I had another look at Bing this morning. And soon wished I hadn’t

Microsoft’s “decision engine”, disappointingly, is still trailing way behind search leader Google in the relevance stakes. The only decision I made based on the results delivered by Bing this morning was to run promptly back to the safe haven that is Google Search.

Google doesn’t always get it right, of course… but by God it’s streets ahead of its wannabe rival.

An example of Bing’s irrelevant results

I launched a new website on Irish wildlife and natural history a couple of weeks back. It’s still very early days, and I’m not expecting it to rank highly in organic search results quite yet. For now I’m very much focussed on building a foundation of great content… the other stuff will follow.

However, it means I am interested in what search engines are serving up on keywords relevant to Ireland’s wildlife, nature and the environment. That’s what prompted me to trot over to Bing this morning and type Ireland Wildlife into the search box.

Oh dear!

Number one result, according to the “Decision Engine” is a page from… wait for it… The Forest Preserve District of Cook County (Illinois). It’s a nature bulletin from March 1978 (nofollowed that one… let’s not perpetuate the idiocy) highlighting the fact there are no snakes in Ireland. It goes on to give a broad brush overview of Ireland’s natural history from an Illinois perspective. Riveting stuff!

How on earth can that be the most relevant and authoritative page in the world for a user searching for info on Ireland’s wildlife from Co. Cork? Yes, I know I can “Narrow results to only pages from Ireland”, but in all fairness I shouldn’t have to!

On the date of writing Bing’s top 5 results for “Ireland wildlife” contained a US page, a Northern Ireland Tourism page, a UK wildlife page, the generic Wikipedia entry for Ireland and… drumroll… our very own National Parks and Wildlife Service. Hallelujah… a relevant result!

Google, on the other hand, serves up the Irish Wildlife Trust homepage in pole position for the same query (spot on), followed by the National Parks and Wildlife Service, Fota Wildlife Park in Cork, a “Proud2beIrish” page on Ireland’s Wildlife and my @WildIreland twitter stream (which is very nice of them).

It’s only one example, sure… but you decide which search engine you think is better at relevance!

I’ve long been an advocate of effective list management and email marketing for small businesses. When I talk to small business clients I always recommend using a professional email marketing service to manage their newsletter and email campaigns.

If you want to stay in touch with your email list effectively you’ll only get so far using contact groups and the BCC field in your desktop email client. Outlook is no place to manage your email marketing, and once your list grows bigger than a couple of dozen addresses you’re going to need dedicated software – if for no other reason than it makes your life (and mine, if I’m working with you on your email campaigns) SO much easier.

There are a lot of email marketing services out there, but one of my favourites is Benchmark Email – a full-featured web based service that’s easy to use, delivers professional results with a minimum of fuss, and makes building and managing your email lists and campaigns really easy. It even integrates with your social media accounts.

Here’s a 90 second video summary:

I’ve used benchmark on several clients’ email campaigns, and recommended it to several others, and they’ve all been very happy with both the web-based service and the results. So if you’re looking for an email marketing solution for your small business, give Benchmark a try… it will make your life a lot easier.

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Link building is probably the hardest part of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). But high quality incoming links are one of the most important components of your search engine optimisation strategy.

Search engines are always looking for better ways to assess the quality and relevance of search results. A significant part of Google’s search ranking algorithm looks at the incoming link profile of your pages, and uses that to help gauge the relevance and authority of your content.

So good incoming links are critical to getting your site in front of your customers for your key search terms.

But how do you go about getting quality backlinks?

• Buy them? Er… no!
• Blast the myriad local web directory sites with “free” and paid listings for your business? Er… no!
• Write a gazillion articles for online article directories in the hope that they’ll be published widely around the web? Er… no!
• Ask nicely? Well, maybe… but you need something compelling for other websites to link to – otherwise why would they bother sending visitors your way?

Effective link building is about adding value for people – and the way to do that is to create original, high quality content.

