Category : Internet Marketing News
Most of us think of LinkedIn as an innocuous networking tool, on which we list our contacts and network with others who use it. Did you know that you can leverage LinkedIn as a powerful marketing tool? This new world was recently opened up to me at a seminar by Chris Muccio, who gave some great tips on using this social networking tool that I’ll share with you here.
LinkedIn, which you can view at LinkedIn.com, has 43 million users in 170 industries. It is projected to grow to 70 million users within the next couple of years. These users are usually savvy business people and networkers, and many are senior level executives. LinkedIn is a great tool for reaching these decision-makers without needing to pester them on the telephone. Use of LinkedIn also shows that you are a tech-savvy professional, something that you want to underscore if you are selling a technical or a marketing service. Every Fortune 500 company is represented on LinkedIn in some capacity, most listing the primary decision-makers that you want to reach. Now, instead of scrolling through a website or calling a company to get a name, you can just use LinkedIn. It lists titles, areas of responsibilities, even personal interests.
LinkedIn can seem deceptively open to a new user. Some people don’t mind if you just add them to your network, but some do. To avoid such gaffes, use the invitation tool to get an introduction to someone that you don’t know. Before beginning the invitation process, make sure that you have a completely filled-out portfolio with at least one or two recommendations.
A recommendation is like a testimonial for a product, only it is a testimonial for your professional services. If someone receives an invitation to connect with you and you don’t have any recommendations, they are much less likely to allow you into their network. It is also important to insert a link to your website. LinkedIn is a very controlled environment and your potential clients can only find out so much about you through it. Think of LinkedIn as the handshake, and your website as the closer.
Along the same lines, don’t include a personal blog or anything else that may make you look less than professional. Friendly, yes. Chugging beers at a frat party or off-color jokes, no. Remember that even comments written on your blog may reflect on you to a less-than tech savvy person who may not know the difference between your site and the comments being posted.
When doing anything on LinkedIn, remember to speak to your demographic. They are generally middle-aged adults, both men and women, 54% of whom make over $100,000 a year. This is why invitations and introductions matter on LinkedIn; this is how someone in this demographic is used to doing business in the real world, and they would prefer their online world to be just as organized.
If you are serious about using LinkedIn as a marketing tool, you should also research the keywords that you would expect people would use for your industry and enter them for your profile. Just like your website, people do search on LinkedIn and you need to optimize for that. You can contact 1 Stop Marketing Solutions for help in this area if you aren’t too sure what that means. You’ll also want to go for the paid subscription rather than the free listing because of the limitations that the free listing has. Anything worth doing is worth paying for, especially with the potential “big fish” clients that you will find on LinkedIn.
41.9% of retailers say paid search advertising has been outperforming all other forms of marketing since the recession began last September. This means that interest in firms that specialize in pay-per-click (PPC) and other forms of paid search advertising have been in high demand. Anyone can sign up for a Google AdWords account, but not very many know how to use it effectively with optimized keywords, or even if Google AdWords is even the solution to the particular paid search needs of your business.
Paid search is also highly scalable. Budgets can be scaled back immediately if needed, where advertising through more traditional mediums entails signing expensive and binding contracts. This scalability alone makes paid search the preferred solution for most online and offline businesses.
Despite the success of paid search, only 24.2% plan to increase spending on paid search while 45.9% plan to keep it about the same. These retailers have recognized the importance of search engine optimization and are using the downturn to spend the time necessary on optimizing their sites naturally.
55.3% of businesses surveyed plan to increase spending on search engine optimization to achieve better natural search results. If looked at as a strategy, PPC campaigns are short-term solutions to boost the popularity and visibility of your website. SEO campaigns involve long term solutions to bring more visitors to your site organically through excellent content and an easily navigable site structure, among other things. The downturn is an excellent time to consider SEO, since it usually involves time-consuming one-time projects such as redesigning the site for easier navigibility, adding social media platforms, stripping out redundant code, and creating rich and in-depth content.
Social media marketing is rearing its head as a serious contender in the online world. Early adopters of Twitter and other social media technologies and methods are reporting success with the medium. As a result, over 30% of surveyed retailers are looking at developing a social media strategy. One only needs to look to the example of Whole Foods and Woot and how they have monetized Twitter to get excited about the possibilities in this medium alone.
1-Stop Marketing Solutions has the benefit of being involved in the world of SEO and the internet in general for years. While our experience is highly sought after right now, we are happy to help out new clients anytime. Contact us for a free consultation on what your SEO roadmap should look like and join the other half of the business world that has decided to invest in SEO, PPC and social media marketing.
All survey numbers used are from an Internet Retailer Survey, the statistics from which are available here.
According to a recent research report from Compete, traffic to social media sites continues to climb, as more and more web users flock to sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Last year alone, these two sites saw over 2.1 trillion page views – nearly double from 2007. The stats are based on the daily Web use of more than two million Compete community members.
Among the top search engines, Google led the way in online search last year–capturing 68% of the market share with 116 billion search queries, up 8 points from 2007. Yahoo had the highest average rate of paid search referrals, with 10% of the volume coming from sponsored sites.
In 2008, visits to publishers’ sites like The New York Times, MSN, CNN and others rose 33%, while visits to social network sites Digg, Facebook, Twitter and others rose 23%.
Does your company have a social media strategy? If you’re not sure how to get your brand in front of the millions of consumers who visit Facebook or Twitter every day, contact the experts at 1 Stop Marketing Solutions, and we’ll customize a social media marketing plan that’s right for you.
