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MARKETING ESSENTIALS PART 6: FACEBOOK

Monday, July 5th, 2010

To end this series, we are going to bring things bang up to date, showing you why Facebook is now one of the most important places to get the word out about your business, and how to start using it.
There are 500 million active Facebook users. Over 70% of these are outside of the United States, and the fastest growing sector of users is women over 55! Facebook is not only one of the most universally used websites, it is actually widening web use overall.

If you’re not a user, there’s nothing like trying it: Go to www.facebook.com, sign up, then give it half an hour a week. It feels very alien at first, but it’s natural after a while, and fun! Look at the last few weeks in your life: There have to be at least half a dozen things that have happened to you that you’ve chatted to friends about – running a charity race, going on holiday, someone’s wedding, new job, bumped your car, saw a great film, whatever. You simply update Facebook with “where you’re at”, and your friends (that is, those who have joined Facebook too) can see this; in return, you get to see their updates. That’s really the basis of it.

So now you’re a pro! It’s time to see how this intensely social, seemingly personal environment can help you to promote your business. We’re going to show you two ways, and give you three practical actions you can undertake right away.

The first way is to get a Facebook Page for your business. Facebook Pages are like a cross between a website and a personal Facebook profile. With a free Facebook Page, Facebook users can comment on your brand, your offers, your new shop repaint, the cartoon on your delivery van – anything. And you can interact, talking back and building rapport and loyalty. It’s a free “extra” website for your business, and it is easy to get started; go here to find out more: http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages.

While you’re there, get some free SEO (search engine optimisation) out of it. Once 25 or more people like your Page (ask all your friends and family to come and give you the thumbs up by clicking the “Like” button), you can change its Facebook web address to one which contains your business’s name. That’s one free brand entry in the Google search results coming your way.

Here’s our second marketing tip. All over Facebook there are the aforementioned “Like” buttons – you can click and say you “like” photos, music, people’s status updates, companies and so on. But if you have a company website, or better still a blog, you can now add a Facebook Like button into every page of your site, every new news item, every blog post – every bit of content.

So what happens when you do this? Well, whenever anyone is on your website and they click on a Facebook Like button, it puts a story in their update feed in Facebook itself, with a graphic of your site and a link, and this appears in their friends’ news feeds too.
The person who just clicked “Like” is behaving like an evangelist for your brand in front of all their (Facebook) friends. If one of those friends clicks through to your site and “likes” something too, it is fed to all of their friends, and so on. What better way to get your brand in front of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who may be interested in what you have to offer, for free? It’s easy to do, and any good web company can help.

To end this series, we are going to bring things bang up to date, showing you why Facebook is now one of the most important places to get the word out about your business, and how to start using it.

There are 500 million active Facebook users. Over 70% of these are outside of the United States, and the fastest growing sector of users is women over 55! Facebook is not only one of the most universally used websites, it is actually widening web use overall.

If you’re not a user, there’s nothing like trying it: Go to www.facebook.com, sign up, then give it half an hour a week. It feels very alien at first, but it’s natural after a while, and fun! Look at the last few weeks in your life: There have to be at least half a dozen things that have happened to you that you’ve chatted to friends about – running a charity race, going on holiday, someone’s wedding, new job, bumped your car, saw a great film, whatever. You simply update Facebook with “where you’re at”, and your friends (that is, those who have joined Facebook too) can see this; in return, you get to see their updates. That’s really the basis of it.

So now you’re a pro! It’s time to see how this intensely social, seemingly personal environment can help you to promote your business. We’re going to show you two ways, and give you three practical actions you can undertake right away.

The first way is to get a Facebook Page for your business. Facebook Pages are like a cross between a website and a personal Facebook profile. With a free Facebook Page, Facebook users can comment on your brand, your offers, your new shop repaint, the cartoon on your delivery van – anything. And you can interact, talking back and building rapport and loyalty. It’s a free “extra” website for your business, and it is easy to get started; go here to find out more: http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages.

While you’re there, get some free SEO (search engine optimisation) out of it. Once 25 or more people like your Page (ask all your friends and family to come and give you the thumbs up by clicking the “Like” button), you can change its Facebook web address to one which contains your business’s name. That’s one free brand entry in the Google search results coming your way.

Here’s our second marketing tip. All over Facebook there are the aforementioned “Like” buttons – you can click and say you “like” photos, music, people’s status updates, companies and so on. But if you have a company website, or better still a blog, you can now add a Facebook Like button into every page of your site, every new news item, every blog post – every bit of content.

