Social Media Marketing

Social Media Marketing is the process of promoting your site or business through social media channels. There is no sure-shot formula for success using marketing since it only gives more visibility to the business and the end sales depend only on the efficiency of the product. However, social media marketing is an important tool that, when properly used is a highly beneficial and promising enterprise.

Social media marketing includes various things such as blogs, video sharing, communities and many more. When searching the Internet, you will find thousands of Social media marketing sites but you have to choose the top ranked sites which have the most visitors. LinkedIn, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and Youtube are the most famous social media sites.

For instance, if your customers are the type to readily participate in online social networks, it may be beneficial to add a blog to your company website. Another beneficial way for your business to take advantage of the popularity of social networking is to perhaps join one or more of the most popular social networking sites and begin discussions, groups, etc. around your relevant products and services.

Here is a look at 7 ways social media can help you.
1. Expand your client base
2. Publicise your reputation
3. Online branding
4. Keeping up to date
5. Get more job offers
6. Keep things dynamic
7. Be yourself

Source : http://www.theportugalnews.com/cgi-bin/article.pl?id=1125-39

Marketing services survived recession in 2010.

While the recession slammed virtually every sector for the last two years, marketing research firms finally saw an upswing at the end of 2010, according to a recent study from the American Marketing Association.

"This doesn't make up entirely for the personnel cutbacks in 2008 and 2009, but it is a big step in the right direction," stated Jack Honomichl, founder of the industry newsletter "Inside Research."

The top 50 U.S. research firms included in the analysis brought in a total revenue of $8.5 billion, according to a Honomichi study, with the Council of American Survey Research Organizations reporting 149 smaller companies brought in an additional $755 million.

Marketing research revenue grew 3.1 percent in 2010, a marked difference from the 2.2 percent and 3.3 percent declines seen in 2008 and 2009, respectively.

As advertising service firms begin turning around and coming back from the economic downturn, other businesses are looking to reinvest in marketing tools and campaigns. Information Week reports that one company which develops content for association publications and conferences, Omni press, has turned to marketing automation to help it deliver on client expectations that more materials be published to the internet.

Source : http://www.ricg.com/marketing_articles/marketing_service/marketing_services_saw_better_performance_in_2010/

Search Engine Marketing

The simple definition of search engine marketing is using Internet search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search smaller search engines to encourage traffic to specified websites. It is a blend of two marketing techniques – Search Engine Optimisation (SEO Services), also known as ‘Natural search’, and Paid Search related marketing Pay Per Click (PPC).

Let’s start with what we know. SEO or search engine optimisation is all about building a website that registers high on the search engine ‘bot’s radar as well as using terminology that your audience uses to locate websites of interest on the search engines. SEO relies on an understanding of the language that is most effective in raising your profile to an extent whereby your traffic levels rise to a sufficient point that makes you interesting to the bots.

The second part of the equation is Paid search, normally in the form of PPC or Pay Per Click. While good SEO is a long-term strategy to improve your position on the page rankings, PPC offers a ‘shortcut’ into the search engines and directories. Search engine marketing has to take account into both aspects of this process and utilise them in such a way that your site encourages both unique and return visits from the human visitors, and continued interest in you by the ‘bots.

PPC allows you to ‘buy’ a top spot on the search engine rankings, but before you throw out everything else and just concentrate on PPC, be warned. It does have its problems – not least the unpredictable way that your human visitors use search engines. While PPC may be a great way to get your site on page one of Google, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’ll grab that 40% of search traffic from day one. PPC allows you to ‘bid’ for keywords you think your customers are most likely to use

One of the pre-requisites of search engine marketing is that you have to constantly monitor your website traffic. Search engine marketing allows you to pinpoint your target audience with sniper-like accuracy and push them in the right direction to convert.

 The expertise and knowledge of what a successful search engine marketing campaign entails will mean that not only does your ranking climb up the listings, but the customers who are being driven towards your site convert into cash sales – and that is the ultimate target for any marketing campaign. 

Source :  http://www.promotionworld.com/se/articles/article/110801-what-is-search-engine-marketing

B2B marketers need a coherent approach to digital content .

Content has always been important to B2B, so why all of a sudden am I writing a blog post about it? For the simple reason that the business audience mindset has been shifting and digital content is the new brochure. 

Business customers are accessing more information online than ever before and using this to inform their buying decisions. Over 70% of B2B buyers use a search engine at the start of their buying process and 75% B2B prospects click on organic results.

·        You need to cater for the needs of a diverse audience

·       You need to be found where people are searching

·        You need to spread the gospel

·        People like to pass your content around & sometimes gossip

·        Poorly planned content campaigns can be costly

Your content needs to be methodically planned to cater for diverse needs. That requires a mind map of how the different content assets at your disposal can be used across digital channels, not just your website, to satisfy the needs of each person in the buying chain. 

Every buying decision has a number of critical stages; points where the process either breaks down or continues.  

