How To Know If You Should Advertise Somewhere Or Not
Locally advertising your business, such as through billboards and newspapers, is a great way to bring people to your business. However, advertising in the wrong areas only wastes money, and it may even risk your reputation if your advertising space is very bad for your business. Go through this checklist to make sure you are advertising in the right area.
Demographic Information
Most businesses sell products or services to a certain demographic. If you are an office supply store, for example, then your main demographic will be small business owners. However, this type of store can also be popular with regular homeowners, teachers and anyone else that needs office supplies. With this wide a demographic, it can be easy to advertise in most places.
However, some businesses have very specific demographics. For example, if you run a gym that specifically trains people in the onset of becoming seniors in the 65 to 70 range, then you should research the area very thoroughly. If you advertise in an area with few seniors, then you won’t make a dent in the market at all.
Research the area and make sure your main demographic is available. If it isn’t, then you probably shouldn’t advertise there.
Traffic
This is especially important for billboards, but it is important for any advertising method. You need to make sure that there is traffic that will see your advertising. Otherwise, no one will see your business information.
For example, if you take out a billboard, make sure it is near a busy road or one that gets a good amount of drivers. If you make an ad in the newspaper, make sure there are enough readers to justify the advertising cost. You want to make sure that people see your ad in order to get people into your business.
This is often very easy to find out. If you are make a location-based ad, like a billboard, then look at the road where the billboard is located. If you are make a print-based ad, then make sure it is attached to a magazine or newspaper with enough readers, or that your flyers are posted in good areas.
Competition
How much competition is there in the nearby area? There will most likely be a few businesses like your own in the local area, and there is nothing wrong with some healthy competition. But, competition can be a little too fierce if the area is full of the same businesses.
For example, if you are advertising a consulting firm, check to see how many similar firms are in the same area. If there are hundreds of firms actively advertising in the area, then you may want to avoid the location. There is probably a huge need for your business, but if there are already established businesses serving all the customers, then you may have a hard time making money.
However, you can counter this by doing something different. If you specialize in something with consulting, or if you can offer a better deal than anyone else in town, then you might be able to steal away some of the market. Make sure you have something that no one else can do, and you may be able to beat the competition.
Assess Risks
Before advertising in an area, you should consider the risks to your business. For example, if you are a software company, you should consider the chance that your software may become obsolete before your advertising is put up. If this happens, then you will waste money on the advertising.
Not only that, but you should assess any other risk factors associated with your business. While there is always the chance that unexpected risks will occur, you should do your best to ensure that your advertising works in the intended area.
Conclusion
Finding the best area for your advertising can be difficult. There are many factors to research, and you can end up wasting a lot of money without getting any revenue in return. However, if you look up these different factors, then you should be able to find the best area for your advertising. Never blindly advertise in an area because you like it, as this often leads to wasted money. Check these factors, and you should succeed.
About the Author: Tom Demers is an avid Tech blogger; writing about topics including windows domain controller.
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Small Business Cost Efficient Facebook Marketing Through Tools
Running a small business can sometimes leave little room for marketing, both in terms of budgeting and marketing efforts. One great source and channel to focus on in this case would be through Facebook. Now, how can you market your business in an effective way? One effective way is to use a Facebook campaign manager tool to take care of the job for you.
One such tool is Qwaya. This is one of only 30 companies around the world that has access to Facebook API, which makes it a reliable product which keeps your ads always updated to the latest standards. Let’s have a look how you can use a tool like this for your marketing.
First off, you can use Qwaya in order to create bulk ads. This features mean that if you provide a couple of different images, titles and bodies for ads, the system can create X amount of combinations that you can try out to see which one fits you the best. Many of these campaign tools comes in different packages and in Qwaya’s case you can with the premium account run up to 1000 ads per week.
One really important feature when it comes to Facebook ads, and any ads for that sake, is to conduct A-B testing. This means that you need to try out and tweak in order to find the best fitting ad for your products and ads. Qwaya offers an interface through which you can follow up on these ads and see how each of these campaigns worked out.
How do you know who should see your ad one their page? Well here is why A-B testing is so important! One suggestion is to try running the ads with a broad demographic group in mind. Based on this you can then see how is actually clicking in to your business fan page. More than often you’ll be surprised that presumptions don’t meet the real target group. This is what makes Facebook such an effective channel, as you have a large community full of potential customers to target directly.
