To finish off the year, as usual, I’ve picked out a bunch of articles from over the last 12 months which I think still have a point to make. So this week I’m bringing you ten articles a day which you may like to dip into before launching yourself into your 2014 marketing. Enjoy! (I hope).
DO IT YOURSELF
Never, ever believe any stats quoted by publishers. Not because they’re made up or anything, but just because you can measure things yourself – so why would you even be remotely interested in data from their side of the fence?
DOUBLE WHAMMY
Companies which appear strongly in both the Google adverts and the natural results for a particular search get some wonderful branding. If you scan both (as some people do), there’s no doubt as to which company comes over as the major player in the market.
EMAIL PROMOTIONS
If you had the time or money to write to every one of your prospects with a different letter addressing their particular situation, you would do. And the response would be spectacular. So is there an automated halfway house between true personalisation and just mailmerging data into a template?
EMAILS
If your first sentence and subject line are the same, you may well be writing a very clear email.
ENQUIRY JOURNEYS
Here’s a visualisation of the different “enquiry journeys” which your prospects take, a first step to making their journey as easy as possible.
EXTERNAL LINKS
When we wrote the entire website copy for an instrumentation manufacturer a few years back, one of our specifications was that every product page should have at least one external link on it. Apart from any SEO benefit, it also gave us the discipline to ensure that each page was genuinely informative for visitors.
FILENAMES
Having discussed not using spaces in the filenames of documents which might end up on the web, …for search engines, as well as humans, the hyphen looks like it’s the winner. A document about Blue Widgets should be called blue-widgets.pdf.
FIND OUT MORE
One huge mistake is to make the vague offer “to find out more”. This is an absolute killer. As a prospect, I have no idea what “finding out more” means. Am I going to be taken to another web page? Emailed something? Sent details of the company’s showroom so I can come along and “find out more”? Am I giving permission for a salesperson to turn up on my doorstep tomorrow?
FORMS
Every field you remove from your form will increase the response rate.
FUNDAMENTAL
The company website is not a marketing channel like a brochure or an exhibition stand.