Marketing Strategy

At this time of year, many people are putting large amounts of energy into cleaning and tidying their homes, getting ready to receive guests. But how much attention has your business given to receiving guests to your web site? Your web site should make it easy for visitors to find three crucial pieces of information about your business – your unique selling proposition, your niche knowledge, and your track record.

Unique selling proposition

Your business is not the same as other businesses. Whether it is the attitude you bring, your particular blend of past experience, or simply the types of jobs you take on, there is something about your business that makes you unique. Your web site should showcase this aspect of your business so that it is clearly visible to the potential customer.

Consider plumbers. One might stress that they have been in business longer than anyone else in that particular city, another might stress that they have 24×7 response teams for plumbing emergencies, another might stress that they quote prices by the job rather than the hour so there are no surprises, and yet another might stress that they use the newest high-tech tools for diagnosing potential plumbing issues before they become expensive problems. These are all the ways in which those particular companies are unique, and which will shape the rest of how their websites are presented.

Niche knowledge

Some companies are generalists, but most companies have one or more niches in which they have developed more than just a surface level of skill. That niche knowledge makes the company more appealing to other businesses in that niche, who feel that the company will understand the details of their industry already, and be able to focus on what makes their business unique and different within that industry.

This also allows you to refine which areas you would prefer to work in. You may have done work with a car dealership, and developed significant knowledge of the new and used car industry. However, while doing that work, you may have determined that you do not want additional work in that industry. By specifically defining the niches in which you have knowledge and experience for your potential customers, you encourage businesses in the industries in which you want to continue working, and discourage businesses in the industries in which you don’t want to continue working.

Track record

Finally, you should include your track record on your website. This can be a list of satisfied customers, before-and-after photographs of successful jobs, a page of customer testimonials, or some combination of all three. The point is to show prospective customers that you have done something similar to the job they are considering you for, and done it well.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: MorgueFile)

There is a story about a professor who started his class by placing a large glass jar on the podium, and put a number of large rocks into the jar, until no more would fit. When he asked, the students responded that it was full – he could not put any more rocks into the jar. The professor took a number of smaller rocks from beneath the podium, and dropped them into the jar, where they settled into the spaces around the larger rocks. He repeated this with pebbles, and then sand. When the students responded that this time, they were certain the jar was full and no more could be added, the professor poured water into the jar. What does this have to do with Internet marketing? There will always be activities you can do online to market your business or products. How do you know if you’re choosing the big rocks that will give you the most pay-off, or allowing your days to be filled with sand?

Big rocks

Your big rocks are those activities with a hard deadline, either because they are tied to a specific holiday, or because you are doing them in conjunction with another business and both of you must roll out the marketing activity at the same time. Put these activities on your calendar first, determining both when you will actually send out your email marketing, blog posts, ads, or website updates, and how long it will take you to create the material you will be sending out. Make sure that you budget in time for reviews if you are working with someone else.

Small rocks

The small rocks are those activities with soft deadlines. You’d like to complete them by a certain date, but if they’re done a day or two earlier or later, it won’t be a crisis. Add these activities to your calendar next.

Pebbles

Your pebbles are projects that do not have deadlines. These can be sample projects for new forms of social media, split tests to refine a marketing message, or other useful but not necessary activities. You can schedule these things on your calendar, or you can keep a to-do list of the most promising projects and schedule time to work on your to-do list.

Sand

Your sand is composed of many, many grains of small effort that together have an impact. Most social media activities fall under the heading of sand. Any one individual post or response will be unlikely to make a difference to your bottom line, but over time, they can have a great effect. Set aside a block of time each day to work on social media, or use small chunks of time in between other tasks.

