Eggblogg

eTips - we've got the visitors, now where are the sales?

Today's eTips is about spending just a small amount on testing usability and customer experience in order to gain a big return.

Things I've been learning recently

Asia leads the way in social media usage, with the exception of Japan...

Why widgets don't work ... and the counter-argument ...

Chris Brogan's tips for getting started in social media ...

And food for thought (thanks to Deb Schultz for flagging this up) - Grant McCracken's excellent post on 'just enough' and what it means to small scale entrepreneurs ( I can relate!)

eTips for 6th March, and related links

Is this relevant? The importance of targeting is today's eTip. The creative and the offer seem to get all the attention in email marketing - but what about timing and targeting?

Stories that have caught my eye today while researching eTips:

Can you blog away the blues? - from the Times online

Creativity vs the machine - Bill Nussey on why small companies can potentially do so well when it comes to innovation.

Some ESPs tolerate the big spammers - why?  - from the Email Experience Council

Better the devil you know?

This article at Marketing Profs touched a nerve for me.

So many business owners admit that all the print advertising, direct mail, etc they do is a waste of money. So why not try something where the results really are measurable ... er, like email marketing?

Because it's easier to stick with what you know, even if it's rubbish?

Like putting up with an unhappy marriage for years, rather than risking something new?

What  a nice thought for Valentines Day!

How to achieve standout in direct mail?

Every now and then I get letters or emails from people who think I might need their services. Sometimes dreadful ('Dear Sir or Madam, blah blah blah'), usually bland, I sometimes put myself in the shoes of the sender - if I were managing this project, what could I do to make it more successful? Or, put another way, who responds to business-to-business direct mail and why?

Lately there seem to have been quite a few approaches from copy writers, sometimes quite creative in execution. Take today's mailbag, for example, in which I found a bright pink cardboard poster tube, with a hand written label (address almost spelt correctly!) containing a sheaf of A4 papers and a wax crayon.

This was a cry for attention if ever I saw one. I certainly looked at everything in the package. The letter ('My name is..', 'My previous experience...' 'If you'd like to see my work...') The four page CV (entitled 'This bit's all about me...' ahem!) The one page of Photoshop art which I didn't quite 'get'.

Did it make me think 'this person could do a great job for my clients'? Well, the only evidence I had to go on was the letter and the CV, and neither blew me away. Did it make me want to pick up the phone? Not really, as there was just a mobile number. Not even an address. 

I admit it, I'm extra harsh on copy writers, but I do wonder if a bit more emphasis on the steak rather than the sizzle would be more effective, especially when you're targeting fellow creatives and marketing agencies.

But maybe I'm wrong - I can't claim to have written the book on DM -  in fact, if you're reading this and recognise yourself in the story, do get in touch and tell me you if had a great response, and I'll put in an order for pink poster tubes right now!

First Friday Lewes is working!

This is nice, yesterday I got not one but three unsolicited testimonials for First Friday Lewes, the informal networking group I set up last May. Business coach Hugh Fenton told me "the first person I spoke to at my first meeting in November is now a client."

Garden designer Mary Stevenson has had one new client and done 2 proposals for people she met at First Friday Lewes and said "I think it's a combination of Lewes/ more creative people/ relaxed venue/ and good hosting.  You are the only networking host who takes the trouble to introduce people."

Our next meeting is this Friday 1st February, new members welcome and it's FREE. See the website for details.

Why I love eggboxes

A bit of an indulgence, this, so please bear with me.

When I changed the name of the business to 'Eggbox Marketing' the first thing people asked was 'why eggbox?'

There were the mundane reasons (eg all the other ideas I had for names were already taken, and I didn't want a name that was hard to spell or pronounce) and the 'marketing-speak' reasons (associations with birth, hatching, new ideas, thinking outside the box, eggheads, brainboxes etc), then the touchy-feely reasons (down to earth, fun, concrete, practical, recognisable, associations with Blue Peter, creativity and getting stuck in).

But most of all, I just love eggboxes. The eggbox is, after all, a design classic unchanged in all of our lifetimes, that lovely textured card, the interesting shapes. Egg-cellent! (Oh, I forgot to mention the fantastic potential for awful puns.)

*thanks to Mrs Webby for the slightly sinister photo!

What does 'online marketing' mean to a small business?

"I'm in online marketing." It's a conversation stopper. Unless you're at a Wired Sussex networking event. It's true that most small businesses these days have a web presence of some sort, and they're aware they need to be doing well on Google. But sometimes that's as far as it goes, especially if they went to a web designer who added 'website promotion' to the service description for another hundred quid.

Fact is, getting the right visitors to your website and converting them into customers now involves a complex set of activities and real strategic thinking. Or, as Lee Odden's suggests in his recent post Recession Proof SEO Tips,  "effective SEO in any economic environment means getting more creative, not mundane." Sensibly, small biz clients don't really care about the details, and even less about the jargon that goes with it. They're more bothered with results. How to break that down? Well, you could start with the desired result and work backwards.

Let's say you have a website which sells your goods or services. That means people want what you're selling and are able to buy. That means you have a website that works and a product or service for which there's a demand. If people are even on the website that means they need to have typed in your URL or arrived there from somewhere else. That means they have either heard of your company and URL or they've seen a link to you on the web and followed it. That means you've either done some traditional marketing already or there are links to your site on the web, in places where those potentially interested people were browsing or searching.

Where should those links be? How do we get them? How many do we need? What should they say? How do we know our prospects will see them and follow them? What other forms of promotion do we need to be doing? We've got the visitors - why won't they buy? How can we do all this without spending a fortune? Um... you need the help of an online marketer!

It's quality, not quantity that counts with PPC

Here's a great case study from Marketing Sherpa which illustrates just how effective it can be to combine Google AdWords with a dedicated landing page and good 'old fashioned' email and phone follow-up.

In particular, I loved the insight that “Google users tend to type in exactly what they want. They don’t type in, ‘Christmas tree.’ They enter in, ‘I want an 8-foot-tall Christmas tree.’”

Sometimes I find clients reluctant to target niche key words and phrases, thinking it's far more important to be found, for example, for 'hotel' than for '4 star hotel in Brighton'. And yet for a 4* Brighton hotel the latter phrase delivers far better qualified leads. Plus, if you're paying for each click, the last thing you want is to waste your money on people who are looking for a hotel in Newcastle.

The frustrations of Dragon's Den

I used to avoid watching 'Dragon's Den' because when I watch TV I don't want to be thinking about business. But having seen a couple of episodes over the holidays I think I'm a rather late convert. In fact, I'd make it mandatory viewing for any budding entrepreneur, even though its primary purpose is clearly to entertain.

One of the frustrations of this show is when people come on asking for money in order to develop their idea, but haven't done their market research properly. They're going about new product development the wrong way round - thinking up an original idea, then looking for people to sell it to.

Call me old fashioned, but I thought marketing was about identifying actual needs, then satisfying them while making a profit in the process. "Yes, but how do original ideas ever get developed in that case?" I hear the inventor say, "what about the stuff people may want or need, but they don't know it yet?"

Ah, well therein lies the genius of true foresight.

But for most of us, if you look around and find there's no competition for your product, it's a good time for a rethink.

As my musician husband says, as he dolefully surveys a concert programme of 'music by a little known Venetian composer, recently rediscovered after being forgotten for four centuries' ... "There's probably a good reason why it was forgotten."