Welcome to Tactical Thinking Regular thoughts on web marketing & winter tourism from Tactic Group

“Content is king” has become quite the quintessential phrase in Blogs like ours over the past few years. But it’s a phrase we at Tactic Group strongly believe in. So if content is king, how should it be communicated?

Last month we setup an email campaign for delivering HTML newsletters to the membership database of the New Zealand Snowsports Instructors Alliance (NZSIA). Our chosen platform was Campaign Monitor. And we were impressed. The functionality was extensive, the approval process for campaigns was thorough and the reporting stats are substantial. 100% recommended!

For NZSIA the newsletter performed well. 50% of recipients opened the newsletter (which is very high for email campaigns), 25% clicked a link and only 0.35% unsubscribed. Pretty good results I’d say. The fact that the recipients of the campaign were a highly targeted market certainly helped. However the newsletter’s clean and simple design plus, getting back on topic now, the well-thought-out readable content would have made the biggest impact – particularly with the clicked link and low unsubscribe rates.

Yep, content is still king, that’s for sure. However, without the vessel to communicate such content the message would have never reached the audience. In this case the vessel was an HTML email campaign in the form of a newsletter. In another cases it might be a Twitter stream or a Vimeo channel, but the vessel must be matched with the message and suited to those you’re trying to reach.

So here we are in week four of this series, and I’ve got another handful of plugins to share. This week I’m introducing tools to help with Web site analytics.

A crucial aspect of Web site management is tracking performance and observing visitor behaviour. This process provides valuable insights that can be used to improve a Web site, create happy, loyal customers and make an online business more successful. This post talks about three plugins that make this process easier on your WordPress site.

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So here’s the third installment in the series. This week I have a handful of plugins to help in the area of SEO.

From its solid foundations WordPress is very ‘search engine friendly’ out of the box. Its default themes and template system are built on modern Web standards and the clean, valid code makes it easy for search engines to find, understand and index content. However, that doesn’t mean there is no room for improvement for those wanting to take every possible advantage when creating exposure for their products or services.

The plugins I have selected today enable little tweaks and techniques to make your site play nice with search engines – and ultimately help them help people find their way to you.

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Following on from last week’s post that kicked this series off, here’s three recommended plugins for maintaining a WordPress site.

WordPress is renowned for its ease of use and its extensive features for keeping a site running smoothly. The comment moderation is first-class, the user management is a breeze, and with the help of the security plugins I recommended last week it’s simple to keep your installation safe. So what other areas of site management are there to improve?

Three areas we like to have covered, on our own sites and client sites, are backing up the data WordPress holds, a user-friendly way of managing site updates and rooting out broken links from site content. (Broken links are also a big issue in the world of SEO, but I wanted to include them this week because of their impact on user experience).

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We at Tactic Group are big WordPress fans. For any project requiring a blog/news based site it is our platform of choice. We’ve installed and maintained a number of sites on WordPress and I would like to share our list of essential plugins to make it fly.

There are over 8,000 plugins available for WordPress. I’m not claiming these are the only plugins you’ll ever need. The plugins I’m listing here are those we’ve used time and time again for specific tasks. Each of them does their job very well, and as a result we’ve grown to love them.

We’ve identified four areas of WordPress that can be beefed-up for easier management and better business: Security, Maintenance, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Analytics. It’s quite a long list so I’m going to break it up into four weekly posts. This week I’ll look at Security and reinforcing your WordPress site, keeping any vulnerabilities to a minimum.

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Our Tactical Thinking posting schedule has been a bit lacking of late. There is a good reason for this however…

Whilst both Doug and myself are the leading partners in the Tactic Group business, we’re both still self-contractors and have fingers in a number of other pies. Recently Doug has launched his own Web site promoting his services as a specialist User Experience Designer. Check it out at dougsomerville.com.

