Welcome
Hi there, my name is Karim, I’m a London-based online marketing specialist. I help companies improve their online marketing to boost business. Find out more about my experience and how I can help you.
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Monday, 1 February 2010
How Will You Take Advantage of the Apple iPad?
The latest Apple product (AAPL), the iPad will be released towards the end of March. This gives marketers and business owners a small window of time to consider how they can leverage this tool to market their business.
Although companies that already have iPhone applications will have a significant advantage when it comes down to developing apps for the iPad, the increased power and screen size of Apple’s newest gadget opens some great possibilities for delivering content and education. Here are a few specific tactics companies could use to take advantage of the iPad:
1. Develop an interactive brochure – A well developed iPad version of your corporate brochure could be very impressive. Including rich graphics and text, incorporating videos and links to website application forms and shopping carts. Add to this the touch interface of the iPad and you have a cross between a traditional brochure and PDF that’s could be much more than the sum of its parts.
2. Deliver a regular newsletter – As with brochures, taking advantage of the iPad’s touch interface means that you can polished, professional and interactive regular newsletters to prospects and clients alike. If you already have one of these, the main challenge will be developing an app that will allow people to easily subscribe to your newsletter and incorporating the added features that are enabled by the iPad.
3. Viral games – This isn’t a new idea by any means, but again the increased size and processing power of the iPad means a whole new world of gaming possibilities. If the iPhone was too restrictive for the types of viral games you might have envisaged, the iPad could be perfect.
4. Hotel/Property 3D Tours – This one seems glaringly obvious, the iPads touch interface and plush screen make it an ideal tool for 3D tours of hotels, rental properties, historic sites, holiday resorts etc. If this could be relevant to your business, you need to start thinking about this ASAP.
5. Banking/Financial Applications – Sounding like a broken record now, but again, the bigger screensize means that financial and banking applications can be even more powerful and pleasurable to use on the iPad. Stock trading applications can take advantage of the additional screenspace to display more information, and banking applications can be clearer with a ‘bigger text size’ option for mature users (the silver surfers could be a huge target market for the iPad).
There are obviously tons of other potential uses for the iPad, the point is to get the ball rolling. We’ve all seen that the iPhone and the app store have been huge, and there’s no reason to doubt the iPad won’t be huge too. Better to get on board now than miss the boat!
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Monday, 25 January 2010
Facebook & Twitter See Massive Growth in 2009
According to research conducted by the Nielsen group (see chart below) time spent on social media sites has skyrocketed 82% between 2008 and 2009, with Facebook and Twitter leading the pack.
While there can be no argument about the seemingly unstoppable growth of facebook, There has been some debate about the longevity of Twitter sparked by an apparent plateauing of its traffic as illustrated in the chart below from compete.com.
Even if traffic, in terms of number of unique visitors, to sites like Twitter is dropping, we have to take Nielsen’s increased engagement stats very seriously. Perhaps more people aren’t visiting Twitter but those that are most certainly are spending an increasing amount of time there.
So what does this mean for marketers today? Well it only confirms what many social media enthusiasts have been saying for a long time, social media is an important place to reach prospects and clients. Some predict that 2010 could be the year that social media overtakes email as the average internet user’s main activity. Best to start investing in a social media strategy now then!
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Tuesday, 12 January 2010
Easyjet Leverages Twitter To Deal With Winter Flight Disruptions
As many holiday makers, travellers and commuters experienced, transport has been one of the biggest casualties of the severe weather conditions over Xmas and New Years. Flights in particular have been disrupted by the snow and cold. The low cost airline Easyjet was one of the hardest hit carriers, cancelling over 250 flights. Despite the inevitable chaos and customer complaints, Easyjet was able to leverage their social media presence to help deal with the crisis.
By directing disgruntled and concerned travellers to their twitter profile Easyjet opened a quick and easily accessible information channel. The Easyjet Twitter account was used to flag fight cancellations, respond to customer questions and generally keep a line of communcation open between the company and its clients.
The fact that Twitter followers more than doubled from the start of December 2009 to Jan 2010 (see chart below) indicates that this channel is providing value for followers.