Content: the most powerful link building weapon in your digital marketing arsenal

When you create compelling, informative and useful content on your website you’re adding value for your visitors… but you’re also doing much more than that.

You’re creating a reasons for people to share, and for other sites to link back to your content.

Good content by its very nature encourages people to share, and with social media sites going from strength to strength sharing great content is easier than ever.

Encouraging people to share high quality content with their online peers and communities is a great strategy… because it ticks multiple boxes all of which benefit your online business.

• Sharing drives direct traffic to your content via the shared link.
• Sharing helps to build your reputation and authority across online communities.
• Sharing encourages backlinks from other site owners who like what they read.

Building a sustainable, high quality, natural link profile for your site is a crucial part of your site optimisation strategy. Getting it right depends a lot on the quality of the content you provide.

When you add content to your site, ask yourself is this something that will add value for my visitors, is it something that I would link to, is it something another website owner will want to share?

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Designers have a tough job. Understanding the brief, weaving the client’s needs into an aesthetic yet functional design, one that resonates with the target audience to deliver measurable results is a tricky business.

It’s even more tricky when the same client takes your winning design, throws in their home-brew copy… and then wonder why it’s not working. Naturally it’s never their copy that’s to blame… it’s your design that’s not delivering!

Sound familiar?

Adding value for your graphic design clients

Good copywriting and good design go together hand-in-glove. It’s the perfect synergy.

When the design and copy work seamlessly together the resulting website, flyer, brochure, (insert marketing collateral of choice), etc. is better by an order of magnitude. No matter how good the copy is, it will never achieve its potential without great design… and likewise, even the best design can’t deliver the goods unless it’s teamed up with great copy.

When designers and copywriters work together the result is always a better end result for the client. Period! Yes, it may cost more, but in terms of value it delivers in spades.

For the freelance graphic designer, teaming up with a pro copywriter to work on client projects makes a lot of sense – from off-line flyers to direct mail packages, PDF downloads to full corporate websites, teaming the right words with the right look and feel is what delivers results.

It can also help to differentiate your freelance design business from the pack – adding another string to your proverbial bow.

If you’re a designer, and want to add value to your client’s projects by working with a professional copywriter feel free to drop me a line.

Image by FindYourSearch via Flickr

1. Know who you’re writing for

Here’s a clue… it’s not you, and it’s certainly not the sub-committee of executives/managers who will sign off on the project.

When it comes to writing effective web content (or any other form of content for that matter) you should be writing for one group of people, and one group of people only: your target audience. The better you know the people who will ultimately be consuming your content, the more effectively you’ll be able to tailor your writing to meet their needs, not yours.

2. Know what you’re aiming for

If you don’t know where you’re heading, there’s a fairly good chance you’ll never end up where you want to be.

When you’re writing web content: you should have a clear goal in mind before you start writing. Write for your audience first and foremost, but do it with a particular goal in mind. Your goal could be to get someone to buy a product, request a follow up call, sign up for your newsletter, download your e-book, click through to another site or simply to inform or entertain. The point is you need to know what it is BEFORE you start

Writing effective web content is all about aligning the needs of your target audience with your business goals.

3. Words are the key to online "findability"

It doesn’t matter how good your content is, it’s worth nothing if nobody reads it.

While social media referrals are growing as a source of targeted web traffic, the way the vast majority of visitors will still find your online content is through their favourite search engine. Every piece of content you write should be optimised for specific targeted keyword phrases (you already know what they are for your site… right?).

That said the days of liberally scattering keywords through your prose and agonising over metrics like keyword density are long gone. Introduce your selected keywords organically into your writing, and use related phrases and expressions that help search engines interpret what your content is about, but always bear in mind point 4 below.

4. Write for humans, not robots

Your website is for people, not search engines, so make sure your content addresses the needs of your human readers first.

