You Improve Online Brand Visibility by Using Offline Marketing Techniques
These days, businesses are now investing heavily in online marketing than compared to traditional marketing (newspapers, TV and radio) as the former can be easily measured and is often less costly than the latter one. Some of the widely used tactics in online marketing by businesses (irrespective of size) include social media, webinar, phone/video, blogging, search optimization, online publishing, email, online conferences, online advertising, and more. But this does not mean there aren’t still plenty of offline marketing strategies that can be a help and support your business’s brand name. In fact, highly effective marketing tactics tend to take advantage of both online and offline initiatives to create a multi-faceted, well-rounded approach.
Networking Approach
When it comes to networking, face-to-face interactions are still considered as a valuable form of it and it can help in driving online traffic to your website when your new connections are inspired to learn more about you and your business. Being able to put a face to the name can help to create a deeper sense of brand loyalty among your customers, so do not ignore the importance of a good old-fashioned handshake. You can make your own opportunities for in-person networking by joining organizations where your target audience is likely to be found. This networking can be augmented over time with audience at national conferences for those same organizations.
Seeking Print Publications
Similar to getting more brand value via SEO, you can get the same benefits through print publications as they are valuable in terms of offline marketing. For increasing your brand visibility and to showcase your expertise to your target customers/clients, you need to obtain relevant placements in industry magazines and journals. You can add print opportunities as part of your blogger outreach strategy and keep an eye out for opportunities to appear in both a web version and the print version of a publication. However, do not seek out print publications just for the sake of it. You need to be selective just as with your online publishers. Make sure that the publishers are relevant to your target audience and well-established source of information.
Direct Mail
Direct mailing is an effective lead generating tool even though they are less affordable than online marketing. Some members of your target audience may appreciate receiving direct mail as it seems more customized. And the practice of sending direct mail for marketing campaigns is still giving some benefits. According to a 2014 statistics conducted by Compu-mail, some members of your target customers may actually prefer direct mail communication to any other method of internet communication.
Print Ads
Just like to publish your articles and PRs in well-known publications, running print ads is another tactic for getting in front of more potential customers. However, it is significantly more difficult to track the ROI for print advertising than it is for online ads and they can often be more costly to run (such as Google Adwords), so you need to consider your options more carefully. If you want to make sure that the members of your target audience will see the ads, then you have to position them in highly targeted print publications. If possible, include a QR code or a URL in the print advertisement to send visitors to the landing page, which help you to track these ad campaigns effectively.
Cold Calls
Similar to direct mails, cold calls have that personal touch which often resonates with interested customers. Compared to emails, phone calls are more personal and demand an instant response which can be both good and bad. Before making calls to your target customers, make sure that you have concrete reasons for why you are reaching out and be mindful of the time of your call’s recipient. Also, cold calls are a great way to reach out to potential partners in marketing about a collaboration opportunity, like producing content together or hosting a webinar.
These are few offline marketing tips you need to know about so that they may become handy for you when developing brand awareness campaigns. You need know that offline marketing still gives benefits similar to online marketing when it comes to brand exposure, reputation, ROI and sales.
Four Marketing Skills One Should Possess In Order to Be Successful in 2015
If you are a small business owner or a seasoned marketer, you probably find it absolutely confounding to how best marketing strategies have changed in the past one decade. To make decisions, customers aren’t using catalogues, direct mail, radio advertising, or trade shows any longer. These days, businesses, irrespective of size prefer social media, mobile apps, content marketing and customized ads for targeting their potential customers. Also, these days, data is not a confidential asset that is closed, guarded by the IT department any longer either, and now big, data is now a necessary and accessible tool for making business and marketing decisions. If you want to build relationships and churn more revenue out of your business this year and beyond, here are the list of marketing skills you need to acquire as soon as possible.
Content Marketing
If you need to be successful from your marketing campaigns then you need content as it is considered one of the main building blocks of online marketing, and offline marketing. When it comes to online marketing, blogging is the widely preferred tool to attract quality web traffic to your website. Many industry experts say blogging is remarkably an effective tool for marketing campaigns, and according to HubSpot, there are 31 percent more bloggers these days than compared to 2-3 years ago.
Blogging is one form of content marketing, and there are content experts who are willing to develop a comprehensive content strategy. According to experts, if one has become content marketing professional, he/she must have a passion for writing, editing and articulating concepts in content. Also, one should have that ability to conceptualize and create visual-based content, developing relevant and real-time stories, and taking a cross-channel approach to telling brand stories.
