Pancentric Blogs

We’re talking email lists before the mind starts to wander. More specifically the difference between purchased lists and lists grown organically from within the business, the list that comes from interactions with individuals who know your brand and know your product - the reason why nothing beats a bit of home grown.

A word of warning about purchased lists, more specifically purchased consumer lists. Don’t expect to get much of a response. Why? Well if you’ve never heard of the company who drops the email into your inbox, and you didn’t give the express permission to email you, would you visit their website and buy their product? No, me either.

Its not all doom and gloom though, acquisition marketing via email can be successful. It just works a lot better if you can build your own house list. It’s slower, yes, but your response rate will be so much better. List co-registration with a relevant partner site is an option too. Just try where possible to avoid the purchased list if selling product directly from the email is your objective. There are plenty of other options available that deliver a better CPA for you to explore SEO and PPC for starters….

Brand & relationship building activity online. Not directly selling your product or service to your cutomers. No special offer, mega discount and no screaming call to action saying ‘Buy this right now!’ So what’s the point?

Some marketers view brand building activity as a waste of time, money and resource. It’s not trackable some say, you can’t monitor the impact is has on your brand say others.

We’ll why not try this next time you’ve got a sales promotion in the pipeline.

Split your database 50/50. Send half of the database some handy updates about your product or service. Perhaps a little while later send them some tips, videos or a feedback platform they can interactive with. Send the other half of the database nothing. Then when you email out that sales promotion see which half of the database is the most responsive. My guess is it will be the 50% that you spent time talking too and building up a relationship with.

It’s important to win the permission to ask your audience the difficult questions. In our experience to get that permission requires a little brand & relationship building activity.

I have found really informed article on folksonomies and taxonomies at FUMSI today here. The author comes down on the side of a blended approach as do we, and adds some useful insight into how this can fail.

I would also expand on the use of folksonomies for marketing insight, whether it is for SEO purposes, i.e. getting at the keywords/keyphrases that you haven’t considered - or getting further into the personas of your visitors/customers.

This is also an important consideration for intranets and extranets, where the author knows their content as the say the “Maintenance Manual v01.02″, and the users know it as “the blue book”.

I think that this is also, in the context of the online world, an example of the top down or bottom up approach challenge.

Once again a mixture of both is what you should aim for - of course whoever commissions the site has expert (read taxonomy) knowledge, that can at its worst manifest itself as a case of “I know best, not my customers” and may make things hard to find for the non-expert visitor.

Conversely taking the opposite viewpoint that starts from the “I know little about the product/service” can end up talking down to the visitor and may end up failing to deliver the site’s value.

The best sites cater for all visitors, understanding their differing personas and goals and delivering the best product/content for them.

I picked this up on Tech Republic and think it deserves a plug - Don’t sweat the small stuff too early its a recognition that sometimes the details slow down decision making and how it is easy to get distracted from the bigger picture, and your goals, by trying to get all the details tied up at too early a stage.

That’s not to say the details aren’t important, it’s just that there is a time and a place for everything.

A key skill for managers is to recognise when and where the details need to be addressed, and how to get the best out of a meeting. Setting a meeting’s agenda helps, as does an indication at the beginning of the meeting what decisions/outcomes the meeting should address will go a long way to achieving this.

So here I am watching ER and there is an advert for something (doesn’t say what) which features a directive to search “who is she”

Now, I am thinking, wow what a great idea, make sure you are top of the listings for that phrase, after all we know how to do this, don’t we? So I do the search and its just a PPC campaign, no cleverness, no style, no substance. For goodness sake the top organic listing is about CRB checks and there is no mention of the product on the 1st 2 pages.

If all you were doing was getting people to use a PPC link, what was the point? You could have driven them directly to the site without using search at all. It just added an extra click for the visitor and no added value. A really dumb move.

Another of those campaigns where they just don’t get digital. Oh, someone had an idea all right, but if only they’d spent a few % of the ad budget on some proper digital expertise they could have had a much better result.

And I will not dignify the product with a mention.

You’ve been working away tirelessly at your marketing strategy and found the perfect way to communicate your new/improved product or service, show the business as a market leader and pioneer of new and innovative approaches, all the while boosting you SEO efforts and keeping up regular communications with your audience. Yes you’ll create a corporate Blog.

