Why not start a Blog?
Many of my clients and prospects consult with me on the creation and execution of their eMarketing Strategy blueprint. One of the tools I often suggest to them is to start a simple blog on their site.
The immediate reaction - Oh No! It won’t work for us. We only provide B2B Products or Services. This is not something that is practical or feasible.
Reasons for Not Blogging
Other reasons can be - There’s no time to blog, there’s no one to blog, our CEO won’t have the time to blog, we are not sure what to blog about, we are not interested in such frivolous acts and the classic - No one in our industry is doing it.
Well, if no body is doing it in the industry, why not be the first to get started on this simple and effective medium and show to your customers and prospects that you can be a thought leader - the one who thinks ahead, and leads the industry, and cares about your customers.
Topics to Blog about?
In terms of topics - you can talk about industry trends, the new products or services being offered by your company, the current economic situation and how you can help your customers, offer support and answer basic questions asked by the clients and prospects all the time, and create awareness.
Finding the Time to Blog
In terms of time - yes, it does take a bit of time to do the posting, but it is not much - a few minutes, to an hour a week… Problogger offers a suggestion to batch write the blog posts - 3 to 5 at one go, and then release them over a week, or several weeks.
Anyone in the company can write the blog
It does not always have to be the CEO - Although some popular blogs are written by CEOs like Jonathan Schwartz. But most are written by marketing departments, people in Customer Services, Product Development, or even Sales. If you absolutely don’t have the time or resource to do blogging for you - you can always find inexpensive ghost writers at Elance.com or GetAFreelancer.com for a few bucks.
List of a few blogs written by CEOs.
1. Jonathan Schwartz (President & CEO, Sun Microsystems)
2. Craig Newmark (CEO, Craig’s List)
3. Mark Cuban (Owner, Dallas Mavericks)
4. Alan Meckler (CEO, Jupiter Media)
5. Kevin Lynch (Chief Software Architect, Adobe)
What to write about
This is the most important aspect of writing a blog - don’t start the blog just for the sake of writing. Your blog must have the top 6 ingredients of a good blog, as per Seth Godin, the marketing guru.
But you might not get all of it right when you first start blogging. The important thing is to get started, and start writing. Your writing, your thought process, and your reader’s comments and criticism will shape your blog over a period of time.
There are enormous benefits of having a Blog
- You show to the customers and prospects that you are listening to them, and are willing to share what’s happening in the company, and what’s coming in the future.
- You showcase your thought leadership in your industry.
- You generate a lot of links for your website - which helps in getting a high ranking in search engines. Many people blog for the sole purpose of generating links, and improving their ranking in organic search results. Search engines love new content, and come to visit your site often, and index more pages.
- People find a way to interact with you through your blog - they can leave comments, and offer suggestions to you, which may not be possible through the normal website, or may not be easy enough.
- A blog gives you a competitive edge. This is a great way to differentiate from the ordinary competitors, and show your expertise. Other may be doing the same things as you do, but if you are the first one to educate the prospect, show them your detailed process, and interact with them, you are treated as the thought leader, the one with the knowledge, expertise and oomph.
Setting a Blog
It is easy to setup and configure a blog on your website. Your IT people should be able to do it quickly. Or you can seek professional help from us - we have got very non IT people to blog - for example Doctors. One of our blogging clients is an Aesthetic Surgeon, who blogs about Aesthetics, Beauty and Wine on her Joie De Vivre blog. We can setup your blog in a day…
Conclusion
Using a Blog as one of the bullets in your eMarketing strategy is a sure fire way to get things started with a bang. Be seen as a thought leader, network with clients and prospects, and learn a new medium you will fall in love with - Start Blogging now!
Cheers,
Vinai
Building your eMarketing Strategy
How to Maintain Contact with Your Prospects Automatically
I am sure you get inquiries from all over the world - from your website, direct promotions, advertising, sales leads, and phone calls etc. all the time.
And if you are like me, you would have setup a good follow-up mechanism. I have ready made letters saved as drafts in my Outlook, for each of my Key Services at Brand Rich - Email Marketing, Search Engine Optimization Services, and Search Engine Friendly Web Design. I take out one of these standard template emails, customize them to the queries of the prospect, add some personalization, and off it goes… all within a few minutes. But this is not enough.
