I’ve recently returned from the 2010 HSBC Business Thinking ‘Thought Exchange’ trip to Istanbul, a chance for up-and-coming UK businesses to get together and talk Turkey (and business).
The week’s discussions reinforced two important points for me – firstly, that emerging markets like Turkey are absolute goldmines of ecommerce opportunity just waiting to be explored, and secondly, just how important it is for companies to think about how their branding will travel across cultures before they go multinational.
E-commerce is growing much faster in emerging markets than in its traditional heartlands of North America and Western Europe. Turkey, for instance, is the fifth largest internet consumer in Europe, behind only Germany, Russia, the UK and France, with some 35 million web users – that’s just under half the population – despite ADSL only being introduced in 2003.
The trend bears out in other emerging markets as well – Chinese is the second most widely used language online behind English (with almost 300 million more users than the third most popular language, Spanish). Meanwhile, in India internet use has doubled since 2007, from 42 million to 81 million users.
So it seems that, just as ‘tele-commuting’ may be the future of work, ‘tele-exporting’ will be the logical future of business, especially for start-ups without the ready resources to get established on-the-ground in foreign markets.
But what does Read more…
Archive for the ‘Marketing and Sales’ Category
Branding across borders – creating a successful international brand
By: Posted on: October 1st, 2010
11 Ways to Make Your Customers Swoon
By: Posted on: September 29th, 2010
Lots of people say that in the world of social media it’s your job to engage with customers. You have to talk to them, be accessible and give them something about yourself to hold on to. I guess that’s true. However, I think businesses have to go even further than that. I think if you want customers to evangelize your brand and be loyal to you, you have to do more than just talk to them – you have to woo them. You have to make your customers swoon.
As a small business owner, how can you get customers to swoon? Here are 11 practical suggestions.
1. Monitor the social networks for people talking about your company. When they’re saying positive stuff, say thank you. When it’s negative, get more details and then say thank you. When they’re asking questions, answer them and say thank you. When you find people talking about your company, respond.
2. Show up places they wouldn’t expect. Your customers have certain places where they hang out on the Web, even outside of Twitter and Facebook. Find their local watering holes and be there when they need you. Don’t hijack their conversation or try to sell your services; just be part of their world and let them know you’re there.
3. Create a blog, write content designed to address customers’ Read more…
How to be All Things to All Customers
By: Posted on: August 27th, 2010
There is one indisputable fact that marketers who sell soap already know about their customers that you probably don’t. Men and women buy soap differently—that’s no surprise. But while you might be tempted to focus on packaging or different scents… it turns out the key to getting repeat purchases is knowing that for women, it is the scent of the soap that is the most important, and for men it is the lather. Sell a great smelling soap to a man with no lather, and he won’t believe it worked as well and stay away from it. There are presumably scores of evidence and research to back up this basic soap fact—yet even if there weren’t you could read this point and immediately understand it to be true.
Soap is a simple product and the lesson that selling it offers for your small business is simple too: find the one ingredient that matters most to your customers and then find a way to focus on it. Sounds pretty obvious, doesn’t it? Now consider home pregnancy tests. Most of them are the same, but what marketers of THOSE products know is that people generally buy them in two emotional states: hope or fear. Depending on which emotion they are buying with, the packaging is different.
What we are talking about here is basic Read more…
23 Clever Little Tactics For Online Lead Generation
By: Posted on: August 23rd, 2010
There’s plenty of ways to generate leads online. In fact, there’s probably an infinite amount of ways to generate leads online.
All it takes is a little creativity and an overarching strategy and you’ll be hard pressed to find that your work isn’t paying off in spades.
If you’ve gotten the strategy down, here’s 23 ways to get the creative juices flowing…
23 Creative Ways to Get Leads Online
1. Landing pages are crucial to online lead generation. Make sure the pages where you capture your leads have all the elements of a great landing page. Most of the tactics on this page will require a landing page of some form or another where the potential lead will enter their email address.
2. Use strong calls-to-action to make every page on your website lead (eventually) to one of these landing pages.
3. Write a special report that provides a solution to a problem your customers have. The goal here is to answer a small problem within a big problem. The big problem should be solved by buying your product. Require and email address to read it.
4. Write a white paper that does basically the same thing as above. You might be surprised at the results of labeling it a “white paper,” though. Read Mike Stelzner’s book if you need help. Again require an email address.
5. Put together Read more…
Ads That Follow You Across the Internet – A Twist on an Old Idea
By: Posted on: July 16th, 2010
Sometimes the most interesting innovations come from the simplest ideas.
Case in point: one of the hottest online advertising trends today is something called “ad retargeting.” Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch explains retargeting this way:
“The idea is simple. When you visit a retailer’s or other advertiser’s website, it drops a cookie on your browser and the next time it sees you pop up on another site it loads an ad from that retailer. You’ve already expressed interest in that advertiser by visiting their site, so they retarget you whenever they can. It may sound a bit stalkerish, but trust me, everyone is doing it.”
There are some variations of this definition, but for our purposes today it’s close enough.
Even Google is now offering retargeting of its Google AdWords, calling it “remarketing” and giving this example on its official Inside AdWords blog:
“Here’s an example of how it works. Let’s say you’re a basketball team with tickets that you want to sell. You can put a piece of code on the tickets page of your website, which will let you later show relevant ticket ads (such as last minute discounts) to everyone who has visited that page, as they subsequently browse sites in the Google Content Network. In addition to your own site, you can also remarket to users who visited your YouTube brand channel or clicked Read more…
Nine Keys to Getting the Most for Your Marketing Money
By: Posted on: July 14th, 2010
1. Ask your questions
Begin your agency relationship by sharing your business goals — as concretely as possible — with your agency. If you don’t have an in-house marketing director, your agency can translate your goals into marketing strategies and tactics that will be the blueprint to achieving your objectives.
