Marketing | Search Engine Optimization

How to Create a Text Marketing Campaign

Posted by: Date: March 16, 2010

by Sage Lewis

American Express OPEN Forum has a good article on how to create a solid text marketing campaign. This gives you some good, concrete tips on how to get started.

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How to Create a Text Marketing Campaign

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Three Simple Words that Push People to Part with Their Cash

Posted by: Date: March 16, 2010

I was on a call with a top copywriting expert yesterday who talked about the three words that will always make people give you their money.

It really made me think hard about the headlines I’d been using in my ads, email and even on twitter. This guy was talking about using curiosity as a driving force in your marketing.

Let’s name it curiosity marketing.

Before I give you the three words, let me explain a bit more about curiosity marketing, how people decide to buy things and how your headline and buyer keywords can tap into each step along the buyer’s decision making process.

Killer Headlines

For curiosity marketing to work really well, your headline is the one of the entry points into your sales funnel. Your sales funnel should mirror buyer decision-making processes, which we’ll talk about in a bit.

The headline needs to hit a number of buttons. It doesn’t always have to hit them all, so don’t make your headline needlessly complex. It needs to grab attention first and foremost.

If you were marketing on dog training, you might use a headline like “7 Free Tricks to Stop your Dog Barking”.

What makes this an effective ‘killer’ headline?

Intrigue. The headline is kind of intriguing since you don’t say what those tricks are so people get curious and want to find out what those tricks are.
Incentive. The information is “free”, which could remove one obstacle to someone taking a look. If you hook people up with a great deal, they like you and trust you more.
A Solution. It offers a solution through use of the question “how” and the answer “tricks”.
Tangible. The number ‘7′ adds something tangible and definite about what you’re offering.
Targeted. The headline is focused on one specific problem, undesirable dog barking, so people searching specifically for help with this one problem, will be highly targeted prospects.

If you were into dog training or were a dog owner searching for a solution to why your dog won’t stop barking, you’d probably click on this, right?

Thus the point of your title is what? To take your visitor to the next step, which is to click your ad, open your email, visit your blog post, read your article.

What you do after they get to your page or blog or whatever comes next in your sales funnel, is partly on how you satisfy the original curiosity and sell them on the next step. (It’s kind of funny to think how the marriage analogy would go in those terms!)

The Buying Decision Process

At this point, you are not expecting someone to buy straight out. People buy from someone they know, like and trust.

Would you ask your girlfriend to move in with you after one date? You’d wine and dine her a few times, and ask after the relationship has developed over time. So now when you pop the question … she may surprise you – your most wanted response!

In marketing, your most wanted response at the start of the buying process is simply that targeted prospects click on your ad, open your email or click the link you give in twitter.

OK, so that got me thinking about what would work in our industry – marketing to the home business opportunity seeker. I’ve always known the importance of researching your buyer keywords.

In other words, you have to identify what people who are looking for a home business are actually looking for … and then draw them in using curiosity.

Identifying Buyer Keywords

The killer keywords are always the starting point of course. What is it that people looking for a business opportunity might be searching for – what solution are they looking for? What’s the problem or situation they want to resolve? What’s their most wanted outcome?

I think it was Perry Marshall who said if someone is out shopping for a drill, they are not searching for a drill they want a hole.

If someone is out searching for dog training, they most probably have a specific and immediate problem they are trying to resolve, like “my dog keeps barking every time we leave him alone in a room and it’s driving us mad, not to mention the complaints from the neighbours!”

Your headline still needs to be relevant to your target audience, but curiosity marketing is about taking people to the next step. How can you entice someone to take the next action step in your sales funnel and ultimately towards a buying decision?

Creating Your Sales Funnel

One approach I have found works really well for creating your sales funnel is to mirror the decision-making processes in your buying chain. In my game, I try to identify probable steps that someone looking for a home business would take.

Once you are clear about what is your ‘most wanted response’ from them at each step, you should be able to more easily identify both headlines and buyer keywords according to where a person has got to in making a decision to buy.

The first step in the sales funnel is to get people INTO your sales funnel. And this is where curiosity marketing to a targeted audience can be really effective.

