Oops... when was the last time you checked your forms were working?
Season 7, Issue 11: A reminder to emulate your customer journeys
📬 In this issue:
A friendly reminder to check your customer journey experience
Keeping up to date on what your competitors are doing
An update on the guerilla marketing issue
Announcement! I made a WhatsApp community for memes, links, and shit posting, click here to join. There’s lots of times I see a campaign and think “that’s cool” but it’s like 2 hours after I’ve just sent a Mehdeeka and waiting a week to share it feels too long, or there’s a marketing meme I want to share but it’s a reel, which isn’t shared easily via email. So this is an overflow for that! It’ll start with only me being able to post, and depending on how it goes I’ll open it up to member posts too!
You’ll be able to react, reply, vote in polls etc but not be able to create new posts. I want to keep it from being spammy.
Buenos dias Mehketeers,
Today’s issue is a bite sized one because hopefully you read it and then jump right into actioning it. I recently was reminded of the importance of today’s topic the hard way, as in, through finding out a form was broken and I had been running campaigns to it without realising it was broken.
You know, sometimes things just break with no real good reason and no warning, so every now and then (let’s say quarterly) it’s a great idea to just double check your top of funnel journey by going through it yourself.
Here’s a thorough but probably has items missing from it checklist:
Find broken forms
This one might be for the smaller companies where having a day (or two, or three) in a row with zero leads isn’t that uncommon. Maybe you’ve got a bigger contract value and less target accounts, or you’re just starting out and people don’t know you yet.
Either way, I have seen more broken “contact us” forms than I’m comfortable with. Especially on agency sites. Agencies, get it together!
My personal experience with this is that pretty recently I set up a campaign, tested everything and it was working, launched the campaign. Then the campaign was doing well from the platform side of things, but wasn’t converting to leads. To check out what was up, I went through it myself and then found a broken form. When had it broken? How many leads did we miss out on? I guess we’ll never know. You bet I went and checked every other form after that though.
See what Google is auto-completing
This one’s kind of fun because it updates over time. Best done using a friend’s phone, incognito mode, or a library computer that’s got some wild browsing histories.
Power up the ol’ google.com home page and type away all the queries you can think of that people would search to find you and see what the autocomplete comes up with.
You might find some new keywords, or some really weird stuff that makes for a good story. Worth doing when you haven’t got the headspace for heavy lifting work.
See what your competitors are doing
While you’re on Google, put some of those autocomplete suggestions through and see what’s coming up post-Google-algorithm changes and with SGE rolling out.
In my opinion, we’re going to see some ups and downs in terms of SGE actually appearing vs regular search results before it settles down into something predictable.
Eli’s Newsletter is a great SEO resource I’ve been reading a lot of recently, and they had this little thought nugget that I am keen to explore:
Build brand citations instead of links
Generate citations about your company and products to aid those branded queries. This means that links will count far less, and the new link-building will be brand-building—no hyperlinks necessary.
Read more:
The link to your competitors is that their old content might be getting picked up by these algo changes OR they’re adapting to it faster than you are, so check where they’re ranking in comparison to you, and on what search terms.
Stocktake your emails
I feel like this is a conflicting piece of advice and more for larger orgs that have way more teams sending emails than just marketing.
If you’ve got sales sending end of month offers, customer success sending customer newsletters, marketing sending nurture flows, marketing sending monthly EDMs of content, partner emails, and on and on, you can quickly have one prospect/custome receive more emails than you’d like them to be receiving.
On the other hand, I’ve written before about how infrequent emails can also make someone have a “wait, what?” reaction to seeing your name in their inbox.
If you haven’t looked at your emails from a receiving-experience point of view in the past six or so months, take this as your sign.
Clean up your ToFU experience
All of these little things should add up to you building a little to-do list of things to clean up. Remember you can always outright ask your recent customers what their experience was like.
An update on the guerilla marketing issue!!
Issue here if you missed it:
So I emailed the City of Sydney to ask about this, and they actually got back to me the day after this issue was posted and then every issue after that just didn’t have space for this update, but here it is!
Advertising Decals on the footpath would fall under the remit of our graffiti team as they are generally not allowed.
Graffiti can be any inscription, word, figure, word design out on any surface of any asset by scratching, spraying, drawing, marking, etching, painting , pasting, or gluing.
For specific events we do allow decals to be added outside a venue for example when there is public queueing required.
They said marketing on the footpath counts as graffiti and they don’t like it. But, I think that also means it falls under the “too small to care about” and “if my job is cleaning graffiti I probably care more about the spray paint etc. than a sticker on the floor that’ll wear off on its own” camp.
****I am not liable for anyone using this method and getting in trouble with the council.
I have also spotted WAY more of these, here’s my little collection:
Quite a variety of uses in this batch!
Finally, I found a supplier that does the thick sticker variety. These were a mystery to me for a while, but then I realised an alternative term for “pavement” is “asphalt” and that had better search results.
Clickity clack: Links
Here’s a couple of things I found and enjoyed on the internet:
Ever wondered what the difference is between a typeface and a font? Here’s the answer
Have you ever noticed every Absolut Vodka ad is the same?
I just booked a holiday to Japan, specifically because I wanted to go see a music festival, and then even though they’re not playing at the festival I’m going to, I was reminded how much I like this song from Hitsujibungaku and if you don’t like foreign music, this song is in English
I shared a snippet from Eli’s newsletter last week, and then he did an expanded take on what the Google SGE changes will mean for your SEO strategy. Worth the read!
That’s all for now. Next week is the last week of the season!
Kayla