Important notice: new site, new address, new blog

If you’ve been following this blog for my marketing thoughts, today marks a shift. I’ve launched a self-hosted blog on my new site at http://www.linkama.com

I copied over the posts from here, so I just have to hope I won’t get penalised by Google for duplicate content.

Anyway, it will be rather quiet here from now on. Please follow me to the new vistas…

I won’t shut this account down, though. I’ll probably find a new use for it in the future.

See you in my new home!

Annual report as a marketing tool

Your company’s annual report is important—often legally required—as a record of the past financial year’s events and business performance. (If your business is based in the US, you might want to read about annual reports in the Reference for Business encyclopedia.)

But have you thought about using your annual report as a marketing tool?

Writers, get your names right

There was a hilarious story by Kirsten Grieshaber on Associated Press the other day, Heil Hound: Nazis dogged by Hitler-mocking mutt.

The story about a Finnish businessman’s dog trained to lift its paw in a mock Nazi salute is in itself both amazing and hilarious. There’s some sloppiness, however. Although the people’s names are spelled correctly, a total of three typos have managed to find their way to the name of the businessman’s company, two words.

Time to slow down

Now that we’ve all been so 110% business-oriented all year, don’t you think we deserve a break?

Let’s just call it a day. Tomorrow’s Christmas Eve, and we can look forward to almost a week of just lazing around reduced working capacity before we land into the New Year 2011.

Maybe that’s something to celebrate. The year 2011 is the beginning of the second decade of the new millennium, and the world hasn’t come to an end yet.

I’m entering the second decade with high hopes. Are you?

Contrary to widespread belief, text rules online

If you want to make a lasting impression through your online marketing efforts, you’d better use text.

The inspiration came to me in the form of Mark Palony’s blog post The Rebirth of Written Communication. Before the time of online tools that allowed you to be in touch with and found by practically the entire world, written documents were pretty much all historians could rely on to put together a picture of famous personalities, major events and so on.

The telephone posed a threat. How can you trace telephone calls made years ago? There’s no trace in history about what was said during those potentially revolutionary discussions.

We’re in exactly the same situation today.

There is still a difference between B2C and B2B

Maybe it’s just that I’ve seen one too many online marketers claim that “there’s no difference any more between B2C and B2B—you’re just talking to PEOPLE”.

While it is certainly true that all marketing should shift more toward a one-on-one style of talking to be efficient and engaging, the differences between the B2C and B2B buying/selling process have not disappeared. Let’s make some comparisons:

“Location-based” defeats the purpose of the internet

When the internet started to spread around the world in earnest, it was hailed as the Great Equalizer. It no longer mattered where you were physically located, you could reach the whole world from your computer.

In recent times, there’s been a clear shift toward locality. I’ve seen at least this:

Make sure your special offer does not erode your credibility as a vendor

It is common practice to offer a newly launched product at a discounted price to early adopters. But are you sure you’re not harming your future sales by discounting it too much?

My B2BTOTY nomination a total surprise

I was astounded when I found a tweet in my timeline today announcing I had been nominated for the B2BTOTY (B2B Twitterer Of The Year) Awards in the B2B “Boss Tweet” Personality category.

Is your squeeze page helping or hurting your sales?

Are you using, or thinking about using, a squeeze page to convert your site visitors?

A squeeze page is “a web page that is specifically designed to compel visitors to opt in to your web site”. In other words, the page leads to an online order, capturing the viewer’s email address or some other single, measurable action with as little distraction from its objective as possible.

Because the squeeze page wants to walk your viewer down a path that finally results in one single yes/no decision—preferably yes, of course—it usually contains a large amount of argumentation and testimonials to convince the reader. These tactics are borrowed from offline direct mail. If you want to learn more about them, just type “direct mail techniques” into an online search.

But my point today is that you can potentially hurt your conversions and sales with your squeeze page.