Archive for the ‘Social Marketing’ Category

9 Great Tips That Can Make Your Social Campaign Work

1.  The 3M’s of Social Marketing

When looking at real estate, it’s “location, location, location”, but in social marketing, it’s metrics, metrics, metrics. You won’t know if you succeed unless you have established a way to get metrics What are the metrics and how are you going to obtain them? The final, crucial step – measurement – can’t succeed unless you know what you are measuring against

2. Keeping it Social

Your social campaigns run on social content, not news energy. Keep it light, fun and engaging. Do it right – conversationally – and your point won’t get lost, it will get shared.

3. Use Simple Email Social Templates

Often, the best way to launch your social campaign is with email and as technology has progressed, they have become better and better launch pads. So you don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you start a campaign, you’ll want templates so that you can easily produce Facebook landing pages, create engagement and deliver messages with professional-looking “Like” pages. Approaches already proven effective can be easily uploaded to email, share and post.

4. Keep the Content Light on Sales and Heavy on Value

Okay, you are trying to sell; that’s no secret. But your content balance needs to be heavily tipped to the value you are offering your community. The best campaigns are thoughtfully prospect-centric – you know them – and the call to action seems more like a way to keep the conversation going.

5. Choose the Appropriate Channels

Businesses can use email to automatically share campaigns and messages to Facebook fans, Twitter followers, Linked-In connections, Google+ and email subscribers. Not to mention fan pages and blog embeds, two critical forums you should not overlook. Many messages can run the gamut, but let the nature of your message help determine which channels are most appropriate.

6. Get Your Video’s Going

Explore using video. The stats are in: viewers respond more enthusiastically and are more likely to share your message. Industry researchers such as Marketing Sherpa have reported that video in an email can lift conversion rates by 50%. Using email + video to kick off the conversation lets you show benefits instead of telling about them, and viewers respond to that. Meanwhile, technology has progressed so that everyone can afford to do it right.

7. Get to the Point

Sounds simple to set up parameters, goals and objectives for what is, ideally, a conversation, but never forget this is a campaign. And campaigns are based on their destination. What do you want out of this? Awareness? Directly drive sales? Drive page traffic? Or to tap into how your audiences feel about your organization – good or bad?

8. Use Creative Email Techniques

You want the ability to engage viewers directly from the email, rather than leaving the email to follow a link where it will play. This key feature keeps communication direct with customers and aligned with the accompanying email message. It will also let you look at all of their behavior – stats on what they clicked, how often and much more – so you fine-tune your future messages according to their likes and dislikes.

9. Look Back and Go Forward

Reporting, well integrated with Google Analytics, will show how campaigns drive page visits, shares, new Facebook fans and email subscribers so that you can not only track it all, you can exactly measure your success to fine-tune future campaigns.

For more information on Social Marketing or if you would like to start a Social Marketing program for company, please call eTargeting today. Click here to contact us today to learn more about what eTargeting can do for your company.

Social Networking – Another Tool For Advertising

These days’ people endorse their industry with classifieds as well as it is the ruler of marketing except a small number of advertisers know how to get the highest profit from it. To produce sales and obtain responses from customers it is very indispensable to advertise your business with advertising. There are lots of sites from there you can promote your business with ads. Advertisement through classifieds is a form of advertising which is generally very popular in newspapers, social networking sites and other mediums.

These sites direct and exclusive promotional services are great and these services main target are targeting customer’s message to real online users. If you promote your business with sites which have good PR and high volume traffic then your exclusive mail outs will be delivered and available to many enthusiastic consumers and your business will reflect in the best presentation. During this slowdown, if your advertisement doesn’t get attention of adequate number of customers then you will not get the maximum benefit. You must know you are facing large competition in the fast growing market and your competitors are promoting their businesses with good advertisings. So getting more attraction is important for a good business. And that’s the reason why social networking sites are getting good popularity.

In this advertisement your point will be delivered to large number of subscribers. With high-quality sites, customers get outstanding responses. There are so many variables in online advertising, and it is realistic to know that results cannot always be perfect for everyone but no can guarantee results. But they do their best to be of the best service to you that they possibly can.