Water

The water in this analogy is your relationships. It permeates everything else that you do, and is ignored at your peril.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: MorgueFile)

Whether you view the month of December as your primary sales month or a dead zone in which nothing happens depends largely on whether you market to the consumer or to businesses. Most consumer-oriented businesses are so busy focusing on their own sales that they have no time to give to other companies trying to sell things to them. They’ll deal with that after the holiday returns are done. Businesses that aren’t consumer-oriented are taking advantage of their slow season for executives and other decision makers to have time off with their families, so you’re still unlikely to be able to reach someone to close a sale. But there are still plenty of ways to prime the pump for your success, and to get a jump on your competitors.

Drip Marketing Campaigns

Is there a major change in your industry coming in the spring? Then now is the time to start a drip marketing campaign, rolling out information about the change, what companies need to know to handle it effectively, and how you can help them take whatever action is necessary to profit from the change. Make sure that your emails are also available online, and at the end of each email point back to the list of previous emails online. This way, the subjects of your emails will start getting people thinking about the upcoming change even if they don’t have time to read them, and they can go back and read everything when they do have the time.

Holiday Bonus Gifts

If you or your employees are under-employed at the end of the year, use some of that free time to create sample work for some of your best clients. One clever tactic is to focus on products or services that those clients do not currently purchase from you. You can do a mock-up of a website redesign, a sample graphic for an advertising campaign, a Facebook ad layout, or a LinkedIn banner graphic.

Less personalised bonus gifts include things such as a single background image, banner graphic, or layout that you can send to all of your clients. If you are a Google Adwords partner, you can also offer money from Google to put toward ad campaigns.

Year-end Analyses

Many companies have no idea whether or not they’ve been profitable until they close the books at the end of the year. They know how they’re doing with regard to revenue or sales, but don’t track their expenses required to generate those sales to know if they’ve made or lost money. As a result, you can schedule meetings with companies in mid-to-late January, after they will know how this year went. Prepare two sets of information for the meeting, one to help them turn things around if they lost money, and one to help them build on the momentum of their existing success if they made money.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: MorgueFile)

Recent statistics show that more than 4 out of 10 Twitter users follow specific companies or brands on Twitter. Of course, you should also be using social media tools to follow your own company or brand, so that you can find out what people are saying about you. But who else is following you? If you’re not building your brand, interacting with your current customer base, providing customer service, developing relationships with key bloggers and media people in your sphere, and building buzz for your events or products, you’re not taking full advantage of Twitter for your business.

Create both business and personal accounts

Even if you’re a one-person shop, you should have both a business and personal Twitter account. The business account, by its nature, is more formal, used to discuss things that are relevant to the business as a whole such as press coverage, product releases, and sponsored events. The personal account puts a human face on the business, and is used for relationship building. Use your business name or brand in your account name, and avoid unprofessional underscores or numbers.

Customise your account profiles

Edit your new profile, and add a profile graphic. This should be your logo for your business account, and a photo showing your face or you engaged in your favourite sport for a personal account. Enter your company’s full name, location, and website. You only have 160 characters to create a compelling Twitter bio for your business or personal account, so leave out the puffery and cut to the chase. What can you tell people that will convince them your tweets are worth following? Remember to tell them what’s in it for them, without sounding like you’re begging for followers.

A picture is worth a thousand words

For a professional image, you should create (or outsource the creation of) a custom background image that can be easily scaled for different sizes of screens, and a custom header image. These images should be simple and easily understood graphics for people who may not be familiar with your brand. So, for example, the custom header of a manufacturing company could include pictures of their products and the custom header for a service company could include a group photograph of their employees. The custom background image for each company would be a simple combination of graphics and short text such as the company’s slogan or marketing catch phrase.

Once your profiles have been customised, you can begin creating tweets, finding people and businesses to follow, and attracting followers of your own. You only get one chance to make a good first impression, so ensure that your profile will give visitors the best possible impression of your company before doing anything else.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: MorgueFile)

A complete Internet marketing strategy may include updates on your website, audio marketing podcasts, video marketing, articles, blogs, posts, tweets, and pins, as well as sharing and commenting on other blogs, posts, pins, and tweets. To make sure you don’t miss one of your updates, a marketing schedule is imperative. This also helps you to plan in advance what you want to do in order to take advantage of holidays or other special events such as joint promotions.

