Digital Marketing Predications for 2015!

The life of a busy digital marketer is a varied one, and knowing where to put your marketing effort is an important factor, but where should you plan to put those efforts?

Everything is changing - and will continue to do so - remember that the only constant is change.

Technology, business models and consumer behaviours change in the blink of an eye; old tactics no longer work (or aren't as effective as they once were).

So as a digital marketer, what should you be considering for the year ahead?

In this article on LinkedIn, I've tried to capture some of the key elements that are important to Digital Marketing in 2015 - enjoy.

Digital Marketing: My Crystal Ball Predications for 2015

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Inbound Marketing: The SECRETS

Actually, there was a small mistake in the subject of this blog, because there isn't really a secret in great inbound marketing – other than ensuring the right people see your content at the right time!

Inbound marketing is all about your prospects finding you, which means that it’s important that your precious and brilliant content is found when it’s needed to be found.

I’m sure we've all done the same thing at some point in our careers; we've created a brilliant piece of content (website content, video, article, blog or social media post etc) we have lined up several online channels to host and promote the piece and clicked send … then sat back ….. and waited ….. and waited some more …. but nothing happens!

No interest at all in our lovely, well crafted content, but it was perfect, what went wrong?

Well the chances are that simply your excellent message just didn't rise above the rubbish and the clutter – image this from a social media perspective, as soon as you click the send button your piece of content is the freshest and newest piece out there and it appears at the top of the stream, but second later it’s buried in a pool of noise.

As an experiment I simply tweeted the hashtag #Marketing and within just two minutes it was buried in my own twitter stream with by all the other stuff I follow, Even when I searched Twitter for my update after only 10 minutes my tweet has disappeared under 187 tweets – for all intents and purposes this post was now gone.

So what could I have done differently?

Very simply I just needed to make my post rise above the clutter and this is easiest done with my advocates – and virtually everyone and every business has some of these. These are your greatest fans, your enthusiastic followers.

These people serve two key functions:

1. They a can extend the life of any content by simply sharing it for you, but more importantly, 
2. They take on a valuable “word of mouth” presence.

What you might not realise is that a large percentage of new business comes from some sort of referral (whether these be Friends, Relatives, Acquaintances or Unknown online networks etc), and word of mouth has always been the most trusted form of advertising.

And whats even better is that these advocates are still working for you when you aren't around, constantly posting, sharing, and mentioning your brand.

How do you find your advocates?

They should be fairly obvious to spot if your close to your online marketing channels, these are the people that will readily retweet, like, favourite or share your content; they respond to your requests, they comment and talk about you (and often without being prompted).

The trick is to recognise these traits in your social networks and recognise the individuals - network with them, thank them, provide easier access to your best staff, provide extra content, training or even prizes. If your industry is suitable for it then try rewarding with gamification (providing points and badges etc).

Numerous big businesses understand the importance of their advocates and work with them – Google have supplied advocates with freebies in the past as a thank you; Samsung provide special events for their advocates and chances to get their hands on the latest devices (the recent Samsung Unpacked 2014 in Barcelona was a great example; Walmat creates specialised online communities of shoppers to help spread their messages. It is everywhere.

It’s the very importance of these advocates is the reason that I seem to find the constant need to explain to people that it’s not the number of Followers or Friends, Retweets or Likes that important, but who Follows and Likes you, who Retweets or Likes your posts.

One good advocate is worth more than 1,000 Followers that don’t listen to you.

Summary:

So listen to your channels, discover your advocates and build a relationship with them, then the life of your precious content will be lengthened allowing your important messages to reach more people.

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3 minutes to a better website

There are a couple of things that websites MUST DO.

1. Visitors MUST be able to understand instantly what products/services you provide. 
2. Visitors MUST be able to find products or services to buy from you. 
3. Visitors MUST be able to understand your value proposition 

MINUTE 1:

Choose a close friend; choose someone who isn't close to your business.
Get them to look at your website and get them to write down what product/service they think you provide.
They have 1 minute to complete this task.

MINUTE 2:

Choose another friend; again, someone who isn’t close to your business.
Give them 4-5 products of yours to find and see if they can easily find them on your website.
They have 1 minute to complete this task.

MINUTE 3:

This is about your Value Proposition.

A Value Proposition helps you to connect to your customers; it says to them ‘we know you’, ‘we know what you’re looking for’. It’s the value proposition that makes them love you and your products. A good value proposition explains how you can solve your prospects problems, it tells your prospects why they should buy from you.

