How to blow up a Death Star

June 10, 2019

 Surrounded by indifference? Limited time and resources?

Try Death Star Strategy. It’s the marketing strategy with explosive results.

Find the weakest point, and for a limited time attack it with all your resources.

You too will blow up the Death Star!

The force is with you. Always.

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How to make sure your hotel guests don’t abandon their online reservations

April 15, 2016

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More than four in five travellers booking hotel rooms online abandon their reservations.

While it’s conceivable that many of those users are just browsing casually to check availability for their preferred dates, 13% cite the extended booking process as the reason for their frustration.

Obviously hotels could benefit from streamlining the reservation procedure.

Making reservations can often be time-consuming. In a recent study, nearly 40% of brands required four or more clicks from the room results page in order to complete a reservation, and over 60% required the user to load multiple pages.

Finding assistance through customer support involved navigating away from the booking process for 50% of the brands in the study.

Luxe hotel and restaurant chain Relais & Châteaux tries to combat this problem by allowing guests to add rooms to their shopping cart, in the same way they would add items to their cart on a retailer’s site.

Guests can also favourite and share properties and access the last set of properties they viewed—reducing navigation time and making it more likely that travellers will complete their reservations.

Need social media training? Contact Furthr.

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Two great ways to win on Pinterest

April 3, 2016

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Achieving Pinterest popularity requires a different strategy than on Instagram or Facebook.

Here’s two great tips.

  1. Focus on lifestyle, not products. Unlike Instagram, where product posts generate the most engagement, Pinterest is more about visual storytelling. Brands do best by casting themselves as  purveyors of a complete lifestyle. In Activewear, that often means sharing content related to outdoor activities: for example,  Quiksilver’s feed includes surfing and snowboarding imagery. While the average Activewear brand has only 239,000 followers, Quiksilver has 2.7 million.
  2. Appeal to women. 85% of Pinterest users are female. Outdoors heavyweight L.L. Bean is trying to engage female audiences with curated style boards and gift guides geared toward women. The brand has 5.1 million followers, so their strategy is working.

Need to brush up your social media training? Email Furthr now.  

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300: the optimum length of a post

December 3, 2014

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What is the optimum length for a post. Execs at Trinity Mirror Digital believe it is 300 words. My old colleague David Hepworth agrees.

 It would take you two minutes to say three hundreds words aloud, which is about as long as most people are capable of concentrating on the average speaker. With three hundred words, a reader can glimpse the end of the piece at the same time as he can see the beginning. In that instant of scanning they are sizing up the job. Therefore the first thing you have to do is give them some idea of the task in hand. You shouldn’t need a word-count. Three hundred words is, if you like, a screen-full.

Google requires 250 words of text before it can index a story for search.

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Content marketing tip #3: if your headline has a question mark in it, the answer is “no”

May 13, 2014

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This is a great editorial idea from my good friends over at Esquire. But having rolled the ball to the top of the creative hill, they stop before they get to the top.

“Is this the most influential haircut in Britain?” asks the headline. Obviously Esquire think so, else they would not have gone to this trouble to commission a photo and come up with a great headline. So why not say so? The question mark at the end makes Esquire look uncertain, equivocal and weak.

Golden rule: if you have to put a question mark at the end of your headline, then the answer is “no.” Queen to retire? No, because if she was, the headline would read Queen to retire. Next!

 

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Content marketing tip #1: keep it simple

April 8, 2014

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Sometimes I feel there are two types of people in the world: simplifiers and complicators.  Some of your co- workers  will love to make things as complex as can be and resist simplification at all costs.

For me, I am a simplifier.  I understand Blaize Pascal when he wrote: “I did not have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” What’s the difference between complicators and simplifiers? The complicator expresses himself, the simplifier communicates.

Example: in my wallet I have a business card  for a retail foresight consultancy I did some work for.  They wanted to describe the service they offered to clients on their business cards. This is what they come up with:

We provide the inspiration and insight that gives the world’s leading companies competitive advantage.

That’s complicator talk. This is what Furthr came up with:

What’s next for retail

So much of excellence is, of course, the art of elimination
.

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