Businesses discover QR codes as marketing method

QR codes are around for several years now.

But with the increasing demand of creative marketing challenges, they come more and more into the focus of marketing professionals worldwide.

What’s a QR code?

A QR code is a specific matrix barcode (or two-dimensional code), readable by dedicated QR barcode readers and camera phones. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white background. The information encoded can be text, URL or other data.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

They have understand that with the massive growth of the mobile device and applications market, the potential customers, which are in hurry should have the opportunity to get information on the fly to review it later when it’s more convenient for them.

We all know those situation, we walk around the street and come across an interesting product or offer.

In the most cases we do not have a pencil and a piece of paper to write down the contact info to reach out to the seller later.

But we have our iPhone, Blackberry or any other smart phone, maybe with a QR app installed!

 

If the seller has a QR Code placed to his offer we simply scan this QR code with our smart phone and have all important details we need to reach out to the seller later.
Scanbuy, the global leader in mobile barcode solutions, released its latest ScanLife Mobile Barcode Trend Report.

Here are some of the Mobile Barcode Trend Report key stats highlighted: 

  • Traffic was up 16x in 2010 overall
  • Traffic doubled since the last Trend Report in September
  • UPC scanning outpaced 2D codes as a result of the holiday shopping season
  • The largest scan days were the day after Thanksgiving (“Black Friday”) and Christmas Day (as people received gifts, many being new Smartphone’s)
  • The top most used features for people scanning UPC codeshare Coupons, Prices, and Nutritional Info. This reflects previous learning that Food and Personal Care are the most scanned categories.
  • There was a 13% increase in female to male traffic, and a 25% increase in the 25-54 age groups. This is likely indicative of how the technology is evolving, and going more mainstream. 
QR codes become more and more popular. They are easy, cheap and quick to produce and can be used for any marketing activity as traditional and interactive campaigns.
Some examples where QR codes are used: 

  • Real estate agents
  • Billboard Ads
  • Guerilla marketing campaigns
  • In-store displays
  • Event ticketing and tracking
  • Business cards
  • Print ads
  • Contests
  • Direct mail campaigns
  • Websites
  • Email marketing
  • Trade shows
  • Conferences
  • Tourism 
QR codes give marketers the ability to measure response rates, which allows them to easily to calculate their marketing profit.
Here are some popular users of QR codes: 

  • U.S. Army
  • Memphis Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum
  • Lviv Tourism Movement (Ukraine)
  • Sports Illustrated
  • Tim McGraw and Dave Matthews
To get your own QR code done is very easy and the most services are online and free.
Here are the TOP 10 QR code generators:

  1. ZXing Project
  2. BeQRious
  3. Delivr
  4. Azonmedia
  5. Maestro
  6. goQR.me
  7. Online Qr Lab
  8. Mobile-Barcodes
  9. KAYWA
  10. BeeTagg

Get your own QR code NOW and start capture leads the smart way!

Do you use QR code for business and how are your experiences? I am curious to read your comment. Please leave your comment below.
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In social media sometimes the early bird wins piggyback

We all know information is the key to success.

If you have the right information you can take advantage of it and make use of an opportunity for your business.

Today in the times of internet and social media where information spreads on each corner it becomes important to have the ability to sort the right info from the crap, and this in the speed of light !

An information lead can make the difference between to profit from an opportunity or not.

If you want to have a chance, to be the early bird and to have an information lead, then you need current information first.

With the spread of internet and social media the mass of information increases daily, this does not makes is easier to differ the important from the less important.

To get you the most important information for your business, you can make use of powerful tools for example:

 

GoogleAlerts

SocialMention

Tweetdeck 

These tools can help you track any keyword or keyword phrase. You can add your name, your brand, names of your products industry related search terms and even the names of your competitors.

All of this information will be directly delivered to you and you can take advantage of the information.

Make it an ongoing task for you to find current info and think about how you could use it for your business.

This works very well if the info is associated with a well known and powerful brand.

You can take advantage of this news by being piggyback on the back of this news.

Keep in mind, these news offer you a small time window of several hours or less to make something out of it to benefit your business.

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How to show short term social media ROI to your boss?

To show a short term ROI out from social media is important to keep the activities motivated and long lasting. In the long term social media brings massive branding power as well.

