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Archive for the ‘marketing strategy’ Category

Getting traffic to your website is the first key to getting people to buy your product or service.  If you’ve been having trouble getting those numbers heading in the right direction, it may be time to switch things up a little and try some different tactics.

1. Appeal to people in an old-school way.  Bumper stickers, posters, t-shirts, and business cards may seem like marketing tools for another generation, but there’s a reason these marketing tools exist: because they work.  This is especially true if your company is location-based and you’re looking to drum up local business.

2. Give things away. People love winning free stuff, so hosting occasional giveaways for your website readers will keep them coming back.  You don’t have to spend a fortune to do this, but keep in mind that the nicer the giveaways, the more often people will check your site to see what’s new.  It’s better to do nicer giveaways less often than to do frequent ones – too much of anything gets boring, eventually.

3. Write a free ebook.  This may be time-consuming, but it can pay off in big ways, and many successful websites have a free ebook driving traffic to the site.  The more informative and useful the eBook, the better.  Don’t be afraid to give away some good tips in exchange for your audience’s trust and loyalty.

4. Get into guest posting.  Writing as a guest on other sites in your niche can be a great way to attract huge amounts of traffic in one fell swoop.  Just make sure that when the new people arrive at your site, you have something amazing there to share with them.

5. Invite guest posters. Having a prominent blogger write for your blog can be just as effective as writing for theirs.  They are almost guaranteed to mention the guest post on their site, and then you will have their readers coming over to check out your site.

6. Fine-tune your SEO.  With the recent changes to Google’s search algorithm, your old SEO may not be as effective as it once was.  Either update your SEO skills and your site, or hire someone who can get the job done for you.

7. Flaunt your expertise.  Search forums and social networks for people who are talking about topics related to your site.  Step into conversations and offer your help, or your take on things.  Mention your qualifications, and make sure your signature or profile contains a link back to your site!

As we head into February, hopefully you’re starting to see how the changes you’ve made to your marketing strategy  for this year are manifesting.  However, trends are hardly static, and as soon as you start implementing one set of tactics, new developments emerge that can help you decide how to fine-tune your efforts.

Mobile is major! More and more people are browsing on their mobile devices, so it’s imperative that your sites are mobile compatible. Additionally, it is often worthwhile for companies to consider creating their own mobile app. This is generally important for sites that lend themselves to being accessed on-the-go. Businesses that offer location-based components, ecommerce stores, and easily-digestible mobile content like articles or blog posts would likely do well to offer a native app. Many companies can simply ensure that their mobile site provides a good browsing experience, without incurring the additional cost of developing an app.

Another thing that is growing by leaps and bounds in the first quarter of 2012 is video advertising .  Consumers are responding both to the rapport that can be established over video, and also the comfortable familiarity and resemblance to television ads.  Online video advertising can be done for a fraction of the cost of TV ads, so there’s no reason not to branch out and connect with a bigger audience in this way.

Exclusivity is another feature that consumers seem to love.  Having trouble getting your customers to “like” your Facebook page?  Offer special, exclusive content or offers to those who do, and watch those numbers soar.  Many businesses have even found success with offering a tiered paid subscription service that lets subscribers in on special deals or offers.  Keep in mind, though, if you’re going to charge money, the reward customers get will have to be worth it.

On the flip side of the exclusivity issue is loyalty.  Getting customers is one part of your goal, but keeping them is even more important.  Establishing a loyalty program with rewards is a great way to make sure customers stick around, but you should also create a series of perpetual action opportunities that give your customers incentive to try various products or services.

Social gaming is a huge deal right now.  If your business has an actual bricks-and-mortar premises, location-based services like Foursquare can help you take advantage of all that social gameplay has to offer, by creating deals and offers for people who prove their loyalty with frequent visits.  You can even create points-based social games on your Facebook page, giving your fans and followers some friendly competition, and keeping them interacting with you the whole time.

Probably the most important thing you can focus on right now is using transparency to increase your online integrity perception.  Being completely open and honest with your audience about who you are, what you stand for, and how you feel about things like privacy can make potential customers more confident about trusting your company with things like personal data.  That sort of connection is essential in this age of online purchasing.

As you know, you can often have better success with concentrating your efforts on reaching a lower number of people whom you know to be in your target market, than just marketing to the general public and hoping for the best.  You may automatically think that Facebook is the place to be, and there’s certainly an argument for the benefit of Facebook for most businesses, but if there were a fairly well populated niche social network that caters to the same market as your company, then it would make sense for you to at least do some test marketing in that network.  It doesn’t matter if “everyone” is on Facebook – if your target customers are elsewhere, then that’s where you need to be.