So what happens when you do this? Well, whenever anyone is on your website and they click on a Facebook Like button, it puts a story in their update feed in Facebook itself, with a graphic of your site and a link, and this appears in their friends’ news feeds too.

The person who just clicked “Like” is behaving like an evangelist for your brand in front of all their (Facebook) friends. If one of those friends clicks through to your site and “likes” something too, it is fed to all of their friends, and so on. What better way to get your brand in front of hundreds, maybe thousands, of people who may be interested in what you have to offer, for free? It’s easy to do, and any good web company can help.

Posted in Internet marketing | No Comments »

How a CMS can help your business to succeed

Wednesday, May 5th, 2010

Your website is out of date the moment it goes live. Even when it hits the internet for the first time, you will have written the content weeks back, and from there on in it only gets more and more dated.

Fact is, things change. Products and services. Personnel. Offers. Events. The marketplace. Your competitors’ offerings. Smart businesses know that an effective web presence is about keeping your site bang up to date.

What are the options?
Asking your web agency to update your website is one route. That’s great if you have a decent chunk of changes you need doing and can present them in one go for a cost-effective quote. But if it’s a picture or two, a new paragraph, a change of a few names somewhere, you are never going to get value for money out of an agency.

That’s because a web agency has to receive your request for work, quote on it, add it to their project management system, assign a member of staff, remove the files from their versioning system (a kind of backup of projects that ensures mistakes can be quickly rectified), do the work, put it on a preview domain so you can check it, make any changes for you, put it live, check the live version, replace all the files in the versioning system, and finally bill you.

That’s a lot of work for a quick photo or text change, and the agency is going to have to charge you for it all in order to remain profitable. It’s like the £2 bottle of wine where the bottle itself costs £1.50. (Best going for a carton of wine at this level…)

Wouldn’t it be nice to make simple and effective changes to your website quickly, cheaply and when you want?

Updating your site with a content management system
 That’s where a CMS, or “content management system”, can help. A CMS allows you to make changes to your site as and when you wish.

CMSs traditionally have been unwieldy beasts, costing a chunk to have added to your website when it is being built, or prohibitively expensive to fit afterwards. In our experience, they also allow clients to very easily break their sites. Cue frantic call to web agency and the above cycle of invoice – set up project – issue big bill (in this case, all for just fixing what you unwittingly broke).

Getting back to basics with a mini CMS
 Fast forward to today, though, and it is possible to have a CMS system that is simple to use, cheap to have, and easy to add to your sites – whether it has been built yet or not. Such CMS systems let you or your staff alter just the content you want, leaving the rest of your site fine, so it’s really hard to break anything.

With this type of “mini-CMS” solution, you get to alter your events, staff, offers, images etc without paying an agency to do so, and so you keep ahead of the competition for very little outlay. Such systems are revolutionising small business websites, and are thoroughly recommended if you find yourself constantly wishing you can change small but important things on your site but holding off for fear of what the bill might be.

Find out more
 Like to know how easily and cheaply you could have a CMS fitted to your website? Contact us today for a free consultation and quote.

Posted in Internet marketing, business | No Comments »

Can your business capitalise on the rise of E-book readers?

