Welcome
Hi I’m Karim, this is my blog. I’m a freelance digital marketing expert, with almost 10 years experience. My key areas of focus are marketing strategy, search and social media. I’m passionate about helping brands develop and implement successful online marketing strategies. Find out more about my experience and how I can help you.
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Tuesday, 8 March 2011
The Ultimate Key To Successful Marketing
When it comes to marketing (especially digital marketing), people often focus on cutting edge new marketing channels, and squeezing the last drops of business from their existing activity. This is certainly important, but I find a lot of people get lost in these areas and forget about the actual human client they’re trying to attract.
For me the ultimate key to marketing success is the ability to empathise with our clients. If we were in their shoes, would we buy our product or service? Would we respond to our marketing initiatives? We should all be asking this question more often.
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Monday, 31 January 2011
Google & Twitter Give Egyptians a Voice with Speak2Tweet
Google has announced that it’s using newly acquired company “SayNow” in a team up with Twitter to launch Speak2Tweet. This service enables users to call up and leave an audio message, and has specifically been designed to enable Egyptians experiencing the current lack of internet connectivity to share their voices. Find out more on the official Google blog.
Great for the people of Egypt but the cynic in me suspects this is partially a cleverly timed moved to show off some potentially interesting new functionality that has just been brought into the Google stable.
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Saturday, 22 January 2011
The Nitty Gritty Guide to LinkedIn (Free PDF Download)
As a freelance digital marketing consultant, I have to maximise my ability to reach out to potential clients and raise my online profile. LinkedIn is one of the most useful social networking sites for achieving this. With this in mind I’ve created a 100% free Nitty Gritty Guide to LinkedIn Whether you’re looking to get a new job, boost your profile within your industry or to engaging potential clients, this free guide will offer you effective tips and tactics for harnessing the power of LinkedIn to boost your online profile. To download this 100% free PDF (about 400kb) simply click here
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Tuesday, 11 January 2011
How to Create a Rock Solid Social Media Strategy for 2011
Throughout 2010, I’ve heard a lot of marketing execs and business owners complain about social media and it’s lacklustre impact on business growth. To anyone who’s worked on social campaigns this reaction is both familiar and understandable.
Why Social Isn’t Working
Unfortunately, much of the social media marketing I’ve seen boils down to extremely compartmentalised activity on a twitter profile, perhaps a blog and facebook page too. Social media efforts are typically disconnected from mainstream marketing activity, vacuum-packed away to the back room ready to be pulled out when directors and business stakeholders desperately ask ‘are we on Twitter?’.
When social media activity is initiated, it’s typically done so in a reactionary, impulsive way without a well thought out strategy that integrates with wider marketing activity. Add to that, minimal company resources and time are made available. With such a haphazard approach, can we honestly anticipate some valuable output?
Blueprint for Social Media Success
In my work advising brands on digital marketing, I always encourage a methodical approach to social media.
1) Assessing the environment – Start with an assessment of the current environment and competitor activity has to be conducted, what are competitors doing?
2) Taking Stock – Follow up with a stock-taking of the company’s own resources needs to be made. Are people available to blog, tweet, and update Facebook profile pages? Is there a well of content/expertise that can be drawn on?
3) A Cunning Plan – Once you’ve got a clear vision of the environment and the available resources you can start to create a solid social media strategy.
Key points to consider are the objective of your social media campaign ( e.g. generate awareness, demonstrate expertise, direct conversions, retain clients), the key channels you will focus on (e.g. blogging, Twitter etc) and how you will measure success.
It’s also critical to consider how your social media marketing will interface, enhance and support your other marketing activities. This is a key pitfall for many businesses trying out social media campaigns.
4) The Devil’s in the Details – Don’t leave your social media activity down to chance. Make a details content plan for your blogs and twitter profiles. Outline and identify key topics to discuss, tweet and blog about. This protects you from the dreaded blog-rot, where you start off a blog in earnest and then shudder to a halt with a lack of ideas or inspiration. It’ll also allow you to generate deeper interactions with people on Twitter.
This is obviously a simplified version of the process I go through with clients, but it should give you a good outline of the type of work involved in creating a solid social campaign.
If you’d like some help developing your social media strategy for 2011, feel free to drop me an email.
———image from – http://www.boardgamebeast.com/risk-board-game-strategies.html
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Wednesday, 29 December 2010
Crappy Websites to Cost UK £205 Billion in 2010
It’s estimated that Britons will spend £42 billion on online shopping in 2010. A huge amount, but what about all the lost potential sales due to low-converting websites?
(yes I appreciate that this is a 20 US$ bill but you get the point!)
Now let’s try a little thought exercise. Based on broadly accepted averages, most sites can expect roughly a 2% conversion rate from visitor to sale. In other words, out of the millions of people that visited online retailers, roughly 2% converted into paying customers, generating £42 billion.
Taking this one step further, we can determine an estimate of the lost sales due to unoptimised, poorly designer retail sites. To achieve this and for the purpose of this exercise, let’s take Amazon.com and it’s 17% conversion rate as an ideal conversion rate for retail websites. Converting at Amazon.com levels would have seen a total of £247 billion spent online in 2010. That’s £205 billion more than the £42 billion expected.
This is by no means a perfect exercise, perhaps higher conversion rates are just impossible to achieve. Although myself and a 1000s of other website optimisation experts would likely disagree with that notion.
The bottom line is that poorly designed, badly structured retail websites are costing us money. They are depriving the economy as a whole of billions in income, and they are costing their owners tens of thousands annually in lost sales. This negative effect is only multiplied when we look at the global online economy.
