Our Daily Articles: Complete Index 2008–2019

Email which the customer can relate to

It’s never too late to start your new year resolutions, so I held this one back for a couple of weeks to allow you to get your feet back under the table. In New Year’s Email Marketing Resolutions on the Email Insider blog, there are five good ideas which you might like to consider if you send out emails to your customers and prospects. It’s a great idea to gradually start segmenting your recipient base and stop sending out one-size-fits-all emails. You’ll get a much better response if you target… Read More »Email which the customer can relate to

Get your website redesign right first time

Businesses are looking at redesigning their websites all the time. We know, because they keep saying to us: “We love the idea of the Insider Programme, and we’ll certainly be joining once we’ve got our new site launched”. D’oh! If you’re about to redesign your website, you have a fabulous opportunity to get it right, rather than having to rework the existing spaghetti like most companies have to. The advice and analysis we can give you is exactly what you need before you redesign your website. But enough of us.… Read More »Get your website redesign right first time

Why, precisely, do you have an ad budget?

Long-time readers will know that like thousands of other people, I love Seth Godin’s take on marketing. With Do Ads Work? he’s hit the nail on the head again. He says: “Why, precisely, do you have an ad budget? If your ads work, if you can measure them and they return more profit than they cost, why not keep buying them until they stop working? And if they don’t work, why are you running them?” If magazines, exhibitions, websites or email newsletters were as good as they say they are,… Read More »Why, precisely, do you have an ad budget?

Small change for big profits

The good folks at Conversion Rate Experts have recently given us 5 reasons to get obsessed with conversion rate optimization in 2009 and you have to agree it makes a lot of sense. In the article, they show how a 50% increase in conversion rate can result in a 500% increase in profits – a very interesting concept. “Conversion” is all about getting sales from where you were getting leads, and leads from where you were getting window shoppers. If you’re spending a fortune directing people to your website and… Read More »Small change for big profits

Another boring email title (with 47 characters)

For the many people who became readers of this blog in the past few days, I should point out that my daily ramblings aren’t usually anything like the length of those you saw last week. Normally I point to another article about online marketing, selected from hundreds of bloggers and authors I read regularly. Today I’d like to draw your attention to an article on the BeRelevant! site which summarises a recent research report on email subject lines. According to the report discussed in Subject Line Research Reveals Content is… Read More »Another boring email title (with 47 characters)

Building your own response forms

I hope you were able to read my articles on the challenge of getting name-and-address sales leads online, why you need to do so and how to convert traffic from Google and from your advertisements. The key is in having a great call to action, and getting it in front of the prospect as soon as possible. The page where people arrive on your website is called the “landing page”. For Google traffic, that’s going to be the product page, so it might be difficult to extract names-and-addresses from visitors… Read More »Building your own response forms

Making those adverts work properly

This week I’ve spent a couple of articles discussing why you need to convert your web traffic into name-and-address sales leads because your website can’t sell on its own. And yesterday I looked at converting traffic from Google into prospects. Today I’d like to cover a source of web traffic which you have a little more control over – your own advertising and promotions. With these, you can tightly control what responders do, such as “phone us for details” or “fill in the coupon”. However, we all know that most… Read More »Making those adverts work properly

Converting Google traffic into names-and-addresses

Right, in the previous two articles I’ve made the fairly obvious point that in industry, we need to capture the name-and-address details of people visiting our websites who are after a specific product or service. If we don’t, it’s exactly the same as having an exhibition stand, and just sitting there in a chair smiling politely at everyone who browses our display. Some potential customers may choose to introduce themselves and talk about their requirements, but the majority won’t. And if you don’t get talking to them, you’ll never be… Read More »Converting Google traffic into names-and-addresses

Perhaps you don’t even need salesmen any more

Yesterday I said that the biggest challenge in industrial marketing has become simply getting the name-and-address sales lead. Prospects see your magazine ad, read your direct mail or browse your exhibition stand, like they always have. But do they then contact you for further information or a sales call, like before? No. They go to your website to find out what they need to know. In theory, that’s fine. You’ve got a great website, haven’t you? All your products and services are laid out clearly, and it couldn’t be easier… Read More »Perhaps you don’t even need salesmen any more

Let’s resolve to get more sales leads in 2009

There are many differences between industrial marketing and consumer marketing, but the main one is the action we want our prospects to take. In consumer marketing, they want them to just buy stuff. In industrial marketing, the buying decision is usually further down the road; what we want the prospects to do is simply to reveal themselves. It’s all about getting the name-and-address sales lead. Unfortunately, while online marketing has made it easier than ever to get direct sales, it’s made it harder than ever to get name-and-address sales leads.… Read More »Let’s resolve to get more sales leads in 2009

Email …or yelling?

