Online Marketing

If you’ve been following the news recently major websites such as Wikipedia and WordPress.org are running a 24 hour blackout today in response to the two bills SOPA and PIPA that are making their way through congress. I won’t go over the full details here. A search for “SOPA Blackout”, “WordPress Blackout” etc should suffice for you.

What I thought I would do is take the time to comment on how their blackouts are not really blackouts. And all because of Search Engine Optimisation.

I’m going to take WordPress.org and Wikipedia as an example for my post (as they are, to me, the main websites staging this blackout). If you load any page on their sites today you will be confronted by the following pages:

However, on further inspection, these blackout ‘faces’ to these websites are simply masking the content sitting behind them. These websites will load all of the normal content that they should show and then force a full screen display over the top.

With a few bits of in-browser Javascript* you are able to view the full content behind the page as it should be.

So why haven’t they replaced their entire websites to actually ‘black out’?

Being some of the biggest websites on the internet they achieve results through strong search engine rankings. Their sites are rich in content and Google (and others) will check them regularly for any updates in content and update their records of that website accordingly. When a Search Engine wants to look at a website it requests a copy of the ‘source’ of a page just like your browser does. Your browser would then convert this ‘source’ or ‘code’ into a nicely styled version for you to view with pleasure. Search Engines don’t have this same wish for aesthetics and will happily read through the code they’re given to understand what that website is about.

What this is in effect doing is keeping all of the content there to keep their search engines happy but then masking each page using those styles I was talking about to hide the useful content from the user audience. This is instead of supplying user and search engine with just the content and styles for these black out messages.

Now if these websites just supplied the content for the  black out messages then when Google does its check today it will decide that every page on their site now reads on the lines of “WordPress.org protests the protect IP act”. Suddenly you will see every page drop out of its place in the rankings. I guess this is a risk that both websites could not take.

Admittedly for these large websites it wouldn’t take them long to be re-ranked once their normal website content comes back online. And with the number of users that will surf directly to wikipedia.org or wordpress.org without going through a search engine they should still see their traffic rise once again. However this is all theoretical and should happen but will not necessarily happen.

Does this make their stand of less value?

Some could say it does and some could say it doesn’t. Unless you work with websites for a living none of this may be at all obvious to you at all and it will be as though the websites are inaccessible to their normal content. However for me it does show that they’re not willing to take the search engine ranking hit to have a real black out. And taking that hit would potentially be great headlines in the fight against the SOPA and PIPA legislation. But their websites will be left at a huge disadvantage online.

So what do you think?

*Javascript is functionality code that runs within the user’s browser once it has loaded the content of a website. It is most commonly used for powering website slide shows and other pretty things.

**If you would like me to clarify anything in this post please leave a comment and I will do my best to help.

Tagged as in Online Marketing, Search Engine Optimisation, web development, Websites

You may already be able to execute the perfect marketing strategy. You can send out your e-shots at the right time and get a fantastic open rate. You can come up with a clever way to get users to follow you on Twitter or ‘like’ your page on Facebook. But if your conversion point (where they move from being a prospective customer to a paying customer) doesn’t work then it’s all for nothing.

Say hello to ebuyer.com

Ebuyer.com are an online company that sell discounted computer hardware and little gadgets on a b2c and a b2b level. They’re good value and reliable (*note here for personal experience – other opinions may vary). I’ve used them time and time again for building computers and servers (some of our machines in the office are in fact made using components bought from them) and we’ve found that they have a very hard working marketing department. At least twice a week without fail I will receive promotional offers from them by e-mail.

The idea

So a few weeks ago they decided they would hold a £1 sale today (Monday 28th November 2011). Lots of clearance stock that they wish to shift – some good and some worthless – all going on sale at different intervals throughout the day. Brilliant idea. Bring in the potential customers and convert them into customers that will now be receiving the e-mail updates several times a week. Sell off some stock that they are finding difficult to sell at full price and in return gain some new faces.

So their marketing department have been hard at work over the last few weeks. They’ve sent out e-mails about this promotion. They created a Facebook campaign that allowed users who have ‘liked’ their Facebook page to access the offers half an hour before everybody else. It’s all looking to be a really brilliant campaign. However 10:30am comes and their site becomes inaccessible. Too many people are trying to access their website to pick up these great deals and their current set up cannot cope with the volume of traffic.

The fallout

The frustrated users that after pressing the F5/Reload key over and over again find that once they’ve finally managed to add an item to their basket and checkout (and even in some cases they’ve paid for their items) that the product that they wanted is now out of stock. Suddenly their incredible viral marketing is about to backfire on them. And it does.

