SEO Illumination
A little while ago at the London Bloggers Meetup, we had the pleasure of Improbulous from A Consuming Experience talk to us about search engine optimisation and getting traffic to your blog. At the time some of the ideas seemed straight forward and well known, but others quite interesting. I certainly picked up a few ideas. Improbulus went on to post at length at her fantastic blog and even developed the following “6 illuminating sayings”:
1. Content is king, originality the crown, and text the crown jewels.
2. Relatedness raises relevance.
3. The early words get the spider, and headings help make things tastier.
4. Links in to your blog’s web address (URL) are good, good links in are better, good link text is best.
5. Link out liberally - cite sites for authority and authenticity.
6. A blog post a day keeps bots from going away; a regular diet is just how they like it.
Great work Improbulus.
To read a full explanation of Imp’s saying, you need to check out her blog right now. Of course, don’t forget to post a comment if you find the content useful or interesting!
Tag:bloggingHow a Smartphone Could Help Your Business
Sitting on the tube and looking at my Palm got me to thinking how great this little gadget is. I can read, write, send and receive my email, write documents, presentations and spreadsheets, stay in touch with my clients and administer my blogs and websites. All this and a lot more while I’m on the move.
It has really made me think about the importance of having a mobile strategy in place for my business, in fact for all businesses. The use of mobile devices is only going to increase, with all of the big analyst houses expecting the market to grow exponentially.
What are the implications of all this to your business then? Here are a few ideas for you to think about…
1. Do you have a mobile plan for your workforce? Can they collect email and work remotely and therefore provide you with greater levels of productivity? Will a smart phone add that extra flexibility and drive up performance.
2. Do you have a backup plan in place in case one of your team mobiles gets stolen, not just for the hardware, but also the potential loss of data and employee down time?
3. Are your communications mobile friendly? For example, do you include a logo in your email footer that will soak up mobile bandwidth?
4. Is your website compatible with the major handsets or do you offer a .mobi version?
5. Does your mobile phone tariff allow you to send and receive email / data without incurring excessive charges? Can you make and receive calls via Skype, the voice over IP provider, to save with costs for international calls?
6. Are you operating with the best handsets? The common perception that the Blackberry is best for business may just not be accurate. I use a palm which is more cost effective, at least in my circumstances, and well within the reach of the average phone user.
7. Are you able to synchronise your smartphone with your email, calendar, to do client and share with your team? Would this help you to work together more smoothly?
Do yourself a favour, get a smartphone from Palm (or others) now - check out the New Palm Treo Pro!
(All written between Edgware Road and Parsons Green on the London Underground District line)
Tag:Technology10 Step Direct Marketing Campaign
I’ve been working on a direct marketing project for a client recently and though I might share with you the 10 core steps we took during this campaign. 
As a quick introduction, the client was a professional services firm wanting to reach out to a business audience to generate leads / appointments for a referral building campaign.
Well, here goes..
The Planning Phase
1. Setting our objectives before we started helped us to shape the strategy and tactics behind the campaign. We decided what we wanted to achieve and what success would look like which included:
- to increase awareness of the referral programme within target audience
- to generate X appointments with key decision makers
- to sign-up X new partners to the programme
2. The next step was to define our target audiences. As the campaign was fairly specific, we identified our target by geography, company type, company size and key decision maker. These criteria enabled us to establish their potential value of the target audience and any specific needs and requirements, essential for us in the next step - defining the media selection.
3. When defining the campaign, we had in mind a direct mail piece as being the core piece of communication. However after more careful thought about our target market, we quickly updated not only the type of direct mailer (content, format and messaging) but also the need to support the mailing with a telemarketing piece. This step was therefore about refining the format of the direct media format.
4. Once we had defined the objectives, target audience, the media selection, we moved on to timing. When would be a good time to send the mailer and when would be good to follow-up with the telemarketing.
After careful consideration, we opted to ensure the mailer or telephone calls were not received on a Monday or a Friday and all calls would not be made first thing in the morning, when our target audience is at it’s busiest. We also considered time of the year and decided to act before we hit August, the key holiday period.