How to show short term social media ROI?

You need to set up a strategy, which includes a whole set of tasks to get ROI out of social media and other online activities if you want to succeed!

 

Inbound marketing offers this kind of strategy to help you succeed with your revenue goals.

Inbound marketing positions you to execute a holistic marketing strategy and measure the results the smart way.

Inbound marketing gets you found and gets you leads!

To make your inbound marketing the right way and become able to measure your results you need to do a documentation of your doings and results.

Brain vs. Budget = Inbound Marketing

Track your month to month results (friends and followers growth) and then divide these numbers through your invested hours, your hourly working rate. You can also drill down to the price per friend and follower.

With this you get a good picture of how much it cost (time = money) to be active and to get followers and friends in each network.

To measure your profits made through social media activities you should setup different landing pages which for example lead friends from facebook to a FB related landing – lead capture page and followers from Twitter to a TW landing page – lead capture page.

Through a lead nurturing process you can track each channel separately and calculate your previous efforts invested (hours/ time = dollars) to your sales results from the said channels.

Your social media traffic has a great value. To calculate the value $$$ of the generated social media traffic which hits your landing pages, you could research the Google AdWords Keywords pricing.

You will discover that your social media landing page traffic, made through PPC, would cost you a ton of cash.With social media it does not.

This additional ROI factor, which also lowers the cost per lead through social media activities, can also be taken into account when presenting your short term social media ROI to your boss.

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The Fortune 100 Companies love social media

During the past years social media has reached more and more big companies.

Companies as Coca Cola, SAP, IBM and many more are successfully active in social media.

For those companies social media has become an important communication channel to get valuable information about trends, customer satisfaction, to learn more about the market demand and address their products and services successfully straight direct to their audience.
For those companies who still did not embrace social media ahard uphill battle has begun!
Still there are misunderstandings and zero strategies when companies try to make use of social media as a communication channel.
Mostly traditional PR thinking collides with the new art of social media marketing.
Burson-Marsteller 2011 Global Social Media Check-up


To get value out of social media activities companies need to have a strategy, resources, budget and to forget the old school PR thinking! It simply does not work anymore in social media. Moreover it can damage a brand seriously.

To be successful in social media, you need to see social media as an important part of a holistic marketing strategy where every gear fits into each other like a Swiss watch.

As social media is one important part but not the only part of your marketing you need to have a holistic inbound marketing strategy. There is some more to be done to get value out of your social media marketing activities as well.

From the initial and important part of to get found online through search engines, social media, corporate blog, guest blogging -commenting, eBooks, whitepapers and some more; To the lead capture, lead nurturing, lead conversion and measurement, the inbound marketing strategy covers it all.

Inbound marketing is the marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers.

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.

Inbound marketing can help you to:

A. Save up to 60% 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.

As your primarily goal is to get found, you need to gain reach. You need to expand your channels like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Search engines, YouTube, Corporate Blog, Blog directories, industry related forums and some more niche social networks.

You need to become a trusted and valuable source for your audience. This helps your business a lot and open doors where walls have been before.

You need to communicate authentic and honestly with your audience and expand your network step by step organically.

As you are active in social media, you can add press releases and sales activities to your social media tasks as well.

Listen carefully! Conversation about your brand is happen in social media for sure. The questions are, do you know about it and how do you respond to it?

Monitor social media to know when your brand is mentioned. Respond in a professional manor and take negative comments as chance to showcase your point of view!

The way you respond shows the level how much you care about your audience opinion!

And also this gives you an outlook about your future chances to survive in this competitive social media world.

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Inbound marketing is not for you if you are not committed

Inbound marketing can help a business to get seen, get found and to get leads!

But inbound marketing is a strategy which requires a lot of work, creativity and focusing on goals.

With Inbound marketing you can become outstanding attractive and get found by your target audience, leave your competitor far behind you and increase your market share and revenue.


For the last six years inbound marketing has proved to be the most powerful internet marketing strategy to gain trust, leads and customers with a decrease of marketing spending’s of up to 60% and an increase of lead conversion of up to 55%.

Inbound marketing has proved to be the best strategy available toget outstanding attractive and make more revenue with lesser investment.

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Inbound marketing is the marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers. Inbound marketing is related to permission based relationship marketing.

