The world is divided into those who hate Valentine’s Day, those who celebrate Valentine’s Day, and those who fall into both categories.
As demonstrated in Facebook posts, people hate Valentine’s Day because it’s a “Hallmark holiday” or “commercial holiday,” or holiday that essentially places too much emphasis on buying cards and other material gifts.
Since the National Retail Federation estimated that last year’s revenue for Valentine’s Day purchases would be close to $16 billion, it’s clear that Valentine’s Day is, in fact, a commercial holiday. Last year, people were expected to spend an average of $116.21 on Valentine’s Day.
If you’re in e-commerce, this means that you want to take advantage of Valentine’s Day sales.
But you already know that you can develop a theme or strategy to market your products or services for Valentine’s Day. We’re all familiar with the ubiquitous pink and red heart decorations, and copy everywhere seems to incorporate words like “cherish.” However, content marketers need to focus more on the truth behind Valentine’s Day.
Valentine’s Day marketing is typically so full of frills and gimmicks that you can set yourself apart just by cutting down on the fluff. That is, if artificiality is what people really hate about Valentine’s Day, then some honesty will feel refreshing.
February is the perfect time to try a more direct approach to giving customers what they want—not what you want them to want. Whether you’re outlining sales points on a web page or sending out an email, try reducing the sales-speak and just be as straightforward as possible. Customers will appreciate your openness, and this is a practice you can continue year-round.
Show your customers some love
Ineffective content marketing is like giving a gift to your Valentine and forgetting why you’re doing it. Sure, you want to impress your significant other, but aren’t you really just trying to express love and fortify your relationship? You shouldn’t give gifts just for the sake of giving gifts, and you also want to avoid gifts that are showy but insubstantial.
As a copywriter or content marketer, you face the same difficulties a gift-giver does. Instead of focusing on using content to sell something, we need to concentrate our efforts on giving customers valuable information. Valentine’s Day offers the perfect opportunity to give something to customers rather than trying to get something from them (or try to make ourselves look good.)
For example, you can give customers a promotion or discount in honor of Valentine’s Day. Besides good value, customers want information, so you can offer them a useful (but non-promotional) eBook, whitepaper, or webinar. Other general marketing strategies, such as holding contests or giveaways, can help get customers fully engaged with your brand. A kind gesture of your appreciation that truly gets at the meaning behind Valentine’s Day could increase customer loyalty and increase your business in the long run. So get creative and give your customers a worthy Valentine’s Day gift.
*Image provided by Enchant_me
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Fathom's Kurt Krejny will be speaking at the Social Media Strategies Summitt (SMSS) 2012 conference in Las Vegas, Nevada on February 7. His 2-hr. afternoon workshop—"Twitter Analysis & Action: Cater to Followers and Attract Key Influencers to Get Results that Matter!"—takes place from 3:15-5:15. The three-day conference happens February 7-9th at The Mirage. Registration for this and other social media workshops is available online.
Kurt's Twitter workshop will cover:
- A walkthrough of free and paid tools to analyze Twitter follower data
- Refining Twitter strategy through Facebook and YouTube
- Developing personas based on your follower research
- Creating an engagement strategy that solves problems
Not everything that happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. You can follow all the event action using the official Twitter hashtag: #SMSS. Additionally, you can get updates from the conference organizers on Twitter by following @GSMIonline.
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Calls to action or "CTA’s" are typically reserved for PPC campaigns, but they shouldn’t be. Most title tags and meta-descriptions are not written to attract the end user, and they should be. Getting a solid call-to-action within your organic listing can have a huge impact on your bottom line (assuming of course: the right keywords, conversion techniques, offerings, etc.). Think about what would happen with your PPC campaigns if you used the same copy that’s reserved for your title tag. I bet your click-thru rate would plummet. Better yet, think what would happen if you used the most effective PPC ad copy in the title tag on your organic page. You would have a significant increase in traffic for that page.
But, I could lose my rankings?
I get it—if you’re on the first page in a top position for one of your keywords, it’s risky to rock the boat by changing a title tag. You could lose your top position or worse yet, move a couple pages back in Google. It does happen occasionally, and it’s a calculated risk. But I think the risk is justified ... here’s why:
First, the best scenario would have been to get compelling calls to action in your title tag and meta-description before getting on the first page, but that’s not always realistic. Setting that aside, if you properly built out the site architecture, content on the page, and incoming links— essentially doing your SEO due diligence—then small changes to your title tag and meta-description shouldn’t make a huge negative impact. And if there are repercussions, they will likely result in a small loss in rankings (position #2 to #4, for example), which could actually be a good thing.
