Welcome
Hi there, my name is Karim, I’m a London-based online marketing specialist. I help companies cut marketing costs and increase conversion rates to boost business. Find out more about my experience and how I can help you.
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Wednesday, 1 July 2009
Social Media Marketing By The Numbers
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Wednesday, 24 June 2009
Why Marketers Are Bad At Marketing
Marketers are guns for hire, mercenaries if you will. You pay us and we promote your products or services. Some of us are very good at what we do, we develop an effective skill set, experience and a good ‘gut instinct’. We can help you get your products and services out there and we can help you make money. But there are drawbacks.
We’re probably not as passionate about your product as you are, how can we be? Even if we’re very impressed by it, it’s your product, your company, your service. We can be passionate about our craft and pulling off an effective marketing campaign, but don’t expect too much more from us (if we’re speaking honestly now).
The next problem is that we’ve picked up some bad habits too. As practitioners of our art, we have a set of codes and rules that we adhere to. But marketing is changing so much nowadays, more importantly, the market is changes. You can’t really follow the same rules of 5 years ago. As a non-marketer, you’re thinking is probably less limited, you’d probably be up for trying things we’d frown upon or ridicule, thing is, sometimes those things that we’d turn our nose up at work.
Now I know that it’s not always realistic that the creator, owner, inventor of a company leads the drive for marketing, but it’s not that crazy a concept. Richard Branson isn’t the Chief Marketing Officer at Virgin, nor does Steve Jobs hold that position at Apple, but they’re both instrumental in marketing their products and services.
So what kind of positive light can we shed on the slanderous statements I’ve made about my fellow marketers? Well I think there are a couple of things worth thinking about:
1) CEOs, Owners, Inventors should take a more decisive role in marketing their products. I think that with the rich array of low (financial) cost social media tools, people behind smaller/startup companies have a great opportunity to bring their passion and conviction to bear to help promote their products. This top down infusion of passion into the marketing approach will also help a marketing mercenary do their job better, passion is usually pretty contagious.
2) Marketers should focus more on finding the ‘passion’ not the just USP of the products and services their working with. If you can get excited about a product, it’ll be a heck of a lot easier to market it.
3) Loosen up a bit. Ok we learned about the different ‘Ps’ of marketing and we know how a properly produced banner ad or TV spot should look, but come on. We need to try and use a beginners mind from time to time and be open to new ideas and new approaches.
4) Finally, as marketers, people with a special passion for our craft, we need to remember that fundamentally marketing is about fulfilling needs. Maybe people don’t want marketers to tell them about the products and services they should be using anymore, maybe they need people that can be genuinely passionate about these products instead. If we have to retire the title of ‘marketer’ and change it to something else, is that so bad if it helps us become better at marketing?
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The Limitations of Optimisation
One of the most powerful aspects of online marketing is its ‘measurability’. Every visit to your website, every click on your banner, ever view of your videos on youtube, it can all be measured.
This wealth of data, when properly monitored and analysed allows for powerful optimisation of websites, banner ads, and emails. That’s great, take a business that hasn’t properly optimised it’s website or ads and with a bit of sifting through the data you can boost conversion rates, make your registration form easier to use and pick subject lines that will get your emails opened more often.
But what happens when you’re done optimising? You still have the same product, services or website to market. After the superfluous links are cleared up and the structure is improved and a big ‘BUY NOW’ button is centered on your homepage you hit a brick wall. Optimisation can’t help you move much further beyond that point.
So what do you do now? Well that’s the problem, the real solution is to do something quite new, something quite different and preferably something quite cool.
Optimisation is safe, nobody gets fired for optimising the current website or PPC campaign. Doing something radical is risky, but to gain distinction from the masses of products and services out there, it’s not enough just to optimise.
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Thursday, 18 June 2009
The Solution To Twitter Spam - Make Them Pay
Along with gaining the attention of celebrities, mainstream media and millions of internet-savy users, Twitter attracted a huge amount of attention from spammers.
Technology expert Bernard Moon recently wrote a post on the popular social media news website Mashable exploring the issue of increased spam on Twitter, according to him
Spammers are becoming more prevalent on Twitter and the “scammer” subset seems to be increasing the fastest.
He outlines three key types of Twitter spam
- Twitomercials – Legitimate companies shamelessly promoting their products
- Straight Cons – Usually involving a deposed African dictator and a dodgy bank account, thankfully most of us know to avoid these
- Clueless Cons – People trying to conceal blatant sales pitches among seemingly ‘normal’ twitter feeds. One example I came across all too many times was the ‘I just got a new laptop’ tweet linking people to a laptop competition of some sorts.
