Archive for the 'Marketing' Category
5 Things you can do to boost your Blog’s Success
One of our clients and a fabulous interior designer, Patricia Gray, recently began blogging. Perhaps she was inspired by Christine’s post on why you should have a blog. As a recap, the 3 reasons Christine cited were:
- Blogs create relationships
- Blogs improve your communication and writing skills
- Blogs allow you to promote yourself
Patricia Gray’s blog is living proof of these principles. She’s an avid and effective blogger, writing voraciously and including lots of juicy pictures in her posts. As a result, she’s creating relationships with the many readers who’ve found her site because of the compelling content in her blog.
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Third Tuesday is coming to Vancouver
Following the success of Casecamp and BarCamp a new opportunity to meet and discuss social media is coming to Vancouver. Third Tuesday is a very informal gathering of computer/marketing/PR types. Guest speakers usually come along and present a topic for 30 minutes or so, and the group has the opportunity to discuss and ask questions. If you are interested in coming along, the first event takes place next week, August 21. We’ll be meeting at Soho Cafe at 6pm. Feel free to drop me a line if you want to come or just show up.
5 Lessons In Getting Quoted, Linked & Discussed
A few weeks ago I wrote an article about marketing and how some of these projects seemed really exciting after reading one of Rohit’s excellent articles on the Simpsons movie. Turns out Rohit’s article was so popular it was quoted by very reputable sources and managed to generate an enormous amount of traffic. Which is just what a blog should do.
This article and a few others have gathered such interest because of the following:
- He targeted new audiences. If you write about the same old stuff, you won’t attract new readers.
- He gave people soundbites. Quoting facts and figures allows others to quote you in their blog and websites and offering urls allows them to forward these to friends and share the story.
- He offered links. His Simpsons article had a great resource of links which proved to be fascinating.
- He used existing buzz. When writing his Facebook article, he picked up on a buzzworthy story created a “halo effect” where the conversation about the topic drove interest and awareness.
- He provided his contact details. Hiding your contact details may safeguard you against spam, but won’t allow people to find you.
Stuck on the Tarmac and wishing I had flown with Air Canada
We often associate companies with negative qualities. A few of them have such negative brands that they fail to attract customers at all. Neither Wal-Mart nor McDonalds are known for their high quality and just the mention of Exxon brings out images of oil slick and pollution. Negative brands are often the result of poor ethical decision on the company’s part but more often than not, customer service is the reason why people dislike certain companies. For those unfortunate enough to have to deal with Telus on a regular basis, you will know that their customer service isn’t that great.
But Telus isn’t the worse culprit in Canada. No the company that brings all Canadians in agreement is Air Canada. Everyone has a story of having to pay for drinks, no food being served on 5 hour flights, being squished in seats so tight your legs can’t move. They are the worst company to fly with.
When booking our latest trip I had three goals. Avoid Air Canada, avoid Charles the Gaulle airport and lay-overs. We found the perfect flight with KLM. Leaving from Vancouver we would fly to Amsterdam, then Amsterdam Bordeaux. Unfortunately last night after spending an hour or so on the tarmac, we were told that our plane wouldn’t leave and we would have to come back today. After contacting KLM and chatting to them for what seemed like 3 hours, we are now booked on North West Airlines leaving today at 2pm. We’ll be flying from Vancouver to Detroit, Detroit to Paris, then Paris to Bordeaux, which involves 3 lay-overs and the dreaded Charles de Gaulle airport. All of this because Air Canada has a bad reputation!
It will be interesting to see if KLM will follow up on this situation and contact us to apologize. I’ll worry about that later, if I can just get to France…
Sometimes I wish I was a marketer
Being a web designer I usually keep my head buried in code all day. I love debugging CSS and writing XHTML but every once in a while I look up and realize that there are people out there doing stuff.
I heard a few weeks ago, while in Seattle, that the Simpsons movie was coming. I used to watch the Simpsons, but got bored of it around year 5 or 6, so I didn’t pay attention to the movie poster. A few weeks later I read somewhere (I forget where) that a few 7-11 stores around town had been converted into Kwik-e marts. I thought that was pretty cool.
