Good content means you have to anticipate what your audience wants. But how do you do that? Ginny Redish, in her book “Letting go of words”, suggests seven tips for getting and using information about your web users. We think it can be as simple as three: Collect: Who are your major audiences? And what […]
Marketing communications is all about persuading people to take action—to change something about the way they do business, buy something new or try something different. In most cases, encouraging them to act will involve both positive and negative drivers—what we might call the ‘carrot’ and the ‘stick’. Dangling a carrot in front of your audience […]
We’re all attracted by the bright lights of ‘new’ and it’s certainly important to keep things fresh and appealing. But every piece of material you create has hidden value. Have you squeezed all the worth you can from it? For example, when you invested in interviewing a customer for a case study, did you explore […]
When I launched my career as a wide-eyed engineer in the early ’90s, the information revolution was just starting to transform people’s lives and the rate of change was phenomenal; in just five years, mobile phones the size and weight of a house brick were reduced to something you could keep in your pocket. Features […]
How many of you have felt the impact from the launch of Google Panda back in February? By now, the analytics should reveal just how this exciting change to Google’s search results ranking algorithm is affecting traffic to your site. Panda update: the results Reportedly, some 12% of all searches are feeling the change. Following […]
In the online world as much as in the ‘old’ world, marketing best practice tells us that we need to define our target audience and how we want to change what they think, feel and do in order to move them along a buying cycle. So if a company that sells anti-virus software is setting […]
Let’s face it, you don’t create great content cheaply. I don’t say this because I think writers are anything but good value, but because good content takes time: it takes quality thinking and input from more than one brain. And that can add up. So once you have that lovely content assembled, you want to […]
‘Why social marketing doesn’t work’ said the tweet, offering a link to follow. Of course I had to see what that was all about. It’s an interesting piece in FT Magazine by Tim Harford, but I think the headline is a bit of an exaggeration. Fair enough—it did what the headline is supposed to do: […]
If it’s not stating the obvious, endings are often the last thing you think about in any piece of storytelling, be that using video or the written word. And yet your ending is the last chance you have to impress your audience and should be given the attention it deserves. It’s your final opportunity to […]
There’s a lot of talk, or maybe it’s just the stuff I’m reading, that says it’s a buyer’s market; that buyers are in control; and that the role of the sales person is no longer tenable. Is that true? It would certainly be good to hear your views via a comment below. Over here in […]