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.

Inbound marketing can help you to:
A. Save up to 60% 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.

Businesses need to learn that they can’t deport inbound marketing tasks and responsibility to an inbound marketing agency.

They are also required to work together with the hired inbound marketing professionals as a team with goals,  to make their business found of their target audience and to get leads out of these activities!

Businesses have to work together with their hired inbound marketing professionals and to be helpful by delivering all necessary information and support to achieve the previously mutually agreed goals!

To hire an inbound marketing agency without communication and commitment to inbound marketing is the same like to go to a hairdresser without telling him which kind of hairstyle you want.

If a business prefers “consent” more than “advice and help” with their inbound marketing, than they better avoid inbound marketing!

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One simple reason why you should do Inbound marketing – PROFIT

In the past five years the inbound marketing – Internet marketing strategy has emerged and grown his popularity through its massive and convincing results.

What’s Inbound marketing?

Inbound marketing is the marketing strategy that focuses on getting found by customers.

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.

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Key benefits of Inbound marketing for your business:

You can engage and empower your consumers, build a relationship and interact with them to earn credibility and trust. This gives you the opportunity to create customer tailored and demanded products and services for your audience.

People only buy from people and brands they like!

Inbound marketing is results driven and studies have proved that Inbound marketing makes your get better you found online, saves you up to 60% of your marketing budget, get’s you leads and up to 55% higher lead conversion rates in the long term.

Last but not least, you are able to measure and track all activities and showcase the ROI within five month!

It helps you to enhance your customer experience. Activities which provide good return can be identified and reinforced to maximize your impact on your target audience at very low cost. Directs your audience laser targeted to the buying process.

Summary how Inbound marketing can help you:

A. Save up to 60% 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.

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Mobile Marketing Goes Online?

By Alexander Gregori

Not so long ago marketers were excited at the prospects of a new tool: online marketing.

They could send out personalized emails directly to leads via email at almost no cost, create a store front of their business with websites, place banner ads on other websites , create newsletters and blogs.

Then the whole thing became more sophisticated with tools like Google AdWords, social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter and e-commerce.

Suddenly the whole world was connected and marketers had unleashed an animal. Not only did online marketing become actual work for which companies had to employ staff or a specialized agency, but now clients, customers and consumers could also praise or bash their brands, products and services.

This posed, and still poses, considerable challenges for marketers.

Enter from stage left: mobile marketing!

Oh my gosh. What is THAT? Another tool that seems to confuse more than be helpful.

Yet MORE work and yet another specialized discipline that has to be learned and mastered. Well, mobile has come a long way and clever marketers quickly understood that INTEGRATION is the keyword.

They supplemented their existing marketing tools with simple, yet effective mobile marketing tools to maximize the ROI of their marketing strategy and objectives.

Others were not so “lucky”. One of the mistakes made was the lumping together of online- and mobile marketing, based on the true but misleading fact that both are making use of the Internet.

Granted, a simple SMS campaign does not involve the Internet but if you want to run an integrated campaign, instead of wasting your bucks on creating databases with worthless cell phone numbers, the Internet comes into play, e.g. with mobisites and apps.

Well, the truth is: online- and mobile marketing are two different disciplines. They have different rules and objectives, and they both work best when they are integrated into an overall marketing strategy.

Imagine this scenario: a company has built a website and used newsletters to build an opt-in database with whom they communicate regularly. They are cutting edge, so they also have a LinkedIn group, Facebook page and Twitter account. Now they heard that SMS, or texting, is much more personal, that only 10% of SMS’s are spam (versus 90% of emails) and that 98% of SMS’s are opened and responded to within 60 minutes (versus 5% of emails).

So they decide to send SMS’s to use their opt-in database, for example to alert their leads of a new special. SMS’s only allow 160 characters, so they include a hyperlink to their website for more information.

First problem: clicking on a hyperlink to a website from a mobile phone will, for most phones, not display the website correctly. In fact, it will be so bad that it can be regarded as useless. Lead and potential sale lost!

So the company decides to build a mobisite, which would render properly on the mobile phones of users but a mobisite has different objectives to a website, so they get entangled in the intricacies of its function and design.

