MARKETING |ORGANISED

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A picture tells a thousand words

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Choosing the images to go with your company page on Facebook or Twitter profiles are key to how you want to be seen by your customer. One really good image can say what you do or what type of company you are in seconds, keeping potential customers on your profile for long enough for them to get to know more.

Beware the stock photo!

Stock photos are all very good and have a certain value but they need to be very carefully chosen so that they do not look like the awful corporate images seen everywhere.  Here is an amusing article about how cheesy stock photos might work for once: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/243613 (to promote the Unfinished Business launch).

Lost in translation

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Working with businesses who use multiple languages can be quite challenging. Everything, from titles and text, to captions for images and links to the correct language translation page needs to be thought of, including disclaimers and error messages.

The meaning of language

There is also the possibility that a marketing message can be lost in translation. What means one thing in English may not mean the same in another language and all use of colloquialisms and slang terminology has to be thought through carefully particularly where culturally it can cause insult (easy enough to do in a home language as it is).

Text spacing

Another complication with multiple languages is that the space required for one line of text in one language may translate into a much longer (or shorter) line of text in another, throwing layouts in adverts and menus on websites out.

Updating a website or email in multiple languages

Care needs to be taken when cutting and pasting translated text into emails or web pages too as if the content editor isn’t familiar with the language, they can’t know if they have made a mistake and they can’t proof-read either. It is a good idea to get the translator to check over the work once it has been completed.

Regardless of all the above, working on marketing material that reaches a wide range of audiences can be beneficial and well worth doing.

Which social media channel to use?

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Which social media channel do you use? Do you know why? Have you looked into whether the channel you are using suits your business or your target demographic and their buying habits or do you “have a Facebook page because everyone has one”?

Different social media sites for everyone

Different social media channels attract different generations, genders, financials and personalities. Do you know which is which? Want to find out more?

I do no marketing (at all)

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I don’t do marketing

.. I was told recently and I can’t help feeling this is foolish but then I am a marketer and I think it is essential for any business. Even if your business is doing nicely and ticking along, that may not always be the case. Then again you might be doing some invisible marketing – customer follow ups, trade shows or emails and calls to customer. Each touch with the customer is marketing, so it is really important to make sure that the receptionist is friendly and helpful. But I digress, I still believe that any business or all businesses should review their position regularly and formulate a cohesive plan for how to market their company.

Check your copy

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I have a number of amusing stories relating to proofreading (well, amusing to me but probably not always the person involved). I won’t recount them all here, but there was the time I was interviewed and the current brochure was passed across to me – with a glaring error on every one of the hundreds of copies they had just had printed! This is a bad when it is printed matter, but even worse when this kind of mistake is on a website where it is easier (and possible!) to change.

Key product information

There was the time I was ushered into probably the most impressive boardroom I have ever been in, all chrome and glass walls and a huge boardroom table, white boards, the works – you could have photographed it for a stock photo. Anyway, I wandered across to a promotional banner in the corner while I waited for the key client to appear and noticed the typo misspelling of their key product.

Proof reading is part of everyday business life

Proof reading should come as standard.  Every person who produces copy or marketing material, at the very least should check and double check it, but there is a more subtle requirement. If the company produces written material on behalf of a customer, like a report or quote, it must also be checked. It lends a level of professionalism to have accuracy and nothing says “slobby workmanship” like errors on a quotation.

Fresh view of your work

If you know that your written work is less than ideal, built in to your work habits to get a cross-check, get a colleague or friend to review your work before it goes out and even better make it a company procedure to get everything checked whenever possible to do so – two sets of eyes are always better than one, particularly if you have worked for any length of time on something, you can get ‘mistake-blind’.

Page speed insights

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I’ve done two SEO reports within the last couple of months for businesses in two different industries and both of them had serious page load issues. This can have a serious knock on effect for both SEO and engagement or conversion.

Optimise web images

Site 1, a luxury travel brand, had used big glossy images all over the site. They had the big splash banners that are so beloved by website designers and some lovely person had uploaded full-size high resolution images. The website didn’t have any image resizing software installed so the consequence was that each page took over 7 seconds to load. Optimising images is a complex task, but as a simple rule of thumb the image should be saved to web (72dpi) and not print resolution (300dpi).

Minimise site files

Site 2, an automotive accessory firm, had large css files and numerous javascript files, (there is a price to pay for that fancy slide automation!) each of which needed to load before the page could complete. These pages were taking over 12 seconds to load! This can be solved by minification of the files and Google themselves provide a number of links to online tools that can be used for this process.

Search engine ranking factor

Site speed is a key search engine ranking factor, cited as one of the top five ranking factors in 2015 by SEO experts. In addition to this, users will click away from the site if a page takes too long to load. There is research to demonstrate the drop off rate can be as dramatic as 11% in a second.  As engagement with pages is also a ranking factor, it is well worth checking your site to ensure that your pages are optimised to their best.  Not least to prevent loss of custom.