Alice Elliott's blog » visibility

New-style online advertising will still annoy?

Alice — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 12:28:58 +0000

It’s a very common occurrence to come across advertising on blogs. Usually it’s the way these publications can keep the information they post free from charge, as the revenue generated helps pay for the expenses incurred.

But do you actually notice them? I certainly don’t. I’ve learned to gloss over them to find the information I want, a bit like the way I scan tweets in Twitter to find the ones that interest me the most.

To overcome this, advertisers have had to think of a way to get people to notice their adverts. Being extra clever with the headlines, putting animation in to disengage your attention, including hard to resist call to actions designed to pull even the hardened punter, all these are failing to get results.

So now the newest idea that’s come up is 30 second long TV-style adverts. These will be much harder to ignore, even pop-up ads. How would you respond to a short film popping up within the blog you were trying to read? Would you really stop, down tools, and watch these phenomena?

Another concept put forward by internet marketers is that even though these adverts will cost more, they will have a higher profile with a huger impact, thus becoming more effective and cost-worthy. The idea is that in the long run these ads will supercede the smaller static versions, who will gradually diminish in their intensity and numbers.

Is this a good idea? After the trial of 5 weeks on 15 carefully chosen websites, will this catch on? Will we welcome this style of advertising with open arms, or will we rue the development of technology and yearn for the old style advertising methods?

How to write good newsletter content

Alice — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 09:00:30 +0000

In my last post I wrote about how to increase the opening rates of your newsletter, and for this post I am concentrating on newsletter content and how that can increase the likelihood of it being read.

Newsletters should be conversational pieces to educate, entertain and inform your readership. They shouldn’t consist of long technical articles stuffed full of jargon which really should be published in professional periodicals or on suitable article directories on the internet. They should consist of short, sharp, snappy sentences in everyday English; the same concept applying to sections or paragraphs, preferably three rather than five or more, accompanied with apt subheadlines to aid scanning and quick reading.

I mentioned earlier how important headlines were. Some people write their headlines after the content has been created, others think of a headline first and then the content materialises afterwards. Whatever you do, most of your attention should be directed to your headline, and the time taken to revise, rethink and rewrite your headline could pay off dividends. Successful newspapers employ special copywriters just for the headlines alone – they realise the importance of a good headline, and so should you.

Be aware that newsletters are not a medium for sales (the same with social networking), they are there to create and maintain a relationship with your readers. Like networking, you provide information about your business and what you are doing to enable your audience to understand various elements in fuller detail that what is available from your website. This is also the same with a blog, albeit in smaller contributions, more frequently and consistently delivered in a bite-sized, digestible format (and even smaller and frequenter still in Twitter).

Another way to boost interest in your content is to work around a prop like a picture or cartoon. Select a single product, idea, concept or service (too many can be confusing) to attract attention and aid concentration, as well as something to hang your subject matter from. One specific idea or concept, simply expressed, will go a long way towards comprehension and relationship building than long-winded missives full of complicated technical stuff that only results in confusion, turn-off, deletion and ultimately unsubscription.

How to get more people to open your newsletters

Alice — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 09:00:33 +0000

One of the features of Appletree’s newsletter system JAC shows how many of your newsletter’s recipients have opened it (and there is also a new feature that shows you who has opened it too and how many times). One statistic is that newsletters with large mailing lists seem to show a low open rate. So how can this be improved?

Large mailing lists that show a high opening rate often have worked well if the sender knows each recipient personally or has been in recent contact with them. This is particularly true if the members have given their permission for their details to be included on the mailing list. If you have boosted your mailing list from purchased lists or have added on this information from business cards collected at a networking meeting, then without their permission readers won’t know who you are, won’t recognise your business, won’t be ready to receive your newsletter and will most likely delete it or unsubscribe. How personal are you with each member on your mailing list?

JAC also shows which emails have bounced. This is because these details are incorrect, the recipeint has moved on or left the company, they are spelt wrong, or whatever. JAC allows you a chance to go through the monthly list and check for corrections and updating, as after three strikes of continuous bouncing, JAC will delete these email addresses from you account. So when did you last clean up your mailing list? Getting rid of unnecessary emails will tighten your list and increase the opening rate.

When a newsletter has been sent into someone’s inbox, the first thing they usually see is the title. This vital portion of your newsletter should be given a lot of thought when writing your newsletter, as it is a major factor towards increasing your opening rate. If they are too long, contain too much jargon, and are not ‘grabbing’ enough, your reader will not be enticed to click on it.

