Our Daily Articles: Complete Index 2008–2020

Sales emails are a tremendously good investment. Other forms of reaching prospects online come and go (and get publicity), but in industrial B2B marketing, it’s email all the way. But why would we do a multi-subject, less personalised “email newsletter” rather than individual emails promoting specific offers and tailored to specific readers? The main advantage of an email newsletter lies in its regularity and familiarity. Readers are more likely to accept something which arrives on a consistent date, in a consistent format. If you send out a company email newsletter… Read More »Email newsletters which engage the reader

I’ve often despaired at how most PR companies have failed to move with the times. Often, their concession to the fact that such a large part of the marketing process has moved online is to say: “Yes, we send the press releases to websites as well as magazines now”. What about the fundamental questions? For example, are press releases even relevant now, or are they just something you need to be seen to be doing (and which fills up some content on your website)? If your PR company is effectively… Read More »Drag your PR company into your online marketing

The “About Us” page presents a huge open goal to business website owners, which many then proceed to miss spectacularly. Here’s the sequence of events: prospect looks for product in Google, prospect clicks through to your website, prospect reads about product …prospect goes straight to your “About Us” page. Why? Because if he’s interested in the product, the next thing he wants to know is more about its supplier. If you run analytics on your website, you’ll see how well-visited the “About Us” page is. Look at the sources of… Read More »“About Us”? Well, for a start, we’re boring.

Today I’m going to suggest three things which you could spend some serious marketing budget on in 2010. Many companies will look at the list and say “they’re hardly radical, Chris”, but based on the dozens of companies I’ve talked to in industrial marketing this year, most of them need to do one, two or all three of these. I’ve put a cost next to each, based on what we’d charge at the moment (other consultancies are available). And before you say “where am I going to find that much… Read More »3 ways you can spend your marketing budget more ambitiously in 2010

Did you miss anything good here in the past few weeks? My first attempt at a monthly roundup, last month, generated a lot of clickthroughs, so I’ve once again taken a look at the email and site traffic data to compile a list of the material which has proved the most popular amongst all you good people. Most-Opened “Online Marketing: An Article A Day” Blog Posts, September 2009 1. Frequently Unanswered Questions – I’ll talk about this one a bit more later in the week, because there’s more to say… Read More »Best of “An Article A Day”, September 2009

Honestly, I should charge you all for this stuff, really I should. Here’s the situtation. I keep saying that the secret of a successful business website is content, content, and content. (Oh, and links, of course). If your website is too formal for adding ad-hoc articles, then set up a blog. But wherever you put it, just keep adding that stuff which will make visitors come back and make Google a very happy search engine at the same time. You nod your head at this, yet think: “All very well,… Read More »How to get an original, 1000-word article for £10

Yesterday I argued that hiding your information behind a registration wall on your website will lose you direct customers, although it will give you more names and addresses for your marketing database. Maybe those people could be turned into customers later, so it might be worth the trade-off; it probably depends on your company setup. Is the job of marketing at your company to create current sales opportunities, or generate a list of future prospects for the sales department? But what if you could have the best of both worlds?… Read More »How to have the sales leads cake …and eat it

One of my favourite discussions in business website design is how much information you give free anonymous access to, and how much you withhold in order to get the prospect to give up their contact details. At one extreme, there’s the unassailable argument that the more you publish on your website, the more you’ll appear in Google, and the more traffic you’ll get. At the other extreme, people will claim most vociferously that “if I don’t know who the visitors are, they’re no use to me”, so they limit the… Read More »Exactly what qualifies as a quality lead?

To send out daily emails, I need a system which will just pick up any blog entries I write, format them nicely and email them to a subscriber list.

UK-based email marketing service provider Sign-Up.to has produced a report based on 216 million emails sent out through its service in the year to July. It allows us to compare the performance of email campaigns in the industrial and manufacturing sector to other areas as diverse as finance and restaurants. The first interesting observation is that from more than 20 categories, the industrial and manufacturing sector produced the highest bounce rate (13%) by far. I assume it means that we have the most out-of-date circulations, but I can’t explain why… Read More »Emailing engineers: could do better

If you read the various blogs coming out of Google, as I do, you’ll know that the folks at the world’s biggest search engine are really trying hard to “localise” their results – so if you’re looking at Google from the UK, for example, even if you type in “www.google.com” you should automagically be redirected to the UK version, www.google.co.uk (because they can detect where you are) …and the results in the UK version should be ones which are relevant to us here. To demonstrate where they’ve got it right,… Read More »Your chance to help Google, and help yourself