Me, well that’s been a bit of a roller coaster ride. I’ve recently published a book about skiing and snowboarding in Japan, called Snow-search Japan and am currently in the land of the rising sun promoting the book whilst doing a little other work. To keep track of all the projects I’m involved in I decided to start a mini scrapbook of projects with Posterous.

2010 will see Tactic Group begin a number of new projects including a Blog strategy and design project for the New Zealand Snowsports Instructors Alliance and a re-design for our own site. Watch this space!

The first half of 2009 saw Tactic Group finish off a couple of major projects. This included a web research and design project for Snow Sports Coaching NZ, which included an e-learning solution – something that was new for us.

More recently we undertook a social media strategy and monitoring project for Cardrona Ski Resort in New Zealand.

Both were fun, interesting projects that, not only opened new doors for Tactic Group, but helped us push our knowledge and abilities in a number of different web mediums. We’ve since written a casestudy about each project that provides a good insight into the processes and techniques we employed, check ‘em out…

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Just recently I found myself choked for words to use in a headline for a news post I was writing.

This led to a good foraging through many blogs for inspiration. What I found was an abundance of information and advice about how to create good headlines. There really is endless amounts of articles that have been written on this subject, so I thought I’d boil a few down for our audience here at Tactical Thinking…

At Copyblogger: How to Write Headlines That Work

In this post Brian Clark, Author of Copyblogger, outlines eight different types of headlines all suited to different situations.

He begins with direct and indirect headlines, i.e. one that states the selling proposition directly or one that uses curiosity to raise a question in the reader’s mind. Here’s a relevant example for our audience:

Direct – “50% off on all 2009 outerwear!”
Indirect – “Why pay full-price for your new jacket?”

He goes on to describe News headlines, How-to headlines, Question and Command headlines, Reason Why headlines and finally Testimonial headlines. Very useful stuff as it opens the doors to many more headline-writing options.
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Which do you use first when searching for a local shop or service? The Yellow Pages or the White Pages?

It all depends on what you’re searching for, right? If you already know the name of the business, it makes sense to flick to the appropriate ‘white’ page. But if you only know the name of the service ‘yellow’ is the way to go.

This same rule is applied to Google everyday by millions of users across the world, often without a second thought. One might search for ‘4 wheel drive cars’ or ‘Subaru Legacy’. ‘Backcountry packs’ or ‘DaKine’. Maybe even… ‘Web Design’ or ‘Tactic Group’.

So which approach is typically you? Yellow or white?

Today I came across this post by Seth Godin entitled ‘How to make money with SEO’ – sent to me by my esteemed colleague Doug (thanks for that mate and sorry to steal your thunder). The title did nothing for me so my initial impression was not one of shock and awe, but the first couple of paragraphs certainly got my interest:

There are two ways to use SEO to help your organization. One is reliable and effective, the other is a glorious crap shoot that usually fails but is wonderful when it works. I’ll start with the second.

The most common way to use search engine optimization is to find a keyword (like “plumbing”) and do whatever you can to ‘own’ that word on Google. This is Google as the Yellow Pages (with free ads).

The Yellow Pages are terrific for plumbers, because if you need a plumber, that’s where you’re going to look. Buy the biggest ad, be the first listing, you get calls. Google is a revelation because it’s a super Yellow Pages and it’s free! The problem: how to be the first listing, because being the 40th listing is fairly worthless.

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Some end of the week inspiration today, in the form of a quick talk about the power of design. If you don’t work in the news industry, and think this isn’t relevant to you – hold your horses, this is well worth spending six minutes of your Friday to watch.

In this short film from TED, Polish designer/art-director, Jacek Utko, presents a case-study on how good design boosted the the flagging circulation of several eastern European newspapers. His story goes beyond graphic design.

While Jacek is talking about design in a very visual medium, I love his sentiments on going beyond visual design, changing the look of the newspapers and transforming the experience. The business and financial gains he shows are astounding!

Via 37Signals.