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Posting By Rivan Ferdian

SiteProNews

Growing Your Business with Online Marketing

Posted: 17 Jun 2009 09:42 AM PDT

As a business owner, you know that one of the keys to a successful year is promoting your business. No matter what size your business is, marketing and promotion need to be addressed. Marketing has become a daunting task with the increasing number of online start-up businesses.

And now, along with the traditional offline marketing methods, there are many online marketing tools and methods available.

Online Marketing is also known as Internet Advertising, web marketing, web advertising or e-marketing.

There are many benefits to marketing your business online. Here are a few.

Lowering Your Costs

A recent eMarketer article (http://www.emarketer.com/Article/aspx?R=1007064) sites that “in the wake of the global economic downturn, marketers worldwide are shifting more of their budgets into cheaper, more-measurable categories. In most cases, that means online.”

Your marketing budget is only so big and online marketing can stretch it even farther for you. TV and radio spots are expensive, printing costs for corporate and product brochures are expensive and traditional mailings cost not only in materials and postage, but deplete the environment as well. Why not direct potential customers to your website for information on products and services? Your website is your brochure, a marketing tool available 24 hours a day to prospective customers. Your revenue potential will increase while your costs diminish.

Offline marketing ads for newspapers, TV and radio are for a limited time and you pay for the time slot and space. In online marketing, your ads potentially can stay up longer and over time you end up paying less. Using article marketing, you could either write an article yourself or pay someone else to write it. When that article is distributed online, it stays on the Internet for many years. For a small cost, you’ve placed a marketing proposition that stays around indefinitely, pointing potential customers to your website and your products and services.

Compared to traditional marketing or telemarketing, email marketing costs very little. These targeted messages go directly into the homes and offices of your potential or existing customers.

Reaching a Larger Market and a Targeted Market

The Internet allows people from all over the world to do business with each other.

From another recent eMarketer article, (http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1006988) in 2009, more than 65% of Americans are Internet users. They’re not only checking e-mail and Twittering, they are shopping for products and services.

With traditional media, your ads are restricted to a specific location for a limited time. When you promote your business online, you reach a larger audience than you would ever be able to reach otherwise since your marketing activity is not restricted by location. More potential customers always equal more sales opportunities.

Online marketing allows you to target specific demographics such as age, location, gender and income levels and in many cases allows you to track the behaviors of these groups as they interact with your online marketing.

It can also bring a branding campaign to life in a new way. This unique consumer interaction with your brand can leverage emotional links to your brand. Instead of a brand talking to a customer, your customer can interact with and experience your brand. This is intelligent brand marketing. You can influence people at the perfect time - their time, right when they are looking for information, comparison shopping and possibly buying.

Flexibility and Tangible Tracking

Online marketing can include email, newsletters, blogs, microblogs, podcasts, video and social media sites. All of these outlets have the ability to be flexible. An ad placed in a magazine or newspaper can’t be changed until the next submission. With online marketing you’ll know very quickly if a campaign is working and you can change wording or graphics and adapt product information to match changing market conditions.

The Internet also removes any guesswork from measuring campaign results. Using web analytics, you can measure the number of visitors that a campaign brings to your website, how long they stay and the average number of pages they visit. This important information along with the flexibility, allows you to improve the conversion of your campaign and to increase your return on investment.

Instant Conversion Ability

Online marketing allows you to convert a shopper to a customer instantly. A potential customer reading a traditional newspaper ad does not have the ability to click a mouse and buy your product or service immediately. Offline marketing involves more time and money to convert a shopper into a sale.

Online ads allow direct response. Consumers can click to learn more about a product, sign up for a newsletter or RSS feed, or buy right then and there. This will in turn create a database for you, which, with email marketing, will allow you to reach people who have already expressed an interest in your product or service. And online marketing allows you to sell to anyone, anywhere and at any time. You’re not restricted by time, geography and location considerations.

Internet marketing includes strategies such as search engine optimization (SEO), pay per click marketing (PPC), article marketing, blog marketing, online brandcasting, social media marketing and many more interactive marketing services.

