Category Archives: Motivational

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What the Girl Scouts Can Teach Us about Internet Marketing

Did you buy Girl Scout cookies this year? If so, you aren’t alone. An estimated 200 million boxes of the delicious sweet treats are sold every year.

The Girl Scouts have been selling cookies as a fundraising tool for more than 100 years. But it was only recently that they extended their marketing efforts online. Now, in addition selling cookies door to door, Girl Scouts can now use the Internet to send customers emails inviting them to place their cookie order.

There’s also a mobile app Girl Scouts can use to handle credit card transactions during face-to-face purchases. The group has come a long way since the days of knocking on every door in the neighborhood.

 

Girl Scout Lessons

If there’s one thing you can’t say about the Girl Scouts it’s that they aren’t good at what they do. The market penetration of their cookie product is the envy of the industry. Honestly, is there anybody who has ever said “no” to a Girl Scout selling cookies?

Here, then, are some lessons we Internet marketers can learn from the Girl Scouts:

– Most People Respond to Human Interaction – In an age where most people are buying products and services from their smart phones, a face to face interaction with a real person has more meaning than ever, especially when that person is an adorable 8-year-old.

Making that type of personalized connection with your customers is what’s ultimately going to make the sale for Internet marketers and Girl Scouts alike.

 

– Know Your Audience – Let’s face it, the vast majority of Girl Scout cookie sales are made to relatives, friends, co-workers and other acquaintances of the parents of Girl Scouts or the girls themselves. Part of the reason for their success is that there already is a built-in customer base that they can reliably return to year after year.

Your Internet marketing can benefit from the same model. Your best customers are going to be the ones who buy whatever you are selling over and over again. Building lasting loyalty bonds for a series of smaller sales is generally better than making a single larger one.

– Friendships Matter – Girl Scouts know that friends are the most important thing in life. Social media marketers and other web-based entrepreneurs are learning the same life lessons.

Creating lasting relationships with your customers can guarantee that they are going to be open to our next offer … and the one after that. But they aren’t going to see you as a friend if you are always trying to sell them something. Alternate your promotional messages with ones that share something personal about yourself. Include free helpful, high value content that your contacts can use in their everyday lives and you can strengthen the genuine bonds you create with your customer base.

– Learning Is Better than Teaching – Girl Scouts is centered on continually learning new things: Crafts, activities, how to do different things. Sharing information and teaching others is fine, but learning something new is even better.

Your communications with your customers shouldn’t be a monologue. It should be a dialogue, with them telling you as much about your business as you are telling them. Make a point of letting your customers know that you value their opinion and are genuinely interested in what they have to say.

Marketers who are always preaching at people, rather than listening to them, usually aren’t as successful as those who value learning as much as they do teaching.

Now, if you will excuse me, I have a couple of boxes of Girl Scout cookies to eat.

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Three Enormously Bad Landing Page Copy Techniques

Do you have a landing page that is under-performing or not converting at all? If so, consider the fact that many landing pages out there follow three extremely flawed approaches for content creation. If your landing page falls into one of these three categories, it’s likely that any promotions, ads or other monetary boosters you try will fail as well, sinking more of your hard-earned money into a failing endeavor. Similarly, it’s unlikely that changing the design or aesthetics of your landing page will help.

 

Three Bad Landing Page Copy Strategies

So what are these three horribly horrible approaches to creating landing page copy?

1. Guessing at What Your Lead Wants to Read. This is how many landing pages are done: simply trying out random messages that might or might not have worked on other landing pages, to see the results. Unfortunately, this takes a lot of time and ultimately, costs you a lot of money in sales. Sure, guessing right the first time can be extremely easy and lucrative, but what are the odds you’ll guess right? Do you really know what you consumer wants to read, or are you too close to the sales aspect of the product to listen to the true consumer needs? Remember, guesswork is costly and most of the time, flat out wrong. If this is how you created your landing page, it’s time to reevaluate your under-performing copy.