Your Prospects Have Questions…
Once that initial email is sent out, do you have a mechanism to follow-up with your prospects? Do you actively seek them after two, three or five days of sending out your initial email? What if they don’t come back to you? Does it simply mean that they are not interested?
Maybe they have a pricing question, maybe you seem too big or too pricey to them, or maybe they are expecting that you will call them to get their business. You may be having all the right intentions of following up with them in a few days, but most of the time, it does not happen… you get caught up in the issues of the day, following up on the new inquiries coming up all the time, making sales presentations, proposals, invoices and doing the actual work for your clients.
And I know that most of you keep asking this question - How do I get more leads? Well, answer this first - Are you doing all there is to woo, romance and convert the existing leads that are coming to you?
What is an Auto Responder
The answer lies in automating some of the follow-up process. The automation is made possible by a smart piece of software called the Auto Responders. There are many companies that offer auto responders on the web. This means that there is no software to install, and you don’t have to check with your ISP if you can run auto responders. Anyone can… as long as you have a need to maintain and build regular contact with your prospects, customers and partners, without spending huge amounts of time!
Let’s say you are running a training institute. So how can you use Auto responders?
Here’s the step by step Process to build and Maintain Regular Contact With Your Prospects
1. Open an account with one of the top Auto responder companies like Aweber or iContact. These are online services, and there’s nothing to install. These companies give you a free 30 day trial, and if you don’t like it you can cancel anytime. After the trial period, they charge a flat fee of $10 to $20 per month. This is good enough and small enough to get started.
2. Create a Email List in the software once you get the login information from them. This step is easy, and there are detailed instructions available on the page itself. You can add the leads who enquire about your courses, fees or timings.
3. Create your first message in the auto responder, and set an interval of when should the message go out. Generally you set the interval to 0 for it to go out immediately, once the prospects email address is added to the subscriber list. Or you can set it to 7 days, to follow-up with them after a week. The message itself can be all text, or HTML. If you are not familiar with HTML formatting, it is ok to stick to simple, plain text first. You can always experiment with HTML formatting, pictures and fonts etc. later on
So the first message can be about the course, its key features, what the student will learn, and pre-requisites.
The second message ( which goes about a 3 days or a week later ) can talk about your training school - its excellent facilities, proximity to transport, affiliations with training partners etc. to build more trust and loyalty about the school.
The third message ( which goes after another 3-5 days ), talks about the experienced trainers, and feature testimonials from some past students, showing the prospect more about the courses, and its benefits ( remember - showing versus telling: showing has much higher value, rather than just telling them)
The fourth message can tell them about the job opportunities or career enhancements possible as a direct or indirect result of doing this course.
All showing them that you care, your training institute is great, the job opportunities are great, the trainers are experienced, and past students all rave about you and your training institute.
I hope you get the idea by now…
4. These auto responder services offer customization & personalization - so the first message to Henry will go as Dear Henry, and another message might go as Hi Julie. Once the message is setup, you don’t have to do anything else.
The best thing is that this system runs on auto pilot. So if Henry was added to your subscriber list on a Tuesday, he gets the first message on next Tuesday. And if Julie joined on a Thursday, she gets the message on the next Thursday. The auto responder will keep track of which message was sent to whom on which day, and it is sophisticated enough to send the right message to the right prospect all the time.
Advantages of Auto Responders
There are many advantages of Auto responders. Some of the most prominent ones are
- Regular contact with the prospects, all running on auto pilot
- Builds trust and loyalty with the prospect. They take you as someone who is serious, and cares about them. The personalized messages show that you are not some fly by night operator. You actually demonstrate that you have a proper follow-up mechanism, getting more brownie points for your business.
- Use Autoresponder Emails to Turn Sales Leads Into Profitable Accounts (A MarketingSherpa Case Study on Aweber)
- The Auto responder follow up system converts subscribers into customers without intervention from you!
- The whole process save time, reduces stress, builds customer loyalty, increases conversion ratios, and helps you make more money!
