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.
A recent report by YouGov states that less than a fifth of SMEs using Google Adwords recoup their costs, and the remaining 82% do not appear to know whether they are getting any benefit from PPC or even recovering their ad spend in sales.
One of the problems is undoubtedly that many SMEs use Pay Per Click as a marketing tactic before understanding what needs to be achieved and how to do so. Whilst PPC is a potentially effective strand to any marketing bow, the temptation may be to rush in before fully understanding how the system works, and then it is also undoubtedly too simple to presume that you can use it as a “Set It and Forget It” service.
Yet, PPC is like anything in that it improves the more time you dedicate to it. So, a mere 30 minutes per week to review your campaign and try out new ad ideas and text/copy can pay dividends.
The fact that such a large number of businesses do not appear to be recovering their costs is not reflected here at ClickThrough Marketing amongst our clients. Amy Bott, Head of Paid Search & Affiliates at ClickThrough, stated, “It’s not uncommon to see ROI of three, four or five times spend. For example, one of our larger clients, Norgren, has generated £9 in sales for every £1 spent on PPC. But it’s not just big companies who can benefit. Small companies can also start to see increased returns on their ad spend by adding in keyword negatives, following best practice in account structure, limiting spend on broad match, controlling CPCs and by thinking carefully about keyword selection.”
Even companies who are spending in the tens of pounds rather than the tens of thousands of pounds on PPC can achieve similar results by understanding the mechanisms behind PPC.
In our 101 Guide to PPC we cover many of the issues such as Quality Score, campaigns, ad copy, keywords, relevancy and much more of the essential tips and tricks which will help any SME to ensure a return on the marketing spend for PPC.
This basic understanding of PPC could mean all the difference between throwing money down the drain and increasing online sales. For instance, is your business setting a cap on spending, especially during the hours that your target audience is least likely to be online? Google will happily spend your advertising budget showing ads when the clickthroughs are least likely to result in a sale, so you need to ensure that this does not occur. Low clickthroughs will also affect your Quality Score, which tends to have a knock on effect over time, lowering the likely placement of an ad in the rankings, amongst other undesirable consequences.
In addition, it is important for SMEs to realise that the competition being faced may be amongst the largest corporates, particularly for certain highly desirable terms, and spending your precious budget on these terms is likely to result in lower sales. There is also too little attention paid to making sure that the terms being used lead to the appropriate landing page and a call to action relevant to the ad copy.
Hashtags. Do they matter or are you unaware of them? If the latter, it’s time you caught up!
There may be terms you do not appreciate or are not willing to use, but they are unlikely to go away any more than the word “internet” is.
#fail or hash fail (meaning “That didn’t work then”) has already worked it’s way into everyday language, especially amongst those who use Twitter or see the term on social media networks. Just as OMG and LOL have.
AFAIK hashtags crept in from the IRC world. If that sentence alone leaves you cold, then you should bring in a marketing expert to get you up to speed. Because if you are not careful, you may find yourself cranking the engine on your business when everyone else has electronic ignition.
Hashtags allow you to simply categorise your content according to a simple term, such as ‘fail’, which is easily searchable upon across the Web by adding the hashtag # in front.
Let’s put this into context in marketing terms. Let’s say you are attending or organising an event. You want people to talk about the event, the speakers, the content, the networking buzz etc. You especially want people to talk about it online. You can send them all to your website (which hopefully you have a special tracking URL for to judge the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns), but you also need them to talk, comment, opine, add comments etc.
This adds a whole extra dimension to any event – whether it is a live product announcement, an expo, a conference/seminar/webinar etc, or a news story.
Your choices are to set up a forum within that site, which requires moderators and extra resource, or just set up a simple back channel using Twitter. (Accept the massive amount of research that has already been done and go for the second option!)
In order to benefit from global exposure, you need to group people into one place, and the #hashtag creates a “room” where everyone interested in that topic can gather. So, I might run a really small, rural event called Fibrewalk and the hashtag for the event is #fibrewalk. If you enter that into any search engine, as well as Twitter, you can see all related content.
Suddenly, you have a whole new tool at your disposal and shortly we will discuss when and where you should be using hashtags to ‘brand’ your products and marketing efforts so that they reach the target audience more effectively.
As we said in Part 1 a while ago, businesses were not at that time permitted on Google + but that was no reason not to start thinking about how you will use it once the business applications open up.
19th September NEWSFLASH – Google+ is now wide open to everyone!!
Google+ is likely to advance quickly once the basics are resolved and Google announced today that they had passed 100 major changes to G+ which had been requested or were on the G+ team wishlist. Having a user base of at least 10 million within only a few weeks, even as a closed beta, the feedback came thick and fast for the development team. In addition, even a quick look at the different applications and services that Google can add on and integrate within G+ puts it considerably ahead of the vast majority of the competition, and that work has been ongoing throughout the summer.
Just a quick look at this page of Google Products, let alone the many Google Labs gives you an idea of how broad the Google church now is and where G+ might be going.
So, the integration of multiple different products inside Google +, or easily accessible from within G+, does indicate that for some G+ could be the portal from which all things happen. However, for others, change is to be avoided at all costs, and if there is a tool which works for you then it is unlikely that you will change it in a hurry.
What this means for businesses is that Google+ may well become yet another place in which you need to seek out your target audience, but not everyone will be using it, so you will still need to target your audience using the applications which they prefer. This could be Facebook, Twitter, Quora, LinkedIn etc.
