Topics, Trends and Techniques from Brooks Bell Interactive
Month: December, 2009
That Reg Path Looks Fabulous on You: Making a shoe-of-the-month club site walk its talk.
I never expected Kim Kardashian to have any sort of effect on my life, let alone a profound one. But that loveable little scamp has become the front woman of a brilliant business: a shoe of the month club. And now that I’m a member, I can enthusiastically blog about it.
The ShoeDazzle.com homepage is stylish and navigable. If you aren’t immediately drawn in by a pouting Kim surrounded by multiple pairs of hot shoes, then the quick bullet points and prominent price point surely will do the trick. The features of the club are compelling, and so is the fixed price for each pair of shoes. A tiny improvement for this page would be changing the background to solid white. The copy will be easier to read, and Kim and her shoes will pop more. Read the rest of this post »
Wednesday, December 30, 2009 AT 9:00 am
View Comments |
Piecing Together the Social Media Puzzle: It’s All About Awareness
Source: HubSpot
The above cartoon helps to demonstrate how the web of social media can accelerate awareness of your brand. In the top left box, there is a marketer. This marketer has a client that sells shoes. He optimizes a registration path for users to sign up to receive email and/or text notifications when shoes that they have pre-selected go on sale or when new products become available. Read the rest of this post »
Monday, December 28, 2009 AT 9:00 am
View Comments |
SEO Copywriting: Don't Let the Keywords Get You Down
Here’s your challenge: take a specific group of words and phrases and use them all in a headline. Seems easy enough, right? Not until you actually try it. Welcome to the world of SEO copywriting.
SEO, short for search engine optimization, is a pretty simple concept. It basically lets you use specific keywords in your copy so it’s easy for the major search engines to find your site.
But there’s a fine line between weaving words into your copy in a compelling way and blatantly overusing words for the sake of exposure. The challenge for a copywriter is to effectively use the keywords in conjunction with the benefit to the end user.
Here’s a fun example of the good, bad and ugly of SEO copywriting: Read the rest of this post »
2010 brings the analytic ruckus!
With 2009 almost over, most will agree… Results-driven online marketing will be further justified and business will spend more in 2010. According to the latest 2010 eMarketer forecasting, online marketing will see one of the largest boosts in investment throughout the marketing/advertising industry. Smart spenders will look to further justify any increase in online spending by establishing solid test and respond campaigns. These campaigns will require analytic teams to further sharpen skills that provide accurate data results, as they learn more from customers.
With Adobe’s acquisition of Omniture, and companies like American Express launching new divisions dedicated to analytics and consulting, there is proof that smart investors are gearing up to benefit from analyzing data that is gained from online marketing initiatives.
“Analytics has been the hottest word [in marketing] for the past 18 months,” stated David Frankland, principal analyst at Forrester Research from Chantal Tode’s “AmEx’s new division displays value of data” in DM News. Tode also points out that this “ data value trend” is being supported by economic conditions which are “forcing marketers to analyze their marketing spend more carefully to ensure profitability.”
Monday, December 21, 2009 AT 12:11 pm
View Comments |
Forget What You Think You Know About the Fold
Here’s a phrase we at BBI throw around a lot: Above the Fold. In context you might hear one of us say, “The call-to-action button is above the fold.”
The fold refers to that imaginary line marking the end of the visible portion of a web page when viewed in a browser window. This lingo is a carryover from broadsheet newspapers that were folded in half with breaking news stories at the top of the page—or above the fold.
Early web design conventions held that important content, and sometimes entire web pages, should be located above the fold because users were disinclined to scroll or spend much time looking for information. It follows that content below the fold is unimportant.
Well, times have changed. Read the rest of this post »
