Posts Tagged ‘business’

• Social Media becomes Crucial Media

  Monday, March 21st, 2011

  The rise in social media usage in critical situations or during political crises over the last few months must surely mark a sea change in the acceptance of this ‘novelty’. Not just for consumers, or businesses, but also for governments, ambassadors, NGOs, and high level corporates.

  Social media has become crucial media. The number of examples of usage during the ongoing Japanese tragedy are almost infinite, and far too many to list here. However, the reality is that whoever you are, social media can help you out, particularly in times of crisis.

  Even SMEs and consumers can suffer a crisis situation, whether that is breaking down on a dark country road, or having to recall a product. On a far larger scale, the need for crisis management is generally drilled into most executives and managers, and certainly into government departments and so on.

  Social media offers advantages that many other routes cannot. For instance, even a hastily crafted press release can take time to reach news outlets; however good your journalist database and contacts are, they still need to get past editorial controls. Yet a tweet can begin to circulate in the time it takes to type 140 characters.

  Even if you have never used Twitter before and do not have a large following, choosing the right hashtags can mean your message hits a global audience in seconds. For instance, #japan, #fukushima #quake etc all meant that you could reach people monitoring the situation worldwide.

  So, social media allows easy communication.

  However, there are still hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of businesses who cannot see the benefits of social media. People seem to have the mistaken belief that social media is simply to share what you had for breakfast or post photos of weekend pranks. The situations in Egypt, Libya, Japan and so on must surely have proven that belief to be wrong now?

  In non-crisis situations, communicating with marketing messages has always been left to the marcomms team, or PR, or, recently, your search marketing agency. Marketing is crucial for all businesses; yet, ignoring a key communications channel for those messages, viz social media, seems still to be commonplace.

  Do you suffer a reticence within your business to adopt social media strategies? Who is the barrier to adoption? Or is it the company culture? Let us know and we will endeavour to help you find effective solutions for social media usage that will undoubtedly bring you benefits you are currently missing.

  Tags: adoption, business, crucial media, Social Media
  Posted in Blog, Social Media

• Are the big boys playing catch up?

  Saturday, March 6th, 2010

  The latest report from the University of Masschusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing research may initially seem to imply that the largest Fortune 500 companies are adopting social media (e.g. Twitter and Facebook) more quickly than their smaller counterparts in the Fortune 500.

  However, the reality is that whilst 35% of the Fortune 500 companies tweet and use Facebook, much smaller (and hence more agile) fastest-growing companies in the US already showed a 91% usage of at least one social media tool in 2009.

  It would seem that the larger companies have some catching up to do, and that smaller companies have an advantage at present when it comes to adopting the use of social media for many purposes. Marketing, CRM, collecting consumer feedback, reviews, and raising brand awareness are all reasons you should be adopting a social media strategy today.

  Tags: business, facebook, fortune 500, marketing, Social Media, strategy, twitter
  Posted in Blog, Small Business Resources, Social Media

• Have you tried vouchers on your site?

  Friday, December 18th, 2009

  Although vouchers and coupons seem to have a rather lowly image in this country, they can bring in additional trade, and help create “word of mouse” promotion for your company.

  Kelkoo have just announced that they are adding voucher codes from MyVouchers, allowing shoppers access to 250-300 new codes each day to get discounts from over 2000 online retailers.

  During times of recession, and particularly in the New Year when the credit card bills begin to bite, this is precisely the type of alternative that will help you find customers and build brand loyalty. Plus, it is has that “feelgood factor” for shoppers that they have found themselves a bargain.

  

  Tags: business, Coupon, discount, ecommerce, Holidays, kelkoo, marketing, online shopping, Voucher, vouchers
  Posted in E-Commerce, Small Business Resources, Tips & Tricks

• 5 easy ways to keep in touch with customers

  Saturday, December 5th, 2009

  Customer acquisition carries a far higher cost than customer retention, so it is vital that you look after your customers once you have found them.

  However, it is surprising how many businesses, particularly small business where the resources are often limited, fail to keep in touch with their customers.

  There are multiple ways to do this, and it need not be expensive. Here are 5 quick and easy ways to make sure your customers remember you.

  1. Have you sent all your existing and past customers a Christmas card yet? It needn’t be at the expense of trees – send a digital Xmas card. It’ll also give you a chance to clean up your e-mail distribution list for 2010.

  2. Write a regular newsletter and email it out. When we say “regular”, it may only be monthly, every three months, or even annual, but make it regular so your customers expect it.And don’t forget to archive it on your site as extra content, and include links in your email so people visit your website. It could include news about new products, clients, exhibitions and shows you have attended, or discounts and special offers.

  3. Add a blog to your site. This means that you will need to come up with regular content, but that needn’t be difficult. Pick a time schedule you can keep to, eg every Thursday or the first week of every month if you have limited time and resources.

