Coaching For Success
Posts tagged Marketing Strategies
Two Kinds Of Internet User
Sep 1st
Two Kind Of Internet Users
There are 2 general types of internet users: those looking for information and those looking to buy. We all wear both of those hats at different times and sometimes something is so compelling we put our buying hat on when we thought we only wanted to wear our research hat. For purposes of most effective optimization you want to make sure you are targeting both groups of people.
You want researchers because catching them early in the process exposes them to your expertise and creates you as a possible future solution for them. You also want buyers because that’s your bread and butter.
Which group you attract is determined by your keywords. You want keywords that call out to researchers and you want keywords that reach out and grab the buyers.
It’s important to consider commercial intent when selecting our keywords. A great tool that can be effective for this is http://adlab.msn.com/Online-Commercial-Intention/
Facebook For Your Internet Business
Aug 12th
Today is a small help guide for those who want to use Facebook but have not yet started. Facebook is the fastest growing social networking site on internet. It has over 500 million active users. These users are from multiple geographies; have different backgrounds; and have different needs. This provides business operating worldwide, a chance to reach out to them.
Many businesses large and small are actively reaching and engaging customers through Facebook and the Facebook Platform. It is indeed useful for Internet Business Marketing. This post looks at the features within facebook which can add value to your internet business promotion.
Facebook Page For Your Internet Business
Facebook Information Tab
To start with you will need a facebook page to give your internet business an identity among millions of online business pages. A typical facebook page has features that allow you to showcase your business to the online communities. You should add all your content to your profile in the form of ‘status updates’, ‘video links’, ‘images’, ‘events’ and many more. This facebook page is the hub of all the activities you do to promote your business.
You can add fans on this page that will be able to see your updates as and when you post them. Whenever a visitor ‘comments’ on or ‘likes’ your activity, it becomes visible to the fans of that visitor. And hence a viral effect is created and the visibility of your page and your business increases exponentially. The increas in visibility helps to increase Search Engine rankings which is great for your Search Engine Optimisation effort.
Apart from that, you can post ‘polls’; add ‘contests’; create ‘quizzes’ and many other custom built applications to promote your business in more effective manner. Following image shows a business page on facebook.
Facebook Advertising Platform
Facebook Advertising
Facebook also provides you the platform to advertise your products. However, these ads are not free and facebook charges usually on the basis of ‘cost per action. This platform helps you to decide the target audience and the budget requirements. You can connect with more than 500 million potential customers. These advertisements range from simple text-based ads to high resolution images. Moreover, you can change your budget on daily basis. Hence this platform is easy and cost effective. The image below shows the interface of facebook advertising platform.
Sponsor Facebook Applications With Ads
Facebook has number of applications for ‘games’, ‘music’ and other ‘leisure’ activities which are accessed by different audiences. As a business, you can choose the applications which are mostly accessed by your target audience and place your advertisements on them as a sponsor. The sponsored application with ads is shown below.
Facebook Sponsor Ads
Integrating Facebook With Your Website
If your website is an important channel to you, Facebook Connect can help you amplify engagement. You can do this by adding Facebook ‘Share’ links to your website. This tool is known as ‘Facebook Connect’. This way you can get your webpage URL visible across the facebook users. The sharing enables you to share website content with friends, and publishing feed stories to generate traffic. Following image shows how Facebook connect works.
Interacting With Your Customers
Most important part of internet business marketing is the two way interaction with your customers. Facebook provides you the facility of opening up the discussion threads. You can initiate any topic related to your business. You can also ask for the feedback from your customers. Continuous engagement with your customers goes a long way in building long term relationship with your customers.
Integrating Facebook With Your Internet Business Website
As we have seen, facebook is an excellent platform to spread the buzz about your internet business products and service in the market. If it is integrated with other promotional tools then it is bound to produce excellent results in terms of helping to provide new customer leads for your internet business.
