After another record-breaking festive period for ecommerce sales, there’s no a better time for retailers to focus on improving their website for the year ahead.
Here are 7 potential new years resolutions for retailers who are looking to stay at the top of their game for the year ahead. (more…)
Piggyback marketing is a technique that has been used by companies for years and if it is done correctly you can end up with fantastic results off the back of it. It is important to get it right though. I have seen companies attempt piggyback marketing and it come back to bite them.
In this post, I am going to share some examples of piggyback marketing campaigns that have gone well and would not have cost the business a huge amount of money. Hopefully these ideas will give you some inspiration to try this marketing technique out for yourself. You simply need to think outside the box and find events that your potential customers would be interested in. (more…)
Recently there’s been a lot of talk about the SEO and PR industry. The reason? Google’s latest developments – mainly Authorship and its ranking signals. For a change this is not only one for SEOs, this time it also highly impacts other professions such as PRs and journalists.
Frankly put industries that have quite a few similarities as both require high visibility and exposure to increase ROI on their efforts. The foundation of PR is creating compelling content that grasps their target audiences’ attention but in order to grasp their attention any PR has to be armed with the finest relationship building skills with the hope that influential journalists will cover the topic, right?
Journalists on the other hand have to ensure that they are well respected and trusted within the industry to maximise their ROI, therefore visibility and exposure are crucial. So where am I going with this? (more…)
Last month I spoke at the SearchLove London conference. One of the sessions I took part in was entitled ‘Let’s Get Real’ where each of the speakers were asked to share an actionable tip or tactic.
The tip I shared was around FAQ or Terms and Conditions pages, and went a little something like this:
When you get back to the office on Wednesday morning, go take a look at your FAQ and/or Terms and Conditions pages. Most are woeful. All too often the language used is unfriendly at best; or impenetrable legal jargon at worst. This is a crying shame on several counts – not only may it adversely affect a visitor’s perception of your company, but it may actually lose you business.
Why am I bothered about these pages?
Because the visitors who are reading your FAQ or Terms and Conditions pages are a hair’s breadth from converting on your site.
Talk about snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.
No one wants to be *that* girl.
Last week I reported on how Mitt Romney’s presidential website accidentally came online and how it was indexed by Google. A classic mistake for those working with websites, I suspect there are few readers who have set websites live in the past did not run into a similar issue once in their professional lives.
In this case however it was the classic mistake made by the company in combination with the losing elections from Romney and the fact that it involved a ‘big name’ which made it interesting. The post did really well, lots of views and lots of shares, most of them with added texts like “hehe” or “Oops”.
The mistake was covered by many websites, from tech sites to political sites to newspaper websites. All over the world. Looking at these articles around the globe about this relatively small mistake gives a nice insight in how different people from different backgrounds can look at this. (more…)
My single biggest gripe I have about the digital marketing industry is the pervasiveness of short-term thinking in clients.
Too many corporate leaders seem to think that digital marketing has a magic bullet, a secret button that can be pressed and voilà tens of thousands of website visitors come rolling out eager to give their hard-earned money to the company.
Of course we know that it’s a ludicrous idea. This stuff is hard. It takes time and effort and patience. (more…)
Search mainly focuses on attracting visitors to your site. Brand managers and digital marketers optimize their sites in order to gain higher rankings in search engines to increase the likelihood of searchers to access the particular sites which as a result leads to higher website traffic. Apart from that though we also ought to think of other forms of optimization. So what happens when visitors land on your page, what other forms of optimization are in place to increase the success of a website?
In this blog post I will look into persuasion optimization, the numerous benefits it brings with it as well as 6 on-site persuasion techniques. Each of your site visitors has a different perception of value therefore I will provide a summary of the 4 most dominant persona types as identified by the Eisenberg brothers.
After having managed to attract visitors to land and access our sites, we want them to stay on it and act upon our call of actions, right? The umbrella term for this is persuasion optimization which focuses on influencing (hence NOT manipulating) and triggering visitors to act in a certain way that are beneficial to you. This could be in the form of feedback, making a purchase, donating, or even downloading a white paper in return for the visitor’s contact details. Once you have planned, designed, and optimized your content for your target audience you’ll see that your site becomes a far more efficient sales tool. (more…)
The world of SEO is a world of change.
As I’m typing this I’m having a déjà vu. I think I start almost every post with a quote of this scope. Because it’s true. Our job as SEOs is to anticipate as good on all the changes around as we can.
We need to find the consistencies within these changes and build a strategy around them to be successful. To make it easier for ourselves to adapt to these changes. If we don’t have to reconsider our whole strategy every time something changes we are better able to adapt to essential changes in the world of SEO.
That means our business strategies shouldn’t be fully focused on search and our search strategies shouldn’t be fully focused on one single aspect of SEO, no matter how important it seems. If that aspect is declined in value, you’re basically screwed. (more…)
Back when dinosaurs still walked the earth I did a marketing qualification in Direct & Interactive Marketing. Whilst the course was definitely really useful most of the stuff I learned back then I don’t use very much and as a result it languishes half-forgotten somewhere in the recesses of my brain.
The SWOT Analysis was one such technique I’d forgotten I knew until Phil Nottingham (who works with me at Distilled) was asked to complete one for a client… and it all came flooding back. (more…)
The second day at A4U Expo in London was kicked off by Edwyn McFarlane, Head Of Publisher Services for Affiliate Window. The talk started by Edwyn stating that “a man is best known by the companion that he keeps”, where he showed a number of the networks and clients that he’s worked with, he hoped that this introduced that “he kind of know’s what he’s talking about”…
Lately I have come across the term ‘gamification’ a lot and so I’ve decided to look into this topic a bit more in-depth. First of all I would like to give you a brief explanation of the term itself, further we’ll be looking into trend predictions for the years to come followed by an outline of brands which have successfully incorporated gamified apps into their overall online business strategy. And last but not least I’ve saved the best until the end: 2 real-world examples of gamified apps and the impact they have had on the local community and their surroundings! (more…)
“Any good marketer can come up with a great content idea for their niche, the difficult part is selling the idea to your company and getting the budget. “
This was the challenge laid down via the comments of a post I wrote back in June for SEOmoz highlighting companies in “boring” niches creating great content. It’s something I’ve been meaning to write for ages – as it’s something I know many face whether their in-house or agency-side.
The way in which you pitch likely depends on whoever you’re pitching to – if you can get a meeting with them, then great – however this might not always be possible. If you’re relying on your documentation to do the talking then keeping it short and sweet is best; backed up with a comprehensive appendix which can be cross-referenced.
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