All of the users that they’ve managed to get to ‘like’ their Facebook page are now constantly updating it with bad reviews and poor comments about the company. Rival firms are managing to get in and link back to their websites for users having difficulties. Prospective and current customers lost (though who knows for how long).

We’ve all seen these problems before. Many people had trouble accessing the Olympic Games booking site and if you’ve ever tried booking tickets for popular concerts then you’ll also know the frustration at seeing “This page cannot be displayed” in your browser.

So what should they do better next time?

Well I could personally go into a lot of technical waffle about balanced loads, failovers etc. and I could also talk about how they should have separated their deals website from their main website (there have been a lot of comments on the Facebook page about customers not even wishing to get a £1 deal becoming frustrated at their inability to buy normal-priced products so have gone elsewhere).

However the essence of what they needed to do was make certain that all parts of the campaign were doing their role. The marketing department obviously managed to do their job brilliantly. But the technical and service departments are now not keeping to their end of the bargain. The technical department cannot keep their website online and the customer service department aren’t responding to (we’d all assume inundated with) customer queries and complaints.

Have you had experience of these situations either as a customer or a business owner? How have the issues been resolved? Or do you have best practices that you adhere to to avoid such problems? Let us know below.

Tagged as in Online Marketing, Websites

Do you run a January sale? If you don’t, do you think you should be?

We as consumers often see January sales as a way of retailers clearing stock. If you run a business that doesn’t hold stock – be it a craft business where you make everything to order or a service based business where you sell your time, then it’s easy to dismiss sales as not being for you. But is it worth looking at them from a different angle?

Sales are just as much about stimulating demand as they are clearing stock.

And when you think about it like that, it sounds a whole lot more attractive doesn’t it! If your business is quiet in January, rather than sitting about moping about it, should you be doing something about it? A sale could be just the thing, with one caveat, it needs to be planned and executed well.

Discounting can look desperate and damage your brand. It can also affect your pricing strategy in the long term, so I would only ever do it with caution. But it really can work.

A poorly planned sale also looks weak. 10% off everything isn’t a sale – it just looks desperate. You need to give people a compelling reason to buy, and a blanket discount just won’t cut it. If you sell product, consider slicing between 25% and 70% off various groups of products rather than applying a global discount to everything. Again, this gives people a more compelling reason to buy.

Last year Clare Yarwood-White ran a sale that started on Christmas eve – her sales increased by 600% compared to the previous year, and it didn’t cannibalise her figures for the rest of the month. printing.com have run a January sale since around 2003 and it works wonders for stimulating demand (although it certainly affects margin for the month). I’ve yet to see a serviced based business pull this off, but I wonder – can it be done? Should it be done? What do you think?

Tagged as in Business Strategy, Marketing, Online Marketing, Powerful Ecommerce

You don’t need to be an ecommerce expert to know that related products helps you sell more stuff online. Amazon are often hailed as the trailblazers for related products, at least, the customers who come in and brief us on their ecommerce websites always ask for ‘the “Customers who bought this also liked…” like Amazon [...]

Tagged as , powerful ecommerce in Online Marketing, Powerful Ecommerce

There seems to be a school of thought amongst many online retailers that price and search engine optimisation are king, and everything else is unimportant. Now whilst I’m not going to argue with the fact that price and being found for what you sell are crucial, many ecommerce businesses fail to place customer experience at [...]

Tagged as in Online Marketing, Powerful Ecommerce, Websites

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Tagged as in Branding, Online Marketing

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Tagged as in Blogging, Graphic Design, Online Marketing

  Blogging isn’t easy is it? You work all day (and sometimes into the night) with the day job and then somehow you’re expected to find the time to blog. And for goodness sake, does it even work? Is it even worth it? You hear horror stores of people putting in dozens of hours a [...]

Tagged as in Blogging, Marketing, Online Marketing

When was the last time you reviewed your website? I mean properly and objectively reviewed it, rather than just looked the other way when you opened the site by mistake? I always recommend my clients review their sites at least every six months, at the very least. It’s amazing how much your business will change, [...]

Tagged as in Online Marketing, Web Design, Websites

  It has never been cheaper to start an ecommerce business. Gone are the days where you need to spend hours learning HTML to build your own website – businesses like Shopify and Create mean that you can create an online shop from around £30 per month. Which is great news for cash-strapped startups – [...]

Tagged as , ecommerce, powerful ecommerce in Branding, Business Strategy, Marketing, Online Marketing, Powerful Ecommerce, Websites