A few lessons that I have learnt from reading this and other Corporate Blogs:

1. Blogging is a good avenue to reach out to existing and potential customers.
2. The feedback you get, if handled properly, can be put to good use in creating a positive image.
3. Blogging doesn’t have to be the responsibility of one individual (CEO, Corporate Affairs department etc.). If the cleaner has something good to say, why not give him/her a chance?
4. Articles don’t need to be long and unwieldy to read. It is also useful not to be too formal or too sloppy.

Have you read any good corporate blogs?

Most businesses (especially small and medium scale ones) are finding it useful to attract their online followers to offline events. They are also finding out  that it does not have to be anything fancy. It could be something as simple as 5 – 10 people meeting for cocktails in your living room, or a BBQ in your yard…

A few principles to live by when organising such events:

1. Have an idea how many people you want to have around. Crowd control is good so you get a good chance of meeting everyone.
2. Have defined objective(s) – for example: I want everyone to leave their contact details.
3. Have an agenda – this is in line with having objective(s). It gives some structure and helps you meet defined objective(s). Just make sure your agenda is not boring.
4. Have fun – try to avoid hard selling people. It’s a turn off.

A useful tool for reaching out to new customers is Facebook’s events tool. It allows you to setup an invite to an event and get people to commit (or not) to attending your event.

Have events worked for you?

The reality, however, is that many businesses are guilty of this sin online. Most businesses and brands have set-up pages and groups on Facebook and other social networking sites with the main objective of attracting people. This is a noble idea and it is to be commended.

However, it is important that if you are going to maintain a presence online, you should be ready to answer online questions and queries that come from you customers. You may be able to get away with not answering your calls in the office, but it does you absolutely no good if you don’t respond to customer queries online, as other people WILL SEE that you are not responding.

So do your business a favour and keep the (on)line(s) of communication to your customers open.

I will be glad to know what your experience has been in this regard.

We like to have rules. Rules make it easy for us, they absolve us of responsibility. With a little bit of work, we can learn the rules and apply them. If we can show that we’re following them, we can prove that we’re doing our jobs. Unfortunately, we won’t be doing them very well. For a system of rules to be effective, it would have to be verifiable, internally consistent and complete. Unfortunately, that is a logical impossibility. Effective management isn’t about following rules, it’s about showing good judgment in the face of uncertainty.

Read Full Article Here

• Networking sites: a good number of businesses have their representatives taking an active part in many a networking site. Amongst the favourites are Facebook, Linkedin, Xing, Plaxo, Twitter, Hi5. Look out for the likes of Apple, Recruitment Companies, Sony Ericsson, Nokia in these sites.
• Blogging: in the old days, companies got journalists and other ‘anonymous’ writers to offer ‘unbiased’ reviews about their products and services in Newspapers and Journals. The idea? It gives some form of credibility to have someone – whose opinions are trusted by a majority of people – to give an opinion (good or bad … but mostly good) on your products and services. Today, the trend is to send out information about your goods and services to professional bloggers. And these are able to do, online, the same thing that is done in the newspapers and journals. A good trick of the trade here is to ‘leak out your secrets’ to these blogs in such a way that it creates the suspense that is associated with gossip columns (believe it or not, gossip sells!). Companies (big and small), and their executives also have their (un)official blogs. Ask Google, Bill Gates; and Apple , and they’ll tell you about the importance of blogs.
• Online Groups: there are so many groups on the net. And you want to take advantage of as many of these as possible to further your interests. Sites like Facebook, Linkedin, and Xing, do very well in this regard. And there are other sites that just focus on discussions. Some examples include Microsoft’s TechNet, Yahoo Groups, and Nairaland (for Nigerians). It is important to identify groups that house people who are most likely to be interested in you and your business. And you have to be careful to word your discussions and comments properly so as not to offend others. I shall deal on the issue of your choice of words in another article.

In conclusion, whether you are Shell or Sanford & Son, you need to start thinking about your strategy for getting yourself out there and using the Internet to reach your customers.
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I would be glad to know what, in your opinion, are the other methods of reaching customers online. Please feel free to share this article with anyone that would find the information useful.

Search Google Below

Today, a good number of businesses are not sure how effective their marketing campaigns are. Yes they know that TV works, Radio Works, and it pays to advertise in the papers. But the role of marketing has moved from just advertising on any/all of these media to identifying which ones are the most effective for which campaigns. Businesses are cutting costs. And marketing costs get affected too. So your Chief Marketing Officer of today to report to the owners of the business which media work, and which ones don’t. Sadly (and it doesn’t have to be this way), a good number of CMOs have not woken up the the reality of measuring which media work the best. And for those who are measuring, a lot of the tools they use are more qualitative (than quantitative).

