Wednesday, December 29, 2010
Tuesday, December 28, 2010
Online marketing has become an important part of almost every business strategy. Social media marketing and search engine marketing are two main aspects of any successful online marketing campaign. One way or the other, both forms of marketing complement each other. Here is a brief overview of the two vast fields of marketing on the internet.
Search Engine Marketing
- They provide concise information about the websites related to a particular question or search topic so viewers are attracted to them.
- Advertisers can place pay per click ads on search engine sites to gain well-placed ads that potential customers will hopefully see.
- Marketers can apply search engine optimization to their websites by developing web content. By doing this they can achieve a good ranking and gain more visibility in the search engine pages.
Social media marketing
- Offers the possibility to communicate directly with the consumer
- Targeted ads based on demographic criteria, focused audience
- Stay connected with your consumers
In the usage of a search engine, your consumer expresses the need or the product that she/he most probably wishes to buy. The consumer has expressed his need in the search query and thus, the probability of buying an item displayed in an Ad or in the search query is very high.
In the usage of social media, the consumer doesn’t specially use the social media to look to buy a product. Furthermore, the ads are displayed based on a mechanism of usage and demographics and not relevancy for the consumer need. How can you guess a consumer need in this case? Must probably the requirements in the product displayed will not match an acceptable level for a buy decision. Thus, the tendency to make a purchase decision is much lower.
However, there is scenario when Social Media Marketing is very useful. Say you have invented a completely new thing for a common problem. Since it’s a new invention, people will not "search" for it. If you use social media marketing to promote that product, the people will think "Hey!... here is a nice solution for this. I've never seen that before. I should buy that/check that.". That’s a clear advantage for Social Media Marketing.
To conclude, SEM is better for direct buy decision, however SMM can help you to promote products that are not yet in the mind of the consumer. To know more about Social Media Marketing visit V Network - The newest social media marketing and advertising program for business online.
Thursday, December 23, 2010
Social media marketing is the latest craze in online marketing. It involves the promotion of your site or business through social media channels. It is a very cost effective yet very powerful strategy what can get you links, attention and enormous amounts of traffic.
No other promotional method can compare to the cost-benefit ration of social media marketing. With almost no cost you can easily obtain large number of visitors, with high probability that a significant portion of them will visit the website again. As a matter of fact, social media marketing is a very universal approach; it can make any website, not just business websites, profitable over time.
Indeed, the potential benefits of social media marketing are epic, and will be great waste if not exploited. In spite of these, there are still those who are unable to benefit from these massive potentials. Such people can be categorized into three classes; the ones who know little or do not know anything about social media, the ones who are interested but don’t know how to utilize it and those who don’t believe in the worth that a social media strategy can convey to a site or business.
The Value of Marketing through Social Media Websites
Creating link baits at popular social networking and social bookmarking sites and being able to bring such baits to popularity can get you two big benefits: primary and secondary traffic and high quality links.
Primary and Secondary Traffic
Primary traffic is the huge amount of visitors that come to your website directly from the social media websites by clicking a link you or another user of that social site posted. Secondary traffic is referral from websites which found your site, page or content interesting and placed a link to your site in their site. Such link is considered an inbound link of you site and it will serve as a channel that will send visitors to your site.
Primary + Secondary Traffic = Community/Supporters
Skeptics cite poor bounce rate as the main argument in using social bookmarking or social news sites. Hence, they claim that such sites will only provide your site with nothing but useless traffic as most of the time visitors will only click a specific webpage and then click away. Well, such claim is usually true.
Saying all traffic from social sites is worthless is exaggeration. If your site has good content that appeals to the interest of the general public your presence in social sites is likely to become stable. And after stability is reached, there will surely be a handful of users that will begin to follow your site for updates. Detractors also pay no attention to the power of much targeted secondary traffic. General sites or blogs in the same niche will link to a story that’s well-liked on social sites, because it adds value for their readers or users. This is done normally on a daily basis for most.
Primary traffic does come in very much larger volume than secondary traffic. Secondary traffic can be considered more valuable if you prefer quality over quantity. Yes, secondary traffic is of far superior quality than primary traffic because visitors coming from links on other websites bring people who are likely to be interested in your content. Such links prove that others acknowledge the worth of your site which also at the same time builds your brand thus leveraging your product, people who get to read your content and end up liking it will likely recommend it to others.
High Quality Links
Being popular in popular social sites will grant you a huge number of links. Some of these links may even help you with your search engine optimization if such links are relevant to your site topics. If not, they will still be beneficial in sending you visitors. A high-quality story can realistically gain a hefty number of high quality editorial links, most of which cannot be easily bought.
Links = Better Search Engine Rankings
Your social media marketing campaign will aid greatly in your link building and thus will help improve your search engine positioning. When a website receives a huge number of natural, permanent links from trusted domains, it builds authority. Search engines then trust it and give its pages crawling priority. If you optimize your link-bait and website structure appropriately, you can effortlessly start ranking for competitive keywords, which will in turn fetch in search engine visitors.
Doing enough social media marketing therefore will definitely increase your search engine traffic. It can also be said that these links that generate secondary traffic for you are built on borrowed trust. Many people still think that sites or pages posted in social news and bookmarking sites are just going to be a waste of time.