Summary
Many companies have a strict view on how to market themselves through Facebook and often miss out to reach the right target audience. By using a campaign manager tool like Qwaya you are opened up to an cost efficient way of promoting your company and products. By A-B testing different ads and tightly following up on these, you’ll soon find your real audience and can significantly increase your Facebook presence and make a difference in sales. For more specific information about the features in Qwaya, please look at www.qwaya.com
About the Author: Craig Robinson works with content for Qwaya and is also a Facebook marketing strategist. Besides writing for this Facebook ads tool, he also tries to be as active as possible in forums about social media and social context.
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Photo Credit: linh.ngân
Lend Me Your Ear: Radio Commercial Tips
Thanks to the technology boom, the marketing landscape has evolved dramatically over the last 20 years. The Internet and social media paved the way for new “pull” marketing techniques, and there has been a shift in some of the more traditional “push” marketing channels, including radio.
Contrary to what you might believe, radio advertising isn’t going away any time soon. In fact, marketing funds spent on radio commercials increased by almost 11% between 2010 and 2011, according to Nielsen. And no wonder—radio reaches an estimated 57 million Americans each week.
Radio Commercial Advantages
Radio advertising has distinct advantages over other media. Audio advertising has been shown to elicit a stronger emotional response than visual, if done correctly. In addition, radio commercials are usually much less expensive to produce than television commercials, and the production time is much shorter, making them an economical choice.
Many radio stations now stream their broadcasts live on the Internet. This means radio commercials have the potential to reach a broader audience for the same cost.
Ride the Radio Waves to Success
Successful radio marketing campaigns take into account a number of key factors in order to maximize their effectiveness. If you’re new to radio advertising, you may want to try to incorporate some of the following into your radio marketing plan:
Know Your Target Your Audience
Radio has a natural system for reaching different audiences due to its ability to target a wide range of demographic segments. It’s up to you to determine which type of listener you’re trying to reach. Knowing your listener will help you find the best station to advertise on, and it will help direct the message within radio commercial itself.
Research How Radio Works
If you’ve never ventured into radio advertising before, you may want to do some research on the metrics used to compare various opportunities. The value (or effectiveness) of radio advertising is usually measured in terms of “cost-per-point,” i.e., what it will cost to reach 1% of your target audience. However, you’ll also want to weigh frequency (number of times your audience will hear your commercial) and reach (number of people who will hear your commercial), along with the cost of actually producing and running the commercial.
Make a Great First Impression
Radio Ad Lab research by Gallup & Robinson determined that successful radio commercials have strong beginnings that capture the audience’s attention in the first few seconds. Grabbing a listener with an emotional “hook” makes the listener much more likely to remain engaged throughout the entire commercial. All the more reason to incorporate a killer first line when writing and producing your commercial.
Say Your Name, Say Your Name
Research shows a strong correlation between the number of times a brand is mentioned and how well a listener is able to recall the brand name after the ad is over. Consider mentioning your brand or product name regularly throughout the script, and be sure to offer your audience a “call to action” within the commercial to drive them to buy.
Use a Great Voice
Your company’s CEO might have a great personality, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he or she should be the radio spokesperson for your brand. Because a commercial’s effectiveness relies on the listener’s emotional response, you may want consider investing in voice talent. Voice actors are specially trained to be effective and clear communicators who have the ability to emotionally engage their audience.
As you can see, radio commercials can be a worthwhile marketing investment. Just remember, the most effective commercials are well-thought-out, strategically placed, and emotionally engaging. If you aren’t already, consider making radio commercials part of your marketing mix.
About the Author: Sarah Stockton is an Outreach Coordinator for Voices.com, a site connects businesses with professional voice talents. She enjoys helping potential voice talent find their start in the voice industry.
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Email Marketing : Alive and Well
You can relax now. All this buzz about blogging. Blah-blah-blah-blah- blogging. Will she never shut up about the many great virtues of blogging? Probably not, but today I will give you all a break and tell you what you’ve been longing to hear for a while now: email marketing is still alive. Yes, it’s true, alive and well, and yes, converting leads to customers. I’ve felt this for a long while now, but with all the buzz about social media being the place to be, no wait, blogging, no wait, video marketing, no, wait once more —you get the picture, we seem to have thrown poor worn down email marketing under the bus, along with the VHS tapes. Its’ efficacy continues to be debated – I recently had the conversation with one of my Master Mind partners, so Kim this blog is for you! You can all take a deep sigh of relief now because if btobonline confirms what I’ve suspected, what with all of their crazy pie graphs and statistics, then we know it’s for real. I feel like I’m sounding facetious here, but honestly I’m not.
