Karim Gargum

Bringing Social Media Into Your Marketing

2009-11-06T17:40:12Z

5 Ways to Integrate Social Media in Your Marketing

View more presentations from Jason Baer.

This is a great presentation that demonstrates some very interesting tactics for integrating social media with your existing marketing.

Key Takeaways

1. Social media works best when used in conjunction with other marketing approaches.

2. Social Media + Search: Consumers exposed to brand in social media 2.8 times more likely to search for that brands products

3. Fishing for traffic with social media appropriate content. Brands with blogs experienced over 50% increase in traffic to main website.

4. Social Media + Email: Enable social media sharing in email.

5. Social Media + Market Research: Ask your fans/followers/Blog readers for feedback

UK Social Media Usage

2009-10-23T17:23:49Z

Here’s a quick chart showing the comparative size of the biggest social media networks in the UK. Facebook leads the pack at 20mil users, followed by MySpace at 10mil, Bebo at 8mil and Twitter at just under 5mil (4.9mil).

These numbers, taken from various online sources (both official and unofficial) need to be taken with a big pinch of salt as they don’t differentiate between active and lapsed users. That being said, they demonstrate the size and potential of the social media space.

How Much Is Your Website Costing You?

2009-10-18T23:59:22Z

Although it’s gotten easier and cheaper to get a website up and running these days, getting your website working efficiently is still a challenge. Part of the work I do as an online marketing consultant involves reviewing and auditing company websites to boost sales.

With the average website converting only 2% of its traffic to profitable sales, there’s usually room for improvement with every website. I want to share three key reasons websites under-perform with you, but first let’s consider the pro’s and con’s of reviewing your website for weaknesses.

As daunting as it may be to commit the time and resources needed to improve your website, it’s really a question of paying now or paying….now. Every day your website could be turning away potential clients.

In my experience, the gains in website efficiency far outweigh any cost or time investment needed to improve a website’s performance. To help get you on your way to improving your website and reclaiming some of those 98% of lost potentials sales, here are 3 key areas of website weakness.

1. What’s the point?

A lot of corporate websites struggle with a crowded and confused homepage. Every time the marketing or sales department wants to promote a new produce feature or service a new link is usually added to the homepage resulting in a something that looks more like a phone directory than a clear, professional sales resource.

The key is to carefully decide what the primary goal of your website is. What is the one, most important action you want visitors to your homepage to take? Focus on this and build the homepage around it.

2. Me, me, me, me

Of course you need to tell website visitors about your company and about what you do, but don’t get carried away. People visit your site for them, not for you. If you’ve got a great new ad or interesting corporate backstory, make sure people can find it but don’t sacrifice the key goals of your website to corporate egotism.

3. Computer Says No

A lot of text on corporate websites read like some sort of legalese contract or like a computer from some 1970s futuristic movie. Make your content accessible and clear. Be conversational and speak to prospects in a human and sincere voice. A good sales person knows that they have to let their personalities and passion shine through when they’re making a sale, why deprive your website of a voice that sets you and your company apart from the competition?

If you can fix these aspects of your website, you’ll be well on your way to boosting that paltry 2% conversion rate. Good luck!

5 Tips To Boost Your Google Adword Campaigns

2009-10-09T17:53:41Z

Every marketer that deals with paid Google advertising understands how competitive this form of promotion has become. To stay competitive and cost-effective we need to make sure our Google ads are working to full capacity, here are five tweaks you can make to your Google account to improve performance and generate more business.

1. Get those headlines matched up

When a user searches Google, sees your ad and clicks on it, they have an expectation. Most likely it’s your ad headline that has motivated them to click, don’t send them through to a landing page that doesn’t acknowledge what you said on your Google ad. If you’re specific in your Google ad, be specific on your landing page. We want to build up a potential client’s forward momentum when they entire the buying process with that. Lazy landing pages and mismatched headlines can make a user think twice and dissipate built-up momentum. Only you might not get a chance to re-build it!

