SEOptimise » Viral Marketing

How to get ready for Christmas NOW

Rachel McCombie — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 15:36:23 +0000

Image credit: Flickr

Despite a tough economic backdrop and widespread fears over delivery times, this was another season of growth for UK online retail. It may seem a little early to be thinking about Christmas again already, but given that careful planning is often hailed as the key to success, what can you start doing now to prepare for next Christmas?

In another bumper year for web businesses, more Britons spent more online than ever before. In fact, a study commissioned by Tealeaf showed that 44% of the country’s web-enabled adults did some of their Christmas shopping online. And if recession and a looming year of cuts weren’t enough to dampen online Christmas shopping growth, then next year is also likely to break a few records.

This means that all consumer-facing online retailers need to ensure that their websites are ready in time for the busy festive season.

The need for a streamline buying process was highlighted by the Tealeaf research, which showed that as many as 45% of respondents said they’d encountered difficulties with their shopping. Almost half said they wouldn’t return to a shop where they’d had problems, and one in 10 said they had criticised retailers on social networks.

With that in mind, how can you ensure next Christmas goes without a hitch?

Start planning your festive marketing straight away

If you’re starting to wonder about your Christmas marketing in November, you’ve left it too late to do a good job.

Fantastic festive viral campaigns, targeted advertising and meticulously executed email marketing drops aren’t thrown together in a few days or even a few weeks.

Start brainstorming your approach now and have a firm idea in place by summer. You then have months to plan it and stage it well. On top of that, you’ll save yourself a horrendous rush in the final few months, and you’ll cut down on hours of expensive overtime.

Protect your Christmas budget

Just as every family is urged to save a little each month to ensure they don’t run into debt in December, your business should be spending a little less each month to make sure it has extra marketing budget to spare at Christmas.

That way you can really work platforms like paid search advertising and drive more festive business to your online shop.

Delivering a reliable and efficient service at Christmas can win you long-term customers, so it’s well worth it.

Offer Christmas discounts throughout the year

Rewarding customers for their loyalty is always a good idea, and pledging to give them a Christmas discount for their shopping earlier in the year can be great.

Not only will you give your customer that warm feeling they get when they know they’re being rewarded, but it will also boost your festive sales.

You can even email the shopper closer to the time to remind them of the discount available, putting your online store at the forefront of their minds.

Start building a gift finder

If you consider yourself to be rubbish at Christmas shopping, the online gift finder is your friend. But an effective gift-finding tool takes time to build and test.

Start planning and budgeting for it now, so that you can have it up and running by October. That should allow you to set it live just as the earlybirds start Christmas shopping.

Examine your customer journey

This is good advice generally, but it will help your Christmas shopping figures.

Comb through your customer journey to check for barriers to sale and to ensure your clients enjoy an easy shopping experience.

Rid your site of unnecessary clicks; each one is a barrier to purchase, increasing your chances of shopping cart abandonment. Ensure your search functions are performing as expected.

One of the best ways to improve your customer journey is to ask your customers, perhaps offering a prize draw as an incentive to complete a survey. Very often a website’s designers can be simply too close to the project to view it objectively.

Customers will have no qualms about putting you right!

Keep sales in mind too

It used to be that the sales began on Boxing Day, but for the online retailer, the sales begin as soon as it’s too late to deliver in time for Christmas.

For most businesses that’s December 23rd or even earlier. With that in mind, when planning your Christmas campaign, don’t forget to give some thought to the sales frenzy that follows it.

You’ll need to work on your marketing campaign for that in advance too.

Have staff working Christmas Day

It’s a pain and no one wants to ask their staff to work over Christmas, but you need to have someone behind the scenes just in case.

According to eDigital Research, 86% of UK consumers went online over Christmas Day and Boxing Day in 2010, and many of them did so to take early advantage of the sales.

Put plans in place now to have your IT teams working over those days, to ensure your website runs smoothly no matter what traffic you face.

Larger stores may also want to have a skeleton customer services team on call, just in case there are any problems. Having a ready response to an issue can turn a negative customer experience into a positive one.

Start making plans now and your staff may be more willing to work the bank holidays. You could even offer them some extra holiday over the year to make up for losing a few hours on Christmas Day.

How To Use Infographics for SEO & Linkbait

Tad Chef — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 16:22:29 +0000

2010 is the year of the infographic. Infographics are probably the most popular way not only to visualize data but also to get links this year. In modern SEO linkbait is the most common method of “link building”. To be more exact: Linkbaiting is not link building as you don’t build them manually like say in directory submission but you create content and then get the links by people you do not even contact.

Infographics have proven ideally suited to both spread awareness about issues and as viral content people share and link to.

It’s surprising though that SEO blogs and forums rarely deal with the creation of infographics to get links and exposure. The reason for this lack of tutorials may be the interdisciplinary approach an infographic requires.

A viral marketer determines the topic of the infographic.
An SEO specialist will find out the keywords you want to target.
A journalist or statistician has to to research the data needed to display.
A graphic designer has to actually make the infographic.
A social media marketer is needed who pushes it out to social media and influencers.

Of course one person can perform several of these tasks maybe even do all of it in some cases but usually more then one person will be involved. Thus a blogger can’t really cover all of these steps. There are some blog posts out there introducing parts of the process. I’ve collected them and compiled a list of a dozen resources showing you how to use infographics for SEO and linkbait. Scroll down to check it out.

As you see below roughly half of these posts deal with the circumstances of publishing an infographic and actual examples or case studies. The other half are tutorials that explain different ways of actually creating the infographic itself.

Where do you start? The idea is the most important part. You can’t take any random data set, create an infographic and expect people to share it all over the place. An infographic has to strike a chord with many people without being the lowest common denominator. It really has to contain some info. You can’t just focus on trivia like celebrities.

