Archive for the ‘social marketing’ Category
Internet Marketing And Personality Infusion
Websites develop with the personality of the business owner. So, how can you take your personal interests and use them to intensify the effect of marketing? This includes both the marketing of the site and the products or services you are making available.
If your personality has a bent toward humor perhaps your website may include humorous bits of trivia that deal with your industry. You might solicit humorous stories from customers (this strategies could also work to improve list building endeavors).
If your personality is one that enjoys art you might consider a site that has a bent toward the artistic. Perhaps the listing of personally selected art shows or concerts may provide the personal touch you are looking for.
If you are a car enthusiast you might find a tasteful way to incorporate design based on your automobile of choice with personal links to a forum dedicated to serving fans of a variety of car buffs. This approach, as with most, may be best linked to products you are selling that have something in common with the automobile you feature or cars in general.
Hopefully you get the idea that personality doesn’t have to be put on the backburner in every case when it comes to Internet marketing.
For instance many sites are incorporating an interest in social issues as a site design feature. Some sites may do this by promoting affiliate products that share a portion of the proceeds with a charity of choice. They may also highlight a social issues site that focuses on the issue closest to the personal interests of the site owner.
This doesn’t have to be (and shouldn’t be) obtrusive, but it can help your customers understand a little bit more about your personality and passion to help others in need.
Imagine a business that took on the idea of assisting in feeding the hungry. They choose a well-respected charity and set aside a portion of their sale proceeds to help feed the hungry.
The website benefits because they may have individuals with similar interests who will make a purchase simply because they identify with the motivation and view this as a way to help. Others will buy because they love your product, and the charity you are interested in receives publicity to help others take notice of what they are doing and how site visitors can help.
You can’t rely on social marketing to be the only way you improve site visitation so make sure you work on other means of getting the word out about your business, but infusing your personal interests can be a positive way to connect in an emotional way with some site visitors.
The key part to this idea is that because most individuals form an emotional connection with a product this approach could be the means of developing that connection for a segment of site visitors.
The growth of your website can happen in numerous ways, but the idea of personality marketing may not be something you have considered before, but should.
Remember I used the word ‘tasteful’. What that means is not overpowering the visitor with your personal interest while negating the marketing effect of the product you are trying to sell. If you’ve made your business site into a fan site of something you really love you might have gone too far. On the other hand if you enjoy something that much consider creating a secondary site and then include links to that site from your primary business site.
Tune In To What Your Customers Really Want
Customer relationship marketing is powerful in theory, but troubled in practice. We need to take time to figure out how and why we are undermining our own best efforts.
Perhaps we’re overlooking the fundamental elements of a good customer relationship program. With the means to connect with customers easily, maybe we’re rushing to cash in on the potential rewards, while forgetting the essentials of all relationships: intimacy and trust.
Close examination reveals that relationships between companies and consumers are suffering. U.S. satisfaction rates are at an all-time low. Complaints, boycotts and growing unhappiness with big corporations are strong indicators that most CRM isn’t working.
Ironically, the very steps marketers are taking to build relationships with customers are often responsible for destroying these connections. Companies may delight in learning more about their customers and providing services to please them, but customers are fed up. They’re tired of irrelevant survey questions, overwhelming product choices, features they’ll never use in phone plans and cars, and rebate-driven buyer reward programs.
The New Frontier: Mining the Internet
With the proliferation of online stores that complement traditional outlets, companies now have a tremendous source of information about consumers’ preferences. Because a traditional store may not always have a product on its shelves, purchase results are not always a good measurement of desires. Online stores can track consumer demand patterns more precisely, as they offer extensive ranges of products to national and global customers.
The web is more than a sales channel; it is a powerful means of collecting data in real time. The Internet is truly the new frontier in connecting with the customer, offering a huge opportunity for companies to improve customer relationships.
The New Social Marketing: Buzz and Word of Mouth
Where does marketing enter the mix? Some experts claim the old days of “push” marketing are over, where a company shoved a one-way message to customers via print or TV. Corporations are asking themselves just how much return on investment there really is from a 30-second Super Bowl commercial.
Consumers are turning away from media and, instead, tuning into each other. Engagement and word of mouth marketing are the buzzwords of this new era. Customers are doing their market research online and listening to each other. Unfortunately, many marketers continue to look at engagement in a one-sided way.
Corporate blogs have become an excellent resource for CEOs and others to connect with customers in a personal manner. In spite of the possible pitfalls in opening two-way communication between the public and employees, there is much to be gained by being personable, accessible, authentic and transparent.
Customers are already communicating with each other online about products and experiences with your company. If you can join the conversation in a real way, in real time, you’ll have an advantage over those who remain silent and inaccessible behind corporate doors.