Whatever social network ends up working best for you, make sure you implement a system of perpetual testing, and keep an eye on the numbers.  If there was a time when MySpace was working for you as a marketing tool that probably isn’t the case anymore.  In the same way, today’s social networks will evolve, and some will eventually give way to newcomers.  Be prepared pick up and move from one social network to another when the appropriate time comes.

For most of us, social media benefits our businesses for two reasons. One, it gives us a way to engage and interact with both customers and potential customers on a personal level. Two, it gives us a platform from which we can market our products and services in a way that will help us connect with the largest audience possible.

Often these two aspects of social media for business overlap quite a bit, and that’s where it’s important to be careful with just how much self-promotion you’re doing in the scope of your everyday social media efforts. While self-promotion is certainly a big part of having a social media presence, being social is the key factor in making your marketing efforts work in your favor.

We’ve all run across that person on Twitter or Facebook, the one who never shuts up about how great their product is, or how their service can help you. How long did it take you to unfollow them? No one wants to listen to a stream of repetitive marketing speak 24/7, so it’s important not to be that person if you want to build a responsive social media following.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with talking about your product on your business social media accounts – that’s what you’re there for, after all. But you have to know where to draw the line between tasteful marketing and obnoxious marketing. If someone on a social network asks you a business-related question and there’s an opportunity to get your marketing message out there, go for it. But if someone asks you how your weekend went, chances are they just want to know how your weekend went.

For some of us, the concept of choosing when not to market is quite foreign. Marketing used to be a one-way conversation – you sent the message, and your target market either got it or they didn’t. These days, marketing is much more give-and-take – your customers ask what they want to know, and you can respond in the context of an actual, one-on-one conversation. Keeping that conversation flowing naturally is essential to keeping their attention.

Today’s social media users are intelligent people. They can smell over-marketing a mile away. If you put the emphasis on being approachable and informative instead, people will want to talk to you more often, which puts you in a great position in terms of building up an audience of potential customers.

2010 was a big year in terms of businesses starting to establish a social media presence, and 2011 expanded on that with an explosion in the number of businesses that started taking social media seriously as a marketing tool. Now that we’ve done an adequate amount of setting things up, it’s time to start thinking of 2012 as the year when we really push forward and begin to innovate in terms of using social media in the best possible way, and customizing the experience so that each business is serving its own customers in a manner that suits their particular situation.

With the unveiling of Google+, and more recently the public debut of Facebook’s new Timeline format, it’s clear that social media channels are evolving to meed the needs of a community that perpetually demands more from its online networking. Whereas before we might simply have been looking to stake a real estate claim on the social media landscape, now we want to decorate our spaces to more accurately reflect our businesses.

As SEO strategies evolve to give greater weight to businesses who provide engaging and relevant content to their customers, social media networks will become the place where much of that engagement happens. If, up until now, you’ve been treating your business’ Facebook or Twitter account like a blog, with mostly one-way communication, 2012 will be the time to start opening up more of a dialogue. You’ll want to encourage your customers to talk to you, and to talk about you in their own social media circles.

Google is already starting to reward business that are more frequently discussed on Google+, by giving those businesses higher rankings in search results. Effective SEO is no longer about static links and self-created keyword density, but about real interactions with real people, and the amount of buzz you can create in your target market. The buzz, of course, is the reward for providing your potential customers with quality products, great customer service, and an online conversation that goes both ways.

2012 will be a stellar year for those who can see where this new customer engagement model is going, and can find ways to provide even better communication than is expected. Both search engines and customers have learned to see through the SEO strategies of the past, so this year the focus should be on moving forward with finding new methods to engage with your audience in ways your competitors haven’t thought of.

Over the past few years, online marketing, and especially social media, has developed into a situation where there is less “businessy” talk, and more real human interaction between businesses and customers. Spouting slogans and pasting logos everywhere is no longer the best way to get customers – you have to have actual conversations with the people you are marketing to, and let them know that they’re dealing with real humans, not some corporate machine.

That said, as a business owner, you still want to draw a line between who you are in your private time, and who you are as the social media face of your business. If you have someone else managing your business social media accounts, you want that person to come across as personally open, without dragging the sordid details of their private life onto your company’s Twitter stream. Finding that balance is important, not only in terms of appealing to your audience, but also in order to avoid scandals and getting attention for all the wrong reasons.

