Social Marketing for Businesses

The internet usage is growing and new technologies like Web 2.0 taking e-world to the next level. Social networking is a new trend now-a-days. Be it any field or age group there are specialized networking groups available for each of them. An intelligent marketer will make most of this social networks for marketing his offerings.

It is always preferred getting your social marketing campaigns done through some specialized agency or company in social media marketing but still if you want to give it a try below is the list of twelve points that you should miss:

Step 1:
Declare who you are to the online community. People should be able to relate to you. Unless they know more about you, you will be just an unknown identity and most people don’t like to deal with people they don’t know. Create an About Me page to líst your achievements, skills and aspirations.

Step 2
Create a MySpace page and link your biography in the Profile of your MySpace page. Also provide a link back from the MySpace page to your website. Spend an hour every week to develop your online social network in MySpace. Invite a few of your new friends to write blog articles at your site about your products or services.

Step 3
Install a free blog and start publishing at least one article in your blog every week. Provide an easy bookmarking feature to social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us. This is done by providing an action button for each article in your site. The action button takes users to the submission page of the bookmarking site.

Step 4
Provide an action button for direct posting of blog articles to Digg. Digg is a popular news ranking site. A well dugg article will bring thousands of visitors to you.

Step 5
Provide a forum at your site for users to discuss your products and services. Don’t delete negative comments because they provide insights into the improvements needed to serve your visitors better. However, censor hate speeches and meaningless bantering. Register your forum at BoardTracker. BoardTracker is a forum search engine.

Step 6
If you are offering products, allow users to review and rate your products. This will help you in inventory management because you may want to discontinue low rated products.

Step 7
Provide RSS feeds for your new products, blogs, forum postings, etc. An RSS feed provides teasers of your content. Users will use RSS readers to scan your teasers and visit your site for more information if the teasers interest them.

Step 8
Publish all your feeds at Feedburner. Feedburner provides media distribution and audience engagement services for RSS feeds. They also provide an advertising network for your feeds. If you have quality content, you will be able to monetize your content using their services.

Step 9
Create short how-to or new product videos and post these videos in social video sharing sites like YouTube and Google video. Provide a few start and end frames in these videos to introduce your site with your site URL. Post these videos using catchy titles, teaser descriptions, and appropriate tags to make them easy to discover.

Step 10
Provide embedded links to your remotely hosted videos on your site. This will save your bandwidth and storage space because the videos reside on the video sharing sites rather than on your site’s server.

Step 11
As well as videos, use social photo sharing sites like Flickr and SmugMug to share pictures related to content on your site. Use the same title, description and tag techniques discussed earlier for social video sites.

Step 12
Provide a “Send to Fríend” feature for all the products and services you provide. This feature is a link that sends the article, product description, etc. to a recipient via e-mail.

Lead generation: most important for any organization

The most important part of any business is ‘Lead generation’. Be it product based or service based company, the core of the business is at generating leads so that business keeps coming day after day and year after year.

If you agree that lead generation is the most important task for any company then it becomes very essential to assess yourself at lead generation.

• Are you best at lead generation?
• Is whatever you are doing for generating lead getting you what you wanted?
• Is this the best way of lead generation?
• Are you addressing all possible ways of lead generation for your industry?

If the answer to any of the above question is ‘NO’ then you should seriously think of outsourcing this prime activity or hire some consultant who will help you streamlining it.

There are many vendors out who will do this for you but the key lies in selecting the proper one. Any mistake in selecting marketing vendor or controlling the selected vendor may bring trouble for you. This doesn’t mean that you should not outsource but do it with care and take due care in your selection process.

Lead generation to-do list

Today I would like to focus on lead generation activity. Generally, most of the organizations start this activity in a full-fledged way but they don’t continue or follow-up it properly.

Here is a small to-do list that will help your lead generation activity to culminate successfully benefiting your organization. This is application to any sort of lead generation campaign. Be it cold call campaign, bulk email campaign or pay per click (PPC) campaign you will find this small list very helpful.

• Develop Universal Lead Definition with sales team
• Follow a rigorous lead qualification process
• Pass only qualified leads to sales team
• Get input from sales on target companies
• Get sales team input to co-develop campaigns
• Connect sales and marketing data in CRM
• Regular close the loop meetings with sales team
• Start lead nurturing now!