Monday, January 25th, 2010
Can your business capitalise on the rise of E-book readers?
I was bought an e-book reader for my birthday and it’s safe to say I have been blown away by it. For the uninitiated, e-book readers are small (mine is the size of a small paperback but much thinner), light (the weight of a heavy mobile phone) and very tactile (at least, the entry-level Sony model I have is). They hold hundreds of “books”, allowing you to carry a bookshelf with you and read any of them whenever you get the chance.
For the sceptical, I predict that once you see one of these, you’ll be converted. The screens are the thing: really sharp, they’re utterly unlike computer screens, in that if you look at it in a dark room, you’ll see absolutely nothing: they’re not back-lit at all, and can be viewed the same from any angle without the text fading. The appearance is just like the printed page, meaning no eye-strain, and they have a very, very long battery life (many thousands of “page turns”; the devices only draw any real power when “turning the page” for you).
A new age of self-publishing?
So here’s the thing for small businesses who have any kind of documentation, case studies, white papers etc. By packaging these up as PDF documents with very little effort (whereas Amazon’s Kindle book reader are proprietary, most of the others are quite happy with PDFs), and offering them in a slightly different manner on your website (“download digital reader edition” next to a picture of one of these readers?), you can now offer potential clients a new way to easily download and carry around company material that could lead to sales for you. After all, the worst part of downloading big PDFs from the internet is that you then have to print them – no longer is that the case.
It is now possible to put all your manuals, support documents, white papers, self-published items (blog post compendiums, tutorials etc) into a format that people can download and keep on a device that is not their PC or phone, and which they use all the time for reading novels and the like.
These things really will be big!
And before you write the idea off as something niche, something only techies will “get”, I have to pass along the fact that 1) My 60-year-old father bought me the reader, 2) Everyone I showed it to, from the team here in the Reedus office to my step-grandmother and my parents-in-law, took one look and absolutely loved it, saying things like “we are going to need two!”. 3) As big book shops and media stores set up their own e-book stores (Waterstones in the UK have just done so, Sony has its own), penetration will increase 4) Prices are dropping – mine was £150, they’l be £99 before long.
In short, if you have material that is more than a chapter or two in length that people currently download as PDFs from your website, there’s an opportunity to increase its penetration here by packaging it up for the new breed of book readers.

I was bought an e-book reader for my birthday and it’s safe to say I have been blown away by it. For the uninitiated, e-book readers are small (mine is the size of a small paperback but much thinner), light (the weight of a heavy mobile phone) and very tactile (at least, the entry-level Sony model I have is).

They hold hundreds of “books”, allowing you to carry a whole bookshelf with you and read from any title whenever you get the chance.

Sceptical?
I predict that once you see one of these, you’ll be converted. The screens are the thing: really sharp, they’re utterly unlike computer screens, in that if you look at it in a dark room, you’ll see absolutely nothing: they’re not back-lit at all, and can be viewed from any angle without the text fading.

The appearance is just like the printed page, meaning no eye-strain, and they have a very, very long battery life (many thousands of “page turns”; the devices only draw any real power when “turning the page” for you).

A new age of self-publishing?
So here’s the thing for small businesses who have any kind of in-depth documentation, case studies, white papers etc. By packaging these up as PDF documents (whereas Amazon’s Kindle book readers use a proprietary format, most of the others are quite happy with PDFs), and offering them in a slightly different manner on your website (“download digital reader edition” next to a picture of one of these readers, for instance), you can now offer potential clients a new way to easily download and carry around company material that could lead to sales for you.

After all, the worst part of downloading big PDFs from the internet is that you then have to print them – no longer is this the case. Now, people can download and keep your material on a device that is not their PC or phone, and which they also use all the time for reading novels and the like.

These things really will be big!
And before you write the idea off as something niche, something only techies will “get”, I have to pass along the following observations:

  1. My 60-year-old father and family bought me the reader (he hates computers, yet was highly enthusiastic about it)
  2. Everyone to a person I showed it to, from the team here in the Reedus office to my step-grandmother and my parents-in-law, took one look and also absolutely loved it, saying things like “we are going to need two!”
  3. As big book shops and media companies set up their own e-book stores (Waterstones in the UK have just done so, Sony has its own), penetration will increase
  4. Prices are dropping – they’ll be £99 before long

In short, if you have material that is more than a chapter or two in length that people currently download as PDFs from your website, there’s a real opportunity to increase its penetration by packaging it up for the new breed of book readers. It needn’t cost you much money to do so, and the benefits could be great.

Posted in Future, Internet marketing | No Comments »

Tell Google where you are, and they’ll tell your clients

Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

With the launch of Google Maps Navigation (only on Android phones for now but rumoured to be coming for iPhone too), Google has taken a swing at the GPS sector. Companies like Tom Tom ought to be quaking at this one, because with Google’s system, there is easy search (no need for address), voice search, real-time traffic info, and even street views, thanks to Google’s photography within cities (of course, this feature will only work where the Google cam-cars have been). But the killer punch: It’s free.

Now, you can debate whether you really want your phone to also be your iPod and now your GPS, but you can rest assured Google will make the usability experience as good as possible, and that people will start using Google to navigate around unfamiliar places whether on foot or by car. Why pay for GPS maps when it is all there for nothing?

The business take-home? Now, more than ever, it is essential to have your business listed in Google’s Local Business Center, assuming there is a geographical element to what you do (even if not, if anyone ever visits you at your premises, it is a good idea ).

