Category Archives: Online Marketing

#Eyemails: ONLINE MARKETING 103 – CHOOSING WHAT’S RIGHT

Online Marketing 103 – Choosing What’s Right

How do you know what platforms and types of online marketing are right for your business? What does each of them really do? And how much is too much? These questions and many more keep new online marketers awake at night. This session will try to answer them to some satisfaction. The truth of the matter is, though, that every business is unique, as is every business owner. Marketing is an organic, living thing, and trying to put it in a box or template doesn’t work. What works today may not tomorrow. What works for me may not for you. The best way we can think of to answer your questions and get your feet on the right path is to ask you more questions. The answers to those will help answer the others. Let’s begin, shall we?

1.)    What is your target audience? Who are your customers? What customers do you want to attract? Knowing the answer to this will take you a long way in online marketing. Some sites, such as Facebook and YouTube, are relatively easy to use and have a wide, general audience of all ages and groups. Twitter and Reddit, however, tend to cater to the trendier, younger crowd. Pay per click campaigns like AdSense can cost a good bit of money, but when aimed at the right audience, can have great benefits. Social media marketing is mostly free, but can have much slower returns. You need to know who you want to reach, and how you want to reach them. Answer that, and you’re on your way to beginning your online marketing career.

2.)    Do you really need a website, or will a blog-site do? Blog sites are blog based websites, like you see with Blogger and WordPress. The site IS the blog and the blog IS the site, essentially. These can be easier and cheaper to establish and maintain. However, if you have a large catalog od product, or want product and not content front and center, then a traditional website may be what you need. Both are now seen as an acceptable choice for business, so there’s no stigma for having one and not the other. What’s more important is knowing where and how to build your online home.

3.)    What’s your budget? Some forms of online marketing can get quite pricey, like Pay Per Click and banner ads. However,social media marketing is typically free. The drawback is that you have to do the marketing yourself. So, perhaps hiring an online marketing or social media marketing professional might be more reasonable, if not for your budget, than for your sanity. Next question, slightly related, is whether you can run a successful campaign on your chosen platforms with the budget you have. Blogsites are typically cheaper than traditional ones, social is cheaper than paid advertising, but will it do the job you need it to do?

4.)    What’s your limit? Doing it all yourself can get pretty time consuming. However, certain platforms can only take minutes a day. Or you can find yourself devoting an entire day or afternoon each week to your marketing endeavors and enjoying it. You won’t know the answer to this one until you’ve tried it, but it’s a great learning experience for the future, I can assure you. You have limits – mental, physical, emotional – as well as time and money, and you won’t know how much is too much until you’ve reached that point, unfortunately. But once you do, you’ll have a base line to work from and you’ll have a clearer picture of just what you’re capable of doing.

http://www.advertisingblender.com/online-marketing-103-choosing-whats-right/

#Eyemails: How Online Marketing Can Fuel Offline Conversations

how-online-marketing-can-fuel-offline-conversations-d7b9c88024

The fact is no medium drives offline conversation better than online marketing. In fact, our research shows that in 15% of conversations about products and 23% of conversations about services, somebody refers to something they saw online.

Yet, a key mistake made by digital marketers is allowing the effectiveness of campaigns to be measured with just digital metrics like clicks, shares, and re-tweets. None of those metrics pick up the impact of offline behavior, such as word of mouth, which can be nine times more voluminous offline than online.

So how does a marketer make sure marketing efforts work in both spaces? Here are five ways to maximize the impact of any marketing strategy.

1. Design Content to be Buzzworthy

This means content needs to focus on things that are truly surprising, funny, or exciting. People like to share things that have a strong emotional component. It’s also key that a marketer realize the story — the content — is more important than the delivery channel. This is why the Old Spice Guy campaign did so well. Its humor and sexiness made it one of the most successful viral campaigns in history.

