Posts tagged web marketing strategy
Web Marketing with Neuroscience – Tip of the Day #4
Feb 12th
There are so many studies that rely on our understanding of neuroscience – marketing is perhaps the most prominent of these (outside of brain surgery!). Today we are looking at how you can improve your connections with customers, your web marketing in general, and of course your SEO performance, by paying attention to how your customers minds work and tailoring your website to make them take action.
Redback spider's mating ritual effectively combines all three important elements ... mating, food and danger!
Can I eat it? Will it eat me? Can I ‘mate’ with it?
The neuroscience: Whenever our brain encounters something new in the world, it tries to determine three things of it. These three things are closely linked to both personal survival and the survival of our species, which is an innate drive:
- Can I eat it?
- Will it eat me?
- Can I mate with it? (alternatively known as ‘Will it mate with me?’)
The web marketing tactic: Where you can, try to incorporate elements of each of the three ‘items’ these questions represent into your web content and marketing for it. If you can relate your product to food, love or danger, your visitors’ brains are wired to instantly pay attention. They will be more likely to read more content, more likely to explore the site further, and more likely to engage with your message than if you have a dry, corporate site. To incorporate food, love and danger into your website, you can do things like:
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- Use photos of attractive women or men in your marketing – or even ordinary women or men with suggestive expressions or poses
- Use a little lateral thinking to connect pictures of food or people eating with your products or services. Happy people are usually a good illustration for a wide variety of products – juts pop a little food in their mouths!
- Use a little lateral thinking to connect pictures of dangerous things with your content
- Highlight in your web copy how your products either help you become more attractive, avoid danger, or remain able to feed yourself (usually related to earning or saving money).
Of note: As with all of these neuroscience tips, don’t overdo it. People can see straight through it when you stretch logic to fit one of these characteristics in, and it usually garners more derision than genuine interest.
Web Marketing with Neuroscience – Tip of the Day #3
Feb 9th
We all have a brain … well, most of us do 
. One of the interesting things about your brain, is that it follows quite a few rules that can be used to predict your behaviour in many situations. Just ask Hunch! Your brain and its rules can also be used in an SEO context, to get visitors to your site, boost its value in their minds, and climb up the Google ladder. Today we explore another tip for using neuroscience in a web marketing context.
The grossest, but certainly the best, web marketing tool
Use scarcity as a selling point
The neuroscience: Humans are a social creature, and we tend to look for both acceptance and status among our peers. If we believe that a lot of other people have (or want) a particular product or service, we will also want it. Having the same thing as everyone else helps build our acceptance; having something everyone else wants confers status.
The web marketing tactic: So, if you truly only have a limited number of items, or can honestly only provide a service for a limited time, let people know that. You might do this by:
- Modifying your ecommerce software to show the number of items left in stock of a particular product
- Modifying your ecommerce software to show how many of a particular item have been sold in the recent past
- Puttingup a widget on your site that shows people the most popular items, and how many there are left
- Creating a special promotion or sale, but only holding it for a limited time. DON’T extend it past the indicated date. This is like telling your two-year old that they will get a time-out for touching the television … and when they touch the television a minute later, simply telling them that they’ll get a time-out again. You are teaching people not to believe what you say.
- Holding a special limited time event, such as an exclusive customer party, a product celebration, a promotion to hold inconjunction with a trade show, etc.
Of note: This usually only works when there really is a limited amount of something! For example, we’ve all seen those email marketing letters and landing pages that urge us to ‘Sign Up Now – This Offer Expires in Thirty Days’ … without mentioning what thirty day time period the offer covers. We know that people say this just to get our attention, and when this occurs, it breeds distrust.
The trick is to let your customers know when there REALLY is a limited time offer … not to invent time limits to try and increase signups.
Web Marketing with Neuroscience – Tip of the Day #1
Feb 3rd
You can do a lot of things with your brain. In fact, without, you can’t do anything at all . You can also do things with other people’s brains, if you have a basic understanding of how to engage certain neural circuits in ways that favour your own ends. This is all sounding a bit mad scientist-ish for internet marketing, I know! It will all become clear very soon. Today we are thoroughly exploring one tip for using the quirks of our human brains (neuroscience) to help get people to take action on your website.
Brain cells - great web marketing tools
Tip of the day: User ratings and reviews
The neuroscience: People are social creatures. It is how we have evolved, and one of the most prominent reasons that we have come to dominate the planet – our ability and drive to cooperate. That drive to fit in, to cooperate rather than confront other humans, can be stimulated by showing your visitors that there is a community that has been built around your product. If you can show other users that there are people that trust your product and believe in its benefits, you are much more likely to convince them.
The web marketing & SEO tactic: There are several ways to implement this strategy on your website.
- Enable ratings on your products
- Enable reviews on your products
- Make sure that people visiting the site, as well as people actually leaving reviews, know that reviews aren’t changed by you, no matter what they say. Writing something like “You can instantly publish your review – we do not moderate comments on our products”.
- Add demographic information to ratings and reviews (as an optional extra). People might relate more strongly to a review if they see that the reviewer has similar demographics – age, location, family status, etc – to themselves.
- Enable comments on your blog and respond to commenters
- Add an ‘Agree’ and ‘Disagree’ button for comments on your site
- Build a forum that can be an additional resource for site visitors
Ratings and reviews can help new buyers, as well as contributing to their sense of community and social validation. They can also help them rationalize purchasing something they haven’t seen in person – “It worked fine for them, it will probably work fine for me”.
Of note: Testimonials don’t really work for this purpose! Every savvy web user knows that they are selected, edited and wouldn’t be on the site if they weren’t positive. Don’t remove bad reviews, simply post a public response to them offering to clear up the problem.
