So in no official order, below are the top ten most read blog posts of 2011:

Top Email Marketing Checks To Do Before You Hit Send

Email marketing is a very effective way to communicate with your current and prospect customers. It’s quick, inexpensive and can give you instant results. But it’s important that it’s done right. Make sure you make the most of each eblast by making the following email marketing checks: From Name Is your ‘From’ name recognisable? Will [...]

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Google+ For Business

If you’ve been in a coma recently, you might not have heard about Google’s new social media platform, Google+! Even though it’s been around now for a few weeks, there’s still some confusion over how to use it and what it could mean to you both personally and as a business. The service is Google’s [...]

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Building Your Email Marketing List : Research Results

A couple of months ago, MarketingSherpa released the results of a study they had undertaken, into the most effective methods of growing an email marketing list. The researchers asked more than 1100 marketers to indicate the effectiveness of various methods used within their organisation. This is what they found: Although these results are based on [...]

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Top Black Hat SEO Techniques You Must Avoid

Wikipedia describes black hat SEO as “SEO tactics such as spamdexing, attempt to redirect search results to particular target pages in a fashion that is against the search engines’ terms of service and is often considered unethical SEO.” The alternative is white hat SEO, which are the techniques that are approved by the search engines [...]

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Reciprocal Linking – Good or Bad SEO?

If you’ve got a new website and you’re trying to optimise it and improve it’s position in the search engine results for your desired key terms, you may be aware that link building is an important area of SEO that you need to focus on. So it could be tempting to respond positively to an [...]

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Secrets of Successful Blogging

The term “weblog” was coined by Jorn Barger on 17 December 1997. The short form, “blog,” was coined by Peter Merholz, who jokingly broke the word weblog into the phrase “we blog” in the sidebar of his blog Peterme.com in April or May 1999. Ever since then, people have been blogging for business and for [...]

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Top Ten Google AdWord Mistakes – Part Two

Following from our previous post last Thursday, here are the additional five mistakes that we see people make in their Google AdWord Campaigns: 6. Not targetting the right group of searchers: Is your product or services aimed towards a particular demographic or geographical location? Did you know that you can set your AdWord campaigns to target those [...]

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MegaBus Robots.txt File Fail

I am organising a trip up to London with some friends in September. We’ve decided to save some money and use the MegaBus to travel from Southampton. Due to my love of all thing organising, I was put in charge of sorting out the costs etc. So first thing I did was to Google MegaBus. [...]

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Online Promotion: How to promote a new offer, product or service online

Online promotion is a key marketing method for small businesses. If you’re promoting a new offer, product or service, how can you market it online? One of the key benefits of the Internet is that it creates an even platform – allowing smaller businesses to promote themselves at a relatively low cost. But you still need [...]

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Small Business Branding, Logo and Corporate Identity – What’s the Difference?

Okay small business owners, I have some questions for you here: How many of you reading this, know what your logo is? (I’m really hoping you’re nodding along, safe in the knowledge that you know what your logo is! I’ll be scared if  you don’t, unless you’re just starting a new business and haven’t had a [...]

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If you want to start 2012 with a bang, get in touch. We love helping businesses grow through using effective online marketing. So if you want more leads, more sales and more growth in 2012 drop us an email or complete our contact form.

You might think that it’s easy to select a few, well targeted keywords, but in reality you need to make sure you target keywords that are not only relevant and achievable, but will also bring in high quality traffic.

