123-reg.co.uk

1. Use bullets

Do you remember when you used to do exams and the teachers always told you if you were running out of time, to list your outstanding points as bullet points? They did that for a reason. It’s far better to show your hand in a bullet than risk either not getting round to making your point or perhaps risk having your point lost in a paragraph or seven further down the page. Especially in digital delivery (online, social media, email, etc) brief is a winner.

2. Keep language simple in your headlines and bullet points

3. Show solutions

4. Pay heed to The Rule of 3

5. Use WOW words

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If you are in business, you should be doing it to make money. If not get out now. Running a business is not for the faint-hearted and even if you have £s to squander running a loss making business brings about more problems than just dwindling bank-balances.

So the key for your business should be getting more customers and thus more sales. That leads to the general assumption that the more resources you throw at your marketing the more your sales will go up. Unfortunately, it isn’t quite that simple.

What you market is as important as how you market and not every marketing push should be geared to making sales. In many ways social media blazed a trail in promoting this philosophy – promoting businesses with no real end checkout gain expected, although even social media now is forever being attacked with the need for improved ROI (return on investment). There is a big place for marketing that isn’t only after a direct sale.

Content Marketing has become something of a buzz-word in recent months which effectively focuses on those pieces of marketing without an immediate sales boost, but are more significant on lead generation and just general brand awareness.

So what is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is simply using engaging content to improve brand awareness and sentiment. In practice it can involve techniques, such as blogging, video, infographics, white papers, audio podcasts and slideshows. Some even more traditional methods like press releases and newsletters as part of their content marketing, provided it is created and written to attract new or engage existing customers and not just feed them a sales line.

Why does Content Marketing work?

It’s all about relationship. Build a rapport with your customer and they will begin to trust you more. Provide them with information that makes their experience with you better and they will show greater loyalty. That means better quality customers and better quality sales in the long run

So aim to engage, build trust and just get your brand known and accessible online and watch your sales increase with no hard sell needed.

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Running an online business has many advantages over a traditional bricks and mortar company. A virtual shop front gives you the ability to attract customers from all around the world. You’re not restricted to people passing on the local High Street. Your overheads are typically smaller, and if your product is an online service, you don’t have to worry about manufacturing or shipping costs.

But there’s a downside too. If your business only exists as a set of pixels on your customers’ computer screens, how do you prove to them that you’re more substantial? Can you demonstrate your credibility, and can you persuade them that you’re not a here-today-gone-tomorrow company?

Create a real world presence

Perhaps your online business needs a real-world presence, to build confidence and trust among more sceptical customers. At 123-reg, we’ve decided to try a high-profile route, by advertising on some of London’s buses. But there are plenty of other ways to ground your online company in reality too:

• Attend trade shows and events. Conferences, industry gatherings and public events are a great way to show the face of your business and meet potential customers. Maybe it’s wedding fayres or perhaps it’s motorshows, but attending the right events can dramatically increase your company profile among your target customers.

• Open a pop-up shop. A growing trend over the last couple of years, a pop-up shop is where you temporarily take over a retail space, usually for just a few weeks. It gives you a physical presence without having to worry about a long lease. Business campaign group StartUp Britain is currently giving online retailers the chance to sell on the High Street in a pop-up shop.

• Brand up your car. Driving around in garishly-branded cars is a trend popularised by estate agents. But there’s no denying it can be effective, particularly if you drive a lot for business or tend to use your car in areas where potential customers live. You just have to make sure you’re happy piloting a big, attention-grabbing advert for your company.

• Offer a collection service to local customers. Many online businesses are run out of small industrial units, large enough to store stock but not suitable as a retail outlet. If you have premises, why not give customers the option to visit to collect their purchases? Simply offering this facility will reassure customers that your business is established and successful.

Finally, always ensure you include a bit of background information on your website. At the very least, it’s important to provide full contact details, including a postal address where people can reach you. Additionally, your website’s ‘about us’ section is the ideal place to provide more information about the people behind the company.

Have you done anything to make your online business more tangible in the real world? Leave a comment to let us know.

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Trying to collate user information for Facebook and Twitter can be slightly tricky at best. If for arguments sake we accept that Facebook has in excess of 750 million users and Twitter has just recently passed the 100 million mark, we can say with a large amount of confidence that these sites command a great deal amount of respect as online communities.
Furthermore, according to research from Basekit, 36 per cent of UK businesses are using Facebook to attract new customers, making it a more popular tool for advertising than the Yellow Pages and Thomson Local.