Unfortunately, Moon believes these are just the tip of the Iceberg. He’s not alone in this conviction, a recent PC World article claimed that
The popular microblogging site [Twitter] has become a hot spot for spammers intent on carpet bombing users with the usual pitches for government grants, debt-reduction services, and penile-enhancement pills.The article goes on to mention a report by Christopher Peri, CEO of Twitfilter where he indicates that as much as 10% of all ‘tweets’ on Twitter are spam.
One particular technique is for spammers or over-eager companies to follow thousands of people on Twitter automatically (using such web-based tools as Twollow) simply with the intention of gaining attention. It has to be said however that some users don’t consider this specific approach as spam, more a case of ‘aggressive selling’.
As these articles and many others demonstrate, Twitter spam is a very serious problem. The question now seems what to do to combat this spam.
Although Twitter has been working hard to reduce spam, it’s currently fighting a losing war. So what is a social media phenomenon to do?
One suggested solution for combating the growth of spam is to increase the ‘friction’ of using Twitter. The well know marketing guru, Seth Godin, summarised this idea in a post earlier this year. His belief is that the lack of friction in email is killing this medium and Twitter is next.
With email, too many people can all too easily spam thousands, and thousands of other people. A ‘stamp’ for each email sent would greatly reduce the motivations of email spammers, in the case of twitter, this could primarily be achieved by charging people to tweet or for setting up a Twitter profile.
I don’t believe this would have to be a signification charge, say something between $20 and $60 dollars for an annual subscription to the service. This would be a price range most users could afford, however spammers who typically set up multiple profiles would be deterred by costs that would accumulate from running their spam profiles.
I can hear some Twitter users groaning about limiting people’s access and soiling the ‘free’ nature of Twitter. Ideally it would remain free for users, but the reality is that many people are growing frustrated with the deluge of Twitter spammers, diluting updates, twitter search results and follower lists. This might be the only way to save Twitter and ensure that the thing that brings people there in the first place content and interaction are preserved. Why not learn from the mistakes made with email and build in this bold anti-spam safeguard from now?
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Wednesday, 10 June 2009
Toughing it Out
Last week I got back to London from a four-day mountain biking trip through the French Juras mountains. For somebody as un-fit as me, it was a major challenge to get through the 6 hours of biking we were doing every day and there were certainly some points I felt that I couldn’t make it.
Luckily I managed to tough it out and get through the trip. I came home happy to have overcome a challenge and feeling a bit fitter too. So what has this got to do with marketing? Well, marketing guru, Seth Godin said it quite eloquently in a recent post:
Marketers have it tough today, just like job seekers, job holders, laid off people and people worrying about being laid off. It’s not easy, very few people are getting what they deserve. You can’t just run an ad or send in a resume and succeed.
Even though we’ve seen various signs of an easing in the global economic crisis (or maybe we’re just getting used to it), times are certainly tough. Sticking to the tried and tested methods for marketing services, products (and ourselves) won’t necessarily work anymore. We’ve got to try new, risky, innovative tactics to market in this economic crisis. At times this is going to be very very hard, we’ll be tempted to give up and go back to the methods we’re familiar with, a lack of immediate success might spook us. It’s important to tough it out. Even when our budgets are slashed and our targets are hiked up, even when it all feels overwhelming. Hanging in there that extra bit longer, trying that extra bit harder could be the factor that brings in big rewards.
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The Key To Twitter and Social Media Explained
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Tuesday, 9 June 2009
The Power of 'Tweaking'
I was relaxing yesterday watching a nature documentary on the animals of the African Savannah.
It took me a few minutes to realise, but something seemed quite different about this nature documentary. Sure the pictures were stunning, the coverage of the animals was intriguing and informative, and there were even some cute animal youngsters. But that wasn’t what made the difference.
I finally noticed it, the guy that was narrating the documentary was African. His soothing voice and musical accent, coupled with his excellent command of the English language added a whole new flavour to the documentary. How nice and how logical to have people talking about animals from their own region. I have never thought this could have made a different to my experience watching a nature documentary but it did.
The guys producing this show didn’t completely revolutionise nature documentaries, but they made a powerful and effective ‘tweak’ that made a difference.
Sometimes you can’t revolutionise your industry, or launch a ground-breaking service. Even power-houses of innovation like Steve Job’s Apple spend a huge amount of time ‘tweaking’ their products. The new iPhone 3G S is a great example of this. It’s still an iPhone, just tweaked.
I’m not saying that we forget about creating genuinely new and ground breaking products, but there are countless opportunities for us to tweak our products and services to make a real difference.
Here are a few examples:
1. Can you change your colours to distinguish yourself from competitors?
2. How can you tweak your website to make it noticeably different?
3. Can your customer services ‘tweak’ the way they answer customer queries (faster, friendlier, more effectively)
4. Can you target a different market for your services (one your competition might be ignoring)
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