Sharpen Marketing

If you’ve looked at a new site or new technology and thought ‘I want that in my business’ then be very careful.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of putting the technology platform first and then trying to find a way to make it work in your organisation.  This is not the right way to go.

Firstly, the originators of whatever  you’re looking at know nothing about your customers, your business and your goals. Secondly, the technology in and of itself is not the great idea - it’s the application and context that’s important to your success. Thirdly, there may be something better to meet your needs that might not be quite as high profile or maybe just hasn’t come past your door yet.

Like all the best plans. Start with your objectives, define the opportunity, outline your needs and then seek out the best method of delivery.

Digital marketing, Management, Planning, Uncategorized

Daily? Weekly? Monthly? How often do you email your customers and customers?

There is varying research on what the frequency of email communication should be, some of this is summarised here:http://bit.ly/MSMxn

This is another area where there is no quick answer. I believe that frequency is the wrong question and relevance is much more important. After all, don’t you like to talk to your partner or best friend everyday?

Three things to consider:

1. Ask your customers how often they want to hear from you.

2. Test by changing the frequency and understanding effectiveness to allow you to arrive at the optimum time period

3. Don’t email for the sake of it. If you haven’t got something to say, don’t say it.

Changing your email frequency can be a great way to increase sales, response and engagement. Ensure you optimise this and then keep it under review.

Email marketing, Planning, Uncategorized email, research, testing

Recently published, ‘Free’ by Chris Anderson may not be as ground breaking as his book, ‘The Long Tail’, but it captures the concept of free and how this relates to digital business.

Link to Amazon here: http://bit.ly/zDf8Q

Uncategorized

Search Engine Optimisation can be the strongest weapon in your marketing mix. There are some core principles behind my approach to SEO and they have proven to deliver effectively for a range of clients.

Good marketing = Good SEO
SEO is not independent of your marketing plan. The same principles of understanding your audience, differentiating your product and identifying your market apply in SEO as they do in any form of marketing.

SEO is ongoing
Good SEO is not a one time activity. Search engines, competitors and your offer are all moving pieces and your SEO strategy needs to reflect this.

Google vs the others
There’s no escaping that Google accounts for over 80% of search. It’s therefore right that Google is the focus for most SEO activity. My starting point is google, with the occasional tweak throughout a campaign for other engines.

The background basics
A lot can be achieved in SEO with on page content and link building, but you will help yourself enourmously if your site build or content management system is search friendly to start with. Make sure you ask your system supplier to talk you through the main search optimisation features of your solution

No guarantees
Noone can guarantee you search positioning. If they do, my advice is to walk away. Through methodic and targeted activity, you should see your site rise up the rankings but ignore promises of top 3 or first page.

Content is king
A cliché perhaps, but it is true. People using the web, and therefore search engines, love content. It provides information that users are looking for and gives you an asset to ’sell’ to the search engines. Without content it’s going to be difficult to make a complete success of SEO.

Plan link building carefully
It can be relatively easy to start building out backlinks to your site through various online services and directories that are availle. However, you should want to apply an element of quality control to this and also need to be aware that this is not always looked on favourably by the search engines. There’s no substitute for a well built and managed link campaign that should, in the long term, product mmuch better results.

Measurement is important
So I’ve said ignore those that make wild promises, but that doesn’t mean to say measurement is not important. Depending on certain circumstances, you should want to see your ranking improve after about a month of SEO activity and this can be measured.

80% planning. 20% execution
Time up front spend on keyphrase analysis is time very well spent. This will be the main driver of your SEO strategy and needs to be right.

Digital marketing digital, online, SEO

Econsultancy has collated 29 tips from their Twitter followers on website optimisation. Some great hints in here and a good checklist to go over

Find out more!

Uncategorized

Getting the subject line right is critical to the success of your outbound email campaign. You need to engage the audience, avoid the spam filters and drive up your open rates and click throughs.

Mailchimp is a great online emarketing tool, check-out their subject line comparison data here.

Direct Marketing email, mailchimp, software

Determining your target market is a critical element of marketing planning, particularly in difficult financial times when budgets are stretched. Don’t waste time and money on the wrong customer.

How to define target market with little budget? Look at the data you have. This is the best starting point by far. Who has bought from you to date, what is their profile, how did they find you, what did they like? Answer these questions and use them to draw a picture of your target market.

Turn your target market into characters with a pen portrait or persona. Given them a name, a background, a family. The more you live and breathe them, the better.

Uncategorized

For a complete software solution for your retail, eCommerce or fulfilment business then you could do a lot worse than looking at Priam business software: www.priamsoftware.com

Priam fit in to the great category of ‘big enough to cope, small enough to care’. They are an easy company to work with and the system is feature rich and cost effective. What they may lack in project management and documentation, they make up for in flexibility.  The Priam system integrates with a front-end eCommerce solution, Appease. While this may not be as feature rich as many applications (check out Magento), it is strong enough as an integrated solution with the Priam system.

Priam and Appease sites include:

www.rucraft.co.uk

www.jojomamanbebe.co.uk

shop.tottenhamhotspur.com

Marketing general eCommerce, software, system

In difficult economic times, looking after customers is more important than ever before.
This is illustrated very well (alongside some other great advice) in this article:
econsultancy.com/blog/2982-top-10-tips-for-retailers-to-combat-the-economic-downturn

Mike Weston comments along similar lines here:
www.sandlines.net/2008/12/01/customer-lifetime-value/

Customer Service recession

This is a great model for time management as it is simple to use and apply but gets you thinking about your projects and tasks.

Important urgent model

Urgent tasks are deadline based - the sooner the deadline, the more urgent it is. Urgency has no relation to importance and is often set by others.

The importance of a task drives how much time you want to spend on it – essentially how critical you believe it is to your business. Again, important is not related to urgent.

A: Highly important and urgent tasks should be rare if you are well planned. These need immediate attention as they are both critical to your business and face deadline demands.

B: You may find many tasks fall into urgent but not important. You should do the minimum required to complete these, can they be delegated? Can they be automated?

C: Tasks left undone in this area may well end up in ‘A’ eventually. This is often where you can make the biggest longer term gains for your business. They demand you make the time outside of your urgent tasks.

D: If tasks here are left undone, they could find themselves becoming urgent or may simply be irrelevant. Some nice to have initiatives may be in here.

Project Management tasks, time management