Even without the new rule-changing GPS development, when you type say “hotel in Nantes” into your mobile phone browser’s Google, as I did last week, it gives you immediate links to contact details of the relevant local business, taken directly from Google’s Local Business Center. If you’re not there, you miss out on this free traffic for your business.

So take the time to update your Local Business Center entries and let Google carry on thinking of innovative new ways to display them to interested parties on your behalf.

by Phil Morse

Posted in Internet marketing | 1 Comment »

Simple marketing tricks from US businesses

Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

We’ve covered before how important it is to collect customers email addresses and to have a presence online away from your own website. I was lucky enough to spend some time in California recently, home of “Silicon Valley”, Apple and countless internet startups and technology firms, and it struck me how far ahead of most European companies many US firms were when it came to offline-to-online marketing .

By the way, I’m talking about the non-techie firms here, not those talked about above above. Here are some examples:

  • A shop that had a computer terminal set up with their website signup page open so people could sign up for their email newsletter there and then
  • A restaurant that had a space for customers to write their email address on their credit card slip, right under where they confirm the amount and sign for their meal
  • A hotel that had “Join our Facebook group” in big letters on its billboards

All of these are simple examples of ways to ask customers for permission to keep in touch with them. they are also examples of how these companies are making such a drive an intergral part of the way they operate.

As getting things done in life becomes ever more reliant on online services, it’s the companies with tightly integrated online marketing tactics that are going to win over those who don’t or won’t start to engage their customers online.

by Phil Morse

Posted in Internet marketing, Uncategorized | No Comments »

Pay-Per-Click advertising: Why spending big is the right way

Tuesday, August 4th, 2009

Pay-per-click adverts are those that appear on the right-hand-side of the Google (and Bing etc) search results. You come up with your ads, point them to a page on your website, and say how much you’re prepared to pay “per click” – the system shows them for free.

Sounds simple, but there are many devils in the detail and much that can trip up a nascent campaign. You need to know what people are likely to type in for your products; what you DON’T want your ads to show for (“free”, “cheap”, “scam” etc); you need to be sure your website does its job (nice big visible form, reiteration of a value proposal). I could go on, but that’s what we’re here for – to cut through the noise and help our clients to conduct effective PPC campaigns.

Why you should allocate a big enough budget for pay-per-click
However, one thing that can trip up a campaign is the amount of money the client wants to spend. Look at it this way: We’d never advocate just coming up with 10 likely key phrases, banging out an ad or two and sending the traffic to your home page. You need well-researched and pitched key terms, lots of ’em, ads that are segmented to your customer groups, and special “landing pages” that allow potential clients to find what they want quickly. All of this costs money, takes time, and is totally essential for success.

So you’ve got a campaign all set up and ready to go. Guess what? You’ll probably find that only one or two niches are driving 80% of your leads. So what happens next? We re-jig the campaign to further divide and conquer within those niches. You get more and better leads and the price drops. The campaign becomes viable.

There’s only one way to find out what works
If all this sounds like double Dutch, that’s fine – we do this for a living and can explain how this often supremely cost-effective method of advertising works when we speak with you. But here’s the rub – if you don’t allow enough money to be spent in order to find those niches, we never get the intelligence we need to make a new campaign start to work. Spending a few thousand on an online advertising campaign may sound like a lot, but if you’ve ever bought a page in a magazine to get 5 leads, you’ll know you have to punt to get the returns. Thing is, with PPC, the last dollar is much more likely to be delivering the goods for you than first.

Or to put it another way, you’ve got to jump in to see how warm the water is. If you stand on the side occasionally dipping your toe in, you’ll never really know and your campaign will suffer accordingly through lack of real data.

PPC advertising isn’t for everyone. But if you feel some well-positioned ads in Google are worth doing, whether you decide to grab an idiot’s guide and have a bash yourself or feel it’s important enough to hand it over to professionals, do realise that web pages aren’t a “build and they will come” phenomenon, and that only through spending can you make the initial findings necessary to get online advertising working for you.

Industry knowledge is itself a valuable commodity
It’s a rollercoaster, but in the end you’ll have a campaign that is either generating leads for you (as is normally the case) or you’ll know for sure that PPC isn’t for your business. The good thing is that if the latter is the case, and you’ve used professionals to conduct your campaign for you, at least you know your competitors will likely be failing too and so have gained some solid market knowledge for your efforts. Nothing worse than the niggling feeling you’re the last to the party, especially in business.

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