I hadn’t realized how big this Simpsons movie is until I stumbled across a post by Rohit. This movie is proving to be something else. I just lost several hours poking around the Official Simpsons movie website. It’s at times like these that I think that marketing would be a cool job.
The flash developers who worked on the site have done a fantastic job and the marketing effort is outstanding. I’m intrigued now and looking forward to the movie.
Serve your clients, no matter what they need
Over the last two days I attended a self-employment workshop at the Sunshine Coast Employment Center, offered by Cassandra Gierden of Prophet Coaching. A valuable idea she offered was to create your own personal “yellow pages” - get out and meet somebody from every possible profession you can think of.
The idea is to be of service to your clients no matter what they need. If they can’t make an appointment with you, don’t just ask to reschedule. Ask them if they need a mechanic and refer them to a great one.
You can make the creation of your yellow pages like a scavenger hunt for yourself: find X contacts by X time.
The concept of serving your clients, no matter the need, is similar to what this blog and indeed many successful sites are all about. Share a little information or service for free, and you become a valuable resource that stays top-of-mind. In the end isn’t that what marketing is all about?
Facebook is surprisingly useful
Recently a friend of mine sent me an invitation to join her network on Facebook. I ignored it at first, thinking back to my first experience with the social networking site; I had seen how my college-aged step-daughter uses it. She and her friends post tons of photos and notes for each other, mainly centering around recent parties etc. Theirs is a socially active world with time to spare, compared to mine. So Facebook didn’t seem like it was a place for me.
But recently the site has broken past it’s college bounds and people from all walks of life are signing up. I was convinced to try it out after reading reviews by Alexandra Samuel and Rob Cottingham.
5 key characteristics of web brands
According to market researchers Millward Brown Optimor, Google is the most powerful brand of 2007. While discussing this, Gerry McGovern writes that the 5 most important characteristics of web brands are:
- Web brands are useful
- They have a clarity of purpose
- The embrace simplicity
- They interact and engage
- They are customer-centric
Now, maybe your business isn’t Google. Maybe your business is selling real live widgets in a brick-and-mortar shop. Even so, if you have a web site, these characteristics of web brands still apply. If your web site isn’t simple to use, doesn’t do what the customer needs it to do, and doesn’t make it easy for the customer to interact with your company, then your brand suffers for it. If you’re not easy to do business with online, why would the customer think you are easy to do business with offline? The trick for an offline business, I think, is to clearly evaluate what it is that your web site needs to be useful at. Why would a customer come to your website? What do they need it for? How can it help the customer meet their goals? To succeed online, businesses need to answer those questions, then design a web site that does all these things well. If your web site doesn’t do these things (at the very least), then it’s wasted everyone’s time.
10 Marketing Diagnostic Questions
It isn’t uncommon for us to land a client, build a website, launch it and then a few weeks later get the following question.
“So what I do to get my site up on Google and increase traffic to my site?”
Internet Marketing is a very broad subject. Anything from newsletter campaigns, pay-per-click, link building strategy to metric analysis falls into this. It is thus a very difficult question to answer briefly and accurately. Before embarking on an expensive internet marketing campaign it is best to go back to basics and look at internet marketing as part of your overall marketing strategy. Perhaps doing a postcard mail out may be a better option for your business than buying keywords while blogging or improving customer service may be better solutions for others.
Chris Flett recently met with Liz Gaige from Market Navigators and discussed several marketing issues that they come across with their clients. Following this discussion, they came up with the following 10 questions that businesses need to ask themselves when planning their marketing strategy. This list of questions is a very good starting point and should be looked at regularly. This will enable you to use marketing and make it a cornerstone of your business operations.
Carlton’s Big Ad
I don’t know about you, but I hate most commercials on TV. I don’t like them when I first see them and then by the time I see them for the upteenth time, I’m ready to scream. With the advent of YouTube there are gems creeping up now and then. The video below for Carlton just cracks me up. Why can’t we have more of this on TV?
Thanks to Karole for sending this my way.