Social Media
According to many surveys, social media is the most popular internet activity worldwide. When we look onto the year 2015, social media witnessed significant growth than it did three or four years ago. Among social media sites, Facebook is the most popular site with one billion active users worldwide. According to pewinternet.org, around 56 percent of adults have a Facebook account and it is seeing more growth in usage by adults in the near future. However, people are now using more than just one social media site they are using other sites also, such as Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, and Google+. So, marketers need to develop strategies for multiple social media sites.
Due to the recent changes in Facebook’s algorithm which focuses on reducing promotional posts on their users’ Newsfeed, and due to the shift in consumer behavior, marketers need to think more than just creating a really great Facebook post. They need to think as researchers, who know how to find the channels their target customers are using, and build a presence there. They need to focus less on channel-specific skill sets than the social and authentic aspects of social media marketing, and thereby you can reap benefits from your unique marketing campaigns.
Email Marketing
There are people in the marketing industry who say that email marketing is dead, but in reality it is not. According to Exact Target, nearly half of customers make at least one purchase per year based on email marketing, and some 56 percent of marketers plan to increase their email campaign budget in the year to come. While the best tactics of email marketing are likely to continue to change, exceptional campaigns are always highly informative, personalized, and relevant to your target customers. To be successful in inbound marketing, you need to develop the ability to intelligently categorize a list and target email messages accordingly.
Relationship Building and Networking
According to many industry experts, marketers are essentially connectors and really, they are in the business of connecting customers with needed products/services, and their clients with a steady stream of new revenue. For this reason, a marketer’s profession will be much more successful if they are able to build relationships both online and offline. Marketers require the ability to develop and project a consistent personal and professional brand online, via content and social media. Also, they require customer support skills to actively engage with prospects and customers in online forums. According to Content Marketing Institute, offline marketing methods are still effective in promoting brands.
Above four skills are must for those who are going for marketing as their main career, and other skills they need to succeed in included search engine marketing, lead generation, customer service, web technologies and user experience.
Five Tools from Google to Help in Promoting Your Brand Online
If you are running a startup firm or a local enterprise and want to boost your brand via online, then search engine Google offers a wide variety of tools to make it possible. Some of these services are popular among marketers and advertisers, while others are not-so-popular. What they all have in common is that they can make a big difference in how your business is seen online. Here are 5 tools from Google and ways to improve your efforts in boosting brand awareness online.
Google My Business
If you have a brick-and-mortar store, then the first thing to do is to set up an account on Google Places. This makes sure your business will show up more visibly in searches and on Google Maps. If you are running a restaurant, then your potential customers can instantly find about you via your site and other key information. As Google owns more than sixty percent of all online search traffic you don’t want to miss out by neglecting this chance at web presence. It is one of the easiest things you can do to increase your company’s brand promotional efforts for free.
Google Analytics
This is an excellent tool for conducting web analytics campaigns and it is free of cost. By using this service, you can take a good look at exactly how visitors are finding your site and how they are using it. You can analyze the performance of your Google ad campaign, in addition to a host of other customizable aspects. This is a powerful tool and leveraging it can provide you results that help your brand to grow. By using Google Analytics, you can see where visitors are dropping off your website and what sources are bringing in not only the most traffic, but also the high-quality traffic. There is a premium version of this tool priced at $150K but it is not required for most companies.
Google Adwords
When it comes mastering Google’s advertising program, it is not easy as you thought, and there is a whole industry dedicated to teaching professionals the ways of Google Adwords. However, it is easy enough to get started and testing it. With Google ads, you can set an advertising budget, for your business and then focus certain Geo-locations and keywords. Your ads will show up in search engine results. You pay on a per click basis, and you set the maximum amount you are willing to pay-per-click. There is lots of potential if you tune the settings to make sure the right kind of customers to see your ads.
Google Alerts
With Google Alerts you can keep track of competitors and other industry related news. You can specify the keywords you want results for, and then the search engine will send you links to the newest content containing these keywords. Keep in mind that some of the results will provide you a little value, but others provide you with instant insight into what others are doing online. There could be opportunities to take over that space with your own brand name. You can also get alerts foe whenever someone mentions your name, which is a great way to follow-up with gratitude or keep track of links back to your website.
Google Maps
Google Maps is a lot more helpful to brick-and-mortar businesses such as shops and restaurants as it helps in finding your store more easily than ever before. Google’s map service can be customized and shared with your customers, which is especially useful for businesses with various locations or establishments to show. For instance, most successful real estate businesses use Google Maps to show multiple listings. These maps can be embedded on your site and be a great interactive tool for users. It is a versatile tool that could be used to interest customers and offer an enhanced user experience.