Not that email marketing isn’t without it’s pitfalls. But lets address them so that we can get past them: The Big 3 Pitfalls to a successful email campaign are:
Pitfall #1
Using a bad list and therefore preaching to the choir. I know I’ve said it before but it’s worth repeating here: If your current email list consists of your camp friends, your parents best friends, your orthodontist and your bank, you need to clean up your list. Not that Dr. Rubenstein won’t forward your email if you make it clear that he is to do so at the bottom, but lets be real here. Preaching to the choir is just that: a choir. What you need is a list of ‘Opt-in Permission Giving Interested in What You’ve Got to Say Because it Speaks to Them Personally’ potential clients, or at the very least folks who will gladly forward or “share” your email with potential clients, rather than your brother who is sick of these things already. Take him off your list please! If I can, as much as it broke my heart, you can too. So to re-cap: make sure you have an easy to find opt-in box on your website so that folks can sign up for your emails.
Pitfall #2
Not being clear on what you’d like your readers to do, once they’re done reading your brilliant information. All too often we forget that very important call to action. Do you want them to pick up the phone and call you, or ‘reply back if interested’? To share this on the social networks you’ve strategically placed in your signature as a live link? (You did place a live link for them to be able to easily tweet/like/share, didn’t you?)
Pitfall #3
Not targeting your email to a target audience. You can’t be everything to everyone. In email marketing especially, it’s very important to pick your target audience and compile content that will address it as a whole. Irrelevant content will be deemed as irrelevant and you know what comes next…..Mr. Delete, that’s who. Your email must speak to who you are targeting, right up front, and address a need. If you have several targets, it’s very easy these days to create email distribution lists that allow you to customize your content for each list. Make sure you’re doing that. More about that below.
Those are the biggest pitfalls, and as you can see, all are easily overcome with a little strategy. The benefits of emailing your blog, message, offer or newsletter so far outweigh the pitfalls it’s silly not to do it. Here are some of the biggest benefits. Let me know if you can come up with some more:
- Most businesses and your clients, unless they are 13 years of age or under are on their email all the time. Don’t let your high schooler or college kid fool you- even though they’re tweeting and Facebook chatting and texting all night and all day, even they are also on their email. They have to be, because us old fogies, their superiors-teachers, coaches, parents, tutors, department heads, etc. are all emailing them…not tweeting them. Your biggest audience is opening up their inboxes an average of 16 times per day, as per Btobonline (see report above)
- Email carries authority and an allure. As compared to the social sites, email still has a sense of urgency about it; we’re compelled to open it, right? Just as we’re compelled to look at road kill even though it’s disgusting.
- Email is cheap, and often free. Most of the big email distribution companies such as Constant Contact and Mail Chimp are free up until a certain amount of contacts. Aweber is not, but they’re fairly cheap, and they have great customer care where you actually get a live person on the phone when you run into a snag, rather than a “forum” to join and wait 2 days for someone to respond…or not. If you’re just starting out or a template look is not important, most servers now let you compile and “distribute” your lists as an option right from your out box, and many allow you to schedule them ahead of time.
- It’s not scary! We all email, we’re comfortable and for many of a “certain generation” it’s doable, and it sure beats tooting. I mean tweeting.
- Emailing converts. Again, see btobonline
The bottom line is that as much as we’d like to believe that when we write our blog or post an amazing offer on our website, the Gates of Heaven will open up, the angels will sing, and the world will be a better place because of our fab new content. Truth is, until we’ve really marketed that content via many channels on a continuous and consistent schedule-to the social networks, social news sites, the search engines, the bookmarking sites, commented on others sites, linked to authority sites, etc., we need emailing as an avenue as well to spread our word. It remains an excellent and easy- probably the easiest- way to get your word out, and can be a very effective piece of your marketing plan.
