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When Content marketing misses the mark

Content marketing relies on a balance between quality and quantity of content. If balance is not achieved, the impact of content that misses the mark can have dire consequences.

Content for content sake is one thing, good content is another

If you are trying to sell or market a product, education is important for product particulars to be trusted and then appealing to customers. Selling of product is aided by leveraging size and key clients to satisfy discerning customers. While there are a variety of content types which can be effectively used to educate, which include:

articles
video
social media
infographics

Similarly, if selling or trying to market services, the nature of content needs to:

demonstrate value of services
differentiation
experience

so as to build and instill trust.

Sharing is caring

The barometer of good content nowadays is the degree to which it is embraced, digested and shared.

The most viral content is video. If well thought through, delivered and presented video can be widely successful in gaining traction and appealing to massive audiences. They do need to be authentic, fact based and compelling to work successfully. Interestingly, of the masses of videos on YouTube, few fit this criteria of authenticity.

Videos that miss the mark can be hugely damaging.

Context is everything

Context is everything with content. You need editorial, images, videos etc that resonates with the audience’s way of thinking.

Lack of context is one of the most common content failures.

Strive for Content consistency & quality

Continuity, consistency and high quality is crucial to a successful content strategy. Business should strive for maintaining the highest content standards as and where possible save for outsourcing to content experts.

Again, the failure of creating good content can leave you with egg on your face and can lead to the erosion of brand equity, positioning and goodwill.

How to monetise ebooks

What we thinkadmin

A brilliant infographic to help commercialise all those how have taken the time to write and publish an ebook. Like with all marketing – it comes down to reach and proper promotion but following these steps will yield a strong return.

4 Simple Steps to help monetise your ebook Infographic

Web Portals Discussed

What we thinkportals, web portaladmin

Over the last decade, portals have become mainstream and a powerful method for a business to offer customers & partners with a value-add and point of differentiation.

Portals often require substantial transformation work in order to be of value

Web Portals offer capability

Portals can be information centric, transactional, or aim to better equip users with the ability to ‘self-manage’.

Portals require two elements – technology & data. The technologies are evolving constantly and are the technology used to power portals more often than not must be custom built. Data is the other core requirement for a portal. The nature of data is synonymous with complexity. Databases are seldom clean. Data is often hugely sensitive.

You may also wish to read: ‘The Pain of Portals‘ for a more in-depth look into portals.

Online portal technology has a lot of advantages. Usage of it can dramatically increase and improve efficiency and overall productivity of a business. Due to this, enterprise web portals are becoming very essential for businesses of all shapes & sizes.

Content is King in the eyes of Google

What we thinkadmin

There are quite a few studies showing that companies publishing more articles/posts and more content generally does generating more conversions/enquiries than those that don’t.

Quality Content is key to SEO and retention of site traffic

Needing to grow qualified search traffic?

If you are a business with a website, you need content in order to drive traffic to your website.

Content Marketing usually would see the creation of thought provoking content for a particular audience designed to influence an action or outcome. In contrast, SEO looks to keyword popularity and uses this to inform content creation. The difference is that content marketing focuses more on understanding the customer buying journey and gears all content to optimise experiences to illicit more sales conversions.

Content marketing and SEO should be viewed together as together they can greatly increase traffic and visibility.

For many companies, this means you may have to restructure your organisation so that content marketing and SEO are overseen, coordinated and marketed from the one area.

Why invest in creation of Content for SEO infographic

Are you interested in How to measure success of your content

Nimble Free CRM under the microscope

What we thinkadmin

Alisdair Blackman reviews Nimble CRM. Given the importance of data for marketing and sales growth, we look at a free option for businesses to consider.

Can a free CRM stack up against enterprise needs?

What is Nimble CRM?

Nimble CRM is built on the philosophy that contact management based on a single view of the past, present, and future of relationships is what business needs. The product aggregates data across Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, Facebook, LinkedIn, Skype, Google+, phone, email and any number of other systems to present it in a view that enables business to analyse and glean insights from.

Nimble Social Offering diagram in product review by Alisdair Blackman

Does the product satisfy its charge?

With data appearing in the one view, it does provide a compelling and rather unique basis for insight.

I have used Nimble and have installed it for two clients both of whom have benefited from the use of this system.

