THINKing

Best Marketing Links To Get You Ready For 2008

This is the last THINKing post of 2007. I have scoured the Internet looking for marketing-related information that will help you get ready for the new year of marketing. So, here we go:

23 Surefire Small Business Marketing Tips

Harry Hoover’s EzineArticle Page

Five-Step PR Plan – 2008

Marketing Planning Calendar Template (pdf)

How To Write A Strategic Advertising Plan

Blog Strategic Planning

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Top 10 Marketing Blogs

Jason Falls at Social Media Explorer posted last week about his top 10 RSS feeds to read regularly. This is my list of top 10 marketing blogs to read either by RSS or online. They are not in any priority order.

Copyblogger bills itself as copywriting tips for online marketing. Brian Clark, the copyblogger himself, writes tight and in a compelling manner. His advice will make anyone a better writer.

Social Media Explorer is one of my favorites because Jason Falls clearly understands – and is able to clearly articulate – the rules of the ever evolving social marketing milieu. If you want to know how to utilize social media effectively without breaking the unwritten social media laws, read this blog.

Brains On Fire is all about the brand. Bloggers there write smart and tight.

Best Of The Web – from the Wall Street Journal – is not a marketing blog. But it is on my list anyway because James Taranto is such a great writer. His plays on words are superb.

Conversation Agent says it is about connecting people and ideas. Valeria Maltoni is the guiding force behind the blog. She understands brand engagement and how that translates into the digital world. Another smart writer. Seems to be a theme, huh?

Duct Tape Marketing is ostensibly about simple, effective small business marketing. However, any marketer can pick up great ideas from blogmeister John Jantsch.

Dosh Dosh is the brainchild of Maki, a Canadian philosophy student, who says the blog is about making money online. Yeah, it does that but it does so much more.

Mashable keeps me fully apprised of all the social networking news I need. They have it covered.

Marketing Profs and its blog Marketing Profs Daily Fix provide a one-two punch of marketing expertise. The mothership shares the expertise of guest marketers in long form and the blog gives you pithier snippets of marketing goodness.

Publicity Hound is all about PR. Joan Stewart, the hound herself, knows media relations inside and out.

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Write Tight

My first news editor hammered one thing into my consciousness: write tight. Leave out the frills, just present the facts and move on.

Many people who think they are writers want to commit an act of literature every time they let the creative muse out of the bottle. Write tight is good advice no matter what you are writing, but especially today when you are developing search engine keyword ads.

Here’s why. The typical Google ad headline has a 25 character count maximum. Description lines one and two cannot exceed 35 characters each. Tolstoy and Faulkner would be in trouble. Let’s review some best practices for writing text, or pay-per-click ads.

Preparation Is Paramount. As in all marketing, the prep work is crucial in writing text ads. Carefully define your audience. Who are they from a demographic, psychographic and geographic perspective? Are they 16-year-olds whose raging hormones are blocking their ability to reason, or time-stressed 50-year-old IT executives? Get inside their heads. Determine what keywords they would search out. Once you have a few keywords identified, use one of the free keyword research tools to beef up your list.

Generate Action. Major companies may have the money to place “brand” ads for the purpose of generating impressions. This is not the purpose of a text ad. Its purpose is to create clicks. Think about what call-to-action phrases would make your target audience respond. For the 16-year-old it may be “get your ringtones now.” For the IT executive it may be “download our whitepaper.” Do you have a service that will solve a problem? Then, say something like “Do the job in half the time”, or “Improve your sex life.”

Less Is More. High concepts and the complex have no place in text ads. Twenty word headlines tend to force the marketer to be simple. Plays on words and attempts at humor usually fall flat in this genre. Simply tell the consumer what your offer is and don’t play games to try to get the consumer to click. You want only those consumers who will have some interest in your offer to come to your website. Tricks for clicks is a waste of money.

Make An Offer. If you have an attractive offer, use it. Offering a lower price? Say so: “10% Off”. Free is still the most powerful word in advertising. If that’s your offer, feel free to say “Free.” Just not in all caps, OK?

Mark Twain once said, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” This won’t wash in writing text ads. Take your time. Get it right. Write tight.

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Website Grader Gives Us A 95

We have used Website Grader before to see how our website and blog rank. We’re moving up in the world. Today’s grade: 95. Here’s The Report For my-creativeteam.com

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Survey Says…

My Creative Team member and longtime colleague and friend, Mark Harrison, wrote a piece about the effective use of surveys for our most recent Think newsletter. This article contends that many marketers go about surveys the wrong way. It’s all about the company, not about the user. Mark says,

What we want to do is get a fresh insight into who you are in your customers’ eyes. What does your role in their business mean to them? We need to determine whether the features and benefits of your offerings, which you spent hours and dollars developing, are really the features and benefits that keep that customer interested in conducting business with your company. You want to get out of your head and into theirs to find out what makes them tick. Your success, it seems, lies closest to the approach that you take with the survey and how you process and act upon what you learn.

Excellent advice, and I recommend that you read the entire article.

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Christmas Break

Turn off the computer and enjoy the Christmas holiday. That’s what I am doing. See you back here in a few days.

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Top 10 RSS Feeds

Social Media Explorer lists its top 10 RSS must read blog feeds this morning. Nice piece, and I’m not just saying that because THINKing is in it. No, really.

I’ll be giving some thought to the question of my top 10  and addressing that next week.

In the interim, what are your top reads? Please wade into the discussion here or at Social Media Explorer.

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StumbleUpon Two-Step

StumbleUpon can be an enormous traffic generator for bloggers and marketers. I use it all the time. And I just tested what I call the StumbleUpon Two-Step technique of driving traffic, and it also worked well to drive traffic. Let’s review how I did it.

Recently I launched a PRWEB release about Holiday For Charity. In the release, I had links back to my blog for additional details about the story. I used these tags in the release: holiday, charity, cause marketing, charitable giving, holiday for charity, holiday spending, donation, gift, ad agency, and pr firm.

A month after launching the release, I gave it a thumbs up on StumbleUpon, placed it in the living category and used the cause marketing and charity tags. I had 118 – and still counting – visits referred by that Stumbled url. Based on my PRWEB statistics for the release, I had more than 200 visits from Stumblers on the day I thumbed it up. So, a very high percentage of visitors to the release made the leap to my blog, too.

I have some ideas to test that may bring even more traffic by the two-step method. Do you have any ideas on how to use this or other Stumble techniques? Post your thoughts.

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Where’s Mikey?

A great way to bring a brand to life is through mascots. They can be used in marketing and PR efforts.

My Creative Team has living logo and top creative, Mikey, a.k.a. Mike Reative. As you’ll see in the photo below, Mikey took the entire team on a trip to the US National Whitewater Center. He also has been seen Christmas shopping and visiting client locations. You’ll be seeing more of Mikey in 2008. Keep a sharp eye out. Or, even send us your ideas of where you think Mikey should appear.

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Top Presidential Candidate 2008 Websites

Hitwise gives us an update on which presidential candidate websites are getting the most traffic. Top Presidential Candidate 2008 Websites

Ron Paul, the Libertarian turned almost Republican, leads the way. This is no surprise. Paul has taken aim at the Internet like no other candidate, and is raising a ton of money online.

A few other links at the Hitwise election center you might like, if you are a political junky:

Top Democratic Candidate Websites

Top Republican Candidate Websites

Top 10 Presidential Candidate Search Terms 

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