You’re at the top end of the sales funnel where there is the most competition usually so you’re ad or email has to stand out in the crowd – in the search engine advertising or email inbox.

Throw in an incentive on the back of a curious headline and your click rates will soar. Offer your visitors valuable information – the 7 free tricks – and use curiosity to sell them on taking the next step into your sales funnel.

This next step might be to give you their contact details in exchange for your newsletter and/or a free report so you continue to provide them with useful information. As a follow up, you could offer a low cost product like a training guide or video bootcamp or perhaps a basic subscription.

There’s no limit to the length of your sales funnel. People who have bought on one step are your prime prospects. They are buyers.

Upsell – offer them your next product or an upgrade or extra related product. They are now buyers who like your information or your products and trust its value to them.

A buyer is a buyer is a buyer – Not sure whose quote that is (maybe Russell Brunson told me).

So curiosity marketing is all about taking people to the next step in the buying chain.

My headline on this article (and I’ll tweet and email on this too cos it’s fun!)

What three words will always make people give you their money?

Question: Who would I target this one at?

Answer: People looking for buyer keywords, marketing strategies, conversion tactics, sales training.

Oh, and I guess you want to know what are the three words, yes?

STICK ‘EM UP!

Jay Allyson – Online Entrepreneur & Home Business Coach – GetRichLifestyle.com

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Three Simple Words that Push People to Part with Their Cash

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Three Simple Words that Push People to Part with Their Cash

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Online Brand Management: Optimizing Facebook

Posted by: Date: March 16, 2010

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Online Brand Management: Optimizing Facebook

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How can small businesses measure offline sales?

Posted by: Date: March 16, 2010

by Mike Moran

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Often, I work with businesses trying to determine the return on investment for their online marketing. For e-commerce companies, it’s not that hard. They can use their Web analytics to see how many people are coming to the site and how many actually convert by checking out. But what if you sell offline? Then it’s not so easy.

Just about any company can put a special phone number on their site that appears nowhere else. If anyone calls it, you know they came from your Web site, so you can tie that eventual sale back to your Web marketing.

Small B2C companies need to find a way to link their online activity to what they do offline, often that involves some form of couponing. If you allow your online activities to discount your prices, or add a free gift, or provide some other service, just require the customer print out the coupon and present it when they buy.

For B2B companies, it’s usually more complicated, although couponing can work for them too. For many B2B businesses, they do face to face or phone sales through their own sales teams, or, more commonly for small B2B firms, manufacturer’s representatives. They usually find themselves passing leads that they hope the sales people will close.

At big companies, they follow these leads with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, where the lead is tracked at every contact point and evaluated as to how close they are to a sale (and what can be done next to get them over the line). Most small businesses don’t have such systems because they are expensive, but in recent years some very inexpensive CRM systems have appeared that give small businesses a way to use CRM, too. Highrise and Zoho CRM are both used by small businesses to track their prospects through to a sale. If you can hand off your online customer activity to your CRM system, then you can follow your online marketing to sales, just like the big boys.

Many small businesses fail to close the loop from Web marketing to sales because it is hard. But that omission keeps you from knowing which marketing activities are working and which ones aren’t. If you make this extra effort to track your sales, and your competitors do not, you’ll have a leg up on them that will supercharge your online marketing.

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SEO 101 - Part 11: Everything You Need to Know About SEO Copywriting

Posted by: Date: March 16, 2010

by Stoney deGeyter

The following series is pulled from a presentation I gave to a group of beauty bloggers hosted by L’Oreal in New York. Most of the presentation is geared toward how to make a blog more search engine and user-friendly, however I will expand many of the concepts here to include tips and strategies for sites selling products or services across all industries.

Copywriting

Copywriting

No SEO is complete without good content. You can stuff keywords into the text all you want, and that might be okay to get you some decent keyword rankings for a time, but it won’t do anything to improve the long-term success of your business.

A website without good copywriting is a sports car with an engine that doesn’t run. It doesn’t matter how pretty it is, the content is what is needed to provide your visitors the information they need in order for you to make the sale (or conversion, or whatever else you want your visitors to do.)