Now there is finally a way to discover what customers want, and a way to connect with them authentically. But there are risks involved in being honest and transparent. Will you and your company take the risk?
Thursday 60 Mins with @BilleBaty @Williger @LarryWentz and Possibly @Uschles
Thursday, June 3rd – FREE Social Marketing Webinar with @BilleBaty! You can find the invite here http://twtvite.com/socialsmm and signup using the box on the left – the topics include Twitter and social media branding and strategy tips presented by Darren Williger, Bille Baty, Kristen Ruby, and Larry Wentz. There’s going to be some incredible things discussed so please try to attend.
June 3rd at 2:00pm Central SIGNUP NOW with box on left!
FREE Social Media Marketing Webinar TODAY!
Thursday, May 27th – FREE Social Marketing Webinar with @BilleBaty! You can find the invite here http://twtvite.com/socialsmm and signup using the box on the left – the topics include Twitter and social media branding and strategy tips presented by Darren Williger, Bille Baty, Kristen Ruby, and Larry Wentz.
There’s going to be some incredible things discussed so please try to attend.
May 27th at 2:00pm Central SIGNUP NOW with box on left!
Get Your Traffic To Expode – Use Social Media!
If you’re like me, I got really tired of paying for my traffic and striving to get a higher search engine ranking. The competition is getting tougher and tougher. Although I am getting more successful with my Google and Yahoo Marketing campaigns and that’s mainly because I’m getting more experienced at it. But believe me, I’ve wasted a lot of money going through the learning curve.
But I’ve gotten smarter! I’ve found a way to generate a lot more traffic to my website and it’s absolutely free! Yes, I’m going to continue using my adwords, but not as much as I have in the past.
How did I get smarter? I kept hearing how social media was going to be the wave of the future when it comes to internet marketing. So I started setting up a couple of accounts on sites like Facebook, MySpace, UTube and Twitter. Started asking people to be my friends and guess what started to happen. You guessed it! I started getting a lot more traffic to my blog and websites, best of all, it’s free traffic. I don’t have to work at getting ranking anymore. The back links from my media sites helps me to rank even higher in the search engines than I did when I worked at it.
If you use social marketing correctly, it will drive big traffic DIRECTLY to your site from the social media sites that you get involved with and that’s huge. After all, that is really the holy grail, isn’t it?
We all want more traffic to our site, right?
You may not realize it, but social media sites have more traffic than Google. And if you use the right strategies and tactics to put yourself in front of that traffic, then you don’t have rely on Google to get traffic to your sites. And best of all, you don’t have to worry about expensive AdWords campaigns or other forms of advertising.
Of course, let’s be real here… just because you start getting big traffic directly from the social media sites doesn’t mean you will abandon your Google rankings and stop all advertising. What it means is that you will be getting a lot more traffic, and the average cost of that traffic will plummet down to levels that are from the stone ages when it comes to the internet…. that’s what I call “back to the future”!
Six Marketing Strategies In Web 2.0 World
In Web 1.0 world, we are using internet banner ads, text ads, email, newsletters as our internet marketing vehicles to drive our marketing message to our potential clients online. Today, internet had been transitioned to web 2.0, new internet marketing strategies are needed to continue be successful in internet world.
With Web 2.0, we need to consider not only the new means of reaching our online audience but also the new nature of the social Web. Weblogs, blogs, and other web 2.0 sites dabbling with social media tools such as wikis, podcasts, videocasting, photo sharing sites, social bookmarking are the key marketing vehicle to drive internet traffic to the targeted websites.
So, as an internet marketer for Web 2.0 world and to be successful in an era where customers are freely discuss your products and services, you should consider the 5 important marketing strategies below:
1. Learn about social media
Social media is one the most important “must know” knowledge in Web 2.0. Thus, the first and foremost, you should participate in and understand social media by learning about it. YouTube, del.icio.us, Flickr, digg, MySpace, and Technorati are examples of new engines that you need to understand in order to effectively use them to reach your markets.
2. Marketing Plan For Web 2.0
You should factor let your visitors to play a more important role in your new marketing plan for Web 2.0. Let your website visitors to create content on your site and pass it a long. You even can your passionate users to create promotional videos about your sites/products, then use them on your local TV channels and post them online everywhere to get maximum exposure.
3. Join & Participate In The Conversation
Social media applications are two-way streets that conversation happens between two or more parties. To get exposure, you can join and participate to these conversation groups. You can join as members to other social media groups of your niche marketing or you can add social tools and services (such as Weblogs, wikis, tagging, video blogs, etc.) to your library Web sites. Enable comments on blogs and allow users to contribute to wikis.