There’s no sweeping solution to this problem, but the key step is for website owners to recognise the huge sums of money they are loosing out on and ensuring they make improving website conversion rates a key objective for 2011.
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If you want to improve the conversion rate on your website and boost online sales in 2011, drop me an email.
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Tuesday, 28 December 2010
Ooops...We Forgot to Optimise for YouTube Search
I was browsing YouTube the other day having arrived at the site through a link a friend sent me to a very silly video. Once I was done laughing I decided to do some searches for key terms that relate to my industry (retail financial trading) and I was disappointed at how few of the big brands were present. For example, see the search I did below for ‘spread betting’:
Both TradeFair and PaddyPower appear, but the top result is for Vince Stanzione an independent financial trading ‘expert’. Where are the big financial spread betting firms? After all YouTube is one of the top search engines on the web, attracting billions of monthly searches in its own right. Add to that it drives users to a video, arguably a richer and more powerful type of interaction than is possible through a conventional website. So with all these benefits why are the key players neglecting YouTube?
Perhaps it’s the conceptional shift in thinking that’s required to view YouTube as a search engine rather than just a website where you watch videos. I suspect it’s also to do with the strong traditional focus on ‘being no. 1 on Google’ (in both natural and paid search). Of course this is critical, but why ignore a potentially rich source of brand awareness and potential clients?
If you’re skeptical about the value of YouTube search optimisation, look at the image above again. PaddyPower generated over 8,000 views, over 4,000s for TradeFair. Considering the cost of producing and uploading these videos is next-to-nothing, this is a great return on investment. Imagine if PaddyPower had 10 videos each with 8,000 views? You’d have to pay quite a bit to get that level of exposure and engagement through traditional display banners.
Of course, to be able to conduct any YouTube search optimisation, you need to actually be prepared to create some engaging videos. Looking at other industries, the ‘Will It Blend’ series of videos, showing off the devastating power of Blendtec blenders, resulted in thousands of views and huge amount of exposure. More importantly, it boosted sales 700% in the first year. If a product as dull as a blender can achieve this with online video, couldn’t your brand see some benefit from this too?
Considering how easy it is for users to view web video (on their phones, iPads etc) it’s critical that all brands look at how to leverage video to generate awareness. This involves developing a video content strategy and ensuring these videos are properly optimised to rank well in YouTube search. What are you waiting for?
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If you want to boost brand awareness in 2011 with a solid video marketing campaign, drop me an email. I’d be happy to discuss this with you.
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Monday, 20 December 2010
Xbox Kinect - Financial Trading Platform of the Future?
In 2010, financial trading applications have advanced in features and functionality, as well as the development of bespoke trading applications for popular new gadgets such as the iPhone and iPad. But I have a prediction for the next platform for financial trading applications, the Xbox.
The futuristic Xbox Kinect
When I say Xbox, I nee to qualify the statement by saying, specifically the Xbox and the Xbox Kinect. Microsoft’s Minority Report style ‘controller-free game control system’. If you haven’t heard of the Xbox Kinect, it’s essentially a sensor that you attach to your Xbox 360 video gaming console. It has a truck-load of complex sensors that can detect your body movements down to precise details. It then interprets these movements and translates them to movements of your character in the video game. As a fan of technology and an avid video gamer use the Xbox Kinect is an amazing experience. It genuinely feels like a paradigm shift away from other technologies used by the Nintendo Wii and Sony Playstation. The ability to control a video game, simple by moving your body is very impressive.
Yes, you can run trading apps on the Xbox
So what does this have to do with financial trading applications? Well the Xbox is basically a computer with a customised input peripherals (a controller and now a Kinect, rather than keyboard and mouse). More importantly it’s fully web-ready. Users can sign-up for an Xbox Live account and play games interactively online against other users. They can also play games that access live data and install software via the Xbox Live marketplace (think of the iTunes App store but for Xbox video games). With the ability to install software, and access the internet. You have the basic components of a platform that can accommodate financial trading applications. With the addition of the high tech Kinect controller, you have the ingredients of a hugely exciting way for users to trade the financial markets.
In a crowded market, brokers need big innovations to capture attention
Increasingly, it’s becoming more and more difficult for Financial Trading providers to stand out of the crowd. Millions are spent jostling for supremacy on Google Adwords and the most popular financial content sites. To really stand out, brands have to make bold, gusty moves that everyone will pay attention to. An Xbox Kinect trading application can achieve this.
Trading 3.0 – buying and selling with a wave of the hand
Imagine the delight at users being able to wave their hands in the air to scroll through a list of financial instruments, or manipulate a chart. Certainly, some might argue that the more sophisticated and complex features might not be easy to translate into an Xbox Kinect software, but how useful are these features to the majority of retail traders? The more experienced would obviously stick to their preferred trading applications, but for the more casual trader or the more novice trader, simplifying the process of selecting a market, viewing a chart and making a trade without being confused by 100s or dropdowns, selectors, and columns of information would be welcome.
Xbox’s built-in social network
Another interesting aspect of leveraging the Xbox platform is the in-built social connectivity. Xbox currently has 24 million Xbox live subscribers who can play games with friends and see information about how they are performing. Although, traders won’t want to share every bit of information with each other. It’s not hard to imagine building in social trade indicators, or the ability to follow strategies of top traders in your network.
Closing thoughts
This isn’t intended as a clinically precise business plan, but rather a brainstorm in post format. I believe we will see the more innovate retail financial brokers exploiting web-ready, socially connected video game consoles in 2011. The question is will your brand be one of them?
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