Online marketing solutions

Now raise your hands if you know the difference between SEO and SEM that is if you know what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and SEM (Search Engine Marketing) are to begin with. I’m sure many of you out there are looking a bit lost now, and really it isn’t your fault. We have been using these terms interchangeably for awhile now and it’s time to stop and end the confusion.
SEO is actually a smaller aspect of SEM (Search Engine Marketing). SEM includes everything that is all the methods to promote a website on search engines, a form of online marketing. SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the technique of promoting a website in natural or organic search results using key words.

The one, two, threes of SEM

Organic/Natural SEO

This method naturally improves a website’s rankings on search engines. The trick is using specific key words or phrases that represent the services offered on a company. The words should be used pretty often on the website itself within articles, links, headlines, and more. Those who are experienced in SEO can really improve a website’s results. SEO brings more readers to the site, which will bring more clients.

Using Local search

A local search uses SEO strategies in conjunction with info on state, city, and zip codes. This particularly helps users searching for local businesses. This can also include local directories, Google’s directory, profiles, and more.

Pay Per Click (PPC)

PPC is advertisements on search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, MSN, Bing… The advertisements will appear under the sponsored results each time a user types in a key word that relates to the subject of the ad. Advertisers only have to pay for users that click on their websites, explaining the name “pay per click.”

Social Media Marketing (SMM)

Social Media Marketing is the use of Internet applications to communicate and market yourself. This includes blogging, Twitter (micro-blogging), using social networking sites like Facebook, Myspace, LinkedIn, and YouTube to advertise yourself, your business, or your services. Set up a profile on one of the sites and begin to market yourself and your skills.

Article Marketing

This is a type of advertising in which businesses write articles about their industry, business, services, and more. The articles are then published in the marketplace or on their own websites. You can add links in your article to get users to your site.
Marketing works best when you use more than one method. Use SEO and try some other SEM techniques. Come up with a plan when you are creating your website. Discuss traffic to the website, plan SEO into the structure of the website instead of after your finished and see where it leads you.

BizReport: Mobile Marketing: March 17, 2009

A chain of fashion clothing stores in the U.S. used mobile coupons to bolster sales.

The coupon campaign was promoted online via the store’s website, blog and on various mall websites where the store was featured. Offline, the campaign was promoted via signage in all Planet Funk stores that displayed the shortcode and corresponding keyword.

The results were phenomenal. Planet Funk created over 20% of their total December revenue via the mobile campaign. Nearly 2,000 coupons were generated and 91% were redeemed. In addition, 15% of those that redeemed coupons opted-in to receive future mobile campaigns.

According to BrandWeek: A new study finds that 72% of consumers are using more coupons than they did six months ago.   While newspapers and magazines were the primary source of coupons for 51% of consumers, 39% said they wanted to receive their future coupons via direct mail, while 26% said e-mail, either direct or through newsletters, would work. Another 16% preferred Web sites.

We all love a bargain – and so do our prospects and clients!

Coupons are highly effective and should be added to your marketing mix and coupon strategies.

Why Use Coupons?

• Coupons can reactivate your old customers. Give them a good reason to start buying from you again, rather then going to your competitors.

• Coupons can be a catalyst to other sales.  Offering a bargin or discount on one product, gives you opportunities to sell something else.

• Customer Feedback.  Reach out to your customers and prospects.  Ask them for honest feedback.  See what they want and are looking for in a sale or discount.

Make your Coupon Campaign a Success

1. Customers want to know exactly how much money they will be savings.  Do not be ambiguous.  Specify the dollar amount.
2. If you are using a discount in percentages, use the higher percentages as in 25%.  Lower percentages give a cheap display.
3. You can offer the buy one, get one free or buy one get half off on your second purchase.
4. Make sure you are clear in your advertisement.  We all want to know exactly what are the discounted items.
5. Use graphics and pictures  of the item on sale – this will help support the text and leave no room for confusion.
6. A strong call to action.  Have an urgency with an expiration date.  You want them to act immediately.
7. Use coupons to obtain subscribers to your newsletter.  Give them a small discount for signing up.
8. Put your campaign on your company blog.
9. Use social media.  Advertisement on Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace.  You can assume your targets are already using these tools.  This will enhance your Web exposure.  Create a strong buzz.