In this article, we shall look at two tools that do give marketing professionals today a good view of what works best:

• Your company website: it started with companies including its site address in marketing communications. Those companies who are higher up the chain include a specific address of the page that the advert is talking about (e.g. yourcompanysite.com/theproductyouareadvertising). Even better, are the companies that track what media is getting the most reach.
• SMS:  with the proliferation of mobile devices, its no wonder that SMS is fast becoming a useful method to capture customer feedback.

So how does this work? Let’s put our imaginative hats on (all characters in this story are fictituous and do not resemble anyone in real life and …) :

You own a company (THECOMPANY). And your site address is thecompany.com. You have just launched a new product called THEPRODUCT. So you have created a page on your website (thecompany.com/theproduct). You have chosen to advertise this product on taxis, on radio stations 1, 2 and 3.

Your campaign works this way:

• People who see your ads on taxis are told to either visit thecompany.com/taxi or SMS the word taxi to a shortcode to find out more.
• Those who listen to radio station 1 are told to go to thecompany.com/radio1 or SMS radio1 to know more.  Its  thecompany.com/radio2 and text radio2; and thecompany.com/radio3 and text radio3 for those who listen to radio stations 2 and 3 respectively.
• The same principle can be applied to any media (TV, Billboard) and you can reduce to any level of granualrity that you desire.

The trick though, is that all these pages redirect to thecompany.com/theproduct. A good website has counters (ask the person who built your site) and statistics at the back-end. And you can ask for how many unique people went to each of the addresses you advertised. Also, you need to keep count of unqiue people sent an SMS to your advertised shortcode. This way you get an indication of which media is doing more than the other. As you get better at this, you can also begin to define campaigns that help you determine which customer segments are reached better by some media than others (most marketing ‘professionals’. if they are honest with themselves, would admit that they are still playing the guessing game with monitoring the quantitative results of their campaigns). For example, you can actually determine if Old people listen to radio station 1 a more than they read newpaper y.

The benefit? You can use the learnings from a campaign to determine  the kind of media (combination) to use to advertise a product has features that can attract a particular customer type.

Things can be as straightforward as this. But there are some considerations for embarking on campaigns like the one described here:

1. You need to be sure that you know what you want to do for people who send you SMS. Most businesses call the customer back to do a follow up and possibly get a sale. Some others have gotten themselves a nice SMS application that allows them to send and receive messages to/from the customer to determine the interest level. Others (and this is my favourite) entice the customer with a potential for reward. This always gets people going.
2. Decide on what it would cost the customer to send you the SMS. This can be free (in which case, your business would bear the costs of receiving those messages); it can be a standard rate that the network charges for SMS; or it can be premium (your customers must really be excited about sending you an SMS for them to want to pay more than what their network charges for a message!).
3. Make sure you get your communication and web/WAP/mobile development teams to align. This is the biggest challenge for most marketing campaigns. And the major reason is that the communication and Web/WAP/Mobile development teams speak different languages. So it can be like building the Tower Of Babel to get them to work together. But it is possible, and the results can be fantastic!

I end this article by saying that your business is like your child. To succeed with your child, you must come down to the level of the child. In the same manner, you cannot decide that all this web and SMS stuff is too techie for you to understand. This is part of the feedback I gave my Uncle when he called to talk to me about building his website. Like every other business, your business is first and foremost a marketing and sales  business. The only difference is that you are marketing and/or selling a particular product(s) or service(s).

Thanks for reading. See you soon!

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P.S. Do go ahead and share this page (and previous articles on the right hand side of this page) with those you care about. I would be glad to know what other methods can be used for measuring the effectiveness of marketing initiatives.

For those who have decided to setup a business and go online, you are to be commended. And this article is for you. How are you going to get the best of people who come to your site?

First, you must realise certain things about the people who visit your site:

• They are busy people. So if they don’t see what they are looking for or what interests them in your site, they will move on!
• They like to get something back. Even if they haven’t given you anything.
• There are so many sites competing for their attention.
• They will be accessing your site from many devices and browsers (a lot of people seem not to bother about this fact).

