Direct Marketing

Archive for May, 2010

Recent research shows that website visitors spend 80% of their time ’above the fold’.

What’s above the fold? It’s all the stuff you can see without having to scroll down a web page.  

Obviously people do scroll down. The point is, they pay much more attention to the information at the top of a web page than they do to the content that appears later.

So it makes sense to prioritise your most important and strongest points – ie. those that drive sales - at the top of your page, with supporting information and fine detail further down.  

If there’s stuff below the fold that you really want people to see, for instance free delivery details, put a strong visual prompt at the top of the page to encourage them to scroll down. 

Like so much ‘new’ marketing wisdom, the relative importance of below/above the fold content to sales isn’t new at all. Successful direct marketers have been putting less important information below their real-life paper folds for decades! 

Source: admin

As a direct marketer I don’t feel comfy unless I know exactly how much profit my marketing campaigns have made. To the penny! 

Offline marketing is traditionally divided into above the line and below the line campaigns. Below the line involves un-glamorous media like direct marketing and cheapo Direct Response TV. Above the line is fluffy stuff like glossy magazine ads and big budget TV brand building.  

You can always calculate ROI, cost per response and cost per sale below the line. But the profitability of above the line work is harder – if not impossible – to quantify. There’s a definite correlation between, say, a high visibility TV branding campaign and an increase in brand awareness. But you can’t really pin down its actual monetary value.  

There are some interesting parallels online.

Direct response campaigns like email marketing generate measurable returns. As does SEO, which visibly increases physical visitor numbers. 

Social media marketing is a different kettle of fish, similar to above the line marketing. You can tweet until you’re blue in the face but it isn’t always possible to relate your spend to actual income.

Having said that, Twitter and co are slowly coming into their own as far as relatively ethereal stuff like reputation management and brand building is concerned.

I plan to hang fire until the medium’s first major financial coup is announced. Once I can see a crystal clear connection between social media marketing investment and return, I’ll consider joining the party!

Source: admin

Most Search Engine Optimisation experts focus hard on link building to gain good positions in search engine results pages. But are inbound  links really all-powerful?

I’ve got an attitude problem. I find it impossible to make myself do boring things. And I find link building super-dull. So, apart from a handful of quality semi automated directory submissions every now and again, I don’t do it.

Despite having very few backlinks, my freelance copywriting website has consistently appeared on page 1 of Google for my top key phrases for more than two years… and counting. So are backlinks really as influential as they’re cracked up to be?

This is exactly what I do to keep  my copywriting services site on page 1 of Google:

• add a single page .pdf newsheet to my freelance copywriting news page every month
• put fresh links on my copywriting portfolio page as and when I finish a suitable project
• update my facebook-style ’status’ line on the index page every day
• update an interesting word of the day line on my SEO page daily
• write blog posts once a week, sometimes more
• update my on site marketing ebook offer every month
• add new  testimonials every time a customer says something nice about my work
• create 5-10 directory links a month using www.easysubmits.com
• incorporate my keywords in all of the above except my ’status’ and interesting word of the day lines 

What’s going on?

I have a theory. I reckon search engine algorithms place much more importance on fresh, relevant, regularly updated content  than many of us realise.  

It seems to make sense. Google loves fairness. And it encourages quality. Any SEO expert will tell you that it’s fairly easy to automate backlinks, building hundreds or even thousands in minutes without Google ‘noticing’. Quality site content, on the other hand, is harder to manipulate.   

It’s only a theory. But it seems to fit what’s been happening to my freelance copywriting dotcom site. The same goes for my ebooks website and my dotcodotuk SEO copywriting site, both of which I’ve got onto P1 Google using the same methods.

Source: admin

It's always a pleasure when a provocative comment appears on this blog.  And the splendid Brad Bell has left this response to my thoughts about the changing nature of anonymity online.  Here it is: "While I don't question the trend toward increasingly valuable (to everyone) real world identities, I don't see any possible reason anonymity is going away. 'On the internet, no one knows you are so many people.' (Anyone who wants to rid the network of anonymity, implicitly desires tyranny.) The ideal is a mix of multiple identities based on roles (professional, personal, familial, consumer, etc) and anonymity – as
well as simply having the spectrum of choices. On the topic of 'free': despite crazy Rupert, it seems cultural belief systems have much less impact than real economic factors. Rupert seems to think there is a culture of 'free,' which can be changed with PR and leadership. Of course, that ignores the actual technological value of the global network: it radically lowers transaction costs. *That's* were the culture of free comes from. The costs of sharing information drop to the point where it resembles a glass of water in a restaurant. Secondly – it's *digital* information. People like Rupert and Mandelson seem to struggle to see that digital media implies the end of the analog business of selling content. (In the analog world, selling content worked because copies of copies introduced noise, whereas copies of digital media are clones of the original.) Like 'free', this is often presented as a cultural belief, like a kind of negative consumer demand. This kind of thinking leads to attempts to legislate digital devices in an attempt to stop them from acting like digital devices, and legislating people into a digital panopticon, relying on dataveillance
to solve problems ranging from outmoded business models to terrorism. In fact, we are being asked to buy into a technological fairy tale in order to preserve the status quo – and the costs to us are simply staggering. It's easy to forget Rupert sold paper with news printed on it. He did not sell the news."  Certainly got me thinking.

Source: James Cherkoff

If you’re doing the right thing and updating your website regularly, it’s a good idea to write yourself a short, succinct content strategy document.  

Why? Because  if you don’t have something to refer to it’s all too easy to wander off track and end up off-message, losing sight of keywords and messing up your customer journey.  

Here’s five top tips for creating a simple but effective website content strategy:

• define your tone of voice. All this means is the way you sound. My tone of voice is plain English, approachable and professional
• note down the different types of content  you want to focus on. There are loads of ways to create new content. My top five are monthly pdf newsletters, blog posts, testimonials, daily status statements and portfolio links. Why not take advantage of every possible kind of content? Because you’ll buckle under the workload and your site will probably end up a dog’s dinner!
• decide how often you’re going to create fresh content. And stick with your timetable… regularity is really important
• make sure your new content doesn’t muck up the customer journey. Check you haven’t created confusion, contradictions, distractions or extra steps in the buying process… every time you add something new! 
• always relate new content back to your top keywords and key phrases so that every new item works as hard as possible to improve your site’s visibility

Source: admin