Zero to Hero – It’s All in the Headline

Celebrated by journalists, advertisers, marketers and astute business people for hundreds of years, great headlines are zero-or-hero, loved-or-lonely, make-it-or-break-it important. And it becomes more so every day. We live in a world where the headline is everything – whether we take notice, what we’re going to think about what comes next, how much time and credibility we’re going to allow something. It’s like this because we no longer always have time to try to work out whether stuff is relevant or interesting to us or not. There’s too much choice, too much information, too much to take our attention.

Give me the headline! I can then work out:

• Do I read this email?
• What’s this document trying to tell me?
• Is this magazine worth buying this week?
• Is this brochure worth picking up?
• Does this website help me?
  

It’s the difference between engaging people or being ignored. No one gets to the opening paragraph or looks for the subheadings if the headline hasn’t interested them first.

And headlines don’t just come in text.

• What’s the headline that your suit shouts in a first meeting with a client?
• How do I trust you’re going to solve my problems? Easily? Courteously?
• When you answer the phone like you don’t care what have you told me in BIG CAPS up front

Everything we do communicates something. And people will understand you more easily when you communicate – with everything you do – like a classic newspaper article; winning headline first, then bold opening paragraph giving an overview, followed by paragraphs broken up with subheadings.


How would your communication look in print? What (and where) are your winning headlines?

How to Increase Retail Sales in 2009

The widely predicted January retail bloodbath has begun as early and viciously as the sales did a few weeks before Christmas. The outcome of this will change not only the business landscape but also the landscapes of many towns. Yet retailers have let it happen to themselves in so many cases by sticking their heads in the sand and ignoring simple sales and marketing practices.

Retailers are blaming the economic situation. Mmm. And they’re blaming online e-tailers. What?!

The facts are that ‘physical’ retailers have seen the internet & economic trends coming and done either little or nothing about them in most cases. They have failed to understand why people visit shops and why people buy online, and what the relative advantages of both are. The simple fact that many online retailers have seen themselves as fighting the internet for the last decade rather than embracing it is just beyond belief.

Most retailers believe that the online e-tailers have them beaten because of price. Wrong. Or convenience. Wrong again. The main reason that e-tailers are forging ahead is because of information. It’s the way that e-tailers are able to get the details of prospects and customers and use that information intelligently that is key. An online e-tailer can continually remind its customers and prospects exactly why they should do business with them; whether that’s because of price (or the perception of better pricing), convenience or any other USP.

The sad thing is, physical retailers could have been doing this for years but it never occurred to them. It never occurred to them to get their customers’ details let alone to continually keep in touch with them or offer them relevant new products. It never crossed their minds to continually tell them about a home delivery service because they never bothered to dream one up. They never thought about telling everybody who bought Widget LX that Widget GLX had just been launched, or about the wonderful in-shop service, the advantages of professional fitting, or of their…. you get the point.

If you’re in retail and have no system of gathering and effectively using customer details – however manually – then get very excited. Implementing some basic practices here could have an utterly amazing effect on your business at a time when many in the sector don’t know what to do apart from slash prices still further.

Google Searchwiki

Last Friday Google changed the rules. And when Google changes the rules – especially when it makes the kind of changes it made last Friday – it’s going to have an impact on your business.

Google launched Google Searchwiki for all it’s registered account users. As the name suggests, this service combines the normal search function of Google with a wiki style interface. (A wiki is a website that allows you to add, move or change content).

Now when you search on Google as a signed-in user, you can pick out your favourite results and promote them straight to the top or delete your least favourite altogether (only within your account). You can add results that you’d like to be there but aren’t (again, only for your own results), and you can add comments. However, the comments you add do become public so everybody can see them – a very significant move. Other users can also see how many times sites have been ‘promoted’ or deleted by other users. This is going to vastly change the way in which many users use Google. Do not underestimate its significance.

For more info on the changes, see:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8Pl1H0dIXE



So what does this mean to you, your business and your internet marketing?

One thing’s for sure and that is that speculation will initially be rife. Already there is even speculation to whether it will last, change or develop further, let alone how it will affect us. However there are a few fundamental questions that we need answers to:


What will the affect be if we have more than one web address?

How will this affect different key-word performance?

How much manipulation of the system will there be?

What happens if you become the victim of malicious comments?

What value will Google place on the changes and will that be added into their algorithm for search?

Is this the end of relevant search, and the beginning of ‘those-with-the-most-fans-wins’ democratic search?

What will the spammers sell you to work round this?

How do you now value SEO?

Is PPC now stronger or weaker?

What can you do to influence positive comments?

Do you now have to work harder off-line to promote your website?

Will there be a backlash?

How will this affect your sales and marketing?



The answers to some of these questions may start to become apparent very quickly as small businesses and busy social networkers get stuck into the system as quickly and avidly as possible and start to play it.

The only thing I can tell you as a fact is this: Google itself is not a ‘fact’ of marketing; it is a continually evolving business. Those who rely heavily on SEO or PPC as their sole routes to markets may now be playing a very different game to the one they were playing on Thursday. And it changed without warning. And it may change again. This underscores two points:

1, Your business should always have many routes to market

2, You can never be complacent on the internet.


More on this as it develops.