Tweeting for Business?

Social networking sites such as My Space and Facebook are used by businesses as part of their marketing repertoire, but it is widely accepted that this type of media is not the same as traditional marketing communications. Broadly speaking, if you are going to Tweet, you have to ask yourself what it is you have to say.

Social networking is all about people keeping in contact with other people – rather than companies and organisations broadcasting en masse about internal achievements.

What To Tweet?

Ok, so we’ve established that you shouldn’t drone incessantly about how great your business is, or you’ll lose listeners very quickly. So what should you be Tweeting about? The most important thing to remember is that the people who follow you are multi-faceted rather than one-dimensional corporate beings. Tweets should cover a variety of topics, and Tweets about your business should be engaging, informative, and be relevant to their audience.

Of course, Twitter isn’t just about keeping your followers in touch with you. It’s also a great way to gauge public opinion on trends, brands and attitudes in your particular industry, community etc. In fact, this can be a good way to begin on Twitter: track what’s being said by and about your competitors before you post your own Tweets.

Entrepreneurs

Like other forms of internet marketing, Twitter can be a great way to increase your status and business reputation.

However, this is only the case if you take the time, prior to starting to use Twitter, to establish a definite strategy for your business on Twitter. It’s always advisable, once you’ve registered your account, to upload a picture and then take some time to listen before you embark on an active Twitter strategy. Of course, it can also be particularly effective to allow your employees to Tweet on behalf of your business.

Sounds risky? Yes, but it can be surprisingly effective. Positive, pro-active employee Tweets can be great PR for your business, but if you don’t let your staff Tweet, what would negative publicity on Twitter do for your reputation management strategy?

Please feel free to leave your views and questions below.

Facebook For Business

Most people know that Facebook was originally intended for college students in the US to be able to keep in contact with one another.

However, it is now widely used for business purposes. Each user can create an individual profile with pictures, information about their interests and details about their lives. As a result, it enables users to contact literally millions of people from all over the world, and who can easily be put into categories such as geographical location, educational establishment, political view, workplace etc.

Using Your Account Wisely

As users are only entitled to have one Facebook account, it is vital at the outset that you decide whether you will use Facebook primarily for business or for personal use (and therefore have your business or personal contacts on it.) It is possible to separate the two: you can keep your personal contacts as your friends, while setting up a fan page for your business.

Do Your Research

As with all marketing strategies it is vital that you take time to consider how you will use Facebook to promote your business.

Look at your competitors’ pages: who has the most successful Facebook page and what makes it so effective? You’ll notice that blatant promotion of their business is generally not the main focus. For example, if you put too many links back to your website this will quickly put other users off.

Facebook can be an effective way to announce important developments related to your business to a large number of people simultaneously. Invitees to your event can visibly RSVP, which can also be an effective way to reaffirm its importance.

Of course, you’re not limited to just using Facebook to enhance your business status online. Linkedin offers a professional, adult atmosphere; Twitter is arguably the ‘hot’ social networking site of the last 12 months; and of course there’s MySpace: these each have their own strengths and features and can work well for different types of businesses.

However, before you use a social networking site to promote your business it is imperative that you have a clear idea of your strategy and what it is you intend to achieve before embarking on any kind of social networking activity.

Any thoughts? Please feel free to leave a comment below.

Sales Copy Call To Action

You could have killer sales copy, an excellent product and a fantastic marketing campaign, but without a call to action you’re unlikely to make many, if any, sales.

Why?

Because the call to action is arguably the most vital part of your sales copy, and is the stage at which you tell your prospect how to become your customer. That’s not to say that sales copy is completely redundant without it: in fact, sales copy without a call to action may merely be pushy PR, but it’s unlikely to give you a high conversion rate.

Buy Me!

Once your prospect is ‘sold’ on your product or service, you need to tell them exactly what it is you want them to do next. The complexity of your call to action will depend on what it is that you are selling, whether you require your prospect to ask for further information, to register their interest or simply to enter their card details on the next page.

Be Assertive

Your call to action may be at the bottom of your sales page, or if you are using long copy, you might have a cumulative call to action, or several calls to action that are placed in strategic areas throughout your copy. When writing a call to action, you should ensure that you are direct but not rude. By including a simple but effective call to action you can increase responses to your marketing considerably. For example, “Call us before 9pm tonight and we’ll take 25% off the cost of your order” is better than “For more information, or to place an order, phone us on this number.”

Make It Urgent

An effective call to action should inject urgency into the prospect’s mind. Deals that are ‘only available to the first 100 customers’, offers that are ‘while stocks last’, or ‘sale ends Friday’ are all time-sensitive and provoke a ‘now or never’ type of response.