The result is a mobisite that works great technically (in some cases) but does not produce an acceptable ROI because it is not geared towards user expectations and preferences. In short: users are not using it!

The result is that this company takes the “informed” decision that mobile does not work for them.

Sadly, they are thus losing out on what is arguably the most exciting, cost effective and valuable communication tool since the invention of marketing. And it could all have been different if that company just understood that online and mobile are two different tools.

If I argue that mobile goes online then I point to the integration of these two marketing tools. Think of the millions of consumers who are using traditionally “online only” social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter from their mobile phones.

If you want to stay ahead of the pack you have to embrace this reality and offer your potential and existing customers the opportunity to remain in the mobile environment when they continue their dialogue with you by e.g. clicking through to your website.

To do this right requires professionals with the knowledge of both the online AND mobile environment (and a principle understanding of traditional media would’t hurt either). So don’t remain stuck with your traditional-, online-, or even digital agencies. Make sure you have someone on your team who understands mobile as well!

About the author
http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/ce522f9be58167b084ce5a2c86e6c120?s=48&d=identicon&r=GAlexander Gregori (BA) is a visionary, entrepreneur and mobile marketing specialist. As Mobile Marketing Winner$ team leader he is an internationally published author on mobile marketing and m-commerce and co-founder of the Thinking Mobile Conference Series.

His company is http://myMOBworld.com. Contact him on tel +27 (0)11 704 0937, fax +27 (0)86 503 6868, email alex@mymobworld.com, skype alex.gregori, read his blog and connect with him on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

 

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A good Page Rank on Google only doesn’t bring you revenue

To have a good PR – Page Rank on Google is not enough to be successful with your business online.

A huge amount of traffic is also no guarantee for a successful online business.

You need to have the right traffic, and a huge amount of it.

You invest effort and money to generate traffic, why not attract the right traffic with the right people to your business?

To attract your target audience to your business you need to show expertise, gain trust and build credibility.

People only buy from people and businesses they trust.

People mainly go online to research and not to buy!

If you are not able to showcase your expertise and build credibility with your target audience than they will not click to buy, no matter which PR o how many traffic you think you have!

You can showcase your expertise; build trust and credibility with remarkable content you publish online.

Build trust and credibility before you try to address your products and services. Social media is a great source to build trust and credibility.

Social media has also become the new SEO!

The more you are active in social media, means the more you interact with your audience, build and distribute remarkable content like blog posts, video, eBooks, Whitepapers and Articles, the more trust and credibility you will build with the people you like to attract as your future customers.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing are actively indexing content from social media.

Those results increasingly come up on search results when people research online in search engines! If you are not active in social media than you waste a big chance to build trust, credibility and to get found online.

“On the web you are what you publish!” –David Meerman Scott

Marketing takeaway tip: Be there before the sale. Build trust and credibility. Be there and they will come!

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Learn – Spy link building from your competitor

Backlinks are important for your business to get better found online.

Search engines rank your site importance depending on the Backlinks which come from other related websites and blogs.

The more Backlinks from related websites you have, the higher the search engines will preferred rate your website or blog.

Means your chances increase to appear on the first page of the search results.

But what if your competitor I rank higher for every search term you also need to rank high as well to get better found, to get more traffic leads and revenue?

There is an easy solution to overcome this issue.

Asses where your “next higher ranked competition” is positioned in the search engines. When I say “next higher ranked competition” than I means the one directly before you.

Do not try to attack the biggest elephant in the jungle with a stone in your hand. Begin with the small one in the jungle, the “next higher ranked competition”.

When you have assessed the Backlinks of your “next higher ranked competition” than you can build a list of activities, websites, blogs, comments and article topics which have lead to his amount of Backlinks.

Now follow the clear footsteps of your “next higher ranked competition” activities and copy his doing. Look out for the next bigger target in the internet jungle when you are done with your first strategic job.

Just repeat this strategy until you achieve your ranking and traffic goals.

But be aware, this strategy is no secret. Others will follow you to outperform you with these tactics. You should include some creativity to build other valuable marketing tactics to set you apart from your following competition.

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How to create mobile friendly emails and get more response

Current analysis show impressive statistics where millions of people will be using advanced email ready phones.

Morgan Stanley Research predicts that sales of smart phones will exceed those of PCs within 2 years.