While these strategies may seem daunting at first, with a little research, you can use some of these tools to help you optimize your website and increase web traffic. Or, if you have it in your budget, there are companies that specialize in many SEO services.

There are many benefits to both online and offline marketing. A mix of the two might be just what your business needs to grow.

Enzo F. Cesario is a Copywriter and co-founder of Brandsplat, the only online marketing and advertising company employing Brandcasting, the most effective way to brand your company on the web. Brandcasting uses informative content and state-of-the-art internet distribution and optimization to build links and drive the right kind of traffic to your website. The approach is simple, highly effective and affordable. Learn more at: http://www.Brandsplat.com/

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Growing Your Business with Online Marketing

How To Cascade Messages via Managers To Employees

Posted: 17 Jun 2009 09:34 AM PDT

One of the common mistakes people make when designing a change program is assuming that if a person is a team leader, supervisor or senior manager they should naturally know how to communicate face to face with their teams.  However communication skills are rarely one of the key competencies that is taught or measured by organizations.  There is however a very easy way to ensure that there is structure and content that make it very easy for managers at all levels to follow.

What is needed is structure and process and team briefing which is a formal communication cascading process via management is a tool that perfectly fits the bill. It has three levels of cascading messages:

  1. The first is the CEO who at his executive team briefings decides which topics for that week he wants communicated to employees.
  2. This is then circulated out to his direct reports who then have to communicate those issues and decide the top 5 issues for their respective divisions and then finally the top 5 issues for their teams.
  3. So the only aspect of a team brief that changes is the last section which is how what is happening in the company and our division relates to the work we are doing in our team. This is the section that always changes depending on your team in the division.

The reason this works is simple.  The only aspect a manager has to think about is what is happening in the organization that will effect his team that week or month depending on the frequency of the team briefing process.  The rest of the information is already determined by the divisional head and the CEO.  The team brief should only take around 15 minutes so it can be incorporated into a regular team meeting.  And most importantly it is constant as the CEO has his Executive team meeting dates set for the entire year and this ensures that everyone from the Executive team to the frontline know what is happening in the organization.

The key factor to the success of team briefings is that they are driven by the CEO.  Whenever your CEO talks with managers and employees he should ask whether they had in fact attended a team briefing and how regularly they occured.This way if they are not he can say to his direct reports, “I am conducting my team brief with you now so there is no excuse for you not to do the same with your team members”.

So these are the keys to making Team Briefings work.

  1. Make sure that you put in place a simple process
  2. Make sure that the CEO drives it and that his direct reports understand the importance to the CEO - not you. Afterall you are not their boss, he is.
  3. Ensure that the topics are the type of content that management are comfortable and knowledgeable about
  4. Provide a feedback loop, again this is part of the process, if there is a question that management do not know the answer to, there must be a formal easy process for them to follow to quickly obtain the answer and respond to the employee.
  5. Team briefings should only take 15 minutes, they can also be incorporated into regular weekly meetings.

When it comes to cascading information in a face to face format via management remember that as with anything, there will be some topics that employees want to hear directly from the CEO and other topics they are happy to hear from their manager. Generally when it comes to significant issues such as retrenchments, closure of offices and mergers or acquisitions employees generally want to hear this from the person at the top. Day to day, week by week and month by month operational issues they are comfortable in hearing from their manager who manages their daily work.

Marcia Xenitelis is a recognized authority on the subject on change management and has spoken at conferences around the world.  For access to case studies and more information on the types of strategies you can implement to engage employees visit http://www.changemanagementtips.com for a wealth of free informative articles and resources.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

How To Cascade Messages via Managers To Employees

Social Networking - 10 Steps to Finding Your Target Market in Facebook

Posted: 17 Jun 2009 08:23 AM PDT

facebookEveryone is talking about social networking, and many claim social networking to be the panacea for all of your marketing ills. Marketing on social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter can help you increase the size of your email list and help you grow your business. The key to success with this strategy is making sure that members of your target market are in your network.