2. Looking to the Competition. Okay, so every online marketer looks at what their competition does in order to keep their finger on pulse of the industry, but some of us use the competition as our basis for research. Figuring that the competition has done their marketing homework, we “borrow” from their landing pages and rewrite copy in the same vein as their copy. We figure, “They must know what they’re doing, so I’ll just do the same, we have the same demographic, after all.” But what if they are just guessing? Or what if they are dead wrong? You just anchored yourself to your competition’s success and furthermore, there’s now nothing to truly differentiate your two landing pages. Why should customers go to you instead?

3. Cliché Ad Copy. Finally, many marketers will turn to tired, old, boring and used cliché messages that they think sound good, they don’t. These messages don’t scream, “Buy me now!” They scream, “Help! I was written by a lazy marketer who might also be extremely corny!” Your message and copy need to mean something. If you aren’t the best-selling product, don’t call yourself that. Empty copy leaves prospects guessing. Be specific in the problems your product solves, it’ll be that much more impressive.

 

What’s the Right Way to Approach Landing Page Copy?

Now that you know the wrong way to approach writing copy for your landing page, what’s the best way? A little technique called Voice of Customer, or VOC. VOC is a marketing technique that relies on knowing your customer demographic in order to create viable copy that speaks directly to them in a language they prefer. VOC writing relies heavily on your understanding of your prospect’s problems and pain points, in other words, what do they need solved and what problems do they have with the solution you’re presenting.

When you know this, you can market the product or service in a manner that speaks directly to the lead, thereby eliminating friction. When you know their wants and needs, you can prioritize them accordingly, deconstructing each bit of friction with every line of copy on your landing page. This brings greater satisfaction to the lead as they read down the landing page and ultimately, all but guarantees the sale.

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The Importance of Unique Relevant Content

No matter what type of website you have, for Internet Marketing there are 3 words that mean more than anything else

Content is King

These three words should be remembered at all times and used as a reminder that on site SEO (search engine optimisation) is just as important as off site SEO for two particular reasons:

Search engines do assess the quality of content and it can elevate your rankings

It is ultimately what will impress potential customers and encourage them to buy.

Although we are talking about improving your search engine rankings in this email, the second point is an important one to remember because your website should still be designed with your customers in mind. Online marketing should take care of the search engines.

The content you need is…

a) High quality,
b) Unique to your site
c) Relevant to the products and services you are attempting to sell. If it does not check all three points then you are getting it wrong.

High quality content will not be crammed with keywords but will instead contain keywords scattered in the text to remind search engines of its purpose. It will be well written, make sense and be completely unique.
Unique content is exactly what the label suggests so it should be written specifically for your site rather than copied from someone else’s site. There are tools you can use to make sure that your content is unique so investing in one of them may not be a bad idea.

Finally, the content on your site should always be relevant to the topic in question. For example; if you sell hardware goods then putting up content about women’s fashion is not a good idea. So what difference does it make?

Most people that are new to maintaining a website will dismiss content as one of the last things they need to worry about but this is simply not the case. Having relevant and unique content on your site can make a world of difference to your rankings. It fulfils many of the criteria set by search engine algorithm for high ranking and can also help to draw traffic to your site.

After all, visitors need to be able to find what they are looking for.

With all of this in mind, you really must take the time to look at the content on your site. You need to make sure that it is of a high quality as well as being unique and relevant. However, there is another aspect of content that you absolutely MUST consider.

The concept of fresh content Fresh content is not a difficult concept to grasp. In fact, it is pretty simple to understand so you should have no difficulty with it. It is literally adding more articles, information and other such content to your site on a regular basis.

There are plenty of ways that you can add fresh content on a regular basis but there are some that are more popular than others. For example, most major sites have a blog or an article section that content is added to whereas others choose to have an RSS feed added. Whichever you decide to do, you should update it at least once a month if not once a week to achieve the results you want.

Why add fresh content?