So we have established that social media is big and that in itself is a rather obvious statement. So, where is this going you ask? There has been considerable research into how people log onto social media sites in recent years. US digital world measurer’s comscore report titled “2012 Mobile Future in Focus”, gives strong insight into the changes in behaviour we have towards social media and our hand held devices. The report highlighted that in the US there were more than 400 smartphone devices on the market. Furthermore, 2011 saw the smartphone market overtake normal handsets in Germany, France and the US joining the UK and Spain which achieved this feat in 2010.

Given the fact that smartphone penetration grew at least 8 percentage points in the US and the five strongest European economies in 2011, I would suggest that it is the development of smart phones that have allowed social media sites to gain the edge I online marketing rather than anything ground breaking from Facebook or Twitter.

Hardcore fans of such social media sites would scoff at this. I suggest that they would point to the fact that smart phones have developed new technologies so that users can have easier access to social media. I accept that in recent year’s large phone manufacturers have been judged by consumers on how well they connect to social media but it is still my belief that the smartphone market is driving social media interactions. Would people be as engaged with Facebook if they were no longer able to access it on the move? I will allow you to forge your own opinions on that but I would argue interactions would decrease at some rate.

Although most analysts would refute that the desktop/laptop PC market was dying out, new methods of interacting are constantly evolving. As this evolutionary process continues, social media will grow.

As tablets develop and become more affordable, it is likely that in the coming years these devices will provide a challenge for the PC and laptop manufacturers giving grounds for the growing argument those users want to access social media on the move.

People want to interact with social media on the move in 2012, which is obvious. As a greater number of small businesses place an importance on social media in relation to marketing campaigns, this can only seriously take off if smart phones and tablets become more affordable.

So as smartphone brands are now tasked with rebranding and becoming life necessities, there is serious room for a budget smartphone to dominate the space. Nokia, once the world’s leading mobile phone provider, last month announced it would unveil its new budget smartphone, the Lumia 610. In China, a country that boats the largest percentage of smartphone users, the country’s largest search giant, Baidu, launched its first budget smartphone.

Whether we accept that smartphones have driven social interactions or not, what is clear is that people want to use social media on the go. It is the wrong strategy for companies to only sell from 9am – 5pm, Monday to Friday. If the cost of smartphones does begin to decrease, the potential customer numbers online and engaged with social media is potentially astronomical. Social media sites have of course benefited from this but the real winners have and will continue to be small/medium sized businesses.

Don’t forget to leave your comments below and follow us on Twitter here 

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Royal Mail’s recent price increase has left many small businesses fearing that their business may not survive this change. The cost of first class stamps have risen 30%, from 46p to 60p, and second class 38%, from 36p to 50p, a massive burden that many businesses, at least in the short term will have to absorb themselves.

Four in five small businesses in the UK believe this change will affect their business as well as the way they communicate with customers. Recent research conducted by Pitney Bowes revealed that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are concerned that the postal rate increase will have such a negative impact that their business may not be able to recover afterwards. These are businesses that were relying on Royal Mail to send out correspondence and orders to their customers.

Cut costs with electronic mail

The change in postal rates is actually forcing businesses to look for alternative methods to communicate with their customers. Sure, you cannot download a shirt or a bike, but you can try cutting costs by switching to electronic email to keep in touch with customers and send them special offers.

With email, it’s so much easier and a lot cheaper to send e-cards, bills or marketing material. Take our professional email hosting service for instance.  You can create your email address personalised to your domain, such as office@yourbusiness.co.uk, and you can access it anywhere, anytime you want.

With email hosting, you will be able to manage all your emails, calendars and contacts from a single location. Also, you can communicate easier and faster with your customers and ensure your messages get to their inbox and are not lost along the way.

How are you planning to cut costs?

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There are a growing number of bloggers across the globe earning a proper and respectable wage from their online writing projects and understandably more and more bloggers or would be bloggers or content creators are keen to collect their slice too.

Until now that has been a bit difficult. Positive comments are nice but don’t pay the bills and pushing a link towards a paypal donation is never looked upon as the most professional approach to ask for some reward. A number of microdonation services have sprung up in recent years, claiming to hold the answer, some have been and gone, others appear to have more longevity.