Avoid Complications

Remember to keep it simple. Giving your prospects a choice is rarely, if ever, an effective call to action. Ask yourself what you want people to do once they’ve read your sales letter or web copy. It may sound stupid but it’s worth revisiting your existing copy with a critical eye. Do you tell them exactly what it is they need to do now? Don’t be afraid to experiment, either. Monitor your success rates, and you’ll be able to identify the words that are the most effective for your business.

As always, please feel free to leave your comments below

Blogging for Business: Getting Started

A successful blog can do wonders for your business but writing it, raising awareness, and spending time working out what topics you should be covering to make it interesting to your readers is only half the battle

You also need to understand how to ensure it is as visible as possible. Put simply, if you use techniques to make your blog more search engine friendly, your site will receive more visitors. A higher number of visitors to your site means greater awareness of your brand, more prospects and can even push up your direct sales figures.

Search Engine Optimization

SEO isn’t, as some people think, a highly technical skill: good results are generally achieved with a mixture of relevant content and links.

However, in order to achieve the best possible SEO results it’s important to do some research too. Find out what your competitors are doing, and conduct research into what customers are searching for online before they land on these blogs. Once you know what these keywords are, this will help you to create a list of topics that you should cover in terms of content. This will also save you time later on because you’ll have a plan for what to post and when, rather than having to rely on a flash of instant inspiration every time you sit down to write.

Regularity

Once you have started your blog, it’s vital to instill some discipline in terms of frequency of posts. Once a week to begin with is fine, but several times a week is better. There is nothing worse than happening upon a blog that was last updated three years ago: although the reason for the abandonment might be quite genuine – such as a huge upsurge in business – it does look a bit like the business has died, which must naturally be avoided at all costs.

Posts

Once you’ve started writing on a regular basis it’s a good idea to keep the list of topics for your content close to hand as well as the keywords you singled out for inclusion in your posts. However, it is best not to try to write your entry with keywords in mind, as it can make your blog come across as wooden or a bit strained. The best way to ensure your posts read naturally, and are also SEO friendly, is to write your blog entry first and then go back to include keywords within the content.

Email Marketing Will They Read What You Say?

In amongst the hoards of email messages your customers and prospects receive on a daily basis, there are those that stand out as ones that are very likely to be read.

What are they?

They’re the ones that are personal to the recipient. If I am your friend, or your colleague, your parent or your boss and I send you an email that is a direct one on one communication, how likely are you to open it? Unless you delete it by mistake, I’d say you’re almost certain to open it.

You’ll be slightly less likely to read an email from someone you know, that has been sent to numerous people such as a chain email or one that has obviously been forwarded by a number of people before it reaches you. Further down the list of email priorities are those from people you know of, but have not met, such as companies you’ve asked to receive communications from, and lists that you’ve subscribed to, such as a headline roundup sent by a newspaper.

Of course, right at the bottom of the list is spam, which most savvy computer users can now recognise without opening. They see that it’s from someone they don’t know, and has a subject title that is completely irrelevant to them. Of course the spammers have long since been wise to this and that’s why you’ll receive something that says “Just one more thing…” in its subject header only to try to sell you cheap Viagra when you click onto it.

Familiarity

The more familiar we are with the person who has sent us an email, the more likely we are to open it. We human beings take comfort in familiarity. Things and people that are familiar to us make us feel safe; McDonalds, soap operas, brands, and favourite items of clothing – are some such examples. A successful email marketing campaign creates an air of familiarity between you, your customers and prospects, so how do you go about achieving this status?

Personalising Emails

People are getting wise to their name being used in a subject header, so it’s important to make the rest of the subject line both interesting and relevant to them.

The best way to achieve this is to ask yourself what it is that they would want to read, and tailor your communication around the answer to this one question. Once you’ve mastered this and people have opened your email, don’t disappoint them. Deliver. Work on building rapport with the people on your list. Remember that they are individuals who, if you give them something that they value, will trust you and grow to like you/your brand/your communications -but this takes time to establish and has to be done skillfully.

Remember that relevance and persistence are vital: the longer someone stays on your mailing list, the more likely they are to come to you when they are ready to buy.

Let’s hear your comments and questions below!

Email Marketing When and How Often?

You may have slaved for hours over your email campaign, and your copy could sell snow to the Eskimos, but there’s one problem: if your intended recipient doesn’t open your email and read it then all your efforts have gone to waste. So how do you ensure that your emails are opened? The reality is that you can’t, but timing and frequency are both important factors to take into account when it comes to giving yourself the best chance of reaching your customers.

Who Are You Mailing?

There is no absolute timescale or frequency, because when and how often you send emails will depend not only on who you are targeting, but also your reason for getting in touch with them. Rather than concentrating solely on when you think you are most likely to get your message across, put yourself in your customers’ shoes. Target business people during the day, between 11am and 3pm, on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Consumers are most likely to be at their computers between 5pm and 8pm during the week, and during the day on Saturday and Sunday.

