Welcome to the Escape Blog

Most website owners recognise the value of good website content yet this appreciation can often occur when they are visiting websites other than their own.

So how does your website compare? Do you think you’ve got good website content?

To find out, ask yourself the following 5 questions:

1. Is your website content relevant and meaningful to your target audience or is it mainly spin and waffle?
2. Is your website content clear and digestible to your target audience or do they just switch off and go away?
3. Is your website content engaging and informative to your target audience or does it offer little emotional or educational value?
4. Is your website content too technical or complex for your target audience resulting in uncertainty or confusion?
5. Is your website content wedged between blocks of irrelevant or unrelated information making it difficult to find or understand?

If any of these questions describe the written content on your website, then perhaps you need to look at ways to make your information more accessible and more valuable to your audience.

Bear in mind that for your website content to carry greater weight for both site visitors and Web ‘bots, it’s all down to its MERIT.

In other words, make your website content Memorable, Engaging, Relevant, Informative and Targeted.

There are two very good reasons why viral marketing can work well for businesses of any size.

Firstly, people are less trusting of ads than they are of  their family, friends or members of on-line communities. And secondly, viral marketing is cheap since the cost is in the idea, not the promotion.

The key to viral marketing success lies fundamentally in the idea so the end product must therefore be something really worth talking about in order for your brand or products to be endorsed optimally.

Use the following as a guide to establishing a concept for your campaigns and for getting your message out.

1. You’ve got to laugh! Use humour in your campaigns as it has universal appeal, spreads very quickly and leaves a positive association.
2. Know your onions! Demonstrate your knowledge by being a resource that educates and informs.
3. Start a debate! Offer a friendly challenge. Done well, this can help gain respect for your brand, services or products.
4. The best things in life! Offer free things. Use caution here by only attracting ‘key influencers’ as this may impact your budget.
5. Fish where the fish are! Find out where your target market hangs out such as social networking sites, discussion forums and blogs.
6. Shout from the rooftops! Getting the word out (seeding) can be done initially by e-mailing family, friends and colleagues or by finding websites, forums and blogs related to your topic.
7. Tools for the job! Get ad space without buying an ad. For example, insert widgets on your blog or web pages that link to your videos on YouTube or your pictures on Flickr.

And finally. Remember that ideas spread because they are important to the spreader, not the originator.

Need some inspiration? See some top quality, big brand viral marketing videos.

Radiohead have fans - lots of them. They could have just released a new record, got some airplay and sold some records. But they allowed people to pay what they thought was a fair price for In Rainbows - marketed online and distributed online.

And today it’s Coldplays turn with the new single of their next album announced as a free download.

How much traditional marketing spend have they saved? You can bet the cost is less than the publicity this ’stunt’ will generate.

Let’s face it thought - it’s not even a marketing stunt. It’s just the way things are moving with cheaper distribution and the nature of a viral message and social tools (I just Twitter‘d it). It goes hand-in-hand with the thousands of un-signed bands on MySpace and YouTube.

Oh yes, did I mention that these people have fans? So, what’s so special about you?

Do vertical markets play a large part in your business marketing online? Perhaps you are interested in how you can leverage your specialist skills to your advantage for marketing?

You may be interested in this article just posted on our website - How To Appeal To Vertical Markets On The Web.

People love a good rank. I know I often check my traffic rankings and web stats and as much as I tell people it’s not so important; I just can’t help myself.

One way of checking a websites traffic is by using Alexa, which bases it’s rankings on people who have visited a website - if they have the Alexa toolbar loaded.

Compete is another such system that allows you to be nosy; looking at other website’s rankings or comparing your website traffic with a competitors.

I still check my Alexa ranking regularly, and I won’t stop, but I also know it’s very vague and below the top 50k, I’d suggest it is easy to manipulate.

For instance, I launched a private project a couple of weeks ago - www.pervolia.org - a community website for a village in Cyprus. It went live on 29th February and already has an Alexa ranking for the week of 399,014 - all from 59 visits (Google Analytics) - and I am pretty sure, I have driven that ranking because I am using the CMS.