As a rule of thumb, if you find yourself doing anything to give your content a boost in the search engines at the expense of readability and usability for your human audience stop and rethink. Successful websites are about conversion, not traffic. If your content doesn’t deliver for human visitors once they arrive all traffic will do is consume bandwidth.

5 "Scanability"

Whether you choose to write short copy or long copy will depend largely on the tastes of your particular target audience — but one thing that’s almost universally acknowledged (and that’s a rare thing online) is that long passages of unbroken text are a bad thing. People simply won’t read them.

Your average web user is a fickle and impatient beast, accustomed to tapping in to vast seams of information quickly and extracting only the relevant nuggets. It makes sense therefore to make it as easy as possible for your visitors to scan your content quickly and pick out bits that are relevant to them.

• Summarise important information early, before going on to provide more detail if necessary (inverted pyramid).
• Use headings and bullet points to break up large chunks of text and make your content easy to scan — but only use them where it makes sense.

Remember everything you do should be designed to make your content more useful / relevant / readable and entertaining for your human readers.

Most of all though, get to know the people you’re writing for. Your readers are online, find them, interact with them, talk to them, listen to them. Employ social media as a vehicle to engage with and learn about your target audience, their likes, dislikes, wants and needs — then tailor your content accordingly.

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The following is a fictional little scenario I penned for Understanding Digital Marketing highlighting how the next generation of consumers (or perhaps the current generation, at this stage) are integrating technology into every facet of their lives.

It’s 7am. Janet wakes up to the sound of her iPod, sitting in its cradle across the room, playing a random song from an album she set to download overnight. As she gets out of bed her mobile trills… a text has arrived from her college friend Simon. It’s about last night’s party.

Janet stabs at the mobile keypad with one hand, deftly firing off a reply, while her other hand opens up her laptop, logs her on to her various social networking accounts and fires up her e-mail. A cursory glance at the mini-feeds on her social network sites shows her that there’s nothing major going on amongst her circle of friends, so she quickly checks her e-mail while simultaneously opening up her feed-reader and scanning what’s new from her favourite news sites, blogs and other locations around the web. In the background her iPod picks another song at random from her music collection and continues to play.

As the twenty or so messages sent to her overnight jostle for space in her e-mail inbox, Janet’s mobile trills again – it’s Simon, replying to her message and arranging to meet her before lectures start. She checks the clock widget on her desktop sidebar and fires off a quick confirmation – she’ll meet him outside the library in an hour-and-a-half. A quick scan of her incoming mail reveals most of it to be spam that’s slipped through the net, but one from her friend, Amy, catches her eye. She reads it, and is about to reply when she notices that Amy is signed in to her IM account, she sends her an instant message instead.

They chat for a few minutes… mainly about last night’s party and what to do after college today. Janet checks the weather in another sidebar widget – there’s rain forecast for later. They agree on the cinema. A quick visit to the theatre’s website reveals what’s on, they check out some online peer-reviews to see what’s hot, agree on a show, and pre-book the tickets. Job done. Janet glances at the clock… it’s 7:15am, time for a shower, then breakfast.

Welcome to the world of the digital native – a hyper-connected, high-octane world of instant access and gratification with digital technology at its core. To young people today these aren’t merely digital tools, they are essential, seamlessly integrated elements of their daily lives. These are digital consumers, the net-generation, generation Y… call them what you will. They are insistent, impatient, demanding, multi-tasking information junkies. They are the mass market of tomorrow – and, as marketers, it’s absolutely imperative that we learn to speak their language today.

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I’m currently going through the original manuscript of Understanding Digital Marketing to assess what needs updating for the second edition. At the moment I’m working through the chapter on Digital Marketing Strategy.