  4. Use the social networks and tools that are available. For instance, create a fan page on Facebook, use Twitter to inform your customers about sales or special offers, join Linkedin and add your news to your profile or discussion groups.

  5. Send a present. It might just be a pen with your company logo on it, but every little reminder of you is good. Especially when the present is useful. (I love receiving dongles/memory sticks. And I often watch and read the content before deleting it

  

  Tags: business, CRM, facebook, LinkedIn, marketing, Social network, twitter, website
  Posted in Blog, CRM, Online PR, Small Business Resources, Tips & Tricks

• Is Seth Godin wrong about Google vs Murdoch?

  Tuesday, November 24th, 2009

  Interestingly, I was just penning a post for another blog on the subject of Rupert Murdoch etc when Seth’s latest article landed in my inbox – Rupert Murdoch has it backwards

  I think Seth, and potentially many others, may have it wrong. I include myself on this as I am now re-writing my post for the other blog!

  Why? Because I read this, literally seconds before Seth’s post landed, on The Register – Murdoch: Google is mortal and together we can kill it

  Have some of us in the industry possibly become innured and accustomed to Google’s presence in our world? Do we fight it or argue about Google being the ‘main man’? Or have we given in? It isn’t that long (only 15 years) since I started in the industry, but there was no Google then. I don’t remember suffering to be honest.

  The whole purpose of setting up an Internet Marketing business was to help companies to be found online. There were plenty of places where they could be found in the pre-Google days, but the SMEs didn’t know how to be featured in those places. For some, the costs vs rewards of internet marketing were infinitely better than now back then.And far less stressful!

  Have we given Google an infinite rein to run around on like a demanding, spoilt brat? Or is it just “let the best man win” and Google are, indeed, winning?

  I have just looked at the last 5 email newsletters from the industry which have landed today.  I will choose one, at random, to illustrate how deeply ingrained our reliance on Google has become.

  Today’s SearchEngine Land: SearchCap, the day in search for November 23rd. First 4 stories: Google + one ad for SMX. Look further down that email, 34 mentions of Google. Just to give you a clue as to its prevalence, there are precisely half that number of instances of the word “and”.

  I urge people to read the somewhat controversial, possibly, article in El Reg and then comment.  But only after you have paused for thought.

  Forget you are American and so is Google, forget you earn your living from SERPs, and Google, adwords etc. First and foremost you are an internet marketer and should be using every channel and avenue for your clients.

  What exactly does this alt.thinking mean to you?

  

  Tags: business, future, Google, internet marketing, Rupert Murdoch, SEM, seth godin
  Posted in Google, Internet Marketing News, SEM Industry

• Your visitors still can't search

  Thursday, November 12th, 2009

  The 10 UK search terms for the 4 weeks since Oct 19th 2009 show that UK searchers still don’t comprehend how a browser works.

  The top 10 search terms include Facebook, Bebo, Youtube, Ebay, Argos – all major brands with basic TLDs eg argos.co.uk, facebook.com and so on. What this implies is that users are not using the location bar to directly enter the domain name or URL of a site, even when it is a global company with a simple and recognised name, such as Facebook.

  Therefore, even if you have picked an obvious domain name for your widget company, such as widgets.co.uk, the majority of users don’t even have a stab at guessing the domain in the location bar – they use a search engine instead.

  This snapshot of search behaviour should indicate to many businesses that one of the most important terms they need to be optimising for is their business name and brands, in order to show up in the search engine rankings.

  It is surprising how few companies get this, and insist on putting their business name in a pretty logo invisible to the search engines, and giving the index page of their site a page title such as “Homepage”.

  Whilst it is not necessary, nor desirable, to scatter liberally across every page the name of your business and brands, to the point where users can’t see beyond those terms to actual quality content, it is vital to ensure that they are included in visible text and indexable content. This includes alt img tags, reference tags, H1 and H2 and so on.

  Check your website today and see how many instances of your business or brand names occur on your site, and how many are indexable. Searchers may be researching the availability, price, existence etc of a product they desire, and not know the names of companies who offer it, many more will be searching directly for you if your advertising and marketing is working as it should. If they can’t find your company even though they know the name, they will resort to researching the product/service type instead, and that is where deeper optimisation on many more keywords is essential.

  

  Tags: Brand, business, Domain name, optimization, search engine, Search Engine Optimisation, SEO, Web search engine
  Posted in SEO, Tips & Tricks

• Communicate with your visitors/customers

  Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

  It’s strange but even in 2009, some companies seem determined to hold their customers and site visitors at arm’s length, making it nigh on impossible to contact or communicate with them.

  Whether the customer has an enquiry, a complaint, a business proposal, or just wants to say how fab the product is, if you do not provide multiple routes to communicate, and then MONITOR points of contact and respond to anyone and everyone endeavouring to reach you, you are going to lose business.