One that appears to be getting a foothold is Flattr. A service aimed at all those positive comment leavers to leave a monetary tip for the content creators too. This week they have announced a deal that could at least put there service under the noses of more and more potential users, and they hope, lead to a groundswell and movement towards tipping for online content your have enjoyed. The deal is with Dailymotion, the biggest video portal behind the giant that is YouTube. Those uploading to Dailymotion now have the option to include a Flattr button onto their channels and on the credits of each video, so you can appeal for donations or tips to earn money from your shared content without the need for a pre-roll ad that so often frustrates.

The concept behind Flattr aims to avoid the barrier of constantly re-entering card details or the like, and takes on the strength of the like button of Facebook by tipping from a pre-paid ‘pot’ with a minimum of just 2 Euro investment per month of which Flattr takes a 10% service fee.  A relatively small investment but in the world of social media, becoming known as the person doing good deeds and genuinely rewarding others could have almost unquantifiable long-term benefits.

Whether this latest move by Dailymotion will kickstart the concept remains to be seen, but in a world where the debate over paid-for-content still rages, this may be the next ‘acceptable’ step for many, especially if the correct ‘well-meaning’ spin is put on the regime.

Are you using Flattr or any other micropayment service? Are there enough ‘good-hearted’ people about for the scheme to ever take off?

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Image: Danilo Rizzuti / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Time: We’re always complaining we don’t have enough time to get things done. However, as a marketer no day should go by without getting up to date with your website analytics. Results matter so you have to check and see if your marketing efforts are paying off.

This article covers a few simple steps you should follow at least once a week so you can stay up to date with your site’s metrics. This is what you have to check:

Traffic

Traffic should be the first thing on your list. No matter the type of website you own/run getting traffic to your site is as important as air. And you don’t want to run out of air, do you?

When you check to see what your site’s traffic looks like, focus mainly on the number of visitors – unique as well as returning. Try to find out from this data what drove visitors to your site in a certain period of time or at a peak – maybe you ran a marketing campaign, sent an e-mail newsletter or ran a special offer. If your traffic was lower compared to a previous month, try to determine the factors that lead to a decrease – were there holidays, for instance, that could influence it?

Conversions

How is your site performing in terms of conversions? You can have a huge amount of traffic but if your visitors don’t convert, it means you’re doing something wrong. Check to see your call-to-actions, special offers or anything that would convince the visitor to convert. Take a closer look at the pages with low conversion rates and figure out how to include more opportunities for your visitors that they wouldn’t want to miss out on. Obviously, check the copy too as there might be something missing there.

Sources

Take a look at the organic searches, marketing campaigns, social media traffic, direct traffic and see if there’s a trend that catches your attention. What about the referral traffic? Anything interesting there? Use the inbound links to see if maybe there’s a linking opportunity there – maybe offer to write a guest post to generate more traffic to your site. If your blog posts are also generating traffic, check to see which ones are the most engaging and create more topics around that type of content.

Keywords

Analyze the keywords and see which ones have converted better. On the other hand, don’t neglect those keywords with low conversion rates because often these are opportunities you need to explore more. Write down these keywords and remember to use them in future content and blog posts. For an even better positioning, try to avoid general keywords and instead go with long-tail variations that are more specific to your business.

ROI

You are investing time and money in to your website, but are you generating sales to provide a return on that investment? See how you can reduce costs where possible.

As a conclusion, don’t just analyse. Review those stats but also write down some actions that need to be taken in order to constantly improve your marketing efforts.

How often do you review your site’s metrics? What metrics do you consider to be the most relevant?

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The rise of social media not only gives you the chance to reach a wider audience with your affiliate links, but also the chance to differentiate how you offer the products of the affiliate scheme you are signed up to compared to fellow affiliates.

It needn’t be just about re-tweeting the offers of your merchant provider. In fact the greater unique content you offer, the more likely your audience and engagement with them will grow. With that will come more click-throughs and hopefully more money.

As an affiliate you naturally have to ‘tell’ the story of your merchant and that’s something you can’t forget. Social media offers some great tools for that too. Using software such as HootSuite you can schedule pre-written tweets to go out at certain times – perfect for tweeting about the latest offers. It means you can still ‘run’ your affiliate marketing scheme in your spare time but to the world you can look busy during normal working hours and tweeting during those hours when more are online you are likely to pick up more click-throughs too.

