Online marketing news and resources.

The world of email marketing gets another hurdle to face as Google announce the launch of a ‘priority inbox’ for its Gmail. If you want to get your messages through and read then you need to know how the new system will sort the incoming mail.

Google algorithms have evolved over the years to become sophisticated learning mechanisms. The approach to evaluating Gmail will be not unlike the process the search engine spiders adopt to assess and index website content according to criteria based upon authenticity, importance, relevance and value.

The automatic capture and instant organisation of ‘important’ emails will demote other email in a process similar to spam filtering. This means that essentially, Gmail will operate by identifying the email that’s important to you, based upon what it has ‘learnt’ from analysing who you send email to the most, how often, and which keywords appear frequently in the emails you read.

For businesses, these indicators will be further essential items of information to carefully assess when compiling future email marketing campaigns and the focus on SEO keywords , even within general mail traffic, can only serve to reinforce their importance.

The upgraded system will highlight ‘starred’ messages, relegating all other mail to a third category called ‘everything else’. The ability for a message to make it to the ‘priority inbox’ will require considerable upping of the online marketing game where every word absolutely counts from the left hand side, demanding to be read!

The good news is that there are built-in manual controls to override and tune the system as well. If Priority Inbox makes a mistake, there are  +  −  buttons to correctly mark a conversation as ‘important’ or ‘not important’, and Priority Inbox will quickly learn current mail reading behaviour. Gmail allows you to toggle between the ‘priority view’ and the conventional ‘inbox view’, in chronological order – and the entire function can also be turned off!

The emphasis is again on adopting marketing strategies to put your brand identity in the best possible light by refraining from the monthly or quarterly mass email out by the lazy use of mail merge software that just simply personalises the intro line!

Today’s online engagement process is defined by social media and that means connecting or reconnecting with your niche audience so that they will ensure that your incoming mail messages or newsletter will be allowed access to priority inbox status.

It’s true to say that companies either ‘get’ Social Media or they don’t. As brows furrow over trying to define whether it should be budgeted under online marketing or PR, and who should be ‘looking after it’, eyebrows shoot upwards as questions of ROI become answers in KPI!

Business owners like straightforward definitions, preferably ones that translate to measurable traffic growth on SEO keywords, website conversions, sales figures and bottom lines!

The likelihood is that social media will be most understood as a combination of marketing and publicity rather than a ‘conversation’, or loose engagement whose principle aim is not to sell a product or service, but simply interact, offering freely shared info, ideas and data.

But this won’t wash with business owners and their Sales Directors who judge a successfully positioned brand identity by monthly sales enquiries and orders taken. After all, as often argued, if their PPC campaigns are already, successfully bringing in traffic -  with a readily measurable return – and email marketing newsletters are relatively low cost, where does social media fit in, and why bother with Twitter, etc??

However, social media is not just about Twitter! The quality content, link building value to both Google and human visitor alike, across all communication platforms, is now an important signifier of online presence. The success of harnessing social engagement is as much to do with defining purpose, i.e. what a company wants to achieve, and interacting with the appropriate channels to achieve realistic objectives.

The distinction between social media as marketing or PR should be made at the outset rather than just to lump in with sales and marketing because it can’t be readily assigned.

Social Media can be involved as marketing strategies if the purpose is to increase traffic and sales, brand exposure and product launches. Key is the online conversation, which builds up crucial feedback and ideas for product or business development and which will establish relationships and connections with potential customers (fans or followers).

If the aim is to use social media within PR campaigns, then this would include the posting of latest company news, blogs and articles, acting as an official source of company information and a “quick response” to any immediate customer comments and issues. The key here is to keep in touch with how the brand is being perceived and commented upon by a company’s audience segment.

Summer’s over, the fourth quarter’s arrived – it’s Sales meetings all this week! Time to step hard on the online marketing pedal. The MD is again demanding that he wants to be Google No.1 – can you double the number of marketing tweets every 10 minutes, blah, blah…!