So think about:

• Relevant keywords: The keywords you target should always be relevant to your business, your products/services and your website
• Use phrases: The term ‘keyword’ can be misleading. It’s unlikely that you’ll have any success targeting a single word. Instead, think about phrases. For example, the word ‘marketing’ is not only too generic for SMEketing to target, but it’s so competitive we’d never get good enough rankings. And if we did, the traffic it would provide would be low quality, low converting visits. Instead something like ‘marketing in Hampshire’ would be better – more focused, less competitive and more likely to drive quality visits
• What would you/your customers/your prospects search: Think about what you would actually type into the search engine if you were looking for your business/service. Ask your current customers what they would search for too
• Local keywords: As in the example above, if geography is important to you, remember to add this into your keywords. But don’t be too specfic
• Number of keywords: Generally, you should optimise each page for one primary keyword, and maybe two or three secondary keywords

Once you’ve put together a list of potential keywords, go to the Google Keyword Tool and enter them in the box provided. The results will tell you how popular a particular keyword is as well as how competitive it is (this is based on Google AdWords rather than organic searches, but you can bet that if companies are bidding on these keywords within AdWords, they’ll be optimising their site for them too). You can also see the number of searches within the UK – just set the ‘Local Results’ to google.co.uk.

As well as giving you information regarding the keywords you’ve entered, it will also give you some additional suggestions that you may have not thought of.

Hopefully, this information will help you narrow down your keyword list to a manageable size. Next you have to select the ones you want to work with. You will need to consider:

• Conversion Rate: The percent of users searching with the term/phrase that you know converts (a conversion would be to make a purchase, an enquiry, download a brochure, sign up to your newsletter, etc.)
• Predicted Traffic: An estimate of how many users will be searching for the given term/phrase each month
• Value per Customer: An average amount of revenue earned per customer using the term or phrase to search – comparing big-ticket search terms vs. smaller ones.
• Keyword Competition: A rough measurement of the competitive environment and the level of difficulty for the given term/phrase.

There’s little point optimising pages for terms that have a low level of competition (so a high chance you’ll achieve a good position), but which are unlikely to convert into sales or leads. You want to have a good balance between the above points – keywords which aren’t so competitive you don’t stand a chance, with a high level of traffic and with a good chance of converting into a high value sale.

Obviously you can’t always strike the perfect balance. But undertaking keyword research will put you in a better position to target keywords that will work for your website. It can be a fine balancing act and you may have to sacrifice traffic volume for quality – but that’s so often the case. Quality and quantity is the goal, but for now, quality over quantity is what will help your website succeed.

Have you got any other keyword research tips? Let us know and leave them in the comments below.

So imagine you have a new offer – promoting 50% of a particular product – what can you do to push this promotion online?

• Create special offer page
  • Explain what the offer is
  • What are the benefits?
  • What are exactly are you offering – what can your customers expect to receive?
  • What is the cost? (free, percentage off, pounds off etc)
  • How to order?
  • Include form on the page to register

Then promote this page using various online platforms:

• If you are using Google AdWords or any other form of pay per click advertising, create a special campaign with dedicated adverts pointing to your promotion web page.
• Create a press release about your offer
  • Upload it to online newswires
  • Might be worth paying £45 or so to put it on a paid newswire
  • Email it to industry journalists and publications (both online and physical)
• Promote on all social media sites
  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
• Create a blog post about it
  • Link to the main landing page
• Create an article about it
  • The benefits of your offer and how it can help your customers
• Create an email about it and blast it out to your email marketing list
  • For previous prospects that maybe didn’t convert in the past, try writing a personalised sales letter to the contact and posting it (old school, but still a good-un!). Explain what the offer is and include a link to the page for people to register for it, and a paper form which they can fax/scan/email back.
• Add it to your email signature
• Maybe consider buying some banner ads on relevant event marketing websites
• When you sell one, try and get a customer testimonial which you can add to the promotional page (and other marketing materials)
• See if you can get existing customers to spread the word to their customers/partners etc

So you see, that with a bit of time and effort there really are very effective methods you can use to promote your latest offer.

If you need any help with any of these areas (creating landing pages, Google AdWords, press releases, blogging or article writing), get in touch with us today. We’re passionate about creating optimised content and have helped many of our customers get fantastic results using such methods.

Call 023 8083 7271 or email us on info@SMEketing.com

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Like always, if you want more information, please get in touch – info@SMEKeting.com. To get email updated from this blog, please register in the box to the right.

