Inbound marketing is the marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers when they research online for products and services your business also has to offer.
With inbound marketing businesses earn their way to the customer, by publishing helpful information on a blog, in social media and forums.
Inbound marketing includes Blogging, Social Media, Lead Conversion, Lead Nurturing and Closed-Loop Analysis.
Most business has not the resources and the knowledge to execute a powerful and result driven inbound marketing strategy.
They have not good writers on their staff to produce buyer persona oriented remarkable content like blog articles, whitepapers, how-to’s and eBooks on a regular basis.
Also they do not have in-house SEO experts to help them to choose the most relevant keywords to better get found in the search engines.
Moreover the knowledge about social media communication and an effective community management is not in place as well.
But the most important fact is the time to get all the required things done.
Studies show that business who try to do inbound marketing without professional help fail within three months.
What did they win when the do not hire a professional inbound marketing agency? Simply nothing! They waste time resources and money for no revenue results.
If you want to profit from inbound marketing than you should think about to hire professionals who can do the job.
What do you get by executing a professional inbound marketing strategy?
A. S ave up to 62% of your marketing budget.
B. Stand out of your competition.
C. Generate a massive amount of leads.
D. Get up to 55% higher lead conversion rates.
E. Increase your customers and sales.
How much does it cost to hire a professional inbound marketing agency?
This is a god question. The same one like how much is a car? What kind of car do you want? Do you want an old car or a brand new Ferrari?
Inbound marketing hourly rates start with $100 per hour, depends what to do.
You can calculate to spend between $2,000/m – $3,000/m for about minimum of six months, depending on the services delivered. Because any serious inbound marketing agency will need this time frame to set your marketing on the right track to help you to reach your revenue goals.
On the end of the day is inbound marketing the most efficient and the most cost effective marketing you can get for your buck.
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Free report: Get found and get leads the smart way.
Content Marketing has become a significant part of online marketing strategy. Content Marketing has proven to be the best and most cost effective way to drive traffic to a company website and convert this traffic to leads and customers.
The most popular ways of Content Marketing are blogging, social media and video. Studies show that 57% of companies which operate a corporate blog get customers through their blogging effort!
4 Reasons to start a corporate blog:
1. Blogging companies get up to 55% more Traffic
2. Blogging companies get up to 97% more Inbound Links
3. Blogging companies get up to 434% more indexed pages in search engines
4. Blogging companies get up to 25x times more business leads
Social Media Marketing has become a powerful tool to spread remarkable content to reach a wide audience.
For companies who engage in social media and show presence in these channels can open wide opportunities to get in touch with their audience. This leads to an increase of credibility and unfiltered feedback of the target audience and can lead to an improvement of products and services.
New studies show that up to 65 percent of today’s consumers expect a brand to listen and to respond on questions, comments and complaints in social media. Studies also show that companies which use social media actively to communicate with their audience are more successful than companies who do not.
7 Reasons to start your social media marketing:
1. Increase customer perception in the marketplace
2. Build long term relationship with customers and partners
3. Can respond to customers in real-time
4. Taylor products and marketing campaigns based on customer preferences
5. React and resolve on negative buzz in real-time
6. Decrease costs of marketing
7. Improved time to market for products and services
Most people think they need to be Steven Spielberg to make a video to put it online to get a positive impact for their business. But this is not true.
You do not need fancy equipment. The only thing you need is a video camera and for the beginning it can be the one from your smart phone.
The most successful video examples come from ordinary people who could not even be considered amateurs. To become successful with your video marketing, with video content, there is only one secret: Just go and do it, do as many video as you can. Publish it and let your audience judge.
6 Reasons to start your video marketing:
1. 200% to 300% more monthly unique visitors
2. 100% longer average time-on-site per visitor
3. 3-minute average time spent on pages with videos
4. 157% increase in search engine traffic
5. 100% increase in unique visitors
6. 63% increase in page views
Infographic: Content Marketing
—What do you think about content marketing? Are you doing one or all three or other content marketing strategies?
The use of mobile devices is increasingly growing. Tablets and smart phones have become state of the art technology around the globe. People are consuming video, audio, social media, games, news, books and periodicals on the run.
By the growing use and demand of mobile apps people become more dependent of them. Popular services like Facebook, Yelp, Foursquare, Groupon and other are using apps to stay in touch with their audience.
