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A key consideration for online marketing in Ireland is centred on how you approach prospective customers. People are becoming more de-sensitised to traditional marketing techniques and this trend is evident in online marketing.

Interruption-based Marketing

In terms of ‘traditional’ marketing activities, interruption-based marketing techniques have been dominant in recent years – mass-emailing, popups, sms marketing, promotional mailers, telemarketing, TV and Radio adverts. Each of these techniques relies on interrupting an individual and grabbing their attention away from whatever they were focussing on at that moment.

The main reason that interruption-based marketing is losing its value as an online marketing tool in Ireland and abroad is that the end user is becoming smarter at filtering out the ‘interruptions’. Spam filters, popup blockers, caller-id and upcoming digital TV scheduling/recording technologies such as NTL digital plus – all of these technologies reduce marketing messages and make it more challenging to achieve an effective ‘interruption’.

Permission-based Marketing

Online marketing which is permission-based works on a completely different concept to interruption-based marketing. Permission-based marketing enables companies and their products to be found by potential consumers by building a significant online presence on their website, on search engines (such as Google) and on social media websites/online community websites.

A company that applies permission-based techniques provides product information on demand via relevant media whilst also educating and/or entertaining the consumer. For example: a potential client finds your services via a search engine while searching for said services. The person is actively interested which means that you are also reaching a target consumer later in the sales cycle which, in turn, means easier conversion to a sale.

Another example would be articles and reviews on industry-related websites about a new product of yours. The right kinds of buzz from trusted online sources can be invaluable in launching a new product to increasingly sceptical consumers.

The best questions to ask yourself is ‘how are my target market selecting suppliers?’ and ‘am I employing an effective marketing technique to meet this shopping style – at the point of research/enquiry?’ Inspiration Online Marketing Ireland has over 10 years experience in online marketing and we can help you answer these questions.

You may feel you know the key words your customers use to search for your services but are you the best person to assess this?

By using online tools, Key word research undertaken by Inspiration usually involves the following steps

• document the key terms considered to be used by prospective customers.
• research these using live tools to see how many searches there are e.g. in google, on these terms
• remember to search within the right market e.g. google.co.uk is different to google.fr etc so make sure research is done on the right location.
• The tools will suggest alternative key terms which may have higher search traffic.
• We will also consider what competitors are doing – if everyone is optimizing for the top traffic terms, often clients get a better result by targeting secondary terms with less competition.

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Who wouldn’t want it? Someone has just recommended this book to me and apparently it’s based on case studies of people who have set up internet-based businesses that run themselves. One guy simply spends four hours a week transferring his money between accounts. Sounds too good to be true – don’t know; I’ll read the book and tell you – unless there’s an Irish entrepreneur out there who’s doing it?

Despite having both a personal and professional interest in all things internet, I’m still not convinced about the benefits for Irish businesses in investing considerable time and money into building activity through social networking sites. (this is the polite, professional version of this blog )

So I was interested to read an article in the Irish Times today about putting businesses on the social media map. It seems to me that the interviewee, Mark Swaine has worked with clients paying someone to keep the social networks up-to-date and he’s come to the same conclusion as myself – it’s probably not worth it. (more…)

General Guidelines:

1. Decide in advance what each page will be about. Focus on a single area for each page i.e. “The Theme” for that page.

2. For each page’s “Theme “use 2 or max 3 keyword phrases in the page content and each pages Meta Tags (description in code). (more…)

If you are considering creating a new website or simply re-developing an existing site, then this document should be useful.

It is a questionnaire which enables you to consider all the key issues when documenting your requirements. If you discuss this with your team and document the answers to each question, you will be well on the way to developing a full website brief which Inspiration can use to give you indicative pricing and to add value to your requirements. (more…)