Of course it’ll be interesting to see how many of these followers Easyjet will retain as the bad weather subsides, but if Easyjet continues to provide value, perhaps by creating exclusive Twitter offers or promotions, it will have created a valuable and profitable marketing asset out of a bad situation.
The Moral of the Story
Every company experiences its share of customer service crises. In this case, Easyjet has demonstrated that it is possible to leverage social media services such as Twitter to help manage these crises and potentially come out in a stronger position at the end of the ordeal.
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Wednesday, 9 December 2009
Social Media Gets Serious for Search
A lot of skeptics still think of social media as a ‘touchy feely’ waste of time. However, Google’s recent announcement that it will be piping in real-time results from twitter and other social media platforms into its search results is very serious. Check the video below to see how this will work.
Of course, we’ll have to see exactly how this feature fucntions in ‘the wild’. There will have to be measures taken against people spamming social networks with streams of keywords to make sure it’s useful. But the fact that Google is willing to place this feature on centre-stage means it’s taking it very seriously.
This means that we have to take it seriously too. If there are any doubts in your mind or the minds of key stakeholders in your company about the value of social media, the impact on search needs to be considered immediately.
With this new feature, Google is offering prime search real-estate for your competitors to transmit messages in real time. This could trump your SEO & PPC activity and require a wholesale re-think of your search strategy.
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Friday, 6 November 2009
Bringing Social Media Into Your Marketing
This is a great presentation that demonstrates some very interesting tactics for integrating social media with your existing marketing.
Key Takeaways
1. Social media works best when used in conjunction with other marketing approaches.
2. Social Media + Search: Consumers exposed to brand in social media 2.8 times more likely to search for that brands products
3. Fishing for traffic with social media appropriate content. Brands with blogs experienced over 50% increase in traffic to main website.
4. Social Media + Email: Enable social media sharing in email.
5. Social Media + Market Research: Ask your fans/followers/Blog readers for feedback
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Friday, 23 October 2009
UK Social Media Usage
Here’s a quick chart showing the comparative size of the biggest social media networks in the UK. Facebook leads the pack at 20mil users, followed by MySpace at 10mil, Bebo at 8mil and Twitter at just under 5mil (4.9mil).
These numbers, taken from various online sources (both official and unofficial) need to be taken with a big pinch of salt as they don’t differentiate between active and lapsed users. That being said, they demonstrate the size and potential of the social media space.
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Monday, 19 October 2009
How Much Is Your Website Costing You?
Although it’s gotten easier and cheaper to get a website up and running these days, getting your website working efficiently is still a challenge. Part of the work I do as an online marketing consultant involves reviewing and auditing company websites to boost sales.
With the average website converting only 2% of its traffic to profitable sales, there’s usually room for improvement with every website. I want to share three key reasons websites under-perform with you, but first let’s consider the pro’s and con’s of reviewing your website for weaknesses.
As daunting as it may be to commit the time and resources needed to improve your website, it’s really a question of paying now or paying….now. Every day your website could be turning away potential clients.
In my experience, the gains in website efficiency far outweigh any cost or time investment needed to improve a website’s performance. To help get you on your way to improving your website and reclaiming some of those 98% of lost potentials sales, here are 3 key areas of website weakness.
1. What’s the point?
A lot of corporate websites struggle with a crowded and confused homepage. Every time the marketing or sales department wants to promote a new produce feature or service a new link is usually added to the homepage resulting in a something that looks more like a phone directory than a clear, professional sales resource.
The key is to carefully decide what the primary goal of your website is. What is the one, most important action you want visitors to your homepage to take? Focus on this and build the homepage around it.
2. Me, me, me, me
Of course you need to tell website visitors about your company and about what you do, but don’t get carried away. People visit your site for them, not for you. If you’ve got a great new ad or interesting corporate backstory, make sure people can find it but don’t sacrifice the key goals of your website to corporate egotism.
3. Computer Says No
A lot of text on corporate websites read like some sort of legalese contract or like a computer from some 1970s futuristic movie. Make your content accessible and clear. Be conversational and speak to prospects in a human and sincere voice. A good sales person knows that they have to let their personalities and passion shine through when they’re making a sale, why deprive your website of a voice that sets you and your company apart from the competition?
If you can fix these aspects of your website, you’ll be well on your way to boosting that paltry 2% conversion rate. Good luck!
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