However, social media really comes into its own in developing ways of making sure your affiliate links get clicked instead of those of a fellow affiliate. Via Twitter it is easy to offer your audience the links to the great offers provided by your merchant, but you can also mix that up with other relevant industry information. In this way you offer more reason for potential customers to follow you – pure sales tweets never entice many in, but interesting content does. Good content spreads across Twitter like wildfire and usually retains the attribution from where it came from too, so people can find you and come and see what else you are tweeting about.

Taking it to the full, that could mean setting up a website that has engaging blogs, or even expert guest bloggers alongside your affiliate links and pods. Yet, you needn’t got that far. Just engaging via Twitter; helping others where you can, tweeting useful articles and combining them with winning offers, will give you credibility and authority on your topic. That brings greater following, greater trust and more than likely, greater click-through and affiliate earnings.

If you’ve not yet tested the water with Twitter, give it a go now. The best way to find out how social media will work with the way you do business is by giving it a try and learning ‘on the job’, so don’t be shy.

Do you use social media to increase your affiliate activity? What have you found most useful?

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FourSquare, Gowalla, Facebook Places: What you are doing when and where is what smartphones appear to have been designed for. Even Twitter lets you search for tweets sent locally – location is a big feature of social media and still much under-used by businesses.

Most Smartphones now come with geo-location and if you’ve not used or don’t really know what it is all about you are missing out. Basically it is similar to tracking or positioning that you may be used to if you use a GPS sat nav. The location of a place or user is identified either by using the IP address of their computer or the radio-frequency identification (RFID) of the user’s smartphone. With the increase in uptake of the smartphone there it is a marketing tool with growing potential for the for small businesses.

The first to use it for marketing have been the bar / restaurants and retail sector. Networks such as Foursquare and Gowalla combine gamification with check-in at new places and by encouraging visitors to check in, the business can use that information to track trends and even target specific campaigns to the users checking in. You can even encourage new people on the networks to sign in by offering special offers when they are in the vicinity. Once customers choose to engage in this way you can almost guarantee they are more likely to be better engaged than your average ‘casual’ customer so it is well worth the investment into looking after them.

What’s more location-based social networks like FourSquare and Gowalla now offer integration into other networks like Twitter and Facebook so you can encourage your check-in customers to re-tweet or post to their wider audiences on the bigger networks too, spreading your brand.

Geo-location is still in its infancy and many even with smartphones don’t yet fully grasp it, either as a business or end-user. However, the integration and possibilities seem endless and are only likely to improve, so if you invest time and effort now you could see yourself several leaps above your competitors in an area of marketing that will become commonplace in a matter of months.

Do you already use location-based marketing? How? With what effect? We’d love to feature any innovative ideas.

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With the summer all but over, so is the festival season that has kept social networks busy in recent months with photo postings, check-ins or simple profile updates. Those active in social media like to show off where they are and what they are doing and those not so lucky to be there like to make comments back, while others in the vicinity often pipe up to say hi, come and meet me. Big ticketing events like these are immensely social but so far it has been more an informal use of social tools and not one businesses have been that great at capitalising upon. Until now.

Ticketmaster last week launched a new feature in it’s Facebook strategy. Seat tagging means now when you book your tickets for your event, your friends can immediately see when and where they will be attending. Either that will make them extremely jealous, or as Ticketmaster hope, it will inspire them to book with you. An article on the changes at FastCompany quotes Ticketmaster CEO Nathan Hubbard “Each time a ticket buyer shared with Facebook friends that he was attending an event, that alert generated $5.30 in additional ticket revenue.” So already, the customers were using Facebook to inspire each other to make similar purchases, but now Ticketmaster have made that easier.

It really is an example of social commerce. Via the new application, just as you might visit a site and see the faces of your friends pop up, as other people who have liked the site via Facebook, so now when you go to book your tickets on the venue seat map, you will see what friends have already booked and where they are sitting. It is enhanced Facebook connectivity that could change the way people spend their leisure time.

Unfortunately, for those in the UK, it is a US-based application for the ticketmaster.com website powering it, but don’t expect it to be too long before the UK follows suit. As a nation entertainment ticket buying is a business sector not apparently affected by the current economic slowdown, we like to have treats like this to look forward too.

The Facebook integration feature Work on the interactive seat map that launched in the US last year and is now used in more than 300 venues  allowing fans to choose their exact seats instead of relying on Ticketmaster’s “best available” option, another feature us in the UK will have to wait a little while for yet.

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