The search function in Nimble is superb. It works similar to Google in that it brings back results based on relevance, exact matches and or from tags which are conveniently ordered based on when last the user or their team accessed a customer record.

Staying on top of what your contacts say on social channels is every bit as important as reading their emails. Nimble merges all disparate data into the one view for any lead, prospect or customer.

Nimble CRM makes it easy to customise and create any channel for leads, prospects and customers to be tracked and tagged against.

Sales Automation

Nimble CRM offers seamless integration with proven sales automation tools to enable users of Nimble to accurately track all business opportunities

Understand your prospect is the key to conversion

By keeping abreast of prospects’ interests, questions, concerns, and trigger rules, it enables business to make informed decisions. By understanding leads, prospects and your customers you can better acquire, convert, service, retain and ensure advocacy.

Eleventh Hour Checklist to help a PM before launching a new website

What we thinkbusiness project management, successful project managementadmin

It’s a stressful time for PM’s on the eve of launch. Accordingly, Alisdair Blackman has devised a simple list or ‘checklist’ to help all PM’s check over the project prior to release/launch/go-live.

Project Checklist Prior to Website Launch

Standards and Validation

Accessibility
HTML validation
JavaScript validation
CSS validation

Search Engine Visibility, SEO and Metrics

Page Titles are important; ensure they make sense and have relevant keywords in them.
Create metadata descriptions for important pages.
Check for canonical domain issues (e.g. variations in links to http://site.com.au http://www.site.com.au http://www.site.com.au/index.html should be reduced to a single consistent style)
Ensure content is marked-up semantically/correctly.
Check for target keyword usage in general content
Check format (user/search engine friendliness) of URLs
Set up Analytics, FeedBurner, and any other packages for measuring ongoing success
Create an XML Sitemap
Configure Google Webmaster Console and Yahoo! Site Explorer

Functional Testing

Check all bespoke/complex functionality
Check search functionality (including relevance of results)
Check on common variations of browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Chrome etc.), version (6, 7, 2.2, 3.1 etc.) and platform (Windows, OSX, Linux)
Check on common variations of Screen Resolution
Test all forms (e.g. contact us, blog comments), including anti-spam features, response emails/text, etc.
Test without JavaScript, Flash, and other plug-ins
Check all external links are valid

Security/Risk

Configure backup schedule, and test recovery from backup.
Protect any sensitive pages (e.g. administration area)
Use robots.txt where necessary
Security/Penetration test
Turn-off verbose error reporting
Check disk space/capacity
Set-up email/SMS monitoring/alerts (e.g. for errors, server warnings); consider internal and external monitoring services

Performance

Load test Check image optimisation
Check and implement caching where necessary
Check total page size/download time Minify/compress static (JavaScript/HTML/CSS) files
Optimise your CSS: use short image paths; make full-use ‘cascading’ nature of CSS, etc.
Check correct database indexing
Check configuration at every level (Web server, Database, any other software e.g. Content Management System)
Configure server-based logging/measurement tools (e.g. database/web server logging)

Finishing Touches

Create custom 404/error pages
Create a favicon

Protect yourself against Heartbleed bug

What we thinkprivacy laws, securityadmin

The Heartbleed bug has already been heralded as one of the biggest security threats on the Internet. It exploits an encryption flaw in Open SSL – used by many hugely popular sites such as Gmail, Facebook etc.

What is the Heartbleed bug?

Heartbleed is a vulnerability discovered in a specific SSL implementation (OpenSSL) that allows an attacker to steal private data from the vulnerable server’s memory. It is not a vulnerability within the design of SSL.

Digital Rehab recommends that you change ALL your passwords immediately for these sites.

Your password information could have been exposed along with some of your sensitive account information.

Some Internet companies have rapidly moved to patch and fix their security while most have not yet.

Although changing your password regularly is always good practice, if a site or service hasn’t yet patched the problem, your information will still be vulnerable.

Also, if you reused the same password on multiple sites, and one of those sites was vulnerable, you’ll need to change the password everywhere. It’s not a good idea to use the same password across multiple sites, anyway.