We end the week with something which is very American, but still quite amusing. Sales Is Still from Mars and Marketing Is Still from Venus on The Funnelholic compares sales and marketing in a table. A college “GPA” is apparently some sort of an academic score. So of course sales doesn’t score as highly as marketing, but hey, we all know the best sales guys didn’t waste their time hanging around in college when there was a big wide world out there to be sold to.

Building relationships with online writers

I’ve touched on link building and its importance before, and I will doubtless do so many more times in the future. One of the great sources for quality links has become quality blogs, and you’d probably be surprised how many there are in your general area of business (think as much about your markets as your products when tracking them down). Now, how do you get bloggers to write about you? It’s no different really from the way you’d approach magazine editors to write about you – just treat them… Read More »Building relationships with online writers

Real comparisons with your competitors

I hope most people by now realise that old-style “site traffic measurement” programs like Webalizer and AWstats are pretty useless nowadays, particularly for industrial websites where we need to know about conversions and return on investment. We should all be using something like Google Analytics, and I hope you are. Similarly, old-style measurement of how good your website is compared to your competitors have been shown up for the crude measurements they are. Statistics such as your “Google PageRank” and relative numbers of links shown in Yahoo! are just that… Read More »Real comparisons with your competitors

The branding spinoff from SEO

Nowadays I’d always advise people that if you want lead generation, you should focus your efforts online, but if you’re after company or product branding, more traditional forms of promotion such as print advertising may still have the edge. However, here’s an interesting result that’s had me questioning that advice slightly. Search Results are 3rd Most Trusted Online Information Source on Blogstorm relays some survey results which suggest that where you appear in the search engines has a significant impact on the trust in your brand. I’m not so interested… Read More »The branding spinoff from SEO

The big screen experience

Do you know how many different web browsers visitors to your website use? While Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox are the most popular, there are many others, including IE6, Opera, Safari, Chrome and more. Then there are the different operating systems; Windows XP may predominate still, but there are quite a few Windows Vista, Mac OS, Linux and older Windows system users out there too. Finally, there are the screen sizes, which cover a wider range than ever today, thanks to the bigger screens on some people’s desks, but the… Read More »The big screen experience

Step by step in the new year

Happy New Year to all readers of Business Marketing Online’s An Article A Day. We’ve gone from 0 to 250 readers in our first few months, so who knows where we’ll be this time next year? Remember, this is a completely free blog, so if you’d like to recommend it to your colleagues, please do. The link to send them is https://www.bmon.co.uk/get-new-articles-by-email/. I have loads of online marketing issues I’m planning to discuss in the next few weeks, and I hope you find them useful. Of course, if you really… Read More »Step by step in the new year

Your new year’s resolution

Here’s a very short post about another very short post. But if you’re looking for a new year’s resolution for your professional life, resolve to answer this question.

SEO in four parts

Yesterday I suggested that getting links into your site is half of the battle when it comes to search engine optimisation (“SEO”). The other half which I was alluding to is “on-page optimisation”, or having the right content presented the right way. In The four fundamentals of SEO remain as relevant as ever, the Search Engine War blog suggests that there are four elements to SEO, splitting my content half into three topics. What’s more, they suggest that these are primarily the same elements as at the start of the… Read More »SEO in four parts

Links are unequal. But how unequal?

One of the most important things you can do to develop your website is to start a link-building campaign. It’s something we’re covering with appropriate significance on our Insider Programme (which you really ought to think about joining in the New Year, by the way). Links are the currency of the web, and the most essential of the two things you need to do if you’re to get to the top of the Google results. Getting links is a chore, but there are loads of good tips to be had.… Read More »Links are unequal. But how unequal?

Re-use, recycle, reduce and remove

The Recession is Here – Time to Become an Eco-Marketer is the title of a brilliant piece on Anything Goes Marketing which is actually nothing to do with environmental issues. It’s actually to do with recycling marketing resources and minimising wasted effort. I won’t try to summarise it any further: have a read. And Happy Christmas, by the way. I’ll be right back after this short break.

Using a PR agency? Or an ostrich?

