Posts Tagged ‘Brand Personality’

What Your S.E.O. Strategist Won’t Tell You

Sunday, November 1st, 2009

Maybe you own your own business, or perhaps you’re a critical cog in the corporate machinery responsible for marketing your company, brand, product or service. If that describes you, here’s eighteen things you need to know about Web-marketing but were afraid to believe.

1. Time To Be Heard
Your mother told you ‘children should be seen and not heard,’ but you’re not a kid anymore. So why are you listening to all those guys telling you not to use audio on your website. If you want to deliver a lot of content that people will remember, try letting your website do the talking.

2. There’s Nothing Like the Real Thing
In a world of virtual everything there’s nothing like the real thing. The sound and image of real people delivering your marketing message makes it a believable, memorable presentation.

3. Unlock the Conventional Wisdom Straightjacket
Driving traffic to your site is great, if those visitors stay long enough to find out why they should be doing business with you. If your website traffic is leaving as fast as it’s arriving, maybe search engine optimization isn’t the answer you’ve been looking for.

4. Linking Your Way To Obscurity
You know the reciprocal linking strategy everyone is talking about as a way to generate leads? Did you ever consider that each link to another website is an invitation to leave your site? Is that really what you want - to invite people to leave? I think not!

5. Your Company’s Voice Is It’s Personality
Give your company a professional voice, with a finely crafted script delivered by a professional voice-over announcer that presents a compelling, memorable marketing message and a unique brand personality. Or do it yourself and sound like an amateur. The choice is yours.

6. Addressing Ass-backwards Priorities
If your website design firm is twisting your marketing message out of shape to conform to the technical ‘technique du jour’ that only looks good in one popular browser, then you hired the wrong guys. It’s not about technology; it’s about communication.

7. Text-Ads Are Dead. Long Live Web-Video
Squeezing your marketing message into a pay-per-click text-ad is like trying to attract leads using one of those newspaper real estate ads where every word needs to be decoded. Start communicating with a Web-video that tells a story - your story.

8. Nobody Ever Bored Anybody Into Buying
The vast majority of website text is boring, unimaginative and self-promoting. If you don’t present a compelling focused story then you are just wasting peoples’ time. Seduce your audience with an informative, entertaining, and memorable presentation created by marketing professionals.

9. Too Much of Good Thing, Isn’t So Good
You were worried about load times and search engine optimization so you dumped most of your images and multimedia and proceeded to put enough text on your site that would take a month to study; but have you considered whether anybody is ever going to actually read that stuff? And that’s assuming people could ever find what they were looking for in the first place.

10. Stop Hiding Behind Your Email Address
You’ve got a killer website. It tells visitors everything. All they have to do is place an order. But wait ? somebody has a question. So they go to your contact page and find an email address. No contact name. No address and no phone number. You’ve provided a Q&A, an FAQ, and a list of technical specs. What more do they want? Well, what they want is to talk to somebody to make sure you’re legit and if they have a problem that you’ll stand behind what you’re selling. Silly them.

11. Do You Suffer From Redundant Redux Reflux?
Search engines love content. They index all your text, searching for keywords and phrases. So what do you do? You repeat and repeat stuff, over and over to make sure the search engines understand what you’re all about. To bad all your Web-visitors get indigestion from reading your redundant copy and leave because they forgot why they were there.

12. Inform. Enlighten. Persuade.
Knowledge is today’s high-value commodity. If you have a set of skills that people want to acquire, then you’ve got something to sell: something to build a business around. But if you don’t know how to present that knowledge to an audience, then your skills are unmarketable. If you want to get paid for what you know, you better find out how to deliver your content.

13. It’s Not About Numbers; It’s About Quality
It’s not the number of hits you get on your website, it’s how long visitors stay on your site and how much information they retain after they leave that counts. It’s about the quality of traffic not the quantity. And the best way to create quality traffic is to provide easy to find, easy to understand, easy to remember content.

14. Don’t Play Constant S.E.O. Catch-up
Every time an S.E.O. whiz kid comes up with a trick to beat the search engine algorithms, the experts at the search engines change their criteria. This means you’re constantly playing S.E.O. catch-up. Good for the whiz kid, not so good for you. And have you ever wondered how all those search engine optimizers can guarantee you, and everybody else they are selling, top billing - kind of hard to believe isn’t it?

15. Show Me What To Do
Anybody who has ever spent the night before Christmas trying to decipher the arcane instructions provided by the manufacturer of the bicycle you bought your kid, or the bizarre graphics included with the do-it-yourself kitchen you bought from ‘you know who’, knows that there is nothing like a good video to explain how Part A actually does fit into Part B.

