I’m sitting with a cup of coffee and taking a long, hard, honest look at what Webfaced has done in terms of communication via social media in the last six months. The reason? Because we are starting to get the feeling that tweets and blog posts are not hitting our target market. For us to get a business lead directly from Twitter for example is rare. Are we in fact shouting into an empty cave? Are we shouting the wrong things or is there more to it?
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When it comes to working online there are many great things about it. Firstly it is perceived as cool, maybe even hip. Along the same lines as being a pilot or working in the stock market, announcing you work in the digital space always gets people interested. I’m sure some people (my parents included) wander where the digital space is and expect you to teleport into it every morning, maybe they think you are Neo and the Matrix was a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ documentary about the digital space. That said when my parents are asked what I do for a living they always say, “He works with computers”.
I digress, as always. Such is the intelligence used in the building of the various platforms we work from, our work is not only creative and emotional, it can be analysed and computed properly. The efforts of a creative strategy session with some insane idea for a virally spread flea-bitten talking meerkat can materialise into a website, email and social media campaign that has full measurability. That is more than most traditional offline marketers can dream of. But it aint all good news. Read the rest of this entry »
As a web design agency we constantly hear about the ‘best’ ecommerce platforms from clients, industry press or conversations with our peers. The same names are bounded about and the Magento’s of the world have gained a huge amount of popularity and really made a mark on the market. They are great tools, really strong platforms with the ability to develop some great ecommerce sites and this has been proved by some exceptional developments over the last 12 months.
However, one name that is missing from most conversations on the ecommerce subject is Actinic. I personally find this very strange. It rarely even comes up in the pages of Net mag despite Actinic’s Ben Dyer making regular contributions. So, why this article? Well, as I sit here on a sunny Sunday morning waiting for a new ecommerce site to publish I feel relaxed and content knowing that what we have just finished building is built on a pretty solid platform.
So, last week we talked about affiliate marketing and why, rather than being something you should hate, affiliates do hold the key to increased brand awareness, traffic and sales.
To understand how to implement and manage a successful affiliate strategy you need to have a little understanding of the type of business an affiliate is. Affiliates by their very business choice are lazy people! Sorry affiliates but you are! You don’t want to create a brand or product yourself you just want to take a cut of someone else’s by helping them sell it. That said, affiliates work bloody hard at getting traffic to their site and passing it on to you because this is the key to their business. Selling the product is then up to you, the retailer.
So, with this in mind think about what you need to do to a) get chosen by an affiliate and b) make sure they focus their attention on promoting you. Firstly, take a look at your competitors if they are using affiliates. What commission are they offering? Are they offering a discount code as well which the affiliate can publish to the user and encourage them to click through? Some competitor analysis at this stage will allow you to come up with an offer that will be more appealing to a customer.
Web-based affiliate marketing is ultimately a commission-based system whereby a third-party website promotes your products or services and earns a percentage of a sale they provide to you. An affiliate doesn’t handle the transaction, they simply pass the customer to your site and take a cut for doing so. All of this happens via a hyperlink which takes a visitor to your site via a quick (split second) detour where the referral is logged by the network.
There are quite a few big affiliate networks in the UK, Affiliate Window and Webgains being the largest. These networks provide the platform for affiliate schemes and allow affiliates to gain access to your creative banners and product information in order to promote you.
The affiliate business is booming and chances are, if you shop online you have bought via an affiliate even if you haven’t been aware of it. Affiliate sites stretch broadly across those small niche sites that target a particular brand and then focus their efforts on SEO to climb the rankings (in direct competition with the brands they are generating sales for). Others target consumers often with discount sites or reward schemes (Quidco and Hot UK Deals are two examples of some of the largest affiliates out there).
“Facebook never made anyone any money”, was a quote I heard this morning. “You are technically an IDIOT”, I furiously shouted back… in my head. In all honesty I can understand why someone might say it because measurability of ROI in the social media space is harder than with something like paid search. However, that said it is a pretty foolish statement because for decades companies have spent billions of pounds on advertising campaigns with NO direct measurement of ROI. It seems in this day and age where the web helps us to market our products and at the same time measure the fruits of our labour we have somehow grown accustomed to only doing activities which can directly show ROI in realtime via a Google Analytics heatmap with JQuery animated barcharts and automated campaign success tweets! With marketing budgets tightened it is of course good to be able to prove ROI, however, I do fear it is leading people away from activities which help to build brand awareness but are harder to measure.