Choose yet another friend; again, someone who isn’t close to your business.
Get them to look at your website and get them to write down 3-4 reasons why they think they should buy from you.
They have 1 minute to complete this task.

You're done!

OK, that’s your 3 minutes. Take a look at the results and see if it tells you anything.

• Is your offering obvious?
• Can people find your products/services easily?
• Are reasons obvious as to why visitors should buy from you? 

The answers to these questions should help you to amend your website to make it more relevant to your visitors.

Good luck

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Get Engaged, Socially Engaged!

Without a shadow of a doubt, a business that is socially engaged online will always get more business than the ones that aren’t; even if they only generate a little more traffic, it’s traffic that they wouldn’t have got otherwise.

But social engagement is more than just generating traffic; it’s also about learning from your market, having conversations with buyers and potential buyers, building a relationship with them, and maybe - just maybe, helping your search engine rankings along the way.

So how does a business become socially engaged?

Here are 6 great ways to become socially engaged.


Do things differently

Think differently – your website might be absolutely professional to the core (as it should be), but social engagement is about having a conversation with your market, and being 100% corporate isn’t always the best policy.

Try relaxing your grasp on corporate speak a little, try having a little fun, talk to your audience in the relaxed way that I’m sure many of them will want to be talked to.

Be prepared to take a well thought-out risk – this will enable you to test and learn. Digital media is ever changing, as a business you need to be flexible and nimble to keep up with it.


Earn your way (by listening)

Listen in social media is really important – remember you’re using social channels to have conversations (not just sell your products and services), so listening must play its part.

Millions of people might be talking about your business, your brand or products and services that you supply; you need to listen to what they are saying so that you can respond correctly (and timely).

Great insights from your market will help you create better value for your market, and therefore better value for your business.


Make social a culture

Don’t make the mistake of sitting one person at a computer and ask them to do social media as well as their current work. Make social a cultural shift within your business by recruiting staff into social roles, report on their activity at least monthly so that everyone inside the business see’s the activity been undertaken and the benefits that are being generated.


Be big and bold

When you start off in social media, it’s easy to fall into the trap that you think no-one is listening and no-one is interested in what you have to say, but they are.

Be bold, talk about topics that are not only important to you as a business but also what is important to your audience. If you provide credit cards or bank accounts then be bold and discuss debt; if you sell mortgages talk about the problem of not been able to keep up with repayments; if you sell software then help people to understand what might happen if that software fails – be brave, be bold.


Creation and Curation

It’s not always about posting topics that you have created in-house or starting your own discussions; sometimes it’s important to comment on other’s work, maybe other similar businesses. Content can come from many different sources, look and listening to what’s outside of your business to see which of it can help you to engage with your market and get the conversation going.


Internal Collaboration

As already alluded to, Social media is a huge role for just one person in a decent sized business; but it is also true that social media is bigger than just one department. Call upon your colleagues in Sales, Customer Services and Support to help facilitate content, topics and discussions; these teams can help provide real-time insights as to what’s important to talk about.


None of this happens overnight, but if you are starting your social engagement journey, consider these points and getting you towards your end game will become much easier.

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Panda and Penguin updates from Google

Lets first of all remember that Google simply loves sites that users love, they want us all to create sites that people love to share with their friends, post of social media sites, bookmark and come back to time and time again, so over the coming months Google is planning a number of updates to it Panda and Penguin algorithm updates to help then serve up great sites.

Panda was introduced in 2011 to weed out sites that have a low quality content (scraped or stolen from other sites or just not useful enough); Penguin was rolled out in 2012 to weed out sites that got links from dubious sources (usually link farms, low quality sites/forums/blogs etc).

Panda

Looks like Google is trying to soften the edges of what they class a poor quality site, certainly some sites with little content (mainly because volumes of copy are not necessary) did get hit by Panda, but in the near future Google will be using some new Authority signals to address this.

These changes to the Authority signals routine should improve the ranking for smaller sites that have a single theme, and has a decent number of good authoritative links.  Better for the smaller sites than the big boys.

Penguin

Google learnt a lot from the original Penguin updates and they did manage to find and destroy a lot of spammy sites that did well in rankings because they got their links from link farms and other low quality sites; they now have a deeper understanding of this murky areas of SEO; so with this extra knowledge they are updating their link analysis algorithm to capture more spammy linked sites.

They will also look to reduce the cluster of results from a single domain on page one of their SERPs.