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How To Create A Realistic Marketing Plan To Generate Sales Within A Tight Budget
In a recession, it’s harder to come up with the money to spend on advertising, but this is exactly what you need to do. A business lives or dies by its sales. If you choke off your marketing department, your business will die. However, you might be in a tough spot right now. That’s fine. There’s no need to spend money like a Madison Avenue ad agency to get good results from your marketing efforts. Here are five ideas for you to revisit:
Business Cards – The Right Way
Most businesses use business cards the wrong way. They put their name, address, and phone number on the card. Wrong. A business card is a mini-marketing piece. It’s your opportunity to tell the world what it is that you do for a living. Don’t tell prospective customers what you are. Rather, tell them the benefits of doing business with you.
Since you don’t have much room on a business card, you have to keep your benefits short. Use bullet points, and consider printing the main benefits of working with you on the back of the card. For example, if you ran a restaurant, your business card benefit statements might look like this:
-No canned foods
- No microwave
- Everything made from scratch
- Leave satisfied or your money back
Most restaurants aren’t bold enough to print something like that on their fliers or business cards. That’s good for you. It lets you take advantage of the skittishness and laziness of your competitors.
Email List
Get an autoresponder service. Invite people to join your mailing list. Email lists are cheaper to maintain that physical newsletters. You can email customers or prospective customers about special promotions and deals that you are offering. You can also help customers solve problems through your email follow up campaigns.
Don’t just pitch your services. Try to get inside the head of your prospective clients. What do they want? What are their biggest challenges and fears? If you can show them, not just tell them, that you have a solution for them, then you will win their business.
Networking
This strategy takes some real initiative, but pays off in the long-run. Call up local businesses and tell them you are starting a networking club. The purpose of the club is to gather together the best and brightest businesses in your area and work together to offer everyone’s clients more value. This works especially well if you can offer something of value to the other businesses. Many businesses do protect their customer lists, and won’t want to share them with you unless you can offer their customers something extremely valuable.
Postcards
It’s more expensive than an email list, but it’s also a way to build your email list. Post cards are cheaper than using traditional direct mail sales letters but still very effective. Like your business card, you have to keep it short on a post card. List your best benefits and a good reason to join your mailing list.
You can get the names and addresses of potential customers from a local list broker (i.e. look in your local yellow pages or do a search on Google). Then, write up your ad copy and mail our your piece.
Facebook/Twitter
Facebook and Twitter are all the rage right now. Unfortunately, most business owners don’t know how to use these sites effectively. Facebook and Twitter are used mostly for social purposes, not for marketing. It’s a great way to gain insight as to what your ideal customers are looking for.
You can interact with your most loyal fans and even ask them directly what they like or don’t like about your company. In some cases, you can sell to people via Facebook or Twitter, but usually those sales will be to loyal and existing customers. Still, it’s free to set up a Facebook and twitter account. You’re limited only by your imagination.
About the Author: Guest post written by Liz Goldman and brought to you by Wonga payday loans experts.
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Is Quality Score Killing your Budget?
Quality Score might not be oblivious as many think. In the past, all the marketing Gurus were influenced by it. But somewhere along the road Quality Score got dethroned.
Quality Scores are one of the most important factors that decide your cost-per-click CPC and the position of your ads. Unless you wish to pay more for your campaign, increasing Quality Score should be your priority.
Before we can take a tour of how to increase your Quality Score, let us dive into the advantages of it.
Pros of High Quality Score
The Quality Score ranges from one and ten which is the lowest and the highest respectively. Greater the Quality Score, better the below mentioned benefits:
1. Higher position on SERPs: A high Quality Score provides the placement of your ads on the first page of SERP. This eventually leads to more visitors and finally higher conversion rate.
2. Low cost-per-click (CPC): You will have to spend less on your CPC with Higher Quality Score (QS). Lowering of your CPC results in more ads to be shown and finally more sales.
These two benefits are enough to provide your entire attention to the Quality Score of your ad campaign. Now, that the advantage of QS is known let us consider the ways to increase it.
Various factors are involved when the increase of QS is considered. Google, on the other hand measures QS every time your ad is clicked; which is to say your QS is updated frequently. Fortunately QS can be increased by following the ideas mentioned below:
Focused Ad Groups
Group of keywords sharing an ad text is known as ‘Ad Groups’. Focusing the ad group on a single theme will allow the written copy to be more relevant increasing the CTR. Luckily this isn’t as tough as you imagine. Create an ad text that relates to various keywords and there you have taken the first step to increase QS.
