Business Marketing Online (BMON): Google AdWords Management

Do your press releases stand out?

Chris Rand — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 18:00:12 +0000

I've written a lot of press releases, and I've read a thousand times as many. However, I've never had the job of writing one press release after another for the same company, or even the same product. You may well be in that unenviable situation. If that's the case, I would imagine that it must be hard to do anything other than go through the motions. However, from the receiving end, I can tell you that 99% of all press releases look like they were written by somebody with that mindset. Somebody who's convinced themselves that there's some rigid format which must be followed, that a "corporate style" devised in the distant past must be followed slavishly, and that anything with a bit of personality would be frowned on by someone, somewhere. And the reason why they don't question this? Simple: it makes their life easier.

Take a look at the last press release your company put out, and ask yourself this question: "If I was an editor wading through 50 press releases from different companies, would this one stand out from the crowd?" It doesn't need to be through presentation (although it could be). It might stand out simply by the product's sheer technical merit. But are you making the most of the material you have to work with?

Do your press releases stand out?

Does your website care about your customer at all?

Chris Rand — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 18:00:53 +0000

Smashing magazine recently looked at a more effective way of structuring and designing websites in an article called Stop Designing Pages And Start Designing Flows. I'm sure we'd all agree that designing a website around the customer experience is a desirable strategy, but one which few of us have done. Instead, we structure everything around our company and its offerings, as if the customer didn't exist. What this excellent article suggests is that we try to identify what customers want from our website, and provide that in clear, unambiguous steps.

For example, customers who don't know the company, but find the website from a Google search for "blue widget manufacturers", will probably be taken straight to a product page. My guess is that the flow will be that they'll make a quick assessment of the benefits of the product, then want to read a bit about the company, then go back to the product for a more thorough investigation. Finally, they'll want to contact the company.

Now, it's unlikely that you'd want to provide that whole sequence on one page. With at least one part (the company background) being common to all products, it makes sense to lead them to another page for that, but doing it with one click so that returning to the product page is only one back-click away. Then you provide the contact details at the end of the product page.

You can devise a whole set of potential visitor flows in this way, and then put them all together to create a site structure built with the customer in mind. It's a lot better than the normal way, which is basically a graphical representation of how you described your company to a web designer, without even considering the customer.

Read more: Stop Designing Pages And Start Designing Flows on Smashing magazine

Does your website care about your customer at all?

How's your About Us page looking?

Chris Rand — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 18:00:44 +0000

I was reading a good article by the great Guy Kawasaki the other day on how to create an enchanting pitch and it occurred to me that the principles go further than just pitching a business. The author suggests that you should get the entire, in-depth description of your proposed new business for new investors over and done in just 11 slides, and I'm sure that's sound advice. However, I've sat at press conferences where the managing director has got up and shown more than 11 slides "just to give a quick overview of the company before we start". A propensity to confuse waffle with comprehensiveness is always a danger.

However, what really got me thinking was that a great description of an existing business could be quite similar to a pitch for a proposed one, and we all need to create a great description of our business …for our own website. After all, the "About Us" page may well be your most-read on your whole site, after the home page.

So how can we modify a new business pitch to be an outline for describing your existing business? Here's what I'd suggest. Start with a quick overview, then describe the market you address, and why you're the right supplier for that market. Then move on to describe why the products are so good, both technically and in terms of availability. Finally, talk about the team and summarise why being one of your customers is such a desirable thing to be. The result will be better than most of your competitors' About Us pages, I can guarantee.

How's your About Us page looking?

How many times a day do you feature in the Google results?

Chris Rand — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:00:40 +0000

If you're running both Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools (and you should be), then there's a degree of integration now available between the two which can yield some interesting insights. Firstly you'll need to set up the link in Webmaster Tools: here's how. Once that's all sorted, and if you're using the new Google Analytics interface, you'll see a menu option called "Search Engine Optimisation" under "Traffic Sources" on the left (see illustration below). Now, you already know how many visitors Google is sending you. But what this integrates is data such as how often your site was appearing in the Google results for those search queries, enabling you to see, for example, that those 100 visitors came from 20,000 searches where you had an average position of 6 in the results.

As with any Google Analytics reporting, be careful not to waste time on this information just because it's fun to play with. If it doesn't offer answers to things you needed to know, then just file it away under "tools which might be useful one day". However, you might well find, for example, that certain pages on your website are getting lower click-through rates from Google search than others, and if you can work out why, you could use the information to improve them. I've certainly had one or two intriguing insights.

How many times a day do you feature in the Google results?

Emails: Are you letting your PC's brain take the strain?

Chris Rand — Sun, 05 Feb 2012 18:00:56 +0000

It's always great when someone comes up with some research which proves you were right all along, and this one once again demonstrates that my company colleagues once again need to bow down before my immense intellect. Want to be more productive? Don’t file your email on the Box Free IT site reports that there's now ample evidence, as if it were needed, that if you file your emails into folders, you're wasting your time. An IBM Research study says that finding emails by searches is three times as fast as finding the emails by folder, with the likelihood of finding the intended email no greater with the folder approach.

The study ponders why people continue to use folders when it's not as efficient as throwing emails into a big pile and letting the computer do the work. Its authors conclude that it's not to make it easier to find those emails later, but a reaction to being overwhelmed by email volume. They conclude that users receiving many messages are more likely to create folders, "possibly because this serves to rationalise their inbox", allowing them to better use the inbox as a task to-do list, another inefficient practice.

If you still love dragging your emails into an ever-expanding list of folders, just try using the search facility for a while, and you may well never look back. I'm just off to do a triumphant lap of honour around the office.

Thanks to reader Juri Romito for pointing me in the direction of this article.

Read more: Want to be more productive? Don’t file your email on the Box Free IT site

Emails: Are you letting your PC's brain take the strain?