All in all it looks like some good changes for webmasters that just want to create a decent site for their visitors and are not interested in gaming Google.

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Are you the Betamax of SEO!

Some things become old hat over time, one moment they have their day and they are good for you, the next, they are definitely bad for you and like the old Betamax videocassette, you really shouldn't be seen dead with them!

Some SEO tactics are now so old fashioned that they will soon start to cause your site problems if you continue use them.

Article Submissions – so very yesterday; there once was a time when submitting an article to a directory could bring you some decent traffic and also be great in the eyes of Google; but those days are now long gone, Google will penalising you for submitting content somewhere in the simple hope of providing a dodgy link back to your site.

Reciprocal Linking and Link Exchanges – a fantastic tactic to use at the turn of the millennium, many sites got lots of links from them and plenty of Google kudos with this tactic, not any more; search engines now detect these links easily and know that your site is simply after cheap, useless links and they won't thank you for it.  If you provide great content, other sites will naturally start linking to it!

Thin Content – providing scant copy on a page just to try to get a few more keywords on your site, is not only a very poor SEO habit (and always was), but also provides absolutely no value to your visitors whatsoever; if you employ this tactic then it is definitely time to move on (after all, we are in the 21st Century now). We already know that great content can drive great links.

Ignoring Design – once upon a time, design didn't matter, you had a site and by hook or by crook, visitors managed to find what they wanted and were somewhat happy! Those times have long gone my friend.

Picture a tatty shop on a typical High Street, dirty windows, paint peeling from the sign, inside the store isn't any better with products placed all over the place, poor internal signage means you can't find what you want and there is no shopkeeper to help you find what you want – chances are you wouldn't enter this shop in the first place, but if you did, I bet you wouldn't want to buy anything from it. 

This High Street shop is like a badly designed website; it's unlikely that anyone would enter a site like this in the first place, but if they did, I'm sure that they wouldn't stay around for long!

Don't settle for or ignore your website design. Your visitors won't!

Summary

Be the Betamax of SEO if you dare; if you do, I can guarantee that Google won't like your site, and if they don't like your site then they won't send anyone your way!

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Convert website visitors to customers in 5 easy steps

We all want to attract visitors to our website, but more important that getting those visitors is the simple fact that once on your pages, you need to be able to convert them into customers, here are some very simple steps you can take to help in that goal.

Design to Delight - OK, I know, this one is obvious right!  Right, but you would be surprised how many website owners forget this one simple rule.  

Sites needs to be well laid out, wish simple, clear navigation (key navigation buttons should be either across the top or down the left hand side).  Use colours that are easy on the eyes and keep fonts simple, the words on the page should be easy to read.  Use images ONLY when they add to what you want to convey.  One or two column content layouts are fine, but always try to put the main content in a slightly wider column to help attract the eye.

Split Test – Google's Website Optimizer is now Google Content Experiments and brings with it the power of split testing to anyone with a website.  Essentially, this and similar tools allow you to test two possible website elements (this could be image, test or buttons etc), and will help you to see which version your visitors engage with the best.

So for example if you have two headlines and you didn't know which one to use then this simple A/B split testing would help you decide which your visitors thought was best.

Usability Testing - This covers a range of options from getting friends, family or colleagues to look at your website to recruiting a specialist agency to do it for you.

You can let them navigate your site freely noting problems and issues that they have with it or provide a list of actions that you want them to perform; tests done yourself are usually best when you can watch your subjects browsing as you can see all the small problems that they have that they might not later comment on.

Titillate your Titles - Did you see what I did there!  Titles on webpages, articles, news and blog posts provide you with a great opportunity to really grab your visitors attention.  If it's suitable for your brand then use a little humour in main titles; break down your content into chunks and start each section with a sub heading, this helps draw in visitors and also makes the piece easier for reading.

Lead them into that all important call to action.

Chat - Consider introducing a live chat feature on your site so if visitors get stuck or need to ask you a question then you are only one click away from an answer; the key is to keep them on your site at all times.

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10 Fabulous Traffic Ideas for your Blog

Blogs are an incredibly popular ways to create an online presence for businesses today; they can be free to set up and you can start creating content almost immediately.

But, is there any point to having great content if no one is ever going to read it, so here are ten ideas to bring traffic in to your blog.

Remember that thousands of blogs have failed over the years; they are like running any type of business in that unless you are willing to put the time in and treat it seriously, you won’t be blogging long.