Thanks!

If you’re not already using Twitter, then you should be. Check out these posts to learn why and how:

• Twitter: Small Business Success Stories – Will yours be one of them? 
• Guide to Getting Your Small Business Started on Twitter

Once you’ve created your Twitter account and you’re using it to tweet regular updates, interacting with your followers and generally being a good source of information and conversation…then what? How do you move it on from being a fun and interesting tool, to something that benefits your small business?

It’s easy - measure, measure and measure again! But what do you measure and how, I hear you ask? You need to measure the response you get to each tweet. If you are using Twitter effectively, you will be linking to interesting articles, news reports and to pages on your own website. You should be using a tool that not only shortens those URLs, but also tracks the click through rate; such as bit.ly, zi.ma or cli.gs (among many, bit.ly is SMEketing’s tool of choice). By shortening the URLs you post in your Tweets through one of these services, you can also measure the success of that tweet. These services allow you to track:

• The number of clicks
• The time/date of clicks
• Clicks split by country
• Retweets

By tracking and measuring your tweets using one of these services, you can accurately see what subjects and topics are most popular. For example, a recent SMEketing Small Business Blog post titled Five Cost Effective Marketing Strategies for Your Small Business got a huge number of clicks and retweets from Twitter. This information tells me that people are interested in learning how they can market their small business using low cost marketing techniques (which given the state the economy right now, doesn’t surprise me!). I then use this knowledge to ensure my future marketing efforts reflect this demand; I can create new blog posts on a similar thread, expand that blog post into a white paper or in-depth article, put an offer on the SMEketing Email Marketing Tool etc. There are many ways I can use this information to further enhance my own marketing activities.

You can also learn what was not popular. You may have read an interesting piece of industry news that you thought would make a good subject of a future blog post. However, if you posted a tweet linking to that peice of news and it had a very low click through rate, you might want to reconsider writing that blog post.

Many people are using Twitter and now asking – where is the business benefit? Like a lot of new social media applications, it can be difficult to determine the exact ROI. But, by using it as a marketing research tool, it can help you direct your marketing efforts into activites that are most likely to pay off, and ensure you to avoid wasting your time on things that your stakeholders are not interested in.

UPDATE 24.07.09: Twitter today released a new ebook: Twitter 101 For Business. If you are new to Twitter, or just want to learn more about its application for your small business, I would recommend reading it.

However, if I may present another (non Disney) chiasmus quote: Fail to plan and you plan to fail. Even if your small business is doing well right now, you never know what’s round the corner. Small business that are successful at marketing always have a marketing plan. Marketing practices are constantly changing and evolving, so it’s best not to plan too far ahead; a 12 month plan should do it. Who knew 12 months ago that Twitter would suddenly explode into a mainstream marketing tool? If you don’t plan and review your marketing activities and continue to only carry out the marketing activities that you’ve always done, you may end up missing out.

You should ensure that your marketing plan is clear and simple – you need to be able to refer back to it easily, and track your progress against your goals and projections.

If you need assistance in creating a marketing plan for your small business, get in touch with SMEketing. We can help put together strategies for business with budgets large and small!

1. Blogging: Setting up a blog can be completely free! Yes, we love anything free. But like most freebies, in order for it to be effective you need to plan it well and invest your time into it. Using free blog providers like WordPress and Google Blogger are great ways of getting involved in the blogging world, without costing you a penny. There are so many different benefits of blogging, one of the biggest benefits is to your websites ranking in the search engines (aka Search Engine Optimisation - SEO): Google loves new and unique content. Blogging is a great way to constantly add new content to your site. Plus your posts will be tagged and full of relevant keyword. Blog well and others in your industry may link to you, increasing the number of valuable inbound links. For more on the benefits of blogging, read this post: Blogging – just for teenagers, or good for your small business?

