Marketing
Creative Promotional Video
With the popularity of YouTube growing, entrepreneurs are understandably excited by the potential of the medium. I’ve consulted with people who are looking at taking their basic web sites to the next level of web marketing, and heard things like “We’ve got to have video. Video is so popular now.” To which I say: maybe. It depends on the video and how you use it.
Unless the video content on your site is somehow great, nobody cares about that video except you and maybe your Mom.
“Great”, on the web, means meeting a need. That need can be to have a laugh, to learn something, to be inspired.
In other words to truly leverage video on the web, you have to create videos that will draw your customers to view them. At it’s best, the video will help new people discover your website.
A fun example of this is The Human Flipbook by the restaurant chain Ebert & Gerbert. This is so creative & wonderful, it was mentioned on a site that I subscribe to. Because the video was embedded in the page at Do Something Pretty I didn’t even realize I was watching a commercial until the end. By then, I was so impressed I didn’t mind.
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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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.
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.
Tag It!
A tag on a blog or article is just like a tag on your shirt: it’s a label that provides brief information about the item in question. A tag on a shirt usually gives the name of the maker or sometimes (in the case of my kid’s) the owner’s details. In other words tags give brief information pertaining to that particular shirt. With a blog or other web posting its the same: a tag is a word or very short phrase that describes concisely what the subject of the piece is all about. Think of them as keywords used to identify the content within.
Extending the shirt analogy, if I lose my shirt and there’s a tag on it with my name on then I’m more likely to find it again. Same goes for tags on the Internet: they are used to make it easier for people to find items such as articles, blog posts, photos, video clips and so on – stuff that interests them.
Blog search engines and bookmarking pages such as Technorati and Del.icio.us use tags extensively to make it easier for users to navigate the blogosphere – users can even give articles their own personal tags so that they can organise information in a manner suited to their needs.
Marshall Kirkpatrick has some more great reasons why you should use tags in his 13 Reasons to Use Tags article.
Tagging a blog article is really easy. Most blog software allows you to create categories that are relevant to each post. These categories are the tags that blog search engines will use to categorise your piece. To use them, simply categorise each blog post before publishing by checking the appropriate word or phrase or adding a new one and checking that.
Here are a few points to remember when you’re coming up with tags:
1. Tags must be concise (1 -2 words max);
2. Tags must be relevant;
3. There is no limit to the number of tags you use;
4. Remember to check your spelling.
What Does the Reader Care About?
Jeanniey Mullen over at ClickZ Experts wrote an excellent article about email marketing. Before you embark on your next email campaign you may want to go through the following checklist:
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.
Where do your get your inspiration from?
The Web is a great source of inspiration. One can get “lost” surfing for hours looking for great design, new concepts or great content. A friend of mine recently sent me these photos of great shopping bags. Now of course we can’t all be this creative with our website or marketing material are these are definitely great concepts.
