Are you about to fire off that blog post/tweet/status update? Put your idea through this flowchart and see if it is share-worthy before pushing the publish button. Most campaigns live and die according to their propensity to be shared, how does yours stack up?

There are a lot of reports about the positive effects online video has in increasing engagement and conversion rates. I think it’s still one of the most under-utilized tactics for ecommerce sites. There are different kinds of videos that can be used for different purposes, just like different kinds of content for each stage of the conversion funnel.

Brand awareness: This is your typical commercial. Usually you have to pay money to get people to watch these. Hopefully you can make something compelling enough that people will enjoy and want to share with their friends.

How to: These are videos not specific to your product but that answer the questions people search for. Lowes does a good job with this, if you Google “How to Install a Glue-Down Engineered Hardwood Floor” Lowes is right there  with helpful content related to their products and services. Lowes isn’t pitching their product, they are earning attention instead of buying it.
These videos are also huge for driving organic traffic; Youtube is the worlds second largest search engine. According to some reports, videos “stand about a 50 times better chance of appearing on the first page of results than any given text page in the index.”

Category Education: Videos don’t have to only live on product detail pages. Videos on category pages can explain collections and broader use cases than on just the individual product level.

Customer Service: Videos can go a long ways to help users navigate a site, answer questions about the assembly or use of their purchases and answer customer service centric calls like how to return a product. All of these types of videos save money deflecting calls from customer service call centers and make customers happier that they don’t have to call.

Product video: The traditional product video explaining the use of the product. Missing from a lot of these videos is showing the product in context. Too often product videos are done inside a beige studio with a stale person showing all the product features. There is a much bigger branding and emotional aspect that these videos could capitalize on by showing the product being used in its intended setting with people who reflect the aspirational style of the customer.

The most focused on types of videos are the brand awareness and product videos, but there are a lot more opportunities in between.

See if this scenario sounds familiar:

This report shows visits are up year over year. Yea! Well done everyone, the markting budget is paying off! Let’s keep the momentum going and see if we can continue to drive even more visits to the site!

This report shows conversion rate is down year over year. Boo! What the heck is going on everyone! Let’s optimize our accounts, cut cost per acquisition in all channels and limit non-qualified visitors entering the site!

The truth lies when you look at conversion rate on top of visits. Obviously, if you’re spending more on reaching out to drive more visitors to the site, chances are they are new visitors and not very low in the conversion funnel, causing a drop in conversion rate. Do you ask someone to marry you on the first date? No of course not, yet that is what too many companies expect when they pay to drive new traffic and expect them to purchase after their first interaction with the site.
What is a “good” conversion rate? Is less than 1% bad? Is greater than 7% amazing? Neither. It all depends on volume of traffic, average order value and margin. If you sell a product for $50 online, would you rather have a site that gets 100,000 daily visits and have a dismal looking conversion rate of .9%, or a site with an amazing conversion rate of 6% but gets 1,000 visits? Option one would be making $45,000 while option two makes only $3,000.
It gets dangerous when an organization has its mind set on a specific conversion rate and makes short term changes to maintain it – like managing their marketing channels so that only the most qualified and interested visitors come to the site. These visitors tend to be repeat customers already far down the conversion funnel – converting the converted. A healthy business will continue to invest in adding more new customers into top of the the bucket. If not, and the tyranny of maintaing conversion rate runs rampant, the amount of people leaking out the bottom of the bucket will exceed the amount going in the top. A target conversion rate should allow for a healthy amount of new visitors who are an investment in the long term. Today’s expensive, non-converting visitors are tomorrows cheap, high-converting visitors.

Deciding the time frame that you use to retarget both prospects and purchasers from your website make a big difference. Visitors that leave the site without buying have the most potential for coming back and purchasing in the first 14 days (of course the tricky part is figuring our whether they would have come back anyway without seeing your ads). The more time passes, the colder the prospect gets in terms of re-activating them as a customer. Past purchasers are just the opposite. Right after purchase isn’t the smartest time to serve them ads since they just purchased, but depending on your product, the more time passes the more valuable they are to message.

Content creation is an important marketing strategy for a business and so is content curation.

At the Techonomy conference in Lake Tahoe, CA in August 2010 Eric Schmidt said, “Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until  2003. That’s something like five exabytes of data.”

With that perspective in mind, it makes sense that curation on the web is really important.

Seth Godin explains it in his post Nearly Infinite, “If you know 100,000 words, names and brand names, there are now a hundred trillion different searches you can do… with only two words in combination.  No, you might not want to search on Starbucks Matzoh, but you could. Just knowing what to search for is now as difficult as the search itself.
In the face of infinity, many of us are panicking and searching less, going shallower, relying on bestseller lists and simple recommendations. The vast majority of Google searches are just one or two words, and obvious ones at that. The long tail gets a lot shorter when you don’t know what’s out there.”

A business can take advantage of this problem that most people face online by curating content for their blog. Use the purpose of your business as the theme of your blog and then find other blogs and content out there that focus on that same content and re-post it. If your business purpose is something that people want to rally behind then your blog can be the rallying point.

Magazine publishers don’t sell magazines and web sites don’t sell content, they sell their audiences to advertisers. They do it by focusing on a topic that attracts a lot of visitors and then churning out a lot of content, most of it curated, on a daily basis for advertisers to sponsor. There’s nothing really special about what publishers do that a brand couldn’t do. So instead of paying publishers to be able to brand their content, make your own content and brand it all for free.

Instead of asking, “what is your marketing strategy?”, I think the more important question is, “what is your content creation strategy?”

Churning out fresh content is the essence of SEO, fuels your Facebook fans and Twitter followers, adds credibility and trust to your brand, helps customers down the conversion funnel, holds the customer’s attention and enhances the customer’s memory.

It’s not easy to blog regularly, upload current videos to your YouTube channel, tweeting and feeding Facebook. But it’s a heck of a lot more worth it than a traditional marketing strategy of having well crafted ads placed periodically in places where people try to ignore them.

And when it comes to quality vs quantity, I think quantity is more important. I’d rather have a few hundred (and growing everyday) fishing lines in the water that a couple really expensive ones.

So what does a content creation strategy look like? I’m still working on that one, but what it begins to look like is a cadence of timely content based on:

• Being a teacher
• Going behind the scenes
• Giving a little at a time
• Focusing on their interests, not yours
• One on one dialogs
• Making customers famous
• Being a curator

In the end your content creation strategy earns you attention by being a publisher instead of paying some other publisher for their audience’s attention.

There is a surge of deal sites on the internet and I don’t think it’s a good thing for businesses. Groupon, LivingSocial, Facebook Deals, Google Offers, Woot, Gilt Group and on and on, all get too much credit for the services they provide: It’s not that hard to give stuff away for cheap on the internet where spreading information is as simple as a click. Retailers have gotten caught up in all the promotion hype of these businesses and have trained customers to be very price sensitive and to not buy anything until it’s on sale. I’m very skeptical of whether these flash sales and deal networks really add value to the business: sure they are getting a ton of volume quickly but are they getting more customers? It’s my opinion that the people who use these deal sites could care less about being return customers and are more interested in jumping to the next business that gives them a deal. Take a look at the growth of the query Coupon Code from Insights for Search:
From a study posted on the Google Retail Blog: 25%, the majority, of people who “Like” brands on Facebook do so for discounts.
The amount of people researching online before they buy is going up: one study shows “58% of Americans now reporting that they perform online research concerning the products and services that they are considering purchasing,” and another says, “34% of customers research online and then went to the store to purchase the products.” The more prolific these deal sites become the easier people doing their research will find them and the harder it will be for a company to sell something at full price.