Building a Great Business Brand Through Blogging
Aug 11th
Continuing on from yesterday article on ‘Engaging your blog readers’ todays post is about building your brand through your blog. Blogs started as medium to share personal experiences. But they quickly became a tool for self-promotion. A popular blogger became a known name in the vast community of bloggers and readers. In marketing terms, they became the ‘brand’.
So blogs are, in a way, tools for building a ‘brand’ in the market. If you are going for internet business marketing, then your blog establishes a brand for your business. We will discuss some basic steps you can take to build a brand through your blog. It is assumed that you are writing a blog to promote a business and not for expressing personal incidences.
‘Pre-requisites for your brand’
Before you go and start writing a blog about your business, you need to have a unique identity which stands your brand apart. A ‘logo’ for any business is useful to help people recall the brand.
You must have a well designed business ‘logo’ which obviously should not be of made of copy and paste objects and should be original. A bit of creativity can help here and there are many sites online where you can get a cheap but professional logo made for or hire a contractor on www.freelancer.com.
Apart from your logo, you can have a catchy ‘statement’ or ‘one liners’ to describe the objectives of your business blog. You can use these to create a recall effect for the brand.
‘Use creativity in presenting the content’
You should try different things while presenting your business blog as a face for your brand. Describing your business in simple texts or images is not a big deal. Your objective should be to catch the attention of the visitors within the first seconds. ‘Controversial taglines’, ‘catchy slogans’ and ‘witty remarks’ grab immediate attention.
If you are giving great ‘offers’ along with your products or particular brands then you must highlight them in your blog by using good pictures and texts. You can make elaborations by using charts, diagrams or infographics.
‘Personalise your blog’
You are establishing your brand identity though your blog. This calls for your original thinking. You are free to express anything, the way you want to express it. The best way to catch the attention of people visiting is to freely express your thoughts.
You must develop a unique style of writing and expressing creativity. You can add personal business or professional pictures and videos to add life to your blog. In essence, you must not shy away from establishing your personal identity among millions of online users.
Visitors to your blog should be addressed in a way that makes them feel that you seem to talk to them directly. This is the best way to connect with the audience and getting them engaged in your content.
‘Regular promotion of the brand’
Promotion of your brand does not end with your blog. You need to publicise it. Social networks like facebook and twitter are great platform through which you can create your brand visibility among millions of users and communities.
They are the places where you can initiate discussions and can get instantaneous responses from the users. They are the best ways to expand your network and hence promote your brand.
A brand is something that makes you stand ahead of your competitors. It is the brand that instigates passion in you. Blogs are platforms where you can express and share this passion.
’6 Ways To Generate More Web Traffic’
Aug 3rd
Getting Your Web Traffic Up Is Not Easy
The number of visitors viewing your websites is termed as ‘Web Traffic’. Web traffic is important for your internet business as the more number of visitors your site gets means the more number of prospective customers and with that the probability of getting more sales for your products or services.
The key to gaining the maximum possible potential customers is to aim for ‘Targeted traffic’, which is the set of visitors who are more likely to be interested in purchasing your products and services. A lot of market research needs to be done to find out where to find your target audience and then what would potentially attract them to your business (This is a big topic and needs a post to itself). However once you have identified your target group, you can use various methods to attract them to your website, this post looks at some of those methods.
‘List Builders’ and ‘Traffic Exchanges’
There are online list building sites which can potentially help you to generate random leads. These websites also work mutually with other websites such that they e-mail their lists in return for receiving mail from other members on their site. This is a great way to build up your list and generate traffic. In order to get maximum benefits from such internet marketing services, you must keep mailing to the people in your lists on a regular basis. If you decide to take this approach try to look for companies to do this with that have complementary products and services to your own so that the list exchange is beneficial to both yourself and to them.
A ‘Traffic exchange’ is a process by which two or more websites mutually agree to exchange the lists of their visitors. This provides new leads to both sites without incurring any extra costs. The rules set by these websites are based on the number of credits earned by viewing a site. You will not get traffic to your site unless you earn credits either by surfing, buy credits, OR referring other users to their site.
