- Online PR Consultancy
- Twitter/Facebook CPC Exchange
- A Hyper-Focused Publication
- Become a website failure/improvement expert
- Online Marketing Dashboard
1. Online PR Consultancy
As mentioned in my last blog, Always the Tools Never the Content many marketers are going straight for the selection of free tools to try and enhance their web presence. “Lets Tweet, Facebook and YouTube it” is often the starting point of a marketing strategy. Rarely do you hear the cry “Lets think what we are going to say, understand what our customers need and understand the best channel to communicate with them”.
Eventually, disappointed marketers will turn to PR professionals for communication strategy advice. Online PR is a very different animal to traditional PR and requires a completely different set of skills. Knowing the editor of a publication isn’t as important as getting readers to digg or retweet the article, for example. The new marketer is the PR Agency that understands online culture not the Design Agency that understands CMYK and HTML.
2. Twitter/Facebook CPC Exchange
We trust recommendations from other consumers over ads. As Google PPC AdWords become increasingly expensive the cost of consumer recommendations stand a chance of becoming a currency. The purchase of retweets, Facebook posts or third party endorsements carry a monetary value to the charity, product or service company needing attention. Realizing this value is a challenge but it could be the new celebrity endorsement.
The successful facilitation of this service is a money-spinner!
3. A Hyper-Focused Publication
My Geneticly Modified Pig Grass Experiment
Deep and thin is better than shallow and wide. A publication that is hyper focused with a limited readership may seem like a bad business model but imagine you had the readership and trust of 400 top Biologists researching genetically modified grass within their universities and research laboratories in the UK and Ireland. What would a supplier of products to this market pay for their attention? This is a deep and thin slice of wealthy influential people.
What if you had the readership of those getting married in the next two years in your region? The average Bride is in charge of €20,000 and is looking to spend. What would a hotel pay for a really hot opportunity to talk to someone like this?
Newspapers are shallow and wide in terms of readership. They don’t hold the attention of those with a passion for niche subject or pastime. Their advertising model is ineffective. Set up your hyper-focused thin and deep publication, work hard and gain trust and then understand the value of good PR with an ad model together and you have revenues for a lifestyle business that exceeds most normal salaries.
4. Become a website failure/improvement expert
Recently the owner of a great company called IQcontent.ie explained to me that their customer was a walking boot manufacturer. The website was well designed in the sense that it looked pretty and had great photographs of the boot with loads of user recommendations.
The site got lots of traffic but visits that were not converting to sales. With limited market research they found that customers were put off because they couldn’t view the sole of the boot to understand how the grip worked in the wet. When new photos addressed the issue sales soared!
Many business owners can get so absorbed in perfecting their product/service, they often assume that the customer assumes the obvious. Sometimes it just takes a different approach to understanding what makes a website work. Your inquisitive and logical approach can be of massive financial value to your customer. Get a few case study stories and start to tell them to everyone you meet! The work will roll in.
5. Marketing Dashboard
I’ll come clean – this is my latest project. In the days of old marketing we had a good idea of what worked but didn’t have the evidence to properly measure where our marketing spend was actually working.
Today we have data in the form of analytics, open rates, click rates, unsubscribes, followers, retweets, SEO, PPC….etc. We have now inverted the problem of old marketing to the point that we can’t digest all of the statistics coming from all of our marketing channels.
Our latest product reports on each channel by way of a handy widget. More importantly it understands the connection between your email marketing campaign and the increase in traffic to your website and delivers holistic advice and analysis.
This business better take off! It’s a great time to start an internet business. What’s your idea?
