We are increasingly aware of how customers are looking to get the best price for the best product, but how can us online marketers ensure that we reach these potential purchasers and get under the skin of what really motivates their buying habits? We need to go back to basics and forget about the traditional demographics which have influenced marketing campaigns for years. Of course age, sex, income and marital status are important but what you really need to think about is who are your target customers, what influences their spending decisions and which sites do they visit during their spending journey? Its time to get personal and the answer lies in creating personas... Personas are fictional characters. They take on identities and represent your customers by their buying trends and search habits. The persona will put a human face to data and create something that can seem real and familiar. Ideal online customers are no longer just ABC1’s, they are individuals sat in...

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Whether it's PPC marketing, email marketing, affiliate marketing or natural search driving traffic to your website, your landing page is critical to the campaign performance - and it's your big opportunity to engage with a potential customer. So why do so many sites get it so wrong, and what are the most important things to remember? What's wrong with my landing page you ask? Well firstly, you have to realise everyone uses the internet differently - so don't try to pigeon hole all users in the same place.  Some users scan a whole page within a few seconds of landing on a site, while others focus on a block of text and read carefully - it all depends on the visitor. With this in mind there are 6 things worth considering to ensure your landing page is optimised to its full potential: Read the rest of this entry...

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Five ways to influence the minds of your potential customers - with web copy. Ok, so you've got a super-slick design for your website and your marketing campaigns are sending a nice number of potential customers to browse its attractive pages - but what happens once they've arrived? Just like a sales person in a shop can employ verbal sales techniques to convince someone to whip out their credit card, the words on your site (or web copy) can act in the same way, all year round - and you don't have to pay them a salary! Apart from applying some basic principles, such as good grammar (!), interesting and informative content and the inclusion of keywords, there are five clever, mind-bending tricks you can employ to tap into the minds of your potential customers and influence what they do on your site. Read the rest of this entry...

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