Why Bother Blogging?

If running your business takes up most of your waking hours – and maybe a few sleeping ones too, why would you want to spend any of your precious time writing a regular blog? Odds are that you’ll fall into one of three categories when it comes to blogging.

1. You get it, and you blog regularly.
2. You get it, but you don’t have time to blog.
3. You don’t get it, but you hear everyone talking about blogging, and think it might be worth exploring.

If you fall into the first group – great, carry on! If you fall into the second one, you should be outsourcing your blogging (more on this later) – and if you fall into the third category, the following reasons will hopefully convince you to get writing straight away:

• Blogging will push traffic to your website:     The most valuable visitors you can get to your website are prospective new customers, those people you’ve not previously engaged with, who know little or nothing about your brand.  You can pay to attract them of course, through pay per click advertising, but blogging is free and it’s effective. Each blog you post boosts the likelihood of your website showing up in search engines, and as a consequence, increases the number of new visitors who will find your site. In addition, blogs are easy for readers to share on social media, which extends your potential reach even further.

• Blogging will convert web traffic into leads:     Getting traffic to your blog is one thing, but what you really need to do is to convert as many of your web visitors as possible into leads. While every business will have a different lead-to-sale conversion ratio, one thing remains constant - upping leads will have a proportionate impact on sales. To make sure as many of your blog readers as possible become leads, you need to include a strong ‘call to action’ at the end of each post. Ideally, your call to action will request the visitor to exchange their contact details in return for something of value – a free guide, trial, e-book, white paper, or webinar for example.

• Blogging will position you as the ‘go to’ expert:     The focus of your blog should be to give your readers high quality, relevant content they will find useful. Many people find it difficult to get their head around the fact that giving away knowledge and information for free (or at least exchanging it for just an email address) can be good for their business. But it most definitely is; over time, as well as building brand awareness, your blog will establish a relationship with your readers, so that when they need your services, you will be top of their list. A well curated blog – that is, one that is indexed by topic and can be easily searched – will become a point of reference for your sector, adding to the overall credibility of your brand.

• Blogging has longevity:     A good blog can have a life that lasts far beyond the initial posting. Each time it’s referenced and shared on social media, it will climb up the search engine rankings, increasing the potential for it to be found by new readers. It’s quite possible for a blog post to be working hard for you, and be bringing traffic to your website years after it was posted!

Is it OK to outsource your blogging?

If you don’t have the time to draft blogs yourself – or even if you do - outsourcing makes sense on a number of levels. It leaves you free to get on with what you do best, guarantees blogging doesn’t grind to a halt when you get busy, and brings a valuable, external perspective. You’ll still need to spend some time briefing your writer of course, but as they get closer to your brand, your business sector, and your customers, briefing should become a very straightforward process.

 Would you like to make regular blogging a part of your sales and marketing strategy?  Whether you’ve never blogged before, or you’ve started but are just not finding time to keep up the momentum, I can take responsibility to give you a completely ‘hands-free’ blogging service.  Call me now to discuss your requirements!

Time to Spring Clean Your Marketing Messages?

Spring may not yet be fully sprung, but here in Oxfordshire it’s definitely well underway, and at this time of year it’s difficult not to be inspired by nature’s lust for life. Despite winter storms and flooding of biblical proportions, the sap is starting to rise once again, the birds are getting frisky and the daffodils are putting on a good show.

In the natural world, the cycle of regeneration is ongoing, a continuous process of striving to stand out, get noticed and grow – not so very different from the business environment when you think about it. As you go through the spring rituals of oiling the lawn-mower, cleaning up the barbecue and scarifying the lawn, give some thought to your marketing messages and your sales and marketing materials; are they in good shape to face another season, or could they do with a freshen up?

 Spring cleaning need not necessarily mean throwing everything out and starting again. The flexible nature of digital media makes updating online communication materials like your website easy. It might just be a case of revisiting your key marketing messages, refreshing them so they work harder for you, and backing them up with compelling copy that will really grab attention and engage your target audience.

 At deep we can review and rejuvenate your marketing messages, breathe new life into your copy and put a spring in the step of your communications.

 

FREE Marketing Messages Review!

If you’re not getting the results you want from your marketing material, why not take advantage of a free Marketing Messages Review from Deep? We’ll spend 2 hours reviewing your messaging, and give you feedback on how we think it can be improved. We’re only able to offer a limited number of reviews free of charge, so hurry! Email contact@deep-mc.co.uk  now, or call Mike Northover on 07891 192552.

