Marketing Tips

By making your Facebook page a source for exclusive information/deals you incentivize people to gather around you. Don't be afraid to be creative in offering something of value. By knowing who and where your consumers are and what they value, you generate reasons for users to join your page.

Your prospects and customers don't care about your company, and your successes, they only care about themselves. They want to know 'What's in It For Me?' and they want to know that immediately -- or they will stop reading. This is a hard lesson for business people to learn, because they are so enamored with their products and services, that they erroneously believe that their prospects/customers will be too. Not true.

Whether you're new to SEO or consider yourself a search engine optimization expert, leveraging your pay-per-click advertising is the best investment you can make. Determine which keywords generate the type of traffic that is most valuable to you and optimize around these terms. They will generate more traffic and revenue at a lower cost.

If your current clients are willing to take a survey, you should certainly use their feedback to help shape your future online marketing direction. Asking your clients questions about what they want from your site, how easy is it to get around on your site, what they think you should improve on, what features they would like added and so on will give you effective marketing insight with which to craft your targeted messages.

Know your audience. Successful campaigns get that way because marketers know their audience. They fully understand their needs, how to help meet those needs and how to create demand. Knowing and understanding your audience through proper market segmentation means a well targeted campaign that generates a profitable return.

Don't get caught up in reading the Google Toolbar's indicator of Page Rank. Many ecommerce experts have done research on this tool to know that it doesn't update often and some have even narrowed it to a quarterly update. Spend more time building quality, relevant inbound links to your site; this is what will help you score big with your page rank.

By creating brand filters in advance of a product or company naming assignment, you can alleviate a lot of missteps and come to consensus naturally and intuitively. The naming process becomes a true process and your naming sessions become more productive. Instead of names that describe the products you sell, you'll create names that convey the essence of who you are, what you do and why you do it. And that makes for great branding.

Always start off any ezine advertising with the most affordable spot first. If you get good results, then you can go for the higher priced advertising once the ezine has proven itself. By the way, you can get a great up to date listing of thousands of ezines at "directoryofezines.com".

Transactional email provides fantastic opportunities for you to engage with your customers again, within an environment that is totally acceptable to them. And the word fantastic doesn't overstate it. By applying a great design and accompanying the message with complementary messages -- about new products, upcoming events or special offers -- you create brand new opportunities to connect and sell. Coupled with transactional messaging, that includes tracking, you can also measure your upsell opportunities on these mediums, which could yield better results than traditional marketing mediums.

There are hundreds of free marketing platforms to choose from. You can't possibly market on all of them. My rule of thumb is to pick five free platforms and focus your marketing efforts there. You'll never succeed if you try to conquer too much. Remember, you don't want to be a "Jack of all Trades, Master of None!" You want to master a few marketing strategies well.

Because Sales is a function of Marketing, the two disciplines must be in agreement as far as goals, efforts and resources are concerned. In the online world, the off-line model doesn't exactly apply - there are no clear real estate costs, shelf prices, POP prices and in-store promotions don't work the same. Further, the online audience is much more fickle than the local customer. The web represents both a marketing channel for off-line acquisition as well as a sales point. Before pursuing any channel execution, internal marketing and online sales groups must work together to define clear online goals, timelines and action plans. In short, there should be a page in every business marketing plan dedicated to the website, and that page needs to be reinforced with a dedicated budget and clear goals such that this area is a tactical piece of an overall strategic plan.

Should you try to sell on a social networking landing page? In a word -- NO! Remember, social networking is all about building relationships and making connections. And, through those relationships people will naturally want to support you and become your customer. The last thing you want to do is send your social networking buds to a page and try to sell them. Now, that doesn't mean your page can't include a couple of links to some products so they can read more and buy, but no hard-core selling.

For an online business, do not rely on the opinions of your family and friends alone. You absolutely must ask a sample of your intended online audience whether or not they like, they understand, they agree with, and most importantly, if they see business potential behind your domain name. Your domain name and brand identity, and how your intended audience perceives it, is of eminent importance.

Has everyone made their new year resolutions? No, not the yearly self improvement mottos of exercise more, eat better, quit smoking..., but business resolutions that hopefully are observed for longer than a month... or less. There is not a one size fits all resolution out there, but if you put some time in you will come up with a great one for your company. What was your biggest weakness in 2009? What do you keep wanting to get done, but never get to? What have your customers been asking for? These are just a couple of questions you could ask to help you develop your marketing resolution. Don't make them too easy or there is no point in setting them. Don't make them too hard or you will give up before you get going. Either way you go, make sure you write it down and hold yourself accountable, or even better, share the goal with the company or at least the team you work with.

When adding content to my blog, site or a newsletter I will always keep SEO in mind, but readability should be the number one goal of any content provider. If the content is not interesting, relevant and enjoyable to read then you may get some traffic, but they will not be coming back again. SEO is a great tool for driving traffic when successful, but just as important is engaging the visitors by providing them with information that will make them want to come back for more. Keep this in mind when you are working on SEO projects or you will not realize much of the return that can come from this traffic.