Today’s consumer audience is a lot more tolerant and even expecting of a very personal approach to online marketing than the audience of five years ago. These days it’s okay to talk to people on your Facebook page as if you were talking to a friend. People understand that there’s a real human typing the words in, and they expect you to speak to them like humans. Whereas before you might have restricted social media content to company promotions and essential information, now it’s okay to talk to people about how beautiful the weather is or how much you’re enjoying an event that’s happening in your city.

It’s important not to go too far, though. While your customers want to know you’re a real person, they don’t need to hear about your digestive issues or your frustrations with the in-laws. Keep any personal talk light and on the surface. Think chit-chat more than a heart-to-heart. Don’t forget to mix any personal observations in with at least an equal amount of company-related updates – it is a business account, after all. But of course you can keep the tone of the business updates quite personal, to remind your audience that it’s all part of the same package. Once you find the balance of personal and business that works well for your company, stick with it and watch your social media following grow.

Believe it or not, it’s already December, and if you haven’t already started thinking about how you want to modify your social media, SEO, blogging, and other aspects of your online marketing strategy for the coming year, now is a good time to get started.

Obviously predicting the future is out of the question, but you can easily see the trends evolving in things like search and engagement strategies, and make some projections for how you can stay slightly ahead of the curve.

In terms of SEO, things like page rank and linkbacks will become less important than other factors. Google in particular is starting to use more human-based feedback to determine the importance of sites. This means that providing quality, relevant content will be more important than ever – not for your ranking, but to keep your audience happy so that they improve your ranking by giving you good feedback. While it may seem that this is going to be trickier than simply relying on keyword saturation and links, in the end it will mean better quality for both searchers and the businesses that are competing for ranking.

In the social media arena, the big question is what’s going to happen with Google+. Despite the fact that you can find plenty of experts claiming it’s the Facebook-killer, Google+ still hasn’t managed to gain even half of one percent of the social networking market share, whereas Facebook still enjoys a hearty two-thirds of the entire market. That said, remember there was a time when MySpace enjoyed a similar heyday – just because a site is dominant for a long time doesn’t mean it won’t crash eventually. Facebook has been slowly losing ground, but opinion is still mixed as to whether Google+ is poised for a takeover.

For those who place a lot of importance on their business blogs, it’s important to note that Google is rewarding fresh content more than ever. So, if have been the kind of blogger that sacrifices quantity in favor of less frequent but longer posts, you may want to start balancing things out with shorter posts that get posted more often. That’s not to say that you’ll benefit from filling up your own blog with irrelevant content – remember that repetitive content will hurt rather than help your ranking. As with everything in a marketing strategy, you’ll want to keep things fresh and concise in your business blog in 2012.

In this age of the internet, the entire world is pretty much at our fingertips. From a commerce standpoint, this has to make a business owner wonder if it’s appropriate to market to a worldwide audience. After all, if all anyone has to do to see your product or service is visit a website, why not market to as many people as possible?

Of course, it’s not that simple. There are plenty of issues that have to be addressed before international marketing would be worth your time and money. Add in the factors of an international SEO and social media strategy, and you can see how things could easily get complicated beyond what you’re able to handle.
In terms of SEO, it’s not safe to assume that the keywords you use in your domestic strategy will work abroad.

Language barriers aside, not everyone in every market uses a particular product for the same purpose, and of course even amongst English-speaking countries there are differences in vernacular. For example, if you sell a special kind of kitchen trash bag on your website and you’re focusing your domestic strategy around that keyword, when marketing abroad you would need to realize that most English-speaking countries outside the United States refer to a trash bag as a “bin liner,” and would search for that term rather than “trash bag” on Google.

There’s also the issue of shipping products. All the successful marketing in the world won’t make a difference if the hassle and cost of international shipping is more than you’re willing to deal with on a regular basis. It’s also important to assess the legalities of shipping certain types of products overseas, as you don’t want legal troubles on top of everything.

Social media might be the easiest and most telling aspect of an international marketing strategy, as it will help you connect with your potential audience in various countries, and give you an idea of what sorts of changes you need to be making. You can also get an idea of what your international fans are interested in versus what interests your domestic customers.

International marketing is not for everyone, but it’s certainly something to look into if you think your business is suitable for a wider audience. As long as you can put the research in to learn about your target market, and take things one market at a time, it can be a rewarding experience in more ways than one.