4. Be Remarkable
Social media is a form of viral marketing where interesting ideas and content get passed along rapidly. Hence, in Web 2.0 world, content is the king. You must have contents that attract your visitors that they can use, bookmark, share online / offline and get your content or message pass along.
5. Get Your Content Travel
Encourage visitors to bookmark and tag your content with a click of a button and allow users to repost booklists, book reviews, photos, podcasts, or videos on their own sites. Post your content on sites like Flickr and YouTube where it’s easy for users to find and share it. Make news feeds for new materials such as books, DVDs, talking books, and video feeds so that these materials can be shared by online users and get your contents spread to the internet world.
6. Be part of the multimedia wave In Web 2.0 world, images and static pictures no enough to attract internet users any more, video is the key driver for Web 2.0. Statistic shows that more than 100 million videos being download daily. So, the effective of video marketing must not be overlooked. Create short videos and post them to YouTube and other video-sharing sites.
In Summary
These are just a few strategies about marketing in a Web 2.0 world. There are still a lot of ideas for social media marketing where you can explore and integrate into your web 2.0 marketing plan.
Catching The Crowd With Social Network Marketing
Marketing on Social network sites is not an easy feat. It relies on a lot of user interaction, especially with existing contacts. Know the benefits Social sites can do to your business. Understand how social networking can drive targeted traffic to your website today.
Social network sites are the new breed of online social hubs. More and more users turn to social networking sites to find loved ones, reconnect with old friends, or even host a high school reunion. However, social networking sites offer more than just meeting new and old friends, it can also be an avenue to promote your latest book, show online users about your website and updates, or even use the social sites to promote your views and agendas. Social network sites or User-created content sites like blogs, forums, or dating websites are basically places online where users can congregate to share information, give advice, or work on similar interests. Users flock social network sites, making it a good vantage point for web marketers to launch their products.
There are two types of marketing involved over social networking sites. Different types of individuals who promote their products or skills over social networking sites often employ varying tactics to get their message across. Several online marketers employ the use of the comments system on social marketing sites to post information about their products or use social sites to improve search engine placement for their websites. Though some web marketers would go overboard with the promotion and quite literally spam their target audience with useless data just to lure them to clicking a link which will direct them to the website being promoted. Other types of web marketers employ a subtle technique of social engineering to make users trust them and to make them purchase their products or click on a link to their main website. Other marketers would go as far as using black hat search optimization techniques to force web browsers into redirecting to another site. This type of marketing is not allowed on most social communities, and could get you banned on that social site, if caught.
Taking the different strategies piece by piece we identify different patterns on how web marketers coordinate their efforts to capture a wider scope of online users on a social networking site and achieve better search engine placement for their websites. Web marketers who operate viral marketing strategies often use software tools that will allow them to harvest different user profiles or account numbers, which they would use to send or post messages on. Web marketers meticulously gather user details and interest, and seek out vital social community sections like forums and rant pages where their messages can go around with the least possible chance of getting erased by members. Web marketers usually lace their promotional words with entertaining music or videos. But this can still be the tip of the iceberg on the grand scheme of online promotions. Once you give into the advertising, you will see yourself clicking on different links which will make you download or get redirected to another website which can force you to download a certain application or Trojan which they can then use to either force your browser to redirect to other web pages when you are browsing or quite literally force your computer to accept different ads from their website.
Social engineering on the other hand employs more interaction between the marketer and the end users. Web marketers who employ social engineering often use chatrooms or utilize the email system of social network sites to send messages to users. VoIP or Internet telephoning can also be used to improve marketer and user interaction. This type of online marketing may take awhile to be realized, but is often more successful in landing repeat customers, if done right.
Best Use of Social Media Local Search Marketing
One of the best ways to marketing your products and services online is through social media marketing. Its easy to get lost in all the various personalized methods of marketing, especially in local online marketing.
To get a feel of the local pulse and how they feel about your products and services, your business should use social media. When doing strategic local marketing, you should make use of social media will give you a chance to keep in touch with members of your community.
If the term social media seems a wee bit unfamiliar to you, then how about blogging, Facebook or Twitter? Join the hundreds of community journalists who make their presence felt in their communities through blogging. The only difference is that you will be blogging not only to interact with your community, but also to share with them important information about your business, which will respond to a particular need in the community.
A growing part of our online necessities is social media marketing. Many companies have joined the bandwagon and created fan pages in sites like Facebook.
The reason why social networking sites are effective is the fact that people who befriend you or follow you actually do so willingly. This is an indication that they are interested in your business, and that they could be future customers.