These headlines (which also are repeated in the newsletter itself and contribute hugely towards the main content) could work better if they contained an open ended question (What? How? Why?) – not one that could be answered by a Yes or a No. The idea is to arouse curiosity in the reader so that they want to open it to find out more about what’s inside. It should also match a need or gap in the reader’s knowledge that is relevant or poignant for that present time – response is always higher if it triggers a ‘Yes, I really need to know this now’ reaction.

So, what other methods do you have to increase the opening rates of your newsletters that you can share with us?

How to make your advert stand out

Alice — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 10:00:36 +0000

In this particular local magazine I regularly receive through my letterbox I get a chance to purvey various attempts at designing advertising. I do feel sorry for multiple trades who have to compete with each other, all trying to attract the same customers from the same page:

Look! Four plumbers jostling with each other to capture the same audience!

(Actually it think it’s a bit cruel of the magazine compiler to do this, but the thinking behind it may be to make it easier for customers to find the plumbers’ ads quickly if they are in an emergency!)

So how do you make your ad stand out from the others?

What all these plumbers are doing are trying to raise customer awareness that they exist. They are relying heavily on reputation, how well they are known in the community, the longevity of their business or even how quickly someone answers the telephone!

They are all keen to tell you their features: what they can do, how many years’ experience they have, even that they can do anything! One does mention his speciality, and another lists what works he can undertake. Not one mentions any benefits they can give their customers, or any testimonials or case studies from satisfied customers.

None of them have reassured their customers they can make their lives better in an emergency, that their focus is to provide a quick and easy service with the least fuss and immediate response. There are no headlines to capture their customers’ attention with empathetic questions or statements that they understand their customers’ pain and can provide the solution for it.

One does say he is a specialist at bathroom refurbishment – great! He needs to grow his reputation in this area to gain a following, then he can tell his satisfied customers he does other plumbing work as well. Just a tiny testimonial saying “I had trouble with X and this plumber sorted it out by doing Y” will speak volumes on an advert. Don’t think to have to mention everything – if you do specialise in other areas, take out other similar adverts for those niches later, using the same principles.

There’s no mistaking the fact that these are all plumbers though, the word plumbing appears at the top of each. But it needn’t be in their names, you can rely on the word appearing in the headlines or solution filled subheaders. If you establish you understand your customers’ predicaments at the top of the adverts, put your company names at the bottom along with your logo, straplines and qualification logos, followed by your contact details in large, clear numbers and letters. Telephone numbers obviously need to be big, as that is usually the main source of contact customers look for, but don’t undermine your email or web addresses either.

List your benefits in bullet points, or failing that a list of features you specialise in, this is why the one that sticks out the most is the top left hand advert. His image of a tap also aids as a focal point. The top right advert has too much text because he has to list everything he works with, so it looks too confusing to someone in a hurry. The bottom left puts his speciality too far down his list, it should be something he crows about. And the bottom right is just plain boring!

And some food for thought: what incentive can you give your customers to make them choose you from the other three, such as a percentage discount or special offer if they quote this advert, for instance? And is there any guarantees you can give your customers, like a response within a certain time? Remember, the customer always comes first… without them you don’t have a business.

Do your customers use the same social media?

Alice — Tue, 11 May 2010 10:30:50 +0000

This was the topic of conversation I had at a CIM course on marketing trends the other week. Of course the speakers were stressing how important it was to get into social networking, in order for our businesses not to get left behind, but one particular lady next to me was not convinced.

I asked her what she meant. She replied saying she worked for a chemical business, full of scientists and technicians. She could not see her colleagues using Facebook, for example, as a means for marketing, as she did not think that was where their clients were. She also couldn’t see them using Twitter, as they did not have the time for ‘gossiping’.

My initial reaction was to defend social networking, but then I stopped and thought about it. Maybe she had a point. Were the ideal clients for this company to be found on Facebook? If they were, they probably had profiles to keep tabs on their travelling children, or to organise their social lives. Not everybody thinks ‘business’ when using Facebook.

And Twitter: excellent for brand awareness, PR and marketing research, for keeping an eye on your competitors or following what your colleagues’ activities, to provide top tips and raise your expertise, to interact with prospects and expand the audience for your blog posts – maybe her concept of ‘gossiping’ could evolve here into something more useful, if she had the inclination.

But what she did agree with was the power of LinkedIn. A professional social networking site full of charted chemical engineers and other like-minded scientists, somewhere to expand your expertise, ask and answer questions, respond to discussions in associated groups, feed your blog posts and share other valuable resources, each profile assimulating a CV and therefore excellent for recruitment or finding suitable colleagues to work with. That is where her company’s clients were.

