conversation about, “Oh, I saw one of those on twitter today. Company XYZ have an offer on,” could win you that all important sale. And every sale matters, as does the customer service backing it.
So, man your phones and email account with the friendliest, nicest, most patient staff you have. Christmas is a stressful time for everyone, and a cheery voice and a 
in an email will go a long way towards buying you long-term evangelists of your brand and products.
What other ideas are you putting into practice this holiday season to increase the chances of a sale? Share them with our readers, especially easy to implement ones that may make that little bit of difference in these hard times that are upon us.
And we are all consumers, so what would you like companies to be doing? What will make you part with your hard-earned cash?
It’s fascinating that even after all these years involved with search engine and internet marketing, there are still those who believe that being in the top 10 results on a search engine is the only result that matters when promoting a business online. And, more interestingly, that many company executives believe that typing in the company name (or, worse, the URL) into the search engine and ranking number one, proves that the budget spent on internet marketing is justified.
Let us consider the problems with the above misunderstanding, particularly for SMEs.
Firstly, if the only budget you are spending to market your business online is on search engine optimisation, you are missing a huge audience. Whilst many companies may not feel that there is the necessary time and resource to handle multiple social media accounts, this is a) where agencies come in and b) a misunderstanding of how social media operates – you do not need a vast social media presence to benefit.
Obviously, the search engines are a logical and essential place for you to have an online presence. However, it is vital to understand how people use the search engines before making the (wrong) assumption that all searchers looking for your company, products and services will type in your company name. Or your URL. If a potential customer knows your URL, and are a savvy Internet user, they are just as likely to type this directly into the location browser of the browser and bypass the search engines entirely.
What is far more likely is that the person looking for your products does not actually know you exist as a company, is unaware of your URL or company name, and therefore will only find your website if it is optimised for the specific terms being searched upon.
If you sell a product, particularly one that is in a competitive market, there is a strong possibility that your website visitors and sales come from word of mouth recommendations from the potential buyer’s social network, from comparison sites, or from links and reviews on other, well-trafficked websites.
Returning to the search engine optimisation issue, many websites do not actually rank for the terms that the average searcher is likely to use to find your product. Many websites are built by website designers, rather than by designers with search engine optimists’ assistance. Whilst Management may love the look of your website, if it does not work for either the search engines or your potential visitors, it will not work for you either.
Therefore, it is important to check that your site includes the terms most likely to be searched for, that these terms occur in all the places required by the search engines, and that the site is competitively optimised in order to rank above others selling similar products.
If the last is not feasible because you are a small fish in a big pond, then it is even more imperative that you use many of the other tools in the internet marketing toolbox to attract attention. eg social media.
To see how well your website is doing on Google, type your main product into the search box and check your ranking. Check your analytics to see how many visitors you are getting from the terms you had expected to be those bringing in most traffic. Think long and hard about where else you are marketing and whether it is driving the necessary traffic to your website. Perhaps 2012 may be the time for a change of tactics?
There have been a number of horror stories over the years about companies who have misjudged their marketing campaigns and ended up seriously out of pocket.
For anyone who has studied marketing, you are probably aware of the Hoover disaster that cost the company £48million. It was a simple concept – buy a Hoover worth at least £100 and get two free flights to America or Europe. The problem was that the two free flights were worth far more than the product, and 200,000 people jumped at the chance to get across the Pond and into Europe for such a bargain price.
A newer version of this type of marketing catastrophe has just emerged through Groupon. A company in Reading, Berkshire, Need a Cake decided to offer a dozen cupcakes for a mere £6.25 – which was a massive saving from the normal price of £26. Step forward 8,500 cake monsters.
Having had to take on extra staff and work through the nights, all to protect the brand image and reputation, the company has lost £12,500 which is equal to the projected profits for the whole year.
There are some obvious reasons, with hindsight in particular, why this type of deal should be avoided. Firstly, the price of the cakes (50p each) is surely about or less than production costs if normally each cake is retailing at over £2? Add to that the commission that Groupon take for each deal and alarm bells should definitely have begun ringing. The point of marketing is generally to raise awareness, not to make a loss. Running loss leaders needs to be a carefully thought out strategy, and should be aimed to result in the sale of a higher value product, rather than just to raise awareness.
For instance, the Sony Playstation 3 was marketed at a loss for one simple reason only – to get a Blu-Ray player into as many homes as possible so that Sony and partners could capitalise on the sales of products such as films, cameras, audio etc that use Blu-Ray technology.
It is not just with Groupon that online marketing campaigns can go wrong (or offline, for that matter). It is important to consider whether you might become a victim of your own success, as is true with both of the cases above. Also, why are you running the campaign? If it is simply to raise awareness of your brand, then you need to set a limit on how much you are willing to pay for that exposure.
If you are doing it to attract people into your store or onto your website, you need to create an attractive environment once people arrive (bricks and mortar or web), so that you can persuade them to spend more than the original deal and also to give them a satisfying experience doing business with you that makes them want to return.
If you are running a bricks and mortar deal, you also need to consider how you will cope with dealing with the administration for what could amount to hundreds or even thousands of coupons. Having a system in place to ensure that people do not endeavour to misuse the coupons is imperative.
When considering coupons and discount vouchers, consider the results you are trying to achieve, aim closer to a 10% discount than 75% (unless you are in the business of going out of business), and consider the potential of success – will it break you?
With over 24million WP blogs already in existence, and over 50,000 new blogs being added daily, it was only a matter of time before Wordpress helped its users monetise on those and helped itself to a share of the lucrative ad market. The launch of WordAds this week sees WordPress taking on Google AdSense with a partnership with Federated Media after announcing late last month that this was on the cards.
The observation on the WordPress blog that many of the AdSense ads aren’t always “terribly tasteful” is of course, sadly true, in that this is one of the areas where the algorithm has not always been very accurate, and has meant occasions where inappropriate ads are shown. Which when this is next to your content can reflect more on you than on a faulty algo. Visitors are more likely to remember, and link to, your site where the bad taste ad appeared than to blame the algorithm, which may not be a good thing for PR.
WordPress have not yet announced the revenue split with bloggers, and there are certain provisos when applying to be part of the program such as a custom domain, level of traffic and engagement, content and language, but for anyone with a WordPress.com blog, it would seem to be worthwhile to apply and see if your blog is accepted.
Are we likely to see more competition to AdSense and other Google services? Yes. It is unlikely that the Google bubble is bursting, but there is definitely an appetite for alternatives; although WordPress was always the most likely competitor, there are opportunities for Tumblr, Posterous etc to help bloggers raise money through displaying adverts.
There are other monetisation options for bloggers such as Flattr.com who ran Pay a Blogger day this week. 
Whilst Flattr is still a small network, it highlights an opportunity available for businesses – advertising with blogs.
Whilst using Google’s display network is one option, the targetting can never be as accurate as looking out niche blogs whose readers fit with your target audience for your products and services. Many bloggers are keen to take an ad or two, or will write reviews on your products, offer giveaways and so on, so it is worth discovering which blogs your customers and potential audience look to for information and getting in touch.
Finding this info will lead you to interesting content, engagement with your audience and possibly exciting new joint ventures. So, take 2 minutes today to craft a tweet or status update for your social network and ask for recommendations of blogs that your followers and friends enjoy.
