Posts Tagged ‘Search Engine Reputation Management’

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?

Most reports peg search traffic at about 10% of total internet traffic. However, most businesses spend 90% of their website efforts on search engine optimization and marketing. Below I outline why this disproportionate emphasis on search traffic can be spell disaster for an online business.

If only 10% of people are searching, what are the other 90% doing? The majority are returning visitors. They may have found a site initially by search but now they return. If someone is comparison shopping, they’ll usually bookmark five or six sites, comparing each one with the others. There’s another small percentage that are simply typing in domains. Looking for lawn furniture? I’ll just type in lawnfurniture dot com. Another even smaller proportion actually type the domain name into a search box, then click on the domain in the search results.

I think as webmasters we get search engine tunnel vision when we’re marketing our businesses. When someone tells me they’re having trouble getting top 10 search positions, I usually ask about the other types of online marketing strategies they’re engaged with. The common response is, what else can I do?

There’s a lot you can do! The great thing about online marketing is that we’re only limited by our creativity. Social marketing is wide open for the creative and savvy marketer. What better way to get traffic than to create word of mouth referrals. How do most offline businesses get clients? Through word of mouth. It’s no different online.

How people get to your site is important. But, what you do with a visitor after they come to your site is even more important.

I would argue that our existing clients are our top marketing vehicles. Do you offer great service and support? You’ll get referrals. Are you hard to work with, arrogant, or stingy? You won’t get referrals. A happy client will tell one other person. An unhappy client will tell at least four other people.

One of the few points I think professional internet marketers get right is traffic diversification. Yes, they focus on getting free, organic search traffic but they also spend a great deal of time on list building, customer service, and word of mouth.

If your only focus is search traffic, sooner or later you’ll be disappointed. My business goal is to have as many traffic streams as I can develop. I’m slowly getting to a point where even if my search traffic went to zero, I’d still keep plugging along.

Search engine algorithms change all the time. Time spent surfing forums to find the best ways to beat search engines is time better spent on other marketing methods. Time spent tweaking a page for keyword density is time better spent handing out business cards with your website address.

For those of you stuck in a search engine rut, step back and look at your options. What else are you doing to drive traffic to your site? There are so many more options than we think if we would just look around.

Tip 1: Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is either taken very lightly or taken so consciously that the results are undesirable. Give around 30% of your time to understand what exactly is your business requirements or on what products/services would you get more business. What exactly are you planning to target and what is your Audience? Conduct a market analysis of it and filter our 10 key phrases that best suit your business. If your website is fresh and /or you have just started with your online business, target light-weight (less-researched) key phrases. Go for targeting more of long-tailed key-phrases rather than single key-words. Give proper Title and Meta, appropriate Alt tags. Check your content in relative to your Meta you have kept and see that your page gets easily downloaded.

Tip 2: Link Building

Once you are done with On-page optimization, put your best of efforts to gain as much inbound links you can. There are multiple ways that you can work on to achieve a golden value for your website. At the outset, submit your website URL to 100+ Search Engines and 500+ Quality online directories that give you quality link-backs. Write good relevant articles and submit them into quality Article sites. You may also submit your Press-notes into quality Press-release directories. Put your Ads into free classified directories. You may also go for link-exchange campaigns but Google has stopped giving much weightage to these links.

Tip 3: Social Media

Make a list of quality social networking sites where in you can go and bookmark your important web-pages into these social sites. You may also create your blogs (relevant to your services), post good content on these and make them more interactive for more visitors to visit them. One such good social marketing is posting comments into good blogs or forums and thereby creating a rich link-base. You are sure to get high traction through social media marketing. It may go as high as getting 2000 hits in just 5 days on one single comment posted with a link to our website. It really makes a lot of difference!

Buyers rely heavily upon search and social media for researching products and services.
It is therefore critical that you not only have relevant and detailed content on your website, but you must be showing up where they are searching for you. To do so you must undertake an integrated and comprehensive search and social media marketing effort.
For more information on these and how to rank your website on the top SERPs or if you want us to get your website rank on the top of SERPs, contact us on 201-777-2366 or email your details at kj@semaphore-software.com.

History the practice of marketing is almost as old as humanity itself. A market was in the beginning simply a sourcilleux place where people with a supply articles or capacity to ensure a service could meet those which could wish the articles or the services, perhaps at a time arranged as a preliminary. Such meetings incarnated many aspects of the methods of today of sale, although sometimes in a manner without ceremony. The salesmen and the purchasers sought to include/understand the needs, of the capacities, and the psychology of each one, all with the goal to obtain the exchange of the articles or the services to take place.

The Stock Market of today of New York had its humble beginnings like market in the open air located at Wall Street in New York City. The rise in agriculture undoubtedly influenced markets like first means “of series production” of an article, namely foodstuff. While agriculture made it possible one to cultivate more food which could be eaten by the farmer, and the majority alone of food are perishable, there was probable motivation to seek others which could employ excessive food, before it was corrupted, in exchange of other articles.

As a Theodore 1960 Levitt wrote an article of newspaper called Marketing Myopia. It is said that this begins really the mania of sale. In him it discussed that the large-scale industries then badly interpreted of which industry they formed part. It declared that until you entirely included/understood industry that you belonged to you were likely to fail. For example the industry of rail was not in the businesses of the rail-bound transport but in the industry of transport in general they always competed with the tastes of the cars and public transport. Levitt would be one of the founders of the discipline of sale, and contributed to the manufacture of the framework 4Ps that the compromise sale is based around. The sale of report/ratio is a form of marketing which evolved/moved of the marketing direct of response in the Sixties and emerged in the Eighties, lesoù the accent is put on longer-term reports/ratios of building with customers rather than on various transactions. It implies arrangement the needs for customer while they pass by their cycles of life.

It underlines to provide a line of goods or customer services existing while they need them. Phillip Kotler presented the social marketing 1971 which is an enlightened concept which supports that a company should make good decisions of sale by considering the consumers wants, the requirements of the company and the interests of long duration of the company. These efforts are now known as a responsibility.