Business Marketing Online

Recently I narrowed down a choice of supplier based on the efficiency and friendliness of their response. What did they actually do though?

It’s well worth looking at as many data sources as possible, because even the Google Ads Keyword Planner may not have that many suggestions.

Images won’t get you a higher open-rate but they can pique the recipients’ interest or keep them engaged as they scroll down a long message.

A quick web search on your old address will give you a long list of websites which need to be contacted and the address changed.

Even just an improved layout for what you’ve already got will say to the very few website visitors who get that far: “We’ve got nothing to hide”.

YouTube is ubiquitous, but it may not be the best place to host videos for other purposes, including embedding them on our own websites

Microsoft could use its ubiquitous Office environment to persuade more people to search through that rather than ‘Googling it’.

It’s a great idea to legitimately a page with new or expanded information, and to ensure that the new date is on the page and in the sitemap.

Looking and sounding good is half the battle. Then it’s a question of having the right agenda and the right support material.

The “stories’ idea is becoming commonplace on social media: in essence they’re just full-screen slideshow presentations.

There are so many products where you’re not quite sure what you’re going to get. An unboxing video literally lays it all out in front of you.

There’s much more to making PDF documents work online than SEO considerations. Think of this next time you’re saving a document as a PDF.

Don’t pretend they’re not there, or that people will ignore them. And since they exist, you want them to reflect well on you.

On a landing page, that big call to action button needs to be at the very top – hence the upside down web page concept.

Some of the suggestions I’ve had from this useful little tool have been very sensible and were worth acting on.

Every email needs to do its job and get out of the recipient’s life as quickly as possible. So what should the focus of an email be?

Google is obsessed with data-driven technology, which is fine so long as it doesn’t ignore the needs of the little guy

To build links on Wikipedia, you need two things: a knowledge of how to edit Wikipedia, and a list of ‘opportunities’ there.

An organisation is defined by the behaviours it tolerates. Reputational recovery can hinge on doing the honourable thing.

While total ad spending is down 8% on a year ago, so-called ‘digital’ advertising is up 6% and ‘traditional’ advertising down a huge 30%.

Starting at the end means summarising what you’re trying to say before you begin. That short one-sentence summary can really focus the mind.

Links to your website are still critical, and it continues to be the case that some links are more important than others.

In B2B marketing, the aim is to get noticed and establish credibility, rather than closing the sale in a single hit.

If you’re going to outsource SEO work – and it can be a really good investment – the budget required is as substantial as ever.

For most of the businesses I work with (although not all), searches have been at a reduced level for the past 6 months.

If you do use a standing desk, don’t use it for more than two hours even if you’re used to it. Alternate between sitting and standing.

At the time of writing, the NEC in Birmingham has trade shows listed as still going ahead physically as soon as November

The prospect of permanent home working is very real for some people. LinkedIn hopes to play a small role in a company’s online presence.

Great content is one of the few things that improves our websites and should get us more visitors. Don’t ease up on the content.

This free tool from Google takes data from Ads, Analytics and Search Console, as well as databases, social media and even flat data files.

Many people don’t use voicemail effectively in business – we can all confirm that from the messages we get. How do we do better?

It’s well worth researching the principles and lessons of Account Based Marketing – why not try implementing the best of both worlds?

If you want to try it, it’s easy to make a standing desk just by raising your computer screen and keyboard using a couple of boxes.

People often ask for easy wins in the search engines; writing better title tags is one of the easiest. Make it a regular exercise.

When visitors see a 5-year-old date on an article, it’s quite possible that they’ll hit the back button and try something else.

The question to ask yourself is will carrying on any further going to help the reader, or might it make them switch off?

A problem common to a lot of industrial marketing is that, well, our products aren’t really that much different to the competition, are they?

Most of us don’t like to think about how much data we’re giving away online, and hate to be reminded of it.

Unfortunately there aren’t that many examples of Judith Lewis’ talks online, but here’s one from last year’s Learn Inbound event.

I think we’d agree that if you search for a name, you want a listing like the one you get on LinkedIn, a directory of people with that name.

Google’s first ‘Virtual UnConference’ will be a giant Google Meet call where you can expect to actively participate.

If the meat of the presentation is pre-recorded, it can be guaranteed to go smoothly, and can presumably have better production values.

If we’ve got an announcement as prosaic as an improved new blue widget, we need to extract everything we can from it.

There are many questions which can be asked, but if you don’t ask the questions, you’ll never really know who you’re talking to.

A consistent, branded header image on promotional emails is reassuring for regular readers, but shouldn’t it be saying something too?

Data pages on old products could be combined into a historical page which doesn’t get in the way of current products.

The chances are that your site is already being indexed ‘mobile first’ – the majority of the web is being indexed this way by Google.

Priming your recipients is rarely a bad idea. If what you’re doing is going to be useful, why not warm up first with a little expectation?

A new section on YouTube called simply How YouTube Works has some interesting insights for users of the almost ubiquitous video site.

In business, the telephone conference call may be a casualty of the events this year. I don’t know about you, but I won’t miss it.