So my question is: in which social networking sites do your clients or customers hang out? And having done the research, fully concentrate on those examples and don’t waste time with irrelevant sources. Doing something well in a concentrated form is better than half-hearted attempts spread thinly across the board. It makes it much easier to track, receive feedback, work out the return on investment and assess the value of further projects in that media.

So what are your ideas about this?

Don’t wait for your customers, go find them

Alice — Thu, 06 May 2010 10:30:15 +0000

Gone are the days when customers came to you. The internet may be compared to a massive shopping-mall, but it is, of course, so huge, there is no way anybody could possibly walk pass your shop (website) unless they knew it was already there.

There are some websites that capitalise on this phenomenon, due to their reputation. They may display a select niche unavailable elsewhere, or provide a service that is second to none. They certainly will have a select following who sing their praises, and word-of-mouth and referrals can be the backbone of a business’s survival.

The alternative, while you are trying to obtain these dizzying heights of recognition, or fine-tune your reputation, would be to increase your visibility. To confirm my first statement, you need to go where your customers are, as well as being very easy to find.

Of course the optimum place would be on the first page on Google (every Search Engine Optimisation provider’s objective), but this is notoriously difficult to achieve. Google positioning is as unpredictable as the British weather. Research into patterns of how visitors use search engines show that many don’t pan below the ‘fold’, the area underneath what is visible, and approximately 80% don’t go further than the first page of their search.

You could spend some money on a pay-per-click campaign (Google Adwords) to achieve your first page position, but bear in mind that only about a third of surfers look at the sponsored ads. And unless you know exactly what you are doing, a huge portion of your marketing budget could be whittled away, especially if you don’t know what your objectives are.

There are alternatives to raising web-visibility. Social networking sites (Facebook is the most visited website online; Twitter is aimed at increased PR and brand awareness; LinkedIn is aimed at professionals and their Answers section could certainly raise your expertise status), blogging (which should act as an interactive hub of your online presence) and YouTube (where adverts are watched far more than on TV, and are searchable for criteria and keywords) should certainly be added into the equation, and form a considerable part of your online-marketing stategy.

So my questions are: what are you doing to bring your online presence to where your customers are? And if so, are you reaching out to the right kind of customer, or are you frequenting the correct social media for your target market? (This sounds like a subject for another post – watch this space…)

How can social media work for you?

Alice — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 10:30:22 +0000

One good reason to social network is to increase your or your business’s online visibility. Nowadays, if you can’t be found on the web, you practically don’t exist. Therefore the need to maintain this level of exposure, especially since social networking knows no boundaries, makes it all the more vital to keep ahead of your competitors.

Use Google Alerts and Twitter Search to keep an eye on what people are saying about you (also called monitoring, commonplace on Twitter) and also to be aware of what your competitors are doing. This means you don’t have to stalk them (heaven forbid), but use this knowledge to your advantage: congratulate them on their achievements, note any developments they are making, find a niche they’re not pursuing which you can.

Work out a marketing strategy before you start. What are you goals? – more traffic to your website; more emails requesting information; more activity in your e-shopping cart, more requests to speak at events… then you can measure these conversions and adapt your methods for better results.

Use social media as a method for marketing research: discussions (Twitter, LinkedIn Q&A, Facebook business pages), polls and surveys (GoDaddy, blogs, LinkedIn groups, Survey Monkey), questions (Twitter, LinkedIn Q&A), finding knowledge through keywords (YouTube, Twitter, blogging networks) – the list goes on.

It’s so important to engage with your followers on social networking. Take an interest in what others are doing: interact positively, retweet and share, listen and provide valuable information. Write your entries in easy to understand language (no jargon, text speak or confusing acronyms), and certainly include links to relevant resources to back you up or show respect to other experts.

And one last point: consistent activity in small bursts is far more effective than a massive marathon and then nothing for a few weeks. Social networking, especially Twitter, works on the concept of ‘now’, so a maintained presence works better than an occasional show.

How to use marketing within LinkedIn

Alice — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 10:30:39 +0000

Everybody in the business world knows that LinkedIn is the professional social networking site, and that anybody worth their salt should be a member. But it’s not just somewhere to put up your profile (which, by the way, is more like a CV than a mere description) so that people can find and connect with you (though that is always a very good thing to encourage), you can use LinkedIn for many marketing purposes as well.

LinkedIn is now connected to other social networking sites, in particular Twitter, where you can feed your updated status comments directly into your Twitter-stream, and vice-versa, either automatically or using the hashtags #in or #li.