When Isn’t A Good Time?

Clearly, three AM on a Tuesday is hardly likely to be a good time to catch people alert and ready to read your emails, but sending at 9am during the week might not be either. You are the expert at your business, and you (presumably) know your customers, what they want and the solutions you are selling to them. It follows, therefore, that every email you send them must be relevant to them. If it doesn’t look interesting, by which I mean relevant, they’ll drag it straight to the trash. Make it too gimmicky or sales oriented and you could do your reputation harm. Your targets receive so much junk in their email folders each day that your communication needs to have as good a chance as possible of being read.

So How Often Should You Send Them?

Again, this varies depending on what you are trying to achieve. Send your communications too infrequently and people will forget to contact you when they’re ready to become a customer. However, if you’re the really annoying person who sends mindless, irrelevant emails to them twice a day then they’re very likely to get fed up and unsubscribe. If you send them information that is interesting to them, relevant to their wants or needs, and is well written – the chances are they will read them. If they don’t have time on one or more occasions, at least they’ll want you to keep them coming.

Think Like Your Customer

Of course, you can’t possibly be expected to know exactly when all your recipients are having a good or bad day, are distracted by something exciting, are fuming about something at work, or are simply too busy to open any emails other than the ones that are flagged as urgent. Similarly, people’s buying decision are cyclical and broadly fall into three categories: they can be happy with the status quo, interested and looking around but not ready to part with any money, or red hot and ready to buy. Show a series of emails to people on different days and you can be sure that they won’t always respond the same way.

So each time you send an email during your campaign, monitor the responses you receive. See how many respond positively, and how many unsubscribe requests you get. Over a period of time you’ll establish the best timing for your marketing communications, at regular (and predictable) intervals – and if your emails are relevant and engaging, people will look forward to receiving them.

As always your comments and questions are appreciated

Article Marketing: Making It Interesting!

When it comes to producing articles for your article marketing campaign, you may find yourself staring at a flashing curser on the screen while you decide what to write. Here are some tips to help you decide not only what you should be writing, but also how to keep it structured, interesting and relevant to your business.

What To Write About

Once you decide to write an article marketing campaign, the first thing you should do is decide on your list of topics. Think about the questions that your customers ask you most regularly. There will be a number of issues that crop up time and time again. Also you can ask your customers what they would like more information on, and what is most relevant to them. If you’ve got a strong viewpoint on something to do with your industry, or there have been important developments that have made mainstream news recently, don’t be afraid to comment on them.

Structure

If you’re new to writing articles, it can be helpful to structure the information you intend to write about before you embark on the actual article itself. Your first paragraph should introduce what it is you’re going to talk about, followed by the points you’re making, then rounded off with a final paragraph in conclusion and (most importantly) the link to your website, your name and company details.

The Competition

Look at what your competitors are doing. Do they post a lot of information online that people can access for free? If so, there probably isn’t going to be mileage in providing exactly the same information.

How can you make your viewpoint different from theirs?

If there’s something that they do that you disagree with, say so – but be prepared to explain why. One of the key components to using article marketing successfully is to make your information better, or different from, the stuff that’s already out there. Don’t though give away your trade secrets – remember that anyone can access the information you put on the internet, and that includes your competitors.

Don’ts With Articles

The trick with article writing is to ensure that what you are writing is of value to the reader. If your article begins to sound like a brochure or advertisement, it’s too sales oriented and is unlikely to hold a reader’s attention for long.

One of the best exercises you can do is to ask yourself whether your customer or someone who could become a potential customer would be pleased to read your article, what they would think of your business once they’d read it, and whether it holds their attention from beginning to end. If you can answer yes to all of these, you’ll have an engaging, high quality article that you can be proud of.

Any thoughts or questions? Please leave a comment below.

Article Marketing: You’re The Expert, Now Tell The World

Done well, your article marketing campaign can establish you as the expert in your field and do wonders for SEO. Done badly, you can spend a lot of time writing and posting content that no one’s going to read or worse, if your content is poor and littered with grammatical and factual mistakes, your articles can damage your brand’s reputation.

Similarly, if your content has been stuffed full of keywords so that it is of little to no use to anyone, this isn’t likely to do your business any favours either.

Overcome Writer’s Block

Let’s face it, even professional writers find it difficult to sit down and write, but before you decide that you hate writing or don’t have the time to write a proper set of articles (for example Ezinearticles gets new writers to write ten articles to begin with) – let’s look at the benefits of marketing in this way.

A good set of well written, correctly categorized articles can enhance your business’s reputation no end. Coupled with this, and with determination and persistence, you can become an established and well-respected expert in your particular field. When a potential customer needs your service, are they more likely to go to the person they’ve heard of and who’s already given them free and reliable information, or someone they’ve never heard of?

