Archives

All posts for the month March, 2013

The Impact of Marketing Purpose on Content and Copywriting

Posted by on March 29, 2013
Posted in: Marketing.

Innovation is nothing without marketing- if the developments within your business aren’t acknowledged by your target market, what’s the use of investing so much time and resources? Therefore, an aggressive marketing campaign is what is essential to establish your product in the market. There are numerous techniques which will enable you to make the right moves within the market and ensure that the vibes of your product are felt throughout the industry. Online marketing is one of these techniques- websites, e-ads, e-mails and social networking; all these ensure that your product experiences a revival. However, there are some important things you need to keep in mind before you employ the e-marketing methodology.

Creating Impact: Marketing Online

Dealing with consumers tactfully should be at the top of your priority list- keep the following pointers in mind when designing a marketing plan for your product over the internet:

  • Read the reader: You’ve got to know who your reader is, the kind of background he/she belongs to and the type of lifestyles they lead. This will help you dive deeper into the market- you will know exactly how to cheer up your customers and how to create a bigger fan following.
  • Keep it short and sweet: With so much information going around the internet, people will prefer to skim and scan the easier, shorter websites which give them what they want. To attract a greater number of people, make sure you use short paragraphs emphasizing the gist of your product. Use subheadings, bullets and visible text for your writings and of course, pen down your content in the most eloquent manner possible!
  • Add fun: The best websites are those that jingle their message through, i.e. communicate with their consumers in a fun, exciting manner! The worst you can do to yourself is to make the consumers think your website was the most boring of all!
  • Link it Up: Use links to substantiate and support your claims. The search engines rank websites and blogs according to the number of links they use as well. So, in order to minimize your chances of being filtered out by the search engines use good links too.
  • Keywords: Make sure you know the cards you’re playing on- use the right keywords in the right amounts- this lends a higher probability of you hitting your target demographic segment and pumping up your sales.
  • Engaging Titles: Title your articles/blogs with the most compelling titles- this will arouse curiosity among the consumers who will hit a click on your website!
  • Edit: Don’t leave your work like a lousy writer- read, edit, and brainstorm and come back with a bang in each sentence you write!
  • Strong connotations: Use powerful, persuasive language that magnets the consumers towards the product or service; that’s how you win the game!

So, content management, copywriting and content strategy should keep the above mentioned points in mind so that consumers read and reach out to the product, so that they realize that the product in question is THE one they desire and that the company providing it is the one!

The Basics of Hiring a Virtual Assistant

Posted by on March 29, 2013
Posted in: Business.

If, lately, you have felt overwhelmed by the daily grind at the office and you are itching to do other more important tasks to propel your business forward, then you might want to consider hiring a virtual assistant. Many have already had a great experience with hiring VAs and are enjoying the benefits of having someone to depend on for all the mundane tasks without having to invest in additional office furnishings and equipment.

Hiring virtual assistants can be daunting for the first time employer as the idea of managing remote employees and delegating tasks to someone you may never meet may be a scary option. Nevertheless, many businesses have done it and to this day, the industry has never been more popular.

Although this may sound like a great way to achieve your business goals faster, you should not dive headfirst into hiring a VA without the following considerations:

Preparation is a crucial part in hiring a VA, whether overseas or domestically. It sets the ground for the job you want the VA to fill and ensures that you are going to achieve your business goals. Be fully prepared before posting the job to any job sites or VA companies.

Identify specific tasks you want to delegate to the VA.

Set your budget according to ongoing market rates and the expertise the VA must possess.

Write a detailed job post indicating the qualities, equipment, schedule, and salary rate you require.

Review applications thoroughly. To find the candidates who have the right qualities, read each application and examine resumes or work samples carefully. This ensures that you do not miss a potentially good VA.

Interview your top picks through online chat or video call. You may also communicate through e-mail based on the type of work you are outsourcing. Through the interview, you will be able to determine which applicant is a good match. Just by having a conversation with them, you can determine the one who can communicate well and understand instructions. You will also be able to verify the applicant’s professional and educational background.

A trial run is an excellent way to gauge the ability of the VAs you are looking to hire. You can conduct a trial period from 10hours to a week just to see if the VA can deliver the quality of work you are looking for.

By following these guidelines, you can find good VAs to hire according to your requirements and expectations.

Driving a Conversation on Facebook

Posted by on March 29, 2013
Posted in: Social Networks.

The key to using Facebook as an effective marketing tool is to get people involved with your conversation. They will like what you do, share it and comment on it if it’s useful to them: note, this conversation is usually ad free.

Ads are what real people hate about businesses on Facebook. People use social networking as a way to share in a conversation.

That conversation can be showing off the new shoes they bought, a trailer to a movie coming out, or simply a status about how they’re feeling that day. These posts generate likes, shares, and comments because they are interesting to their friends.

They did not get on Facebook to see another video selling them a new Laptop or Snuggie. They turned off the TV for a reason.