From your advertisements, you have the numerous options to choose and ads ranging from cheap classifieds to free classifieds are all available options. To get noticed by customers it is necessary that your advertisements should be on the top. When I first started marketing on the Internet, I had no hint that there were so many special choices and options accessible. I purchased whatsoever marketing I could manage to pay for, from whoever had the best specials.

Six months and I can only figure how much money later; I have well-read a number of essential information on social networking sites. By tracking my ads I have well-read that the most cost efficient form of promotion I have found are cheap classifieds.

The first step to selling anything is to get the buyer’s interest. If you want buyers’ attention, you have a better chance of getting it if you provide an incentive. And the successful marketer understands that one of the best payoffs they can get is being offered a chance for more advertising

10 Tips For Creating A Winning Mobile Strategy

Last week, I had the chance to attend a keynote on mobile – and even more broadly, the notion of connectedness – given by Emily Nagle Green, president and CEO of Yankee Group and author of “Anywhere.”

I found myself furiously taking notes because the themes and questions that Emily shared struck me as absolutely essential for developing a winning mobile strategy.

Below are 10 of the nuggets I took away, along with my take on their implications. I hope you find this as useful as I did.

  1. Mobile increases consumer expectations of connectedness. We tend to evaluate new opportunities with a tipping point mentality, asking ourselves “when is the opportunity big enough to take seriously?” The statistics already tell us that mobile has reached that point, but I loved how Emily reframed the issue away from hard facts and toward a very clear picture of the way behavior has changed as a result of the powerful computers we carry with us in our pockets and purses. Simply put, we expect more, all the time. Instead of thinking about whether mobile is big enough, we should be thinking about what expectations we’d actually be failing to meet without a thoughtful approach to mobile in place.
  2. Connectivity makes things more useful. When thinking about the expectations consumers have, start here. What useful thing could we do if we added connectivity to existing experiences? Take an inventory of all the places your brand exists and insert a connected experience wherever it adds value.
  3. Presence at the point of need. Every product or service exists to serve a consumer need. Think about the time or place that the need manifests itself, and how mobile can play a helpful role. Whether it’s in a store, at an airport, in the home, or anyplace else, it’s a good bet that mobile could enhance the experience. What better place for the brand to exist than at the point where the need for it becomes apparent?
  4. It’s not a screen, it’s a partner. Mobile is certainly a media channel – and one that’s about to get a lot more interesting with the launch of the iAd platform – but thinking of mobile predominantly as another screen to deliver messages misses the real benefit. Instead, think of mobile as an extension of your team.
  5. Create apps that deliver persistent value. Apps are fickle things. They’re hard to find and easily forgotten once downloaded. Creating sticky apps is as difficult as creating a video you hope goes viral. How do you create something that maintains relevance? Read on to number 6…
  6. Think about problem solving. As opposed to messaging, or branding, or anything else that’s primarily driven by your brand’s objectives. If you want to be a go-to app that stays on the first screen, solve a problem for consumers in a way that makes sense for your brand.
  7. The mobile Web isn’t the mini-Internet. Ten years ago, the mantra was: “a website is not an online version of your brochure.” Today, we similarly need to remind ourselves that the mobile Web experience shouldn’t be a pocket-sized version of the desktop. Mobile sites should be created ground-up, prioritizing the information mobile consumers need. A useful (and maybe unflattering) exercise to go through is to access your company’s Web content on a mobile device. If you find a same-but-smaller version of the desktop site, you’ll know you’re not giving consumers what they need.
  8. Use mobile’s embedded tools. To differentiate from the desktop experience and develop something mobile-worthy, think about how you can use the tools that mobile devices increasingly come equipped with, including GPS, accelerometer, camera, video, speakers, etc. For thought starters, read this insanely long but very useful post by mobile guru Tomi Ahonen about the eight unique properties of the mobile device and how they can be put to good use.
  9. Don’t rely on your brand name. Brands shouldn’t assume that their heritage or prior success will lead to more of the same within mobile. Your brand can’t do the work for you; you have to provide an enriching experience…or someone else will. If the brand name was all that mattered, Zagat would be the leading source for mobile restaurant reviews, but that space has now been claimed by players like Yelp.
  10. Become an anywhere brand. Emily closed her presentation with a compelling, aspirational definition of the “anywhere brand.” She described an anywhere brand as one that appears in meaningful ways, on appropriate devices, wherever the consumers needs it.What would it take to transform your brand into an “anywhere brand”.