So with the above facts in mind, let’s give consideration to elements of your site that you must give top priority to:

• Browsers: most sites seem to be built only for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The reality, though, is that there are many others. And of the browsers that exist, the one that are most ignored are the mobile browsers. Yes! The number of people browsing on their phones is growing. And as my Rapper friends would say: You’d better recognise! So ask yourself: How does my site look on a phone? One mistake a lot of people make is that they load their sites with very heavy pictures. And it takes anything from 15 – 20 minutes to download a page of their site in some parts of the world. Recognise that viewing your site from your laptop is a different experience from someone viewing it in a Cybercafe that is run off a phone line copper wire somewhere in Africa. So, unless you are totally not bothered about people in Africa (or somewhere else in the world where their government haven’t seen it fit to launch a Geostationary satellite into space), try and do the world a favour and make your site as light as possible. And whatever you do, get your site builder to ensure your site is legible on the phone.
• Your Homepage: the most important objective of your homepage is to immediately grab the attention of visitors to your site. And what word grabs attention better than the word ‘Free‘. Yes! People like anything for ‘Free’. So what can you give your customers for Free? Once you have identified what you can give them for free (and please make sure that whatever you give is something that has some value attached to it), ask for the visitors Name and Email Address in return for this freebie. These two pieces of information, are probably the most important things you can get from anyone who visits your site. Think about it this way: What are the chances that you can make friends with someone who has told you their name? Very high! All you have to do is interact with this person long enough to get them interested in you (we shall discuss this concept in another article).
• Look and Feel: this is something that turns people off on many a site. I am not going to dwell too much on this, but you want to make sure that the mix of colours are appeal to eyes; the fonts are consistent; your style is consistent (e.g. links should all look the same), there is some sense of symmetry/arrangement. And you can’t go wrong with a white background.
• The words you use: make sure your choice of words - especially on the homepage – tell how you can help meet a need. The old ask-a-question-and-provide-the-answer method works well (Example: Is that headache killing you? We can make you come alive!). You also want o give a sense of ease. So be careful not to be too formal in your communication.  Relax! Your site is there to make friends. And if your visitors become your friends, its most likely that they’ll patronise you.

So there you go! There are so many things to say about what should or shouldn’t be on a site. I guess its all summed up on these words: Put your self in your customers shoes and think of things that are attractive to them. Don’t let your first priority be that you want to make a sale. If you do the right things, the sale would come.

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P.S. I would be glad to know what your opinion is about other considerations that should be given to succeed online.

And I mentioned that this wasn’t a technical word. Yes, it’s a marketing term. And if you are going to succeed on the Internet, then you must get a grip of what this phrase means, and how it can change your (online) life!

I also talked about how the likes of Google are not really Search companies, but marketing companies.

So the question is: how do you enhance your search engine optimisation?

To provide an answer, I shall dig back into my history:

One of the biggest hurdles that I consider to have scaled was passing my matriculation exams to go to university (I am sure a lot of readers would agree with me… I see you smiling with some sense of nostalgia!). Well, there something I was told about passing those exams [for the record, I only passed on second attempt], and every other exam that you have to take. The saying goes something like this: your passing any exam is not really an indication of how brilliant you are, but more of an indication of how well you were able to pass that exam. I guess this is the reason some schools place more emphasis on your curricular activities than passing exams.

And how does this story affect the price of fish?

To put into context: your ability to get in front of the millions (sometime billions) of other pages that are available on the Net, doesn’t have a lot to do with how fancy-looking your website is. It has more to do with how well you do in the Search Engine Optimisation matriculation exam. And what are the scores that are used to determine the leaders in this field? Here are few:

- Tags and keywords: Again, let’s go back to Google. And do that search for the word ‘Marketing’. You will find that Wikipedia’s page on Marketing beat everyone to the pack. Now let’s do a little magic: right-click on this Wikipedia Page, and click on ‘View Page Source’. A very ugly looking page should appear. Do a search (that’s CTRL F for those of you using Windows) for the word ‘Marketing’. You will see a line that looks like this: <meta name=”keywords” content=”Marketing,Articles needing additional references from February 2008,Cleanup from May 2008,Articles with unsourced statements since October 2008,Special:Search/Marketing,2006,Account-based Marketing,Advertising,Advertising Research,Affiliate marketing,Amazon.com” />

If you ask a Website expert, they would explain this statement as a Meta Tag. What this means is simply that Wikipedia would like people, who search for the word ‘Marketing’, to see this page on the Google search results. So you should start asking yourself: what keywords would my potential customers be looking for?
These are the words that should be placed in your ‘meta tags’. The hard truth, however, is that you are not the only one who is thinking of these words. Many are also putting these words in their meta tags. So how does Google separate the boys from the men?