To view an updated listing of what has been impacted by Heathbleed – please see Mashable’s table

LATEST UPDATE 17th APRIL 2014:

There has been a lot of press coverage over the last week about Heartbleed. As the vulnerable library, OpenSSL, is predominantly used in Linux and open source environments, there hasn’t been as much attention applied to those of us with Microsoft-centric investments.

Should you be running a Microsoft environment, here are some helpful tips:

Microsoft software, like IIS, uses an SSL implementation called SChannel (“Secure Channel”), which does not exhibit the vulnerability. This does not mean that your organisation is unaffected though.
The most common scenario to see OpenSSL in an otherwise Microsoft web stack is edge servers. That is, performing SSL termination at load balancers and cache servers. These are often deployed as hardware appliances, external site acceleration services, orcontent delivery networks. In many scenarios, I find that application teams are unaware of these extra infrastructure layers, and thus may erroneously declare their application as unaffected on an initial pass.
Another scenario is embedded devices, and these are a usually harder to patch.
Unfortunately, due to the nature of the potential attack, you will not find any record of an attack in your logs.
If an affected version of OpenSSL is present anywhere in your data flow, you will need to at least patch and rotate SSL keys. You’ll also need to consider any secrets that have been present on the vulnerable node, such as user submitted data and passwords. This applies even if there are further layers of SSL behind the affected device (eg, terminate-and-forward scenarios that forward to SSL-based endpoints). Remember that if you are reusing a certificate across multiple services, such as a wildcard certificate, you will need to revoke and rotate all usages, not just the vulnerable nodes.

Importance of Remarketing

What we thinkremarketing, retargetingadmin

Remarketing, also known as retargeting, is the strategy whereby advertisers serve online ads to visitors who have previously visited their website. What this enables is for custom communications and creative to be displayed based on behavioural patterns of users i.e. Repeat visitation to a website.

Remarketing helps bring customers who have already shown an interest in your product or service back to your website, significantly increasing the chance of purchase.

How does it work?

Remarketing often performs better than other forms of display advertising and has been heralded by online marketers as a ‘must have’ in their marketing mix.

It is important to realise that there are THREE (3) main types of remarketing, which include:

Site retargeting
Retargeting on Social
Mobile retargeting

The key ingredient to successful remarketing is to know and own the Customer Journey.

Remarketing is only worthwhile to those companies who value and embrace performance tracking and continual monitoring and reporting. In order to measure the success of your remarketing, you will need to look over results be they impression, conversion (eg. Purchase, sign up to newsletter or creating an account), or revenue based.

Remarketing is a long term tactic that will deliver better marketing results.

Want to learn more?

Guide to Remarketing Recommended by Digital Rehab

To read more from Remarketing industry experts, view this Guide on Retargeting

New Privacy Laws start today

What we thinkprivacy lawsadmin

The privacy reforms today introduced aim to create greater transparency for business and government to disclose to consumers about personal information is maintained, handled and also how it is used.

Todays changes to the Privacy Act 1988 have been heralded as the most significant in more than 25 years and grant greater power to both average Australians and the Privacy Commissioner.

The Australian Government introduced the Privacy Amendment (Enhancing Privacy Protection) Act 2012 (Cth).

The Act introduces the APPs a set of mandatory privacy principles which replace the National Privacy Principles and the Information Privacy Principles contained in the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth).

From a marketing standpoint, the changes represent a tightly defined mandate from which we can operate from. This is demonstrated in APP 7.1 which states: “If an organisation holds personal information about an individual, the organisation must not use or disclose the information for the purpose of direct marketing.” There are however a number of exceptions to this rule, outlined further on in APP 7 – Direct Marketing.

Such exceptions include that there must be some sort of functioning opt out mechanism for all direct marketing communication in line with their technical platform, whether that be an unsubscribe button on email, information about cookies and where not to accept or sending STOP on a txt message.

The use of personal information, what is considered personal information and how you obtain it was one of the key points from the new laws.

Another key aspect to the laws is the inclusion of a “collection statement” of solicited personal information, which marketers should perhaps consider having a tick box for the consumer to agree regarding the use of their personal information to ensure consent.

“The data collection statement is, both a blessing and a possible nightmare for fellow marketers who preside over a database. If well managed, there is a lot that can be leveraged but, get if poorly managed, there is every chance you might run into problems.”