As their audience is actively using their apps when they are on the road the chance decrease that they separately open their browser to research on Google for products or serivces. They will use their location based services and the recently activated apps to discover, products, services, locations, deals and things they are interested in.
People are about three hours online on their mobile devices compared with one hour from their pc.
The more people research this way, the more the search engine research will decrease.
This trend is creating a growing demand for businesses to be visible in these services and their apps as well. Also to think about to produce own mobile apps to be and to stay connected to their audience.
What can a business do to participate from I call it “Mobile SEO”?
1st Register with all important location based services like Yelp, Foursquare, Neer, Loopt and SCVNGR. Engage here with your audience, build and customize these digital outposts.
2nd Be active in social media sites like Facebook, Linked, Twitter and others important to your audience.
3rd Jump start your mobile marketing the smart way. Collect the mobile phone numbers from your customers. Establish a database where you store all important information about them to later have the ability to custom tailor personalized messages to reach them the right and human way. Look out for a two SMS marketing software which enables you to do and to control your messages.
4th Get even smarter and develop your own mobile app for your audience. To get ideas look through the industries and get inspired how others have done it.
A recent IBM study shows that 82% of CMOs worldwide are planning increase their technology investment in social media within the next three to five years.
These are interesting data. As social media evolves and more businesses jumping o this bandwagon it looks for me that three to five years are not an appropriate time frame to step into conversation with existing and future customers.
The more companies engage in social media two way communications the thinner the air becomes for those who start later. Those who come late will experience a massive uphill battle to gain positions which their competitors already have secured.
Companies which like to position their business to gain a competitive advantage need to act now, and not to wait three to five years.
Moreover companies who decide to take action within the next five years will be under risk to vanish from the customer radar and sink.
As social media is evolving at a very quick pace businesses also need to evolve to stay on track.
Content creation is the key to get found on the web. Your audience is researching o the web fist. If your audience can’t find you when they research for products or services which you also have to offer than you will lose potential business.
The three big search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are indexing content form social media. So if you are in social media your chances increase to get found on the web.
What can you do to position your business today?
If you want to do business in the next five years and beyond you should take the opportunity to jump into social media as a valuable communication channel.
A. Register the most important social media networks for your brand as they are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Flickr, Slideshare and any other sites or forums where your target audience is around.
B. Complete and customize your profiles there to have a social media branding to get recognized by your audience.
C. Listen to the social media conversation and contribute if you feel you have something valuable and helpful to say.
D. Start a corporate blog where you write about topics which your audience is interested in. Share your articles in your social media channels and ask your audience about their opinion.
E. Train you staff to become your brand ambassadors on the web and I social media and give them the freedom to decide how to communicate by establishing clear social media policy.
F. Measure your doings and check out what is working and what is not working. The things which work for your business you should intensify and the thing which do not work the way you have expected you should cut back.
G. Set realistic goals! Be realistic with your social media engagement. Rome wasn’t built in a day as well. Be patient as any strategy needs time to breathe to show up results and social media marketing a blogging are no exceptions.
Infographic: The ROI of Social Media
–How about you? What are your experiences with sociel media? I am looking forward to your comment below.
Google Panda update favors websites with great and interesting content. Moreover it favors site content which people like and find it share worthy!
In the old days there have been a lot of people known as SEO experts which try to tweak websites to trick out search engines to get a better search ranking.
But these times are over. To only use tricks and fancy software does not bring you in front of your target audience. Your buyer personas will not find you with this kind of old school methods anymore.
Search engines are trying to get the best results for their users. So they are sorting out crappy and worthless sites. Search engines have become very fine tuned to differ good from bad content. And to insert some keywords here and there is not enough anymore.
Inbound marketing which uses Content Creation strategies like Blogging to publish interesting, valuable and share worthy content are on their way to dominate internet marketing and substitute the old SEO tricks.
Content is king! But only the right content for the right buyer persona will get found and attract the right future customer! This means, businesses have to take the effort to learn about their target audience a lot more than before.
To produce and to publish buyer persona oriented and share worthy content businesses need to listen to their audience and authentically show that they understand and care about them.
Businesses need to participate in conversation and in social media to gain the trust and the opportunity to market their content (blog articles, eBooks, video, photos, documents, presentations, etc.) to their target audience.