• Pagerank: you have to understand Google’s criteria for determine a page’s importance. Google’s term for determining a webpage’s importance is called Pagerank. To understand Pagerank better you may have to download Google’s Toolbar. After installing it, you would see the Pagerank indicator somewhere near the ‘Bookmarks’ indicator on the Google Toolbar. Google measures the number of high quality web pages that link to yours. And this gives your web pagerank a score from Zero to Ten. So, if you don’t anything from this article, get this: One of the most effective methods of marketing your site on the Internet is in your to get other sites (good ones at that!) to link to yours. Another important Google rule for pageranking is that your rank is downgraded if Google finds out that you paid for the in-bound link from some other site to yours. So what Google is saying is: Get as many free referrals as possible, and you would be rewarded on the Search Engine League table.
• Your Keywords: its one thing to have inbound links to your site. The biggest mistake most people make, when they setup such links with their web partners, is the choice of words they use. To illustrate: assuming you have setup an auto-mechanic workshop website. Let’s say that you have a friend who sells spare parts. And you have both agreed to place inbound links to each other’s site. I’ll take a guess at what you would give him as your inbound link. I am sure it would read something like: Click here to see XYZ Auto Mechanic. And the hyperlink would be on the phrase ‘Click here’. Now go back to Google and do a search for the phrase ‘Click here’. The number one item is the Adobe reader download page. I am sure I don’t need to explain why. But for those who still haven’t gotten it, the reason why the Adobe reader is the number one page for search engine results for ‘Click Here’ is that the phrase ‘Click Here’ is what everyone around the world uses when they want to refer you to download the Adobe Reader so that you can download a PDF on their site (Did I hear you say ‘Ah Ah!’?). So, instead of competing with Adobe Reader for the phrase ‘Click Here’, why not change your inbound link to read’ Check out the best Auto Mechanic here (with the hyperlink on the phrase auto mechanic)? I guarantee you, that this would go a long way to improving your ratings on the Search Engine League table.

Now that you have people coming to your site, what do you do to covert them to customers? Coming soon to a Web page near you! Watch out!

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P.S. Do go ahead and share this page (and previous articles on the right hand side of this page) with those you care about. And your feedback is most useful. It would great to get your thoughts on what else makes for success on the Internet.

What about you? Can you use the Internet to enhance your business? The answer to that question is …. ‘It depends’ (Not the answer you expect uh?). Why is the correct answer ‘It depends’. The reason ‘it depends’ is that if you are in line of business that has nothing whatsoever to do with the Internet (and, though it seems remote, it is possible that there would be businesses that don’t need the Internet) then you should not be worrying just yet about being present on the web. A practical example? A friend of mine is setting up a fish pond. And she is starting out by selling to the local fish mongers in a market near the pond. I am not sure that her customers would need the Net to make business with her better. She might consider going on the Internet, at a later stage in the business, when she starts supplying local and international chain stores (Can I get an ‘Amen’?).

Now back to the story…

Yes the Internet is probably the most powerful tool you can have to grow your business. And the lovely thing about growing your business on the Internet is that you can do it for almost next to nothing… yes Free! Unfortunately, a lot of businesses do not realise this. And for those that do, and are taking advantage of it, they could do better.

So what is this free method of growing your business on the Internet? One word summarises this: Marketing. This is one word that is misconstrued a good number of times. Merriam-Webster’s Online Dictionary defines this word as “the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service“. Sadly people generally associate marketing with ‘advertising’. But its more than this.

In this article, I too shall be limited and focus on one word from the above definition in this article: promoting. In subsequent articles, I shall look at some of the other words in this definition. Can you use the Internet to promote your business? Yes! We Can! (I hope Mr Obama didn’t patent that phrase!) How? One of the answers to that question is ‘Google‘. A lot people don’t know it, but Google’s business isn’t really Internet search. Its more of marketing company, but providing marketing services on the web. And how does Google make its money? To answer this question, let us go and do a search on Google. Now type the words Marketing in the search field and click on ‘Search’. A few things you will notice in the results page:

• There are 668,000,000 (or more) pages that were returned (You can see this on the top right hand corner of the page). This is a lot, isn’t? And don’t you just feel sorry for the site that is returned as number 668,000,000 on page last? In fact, you should feel sorry for any site that is listed after page 4.

• On the Top and Right Hand of the page, you will find ’special’ results under the ‘Sponsored Links’ headers. The sites that are displayed here have paid Google to put them up. And Google gets paid when you click on any of the links to go to these sites. Google has a scheme called ‘Google Adwords’. And Google can reward you if you allow these ’sponsored links’ to be pasted on your site
• The rest of the page contains links to other sites. And Google gets absolutely nothing when you click on the links to go to any of these sites.

Hmmm! Now, how did the Marketing Page on Wikipedia get to become the number 1 entry returned, when you search for Marketing on Google? The answer lies in 3 words: Search Engine Optimisation. I assure you, this is not a technical term. And don’t switch off on me just yet. We shall discuss Search Engine Optimisation our next article. And we shall find out what your website builder would tell you that it is vs. what Google will tell you that it is (by the way, you may want to listen to Google and not your website builder). We shall also learn what you can do to promote your site in the Search Engine Optimisation league table.

Speak to you soon!

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P.S. Do go ahead and share this page (and others) with those you care about. I would be glad to know what your take on the relevance of marketing on the web is to businesses today.