2. Post at the Right Time

Whenever possible, plan for digital content to be delivered at times of the day when people are likely to be in social settings, which makes conversation possible. The reason is that research shows that people are going online and talking with other people the most between 8 a.m. and 10 a.m. weekday mornings. That’s just about the time they are firing up the computers at work and saying good morning to their colleagues. This is the ideal time to deliver a digital message that will be shared offline among colleagues. Good examples would be restaurants offering an online lunch deal, or the humorous trailer for a new movie.

3. Make Content Useful and Easy to Find

Make digital content “conversation friendly” because studies show that people often turn to the internet seeking information while in the middle of a conversation. They do this because they are looking to fill gaps in their conversation. For example, they may want to know where a restaurant is located. If you google “Where is the nearest Subway,” a top result is the Subway locator, which provides an incredibly quick answer to a question that might be raised in a real-time conversation about where to have lunch. Quick access to such information is critical.

4. Target Influencers

About 25% of word of mouth comes from 10% of the population who are most active in making recommendations. And here we mean real-world influencers, not just people with high Klout scores. They have their own unique media usage patterns, both in terms of which media, as well as the time of day they use it. For five decades, the oil and gas industry has used these types of audiences to advocate their positions on public policy issues, and for good reason. It’s a strategy that can work for consumer categories as well.

5. Design With Brand Advocates in Mind

Brand advocates are among the most frequent visitors to your site. They are looking for content they can share with others to spread the word about your products and services. These are people who return regularly and need to have fresh material to make the visit worthwhile. They’ll share what they find via their social media channels, but mostly through email and in face-to-face conversations.

http://mashable.com/2012/07/18/online-marketing-offline-marketing/

#Eyemails: 3 BENEFITS OF INTERNET MARKETING

For people with no internet marketing experience whatsoever it can be very difficult to understand what exactly the benefits of internet marketing are. You might already know some basic fundamentals regarding how to promote websites and such, but eventually that knowledge just won’t cut it if you would like to have a professional internet marketing career. I know a lot of people who run a small business for instance and pay for a website without even knowing what the benefits are and how to work with it.

Many People Don’t Know That…

  • Every visitor on a website is a potential customer or customer for the advertisers on that site.
  • The more traffic a website has, the more money it will make.
  • So internet marketing is much more than just having a website. It’s about generating traffic, creating sales, publishing, advertising and so much more.

The Benefits Of Internet Marketing

In this blog post I explain the benefits of internet marketing without really getting into technical details and marketing techniques. You can surf around on this blog if you need more information regarding the three facts that I stated above.

The internet can feel like a real jungle when you first get started online. So if you have absolutely no experience, you have to start from the beginning. Everything starts with understanding. If you don’t understand what the benefits of internet marketing are, you also won’t do any effort to build an online marketing business.

What Are The Benefits Of Internet Marketing?

1. You Can Help The Right People

In online marketing and the home based business industry in general you can decide who you want to work with. In all honesty, if you know that you’re the excuse-type of person, do yourself and me a favor and don’t get started. Look, I don’t have time to babysit, nor do I make time for people who don’t want to roll up their sleeves. I’m not saying that working with me requires you to be Spartacus, but you need at least a positive mindset and the will to make things happen.

So when you focus on helping the right people, you will see the results that you deserve. When you waste your time on people who don’t deserve it, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

2. The Benefits Of Internet Marketing When You’re A Full-Time Online Marketer

The truth is that when you get started online, you will have to work many hours to get your business off the ground. Once you are making profit, things always get much easier. You will be learning how the business works and keep on improving as an online marketer.

When you’re a fulltime online marketer, you no longer have a boss who orders you to do this and that. This is a tricky benefit because it can make you believe that you are no longer obliged to do this and that. However, that’s total bullshit of course because you now have a business so you need to pull in cash by yourself. The big difference is that you can succeed if you really want it. Ask yourself this question before you get started: would you hire yourself?

3. Unlimited Income

Whenever you are working for yourself, you can earn unlimited income. Whether it’s in the home based business industry or in a bricks-and-mortar business, if you are your own boss, you basically decide how much you want to work and as a result how much you will approximately earn.

