Category Archives for "Worldviews"

1 Content Marketing

In content marketing, it is claimed, “content is king”. I’m not sure about the monarchical turn of phrase but that’s what they say.  It is still news to many website owners who believe the technical challenges of design and site maintenance are more important.  This means they often undervalue the content on their site.  Content has to be the site owner’s first responsibility as it is likely their designer will have no idea what the owner hopes to achieve through their site.  Of course the designer should discuss this with the owner but many are “techies” and have no idea.  There are many wrong ways to approach content.

Is content really the most important thing? Well, yes although it does depend on which content you mean. If you have followed this sequence, you may remember the product launch sequence must include high quality content. This means content of real value. The reader or video watcher should be able to do something useful with the content and not find they are missing vital information. This is marketing based upon generosity. The idea is people are more likely to buy if they are grateful for the free content.  And this works if what they buy is of equal or greater value.  Perhaps it is easier to produce great value than it ever has been but it still requires hard work.

Conversion depends upon good content. If people arrive at your site and find it is full of high quality information, they are more likely to buy your products. This seems to apply just as much to information products as it does to products that arrive by post.  So, someone who sells jewellery might blog about how they make it, the origins of the materials they use, the history of particular pieces, etc.  Readers might buy out of gratitude for the stories and information they read.  They can be encouraged to subscribe and so be invited to return to the site when you post something that interests them.

So, what benefits are there in providing high quality content?  Well

The aim of all of this activity is to build a tribe. That’s the usual term used although I would prefer community. Tribe to me implies conversations between a chief and various members of the tribe. Community implies a space where people can share with one another.  These are the people who will help you design your online content, market it and purchase it.

One interesting emerging thought is much content marketing lacks one essential for building community online. The technical stuff is all in place but it seems one thing is lacking. Any ideas? Let me know what you think it may be. I’ll tell you next Tuesday.

If you enjoyed this post, you can sign up to my email list at the top of the right-hand column. You will receive a weekly summary of my posts, an email sequence about community development and occasional emails about community development online.

0 Traffic and Conversion

Last time I described product launches, an effective form of online marketing; one of many approaches and an innovative alternative to the old-fashioned long sales letter.  To get anything to work you need to be aware of traffic and conversion.

Not all online marketers run launches. A launch is usually a brief period during which a product is available. It is particularly appropriate where online courses need a number of people to sign up at the same time.  Many businesses have evergreen products, available for purchase at any time. These businesses can be successful; Amazon is an example that springs to mind.

There are two problems your business needs to solve if you are to sell in this way. The first is traffic, where you need to get the right kind of visitors to your site. The right kind of visitor is the person who is likely to want to buy whatever you are selling.  The second task, conversion, encourages visitors to the site to make a purchase.

Traffic

Traffic is usually approached through search engine optimisation (seo), which has its own rather complicated history. (There are other ways to attract people to a site and I’ve written about some of these.) SEO developed as Google’s search engine developed and so Google drives most of it, although there are other search engines. (The next most popular is YouTube’s search engine and seo on YouTube is very different, even though Google owns it.)

Google’s aim is when someone searches for something, they will find the best quality  information on the search engine results page (SERP) and not a load of adverts. This means a lot of what only a year or 2 ago was effective practice now has a more limited application. Google are right about the changes they have made and the literature is full of accounts of white hat and black hat seo.  White hat seo aims to produce content Google aims to give high priority on its search engines, whereas black hat seo tries to game the system.  These days white hat seo is more effective and is largely about content marketing.  I’ll go into this in more detail next Tuesday.

Conversion

It is hard to see how conversion could ever become less important. SEO was always subject to decisions made by Google but conversion depends on your decisions about your site. Conversion is becoming a bigger topic and covers many aspects of online business practice. It is not just the look of the site but also its content.

A lot of what is visible on your site matters. It is important to understand it is not always possible to predict which of two options will be more successful.  The good news is it is possible, using split testing, to compare  two similar pages for performance and so pinpoint on-page characteristics that encourage visitors to respond in the ways you want them to.  Of course, these tests will work only if you are getting substantial traffic to your site (or else you’ll have to wait a very long time for significant results).

One final point: if you are thinking you don’t want to make sales from your site and so conversion is less important, think again. If you are driving traffic to your site and you have some purpose other than making a sale, you still need to communicate with your visitors and encourage them to do whatever is the purpose of your site. Many third sector sites are ineffective because they have not thought through what they want visitors to their site to do.

Your effectiveness depends a lot upon your site’s content and it is to that we turn next Tuesday.

9 Product Launches

An alternative to long sales letters is the sideways sales letter, developed by Jeff Walker, for his product launches, a few years ago. The idea may not be well-known but as I describe it you may realise you have encountered it!

This approach is hard work. I am not trying to promote it here but do take care if you’re tempted to try it out. It is not a get rich quick scheme and requires a lot of work to carry out properly.

You need three things:

Sideways Sales Letters

So, what is a sideways sales letter? It is an email sequence sent to your list (and perhaps other peoples’ lists) that links to squeeze pages on your website. These pages will usually link to high quality content, your best material, after the visitor has contributed their email address. The content should not include anything about sales.  It can be long copy or video and people will read it because it is useful information. There are usually three of these followed by a fourth which is the sales letter.