It is also possible though that just as Tweetdeck has become the most popular Twitter app, third party developers will help to integrate existing tools with G+. Facebook has made this very difficult except with Connect, because the whole arena is closed off and everyone wanting to develop for Facebook must do so inside Facebook. Google is unlikely to make the same mistake, and the API for G+ is now available which means that many of the integration tools which were available previously will likely be superseded by apps developed within the API.
Will G+ take off as a replacement for Facebook for businesses? Right now, as Facebook also announce many changes, the likelihood is that as a business you will need to market to more than just one social network. But G+ now offers functionality for your business, rather than just as a marketing tool, that you would do well to look at. Shortly, we will be blogging about Hangouts and the changes announced this week that could save a fortune in producing content, collaboration, and exciting ways to engage with your customers.
Google has acquired Zagat.com – a local restaurant review site – and this acquisition indicates that Google are getting ever more serious about local search.
Zagat is not a start up but has reinvented itself for the Web after originally being a print based review platform. Looking at the stats – 350,000 reviewers, 100 countries, mobile, web and print presence, 32 years in the business – you can see why it would be an attractive buy for Google.
The reviews for the UK are quite sparse, although London is reasonably well-covered, and it is obvious that Google’s acquisition will mean the site gains considerable coverage and probably inclusion into the SERPs in some way. There have been plenty of intimations that reviews will play a far greater part in rankings, and adding additional value to the +1 button by linking to reviews on Zagat would seem like a good move for eateries and drinking establishments who understand search marketing.
Recently, whilst visiting hostelries and the like, it has become obvious that more and more are realising the value of online reviews and mentions. Foursquare stickers in windows and offers to the mayor, fliers on the bar encouraging reviews and offering rewards for doing so, and now services such as Urbanspoon.com have linked up with Zagat too.
For all restaurants, cafes, pubs, bars, fine dining, eateries and drinkeries of all sorts, online reviews are very important, and becoming ever more so now Google is involved.
The annual Talk Like a Pirate Day is upon us again – 19th September.
It’s the 16th year of the event and although the official website is showing its age, it is still worth a visit if you haven’t yet lost your sea legs.
So, how is the web’s love of everything Pirate holding up year on year?
Wouldn’t it be great if we could find out…
Funnily enough, we now have a lot more visibility on long-term search trends thanks to Google Trends, and it’s archive now contains seven years of data to give a true picture of the growth (and sadly, the fall) of the popularity in Talk Like a Pirate Day.
Talk Like a Pirate Day - Global Search Trends from Google Trends
As you can see from the above chart, Talk Like a Pirate Day peaked in 2006 (in terms of search volume). That’s back when MySpace was bigger than Facebook, and Tony Blair still had a year left in Number 10.
What is interesting is that although some online trends are real flash-in-the-pan – it has taken six years for the web to really begin to tire of this (admittedly very fun) day of Pirate-i-ness. And that’s possibly one reason why – if something only happens once a year, it takes far longer for people to tire of it – and there will still be some people online who have yet to discover this day dedicated to all things Piratey.
What’s the lesson for marketers? Well, creating “event days” have long been a mainstay of marketers, where they seek to “own” a day each year for their brand. In recent years, many brands have decided to launch their own music festivals and sporting events (e.g. Innocent Fruitstock, Ben & Jerrys Double Scoop Sundae and Red Bull X Fighters) to create an evergreen marketing vehicle that chimes with a particular demographic. They can create fantastic PR, generate oodles of unique content and provide opportunities to develop “money can’t buy” giveaways for consumers.
And what about the benefit in recurring events for online marketers? This chart from MajesticSEO for talklikeapirate.com show that even 16 years after launch the site still manages to gain links in the months surrounding the annual event, which can be very valuable as many of these will come from reputable and authoritative news sites reporting on the event on the day itself.
MajesticSEO - talklikeapirate.com
If you have run a one-off online event that has gone well, consider whether it can be repeated again – don’t assume that you target market has grown tired of it – or even that they all heard about it the first time around!
So, I hope ye enjoyed Talk Like a Pirate Day, ‘n I look fore t’ seein’ ye soon!
BTW – Have a go at Talking Like a Pirate yourself with this handy translation tool!
You may not know it but Tesco is the number 2 supermarket in Korea. And Korea is the land of super dooper Internet connectivity that puts Britain’s 2-20Mbps to shame. On top of that the Koreans have mastered everything mobile and tend to lead the way in mobile apps and services.
Shopping at rush hour in any city in the world is a faff. And carrying the bags back home – even worse. So, what has Tesco done? They have created a shop where there are simply life-size replicas of all the products and you scan them with your smartphone to add them to your virtual shopping basket. Which is then delivered to you at home.
This video highlights the experiment.
Tesco takes QR codes to new shopping levels
Whilst QR codes are still a novelty here, where smartphone ownership is considerably lower than older style phones, there are increasing numbers of uses being found for them around the world. Animated tattoos, QR codes on headstones, people wearing ties with QR codes for business contact details or to show a promotional video, in magazines, and on every product and space imaginable.
Now, start to imagine your expensive print brochure – 2D, static and with just a link to your website – coming alive with the use of QR codes. User manuals, videos of your products being used, customer testimonials on your site or Youtube, podcasts, business contact details, the latest news on your blog, even a webinar held only the previous day. All of this becomes possible with QR codes.
Tesco’s solution in Korea to the rush hour shopping problem, maximising the use of underground tunnels to capture new customers, is just a start. Any business can make use of QR codes in a fun and innovative manner, to cut production costs for marketing collateral, to attract attention to promotional material, to reach new customers.
Even adding one to your business card can mean you can easily share your business details when you are networking and know that your details are now securely held in the phone of your new contact, not lost deep inside a pocket.
All it needs is a little imagination and a QR generator such as Kaywa