Facebook users only want to see something they agree with, are funny, unique, helpful or entertaining in some way. Check out 2 vastly different approaches.

Doritos took on a campaign of creating ridiculous images and quotes that all involved their product. They created a ridiculous marketing ad for the “dPhone”—an orange chip looking phone that imitates the iPhone.

They listed a bunch of hilarious features that create a good image of what an iPhone would look like if it fused with a Dorito chip. They created an ad, yes, but they did it for humors sake.

Its purpose was to be funny, not to sell a product. By making it funny, their images have created thousands of likes and shares, increasing their exposure.

Very quickly, people were laughing at the dPhone and creating positive associations with the product. The more positive the associations, the more likely they are to buy it come game or shopping day.

They drive the conversation with humor. Look in contrast at Random House’s Facebook page.

For those of you that don’t know, Random House is one of the biggest book publishers in the country. They focus their attention on posting about things that appeal to readers.

You can find a picture of a beautiful bookcase or armchair in someone’s house. You will find quotes from famous authors about reading.

These quotes reflect strong opinions readers have about literature, writing and reading. They like them because they agree.

Their focus is to get people to agree with what they say; that way they’ll agree with what they do—sell books. They know what their audience wants to see and cater to them.

Your conversation will increase as you make content that people agree with, learn something from, or find humorous. Think like your audience thinks and you’ll capture their attention.

Don’t worry if your conversation isn’t generating as much conversation as these two examples. Remember that their pages have tens of thousands of likes, meaning their images reach more newsfeeds than yours.

You can increase your exposure by asking people to like you. You can also run a contest that requires as little as a like on Facebook to enter you into the drawing.

These will help you increase your market reach and drive people to notice your conversation more. They can only do so much though.

It’s your content that’s going to sell people on who you are and what you do. Avoid making ad posts your primary focus.

Instead, add something that would perk your interest. It will likely perk their interests too.

Stevens Henager is in the business of helping students in Mountain Home put social media technology to use in their careers. They bring help residents in Mountain Home master Social Media Technology.

This education is open to people of every walk of life. Even if you’re knee deep in a career already, it’s never too late to come back to school to complete your education.

Find out how Stevens Henager can help you. Come to our campus in Mountain Home for your Social Media Technology education.

Creating an Effective Brand PR Campaign

Posted by on March 29, 2013
Posted in: Business.

A lot of small business owners are asking, how can you guarantee that your public relations campaign is efficient? Well, written below you can find a simple to follow guide that lists the essential steps that has to be taken in order to create an effective, intuitive as well as unique PR campaign. Read on!

First Step It is very important that prior you dive into a public relations campaign, you should first take into consideration how, why and when such campaign is required. As a business owner, you need to take time to establish as well as develop the aims behind your desired campaign. For instance, is the campaign meant to establish goodwill among suppliers, press and/or the community surrounding you? Generate leads and sales? Undo any damage caused by wrongful accusations or negative publicity? Every scenario calls for a unique kind of PR. By initially focusing on such specific needs, you can ensure that your efforts are narrowly targeted and well-focused.

Second Step After establishing the real requirement for a brand PR, the next thing to do is to create precise, measurable and time-sensitive goals. These goals, if well-defined, can help the PR campaign to stay in accordance with the already existing marketing approach, positioning, packaging as well as sales objective.

Third Step Together with the goals and public relations requirements, it is essential also for you to keep your desired customers in mind when you are formulating a brand public relations approach. For instance, are families the main target of the campaign? If yes, public as well as family-oriented facilities make for the ideal place to start getting the word out.

Fourth Step Come up with a strategic, yet reasonable timeline. A good brand public relations approach has to be scheduled to correspond with other traditional as well as proven marketing approaches. For instance, if the campaign is meant to concentrate on a recently released service or product, then you should combine your campaign with yearly sales, seasonal clearance and also community support plans.

Fifth Step You should take the necessary steps to weigh as well as evaluate the success of every brand PR and marketing campaign. Companies and organizations may wish to consider having a PR campaign journal in order to keep track of which efforts or approaches were beneficial as well as worth using again, and also which did not deliver and resulted to financial loss and require changes.

Check out these Dallas marketing consultants for more information.

How to Use Facebook Graph for Business

Posted by on March 29, 2013
Posted in: Business.

Facebook finally announced the launch of Facebook Graph Search a couple of weeks ago as their newest and latest feature for users. Those who signed up to use this new beta feature was instantly upgraded, but for those who didn’t, the change will come to you sooner or later. If like many, Facebook is crucial to your business, here a some important pointers you should note down.

What is Facebook Graph Search?

Basically this new feature is very similar to a search engine in that is will process and find something based on what you are looking for. Here’s some examples of what you can type into Facebook Graph Search.

