5 Online Marketing Tips for the Holidays

The fast-approaching holidays and New Year offer a great opportunity for reflection. Below are 5 blog posts from Underwire over the past year. They are the blog posts that are most popular on the site and undoubtedly a good reminder of online marketing tips for the upcoming year.

1. Internet Marketing: How to Measure Success
If you’re not measuring the results of your marketing efforts, then you are wasting money. This post offers 3 steps to planning, measuring and improving online campaigns. Learn how to establish measurable indicators, determine your cost per conversion, and set the value.

2. Seven Sentence Online Marketing Plan
Based on Guerrilla Consulting’s 7 Sentence Marketing Plan, this post presents the 7 Sentences Marketing Plan for Online Marketing. See how easy it is to write an online marketing plan, and why it is an important document to create before you begin an online campaign.

3. A Quick Guide to Reading Webstats
My partner James’ original quick guide to understanding webstats continues to be a frequently requested document. If you need to make sense of the numbers in your website traffic report, this is the post for you. Simple, clear instructions on what is important and what you can ignore.

4. Email Newsletters: 6 Mistakes to Avoid
Email marketing is still a strong component of the marketing mix. This 20-minute video is a presentation I gave to the Vancouver League of Drupalers (the Vancouver Drupal users group) on designing and developing an email newsletter.

5. Ask for Support: Excel Tip for Finding Duplicates
Metrics and measurements seem to go hand in hand with spreadsheets. This Microsoft Excel tip for finding duplicates in a spreadsheet continues to be a popular page on the blog so here’s a reference link to it. Do you want more Excel tips? I have them. Just email me with Ask for Support and I will post the answer on the blog.

What else do we think about?
Steal this Idea: Buying Futures of Gasoline. In April 2006, James was thinking of gas futures and business opportunities around the fear of gas price hikes.

AdHack: People-Powered Advertising. Speaking of smarty pants James, he has started a new company called AdHack, which is a way for businesses to outsource advertising creative to their fan community. It’s an interesting approach to the conversation economy. The production, distribution and consumption of products and services is more and more influenced by the conversations people have with each other rather than by the big brand messages we are presented by companies or their advertising agencies.

Too much to think about?
Look at my favourite photos from Jordan and Egypt.

Define: Conversation Marketing

WOM (word of mouth), people-powered, social media ... these are all words we use to talk about internet marketing strategies for talking to our customers.

The word of the day is now Conversation Marketing.

Conversation Marketing builds on the idea that we, as businesses, need to talk to our customers in a human voice. We need to move away from the corporate PR voice and adopt a friendly, more transparent approach to the sales and marketing of our products and services.

Conversation is a natural human behaviour. We talk. We talk to each other about the things we like, don’t like, the services that were good, the ones that were bad. We act as a filter for each other, and we build up or tear down the reputation of companies through our daily comments.

As an internet marketers, we have to be conversationalists. We build relationships through conversation. And in order to market products and services, we need to be good at constructing conversations. It’s like being good at small talk. Are you able to listen and create something interesting and engaging out of what’s going on around you?

And for marketers, the small talk is important because the big brand messages aren’t sinking in the way they were in those wonder days that are glorified by MadMen. Plus the small talk is the marketing glue. Blog posts, customer reviews, feedback emails, these are all larger conversations happening about companies, products and services. In addition, we also live in a world of text messages, StumbleUpon thumbs up or down, TinyURL and Twitter. A world of small talk: 140 characters.

Your marketing messages are still important. But the storytelling that happens around those messages is much more interesting: the small talk, the glue, the conversation.