It’s important to make the content on your site relevant and interesting to your customers.

If you offer sea freight services, you are looking for people who need those services. What other content can you put online other than the services you offer which may be of interest to your customers. Legal or sea freight terms perhaps? A chart of the tide timetables? People aren’t one dimensional, so try to enhance your site beyond the basics.

Keeping this in mind, people tend to scan writing online, so writing essays of text is not necessary. Bullet pointed lists are easy to read and can help focus on your key selling points. For example:

• Keep content relevant to the customers you’re trying to attract
• Write short, jargon free sentences
• Use bullet points where applicable
• Update your site at least once a year – to show that your company is still in business!

Following on from your content, the design of your web site is also critically important as easily navigable web sites are much more successful. As a general rule of thumb, your customer should be able to find what they want in three clicks or less.  Crucial information, such as opening hours, locations, services offered should be easily found on the web site.

Another point to keep in mind is that the design your web site should be consistent with the design your company logo/ reception area. Clean lines with cool colours such as blues, greens and whites help convey a feeling of professionalism.  Rich colours such as reds, oranges and purples can give a sumptuous feel to a site.

Font choice is also important. In general, san serif fonts, such as Arial, Verdana or Helvetica (to mention but a few) are easier to read online.

The three top players in the Pay Per Click field are Google, Yahoo! MSN.  For the purposes of these tips, I will focus on Google AdWords.  The key to Google’s success is Pay Per Click Advertising. The key to your success using Pay Per Click Advertising is choosing the right ‘Keywords’.

Keywords are any words or phrases that are typed into Google search.  Advertisers then pay money to appear beside keywords that are related to their business.  The key to selecting keywords is to get a balance between generic terms, which cost a lot and may not provide much return on investment, and specific ‘long tail’ terms, which are cheaper but have fewer people searching for them. For example, businesses that offer airfreight services in Ireland would want to bid on keywords such as “airfreight, air cargo, airports” etc.  These are highly generic terms. “Airfreight in Ireland, or “Irish airfreight company” are better phrases as they are more specific to the location. “Ireland to Dubai airfreight” is better again in targeting terms, as it represents customers that are looking for that specific service.  However, only a few people may actually be looking for this service, so unless this is the only service that company is ever going to offer, a good middle ground is necessary.

Writing compelling ad copy is also crucial to Pay Per Click advertising.  Google, Yahoo and MSN all have their own specific editorial guidelines for creating good ad copy.  Here are some general Do’s and Don’t’s

• Do make sure your keyword (i.e. airfreight in Ireland) is in your ad copy. This should be preferably in the Title of your ad copy. This word gets highlighted when the results are shown on the search engine results page and helps your ad stand out.
• Don’t use all capital letters in your ad copy unless it is necessary, i.e. FIATA.  The use of all capital letters looks amateurish and unprofessional.
• Don’t put your telephone number in the ad copy either for the same reason.
• Do try to include a ‘Call To Action’ in the copy, such as “Buy Now” or “Contact Us Today”.  It’s corny, but it works – try it today!

The final part of pay per click advertising relies on “Landing pages”.  Landing Pages are the pages that open when a web user clicks on a sponsored ad.  You want to make sure that what you have said you are selling in your ad copy, is what the customer sees when they click on your link.  Consider this, Joe Blogs is looking for a company that offers airfreight services in Ireland. He types “airfreight in Ireland” into the Google search box, presses return and sees

“Airfreight in Ireland
We Connect Ireland to the World.
Call us for a Quote Today”
www.InsertFreightCompanyNameHere.com

He clicks on it, only to be brought to a page which shows seafreight services.  What would you do in this situation?  The majority of people press the back button, or click off the site to another site. Either way, they aren’t getting what they need out of your landing page. While this means your Ad may get more clicks, the likelihood of those clicks bringing you any money is slim to none.

This example shows us how the design of your site can really impact your bottom line.
It also shows how important it is for your Ad Copy (highlighted in blue) to match what you are selling.  Google, Yahoo! and MSN will let you write pretty much whatever you want, but the bottom line is, you don’t want wasting money on people who click on your ad but don’t want what you’re selling.

Search Engine Optimisation (aka SEO) is a huge area (much like Pay Per Click) so I’ll just go over the basics here.

SEO refers to the content in your site and how well it relates to what your customers are searching for.  Ever wondered why your site isn’t to the top five results in Google? The answer is, you’re not giving Google’s algorithms what they need to list your site in the ‘above the fold’ listings.  There are many things which affect rankings in Google search listings and they are not set in stone.  Here comes the science bit:

Keyword Rich Title and Description.  Remember way back on Day Three: (Pay Per Click Advertising: An Introduction to the Show Pony of Online Marketing) we talked about keywords? Keywords are very important in SEO as well as PPC (Pay Per Click). Ideally you want to choose around 5 keywords which best sums up your site, and what your company offers. In an ideal virtual world, you want to include your 5 main keywords in your Title and Description Meta Tags.  This helps Google understand what your site is about.

Include Keywords in you text. Try to make this as natural as possible – both for Google’s sake and for your customers’ sake. A good guide would be to include your keywords in the title of a paragraph, within the first line of that paragraph and preferably as the last word in that paragraph. An example for the keyword “airfreight services” would be:

“Airfreight Services

Airfreight services at ‘Insert Company Name Here’ are some of the best in the business.  We pride ourselves in getting your products where you want them, when you need them there.

