Give guinea pigs more of a marketing girth!

Yesterday Chrissie Slade of Gorgeous Guineas came to see me for a half hour health check (but as always with me she got a bit more than just half an hour!).

Chrissie makes aromatherapy skin products for guinea pigs, and claims she’s the only one in the world doing this. It’s a fascinating little business, and Chrissie spends her time looking after her own five piggies, plus any that are holidaying with her, and cooking up various lotions and potions to cure skin problems in guinea pigs.

But having created her range of products, she wanted to know how to market them better. I took a look at her website www.gorgeousguineas.com and its accompanying shop, and was suitably impressed. Chrissie certainly knows her stuff, and she was keen to write more articles about her products to educate the world. I suggested selected articles could be linked into a the shopping pages that presented the relevant product, acting as testimonials, examples or recommendations.

She already has a blog (hosted WordPress attached to her website) which needs more content, even though what is on there is good. It is lacking various elements such as a RSS feed and a sign-up form to her newsletter, plus better regulation of her categories and tags, and more encouragement for comments, but once accomplished this can become a useful prop towards getting more traffic to her website and shop.

Chrissie also has a newsletter that regularly goes out to several hundred subscribers, each with a defined purpose and special deals, and Chrissie informed me the response rate was good, not only opening and reading it, but reacting to her offers as well.

She had recently moved her newsletter to another provider that offered her an autoresponder as well, so we discussed ways of how she could use that to her advantage, such as creating e-courses on how to care for guineas with particular problems, spacing out the emails over a series of days to correspond with the various stages of the treatment, watching out for signs of improvement and providing gentle reminders. Chrissie could see other ways how this could be used to educate her followers.

We discussed how articles could be transformed into various guises, such as blog posts, newsletter articles, pdfs for downloading, posted onto article directory sites such as EzineArticles.com, and also ‘fed’ into other areas on the web, such as her Facebook fanpage and Twitter, through the power of RSS. Chrissie was impressed that one action could result in several reactionary performances to spread her word around a wider area on the net.

Chrissie had set up a Facebook fanpage but had done very little with it. Once I had explained how she could fill its pages with different details and information about her business and her piggies, such as ‘before and after’ pictures of treated guineas, encourage responses and similar stories from her 117 fans, visit other like-minded groups and comment on their walls, feed in her blog posts and Twitterings, publicise her new products or successful treatments, she soon saw the page’s value. Like all social networking it should not be neglected, only warranting regular small attention now and again.

Whew, all that in half an hour! The next question is: how much are you doing to market your business?

What is the difference between an article and a blog post?

An article is a lengthy piece of writing, written in an expert’s point of view, aimed at explaining a topic in great detail. A blog post is a shorter piece of writing, usually in a ‘conversational’ style, aimed at updating or educating your readers, or to spark ideas and interest in your business.

Articles are produced to promote the author’s expertise and prowess at writing and research, hence why they are long. A blog post should take one subject and explain it succinctly within a few short paragraphs, written from multiple view-points to gain the comprehension of the reader.

Articles can vary in length, and even though they are online, are designed to be printed out for leisurely reading. Blog posts are meant to be read immediately. The subject should be introduced within the headline and first sentence, and the concept within the first paragraph. As most blog readers only read the first 25% of a post, or spend an average of 96 seconds, getting the jist across at the very beginning is important to achieve your post being read in full.

Twitter has minimalised this even further (hence why it’s called micro-blogging). There are just 140 characters to get your point across and capture your reader’s interest, but you do have the advantage of interaction: a tinyurl link can be added to direct the reader to a blog post or article for further reading.

Treat Twitter respectfully for the right response

Twitter is also called micro-blogging, because it is an opportunity for you to express yourself and tell the world all the facts about you and your business you are unable to fit into your website. It’s micro-blogging because it is confined to only 140 characters per ‘tweet’, which means you have to be concise with your message. (If you reduce it down to 120 characters that will leave room for any retweets.)

Just go ahead and join up, but make sure you’re careful with your username. Does it truly reflect you or your business? And if you were to change direction, would it continue to be useful? And is it memberable, easy to spell, universal to understand? If you can squeeze in a keyword, so much the better.

Communicate with your followers, don’t just post endless bits about yourself. Also don’t tweet rubbish or uninteresting material. Find out others within your target market and ask them questions, engage them in conversation, just like networking. People react to a lively commentary, and if you want to know something, tweet it in general – some people say Twitter is better than search engines for finding out what you want.

Find all the gurus and experts in your field through Twellow.com. Ask them questions and try and get to know them, but don’t bombard them – they also have a life. It’s best to watch and read their tweets first to learn how to tweet effectively and what line they are taking. Look at their followers and see if there are any you would like to follow too.

Post up some valuable information for your followers to read, and if you’re stuck for content, use Google Alerts to send you material on your chosen subjects, then trawl through and post up the interesting stuff using tinyurls for the links (this facility is incorporated into applications like TweetDeck). But usually the advice that comes direct from you is best because it shows off who you are, unlike those people who tweet endless quotations.

Get fodder for your tweets from the stuff you have already written – any articles, blogs, e-books, old emails or whatever. You’d be surprised what you have already, and it will be all your own material. Feed your new posts from your blog into your Twitter stream, and get retweet widgets for your blog so people can retweet your posts if they like them, and you can also feed your e-newsletters through Aweber.com and articles from EzineArticles.com into Twitter through their automation.