Include Keyword in your ad
Keyword(s) related searches will be attracted to your ads only if the keyword is included in your ad copy. Remember, Google’s aim is to create a better user experience and relevancy is the key for them. If the keyword is included in your ad, the user will find it enticing and result in a click. Google will be alerted of this action and your QS will be updated.
Let’ say you would like to take a vacation to a place where you can feast on wine. Therefore you search over Google for the term ‘Relaxing hotel Napa Valley’
Various searches are displayed.
Among one of the searches, an ad displays all the terms you had searched for. Naturally that would be the ad which you would click. This is how other users will prefer your ad if the description contains the keyword that has been searched.
Split testing
The overall goal is to increase the click-through-rate (CTR) of your ad campaign. Split testing is the perfect method to find out which campaign gets the highest CTR. Create two ad groups for the same product and run them for a month. Depending upon the CTR, find the campaign that shows more promise and slash the other.
Landing Page Optimization
Optimization seems to be important with respect to Quality Score. Upon clicking an ad, a user is generally directed to a landing page for conversion. If the landing page is deficient in important elements and loads slower, then your Quality Score is seriously at trouble.
Landing page optimization is a vast subject. However, for faster loading of landing page follow these tips:
1. A faster landing page is necessary unless you wish your users to get annoyed. Using too many images can be one of the prominent reasons. Cut down the images which seem to be unnecessary.
2. Secondly is the design of the page. If it’s too flashy and the graphical elements are more than necessary then the loading speed of the page can be seriously hindered. Reduce the usage of graphical elements and keep it plain and simple
3. In some cases your hosting provider might be responsible. Get a decent hosting provider.
About the Author: Richie Richardson is passionate about Social Media Marketing, SEO& SEM and Internet Marketing. He also writes for vodafone voucher codes and asda voucher codes. He recommends you to check them as their usage can provide huge discounts.
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Marketing for Small Businesses on YouTube
All small businesses these days require a web presence if they are going to get by on on anything but walk-in clients and still, internet presence is a vital source of proof of the business authenticity. Those who want to broaden their companies online also know that video clips of any sort are usually an advantage for websites. It stimulates stickiness or prolonged view time on the website, offers value and entertains the viewer if it’s at all good, and is positively loved by the search engines — Google, Yahoo, Bing, and all the particular niche engines.
Using YouTube Video to Promote Your Business
No dialogue of web video could be complete without mentioning the king of all video hosting sites, YouTube. If you’re swimming with the seals off the coast of South Africa, you should to know about the sharks. Well, suppose in your small business realm, you could be the shark as opposed to the seal? Look at the video below to find out how.
The video above was inspired by an article I read at marketingprofs.com concerning marketing on YouTube. It lists various business examples of businesses that creatively and innovatively exploited YouTube to get viral and dramatically increase sales.
I explained Executive Video Interviews on Skype for small business marketing, in which in 30 minutes you can make a refined business interview video from your own office or house without any business disruption. Find out how you can affordably cultivate branding videos for your business using this method, and take a look at the growing list of videos in our portfolio for happy customers.
So how are you using YouTube or online video to propel sales to your business? Comment your creativity below.
About the Author: Karl Walinskas is the CEO of Smart Company Growth, a business development firm that helps small to mid-size professional service firms builds competitive advantage in an online world of sameness. He is author of numerous articles and the Smart Blog on leadership, business communication, sales & service, public speaking and virtual business, and Getting Connected Through Exceptional Leadership, available in theSmartShop. Get your FREE LinkedIn Profile Optimization eBook & Video Course, Video Marketing video and course, or Mastermind Groups e-course & video now.
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Franchise Marketing Techniques to Increase Franchise Sales
For franchise owners it is important to continuously be growing your business. By expanding your business, you are coming into contact with more patrons and potential franchisees. Unfortunately, in economic recessions this task can prove to be more difficult. This is the reason you should always be watching for new franchise marketing techniques to pique the interest of new franchisees and increase your franchise sales. Eye catching franchise marketing can prove to be an important part of your business model. Below are five techniques to help grow your business.
In-Store Advertising
Although it may seem simple, you can use your own stores to broadcast your business. Franchise owners are able to use the popularity of their stores and the frequent visits from customers to promote new franchise locations. Each new store has the opportunity to further promote future franchisees, while bringing your products into the lives of new patrons.