Most new bloggers really aren’t prepared for the work that goes into creating a successful one. Just building the blog doesn’t mean that people will necessary come to you. You pursue the audience and give them a reason to see what you have to say.

1.         Fresh Content – Apart from the fact that the major search engines love sites to have fresh content, no one wants to visit a blog day after day and see the same posts. You really need to update your blog content at least twice a week. This will be easier if you write several posts ahead of time and upload them at the appropriate times – which is what I do.

2.         Article Marketing – whilst traditional article marketing used to help rank your site better in Google isn’t worthwhile anymore, it is still useful to write some of your articles so that they can be posted on article directory site to help bring in more visitors.

3.         Social Networking – these sites are everywhere. Allowing visitors to share your post via social media (look at addthis.com) and promoting your posts via Tweets etc is a great viral way to help promote your posts.

4.         Viral Marketing – this is where you spread the word about your blog. Talk to friends, family and even strangers. Give out business cards that have your blog address on them.  Add it to your email signature, promote it within forums, talk about it and share it at every opportunity.

5.         Use RSS Feeds – RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” Readers can subscribe to your feed and get email updates when your new content is posted. It is an incredibly easy way for them to keep up with your blog.

6.         Submit Blog to Search Engines – a lot of people forget to do this, but submitting your blog to search engine directories will allow it to be ranked in search results. Search engines don’t necessary need you to do this anymore, but it is worth doing.  Please note that submitting your blog to search engines doesn’t automatically mean you’ll get a high ranking.

7.         Joining Forums – as a blogger you are a budding entrepreneur. Your main job is to market yourself and your blog. Become a member of related business forums, work at home forums and others to meet new people and share ideas. Remember that you should add a link to your blog in the signature line so others can easily find you.

8.         Visit other blogs – visit other blogs and leave positive comments; add a link back to your blog in your comments or there is also usually a “website” field that will link your name to your blog automatically.

9.         SEO Marketing – whatever you write, use relevant keywords. Ensure that you mention these keywords enough times throughout your blog posts but not too much; aim for about a five percent keyword density to help search engine rankings  Base your keywords on a research you do to find the most popular words used in search engines for your niche.  If you are unsure about keywords and how to get them into your content correctly then talk to a copywriter.

10.       Social Bookmarking – submitting your posts to social bookmarking sites allows others who are members of those sites that don’t know about your blog to visit you.

Using any of these ideas will start the traffic moving in your direction. It takes time but you will build the readership you want.

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Five Tips to Search Engine Success

Tip 1 – You can’t outsmart Google

It’s a fact that if you try to beat Google by trying the latest way to force your pages into the top of the rankings then you will get found out!  Site owners that were spanked by Google's most recent updates (Penguin or Panda), will testify to the fact that you have to bide your time.

A spammy approach to gaining good ranking will hurt you and your business in the long run.  There is no automated way to the top, no quick win – only and effort will get you there.

Tip 2 – Normal business rules apply

If you owned a ‘bricks and motor’ store then I'm guessing that you wouldn't expect to attract customers for free; the internet is exactly the same, it isn't free nor easy to attract visitors to a website.

Invest time and effort and you’ll do well.

Tip 3 – ensure your site has a good infrastructure

It stands to reason that your site won’t survive for long if it had a poor design.  To get ranked well you need a fast loading site filled with pages with great content and pages that link to all the other pages within your site (needed so that search engines spiders know where all your pages are.)

If you're serious about your website, don't use the cheapest web host or designer. Slow poorly designed pages can influence the rankings of your web pages.

Tip 4 – Take Control

Stop searching for gurus or secret tricks that promise to make your site number one in Google (or any other search engine for that matter), they don’t exist.

Work with a search engine marketing professional, ideally someone who understands business and how search engines work.

With their assistance discover what your unique selling proposition is

Identify your audience and make a plan.

Create a great website with valuable content (if visitors like your site word will get out)

Advertise your site (use SEO, paid advertising, even traditional advertising to promote it)

Step 5 -  Act Now

There is always something is your business that’s more important that promoting your website (or so you think), talk to someone today (talk to me) about improving your search engine rankings.

SEO is not necessarily about getting backlinks. It's also not necessarily about getting high rankings on Google. It is about getting sales. It is about improving your business.

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5 Top Tips for improved search engine ranking

Having a website that gets found in Google, Yahoo! or MSN, etc. isn't hard to do, but it can be difficult to know where to begin. Here are our latest tips to help get you started.

Optimise for your Visitors!

