Small business are always looking for the next “must have” in online marketing, but are they utilizing the previous “must haves” effectively? I came across this great article by Eric Groves about the 3 must haves for small business
This might seem like an outdated idea, but email marketing continually delivers the highest ROI for any marketing method. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing delivered $43.62 for every dollar spent in 2009. Email marketing allows you to communicate your expertise, your offerings, and your brand, thereby building trust and recognition
2. Online surveys
What is the best way to serve your customers? Maybe you should do an online survey about it. Online survey is a great tools to glean valuable information about your customers’ satisfaction, experience with your business, or feedback on your product.
3. Your social network of choice
Countless small business owners have made valuable connections, including new customers, through their participation in social networks. Participation is the key to success when it comes to social media. Business need to establish themselves as a resource by sharing their knowledge through social media.
Twitter recently announced that a select group of small business can begin using its self-serve advertising platform to create promoted tweets and promoted accounts
What promoted accounts does is suggest a brand’s Twitter account to users with interests similar to those who are already following the brand. Promoted Tweets take an existing tweet from a brand’s account that is inspiring a lot of engagement and promotes it in search results. Small business pay only when their account is followed or someone engages with their promoted tweet
I feel like this a great opportunity for small business as Twitter has grown massively over the last couple of years. If successful, Twitter’s self-serve advertising platform can be at the same level as Google Adwords. An eMarketer estimate suggests Twitter’s overall revenues — most of which come from advertising — will total $259.9 million this year.
I’m currently reading this amazing book called “Brand Media Strategy” by Antony Young. In it, there is a section on online measurement tools for brands.
Below are only 3 of many great tools he mention:
1. HowSociable: Measures brand visibility across social web. It tracks a brand across thirty two social media metrics and provides a visibility that can be used to compare one brand to another
2. Social Mention: A social media search platform that aggregates user-generated content from across the internet into a single stream of information. It allows you to easily track what people are saying about you, your company, a new product or any topic across the web’s social media landscape in real time.
3. Twitalyzer: Evaluates the activity of any brand in Twitter and reports on relative strength, signal-to-noise ratio, favor, passion, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media.
A lot of my friends have been sharing this video on Facebook about a website called Dollarshaveclub.com. Take a look,
Isn’t it the greatest start-up commercial you have ever seen!!! The video has garnered 3 million views in just one week, while competitors like Gillette only have 150,000 views on their brand new Super Bowl commercial. What’s astonishing is that Michael Dubin (CEO/Pitchman) only spent $4,500 on the commercial (Macclean’s 2012). On the first day, the company’s website was broken, because so many people were trying to log in and sign up. That’s what I call an awesome return on investment.
I guess a good concept and an amazing pitch seems to do the trick… (Taking notes)
You might be wondering how I came across such a site/service. It was all thanks to my roommates Kevin and Keith. Kevin has been using K9 Web Protection for awhile now. He activates the service during midterm and final periods. Basically, K9 filters and blocks whatever websites Kevin gets distracted from (ex. Facebook, Youtube). Kevin sends the password to the filter to my roommate Keith via email and ask him to give it to him after midterms or finals. Apparently it works for Kevin.
After doing some research, I realize K9 Web Protection is great for parents wanting some control over what their kids are viewing on the internet. The program also scans and protects your computer from malware and spyware.
Fact: I never personally thought blogging would be enjoyable
Fact: I was wrong
I always wondered how blogging could help small businesses bring in more customers and sales. I thought small businesses added a blog to their website for the sole purpose of SEO, but data from Hubspot’s annual State of Inbound Marketing study says I’m wrong.
The data shows the percentage of respondents with a company blog has grown from 48 percent to 65 percent from 2009-2011. Even more important, 57 percent of those using company blogs say they’ve acquired a customer through a blog-generated lead, an increase of 11 percent since 2010.
It also turns out there is a direct correlation between blog post frequency and new customers acquired.
According to the data, the percent of companies who acquired a customer through their blog breaks down this way:
33 percent: Blog less than monthly
49 percent: Blog monthly
72 percent: Blog weekly
76 percent: Blog 2-3 times a week
78 percent: Blog daily
89 percent: Blog multiple times a day
With cost being minimum and the potential to acquire more customers, its a win win situation! Consistent blogging gives small businesses an opportunity to build credibility with potential customers, to build up your authority, to create news around your brand/product/service.
My dad has been pestering me for months to help him use his free $100 from Google to run a Google Adword campaign for his small business and when he heard I was learning about it in E-Marketing class, I basically had no choice, but to help.
Now, my dad actually has a computer technician degree from early 2000′s, but have since ventured into other interests. My dad’s broad knowledge of Google Adwords were that you choose a couple of search words, write a small ad, pay, and Google will take care of the rest. However, when I walked him through the Adword’s interface and the basic terms, he just became plain confused, which means he just completely handed the project to me.