Sometimes, integrating social media into a company’s everyday marketing strategies can be a long journey into understanding the new rules of customer engagement! The MD has become fixated with his shiny new social media toy, thinking it’s the latest internet fast-track to eCommerce nirvana now that the website has Twitter and Facebook buttons.

Too often the impatient desire for instant results from the instant social media take-up on a top heavy, one channel approach can lead to the hasty assumption that it doesn’t work because sales figures are unaffected.

As with organic website SEO and the long game of consistent quality link building, so too with social media engagement. Your niche market consumers must be exposed to your message multiple times before they notice you, let alone trust you enough to respond. Social media does not replace established channels such as email marketing or online newsletters. It is an interactive means to reach people by their various, preferred channels.You must learn how they wish to engage so they might truly focus on your message!

Directly seeing your company ad may barely register on their radar! But a thumbs up recommendation or retweet via a reader’s social network is the ‘quality referral’ link that operates like an offline introduction to opening up the doors of your brand identity to an intrigued enquirer.

Integrated marketing does not mean obsessing over using every single available channel but seeking those that are relevant, valuable and will work for your segment because you have an intuitive understanding of its’ reach and can consistently communicate naturally through the medium. Adoption of different techniques will invariably be based on whether you are a b2b or b2c company, and their key demographics. Different age groups opt to use different platforms for different applications.

Remember - a powerful CRM presence is one of the most cost efficient marketing tools to increase business. A loyal audience will themselves broadcast and share your intrinsic content value, thus performing invaluable marketing. By simply ensuring your message and brand are always recognisable from channel to channel, the connections can be made.

But most of all, the results of sustained quality endeavour will eventually yield positive feedback, increased traffic and the much desired PageRank elevation the MD now loves to check every morning alongside his emails.

There has been much talk lately of the continuing merits of email marketing and how it stands up well alongside social media messaging channels like Twitter. The big issue is that the web is awash with spam, making it difficult for genuine email messages to get noticed or read. So how do you optimise to improve your chances?

Email is still a standard message bearer for business applications, even in the age of SMS, Twitter feeds and Facebook updates. The emergence of the mobile internet boosts emailing rather than diminishes, so the incursion of online marketing into developing channels continues.

The universal problem of spamming is here to stay and, as a result, the future of the web may lay behind a paywall for professional users, unhindered by the growing contamination of spammers, hackers, scammers and PC hijackers poisoning the web.

In the meanwhile, genuine business marketing has to carry on, your business needs to keep it’s brand identity and visibility out there with your customers in your marketplace – and emails need to be sent, received, opened and read! So, what are some of the actions we can easily carry out to sharpen our approach to getting our vital messages through?

Some Top Ten Tips ….

1. Purpose Of Email : Make it clear from the first sentence exactly what you want the recipients of your e-mail to feel, think or do! This also helps you to follow and analyse their consequent response.

2. Grab Interest: Stand out from the crowd, be different and create a distinctive look or feel, but do get it right! Too OTT or just plain naff is no good either! Experiment with subject lines and with Personal URL’s in the subject line.

3. Regular Transmission: Encourage your customers to expect certain messages at regular intervals, say, on a monthly cycle. Always include the stated benefit to the recipient in the ‘TO’ address box to reinforce the content or value contained in a campaign series of offers.

4. Target Niche Customers : Test the criteria upon which your marketing is based by stating the criteria, and the benefits are highlighted in the subject line.

5. Segment Sort and Send : Separate out your database to offer a different message / content approach to each customer type. Segmentation should be based on info you know about the requirements or behaviour of customers in that segment.

6. Carefully Doublecheck Database : Every database contains errors and can quickly go out-of-date. Opt-in recipients need to be prioritised and will perform much better than random names gathered by lead generation sites or list compilers.

7. Frequency According to Response : Recipients who take a desired action are much more likely to repeat, and much sooner, than those who, at one time opted-in but rarely, if ever, responded afterwards.