7 Ways to Use Social Media to Promote Marketing Events

Events, big and small, have historically been an important marketing tool. Internet Week New York, consisting of over 200 smaller events, and Social Media Day, comprising over 700 Meetups across six continents, show the power of social media to significantly transform the impact of an event to achieve a variety of goals. Social media was a critical component of these events in terms of raising awareness, encouraging participation, and enhancing the experience.

7 Reasons to Add Events to Your Marketing Mix

Events can help marketers attain a variety of business goals whether your firm has a permanent physical presence or not. Here are seven reasons to create and/or participate in events:

  1. Create revenue opportunities by offering either additional or related product or by charging admission.
  2. Expand reach to new prospects who either hear about and/or attend your events.
  3. Build your brand cost-effectively, either directly as the creator of the event or as a sponsor, advertiser, exhibitor, or presenter.
  4. Enhance relationships with existing customers.
  5. Provide education and/or training related to your offering.
  6. Gather consumer input, especially for testing new business ideas and products.
  7. Use as an internal tool set to enhance employee team building offsites, annual meetings, or fun outings.

7 Types of Events

From a marketing perspective, consider the type of event and match it with the appropriate social media to achieve your company’s goals. Here are seven options from which to choose.

  1. Festivals are often consumer-oriented and include established, recurring events, such as those around holidays like Independence Day or annual events like Fashion Week. The social media version is a Twitter festival organized for social good with offline events. For example, Twestival Global 2010 consisted of 175 offline events focused on education. Company participation can vary from sponsorship to special-related activities.
  2. Conferences, including their less structured social media cousins, unconferences, and the online version, virtual conferences. These can be important revenue-generators for businesses. Alternatively, companies can be sponsors, exhibitors, or presenters. For example, ThoughtLead created The Influencer Project. Billed as the world’s shortest conference ever, it presented 60 social media experts in one hour. The event was promoted and shared using #Influencer.
  3. Meetings and their social media variant, Meetups, can be organized around business topics such as WordPress or consumer interests such as knitting. For example, SEMPO NY has a Meetup group with over 1,100 members.
  4. Classes may be a fee-based line extension to provide skills to enable users to more effectively use your product or a means to encourage additional sales. Online video demonstrations also fall into this category. One great example is WordPress.tv.
  5. Webinars – while most frequently used to reach a business audience in order to raise awareness or engage prospects, Webinars can be adapted to help consumers with complex topics like finance.
  6. Twitter chats – promoted on Twitter and blogs, these are discussions that occur on Twitter where participants contribute to the conversation using tweets. They are identified through the use of a hashtag. (For a list of Twitter chats, check out this.) One popular example is #blogchat, which occurs Sunday nights.
  7. Tweetups – formally or informally organized real-life meetings promoted via Twitter. Location-based services like Foursquare also enable impromptu gatherings at a specific location. For example, Boston and Chicago have regularly planned events.

7 Ways to Use Social Media to Promote Your Events

Social media expands the reach of your event while generating content that can be used to promote your events.