Buying the Data
5. With all of the planning out of the way, it was time to acquire some data. I wanted to run a sample to test our creative and messaging before buying any data. This helped us to better refine our buying requirements, for example through clearly identifying who the core decision makers would be. As such we compiled a short data list through our own research, generating a 10% sample size.
6. Following this test we were in a good position to buy data that accurately reflected our target audience. For some guidance on buying data, I refer you to an excellent book called ‘The B2B Handbook, A Guide to achieving success in business-to-business direct marketing’.
Produced in association with the Direct Marketing Association and various professional consultancies, its guidelines include:
- remember all charges when calculating a cost per thousand – watch out for those extra charges some data list providers add on top
- check the recency of the data you are buying – did you know that some data lists decay at a rate of 40% each year. As such, check with the list provider how recent the data is and ensure you receive the most recent data – otherwise you may well be wasting you money
- negotiate usage in advance – make sure if you plan on multiple contacts with your list that you pay upfront as it can be costly if you want to buy re-use of the data – data is bought in single or multi use rates.
For more ideas, I strongly recommend buying the book - ‘The B2B Handbook, A Guide to achieving success in business-to-business direct marketing’.
Of course there are plenty of options for acquiring data, from in-house (i.e. your own data), to custom research (as we conducted for the test) to list brokers and data owners. Each offers it’s own advantages and disadvantages, which you ought to consider carefully before proceeding.
Executing the Campaign
7. The test campaign enabled us to identify the core messages that worked well with the mailer and the telemarketing campaign. We know as we asked for feedback from our sample as to why they did or didn’t respond. We then applied these lessons directly to the main campaign, refining our direct mail piece to a personalised letter with clear product examples. Again, for some guidance on how to structure the content of your creative, I would refer you to ‘The B2B Handbook, A Guide to achieving success in business-to-business direct marketing’.
8. We decided to fulfil the mailer and telemarketing in-house in order to save on the costs. The mailer was personalised and each one signed in ink by a company director to add the additional touch. The telemarketing was handled by the marketing department to ensure the follow-up was appropriately managed and sales scripts adhered to - although of course there are plenty of high quality agencies that can fulfil on both of these counts.
9. Along with running the campaign, we planned the resources required to enable effective follow-up. This included providing resources online for target decision makers to acquire additional information, training incoming call staff on how to deal with enquiries, setting up the database to be properly updated and more. This alignment ensured we were able to manage responses to the mailer and telemarketing.
The Aftermath
10. The final step of the campaign was to analyse how well we had performed. We of course looked at the response we had generated, but also what the cost per acquisition was. This is useful for comparing the campaign to other marketing tactics.
We also looked for patterns in the response rates, considering what company sizes responded better, which decision makers carried the most weight, whether any of the geographies we targeted offered a better success rate. All of which will be helpful for our next campaign. Overall it was a very successful campaign and even where we didn’t receive a positive result we learned a few lessons for next time around.
Now I know this isn’t a perfect example of a direct marketing campaign, but for small companies, it might give you a few ideas and some structure to work with. As ever I’d be delighted to hear from anyone who would like to tell our readers about a recent direct marketing campaign – successful or not.
Tag:direct marketing-
Recent Conversations
-
- Alchemist: I wasn’t impressed. This isn’t a matter of subliminal messaging at all....
- Jez Hunt: Segmentation is SUCH an important part of marketing today… and it’s...
- Commercial Real Estate Florida: Awesome video and very inspiring. Thanks for sharing!
- Rabbit Pearl: Great tip! Its very very interesting when you learn about that you can choose your...
- car insurance by state prices: Yes its very important to have up to date knowledge of your...
- Tereza: I heard some time ago about this book and most interesting part for me was his...
- Hosted PBX: Smartphones are the way to go. Offices using Blackberries have flexibility and...
- funny tshirts: thanks for this.. great opener to me about crowdsourcing. thanks again
-
Loading ...
-
Subscribe to this Blog