The detail article can be found at http://blog.startwithalead.com/weblog/2004/10/marketing_to_do.html

FAQs for SEO and SEM outsourcing

With the advent of search engine technologies and the rate of internet penetration marketers are finding search engine marketing as a new tool to market their product and services. Generally you find many claimant of the new technology know-how and this makes it difficult for marketers to identify right partner for outsourcing of such technology activity.

To help you in search engine marketing outsourcing partner selection, have a look below at a list of general questions that one should look before going to outsource.

General Questions

• How long have you been online?
• How long have you been doing SEM/SEO for your online strategy?
• How are you promoting your online services to the online market today?
• How are you presenting your internet products/services to your offline market?
• Do you have informational content online about your products/services?
• Do you have any current alliances or partnerships online?
• Please explain your current online efforts outside of SEM in a general form (ie. banners with x,y,z, email newsletter, etc.)
• What quality assurance process do you have in place to verify customer’s satisfaction levels during its web presence and online purchase (ie. feedback forms, questionnaires, etc.)?
• Is your only focus the consumer or are you targeting any B2B customers of the market vertical via the web?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

• Is you website search engine optimized at all? If so, who did this for you? How long ago?
• Are you currently using any “black hat” or “risky” ways of SEO? If not today, in the past?
• Are any of your sites penalized or banned by any of the search engines?
• What percentage of your pages on all websites would you guess is indexed by the search engines (general ball park figure)?
• Are all your copywriting materials optimized for the search engines (eg. page copy for website, press releases, etc.) or only the standard SEO parameters (title, meta tags, keywords, etc.)?

Search Engine Marketing

• Are you doing Pay Per Click (PPC)?
• How many keywords are your running on PPC campaigns?
• How are you handling your PPC management (manual or software)? If software, which one?
• Do you perform any testing of your PPC campaigns with regards to different landing pages?
• What metrics reporting tool are you using to track traffic and conversions?
• Are your SEO and PPC campaigns only in the USA?
• Are they only for the General Market or are you also targeting the Hispanic or other non-anglo markets?
• Are you doing any Paid Inclusion? If so, with whom?
• How much do you know about your competitors SEO rankings & PPC campaigns?
• Do you have an online affiliate program? If so, are your affiliates doing any PPC arbitrage to your keywords? Are they violating your trademarks?
• Are you tracking for Click Fraud?
• Do you have all your SEM efforts and Web Development architecture documented?
• On your perspective, what are the differences between search engine marketing for the general market vs. the Hispanic market or any other multi-lingual search markets and non-U.S. search engines?

Other Related SEM

• How about Contextual Advertising (ie. Google Adsense)?
• Have you established a direct relationship with the Search Engines?
• Don’t forget to talk about what you are doing, what you are looking to do, your objectives, timing, what you seek in terms of results, etc.

If you feel there are other questions that should help prepare a company that is seeking outsourcing SEM, please add them in comment.

Original source: http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=2359

Creativity has no end

With all types of media being used for marketing products and services by marketers has created a crowd of advertisements. If one needs to create space for itself then ‘creativity’ is the only way.

McD has done great with adopting ‘creativity’ in their way of promoting their products. This time report cards is the medium McD is sitting on to pull sales figures up.

The Golden Arches picked up the $1,600 cost of printing report-card jackets for the 2007-2008 school year in Seminole County, Fla., in exchange for a Happy Meal coupon on the card’s cover. With 27,000 elementary school kids taking their report-card jackets home to be signed three or four times a year, that’s less than 2 cents per impression.

Children who earn all A’s and B’s, have two or fewer absences or exhibit good behavior are entitled to a free happy meal at a local McDonald’s — so long as they present their report card.

Read full detail at http://adage.com/article?article_id=122421

Outsource your marketing activities

The world is talking about ‘outsourcing’. Yesterday it was an option but today it is a demand. Maturing over the period of time through outsourcing various non-critical business activities and then slowly moving to business critical activities has created a mindset which allows easy acceptance to the philosophy of ‘outsourcing’. This philosophy of outsourcing is ’save cost and get cutting edge over your competition simultaneously’.

Having tried outsourcing with n type and nature of work the world is now ready for the new phase of it ‘Outsourcing of marketing activities’.

Advertising is supposed to be the oldest activity to get outsourced. Thinking of viral marketing necessarily confirms outsourcing this. In viral marketing the task of marketing (advertising) of your product and service is outsourced to its users and it is they who do it free of charge (save cost) and try to seed the trust that they in your product and service in others.

So this is an attempt to tell you more about the oldest and the latest in outsourcing category - outsourcing of marketing…