Only when companies earn the right and the respect of their buyer personas, then those buyer personas will take notice and share their content to their friends and followers on the web.
This makes the content flow through the digital world of the internet and social media and also offers the opportunity to get indexed by search engines and given out as search results when future buyers are researching there.
The more buyer persona oriented, valuable, interesting and share worthy content a company is publishing on the web, the better are the chances that this content gets shared, get s indexed from search engines and get found from people who research for these kind of products and services.
— Your goal should be to become an authority of your industry, a trusted and valuable source to look for important and helpful information. —
This will increase your brand value and your reach. And in the same time the people who listen when you speak – publish content. This makes it easier to build relationships and to get long lasting business ties.
Companies who publish remarkable content increase their chances to get new business by up to 60%. Studies show that companies who blog can relate about 50% of their new business to their blogging activities.
To produce valuable and share worthy content is not a difficult thing. Each and every business has a lot of sources inside to produce such content. Sources like email requests from customers and the answers which they got make great blog articles.
- To showcase products how they work and the potential through vide is another great way to produce remarkable content.
- To write how to and publish them will help your future and existing customers.
- Every time a company achieves a milestone, big or small, this is a reason to write and publish a press release.
The possibilities are endless. Just use your creativity to produce great content. Look through other industries how they do and market content and use them as an inspiration.
How about you? How do you utilize content creation to gain a competitive advantage?
When Google+ was launched some people had the opinion that it will destroy Facebook in a short time period. Within the first weeks which have been running under invitation only to get an Google+ account, Google+ as been able to register more than ten million users.
Some observer had the opinion that a big exodus from Facebook to G+ will happen and maybe Facebook had the same in mind when they begun to close loopholes to expert contacts to Google+.
But this has not happen. Sure users which use Facebook are also on G+ now but no exodus took place.
The last estimations about the number of G+ users go in a range of 40 million and up. With its 750 million and daily growing base of global users Facebook does not need to be scared of G+ yet.
Imagine you went several years back and had the chance to register with Facebook when they had about 40 million users. Can you imagine how big your possible network could grow and how far would be your brands range globally?
This is your chance now to turn the wheel of time several years back and get into the game. Probably this will be your last chance to become part of massively growing social network for the next ten years. Position your business now, before you competitor does!
G+ actually offer personal profiles only but is also experimenting with company profiles similar as Facebook Pages.
The best thing what you can do as a business person or marketer is to register a personal profile with G+ which is now open for everybody and help your employees and coworkers to do the same.
G+ is ruled by the social networking rules too!
Build relationships and communicate in a professional and beneficial way to your Circles! This will help you to increase the number of connection and when the day has come that you can register your business page on G+ than you hopefully have a large and influential audience with which you maintain good relationships. This could jumpstart your G+ Business Page in a very powerful way.
To take action now can make huge a difference for your business. As G+ and social media are no secrets anymore, simply any business is tried to get a share of the cake.
Businesses that wait will be left behind and have to fight an uphill battle reach a reasonable position, but will never overtaking those who came first. That’s for sure!
Here are some simple tips for you to take advantage of G+ NOW!
1. Go to Google and register a G+.
2. Complete your profile and upload a personal picture.
3. Research who of your business partners and other connections is actually on G+ and invite them.
4. Place the G+ widget on your website and blog so your visitors can use this as an opportunity to connect with from there.
5. Look daily through your STREAM and see if you can contribute to your Circles news or if there are interesting information which you could share.
6. When some of your Circles comment your info than this are you weak up call to start the conversation. Ask some open question.
7. If you operate your own corporate or personal blog you could share your latest post in your STREAM.
And as you are waiting for the G+ Business Page to come you have the opportunity to get into G+, build your circles, expand your reach and set you and your business in advanced position. And this all with no pressure or any deadlines!
–How about you, how do use G+ actually? I am looking forward to your comment.
Most people who are interested to market their business on the web and especially in social media become overwhelmed of the necessary tasks which need to be done to achieve any serious results.
They feel that they need to handle an avalanche of information and requirements to get the necessary steps done.
And I fully agree with this. Inbound marketing which also includes, content creation as blogging and marketing this content through social media channels is a very time consuming business!