When working online, however, the benefits of internet marketing can boost your income big time. Internet niches such as online advertising are crisis-free and there’s almost no saturation in the marketplace. The internet also gives you the power to make sales 24/7 even while you’re not working.

Read more: http://jensholvoet.com/3-benefits-of-internet-marketing/#ixzz33ZGcCokx

#Eyemails: Optimize-5 Essential Customer Touchpoints for Online Marketers

customer centric online marketing

A lot of self-centered corporate marketing is giving way to customer-centric ways of communicating the value of doing business.  I’ve been thinking about this a lot in terms of online marketing and have been sharing these ideas through client content marketing strategy. At the same time, more companies are actively seeking expertise with a customer-centric approach to content.

One area of change is search engine optimization and going after the most popular keywords (relevant to products & services) and optimizing to attract customers. The assumption is that the search result will compel users to click and the destination page visit results in a conversion.

Before search, there are many other behaviors to consider that influence the consumer’s confidence in what they find. It’s a lot more complex than needing something, searching, finding & buying with no other influences.

To that end, here’s an approach to better understanding how consumers/buyers move about the web and opportunities for marketers to connect, engage and inspire commerce.

1. Discovering

(Searching, Asking, “Social Surfing”) – How do consumers, especially the audience or customer segments you’re after, find new content? How do they seek information?  To what extent do they search for resources in combination or instead of tapping into knowledge within their social networks?

Getting a handle on your customer’s discovery behaviors is an important step in meeting their information needs. This is a fluid thing, it’s not static and marketers need to maintain their knowledge of these customer preferences.

2. Consuming

(Reading, Watching, Listening) – To what extent do your customers use computers vs tablets or mobile to consume content?  What formats of information do they prefer?  Are there media or content types in favor such as long form text vs. nuggets, or video vs. images or audio?  Which content formats do they respond best to at the varying stages of their relationship with your brand?

The value of knowing information formats and consumption goes far beyond lead generation, since brands and customers communicate for a variety of reasons throughout the life cycle.

3. Creating

(Authoring, Developing, Any Kind of Media) – Are your customers part of the elite minority that create media and content online? How can the brand recognize that effort? How can they empower it and facilitate it towards a mutual end benefit?

Creation of content is also an important consideration for the brand marketer of course, since content marketing provides a solid base for SEO and blends well with social media marketing efforts. Creating content of relevance by understanding consumer interests, pain points and needs is essential. Co-creation with a brands social community can reveal tremendous mutual value.

4. Curating

(Aggregating, Collecting, Mash-up, Repurposing) – If your target audience curates information, where do they collect content? What tools to they use? What topics are they curating and how can your brand become a favorite? What formats are they prone to save, share and mashup?

As with creation, content curation is an opportunity for brands as well. Thought leadership efforts through news curation can be very effective and the sheer volume of new content being published online (5 exabytes of data every 2 days) means there’s opportunity to be a lighthouse of useful signal amongst a growing sea of noise.

5. Engaging

(Commenting, Rating, Reviewing, Promoting, Asking/Answering, Connecting) – How do your customers engage with the content they discover and consume?  Do they interact with it and how? Do they share?  Which social sharing services, buttons and bookmarking services to they prefer?

Understanding consumer engagement preferences will help brand marketers plan and promote content in ways that will inspire interaction and sharing. Engagement is also an invaluable source of feedback for ongoing social content management as well as ideas for content.

Optimize: 5 Essential Customer Touchpoints for Online Marketers

#Eyemails: Try These Tips If You Are Stumped About Online Marketing


Online marketing will be around for years to come so you should start by making a marketing plan every time you are marketing a new product. Try these useful tips to earn more profit.
 
It can be hard to decide how to keep your website going. Analyze your primary interests and what really makes you tick before deciding which one to focus on. Make sure your approach is something you would enjoy and pleases others as well. Marketing your website will be easier when you have a definite goal.
 
Creating a solid internet marketing plan will enable you to identify your most successful products. Using these profitable products can help you convince consumers to buy other products you market. Advertising accessories for these popular items will likely further your sales. This way, you will spend less on advertising these newer products, because they are riding on the coattails of your already popular items.
 