Defining, implementing and refining a coherent digital strategy is one of the fundamental steps to successful online business. It’s worth re-examining some of the fundamental building blocks that make up an effective digital marketing strategy here:

• Know your business: is your business ready to embrace digital marketing? Are your products / services suited to online promotion? Do you have the right technology / skills / infrastructure in place? How will digital marketing fit into your existing business processes,  do those processes need to change, and are you and your staff ready to accommodate those changes?
• Know the competition: who are your main competitors in the digital marketplace? Are they the same as your off-line competitors? What are they doing right (emulate them), what are they doing wrong (learn from them), what aren’t they doing at all (is there an opportunity there for you?) and how can you differentiate your online offering from theirs? Remember, competition in the digital world can come from just around the corner, or from right around the globe. The same technologies that allow you to reach out to a broader geographical market also allow others to reach in to your local market. When you venture online you’re entering a global game, so don’t limit your analysis to local competition.
• Know your customers: who are your customers and what do they want from you? Are you going to be servicing the same customer base online, or are you fishing for business from a completely new demographic? How do the customers you’re targeting use digital technology, and how can you harness that knowledge to engage in a productive and ongoing relationship with them?
• Know what you want to achieve: if you don’t know where you’re going, there’s a pretty fair chance you’ll never get there. What do you want to get out of digital marketing? Setting clear, measurable and achievable goals is a key part of your digital marketing strategy. Are you looking to generate online sales, create a source of targeted sales leads, improve your brand awareness among online communities, all of the above or perhaps something completely different? Your goals are the yardsticks against which you can measure the progress of your digital marketing campaigns.
• Know how you’re doing: the beauty of digital marketing is that, compared to many forms of advertising, results are so much more measurable. You can track everything that happens online and compare your progress against predefined goals and key performance indicators (KPIs). How is your digital campaign progressing? Are certain digital channels delivering more traffic than others? Why is that? What about conversion rates, how much of that increased traffic results in tangible value to your business? Measure, tweak, refine, re-measure. Digital marketing is an ongoing iterative process.

The process of formally defining your digital marketing strategy forces you to sit down and analyse the market you’re operating in with a critical eye, and to really think about the different components of your business and how digital marketing can help you to achieve your business goals.

Don’t get too bogged down in the technical details – remember, digital marketing is about people communicating with other people, the technology is just the bit in the middle that helps it to happen. Your strategy should provide you with a high level framework – a birds-eye view of the digital marketing landscape with your business centre stage – the details will come later.

 

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Social media…. it’s all everyone seems to be talking about in online marketing circles these days. Well, that and mobile marketing… which inevitably evolves into a conversation about social media on mobile.

In the digital marketing multiverse the star of social media is very much in the ascendency – but as a small business owner you need to be careful that this shining beacon doesn’t lead you to take your eye off the ball when allocating your marketing budget.

The simple, inalienable truth is that, if the thrust of your online marketing is to send targeted, conversion-ready traffic to your small business website, search marketing is still where you should focus the bulk of your online marketing effort.

It’s easy to get swayed by the headline-grabbing, buzz-generating hype surrounding social media. The statistics seem to back up the fact that spending on social media marketing is a no-brainer. Facebook now attracts more traffic than Google in both the US and the UK markets – so surely it makes sense to shift more marketing dollars to social channels… right? Not necessarily. Statistics tend to be equivocal beasts at best, and generic traffic numbers don’t tell the whole story.

While more consumers now visit social media websites than search engines, the real question you should be asking when you’re apportioning your online marketing budget is WHY are they going there? People typically go to social media sites to share with their peers – to exchange information, ask and offer opinions, discover what their friends are doing, liking, working on, reading, listening to… the list is practically endless.

But when a consumer is ready to part with their hard-earned cash, when they’re on the brink of making a purchasing decision, they’re unlikely to log in to their social media profile to do it. They’re much more likely to turn to their search engine of choice and type in a highly targeted keyword phrase.

As a small business with a limited online marketing budget that’s the kind of traffic you’re looking for. Your goal is to attract the maximum number of targeted visitors who are actively looking to buy the product or service you’re selling. For that, search engine marketing (both PPC and organic SEO) remains your best option.