As any other marketing activity you cannot expect to do all the necessary tasks at once. You also need a strategic plan where you set timeframes to do your necessary inbound marketing tasks and which you can stick to. Discipline is a key factor!
Above in the title I ask how to eat an elephant? This is very simple, bit by bit!
As any other work you need to split your inbound marketing in daily tasks. You have five working days you can use. You need to determine how much time you can invest daily and from this point you can start.
Inbound marketing includes Blogging, Social Media, Lead Conversion, Lead Nurturing and Closed-Loop Analysis.
Content creation – blogging
As blogging is a key factor for lead generation we suggest to blog no matter which kind of other content you have or want to publish!
Which kind of content is the best fit for your target audience, your buyer personas?
Can you reach your audience with video, eBooks, reports, whitepapers, and pictures, blog commenting or any other piece of content?
Find out which kind of content has the best opportunities in your industry, and this does not mean it must be the same old way like your competitors do it! Be creative. When you competitor does eBook, than you can do video! When they do video than you can do eBooks! To get ideas and inspiration just look through other industries how and what kind of other content thy produce.
Social Media / Forums
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and industry related forums are great place to get seen from your future clients. These places are also great to improve your of page SEO. When you are active there, means when you get into the conversation and share your content there than you increase your chances to found in the search engines!
Lead Generation / Conversion
Content creation and social media marketing are great tools to drive interested visitors to SEO optimized landing pages (lead capture pages) to get them into you database to follow up and to make them paying customers through the time.
Lead Nurturing
As you generate leads you should stay in touch with them. But avoid sales pitches. Instead of do the same which whom you have generated your leads. Inform them with interesting and share worthy content, solve problems, answer questions and simply stay in touch with them, stay visible!
Closed-Loop Analysis
Analyze your doings to determine where your lead and revenue coming from measure refine and improve your content creation, social media marketing, lead nurturing and analysis.
Repeat this process above!
Example: The daily inbound marketing tasks!
Monday
Facebook 15 minutes
Twitter 15 minutes
LinkedIn 15 minutes
Forums 15 minutes
Check email / Leads 30 minutes
Blog commenting 30 minutes
Draft blog article 30 minutes
Tuesday
Facebook 15 minutes
Twitter 15 minutes
LinkedIn 15 minutes
Forums 15 minutes
Check email / Leads 30 minutes
Blog commenting 30 minutes
Draft blog article 30 minutes
Publish blog article 30 minutes
Market blog article in social media
Wednesday
Facebook 15 minutes
Twitter 15 minutes
LinkedIn 15 minutes
Forums 15 minutes
Check email / Leads 30 minutes
Blog commenting 30 minutes
Draft blog article 30 minutes
Thursday
Facebook 15 minutes
Twitter 15 minutes
LinkedIn 15 minutes
Forums 15 minutes
Check email / Leads 30 minutes
Blog commenting 30 minutes
Draft blog article 30 minutes
Publish blog article 30 minutes
Market blog article in social media
Friday
Facebook 15 minutes
Twitter 15 minutes
LinkedIn 15 minutes
Forums 15 minutes
Check email / Leads 30 minutes
Blog commenting 30 minutes
Draft blog article 30 minutes
Check analytics 15 minutes
Refine tasks 30 minutes
———
To effectively profit from your web marketing efforts you should plan to invest about 2.5 hrs. daily and more, this depends on your business goals.
You also can split this work to different persons in your company.
– What do you think and how get you the daily web marketing tasks done?
Facebook is accessible in 70 languages and has about 750 million users worldwide and there is actually 1,5+ million active business pages online.
There is no doubt if you want to reach your target audience the chances are good that they are on Facebook.
Facebook has become a true business machine which has the power to lift up business in the same speed like its progress. Groupon and other popular brands have experienced this effect in a very successful way. Not to mention the thousands of small businesses who have embraced social media networks like Facebook.
With its massive global reach Facebook has become some kind of a state by its own. And with its technical possibilities like Pages and apps it offers a large toolset for businesses to get seen on this powerful globally accessible network.
But what’s in for your business you will ask now?
My question: Are you active on Facebook, because if not, than nothing. But if you are seriously active in Facebook than this question should have been answered in a positive way yet.