Design your emails so that they create a sense of urgency to act in your customers. People should be compelled by your email to take action, be it purchasing your new service or product or reading your new blog. This also gives you valuable insight on your email campaign’s effectiveness since you can track each of these actions.
 
One good example of this is offering the websites you are selling to a writer, who can in turn offer them for discounts to their customers. If one partner is willing to reduce the prices of its products or services, both partners are likely to profit from the move.
 
You could add some user polls alongside your specific content to get readers’ views and feedback. This will aid in providing content that is relevant to users, and will help them feel that they are taking part in the site’s direction.
 
When you are starting out your site and are trying to make the best site you can for marketing  a new product on the internet, start small. Search engines are more capable of cataloging sites with fewer subpages, than sites that have large quantities of pages.
 
Good advertising is the key to growing your business fast. Paid advertising is a necessary investment when you first launch your business. Doing so can bring in business that is difficult to find in other ways.
 
A flashy website might look pretty, but try not to make it too distracting. You only have 5 seconds to get a visitors attention. If your site can’t quickly grab your visitor’s attention, they will click away to search elsewhere.
 
If you want to gain PageRank quickly, promote a limited-time offer. You can also “buy” PageRank by getting deal sites and consumer news sites to link to your page. This functions in the same way as loss leaders do.
 
As you know from earlier, knowledge is the key to improving your Internet marketing efforts. Take this knowledge and put it into action by formulating new goals, strategies, and ideas which can be implemented in your marketing efforts. You should keep these things in mind and reap the benefits.

– See more at: http://www.bestgatewaytosuccess.com/blog/118/Try-These-Tips-If-You-Are-Stumped-About-Online-Marketing————#sthash.ogFWORzr.dpuf

#Eyemails: Creating a Successful Online Marketing Strategy

Creating a Successful Online Marketing Strategy image online bulb

Online marketing tools have significantly advanced over the years, but there are many organizations that still struggle to get the return on investment that they expect from their Internet campaigns. Whether they’re using email, social media or another medium, marketing through online platforms has become a necessity to many businesses, but it’s also creating substantial challenges. As demands for reaching a broader audience become more pressing, companies must ensure that they are using their resources effectively and have created a campaign strategy that will maximize benefits.

The Internet has opened a variety of new ways to reach consumers and capture their interests for services and products. Many small businesses, for example, may not have a person designated only for the maintenance of the social media profiles and email campaigns. According to a recent A Weber survey of 1,500 small business owners and marketers, more companies are spending less than 2 hours a week on Twitter (79 percent), email (57 percent) and Facebook (55 percent). However, this trend is contrary to the 89 percent of respondents that intend to use email more for their online marketing. While word of mouth is also a big channel for producing ROI, emails have become the main source for business campaigns. Marketing with emails can easily be automated, allowing staff to boost efficiency and focus on other aspects of the organization.

Using digital marketing effectively
Online mediums are becoming increasingly important for consumers. Users will surf the Web, view social media and shop from their mobile devices, making it essential for businesses to support this audience. Investing in mobile marketing and data activism will enable decision makers to reach mobile clients and have actionable information that could lead to further growth, according to MarketingProfs contributor Ali Behnam. However, organizations must ensure that their campaigns are flexible enough to adapt to any situation. Having a high level of responsiveness will help provide better products and create more effective marketing content that’s directly relevant to the audience.


Read more at http://www.business2community.com/online-marketing/creating-successful-online-marketing-strategy-0750147#Jlx5IvGdGGDZuWU8.99

#Eyemails: Ideas for online marketing

e-mail marketingYou have to bear in mind that the user doesn’t conform to whatever thing. First of all, because with the pass of time we become experts in searching and buying what interests us on the internet. In the second place, because companies understand all the market possibilities that the world wide web offers and compete for them in order to be the one that gets the client and his wallet.