Demographics

When designing your coupon campaign, you need to know:

• Who your target audience is?  Prospects, clients, or wanting to reconnect with old and inactive clients.
• What is the focus and goal of your campaign?  A clearing house special, a new product, an upgrade?

Don’t forget to track your campaign results. Tracking campaigns results is the only way to measure success.

As Internet marketers we know that the only way to have a successful campaign is to target the right message to the right people.  How is that done?  By obtaining cutting edge demographics, we track our e-campaign results, as we continue to fine tune and modify them, for the best optimal results.

The Internet and Worldwide Web have not only broadened our markets, but have made them international as we market to totally different cultures that are unique and not our own.  That changes everything.  How?

Well, I can give you a small personal example.  I moved from the United States to Israel.  Both countries have two totally different cultures with their own individual languages and ways of living their lives.  Some things are just not as important to them as it is in the US.

Their buying habits, clothes, and culture, is dissimilar in so many ways from my own.  Using generic internet marketing will never cut it when striving to reach a global international audience.

Tracking Online Behavior

As marketers we need to personalize our messages and campaigns to the right segment and market.  We need to understand a person’s personality and makeup – not just push a product or service they might need.  So the goal and challenge is how to market a global brand, making it relevant to each culture and individual.

Another factor to consider are the differences in the decision making process.  Each group may base their decisions to purchase on totally different factors. For those of you who send out email campaigns, the use of technology in tracking a recipient’s click through rate and purchase response to a call to action, is not new.

Today, with just an ISP address, we can access a great amount of detailed information on what people do, where they go,  and where they click when they visit a website.  We use this information to give  ourselves a better direct marketing advantage helping us target their choices and buying habits.

Know What Might Offend

Not only are the words we use responded to differently by another culture, but the images and symbols we project for our brand or services can affect our market as well.  I remember when I was taking a technical writing course, we were shown how an innocent symbol used in a United States technical user manual, when translated into another language, could greatly offend a different country and culture using the same product, graphic, text and symbols.

We learned when translating technical documents from one language to another, we had to research the words, graphics, and symbols that might offend the target country and replace them.  An entire marketing niche could be lost by one misunderstood symbol or graphic.

Whether we market internationally or not, at the end of the day, our marketing strategies have one and only one basic objective.  Our goal is to reach out and connect with our target audience on a personal, relevant, and meaningful level.

As we learn how to develop a broader marketing base, with the inclusion of culturally informed strategies, this will not only engage a more accurate recipient, but further enhance and develop our global market niche.

How Restaurants Can Use Social Media

Every kind of business and service is getting on the bandwagon of Social Media.  Whether you are using email bulk campaigns or e-newsletters, Social media has given the Internet a new intimacy of virtual relationships. Reaching out to your customers and prospects has never been easier. This indeed is another great marketing channel for every restaurant looking to grow their brand awareness.

If your restaurant has been in business for years, and is known in the neighborhood, trust me, people are talking about you online. Make no mistake that there is chatter happening. The question remains, what are they saying? Most restaurants know that having a spectacular dish or menu is not the end of it all. Your customers want to be appreciated and connect personally with you in some way.

I don’t know about you, but when I enjoy a meal, and feel very satisfied and happy with the service, I start talking about that restaurant almost immediately.  Don’t you?  We tell our friends, you need to check this place out, great food, fabulous service. You want to share a good thing when you find it. How much better it would be if we could actually connect with our favorite restaurants online, or see what they are talking about. It sort of completes the experience.

Here is a list of tools that any restaurant owner could use to connect with their customer that in return could produce a type of brand evangelist.

Social Media Tools for Restaurants

• SEO: – your website must be optimized with your key words. That is a must. Being found on a search and ranking high in the SERPs is the first step for brand awareness.

• Sign up with the local restaurant search engines: Yelp.com, Urbanspoon.com, and TripAdvisor.com – Request that any  positive feedback be shared on the site publicly.

• Twitter: – Create a Twitter Account – publish you profile and use it to announce special family deals and discounts on meals.

• Create an E-Newsletter: – Ask your repeat customers for their email addresses and send a double opt in to subscribe to your e-newsletter.  Send a new recipe once a month, include some food preparation tips.  Ask for feedback for your next newsletter.  This is a great way to start your database list for future use along with acquiring a solid lead of customers.