If this is your first time working with an agency, go over the contract fine print upfront. We try to do an Agency 101 with new clients to explain how we bill, how the project will flow, what the processes are. Don’t be shy when asking about advertising terms, some of which are right up there with Aramaic.
2. Throw back that curtain
Once you have committed to an agency relationship, treat the agency as a partner. We are not the printer repairman; we’re an extension of your marketing team. An agency can help create some remarkable shifts in your business, but not if you keep us at arm’s length. Throw back that curtain and share what’s worked in the past and what hasn’t. Give us access to your team. Let us listen in on your customer calls and evaluate all of your touch points — your reception area, proposals, receipts, signage, ads and Web experience. A good agency wants to be challenged and held accountable for results.
3. Do your homework
Our vice president and Read more…
5 Reasons Why Landing Pages & Forms are More Valuable than Homepages
Posted on: March 29th, 2010
A recent post over at Google made an interesting claim: The ROI for improvement is much better for landing pages and forms than it is for homepages. At first this sounds controversial, but it makes sense for many reasons. While the article talks about how to improve forms and landing pages, it doesn’t really explain why they are more valuable than home pages.
Here are five reasons landing pages are more valuable than home pages:
Landing pages & forms are real interaction points.They are the primary way that visitors enter information or communicate back to you, the web site owner. Most pages are simply one-way communication, but forms and landing pages with forms are two-way…they are the conversation. By “listening” to the conversation on these types of pages, you’ll learn a lot more than you will by trying to figure out what home page traffic is telling you.
Landing pages are transactional, and the transactions they enable are the ones crucial to your business. This means they are the most important point in the usage lifecycle of your customers…it’s when visitors are deciding to do business with you or start the process of doing business with you. They contain the most important decision points for your customers.
Landing pages are contextual. When designed well, landing pages address a very specific need of a very specific Read more…
5 Marketing Principles Brands Should Embrace in 2010
By: Posted on: March 3rd, 2010
Most of the marketing rules we lived by just five years ago are practically obsolete. The industry has faced more changes in the last five years than in the previous 50. Let’s face it, there’s no point in improving broken legacy models. Since necessity is the mother of invention, let’s not waste this recession and instead use it to rethink how we go about branding in this new decade. Here are five key ways:
1. Create better realities: A Bain & Co. survey notes that 80 percent of CEOs believe their product to be differentiated, but only 8 percent of consumers agree. And Y&R’s recent Brand Asset Valuator found a 90 percent erosion in brand differentiation over the last 10 years. These are not just sad examples of illusory superiority, but a staggering statement of our industry’s failure to add value in the past decade.
It’s critical that marketers realize that the product itself is the most powerful brand-building tool. We’ve all heard it before: “innovate or die.” But today’s hyper-connected society adds a sense of urgency to this broadly accepted mantra because mediocrity is getting extinguished with increasing speed via social networks.
Because reality always trumps image, marketing needs to create real value versus just adding a perceived value. Marketers need to shape the offer — the product, service and experiences consumer Read more…
7 Widely Believed Myths Of SEO
By: Posted on: March 2nd, 2010
I recently signed up to a few business and SEO forums and was amazed at what people still recommend.
As there are so many people offering outdated or wrong tips and tricks on how to improve your search engine optimisation (SEO) campaigns, I thought I’d let you know of some of the biggest myths around.
Search engines are always changing their algorithms, and over the past decade things have changed dramatically. Due to complexity of this industry, and the rapid changes, this has led to the many believed SEO myths which I have listed below.
1) Submit your websites to search engines
I still hear about people submitting their website to Google and other search engines to get indexed and to “rank higher” – this just simply isn’t true anymore. It has been at least 5 years since this technique has been necessary and all you need to do is obtain a few backlinks and make sure your not blocking robots from crawling your website.
2) Keyword densities
There are still hundreds and hundreds (probably thousands) of websites that either have lots of keywords spammed at the bottom of their website or within their content. This will do more harm than good, and it’s almost a certainty that you will get penalised and dropped from the results.
So instead of spamming, I recommend that you write great content Read more…
5 Fantastic Facebook Fan Page Ideas to Learn From
By: Posted on: February 22nd, 2010
So your business is on Facebook, and brand engagement is up thanks to some savvy social media strategy. You may even be interested in further distinguishing your brand by building a custom landing page for your account.
But what kind of value does a custom Facebook Fan Page offer? What are your fans looking for on a social network that they can’t get from your business website? For some insight, let’s check out how some big-name brands have stepped up their engagement by investing a little more TLC into their Facebook presence.
Interactivity
Social networks are not passive, so your Facebook landing page shouldn’t be either. It’s nice to have a great looking “Welcome” splash, but users are going to want to do something when they arrive.
Facebook is all about sharing, and The Gap has an ingenious promotion on the Baby Gap tab of their Fan Page. The simple splash image has a link to one of their photo albums where fans can upload pictures of their babies wearing their favorite Gap denim gear.
This kind of campaign provides a wealth of free, user-generated content that displays Gap products, and best of all, the functionality of photo uploading is already built into Facebook — no development necessary. This is an interactive idea that any small business could implement.
The Home Depot has built a bit on the shareability Read more…