Internet Trends 2010 by Morgan Stanley Research

  • According to Juniper Research annual sales of smart phones over 300 million by 2013.
  • Sales of smart phones will exceed those of PCs within 2 years.
  • Studies also show that people surf about four hours in social media compared with one hour from their PC.
  • 30% of consumers are already using mobile devices to read personal email.

The importance of mobile email is growing rapidly and is playing an increasing role in email marketing.

When you send out email to your leads and customers than that information above should lead you to seriously consider to adopting mobile marketing strategies.

When you create mobile friendly email by adopting new tactics tailored specially for mobile devices than you increase your chances to get your message read.

To get started follow these Tipps:

  1. When you do an email template, and then also do a text version of your message. For the mobile template set width 320 pixels with a single column.
  2. Keep your images small and brief and describe them using the ALT tag.
  3. Space your clickable links to make them easier clickable.
  4. Put the most important content on the top, where it can be seen very quickly.
  5. Make your subject line and your message attractive, short and compelling. [According to Marketing Sherpa, the average user only spends 15-20 seconds looking at your email]
  6. Test you email look and feel here Litmus and Previewmyemail.
  7. Ad a mobile option to your newsletter subscription form, for example a checkbox “get mail on mobile”.

Marketing takeaway tip: When you make it easy and possible for your subscribers to read your message on their smart phones than more and more of them will take action. Those points above are easy to get done. Just do it!

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Social Media vs. Traditional Advertising

How to make the most of inbound marketing

If you’ve been following this blog, or if you have put any time into strategizing your online marketing campaign, you understand the importance of inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing is a way of making customers come to your site usually via Social Media, PR’s, articles, blogs, online ads, PCP campaigns, and others.

For now let’s focus on Social Media, perhaps the least understood yet the most cost effective and potentially the most lucrative branch of online marketing.

Over 20 million people use Twitter. It is estimated over 175 million people log onto Facebook every single day and there are over 600 million active users.

Other social mediums like Myspace and YouTube have more followers viewing their pages than the cleverest billboard on the busiest highway in the world.

In fact the only advertising scenario that can draw as much attention as these sites potentially is a Super Bowl ad, and those cost around $3 million a minute.

So obviously Social Media has a lot of potential, especially since is it is basically free minus people costs to set everything up and post regularly

But Social Media is not a billboard or Super Bowl ad. Traditional advertising differs for a couple of reasons:

1. People have no choice. If they are watching TV, they are going to see commercials.

It is acceptable because for the rest of the time they are being entertained.

That is they are getting something out of the deal, and as a trade the customer is allowing advertisers the 30 second opportunity to try to sell them their product.

Same with a Newspaper or Magazine ad. For billboards or POS ads, people are a certain place, and have no choice but to see the ad. The advertiser has a second or so to get their attention, but they have a definite audience.

When you have a Facebook page, Twitter account, or YouTube page, your customer does have a choice. And let’s be honest with ourselves for a moment and admit 99.99% of people online don’t want to see your ad – or your Social Site acting as an ad of sorts in this instance.

How to overcome this: Well, you can’t post a billboard on the internet, least not at this point, so treating it like a billboard or POS ad is out of the question.

And besides, you’re not looking for branding only at this point (what an ad usually is), you’re looking for people to actually take action now, “branding” is kind of the Silver Metal of the Social Media marketing Olympics.

What does work is interacting with people in a way they want to be “interacted” with.

Sell your product, but give them a reason to follow you outside of your core benefits.

Your benefits aren’t enough if you’re looking for new customers. Benefits are only for people who already knew they wanted your product. If you only want those people, you don’t need Social Media.

2. “Changing the channel” is simpler online. Sure you can switch the channel at home sitting on your couch.

You can ignore a sign, skip an ad in a Paper, turn off the radio, etc. However it is not as easy, and when you’re dealing with large numbers of people, simply from an anthropological perspective the easier it is to ignore you the more likely more people are going to ignore you.

How to overcome this: As mentioned you need to give people something outside of your core benefits if you want to begin a real following (as opposed to the manufactured type many companies fall for paying for that don’t work and in some cases are counter productive).

However, to ensure people don’t “change the channel” you need to keep giving them something.

