A message from the love doctor

When I start consulting with a new client, the first thing we work on is the writing; words are at the heart of your marketing message, no matter how pretty you are, if the text doesn’t resonate, you won’t convert.

Having said that – you could be Mark Twain but if your presentation is poor, you won’t get read.

Yep – we’re still in high school

New customers are just like freshmen, nobody knows each other so decisions are made entirely upon looks. And with so much choice, the decision you need to worry about is not “will they choose me?” it is “will they reject me?”

It is far easier to make the decision to not read something and move on, than it is to spend the time to actually read what is being said.

Don’t be Miss South Carolina

I do feel for Miss Lauren Caitlin Upton – she’s a product of society that values beauty over substance, however, as this clip shows, truth will out. There’s no point in having a beautiful website if you can’t string a sentence together – disappointing a potential customer is worse than having no customer at all.

http://youtu.be/lj3iNxZ8Dww (49 seconds)

Beauty & Substance

Yes you need both. The hard part is the substance, the writing, the adding new content to your website every week; everyone on this list understands the need for it, only a few of you are actually doing it.

But almost as important is how you look and how you present yourself. Likewise, there are still a few of you who have yet to take care of the basics.

Calling Dr. Digital Love

If you want to re-boot your writing program or even just start one, or you’re finally ready to complete that makeover, reply to this email and book a session.

Facebook pages - do you really have the time?

I Don't!

In fact, this week, I hardly have any time at all, so I’m going to summarize a great recent article on why maybe you don’t want or need a Facebook business page:

1. People don’t really “like” your business – they’re after something

2. You can have all the Facebook fans and likes in the world, the vast majority of them will never come to your page

3. Unless you’re actively trying to develop a Facebook community you’re pretty much just talking to yourself

4. Having said that – it’s still a numbers game – the more likes you have, the more people you will reach

5. The tools that people use to drive their Facebook numbers are counterintuitive to creating a real community

Having said all that, if you are a natural at Facebook and you’re familiar with the platform as a user, then it can be a very successful channel. There are a few businesses on this list that do it very well, but they’re taking the time to work it.

Facebook will work for you if you actively build a community, but that takes time and effort and for most of you, it’s likely you can get a bigger bang for your buck elsewhere.

If you’d like to spend your marketing budget wisely, reply to this email and book a session.

Source: The Five Reasons Why Most Facebook Brand Pages Aren’t True Communities by Jessica Malnik

Why you should love your Ed. Cal

Don't know what an Ed.Cal is?

Read this: Editorial Calendar

There are two components to effective content marketing and you have to do both:

1/ Taking care of the basics

This includes:

• Making sure your website looks good & reflects your business goals
• Learning how to write for the web
• Developing the habit of actually marketing your business every week
• Creating KPIs and developing the habit of looking at them every week

Most people on this list know the basic steps, some of you are actually doing a few of them and a few of you are actually doing most of them; guess whose businesses are growing?

2/ Getting customers

Yes there is a direct relationship between how much content you publish and how much traffic comes to your website, but depending on pure organic growth can take years.

The fastest way to grow your traffic and therefore your clients and customers, is to get your brand – your name – your presence – in front of someone else’s traffic.

There are lots of ways to do this.

The Ed.Cal – it’s a thing of beauty

The editorial calendar is the document that controls how you execute all the above:

• It makes you think of the future and plan for it
• It maps out your writing schedule and cures writer’s block
• It helps you to promote the right product to the right customer
• It co-ordinates your different marketing activities
• It helps you develop relationships with other websites and businesses

All this from one little excel spreadsheet; how could you not love it?

If you’ve fallen out of love with your Ed. Cal, or if you never had one in the first place (god forbid!) then reply to this email and book a session.

Hat tip to @HollyTHawkins for the title!

Goooooooooooooooooooooooooals!

No Goals

No Glory

KPIs

If you’ve been working with me, you will have a set of KPIs (key performance indicators) that measures how your business has performed and sets targets for the future. If you’re not tracking the impact of your marketing efforts you should either get in touch with me and book a session or unsubscribe from these newsletters.

KPIs are great for giving you a top level feel for how your business is performing but they don’t really get down to specifics, and it’s in the specifics where your business actually grows.

Google analytics – complicated but awesome

If you’ve peeked under the hood of Google analytics (GA), you might have been a little overwhelmed by the amount of information available to you; information overload is crippling and for that reason, most people ignore the amazing data they can get from GA.