Some of our special airfreight service features are:

·    Worldwide Import and Export Capabilities
·    Real Time Tracking of All Items Sent
·    Experienced and Qualified Personnel
·    Membership of International Air Shipping Association
·    Membership of International Air Transport Association

Contact us online, or call us today for a quote on our airfreight services.”

Note the use of bullet points here – just a gentle reminder from Tip 1: Content is King…

According to Wikipedia, Social Media

“are primarily Internet- and mobile-based tools for sharing and discussing information among human beings.”

In reality this translates to the formation of sites such as YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Bebo, etc. The amount of people accessing these sites is huge and statistics show that this number is still growing.  In the past year, there has been a 35% increase in the number of people accessing social media sites in Europe (ComScore World Metrix).
The question for those in the freight industry however is whether these new sources of communication can be used in a commercial setting.

The key to using social media is to view it as a long term game plan.  PPC can give an instant boost to web statistics and revenue. However, this can be an expensive and draining channel.  SEO work, such as the use of social media platforms (Facebook, YouTube etc) on the other hand can provide more sustained benefits well into the future.

What is crucial to the use of social media marketing is the idea of conversing with your customers.  While it is important to maintain a business tone in conversations (and not forgetting the importance of confidentiality between clients), if you can provide some information which will make a person’s job easier, you’ve got a friend. And information can vary from tables of statistics, to a short promotional video, to commeting on recents events which impact on your business (and therefore your customers too).  Remember that your customers are not one dimensional characters, so why should you act in one dimension?

Dell is a great case study of how social media can help a corporation interact with its customers.  Dell has harnassed the power of the blog world to let them know exactly what their customers think of them, and to provide inspiration for how to fix discontentment.  It can be daunting knowing exactly what your customers think about your company, but hiding in the sand isn’t an option. Once you become aware of a problem, you at least have an opportunity to deal with it.  If you want your company to be seen as reputable, innovative and ‘one of the big guys’ then your going to have to start listening to you customers.

The difference with online press releases rests on the fact that writing for online publication differs from print publications.  As mentioned before in Online Marketing Tip 1: Content is King…, writing essays are not necessary in the online world. People scan writing online. If they find something of benefit, they tend to print out texts.  It is also not necessary from a users’ point of view to explain what a company does in a press release that will be archived on their own web site as they should be able to gather that from your ‘About Us’ section.

However from a Search Engine Optimisation point of view, archived press releases are great ways of getting more content on to your site.  In addition to this, by publishing them on online press release web sites such as www.24-7pressrelease.com, you can also provide a broader catchment area on search engines for your keywords.  These sites can also provide you with invaluable analysis of who is reading your press releases.

Another tip is to use an emailing system such as Constant Contact to send out press releases. At least that way, you’ll know who’s evening opening your press releases.  If you have very low response, don’t despair. The web is full of tips for online writing. There may even be a few in this blog in the days before Christmas!

In regards to writing press release tips, in my humble opinion, write an article you would find interesting. Try to hold back on the hype. Readers in general, and particularly those who are in the same business as yourself are able to suss out BS. So lay off on the claims of sending freight to the moon, unless you are NASA of course.

People will do business with companies they feel are trustworthy and as ‘On the Internet no one knows you’re a dog’ you have to fight to prove you’re not a mongrel.

Newsletters – whether internal, external, purely electronic or printed can provide an opportunity for a company or organisation to publish its success stories as well as providing a more rounded view of the company. As has been mentioned before, your customers are not one dimensional beings, so why should your company portray itself that way? I’m not suggesting you put family photographs in or how little Johnny is doing in Home-Ec class, but providing small articles on items you find interesting as it pertains to your work, will more than likely also interest your customers.

Deciding whether to print a newsletter or to only have online versions is a decision each company has to make for itself. I know of one company which does both, though not with every edition. The benefit they find with doing it this way is that the printed versions have much more impact that the email version, however the email version has analysis and tracking capabilities. They’ve only been conducting this form of newsletter distribution for 6 months so far, so we’ll have to see how this progress continues. However so far, so good!

In general, newsletters are a great way of keeping your company’s name in your customers minds. However they are time hungry, and if you think you cannot afford time in writing, editing, laying out and proof reading the newsletters (not to mention distribution), I wouldn’t suggest it. Perhaps an annual newsletter may be a good compromise? Newsletters can be a great source of market research if monitored properly, and they can also provide another advertising medium. If you’re going to launch into producing one, make sure it will be possible to maintain at regular interals – daily, weekly, monthly, yearly etc, and that you let your customers know how often it will be published.

E-mails are a fantastic part of an overall marketing strategy for a number of reasons:

• They’re a cheap and easy way to communicate with your customers
• They’re a cheap and easy way to divide your customers into sub-sets and target them accordingly
• They’re a cheap and easy way of gathering analysis on how your customers interact with your brand
• Bottom line – they’re cheap and easy

However, it is because of their cheap-and-easyness, that they come undone. During research for my thesis, I interviewed a person in charge of a marketing department in a larger multinational corporation. They told me that they sent out 4 – 5 e-mail campaigns Per Day. That’s a huge amount of information being sent and collected. What I found was interesting however was that they also told me that for their ‘premium customers’ they still posted them invitations, letters or flyers. The impact that a real life letter has over a virtual e-mail is without question.

What e-mail marketing has brought to the marketing party so to speak is that it has given companies an option to make contact with their customers, employees or suppliers in more than one medium. The key thing to remember however is that “The Medium is the Message”. If emails are cheap and easy, is that what you want your customers to think of your company as well?