Networking
Typically, when people think of networking, many think of finding a job. But in franchise marketing it is the opposite, you are seeking individuals who you can offer jobs to. By networking, you will be able to connect with new franchisees, while promoting your business and helping to create a larger employment pool. There are many different types of networking, ranging from email, to in person, to online on LinkedIn and other social networking sites. Knowing the right people can cause an increase in your franchise sales.
Media
The media provides another option to increase your franchise sales. Although different strategies apply, you can use both the local and national media to expand your business. The local media is an important tool for lead generation and allows you to target geographic areas where you would like to grow. National exposure provides the largest scope and can attract large amounts of attention.
Internet Marketing
One of the largest and most powerful franchise marketing tools is the Internet. Franchises are able to utilize online marketing tactics both through advertisements, social media and email campaigns. Companies can utilize both paid and organic marketing to connect with users.
Trade Shows
Tradeshows are another way to meet prospective franchisees. The event will provide an insight for potential franchise owners, while promoting brand awareness and product visibility. Tradeshows also provide an opportunity to promote new and current products and drive sales.
About the Author: For a franchise business to be successful, it is important to continuously work to find new leads and increase franchise sales. Franchise marketing is a proven way to generate new leads and expand your business. For more information, contact Upside Group Franchise Consulting today!
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How to Cut the Confusion out of Internet Marketing
Promoting a small business over the internet is the Wild, Wild West. Excessive choices, not enough time, and it all sounds like it will do the job, right? Here’s a way to muddle through the confusion and maintain your peace of mind while noting outcomes in internet advertising strategy.
Un-Scientific Poll Results
About a month back I ran this poll on how business managers are using internet marketing to drive their company.
The conclusions are a long way from scientific but tell us something. 44% of respondents, with a rather stable mix of ladies and gents and the bulk over the age of 30, not business novices, either don’t know, don’t use any or see mixed success. Blogging and developing good subject matter seems to have moved the needle in second. Due to the number of participants the quality of Social Media Marketing, PPC and Video as responses is statistically suspect.
In other words, most small business managers don’t know what works or haven’t yet discovered the key to that vault of internet gold. Nearly half of people responding are simply uncertain what the heck to invest in, if anything. Here are some suggestions.
Make a Plan
This comes off as condescending but it genuinely isn’t. I had a conversation with a couple of small business colleagues of mine a few weeks back on the PPC (pay per click) technique, and they were arguing about where to focus their efforts. These were two successful brothers who have done considerable amounts of traffic to their website with transformations to sales not being what they wanted them. I share their problem. One brother argued that they should pull all their PPC and discontinues blogging efforts and bore into editing their website around conversions. The other worried that ending content generation was not a very good concept, that a void would open up and it would be doubly hard to garner up that movement again.
My answer? Right!
Just remember this. Any monkey can purchase PPC on Google Adwords and bounce their traffic, and if traffic were the objective, that monkey would be in success city. For the bulk of us, it isn’t, traffic is a means to an end, and that generally implies more sales or some progress in the selling process (like they subscribe for your mailing list). Answer the question, “What exactly do I wish to happen due to my online marketing efforts?”, and be overly detailed. Get a reality check from those competent in the art, as in business mastermind group colleagues who are flourishing with online marketing plans. Now you have an apex of focus to start against.
Decide Who Does What, and Where
Contracting specialists can be costly to be certain, yet understand this. None of the tactics in the survey above are worth doing poorly. Each needs a lot of work. If you want to do them all on your own, you are fooling yourself. As a small business CEO, you really don’t have the time to accomplish them all on your own, so if you want to start small and try it alone, just choose one category, one technique within that category to excel in, and a secondary gadget to learn and do OK. That’s the choice you should make.
What do I mean? Well, let’s consider Social Media. That’s in vogue lately. There are so many social media websites available you cannot truly keep up with all of them. Websites like YouTube, by the way, are social media websites, along with a lot of Social Bookmarking outlets like Digg, etc.