A new website will usually find difficulty in getting links from sites that are not familiar with it. But announcing your site in trusted news or content resource sites makes getting links a whole lot easier. Always remember however that content is still undoubtedly the king. Make sure your content is informative and interesting as well as fresh and unique.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Monday, December 20, 2010
Lead Generation always takes precedence for marketers. With fierce competition looming around, marketing teams are under tremendous pressure to come up with innovative and effective lead generation strategies to keep an incessant flow of qualified leads through the sales funnel. In addition to this, marketing teams are also required to justify their budgets and clearly demonstrate good ROI.
A successful lead generation seems virtually impossible with these many constraints. However, a well planned framework can cinch a successful lead generation. Here is a step-by-step framework which has proven to be effective for many:
Step 1- Conduct a Lead Generation Audit: Firstly, it is of utmost importance to assess your lead generation capabilities- to understand what methods have been used for lead generation so far, and how efficient or effective these methods have been. Also, does your marketing team have the scope to improve their lead generation efforts, and what skills and resources would be required to generate more quality leads.Your lead management audit should be able to counter all these questions.
Step 2- Plan & Strategize: Once the capabilities have been assessed, it is essential to develop a lead generation strategy. Plan your campaigns and build a lead acquisition model. This model should specify how you will engage the market with your brand, and how you plan to convert them into qualified leads. Therefore a ‘qualified lead’ needs to be defined, for which you need to collaborate with your sales team.
Step 3- Plan Your Communication & Budget: Decide on the channels of communication that would work best for your target market, and come up with appropriate messages that need to be sent out at the right time. Furthermore a budget needs to be drawn at this stage to make sure all likely expenses are covered and approved.
Step 4- Organize Resources, Assign Roles & Responsibilities: Define goals clearly and convey the requirements to your team. Assess the skill-sets of your team and see what you lack. Equip them with the right tools to enhance their skills by providing the necessary training. Standardize a project management policy and methodology.
Step 5- Make Optimal Use of Your Website: Evaluate the effectiveness of your website by conducting a website effectiveness audit to understand where improvements are required. Consider aspects such as clarity of content, aesthetic appeal, brand consistency, user-friendliness etc. Optimize your website content for search engines and boost traffic through intense backlinking activities.
Step 6: Consider Marketing Automation Options: It may be difficult and even expensive to track the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, if incongruous systems are used for marketing, website analytics, online advertising, etc. Having a sophisticated marketing automation tool technology, can automate marketing processes and drive efficiency even in small and mid-sized businesses. So opt for a marketing automation software that can simplify your lead generation efforts to a large extent.
Step 7- Rollout Your Campaign: Begin your direct marketing activities, implement your advertising plan, intensify your call center activities and make cold calling work for you, schedule webcasts, and podcasts to reach out to your market. Promptly respond to the needs of your target market by assessing the performance of your campaign, concurrently making any changes if necessary.
Although these steps can guide you through lead generation, it is always important to keep your campaigns flexible so that you can adjust your messages to changing market trends and demands- and this is the secret component for successful lead generation software!
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
Monday, December 13, 2010
- Email marketing strategies
- Lead & sales conversion methods
- Search engine optimization
- Web design and development
- Media marketing
- How to be successful at advertising
Friday, December 10, 2010
Thursday, December 9, 2010
Wednesday, December 8, 2010
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Friday, December 3, 2010
A popular method for acquiring new lead is to compose an e-mail list of prospective buyers and send out an e-mail informing them about your business and its benefits. In order to obtain such a list of buyers it would be helpful to visit a site containing lists of contact information for a number of private and public businesses.
One of the best and most cost effective ways to gain new leads is to search out websites, blogs, newspapers, etc. that will reach the target audience for your business. After such places have been acquired, the next step is to contact the owners of such places and ask if they would be willing to mention your business in one of their public areas. The best way to go about this is to call or e-mail each place personally. If your business does not need to be so frugal, you could contact a site such as advertising.com to generate such a list and e-mail for you. This certainly saves time and these businesses have experience in the marketing field. Also, such sites usually allow for the ability to track the effectiveness of different sales tactics so you can personally decide which are best to use.
Another affective tactic is "cold calling" prospective leads. This is something most people do not want to do, but it is very affective because of its personal touch. It's much more difficult to say no to someone on the phone than it is to delete an e-mail.
To go beyond these tactics, visit a webinar or networking functions for lead generation. Webinars can be found on a variety of business marketing sites and can double as networking functions. Networking functions give you a chance to reach out to experienced businesses for advice or help with generating leads. Also, it may be helpful to read business articles such as the ones found on Goliath pertaining to lead acquisition to generate ideas. Such sites may additionally offer sample business plans that could help generate new ideas. Also, these sites may contain information about consultants. Consultants can help bring new ideas to your business and re-vamp it so that it is more pleasing to customers.
Besides hiring a consultant, you could decide to re-vamp your business's image on your own. Writing a newsletter with information that would be helpful to your customers is a great way to get your name out there without implementing "in your face" advertising. Watch the current trends in your market and try to find other ways for your business to stand out. Re-new web pages or give a special offer on your product. This will capture leads initially, and then the content of your website should draw them in.
Implementing these tactics will ensure a rise in leads and customers for your business. Along with applying the above practices, your business should remember to think like a customer. If you put yourself in the customer's shoes, or simply leave a place on your site for customer advice, you'll find that new business leads will pop up all over in response. Also, it is vital to realize that each new lead is important, no matter the time taken to gain it. With each new lead, your business is opened up to a new world of potential customers who in turn will open you to another group of potential leads. Each new lead is fundamental to the growth of your business.
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