8. Limit Response Option: Customers or prospects should be given a limited number of response choices. The more choices you offer, the less response you are likely to get.

9. Tighten Up Content : Short, to the point copy in simple plain words works best. Many e-mails are read without fully opening the browser frame or on mobile devices. Ensure the core message and the offer is contained in the opening paragraph.

10. Be NONE SPAM compliant : Every legitimate e-mail has to show who it came from, include a postal address, landline number, email and web addresses, etc, and offer an opt-out mechanism. If your email is misread as spam, you will be deleted …..!

So you had your website ‘done’ a few months back! So you think that’s it? Google will not rank and your intended traffic won’t drive unless you ensure daily activity and updated content. You need to check performance and audit your website – refresh as well as engage, constantly.

Don’t assume you know how your visitors are really behaving on your website, so it’s essential that you make a periodic audit to check if your site pages really do meet customer needs, are not being abandoned and clicked away from, as well as engaging with them through social media and blogging.

Visitor behaviour can be fickle, and your site analytics different very time you look! Your visitors may be telling you one thing and doing another! You do need to keep a regular picture of how your brand identity is perceived by what is going on within the different pages of your site.

Visitors tend to look for a number of reassuring items when making vital decisions over who to follow, trust, bookmark and retweet! When you check your own site, be sure to check the following basic essentials: (more…)

It’s been said before – online marketing tools complement, not compete with each other! Reports always announce that one or the other is in the ascendency but in fact, social marketing helps draw attention to a company profile or product, whereas sales are likely to be generated when information is received by email!

Another report – based on a survey of over 1,400 so-called ‘representative’ consumers, – has just announced that email still beats social networks when it comes to marketing for eCommerce. Apparently, over a third of consumers are not using a social networking site, and online brand identity ‘fans’ are still in the minority!

Depending on the market niche a business occupies, email marketing can definitely be the more important way to contact people over a longer period of time, because, as a rule, almost everyone reads email. Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, or LinkedIn will invariably update to an email account anyway!

As we  all should know by now, because a variety of media platforms are available, every user will adopt the channel they feel is best for them, even though, as the long established workhorse, email continues to be the desired channel for many types of commercial communication. (more…)

It is fairly common knowledge amongst many of the website design and marketing agencies, there have been recent changes to Google’s algorithm, influencing optimised content, link building, and ultimately, visitor search results. In short, Google looks at site pages for signals of human activity in the form of regular, fresh content of relevance, influence and authority.

After two decades, the web resembles Mount Everest. Countless explorers have visited, leaving behind a detritus littered landscape. There are simply thousands upon thousands of dead or automated websites left unattended or simply not being looked after and updated on a regular basis.

This begs the question of how much – or how little – online marketing the site owner companies are actually doing? What would be the incentive, value and interest for a return visit? Aside from an eCommerce business alerting their database via an email marketing newsletter to a few price changes, the content remains unaltered, and means visitors will not be staying at the site to engage further. In other words, a brand identity is formed of a price–driven attitude, which offers potential customers nothing further in terms of added content value.

Google is always changing, and some important changes are now more evident than ever before. Relevant back linking from niche market sites is now more important and valuable, even if the sites are lower ranked. It had always been assumed that the top ranking factor voted by Google was always keyword-focused, anchor text from external links. (more…)

Website design constantly adapts to the needs of consumer search – or so you would think! It’s remarkable how still many businesses online still view their sites as little no more than a virtual brochure with a visitor enquiries and info capture page.

For a website to succeed today and attract and retain regular traffic, it must offer multiple compelling content as a self publishing portal of niche industry sector news, information, interactive visitor engagement and social media conversation sharing.

A web based business or eCommerce website needs to be simply more than products or service selling. Search visitors primarily look to the web as an information resource. A site needs to offer two types of web page: a sales page and a content page, often referred to as the ‘squeeze’ or landing page and the article page.