For my business, consulting and professional services, it made sense to me to focus on LinkedIn and learn it to the maximum. So I did, and have become professional enough that business professionals pay me to get their traffic to their profiles up and the queries coming. As I blog a lot, Twitter made sense as a way to at the very least promote the blog, so I am learning and getting better at that. My approach is a bit like this:
- Classification: Social Media
- Master: LinkedIn
- Learn: Twitter
But Karl, there’s 600 million folks on Facebook? Yep! I know little about Facebook. Oh, I do have a profile and post my tweets to it using some automated devices, but I am not the best at it as a tool for my business. In fact, an associate of mine after seeing 3 consecutive write ups on my professional page remarked that he didn’t think it was conceivable to take the fun out of Facebook, but I discovered a way to do it. Facebook is mainly about photos and real socializing, joking, personal content for me to see a way through it for B2B success (mind that Facebook is getting manipulated initially in the B2C arena). I’m not saying given more time I couldn’t master and use Facebook for business technique and economic profit; I just have decided to allocate my energies elsewhere.
You can definitely leverage your time with selective outsourcing.
Outsource Properly
If you are going to outsource, there are loads of individuals around you can outsource too who are better than you, but precious few who will actually move the needle on your company Geiger counter. Check out this post I read and posted on LinkedIn by Zach Weiner on just that. This applies to more than Social Media; it applies to virtually any marketing method. Check people out, consider their references and work samples where they have been productive elsewhere. LinkedIn is fantastic for this, because LinkedIn recommendations are at least legitimate with links to those users (see my technique for receiving Great Recommendations on LinkedIn).
The advantage to outsourcing your advertising endeavors for your business is that you can take a well balanced assault given enough resources, meaning cash. You can get some results utilizing web video, make a social media explosion, boost traffic with PPC and even outsource your blog for fantastic content. Most advertising folks of any sort, comprising of traditional print, radio, TV types, will tell you that a mix is important to cover the bases of how people desire to be marketed to. Given, of course, that you don’t suck at any of the devices you use, else better to drop it.
A suggestion: Much like you don’t have the time to be perfect at everything, be a bit cautious of the person who claims to be a specialist in every bloody thing, regardless if it is web design or social media or anything else. It’s difficult to be great at all things. I do LinkedIn effectively, but wouldn’t think to hawk my services on anything else I am not a pro at other than technique on what instruments to use. I do web video, but a particular kind of web video called Executive Video Interviews that exploits my vocal talent and lack of technical acumen with all things high-priced video. If a person you are considering to outsource to is claiming he is an A to Z specialist (what you really want), be sure there is a firm with numerous employees who niche themselves in the particular tools of the trade.
Monitor Results and Adjust
The cool thing about online advertising is that it is much simpler to keep track of results than other means, which have constantly had a problem tying in concrete perks and have promoted the rationale that if it spreads your name out there, it must be doing ok. Everything that you get through the internet has stats you can check out (translating them can be a challenge) and make adjustments. For instance, I just cut down on and changed my Google Adwords campaign based upon what I realized that was working and getting clicked on, AND what areas on my website were receiving visitors without the results I hoped for. In only a few months I can figure out where the weak spot is and react to remedy it.
Just remember to keep your target in mind. For example, most internet advertising landing pages will have a set of pages that the user must click on to forge ahead in the process. This is done for no small cause to be able to oversee involvement degree of the sales process that is occurring. Statistics show that every subsequent page has its percentage of attrition, however those who run the gauntlet are now extremely certified customers that are more likely to transform to sales. Internet marketers can tell who got to the page, who ordered the free report, who downloaded the video, and consequently, who put a product to the shopping cart. This assists you as a business owner know that of your traffic to the website, a certain percentage take the next step in the sales process. If you want that to be higher, alter the landing page.
What are Your Methods to Navigate the Internet Marketing Seas?
Write your comments on what you’ve done to get the most out of your advertising, what devices you have settled on to become specialists or at least familiar with, and if you have been befuddled to this point, what you plan to do next. You’ll get a link back to your website and may get mentioned in a future article.
About the Author: Karl Walinskas is the CEO of Smart Company Growth, a business development firm that helps small to mid-size professional service firms builds competitive advantage in an online world of sameness. He is author of numerous articles and the Smart Blog on leadership, business communication, sales & service, public speaking and virtual business, and Getting Connected Through Exceptional Leadership, available in the SmartShop. Get your FREE LinkedIn Profile Optimization eBook & Video Course, Video Marketing video and course, or Mastermind Groups e-course & video now.
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