This applies to B2C and B2B both. If you sell to businesses, keep them up to date on news within your industry, even if it has little to do with you, tell them where your company is going sure, but also tell them where the industry is going.

And do it in a more casual tone than a white letter, do it like you’re talking to someone at a convention and are really just waiting to grab a beer after – well maybe not that casual, but you get the idea. If you’re talking directly to consumers you may want to hire a professional to be your spokesperson.

Yes, I’m sure there are many ways your product will benefit them, but as mentioned, they don’t care.

You have to break through that. If we’re using the “just waiting until the convention is over to grab a beer” analogy from above, this time it’s more like you’re ad a barbeque already, not drunk, but having a good time.

Hope that makes sense. The main points are:

1. Don’t forget the “social” in Social Media.
2. Sell, but give them something outside of your product.
3. Keep doing it. Social Media is not a constant, and if you do not stay on top of it your followers will disappear tomorrow.

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 http://0.gravatar.com/avatar/6fdf1f5d69082ea116d4728a89915c1b?s=32&d=&r=G Author’s Bio: Jeffrey Gross is an Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Enthusiast who lives on Long Island, NY. Jeff’s Search Engine Optimization Company (nPromote) helps Long Island business owners (and business owners across the country) get their businesses to the top of the search engines. In his spare time Jeff teaches Search Engine Optimization to small business owners and enjoys lecturing at local colleges and other venues as well.

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5 ToDos for your Social Media Success in 2011

You should focus on major trands to market your business.

Here below are 5 todo’s for you to be a step ahead of your competition!

1. Shift your employee recruitment to social media

http://www.techaffect.com/wp-content/uploads/success-social-media-case-study.jpgLet your employees find you! The same rules which apply to attract new customers the social media way, also apply to attract new employees.

You need to be there before you offer a job. Means, you need to communicate and to generate trust before you are actively looking for employees.

You can do this by show a human face of your company.

Also you can introduce your staff with a short bio, picture and social media activities they are in.

Give everybody of your staff a Flip Cam to record interesting daily tasks and upload  those videos on YouTube.

Let your staff write a blog and show insides of your corporate culture.

These gains trust and show that you have nothing to hide.

Encourage your staff to communicate open positions within their social networks. This spreads your reach.

Communicate your open positions through your Facebook Fan Page and advertise it Facebook Ads. You can do the same with LinkedIn.

The more you are active, the more results you will have!

You can reach new potential employees with Inbound Marketing the smart and easy way!


2. Measure your results
Marketing only works with a budget! You need to show where the money goes and the ROI of your activities.

Therefore you need to track and measure where you are active.

For example when you do a PPC campaign on LinkedIn you can setup landing pages to capture the people who previously clicked on the advertisement.

So you have a price per click, you have the number of click through and you have the registered leads.

During you lead nurturing process you convert them to paying customers.

Let’s do the math:
Clicks 1000, for $1 per click = $1000
Captured Leads, 25% = 250
Conversion rate, 4% = 10 sales
Revenue per sale, $300 x 10 = $3000 Revenue
$3000 Revenue – $1000 PPC costs = $2000

You see it is not necessary to measure everything. You only need to measure the right things. Keep it short and simple!

3. Improve your customer service through Real-time conversations
As you are active and online in social media, you can immediately react on customer compliance, critics and questions.

Means, you should take this opportunity and get into conversation and set your company apart from the old school “Request Support and wait 24 hrs. until you get response”.

This is easy to do make a great difference! You are able to help your customer life and your community will see this and talk about your great service quality.

You decide if you want to make a great marketing tool out of your service and support.

4. Use location based marketing

Here at some of the platforms you can use to do location based marketing:

Things you could do to jumpstart your location based marketing:

1. Deliver coupons and message to a mobile phones
2. Display local ads to target buyer from a specific location
3. When someone is standing in front of the product you could deliver product info to him
4. You could offer incentives to your target audience for location based activities like visiting your store multiple times
5. Offer info and help to your target audience, for example to find nearby things such as stores, ATM’s or even Pepsi machines
6. You could provide event and social opportunities based on your target audience physical location
7. Share your location based info with others in a social network

5. Keep your eyes on LinkedIn as major business tool
LinkedIn is massively growing and steadily adding new feature for free use.