The point is you can’t scroll down to see the price or indeed you may not at first know what the product is! You read or view because of the value of the content. By the time you get to the sales (in the final email/webpage of the sequence) you’re hooked.  Whilst some people who sign up will make a purchase, most will not but take away valuable information and maybe make a purchase at a later date.

This seems to work for a range of businesses, particularly small businesses.  I’ll discuss how it works in my final evaluation. Before I get to that there are some other approaches to online marketing and so next time I’ll progress onto traffic and conversion.

2 The Long Sales Letter

Last time I summarised the history of marketing pre-Internet. In this and the next few posts, I shall briefly introduce some major themes in the history of online marketing.

A florist launched the first ever website and for some time the online world consisted of static websites. At that time, people online had dial-up connections and went online to view sites for information.

The long sales letter could easily be transferred from paper to website or email at this time. It seems when this first happened it was rather successful. But then it became less effective. Why?

Well, people became more sceptical. Think of your own approach to online marketing. You see something that is attempting a sale and you click away.

The thing about long sales letters is they work when people read them, although not everyone who reads will buy. They’re designed to make a sale. If you go to buy a used car, you get the spiel from the salesperson. The letter substitutes for the spiel. You can learn to write a good sales letter, just as a salesperson learns how to make a sale.

Long Sales Letters Online

People do read them and they are influenced by them. Or at least they were. The problem is online, people are less patient. Maybe it is because reading from the screen is less easy than reading from paper. People began to scroll down to view the price without reading the letter. If they decided it was too much they would click away.

The aim of the long sales letter is to build desire for the product or service. If the prospect doesn’t read it, they will click away if they don’t like the price even if the product or service is something they want.

So, what was to be done? The answer came in something called the sideways sales letter, a topic for next time.

Please note I am describing methods used by online marketers. This does not mean I necessarily approve of them! I am taking a few weeks to describe a few approaches and then I will evaluate them.

1 Marketing Before the Internet

I’m not going to spend a lot of time on marketing before the Internet. There are loads of histories but I want to make two points to kick off my review of marketing online.

Broadcast Marketing

My first point is marketing was expensive. Advertising via billboard or TV/radio commercial cost a lot of money and so in effect it was available only to large businesses. Without a doubt, it was very effective.

Large businesses invested in broadcast marketing.  Broadcast is a word that comes from farming. Broadcast sowing is where you spread seeds around and not planting individual seeds in specific places. Some people will know the parable of the sower where seeds fall on the path and stony ground. This particular broadcast sower was not very good at his job as most farmers would avoid the places where the seeds would not thrive.

The broadcast approach meant targeting of marketing was perhaps a bit less important. Certainly billboards and television would be seen by many people. You might put your adverts around certain TV programmes; children would see adverts about ice cream and not insurance, but mass media meant you could depend upon enough of the right people seeing a strategically placed advert to make it worthwhile.

This approach has not entirely disappeared but it is possible to target advertising online in ways not available pre-Internet.

Long Sales Letters

My second point is perhaps one of the more targeted approaches pre-Internet was the long sales letter. Older readers might remember the days when our letter boxes were full of junk mail. Most of this has disappeared into the ether but at one time a lot of unsolicited mail arrived almost every day. The long sales letter was the letter that accompanied the glossy brochures. It often covered several pages and would explain some special offer in detail with bonuses, guarantees, etc. More sceptical readers may find this hard to believe: the reason they did this was because it worked! It worked if done properly. One-size-fits-all sales letters going out willy-nilly to anyone and everyone were less successful than targeted letters but overall they worked.

And they worked when they went online. More of which next time.  Reminiscences about junk mail will be gratefully received!

2 Marketing Worldviews

Today’s new topic will compare two worldviews, marketing and third sector.  Worldviews, sometimes called mindsets, refers to the often unexamined assumptions we make about the world.

In the UK, for example, our worldview makes clear distinctions between statutory, private and third sectors. This can be helpful but like a lot of helpful models there comes a point where the model constrains thinking.

These powerful distinctions are not held universally. Outside the UK people don’t see things in the same way.  I first became aware of this in the early 1980s, while studying with the Urban Theology Unit in Sheffield, UK.

Can Community Groups and Businesses be Natural Allies?

I read about community development during that year and I remember one text in particular (although I cannot remember what it was). It argued that in the US, community organisations and private businesses are natural allies. Businesses took up and developed further participative methodologies that began in community groups. As businesses developed new models, they shared them with community groups. Many of these groups, eg the Industrial Areas Foundation, were church-based and so Gospel paradigms can be traced through many of these methodologies.  Community groups, churches and businesses are natural allies in the US.  When I read management text books I can see approaches to strategic thinking shared across these sectors.

I’m sure the resulting relationships are healthy and in the US businesses have tax incentives to fund community organisations through charitable foundations. We have no comparable legislation in the UK, where community groups see the statutory sector as more natural allies.  There have been some exceptions but when community groups need money they turn first to government funds, next to charitable trusts and at a distant third, to businesses.

In both countries community organisations have to follow the money. But in the UK at a time of so-called austerity, there may be an opportunity to re-appraise these relationships. If so, online marketing is going to play a major role. We may not yet be clear about that role but this blog is a contribution to working out the direction this re-appraisal might take.

I’m going to start with a basic review of approaches to marketing and then review the marketing worldview before moving onto examining third sector worldviews.

How do you understand relationships between private, statutory and third sectors?