The two different formats enable both online marketing and email marketing campaigns to be sharply focused on drawing visitor segments with their known areas of interest to the relevant site pages. Targeted organic SEO and its essential link building process aim to drive visitor traffic and raise search engine ranking.

Businesses may readily understand the purpose of a landing or sales page. It is to either sell a product or encourage visitors to opt in to a mailing list or preferably both! This page will dedicated strictly to achieving either or both of these aims and will not include any other type of content that would likely to distract a visitor from its purpose.

The main function of an ‘article’ page is to add fresh, valuable written content, which will be of genuine interest to their target market. They should be original and as unique as possible to obtain higher ranking. Today’s search engine algorithms seek out decisive and relevant content – not just voting on SEO terms alone – to index and return site pages to visitor search.

Content pages can be linked to all the other pages on a website, making it easy and straightforward for visitors to navigate and comfortably explore products and services on offer. Keyword phrases which describe the purpose of the target page can of course be hyperlinked. It’s important to always include links to the most recent blogs, articles and news updates as well as the products/services sales pages.

In addition, info sharing buttons via the social messaging networks, such as Twitter and Facebook, as well as bookmarking sites, are now expected to be found not only on the homepage but accompanying key content throughout an entire website.

Spam now accounts for around 80 to 90 per cent of email traffic, which will choke up inboxes unless secure gatekeeper software filters the unwanted junk and protects from serious system attack. The battle to get email marketing messages through and read becomes harder, so in today’s increasingly socially connected web, how can email compete to regain attention?

Recent research has found that that as many as 10 per cent of all UK marketing campaign emails do not reach their intended inbox, the figure sometimes peaking as high as 20 and 30 per cent. While we all know that some emails seem to just not get through, the scale of the issue is bigger than most people think, which makes deliverability a key concern affecting outcomes of email marketing strategies.

In the age of multi channel social media messaging and the many layers of system filtering required, it is now vital to ensure your email is in fact, wanted, accepted and indeed, read! A company’s brand identity will only remain credible and online marketing campaigns worth the time and effort in the first place if a way through can be satisfactorily maintained.

So, how to avoid the spam filter …. (more…)

It’s often pointed out that social media is the realm of building relationships between business and customer so the necessity of applying a similar engagement to b2b contact is thought mostly inappropriate. The value of b2b social media interaction and the tone of exchange is yet another key online marketing issue that can make a meaningful difference.

There may be shades of difference and businesses can be both colleagues and clients to each other at the same time. Either way, reinforcing brand identity, reminding and defining exactly how and why a business can be of assistance, still stands as a crucial issue to be communicated. Once again, key rules come into greater focus, when talking b2b!

With apologies for directness here but, most appropriately, without doubt the number one rule of engagement is ‘cut the crap’! It’s a lesson that has yet to be learned by many a business, still hiding behind their constructed language barriers! Straightforward, clear, precise English is best practice for writing content online.

The crucial difference when speaking b2b is that, unlike b2c marketing strategies, business colleagues do not require the added ‘personality’ injection, used on Twitter or Facebook. Avoid incurring their impatience, and possible annoyance, and simply state in plain language what it is you offer, what it’s for and how it will benefit their particular business, and ditch the outdated and incomprehensible brochure speak – no one is impressed !

Likewise, consider how to maintain meaningful and helpful contact. Businesses may just say ‘keep in touch’ as a polite way of trying to avoid yet more incoming info overload but they’ll always be interested to receive genuine free advice or news, especially if relating to competitors or their particular market niche.

Use social media to be seen to be participating in and contributing real extra value, which will raise your company profile and respect. Consider sending a speculative tweet or message via a social network based upon your actual usefulness as a supplier to a particular business rather than strictly relying on a monthly email marketing newsletter, often containing non-essential ‘filler’ content which is unlikely to be of direct interest.

Become more active on business networking forums and raise your profile, which will be picked up. Remember – while your tone should be different, the end result towards bringing about closer engagement is the universal social media goal. (more…)