Back in 2000 I addressed a seminar of PR consultants who were discussing the “threat” from the internet. Many of them were worried that if print magazines started to die off, relationships with editors would become less important, and many companies would just start to write their own press and PR material which would find a much easier route to publication on the web. Meanwhile, online advertising looked set to boom, and advertising agencies were going to have a great time. I argued that this wasn’t the case: the web… Read More »Using a PR agency? Or an ostrich?

Time to get on the road

In marketing we can view the sales team as our customers really, and we all know how crucial it is to understand customers. The problem at many companies (especially where the sales team significantly outnumbers the marketing team) is often that the sales team shout loudly about what they want, but the marketing team “know” that the sales team doesn’t really understand the problem. Immediately you get a “them and us” situation, and I can name many companies where I’ve seen this happen. So often marketing is a gentler, more… Read More »Time to get on the road

The next step for your AdWords campaigns

Hands up who’s doing PPC (pay per click) advertising? You know, Google AdWords and the like? Hmm, that’s quite a lot of you. And I see a few of you, even at fairly small companies, spending as much as you ever did on print advertising – and the monthly expenditure is rising too. So perhaps we need to take stock of where we are. In 7 Signs Your PPC Campaigns Needs Optimization on the Marketing Optimization Blog the author contends that you’re probably not doing AdWords as efficiently as you… Read More »The next step for your AdWords campaigns

Good things needn’t cost a fortune

I feel for the three or four companies who’ve told me recently that they’re keen on our Insider Programme and who like the idea of having my advice on tap for their website and associated activities – but who genuinely can’t find £500 a month in 2009. That’s fair enough, although I’d be interested to know what’s more important than developing your online marketing at the moment: please tell me it’s not print ads any more! Anyway, whatever the budgetary restrictions, we’re all looking for good low-cost opportunities, and there… Read More »Good things needn’t cost a fortune

Is Facebook relevant to us in industry?

Here’s an interesting discussion. Industrial Search Engine Marketing asks: “(is) Facebook a Viable Channel for Industrial Marketing?” and the answer is that it could well be. Now, like me, in a business context you may well gloss over anyone talking about Facebook and social media in general, thinking that it’s of no consequence. But there’s a growing (if still small) amount of business related activity going on in Facebook, and it might well be worth some of your time, especially if you’re a regular Facebook user and know your way… Read More »Is Facebook relevant to us in industry?

I’d never thought of that

You may be one of those people who think brainstorming is a woolly management idea which takes your team away from their real jobs, yet produces very little (while requiring significant expenditure in biscuits). But most people who have attended a brainstorming session run by an experienced facilitator will be great fans – I became a convert many years ago after attending one at an open day run by a local management consultancy. However, it’s quite possible to run a really good session without professional outside help. The Marketing Profs… Read More »I’d never thought of that

Feel good about yourself

With budgets increasingly under pressure at many industrial companies, 2009 may well be a year to work smarter. However, an article from B2B Magazine argues Why b-to-b is the place to be in the downturn. The reason is that in the consumer sector, marketing is going to have to start thinking and acting like the business-to-business sector. Where their differentiator has usually been branding, now they’re going to have to think more about what we take for granted: sales support, customer service, supply chain compliance, distribution and ultimately, as always,… Read More »Feel good about yourself

Look from a different angle

Another week, another great Seth’s Blog article. Gravity is just a theory is one of those ideas which will immediately get you wondering how it applies to your own marketing activities (it did for me, anyway). What Seth Godin is saying is that if you really want to be able to get people to act on your message now, it should not force them to change their minds and should be demonstrable before they get bored. Easier said than done, but once you start thinking about it, you may find… Read More »Look from a different angle

New, faster-acting suppliers

Here’s an interesting discussion from Sales Lead Insights B2B Marketing. React Faster to Your Leads to Increase Your ROI asks how quickly do you respond to the calls to action and contact forms on your website? It’s true (and I’ve been guilty of this at various companies) that when an enquiry comes in, we put it “into the system” and the prospect may be contacted in hours, possibly days, but never within minutes. But if you think about it, that’s exactly when you need to catch them. How many times… Read More »New, faster-acting suppliers

Deliver first, ask questions later?

White Papers are great. Because they were taken up most enthusiastically in the nineties by IT companies whose mission seemed to be to make even the simplest concepts bafflingly complex, many people (including me) were put off them almost forever. However, the concept has been reclaimed now by people with something to sell, and I believe they should be a part of the marketing armoury of every business. Essentially, a white paper is a good explanatory document aimed at helping readers make decisions. If you want to establish yourself as… Read More »Deliver first, ask questions later?