They have 75+ million users registered. LinkedIn has become the Number One Business related social network world wide.

It is predicted that LinkedIn will soon grow to 160 million registered users from all over the world.

You should register with LinkedIn and start using it effectively.

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Internet population has crossed 2 billion

The UN’s telecommunication agency released a statement that the number of internet users in the world has now touched the 2 billion mark.

Around 6.8 billion people are on the planet currently. The statement shows that about a third of the world population surfs online.

The exact figure stands at 2.08 billion at the end of 2010, compared to 1.86 billion a year before.

The Arab region (88 million) achieved the greatest growth and the countries of the former Soviet Union.

Asia and the Pacific are the leaders, with more than 857 million internet users.

When you take a look at this number of more than two billion users online globally; than you do not need to be a genius to understand, to be engaged in Social Media will open you doors to more potential customers for your products and services.

Facebook has crossed the 600 million mark, Twitter has more than 100 million users, LinkedIn has 75+ million and they all are worldwide steadily growing.

You should take action before your competitor does!

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Old school marketing vs. inbound marketing

You have established a corporate blog and you write remarkable content and you distribute it through various social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and some more.

You are also active in Foursquare and have set your place in Google places.

You are commenting on Twitter, industry related blogs and forums and you have established great relationships to your audience and industry related bloggers.

You have also set a lead generation and lead nurturing process successfully and you generate real revenue out of your efforts, right?

I am really proud of you! But do you really think this is all you can do?

And here is the problem! You are satisfied with your results and you do not go further.

You simply stoped your efforts to look further and to go the extra mile!

In the times before internet, social media hype and inbound marketing strategy businesses used to do trade shows, cold calling, writing and sending out sales letters to their audience and doing industry related magazine ads.

We have learned that these strategies do not offer any valuable opportunity to get measured and to calculate any ROI.

You do not need to do these strategies mentioned above.

But there are further opportunities to get seen from your target audience. Maybe you should take a closer look to business directory listings, Trade Magazines, PPC and Social Media behavioral marketing.

Some sources you could take a closer look to, to reach more of your target audience and generate more leads.

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8 Ways to increase your conversion rate

If you ever had thought about to optimize your website or to do a complete redesign than this 9 ways could help you to priories your doing.

1. Implementing Landing Pages
In online marketing a landing page, also known as a lead capture page, is a single web page that appears in response to clicking on an advertisement.

The landing page will usually display directed sales copy that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link.

Landing pages are often linked to and from social media, email campaigns or pay per click (PPC) campaigns in order to enhance the effectiveness of the advertisements.

The general goal of a landing page is to convert site visitors into sales lead.

2. Optimizing Website and Content for Conversion
As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for.

Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

Promoting a site to increase the number of Backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an essential element of any inbound marketing strategy and can account for up to 25% of your website search engine results.

3. Implementing Micro Sites
A micro site, also known as a landing page, is an individual web page or cluster of pages. The micro site’s main landing page most likely has its own domain name or sub domain.

They are typically used to add a specialized group of information.

A micro site may be linked in to a main site.

The main distinction of a micro site versus its parent site is its purpose and specific cohesiveness as compared to the micro site’s broader overall parent website.

Click here to see a larger, printable version of this chart

 

4. Utilizing Video
Corporate video helps to deliver your message online. High quality video can enhance your ability to deliver your message online. Its more powerful than only words.

5. Implementing Social Media
Social media marketing is an integrated marketing strategy.

Social media marketing is integrated marketing communications to connect with targeted markets.

Integrated marketing communications coordinates the elements of the marketing mix like personal selling, PR, direct marketing, and sales promotion.

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6. Implementing Live Chat
Live chat gives you the opportunity to discuss live with your potential customer and answer his question in real time.

7. Implementing Click to Call Feature
Click-to-call, also known as click-to-talk, is a form of Web-based communication in which a person clicks a button to request an immediate connection with a company in real-time by phone call.

A great invention is the click to call feature on a website, where a visitor can ask you to call him.

8. Cookie Based Personalization of Website Content
This feature gives a website owner the opportunity to enhance the user experience by personalizing the pages he surfs with related offers.

Companies like eBay and Amazon use these technologies to offer related products to their customers and to increase their revenue.

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