10. Collateral The number of UK internet users who read blogs 5.7m 11.2m Total UK daily newspaper circulation September 2008 Sources: Universal McCann Wave 3 , March 2008 The Guardian ABC Figures September 2008 Blogs vs. newspapers: UK reach
11. Collateral Sources: Universal McCann Wave 3 , March 2008 The influence of blogs on purchasing decisions 4.3m 1.5m The number of UK 16-54 year olds who blog The number of UK bloggers who write about their opinions on products and brands 32% The number of internet users who trust bloggers’ opinions on products and services
12. Collateral “ Over the last 3 years UK Internet traffic to our Blogs and Personal Websites category has increased by 208%, compared to 70% for News and Media” Hitwise, June 2008
Excitement is also the biggest challenge – change search almost boring until social media came along! Speed, scale, boundary – impacting on brand communications Social web is a much more fun, personal place to do business
Freshegg methodology has followed a true path Technical ability Defining the boundaries of the art without compromising client success Portals and other sites allow a permanent sandbox
Page Titles – 70 characters of search term rich text that marks the most important piece of real estate in search. Even if you have unique page titles for every page have you tried testing your click through rates by swapping your brand from the beginning to the the end as your rankings increase
Headings – Again sometimes overlooked but so critical to ranking success. Are you using H1, H2 and H3. View your source and see how your Content Management System is outputting your page content.
Meta description – Often confused as a factor that has direct impact on search engine visibility. It doesn’t, but indirectly Google is determining how many users are clicking through to your website and scoring it accordingly. Not conveying the right, unique message can have a detrimental effect. These 240 characters are the modern day test of internet marketing creative ability.
Links, links, links – 70% of Google’s algorithm. Reputation can no longer be manipulated. My following presenters will underline this. Listening to what is being said about what you do, taking an interest, and joining in by providing something useful to a willing audience is the only way to join in the conversation.
The Tail of Search – Amazon made their business from retailing everything than Barnes & Noble didn’t stock. Allowing yourself the ability and the space to be able to tap into this via a blog is a low cost solution that also provides much broader business use, such as customer service, retention, community management, CRM customer database, Public Relations, product development. It also aids branding and encourages fresh crawling of new content.
Collateral – A critical point here for marketing in a recession is that you don’t need to invest any more in collateral – just make sue you are using and reusing any marketing collateral you already have… as press releases, competitions, etc. Joining up other business activities is a good idea right now. Agencies can support these types of initiatives but it is key that internal teams also pull their weight – across the business. In a recent IAB study 41% of respondents said the time they spent shopping online had increased—but 45% said they were spending more time looking for deals. Knowing your business well enough to determine what you can or can’t offer to compete with your competition should be part of your role with your business – if you can’t determine this who can. Challenge to your agency by raising your game by not looking at marketing as a silo’d business activity.
So get blogging and use your own internal fonts of content. Allow us to help you make the argument to the rest of the business. Here we can see how important blogging is becoming against the demise of the newspaper. The age of citizen journalism means we all have a right to speak up and be heard, and if you’re not a a business then you will be loosing out to a competitor who will.
Blogs are being take more seriously all the time. That multifaceted voice that you can push out through a blogging platform is having more and more influence on consumers.
And here we see that shift demonstrated by competitive intelligence experts Hitwise.
Analytics – A key growth area. Improving conversions by just a small percentage can reap huge dividends. An often misunderstood field, conversion analysis is a big focus for Freshegg, and it’s something you can look into too. Don’t just rely on your agency driving traffic to the website to be enough – have a look at the funnel of traffic through the website and see where the drop offs are and where you can improve on them. There are online qualifications that you can do too – qualifications that you take with you if and when you move to another job. There are plenty of usability books to help you define what customers/web users like on the web page.