Social networking can be a successful tool when looking to increase strategic local marketing. It doesn’t take much effort or cost to get your business set up with a social networking site. You will be surprised on how quickly you gain “fans” or “followers” of your companies site. You can also target your markets by age, sex, interests, geographic and more.
To get higher ranking in the search engines, and to drive more traffic to your site, social media marketing will help you gain leads without having to spend extra money.
It cost almost nothing (other than a bit of time) to promote your business through social networking. You can definitely hire others for relatively low costs to setup and manage your social media sites if your time is spent better elsewhere in your business.
A company should be responding to a customers need, and the best way to determine those needs (whether its products or services) is through social media marketing. This is a great way to build your business brand that is targeting a specific community.
By using the various social networking sites, it will easier for you to respond to queries about your business, It is also easier to increase brand awareness, build a stronger reputation, and combat any negative issues being hurled against the business.
To better build your online branding and your Local branding, you will need the help of social networks. Tapping into these networks will not only gain greater access to potential customers in Local, but in other parts of the globe and into a market that may be bigger than your imagination.
How to Sell Social Media to Your CEO
Social media when used as part of an internet marketing strategy is a very effective tool. But social media does have a branding issue. If you talk to many CEO’s about using Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (among others) as part of your marketing strategy you may come up against some resistance. This is because:
• many CEO’s perceive social media as a business distraction and not a business tool
• many CEO’s find it difficult to see how you can generate sales using social media
• and many CEO’s don’t understand how consumers use these tools as they don’t use them themselves.
In order to sell a social media strategy to your CEO, we have listed three key areas that you must address as part of your pitch.
1. Make the connection between your ideal customer profile and social media usage
The first part of the sales approach is to connect your ideal customer profile to social media usage. It’s quite simple. For an effective social media strategy to work, your ideal customer must be a high user of social media. It’s the same principle you use for any other media. You wouldn’t place TV ads in a program that is not viewed by your ideal customer so you need to prove that connection first. Some other key points are:
• Your ideal customer must use the internet as a primary source of information when making purchase decisions.
• Your business must have a website that is a key marketing channel for product sales, customer inquiries, product information and data capture for direct marketing.
By making this connection first, your CEO should identify that social media can target the right audience.
2. Understand your key website analytics and metrics
Metrics and website analytics are the second piece of sales puzzle. Through web analytics and sales analysis you must show a correlation between website visitors and sales. In simple terms, if your web-based sales increase when there is an increase in website traffic then you have established a correlation. Your goal is now to increase website traffic which should (based on your analysis) result in an increase in product sales. Once you have this established connection then you have a basis of measuring return on investment.
A key point to make here is than numbers of Twitter followers or Facebook fans are not metrics that you should use for this sales pitch. It is near impossible to directly related them to product sales. Having 20,000 Twitter followers is in many cases of no more commercial value than having 1,000 followers. It is follower quality that is important and your ability to engage with them to visit your website.
3. Have a clear strategy to increase website traffic
This really is the “how to” of the strategy. As you have identified website traffic as the key metric, you should now outline how you will meet it through the various social media platforms. Your pitch should consider how consumers use each medium and how you will use them to drive traffic and sales. Below are some examples of how three of the main platforms in Twitter, Facebook and YouTube can be used to increase web traffic.
Twitter is a sharing platform for links, text and pictures. Businesses can use Twitter to promote new blog posts, promotional offers, links to website content and as a customer service platform. All of these promote your website URL as the destination link which drives web traffic.
Facebook is a connecting platform. Users maintain personal relationships and use it to keep in touch with friends. Users can also connect with fan pages and events that are of interest to them. For a business, a fan page can be created to provide links, helpful tips and promote events among many other things that link back to your main site.
YouTube is also a sharing platform for video. Businesses can use YouTube to host TV ads, instructional videos and show conference footage that link back to a main website URL.
With this increased traffic, your website should also receive a boost in it’s Google page ranking which improves your visibility in organic search results.
4. Closing the deal
To close the deal, the key question you need to answer for your CEO is what is the impact on sales from an investment in social media? If you can connect your ideal customer to social media use. Correlate a connection between website visitors and sales with a well defined social media strategy you are well on your way to selling your CEO on the benefits of social media.
How to Make Money Online?
have a full-time job, but yesterday my paycheck got lost in the mail. Plus, because of budget cuts, the company is not giving any raises this year and no one is allowed overtime. I need a way to supplement my income, but my demanding hours won’t give me time for a second job.
In the meantime, I’m looking for a way to make extra money. I have extensive writing experience and I’m very adept with the internet, internet marketing, social media, etc. Where and how can I make money online fast? (Serious answers only please–no MLM, surveys, etc.)
Thanx!