The easiest way to plan out your marketing schedule is to superimpose a spreadsheet over a calendar. The rows and columns will correspond to the weeks and days of the week in your calendar. If you have a very dense strategy, you will include multiple keywords or multiple platforms on each day. If you have a sparse strategy, you will have only a single platform and keyword combination per day.

Create lines of keywords

If you put together a full marketing schedule that describes what content you will be creating when, you can more easily vary the keywords that you use for your different content. List your main keywords, auxiliary long-tail keywords, and variations of keywords. Create at least four sets of these different keyword combinations, to correspond to the four weeks in the month. If you need more content, create more sets of keyword combinations.

Create columns of media formats

Each combination of keywords can be featured in SEO optimised blogs, articles, audio, video, and social media. If you need more content, include more formats in each column, for example breaking out multiple social media platforms.

Organise by holiday or special event

Superimpose your spreadsheet of rows and columns over your calendar. Note any holidays or special events that will require specific types of marketing activities, and move the keywords and formats around until the appropriate marketing activities line up with the dates on which you want them to occur.

Create keyword rich topics

Now that you know which keywords you want to focus on in which formats for each day, you can plan appropriate keyword rich topics, including SEO optimised headlines. Enter the topic or topics for each day on your calendar. By knowing in advance what you plan to create content for, you will be able to recognize ideas that can contribute to those topics when you run across them. It also gives you plenty of time to subcontract out content creation and still be sure the resulting content will fit into your overall marketing plan.

Schedule content release in advance

Once you know what you’ll be releasing on each day, you can schedule it in advance for release, saving yourself last-minute headaches. Various tools exist for different platforms, such as WordPress for blogs and HootSuite for social media that allow you to pre-load your content to be released at a specific time and date. You don’t have to worry about interruptions caused by vacations, volume of work, illness or natural disaster. Your content will automatically appear where and when it is scheduled.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: Stock Xchng)

There are many different ways to use Facebook as part of Internet marketing. If you plan on using Facebook to engage with your fans, however, you should follow the five tips below to get the best results.

#1: Make Content Shareable

You may have a fantastic news story or exciting product announcement, but that Facebook post sits like a lump. Meanwhile, a photo of your pet doing something adorable goes viral. Why? People share things that they are able to personalise with their own spin, or that reflect their own values. Put a picture of your product next to a famous quote highlighting some key benefit of it, and suddenly it’s sharable. Say you’re releasing a new gizmo that is twice as fast with 10% less waste. Try pairing it with the quote from George Allen, “Every day you waste is one you can never make up,” with a caption of “More time, less waste with Gizmo 2.0.”

#2: Think Visually

This was alluded to in the first tip, but you should always think visually about your content. Every post should have an associated visual, even if it is not a photo post. People’s attention goes first to visual images, and then to text, so as your post is competing for attention on a busy page, having a picture associated with it makes it more likely that someone will actually read it. Having read it, they will also be more likely to share something that includes a picture.

#3: Be a Real Person

Facebook is not the place for corporate pronouncements wrapped in marketing hype or couched in legalese. It’s a way for people to feel like they are connecting with the human heart of an otherwise soulless organisation. You have a business culture – show it! Whether you’re an aficionado of a particular kind of music, or let loose with Crazy Hat Day, let your fans know that you’re not all about business.

#4: Get Their Opinions

People love to express their opinions. Make it easy to do by running posts that have 2, 4, or 6 different choices (each with a photo) and asking them to choose their favourite. It could be as simple as picking their favourite colour of the new product, or as silly as choosing the best looking dog.