Now you know what fresh content is and how to add it, you need to consider why you need to put the time and effort in. Well, it is primarily to attract two things to your website:

Spiders -No, not the eight legged kind but rather the search engine kind. Spiders crawl your site to update your ranking periodically based on the content there. If you do not update your site then a search engine may well visit less frequently in future. If you update it regularly then you will find that spiders drop by and your rankings change on a more regular basis.

Humans – If you want to build trust and invite visitors to come back again and again then fresh content is the way to do it. It gives the impression that your customers mean a lot to you and can keep your visitor number and conversion rates high.

There is one other point that should be made about adding fresh content on a regular basis and that is the overall effect it has on your site. It helps to build authority. The more relevant and fresh content you add, the greater the authority your website seems to have on the topic. This not only improves your ranking but also increases the number of other people and companies that are willing to link to you.

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What’s New for Internet Marketing in 2015?

So, right about now your newsfeed is probably littered with predictions for internet marketing in 2015, ringing in the New Year with “insider knowledge” in your pocket, blah, blah, baitclick. What a drastic change from each one of the past ten New Years blog trends, no? Do you want to know what is going to happen with internet marketing next year in no uncertain terms: the same thing that is happening right now.

The Most Exciting Prediction in the World

Here it is: trends are going to continue; they are not going to reverse. Things that are working right now are going to continue to work and slightly change as the weeks turn into months. Things that are not working any more will stop being used. If something new comes out that works, people will start to move towards that tool/technique.

Brilliant, no? Actually, what I’m really trying to get at here is that the current trends are only going to get more in-depth. And as for new trends, you’re going to have to keep your ear to the ground and your eyes to blogs to follow them. Don’t rely on a once a year prediction blog to set your internet marketing strategy for 2015, this is the age of real time pivoting and actionable metrics. If you aren’t plugged in 24/7, you’re run the risk of missing out on something big and falling behind.

If Marketing Trends Were Ponies Which Would I Bet On?

But if you are really dying to know what I think about the marketing trends that will be the hottest in this upcoming year, I guess I can put in some picks for you, but as I said, your best gauge for next year’s success is your own intuition and your own research. After all, isn’t it your money and livelihood on the line?

– Mobile marketing will continue to be on the top of everyone’s “must” list but honestly, unless you’re running a huge website, I’m going to go ahead and tell the truth: every one has been predicting this trend for the past four or five years. When are we “there” and not “striving for there” already? If your site isn’t mobile-friendly by now, chances are you’re not in business.

– SEO will continue to be blurred along with content creation and social media. What we have now is a digital marketing operation that is focused on driving traffic and sales. Or conversions. Or whatever you want to call them. The point is, the once finely delineated departments of internet marketing are all lumped together. Watch for this mixed cauldron to continue to be stirred until unrecognizable as separate entities.

– Content will still be king. SEO will still be dead. Everybody will continue to say it and argue about it, but the fact remains that the more quality content you have that is written for your customers and not for search engines the better ranking and sales you will have.

– Metrics and analytics will continue to be super-important as well real-time pivoting, so if you aren’t paying attention to what customer behavior yet, your time is rapidly drawing near to being “too late.”

Now, before you say there was nothing of value there, remember what I said earlier. You are the only one who can bring value to your internet marketing and it’s not going to come from the predictions of a quick email on 2015 internet marketing trends. I don’t care who writes it, the fact of the matter is, you have to pay attention year round if you want to get to the heart of the matter.

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How to have a successful business

 Even though this video is from almost 10 years ago – the message still rings true today.

CNBC’s talk show “The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch”, which ended in 2008, talked to successful businessmen and women about their histories and philosophies. Many of these talksended up providing some sound advice for would-be entrepreneurs.

One show in particular had Robert Greenberg (the CEO of Sketchers) discusses what distinguishes successful businesses from unsuccessful ventures.  Greenberg’s answer is simple – Persistence – “If you start down any road, there’s always going to be a left or right turn. You just can’t see it from the starting line,” Greenberg says. “Just don’t ever stop trying.”