Here’s why: Let’s say you’re currently in position #2. We’ve seen that position #2 can generate 10% of Google’s estimated search traffic, while position #4 can generate 6%. If you move from position 2 to 4, you should expect to see a decrease in traffic by at least 4%, right?? WRONG! If you’ve included a solid CTA ("free trial," "buy now," "download the guide," "contact us," etc.) then you’re likely to see an increase in traffic because your listing in Google is that much more compelling and will attract a greater number of clicks.
Below are a few examples of results on Google's first page for a search for “network security solutions.” I like the contact information and bolded exact phrase on the first listing. The second two could use some help:
In summary, title tags and meta-descriptions should be written for more than just search engines. They should be written for end users in order to grab their attention. Get some solid calls-to-action in place, and you’ll reap the benefits in traffic which should equate to leads and revenue. At Fathom, we build our SEO programs from the ground up with this in mind.
1 Comment »I’m sure you’ve all heard and read enough about the painful missing information from our Google Analytics organic search traffic, the (not provided) data. Yep, it’s not over. If you haven’t heard about it yet, you can read it on Google’s blog.
I’ve been tracking this so-called “(not provided)” data since Oct. 17th, and the results are interesting. I have pulled together data from 10 sites in various industries which includes e-commerce, education, health, manufacturing, lead generation, and our very own site. Daily visitors range between 3 million to less than 1K and anywhere from 60K to under 100K in daily organic search traffic.
Figure 1 is a chart that shows a week-by-week comparison of the (not provided) data from 10/17 to 1/8. The chart is too large to fit this space so be sure to click the image for a much better view. Click here to see the numbers.
Figure 1
Site 9 and 10 were the most interesting as it climbs the scale for the percentage of (not provided) search traffic. I suspected education would be the front runner of them all. I guess our younger generations are not all that interested in Google Docs, Gmail or even Google+. Are you surprised?
Now take a look at Figure 2 below.
Figure 2
This chart shows a different perspective for the (not provided) search traffic. Below are the numbers. Again, Education is still not the front-runner, but we’re still in the early stages of this (not provided) dilemma.
Figure 3
Figure 1 and Figure 3 are simple segments from Google Analytics. I’m just pulling keywords with an exact match to (not provided), and you’ll see the percentage. Now, calculating the amount of (not provided) divided by the number of organic (Google) search traffic, you’ll see a widely different percentage in Figure 4.
Figure 4
The metrics are amazing across various industries, aren’t they?
So what metric did Google project its >10% search-engine traffic on? Was it week by week? One month at a time? Or did it combine several months to project >10%?
No matter what percentage we look at, they will continue to rise now that Google has launched ‘Search Plus Your World.’ What will the impact be on the (not provided) search traffic? We’ll have to report back once we gather some data.
What are your percentages and what metrics or segments are you using to get your (not provided) information?
A few colleagues in our field have come up with some interesting points: that it’s not totally the end of the world. So let’s move forward and discover what we can do with this information to make the best of it. Check out Avinash’s post and David Harry’s post for tips and value from this (not provided) data.
No Comments yet, your thoughts are welcome. »Last spring, Google AdWords announced some policy changes that would affect all AdWords advertisers. This particular policy change dealt with privacy policies. Google stated to better protect people’s personal and financial information, a clear, accessible disclosure must be presented to visitors before they submitted any personal information. So our account teams did our due diligence and went through our clients' landing pages to review them and see if they were going to be compliant to Google’s new policy change.
Fast-forward to early December….
I log in to one of my accounts and notice that this particular client had no clicks or impressions for that day. After digging through this account, I noticed that all of the ads were listed as “site suspended due to privacy policy.” I quickly checked the landing pages we were employing and found that we indeed were in violation as 1 of our roughly 25 landing pages was missing a link to a privacy policy (we had been running some landing page tests and used an older page that was missing the privacy policy).
We acted quickly and updated the page. I then reached out to our account reps at Google to expedite the review process to get our account back online. After a day, I received word that we were still in violation. However, even though each page had a privacy-policy link, Google deemed the client’s privacy policy not sufficient enough to pass.
So, without further ado, here is what you need to include in your privacy policy to be Google-compliant.
The Privacy Policy on the website should include the following required information:
- What personal information is collected from the user
- How this information will used by the company
- How the company transfers data to third-party companies
- How to modify/delete this information or opt-out
- A contact address for the business in case of questions
Placement of Privacy Policy
That Privacy Policy should be easily accessible for the user on all landing pages before he provides any personal information.
My favorite part of this entire exercise: While in the process of getting my client’s privacy policy revised with their legal team, Google re-enabled our ads without any updates being made to our previously frowned-upon privacy statement.
We here at Fathom value your privacy! To learn more about how you can benefit from any of the services offered by Fathom, contact us today. We promise to not sell your information to any Viagra suppliers.
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