Applying The Immutable Laws of Marketing in SEO, part 3
Jan 23rd
Phew! 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing is actually quite a few . Ries and Trout have done quite a good job explaining what happens in a marketing context overall, but only a segment of the laws apply closely to internet marketing, and to SEO in particular. Today we continue our look at how Ries and Trout’s observations relate to the world of marketing on the web.
Marketing styles - different for every business, but all follow the same rules!
Time, time, time – see what’s become of me
One of the most relevant laws in an SEO context is number 11 – “Marketing effects take place over an extended period of time”. This is absolutely true in SEO – there is no business, anywhere in the world, that can launch a website one day, and be first on Google the next. Not only is the phenomenon not overnight, it often takes much longer than you expect. However, it is an ongoing practice with ongoing, very real rewards.
Negative thinking
This highly counter-intuitive rule is practiced almost nowhere on the web, and almost nowhere in traditional marketing – the rule states that ” When you admit a negative, the prospect will give you a positive”. The examples given are Avis, which ran a successful marketing campaign after admitting they were the number 2 car rental brand; Volkswagen, which admitted the Beetle was ugly; and Listerine, who admitted the mouthwash tastes like petrol. The fact is, it takes courage, honesty and confidence in your product to admit something negative about your brand … and those are aspects everybody wants to have in companies they partner with. Make use of it in your website copywriting, your PPC ads, your social media marketing, and any communication your have with your customers.
Success, arrogance, and failure
The 18th law of marketing is that ” Success often leads to arrogance, and arrogance to failure”. In an SEO context, we see this most often when companies believe that a number one Google position is absolute. They get to #1 … and then believe they can stop spending on SEO. If you want to remain successful, you have to keep trying to be successful!
Corporate SEO: How it differs from SME Web Marketing
Jan 8th
In business, the difference between a large company and a small company is not simply a matter of employee numbers and profit. The same holds true for SEO for large businesses as opposed to small ones; they are as different as night and day! Today we are looking at how SEO differs for the Goliaths of the business world, as opposed to the Davids.
Does size matter? The obvious differences
There are several obvious differences between big business sites and small business sites. These contrasts can be seen in all sorts of business activities, and are also prominent in SEO:
- Bigger companies often have bigger marketing budgets (meaning that paid search can be a good place to start building a visitor base).
- The value of the pre-existing branding in a digital world is immense. Even if no search engine optimization has been done on the site, it likely has plenty of trust with Google already.
- Big business usually means big everything; the website itself can be quite large and difficult to manage.
The Technical Differences in SEO for Big Sites
- The advent of Google personalized search means that if a person has visited a site before, it is pushed up the rankings for its keyphrases. This is a natural advantage for large corporations.
- On-page SEO for large corporate sites generally accounts for about 80% of the search engine ranking. For smaller sites, it can be as little as 20%.
- Changes to existing pages on a large corporate site can have a major impact on your exposure on search engines, and your traffic. Make changes slowly, and have your SEO company check on the impact on the changes.
- On-site content is a large part of the equation, but changing it may incur lower SERPs.
- Site structure changes can incur similar penalties
What can small businesses learn about SEO from the large ones?
There are a couple of guidelines you can use for getting the benefit of big company web marketing (although perhaps, without the budget!), even for smaller businesses.
- Establish your website domain name as soon as possible, to gain more Google trust.
- Spread content onto a larger number of pages (within the bounds of reason!), and do plenty of internal linking.
- Make minor changes to your site and then test the effects, rather than changing everything at once.
Remember, even the largest business giant was once a tiny baby … just the zygote of an idea in its founder’s brain! Internet marketing is a vital step in that road from idea to giant, for modern businesses.
Blogging as Web Marketing Strategy
Mar 13th
Blogs are actually software, a Content Management System (CMS) in simple form. With this software, adding new pages are made easier. Thus, integrating the new added content into the navigational structure of your site is also easy. As a result, search engines would tend to crawl on the site more frequently because of fresh contents. Especially Googlebot, it treats newly added contents as freshly cooked bacon and egg for breakfast.
Web marketing such as SEO is all about playing games with search engines. Since blogs are search-engine friendly by nature, SEO experts integrated blogging or blog posting into one of the internet marketing strategies. By the way, what make blog posts search engine-friendly are the rich links and text plus the frequently updating web pages. Aside from that, blog pages use CSS instead of HTML because the latter is extraneous. Extraneous HTML codes would have the spider a little bit confused what the page is about because of those codes.
If optimizing a site is through internal and external links, optimizing a blog is just the same. However, frequently updating the blog with new contents is already enough to have it cached by search engines and eventually get ranked. Once you frequently update the blog, it is more likely to be crawled more often and your posts would get more visibility in search engines such as Google.
Since blog posts can be seen more often in search engines, there are great chances that the links that you create in the write ups would be clicked by internet users. You are not just generating links for your site with blogging, but you are also driving traffic.
If you are thinking of the most effective web marketing strategy, just blog.
Applying A Web Marketing Strategy
Dec 10th
Launching an online business is a crucial undertaking. Possessing a good web marketing plan can make your site be visible despite the web’s enormity. There is a lot of activity in the Web that if a business is not vigilant in monitoring the level it is in everyday, then it will not be seen by users. Hence if you are looking for maximum growth potential, visibility and a great pay packet, using a web marketing strategy is absolutely needful.
Recognizing the importance of an effective web marketing plan will help you extend your range to a global perspective. You will have to sell to all corners of the world if you want to spread your extent. With this consideration, a web marketing tactic can take you to greater levels when your website goes “live” in the Internet. So, applying web marketing strategy means that you are aiming to: