Whatever You Do, Remember Your Brand

SMEs can’t be blamed for being a little confused about the proliferation of digital media, the doomsday predictions for traditional media and the noise of advice on what to do about it all – (with the exception of this helpful blog of course!)

Questions abound: should you continue your print advertising? Is internet marketing going to pay off? Should you make time for social networking?

You know the answers already. If something works for you, go with it – and it doesn’t take as long as you think to discover what works. Getting value from any marketing channel is a great way to determine whether to use it.

However, it’s important to stay ahead of the curve. Don’t wait until the last newspaper rolls off the press to start scanning the horizon for other valuable marketing channels. It doesn’t hurt to develop marketing channels before you actually need them.

This doesn’t mean you have to start spending half your day writing blog posts or finding something clever to tweet. Poke around, scan information, check out anything that looks interesting. Nothing wrong with a little old fashioned networking - find out what your colleagues and suppliers think. Of course, talk to your customers. In other words, don’t be afraid to test the water because you don’t know when you might need to jump in.

Whatever you do, wherever your media search takes you, support your brand. The familiarity of your brand will help you and your customers transition across marketing channels. Reinforcing your brand also gives you a direction for content on new channels.

Your brand is everything you do - in everything you do, every tweet, connection or link, remember your brand.

By Stephen Da Cambra

Long & Short Tail Tales

Search keywords are hot commodities. As we all learn more about how our customers shop on the internet, keywords open a link between seller and buyer.

Keywords take the guesswork out of your internet marketing. Enter the name of your product or industry into a keyword search tool and ~ * poof * ~ you have all the words and terms your potential customers use to find your business or product on the internet. Use those words and terms in your internet marketing and watch your conversion rates go up.

That’s the good news. The bad news is: you are not alone in knowing the good news. Every day, more businesses learn more about how their prospects use the internet and the value of keywords. Depending on your industry, countless other companies could be creating web content using exactly the same keywords as you. Pity the poor shoe store trying to get noticed by internet customers for terms like “shoes” and “footwear” – imagine the number of other companies trying to get ranked on search engines for the same keywords. Loyal readers of this blog will know that if you are not on the first page of search results – a total of 10 spots – you are as good as invisible on the internet.

The Long and Short of It

Luckily, there’s more good news. While there might be lots of competition for rankings on the most popular keywords in your market segment, there are many other keywords that, while not as popular, still produce results. Their lack of popularity makes it easier to get good rankings for them.

In our shoe store example, while a Google search for “shoes” produced 302,000,000 results, a search for “leather sandals” got only 10,000,000 results.

If the keyword popularity for any given industry is graphed, it would probably look a little like the image above.

Tale of The Short Tail – Relatively few keywords enjoying lots of search popularity. Getting a good ranking when your customers use these keywords will get results, but it will cost more and take more time.

Tale of The Long Tail – Lots of keywords with fewer searches. In some cases, ranking can be had for long tail keywords without too much effort – and for a lower cost.

The Moral of the Story

Chasing short tail keywords can have a huge payoff, but they carry a heavy price tag. Similar results can be had by ranking for a number of different long tail keywords – for less cost and less effort.

The End

(Not really "The End", keyword marketing is, so far, a never ending story about finding out as much as you can about your customers’ internet shopping habits.)

By Stephen Da Cambra

Get Committed (Before Starting a Blog)

Straight up: blogging requires a lot of time. If you cannot devote time daily to writing and maintaining a blog, you should rethink the tactic.

However, if you make the time commitment, the rewards can include becoming an authority in your industry, influencing buying decisions and - let’s not lose sight of why we do anything in business - an improved bottom line.

So, before you move forward on a blog, you need to know how much time it will take. Different industries and niches will require different commitments. If you want a real estate blog to be noticed, prepare for a significant daily grind for a couple years because of high internet competition.

Fortunately, most business sectors aren’t as competitive as real estate. Many SMEs do business locally and can tailor their blog to their geographic market to help cut down the blogging competition – and the amount of time needed to be noticed.

In other words, a blog about “real estate in Toronto” will get noticed locally in Toronto long before a blog about “real estate” will get noticed anywhere. If your business deals only locally, your blog doesn’t need to compete with one in Brazil. (If you are in Brazil, why haven’t you subscribed?!)

If your blog gets noticed sooner, it means you will have a smaller time commitment. But don’t think that focusing your blog locally, or otherwise, is an easy way out of a time commitment. The best blogs, regardless of industry, subject or purpose, are tended to daily.

In addition to actually writing the blog, you need to budget time for research. Sure, the first few entries might roll off the keyboard easily because you know your stuff and there’s a lot to tell. But, while everything you know about your business can be written up in your blog, it is the low hanging fruit of blogging. Sooner or later you’ll need to spend more time researching your posts, reading other blogs and corresponding with bloggers, customers and colleagues to get the fuel you need to keep your blog burning brightly - and getting attention.

Not only will a blog help you become an influential authority and improve your bottom line – it will probably help you learn a lot more about your business.

By Stephen Da Cambra

Web 2.0 - The End of Surfing

“Web surfing” is one of those early internet terms, like “information superhighway”, that now seem so anachronistic; so five years ago.  Web 2.0 has changed the way people use the internet. 

Instead of surfing, where web users went where the wave took them, they are more like web jet skiers, going where they want to go and using an accelerator to get there.   

What is Web 2.0?

It’s the second generation of the internet. The web’s coming of age as a collaborative communications medium where the message isn’t “pushed” to web users, but “pulled”, authored and edited by them. 

So what?

Web 2.0 means doing business differently on the web. 

Web 2.0 users want what they seek and nothing else. 

For example, before Web 2.0, if you wanted a pair of red leather gloves, you probably used the following process to find them on the web:

1. Think of all the stores in the area that might carry gloves.
2. Enter the name of the first store followed by “.com” into your net browser.
3. Hope the store has a web site. 
4. If it did, you would go through pages of merchandise, looking for gloves
1. then leather ones
2. then red, etc..
5. You would repeat steps 1 to 4 for the next store.
6. And the next store.
7. Then you would call the winning store, hoping they have the right size.
8. Put on a jacket and drive to the store.

For Web 2.0 users, the process is:

1. Google “red leather gloves”. (Go ahead, click it, but be sure to come back!)
2. Choose the most appealing results until you find something you like.
3. Ask your friends on Facebook what they think.
4. Order online.

Web 2.0 users are savvy and they know they can find what they want and avoid everything else.  They don’t want to go through your web site looking for what they need.  They don’t have to surf your wave.   

Fortunately, Web 2.0 means you can know precisely what your customers are looking for on the internet and, even better, you can give it to them in a number of ways.  When you do, get ready for the jet skis.

By Stephen Da Cambra