  1. Organize events. Use of products like Meetup.com and Eventbrite facilitate keeping on top of meeting details.
  2. Provide venues for the online participation in events using Twitter and Facebook, for example.
  3. Promote events with a variety of media formats such as blogs, Facebook, and Twitter to encourage participation. Enhance the reach of your event by making content about it socially shareable. To this end, create a unique event hashtag like #smday to aid findability across social media platforms.
  4. Enhance live events by providing concurrent commentary and capturing salient ideas using Twitter, live blogging, and live streaming. For example, moderators at live panels can incorporate comments and questions sourced from Twitter.
  5. Extend audience for live events via online participation both in real time and on-demand. For example, the contents of Facebook’s F8 conference are available on its site.
  6. Enable attendee interaction through Twitter, blog posts and comments, blogs, video, photographs, and Facebook. For example, check out the highly popular NY Tech Meetup’s page.
  7. Record and post record of events via Facebook, blogs, video, and photo sharing. For example, here’s the record of Social Media Day on Flickr.

7 Metrics to Track Event Success

As with any marketing program, it’s critical to measure your results to determine their effectiveness. Among the salient measures to track are:

  1. Participants. Monitor separately how many people attended your event live and online.
  2. Shares of event-related content. Users that share feel strongly enough to spread word of your event to their contacts. Remember that sharing can happen across a wide range of platforms.
  3. User-generated content created in a variety of formats including tweets, comments, check-ins on location-based services, blog posts, photographs, and video. In addition to tracking the number of comments and uploads, assess the sentiment of the contributions to determine how they reflect on your company and brand.
  4. House file. As a result of this event, how many new prospects registered to receive your e-mails, catalogs, tweets, RSS feeds, or other forms of content?
  5. Media attention. Did the event garner additional media attention? How large was the audience for this “free reach” and what were its demographics?
  6. Revenues. Did you generate additional sales of product via new streams or any other related revenues such as training or conference fees?
  7. Expenses. What was the cost in terms of the event and related marketing? Was additional headcount needed to support the event?

In addition, don’t forget to track less quantifiable variables. For example, did the event improve employee moral or brand recognition?

While events in themselves don’t constitute a total marketing strategy, they can be an important component of the mix, since they provide benefits for both marketers and consumers. By using social media to enhance your events, you can extend your reach while providing additional means to connect with your firm.

What is the Social Marketing Revolution?

Social marketing is revolutionary phenomena in online marketing. Social marketing sites like Twitter, FaceBook are used to generate more and more revenue. These social networking sites are the hot places for business promotion. Twitter uses for many purposes like information and media sharing, and for business purposes. Twitter is a social tool that helps connect businesses more meaningfully with the right prospect. These sites are used by business organization as well their customer. Different people use it for different reasons, business organization uses it to connect with their customers, for sharing information, for gathering real time market information or market intelligence and undoubtedly to build relationship with their business environment may be it is internal business environment or external business environment, on the other side twitter is used by customers as well, they use twitter to tell their experience with your product, offer and for gathering more information about the product.

Twitter followers usually have a specific reason for following you. If your twitter account is for professional networking, they most likely want to hear your thoughts on relevant industry topics. Twitter thrives on the relationship between you and your followers, so almost all internet marketers use it to advertise their product. We all know social networking is about building relations. The only way to build strong relation is to follow those who follow you. There is automation software available which will help to grow twitter followers. Twitter is the cheapest way to market your online business. Twitter is a simple tool that helps connect businesses more significantly. Online businesses earn more and more profit with the increase of twitter followers, so online marketer always try to increase twitter follower. Online marketer always searches for a solution which will provide them right prospect without using any time consuming process like searching the client and then interacting with them. Many web sites provide the facility to buy twitter follower, this type of packages are available in different variants in terms of number of followers say they will provide you package of 1000 , 2000 and 5000 followers, which an online marketer can buy easily. But it’s not a guarantee that these are your prospects, if not than your money is not utilized and again you have to search for the prospect. For approaching correct prospect online marketer always try to buy targeted twitter follower.

These websites help attract thousands of followers that you can keep informed about your product or service you just have to give an offer to move them into your network. Both the above ways are useful in case of online marketing. For promoting their product online marketer always searches for a place where they can promote their product to a large number of audience so they can target their prospect easily and at affordable prices.