Rule of Thumb is this: if you collect personal information you must take reasonable steps to notify the individuals of how you intend to manage and use data certain matters at or before the time of collection.

The new laws apply to all organisations that collect personal information with a minimum annual turnover of $3 million.

Additional information can be found in the Act.

Written by Alisdair Blackman

Alisdair Blackman is Digital Rehab’s Owner & Principal Consultant and has owned, run and grown 4 successful digital agencies since 1996 and is an online marketing specialist.

How to achieve better conversion rates

What we thinkconversion ratesadmin

Digital or online marketing has become more than ever before fixated with ‘conversion’ as measured by a ‘conversion rate’. Success nowadays of activities online is directly gauged via the conversion rate – the higher your conversion rate, the more profitable you are.

Given the often fierce competition across industry, to gain a competitive advantage over key competitors, conversion optimisation is a key success ingredient in online marketing.

For those who need a reminder on what is meant by ‘conversion rate’, this is measured by the number of website visitors divided by the actual percentage of customers who have completed a set action (payment,

This article shares some of our advice on how best to achieve better conversion rates in your digital marketing. Should you wish to increase your conversion rates, simply incorporate one or more of the below tips.

Incentive – a key ingredient to increase conversion rates is to offer an attractive incentive. Developing a unique or great offer will increase your conversions. Recommend you trial a few different offers over a few months to ascertain which delivers the best conversion then run with the best performing offer. By trialling different offers and optimising market response – you are safeguarding against media budget burn and poor overall results.
Re-targeting – to illicit conversions over a period of time, you need to remember that your target audience may not convert immediately. By using re-targeting across your website, social media assets and that of advertisers, your target audiences will be subjected to a range of ads and messaging which overtime will lead to increase conversions.
Personalise – in order to personalise your messaging, ads, communications etc, you first need to capture email addresses of prospects and leads. Again, on occasion you may need to resort to offering something for free to glean an individuals email address but this is of critical importance such that over time a profile of that individual can be gathered which allows you to personalise the manner and ways in which you engage with your prospects, leads and conversions.
Communicate – once you have harvested email addresses and are starting to cultivate a database, it is important to periodically communicate with your database so as to build a relationship. For a relationship to be fruitful, you need to understand that a balance between ‘giving’ and ‘selling’ must be struck. Giving such things as really compelling and valuable content (advice, videos, ebooks etc) are common tactics all of which serve to strengthen the relationship between you and your prospects/leads. Then, on occasion incorporate a few offers to encourage conversions.
Refine Keywords in your PPC – many businesses use PPC (pay-per-click) advertising on Facebook, Google, Bing etc to generate traffic and attempt to gain conversions. We would strongly recommend that you look to refine and be more specific with your keywords – more is less! More targeted and specific you are with your keywords, the higher your relevance will be and accordingly, higher your conversion rates will be. Also – be sure that the keywords you have chosen are converting – if not, stop advertising on non-converting keywords.
Landing pages – rather than sending traffic to your homepage instead, consider building unique landing pages that are simple and focus on converting traffic that arrives to the landing page into a lead. Forms or Click to call functionality should be used.
Test, Test and Test again – to determine which banner ad, landing page, form fields etc work best, we can’t stress enough the importance of split testing whereby you send a portion of your traffic to one and the remainder to another thereby being able to report on performance across two or more variations.
Tracking – successful online marketing encourages two or more methods for conversion – usually by completing an online form or by making a call. It is important that both are set up to track where leads have come from. Setup phone tracking so you have visibility on where your ads are coming from.
Improve your message – copywriting is a skill not everyone can possess. Its value is seldom appreciated.

The better you can communicate your products / services, the higher your conversion rate.

The above are just some basic tips on how you can better optimise your conversion rate. Remember – optimisation should not be done as a once off but instead reviewed periodically and refined so as to continually improve performance. Similarly, conversion rate optimisation requires that ALL components of your online marketing are optimised.

The role of an online marketer is to never sit still – instead to continually strive to improve conversion rates. So ask yourself, can you improve upon your current conversion rates?

Written by Alisdair Blackman

Alisdair Blackman is Digital Rehab’s Owner & Principal Consultant and has owned, run and grown 4 successful digital agencies since 1996 and is an online marketing specialist.