2. Twitter: Again, another freebie! Twitter is great for promoting what you do and learning about latest industry trends. By joining the conversation and providing useful information, you will soon generate a loyal base of followers. Use Twitter to answer questions relevant to your industry, learn about new goings on, promote your product, events and news (but don’t be pushy). For more information on using Twitter to promote your small business, read these blog posts: Twitter: Small Business Success Stories – Will yours be one of them? and Guide to Getting Your Small Business Started on Twitter

3. Email Marketing: Email marketing can cost as little as 1p per recipient and £5 per mailshot (well, those are the rates for using a self managed SMEketing Email Marketing solution, but we like to think these are pretty competitive!). If you don’t have time to maintain a close working relationship with your customer base, email marketing is a great, cost effective way of keeping them updated with your latest news, products and offers. Email marketing can also be used as a lead generation tool. Send out well targeted mailshots to relevant recipients and you will find visits to your web site go up, and conversion rates increase. For more information on the benefits of email marketing read this blog post: Email Marketing for Small Businesses

4. Google AdWords: These unfortunately are not free (we wish!), but you completely control your budget. If you only have £10 a day to spend, that’s fine! Make sure you get the most from your budget by using relevant keywords, focused adverts with a strong call to action, and a well thought-through landing page. Google AdWords can be a great way of driving relevant traffic to your site, and the results are completely measurable. If something isn’t working, you know straight away. This is why AdWords are one of the most cost effective advertising mediums out there. Add Conversion Tracking to your adverts and you’ll be able to see exactly what ad’s are providing the highest conversion rate once visitors are on your site. Once you know that, you can direct your budget to keywords and adverts that are giving you the highest Return on Investment (ROI).

5. Search Engine Optimisation (SEO):You know I said Google AdWords weren’t free, well there is a way that you can get Google to promote your site FOR FREE! How? Improve your website’s ranking for relevant keywords, and Google will display your site in their search results – free of charge! But again, this is something that will take an investment in your time. Make sure your website is well designed – good navigation, lots of keyword rich content, no broken links, good use of anchor text in your links, etc… Once that is done, you need to boost the number of high quality inbound links. Go to Yahoo and type “linkdomain:yourcompany.com -site:yourcompany.com” to see the number of your inbound links. Do the same for your competitors and see how you compare. Next create a plan to increase the number of incoming links – sign up to relevant directories, promote your blog, create great content on your site that people want to link to. Links should be from high quality sites – link farms are NOT GOOD! The page giving you a link should have few other outgoing links on the same page, and the anchor text should be optimised to promote what you do, not necessarily your business name. An example of a good link to SMEketing would be: “SMEketing is a fantastic source for small business marketing advice and services.” The anchor text here tells Google that the link (www.SMEketing.com) is relevant to “small business marketing”. If the anchor text fell on the business name, it would just tell Google that “SMEketing” is relevant to www.SMEketing.com – which to be fair, it probably had figured out anyway!
Read here for more SEO tips: Top 10 SEO Mistakes Your Small Business Should Avoid

If you want to learn more about any of the above marketing strategies, please get in touch. At SMEketing we’re experienced in all these marketing mediums and have seen first hand the benefits when small businesses employ such tactics.

During my visits to clients and prospects this week, the importance of educating oneself has being hugely reinforced. Unfortunately, more than one person I’ve spoken to this week has told me about an unfortunate experience when outsourcing a marketing function to an marketing agency or consultant (not SMEketing though!!!). This is why it’s so important to educate yourself in the basics of what you want to outsource. If you want to employ a marketing agency or a marketing consultant to manage your search engine optimisation (SEO), Google Adword (PPC), or design a website, you must educate yourself on the foundation prinicples of these marketing activities. Only then are you in a position where you can question the marketing agency; for example, if you don’t know what is involved in creating and managing a small business website, how do you know if you’re being spun a yarn?