Understanding Copy

Understanding Copy

To the search engines the content on the page is just a bunch of words. Without making this too complex, the engines analyze the words in an attempt to determine what each page is about. If the web page covers too many different topics then it makes it difficult for the engines to determine which topic is prominent and deserves ranking. It creates a dilution of focus.

The search engines have analyzed millions of web pages and from that have been able to gather significant knowledge of the human languages. They have an idea of how words and topics work together. It’s not really about the number of times a keyword is used but the focus of the content. If you use a word or phrase too much then it’ll be seen as manipulation. Too little and it’s not enough to be relevant. Write as much or as little text as is needed in order to make the point you need for your visitors.

Draw Them In

Draw Them In

SEO copywriting isn’t all that different from normal copywriting except that you have to pay particular attention to keywords. Actually, non-seo copywriting would be better if keywords were paid attention to anyway. Not for search engines per se, but in order to use the key phrases that attracts and appeals to the readers. In that light, SEO copywriting and “normal” copywriting would be no different.

There are four basic things that the content of each of your web pages must do, regardless if its the home page, a category page, a product page, an article or a blog post.

Grab Attention

If the reader hits the page and the content is unable to get and keep their attention, then all is lost. They move on to another page or another site and you lost the possibility of a conversion.

Appeal to their Needs

Once you have their attention then you have to make your case. The simplest way to do that is to appeal to them on their terms. You already have what they want, but you have to write your content that shows them you understand their needs.

What motivated them to search for what you offer? By clearly re-iterating the need, you are then in a position to show that you have the solution. Go into great detail on why your solution is the right one and then move on to explain all the benefits of selecting you as that solution.

Ask questions

Questions make people think. Often times asking a question first and then providing an answer is far more effective than just providing an answer. Question make your readers consider what they are reading and then seek an answer to a question that they didn’t even know they had.

What kind of questions should you ask? Just go back to the basics. Who? What? When? Why? Where? How? Each of these can provide an avenue for a good amount of additional information that may be important to the reader.

Inform

Finally, your content must inform. The visitor has to walk away having learned something valuable. And not just about you or your product or service, but about them as well. The visitor needs to know that you have exactly what they need and you must provide enough information to justify making a purchase from you both intellectually and emotionally.

Ways to inform are to show how your product or service can make their lives better, give them more time, money or freedom. You can also give them ideas on how to use your product or service which gives them additional incentives to make the purchase.

Five Rules of Copywriting

Five Rules of Copywriting

There are five basic rules to writing good website content that is appealing to both visitors and the search engines.

1. Avoid graphics in text.

Search engines are not so good about reading text in a graphic format. They are getting better at it but I think that it will always be problematic, especially when it comes to busy graphics or non-standard fonts. So for now, and the foreseeable future, it’s a good idea to keep your text outside of graphics.

You also have to consider the user. Some users search with images off or the small screens of their mobile phones. Text in those graphics may be difficult or impossible to read. If the content is worth reading then it’s worth ensuring that it is in the most readable format.

2. Think users before engines.

Your visitors come first. The search engines don’t buy from you, they don’t write comments, and they don’t retweet your message. People do. The search engines only want what people want so give the people what they want and the search engines will, in most cases, reward you for that.

3. Write enough content.

How much content is enough? Only you know that. You need to write enough content to make the points you need and no more. Each visitor needs a different amount of content to read in order to be convinced. don’t leave anybody out.

4. Target phrases not words.

People rarely search for words, they search for phrases. Knowing what those phrases are is essential to writing content that speaks to your visitor’s desires. The phrases also put the words into context and give meaning to what the visitor is really searching for.

5. Don’t force it.

Writing your content using the rules above should work naturally. Don’t force anything if it just doesn’t work. If you’re trying to work in phrases that are not a fit for the page, then move those phrases to another page. If you’re trying to produce content that will speak to different kinds of visitors, don’t be afraid to break content off into other sections of the site such as articles or tutorials. This goes back to writing for the visitor. Meet their needs first and foremost and don’t try to force anything that doesn’t work.

As I said above, SEO copywriting isn’t all that much different than standard copywriting. It’s all about creating good content that appeals to the visitors and meets certain criteria in terms of keyword usage. In Part 12 I’ll go over some key examples of how to write good content that is good for engines and users alike.

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