Businesses which want to be active in Facebook but don’t know how to make it happen have two options:
1.) They can do the steps by them self, because there is a truck load of free information on how to establish a business outpost on Facebook. The only thing a business needs to get started is to do the first step and to register a personal account on Facebook. From there you can do one step behind another. From completing your Facebook profile to the registration of a business page.
2.) Or you could shorten your learning curve and save time and money through trial and error by hire a professional agency to help you with your social media marketing like Facebook.
Facebook is a great place to get seen from recent and future customers. Moreover you can attract new customers targeted through the help of Facebook and direct them to your business and your products.
Facebook can become your automated 24/7 business leads machine if you know how to handle it.
How mentioned above there are more than 3.5 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, videos, etc.) shared each week on Facebook.
You could be one of those smart marketers who are doing content marketing on Facebook to generate new business leads.
Facebook offers you to connect your corporate blog with your personal profile and your business page. So every time you publish a blog post it is also showing up on your personal profile and your business page.
Also you can connect your Twitter with Facebook. Every time you tweet something it also shows up on Facebook.
These above are great ways to spread your content to reach your target audience.
Facebook pages offer you the opportunity to establish custom tabs with your content which you can also optimize for SEO.
By the way when you use Facebook, take care that all what you write there is SEO optimized and tagged the right way. This makes it easier for search engines to find your content and to index it.
Facebook pictures are also in the game of content marketing. Pictures are content as well. Upload pictures from your products and events and describe and tag them right.
Facebook video: A great way to show videos from events, product description and testimonials of satisfied customers.
Avoid speaking about you self. Publish interesting and share worthy content. Publish content with your audience in mind. Allways have your target audience in focus!
Again! Take care that all what you write there is described correctly, SEO optimized and tagged the right way. This makes it easier for search engines to find your content and to index it. Social media marketing is the new SEO.
Marketing takeawy tipp: To publish and market your content on facebook will increase your brand recognition and your credibilty. Produce share worthy and helpful content with your audience in mind.
More interesting is that 20 percent of searches on Google each day have NEVER been searched for before. So every day 20 percent of chances are completely new with new search terms which include products and services.
People hear from their friends’ info about products and services and then they go to their favorite search engines and try to find more information on.
What does this mean for your business? More and more people research online on search engines before they buy products and services. The chances are good that an interesting amount of your target audience is also looking for products and services on the web which you also have to offer.
The chances are also good that those people do not know your business and what you have to offer.
And here is your big opportunity to profit from this fact.
Here are some tips how you can get more seen on the web:
To get found online you need to be active and visible there where your audience is. The best and proven way to get seen on the web is content marketing. Content marketing is very simple and easy to do.
You should publish interesting and share worthy content on the web and market it in social media.
Content is everything you have from your business which can be published online. For example photos, articles, videos published on Flickr, forums, social networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, document and video sharing platforms like Slideshare and YouTube.
But it is not enough to publish the content. To tag it right with long tail keywords and include a keyword rich description can also help to get it found on the search engines.
By publishing content through a corporate blog every blog article you publish becomes an outpost of your business online.
Market your blog articles in social media. Social media content is indexed by major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing and your social media activities increase your chances to get found on search results of search engines from people who are looking for products and services you also have to offer. Social media marketing has become the new SEO!
Companies who blog generate more traffic and more business leads.
Find further spaces to publish other kind of content and repeat this. Make content marketing to an important part of your marketing strategy.
The more outposts you establish online the more chances you have to get found from future clients.
Published content increases the brand recognition of a business and can earn a trust and credibility with its target audience. The more interesting content a business publishes on the web the higher are the chances that people will find it also interesting and share worthy and share it with their friends and their social network. This spreads your brand to undefined reach and attracts attention from people which did not know you before.
This effect multiplies! The more content, the more outpost, the more chances to get shared and to get seen from new people the more potential clients you will attract to your business!
Companies which do the content marketing strategy seriously get the most traffic through their outposts on the web. The content there is indexed by search engines and appears in search results when the used keywords are typed into search engines!
Smart companies direct this “outpost traffic” to optimized landing pages to generate business leads, to get new customers and increase revenue!
Marketing takeaway tip: Start to publish interesting and share worthy content on the web and market it on social media. The more content you publish, the more your chances will increase to get found from future customer.