Think With Google
It is like a digital cheat sheet in which it looks at the current marketing trends through case studies, articles and infographics. It is a great opportunity to find some inspiration and see what’s working. You can choose an email newsletter to stay up to date.
There are many other Google products that you can make use of and some of them include Gmail, Google Apps, Google+, Blogger, YouTube and many more. These tools will help you bring your company’s profile to where you want it to be.
Five Content Marketing Strategies that are Deemed Ineffective
If you are implementing online marketing campaigns for reaching out your target audience, then you must need useful and relevant content to attract their attention towards you or your brand. There are several ways in content marketing to attract a major chunk of online traffic to your site. There are businesses that give no importance to content and they develop content only to “impress” search engines, not their target audience. Some of them use strategies that are not so effective, or even redundant. Here is a list of content marketing tactics that are deemed ineffective in your brand promotional campaign.
Treating Your Content as a Sale or Promotional Material
When it comes to marketing or advertising campaigns, treating your content as a sales or promotional material won’t give you benefits such as ROI, high web traffic or conversion sales. If you want these benefits then you need to make your content richer and deeper so that your target audience will engage with it. You need to have a true goal other than conversion, and it must be bringing value to your audience’s lives. According to industry experts, content that is of good-quality enriches the customer and that should be how you should treat your content when you use it for marketing purposes.
Not Setting Goals Before Starting Your Campaign
If you are one to something, you need to set goals first and when it comes to setting goals for your content marketing campaign, far too many marketers do not set clear goals before starting their campaign. As such, they do not know where they should be focusing for. We all know that content marketing has a level, and in order to get past it, content audits and new ways to your content is required. Unless you begin setting goals from the start where you want your content marketing to take you, you are not going to know how well your marketing has done and if it can or should be improved. One of the most important things for a content marketer to do is setting clear goals and fulfilling them in the specified time frame.
Blog Comments
Blogging is one of the popular and important tactics in content marketing, and it still provides considerable benefits to marketers and businesses. Your blog gets a value when it gets comments from your readers and it is seen as an actual interaction. One thing you come to learn quickly is that the number of blog comments is another one of those misleading metrics since the actual amount of comments on a single post does not necessarily associate with the amount of leads or visits you get from the post. Although the amount of comments is a parameter that some advertisers use as a go-to, it really is not nearly an accurate description of a blog’s performance in terms of marketing.
Not Making Your Content More Customer-Centric
This is similar to treating your content as a sales material. You need to keep in mind that it’s your target audience that drives your earnings, and your content is supposed to attract and interest them. This means that you need to engage with your readers on a comfortable level, and here emotional is one of the most effective ways to get them interested in your product/service but it is not exactly the same for your blog/article. You have to treat your target audience with respect and not talk down to them and this includes making false claims in your content campaign, because when you do that you assume your audience just won’t check your references and contact you out of it.
Ad Impressions Counting
Sometimes ad impressions counters are pretty much misleading as their code can be done in a number of inappropriate ways for a content marketer to use. Some counters add one to the count every time the page loads, whether or not the ad was actually visible to the user. You can see where this can be an issue, since if the ad is not visible, it is really not making much of an impression. Looking at the number of impressions can give you a false sense of how many people are actually seeing your ad and in turn can make you think that you need to change the ad copy, when all you really need to do is change the location of the advertisement.
So, instead of spending your time on the above mentioned ‘strategies’, it could be put to use improving and streamlining your content marketing campaign. Thereby you can expect the results totally in your favor.
Seven Tools for Small Businesses for Managing Online Brand Reputation
When it comes to maintaining an online presence, it can be a bit daunting, especially for small and medium business enterprises. It can take a lot of time to maintain a website and visible presence on various social media channels. There are small businesses which find it hard to simply maintain a Twitter or Facebook page, to be active all times. As a result, they hire staff and assign the task of maintaining social media management to them. But in reality, most of the hired staff simply does menial tasks such as post here, tweet there and that’s that.
According to experts, brand monitoring and reputation management is one such element that is often forgotten by most businesses and marketers. Simply posting content on popular social media channels is not enough to keep your brand alive online, instead you need to find out what people is saying, or not saying, about you and your competitors. Here are seven tools that most ORM experts use regularly and are highly effective in knowing what your customers and others saying about your brand.