The words which will make or break you

I thought I’d run with the subject of emails a bit more, as we’ve redesigned our own output this week for those of you who read these articles by email. iMedia Connection covered the topic of titling emails the other day in How to craft irresistible subject lines. The basics are to keep your subject line short, and to get your brand name in. If you’re sending a frequent communication, the standard format is to put your brand in square brackets at the start of the subject line. For things… Read More »The words which will make or break you

We all need to simplify what we do

“Ironic” is a frequently misused word, but I guess it may be ironic that on a day with a headline like the one above, those of you who receive these articles by email will be seeing a more designed layout rather than the almost plain-text one we’ve been using until now. “HTML emails”, as these are known, are fraught with dangers, as even amongst a circulation of 250 (like this blog), there’ll be many different email readers (Outlook, Notes, Googlemail, etc), and all will display the email slightly differently. The… Read More »We all need to simplify what we do

The next shift in online marketing

Here’s a long, thoughtful post which you might like to consider over the weekend. Inbound Marketing and the Next Phase of Marketing on the Web on the Inbound Internet Marketing blog looks at just how a major shock in the business and financial markets led people to change their online marketing strategies in 2001, so the current market crises may have the same effect. Back then, web advertising shifted from display (banner) advertising towards pay-per-click (although at the speed most industrial B2B companies operate, that’s only just being realised in… Read More »The next shift in online marketing

Key 9 to go to the next menu

Right, one of those short posts from marketing guru Seth Godin today, which – as ever – hits the nail squarely on the head. In How to answer the phone he recounts the difficulty of getting through to a company on the phone, and reiterates the maxim: the only reason to answer the phone when a customer calls is to make the customer happy. Bland yes, but also dead right. He continues: “If you’re not doing this or you are unable to do this, do not answer the phone. There… Read More »Key 9 to go to the next menu

Control your own Google

If you hadn’t heard, Google introduced a highly significant enhancement to its service a week or so back, called SearchWiki. This enables users to edit their search results – that is, reorder, remove, or add web pages to the results for any query. You can add notes to listings too. There’s a good summary of the implications of this in Google SearchWiki 101: An Illustrated Guide on Search Engine Land which you might like to read. If that looks daunting, I’ll highlight the bits you need to know, before any… Read More »Control your own Google

Making a sales letter truly great

Thank you so much for all your flattering comments about last week’s series of articles about the state of online marketing in UK industrial companies. I’ll try to write a few more pieces like that which are closer to home in the future. In the meantime, back to work. I’ve read entire books on writing sales letters, and some of them have even been worth reading. But to fill an entire book on this subject you need to get far too detailed; the really good stuff can be summarised in… Read More »Making a sales letter truly great

Time to get to the point

Should you continue promoting your company in a business downturn? Of course you should, even if it has to be at a reduced level, because a dip in the market is the easiest time to increase market share, history has taught us that. But should your marketing message change? In Ten Tips for Effective Creative in Difficult Times on the B2B Insights Blog it’s suggested that you make more effort to understand the situation in which your customers find themselves (and I should add that their situation might just be… Read More »Time to get to the point

Here’s what I learned this summer (4)

This is the final observation I’d like to make from seeing so many UK industrial companies’ online marketing operations this summer: my surprise at how much companies are spending on pay-per-click advertising – and my concern at how much they may be wasting. By pay-per-click advertising, effectively I mean Google AdWords, which dominates the market. If you’d asked me to have made an educated guess at how much this was being used in UK industrial marketing, I’d have probably said maybe a quarter of companies might have tried it, but… Read More »Here’s what I learned this summer (4)

Here’s what I learned this summer (3)

What else did I learn this summer, while talking to loads of UK industrial companies about their websites? I learned that many companies do not have website traffic analytics data, and even fewer are actually using it to calculate return on investment from online campaigns, or their website as a whole. At many companies, I asked what analytics data they had on their website visitors, and they pointed to some horribly crude log analysis program provided for free by their website host – something like AWStats or Webalizer. A chart… Read More »Here’s what I learned this summer (3)
Here’s what I learned this summer (2)

Here’s what I learned this summer (2)

As I mentioned yesterday, while travelling around the UK this summer introducing our Insider Programme, I’ve started to see the challenges involved in online marketing in UK industry, and have discovered some common problems and mistakes, which I thought I’d bring to you all this week. Today: the Splash Page lives! Now, you’re probably thinking: “The Splash Page? Does Chris mean those movies people used to make you watch before being able to access their websites? The ones which made half the visitors hurriedly scroll around for the “skip this”… Read More »Here’s what I learned this summer (2)