It sounds like common sense, but very few businesses actually do it. Many businesses optimise their site for search engines, putting in keywords and phrases that are commonly used in search engines rather than actually researching what customers actually search on.

Search engines are looking for pages that best fit the keyword phrase someone types into their search box. If this person searching the internet is typing in search words that relate to what your site actually offers, then they are most likely members of your target audience.

You need to optimise your site to meet their needs. If you don't know who your target audience is, then you need to find out one way or another. Look for studies online that might provide the relative information, and visit other sites, communities, or forums where your target audience might hang out and listen to what they discuss. This information will be crucial to your resulting website design, keyword research, and copywriting.

Research keywords

Research your keyword phrases extensively, and never give up, the smallest of tweaks in the right direction can make a huge difference to your ranking.

The phrases you think your target market might be searching for may very well be incorrect.
To find the very best phrases to optimise your site for, use research tools such as Keyword Discovery, Wordtracker or any Google or Yahoo Search Marketing data you can lay your hands on.

Compile lists of the most relevant phrases for your site, and choose a few different ones for every page.
Never shoot for general keywords such as "parties" or "cars" as they are rarely indicative of what your site is really about.

You are aiming for a list of just ten good keywords or phrases, then start your optimisation.

Labels

It’s great coding too, but remember to label your internal text links and clickable image alt attributes (alt tags) as clearly and descriptively as possible.

Your site visitors and the search engines look at the clickable portion of your links (i.e. the anchor text) to help them understand what they're going to find once they click-through.

Don't make them guess what's at the other end with links that say "click here" or other nondescriptive words. Be as descriptive as possible with every text and graphical link on your site.

The cool thing about writing your anchor text and alt attributes is that you can be as descriptive (and relevant) as you want to be, and try to include some of those keywords too.

Copywriting

Great web site copy is one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal to get you ranked well on the major search engines.

Write compelling copy for the key pages of your site based on your chosen keyword phrases and your target market's needs, and make sure it's copy that the search engines can "see".

This is a crucial component to having a successful web site. The search engines (i.e. Google and Yahoo!) need to read keyword rich copy on your pages so they can understand how to classify your site.

This copy shouldn't be buried in graphics or hidden in Flash or as coding comments. Write your copy based on your most relevant keyword phrases while also making an emotional connection with your site visitor.

There are no magic number of words per page or number of times to use your phrases in your copy, just do not use too many or too few! Try aiming for between 5 percent and 15 percent keyword density and you should be OK.

The important thing is to use your keyword phrases only when and where it makes sense to do so for the real people reading your pages. Simply sticking keyword phrases at the top of the page for no apparent reason isn't going to cut it, and it just looks silly.

Linking

Make sure your site is "link-worthy."

Other sites linking to yours is a critical component of a successful search engine optimisation campaign, as all of the major search engines place a good deal of emphasis on your site's overall link popularity.

You can go out and request hundreds or thousands of links, but if your site is poor, why would anyone want to link to it?

On the other hand, if your site is full of wonderful, useful information, other sites will naturally link to it without you even asking.

The jury is out on where it is fine or not to simply trade links, the approach of black and white marketing is to get as many one way links for our clients as possible because we know that this is the very best linking approach to take; but it does take time.

When you link to lousy sites, keep in mind what this says to your site visitors as well as to the search engines.

Conclusion

There are some things that you can do to your web site to help you get a better search engine ranking, but it takes time (a long time), it's hard work, and lots of people think its boring, I actually enjoy doing it!

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Easy to Read = More Online Sales

It pretty much stands to reason that when a visitor lands on your website they will be more engaged with it if they can understand it!

By their very nature, website visitors are impatient people. If they have to work to understand your web pages (navigation or content), then they will go away to find an easier site than yours. Your competitors!


Many websites that I get to look at or look after contain some very technical language that is very difficult to understand for the seasoned professionals never-mind the average web surfer. Some webmasters also like long and complicated sentences.

Long and complicated sentences are not a sign of intelligence, it doesn't suggest to your readers that you know about the topic or more educated than them, it just shows that you really don't care about the readers.

Here are some very simple tips to help you.

• Write short sentences on your pages
• Use paragraphs
• Use headings and sub headings to structure the content logically
• Use bullet points
• Avoid using complicated words. Don't say "Dulcet" when you mean sweet or sugary!
• Use relevant  images on your pages

Follow these simple rules and your website visitors will flock to your pages and engage more with your brand/business.

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