- Google Alerts – When you are focusing your ORM efforts on Google search then you cannot ignore Google Alerts as it is considered as the leader of all brand monitoring tools. You need to set up a Google Alerts account so that you will receive an email any time when someone mentions your brand or something related to your brand. Even though it is totally foolproof, it can be a good starter for small business. You can get the email alerts anytime when Google finds a mention, or set it for reports once a day or once a week. Also, using Google Alerts you can monitor common misspellings of your brand name or your own name, as well.
- Talkwalker Alerts – Few years ago, Talkwalker Alerts became a popular brand monitoring tool when there was a rumor going around in the marketing industry about Google shutting down its Google Alerts product, and a lot of people embraced Talkwalker Alerts as their primary ORM tool. It is being found that Talkwalker get more mentions than Google, and it can be considered as a good thing. You can use Talkwalker Alerts and Google Alerts and they will do a great job of any mentions on blogs/articles as well as in news stories.
- Mention – Mention offers both free and paid versions, and it does a great job of roaming around social channels for mentioning about your brand. If you are using the free version of the product, you are limited to getting only a certain number of alert notifications. Also, you will be run out of notifications each month because of how thorough it is, so if you want more features to your tool then go for the paid version.
- Hootsuite – For social management and engagement, Hootsuite can be used as a primary tool, and its notifications of mentions on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are really helpful. You can even set up a column/stream that searches specifically for your brand name apart from actual “@-mentions” on the microblogging site. Also, you can respond to mentions from right there in the Hootsuite dashboard or app. This tool also offers both free and premium versions, and it is up to you, choose the version best suited to your needs.
- Topsy – Topsy also offers both free and paid versions, and this tool is effective as the tools mentioned above in scouring social channels and news websites. As with any ORM software, the premium version of Topsy has some added features, but if you cannot afford or doesn’t need extra features, then you can go for the free version of this ORM tool. This tool allows you to quickly toggle back and forth between different ranges of date so that you can visualize trends over various periods of time.
These are some of the tools that help you in managing brand monitoring and reputation management on the web. If you need more help on successfully implementing this campaign, you can consult with experts who are willing to provide services as per your budget specifications.
Whether Beacon Technology has the Potential to Revolutionize Retail Industry
In the retail industry, there is a lot of debates going regarding the use of beacon technology and how it will bridge the gap between mobile technology and sales at brick-and-mortar stores. Before we go into detail, here is a little background about beacons and how they work. As the name implies, beacons are low-powered radio transmitters that utilize Bluetooth technology to monitor the proximity of smartphones and tablets. When a mobile device is in the proximity of a beacon and has the retailer’s app enabled on the mobile device, the beacon can trigger push notifications that promote special offers and useful content directly to the device.
It is for this reason why retailers so much interested in this technology. For instance, in January 2014, popular grocery stores such as Safeway sought the services from iBeacons which is beacon technology service provider by rolling out their Bluetooth LE beacons at the entry of over 200 stores. The primary goal of such campaign is to reach consumers who they know with absolute surety are walking in or right near a store in order to enhance the effectiveness of messaging.
According to a January 2014 study conducted by Swirl, about 80 percent of customers are more likely to engage with retailer mobile apps while shopping if they receive notifications on deals and discounts. Also, another 62 percent of survey respondents will engage if the content is personalized to their likes and preferences. It seems that more and more retailers are trying to ‘experiment’ with this technology.
Sephora Rolled Out a Beacon Trial
French cosmetics brand, Sephora rolled out a beacon trial a few weeks ago in their store in San Francisco, during which they found that 82 percent of customers opted in to receive messages. According to Swirl’s study, 65 percent of 1000 surveyed smartphone owners would rather learn about a promotion from their mobile over a sales associate. Furthermore, 79 percent of users who read or opened push notifications related to shopping made a purchase. By investing in beacon technology, the cosmetic brand is letting customers personalize their shopping experiences with primary information coming from a trusted source, their mobile device. Also, the representatives of customer service department serve as bountiful sources of supplemental knowledge that reinforce purchasing decisions.
Target can Enhance Mobile Experience to Next Level
Before the 2014 holiday season, popular retailer Target tied to Point Inside to develop a detailed, in-store maps on their mobile app to help customers navigate the aisles. If you have the app on your smartphone, you can add a power bank to your cart and it will provide the option to find the product in a nearby Target. It is at this moment where beacon technology could take this already good mobile experience to the next level. Here we can imagine a situation in which you enter the store and you would like to have received a push notification that the item in your cart was still available and could be found on the 3rd floor. Once the power bank was located, a beacon could relay information about what devices it was compatible with or send you a promotional offer for a similar category or product.