#5: Monitor, Analyse, and Incorporate

Track the results of all of your postings. Which result in the most Likes? Which result in the most Shares? Which do the most to expand your reach? Can you correlate any of this activity with increased sales? Are there particular days or times of day that you get better responses? Are there particular types or subjects of posts that get better responses? Use the information you gather to refine and improve your strategy.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image: Stock Xchng)

Even more than traditional marketing, internet marketing is both a science and an art. The tricky part is that the science is one that’s constantly evolving since the entire internet is rapidly evolving and therefore all things and activities related to it must rapid evolve as well.

The original measurement of internet marketing success was measuring the number of people who viewed a particular webpage; this is known as “getting eyeballs”. Companies were well funded and purchased for multi-million dollar pay-outs to their owners on the basis of the number of eyeballs that could be documented. For example, there was a time when e-mail providers were able to command $400 per subscriber on the theory that the subscribers would somehow be monetized in the years ahead via a stream of ad revenue.

Of course, we now have different models of generating revenue that vary from pay per click (or PPC) advertising to affiliate commission payments. The key thing is that the models are evolving; the only model that bears resemblance to conventional ideas of marketing from years past is that of payment of commissions on actual sales. This is, of course, the only model that actually assures that there is pay for performance that matters, as opposed to pay for performance that may or may not matter.

Consider, for example, a campaign that yields 1 million visitors to a website. That’s pretty good, in many views. However, suppose that only 10 of these visitors actually buy something. If that something is a six-figure item such as a luxury car then it may be worthwhile. On the other hand, if it’s a bag of peanuts then the campaign has been, in the words of Shakespeare, much sound and fury signifying nothing.

It’s a fact that much of marketing is done in ignorance. People don’t know what works until it actually works, and unlike scientific experiments the conditions in which marketing is done are always changing. Sure, you can run two promotional pieces to demographically identical audiences at the same time and track the results. In theory, this will tell you which piece works better; it’s scientific in a way.

But how do you know that you’ve controlled for all of the variables? You don’t, since the real world is always infinitely more complex than a lab environment. What you’re really doing is playing the odds, much like a professional gambler. That’s why marketing is and will always be more an art than a science.

That being said, one should use scientific methods such as split tests when possible since it’s a far better approach than throwing darts. Add to that the seasoned judgment of a marketing pro who’s produced real-world results that matter time and again, and you might have a good chance of making money.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat

Managing Director

The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image PhotoMorgue)

Webinars are excellent ways to launch a new product or service. They can also be used to bring new life to an existing product or service, presenting it in a way that captures people’s interest and makes it hot again. For evergreen products or services, a recorded webinar can be posted to YouTube and continue to inform and convert potential customers for years to come.

There are some key points to keep in mind when creating a webinar to create a webinar that will wow your audience, to have them buying your product or telling their friends about it. Failure to follow these guidelines will result in a webinar that unlikely to move your audience to action, and that will sink into obscurity moments after it is launched.

First, you must be able to both define and reach your audience. Say that your ideal audience is shopkeepers. Is there a way to reach all of the shopkeepers in the UK? Not easily. However, if you define your audience more narrowly, for example shopkeepers in a single city, there is probably an organization that they belong to which would allow you to reach most if not all of them. Be careful of how much you narrow the audience. If you have to restrict your audience to a very tiny segment of your potential customer base in order to be able to reach them, make sure that the size of the audience still warrants a webinar. For example, you may want to narrow the audience to shopkeepers in a specific city so that you can reach them, but keep the presentation general enough that you can later present it to shopkeepers in different cities.

Once you know your audience, determine what topics will prove valuable to them. Ideally, you can string a number of different topics together into a series. This will build upon the audience of the first webinar, and get them excited to attend the next webinar. Of course, it relies upon you actually delivering upon your promised value.

Start as you mean to go on. Do not start with a low-cost webinar provider if it has a limit to the number of attendees and quirky formatting. At some point, your series of webinars will outgrow the service, and it will cause you many headaches to transfer to a new service. Look for something that can be scaled up as your audience grows.