Facebook is very strict and very particular about how its participants contact each other. Facebook limits the number of new invitations that can be sent in a given day or week. The exact number is a Facebook secret and unknown to the public, but if you exceed this secret amount you can get booted from Facebook. However, I think if you stick with no more than 10 per day, you will probably stay within their limits. Secondly, you are permitted only 5000 friends in Facebook, so if you’re successful in this strategy, you may ultimately need to create a waiting list of friends.

How do you find your target market in Facebook? Whether you’re an experienced social networker or just a newbie, here are 10 secrets to growing your target market network in Facebook:

  1. Update-to-date profile and/or Fan page: Before you begin a “friending” (i.e. request to become another’s friend), be sure that your profile is up-to-date with an accurate description of what you do, your interests, and your contact info, including your web site URLs. If you have multiple businesses, invite people in your appropriate target market to become fans of your niche-specific fan page.
  2. Follow the gurus. Follow leaders in your field/industry and “friend” them. Anytime you make a friend request, include a personal note, as that will increase the likelihood that they will accept your request. Say something like, “I’m a big fan and have been on your ezine/blog list for several years. I’d love to have you in my network in Facebook.” Once they have accepted your invitation, make comments about their status updates to help you get on their radar and in front of their networks.
  3. Friends of friends. Take a look at the people in the network of your industry leaders, as they are probably part of your target market as well, and send friend requests to those of interest to you. When you friend someone that you only know by association, send a personal note as well, like “I discovered your profile in ’s network and would like to get to know you batter by adding you to my network.”
  4. Use groups. Look for groups that may contain your target market. In your search for groups, use keywords that describe your niche, your industry, your geographic area, the interests of your target market, or whatever other terms you might use to find members of your target market. Join and begin to participate in the group so that they begin to get to know you. Then peruse the member lists for good prospects, sic as the members you’ve connected with or have gotten to know. Since you won’t be able to view the profiles of the group members because they aren’t in your network, much of your decision-making about whom to friend may be based upon appearance or how you might be connected to them via other friends in your network.
  5. Check your own lists. Friend people that you already know from your high school, college, alumni associations, and places of employment if they fall within your target market definition.
  6. Facebook-recommended friends. Facebook typically recommends friends based on your current friends list when you log into your profile. I’ve found these recommendations to be pretty solid. Take them up on their recommendation and add those folks to your network.
  7. Add by interest or industry. Do a people search by job title, industry, geographic location, or interest. Those people with those terms in their profile will show up in your search, and you can request to add them based on common interests.
  8. Build the relationship. Once you friend someone, you need to begin to get to know them and start them on the like, know and trust journey so that you become their top-of-mind expert in a particular area. Begin building the relationship by posting a quick “thank you” note on their wall, as well as a comment about something on their profile that interests you or in which you have in common. Watch for their status updates, as well, and comment on these when appropriate.
  9. Create a group. Once you’ve got about 500 followers, create a group for your target market. Provide the group with useful content and and ask questions to stimulate discussion and get the members to return to participate in the group. You can post articles, links to blog posts, or videos you have created. Invite group members to any free virtual or face-to-face events you’re hosting.
  10. Integrate into your plan. No marketing strategy works unless you consistently implement it over time. As a newbie to Facebook, you might want to spend as much as 60 minutes per day researching friends and participating in groups. As your network grows, you many spend only 15 minutes 3 times per week on Facebook. The key to success is to put this strategy on your calendar and make it a routine part of your ongoing Internet marketing tasks.

While social networking is an inexpensive marketing tool and can be effective in helping you grow your business, maintain your other marketing strategies, as well, and simply add this strategy to your marketing mix. A well-rounded Internet marketing plan that includes social networking and is implemented consistently will mean that your prospect well will never run dry.

Online Business Coach Donna Gunter helps baby boomers create profitable online retirement businesses by demystifying the steps needed to successfully market a baby boomer business online. Would you like to learn the specific Internet marketing strategies that get results? Discover how to increase your visibility and get found online by claiming your FREE gift, TurboCharge Your Online Marketing Toolkit, at http://www.OnlineBizU.com

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Social Networking - 10 Steps to Finding Your Target Market in Facebook

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