Marketing online is a very powerful tool that if used wisely will bring you a lot of clients and will give you visibility in the internet world. Treat as best as you can your customers, give them solution, create a design that will make them feel comfortable and optimize your website for mobile devices – this is the success formula.

The problem is that a lot of those companies, although trying to offer better services than the competition, they don’t know what to do in order to get clients, that’s why their efforts are often useless. When trying to stand out and position your company in the online market, regardless of the services you offer, it’s good to have in mind certain aspects.

How to start online marketing

When you start a business you have various priorities, but maybe the one that most worries you is marketing. How do you let people know about your business? How do you get your first sales? What will you marketing strategy be? Here are some tips:

  1. Tools for keywords. It helps you understanding the traffic that keywords have on a monthly basis according to Google and suggests you additional keywords similar to the ones you’ve introduced initially.
  2. Traffic estimator. It allows us to understand the traffic that we could buy through the AdWords platform for a certain budget.
  3. Create a blog. In order to offer quality article contents and improve SEO you have to create a blog, the visitors will appreciate that original content you give away. Its aim is subscription of the clients. The blog must urge them to this small investment. It’s obvious that we want to sell and the fact that they subscribe to the blog, it’s already a big step.
  4. E-mail marketing campaigns. One of the most important weapons you have is quality e-mail marketing. Your registered clients expect something more. You must communicate with them for them to buy something from you and that they will want to do it later. Through e-mail, you create a certain liaison. Besides, you remind your client that you want to be useful to him.

Read more: http://www.onbile.com/info/ideas-for-online-marketing/

3 Biggest Challenges in Online Marketing

In order to run a successful online marketing campaign, companies need to be able to effectively juggle multiple factors simultaneously. Online marketing is not one thing, but rather, a combination of smaller campaigns that work together. For example, an online marketing campaign will include SEO, content marketing, and a sound social media strategy.

While there is a laundry list of possible challenges for online marketers, here are the three challenges most marketers face.

1. Optimizing for Mobile Users. The massive growth of smartphones and tablets, has led to an increasingly larger number of people are searching the web from a mobile device. This creates a unique challenge for online marketers. Mobile optimization should not be avoided. In order to survive and grow in the current digital world, companies have to focus on mobile users. This means having a responsive website that allows it to be fully utilized from a desk top, mobile phone, tablet and any other mobile device. In addition to being responsive, companies also need to tailor their content to mobile users. Mobile users are more drawn to image or video based content. Articles need to be concise and all links need to be fully functional.

2. Social Media Management. Social media management can be a significant challenge because it can be a full-time job by itself. Many large companies have entire departments dedicated to their social media networks. Each network needs to be treated differently because users on different networks have different expectations. For example, Facebook allows for photos, videos and longer status updates. You want to post things to Facebook that will engage conversations, likes and shares. However, Twitter is tailored more to small bits of information or links to information. Twitter also tolerates multiple posts a day, while Facebook users get annoyed by companies that post too often.

3. Effectively Implementing SEO. Google basically dictates SEO because they are the largest search engine, so they get to make the rules regarding what will get a website a top ranking in the search results. While SEO used to mean effectively using certain words, it is now significantly more complicated and integrated as part of content marketing. Companies need to establish themselves as an authority within their field.

http://www.josic.com/3-biggest-challenges-323in-online-marketing

Get an Internet Marketing Plan

 

Internet Marketing Plan

Do you’ve have a home company? Does a person conduct some business, but actually want to take your organization to another level? If this seems like you, the number 1 thing that can be done to assist yourself is placed up an online marketing plan. Should you already come with an internet advertising plan in position, you may wish to look in to revising this. Many people believe that they don’t need an online marketing plan to achieve success. This might be true, but in the most common of home based business owners, an online marketing plan is really a huge crucial to achievement. Follow the actual tips below when you’re setting upward an online marketing plan.

1. Ensure that you put your online marketing intend on paper. Many home based business owners claim they have an online marketing plan, but can’t show it for you because it’s only within their mind. By getting an online marketing plan in position it is possible to remain on pace with no trouble whatsoever. An online marketing plan is really a key in order to staying upon course without having getting lost on the way.