Search is one way to put your content in front of B2B decision makers when they want it most. The challenge is to understand the techniques needed to:

a) Optimise your website technically to facilitate indexing/spidering by search engines e.g. dynamically generated sitemaps (XML and HTML).

b) Optimise your content to be visible for the most relevant search terms.

c) Analyse the impact of your SEO to determine how you can fine tune and improve.

The ability to reach a large audience cost effectively via direct digital marketing is in your hands.

One challenge is to ensure you have the content that addresses the likely questions that will be asked during the buying cycle.

This content can be made available on your website and distributed across other digital channels. If you do your keyword research and optimise the content accordingly, you can rapidly make this visible for relevant online searches.

Key thought: your content isn’t just web content and statics asset like a white paper; it’s also the words that your employees can speak and write. How are you maximising the value and impact of these assets?

Your competitors have access to all these tools too!

If you’re not on top of your content creation & distribution, you will lag behind. If you have a gap at any stage of your customers’ buying cycle, the competition could steal them from under your nose.  

There is a resource limitation and the need to prioritise. This is where web analytics, testing and optimisation come in. I always advocate measuring the impact of your content, which isn’t as daunting as it sounds.

Source : http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/7757-five-reasons-why-b2b-marketers-need-a-coherent-approach-to-digital-content

Companies must evolve with technology developing new services

Business marketers should expect practical growth, evolve with new technologies, and use data to drive business decisions. 

Companies should expect 3% to 5% annual growth over the next five years as the economy recovers strong companies will thrive, while weak companies grow weaker during the recovery. B-to-b marketers must evolve with the explosion of technology that is driving one-to-one customer relationships.

The Web allows small players to be hyper-targeted and focused. The market is moving to near-perfect information. We should focus on six things like product and service innovation; leveraging knowledge and content; providing consultative selling; leveraging integrated marketing tactics; using data to drive business decisions; and taking advantage of online marketing.

 Build new, unique and hard to find products. 

Collect data unique to your business and look at data to validate a hypothesis, but it will also tell you things you don't know that will lead to a new hypothesis.

 Source : http://www.dmnews.com/companies-must-evolve-with-technology-develop-new-services-meritdirect-co-op/article/207376/

SMO ideas for marketing

Viral videos : Television commercials adds to the marketing world as the preferred advertising method for Fortune 500 companies. Social media sites are slowly rendering these TV commercials obsolete as Internet video traffic grows. A new breed of advertising dubbed the viral video is giving brands exposure on video-sharing giant YouTube.

Facebook fan gating : Big brands are enticing their consumers by asking them to “Like” their pages to gain access to special content. For instance, Dr. Pepper’s Facebook page allows you to win free cases of the soft drink. Large brands are following up with custom games, apps and contests to keep people active on their page.

Crowdsourcing : If you have a brick-and-mortar business selling a product or service, your best bet is crowdsourcing. The catch is you provide a heavy discount in exchange for an abnormally large amount of new customers. The tradeoff is good enough that these sites are generating millions of dollars daily.

Twitter engagement :Think of your company on Twitter as a human entity. For the first time in history, companies are enabled to talk to their customers directly, quickly, and efficiently. The micro-blogging tool can gives businesses a voice to respond to customer inquiries.

Listening and monitoring : When a company is looking to break into the social media space, the easiest way to start is by listening.Traditional marketing is a one-way street where the business pushes a marketing message to the consumer. Social media has created a two-way street where consumers respond to the marketing messages. Businesses need to take an active role in participating in the conversation that ensues.

Source : http://www.digitaltrends.com/social-media/five-social-media-marketing-ideas-for-businesses/

Marketing Definitions for a job seeker.

College graduates go into the business world with lack of understanding of  the important facets that shape marketing today. Here are some marketing definitions for aspiring marketing professional.

 

1. SEO Services - Search engine optimization or SEO is the foundation of online marketing in the year 2011. It  is the studying of search engine algorithms to determine how to rank highly when people search specific keyword phrases.  The end goal is to get incoming leads and minimize the number of cold-calls that a firm has to make.

2. Landing Pages - Landing pages are separate pages on the website, constructed to highlight the keywords. Landing pages are a facet of marketing that the aspiring marketing professional will have to learn early, simply because being able to style a webpage, yet still keyword stuff it, takes a significant amount of skill.

3. Ezine websites - Ezine sites are article websites that cater to the nonprofessional writer and allow the general public to publish articles on topics of their choice. There are many advantageous reasons to write for these publications.  One main factor is to get a permanent backlink thereby ranking high in Google. 

4. Google Analytics - Google Analytics is a web-based software that tells the marketing professional, among many other things, how many visitors (both unique and returning) are coming to a particular website on any given day.  The program also covers the amount of time each visitor is staying on the website and the subsequent bounce rate of that particular site. Google Analytics will tell the viewer what keywords are most popular in leading to visits on the website, as well as what pages the visitor lands on, and which web pages are most popular. 

 5. Page Rank - Page Rank is a numeric value given by Google that aims to quantify how important a particular website is in the eyes of the search engine.  Page rank is judged on a number basis between 1 and 10, 10 being the highest and 1 being the lowest.

Source : http://www.businessinsider.com/5-marketing-definitions-every-young-job-seeker-should-know-2011-7