And finally, get a following to follow you, which you can achieve if you continue to post up valuable information, strike up intellectual and humorous conversations, provide relevant input to discussions, regularly retweet stuff you like and acknowledge kind gestures towards you. Then you’ll get to be known as an expert in your field, and can start to achieve more business through your other business media.

How can your newsletters become successful?

Recently I was asked this question: “I need to know what is the success criteria of a newsletter, how could we know it will be appreciated or not?”

Success of a newsletter will be measured by the response you get from your readership, how many more subscriptions you get from word of mouth or referrals, recommendations from people viewing past issues, people contacting you to ask to submit articles or to advertise, and general feedback from the readership.

Don’t forget that the initial point of getting feedback is to ask for it. Set up competitions or other interactive activities that demand a response to gauge your popularity or whether your content is right. If you are sending out your electronic newsletter from an autoresponder, then your click rate should indicate how many are reading and reacting to your newsletter. Don’t just sit on your laurels and wonder if anybody is reading your stuff, set something up so you can measure a response. Good headlines leading onto apt, up-to-the-minute or relevant stories and content are key to encouraging a good click rate or passing interest.

Success depends on whether your newsletter is readable, easy to understand, has consistent areas or departments your readership can relate to, for example the news section or letters page, is well designed with appropriate columns and relevant pictures, headlines that grab the attention of the skimmer reader, uncluttered design for instant readability, noticeable banners for fast recognition, full use of effective colour if your budget affords it, or plenty of ‘white space’ if only in black and white.

Oh, yes, and great content!

Any other questions, please feel free to go ask Alice!

What goes into a newsletter?

When you write about a specific subject in your newsletter, the best way is to break it down into its basic components, and explain it simply using everyday language. This exercise is more difficult than it sounds, because the idea is to make it not only interesting, but to appeal to as many readers as possible to gain their trust and form relationships with them. By breaking down a subject, it will then lend itself to a number of other subjects which will become fodder for future articles.

Do a postcard campaign to gain interest and increase your readership. This is cheaper than creating a large quantity of the first edition of your newsletter and potentially losing most of them to an uninterested audience. The postcard campaign would have to be run over a series, as in today’s society not everyone responds immediately to information, they may need to be coerced into your way of thinking, seduced into the benefits of your profession, and stimulated by fascinating facts that they may not have thought of before. Sometimes it can take several goes to gain a follower.

Please don’t bore your readers too much about your business (this may sound unkind, but people are notoriously self-centered, and only think in terms of what is in it for them). You could easily explain the various features of your company through the benefits it offers, by writing about successful case studies, funny stories with good endings, witty and entertaining information articles about certain subjects you want to get across, special offers that cannot be resisted, competitions to raise awareness, ‘try before you buy’ offers to get them across your threshold…

Selecting certain pages for particular subjects is a good idea, because if you are going to make your newsletter a regular feature, people will like to look at a particular page first (like as for the local newspaper the sports section, the horoscopes, the letters page, the classified ads, for example) before reading the remainder of the newsletter. Keeping a consistency will help your readers in gaining confidence, and they will then look forward to the next issue. It’s like a supermarket that always has its basics like milk and bread, but the way there will offer all sorts of more provocative products to entice their interest.

But it is all very well giving them all this wonderful information if you don’t get anything in return. The idea is to get more people to try what your organisation has to offer. Therefore you must provide special offers that have a time dependent call to action. These must be worth the reader’s while, maybe even a lost leader to get them to sample what you have to offer them. Usually if you do a really good job, it will sell itself and you will get more customers. I say time dependent because if you leave it open ended, the lack of urgency will disappear from their busy minds and the opportunity will be lost or forgotten.

Why not create a blog as an archive medium for all the really important or successful features and articles of your newsletter. Because it is a blog, it would be frequently visited by the ‘internet spiders’ compared to that of a website, which can wait weeks for a visitation. The more frequent the postings, the more often the spiders visit. These postings could have links to your website or any other internet based information, which again would raise awareness and click value of your website, because it is not only spiders who roam the web and click on links but people too.

Create a sign-up form on the homepage of your website to increase your newsletter membership. You could have past copies in pdf form on the newsletter page, which readers could download if they’ve lost their original copy, or interested future subscribers to see what it is like. Again the spiders trawl the pdfs, so more info is passed onto the internet, encouraging more visits to your website, blog and sign up forms, especially if you include web links in the newsletter.

Get noticed above your competitors

Today I met a office furniture company while out networking. They were an established foreign firm who were looking to expand into Europe and the UK, and had formed a Reading branch. The sales rep was out networking around various groups to tout her wares, which included a well designed brochure sporting the clean, simple lines her furniture was valued for.

Now there are plenty of other office furniture businesses in Reading, so how could she get her company’s reputation levitated above the rest? I suggested she should first collect some testimonials of satisfied clients, and also statements of successful return on investments, such as how the lives of their workforce had been improved through a better environment, increased their sales because of the ambience and quality of their premises had impressed prospective clients, and the efficiency of layout of furniture had made the processing and resourcefulness of their business that much easier.

How to get all this information out to the public? Well, take this newly resourced material and use it in  articles, press releases, blogs, newsletters, speaking events, direct mail… just to get your concept out there. Keep the same clean, simple style as the company’s branding, in both presentation and writing style, to promote your branch effectively. All this can be accommodated in both a paper format and the web, as combining the two can produce very powerful results. Using all the technology resources to best effect can have quite an impact on your business’s success and sales…

Want to know more? Then go ask Alice!