Hubspot, don’t get me wrong, I read your blog _every_ day.  I love it. Its made me show lots of interesting graphs to my fellow workmates to re-enforce the benefits of business bloging and “inbound” marketing.   But you know what – I think you’re at least _partly_ wrong on this one.

I’m referring of course to your “5 Items to Delete From your Website Today” article.   I’m not disagreeing that large amounts of text, images and industry jargon are useless on your company site.. but removing the contact form? are you serious?

5. “Contact Us” Form – Contact us forms don’t work. Instead of qualified leads, they mostly attract spam. Having your business contact information as part of your website is critical. However, when it comes to using forms, use landing pages. Landing pages provide a dedicated form that is connected to a lead generation offer. For example, if you have a form connected to a free assessment, you clearly know that submissions from that form are related to potential customers who want a free assessment. You don’t have this clarity with a contact us form, and response rates for dedicated landing pages are much higher.

My view on this? Contact forms are necessary (yes you will get spam) and business contact information is absolutely critical (I personally won’t buy from any company that doesnt list a number for me to call), but placing contact details on landing pages are not necessarily the answer anymore.  Perhaps I’m just impatient, but if I’ve made a decision to talk to you about your product, I want to do it now.  Not when you’ve picked up your forms responses. Not when it suits you.   I’m not saying don’t have a form, just list contact details as well, on the same page, and if you do have a form make sure you contact people immediately.

A recent report by the UK’s Ofcom has concluded that the UK leads the way in digital marketing.

UK consumers also enjoy the cheapest prices for mobile phones and broadband, while the country also leads the world in online advertising.

Well done guys – Makes me proud to be at the leading edge of digital marketing.

SOURCE : BBC

Ok, so last week I was tasked with running some classes on digital media with some of the other departments in work.  Nothing too exciting, just run them through the basics and let them know how to sell our services…. This particular one was on social media.  Now I’ve head alot of speakers talk about writing articles / books before they start writing a talk to help organise their ideas, hence why I’m doing it on this occasion, as not only is social media a rather “new” but its relatively unstructured (some will argue).
Now the more switched-on of you out there will be thinking .. by the time I write this, not only will it probably be out of date, but also, however long I write this (or teach this tomorrow) it still wont be long or detailed enough to cover everything in socia media!  Well here goes;

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I’ve seen many attempts of companies (especially these car insurance comparison brokers) trying to find new and more “web 2.0″ methods of marketing their services (perhaps web 2.0 isn’t the right phase to use there, but more “viral”).  Perhaps the best pervious example I’ve seen of marketing car insurance virally was the “Ace Driver” game created by the award winning viral gaming company tamba, which recieved over one million visits in 14 days, and allowed a small local car insurance broker to expand from a tiny operation into a nationwide power..

But this new campaign (albiet by a large company with a huge budget) is a campaign just launched by “comparethemarket.com” (no I am not linking directly to their site).   This campaign involved a talking Meerkat discussing how many visiters they have visiting their site looking for car insurance.    Not only did this make quite an amusing advert (although not as amusing as my currently favourate advert “Pablo the Drug Mule“) but they’ve bothered to create the ensure site behind it too – which is fully functional (yes you can *ACTUALLY* compare meerkats, including their various silly hobbies).  But this isn’t without it its uses as an actual marketing campaign.  The site will periodically ask you (incase you weren’t actually there to compare Meerkats) via layer popups that you may be on the wrong site – and would you like to goto the actual “comparethemarket.com” site..  and on top of they provide references in all the usual places (the FAQ, T&Cs etc, mostly to humorous effect).

I for one will be interested to see how many referals comparethemarket.com gets from this silly site – perhaps this will prove that car insureance is not immune to a good viral marketing campaign.   I hope so…

This is a great article by the New York Times,  some great tips on making the most out of social networking sites..

http://shiftingcareers.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/taking-the-social-networking-plunge/