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Archive for the ‘Online Marketing’ Category
Every internet user is all too familiar with the concept of online advertising, be it in the form of a too-good-to-be-true offer, a survey, a pop-up window advertising myriad of services, and the text that runs along the bottom of streaming online video. As consumers have turned off their televisions and plugged in their PCs for home entertainment, the very nature of these advertisements has changed abruptly and in a noticeable way.
Taking the place of boilerplate, generalized advertisements like those that run on network television, we see customized and targeted information directly related to the content of our emails, our interests on Facebook, and our connections on LinkedIn. While this information is still used to sell products, a movement towards using this idea to address the social concerns of users has been quietly growing across the web.
Barack Obama raised $500 million from his online campaign, garnering a total of 5 million fans on social media sites. Dell used Twitter to sell $3 million worth of computers with over 600,000 followers. Clearly, these are some extreme examples of hard return on investment.
Social media ROI has been largely overlooked by businesses, as a study by Mzina and Babson Executive Education revealed. Eighty-four percent of professionals worldwide don’t measure the ROI of their social media programs, while 40 percent weren’t even sure if they could track ROI with their social media tools.
In spring of this year, Facebook started allowing Facebook pages to be customized more heavily with Facebook Markup language (FBML). This customization allows for greater control of messaging on a company or organization’s Facebook Page.
Toys R Us has provided an example of a particularly shrewd deployment of this functionality with a Black Friday-specific Facebook Page offering. The page gives a preview of the Black Friday promotions Toys R Us will be running, but only to fans of the page. Users can then click through to Toys R Us’ main site.
As humanity continues to trend away from such oddities as spending time with each other, a new trend is emerging. No longer is television the undisputed king of making people sit idle. In fact, companies in Great Britain are actually spending more money online for advertising than they are for television. Yet, at least in America, online advertising is down.
So what does this mean for you? Online advertising isn’t even remotely trending toward being useless. You don’t even have to be smarter about it; a lot of that decrease is probably due to capacity cuts and huge expenditure decreases more generally. That said, more profit is good, and, with keywords costing more and more on Google, greater bang for your buck may be had in the social media realm. Nielsen reports that advertising on social media networks is up 119% from last year. The same study says people are spending 17% of their time online on social networks.
Think about that. When people are on a social network, what state of mind are they usually in? They might be using it for work, sure, but most of the time they’re bored and just killing time. Not exactly busy, you could say. Add to that, they put their demographic information in their profile. Does this get easier?
Bottom line: Strongly consider allocating more of your online advertising budget toward social media advertising. Depending on your demographic, this could be a no-brainer.
The internet is a second reality where users create persona’s and garner reputations separate from those earned in the physical, day-to-day world. In Reality 2.0 – Web Edition, online reputations and presences can have absolutely nothing to do with Reality 1.0 – Earth Edition, commonly considered “the real world.”
Founded in early 2009, Getlisted.org is a tool for tracking businesses online across the major local search engine platforms Google, Yahoo!, MSN Live Search and Best of the Web. This tool allows users to search and immediately find your business location and information in a local search listing, lending your business more credibility than one that isn’t listed anywhere.
Even if you don’t have a current website or you’re in the process of redesigning it, you can list your business online if you have an email address. This is a good way to gain visibility without committing to a particular brand identity.
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Corporate blogs are common enough to be found on websites of Fortune 100 companies, and simple enough to be executed by small, family-owned businesses. The concept of a company directly communicating with its customers online and having a personal voice has taken off, and with good reason. But it’s not as intuitive as you may think, and there are tips that should be kept in mind when publishing your company’s blog.
Smile and have fun – Blogging is known for being more personable than other company communications, so show the fun and interesting side of your company. Take a cue from Kodak (1000words.kodak.com). Their chief blogger tries out new products and writes about her experiences, instead of just trying to market them. Which brings us to the next point…
Converse, don’t market- Don’t make the mistake of thinking this is the place for advertising slogans and generating testimonials. Let your customers tell their stories with your products, like Carhartt does – blogs.carhartt.com/blog/carhartt – by letting its fans post pictures of their kids in Carhartt, or tell stories about their tough jobs. Blogging is not always about what you have to tell your customers; that’s what traditional advertising is for.
Accept criticism - We know it’s a scary thing when you open up your blog for comments. There is the possibility that people might have a complaint. But don’t shy away, instead listen to what your customers have to say and let them know you’re listening.
We’ve all done it. You don’t have to feel ashamed to admit to that moment of intrigue while staring at that famous little search box. Recently, however, the act of “Googling” yourself or someone else has just gotten just a little bit more interesting. Let’s face it: curiosity has gotten the best of most of us at one time or another as we type our name into Google just to see how many results come back.
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With all the advances of the Internet and the hype for social networking it’s easy to forget some of the original online marketing methods. Email gets a bad rap sometimes because of aggressive spammers and over-zealous product advocates who constantly attack your inbox. But in today’s economy email marketing can be extremely effective if done right – it’s cost effective, targeted, has a great reach for potential customers and current ones, and can even help establish your company as an expert in your industry.
Email marketing techniques
We all get tons of email every day, so it’s important to take a second and consider what has worked in your own inbox to pull you in. The source and reason of the email plays an important role in deciding if it gets opened or sent to the spam folder. You will have to think like a marketer and try to understand what your customers are looking for and unify that with the goals of your email campaign.
- Here are 6 email marketing strategies to keep in mind:
- Start with a strong subject line. If you can’t capture your reader’s attention in an interesting subject line then they they probably will not go any further when viewing your e-newsletter. You have just a few words to grab their attention and ensure they continue reading.
- Two most important words: Design and Content. Is your design user-friendly? Does it encourage your reader’s eye to move down the page? Does it take into account different email viewing platforms and image filters? Once you get over the visual hurdles, remember that your content is responsible for engaging people and giving them a reason to keep reading.
- Include a call-to-action. Whether you want readers to visit the website, pass on information or download a whitepaper, make sure your email has a purpose. Even consider offering a promotion to your subscribers. It shows you appreciate their readership, and will encourage them to keep reading and forward your email to their friends and family.
- Make sure the links work. This seems basic, but your audience can’t pass on your great deals and stellar product message if they can’t forward your email or connect to your website.
- Respect your readers. This one can come in many forms. It might seem easy to skip a couple of these tips to increase email list volume, but remember that finding new members is much harder than keeping current ones:
- Don’t sell their email addresses
- Don’t bomb them with emails that are not relevant to them
- Don’t assume everyone views their email the same – account for smart phones and PDAs
- Don’t make the unsubscribe process more complicated than necessary - Set goals and track results. It’s hard to see if you’ve made progress if you don’t know where you started or what you’re reaching for. You also can’t tell what works if you can’t see where your users are clicking.
Semantics is the study of the meaning of words and sentences. While this is how you communicate to your friends, family and coworkers, it now can apply to how we communicate with search engines. Google, Yahoo and MSN require different language tactics to help them understand and process your website content efficiently. Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) is the process in which search engines place value on websites based on the organization of their text. Algorithms determine what a page is trying to say by analyzing the words and phrases and how their meanings are related.
Google’s mission statement is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Their algorithm’s main goal is to place value correctly on web pages and rank them appropriately for each given search.