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Hiscox surveyed US small business leaders and found out that 47% do not use social media for business. Furthermore 24% of the surveyed stated they do it when they have the time and about 14% indicated they don’t know enough about it.
Puuuuh, I don’t know what you think when you read such information but I ask myself: “What do the 24% mean when they say they do it when they have the time and the 14% which indicated they don’t know enough about it?
Does this mean they step into customer conversation when they have the time and the other seem even not to know how to communicate with their audience?
Maybe they do communication through telepathy or any other exciting media. I am just kidding, let’s get serious now.
Social media websites are communication channels. These communication channels are the places where your target audience is around, where they communicate, ask their network friends for product and services opinion and where major brands and thousands of small business worldwide are ready and prepared to step into the conversation with their audience.
Those businesses are aware they need to be active in social media, to get seen, to gain trust, credibility and to attract there audience to their products and services by publishing share worthy and remarkable content on the web and in social media.
Every business which treats social media as a serious communication channel to attract new customers and to stay in touch with their existing customers and their followers (potential future customers) is a step ahead of those 47% which not using social media for business.
Moreover, every business which treats social media marketing with a strategy and obligation instead of doing it when they have the time will profit from it.
Some facts about social media for business:
- Customer behavior has changed so your marketing must change!
- Internet and social media has changed the marketing push to a real time communication.
- 78% of internet users do research online before they buy!
- They spent 3x more time on blogs and social media than on email or other publications.
- 67% of the b2c and 41% of the b2b companies report to have acquired new customers through Facebook.
- 42% of the companies report to have acquired new customers through Twitter.
Social media makes your business found when your audience is looking! As social media is indexed through search engines, the chances are good that your business appears in search results of the big search engines when potential customers are researching on the web!
What does this mean for your business when you are active in social media actually? It’s simple you are a big step ahead of those 47% which are not.
You should improve your social media tasks and fine tune them step by step to improve your results.
Listen to your audience; this will help you to improve your business and products. When you listen carefully your audience will tell you what they want to buy from you. This gives you the opportunity to build custom tailored products and services to increase your customer base and revenue this way.
Marketing Tip: Keep an eye on your competition and look what they are doing, but do not try to copy them. Instead of look through other industries to get ideas and to adopt their creativity with social media marketing to your business! Don’t try to do your social media marketing perfect. It will never be perfect! Just do it as soon as you can and get the word out to your target audience and then refine it step by step.
More and more advertising money is shifting to social networks. Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter offer various opportunities to advertise a company targeted to their audience.
Twitter announced to start displaying promoted tweets in user streams. Twitter is also planning to release a self-service platform later this year. Facebook and LinkedIn already have self-service platforms where business can showcase their brand message, products and services.
Pros of paid advertising
Paid advertising allows you to place your ad there where your community is so that you reach this community instantly. You save time because you do not need to develop relationships and do interaction with people. But this will not instantly led your business to a loyal customer base.
Pros:
Instantly visible: You are instantly visible as long as you want to be and with the keywords you have chosen.
Keywords control: you have your keywords under control and choose which to use and which not.
Flexible budget: You can start paid as with any budget.
Cheap: As it customizable you can choose how much and how long you want to spend.
Measurable results: You can track your spending and your results. Lead to customer quote, etc. and have a good picture of your returns.
Wide reach: you can instantly reach a wide user base of millions who are already looking for products and services you also have to offer.
Quick: You can set up a paid ads campaign very quick.
Target your location: When you are a local business it makes more sense to target your local area. With paid ads you are in full control that should see your advertisement.
Time frame: You can set the start and the end of any campaign. You are not obligated on long term agreements.
Mobile: As more people are on their favorite social networks though their mobile devices, you can also reach them through paid ads.
Cons of paid advertising
As you have no relationship with your audience in these communities where you place your ads, it can become difficult to attract them to your business even if your ads are fancy. Only a good relationship to your target audience leads you to a loyal customer base in the long term.
Cons:
You can’t buy authority: Even ifyou have a high ad budget; you do not have the relationship and authority to your audience.
You can’t buy credibility: Through paid ads you get seen but when they visit your website. What will they find? Is there anything what can increase trust and credibility?
Paid traffic costs money: As long as you want results out of paid traffic you need to do paid advertising. In the moment you stop, your constant stream of leads will stop instantly as it has begun!