 

 

The Case for Case Studies

Everyone knows that the best sort of sales leads are recommendations – referrals from satisfied customers who have experienced your business and are happy to tell others just how great your organisation is. The trouble is, no matter how enthusiastic these ‘brand ambassadors’ might be, simply hoping they will remember to refer you – if and when they have the opportunity to do so, is not much of a sales strategy. There is however a really easy way you can take control, using the strong relationships you’ve developed, and the projects you’ve successfully delivered, to proactively leverage further sales opportunities – by capturing your success stories as case studies. Case studies are a powerful way to showcase your projects, the customers you work with and the results you get for them. They have a number of advantages which make them particularly effective:

• Versatile: Case studies can be used in both digital and hard copy formats - use them to support a wide range of sales and marketing activities including: 
• New business presentations 
• Direct mail 
• Events 

 

• Dynamic: Because a case study brings your business to life through a real-life story, it is far more emotive than a list of products or services can ever be! 

• Independent endorsement: A third party endorsement is an extremely powerful validation of your expertise, and vital for converting a prospect into a customer. 

What should a case study look like? 
While there are no strict rules, most case studies will follow a similar format with regards to content. Here are some guidelines for a typical structure:

• Your customer: Briefly introduce your customer, explaining a little about who they are, what they do, and the position they hold within their market sector. 

• The challenge: Set out the story of the challenge your customer faced, and the ‘hurt’ their business was feeling before they made the decision to engage you. 

• The result: Detail the outcome you were instrumental in bringing about, and explain how your customer’s position has improved. The more evidence you can introduce to qualify how successful the outcome was the better. If possible, express results as real, specific measura
• bl – ‘an X £ saving’ or ‘an X % improvement’ for example. 

• Customer testimonial: Your case study should finish with a short testimonial from your customer, summarizing how pleased they are with the work you did. It’s important to attribute this to a senior person and to include their name and job title. 

Keep your case study reasonably short – no more than 1 or 2 sides of A4 as a guide (though the format you use is up to you), and make use of good imagery to support the words you use.

If you’re not already using them, consider adding case studies to your sales and marketing collateral. Each time you deliver a project that highlights a different aspect of your offering, or a new market sector, get into the habit of capturing the appropriate words and images – drop them into your template to keep your portfolio of case studies fresh and right up to date.

Lingerie, eCigarettes, Coffee & Cash Machines: What’s the link?

No, it’s not the ingredients for a great night out or the title of a long-lost Ian Dury album. This seemingly disparate list is actually just a selection of some of the topics I have written about in the last few months. I could have included Cloud Computing, Live events, Apprenticeship schemes - and bespoke hats to name just a few others.

So what’s my point? I’m not listing these things to brag about the diversity of the projects I get to work on, I am simply using them to illustrate that you don’t have to be an expert on a particular subject to draft a persuasive marketing communication about it. I certainly would not profess to have anything more than a superficial level of knowledge in most of these areas, (with the exception of live events). I think you’d agree that it would be pretty odd if I did have a career path that somehow managed to encompass all of these things.

If you’re writing a marketing communication piece for your business, you will - I hope - have an in-depth understanding of your topic, but should you decide to outsource your copywriting, you don’t necessarily have to search out and engage a writer who is an industry expert.

With a thorough briefing, a good writer should be able to create marketing and sales focused content around virtually any subject. Whatever the business sector and selected medium, your communication will have clearly defined objectives – most likely, to inform, promote or sell. The techniques for weaving these key messages into copy and driving the reader towards the outcome you want will be the same whatever the product or service in question. Of course, a certain level of understanding will need to be acquired by the writer at the briefing stage. It will be the writer’s responsibility to ask the right questions and ensure they have all the information they need to undertake the project. A written brief will be helpful for reference, but in my own experience, I don’t think there is really any substitute for including a face to face meeting as part of the briefing process – even if it takes place virtually, via Skype.

If your communication is directed at an audience with limited knowledge of the subject, I would argue that using a ‘non expert’ writer can actually be an advantage. Typically, the end-user you are communicating with will be far more interested in the benefits your product or service will bring, than they will be in the detail of how it works. Coming fresh to a topic with no preconceptions, a writer will bring a different perspective, asking questions which as an authority on your subject you may easily overlook – but which to your audience may be fundamental.

Email Newsletters: Are your readers seeing what you want them to see?

An email newsletter is a powerful marketing tool, but now that one in five emails is being read on a mobile device, are you sure that your mailing is readable to all your recipients?

• Is the width of your design compatible when it’s viewed on an iPhone?
• What happens to text when it’s displayed on a mobile device – is it still legible?
• Is your template compatible for Outlook 2007 and 2010? (If your email was designed for Outlook 2003, these email clients will handle your email differently). To be certain your recipients see your mailing as you want them to, you need to take these – and many other questions into account when designing your email template.