Yes there are boundless opportunities to engage through social media, and I’m a strong advocate of using social media to reach out and connect with customers. Many small businesses do a great job of building advocacy, bolstering reputation, retaining customers and yes, even finding new business through social media channels.

So by all means invest in social media… just do it for the right reasons, and in the full knowledge that it isn’t a direct replacement for your search marketing efforts.

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Blog content is just another type of web content, right?

Well, yes and no….

While there is obviously cross-over, and the traits outlined below are more loose guidelines than actual content rules, here are a few crucial ways in which your blog content should differ from the corporate web content on your business website:

• Web content encourages action; blog content drives interaction: your business related web content is focussed on conversion – driving visitors to take action and ultimately converting them into customers. Your blog content is different… it’s a platform to encourage engagement, start a dialogue and to foster relationships.
• Web content is all business; blog content is more personal: your web content is professional and focussed on purely business; your blog content on the other hand, lets your personality shine through. While it will still carry the theme of your core business, the writing is typically much more open.
• Web content is a platform for selling; blog content is more of a “value add”: as a business your web content is often your primary online sales channel. It’s the right place for that finely honed sales copy, your online landing pages and your call to action. Put sales copy in a blog too often and you’ll start haemorrhaging readers pronto. Your blog content is about supporting your core business by adding value.

Moving from writing effective web content to writing great content for your business blog requires a shift of mindset: you need to change the focus of your writing. But the fundamental considerations of effective writing still apply: know your readers’ needs, know your business goals and strive to strike that happy balance where both converge.

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I’ve been hearing on the online grapevine for quite a while that location based social networks are “the new next big thing” in social media. Because I spend part of my professional existence writing about the emerging opportunities in online marketing (yes, there is another book coming… honest… any time now ), I figured I’d better have a little look.

So I signed up for a foursquare account, and have been semi-dutifully checking in using my iPhone whenever I’m out and about and can get a signal (still patchy enough here in West Cork… although Vodafone Ireland assure me they’re working on it ).

Initially checking in on foursquare is a bit of a buzz… you get a curious thrill from signing in somewhere new, building your points tally, becoming mayor of your favourite locations and checking your position on your personalised “leaderboard”.

But that soon wears off, and you’re left wondering… why?

While I can appreciate some of the benefits of location based networks for helping to connect you with friends, colleagues and acquaintances when you’re living in, say, New York, London, Paris… and perhaps even Dublin, outside the large population centres that potential utility wanes quickly.

What’s the use of checking in to places you add yourself, only visit yourself and become mayor of yourself? That pretty much sums up my experience of using FourSquare in West Cork.

Even in Cork City, most of the places I visit I have to add to foursquare myself, and there appear to be relatively few businesses offering any sort of incentives to foursquare users.

Perhaps it’s because things are still very much in the “early-adopter” days for location based social software. We haven’t reached that critical mass – the fabled “tipping point”. You need volume to realise the true utility of social software… it only becomes valuable when enough people you know use it as part of their daily routine.

The other question that quickly rises to the fore is this: do we really want other people knowing exactly where we are every hour of the day? I’m not so sure that we do.

All sorts of privacy concerns are emerging as growing numbers of us choose to broadcast our precise location to the world. Some media commentators even suggest that foursquare could be a stalker’s dream – not to mention a boon to would-be-burglars. Others question the value of the “check-in” as location-based social currency.

At the moment foursquare is little more than a game – a curiosity – outside main urban population centres. I suspect that statement probably holds true for many users even within our larger cities. They’re using foursquare (and the same applies to gowalla, brightkite and other location based services) to check-in, amass points, win badges and earn rewards, rather than to connect in any meaningful way with their network of friends and colleagues.

Will foursquare and it’s ilk become truly useful social, and eventually even commercial tools? I guess that really depends on their ability to fuel continued uptake, keep people engaged beyond an initial fascination with the “game”, and on finding a way to add real value to the process of “checking in”.

Where do you think location based social applications are heading… are they useful or not… would you use them… what are the benefits and/or risks?