Some interesting marketing-related stats from 2011

Thursday, December 22, 2011

It's been an 'interesting' year. If your business has survived the economic chaos you must be doing something seriously right! Here's some stats from 2011 to whet your marketing appetite and provide informed inspiration for 2012.

The state of the B2B creative and new media sector:

• 55% of new B2B media agencies surveyed said that, in their opinion, their market was 'strong'
• only 10% of agencies were NOT offering social media marketing services, compared to 25% in 2010
• responding B2B agencies reported an average 15% increase in gross annual income over 2010

The state of social media marketing:

• 78% of B2B organisations surveyed are already engaging with social media marketing
• 6% have employed staff especially to handle their SMM activity
• 22% have allocated a dedicated SMM budget for 2012

Going online for the first time and entering a mature ecommerce market

Thursday, December 15, 2011

There are still plenty of small businesses out there who haven't yet ventured online. And who can blame them? 

It's been a hair raising ride so far and the ecommerce market is only just maturing. The minute you get a grip on things they change. New media enter the marketplace and fizzle out just as fast. Then there's SEO and SMM and SEM. New tools and payment methods, content management systems and coding requirements. 

But despite everything, there's nothing wrong with entering a mature market. It just means the early adopters have done most of the hard experimental work for you, forging ahead and weathering the winds of change... or not! You'll be building your business based on what they've learned.  

These days setting up a website is easier than ever, faster than ever and costs less than ever. Remember the bad old days fifteen years ago when a simple brochure site build could easily cost £25k and building your own, unless you were a true geek, was a horrible coding hell? 

If you're sitting on the ecommerce fence, about to jump off into online business, take heart. The internet might be growing exponentially but there's still room for new players. An online business works in much the same way as an offline business in terms of things like good customer service, a pleasant shopping environment, an enjoyable experience, efficiency, responsiveness and so on. You're on relatively familiar ground, just swimming in a different medium. If you run a tight, successful offline business, you should be able to run a tight, successful online business... with the right kind of website and judicious use of specialist support. 

The most important thing of all is to find a web designer and builder you can trust. It's best to follow word of mouth recommendations if you're looking for someone reliable and appropriately creative, business savvy and able to speak plain English. Whatever you do, don't take the amateur route and get your cousin's nephew's best mate on the job because he's done a bit of web design at sixth form. When you mean business, you need to be businesslike!  

If you fancy a no-obligation chat about getting your small business online for the first time - or making a better job of your existing site - why not contact Chris? He'll talk you through the process, no strings attached, and ultimately make sure your ecommerce site ticks all the right boxes. You never know, 2012 might be your big year!

Useful marketing-led stuff to do over Christmas

Thursday, December 08, 2011

Unless you're selling Christmas-related stuff, you might find business soon starts slowing down for the festive season. It's a classic time for marketers to hang up their hats for a couple of weeks and get organised for the new year. Here's a list of things to do while you twiddle your thumbs and wait for sanity to return! 

• don't stop doing SEO. Search engines don't know it's Christmas
• stop your non-SEO marketing campaigns or at least slow down 'til the first clear business week in January. If you keep going you'll only get lost in all the Xmas media noise - you might as well save your money
• clean your customer and prospect databases so they're up to date ready for email marketing, direct mail or whatever in 2012
• sort out your invoices and payments so you know who to remind in the new year, in preparation for the end of the tax year in March
• take a long, hard look at your website and get it in the best possible shape for 2012: take down old stuff, out of date offers, dead stock and so on. And check your content sounds / looks its best. 
• if you don't have a business blog yet, award your business a blog for Christmas. It'll benefit your bottom line in all sorts of ways, as we've already mentioned in earlier posts
• do some planning. If you've been marketing on an ad hoc basis all year, do your sums and find out which of your efforts bore the most fruit. Plan to do more of the best performing stuff. Drop the rest for the time being and make a note to re-test them again later in 2012 just in case things have changed
• research your market and competitors to check you're on the right track 

20 top blogging tips to make a big marketing hit

Thursday, December 01, 2011

Blogging continues to top the on-site SEO charts. 

In the wake of Google's ongoing Panda updates, which are still rolling out like marketing Tsunami across the magical interweb, everyone's talking about quality. 

There have been freshness-related search engine algorithm updates too, namely the 'Caffeine' algo update and its offspring. So the fresher you can keep your site, the better

Blogging remains a popular and effective online marketing medium because it is one of the easiest ways to steadily grow your site, adding good quality, fresh content without having to tinker with your your architecture. 

Here's twenty handy tips to help you write great posts and build a popular blog your business can be proud of. A blog that drives visitors to buy from your site because they think you're great, trust you, like you and appreciate your expertise:

1. make sure your blog sits in your main website directory so you get the benefit of backlinks from people who like your site. If your blog is on a different url your website doesn't get any benefit. This one sits at www.lucidsynergy/blog, which is perfect 
2. instead of selling, inform and excite
3. make people think, be contentious, be bold
4. let your personality show through 
5. lose the jargon
6. never use caveats or small print - turn them into positives and include them up front instead
7. only say something when you've genuinely got something interesting to say
8. be aware of your business's key words and phrases, focusing on them so search engines 'understand' what your posts are about. But don't overdo it! 
9. get inspiration from your trade press, breaking news stories, your sector's history, new product development, New Scientist magazine (an excellent source of amazing news for every sector)
10. try to state both sides of an argument and leave conclusions to the reader rather than lecturing
11. use images in your blog posts - they make a huge difference! But use small file sizes. Search engines don't like sites that take ages to load because they're difficult for people with slow connections - that's most of the world - to use
12. split your posts into paragraphs and use headers throughout to pick out different sections and ideas. It makes posts easier to read and search engines appreciate it too. The same goes for bullets and lists
13. be honest. People can smell BS a mile off
14. focus your posts on the reader's needs. Don't just blow your own trumpet. Think about the kind of stuff you'd like to read on a blog like yours, and give it to your visitors
15. think up a title that'll make people want to read your post
16. include a key word or phrase in your title if it's appropriate, to attract search engines' and readers' attention 
17. link back from your blog to your website somewhere obvious so people can get there in one click if they decide to buy something or contact you
18. vary the length of your posts. Some short with links to interesting places. Some medium. Some long. Variety is the spice of blogging life and it keeps people coming back for more
19. think about opening your blog to comments. If you don't, you still get the SEO benefit. But if you do, make sure you configure your blog so you have to authorise comments before publishing them. Otherwise you'll suffer a huge deluge of spam comments. One of my sites gets 7000 a week. Thank goodness for the spam catcher! Interaction with your audience is good stuff. But it isn't essential for blog success
20. blog as often as you can. Daily is fantastic. Weekly is cool too. Any less frequent than that and you're not really taking full advantage of your blog. And you might as well - it's such a simple and effective on-site marketing option