DIY copywriting, marketing and SEO

In 2011 I invested time and effort testing Twitter to see if I could make it turn a decent profit.

It worked, and these days I tweet regularly to generate new freelance copywriting business. It’s very lucrative.

But time and distance are wonderful things.

Having read through last year’s posts about making Twitter pay, I’ve finally realised I haven’t actually been marketing via Twitter. I have simply been networking. Duh!

So, I’ve come a full circle. Revisiting what I did last year, I don’t think you can make a success of marketing on Twitter. Marketing just isn’t intimate enough, you can’t automate intimacy and blatting out a load of hash tag-filled, sales led, link stuffed Tweets doesn’t cut the mustard.

In my experience, taking a bird’s eye view of last year’s testing, it’s one-on-one interaction that attracts new business via Twitter. Stuff like favouriting, re-Tweeting and replying, giving support, asking and answering questions and so on. In other words, classic networking activity.

In conclusion, networking on Twitter can generate a healthy ROI. It shouldn’t be a surprise when you think about it. Twitter is, after all, a network.

All of which proves that taking a regular, dispassionate look at your marketing efforts generates extremely useful insights!

(Thanks to http://www.sxc.hu/profile/Cieleke for the royalty-free image)

Thanks to Marc Mathieu, Senior VP of Marketing at Unilever, for his excellent Marketing Week quote about achieving marketing success in today’s tricky economic climate: 

“Success requires people who are human beings first and marketers second to do marketing for people who are human beings first and foremost, not just consumers”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Happy New Year!

It’s been a whirlwind year full of marketing dramas and crises, excitement, gloom and doom. Here’s the top 5 marketing lessons to learn from 2011, possibly the most exciting twelve months marketers have enjoyed for decades.  

1. Google algorithm updates wreaked havoc with search positions and as a result fresh, good quality on-site content became more important than ever. What to do in 2012? Keep your site fresh and pack it with interesting, relevant, useful information
2. Social Media Marketing grew to epic proportionswith Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn leading the pack. Is Google Plus a social network too many? Only time will tell. The only certainty is things will continue to change… fast! So stay alert. 
3. conversion analysis came into its own, with more online businesses using their web stats to determine how to turn more visitors into buying customers. Remember that knowledge is power and keep a close eye on your stats for 2012
4. keyword stuffing finally died a nasty but well-deserved death. Once much more clunky, today’s search engine algorithms are sensitive enough to ‘see’ what a web page is about without site owners having to resort to gobbledegook. So you’re free to write well! 
5. mobile web took off like a rocket. Owners of complicated, fiddly, fancy websites found they didn’t display correctly on a small screen. But sites with flat, simple structures and clean code performed perfectly well on mobiles, smartphones and tablets. Good news when search engines and most humans prefer simplicity and clarity too

On a personal level this year, my sixth as a freelance writer, has been a gem. Thank you so much to my lovely clients, who have trusted me to make their businesses work better using the power of the written word. It’s been great. Here’s to 2012!

Just for fun… in case you missed my Twittter poem last week on Twitter itself, here it is again: a true short story in six 140 word tweets.

In old Ibiza town, rounding a dusty, sunset-drenched, high-walled corner, heat blinded and dizzy, we’re stopped in our tracks by…  a vision.

At least seven feet tall. Somewhere between Roman statue and Greek god. Striding through the low slung late sun’s rays, casting huge shadows.

Bronze smooth. Glistening musculature moving like solid brass Victorian machinery. Dwarfing the ancient, higgledy-piggledy Ibizan buildings.

Wearing pure white buttock peeping shorts. Gigantic Caterpillar boots. Navy blue and white sailor cap set jauntily upon sculpted blonde hair

Bare chest with gleaming slabs of six pack. Dazzling turquoise eyes. The chiselled jawline of a Mills & Boon hero. Vast Desperate Dan fists.

Scented, oiled and beaming, he crunches past us along the sandy road leaving two ordinary mortals astonished and amazed in his splendid wake.

(Thanks to http://www.sxc.hu/profile/skizof for the excellent royalty-free image)

Perversely, I enjoy getting spam. It’s a valuable exercise in how not to do email marketing!   

The subject line of one of today’s spam messages asks if I have “Enough passion for these hotter nights?”  It’s snowing in Woodingdean right now and hotter nights are a distant dream. Wrong hemisphere, chaps.

In the context of spam it doesn’t matter much. The whole campaign is crap anyway, coming from the ‘if you throw enough poo at the wall some of it will stick’ school of marketing. But it would harm your business’s reputation if you sent a summer-led offer to hot prospects in the southern hemisphere in the middle of their winter. And your campaign would probably flop.

If you’re planning an international email marketing campaign, examine your offer and the way it’s presented logically before pressing the button. Think about things like:

• the seasons – If you’re basing your offer or creative treatment on how hot or cold it is, make sure you get your hemispheres right!
• messaging – Something that’s fine in the UK might offend people in other countries
• colloquialisms – We’re a nation of punners. But puns, wryness, colloquialisms and irony don’t translate well
• culture – Here’s an example. North Americans praise each other all the time, whereas we’re more circumspect. They blow their own trumpets louder than we do, too. Just look at a few US B2B websites and you’ll see what I mean. We speak the same language… but we’re very different people
• imagery –  make sure your imagery doesn’t alienate, but resonates with people in your target countries
• Zeitgeist – What’s affecting consumers and businesses in your target countries right now? Does your marketing message address, reflect or tap into the population’s concerns and enthusiasms?

My top seven international email marketing tips

1. segment your data by country
2. research each country’s market thoroughly
3. alter your creative treatment for each country, informed by your research
4. act on empirical response and conversion information…
5. … but remember the fewer people you email, the less reliable your statistics
6. always test new creative treatments and offers against a control segment to gauge relative performance accurately
7. be aware of confirmation bias, where we ignore evidence that doesn’t match our opinions and convictions. We kid ourselves with ease. But the numbers never lie

(Thanks to http://www.sxc.hu/profile/silviadg for the gorgeous royalty-free image)