Your Facebook page is flat, your Tweets have an echo, and your Google+ page seems to be more minus than plus. You fell victim to the pitch. You suffer from acute push marketing disease. Don’t despair. The cure is here. Discover the top five things you need to put unsuccessful push marketing behind you. Learn: Why your online marketing will fail before it succeeds The secret to never using push marketing again What bad online marketing is, and how to avoid it Why finding your niche is necessary How to be human again For a limited time, our absolutely free [...]
One of my most favorite things to say is that people hire brands that they know, like, and trust. Think about it. How do you feel about your insurance man, or the guy who sold you your last car? In all of our lives, there is a salesman that we feel connected to, or a brand that is familiar to us. Making a purchase isn’t just something that we do, it is something that we experience. When it comes to business and sales, we start to look at things from a different perspective. How do we get our customers to [...]
Meet the new Todaymade homepage. Does it look familiar? [This post is part of the ongoing Better Websites Series.] Think Google For all the talk about social media, there should be twice as much about Google and the other search engines. When it comes to measuring impact on your small business, there is little that can have more impact than a strong Google presence. A 2010 Local Consumer Review Study (source) found that: 70% of people have used the internet to find a local business in the last 12 months 67% of local consumers have consulted online customer reviews of [...]
It has been quite the week here at Todaymade – including more that a few late nights. Last night, as I was burning some midnight oil, I decided to tune-in to a keynote speach by author and marketer Mitch Joel. I was already familiar with his work through his blog and podcast, but had never heard him speak. I am sad to report that I have never read his book either – a problem that I will soon be remedying. What I really love about Joel’s approach is that he really hits on the fundamental shifts in consumer thought and [...]
We are starting a new series of video posts this week that we are calling Fireside Chats. Each week we will share something with you via video that we hope will be helpful and somewhat entertaining. [This post is part of the ongoing Better Websites Series.] In this first video, we are talking about the common misconception that websites are technology problems. You know, technology is a major player in all of our businesses. It controls our communication, outreach, and our online presence. It can be a mistake, though, to think of your website as a technology problem when it [...]
Frequently Asked Questions pages, commonly referred to as FAQ pages, are not uncommon online. They can be a great tool for many reasons, but only if you use them the right way. Here are a few tips for making great, and useful, FAQ pages. [This post is part of the ongoing Better Websites Series.] When To Use An FAQ Page Most FAQ pages are designed to relieve the requirements of online customer support. Many businesses get the same questions over and over. To answer them all via email can be tedious, and inefficient for the customer and the business. FAQ [...]
One of the challenges that we face in online marketing is consistently staying up with the times. For most businesses, a website only lasts a couple of years. That said, your budget may not allow for a complete redesign that often. So, what do you do with an old website that needs a fresher feel? [This post is part of the ongoing Better Websites Series.] If there is one thing that we know, your clients, customers, and patrons, will only visit your site when it offers them something new or valuable. As website owners, it is our job to keep [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing Better Websites Series.] For some reason, the lyrics from Rick Ashley’s 80s hit Never Gonna Give You Up comes to mind when I think about websites… Never gonna give you up Never gonna let you down Never gonna run around and desert you Strange association perhaps, but all too often we do exactly that. We give up on our website. Websites can take a lot of work, thought, and time. It isn’t uncommon to feel like you are dragging it across the finish line on launch day. But, for a website, launch day [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing Better Websites Series.] Here’s the honest truth – most websites fail to impress because their owners don’t set reasonable expectations on what they want users to do once we get there. Most of the time, website owners have grandiose expectations for traffic, participation, and sales without really taking the steps necessary to make it happen. Now, some may attribute this to a lack of planning, but I call it a common case of not understanding the real needs of the customer. Here are some of the most common expectations that we set, and [...]
Every year, we see continual growth in the online shopping world. Customers are continually looking to the web more and more for product research before making buying decisions. Data from “The 2011 Social Shopping Study” (a recent study by the e-tailing group and PowerReviews) indicates that 50% of consumers spend 75% or more of their total shopping time conducting online product research, with 15% spending 90% or more of their shopping time in this manner. In 2010, only 21% of consumers spent 75% or more of their shopping time conducting online product research, meaning this percentage has more than doubled [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing Better Websites Series.] Let me ask you something. Why does your company have a website? Is it because you want an online presence, or because your competitors have one? Even worse, is it because some committee thinks you need one? While I certainly hope it isn’t to please the committee, these things do happen. The three reasons listed above are really some of the most likely reasons that businesses enter online marketing. And really, it isn’t their fault. Back in the mid 90s when everyone was jumping online, those were the reasons to [...]