Also infographics work best for huge numbers or complex processes nobody can really fathom. A great example is the BP oil catastrophe which by far extended the term spill from day one but people couldn’t really imagine the sheer size and the dire consequences of it. The BP oil spill thus spawned a huge number of infographics to illustrate the disaster.

While the term infographic also entail the “graphic” it doesn’t have to a fancy graphic. Often a combination of maps, diagrams and a few images reduced to their symbolic character are enough.

The starting point for a successful infographic one it is ready is still often Digg, the almost dead social news site. While Facebook, Twitter and even Tumblr have by now much more overall traffic and influence than Digg, the Digg frontpage can make the infographic succeed elsewhere.

Of course many bloggers, especially the less important ones who lack the ability to create killer content themselves love to include infographics in their blogs. It’s a good idea to contact some bloggers directly and send them the infographic. Of course you have to research bloggers who really care for the topic you illustrate.

On the other hand you need to display the infographic on your site or blog to get the credit and links in the first place. So you have to make sure that you are the first to publish it and that a predefined embed code includes your site as the source. Don’t forget to add the source at the bottom of the graphic itself as well.

12 infographic resources:

30 SEO, Social Media & Marketing Case Studies that Prove the ROI of it All

Tad Chef — Fri, 07 May 2010 12:34:39 +0000

We all love case studies. Who is we? We in the SEO industry, we in social media and online marketing, we business people. Case studies show on real life examples, real websites, projects and campaigns that something works.

Good case studies are more than proof though. They also show you how to market or optimize a site. They show an example of how it actually works.

Case studies combine both, the insight of a how to articles and the business proof of a finished campaign. They shows the results from experience.

These are some of the reasons why I’ve collected a comprehensive list of 30 SEO, social media & marketing case studies that prove the ROI of it All.

Yes, the ROI in SEO, social media and other kinds of online marketing is still too often fuzzy. We want success stories, numbers and explanations so that we can reenact the steps you need to succeed. So here they are, enjoy:

Link building/baiting

Other SEO

Social Media

Blogging

Other

It took me more than a year to collect those case studies so they are only those that I really think are worth your attention. Most of them are not overt advertising or blatant self promotion, they are quite neutral case studies you can rely on.

Take note that I included more than one (actually three) articles about two particularly successful marketing campaigns on Twitter and Facebook. The results were to good to not get covered in depth.

Of course we at SEOptimise have our own SEO case studies. You can download them here and here as PDF documents.

Nine reasons why your viral campaigns aren’t working

Marcus Taylor — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:33:43 +0000

Viral marketing is without a doubt one of the most appealing ways for a company to promote a new product on the Internet – it really is a win-win situation; customers do all the dirty work for you, and it costs near to nothing to market your product in front of millions of potential customers. That said, creating a successful viral campaign can be somewhat of an art, but when mastered and implemented correctly, no amount of money spent on billboard, TV, and magazine advertisements will compete.

Image from Flickr.

So why aren’t we all using viral marketing campaigns to skyrocket companies into the fortune 500? Unsurprisingly, most companies do try to launch viral marketing campaigns for their products, but give up due to a either a poor approach to viral marketing, or the lack of scalable ROI results.

Here is a list of my top viral marketing tips:

Don’t restrict sharing – you’d think that this would be obvious when trying to create a viral campaign wouldn’t you? Unfortunately, many companies still require you to enter personal data to access their sharable content such as ebooks, this significantly reduces the success of a viral campaign.

Encourage sharing – As well as not restricting sharing, you should also encourage it. If you run a conference or workshop, ask the audience to get their phones out and video you saying or doing something interesting, funny, or controversial, this content will often end up on Youtube or Facebook, infront of your audiences networks.

Don’t talk about your products – Many companies fall into the trap of filling their advertising and marketing content to the brim with corporate gobblydegook, and jargon that doesn’t interact with the customers needs. If you want customers to share your content they must be able to understand it.

Trigger emotions – Some of the most successful viral campaigns are those which provoke an extreme emotion. Think of some of the films, music, and Youtube videos you have shared with friends; it’s likely that they made you feel either very happy, very sad, very relaxed, very confused etc – People rarely share stories that didn’t have an effect on them.

Target the right people – It makes sense to target your viral campaigns at those who have the biggest online influence in your industry first, this often includes bloggers, social media users, and forum members for industry specific forums.

Understand the purpose of your campaign – The most successful viral marketing campaigns are not those that directly try to sell a product, or create leads. Instead, it should be used to create a buzz about your product, or brand. This will indirectly increase interest in your products or brand. Remember the Cadbury’s Gorilla advert? Not once does the advert say ‘Buy Cadbury products because X, Y, and Z’, they just did something unique and funny which saturated the internet for months with mentions of the Cadbury brand and product. Think about it, that advert ticked all of the boxes mentioned in this post.

Don’t be afraid of producing ‘off-brand’ content – Many corporate companies are afraid of producing the kind of viral content that works best because it doesn’t fit their traditional brand image. Well, that’s even better – many companies have benefited massively from unexpected content going viral because people are so suprised to see a company in such a way, they feel they have to share it.

Be controversial / Provocative – People love talking about controversial issues, so don’t be afraid to strike a few nerves, after all, people disagreeing with you will only provoke discussion, which is what viral marketing is all about.

Make it easy to consume – Let’s face it, people are pretty lazy on the internet and like information to be as simple as possible to consume. If you’re launching a video, keep it short (under 3 minutes works best), ensure it can be easily found on your website if promoting on your own networks, and if possible make it understandable to viewers who do not have sound.