Keywords battles: As you are not the only person who understands the opportunities of paid ads, others will also try to get the most popular keywords. A keywords battle begins and prices for those keywords increase massively! So a single click to your website can cost you a large sum of money! And there is no guarantee that this click will convert into a lead or in a paying customer!
Brand recognition: As you buy your audiences attention through paid ads you can imagine they will not be very willing to listen to what you have to say. This could let you look like a lazy and budget oriented company without a personal face. So your brand could suffer!
Marketing Takeaway Tipp: Paid ads on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter offer various opportunities to advertise a company targeted to their audience. Paid ads should be used in a context of a clear marketing strategy which includes blogging, social media and social web marketing, premium content creation and real time marketing and PR. Only than paid advertising can serve you as a valuable source of new business leads an customers!
Facebook has over 700 million users worldwide. It has become a powerful part of marketing and communication for major businesses and thousands of small and mi sized businesses as well.
B2B and B2C companies profit from it reach and various marketing opportunities. Recent studies show that 67% of B2C and 41% of B2B companies report to have acquired new customers through facebook.
Facebook has started Facebook for Business. It introduces and teaches business hoe to use the Facebook marketing tools like Pages, PPC ads, sponsored stories and the platform himself.
Facebook for Business
Facebook Pages
Facebook PPC Ads
Facebook Sponsored Stories
Facebook Platform
The first part of a Facebook strategy is to set up a Facebook Fan Page for a business.
The next step is to promote this Facebook Fan Page by writing a press release, a blog post, send an announcement to the recent customers and include the link to the company’s new Fan Page in the signature of every email which goes out. Keep in mind to include a call to action “Like us on Facebook”!
As you have kick started your Fan Page you should think about to enhance it with custom design to make it more a branded outpost of your business.
To expand your reach you could use Facebook’s advertising platform.
Last but not least get into conversation with your audience. This is the most important part of your Facebook marketing, listen, give and talk when you have something important to contribute.
The next steps you could do are to do sweepstakes or special FB related offers only for your FB friends on your Facebook Fan Page.
You can ad your blog and your twitter account to your Fan Page so Information are directly distributed from your blog and your Twitter to your Fan Page so your fans can see and interact.
As you start you will have no likes and no discussions on your Page, but don’t worry, almost the biggest Fan Pages started out with ZERO likes and discussions! The only thing you need to do is to get your Fan Pages seen from your audience.
When they discover your Fan Page and like the content you publish than they will share it and this will attract more visitors and more likes. You have to do one step behind another to achieve success on Facebook. Rome wasn’t built in a day! Be patient and be open and communicative and the Facebook success will come to you as well.
A further great way to attract your audience very quick is to participate on related Facebook groups and even to like the Facebook Fan Pages of your competitors.
When you contribute educated information to those groups participate in the discussions on the walls of your competitors with helpful information you will quickly attract Likes form those sources to your Fan Page.
As you publish content and do discussions and interaction on Facebook you increase your chances to get indexed from the search engines like Bing. This could bring your content up in the top search results and help you to get seen through your Facebook marketing on the search engines.
Facebook like other social web activities is numbers related. The more you put in the more you get out. And this is also valid for Facebook marketing. The more effort and creativity you put into your Facebook marketing the more results you will have for your business.
Google+ launched on June 28, 2011 and had about ten million users 2 weeks later!
Google+ integrates social services such as Google Profiles and Google Buzz. It will also be available as a desktop application and as a mobile application.
When you look on Google+ the new social network than you might think, oh another one where I have to register and maintain relationships as I already have tot do in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other one. And Google has failed in the past with its efforts to come up with some king of big thing in social media. For example take Google Wave or Google Buzz.
So why you should bother about Google+?
Within the first week Google+ was able to gain 10 million new members. When you look at the dominance of Google than you can imagine the growth potential which Google+ has.
Google has added the +1 button before the launch of Google+ and offered a powerful tool to recommend a website to friends, as like the “Facebook Like Button” but with higher volume depending on the Google search results. So everybody can rate any website with the +1 button and show it to his network of friends. Also the +1 button becomes visible in the ads and once clicked it can increase the attention o the ad which increases his visibility and so on.
Most of the corporations don’t allow its employees to access Facebook from their office. Not so with Google, it is available for all with no restrictions.