Incorporate email marketing with your webinars, first to drive attendance, and after the webinar, to convert attendees into customers. If necessary, partner with another firm that has a larger email list to try and gain your first attendees. Capture attendees email addresses by making them register for the webinar, and then follow up with drip mail campaigns until they convert.

Thanks!

Sean

Sean McPheat
Managing Director
The Internet Marketing Academy

http://www.internetmarketingacademy.com

(Image PhotoMorgue)

Has your social media routine become out of control? Do you find that you are spending hours a day on a variety of social media sites trying to acquire a following? When we take a good hard look at how much time we are investing in our social media efforts, many of us will discover that hours upon hours are being used. This excessive amount of time, spent on trying to acquire more customers and leads via social media platforms, is actually working against you. You are taking time from doing what is most important, which is your work. How can you optimize your social media routine to have it work for you and to see excellent results?

Egg Timer
If you don’t have one already in your kitchen, go and buy one immediately. This will be the best investment for the least amount of money that you can make. Put the egg timer next to your computer and set it for 15 minutes. Do this twice a day to time and monitor the time you spend reading blogs, commenting on articles, posting on Facebook and tweeting on Twitter. By using an egg timer you are forcing a schedule that keeps you accountable for 30 minutes out of each business day. You shouldn’t be spending more than 30 minutes each day and the egg timer will remind you when to stop.

A good strategy is to use the first 15 minutes to read and respond to what is being said on your blog, on Twitter and Facebook. Spare a few minutes each day to answer questions and address any possible complaints. Use the second 15 minutes to engage. This is where you will comment on blog posts and build solid relationships with your online audience. It’s a hard habit to form, but once you get started, you will find that your time is being managed optimally.

Utilise RSS Feed
Aggregate all of your news, the blogs that you visit and the feeds from your social media platforms into once place. Hours can be lost in a week simply by taking the time to look up all of the sites you want to visit and organizing your bookmark toolbar. Keep it simple and use your RSS Feed. This will give you one place to look each day to see what is happening. When something notable stands out, you can visit that site. The benefit is gaining precious minutes that can be used to close a sale and not get lost on the Internet.

We all lose time when we are online. Take a few minutes to incorporate an egg timer and a RSS Feed and you will save a great deal of time and energy.
Thanks!
Sean
Internet Marketing Training – Internet Marketing Course – Internet Marketing Blog

(Image by Stuart Miles)

A well planned and well executed Twitter presence can go a long way towards fulfilling your social media marketing obligations. However, what exactly you should do, what you should tweet, and how you should manage the direction and strategy of your campaign are some of the biggest points that I see potential marketing mavens struggling with day in and day out.

Today we’re going to talk a bit about that last bit – how to structure your campaign.

To begin with, make sure that your Twitter campaign has a target and a direction, and that all of your tweets should move with the central strategy. This sounds obvious, but it can be difficult to implement.

For instance, if you’re going to make a campaign to publicize the launch of a new version of your product at the end of April, then every post you make should be moving you towards that goal. This doesn’t mean that your Twitter has to be totally co-opted by the marketing campaign, but whatever hashtag you’re using for your marketing campaign should not be used for everything else. You do not want to dilute the focus of your campaign.

This should basically go without saying, but make sure that whatever your campaign is, it has a reason for people to participate, and a reason for people to fall in love with it. People have more inertia than you would expect. They are not interested in getting motivated to participate in your Twitter campaign unless you give them a good reason to do so.

A lot of the most successful Twitter campaigns today are including a certain number of prizes, and offering everyone who participates a chance to win a prize. Offer a year’s free subscription to your service to a certain number of people who follow your campaign, or who visit your website from your Twitter and fill out a quick form. When people stand to gain something, they’re much more likely to act.

Thanks!

Sean

Internet Marketing Academy

Internet Marketing Training – Internet Marketing Course – Internet Marketing Blog