Not Convinced You’re An Expert?

You know your business better than anyone else. Your business is how you make money, so you’ve undoubtedly put a lot of time and effort into building it and making it as successful as you can.

You also have your own individual take on the world and your experience, coupled with the business area in which you have specialist expertise, gives you a unique insight into your subject matter. Your competitors may have been in business longer than you, have a different business model, and have competing ideas about your industry. So if you disagree with them, why not be bold and say so?

Think Like An Expert

Of course, being an expert comes with its own responsibilities. You’re not only projecting your viewpoint on the world, but you also have to be prepared for the fact that other experts can and will disagree with you.

The trick here is not to shout them down, discredit them, or insist on having the last word. It’s far better to accept that not everyone will agree with you or your viewpoint. However, always ensure that what you do write, you write with conviction – and your expertise will shine through.

Internet Sales Letters

Sales letters are designed to convert interested prospects into red hot buyers, and when they’re well written and subjected to a highly targeted pay per click campaign they can literally earn thousands of pounds worth of profit overnight. So what is it that makes sales copy so persuasive?

Benefits v Features

Good sales copy explains how your product benefits customers. This requires you to know the difference between what you’re trying to say and what they want to hear. You don’t sell someone a duster with an extendable pole (features): you tell them that can banish dust and cobwebs in those hard to reach places forever (benefits). You don’t merely show someone a titanium high-powered drill (features): you describe the fantastic holes they’ll be able to make once they own it (benefits.)

Relevance

A major element of internet sales letters is that they are written with a very specific audience in mind. The people who buy after reading a sales letter have had a problem solved for them. They went onto the internet looking for information, a solution, guidance or knowledge about a particular problem they have – and your product or service offers the solution they’re after.

Outline Of An Internet Sales Letter

The headline, or statement, at the top of a sales letter must be very bold and entice the reader to scroll further down the page. Get this wrong, and you’ve lost your chance: Get it right and you’ve got the interest of your prospect, but don’t over-promise, as your reader will feel let down.

There should be no distractions as you scroll down the page. Plain, black copy on a white background helps, but a whole block of text can be intimidating, which is why the most effective letters contain break out boxes of highlighted and/or coloured text. This makes reading easier on the eye but often includes third party endorsements (facts, expert opinion, testimonials) which reaffirms the sales message.

Call To Action

There are usually several opportunities to ‘opt in’, either to sign up for further information or to buy the product. After the first ‘opt in’ link, there are usually other enticements such as a no-quibble money back guarantee, and bonuses that you receive for free when you buy the main product or service. These reaffirm to the reader that the product is not only good value for money, but also that their decision to buy is indeed ‘risk free.’

Get the structure of your sales letter right, combine it with a targeted PPC campaign, and you could see your sales dramatically increase.

Please feel free to leave your comments and questions below.

Dan Kennedy Event

As many of you know we recently attended the PHENOMENON Dan Kennedy Event in Orlando Florida.

We arrived back safely at 7.30 Tuesday morning with some fantastic new tips, tricks and marketing strategies to put to the test. As always we’ll keep you informed of the progress.

We had an amazing time catching up with some of our state side friends such as Derek Gehl, Bill Glazer and Dan Kennedy himself but listening to all the other speakers at the event was a real eye opener.

(Left: Dan Kennedy, Mark Bowden, Bill Glazer)
(Right: Derek Gehl, Mark Bowden)

Speakers at the Dan Kennedy Event included: Lee Milteer an amazingly successful Performance & Productivity Coach, Michael Cage the “go to guy” for teleseminar and webinar marketing, Ron Ipach the king of outsourcing, working less and getting things done, Andrew Lock with his innovative H3 system for legitimately diverting buyers from Ebay to your website, Steve Harrison PR master who explained all about acquiring free publicity and the amazing Scott Lewis (hypnotist) who headlined at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas for a record breaking 7 years. Plus many more!

We also met some fantastic people such as Conrad & Alicia (pictured left) who both have highly successful business in the USA. “Hi guy’s hope you enjoyed the Dan Kennedy Event just as much as we did”.

On a lighter note you’ll be pleased that we didn’t let the UK down and managed to clear the hotel out of Heineken on the first night.

Also I have to say one of the funniest things I have ever seen was Scott Lewis hypnotize members of the audience in a special Showtime evening.

Some attendees were made to believe that they had lost their “but” and couldn’t sit down, that they were Martians from Mars and only spoke “erpa looper” & “eeper oop” and also that they were famous singers performing and dancing on stage plus many other outrageously funny skits. Thanks Scott! (here’s a clip i found of scott on you tube)

Both myself and Jon had a great time and we will keep you updated with all the new strategise we are testing.