FREE EMAIL NEWSLETTER TEMPLATE TESTING
Take the acid test: We are offering free HTML email newsletter testing until 31st January 2012. If you would like to know what your email newsletter template looks like on the iPhone, Gmail, Hotmail, etc. we can offer access to a virtual email simulation environment so you can see exactly what your recipients are seeing.

To access this free service, email us a link to the web version of one of your previous email newsletters and we’ll email back a link to you. If you don’t have a web version, you can email the entire HTML for the newsletter and we’ll do the rest - send to contact@deep-mc.co.uk.

Does your business have a communication strategy?

Social media, e-newsletters, blogging; most business owners recognise the value of using these digital communication platforms to engage with customers and clients – even if they may not always fully understand the technology involved. They are instant, powerful and highly cost-effective, so how come – many businesses have yet to utilize these online tools fully? The two reasons most often given are lack of content and lack of time.

In fact, managing and implementing an ongoing communication programme need not – and should not – be an onerous task. Taking a strategic approach and creating a simple internal process will enable you to communicate regularly across all these mediums.

Planning and integrating activity will ensure that;

• Your time and energy is used to maximum effect
• You don’t start out with good intentions only to come to a grinding halt
• You don’t feel like you’ve created an un-manageable monster that is always demanding to be fed

Yes, you will always need good quality content to drive your communication programme, but making ‘smart’ use of content will increase the impact of your activity while taking up less of your time.

Get smart with your content
Content is precious and using it strategically will make it go further. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel by generating completely new content for each medium - use your ‘core’ content to feed all the different platforms. Making your blog the ‘key-stone’ to your communication campaign is probably the most logical route;

• Step 1: Create blog posts on a regular basis
Decide how regularly you are going to upload new posts. Be realistic (see below) and try to keep each post to one discreet topic – doing this will make it much easier to re-utilise.

• Step 2: Extract social media posts from blog post
Doing this will be very straight-forward if you have kept your blog post to a single topic and you should find it relatively easy to extract a good number of posts to use on your preferred social media platform. You will just need to ‘top and tail’ to make them useable.

• Step 3: Use links to blog posts in your e-newsletter
Your e-newsletter will virtually write itself. You will simply need to generate an introductory paragraph or two and then provide shortened URL links to the blogs you want to highlight – with a line to introduce the topic. This way, your readers will be taken straight to the area on your website where your blog sits

Be realistic
Often, when a business makes a start at a communication programme only to have it fizzle out - the reason is an over-ambitious plan. Far better, the set realistic goals which can always be adjusted if it turns out there is more time available.

If you use the model outlined above, the frequency of your blog posts will determine how often you send out social media posts and the length of time between newsletters. A typical example might be;

• Blog post= bi-weekly (generates 20 tweets)
• Tweets = 2 per day
• Newsletter = bi-monthly (links to 4 blog posts)

Plan ahead
While your content will be informed by current topics and there will always be issues you will want to introduce last-minute, having a plan of non time-sensitive topics will make your life a lot easier. Try and plan ahead at least 3 months.

Stick to your schedule
Always keep to the schedule you have set yourself – slippage and erratic frequency will be noticed by your readers. Using tools to automatically schedule in advance means it is possible to make best use of any time you have available and will make it far less likely that you will deviate from your plan.

Writing with my ears

If you asked me which part of my anatomy I rely on most when I am generating copy – you may not expect me to nominate my ears as my most valuable asset (well, after a superbly creative brain of course). Before you begin to think that I may have missed out on a far more lucrative career in the circus, let me clarify right away that I don’t literally write with them. To be honest, while I find they function perfectly well as auditory receptors, they are poorly designed for gripping a pencil or tapping away at a keyboard.

What use are they to me when it comes to writing then? Well, being partially-sighted means that I use text-to-speech software when I work - every keystroke that I input into my PC is converted into an electronic, synthesised voice – so, proof-reading takes place using my ears rather than my eyes. Interestingly, I find that having my copy read back to me this way actually has a number of advantages; not needing to follow the words with my eyes makes maintaining focus a lot easier and while listening to my unpaid assistant - who sounds like a close relative of Professor Stephen Hawking - can occasionally get a little monotonous, it is easy to spot a badly constructed paragraph, or a sentence that doesn’t scan properly.

While spell-checkers are great for highlighting spelling and grammar issues, there is no substitute for having someone else read your copy aloud – as many people as possible in fact. But if you run out of human-beings in the form of colleagues or friends willing to give you their time, you might try switching on the basic text reading technology that most computers have built in.