Business Marketing Online

Where ‘a whole new way of working’ comes in is to have discussions recorded and the transcriptions used primarily as a searchable index.

One tip to in-house company video directors: ensure that the interviewee knows the day before that they’ll be taking part in a video.

For product pages, it may make sense to strip back the URL to the important stuff (the product name) while adding some helpful descriptors.

It makes sense to ensure your company page is set up well, because that’s where readers are likely to turn after reading your content.

If you’re not personalising your marketing more in 2020, just remember that your competitors may well be. Video is just another outlet.

Hmm… not many enquiries and an inability to knock up tailored landing pages? I suspect most readers will identify themselves here.

How convenient is responding to your advertising? Or finding out a crucial technical specification about one of your products?

It’s becoming increasingly clear that the direction in which we’re heading inexorably is one where the marketer needs to be more empathetic.

If your keywords make sense as tags, use them, but also investigate what existing highly-performing videos are using as their tags.

Search adverts against your competitors’ brand names are not a good idea, as it can be expensive and have unintended consequences.

We don’t have scope for experimenting with direct mail; it needs to be right first time …and here’s where our online capabilities come in.

It could well be a good investment of time or money to take a serious look at a whole range of speed-related aspects.

A nice walk in your lunch hour to think about things wouldn’t go amiss once a year. Or once a decade.

My sample of clients’ websites is showing a doubling of mobile traffic share in the last three years, typically from 10–20% to 25–40%.

I’ve mentioned the ‘title’ attribute for web page elements, and the ‘alt’ attribute. Now we need to talk about ‘caption’ and ‘description’.

Should I use the ‘title’ attribute on images and links? No.

This may cover different things at different companies; many don’t include the salaries of the marketing team in this, for example.

The key is to be somebody who answers questions regularly. Join in the sites as a community member, and be respectful as well as helpful.

Great salespeople get prospects to identify their situation and offer material to demonstrate credibility. Can we do this on a website? Yes we can.

Politicians know what resonates with people. They need to communicate relevance, and they do this by showing how they’ll improve our lot.

If links to a page are to be an indication of the page’s relevancy, what should these links be? Not in press releases, unfortunately.

If you sell online, you have a thank-you page which is only seen by customers. Tag this, and you have an ad campaign for those people alone.

If your adverts are aimed at getting prospects to call you now and talk to an expert, you may be wasting your money if your company is closed.

If you’re still not using Slack or Teams at work, and indeed not using it anywhere, I’d recommend giving it a try.

The potential of independent industry publications and websites may be even more valuable to manufacturers than it was in the past.

So many websites get this wrong because what the designers fail to do is to put themselves in the shoes of the visitor.

The traditional search box still sits top and centre, but it’s now followed by a string of articles in panels.

I like to use emojis to add emphasis to a message, but I think it’s dangerous to make the meaning of the message dependent on them.

I often discourage people from ‘gating’ content, but when you do, it’s important to ensure the content actually arrives.

Google’s WordPress plugin is an excellent time-saver, which brings Search Console, Analytics and PageSpeed Insights to your Dashboard.

It’s not a good idea to embed videos in emails, because many email apps won’t support them, and some services will classify them as spam.

People visit sites to find out things. They are becoming less patient. We need to understand this, like Amazon does.

If you’re a typical small B2B company, you probably put little or no resources into this, because it’s hard. That’s a mistake.

Repetition in advertising works, particularly when purchases are by necessity and only occasional

Using ‘alt’ text to describe images is as important today as ever, and not just because of SEO. It’s a simple thing, but often forgotten.

After writing something, we read it back. Get someone else to read it out loud though; almost every PC or phone has the ability to do this.

A content hub is a top level index of resources around a particular topic, which could, for example, be a product category or an application.

We think that by providing a great product or service, we’re the only ones doing the helping. But it’s a two-way thing.

The “People Also Ask” list can have different numbers of questions and may appear in different positions on the page.

We’re being offered the chance to have a pop-up form generated directly by the advert, where the prospect can enter basic contact details.

There are many reasons why an email might only be read on a second attempt, such as initially receiving it at an inconvenient time of day.

I’ve noticed a lot of individual page performance changes recently. This wouldn’t be apparent just by looking at overall site traffic totals.

I’ve shot loads of really good videos in the last year. Once you’ve done a few practice ones, it really becomes second nature.

People accept that there’s a quid-pro-quo, but your website visitors came hoping to get a question answered, not to get on your database.

I have seen anecdotes of sites removing half or more of their content, stretching back many years, and seeing a substantial SEO benefit from doing so.

Although ‘affinity audiences’ are hobby- or general-interest-based, they still present some possibilities for technical business marketing

You’ll soon be able to register the “.new” top-level domain for shortcuts to online services. Details are – predictably – at whats.new

There are loads of tools for analysing the SEO strength of domains, but a new one from SEO tool provider Moz.com looks straightforward

A live webinar needs to be right first time – you can’t edit out the mistakes or start again. But I don’t think an audience expects perfection

This tool is a bit trivial, but it doesn’t hurt to give it a try if you’re writing an article about something and don’t know where to begin.