2. Your online marketing plan ought to be diverse. Many home based business owners drop prey in order to only utilizing one online marketing strategy. As a result you are going to be hurting yourself if your technique stops working you’ll have no possibility of recovering rapidly.

3. When assembling an online marketing plan you would like to make certain that you make use of strategies which have been proven successful again and again. These consist of strategies for example affiliate advertising, and putting ads in various ezines.

Affiliate marketing is especially successful because you don’t have to pay anything up front to get started. With this particular program, you’ll pay affiliate marketers to deliver traffic for your site. But the primary advantage is that you simply just pay your own affiliates once the customers they send really purchase something from you. Which means that you are becoming free advertising, and just pay up whenever you make the sale? This is among the most popular online marketing strategies.

Another online marketing strategy which works is actually placing advertisements in ezines. Ezines venture out to subscribers on the daily, every week, or month-to-month basis. The best thing about utilizing ezines is that you could market in order to people inside your industry. If you’re selling workplace equipment, you may put your own ad within an ezine for those who may be searching for your items.

Overall, having a top notch online marketing plan you’ll be increasing your likelihood of being prosperous. By placing an online marketing plan in to place after which following through by using it, you might find more earnings rolling in most months.

http://www.alouwebdesign.com/get-an-internet-marketing-plan

7 Basics for Social Media – Online Marketing in a B2B World

 

Start with the Basics

 B2B online marketing is really about presence. Your prospects and customers want to know they are doing business with a hip company that knows enough to have presence on Twitter and other social media sites. So, at a minimum, you need to establish your online presence. Here are a few core sites where your flag should be hanging:

-Your website: Hopefully, this is more than a single page, or even just a few basic pages. I’ll elaborate on the overall website and its optimization in another article, but a website showcases who you are, and serves as home turf. You have the most direct influence on how people perceive you through your website. What are conveying to your prospects, customers, and partners today?

-Blog: This is similar to your website in that you have full control over the look, content, and presentation.

-Twitter: At a minimum, have a Twitter account live, and a semi-customized page. You can decide if you want to be a re-broadcaster of others’ news, respond to others queries, or send out your own thought leadership comments. Just be sure that you are posting on a daily and consistent basis.

-LinkedIn: Depending on your industry and how engaged contacts are within your prospects or customers, you should have a company page and product page at a minimum. Occasional announcements can correspond with your press releases or you can engage “all-in” by joining various groups. LinkedIn bought Slide Share, which is yet another form of having online presence – we’ll reserve this for a deep-dive or advanced topic.

-YouTube: For the last few years, video has been the big, anticipated wave. While viewership is tremendously high and articles in the news now contemplate the future of cable operators – video still hasn’t fully caught on in B2B. However, it is still important to put some videos on YouTube, again, simply so that your prospects and customers see that their vendor is hip with the market.

-Facebook: When it comes to B2B, Facebook isn’t the ideal platform to intrude into your prospects’ personal time. Nonetheless, you need a flag posted here. Be sure to put some effort to obtaining “fans” or “likes” to this page from internal employees, vendors, and customers to start.

-Pinterest, Instagram: By now, you must be thinking – when will this list end?! And how does someone manage all of these sites without an army of online marketing specialists? I couldn’t ignore these sites, but in B2B, this normally would not apply, unless you have tangible goods that you want to showcase to customers and prospects. Or, for example, if you are a limo company that wants to show corporate customers your fleet, or other customers enjoying your services.

At this point, we have only scratched the surface of online marketing basics. If you don’t already have presence on these sites – that is your first step. If you do not have an in-house resource to set this up, it is worthwhile to have a contractor set it up for you*. If you do have in-house resources – make sure there is a reminder or checklist on a weekly or bi-weekly basis to keep content fresh. It never looks good when you have a Twitter account that started, but has no activity for several months in a row. If you cannot maintain it – skip having the presence until you can.

Read more: http://businesstips.com/7-basics-for-social-media-online-marketing-in-a-b2b-world/