Anyway, as usual I have digressed! This post, fuelled by the comment above, is about whether you can afford to ignore Facebook in your marketing strategy or whether any time invested on the site (or similar social networks) is money down the drain.
It’s a simple question. If a business does not have a website are they doomed to fail? Well no, because obviously it is possible to market and promote yourself offline. The decision will differ for every business with some not having the ability to market themselves in any other way and some choosing to invest in more traditional methods such as newspaper advertising because they are more comfortable with it.
Let’s clear up what sort of business we are talking about here. Firstly, if you are an online retailer then yes, you need a site, its pretty straightforward. I will count into ‘having a site’ those who have developed an eBay store and the like since the fact remains that you have some dedicated page somewhere on the worldwide-interweb-net where you are promoting yourself. But, everyone else, small or large, new or old, does everyone need a site?
In order to understand whether you do, go back to basics and do a spot of research into your market. Let’s say you sell sweets, in fact let’s be specific and say retro sweets since this is what one of our clients does. The company is cornering the UK retro sweets market which they happen to know very well. Did they need a site? Well, the market is geographically far-reaching ruling out the ability to capture the market with a single high street presence. The market on the whole is also very broad with a heavy weighting towards the 25-40 age bracket who remember the sweets first time around. This means they are statistically very likely to be using the web. So, it would clearly be beneficial to promote your business within an environment shared by your market, however, it still isn’t a must.
Well, it has been a couple of weeks since I posted the contents of a free SEO guide we put together to help new clients to get their heads around what was required from a natural search campaign. If you missed the article you can find the FREE Webfaced SEO Guide here.
What I want to focus on this time around is a simple checklist of considerations for PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising. These are the paid ads that appear at the top and the right of a search results page. These ads, unlike their natural listings to the left are the result of a paid campaign whereby the advertiser pays a certain amount for every click the ad receives. PPC provides a highly measurable marketing medium. To know the value of a click, you need to decide what the goal of your advertising is. If you are just branding, then you should expect to lose money to gain mindshare. If you are using pay-per-click to generate direct product sales you need to know how much each click is worth. Most clicks end up being failures so even if you have a 30% conversion rate, 7 out of 10 clicks did nothing for you (and they cost you money). When you begin PPC advertising you stand a good chance of losing money before you start making it.
Well that sounds really positive, thanks, sign me up.
Keep reading! PPC is a highly measurable way of reaching your market and whilst it can be run at any point to boost traffic, where Webfaced almost always recommends a paid search strategy to clients is when their sites have just launched.
For the first time this week I heard someone talk about social media and they actually talked some sense. I like people that talk sense, they inspire me.
Anyone following the Webfaced tweets this week will know that the TFM&A exhibition (Technology for Marketing & Advertising) was in town. However, it was not during a seminar at Earls Court that I heard such sense being talked. Actually, all TFM&A did was to demonstrate why few people will earn the right to be called a social media expert (even if they declare themselves to be one). This post is dedicated to someone who was NOT at TFM&A, Chris Buckley, who heads-up social media consulting for the social PR agency, Headstream.
I can’t get through a day without hearing the constant sound of tweeting and trying to get through an evening without being poked to death by a friend is impossible. So why do I say that there is no such thing as social media? Well, because I wanted to make a sensationalist statement to inspire you to read this post. There is such a thing of course, however, “social media” is a term I loathe because it leads people to place too much emphasis on the ‘media’ part and not enough on what is ’social’ about it.
For many clients, the creation of a website signals the end of a process. The build may have been done internally or by an agency but whichever way it happened it is likely that a lot of time, effort, thought and money went into its creation. The fact is that once a website has been built it should never be the end of the process, your website’s existence does not guarantee its success!
A simple analogy normally gets entered at this stage so we will of course oblige! If you decided to open a shop on your local high street the grand opening would be a momentous occasion. You might have banners and balloons, music playing and maybe even enlist the help of last year’s Big Brother runner-up to hand out flyers. Some will be enticed into the shop by the banner on the door, some by the products they can see in the window and some just to witness last year’s Big Brother runner-up’s rapid fall from celebrity!
At the end of your first day you might have sold a few items and certainly some people will have gone home and talked about your new shop and what you sell; good times.