Google+ actually offers features which Facebook does not. For example the feature to communicate vie web cam with up to ten persons of your circle.
With this strategic move Google made the Google profile to an online asset. Now you can see the people in your social circles who and which search listing they like.
As a marketing person you can profit from this when the people visit your search listing like it with Google +1. Site which earn legitimate +1 will be rewarded by Google and they relevancy will increase.
The best way for your business to gain relevancy in this new Google world is to create relevant content and get as many Google +1 rating as you can. By following this opportunity your business gains a competitive advantage.
Your social activity will set you apart from your competition and gain you an advantage in the Google’s ecosystem and evolving social search strategy.
This existing Google tools offers you as a marketer a big advantage which you should use to get seen and t get found from your target audience.
Here is a Google cheat sheet you can utilize for your Google+ daily tasks
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Facebook has surpassed Google with search requests and is now the most trafficked site on the web. With its 700+ million users, Facebook is reaching a worldwide audience.
A study conducted with 180 businesses discovered that 67% of the B2C and 41% of the B2B companies have been able to win new customers through Facebook.
Businesses which have serious social media marketing strategies in place have connected to social network sites like Facebook and experienced the similar growth as those social networking sites.
There about 3 million Facebook pages of local businesses online and this number increases daily. Because these pages are free and can bring tremendous value when you add them to your social media marketing strategies to get in touch with your audience on Facebook. You can utilize Facebook for your business and profit from it.
Here are 6 advantages to be on Facebook:
1st Advantage to be on Facebook, Visibility: You can increase your visibility. As your network grows there also your reach grows. The more people you are connected with the more your visibility for your business will increase and the chances to attract new customers.
2nd Advantage to be on Facebook, Share ability: When you publish valuable and share worthy content on Facebook the chances are good that your network will share it to their friends. With this share ability of content more people become aware of your business and maybe connect with you on Facebook and visit your website to see what you have to offer.
3rd Advantage to be on Facebook, Branding: The more people get to know you, the more your brand will spread on Facebook and on the web as well. To become a visible brand is important to gain attention and to get the chance to start a conversation with potential customers.
4th Advantage to be on Facebook, Trust and Authority: You can’t buy trust and authority you have to earn it in a long trust building process. Your audience will only listen to you when they think you are trustworthy. When your audience decides you are trustworthy, than your communication get weight and your audience will listen to it and share it with their connections.
5th Advantage to be on Facebook, Connection: Social networking is all about building connections to people with the same interest. An average Facebook user has about 130 connections. The more relevant connections you can build the better. But keep in mind that this does not happen overnight! To build relevant connection takes work and time.
6th Advantage to be on Facebook, SEO: As the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing indexing social media content and give it out in search requests, your communication could also be on such a search result and make you known with people who didn’t new you before!
How do you utilize Facebook fan pages for your marketing? I am looking forward to your comments below in the comment field.
Here are further important resources for the topic Facebook Fan Pages:
Location based marketing integrates mobile advertising with different mobile technologies.
Location based marketing is used to pinpoint consumer’s location and provide location specific information, to attract customers to products and services, on their mobile devices. Location based marketing is going to out beat other types of traditional advertising as the mode of delivering the advertisements is a mobile device which is ubiquitous.
As location based services use mobile devices to share location and your doing with your network, they get more info and improve your experiences.
Studies show that people who use location based services are:
— 80% male
— 70% 19-35 yrs. Old
— 70% college grads
— 38% considered influential
— 20% more likely to do mobile research
The motivation to use location based services are to find friends, play games, get coupons and share their activity and increase loyalty. Further motivations are to find hidden offers, discover points of interest, get new experiences and find new products and services.
Two profitable reasons why you as a marketer should use location based marketing for your business:
— Location based services users will increase from today’s 96 million users by 2012 to 526 million users.
— Of all Smart Phone users about 10% are on location based services. About 63% of all IPhone users are on location based services minimum once a week.
Here are five location based services which you should utilize for your marketing:
Gowalla
Goby
The Dealmap
Yelp
Foursquare
Is your business location based services and marketing ready?
— Is your website optimized for mobile? — Do you have planned to do a mobile app which complements your business with location based services?
On the end the products seek us based on our activities and location. The question is will it be your products or the products of your competitor which will find the new customer?
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