Here’s what I learned this summer (1)

This week, rather than refer you to other people’s articles, I thought I’d write about some of my own recent experiences. In the course of launching our Insider Programme this summer, I’ve visited many industrial companies around the UK, and spoken to many more at the series of seminars we held. In doing so, I’ve started to get an idea of the state of online marketing in UK industry, and it’s been most revealing – in some cases, pleasantly surprising, in others, quite shocking. While my small sample of a… Read More »Here’s what I learned this summer (1)

Those nice people at Google

To know how to write web pages to do well in Google, it can be helpful to know a bit about Google itself. And there’s a nice little introductory article on the official Google Blog, called Introduction to Google Search Quality, which puts a human face on what they do. Obviously it doesn’t reveal any trade secrets, but it reinforces the fact that there are people behind all this technology. As well as a staggering number of PCs.

Avoiding errors in error pages

I’ve mentioned “error pages” before, but I’ll revisit the subject regularly until everyone’s sorted theirs out. Do you know what happens if someone types in a page on your site which doesn’t exist? Here’s what happens on our site. Is your “error page” as user-friendly? Try typing a load of nonsense after your domain name and see what happens. Even if you think what you’re providing is OK, it may still be worth reading 404 error pages, news sites and user experience on the E-consultancy blog, where they investigate what… Read More »Avoiding errors in error pages

Free does not mean cheap. It means “thanks”.

I know many industrial marketing managers don’t like free gifts, perhaps considering them to be in some way unprofessional. I disagree – some of the best branding I’ve experienced over the years has come from decent freebies. I can even name (without looking) many things which have hung around my home and office for years: a Telemecanique umbrella, a Rose+Krieger pen, an Adept Scientific calculator, and some SMC Pneumatics golf balls – and that’s straight off the top of my head. But what have freebies got to do with online… Read More »Free does not mean cheap. It means “thanks”.

Who knows what works?

Analysing your website visitors is one of the great exercises in marketing today. It genuinely excites me to follow who they are, where they came from and what they do on my website. I never had this level of insight into the customer with any traditional marketing technique. But there’s another fascinating exercise which online marketing has given us, and that’s the ability to test everything easily. We’re all daft if we don’t find the time to do it, if only because it was so much more difficult to do… Read More »Who knows what works?

Get more Good Stuff on your site

An excellent article has just appeared on the E-consultancy blog about content for your B2B website. In Creating Cracking Corporate Content author Kevin Gibbons reminds us that the days of writing stilted web pages full of key search terms have long gone, and nowadays there’s little difference between copy which “works” for human visitors and that which “works” for search engines. The content requirements for technology guides, press releases, product descriptions and blogs are all discussed. Well worth digesting.

The essentials of email newsletters

Here’s one of the best articles ever on email newsletter writing. How To Build a Successful Email Newsletter on Problogger points out that you need to start out by defining what you’re trying to do with the publication, and letting the potential readers know this. Then you need a voice, and a clear idea of the value you’re offering the readers (in exchange for their time). Your content needs to be scannable, have trackable results, and good subject lines. Finally you need a good distribution service, and a reliable opt-in/opt-out… Read More »The essentials of email newsletters

Your online marketing in 2009

Last week we completed a series of four seminars for marketing managers from UK engineering, scientific and construction sector suppliers. If you were one of the 60 or 70 people who attended, we hope you enjoyed your day with us and found it useful. Certainly the feedback (100% positive!) leads us to believe we got it right. We hope you found the introduction of our Insider Programme on a face-to-face basis to be revealing, and we know that many of you got quite a few ideas from my presentation on… Read More »Your online marketing in 2009

Run far, far away. Very fast.

A week ago I wrote an article which suggested that many “search engine optimisation” (SEO) consultants out there were little more than charlatans, and I’d like to thank the many of you who emailed me with sympathetic messages based on your own experiences. There are some great ones out there, although they rightly expect decent fees, and I do understand that it’s often a sign of the immaturity of the customers that forces even good SEO consultants to resort to claiming they’ll “get you to number one on Google”, because… Read More »Run far, far away. Very fast.

Free guide to email marketing

Thanks to BeRelevant for pointing out that a nice little e-book called The Practical Guide to Email Marketing is available for free download – go get your copy now while it’s still available. If you do any sort of promotional emailing for your company, I’m pretty certain you’ll find some good tips inside.