•  Blog on your Website: – Bring your customers into the kitchen, behind the scenes.  Let them feel they are part of the action -  as if they are participating.  We all want to feel a little more than just being filled with good food.  We all want to belong.

•  YouTube – sign up for a free account.  Make a YouTube video of one of your most popular dishes.  Send out the URL on your newsletter and announce it in your blog.  As for feedback from those who have tried the recipe.  What a great way to engage people.

• GoMobile – Collect your client’s cell numbers and send SMS messages about specials and coupon deals.

If you need some guidance with marketing ideas, see this free online source: Virtual Restaurant

BEFORE you Jump into Social Media Marketing:

• Create a plan: First, know your audience, says L. Michelle Smith, president and CEO of Dallas-based media-strategy firm M Strategies Inc., whose clients include Atlanta-based Church’s Chicken.  Are your customers on social networks, and if so, which ones? Next, know what you want to accomplish: Is your goal to build a relationship through dialogue with an audience? To tell people about the brand, or about news and events? “It’s not a strategy just to be there,” Smith says.

• Listen to what customers are saying: Search social-media sites and read what already has been posted—not just in reviews but in comments and conversations. “You’ll learn a phenomenal amount,” says Van Vandegrift, president and emerging-media consultant with Matrixx Pictures, a Santa Monica, Calif., production company whose clients include Austin, Texas-based Schlotzsky’s Deli. “They’ll say all the things they love and all the things they hate, and that’s incredible business knowledge.

• Know your Voice: Decide whether you want to speak to consumers in your personal voice (i.e., as the owner, chef or general manager), or as the overall brand, says Christina Wong, restaurant and chef publicist at JS² Communications in Los Angeles.

• Create brand ambassadors: Find the people who really love your restaurant.  Share your vital info with them, let them spread the good word.

• Make  your conversations interesting: Just listing menu items, unless they’re particularly unusual, makes for a boring post. “Say something that shares part of who you are, like, ‘Chocolate ice cream is the only worthy ice cream’ or ‘Just finished making my grandmother’s bread-pudding recipe and it rocks,’ or ‘Completely slammed in the kitchen, no end in sight,’” says publicist Ellen Malloy.

Remember, social media is just a tool, but you are the one to make it happen.  Listen, answer questions, and connect with people online.  Take these opportunities to reach out to your customers.  When you do, they will be telling others about you, building your brand, and making you visible.

One of the best ways to increase traffic to your website is to combine email campaigns with SEO, by using the same keywords on your email campaigns as you use on your site. Now WordStream have released a new free keyword tool that can help you find the best keywords for your website. According to WordStream, “The Free Keyword Tool is continuously updating a database of over a billion of the world’s most popular keywords, aggregating over a trillion unique searches”.

Gmail, by Google, has become the third most visited email service in the US, according to Comscore. Between July 2008 and July 2009, Gmail’s number of unique monthly visitors in the U.S. increased from 25.3 million to 36.9 million. By that, Google had overtaken AOL place. Comscore predicts that Gmail will surpass Windows Live Hotmail in about seven months. Think about that with your upcoming email campaigns…

Twitter had become the most linked social media site from email campaigns, passing even the respectable Facebook, according to data collected by Email Data Source. During 2009, the number of campaigns with Twitter links has grown to 41,399 and 41,052 for Facebook. In June, Twitter was linked to in 9,506 campaigns and Facebook was linked to in 8,636 campaigns.

Small businesses, with less than 50 employees, channel 13% of their marketing budget to email campaigns, according to a survey conducted by Equation Research. Businesses with more than 50 employees spend 10% of their marketing budget on email marketing, and agencies spend 11% on email marketing.

google is trying to make friends with online advertising agencies, by sending them account managers that instructs them in the ways of internet advertising, and giving them online study materials. Google recently launched a beta testing of a “online education portal” dubbed Agencyland, which includes webinars, a searchable library with more than 200 marketing case studies and short, on-demand video segments featuring Google leaders. Here is a nice piece about it, in the Boston Globe.

Tagged social network stole the identities of 60 million internet users by sending email that raided their private account, claims New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. Cuomo says that consumers who visited Tagged were tricked into providing the company with access to their personal email contacts, and his office intents to press charges against Tagged for deceptive marketing and invasion of privacy. Tagged suspended its online email campaigns last month because of user complaints.