A client was talking me through his current advertising strategy last week. He has just placed his first TV adverts and has been told that if he didn’t get the enquiries pretty much immediately, he probably wouldn’t get them at all.
It got me thinking about advertising versus content and how you can either go for the quick interruption of adverts, or you can cultivate exposure online.
It looks a bit like this graph.
I often talk about content and how you can create articles to attract relevant search traffic. Of course, there is no reason why it can’t be focussed towards your existing clients.
I had a meeting with a potential new client last week who is doing this already. I liked her approach.
Basically, she goes to existing client sites and spends half a day discussing the issues they have around what her company supply, in this case IT network services. It is market specific, in this case it was regarding the network security issues in schools.
She then takes the feedback and writes white papers focusing on the problems, putting in time to do research and creating solutions.
This is then utilised as e-mail marketing material to existing clients.
It takes time but the point is that it is content that answers a problem, one of the first rules of advertising.
Sarah made an interesting comment about our new website, remarking on the loss of some of the old content relating to our prices.
That was an important choice for us; a choice that I think will change the type of people who enquire for our services. And that’s exactly why we did it.
I was quite eager on the last website to show ballpark prices for our services to break down barriers and encourage people to contact us. But, the problem came with the focus of the people who made contact.
Most of the enquiries we had were based on the costs, rather than the value of the services we offer. It wastes a lot of time and energy for both parties and potentially sends out the wrong message.
So, the new website focussed on the benefits and the value of the services we offer, rather than the initial costs. What we do hasn’t changed, but the way we sell it had to, to attract the right enquiries.
It’s something on the web that gets overlooked sometimes, good [potential] client focussed content.
Found a new Blog today via Copyblogger - Direct Creative.
What drew me instantly, was this article about writing badly for great copy. Another feed worth subscribing to IMO.
I believe that one of the most important (and hardest to create) elements of a growing web presence is content. The pressure to create news and articles is often too much for a company and many a ‘news’ section of a website is at least six months out of date. It’s a crime really and any website that suffers from this would do well to remove their news section.
I also tire of seeing generic marketing text on pages, which is non-specific and sparce. Yes, you probably need more that one paragraph to explain what your company does.
That said, there are companies that generate a hell of a lot of content and don’t put it on their websites. Case studies and commentar, often used for PR, is an ideal source of content for your own website. Appropriately crafted and placed on a website or Blog, you create two things:
One thing NOT to do though, stick it behind a subscribe to read page. That is unless, you actually sell content online.
Go on - start being attractive!
As you may know we sponsored Basingstoke Live last week (a local music festival) and ran our own ‘branded’ campaign of “supporting creative talent” across the event.
Part of the campaign involved taking some famous song lyrics and having them on banners around the various stages… “we bet that you look good on the dancefloor”, “it’s only rock ‘n’ roll but we like it”, etc. to add a bit of fun to our message.
One of my fellow Escapees showed me a forum post on the Basingstoke Live website with someone mocking it:
(more…)
I knew quite a bit of what Bill Slawski was saying when I read his article - Finding Customers through Anti-Commercial Queries - he wrote on Search Engineland, but he really got me thinking this morning.
When I think of how I buy on the internet, I only type a sales-based query into a search engine when I really want to buy something and quite a bit of the time I don’t tend to find what I am looking for exactly. That said, what about all those other search queries that could lead to a sale?
Business-to-business and the more complex ’service’ sale is obviously, well, more complex; but how often would someone be searching to solve THEIR problem, rather than looking for what you sell (or what you say you sell), when they do a search? (more…)
I found a free tool today that checks the EMV of your web page. “Emotional Marketing Value” analyses the words that you use and how they tap into the emotions of an Audience.
There is no doubt that great web copy does sell, especially a headline, and spending a little time on crafting an effective headline of a web page, blog post, or news story can have a massive impact on traffic and take-up, especially if the page is being submitted to social news sites like Digg, Netscape and Reddit. (more…)
I am beginning to understand, more and more, how powerful words can be in marketing and have noticed recently that tone of voice and great copywriting are rightly taking more of the credit for really engaging customers of successful brands.
Now, imagine if you will, the advantages to your business with a more engaged customer base. It’s quite exciting, isn’t it? When someone becomes so engaged with your brand and your company that they have to tell someone else about you. (more…)
[when used in the right way]
I found this article by Ken McGaffin, chief marketing officer of Wordtracker.com, very interesting… over on E-Consultancy… How to write an article with keywords in mind - Which are your best keywords?
It makes me realise potential opportunities of traffic I miss out on when I don’t structure my posts and just start rambling. Like now for instance.