Viral Marketing – A Great Way To Spread The Word

Before we explain how you can use viral marketing strategies to promote your online business and get a buzz spreading through the worldwide web, here’s a definition from Wikipedia,

“Viral marketing and viral advertising refer to marketing techniques that use preexisting social networks to produce increases in brand awareness, through self-replicating viral processes, analogous to the spread of pathological and computer viruses. It can be word-of-mouth delivered or enhanced by the network effects of the Internet. Viral marketing is a marketing phenomenon that facilitates and encourages people to pass along a marketing message voluntarily. Viral promotions may take the form of video clips, interactive Flash games, advergames, images, or even text messages.”

If you’ve ever used hotmail, yahoo or G-mail account, you’ve participated in a viral marketing campaign every time you sent an email to someone – because the company inserted a small (and usually discreet advertisement) at the bottom of all of your outgoing email messages – inviting the people you were communicating with to receive their own free email account.

So, how can you put a viral marketing campaign together for your own online business to get the same advertising buzz like these major companies for free?

You don’t have to look very far to find the answer these days. Viral marketing has taken off with a bang with the introduction of web2.0 web sites like Youtube, Facebook, Myspace and twitter – to mention a few. Bookmarking and social networking sites have made it easier for you to engage your friends in spreading any message you want to promote.

According to a recent survey done by Forrester Research, people are almost 65% more likely to trust a review posted by a peer – or even a complete stranger – than they are to trust the marketing or sales information put out by the company.

Companies like Amazon and I-Tunes have used these tactics to build their brands to mega corporations, and now all the celebrities and broadcasters are using Twitter and Facebook to spread their messages and expand their brands.

Why is this the case? Because as consumers we tend to think that the average “Joe Blow” has less of a personal agenda when posting his review about the latest “Dixie Chicks” album and so we give it more weight.

And, by the way, this is a normal reaction – it’s one that’s kind of hard-wired into all of us. People have always shared the things they like – or hate – with their friends and family members. Back in the 50’s and 60’s, our grandparents used to talk to their neighbors over the “back fence,” call each other on the phone or tell their friends during lunch. The difference is, these days we use the Internet and cell phones.

What’s interesting though, is that with the popularity of the Internet, our trust – and believe in “social proof” – has become even stronger.

By creating your own viral marketing campaign, you’ll be doing more than getting the word out about your new product or service, you’ll be gathering social proof – and that will help your sales to go through the roof.

If you don’t have your own product or service as yet, you can start promoting affiliate products. Affiliate products already have a brand name presence and an established market.

So, how do you set up your own viral marketing campaign? The first thing to do is to get back to the basics.

Then make sure that you’re sending out the right message – an in the right way. If you’re marketing a product to teens, you’ll want to make sure that it’s something they want – and you’ll have to reach them where they’re hanging out. That might be on MySpace, twitter or even Friendster.

What’s the right message? Maybe it’s a special report. But it could just as easily be a video. Or an audio mp3 file. Match your message to your audience. And finally, make sure that you’re getting your message out at the right time – when your audience is ready to buy it.

Make your viral marketing campaign stand out from the crowd – because that’s how it’s going to get passed around and become viral. By understanding the basics – who your audience is, what they want, how they want to get it and when they want it – all you have to do next is to create something that your audience loves – or hates – or finds interesting enough – to pass around to their friends. And because your product comes with an implied endorsement – social proof – those people will pass it around to other people – and the buzz goes on…and on…and on…and you’ll start hearing the “ka-ching!” of your cash register going off a lot more often.

Writen by: James Max

4 Ways Viral Marketing Can Drive Traffic To Your Website

Viral marketing comes with an array of possibilities and ways to achieve your overall goals. As with anything all you need is preplanning and the right setup to create success for years to come. Viral marketing is a very powerful asset every web site owner should pursue.

However, don’t get over-zealous. One issue you must avoid at all costs is spamming. Spamming otherwise known as “spam mail” is still used widely, but with government establishing more restrictions and fines you don’t want this to be a source for income. The professional image of your site will also suffer greatly if you send mail blatantly.

