Thursday, 15th of November

15.11.2012

Slogan of the day: SEMRush

- Some tips about marketing graphical design that proved to be useful:

1. Use only pictures that are absolutely 100% legal. That means - are in corporate property of your company / drawn by yourself
2. Make all text fonts similar. Avoid "cluttering" fonts, such as Times New Roman, and use only 1-2 text styles (one small and one big, or one bold and one italic, etc.)
3. Be more soft in your marketing messages. Words like "buy", "purchase", "now", etc. are too strong to your potential clients tender years. Better replace them with "leverage", "try", "today".
4. Be logical. Both graphical and textual parts of the advertisement should should be connected to each other and have some sort of narrative structure or logic. For example, if text is "having problems with X?" then it will be more convenient if the supporting image will be a graphical illustration of the problem, or an image of person having trouble with X. Also if the "catch" is "having trouble with X?" then at the end of your little advertising narrative should be some kind of answer or hint, that could show potential customers that the decision is your product. For example: "Then use Y!" or "Then contact with us and we will help you!".

- There this web service called SEMRush that is said to be highly accurate in website researches. I checked it and was not disappointed - by the entering of competitors domain and clicking "search" it gave me a lot of very useful data, like competitors keywords, traffic, trend statistic, etc. It was actually promising until I found out that only 20% of acquired info are available for free. In order to get the whole pie and to be able to export the results to excel I need to pay 400$+ something to them monthly. Considering my bosses miserliness I will probably never get my hands to this data, without which my masterpiece keyword-research would not be completed...

- SemRush was useful in two ways: first, it allowed me to include in the list some of the competitors traffic-generating keywords that I've overlooked before. Second, it did provide some data about exactly how much traffic (in %) some of these keywords are generating. Some of the data that SEMRush offers, though, proved to be incorrect (Google rank of competitors websites was a complete mismatch to Rank Check results, which i tend to trust more), so it's a questionable data resource anyway. 

- Today I've received e-mail from Jesus Christ. Some antisemitic, fanatical and intolerable fundamentalist Jesus Christ. I think I'll keep it for history (and for possible miracle proof). 

- EMERGENCY TASK: I was told to make an email invitation to the next big exhibition-symposium that we are taking part in. Once again, the seemingly easy task proved to be a little challenge. Since our popularity and sailings are dropping, my boss decided to refuse our old safe and plain "come visit our booth" strategy, and wrote an "attack" text, that was sharp and tended to "hurt the nerve". We chat a little and decided to include three points in our invitation e-mail:

• Sharp and edgy problems that, according to my boss, every project manager is facing
• Our solutions to these problems and some fake numbers from the last exhibition invitation
• Promise to donate 10% of our income to the victims of Sandy superstorm, if our clients will preorder our services for the next year (this branched from my idea to somehow tailor the disaster to our marketing strategy)