I’m detecting a lot of interest at the moment in B2B companies rebuilding their websites. There are many reasons why you might want to tear it all up and start again, but they’ll probably be something to do with the fact that the existing one is fiddly (or expensive) to add to or maintain. Many companies have been soldiering on with old, outdated content management systems which have severely restricted their ability to make the changes required for search engine optimisation, for instance. If you think that your 2010 marketing… Read More »5 things whoever rebuilds your website needs to understand

Sorting out the “keywords”, or search terms, which you need to focus your efforts on, is a fundamental part of web marketing. As I’ve written often enough, you don’t necessarily want to concentrate on “blue widgets”, even if that’s what you sell, because the competition might be too great, or there might be alternative meanings for “blue widgets”. So where do marketing managers turn to for inspiration? Here are two common destinations which need great care. Firstly, looking at the search terms which people used to get to your website.… Read More »2 Ways Not To Do Keyword Research

When doing website redesign and relaunch – which I’m being increasingly asked to do – I often ask the client to show me some websites which they’d like to emulate. The response is often a little disappointing, because the sites offered are usually just the pick of immediate competitors. There’s much more to be gained, however, by setting your sights high and looking at the websites of much bigger operations, with much bigger budgets. Of course there’s no chance you could build a site requiring those sorts or resources, but… Read More »Don’t just settle for keeping up with your competitors

Most people I speak to who tell me they enjoy these emails add, almost apologetically, “although I can’t say I have time to read every one”, as if it was a requirement. It’s OK, you are allowed to have more pressing matters to attend to. However, in case you ever wonder if the ones you miss happen to be the ones which contain the best advice ever, I thought that, as another month ends, I’d bring you the five articles which inspired the most people to open the emails this… Read More »Best of “An Article A Day”, August 2009

It’s Friday, so that means it’s time for a useful web tool. Today’s, however, has a few implications which you might like to consider. Mailinator is one of many online services which gives you a “disposable e-mail address” – useful if somebody requests your email address in order to get something, but you don’t want to give them your real one. Expect to see a lot more people in the future entering disposable addresses into your web forms unless you give them a really good reason to give you their… Read More »How genuine is that email address?

I was doing some online research earlier this month (for a new camera, as it happens), and I realised that I was in a class of people which websites don’t seem to be very helpful towards. Maybe it’s because I’m just odd, but we might be a growing group who you might want to take into account on your site. We’re the people who organise our lives around email. What does that mean? Well, I use email as a to-do list. I use email as a bookmarking service. If I… Read More »Help your prospects remember you – by email

When people say: “I want to get my site to number one in Google for red widgets”, I don’t tell them they’ve just made a fundamental error in terminology, because it doesn’t really matter, I know what they mean. Except it does matter. It’s only just dawned on me that they’re not being sloppy with their language, they’re betraying a misapprehension which needs to be corrected, because once it is, the path to getting to number one in Google becomes a lot clearer. Sites don’t get to number one in… Read More »1 thing you need to know about SEO

Right, I’ve told you how the way to get to the top of the Google results is to get lots of inbound links. And I’ve told you that having lots of content on your site is the way to, er, get to the top of the Google results. So which one is it, Chris? Oh, you know the answer …it’s both. Do I have to get off the fence? OK, I’ll go for content, but only because the more content you have, the more material you’ve got which might attract… Read More »Number one on Google doesn’t just happen

Keyword research. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, keyword research is one of the most important things to do in your online marketing. If you know what you want to be found for, you can create web pages, emails, PPC ad campaigns and more with those searched-for words or phrases (“keywords”) in mind. If you haven’t formulated a list, you haven’t got a focus, and you won’t be using the keywords at every opportunity like you should. And it matters, because the chances are at least one… Read More »Keywords: they’re that important

Does the writing which goes on your website get as much scrutiny or proofreading as the writing which goes into your company’s printed brochures? I bet it doesn’t. Somehow there’s a “permanence” about print which makes it held in some sort of awe, whereas online copy is normally just one person’s unedited, unplanned thoughts. Strange, because in many cases, not only will web copy be read by more people than print copy nowadays, but I believe the difference in response between good and ordinary copy is greater on a web… Read More »How much do you care about your words?

Yesterday I discussed “content marketing“, which is the opposite of traditional interruption marketing in that you provide the material which people want to be engaged with, rather than hanging around someone else’s work. So how do we go about setting up a content marketing campaign? There are loads of possibilities, and they’re not just writing articles. Remember, this is all about showing you’re an industry authority (and you are!), so you can tell the story through videos, presentations, whatever you like. However, let’s start at the most obvious place: written… Read More »Put some content generation at the heart of your marketing