16. Even Cows Have Brands
If you’ve got a business, you’ve got a brand. We’re not just talking about a logo. We’re talking about every thing you do: your website, your print collaterals, everything, including how you answer the phone. You do answer the phone don’t you? If your website design firm doesn’t get it, if they aren’t creating a brand personality, what are they doing?

17. Lost In Space
Ever go to one of those websites that’s impossible to navigate. Maybe the navigation system doesn’t work in your favorite browser, or maybe the navigation system is so confusing visitors get lost in cyber-content-hell. Information architecture, how people find the content they are looking for, is critical to creating a satisfying user experience.

18. You Can Have It Both Ways
Remember when your mother told you, you couldn’t have dessert if you didn’t finish your broccoli? Sounds like those know-it-all search engine gurus telling you that you can’t have multimedia on your site. Well you’re a big boy now, and if you want that multimedia hot fudge sundae you can have it. And you can also have all the good-for-you search engine friendly copy too. Who said you couldn’t have it both ways?

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Are You A Hunter Or A Farmer?

Sunday, October 25th, 2009

You want your customers, potential customers, distributors, professional contacts, staff, distributors, the media, and other third parties who might be advocates for you to know as much about your products and services and your business as they possibly can. And you want them to keep you fresh in their minds.

EMail newsletters are useful for getting all these audiences excited about you or, at least interested in you.

EMail newsletters are one of the most important ways to communicate with these audiences. EMail newsletters can help to build relationships; people read them because they think they might find something useful or interesting - not just a blatant sales pitch and that gift from you tends to provoke reciprocal feelings: ?Give and you shall receive.?

So, if you can get people to remember you and be at least interested (excited really is a tall order!!) about your newsletter, they are going to be much more likely to do business with you or write about you or recommend you to others.

This is becoming more and more important as products and services themselves become ?commoditized?.

This is happening in more and more markets; the ?real? differences between products have narrowed to the point of insignificance. So, your ability to build a relationship with these audiences is more critical than ever.

Brand personality and perceived value are just as important as the product or service ? why else are brands sometimes worth more than the physical assets that produce their goods or services?

So, if EMail newsletters are so great, why doesn’t everyone use them?

The main reason is that they don’t understand how EMail newsletters really work. EMail newsletters further a relationship. EMail newsletters are farming, not hunting.

Farming is a constant process of seeding, watering, cultivating and replanting and that is how EMail newsletters can help turn strangers into friends, leads into clients and clients into referrals.

Although doing a newsletter is a great idea, don?t just ?jump on the bandwagon?. An Email newsletter, like all marketing, needs planning.

They are about news or valuable information to position you as the expert and if you’re not a born writer, EMail newsletters can appear daunting. Gathering and producing content is a challenge, then there’s putting the newsletter together in an attractive format, and mailing or e-mailing it out.

Even though you may have great information to give away, you must also consider the time it takes to put a good newsletter together. Doing a newsletter requires commitment of time and effort. You need to spend an absolute minimum of 3 hours putting it together and editing and polishing.

You have to offer you newsletter in a time frame that will be easy for you to manage and it has to be sent at the right frequency ? not too often and not so infrequently that you are forgotten.

You also need to determine what day of the week and time of the day the newsletter will be distributed. Some days and times are better for getting read than others and they vary by business and audience type. Research it to find out when is the best time to deliver and watch your open rate stats.

Once you have decided on a newsletter then make sure you can do more than 3! It?s a classic that organizations can be inspired to do 3 but then give up because they ?can?t think of anything interesting to say? and ?it?s becoming boring and too much like hard work?!

So, now you have actually decided to go ahead and have an idea of frequency and look and all those other points sit down with a blank piece of paper and write down as many questions as you can think of about your business.

Write down the things that your customers, prospective customers, colleagues, advisers, sales people, friends, relatives ? in fact anyone - ask you every day about your work. What do they want to know?

?How do you. . .??

?Does it. . .??

?What do you think about. . .??

?Can I . . . ??

?Do we have a budget for. . .?

?What do you recommend if. . .??

?Who is in charge of. . .??

Questions, questions, questions.

Now get in contact with all those customers, prospective customers, colleagues, advisers, sales people, friends, relatives and others and ask them what they find

?Most interesting?

?Most puzzling?

?Most confusing?

?Most amusing?

?Most difficult?

?Most ?? anything?

about your business and why.

Then find out what you can say about them that is likely to answer those questions in an appropriate style as long as it?s not boring.

Then go ahead and produce them.

Just remember ?.. EMail newsletters can be a mixed blessing. They can be time-consuming and frustrating, but a good newsletter will bring you more business.

Not only that they continue to work for you after they are produced adding content to your website that is relevant and keeps feeding the search engines and widening your relevant profile so that you have greater index visibility and even more chances of people finding your site.

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