What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

Happy Monday everyone! I hope you’re week is off to an amazing start and that you have time for some reading today as I come with interesting suggestions.

If you’re planning to boost your e-commerce sales through blogging, Michael Martine of Remarkablogger has 10 wonderful tips to help you achieve your goals.

Ian Lurie of Conversation Marketing explains a very important interdependence: social media and SEO go together and can’t possibly be separated.

We all want to increase our traffic. And Ted Demopoulos of Blogging and Business has some great tips for us to read and apply.

Erica Douglass from Erica.biz is determined to show us how to obtain a difficult, yet rewarding goal: making a million dollars with our business.

As word of mouth is such a powerful marketing tool, we all want others to talk about us and, more importantly, our business. Dawud Miracle explains how to get the conversation started.

As this week seems to be dedicated to 10-tip lists, here’s another exciting collection: read NetBusinessBlog to improve local search rankings in Google.

If you were wondering how not to pitch to a blogger, here’s Eric Karjaluoto’s (Ideas on Ideas) take on bad blog PR.

From tips, moving on to 10 commandments: Beth Kanter of Beth’s Blog: How Non Profits Can Use Social media has recently published the 10 commandments of of panel discussions.

And if you’re ever using Typepad and want to switch to Wordpress, stop by Confident writing first and read Joanna’s Young guide to the move.

I do hope you’re able to find something useful on this list. See you all next week when I promise to be back with more interesting articles for you to enjoy. Have a lovely Monday and week!

Alina

There are some who believe bad PR only comes from failed or irresponsibly planned actions of public relation specialists. It actually also comes from having no PR to handle negativity associated with a certain company. There’s also this ongoing belief that not all companies need PR, because they see PR as just some people trying to get stories into the newspapers.

Yet here’s the example revealing how PR can help you better communicate with existing and prospect customers. Let’s take a construction company. Negotiations are mostly based on different things than the number of articles on the papers. Old projects are analyzed, those hiring them want to know if they work effectively, if they finish on time and if they can adapt to new challenges throughout a project.

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I believe Generali is a great insurance company. My experience with them has been really pleasant. But their Marketing and PR team really needs a little scolding. Why, read on and you’ll find out!

My car insurance is a mixed product of Genrali and my bank, ING. It’s supposed to expire in 15 days. So today, I got a letter from Generali. I opened it anxiously and what do I get? A scary notification saying my insurance policy will be canceled in 20 days.

After three paragraphs of scary legal stuff, I get the reason why this happens. They have a new and improve insurance package that they distribute through Generali! Really now? Wow, that’s not really scary at all.

How they should have packaged this information? If you have to send the legal stuff, then send it, but put it on a separate page. The first page should be something like this:

Dear X, (surely better than Notification)

Thank you for being our customer in the past year. We’d like to tell you we’ve got this hot new product for ING Office and as your old insurance is about to expire, why don’t you find out more about it.

By the way, we’ve included some legal mumbo jumbo on the second page. But basically we have this new cool thing to make your life better.

Cheers,

Generali

I would have definitely avoided a huge scare, wondering if there’s something wrong I did to receive such a formal notification.

I am going to take Generali’s product for another year. But this letter definitely didn’t help me reach that decision. So I suggest a nice bonus for the rest of their personnel and some kind of training for those handling their communication with customers.

What I think you shouldn’t have missed last week…

A new week has just started and I am back with a reading list to keep you busy for a while. Hope you enjoy it at least as much as you’ve enjoyed previous roundups.

The Homeless Tales is a rather new blog documenting the journey of a homeowner turned homeless through the days and nights of having nowhere to go. Here’s a slice of this amazing story, e lesson of discovering the true beauty surrounding us even in the hardest moments of our existence.

Jonathan Fields has taken us on a slogan train wreck, showing us how a bad choice of words, although funny to some, may end up driving most customers away.

If you were wondering how many customer reviews it takes to have online shoppers press the “buy now” button, David Wilson of Social Media Optimization has the right answer.

As additional proof that the road to hell is paved with good intentions is always welcome, Drew McLellan of Drew’s Marketing Minute shows us how employees saying a bit too much to customers about you and your business can do a lot of harm.

When it comes to social media, there’s no problem in doing a little self promoting. Or at least that’s the opinion of Janelle, one of the Create Business Growth contributors.

Liz Fuller of Business and Blogging has applied the Pareto Principle to blogging and has also proved her theory, give or take 5%.

If you’re a marketer, this is something you really need to read. Chris Brogan points out, again, that the marketing message should be what the customers actually want to here, not something they couldn’t care less about.

As always, I hope you find at least one useful suggestion in this Monday list. I’ve surely left out quite a few interesting entries of last week’s blogging world, so feel free to add your own recommendations in the comments section. See you next week!

If you want to create any kind of marketing literature, from personalized emails to brochures and flyers with samples attached to it, you must have a target in mind. That target is the public segment you want to address. That group of people needs to be properly selected and the message you want to convey needs to be build around their set of ideas, principles, likes and/or dislikes.

Now that you have your targeted audience and the envelopes you want to send out are ready, you need some contact details of real people matching the image of your prospect customer. Now, if you’re product is rather expensive and you want to select middle and top managers from local companies, that sounds like a great idea. But make sure they fit your initial profile! Having the money to buy your product is not enough

Let me introduce you to the real-life failure example that triggered this post. Vichy thought to send out samples of its newest products to all women managers in Bucharest (or maybe in other cities as well). So I got one of their nice envelops with nicely printed brochures and samples of a new foundation and cream. All nice up to now.

And the weird part kicks in: I AM 26!!! I really don’t need samples of a very effective anti-wrinkle product. Really! I might be worried about preventing wrinkles and fighting some small ones annoying me, but really, seeing the photo of a 50 something woman who’s in their main target won’t help make my mind about purchasing Vichy products! I’ll just think you’re not paying enough attention to what you’re doing or that those in your MK team handling this project suck. Or that you’ve selected a cheap subcontractor to get the contact details and that shows. If Vichy’s really, really lucky, I might give the samples to my mom. Then again, I might not.

The bottom line here: keep your audience in mind throughout every step of your marketing action. Just thinking of a great concept and writing the texts to suit your target won’t do much if you then get lost on the way and the message gets to someone who’s not even close to your intended public.