To create Spam mail you typically need a database that contains a huge list of email addresses where you can deliver your message with one click. Unfortunately, Spam mail takes us back to the days of broadcast faxes. It irritates the recipient and kills the validity of your company, which in turn kills the factors that would motivate someone to refer your site.

However there is good news, you can get your message out in a way that motivates people to check it out and keep coming back for more. Let’s look a little further at the next four avenues you should consider.

  • Personalize - Create your website with personal appeal. In other words, design it where customers can go in to setup their own personal profile. This will help to give your customers a feeling of comfort. Let’s face, it people instinctively think about themselves and their own needs above others. So give them the ability to use your site in a way that they feel safe secure, and cared for.
  • E-mail - Email is very important, because it is going to be one of the most affordable ways to keep in touch with your customers. The proper way to handle email permission is to first let your customer know that you will not transmit their email to third party companies. Then you will want to attach the need for their email to the benefits they can receive. For example: Coupons or discounts that are only available to members that receive email notifications.
    With each e-mail, you send, the viral marketing effect takes place. If the receiver feels good about the information they received, they will pass it along which is exactly what you want to accomplish. Another good viral marketing method to use with e-mails is to offer another piece of viral marketing material in your e-mail. Incorporate things like a free report, free e-book, or a free newsletter. Anything free will attract attention and help to build your prospect list through viral marketing.
  • Scheduler - Building a way of reminding people of certain events or sales on your website will go along way in customer retention as well as keeping your site on their minds. Basically, the more you stay in front of your customers the more they will be talking to others about your site. Offering simple services like this can keep your name in front of potential customers on a regular basis as well a generate the viral marketing results you want.
  • Web Forums - Once you have obtained your customers email address you will want to setup a link that will allow them to discuss products or services that you offer with other customers. This helps in building bonds, but more importantly people typically like to include their friends in the arena. Look at gambling sites; the majority of business that they receive is via referrals. Once you’re on the site the majority of them have rooms that you can go to and talk and play with others from around the world.

By properly building a web forum community, you will create a buzz and with the right preparations will cause your business to grow significantly.

Social Marketing is Revolutionary

Social marketing is revolutionary phenomena in online marketing. Social marketing sites like Twitter, FaceBook are used to generate more and more revenue. These social networking sites are the hot places for business promotion. Twitter uses for many purposes like information and media sharing, and for business purposes. Twitter is a social tool that helps connect businesses more meaningfully with the right prospect. These sites are used by business organization as well their customer. Different people use it for different reasons, business organization uses it to connect with their customers, for sharing information, for gathering real time market information or market intelligence and undoubtedly to build relationship with their business environment may be it is internal business environment or external business environment, on the other side twitter is used by customers as well, they use twitter to tell their experience with your product, offer and for gathering more information about the product.

Twitter followers usually have a specific reason for following you. If your twitter account is for professional networking, they most likely want to hear your thoughts on relevant industry topics. Twitter thrives on the relationship between you and your followers, so almost all internet marketers use it to advertise their product. We all know social networking is about building relations. The only way to build strong relation is to follow those who follow you. There is automation software available which will help to grow twitter followers. Twitter is the cheapest way to market your online business. Twitter is a simple tool that helps connect businesses more significantly. Online businesses earn more and more profit with the increase of twitter followers, so online marketer always try to increase twitter follower. Online marketer always searches for a solution which will provide them right prospect without using any time consuming process like searching the client and then interacting with them. Many web sites provide the facility to buy twitter follower, this type of packages are available in different variants in terms of number of followers say they will provide you package of 1000 , 2000 and 5000 followers, which an online marketer can buy easily. But it’s not a guarantee that these are your prospects, if not than your money is not utilized and again you have to search for the prospect. For approaching correct prospect online marketer always try to buy targeted twitter follower.

These websites help attract thousands of followers that you can keep informed about your product or service you just have to give an offer to move them into your network. Both the above ways are useful in case of online marketing. For promoting their product online marketer always searches for a place where they can promote their product to a large number of audience so they can target their prospect easily and at affordable prices.

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