‘Social Media and blogs’
Social media is a powerful tool for promotion. Various social networking sites like facebook or twitter provides you the exciting features for interaction in innovative ways. The features include building your own online profile, adding new friends, attract more like-minded people by sharing interests or comments or any type of discussion. This continuous interaction facilitates long term relationships with people which then makes it easier for yafter ou to advertise your products or services to these people through these sites.
Another easy way to both build trust and long-term relationships is through ‘blogging’. WordPress is a nice simple blog platform which is feature packed and has facility to add widgets, images or videos which can help you showcase your content in blogs. Blogs also help to improve your page ranks in search engines as they enhance your visibility. However, the basic rule for using blogs is for great, informative content to attract visitors so in essense try not to use it to pitch your products or service.
‘Article marketing’
The best way to establish your reputation as an ‘expert’ in your business niche is to showcase your talent through articles, publications and papers. If you are providing informative content by which there is value addition to the users, they will trust you for giving them information on the topic of their interest. This method can we utilised on your actual website by providing informative information there or by using external sites which provide for article submissions like- EzineArticles, MarketingCheckpoint, NewFreeArticles.com etc. They all provide you a resource box along with the article space. In the resource box you can mention your website link and hence promote it.
‘Forum Marketing’
Apart from blogs and social networks, there are many other forums where you can interact with other people and learn from them. These forums are great way of building long term relationships. You can build your reputation in forums by regularly posting informative and valuable content. Forums allow you to advertise yourself in an indirect way through use of ‘signatures’. So, you can put your web-site link in the signature that appears at the end of every post which is there for all to see. Some of the quality forums are – MarketingCheckpoint, Money Maker Group. Dream Team Money, OnlineMLM.com and Warrior Forum to name a few.
By utilising some of the above mentioned methods you can help yourself to generate more web traffic to your website which will help improve the chances of your internet business getting more customers.
Need V Desire Marketing
Jul 24th
We are told in almost everything we read to do with sales and marketing to target a customers needs and then fill it. All the stats we collect tend to be to this end and rightly so however sometimes this approach can lead you to make some false assumptions which could cost you time, money and potentially lost revunue. This post looks at whether need or desire should be catered to.
Many times when we target customers through need we sometimes miss signals that clearly raise there head for the type of customer we should be looking to attract. This problem normally starts with the perception of which niche to market to and how. Generally most people go into their business with the preconcieved notion of who their customer is or who has the need and thus market to what they believe the need to be rather than who has the desire to buy.
Needing something is not the same as desiring something or desire to buy something i.e. I needed a laptop but the new ipad was far more desirable, it was new, hip and cool, hence my purchase of the final product was based on my desire. My desire outweighed my need, the ipad was sexy the laptop well, it was a laptop, functional in everyway but it was the wow factor of the ipad that made me buy it.
The difference was very clear and this is what you need to identify in your marketing and sales process, it is the desire to take action that you really need to target not the need to buy. How you choose your market is very important as this is the first step to getting this process of need V desire correct. If you get this part wrong it does not matter how good your product or service is, how great your content is – people pretty much will not buy what you are offering.
If you get 100 people to your site how have a need and only 1 person purchases you have not achieve a good sales to advertising ratio, however if you target the people who are willing to take action through desire to buy and only 10 of these people come to your site and 2 buy then you have achieve a good ratio. In essence desire to take action can potentially outweigh need to purchase.
To help yourself understand this process you need to do your research slightly differently instead of looking for who needs something, look for information on how are buying similiar products or services, how often they buy, who they are they buying from and getting access to this information is not hard regardless of whether you sell your products or service online or offline.
By doing this type of research you can position your business and marketing in such a way as to take advantage of desire rather than need. However your best bet would be to target desire and need as this is possible to do but using slightly different marketing campaigns for the same product.
By taking advantage of the desire to take action instead of only targeting need you are more likely to have a profitable and highly successful marketing and sales campaign.