This got me thinking…is Adwords too complicated for an average small business owner to navigate?
I found this great blog entry by Robert Brady from small business trends and he explains that even though Google Adwords have got more complicated in the past 10 years, success still depend on the basics.
Recently, I have notice many big brands are using Twitter Hashtags to promote their brands, products, or concepts.
Adidas recently spent $120,000 on a Promoted Trend purchase on Twitter, announcing the signing of 2011 Heisman Trophy winner Robert Griffith III. They used the Hashtag ”#RG3″ to point people to a landing page, where a 51 second video can be view.
Last year during the Super Bowl, Audi included the Hashtag “#ProgressIs” at the end of their 60 second Super Bowl ad. Viewers who use that hashtag and the URL audi.us/ProgressIs in their tweets, which will enter them in a contest with the grand prize of a trip to Sonoma, California, for a test drive of the Audi R8 supercar. Audi will also award $25,000 to a charity on behalf of the grand prize winner.
The big questions: Are Twitter Hashtag campaigns really worth doing? Are their any tangible returns? Can all kinds of businesses benefit from it?
1. Find your prospects with the hashtag: Find your prospects by finding the hash-tags used in their industry.
2. Monitor conversations with the hashtag: Scheduled conversations, called Tweet Chats, occur on twitter with the use of hashtags. You can listen in to weekly chat about topics affecting your business.
3. Build a targeted audience with the hashtag: By adding targeted hash-tags to tweets, you’ll be found, followed and added to twitter lists. People who care about your product or service will find you easier.
4. Increase exposure with the hashtag: If it’s just exposure you’re after, and you don’t expect for people to follow you, using a trending hashtag will get you in front of a larger audience. You see what’s trending at a particular geographic area. By adding that to a tweet, you will get exposure among the hundreds of twitter users paying attention in that area
5. Send traffic to your website with the hashtag: An effective way to convert tweets into leads, is by sending twitter traffic to where they can convert. If your web site has visible calls to actions that will capture emails and contact information, send twitter traffic to your web site by adding a link, with the appropriate hashtags.
I personally feel like Hashtags are great for brands awareness, but not necessarily for sales. However, when Businesses start figuring out how to combine both, they usually have a winner.
Prediction: Robert Griffin III will be the 2nd pick in the draft, the Redskins will move up and get him.
A couple years ago, a website was the must have to run a successful business. Now a days, Google Adwords has become the must have. Adwords is awesome! However, if on-line advertising is so popular and great shouldn’t companies be moving more of their TV advertising budget to on-line?
I found this great article by Jack Krawczyk of iMedia Connection. His answer to my question is based on two things: brands and users’ psychology.
Even though on-line advertising is gaining popularity, TV has been growing over the past few years too. Brands have been using GRP (gross rating points= multiplying the frequency of a 30-second ad by the percentage composition of your target audience in the program block for which you are buying) to help media buying for years. However, many on-line marketers argue that GRP is an imprecise measurement and now a days, more people spend more time on-line.
Game changing fact: Over the past 15 years, time spent watching TV per person in the U.S. has gone up by nearly 25 percent
Brands are stubborn. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The audience for TV advertising are still alive and apparently kicking. However, I feel change is on our horizon especially with the computer generation (people in their 40-50′s) getting older. Today’s world is all about convenience and on the go. People are starting to use PVR’s to watch their favorite shows whenever they want (fasting forwarding the ads) and watching on-line. I believe Brands will start to soon realize the great return on investment they can be getting with on-line advertising especially the simplicity of targeting specific target audiences, regions, and even countries.
Brands and Business will have to allocated more their budget to online…but just not yet
Have you ever wanted to be as successful as Kobe Bryant?
Nike recently came out with a Youtube campaign for Kobe’s new shoes (Kobe VII’s). Now, instead of promoting the shoe, Nike wanted to promote a lifestyle. The “Kobe System” teaches you how to achieve success over success!
When the teaser videos first came out on youtube, I had no idea what the “Kobe System” meant. However, it was quite obvious from the beginning it was going to be something huge. Nike got some of the top athletes and successful people in the world to be in this campaign. Here is a list of everyone in the videos: Aziz Ansari, Serena Williams, Wong Lee Ho, Jerry Rice, Tony Ribbons, Kanye West, Richard Branson, Landon Donovan, Larry Fitzgerld, Hope Solo, and Paul Rodriguez.
When the seminar Youtube videos came out, it became a little bit more clear. These videos included Kobe Bryant teaching these successful people in the world how to be even more successful. These 7 videos were hilarious and have garnered over 1 million views each on Youtube.
I believe Nike was brilliant in it’s execution of the Youtube campaign. They didn’t release all the videos all at once, which left us Youtube watchers craving for more and they did not release the ad on T.V. until after the Youtube videos were posted. The big question is does the videos make me want to buy his shoes? a little bit. Does the videos make me like him a little more? Yes.
bzhou4s