So who will Blog? You’ll get the head of product innovation blog about why he came up with the latest solution and the MD to blog about how the business has emerged as Market leader due to its customer centric focus. You and the rest of the marketing team will then keep the blog ticking over with timely news and updates that will be of real interest to your customer base.

So what’s the problem? The problem is the experts in the business, the ones who know your product inside and out, help shape the business and its direction tell you they simply haven’t got the time to Blog.

I would argue they can’t afford not to have the time to blog. If there is an audience out there that want to hear from you and you have the people who have something meaningful to say then find the time.

Here are my top 5 reasons for creating a corporate blog:

1. Most Blog platforms are free, so the only real expenditure is time.
2. Blogs help improve your search marketing efforts. Fact.
3. Blogging helps create a community of loyal followers a.k.a brand advocates
4. Blogs help you understand your market. Look at the comments left on your blog, are they telling you something?
5. Publishing regular, useful, engaging content to your audience strengthens your credibility in your given industry

Now there’s no need for any excuses.

A new buzzword for you. ‘Crowdsourcing’, Heard of it? No? Let me give you the definition from Jeff Howe, the man who wrote the book:

“Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.”

Let’s simplify that, getting your audience to do your work for you! Genius.

It’s a brilliant approach to marketing strategy. Ask the audience their opinion, get them to contribute and feel part of the business. Then Utilise user generated content for new product and service ideas and new approaches to marketing your business.

It’s not a new concept either. Some classic examples include the Walkers ‘Do me a flavour’ campaign, istockphoto.com (you add your images to build their library), and of course wikipedia. There’s also an example of this on the way from Pancentric, so watch this space.

Crowdsourcing: Highly successful, highly engaging, highly recommended.

A friend who knows how much I love celebrity gossip (and discovering new search platforms), recommended a new website the other day. Intrigued, I paid it a visit….

Kosmix is essentially a vertical search engine that aggregates content from a number of sources across the web; it then builds you a profile of your search query right before your eyes. There are several vertical search engines and apps aggregating content from multiple sources, Globrix and Headup being just a couple of examples, but this is definitely the best I’ve seen so far.

There are still a few things they need to iron out, country specific results would be nice, suggestions for search strings with spelling errors - essential, and improvements are needed for non-people based searches. However, if you’re trying to find out more about a particular individual the results are mighty impressive. A quick search on Jeffery Archer (no particular reason) for example presents me with his Wiki, a selection of blogs related to him, his official website, pictures, videos, book reviews, twitter feeds and even amazon purchase recommendations.

Perfect for all your celebrity stalking needs…. and some background research on authors!

To try it for yourself visit www.ksomix.com

How successful are those demonstrations you get when you go to marketing conferences?

If you don’t know the ones I’m talking about, it’s where the presenter tells you how great this new approach to marketing is, or how wonderful this new piece of technology is. The presenter then proceeds to fire of a twitter, a blog or a forum post only to be inundated with responses by the time they finishes their talk. Success!

So here’s my attempt. Right now myself and two colleagues are giving a talk on the benefit of search marketing to businesses. We’ve just set ourselves the challenge of getting this blog post to the top of Google before the end of the talk. Nothing like pressure then.

Yes, this is something we’ve done before on the Pancentric blog, but we want to prove to our guests this morning that it works, and works quickly.

Simply type the title of this blog post into Google, and (fingers crossed) we’re top.

The title of today’s blog post was provided by our esteemed guests, nothing to do with me. Honest.

But they are - according Neale Martin.

A new one for me on this blog, but today’s post is a reading recommendation.

I’ve just finished an excellent book. Habit: The 95% of Behavior Marketers Ignore

The book, by Neale Martin explores the reasons why 80% of new products fail, why traditional marketing techniques of the last 50 years are flawed, and how we’ve ignored what’s been in front of us for all these years - that human behavior is largely managed through subconscious process.

Neale provides an excellent insight into today’s marketing techniques, and challenges the reader to focus more on behaviour than attitudes and intentions.

It certainly provokes a lot of thought and gives a new perspective on approaches to marketing to your loyal consumers. Actually, are they really loyal customers or just creatures of habit?