– People who like Cycling and are from my hometown

– Photos before 1990

– Photos of my friends in New York

– Music my friends like

There are more things you could search for, but this is the rough idea. You are then able to find something that your friends have liked or find people who live in your area who share your interests to name a few.

How To Use it in Your Business

This kind of search is even more crucial. People nowadays do not only look for what appears 1st or 2nd in Google search results, but they want to try or join something that someone they know has tried before.

E.g. You would rather go to a place your friends suggest rather than some random restaurant you have never heard of.

Facebook graph search eases this even more as you don’t even need to actually make contact with your friends. You basically know what they have done or where they have been by using the search functions, making it easier for people to find a service, restaurant or find people. Eventually more and more people will start using this search tool and business can hopefully attract more customers.

How To Use To Your Advantage

This allows you to get to know customers better by searching for patterns. Business have paid overwhelming amounts for market research in an attempt to find consumer patterns and behaviors.

E.g. If you own a Italian Restaurant, it might help if you knew how many people like to eat Italian around your area. Or search for people who eat at your competitors restaurant in that area to get a sense of the market.

Using this data, you can now understand your customers better and learn how to target them accordingly. Results are at the tip of your fingers. All you have to do is type it in and analyze the data.

Article written by Greg, a writer at domainraccoon.com who specializes in domain registrars and seo.

4 SEO Metrics to Watch

Posted by on March 29, 2013
Posted in: SEO.

Search Engine Optimization is an industry surrounded by metrics. Thanks to the likes of metrics packages like Google Analytics, Statcounter, and Clicktale, business and website owners have the availability to be buried under a mountain of data when it comes to visitors to their own website.

With that said, it’s hard to understand where to focus your attention. It’s way too easy to get lost in all of the metrics – and also hard to figure out which ones are important – so this post details the four biggest SEO metrics to watch.

Bounce Rate

Bounce rate is a key metric that also feeds information back to the search engines, and in turn partially determines your website’s rankings. Bounce rate tells you the percentage of visitors that land on your website, view only the first page, and then leave, or “bounce.” This metric is usually over 50% for small businesses, so don’t fear if your numbers are higher! Too high, though, and it shows the search engines that users aren’t finding what they want, so has a negative impact on your SEO success.

Pages per Visit

Pages per Visit is the best metric for showing user engagement. This tells you the average number of pages that a visitor looks at on your website, so shows how well the content entices them to view more. If you have a bounce rate of 100% then every visitor is only viewing one page before leaving, so your pages per visit number would be 1.0. If your website is very engaging, however, visitors will view three, four, or more pages, so the pages per visit will be much higher.

Percent of Organic Traffic

This figure is the number that will actually tell you how much of an impact your search marketing efforts are having. If your website relies largely on traffic from search engines then this number will be high, which shows your dependence. If it’s not already high, though, then seeing how this number changes over time will tell you if search is becoming more or less important for your traffic numbers.

Percent of Mobile Users

Metrics packages like Google Analytics will also show you the breakdown of users’ devices so you know where your website’s visitors are coming from. This is becoming an even more important metric as Google and the other search engines are looking to websites to optimize towards mobile, since more and more searches are coming from smartphones and tablets. By keeping an eye on your percentage of mobile users you’ll be able to determine how important optimizing for mobile is, and more than likely you’ll see that you need to invest in a mobile compatible website.

To learn more about these metrics and more SEO techniques, check your local events listings to see if there are any SEO training workshops.

Two Tips For Successful Business Symposium Hosting

Posted by on March 29, 2013
Posted in: Business.

There are many times when it may make sense for you to host a number of business associates from a foreign country. For instance, when you are organizing some kind of business symposium or just want to make a few business links, you may find it prudent to host them for some kind of event. Most of the time, whether or not you are successful in your endeavor will be determined by how well you treat them. This mean that if you need this kind of thing to work out for you, you will have to find a way to make sure that they are happy when they arrive. Some of the very simple things you can do in order to achieve this include:

Make sure that you prepare for them adequately

This is perhaps one of the most important things you can do. It can be very discouraging to go to a new country and the find that the person who had invited you over has some logistical difficulties especially if they had time to plan. In addition to that, the fact that they are in a new country means that they are bound to be uneasy, and this will be made worse if you seem to be out of your depth.

This basically means that you will need to put yourself together way in advance. For instance, when you have to use cabs to transport them from place to place, it makes a lot of sense to get cabs in Cleveland Ohio to work for you during this time on a permanent basis. This way, you will not have to go through the hassle of having to find one when you need it the most. Additionally, you can try and find the number of a trustworthy company, so that you can call them when you need them.

Make sure that your itinerary is clear and concise

In addition to that, you will also need to organize the event in a very logical manner. For instance, if you have planned a number of activities, you need to make sure that you arrange for them in advance so that you will not need to skip some of the parts of the itinerary due to poor planning.

The key to hosting such events is making sure that everything flows as it should, right from the moment your guests arrive to when they leave. The above are just some of the ways of doing this.