Apple Watch Creates New Opportunities for Retailers
With the imminent arrival of Apple Watch into the consumer market, this creates a new exciting opportunity for both marketers and retailers. Here, instead of broadcast notifications you can provide more customized content to customers via Apple Watch. The customer has the power to choose what apps get their attention, leaving it up to the retailer to personalize the proper shopping experience.
With more wearable devices coming this year, many companies have already started this process. Popular news broadcaster CNN recently updated its mobile app so that readers can select twelve news categories they would like to be notified on their smart watches. Furthermore, they have scaled down their headlines and teaser copy so that the smart watch acts as a path to their mobile app where more in-depth content exists such as video and live streams. Many industry experts say that Apple Watch can be synchronized with beacon technology. Before the wearable device launched onto the market, Marsh Supermarkets had already announced its plan to send recipe ideas and shopping lists directly to shoppers’ wrists.
Currently, beacon technology is still in the infant stage and with backing from technology giants such as Apple and Samsung, this technology can be improved further with the inclusion of mobile technology, thereby enhancing the in-store experience of customers.
Three Strategies for Maximizing Website Conversion Rate
For businesses such as online retailers, conversion rate is a crucial factor that determines the growth of revenue from their business. These businesses heavily invest in online marketing campaigns to attract quality traffic from search engines and social media sites to their website. They expect the majority of this traffic will convert into sales by purchasing products displayed on their site. Getting conversions online is not easy as thought and just like any other business, it is essential that your customers feel confident in your business to make a profit. Whether you are selling products or selling a service and trying to generate leads from your site, the same principles coincide.
Here you need to build up consumer confidence by following five important strategies given below. By adhering to these 3 conversion optimization strategies, you will build confidence of your consumers and generate leads and conversions you are looking for.
Making Your Site Professional-looking and Navigation-friendly
When you visit a website and leave it a few seconds later, it is called a “bounce” and it is usually because of the way the website appears to the site visitor. This can be due to the usability of the site or user experience in designing a site specifically for your target customers. Either way, there are people who study conversion rate optimization (CRO) for a living. When you own a website that is professional-looking with navigation-friendly features, then you will find that site visitors perceive your business as a professional enterprise which they can put on their confidence. Your website visitors will understand precisely what they need to do and how to find the information they want, if the website is navigation-friendly. Yu need to ask yourself the following questions to figure out whether your site is navigation-friendly.
- Does my site possess clear navigation links that lead to relevant and useful content?
- Does my site have a clear call-to-action?
- Is the opt-in box in my site provides a free offer that is appealing to customers?
- Whether the opt-in box is easy to find and above the fold?
- Is there a shortcut way other than the Menu bar that will lead to my products/services and “About Us” page?
Once you have got your website designed as per your customers’ needs, it will develop confidence in your business, thereby attract more visitors to your site, and more conversions.
Incorporating Testimonials in Your Site
When it comes to building customer confidence in your business, you cannot underestimate the value of word-of-mouth marketing. Also, when it comes to getting more conversions, what other people have to say is much more significant and effective than showcasing your work. You showcase the evidence of satisfied customers on your site, then more customer traffic will pour into your site and will convert. For realizing this goal, you need to ask your ‘satisfied’ customers to write a short testimonial for you to post it on your site. If most of the customers are really happy with what you have done for them, then they surely write a testimonial that positively portrays your business. You need to ensure that these testimonials are specific and show results. You can even take it one step further and ask for video-based testimonials.
Why Your Products/Services are Different Your Competitors
When it comes to purchasing a product, people do not care about its manufacturing jargon. They only care about how this product will solve their problems. When a potential customer visits your site, they expect three things that need to be satisfied:
- Can your product/service really solve my issue?
- Why is your solution is different and better than everyone else’?
- Whether your product/service is affordable to purchase?
Before selling your product to a customer, you need to think about why your site is different from your competitors and how it will increase sales from your target audience. Here you need to think as a customer, ask questions such as what a customer want to have and how he/she will use your product. Also, you need to figure out why your product is the best one to solve customer’s problems, and lay that out for them.
If you find difficulty in developing CRO strategies for increasing sales from your sites, you can consult with experts who will offer cost-effective and client-specific solutions that will fulfill your marketing campaign requirements.
