Posts About ‘strategy’

FAQ Pages – Are you Snatching Defeat from the Jaws of Victory?

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.

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Romney shows us: Not Everyone is Like Us

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…)

Overcoming Short-term Thinking in the Digital Industry

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…)

The Changing Landscape of SEO

With an ever changing landscape, SEO in 2012 has seen a significant shift in dynamics. We have seen the rise of content marketing and inbound marketing agencies, the decreasing influence of affiliates on the organic search landscape.

As such there are a number of things that we can no longer take for granted. (more…)

Persuasion Optimization for your Website’s Traffic

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 Two ways of SEO: Quantity vs. Quality

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…)

SWOT Analysis for SEO

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…)

Global Brand Building for Advertisers and Publishers

Having studied international business at university this was a talk that I was particularly interested in hearing. The panel were introduced by chair, Florian Gramshammer, as the “The United Nations of affiliate marketing“ as there were representatives from 5 different countries on the panel. The panel began the session by setting up some of the common questions they find themselves answering, and sometime asking themselves, including:

“Why should you try to enter another country?”
And if you have decided on international expansion then “where do you go and what do you base that decision on?”

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The Impact Online Gamification Can Have On The Real World

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…)

Revealing the Hidden Benefits of Search Marketing

This is a guest post by Cedric Chambaz, EMEA Marketing Lead of Microsoft Advertising.

For several years now, an increasing number of small businesses have reaped the rewards of investing in search marketing as a way of reaching their target audience and delivering to them exactly what they seek. The obvious benefits – better targeting, clearer return on investment (ROI), cost efficiencies and others – are clear to many business owners, and as search continues to grow in popularity, the results only become more compelling.

However, while the benefits mentioned above are soon felt by those embarking on their first search campaigns, if you look past them there are also some more hidden rewards which SMBs might not at first connect with search marketing. Search is much more than just a lead generator; it can be turned into an incredibly powerful business intelligence tool, extending into parts of the business such as PR, product development, sales, merchandising and broader business strategy. All it takes is for marketers to think a little bit outside the (search) box… (more…)

Marketers: Stop Whining about Google+, Start Using It

So this is a post written on the plane so bare with me for a little. It’s thoughts put on paper, but I think it’s important. For the past year and a half I have been talking all over the world about Google’s Social Search efforts. How the search giant was, and still is, trying to embed social into search. At first my talks were about the social signals we were seeing, how Google was for example integrating Twitter results or how it was showing when and where someone was sharing a specific piece of content. That was even before Google launched Google+. And even then I was saying: Google is up to something more than just a Facebook clone.

I showed some of my findings and conclusions at SMX 2011. Soon after that Google+ launched. It sure as hell looked like a Facebook clone, and don’t get me wrong, if Google would be able to push out Facebook, they sure would, but still Google+ is much bigger than a social network. It is much bigger than a Facebook competitor. I actually wrote about that back then as well, explaining what Google+ was really all about.

In the past few months, well, to be honest ever since Google+ launched, I have heard a lot of complaints from marketers about Google+. These complaints are mostly about the social network part of Google+: too little numbers, not enough functionalities, not enough engagement, you name it, all the complaints were there. And the funny thing is: they were all true. But now I believe it is time to stop complaining and get to work, you might be too late already. (more…)

Everything Starts With a Marketing Strategy

It’s time to throw scepticism overboard. Time to bite the bullet. No matter how much we want to deny it, we have to face up to the fact that content is king.

Whether your content strategy focuses on creating highly engaging pieces of quality content, or whether it’s about automated processes that churn out massive amounts of unique human-readable articles – or whatever hybrid model you adopt that sits somewhere on a spectrum between those two extremes – the fact remains that content is the pivot around which all our digital marketing activities revolve. (more…)

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