Another example is SEO; just type “SEO basics” into Google and millions of entries come up. Even 30 minutes spent browsing these articles is time well spent. That way, when you talk to your marketing agency, you will understand the jargon (although a good agency will not try to confuse you by using terms and jargon that you won’t understand). You’ll also know if the agency or marketing consultant is implementing unethical tactics – something which is vitally important, especially when dealing with SEO.

So this is the lesson for the week – educate, educate, educate. I’m not suggesting you go out and buy loads of books on various marketing strategies or spend hours crawling the internet for information. But by arming yourself with a basic level of knowledge, when you’re talking to an ‘expert’, you’ll be in a better position to decide if they are really an ‘expert’ at all. Outsourcing marketing activies can can be a vital part of your small business strategy, but it can become very expensive if you’re dealing with an agency or consultant who is willing to take your money and run because you don’t know better!

1. How many of you reading this, know what your logo is? (I’m really hoping you’re nodding along, safe in the knowledge that you know what your logo is! I’ll be scared if  you don’t, unless you’re just starting a new business and haven’t had a logo created yet…in which case, get in touch, we’d love to help!)
2. Great, number 2, how many of you know the difference between your logo and your corporate identity? (From our experience, approximately 60-70% of people reading will know)
3. And finally, how many of you understand the difference between your corporate identity and your brand? (this is the biggy – and I’m assuming that some of you might not be 100% sure of the answer here…)

It is really is important for your small business, that you understand not only the differences between these key elements, but also how they work together to form the overall impression of who your company (or personal brand) is… So here’s a quick and easy guide to the differences and how they all work together:

Logo: It is rare that a company, even the smallest of small businesses, doesn’t have a logo, even if it’s a simple word, mark or symbol that someone internally has created to serve as your identifier. A logo can be made up of a different parts, which may or may not always be used together; the word mark, a logo symbol, a tagline.

Corporate Identity: These are the elements of your small business’s graphic/identity/visual language, and are usually, but not always, devised from the elements that make up your logo. If you have worked with an marketing agency (such as SMEketing) to develop your corporate identity, you must ensure that they provide you with a manual, commonly known as the Brand Guidelines  (also called a brand manual) as part of the package. This will guide you, your team and suppliers, as to how to correctly utilise your corporate identity. It safeguards your investment in your brand and prevents it from being diluted.

Your corporate identity is made up of symbols, textures, colours, images, photography style and fonts. If you’d like to see an example of some brand guidelines get in touch with us and we can send you some examples of ones we’ve created for past clients.

And all of these elements come together visually in your marketing material (business cards, stationery, website, brochures, forms, email marketing, signage, advertisements, vehicles, etc) to express your corporate identity. A strong corporate identity is one that maintains a consistent use of the elements to achieve quick recognition by a potential client when they come in contact with a marketing piece.

Brand: A lot of people will tell you that your brand IS your corporate identity, however it is much much more than that. A Brand is the sum of ALL parts that make up a company. It includes your logo, your corporate identity, and any and all of the follow elements:

• your company name
• your company culture
• what customers have come to expect from an interaction experience with your company
• team uniforms
• company policies
• tone of how your written content is delivered
• corporate identity
• logo
• tagline
• word of mouth advertising (how your current clients & suppliers talk about you when they refer you)
• partner relationships
• sponsorships
• the space you work in
• and many more..

To summarise, your brand is what people come to expect from your company, whether it be from seeing an advert in a magazine, to ordering a product online, to interacting with a team member over the phone or in person, and so on. And with any great brand these elements are always consistent and congruent.

Developing and maintaining a corporate brand is essential in modern business. SMEketing can work with you and your small business to develop your brand and carry it through all your marketing efforts.

Speak to us about logo design, company stationary, website design, copywriting and more. See our Services page for a full list of marketing solutions we provide.

Our small business marketing agency is based in Hampshire and service all of Hampshire, as well as Wiltshire, Dorset and Surrey, Sussex and Berkshire (and of course the Isle of Wight – in fact it’s so lovely over there we’d welcome the excuse to visit!).