  Obviously, if you are a major brand, the damage to reputation caused by a single person whingeing on a forum about the fact they can’t reach anyone at your company may have a minimal impact on your branding. But when people type onto forums, Twitter, Facebook etc and that comment is then pushed out to multiple, interlinked sites, asking “Does anyone have an email address for a real person at XYZ?”, the implication there is that you have  little interest in your potential and actual customers.

  The facts need not even be known.

  How many attempts at contact have already been made? How important is the query? Is it life or death? Have repeated attempts to reach a human been met only by automated messages sent by autoresponder? Are the phones not being answered?

  None of us in reading the request for an email address need to know the answer to any of those questions. The implication is clear. XYZ company are difficult, nay impossible, to get hold of by the normal routes. So, Mr Desperate of Acacia Avenue has decided to put it out on to the blogosphere, twittersphere, to everyone he can think of to find a way to reach XYZ.

  Whether it was a completely trivial reason to ask, or a vitally important one threatening a multi-million pound business venture, none of us are likely to ever know. But, when any of us think of XYZ company in the future, our perception is likely to be tainted by that one question. And the assumption which goes with it, which is that XYZ don’t know how to operate a business where customers matter.

  

  Tags: Brand, business, communication, E-mail address, internet marketing
  Posted in Social Media, Tips & Tricks

• Effective way to sell through Twitter

  Monday, August 10th, 2009

  Retailers are fast catching on to the benefits of Twitter by advertising sales and discounts to their followers, and hence through their followers to many more than a normal advert could reach for even a fraction of the spend.

  Using tools such as cheaptweet, retailers can clear end of line stock, raise brand awareness, and pull people onto their website with only 140 characters.

  Whilst there are likely to be many more applications in the near future that supercede Twitter, right now it is one hectic space where you can make sales, and hence make money.

  

  Tags: advertising, Brand awareness, business, Social media marketing, twitter
  Posted in E-Commerce, Small Business Resources, Social Media

• Social media good for hotels and accommodation providers

  Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

  Whilst this article states that search engine marketing is still the way to go for hoteliers, there are aspects of social media marketing that hotels are still ignoring.

  For instance, a hotel that I recently stayed in (which also provided free wifi not just in the lobby but also in the rooms) sent a tweet shortly after my arrival, welcoming me to the hotel and telling me to tweet if there was anything I needed.

  Why did this make me feel good?

  Because it showed a level of personal interaction that is rare in this homogenous world. There is a person at the other end of that Tweet who I could then talk to if I chose.

  It showed an ingenious use of Twitter to offer a personal welcoming service, rather than the standard automated answerphone message on the phone or through the TV screen.

  Because I could retweet it to show off to other hotels how it should be done. And hence promote the hotel.

  Here was a hotel who had GOT using social media for not just internet marketing, but also for customer relationship management.

  Whether you are in the accommodation sector, or any other industry, think out of the box, and start using social media for more than just promotion. Engage with your customers directly and offer a service over and above that of your competitors.

  

  Tags: accommodation, accommodation providers, business, hotels, marketing, Social media marketing, twitter
  Posted in Blog, Social Media

• Search for your life / living

  Friday, June 26th, 2009

  It is surprising how many businesses have not yet mastered search, not just within the search engines, but elsewhere too. The benefits of becoming “search literate” are many fold, and will allow you to save time and effort in finding the answers or solutions to a multitude of questions.

  Not just who are your competitors, but who are the best suppliers for your product range, where do your customers hang out, what are the best keywords for your website, where in the blog comments is that link I saw earlier, does this document refer to us (or our competitors, industry sector etc) at all, and so on, and so on. The list is endless.

  Learning how to become search literate will put you ahead of the competition in a world where being able to find information amongst the noise is paramount. Additionally, when you are struck by that fantastic business idea at 2am, before you take your late night scribbles to the bank manager for a loan you will struggle to repay, reSEARCH. Undoubtedly, someone somewhere has alread tried and failed, or succeeded. In order to win in business you need to find a niche, rather than duplicate an already successful product or service, and searching can frequently prevent you making a disastrous mistake or three!

  There are some great articles out there about how to use search in multiple ways, for example:

  Business Mind Hacks Blog – Before you do anything else, search

  Twitip – 7 Secret Ways to use Twitter Search

  LinkedIn – Power searches on LinkedIn

  And if you need to find something slightly out of the ordinary, go into the deeper pages of the SERPs here! Whatever your interest, there is undoubtedly a link to a resource you had never imagined would exist.

  

  Tags: business, LinkedIn, search, Web search engine
  Posted in Keywords, Social Media, Tips & Tricks

• « Older Entries
• Newer Entries »