No matter what you buy, you can always count on there being an owners manual in the box. Some are large, and some are small, but we all expect them to be there. Why should a website be any different? Today we are starting a new series to solve that pesky problem, and we are calling it the Better Websites Series. It is, in short, the official Todaymade website owners manual, and it is going to cover the gamete. The first article in this series will be teaching you how to start thinking beyond the sales brochure. For too long, [...]
We just love to categorize things don’t we? First, we had the age of enlightenment, then age of reason. We all still remember the age of advertising, right? Well, the next ‘age’ has finally come. It is time for the age of the customer. I wouldn’t just make this up. Recently, one of Forrester’s leading analysts, shared a new report that showed we have now entered the age of the customer. Empowered customers are disrupting every industry; competitive barriers like manufacturing strength, distribution power, and information mastery can’t save you. In this age of the customer, the only sustainable competitive [...]
Do you know how Tommy Hilfiger got his big beak? Partially at least, it was due to a great ad. Tommy was just about to launch his new brand and clothing line, when he approached an advertising giant, George Lois. George knew that Tommy needed something big to help launch the brand. Something that would instantly make everybody know his name. The ad that George came up with made Tommy very uncomfortable. The ad depicted a fill-in-the-blank style list with the names of the worlds most popular clothing designers – including Ralph Lauren, Perry Ellis, and Calvin Klein. Essentially, George [...]
The web has brought us many things, but above them all is the gift of instant communication. For customers, it has also brought the gift of instant satisfaction – that is if your company is willing to put in the effort. Forrester research recently conducted an online survey trying to determine how consumers interact with customer service organizations. The results were surprising. The report showed that 58% of of customers looked to the companies website, while only 50% have looked to the telephone. Overall, customers accessed online channels for information long before they picked up the telephone. From Forrester: Consumers [...]
[This post is part of the ongoing Better Websites Series.] The term Search Engine Optimization is not a new. However, most of us don’t understand how it works, or how to do it. The truth is that it isn’t something you need to hire a fancy firm to figure out. It is something that you can do yourself, with a little determination and some elbow grease. There are two primary strategies for SEO greatness. Before we dive in, though, you need to understand the science, and the history, of how search engines work. The History of Search For the most [...]
What would cause the CEO of a Fortune 500 company to inspect the floor tiles at their latest retail location? In his book, The Steve Jobs Way: iLeadership for a New Generation, Jay Elliot describes CEO Steve Jobs and his meticulous attention to detail. Elliot carefully describes a scene where Steve spends months choosing the new tile floor for the latest Apple store. In the end, he selects a premium stone that is handcrafted in Italy. Overnight, flooring installers work to remove the old tiles and install the new ones. By morning, the store is open and ready for business. [...]
We can all recognize the corporate voice that marketing and public relations departments use when writing official company materials. It is official, plastic, and always the same. Anyone who has spent more than a millisecond in business knows it. It is the corporate drone that binds us. It is the bland voice that unifies the company. The bigger the corporation, the more bland the blather. Even worse, small businesses and little marketing shops have, unfortunately, learned to mimic this official voice. It is definitely an epidemic, and I like to call it the marketing voice. Sometimes we are guilty of [...]
Earlier this week, it was reported that Google+ was already approaching 18 million users. Take that compared to Twitter’s 175 million and Facebook’s 750 million and it doesn’t look like a lot, but considering it has only been two weeks – the rate of growth is phenomenal. Clearly Google did something right. What was it? Launching a product, particularly online, is quickly becoming a necessary and important skill for just about any marketing pro. Here, are a few of the things that I think Google did right, and the science of how they launched Google+ in such a successful manner. [...]
Since the beginning of time, anyone with a product to sell or trade, has been after one thing – attention. The more heartbeats and eyeballs that touch your product, the more revenue you will generate. Like internet marketer Jim Kukral says, attention always equals revenue. Of course, any business owner understands this, and knows that there have always been two ways to get attention. Paying For Attention Paying cash to gain attention is usually a simple solution to a problem. Television, radio, and print ads are expensive, but take big swoops at large problems. For your dollar, you are guaranteed [...]