You can feed your blog’s RSS URL into your LinkedIn profile which automatically updates with a headline link and a taster of your post’s beginning. A great way to promote your blog more than just including the link to it in your profile.

Oh, and in the links capacity in your profile, don’t just use the standard ‘My website’ description, use the ‘other’ facility to be more descriptive or supply the website’s or blog’s proper name.

Join up to as many groups as you can. These are a fantastic way to network and spread your expertise. Participate in the discussions, feed relevant resource material into the news sections, and share your knowledge. Create your own group for your company or organisation, an excellent opportunity for your own promotions or keeping in touch with interested parties.

Regularly participate in the Question and Answers section of LinkedIn; a thriving area that you can’t afford to overlook. It’s perfectly positioned for spreading your expertise, doing marketing research, finding out what’s happening in your particular niche, finding answers to your most pressing questions. This is a fantastic resource of valuable information, which can be sent to your Google homepage through RSS feeds so you can immediately view the most recent questions to get your contribution in fast. And if you’re fortunate to be chosen as the best answer, this is indicated on your profile and signature throughout LinkedIn.

How to use Twitter without wasting time

Alice — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 10:00:56 +0000

At a networking talk I gave recently about social media, one of the questions I was asked was ‘how do you use things like Twitter without wasting so much time?’

First of all it’s important to have a focus in what you want out of using social media. It is very easy to go in without any idea of what you want to get out of it, so you watch and read everything that is going on, get sidetracked into areas that aren’t anything to do with you or your business, and before long an hour has gone by.

Whereas if your purpose is to find out more about your niche or subject that is relevant to you, you could post up statements or questions aimed to provoke an answer or feedback, follow like-minded or expert followers who could provide more information about your line of business, or even put up tweets that promote or explain your business (but a word of warning here, Twitter is about networking, not selling) so that interested tweeple might want to read it, retweet it and comment back.

I use TweetDeck to follow mentions of my username or any other keyword I have chosen, columns of interesting tweeple who I like to keep an eye on and experts/competitors you want to follow, and dip in now and again to see what’s going on. I give it about 30 seconds for anything to grab my attention, otherwise I go back to work.

If there is something worth-while, I participate by answering or retweeting what I think is applicable. I wait and read the main Twitter-stream for a while to see if anything comes from my contribution, and respond accordingly. Sometimes I go back to work for a quarter of an hour and then drop in again to see if there have been any more responses to earlier tweets, but again keeping my presence to a minimum.

This is my way of getting my work done, but still being aware of what is happening on Twitter within my pre-determined group of followers.

How effectively are you using LinkedIn?

Alice — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 10:30:52 +0000

LinkedIn is usually considered to be professional, as opposed to Facebook which is more social. It is more business biased, yet should be treated as a social networking site. The method of acquiring contacts (rather than friends) is strictly controlled, with a connective reason needing to be confirmed before a prospective is approached.

Promote yourself, not your business

As it is a networking site, it shouldn’t be used to publicise your business. The profile is in your name, so ideally it is you and your expertise which should be promoted. Therefore your profile page needs to be fully completed, with a good photo, a quick summary underneath it, links to you website and blogs so inquirers can find out more about you, and a CV biography showing your past employment and educational history.

If you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours

People buy from people, so create a good impression by growing your contact list, and by giving and receiving recommendations or testimonials. It’s worth communicating with the people you have collated, rather than just acquiring them as trophies, and swapping over information for each other can further your social networking prowess.

Spread your knowledge around

Expand your expertise by regularly visiting the Questions and Answers section on LinkedIn and contributing to the activity. You can feed these questions to your Google Reader page to keep tabs on new entries and to quickly get your response in. If you are fortunate to be chosen as the best answer, this is promoted on your profile. And ask a question for marketing research purposes, as this is an excellent tool to gather necessary and valuable information.

Join in with the activities

Join groups on LinkedIn and participate in them regularly. You will get email reminders on new material in each group, but it is worth going in to see if new comments have recently been added, or whether anybody has responded to your previous contribution; create a vibrant discussion on a particular point. Also spread your expertise by feeding your blog posts or any other relevant resource into the News section. You could even set up your own group and grow a following who are interested in contributing to your cause or discussing your area of business.

It won’t happen immediately

As networking is a long-term activity, don’t expect results overnight. Remember to update your status box regularly and feed it to Twitter, set up a feed from your blog into your profile so visitors can read your latest posts, watch your contacts’ activities, be interested and generally participate. The dividends will be worth it – but over time.