The trick is to identify the key behaviors that drive your business: newsletter signups, white paper downloads, visits to the contact page, visits to the testimonials page etc, and prioritize that data above everything else.

Goal setting – simple and more awesome

One of the easiest things to do in Google Analytics is set Goals – literally, it takes less than 1 minute to set up a specific goal such as tracking how many people visit a particular page, or how long they spend there. Once a goal is set up, you get the data delivered to you in your weekly analytics report.

If you start doing this, it will very quickly change how you perceive your website and will ultimately motivate you to make changes that will drive your business

What you should do now

Think about your website, think about the pages you wish visitors would look at most and then set up some simple goals in Google Analytics.

If you don’t know how to do this and would like a hand, reply to this email and book a session.

WTF: Outreach, Landing Pages & No Bananas (2)

Last week we looked at outreach copy - targeting your text to a specific audience and giving them a reason to click through; today we’re going to look at the page they arrive on – the “Landing page.”

What’s the point?

Before you do anything, actually before you write the original ad copy or guest post, you need to have a clear idea of what it is you want to achieve; just saying “more clients” or “sell more stuff” isn’t going to cut it.

Get their information

The only way you can turn a new visitor into a lead is to get them to give you their contact details. This could be in exchange for a specific piece of information, to set up a conversation, to join your mailing list, whatever; you need to come up with something that will persuade the new visitor to enter their information on the page.

Design

Once you’ve worked that out, you can then look at the design of the landing page – here are a few things to think about…

Relevancy = Trust

If you are using LinkedIn to target HR executives in the LA area the page copy needs to reflect that: use the LinkedIn logo, use an image of downtown LA, use headline copy that acknowledges HR. The Landing page is an extension of the copy they clicked on, the more relevant you make it, the more trustworthy you are and the more likely they will give you their information.

Less is more than enough

Get rid of anything that isn’t directly related to the purpose at hand; they’re here for one reason – don’t try and promote other things, not only does it weaken the core message, it’s actually kind of rude!

Single call to action

Remember that at this point, they’re not interested in you; they’re interested in what you said you could give them, or do for them. Make it easy for them to get that; consider removing all navigation from the page, change the page design, make it all about that one thing: filling in a contact form, entering their email, etc. The more options you give them, the less you will convert.

Don’t be lazy

You should have different landing pages for every campaign and outreach post you do, they don’t need to be radically different, but they do need to reflect the website and demographic you were targeting.

Yes – this is harder than just sending them to your home page and yes it takes more time and unless you’re doing it yourself it’ll cost a bit more, however, not doing it this way will dramatically reduce the success of your marketing efforts.

If you’re thinking about outreach and would like to do it right, reply to this email and book a session.

WTF: Outreach, Landing Pages & Bananas (1)

When you do any kind of outreach, be it an ad or a guest post, you are creating content for the specific purpose of bringing people into your website; there are two components to this process:

• The copy
• The landing page

For purposes of this newsletter I’m going to deal with ad copy but the same rules apply to the short bio that is appended to any guest post that you submit.

The wrong way

The typical approach would be to create an ad and just send them to your front page. So for example if you were a Banana seller – you might run an ad along the lines of:

We are banana sellers
We have awesome bananas.
http://banana.com

Why is this wrong?

If you make your content too generic & try to hit as many people as possible, you’re going to become invisible. There are a million banana sellers out there so your copy has to be more than just “we sell bananas.”

Demographics = Relevancy

The narrower you make your target audience, the more relevant and resonant you become. Every platform should offer a decent set of demographics; just by using one of them you can make your ad a little more relevant:

Are you a man? Do you like Bananas?
We have awesome bananas for awesome men
http://banana.com

It might be a little basic but it’s certainly more resonant to us XY types than the first one. However, it’s still pretty lame and doesn’t offer a compelling reason to click through.

Relevancy & Reason FTW!

L.A based V.P of H.R who loves shoes?
Read how bananas prevent blisters
http://banana.com/freebananas

Now we’re talking! We’ve narrowed the demographic down by location, seniority and gender (kind of!) and we’ve offered some information that they might be interested in learning about. We’ve even been clever in the naming of the url to let them know there’s something in it for them!

The Landing page

Of course, the success of this campaign is not driven by how many people click through on the ad – it is driven by how many people become new clients or customers, and that element is totally determined by the design of the page they arrive on. More on that next week!

If you’d like help setting up a creative outreach campaign, reply to this email and book a session!