$10 for a promoted update on Facebook earned me $7500

April 10, 2013 By 10 Comments

James Royal LawsonEarlier this year I ran a Facebook campaign. I paid to promote a status update I made on my Facebook business page. I got an ROI (so far) of 75000%.

As a small business owner, I’m faced with a multitude of marketing options both free and paid, time consuming and mindlessly quick.

I’m also a digital strategist, so I have a slightly easier time with the digital initiatives than I perhaps do with the analogue ones.

Even so, there’s only so much you can guess or hypothesise before you need to dip your toes in the water.
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8 Actionable Marketing Tips

January 4, 2012 By Leave a Comment


Actionable marketing is one of the key secrets to growing your business online.

By actionable marketing, I don’t mean the kind of creepy online marketing that gets you busted. I mean marketing that persuades visitors to your website to take a specific action.

Great copyrighting and design strategy should, as an example, result in visitors to your landing pages taking the action you want them to such as signing-up for a newsletter or trading their email address for a free ebook.

1. Target Your Audience

For your marketing to hit home you have to understand your audience inside and out. You need to know the demographics, their likes and dislikes, where they hang out online and where they don’t. In this way you can ensure that you or your team develop tailor-made content marketing for your audience. Giving visitors to your site exactly what they want or need will give you the very best chance of them completing the desired action whether it’s signing up to your newsletter or purchasing a product.

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Think Content Marketing, Not Copywriting

January 2, 2012 By 10 Comments


Great copywriting is meant to prompt visitors to your website to take action like sign-up for an email newsletter or purchase a product on a landing page.

Content marketing, on the other hand, is copywriting’s big brother; it’s blogs, podcasts, ebooks, white papers and video that are created directly for the purpose of marketing.

If you’re new to digital marketing, a first time business owner or just setting yourself up as a consultant, before you think about investing in professional copywriting services to tighten up or even create the copy on your website, it’s important to understand that online marketing is not just an online CV or newspaper ad.

Online content marketing, for example, is NOT:

  • a salesy landing page pimping your products or services!
  • or an advertising banner you see down the side of your Facebook page
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The No1 Reason Direct Mail is Dying

August 29, 2011 By 11 Comments

DirectMail

I spent half an hour on the phone last week explaining to a sales executive that I really didn’t want to invest 8,000 USD (50, 000 SEK) of a client’s money on an advert in a magazine.

To explain:

I handle the marketing and advertising for a couple of educational clients. For one in particular we’ve focused on social media channels and online marketing for the last couple of years and it’s been a success.

Every autumn ahead of the annual student recruitment drive I get bombarded by portals, sites, newspapers and advertising executives trying to persuade me to persuade my client to invest in their services.

Typically prices start out massively high but the minute I play hardball the price comes down. Last year many traditional print outlets were offering half their initial asking price the minute I declined their first offer.

The exec who called me last week didn’t try that. Instead, she tried to persuade me that a magazine sent home to every 15-16 year old in the Stockholm region was cutting edge marketing this year. Then she threw in the fear factor.

“All the big schools are going to be with,” she said. “They’ve chosen to go with us.”

I was immediately suspicious. She was trying to scare me into buying advertising space. [Read more...]

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Creative Approaches to B2B Marketing

August 4, 2010 By 30 Comments

I‘m a firm believer in creative online content. The kind of content that makes you stop and soak it in for a moment – like the Old Spice videos. Or a Seth Godin E-book.

creative content

Go on, get creative!

If you’re working in the B2B sector and looking to marketing your services or products online you need to embrace creativity if your content marketing is going to dazzle and increase sales.

Content is King, But Creativity is Queen

I don’t mean that you should put creativity or razzmatazz ahead of substance; getting your key value proposition across is essential. Nevertheless, the creativity that underscores a piece of online content is an important part of the marketing process. The Net has all but replaced TV as the go-to medium but text alone is losing some of its sparkle; in the last two years video and audio have begun to feel just as natural on the Net. After all, there’s a reason YouTube is the number 2 search engine on the planet!

Creative Strategies

With the Net increasingly the domain of mixed (or multi) media, content marketing strategies have had to change. Getting traffic to your website isn’t just a matter of great writing. It’s also about search engine optimization, participation across social media channels, and building communities of engagement.

Throwing money at a project isn’t the be all and end all of strategy. Sure, large companies may be able to throw money at creative teams in the pursuit of standout content, but that doesn’t always ensure success. Just ask Cisco. They aped the Old Spice campaign and no one seemed to notice. [Read more...]

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Teach for Reach

June 9, 2010 By 9 Comments

Whilst your content marketing might be entertaining, informative, snappy and sexy, you might want to try teaching for reach.

For example, if you run a copywriting agency don’t just bombard clients with ads, banners, testimonials or sign-up forms, set out to actually teach them.

My post last week 10 Tips to Help You Write Better Headlines was a specific example of teaching to reach.

Now I could have saved that kind of post for an existing client who I’m teaching to write better web-copy, but by sharing it with everyone for free, my experience and expertise becomes a way of reaching new audiences.

Giving it Away

For some “old school” business folk giving products or services away for free seems crazy. But as someone who embraces online marketing and communications I know from experience that sharing some of your best tips or suggestions actually brings people in. Not everyone will feel, for example, that they have the skills to craft their writing into web-writing and may then turn to you – say, an experienced, professional copywriter – to help them with their campaign.
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