For more insight into the advantages of Auto responders, review these articles
a. Written by Nelson Tan
b. A Very long and detailed article by Mukti Effendi
c. Articles and Resources from Aweber’s site
Conclusion
Email Marketing is about the cheapest way to market, and maintain contact with your prospects and clients. Use the automation offered by Auto Responders and run your marketing on auto-pilot. This quick and simple way will save you enormous time, and will give a great experience to your clients, building trust and loyalty. Ignore this excellent medium at your own risk.
Get started now with the best tools like Aweber or iContact.
And let me know your experiences. Share your findings, so we all can learn from it. Post a comment below.
Cheers,
Vinai
Chief Strategist - Brand Rich Marketing in Singapore, Asia.
Contextual Ads Outperform Search Ads
Introduction
Most of the time, we used to get useless, non-converting clicks from the Google Content network, so at times we stopped showing the ads in content networks. This used to reduce the money our clients were paying for the Pay per click advertising, and give them time for a more focused experience to service people who were actively looking for their products and services.
The Problem With Search Ads
However, when we were advertising on the search engines for a training school, we could not get any impressions. This was strange, as most ads start to run up impressions within an hour of setting up on Google. After 3 days, there number of impression was just 3. The landing page was strong, the keywords were all good, and I was bidding quite high to get a good CTR to hold initially, so I was really puzzled.
At this moment, I was almost going to lodge a support ticket with Google, when an idea struck me. Why not check out the contextual ads on the Google Content Network, since we had disable it upfront to get an idea of the CTR and bid amounts.
Setting up on Google Content Network
Within minutes of setting it up, we were running impressions, which was understandable. I then left the campaign for the day, to monitor it the next day morning.
Boy, I was in for a surprise the next morning. at 10am, the ad had collected 84 clicks. In a market when no one searches for the keyword, how can I get 84 clicks in about 12 hours flat? I ran a Google Placement Ad Report, but it drew a blank. The data wasn’t available yet. After monitoring every hour, I finally lodged a click fraud complaint with Google, in the absence of any placement report data, and increasing number of clicks.
Normally Google takes 3 to 5 days to respond to such queries. So I thought I to update the client, and discuss the matter with them. I was thinking to pause the campaign for a while, until Google could find the source of the clicks.
Surprise! Surprise!
Even before I could call my client, I got a call. It was from my client. I feared the worst. They must be deluged with bogus inquiries, and must be cursing me for all this. Instead, they were quite excited, and thanked me for my efforts.
I was puzzled. Sorry, What did you say? Quite good response!!! very happy? Eh yes, well ya ya, thank you for your kind words… we have just started working on your campaign… what? you never expected such good results… well, Thank you!
The client has got 17 inquiries, and 3 people have already enrolled in their course since today morning… and it is only 10:30am!
I check out the ad in Google again…. It is steadily registering clicks on the content network… 108 clicks by 11am.
Mystery Solved
Google gets back to me in 2 days, with no click fraud result. I check the Content Placement report, and take each of the content network site to check it out. Turns out all are full of adsense ads, but all are on topic. They are talking about what course to select, how to select the right course, where to study etc.
Most students in our target market do not search for these kind of courses. But while they are visiting their favorite sites, reading about their future career prospects, they chance upon these ads, click them, and end up enrolling…. all without ever searching for the course at all.
Lesson Learned - Don’t Ignore the Content Network
I then tested this method of several clients, and several different markets, with similar results in some countries. Boy, it helped me to understand the power of Contextual ads a whole lot better.
No wonder Google is making a whole lot of money, and is expected to surpass the size of Microsoft in 2009.
Content Ideas for Future
In fact, such a trend is giving me ideas to setup some Adsense ad sites. Check out the adsense tips if you intend to do so. But for me, I always spend my time focusing on how to improve the Google Adwords ads for my clients, and how to get them a better return on their dollars.
In fact, today, Brand Rich marketing is doing a whole lot of work with Training schools in Singapore to help them promote their training programs on the Internet, using Search Engines.
If you need any help to promote your business on Google or Yahoo, do give us a shout at (65) 9877-3485 or visit our website and request for a PPC proposal.
Cheers,
Vinai Prakash
Web Marketing Consultant
Brand Rich Marketing, Singapore
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