2. Use specific landing pages

Wait, you’re not sending people through to your homepage are you? That’s pretty old school. If you’re trying to extract customers from Google and you’re covering a very specific search term, make sure your ad links through to a specific landing page with a matching headline (see tip 1) and relevant body copy. If you just send people through to your homepage or a generic landing page you’ll be wasting a golden opportunity to seal the deal.

3. Use dynamic ads with caution

A lot of clever Google advertisers set up their google ads so the headline automatically matches the keyword or keyphrase a user searches for. This is intended to increase relevancy. Although this technique can be highly effective in boosting click through rates, it can look strange and sometimes even spammy. Also you may not always want your ad to match a users search phrase exactly. They might be searching in the form of a question. Better to craft a relevant, well written ad if at all possible. Especially if you sell a smaller range of high end products or more complex services (e.g financial services).

4. Don’t trip over the long tail

There’s been a lot of fuss about the long tail in every aspect of online marketing and commerce. This has certainly been applied to the area of Google advertising, where advertisers run targeted ads against a long range of niche keywords. This can work well if you’ve got the budget to support it. In fact, if you’re like Amazon and you sell 1000s of different products/services then you live in the long tail.

However, if you have a much more focused range of products and services, it’s better to re-allocate any long tail budget back to your core group of keywords. Once you’ve got a highly optimised campaign in this area you can venture back out to the long tale.

5. Synchronise Google Ads with your other activities

Although Google Adwords can perform very well in isolation, performance is way more powerful when tied in with your other marketing activities. If you’re running specific offers or promotions, don’t be shy about including these in your Google ads. If people are searching for your offers or recently launched products or services, make sure you’ve modified your Google Ads to reflect these.

Ok there you have it, five straightforward tips to boost your Google Adwords campaigns. I hope you find them useful.

Google Hijacks Your Home Page With SideWiki [1]

2009-10-05T16:50:47Z

If you were still clinging to the idea that your website homepage was your own sacred, protected patch of internet real estate, you won’t be pleased by Google’s recent launch of SideWiki.

SideWiki allows anyone to comment on your website by downloading and installing the Google browser Toolbar. Comments won’t actually appear on your website (i.e. the content of your website won’t be changed) but they will be visible to anyone using the Google Toolbar. Google describes the service as follows:

We’re launching Google Sidewiki, which allows you to contribute helpful information next to any webpage. Google Sidewiki appears as a browser sidebar, where you can read and write entries along the side of the page.

In one swift move, Google has effectively taken control of your website and handed it over to the masses of website visitors (well the ones with Google Toolbar installed on their browsers). I think there are a couple of potential dangers that come with the launch of this tool:

1. People can blast your brand where it counts….on your website

Drawn out rants are disturbing enough when they take place on industry forums, blogs and social media networks, but having a disgruntled customer slagging off your brand on your HOME PAGE is a whole other kind of scary. Google hasn’t really been too clear about how they might sensor or block negative comments as the Daily Mail found out when this comment was left on the site via SideWiki.

2. Backdoor access for Ads & Spammers

So Google now controls a window on your website, right next to your product and your service. Wouldn’t it be handy for them to run ads along side your site for say, your competitors? Although this hasn’t happened YET I wouldn’t put this past Google and their undying quest to boost advertising revenue. If Google don’t do this themselves, I’m sure we’ll see a surge of spammers taking advantage of this space to push their erectile dysfunction medicine and international Lotteries.

3. Stealing your voice

We should have all learned by now that our websites can’t exist in a vacuum. People can blog about us, mention us on Twitter, discuss our products and services on forums or even create a fanpage about us on Facebook. The fact is that people are talking about us whether we like it or not. For brands that haven’t developed a social media strategy or established their own voice online, SideWiki threatens to make this lack of involvement in the conversation painfully obvious.

Despite the potential problem SideWiki poses to marketers, it won’t be visible to all users for the time being, in fact, some people are convinced this tool will be a failure like similar tools that have passed before it, only time will tell. However, even if it is short-lived, SideWiki should be the wakeup call for us to start joining in the online conversation. Let’s build a social media presence, let’s build a blog and actually engage with our audience. We really don’t have anymore excuses to put this off, better the conversation happen with than without you.