I used to have this conversation with Adam about his website which attracts A LOT of traffic. He would get a bit irrate when he knew he was getting tens of thousands of visitors a week, and The Escape site would still be higher on 100 per day. BTW, his site has since eclipsed ours.

MTV reported that even the Pros get it wrong after Comscore gave their verdict on Radiohead’s “In Rainbows” online release last year:

The band’s statement also dismissed the results of a recent report issued by comScore, a company that measures online consumer activity. The comScore report suggested that 60 percent of fans who downloaded In Rainbows — which the band offered as a “name-your-own-price” product beginning October 10 — paid nothing for the tracks.

In the statement, Radiohead said the comScore data was “wholly inaccurate” and that it “in no way reflected definitive market intelligence or, indeed, the true success of the project.”

I’m trying to find a yoga teacher in Basingstoke. Someone who can come to our office and do a Yoga session with the staff once or twice a month. So, I do what I would for any business search and turn to Google. I type in my search phrase and sift through what’s there.

I know I will not find someone with a massive budget so my expectations on website experiences are set and I find a couple that look like the part. I look for email addresses to contact them because I don’t want to speak to them yet.

Two days later and I am still waiting for a reply… Now here’s my question (mainly to myself but feel free to answer).

Will I even get a reply? Am I being too impatient (it has been known) and how long should I leave it before I search for others?

As a reader, you may agree with me or you may think I am completely unreasonable and here is the correct answer…

I am the searcher and as such can afford to be as irrational as I so chose. I could just go back to Google and choose one of the other large selection. My purchasing strategy may not agree with the sellers, but I am the person in the driving seat - the customer.

It’s all about setting expectations 

As an online marketing exercise, the hard work had been done for the seller and they fell at the last hurdle because my

My expectation of e-mail is that I send it and the other person gets it within a minute - I know I do. But, I can’t imagine a Yoga Instructor is as much as a geek as me waiting for their e-mail, they are probably Yoga’ing.

But, if they had a small message that said something like, “I am busy practicing my Yoga, but I check my e-mails every 48 hours. Alternatively, you could call me on xxxx”, my expectation would have been set.

So, who gets the enquiry forms on your website?

Via E-Consultancy comes details from a report from the Direct Marketing Association that asked contributing ESPs (Email Service Providers) what value their clients could allocate to an email address? The average result being £9.11.

This figure obviously isn’t finite and is industry and business dependent. For instance, if your average sale value is £1m then I would guess an e-mail address is worth more than if your average sale value is £30.

What interests me is that we have an average figure to work to and of course there is nothing from stopping you doing your own specific research.

This begs a question that’s worth pondering (and acting on). How much would you spend to aquire a quality e-mail address lead and, more importantly, how much would you invest to keep hold of it?
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So, this week it emerges that Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo and Google’s share price (independently) dropped 9% (FT). We may have a scrap on our hands for online domination. But, the key point here is the rise of the user - yes that’s you…

Kjell Nordstrom and Jonas Ridderstrale talked about the fall and rise of social tribes nearly ten years ago in Funky Business. Today, we are obsessed with social networking - the Internet makes this very easy. We connect to people we want to, and talk about things we want to discuss, directly - no intermediaries and no matter how obscure the topic.

For instance, I want to buy a new TV this weekend. I went to the shop and got bombarded. So, I went online and read a number of reviews. Even the users reviews were voted on by other users so I could filter those out.

Around the same time business was getting funky, Seth Godin was talking about Permission marketing: The fact that we don’t actually want to be marketed to arbitrarily - and how we won’t have to as technology will enable personalised communication.
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It used to be that a client would come in with a brief for a brochure and a flat budget, “I have £5,000 and I need 3000 brochures.”. Easy.

An effective website is different and boy do a lot of people waste a lot of money on the wrong things. Many times  in a pitch for a website I have advised someone not to spend their entire budget building a website, slashing their estimates and crushing their dreams. In fact, a prospect in a pitch meeting last week had to ask me how we make our money, because I wouldn’t sell a quick fix solution.

So how do you budget for your website?
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Viral marketing is not just for the fancy tech companies as this example from Pazazz proves.