Gone are the days when selling marketing and website design services to an internet retailer was like pushing a boulder uphill. Due to firsthand experience of what SEO and improved design can do for their ROI, internet retailers are getting with the program where internet marketing services are concerned.
Last year, almost half of all respondents to a survey by Internet Retailer stated that they had implemented a complete redesign of their website. Site optimization was top priority for 73% of the same group. Better navigation and organization of their sites were the chief concerns in this category, underscoring the fact that improved navigability translates into higher conversion rates.
“Retailers are listing site optimization as their top design objective,” stated David Wartzheimer, director of strategy for Alexander Interactive Inc. This more practical approach to site design firmly puts the customer in the driver’s seat which in turn leads to higher sales. Gone are the days when graphic designers and the IT department are considered the gurus on the subject of navigability – experts, business and customers have all shown that site optimization is much more important than a pretty picture.
Close to 44% of the survey respondents will be updating their sites with video in 2009, probably due to demand from customers for more interactive instructions or product demonstrations. Respondents also want more personalization and customizability in their current online shopping environments, allowing more multi-channel sales and encouraging customer loyalty.
The good news for website design firms is that a full 60% of the companies responding to the survey plan to outsource their site design, and only 15% plan to use their current agency. While that may be good news for getting new business, we can all judge by those numbers that the industry needs to do some more work in customer retention and after-sales service.
Most internet retailers found that posting more customer reviews has not translated to greater conversion rates. Video and more interactive features on the site have, leading most of them to want to incorporate more of these services. According to this survey, 2009 should be a fairly busy year!
The term “social media” has been bandied about by us web industry types as a catch all phrase for a number of different web technologies and sites. These include Twitter, Digg and Facebook. If there was a holy trinity of social media, those three would be it. Everything else is not incidental, but if you are going to start on the path of promoting your business via social media these are the three technologies and sites that you should pay the most attention to.
While a website gives your customers instant access to your business, social media takes everything a step further and allows your consumers to interact with your company and its products on a more engaging level. It could be argued that encouraging this interaction and engagement is many times more profitable to your business than spending money on static advertising such as TV, print or radio. The thing that most business owners want to know when they come to us is how to get started on social media. For each of the technologies named below, take a few minutes to visit their websites and explore the technology in order to immerse yourself in the topic a bit rather than just taking our word for it. There is much more to each site or technology than the brief paragraph that we have given you on it.
Twitter – www.twitter.com
Your company should have a Twitter feed that is advertised and linked to on your main website. This will allow fellow Twitterers to “follow” your company as you post new information in real time. Twitter should be updated a few times throughout the work day in order to maintain a constant flow of information to your followers. A good tool to use to do this is Digsby, which may be downloaded from Digsby.com. This tool also allows you to see short descriptions of e-mails as they come in, which saves you the time of checking your inbox. In addition to many other features including being an all-in-one message client service, Digsby allows you to post new tweets “on the fly” without doing anything more than opening up a box quickly on your taskbar. Twitter gives you the power to advertise promotions instantly without having to wait for a customer to open an e-mail or click on your site. It shouldn’t replace e-mail blasts altogether, but it does engage your followers more directly.
Digg – www.digg.com
If you have a company blog, you should make the contents of the blog “diggable”. Digg is a website that allows users to share content with other users from anywhere. These are known as “social bookmarking” sites, and StumbleUpon and De.lic.ous are two others. One of the objects of a lot of internet marketers is to make their blog entry hit the first page of Digg – in your case you only need to make your blog accessible to Digg so that your loyal customers can share the content with their friends. How do you do this? If you have a Wordpress blog installed, there are many plugins which allow you to share content on various social bookmarking sites, including Digg. One of our favorites is Bookmarkify, which can be downloaded from here.
Facebook – www.facebook.com
While you may not have heard of Twitter or Digg, you’d have to be living under a rock in order to not have heard of Facebook. Your kids are on it, you’re on it, your employees may be on it too much for your liking. Turn their interest in Facebook to good use in creating a page and group for your company on Facebook. Some businesses think that it is enough to create a page on Facebook – this simply isn’t the case. A page is static and doesn’t encourage any interaction between customers. A group allows you to have a Wall, Discussions and posted photos. Facebook is a place for you to be more casual than your website – post photos of your office, staff and other fun items to give your customers more of a sense of interaction. Interaction is what Facebook is all about.
We think you’ll agree that we’ve given you enough homework for one day by just checking out one of these technologies. Pick the one that is most appealing to you and get started today!
In today’s tough economy, many business owners are searching for answers on the best strategy to help attract new customers and grow their business. It’s no big surprise that consumers are tightening their spending due to the economy. However, most marketers will agree that a tough economy is precisely the time when marketing plays a key role.
A recent Epsilon CMO Survey published by MediaPost.com sheds some light into how marketing executives of some of the largest brands in the nation are dealing with this issue. The report states that many of the biggest brands are seeing a major shift in the marketing landscape. 63% of the 175 marketing executives surveyed see an increase in their spending on interactive/digital advertising while 59% report a decrease in traditional marketing spend.
As the overall marketing pool diminishes, the budget for interactive and digital marketing is dramatically increasing, while that for traditional marketing continues to shrink toward interactive, digital marketing.
Part of the reason for this increase in digital adveritisng and interactive marketing is that marketing executives are seeking accountablity and measurable results for their marketing dollars. Interactive marketing campaigns are able to provide real-time results which is a critical component of many marketing campaigns.
Does your company have a digital marketing plan to help you get this this tough economy? Rely on the experts at 1-Stop Marketing Solutions to provide you with the results-oriented online marketing strategy you need to improve sales and revenue.
